by M. D. Cooper
Tanis could tell the ambassador was still trying to convince herself that the loss of her AI had a silver lining.
Sometimes, shitty situations are just shitty.
At the bottom of the shaft, the hoverpad stopped a few meters above the ground, floating above piles of rubble that had fallen from the mountain above.
“Not far from here,” Petra said before leaping off the platform and unfurling her wings, gliding toward one of the arches leading deeper into the mountain.
Tanis released a passel of nano, letting the bots map the area around her and fill in her HUD with what information her eyes couldn’t pick up in the dim light.
“So, why didn’t you just fully bury this place?” Joe asked as they skirted around debris to catch up to the winged woman, who waited at the tunnel entrance.
Petra shrugged, spreading her wings to their full ten-meter span before refolding them behind her back. “I always meant to come back and find out where the Scipians got their gate tech so long ago. The timelines didn’t make sense—this facility dates back to before Finaeus finished his work on gate tech. I mean, that’s crazy, right?”
The question was obviously intended to lead Tanis into revealing exactly why they were all making the trip to look at the relic beneath the mountain.
She only winked at Petra as they caught up. “Well, we might have found something to suggest that others were working on gates before Finaeus. And…well…Joe remembered the reports of this gate and its similarities to those other ones.”
“What other ones?” Petra asked, planting her hands on her hips. “Seriously, just spill it.”
Joe quirked a smile. “Ones made thousands of years before Finaeus made his.”
The ambassador’s eyes widened. “Thousands?”
Petra’s jaw fell open, and she stood staring at the others until Tanis laughed.
“Yes!” Tanis said. “Aliens. Aliens made gates first. I’m curious if this Scipian gate is like theirs. It had similar properties.”
“Wait…you’ve seen alien gates?”
“OK,” Petra crossed her arms. “You have a lot to explain.”
“Can we see the gate, first?” Tanis asked. “It’s going to take a bit to share it all.”
“Alright,” Petra led them down the passage. “But I want all the details.”
“Of course,” Tanis said, sharing a knowing look with Joe.
Five minutes later, they reached a nondescript door that appeared to be only a few years old. Petra palmed the panel and waited a few moments before glancing back.
“There are some automated defenses in there, just making sure they’re all standing down.”
“I appreciate it,” Joe said. “Getting killed under some mountain by mistake would be a terrible way to go.”
The ambassador chuckled. “Stars, yes. I hear you there.”
A click came from the door, and a second later, it slid open to reveal a hundred-meter square room, in the center of which stood a ten-meter-wide gate, scaffolding and diagnostic equipment arrayed around it.
“Oh damn,” Joe whispered. “That doesn’t look like a Sig gate.”
“You’re right,” Tanis nodded, her eyes meeting her husband’s. “That is a Sig gate.”
CHAPTER 45 - CARY
STELLAR DATE: 01.15.8960 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Skipper
REGION: SIU-8209, Norma Arm
“Tell me this isn’t natural, Earnest,” Cary whispered, glancing at the engineer, who was staring as raptly at the forward display as she was.
After what felt like an eternity, he shook his head in amazement. “There’s no way it’s natural. Look at that third belt around the star. That is clearly a segment of an orbital ring….”
“Could the Starshift have caused this?” she asked. “Wait…no, there’s just not enough time for the system to have settled into a pattern like this.”
Earnest glanced at her and nodded. “Unless someone else has traveled back in time, there is no way that we’re looking at a system colonized by Terrans.”
“Are you saying that we’ve found aliens?”
“The remains of aliens, at least. Maybe….” Earnest’s voice died out, and he scowled at the display. “What’s that?”
A marker appeared on the display, and Cary flipped it to maximum zoom.
“Engine flare, if I had to guess,” she said in a quiet voice. “So much for discovering the aliens first.”
“Or maybe we just discovered living ones,” Earnest suggested. “I’m launching our probes. If I arrange them around the Skipper, we can get a higher resolution image.”
Cary nodded absently, swapping to her extradimensional vision. “Whoever it is, they’re burning deuterium. No evidence of an AP drive. We could probably get a lot closer before they spotted us if we spooled ours out.”
“Do it,” Earnest said. “Alright, we’re getting more photons in now. Building a new image.”
Above the view of the ruined system, a starship began to take shape. It was wide and flat, looking almost like a manta ray. It wasn’t overlong, on the larger side of a corvette-class.
“That craft doesn’t look familiar to me,” Cary said. “Do you think it could be alien?”
