Night Raiders

by James David Victor

  “But you know that the Oracle could be considered a spy by the Golden Throne?” Anders questioned. “And last time I checked, the Void Worlds are still under the protection of the Eternal Empress,” he repeated the common knowledge.

  At this, the holo of the young man in the opposite ship showed a different side, making Anders think that maybe he had changed after his experience on Hecta 3.

  “That depends on which Voiders you’re talking to, doesn’t it, Lieutenant?” the be-goggled man said quietly, almost conspiratorially.

  “Those craft that attacked us, who were they?” Anders asked.

  “Night Raiders,” he said with an obvious shudder.

  “Who—” Anders began to say, only for Patch to shake his head violently.

  “Not out here, Lieutenant,” the Voider said earnestly. “As much as my people love it out here—the mysteries, the infinity—there are dangers too. The dark…” The young man’s voice went far away. “You don’t want to invite it in…” He started a bit, coming out of his musing. “Come, let me guide you back to Ozymandias Station. Everything will become clear.”

  The Voider threw a very sloppy salute at the lieutenant before gesturing with his gloved hands to manipulate his own holo-controls, raising the Whistle and turning it around.

  Anders was still stunned with confusion and surprise. What does the Oracle want? Why send us out here? How is this going to stop the Empress’s apocalypse weapon? But he also felt something like optimism as he turned the Nova to follow his old friend.

  If Anders had been surprised by what he had so far seen in the Void, then when he saw Ozymandias Station, he was absolutely stunned.

  “That thing is huge.”

  “Great, ain’t she?” Patch called over the ship-to-ship intercom.

  Anders wasn’t sure if he would call the haphazard, multi-rotating rings and attached modules ‘great’ at all. Unless he was referring to its size.

  Ozymandias was larger than any other space station or habitat the lieutenant had seen in his career, ever. It was easily the size of a small moon, and it seemed to be made of three alternately rotating rings clustered with blocky, rectangular, or rounded modules. It looked, in fact, as though large parts of its apparatus had been added on as an afterthought, cobbled together from many other types of craft.

  They approached it side-on, so the three rings—each of different sizes—were spinning vertical to them. Ozymandias was currently roaring slowly through the Void, with multiple burns of 18G blue field engines creating a stream of plasma behind it. Its progress apparently didn’t stop the cloud of smaller Void craft that clustered and swept around it, each one as unique and as strange as the Whistle. Anders saw disks and octagons, things that looked to just be twin engines with underslung compartments or else five-winged, spinning craft.

  “Where’s she going?” Dalia asked from her seat. Anders saw her frown slightly at the inelegant design and apparent chaos, definitely not an Ilythian virtue.

  “Oh, Ozymandias is always on the move. We were in Sector 7 just recently, but the Collective voted to take her out, especially since the war’s coming,” Patch informed them as he matched his tube-craft to the station and drew them closer to one of the largest of the outer rings.

  The war, Anders remembered. The Golden Throne had staged a terrorist attack on one of their own cruise liners and blamed the Ilythians for it, and then, when the Ilythian diplomats had denied such an outrageous lie, the Golden Throne had struck out at Eadaryn, completely destroying the Ilythian ring-world. The lieutenant didn’t know what the current state of affairs was between two of the Milky Way’s most powerful civilizations, but he was willing to bet that Patch was right. The war would spread everywhere, even to the edges of the galaxy in Sector 7.

  “Whistle to Control, permission to dock,” they heard Patch say over his holo, “and tell the Collective we’ve got some guests!”

  There was a crackle of static, and Anders heard the strange whistling clicks and clacks of Voider tongue in response. He’d heard Patch use this same speech himself on Hecta 3 when he had somehow used it to re-program Anders’s data-node.

  Voiders are weird, the lieutenant thought, but then, as he matched his course and saw that he had an alien spy acting as his copilot and a PK youth who had spent the last ten years in a bio-containment tube, he realized that maybe he was in good company.

  The Whistle attached itself to the outside of the ring, and the Nova slid alongside to dock next to it, where the flashing lights of an airlock rotated.

