He suddenly turned to his two companions. “There are probably more of these stations! If they came here, who’s to say they didn’t set up stations anywhere else?”
“Gods!” Mila whispered. “They might still be out there!”
“Good luck finding them,” Melchior muttered. “They only found this place by accident when a path-drive failed and stranded a freighter nearby.”
“Yeah,” Meesh admitted, “but they found it. If there are other stations like this one, don’t you think these guys would have known about it? You ever manage to get a data interface working?”
Melchior shook his head. “No luck. The folks that run the place have managed to splice their own tech into some of the data feeds, like the elevator metrics, but that’s about it. Most of the original computing tech was pretty heavily scavenged before the capital city even started organizing. Nobody’s even bothered in thousands of years.”
“What about where we’re headed?” Mila asked. “The systems must be intact, if it’s so remote. Might be worth a try?”
“I suppose.” The smuggler sounded dubious. “But you’d still need to know their language and nobody’s ever been able to crack it.”
“Yeah but it’s not an impossibility,” Meesh insisted. “This could… Hells!” He threw his arms up in front of his face as the far wall of the gigantic cavern slammed toward them, the view suddenly darkening, once again, to a dark gray.
He lowered his hands, breath coming in short gasps. “This place is very unsettling.” He fought to bring his body back under control.
“You remember that weird feeling I mentioned up on the elevator station?” Mila asked. Her icon on his HUD indicated the conversation was only between the two of them. “It came back when we reached that cavern and it’s stronger.”
Meesh reached out with his mind but he still felt nothing. “What are you picking up?”
“It’s… detached, dispassionate, but it’s definitely communication.”
“And you’re not just reading me?”
“No, it’s the same as what I felt in that orbital station or, at least, it’s continuous. It’s like thought without emotion.”
“What kind of thought?”
“Feels like an inquiry.”
Both were distracted as they burst out into a new cavern. Its size was just as awe-inspiring as the last one but the bottom was missing and their visor shielding adjusted to filter out the increased light.
“Gods!” Meesh whispered and it almost sounded like a prayer, for once. He stared down through the clear floor. “That’s the star, isn’t it?”
Through the space where the cavern floor should have been, they could see the white dwarf. Though ‘dwarf’ led one to expect less illumination, the heart of Babilim Station shone with a pale brilliance that sent shivers of supernatural fear down Meesh’s spine. Like everything on this station, the star was old beyond belief, so stable that a trillion years represented nothing more than the blink of an eye.
This was the eventual future of all life in the universe. A day would come when all the stars had settled down to this state.
And then the white dwarfs would start blinking out, turning into black dwarfs.
But that day, Meesh knew, would be more than ten to the power of thirty standard years away, at the very least. “So we’ve got some time,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” Melchior asked.
Meesh looked to the corner of his HUD, seeing the two-way conversation had shut down automatically from lack of traffic. He was glad he hadn’t said anything of any importance in his distracted state.
“Do you think the floor just collapsed?” Mila asked.
“Maybe,” Meesh allowed, “but I seriously doubt it. Whoever built this thing went to a lot of trouble and I imagine a big part of their reasoning was the longevity of white dwarf stars.” He gestured at the star, brilliant shards of light stabbing out from its outer surface. “This is prime real estate. You build here, you build to last.”
He forced himself to look up and his suspicions were confirmed. “Look up there,” he pointed. “See how dark the upper surfaces are? Designed to absorb the radiation. This chamber was built with energy collection in mind.”
“You know what I don’t get?” Mila asked. “Melchior says he’s the only one to come out this way.” She cocked her head quizzically. “Why is that? Why haven’t the folks holding the nominal claim on this station bothered to come out from their city and see what they can learn?”
They all flinched when the train hurtled back into a tiny hole on the far side.
Melchior tilted his head forward, peering at her from under his heavy brow-ridges. “Really? Are you talking about the same Quailu that run the HQE? The biggest, baddest mechiros ever to stride amongst the stars? Those Quailu?
“You think they want to come out here and face their own relative insignificance?” He almost looked as though he was going to spit on the floor but must have realized it wouldn’t make it through his suit’s shielding. “No, they sit in their city, collect trade-duties and pretend the rest of the place doesn’t exist.”
“Kind of stupid,” she said mildly.
“Yeah,” Melchior agreed, “but when you’re the toughest guys around, you can afford to be stupid.”
“Until you’re no longer the toughest guys around,” Meesh said.
The smuggler shrugged then nodded forward. “There’s an untouched crater up ahead. That’s what you wanted to see, right?”
Meesh nodded but twitched in a very un-heroic fashion as they burst out into the next open space. “That must take a lot of getting used to,” he said, trying to pretend Mila wasn’t laughing at him.
“You can see the cargo handling armatures,” Melchior said with a nod downward. “The guys back where you found me had already removed most of the heavy gear in that crater but everything’s still intact here. You can even see how they work. When I powered this place up, the gantries started working as if they hadn’t spent the last couple hundred thousand years sitting idle.”
“So everything just stopped one day, huh?” Mila leaned over to bring her eyes a few inches closer to a view that must have been several kilometers away. “There must be stalled cargo containers all over the place!”
