The Fleet battleship flew into hundreds of small pieces. Sommen plasma intersected with the ship’s bow, cutting through the center and deep into the core where, Win guessed, it had hit the magazine. His heart sank. Win didn’t care about the crews; this would be bad news for Zhelnikov and his group, who had been counting on these vessels and their new weaponry for use against the Proelians.
Your thoughts have leaked. They’re refuse, tumbling through space-time to be picked up by anyone who looks.
Win felt a twinge of panic. He was about to retreat when the voice stopped him.
Don’t run. We want you to see. To witness. You are the abomination; we grieve because now we know your body is not here to dismantle slowly.
I’m difficult to find, Win sent. Even harder to kill.
It is better this way. You watch the destruction of your fleet and will spread fear among those who broke the treaty.
I am like you; I do not fear.
You are a poor imitation. It fooled us. Your masters know they break the treaty by abandoning your race. Your priests and priestesses have saved you from an early invasion; we will honor the treaty because of them, and because of your sister.
She is nothing.
Win sensed amusement in the priest, a kind of laughter infused into his response. That is an erroneous conclusion. Come. Watch. Get closer to your station and see what we do to those who break treaties.
Win followed the Sommen vessel as it burned toward the area that had been occupied by the Fleet ships. Another warship emerged out of darkness: a squat, oblong box, constructed in the usual Sommen green material—translucent, resinlike plates that overlapped in leaves. A troop carrier, Win thought. The ship crept closer to an asteroid so large that it resembled a small planet, with a rocky surface gouged by long black trenches where Sommen plasma had already destroyed whatever Fleet missile defenses had been present. As soon as the Sommen ship docked, Win flew; he moved through the rock until popping into a corridor, its walls bored smooth.
Armored Sommen warriors poured through the station’s airlock, not bothering to use rifles and instead opting for long knives. None of the station’s defenders had weapons that would work against Sommen personnel armor anyway, Win figured. Within seconds, thirty Marines lay dead, sliced open from neck to groin.
This is our faith, the Sommen sent. Those are brave men. My warriors honor them by refusing to use rifles. They wanted to remove their armor and use only breathing gear, but I forbade it.
Why?
Because we are not here to fight for honor. We are here to teach a lesson and punish. There is no point in seeking glory when spanking a child.
We will destroy you.
Again the Sommen laughed. That is what we hope. But there are things darker and older than my species; what will you do with them?
In a blink, Win returned to his body on the Higgins. He twisted in midair, using a gas jet to push toward the hatch and then out into the corridors. Blood floated in every intersection. Win sensed that Zhelnikov wanted to see him, but he ignored the thought and instead moved in the direction of the main airlock where he found a group of Marines, their magnetic boots grounded to the deck while prisoners hovered nearby.
“Are these all the Proelians?”
A Marine nodded. “All the ones that lived. I’m sure you’ve seen the corridors; we’ve spilled a lot of Proelian blood.”
“Get your men out of the airlock.”
Win backed up with the Marines so they all stood inside the ship, watching as the huge inner bulkhead door slid shut. It closed with a thud. He looked through the window, expecting the prisoners to cry or scream, begging for mercy. Instead they had all joined hands.
“What the hell are they doing?” Win asked.
“Praying, sir.”
Win slammed his hand on the airlock controls, punching in his security code and then pulling the outer door handle. At first the Proelians were there, then they weren’t. It ended in a puff of gas and Win imagined that the group now sped through space, a cluster of dead bodies holding hands and frozen in prayer. He grabbed the Marine’s shoulder and pointed at a nearby communication port.
“Jack in. Tell Zhelnikov I’m on my way to his quarters.”
His sister. Nothing in Win’s Sommen physiology had prepared him for the rage he felt at realizing the Sommen had accepted her but rejected him, and as he moved through the red-streaked corridors he began to wish that he’d been awake—to help with the slaughter of Proelians. He imagined the satisfaction of stabbing her. A memory of his father, from long ago, bubbled out from underneath his mantras to remind Win of their hovel in Charleston; the image stirred his thoughts, generating a stream of bitterness. My father abandoned me to start another family, with a Proelian whore.
He burst through Zhelnikov’s hatch and shut it behind him. “I want to know everything about her. Now.”
“Who, Win?”
“Don’t pretend to be confused!”
Zhelnikov shook his head. “Her name is San. She is a Proelian. For now you need worry only about the mission, Win—not reliving past slights or the fact that you grew up without a father. None of that matters. She is a Proelian theurgist and you don’t have to deal with her. Not yet.”
“It matters, old man, and I do have to deal with her. I saw the Sommen. Spoke with their priest. Not only do they want me dead because my creation broke the treaty, I saw in his thoughts: My sister has been assigned the task of killing me.”
“Damn it, boy!” Zhelnikov shouted. “Look around you. We just took over a Fleet vessel and are one transit from leaving human space; when we eventually relink with the main group, we’ll be well inside Sommen space. I need you focused on the mission. What did you see?”
“The Sommen have Childress Station. Everyone is dead, and your three ships destroyed.”
