“And one’s lit, but the other’s not,” Sirius said. “The black hole sucks gas in, but the star’s hot. Its solar wind pushes away gas, but only so far—the heliopause, the boundary where we normally shut off the glider. When the black hole crosses that boundary—”
They all stared up at the Beacon as it flared atop the blue-white metal of the castle.
“It becomes half a hyperdrive,” Serendipity said, “and burns up every matching circuit.”
“Including all the ones in you,” Leonid said. “Were you seriously hurt, Serendipity?”
“My weave was scrambled, but I’ll be fine,” Serendipity said, brushing her quills. “A century ago, even twenty-five years ago, it would have been totally ruined. But my grandmother got her implant burnt out by tensor shock, so my grandfather’s team designed . . . upgrades.”
She looked off, an odd mixture of bitterness and gratitude on her face.
“I’ll be fine, Leonid,” she said. “My equipment’s repairing itself. Give it a few days.”
“If you two are done flirting,” Sirius said coldly—and both Leonid and Serendipity started—“I’m guessing this is the ‘shelter that stood for ten thousand years’ you mentioned. Yes? Can we get inside before the wind drifts one of those gasbag feeders over this way?”
They picked their way down the hill, encountering twisted, stunted trees with steeply angled trunks that Serendipity identified as Dresanian harvest trees, engineered to extract minerals and nutrients from the crust.
“We can’t eat this—it’s a molybdenum harvester,” Serendipity said, inspecting a tree with stunted-looking metallic fruit. “These are used for nanotech. That’s kind of odd for a colony this old—oh, hey.” She bolted forward, seizing a fruit from another tree—then cursed.
Sirius stepped up. The fruit was half consumed by white fungi.
“A lot of the trees have the same fungus,” Leonid said. “It looks . . . native.”
“This explains why the refugee boy was starving,” Serendipity said.
She dropped the fruit and they went on, but Sirius kept an eye out for more of the tree Serendipity had thought was edible. Most of the fruit were ruined by the same white fungi, but things started changing the further they went towards the Beacon.
“The trees are getting bigger,” Sirius said, inspecting a dark blue-green leaf. At first the foliage had been spotted and crumbly, but now it was glossy, the angled trunks wrapped in dark peeling paper, their roots surrounded by bushy moss. “Everything’s healthier, the closer we get.”
“That’s the crustal plug,” Serendipity said. “A biosphere’s more than surface ecology. The roots of life go down kilometers. Dresanians are experts at grafting biospheres together. Looks like this one went fallow before the harmonies developed.”
They followed a path down to the spaceport’s mammoth door, hanging half off its hinges, with a narrow triangular crack lit from within by a flickering blue light. The path ended by a pool at the base of the door, where the water seemed to stop midair.
Sirius leaned over the greenish pond—a lazy fat fish wriggled there, but Serendipity warned him off—a “thinkfish,” inedible. Sirius peered at the weird cliff in the water at the base of the door: it was almost like there was an invisible force field holding the pond back.
“Well, here goes,” Sirius said, trying to leap over the water through the crack in the doors. He ran smack into an invisible barrier, right over the water’s edge. The barrier flashed and rang like the bass note of a strumstick, and Sirius rebounded, falling back into the water.
“Let me try,” Serendipity laughed, as he spluttered back to the path. She edged up along the path, then began speaking in derkesthai. Sirius activated his translator, and caught the end: “ . . . by confirmation code Third Falling Lothi Leaf of the Second Red Branched Bough.”
Serendipity hopped through, with a little yelp when she landed, and spun to face them. Sirius noticed that the blue light inside gave her mane of rainbow hair the appearance of irregular light and dark stripes. “And these are my friends, my allies,” she said. “Let them through.”
Sirius gripped the tilted edge of the door and leaned through the gap. Nothing barred his way; moments later, Leonid followed. Sirius gaped: the force field literally did stop the pond midair, and he could clearly see the thinkfish wriggling in the greenish water.
