by J. N. Chaney
“There’s the pedantic old Sentinel I’d come to know and love. Okay, is it heading toward the Milky Way, or away from it?”
“Its trajectory is generally toward the Milky Way.”
“So it came from somewhere—well, out there, is what you’re saying,” Dash said.
“Correct.”
Dash studied the tiny object a moment longer. “Okay, everyone else hang back and stay alert. For all we know, this is some kind of trap, like, maybe the Deepers have this set up as some sort of nav beacon, and they’re going to drop right on top of us.”
The other pilots acknowledged and pulled away from the object, dispersing the mechs, but keeping them close enough for mutual support. Dash nudged the thrusters and slowly drifted toward whatever this thing was.
“It is at ambient temperature, less than one degree above absolute zero,” Sentinel said.
“Any emissions, power signatures, anything like that?”
“None detectable.”
“Huh. Okay…”
Dash eased the Archetype to within reach of the little object. Still no reaction. He reached for it, bringing the Archetype’s fingertip almost close enough to touch it. The object was smaller, Dash noted, than even just the last joint of the mech’s finger.
Still nothing.
He edged closer and gently grasped the object. As he did, he noticed a slight, round indentation in its surface. It had a slightly crystalline sheen but had been rimed with frost. He used the fine manipulators on the mech’s finger to carefully scrape the frost away, then magnified the imagery of what it revealed.
For a moment, Dash just stared.
“Dash? Anything you care to share?” Leira said.
“Yeah, way to keep us in suspense,” Amy added.
Dash let out a slow breath. “Well, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you, guys.”
“What? What is it?” Leira snapped.
Dash stared at the very human face, that of a woman, revealed behind the faceplate.
“Turns out we are not the first people to make it this far out into space.”
“We’ve completed facial recognition analysis and have a ninety-one percent match,” Sentinel said.
Dash’s eyes widened in surprise. He’d been staring at the woman in the tube, taking note of her strong features, framed by black hair. He couldn’t make out anything else. She was, apparently, alive, after a fashion, at least. Sentinel had been able to detect trace signatures of ongoing metabolic processes expected in a living human, albeit at a vastly slower rate than someone fully aware and awake.
“Ninety-one percent? Really? I thought you weren’t even sure you could get a match from the databases you have available. What gives?” Dash asked.
Sentinel had already tempered expectations because this far from the Forge, anything resembling real-time comms wasn’t even possible. They’d been stuck to reviewing the archival databases loaded into the mechs’ memory cores, which were enormous, but certainly didn’t include details of every human being who’d ever lived.
“We do have access to archival data for all humans directly involved in spaceflight since they’re the ones most likely to be encountered. She matches an identity in them.”
“Okay, so who is she?”
“Accepting this match as correct, her name is Sabina Lavarovna. She was a member of the first manned human mission to pass the orbit of Jupiter in the Sol System. She, and two other personnel, were tasked with testing new flight technology intended to make travel to and exploration of the outer Solar System possible.”
“Let me guess. They disappeared.”
“Without a trace. It was assumed that their vessel had suffered a catastrophic failure while conducting a gravitational slingshot maneuver around Jupiter, and that the wreckage had fallen into the planet’s atmosphere and been lost.”
“Apparently not.”
The other mech pilots had been listening. Leira finally spoke up. “I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but we’re an awfully long way from Jupiter.”
“I doubt that the technology available to humans at the time would have been able to bring her out this far,” Amy said.
Hathaway, her mech’s somber and sardonic AI, cut in. “It could have if she began this journey approximately eighty million years ago.”
“Yeah, she just doesn’t look that old,” Dash said.
“Not only that, but she’s traveling the opposite way, toward the galaxy, not away from it,” Conover added.
“Which brings us to the next question—”
“Which I have already anticipated,” Sentinel said. “You are going to ask if there is anything whatsoever located along the course she has been following. Yes, there is—a single, lone white dwarf star whose luminescence barely crosses the visible threshold. And, yes, that dwarf star approximately corresponds to the intersection of the two Arkubator trajectories.”
“Again, do you really need me out here for this?” Dash asked.
“Were it not for you, we wouldn’t even be here, so yes.”
“It’s nice to feel wanted.” Dash studied the lonely dwarf star, which Sentinel had centered in his field of view. Even at maximum intensification, he could only make out a tiny, pale point of light, only slightly brighter than the utter blackness behind it.
“Is there anything else out here?” he asked.
“Not that we have detected. That dwarf star is, as far as we can tell, the only matter within detection range that isn’t just dust or gas.”
“So there’s something more than just her presence out here,” Dash said.
“What could be more—I mean, nothing makes less sense than finding one of the first space travelers from old Earth this far out,” Conover muttered.
Dash turned the Archetype to face a circle of the most lethal weapons known to humanity. “Well, unless anyone has any better ideas, I’m going to stash our new friend Sabina here in one of the Archetype’s leg compartments, and then we’ll go see what we’ve found.”
Leira gave a dry laugh. “Well, we’ve come all this way, so we might as well, right?”
Amy chuckled back. “Hey, I’ve got nothing better to do.”
