Alliance

by Bruce S Larson

  A red line formed in the star scene. Once closer, the line was revealed as a trough of roiling fire. Worse yet, hideous beasts with tentacled mouths swam within the flames as if awaiting prey from above. All beasts stared up at the three with confident, predator eyes.

  “Is this a question?” Myra asked.

  “A somewhat simplistic means to instill fear.” Buran said with disappointment, yet he stayed on the stone floor.

  “Simplistic? I think it’s tapped our minds. Fire. Monsters. Some fairly common themes across civilizations.” Myra said.

  “Perhaps these visions are from within our minds.” Buran paused to think on the structure of the beasts. It seemed almost a memory.

  “They may be mental, but we know some real beings exemplify such terrors,” Niko glanced at Myra who stayed focused on the fire trough. He slowly moved his head over the hall’s threshold to stare at the monsters, and then jerked back. “Maybe this is a vision of Hell, itself.”

  “Perhaps the root of the legend,” Buran observed. “I have never seen Hell, only a hellship.”

  “As have we,” Myra said. “Our people have, now twice in our history. The first sighting drove us here.”

  “So maybe it’s a warning. Look!” Niko pointed to the bottom edges of the passage walls.

  Shattered ship debris tumbled downward beyond the polished walls. The pieces fell toward the fire trough and the beasts began a frenzy of snatching them into the fire.

  “So, a more realistic scenario. Unfortunately.” Buran said and looked down the passage. “To proceed is an act of faith.”

  “Faith?” Myra asked. “Or the triumph of intellect over fear. You see a floor, albeit transparent.”

  “It’s just a reflection,” Niko said.

  “But where was this stone floor before now?” Myra asked and pushed between Niko and Buran.

  “I agree, it is simplistic.” Myra said. “So is the solution.”

  “Then share it.” Buran snapped. “I am not here for the psychology of these images. I want what is beyond them.”

  “Then follow me.” Myra stepped over the threshold. She walked across the seeming bottomless platform disregarding the hellish trough and toward the adjoining passage.

  A flash of shock and moment of anger jolted Buran. He bolted to catch Myra. Niko made a nervous laugh, and followed.

  “I think it respects we are a courageous species,” Myra said as Buran caught up to her. She omitted adding plural, of course.

  The bottom-free passage and fire trough vanished. In the distance, a huge, orange-red iris sped toward them. All three recognized it as the center of an eye, yet not from either species staring back at it.

  “All right. It sees us. It’s coming.” Niko said. “But why does that eye-thing need to be so massive?”

  “It’s massive to us.” Buran replied.

  “But they could scale down,” Myra added. “I think it, or they, want to impress. That eye would seem vast to most species. They want us to know who came before, just like students leaving notes or etching in a book or desk to mark their presence to the students that follow.”

  “Like graffiti?” Niko asked.

  “Or the marks for a grave,” Myra said.

  Buran glanced at his companions. “I’m afraid my translator is not keeping up with your references.”

  “Good,” Myra glanced at Buran. “Then we can talk and scheme right in front of you.”

  “And why would you?” Buran asked.

  “To secure our liberty once you have stolen what you seek from our world.” Myra replied.

  “The world on the surface is yours,” Buran sighed as the iris neared. “I have no wish to destroy or enslave it. But what rests in this ancient vault library is mine. I have the knowledge to unlock it. You weren’t even aware it existed. Your strange liberators, the demons, didn’t either. And if I were truly a tyrant, would I ask you to share this experience? To witness this?”

  “Maybe for the same reason your Physic made grandiose doorways.” Myra said.

  “My ego is not what guides me.” Buran said as the iris was nearly upon them. “Now please, let go of yours.”

  The alien eye now towered so high that that if their feet were not pressed flat, the eye’s surface would appear as a vast, horizontal plane to the three minds straining to look up at it. The disk of the iris stretched too far to see its edge. The pupil became an immense cavern that moved over them with rough, orange walls that coursed with electrical arcs between crags on its hemisphere-sized interior. There was no visible floor, but all three were now used to walking along an invisible surface.