“I bet the food’s gone bad by now,” Meesh joked, “but I’d love to spend some time getting into those cans and see what surprises they left for us.” This could be a useful place, if we ever need somewhere to hide.
“Yeah.” Mila rolled her eyes. “Like automated killer droid-swarms or bio-weapons with dodgy containment units…” She gave him a light punch in the shoulder. “This is why you needed an ops NCO along, someone to keep the engineer from running off looking for new toys!”
“Lots of ships still docked out there,” he said, pretending not to have heard her. “So they used to fly freight in, rather than just using the elevators.” He caught the queer look on Melchior’s face and realized, a little late, that the Humans were supposed to have stolen ships from this station, at least according to the smuggler’s accidentally correct narrative.
He sighed. “Listen, if you haven’t sorted out by now that your story is way off the path, then you’re not half as smart as I’d figured you to be.”
He squared off to face the Ashurapolitan. “Why would we want you as a tour-guide, if we’d already been here shopping for stolen ships and, come to think of it, why say we somehow managed to launch them past the station’s defense grid, if we had access to trans-dimensional portals in the first place?”
He felt the flare of alarm from their guide, mirrored by his features. Melchior must have taken the statement as a prelude to his execution.
Meesh waved, an impatient gesture. “We’re not going to hurt you. In fact, we might have work for you.”
“Work?” The alarm was fading but mild apprehension began taking its place.
“Sure.” Meesh nodded out to the busy hive of commerce beneath them. “You know how to get all
this up and running and we might have use for that kind of expertise, someday.
“Let’s have a quick look around while we’re out here, then go back. Not a word to your buddies back at your salvage operation. We just climb back into that auto-cab and fly straight to the elevator.”
“We?”
“You wanted off this place, right?”
“Well, yeah…” The hope was rising but a sudden impediment knocked it over. Melchior wrung his hands.
Meesh chuckled. “The cab left already, right?”
A weak nod.
“Well, that settles the pool, doesn’t it?” Mila asked, an edge in her voice. Betting on your own death was easy enough when you were still sitting in the wardroom. Hearing the plan from the would-be killer was a different matter entirely.
“Don’t want to tell you how to run your business,” Meesh said, “but, if you want to be an informant, you need repeat business.” He shrugged as if to say it was no difference to the Humans personally. “A dead customer is unlikely to become a repeat customer.”
“So…” Melchior darted his gaze between the two Humans. “… you’re still not going to kill me?”
“Hey, a lot of folks were talking about killing,” Meesh said airily.
“Including us,” Mila admitted with a grin.
“Yeah,” Meesh conceded vaguely, “I might have hinted at it…”
“You were talking about spreading polymer film so there’d be no DNA evidence,” Melchior reminded him.
“Hey, if you’re coming with us, you gotta learn to take a joke.” Meesh leaned back as the train slid to a halt. They moved through the airlock and into the fresher air of the cargo crater.
“We’ll take you with us but you need to stay on our ship for a while. You’re about to learn the real reason why we’re able to board ships undetected…”
“What about the understanding?” Mila had switched back to a two-person link. “He’s bound to find out, if he’s coming back to the Stiletto with us.”
“Neither can be kept secret indefinitely,” he answered on the link, “and this guy can be useful.”
“Are you two talking about killing me again?” Melchior broke in on the open link. “I can see your lips moving inside your helmets. I only ask ‘cause my personal physician told me not to let any projectiles go through my body.”
He held out his hands in a ‘what can you do’ gesture. “It’s an allergy, y’see. I get it from my father’s side of the family…”
“Hey, would you look at that!” Meesh exclaimed, returning to the open channel. “He’s learning to take a joke… and to make some of his own!”
“Yeah, that’s great,” the smuggler said. “Do I need to take precautions for my allergy or what?”
Meesh shook his head, still smiling. “Nah, you’re still good. We were just having a private moment.”
“Oh!” The Ashurapolitan leaned back slightly. “You mean you two are…”
“Hah!” Meesh laughed. “She wishes!”
“Wishes she didn’t just get that mental picture,” Mila corrected.
The trip back was uneventful, except for the need to play hardball while waiting for a new auto-cab to come collect them from the tech prospector camp where they’d found Melchior. There was an almost touching reluctance to see him leave, though it was entirely due to the amount of credits he seemed to owe them.
Hands had been resting on pistol-grips, when the cab finally arrived, and Meesh had tossed a credit chip over the prospectors’ heads as a last resort. “That should more than cover it!” he’d shouted as he shoved Melchior into the vehicle.
The shuttle waiting for them at the top of the orbital elevator was decidedly pedestrian and Meesh had ignored their new friend’s disappointment as they disengaged from the station and got underway for the nearest planet, a fried-out husk that had somehow managed to survive the local star’s red giant phase.
“I get it now,” Melchior announced.
“What do you get?” Meesh double-checked the nav settings.
“How you manage to get your ships so close to an enemy without them spotting you. You fly around in turd-buckets like this. Who the hells would even notice you, right?”