Dash scrutinized the tiny star system. It didn’t take long. The white dwarf itself hovered on the very edge of what could even be considered a star, its surface temperature and luminosity so low that it, in astronomical terms, would soon be just a black dwarf, a burned-out cinder. After that, it would simply go on existing, quite possibly to the literal end of the universe, when proton decay would finally make it vanish.
Sentinel listed off its stellar characteristics. “It is a class DX white dwarf. Its spectral signature is entirely uncertain, as is its origin. It’s quite possible, in fact, that it originated in another galaxy entirely and long predates the Milky Way.”
“I get the shivers just looking at it,” Amy said.
“It is an awfully lonely place, isn’t it?” Jexin put in, her voice quiet.
“Lonely doesn’t even scratch the surface,” Dash replied, then turned his attention to the two objects orbiting the feeble little dwarf star. Both were airless rocks, scoured bare and in lockstep as they orbited their companion. Interestingly, both were in the same orbital track but on exactly opposite sides of the star. Sentinel speculated that they had once been a single mass that had been split apart. How or why, she couldn’t even begin to speculate.
“Dash, Kristin says she’s detecting a slightly different signal from the nearer of the two—uh, planets? Are we calling these two little rocks planets?”
“Planets will do, sure. Sentinel, can you confirm that?” Dash asked.
“I can. Signal resolution is very poor, but it’s enough to indicate a slight difference in the composition of the surface. I recommend we move in closer to obtain better imaging.”
“Sounds good,” Dash replied and accelerated the Archetype, the other four mechs following.
A moment later, the threat board lit up.
&
nbsp; “We’ve got company,” Leira said.
Dash turned his attention to the tactical display. Six objects had just accelerated away from the dwarf star, toward them. They’d likely been lurking on the far side of the dwarf, waiting to see what the Realm mechs were going to do. It only took a few seconds to identify them as Deeper ships.
“Well, if we were going to run into anyone out here, it stands to reason it would be the Deepers,” Jexin offered.
“Yeah, it does,” Dash replied, but he didn’t move to close for battle. There was something about the Deeper ships. Something off.
Amy apparently noticed it, too. “Do they seem sluggish? Like we, uh, woke them up from a nap?”
“Now that you mention it, they do,” Jexin replied. “They’re not showing anything even close to the performance we’ve seen in typical Deepers ships.”
“Maybe they’re sick,” Leira suggested. Amy immediately picked up on that.
“You think so? The Deepers technology is partly organic. Do you think it might be susceptible to things like disease? Like maybe these ships have the flu?”
“No idea. All I know is that they’re coming out for a fight. Once we’ve kicked their butts, we can give them a medical check-up and see if they’re sick.”
As he spoke, Dash accelerated the Archetype directly toward the Deeper ships. The other four mechs fell into a wedge formation behind and to his sides, Leira and Conover to his right, Amy and Jexin to his left. It was a vanguard of fearsome power, and they were accelerating into the teeth of the enemy advance.
As soon as they reached missile range, the Deepers opened fire. Like the ships themselves, their projectiles were sluggish, accelerating and making course changes with, by the standards of space battles, glacial slowness. Dash easily dodged, using the Archetype’s fearsome acceleration to weave among the missiles, the point-defenses smacking one after another out of space. The few that leaked through were blasted to fragments by the other mechs.
“Everyone listen up—let’s not expend any of our own missiles. I’m not convinced this isn’t some sort of diversionary force or something,” Dash said. Acknowledgments rattled in, and Dash flung himself into combat.
Despite their ponderous approach, the Deeper ships put up a spirited fight. Dash took two solid x-ray laser hits in rapid succession. He’d been worried about the new Deeper beam weapon showing up, but there was no sign of it. That was good because Custodian and the other AIs were still struggling to make sense of it, based on the severely damaged examples they’d been able to retrieve. Until they understood it well enough to enact effective countermeasures, it was going to remain a sinister, looming threat over every engagement.
Dash whipped the Archetype through a hard turn and poured dark-lance fire into the lead Deeper ship. It tried to maneuver but to no avail. He closed in, delivering the killing blow with the Archetype’s wrist-mounted rail gun, followed by a flurry of blows from the power-sword, every brilliant slash of his weapon rending the enemy hull with ruthless efficiency. As the Deeper ship tumbled on in its death throes, he turned to look for a new target, but there were none. The other mechs had smashed the remaining Deeper vessels into derelicts surrounded by clouds of debris.
“Was that it?” Jexin asked.
“Yeah, that didn’t seem like much of a defense,” Conover added.
Dash took in the threat indicator, now dark, then scanned the space around the lonesome dwarf star. Short of some pretty sophisticated stealth tech, the only place a Deeper fleet could be hiding was on the far side of the star itself, tucked in close and radio silent. Dash led the mechs up and over the little star’s north pole to check and confirmed there was nothing there.
“So I guess that was it,” Jexin said. “Six decrepit old ships.”
“Yeah, but how much of a threat would the Deepers expect out here? We are twenty-three-thousand-odd light-years from known space, after all,” Leira replied.
“We’re also assuming this place is important to the Deepers, but it might not be,” Conover put in.