Despite the force field, debris had gotten into the spaceport, choking its floor with mud, leaves and branches. They picked their way toward the Beacon rising before them through the cavernous roof. At its base, the skyscraper-sized spire narrowed to a slender tip.
Sirius swallowed. Just meters overhead, the kinetic energy of a collapsed star was pouring into that antenna. Flickering foxfire rippled over it, building up to a silent crescendo, then crackling over the giant spheres and cylinders of the receiver like slow-motion lightning.
“I thought the Beacon had been signaling all these years,” Serendipity said. Much of the equipment was burned out, but emergency lights glowed a deep red. “It was just the emission spire, echoing the tensor shock, every time the black hole entered the system.”
“At least we’ll have power,” Sirius said. “If anything’s working, that is.”
“A Beacon’s robust,” Leonid said, inspecting some loading equipment, which seemed partially active. “That much I know. But most of the other circuitry seems fried. I bet everyone who was stranded here got eaten by those monsters out there.”
“Will the shield keep them out?” Sirius said.
“If the spaceport was still conscious, maybe,” Serendipity said, touching a panel. It looked whole, but remained dark. “As it is, no central will, running on reflexes . . . no.”
She glanced at Leonid, then quickly looked away; Leonid was still also stealing glances. Sirius fumed: they were flirting. But even he had to admit she looked even more beautiful with her hair frazzled in every color, the lighter threads highlighting the shape of her huge mane.
But she also looked hurt, tired, beaten down—and so painfully, painfully sad.
“Now we know why this system was left fallow,” she said.
«My parents, have you seen them?» asked the voice of a child in Sirius’s ear.
—————
Leonid yelped, the voice was so close—and when Sirius did too, he realized the voice was translated. Leonid followed the arrows of his targeting indicator and found the voice came from a stand of wires. Hiding in them was a scared alien child with yellow skin and turquoise hair, pointed ears and long switching tail, wearing little more than a ripped tarpaulin.
The same boy that he’d shot back in the rigging of Independence.
«My parents, hunting they went, for food,» the translator in Leonid’s comm cowl said, struggling to keep up with the boy’s speech. The child hugged himself, shivering, leaning on a loose pole for support. «This place, there is little edible. My parents, they never came back.»
Leonid stepped forward, starting to speak—and the boy’s eyes widened.
«You!» he said, flinching back. «You . . . you killed me!»
“It’s right enough, it’s right enough,” Serendipity said, extending her hand to Leonid to stay back. She murmured something to the boy in derkesthai, the Dresanian language, and pulled something from her satchel. «Just woke up? Still hungry? Remember this? You can finish it.»
The boy stepped forward tentatively, then took the sandwich and ate eagerly. Serendipity adjusted the boy’s tarp . . . and then looked over at Leonid, her face drained of color.
“Nanotech trees and inexplicable resurrections?” Serendipity said. “Now I really know why this place was left fallow.”
Leonid opened his mouth, but Serendipity shook her head to discourage questions, and they watched the boy eat in silence. After a minute, Serendipity touched her for
ehead.
«A question, young one,» she said, still in derkesthai. «What are you called?»
Leonid clucked impatiently. “More importantly, what happened here?” he asked, with a sidelong glance at Serendipity. “Why was this place abandoned?”
“Let the boy talk,” Sirius said. He paused as their helms finished babbling Leonid’s translated questions. After they finished, he said: “Go on, kid. What’s your story?”
«Norylan is my name,» the boy said. «My parents, they were settlers. When the dark sun rose, they went for help. Their ship crashed, then they died. After that, things were hard. My parents, they went for food, and never came back. Since then, it has just been me.»
“Wait . . . Norylan’s parents died, then went for food?” Leonid said.
“After being resurrected,” Sirius said, “just like him?”
“What did your parents come here for, Norylan?” Sirius asked.