  “I think I liked Hell, better.” Niko said and slowly lowered his strained neck to look at the distant, dark end of the vast tunnel that now engulfed them. He flinched as a massive arc leapt between crags, overhead.

  “Now what?” Myra looked all around her for any other means of interaction.

  “If we are in an eye, I assume something will see us.” Buran flipped up the flaps of his satchels with his lower arms and then swiftly reached down with his upper limbs to tap small consoles within them. “And now we poke it.”

  Buran raised his nimble fingers as if to an unseen keyboard that almost instantly materialized below them as if from dust. He began entering commands before its edges formed. He spoke as if again answered an unspoken question.

  “The manifest keyboard is to input data and queries into the system. The energy cells are bulky, as I need quite a bit of power. The corresponding output is a transmission of multiple phase patterns. I’ve derived the output spectrum from resonances of previous places, much like this. It should create a sort of bypass.”

  “Bypass?” Niko and Myra asked.

  “Yes. Although all we Nemorosans enjoy a good climb, this method will shorten and clarify our interaction. I hope.”

  Myra and Niko looked at each other with faces warped by confusion.

  “But, I’m afraid they—it—will reply in the ostentatious manner you disprove.” Buran glanced at Myra.

  Buran halted. He quickly turned his head to Niko and Myra. “By the way, I transmitted my name with the coordinates for our surface meeting. There were no names in the reply.”

  “I’m Niko.”

  “Myra.”

  “Greetings, Again. Now, Niko, Myra, witness galactic history.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Zaria looked within. Her vision was more than sight. She saw information across all wavelengths and many planes. She complied what she learned on her sojourn above the galaxy and across the quadrant that contained her home, Asherah, and Hell. She looked toward the galactic core from far along a great swirl tens of thousands of light years long. Bands of dust and interstellar matter and billions of stars coursed together. It was never static, even so massive. There was a constant dynamic of gravity and energy along the vast arc reaching the intensely luminous center. Zaria knew deep within the galactic core spun several dark hearts more powerful than the quasar she visited at her journey’s start. They held matter in a balance of velocity and destruction.

  Zaria fought another form of darkness, certain evil. She was instrumental in the defeat of the Dark Urge, and sought to build a new era of hope. Now she worried life, light, and more, were threatened anew. Quantum bonds permitted instantaneous travel of information, or minds, across reality. One mind, unknown, had used these bridges in disturbing ways.

  Zaria had retraced the unknown mind’s travels. Its pattern followed a massive ship. The unknown mind likely reached into the brain of one or many of its crew. That ship joined and led a marauding fleet, yet it had also been to several worlds either created or remade by the Builders. This was no coincidence. The ship, called the Sword Wing, had come from a solar system reengineered by the Builders.

  The Sword Wing’s makers were a highly social species. They developed quickly at the apex of their ecology on Nemorosa. For much of their pre-technological existence, they had no clue of the powerful minds that shaped their sys
tem, or the malignant legacy that threatened it.

  Hell’s campaign to destroy life was effective, brutal, and typically complete. Yet, it was not efficient. The Dark Urge designed her forces with strange aesthetics influenced by fear and madness. Hell’s onslaught consumed time as well as planets. Some systems farther from Hell had more time to develop, more time to explore and learn. Nemorosa was such a system. It was also a product of powerful minds given to eccentric and unfathomable acts, such as building a solar system with obvious clues to its artifice.

  Zaria did not know if the Builders intended the Nemorosans to develop sentience and then plumb their wonders. Perhaps that occurred only through unforeseen evolution and happenstance. Those questions would endure. The Nemorosans gained intellect and sought answers among a solar system of treasures for persistent scientists.