  “Matching,” Moriarty said, and there was a clunk as the clipper’s airlock met metal. With a slight sense of motion as they joined Ozymandias’s speed, they were secure. “Airlock checks, atmospheric pressure stable. Opening,” Moriarty informed them, and Anders looked to his crew.

  “Let’s go say hello.” He nodded.

  Dressed in the dark blue and blacks of his service jacket and suit, with his data-nodes at his lapel and cuffs, and armed with the laser pistols strapped to his thigh, Anders thought that he might look half like a space pirate himself as he went to the opening airlock door.

  “This is him?” said a gruff voice in the connecting hallway they had entered. It belonged to one of two people waiting there, each stranger than the last. The speaker was a very short, round man with a full beard but bald head, sporting only a pair of Void goggles. Next to him was an impossibly tall human woman—taller even than Dalia!—dressed in plum and crimson robes, with frizzy hair and spectacles

  Spectacles? Who doesn’t have corrective eye treatment in the twenty-seventh century!? Anders wondered. Last came Patch himself, hurrying out of the adjacent airlock.

  “This is our guy, Councilor Hernandez.” Patch beamed, and Anders felt uncomfortable being under such appraising scrutiny.

  “Then we’d better get him to the vault immediately,” said the woman, stepping forward to extend a hand to Anders.

  Vault? Anders wondered.

  “I am Councilor Martravia, and you must be Lieutenant Anders Corsigon,” the tall woman said.

  Anders found that her handshake was surprisingly strong. Why lie to these people, he thought and nodded.

  “This is Dalia of the Sixth Family—” he said a little formally.

  “ichy’dycheel-mar’ Viriy’in?” Martravia surprised him by addressing Dalia herself in Ilythian. It didn’t sound quite so musical or birdlike when she spoke it, but the smile that played across Dalia’s features was genuine.

  “Yes, you could say so, Councilor,” Dalia laughed, casting a quick look at Anders, who got the sense that the two women were talking about him.

  “And this is Jake.” Dalia swept her long-fingered, gloved hand to the youth hovering behind them, looking wide-eyed at everything.

  “A pleasure.” Councilor Martravia extended her hand.

  “No, it’s not safe,” Jake muttered, nodding instead.

  “Ah, um, this young man is touch-PK,” Anders said. He watched the councilor’s reaction with the trained eye of a police investigator. The smaller Councilor Hernandez drew himself back a little, but Martravia just nodded matter-of-factly.

  “Please follow me. The safety of the entire galaxy is at stake.” She turned and swept down the curving hallway, with Anders, Dalia, Jake, and Patch falling in behind.

  The Voider station proved just as strange on the inside as it was on the outside. They passed doors opening into rooms filled with light, or the steam and clank of strange robotics. Once, their path turned into a thin wire bridge over a section of the ring that had been turned into a terraced garden.

  It was also busy, with Voiders in patchwork service gear hurrying from one workshop or seminar room to the next. None of them wore insignia, and each was as unique as the different environments that Anders’s steps took him through. Some raced down the halls seated on tiny hover-drones, while others lurched and trembled under the weight of monstrous metal equipment. Anders was just ducking as a small flock of hovering drone-orbs almost
crashed into his skull, when Councilor Martravia had announced that they had arrived.

  “Please.” She indicated the doorway ahead of them.

  It was a bulkhead door that clearly led to the station’s central column, as on either side of it were crystal-glass windows displaying the internal geometries of the rotating rings. Numerous similar bridges and connecting tubes ran from the other rings to the cuffs of the central column, and between them swerved and dodged many Voiders in space, wearing small rocketry-suits as they worked on the station or merely commuted from one ring to the next.

  Anders and the others stepped inside of a large shuttle-lift, with the small Councilor Hernandez placing himself as far away from the wary-looking Jake as he could. Anders didn’t like that. They suddenly swept backward at incredible speeds, before clunking not-so-gently into place, then the entire lift rotated as they arrived at their destination.

  “Gentlemen, ladies,” Patch crowed. “The Voider Vaults!”