The boy cringed and looked away. «The soulforge, I’m not supposed to talk about it.»
“To experiment with nanotechnological reincarnation,” Serendipity filled in quietly. “Commonplace now, but highly illegal back when they came here. That’s why they picked this remote world; that’s why they never called for help. They didn’t want to be killed.”
“Your people would really kill this boy just because . . . because he . . .” Leonid said, realizing how bizarre it sounded, “because he came back from the dead?”
“Not now,” Serendipity said. “But back then, we’d been through wars with group minds and nanomachines, and had all sorts of taboos. Today, people like Norylan’s parents are regarded as heroes. Someone was probably covering for them when they stopped paying the mortgage.”
“When was that?” Sirius said.
“Ten thousand years ago,” Serendipity said.
“He’s been here, alone, for ten thousand years?”
“And probably starving all that time,” Serendipity said. “Norylan’s brain is instrumented with nanomachines, stone knives and bearskins versions of the ones I have. Every time he gets killed, there’s a capacitive flash that transmits his last memories back to a soulforge here.”
«It’s worse than she said,» Norylan said. «Sometimes I live for years. But I can’t reset my pattern. Every time I screw up and die, all I am, all I’ve learned is stuffed back into this child. I stumble around traumatized for decades, dying every few weeks until I find my wits again.»
“If he comes back all the time . . . then what happened to his parents?” Sirius said. He looked as pale as if he’d run out of oxygen. “They came back at least once—”
“I don’t know,” Serendipity said, rising. “Let’s go find out.”
—————
The soulforge was deep within the spaceport. The outside looked like a cargo bay to Sirius. Inside, however, was a decked-out lab, battered and dirty from long use. Banks of flickering lights and time-worn switches guarded a glowing shaft filled with blue fluid.
Sirius stared in admiration at the tall, humming cylinder. “It’s still running.”
“It’s Dresanian equipment,” Serendipity said, inspecting a glowing, floating orb she’d pulled from her satchel. Inside was a tiny tree with vibrant green leaves and sparkling blue moss at its base, but she called it a brainsai and treated it like a scanner. “And in good condition.”
“Even after the tensor shock?” Sirius asked, inspecting grimy keyboards, their common keys worn shiny after centuries of use. In places Independence looked the same, but after a while the switches broke and had to be replaced. But here . . . “After hundreds of tensor shocks—”
«The soulforge is a failsafe against death,» the boy said. Suddenly he sounded far older, far more mature. «My parents, they designed weatherproofing against every calamity.»
“And trained you to maintain it,” Serendipity said.
«Yes,» the boy said. «It was my first duty.»
“All alone for all these years,” Sirius said, looking at Leonid.
“And always starving,” Leonid said, looking back at Sirius. “God—”
«Most of the life-forms of this world are inedible,» the boy said. «The soulforge feeds off the crustal plug. It can rebuild me from atoms, but the food was all on their spacecraft—»
“We can fix that,” Serendipity said, pulling a small orange orb out of her satchel. It had a pebbly surface and smelled delicious. “Care to resurrect enough satsumas for the four of us?”
The boy stared at it, then laughed, a strange kind of hooting laugh. He seized the fruit and ran off to a bank of equipment, which hummed and glowed to life.
“Ruggedized equipment survived here for ten thousand years,” Serendipity said. “And so did this boy, with no more than eight or nine years of experience, and no food, being reanimated over and over again. God, I can’t imagine that beastly treadmill . . . but he survived.”
“Starving to death . . . forever,” Sirius said. The thought made him sick. “Your point?”
“I,” Serendipity said, plucking her brainsai from the air, “can make this world work.”
“You?” Sirius said incredulously. “Is that your job, fixing planets?”
“My . . . job?” Serendipity said. “I’m a little young to have a job—”
“You have crew rotations where you come from, right?” Leonid said.