  They became an interstellar species faster than most civilizations. They used it, not merely to reach other stars, but seek Builder mysteries around them. Recently, one of their scientists has not alone in this quest. He gained a spectator, an intruder, if he realized it or not. That intruder followed him. The intruder’s mind could reach across space via quantum ties. Builder technology permeated across many planes, and its links made for easy passage through the galaxy. The resonance of Builder sites linked them to the Sword Wing and its crew. There was nowhere to hide from the intruder when once you stepped from them and back into the physical realm.

  The intruder hid from Zaria, but could not erase all its traces. This troubled her. Why hide? Predators hid to ambush prey. Was this intruder a hunter? Zaria thought of an arcane predator capable of traversing spacetime via quantum links. Yet, she felt only the barest trace of anything similar to the Great Widow. She could not be certain, but the very slight sensation was like the resonance of the arcane silk that the spider spun through hellships. Could this mind be a General? Or—?

  Zaria felt a ripple of fear through her luminous form. She found herself floating closer to the galactic core, and stopped. The Dark Urge was withdrawn. Zaria had contacted the Great Widow in a dream and left the suggestion the now childlike mind was more prey than sovereign. Yet the Great Widow had not struck and Hell still posed a threat, even without its almighty darkness fully awake and angry.

  However, if this intruder, like the Dark Urge, embarked on a campaign to acquire power—! If it had access to the Great Widow’s web, it could link to several places at once and not be limited to visiting one site at a time, just as any being capable of rising above four dimensions could see them in cross section from a fifth.

  Zaria considered that this intruder also wanted information, or maybe control of Builder sites. Yet, the power in only one of their machines was too great for a single mind in the present universe. If the intruder could reach across spacetime to the Builders’ structures, perhaps it sought to unleash forces they contained. Those forces bound stars and solar systems. Long ago, something corrupted the Builder machine called the Forge and caused the schism that created her and the Dark Urge, and eventually the Age of Apocalypse.

  The Dark Urge was inefficient, and that gave time and hope. This intruder might have the same desire to annihilate, or merely rule. If it gained the power to corrupt Builder machines, it could unleash their power in uncontrolled reactions that could bring greater devastation than Hell ever had. The detonations would be greater than gamma bursts. If it shared the madness of the Dark Urge, galactic annihilation might occur far more rapidly. There could rise a new age of apocalypse, and the end of liberty and life may be complete.

  “History?” Myra asked as she stared up at the odd, massive scene enclosing herself, Niko, and Buran. If she had not seen the iris overtake them, she would think her surroundings were an orange, craggy canyon warped into an impossibly large cylinder to encircle them. Myra guessed the crags, minus the gigantic electrical arcs, might represent the ends of the fibrous, pigmented tissue of an alien iris seen from within the pupil by a microscope or microscopic parasite.

  Myra knew there were multiple layers of an iris in natural eyes. Her people had altered theirs to aid them as colonists. This massive image was not based on any sighted lifeform she had studied. Perhaps being in a vast pupil was intended to make them feel as minute as a bacteria. The lightning was for added drama. Or, if the iris represented the size of the head, perhaps it was a depiction of its ego. She shook her head and blinked her own eyes as another arc shot above them.

  “I agree,” Niko looked down from the arcs and at Buran who tapped keys rapidly. “Are you sure you want to try—I mean, what are you doing?”

  For a moment, Buran regretted including the two indigenous minds. His race faced doom if he was successful. That was their goal. Yet, if they failed and he only brought doom, a sentience species could at least be a witness, if not take up his work and legacy against Hell. He sighed and actually blinked his four eyes. Then, he spoke.

  “My solar system was built by the Physic. I have studied other Physic sites, and communicated with their automation. At least, eventually. I derived a common set of symbols. A sort of identifier code. It acts as a key to solicit more than grand imagery.”

  “A code. Like a password?” Niko asked.

  “A pass process,” Buran answered. “They are, basically, geometric shapes. Yet they are layered with meaning. Each of their aspects represents a different context for communication: mathematic, geometric, physics, and others. Based on one, I’m certain they also represent planets. Thus, masses. Orbits. Gravity.”