Earnest didn’t reply, and she turned to see him frozen in place, skin pale, eyes bulging.
“Uncle, what is it?”
“That ship…that design,” he whispered. “I worked on that.”
“Dammit,” Cary folded her arms across her chest. “So much for being first.”
“You don’t understand.” Earnest shook his head, eyes still locked on the view before them. “I worked on that design before we left Sol…five thousand years ago. It was a new Enfield Technologies corvette being made under contract for the Terran Space Force. The contract fell through for reasons I don’t recall, and we mothballed the plans.”
“Could someone have found them?”
He finally looked away, his pale, green eyes locking onto hers. “Out here? On the far side of the core? No. It’s them. It has to be them.”
“Who?” Cary pressed. “Who is out here?”
“The ones we left behind.”
CHAPTER 46 - PEREZ
STELLAR DATE: 01.15.8960 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Harshni Station, outer system
REGION: Bysmark System, Outer Alliance
Colonel Perez strode through the warehouse in Harshni Station’s lower decks, triple-checking that his teams had everything covered.
Perez pursed his lips. If the president was here, something bigger was going on than he’d even begun to suspect. Not that it mattered as much as finding out if his kids and niece were alright.
Their patrol should have been easy, barely an inconvenience. But when a probe showed up with an OASF beacon, and Bozas intercepted it, claiming it contained proprietary information, his shit-hitting-the-fan radar went off.
The Bozan lawyers had stonewalled him for days, blocking his access to the probe—not that Perez cared. It was the OASF’s, and had been sent by people under his command. The message belonged to him, and if Bozas was willing to throw lives away to keep him from seeing it, that would be a capital expenditure yielding no net profit—to use their corporate lingo.
Perez turned to see the president entering the warehouse, w
ith Williams and Katelyn on either side. Their expressions were grim, and the colonel waited patiently for them to reach his side before he led them toward where the probe lay half-disassembled near the center of the space.
“This is messy,” Williams said. “I wish you’d waited before coming in weapons blazing.”
“I don’t,” Katelyn shot her husband a cool look. “This is our kids we’re talking about.”
“I know, but we’ll get accused of nepotism if we bend rules for our own children.”
“Fuck that,” she replied. “I just want to know what’s on the probe. If Mira sent it, and Bozas tried to hide it from us, I’m going to tear their CEO a dozen new assholes.”
Lysander glanced at Perez as they stopped in front of the probe, where a pair of OASF Marines stood with the company AI and commander.
“I think they destroyed some of it,” the AI said. “But not all.”
“I can recover it,” Lysander replied.
The Weapon Born’s eyes closed, and an instant later, they were in space, on the fringes of a star system.
“This is Regina. This is where their first dataset points us,” he said.
“There’s nothing here,” Katelyn said. “Why are they telling us about empty space on the fringe of the system?”
“Because it’s not empty,” the president said.
At his words, a large station appeared, cylindrical and covered with raised segments, all joining in an irregular, angular pattern.
“The data from the Inquiry shows that the surface of this station is thousands of years old. Many thousands.”
Perez’s breath caught in his throat. “We weren’t here that long ago. Not even close.”
Lysander coughed, annoyance evident in the sound. “Obviously. Let’s not jump to conclusions, though. According to the data, those are Bozan ships surrounding the artifact, and they attacked the Inquiry. It would appear that young Mira destroyed one of their ships and damaged several others before jumping to Khorina.”
The battle appeared before them, progressing in high speed and taking only a few minutes to play out.
“Good,” Williams grunted, nodding with satisfaction. “And the crew? Did she report any injuries?”
“None,” Lysander replied. “Though the ship did take considerable damage in that final exchange. It would appear they’ve suffered a variety of failures with their shield emitters.”
“And now?” Kaytelyn asked. “Did they send a probe from Khorina?”
“They did.” Lysander shifted the view to the next system. “The X-Cor group has an automated mining facility on one of the worlds in that system, but otherwise, it is entirely empty.”
A marker in the outer system showed the Inquiry’s position when they sent the probe, and another denoted the planet Kyra and its mine.
“Not the best place for repairs,” Williams said. “Looks like we know where we’re going, though.”
A second later, they were back in the warehouse, the president’s expression one of understanding and concern.
“Not you, General. I need you here. I suspect that things are going to get dicey, and we’ll need our best people ready for whatever may come.” Lysander turned to Katelyn and Perez. “Take the Normandy, find your children.”
Katelyn’s jaw was set. “You don’t have to tell me, twice, Lysander. Perez, let’s go find our kids and kick some ass. Not necessarily in that order.”