“You know, we started out not far from that concept,” Meesh replied. “Small ships, not much bigger than this shuttle. Small cross-section to enemy scanners. We’d sneak up their baffles, hiding in their engine discharge.”
“And then you found a way to make your ships look exactly like a shuttle?” Melchior asked, half joking, half exasperated. “I mean, I’m glad to get off that station but, if I’m gonna spend much time on this thing, I’ll…”
His mouth had opened for his next word and it just stayed that way. Ahead of him, a large door was swinging open on the Stiletto’s port hangar bay. The door wasn’t required for any structural purpose but the ship needed something to hold a coating of carbon nano-tubules in front of the large opening in the hull.
Melchior must have thought he was right, after all, because it looked as though a portal had just been opened in space. Through it, he could see a ship’s hangar bay with Human crewmen hurrying about their business.
“Welcome aboard the Stiletto,” Meesh said proudly. “Fast attack corvette. You’ll get your own cabin, three squares a day and a job, so you don’t get too bored.”
“And a proper EVA suit,” Mila added, looking pointedly at Melchior’s emergency suit-pack, “because, that thing’s so sad it would make our whole ship look bad by association.” She held out her hand, palm up.
“Nobody on our crew wears sub-standard junk like that.”
Melchior looked down at the only protection he’d had for gods-only-knew how long. He took a deep breath and pulled it off his chest, handing it over.
She took it and set it on the console. “The under-armor suits in your cabin should be able to adjust for your body. We can get a proper suit calibrated for you by the quartermaster later today.”
Meesh could feel the first stirrings of real hope from their new crewman. Something his crew took for granted, like an EVA combat suit, could mean a lot to someone who’d spent most of his life on the ragged edge of ruin. Melchior was trying to bring his old attitude, his only real armor, back online but the hope was having none of it.
The Human had to force his attention back to the controls before he got carried away by the moment.
And… we Bau…
Enbilulu System
Gleb grinned across the shuttle at Mel and Siri. He’d said little about what awaited them at Bau’s court. It was partly because he didn’t want to over-promise on their welcome but he also knew how hard it was for them to adjust to their new reality as free Humans, truly free Humans.
Belief came hard for them. If he told them that a Human was holding the rank of Commander, that he himself was a commissioned officer in the Prince-Presumptive’s house forces…
They’ll just have to see for themselves, he thought, realizing that, even now, they probably harboured doubts about where they were really headed in the small shuttle that bucked its way down through Enbilulu’s atmosphere. “Nervous?” he asked.
“Nah,” Siri answered gamely. “Just meeting an elector, right? We do that all the time.”
The doubt was definitely there. Gleb could feel it, lurking beneath her calm façade. Both of his rescued Humans were half expecting this to prove an elaborate misunderstanding or ruse.
“She actually prefers the term ‘electress’,” he told them, “but she won’t hold it against you, if you don’t use it. And she’s not just any electress. She controls nearly thirty percent of the HQE’s food output. She may not have as many systems as Sandrak, but she’s still one of the most powerful Awilu alive!”
“And you saved her life?” Mel asked, disbelief plain on his face and in his mind.
“They brought their dinky little scout-ship alongside her cruiser and took her off,” the Quailu engineering lieutenant explained. “Otherwise, she would have go
ne down into the gas giant. Her ship had been rammed by the enemy and it was on its way to the after-pasture!”
“And then her own bridge crew tried to finish the job,” Gleb added.
The engineer nodded. “They crowded onto the scout-ship as well but it was too much weight. They couldn’t climb back out, so the Humans started throwing them overboard!”
“Throwing…” Mel faltered for a moment. “Throwing them… into the gas giant?”
“That’s right,” the Quailu affirmed. “Those fools had sworn a holy oath to our lady! They owed her their service and, yet, they were crowded onto that little ship, knowing they were trading her life for a few more seconds of their own!”
Gleb heard an increase in the engine’s whine and his hands suddenly pressed down a little harder on his lap. A trio of closely timed thumps announced they’d landed and he released his restraints, standing as the ramp opened.
“Stay close,” he advised the two Humans, “and follow my lead.” He descended the ramp alongside the engineer, the most senior Quailu officer left aboard the Harpy.
They crossed the landing pad to a massive set of doors that could have easily accommodated the shuttle and, he suspected, one of the new Scorpion class corvettes. She probably used those doors to arrive at court by orbital shuttle.
It put Mishak’s throne room on Kish to shame but he’d only been a one-system minor lord back then.
The large doors, elaborately formed frameworks of carbon-matrix holding amber-colored glass panels, slid out of the way and they passed a phalanx of guards to enter Bau’s throne room, their names announced by the court herald.
They walked along a central bridge that ran from the south end of the throne-room to the north, where Bau’s raised platform stood. It was only a two-hundred-meter walk, not a patch on the imperial palace, but it was impressive, all the same.
Especially when you counted in the roaring applause.
Siri didn’t quite know what to make of this. She’d been willing to consider believing what Gleb had been telling her but this thunderous welcome of a Human to a powerful Quailu court was overwhelming.
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