  The doors opened, and Anders saw what looked to be a field of stars.

  4

  The Voider Vaults

  “Nodes,” Anders said as the nearest of the stars hovered into view.

  The bright orbs that Anders had thought were lights were in fact a kind of very-large data-node, similar to the ones that Anders and Patch, and all humans under the Reach of the Throne, wore. He could see the enlarged matrix crystal in their centers, overlaid with the fine golden lattice of neural wire connections.

  Whereas the miniature ones that he and the others wore were held in tiny capsules of open-eyed titanium, these were as large as Anders’s skull and were held in a sphere of the gray-silver metal. The crystal of each one was so bright that, from afar, they appeared like stars hanging in a vast black space.

  “It’s the great Voider secret,” Patch confided in him conspiratorially. “Everyone thinks we’re all about the rockets and the field generators, but we realized a long time ago what the true currency is.” The young man lifted his hands up around them. “Data!”

  The group stood on a wide metal-grill balcony, and as Anders and Patch talked, Martravia had tapped the small body of her own node causing something to clunk and emerge from the underside of the balcony—a wide drone disk, fitted with its own field generators like each of these ‘star-nodes’ were.

  “Come,” she said, stepping onto the disk where there was ample room for everyone. Jake edged closer to Anders from the bare edge, but soon they were rising through the black space and sweeping their way through the field of stars toward the cluster that Martravia directed them. Beneath them, Anders caught a glimpse of other such disks with other Voiders hovering and flying to other star-nodes as they went about their constant science and research.

  “I take it that you know of the empress’s apocalypse-weapon?” Councilor Martravia said severely as they rose slowly into the bright pool of radiance emitted from a constellation of five star-nodes. She reached up to point at one, and it slowly lowered toward them.

  Dalia nodded. “But only what our contact—your Oracle—has hinted at: Some new sort of weapon, powered by PK, which could pose a threat to both the Ilythian and human civilizations.” Anders could see her jaw tighten a notch. After seeing the destruction of Eadaryn, he thought it no surprise that the alien was desperate to not let the Eternal Empress get her hands on anything that could do worse damage than that atrocity.

  “A danger not just to the Ilythians and the Golden Throne worlds,” Councilor Hernandez broke his silence by saying, “but to all sentient life in the galaxy!” The diminutive man’s voice was stern and severe.

  “All sentient life!?” Anders was shocked. Come on, he thought. The Throne, Ilythian, Mondrauks, and Secari only occupy about a half of the Milky Way put together. The idea that their combined races, plus those as-yet undiscovered, was threatened by one woman was a stretch.

  “It’s happened before,” Hernandez muttered as he looked into the dark.

  It has? Anders looked at Dalia, whose Ilythian culture was supposedly far older than humanity, but her face was impassive.

  “Friends, meet Codename: Archon.” Councilor Martravia’s voice went very low, almost as if she daren’t speak its name, even here in the heart of the Voider super-station.

  The star-node that Martravia was directing with her own cuff-mounted miniature ones flashed, and a fine blue haze extended as a sphere around their entire area. When it swept over Anders, he felt his hair stand on end and the tingle of field energy over his skin. A privacy shield, the man realized. Commonplace in diplomatic or confidential meetings, anyone outside of their space would just see the flat blue of the field and would not hear or see anything happening inside.

  And then the star-node flashed again and emitted a large holo-image in front of them.

  It was of a patch of space, Anders saw, but none that he recognized. There was the twinkling of stars in the background, but also the wide orange, gold, and crimson haze of a nebula or plasma field.

  In the center of the image was a perfectly spherical, black orb.

  Suddenly, the image scattered and glitched, before becoming true-focus once again, only now with all the colors inverted. It glitched again, losing definition before finally returning to true.

  “This is footage was taken from the drone reconnaissance probe known as the Zephyr, in its first—and only—historic mission,” Councilor Martravia said. “The Zephyr reached approximately eight thousand lightyears from the galactic core, the closest that any human-made vessel has reached.”