As Win told the story, the hair on his neck stood with a feeling that things had changed. The ship had begun accelerating. Win’s feet touched the room’s deck and his servos hummed as suit joints accepted weight and picked up the gentle vibration of ship’s engines. When he’d finished his report, Win leaned against a bulkhead.
“We are underway?”
“We have two bases—one on either side of the wormhole. You said that the Sommen priest warned you about things out there that are old and dark?” When Win nodded, Zhelnikov continued. “Then you need to see something. We’ll be at the human-side base in under an hour, near Childress transit.”
In deep space there was no visible light to illuminate the object Win’s shuttle now approached, and his view screen showed only a field of stars with a circular section that had been blocked by a moon or asteroid—a perfect circle so empty that Win imagined their shuttle headed into the throat of a black hole. He altered his sensor settings in an attempt to gain perspective. Without any markers or shadows, the one thing lending a sense of distance to the object was radar data that cascaded through his heads-up.
“It’s artificial,” Zhelnikov said.
“I thought it was an asteroid.”
“Everyone does when they first see this. I did. Its mineral composition absorbs and blocks all emissions and the only way you’d know it was here is if you kept a close eye for gravity anomalies or swept with radar. We found it when one of our destroyers slammed into its surface, the entire crew lost.”
Win had been searching his memories for any indication of Fleet having built artificial asteroids, when Zhelnikov’s words registered.
“You mean Fleet didn’t build this?”
“It’s artificial.” Zhelnikov pointed at a rectangle of light that had just appeared in front of them, where a landing-bay door crept upward to allow the shuttle to enter. “And it’s hollow. And yes: Fleet did not build it. As far as we can tell, the Sommen didn’t build it either.”
Win wanted to say something and opened his mouth to talk, but nothing emerged. The shuttle entered and his screens lit up on all sides to show the cavity, which consisted of glitteri
ng rock lit by human activity within a cavernous expanse—large enough to hold several battleships or towns. Holes and openings littered the walls. Win asked Zhelnikov to zoom in on one of them, and he saw a series of walkways, staircases, and ladders that connected each hole to another, forming a network of sorts that resembled an ancient settlement he’d seen back on Earth.
“I’ve seen this, in an old documentary about Earth.”
Zhelnikov nodded. “The Puye Indians, North America—or one of any hundreds of cliff-dwelling civilizations. But whoever lived here wasn’t human. The distance between steps suggests they’re huge. Giants. Bipedal for sure, with three toes on each foot, three fingers on each hand. Clawed.”
“What did they do here?”
“They travelled. Nothing remains except the spaces where they once lived and had equipment and machinery, but we can tell that this was a spacecraft. They hollowed out an asteroid and voila: a massive ship.”
“Nothing is left?”
“Almost nothing.” The shuttle bumped on a rock surface and metallic claws swung up to grab its landing gear, securing it to the rock. Zhelnikov grabbed his helmet and waited for the pilot to pop the airlock doors. “I need to show you something.”
“What about vacuum? Aren’t you going to wear your helmet?”
“We transited through an airlock, it’s pressurized. And there are growing stations for oxygen generation and O-two generators to compensate if something goes wrong. Plenty of fusion power.”
Win followed Zhelnikov out the door, drifting down toward the rock; his servo legs kicked up dust. Both men navigated through a maze of shuttles and small destroyers, winding their way through Fleet personnel that scurried toward the shuttle in bouncing motions. Win stretched, relieved to be outside the confines of a ship. The gravity, although almost unnoticeable, was enough to make him feel better, banishing the constant disorientation of navigating in zero g.
They weaved their way toward the closest wall. When Zhelnikov started to climb one of the staircases, Win noticed how awkward it would be—the wide gaps between them requiring the use of both arms and legs to move upward.
“Don’t fall. Even in slight gravity, once we get high enough, the fall can kill you. We lost three people the first time we explored.”
By the time they made it to one of the lower holes, Win’s systems had started to warn of his elevated heart rate and rapid breathing, and he felt the sweat slide off his forehead, making its way toward his undersuit. The hole was too big. Win’s servos whined as he extended both arms, which couldn’t touch either side, and he looked up to see that the top of the opening was at least six feet overhead. Zhelnikov hadn’t exaggerated, he thought. Giants.
Zhelnikov motioned for Win to approach. He stood in front of a wall that stretched upward, so high it reminded Win of one side of a skyscraper. Floodlights clanked on to illuminate it with a cold blue light, the glare of which made crystals in the rock glint.
“They knew us,” said Zhelnikov. “And they knew the Sommen.”
“This is . . .” Win started, unable to finish the thought.
“Unusual?”
“Impossible.”
A series of carved frescoes covered the wall from top to bottom, the upper ones so far above that Win had to adjust his zoom. The sight made him take a step back. Win stumbled, catching his balance in time to prevent from falling and then scanned the images into his system for future reference.