“Only one way to find out,” Dash said, flipping the Archetype end-over-end and accelerating toward the planet—actually, planetesimal was probably more correct, as Tybalt noted—that had displayed the odd signal.
“It looks like black goo,” Amy said.
Leira chuckled. “That’s because it is black goo.”
Dash had landed the Archetype near the extraneous signal, which was located on the far side of the planetesimal from the star. That technically made it the cold side of the planet, but the ancient stellar remnant generated about as much heat as one of Freya’s ovens, so every part of the rocky little world was cold, just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero.
Now, he stood staring at a small lake of what was, indeed, best described as black goo. Amy and Leira had landed with him, while Jexin and Conover stayed in space, keeping watch. They might be surrounded by thousands of light-years of absolutely nothing, but when it came to the Deepers, Dash didn’t want to take any chances.
“Sentinel, can we do better than just calling this stuff black goo? Like, what is it, exactly?”
“And how could it possibly still be liquid at these temperatures?” Amy asked.
“To answer Amy’s question first, I have no answer. There are only a few materials that can remain in a liquid state at extreme cryogenic temperatures, but even they become solid under these conditions,” Sentinel said.
“Okay, what about the first question? What the hell is this stuff?” Dash asked.
“It’s a complex mixture of organic materials, with Dark Metal held in suspension. I suspect it’s some property of the Dark Metal that allows this material to remain liquid.”
“So, it’s what? Some sort of primordial ooze?” Leira asked.
“For lack of a better term, yes,” Sentinel agreed.
Amy bent the Polaris over the pond, one of three pooled in low spots amid the barren, rocky terrain. She reached out a finger, touched the ooze, then drew it back. A long, gooey string of what looked like thick tar stretched, finally breaking and slowly falling in globules under the low gravity.
Amy made a disgusted sound. “Gross!”
“Okay, so let’s recap. We’ve got three ponds of primordial ooze, on a barren little rock, orbiting the tiny corpse of some ancient star, thousands of light-years from anywhere,” Dash said.
“That about sums it up,” Leira agreed.
Dash opened his mouth to say some variation of what the hell, but Amy cut him off.
“Dash, there are—things in this ooze.”
“Things?”
“Yeah, things. Like, I don’t know, blobs.”
Dash moved closer to the pond. Closer inspection revealed that there were humped shapes, almost completely submerged in the ooze. “Sentinel, any ideas?”
“Their closest analog are Deeper warriors. These ones seem to be in some sort of dormant chrysalis-like state, however.”
“They might also be immature specimens,” Tybalt added.
Dash narrowed his eyes at the motionless humps. Was this the real threat? Would they fiddle with this ooze and provoke some sort of massed attack by suddenly awakened Deepers?
He prodded one with the Archetype’s finger. It rocked slightly in response, but that was all.
“Tybalt’s convinced that they’re immature Deepers, some sort of larval or pupal state or something. So it’s a nursery, I think,” Leira said.
Jexin clicked her tongue. “What a terrible fate, even for Deepers. Out there, all alone, no community, just, well, this. Just cold, empty space.”
“Do you actually feel sorry for them, Jex?” Dash asked.
“In a way, I do. In a bigger way, though, I’d be quite happy to put them out of their misery.”
“It’s almost like they were meant to keep watch over something. But what? What are they watching?” Conover asked.
“The answer to that, I think, is in this pond. Sentinel, can you configure the shield to protect
the Archetype from being coated with this icky black sludge?” Dash asked.
“I can.”
Dash sniffed. “Well, then, here’s something I never imagined I’d be saying twenty-three-odd-thousand light-years from home, in the depths of intergalactic space.”
“What’s that?” Leira asked.
“I’m going for a swim.”
The primordial muck turned out to be so viscous that Dash actually had to apply some downward thrust to get the Archetype to sink at a decent rate. Once the goo closed over the mech, he was submerged in utter darkness.
“Uh, Sentinel? Can we do any better with these sensors? I can’t see a damned thing.”
“The Dark Metal suspended in this fluid is severely degrading sensor operation. However, I have an idea. One moment.”
Dash waited as the Archetype continued to sink. The mech passed through one hundred meters of depth and just kept going.
A series of ghostly, greyish images suddenly materialized around Dash. He could make out the roughness of a rock wall about twenty meters to his left, slowly scrolling upwards.
“I’ve caused a harmonic in the auxiliary main power coupling. The result is acoustic energy, which is reflecting back from any solid surfaces. It’s similar to an ancient method submersible craft once used, called sonar.”
“Now that’s what I like, thinking outside the box,” Dash said, grinning.
The mech continued to sink. As it passed through two hundred and fifty meters of depth, a new sonar return bounced up from below. It was the bottom of the pool.
“Well, this turned out to be not very interesting,” Dash said, his grin fading.
He nudged the Archetype laterally, drifting about ten meters above the rocky bottom. He didn’t really expect to find much and didn’t—
Until he did.
The grin returned, spreading across his face. “Ah, there’s something, just ahead of us. I even think I even know what it is. And if I’m right, then this whole trip just became totally worth it.”