  “All of that is part of the pass process?” Niko asked with his large eyes widened.

  “I assume most of it is understood,” Buran answered and tapped his floating pad. “The geometric symbols require an order when first entered. After that, changing the order, I hope, creates context for my request.”

  “How do you know the order?” Myra asked and narrowed her gaze at Buran.

  “Observation. Trial and error.”

  “You put our lives on the line with trial and error?” Myra shouted with no echo in such an apparently vast space.

  “Yes. This is a different sort of site from the others. A library. Perhaps a gift meant to be accessed. The other sites had only, well, access panels. But I could never get them to permit me to remove any objects, even ones proportionately microscopic to the vast machines.”

  “Vaster than this?” Niko asked and looked up with opened jaw at more lightning across the orange crags.

  “Yes. Some had spheres, like this one, captured within gigantic chambers.”

  “Wait, chambers holding planets?” Niko stumbled backward. Myra stopped him from falling.

  “Yes. You see the extent of their power.” Buran glanced up.

  Myra and Niko exchanged disbelieving glances.

  “You can imagine my pride at gaining entry to such a place. You can also imagine my despair when they closed, forcing me to flee. Not all of my assistants made it out with me. But each time, each sacrifice, gained more data.”

  Myra slowly shook her head and frowned in disgust.

  “I deduced some of the library spheres traveled by looking not merely at solar and nebular systems, but between them. Some of the enormous chambers—enormous? Make that solar-scale vaults had what appeared to be spaces for missing spheres. It took a long time to process the data and compile an image we could perceive. It was like imaging a planetary system.”

  Myra and Niko stared off at the thought. Both considered that Buran built the Sword Wing large for more than its role as a battleship.

  “I recorded each interaction, each survival, before they blocked me.” Buran continued and still tapped, furiously. “I think they might’ve even been teasing me, plumbing my intellect and capability.”

  “Teasing you? Like a child?” Myra asked and looked back down at Buran.

  “Perhaps. And perhaps they are the children, or Physic children’s toys, and were trying to entertain me.”

  Myra and Niko shook themselves as another impossible idea se
ared their brains more than the massive arcs all around them.

  “Considering the knowledge and thus power the Physic possessed, the eccentric nature of their creations that we can perceive, maybe all this is awe is simply entertainments for their young.”

  Myra peered intently at Buran and considered that he might have a sense of humor, or that he was teasing them.

  Buran stopped typing and relaxed “I have transmitted the geometric series in various codes and high-form image types. The reply should be—there!”

  Buran pointed with his two left arms at the emptiness between them and the distant, black dot of space beyond the iris. A ripple like hot air appeared. It coalesced into a sphere and then a three-dimensional octahedron appeared inside it that flashed into a black shape as if cut from obsidian. The sphere expanded, and an icosahedron formed and flashed into obsidian. The sphere continued to expand as an obsidian dodecahedron and then tetrahedron appeared.

  The sphere’s fifth expansion was close to the three watchers. The surface appeared as rippling glass and all felt as though they were suddenly flying over a hemisphere rather than standing on an unseen surface. They didn’t notice the lightning arcs and crags had vanished, but jolted when an enormous cube formed, flashed to black and slowly rolled as a squared moon in a blacker, starless sky.

  The sixth sphere itself became black. All three felt as though they were now drifting in the vastness of space in the orbit of a black, gas giant.

  “Look!” Myra was afraid to point for fear any motion would cause her to lose her orientation and balance. The others looked over to where she stared. The edge of a ring appeared near the equator of the giant black sphere. It was a just as when they entered the vault.

  “Yes! A ringed ball. It’s the sixth symbol. It’s working!” Buran shouted and began typing anew. “I’m transmitting the shapes in a series of orbits.”

  “Like planets?” Myra asked and wanted to grab something.

  Niko grabbed her.

  “Yes. Each shape represents not only its geometric formula, but a planet of some, perhaps vanished, solar system.”