  “I’ve never heard of that mission.” Anders frowned.

  “I’m not surprised.” Martravia nodded to the glitching image before it suddenly winked out to be replaced by the blue sphere of their privacy field. “The Zephyr was to be, as the Acronis and Voyager missions had been before it, a statement of the development and reach of humanity. A prelude to first contact in some cases, or an outright stake-of-claim on uninhabited worlds,” Martravia explained. “However, what the Zephyr discovered out there was a secret that could never be revealed.

  “We know, of course, that our galaxy has been inhabited many times, and for far longer than humans first walked out of the forests. But the existence of this orb, and the resulting scans that were made of it, point toward a vastly superior, more ancient civilization than any of those currently in play.”

  “Excuse me if I interrupt,” Anders said. “But, so? The galaxy is a big place. There is plenty of room for all of us.”

  “But not for the Eternal Empress’s hunger, Lieutenant,” Councilor Hernandez muttered darkly.

  Martravia continued, “The Zephyr’s scans showed an energy output greater than a pulsar burst, larger than many supernovas, and it was contained in a way that we still do not understand.”

  “Some new type of star?” Anders hazarded a guess.

  “Your guess is as good as ours, Lieutenant,” Councilor Hernandez announced gruffly. “Pull up the expedition scans, Martravia. You know the ones I mean.”

  She made a gesture and another holo, or rather, a series of holos, appeared in the air. The images flickered and changed often, and each one showed barren, rocky desert-worlds, interspersed with images of vast asteroid fields.

  Again, space is a big neighborhood, Anders had to caution himself. Even the old stories of the Sol System said that it had Mars and Venus and Mercury—all barren rocks now.

  “The same energy signature emitted by that sphere was detected at each of these locations during the Zephyr’s flight,” Martravia said.

  “An explosion?” Dalia hazarded a guess this time.

  Which would make the orb some kind of remnant of a super-massive star, like a white dwarf? Anders thought.

  “They were at unique, separate locations here and there,” Hernandez growled. “In short, they were directed attacks. We believe that orb is in fact an ancient weapon, left behind by some lost civilization.”

  “Someone harnessed the power of that orb to destroy ancient planets,” And
ers said. The idea was horrifying, and now that the Eternal Empress knew where this stellar object was, she would be trying to harness its power for her war efforts! He looked at Dalia, who had tightened her hands into fists at her side.

  “And it gets even worse than that, Lieutenant,” Councilor Martravia said. “The Oracle—whom you call your contact—revealed to us that the Eternal Empress has found a way to transmit the orb’s power through PK. As the orb is so far away, it would doubtless be a monumental effort to jump it here, and probably far too dangerous to have in Golden Throne territory in case it misfired. But the throne means to use the power of what they call Codename: Archon through batteries of PK clones.”

  There was a shuffle in the middle of the group, and Jake’s wavering voice emerged, “And that is why she abducted people like me at birth? And why we were grown in those bio-containment tubes?”

  “Yes,” Martravia said seriously, and then her eyes softened somewhat. “I am sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your doing.” Jake grimaced, and Anders felt an ache in the back of his jaw as a wave of anger rolled out from the young man. The entire hover-deck they stood on shook slightly.

  “Jake…” It was Dalia’s voice, soothingly turning to him. “Hold yourself strong. I will teach you simple Ilythian exercises to control your abilities.”

  Anders had forgotten that Dalia—just like all Ilythians—were latent PK as well. But something else was bothering him. He turned his attention back to the councilors.

  “This whole situation still isn’t making any sense,” he announced.

  “We Voiders have a saying, Lieutenant,” Martravia said wryly, “you left sense behind on the edge of Sector 7.”

  “Cute.” Anders grimaced. “But what I mean is, why? Why would the Eternal Empress go to such great lengths, kidnapping and developing an entirely new branch of Gene Seer technology to control a weapon so far away?” Anders knew that it probably would have taken years, perhaps even decades, to get to this point. He knew that the empress was ancient, but this was ridiculous! “What does she possibly gain by throwing the galaxy into a stellar war?”