He nodded, glad to know the Inquiry’s crew and his family were alright, though unable to hold back the fear that they’d not be in that condition by the time help arrived.
Williams embraced his wife and then Perez. “Stay safe, you two. Bring them home.”
“Will do, General.”
“Brother.” Williams placed a hand on Perez’s shoulder. “I know you’ll get it done.”
“Absolutely.”
CHAPTER 47 - SERA
STELLAR DATE: 01.15.8960 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Grace O’Malley
REGION: Sigma 1431, Norma Arm
“I have to admit,” Sera whispered as she stared at the view on the Grace O’Malley’s forward display. “I didn’t really believe it would be that big. It’s, what…a hundred kilometers across?”
“Look at the planet,” Cargo said, swapping the view to the surface of the world below. “They had more uber-gates at one point.”
Jason let out a low whistle as they took in an overhead view of a vast desert, the remains of several gates jutting out of the sands. “That’s, what…four—no, five more of those things?”
“You know…” West drew in a deep breath before she continued. “I kinda wanted to meet these people, but now…I mean, what do they need with half a dozen gates this big? What are they carting around?”
Sera cast the woman a knowing look. “Right? A lot of these orbitals have been damaged—hard to say if that’s from time or battle. But if it’s battle….”
“Then maybe this was an exodus,” Jason supplied. “Perhaps they were researching the gate at the Sig 1199 base, and then once they worked them out, they deployed the full-size models here.”
“OK.” West glanced around. “We all realize that that is less-good, right? If people who have ships needing hundred-kilometer gates are running away, I don’t want to meet who they were running from.”
Cargo grunted a laugh. “That’s a fair point. Still, no one has been here for ages, just like the crater base. Let’s get closer and take a look at that remaining gate.”
“Works for me,” Sera replied. They were still several AU away from the world, so she set a course that would bring them over the stellar disk and into orbit of the gas giant the gate world orbited. “Looks like we can make it there in a day. Who wants lunch?”
“Seriously?” Jason asked. “You’re hungry at a time like this? We’ve just made one of the most important discoveries in Terran history.”
“Sure.” She shrugged. “Just like we did last week. And I got hungry then, too.”
* * * * *
Over the course of the following day, the crew of the Grace O’Malley mapped out thousands of orbital habitats in the system, as well as fourteen inhabited worlds and moons. Each one bore the remains of massive rings, though the one around Sig Prime, as the crew had come to call the large moon, was the only one still intact.
Jen had identified a station that was co-orbital with the ring as the most likely location for a control center. The fact that it and the ring had remained in stable orbits for centuries suggested that both were still running on some amount of power, and might just hold a clue as to what had happened in the system.
“Can I just say,” Cargo glanced at Sera and the others before clearing his throat, “these stations are the weirdest things I’ve ever seen. Why don’t they make the spokes straight? Having them bend at all these strange angles doesn’t make them stronger, so why do it?”
“Maybe they like how it looks?” Sera asked. “Humans like straight angles and clean lines—most of our scions do as well—but not all do. And it might also be a function of the gravity we evolved under.”
“I suppose. It still makes these torus stations of theirs look like spiderwebs.”
“Maybe.” Cargo shrugged. “I feel like I’m fully within my rights to be wigged out by this, though. What if we find their eggs, frozen in stasis, and someone wakes them, and we’re all overrun with sapient spiders? We should really think this through.”
“We’re going to be exceedingly careful,” Jason said. “Just like on Sig 1199. You didn’t get all freaked out there.”
“I didn’t know we were up against massive spider people who build equally massive gates,” Cargo countered.
Sera turned and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“It’s alright, worst we’ll encounter are those killer drones. But, honestly, ten thousand years eating gamma rays from this system’s star will likely have taken them out. We should be fine.”
“And if you’re not?” Cargo folded his arms, eyeing her with a level stare.
She winked. “Then we’ll call you and West for rescue.”
Half an hour later, Sera stood next to Jason in the Grace’s port-side airlock, looking out at the station that followed the gate in its orbit around Sig Prime.
Jason sighed.
The alien orbital consisted of a ten-kilometer-long spire with five rings mounted to it, each with a different diameter, though they all came in at around eight kilometers across.
That alone was unusual. Sera wasn’t certain she’d ever seen a station with what appeared to be randomly sized rings—though some seemed to be done for purely artistic reasons.
Maybe the Sigs are just really artsy in their own way.
Jen said.