“Crew rotations?” Serendipity said. “Once on a summer cruise, once, yes—”
“A summer cruise?” Sirius said. “What’s a—so you don’t have a regular duty?”
“I’m only nineteen,” she said. “I’ve a dozen years of schooling before I’m eligible—”
“You don’t expect to do real work until you’re thirty?” Leonid said. “You’re useless.”
“I am not useless,” Serendipity said with a snort. “I’ve studied history extensively—”
“So you’ve read a few books,” Sirius said, “and expect to be able to rebuild a world.”
“Yes,” Serendipity said. She reached into her satchel. “I’ve been studying for months—”
“Oh, that’s going to help us,” Leonid said.
“Me studying something for months is like you studying something for years,” she said. “Seriously. I’m half made of nanomachines with a computer woven through my nervous system, with access to an education system seven centuries ahead of yours.” She held up a computer pad. “And I’m a historian. I’ve been planning to run away for months. I studied every new colony for four million light years . . . and fed them all into here.”
“That’s why you grabbed your satchel,” Sirius said, staring enviously at the little pad. If he guessed right, it was a universal encyclopedia, another Dresanian treasure, containing as much Lore as a thousand ships. No wonder she’d gone back for it. “For your brittanica.”
“Well, that and the sandwich,” Serendipity said. Hearing that bit of forethought, Sirius found his estimation of her go up a notch. “The boy said there was little edible here, and if an Andiathar has trouble eating then humans won’t fare too well either,” she said—then scowled. “What we really need is my macdonald . . . but it’s in my saddlebags.”
“Which are in the camp,” Leonid said. “That’s why Toren wouldn’t let you take them.”
“So . . .” Sirius said. “You’re gonna rebuild this world. And you’ve studied a gajillion colonies. Do they give you any bright ideas on how three and a half refugees can do that before being swarmed by Toren’s goons when the gasbags chase them up here?”
Serendipity lowered the book. “Toren’s a problem,” she said. “I’m not worried about him coming here just yet—his best bet is to reboard Independence once the radiation dies down. I’m worried about what he’s going to do to all the women on your ship. What the hell happened?”
“Leonid broke up with his girlfriend,” Sirius said hotly. Leonid glared, but said nothing.
“Okay, good to know,” Serendipity said, almost immediately blushing, and Sirius snorted. “But you have to give me more than that. An ancient ship, no adults, crashing—”
“Independence had a huge crew,” Leonid said. “Three hundred forty-seven, three-fifty when we picked up Sirius and his parents adrift with a fried glider . . . what, five years ago?”
“Sounds right,” Sirius said. “Those were the good times, when I first met Tori, and . . . anyway, the crew of Independence was wonderful to us. They kept looking for parts to fix my parents’ flyer. And then, about four months later, we salvaged this old probe and . . .”
“And let loose a disease,” Leonid said. “It killed almost everyone from thirteen to fifty.”
“That’s Halcyan’s,” Serendipity said, leaning back. “Near murdered my family—”
“We know what it was,” Sirius said. “Almost killed my parents too, but they survived. They survived. We contained the disease to the cargo module, purged it, even set up a special pod for the survivors. But it left the ship so weak, so vulnerable, that when pirates attacked—”
Sirius swallowed, eyes welling up. He stood up and turned away.
Behind him, Leonid spoke quietly. “They killed the rest,” he said. “They ambushed one of our survey recces and came back to claim the ship. His parents suffocated to death when the pirates pulled the plug on life support for the quarantine module.”
“We got them, though,” Sirius said, folding his arms. It hurt so much to think about his parents being gone, even after all this time—but at least he had the memories of making the pirates pay to console him. “We showed them—”
“My grandfather mobilized us kids,” Leonid said. “We fought them off with his old collection of pistols and one remaining blaster. Surprised the heck out of them once, then again when he evacuated the cargo module with them in it. Since then, it was just us.”
Serendipity swallowed. “Everything I’ve done seems so . . . small.”
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