“That’s Earth, Precambrian. But there are far more life forms than we’ve ever been able to catalog. I don’t recognize many of them. Then you have the Cambrian explosion. Those organisms are consistent with the ones we’ve documented.” Win cycled through the frescoes, naming each geologic epoch. When he approached the bottom-most line of frescoes he stopped.
“That cannot be.”
Zhelnikov shook his head. “I assure you it’s real. Nobody could have come out here and carved this rock as a hoax. Only Fleet assets can travel here and we would have no need for this kind of deception.”
“Then the Sommen made this place—to scare or influence us in some way.”
“Win, we scanned every centimeter for traces of their material. Sweat. Nitrogenous waste. Bits of DNA. We found nothing. The few traces of carbon-bearing materials we did find we were scraps of some kind of fabric we were unable to identify.”
“Did you date it?”
“We did but it was far too old for carbon dating. Instead we found a perfectly square section of the rock that these things had melted somehow, either to form part of an engine room or they had a power source in here that went haywire, malfunctioned, and liquefied everything around it. New zirconium crystals formed. They yielded uranium-lead dates at just over one million years.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Repeating that won’t make it true, Win. This place was created at least a million years ago by an unknown race that knew about Earth, and knew about the Sommen. Then they abandoned it. And we’ve never seen a trace of them since.”
Win pointed at the lower row of frescoes. “Those are frescoes of things that haven’t happened yet, Zhelnikov. Those are of us and the Sommen, at war.”
“Partly correct. The first few are humans and Sommen at war. The next ones show us fighting on the same side, against an unseen enemy. And the last one, the last section has been prepared for carving but they never completed it.”
Win studied the pictures, moving forward but taking care not to bounce too high in low gravity. Zhelnikov was right. Sommen warriors—double the height of the humans beside them—fired plasma weapons, their frames encased in battle armor and faces obscured by their faceplates. The humans wore something altogether different. Win had never seen the kind of suits depicted in the frescos, skin tight and with helmets similar to an ancient crusader’s, and he gave up trying to identify them, instead running his gloved hand over the blank section to test its smoothness.
“This is why we need the Proelian prophecy texts,” said Win. “And the Sommen religious texts. Whatever is happening here, the Sommen have the answers and the Proelians have had a glimpse.”
“No, Win. Right now I need you back on the Higgins. We had a modular factory shipped here years ago and installed, as a backup to Childress. But this facility is—was,” Zhelnikov corrected himself, “subject to Fleet inspections. So we didn’t want to risk storing the plasma weapon plans and equipment here. The plans were all on Childress; we need you to retrieve them. And on your way, pick up the damaged signal buoy.”
“Why is this facility no longer subject to inspection?”
Zhelnikov hung his head, staring at the ground. “When you return from your mission on Childress we will take over this installation, eradicate the Proelian presence, and retrofit the Higgins with plasma weapons. There is more killing that needs to be done.”
“Don’t let it upset you, Zhelnikov.” Win felt the Sommen part of him grow in a burst of pain, followed by the elation of having a mission and purpose: going to Childress after a Sommen assault would be dangerous. “The ability to ambush and kill unwitting Fleet personnel has always been your greatest gift.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
San tried to shake the sleep from her head, coughing up mouthful after mouthful of oxygenated fluid at the same time a medic scraped cryo gel from her skin and then toweled her off. Two crewmen pulled her from the tube. She hovered in her quarters, squinting as her eyes adjusted to the light and shivering while a female crewmember helped her into an undersuit and environment suit; warm fluid circulated once her power flicked on, thawing her from the outside in.
“Gently,” someone whispered. “Coming out of cryo for the first time is the hardest.”
“Where are we?” San asked.
“About to go through transit one. You were supposed to be woken after passing through but the captain called an alert.”
“An alert?”
“We sent a stealth probe through. Chinese ships are waiting for us on the other side.”
“I thought I was supposed to do the scouting.”
“You are. Normally. But Captain wants you to try communicating with Ganymede Station. We’re going through to test the stealth features of these vessels and will engage the Chinese while you report the contact to the abbess.”
The woman finished connecting San’s suit and clapped her helmet on, sealing it with a click. They exited into the passageway. San did her best to move muscles that hadn’t been used in ages and her vision filled with stars so that she had to blink to maintain clarity.
“How long were we asleep?”
“Just over a year. We had to stop for an engine issue, so you slept a little longer than intended.”
“How long were you asleep?” San asked. “You look wide awake; there’s no way you just got out of cryo.”
“I’m part of the flight crew. We have three crews that rotate, so I’ve been awake for months. Here we are.”
One year gone. San’s attention shifted to Mars the moment she entered a tight conference room, a holographic star map rotating over the table. My mother is dead. She flew over the red and black landscape of the research station that had been her childhood and into the graveyard where her father had been buried, her mother now next to him. A basalt headstone had been carved with Nang Vongchanh. Mars’ rotation generated a gentle wind from between crevices and dunes, and it howled in a moan that died in Mars’ thin atmosphere as quickly as it had been born.
My mother is dead.
The captain entered and everyone in the room hooked their feet into floor straps while he positioned himself at the head.
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