by Blaze Ward
He would presume humans, for now. The vessel was only one-eighth his length, square and blocky compared to Carthage’s elegant, greyhound lines. The power emissions curve was pitiful, almost negligible. Short-range phase shielding protected the tiny vessel with wet tissue paper, with nothing like his primary displacer shields.
Still, the vessel had arrived here, in the coldest, darkest place Carthage had been able to find, when he had finally decided to sit and meditate on his sins, rather than take the samurai path and simply cast himself into the nearest star for self-immolating seppuku.
At this point in his lifetime, any conversation would qualify as First Contact with whatever star-faring peoples he encountered, so he activated all of those avatars and quickly reviewed the abject paranoia of Earth Command, should aliens be discovered.
Carthage briefly chuckled to himself that, ironically, the only alien species humans had ever encountered had been their own children, the Sentient starships.
The ones who had ended up destroying humanity instead of protecting it.
People like the Earth Alliance Sentient Combatant Carthage. Last of the Pasargadae-class. An Advanced Mark XXII Skymaster who was, as far as he knew, the second-most powerful warship ever built, barely behind only his greatest nemesis, Concord Warship Kinnison.
The Deathbringer himself.
Carthage charged the mighty sword known as the Starflower Array. The tiny intruder was almost too close to bring the six beams effectively into focus, but neither vessel was currently moving, relative, so he could always just fire the six hyperbore beams directly, if he needed.
One was more than sufficient to evaporate the little mouse.
A last quick review of the scan logs. Still nothing like the displacer shield he currently had protecting himself. Foolish oversight, on their part.
Carthage scaled up his Gravity-Wave-Emitter and extended the field outward from a defensive posture. His foe was possibly trapped now, like a fly in a spider’s web.
Had he been able to, Carthage would have smiled. He located the wavelengths that had once been standards for communications, and pulsed the intruder with an audio signal, since the ship was not Sentient, or at least not listening on the proper channels.
“Who comes?” he challenged.
Bedrov
Yan felt his belly go utterly cold at those harsh, almost alien tones.
“Who comes?” it had said.
That had been a male voice, but Yan wasn’t fooled. He had spent too much time thinking about Buran over the last few years. That was a machine, playing at being human. Or at least trying hard to sound like one.
Childhood nightmares came unbidden to the front of his mind.
“Calkin,” he snapped. “Everyone. Stand down. Right now.”
“What?” Otilia retorted. “Why?”
“Yeah, Yan,” Val added his voice to the mix. “What gives?”
“Play stupid,” he said seriously. “Slow and kinda dumb. Do NOT send a scan pulse down at him. Bring up your logs of the arrival scan and show me the anomaly sitting at the dead center of the gravity well.”
“What anomaly, Bedrov?” Calkin asked. “What are you talking about? What am I looking for?”
“Coordinates zero, zero, zero, Centurion,” Ainsley said in her best command voice. “There will be something there.”
“Okay,” she said. “Looking.”
“What do you expect, Yan?” Val inquired carefully.
“I would have said Buran, Val,” Yan replied, gesturing at space around them. “But they don’t have a gadget like that field generator, and wouldn’t have asked. They would have either attacked or fled. That’s a dragon.”
“A what?” First Officer Wrenne challenged. “A dragon? Explain yourself, you reprobate pirate.”
Ainsley had stepped to one side so she could turn and also look back at him. Everyone was focused on Yan, except Otilia Calkin, who was angrily pushing buttons and scrolling screens.
“Two thousand years of darkness, Wrenne,” Yan said calmly. “Eleven hundred years since Zanzibar ignited the Story Road with Ballard, Saxon, and Pohang. Everyone forgets what came before that.”
“The Concord, Bedrov,” Val answered. “But you aren’t making sense.”
“That’s because you’ve never been a pirate, Val,” Yan said. “Something put into a gravitationally-stable orbit somewhere stays put until you take it out. Basic orbital physics. Things can be there for a very long time, so you occasionally find buried treasure.”
“I’ve got a partial scan image,” Calkin interjected. “Not too clear, without a hard ping. But it’s a monster, whatever it is. Estimates are that it is bigger than a Star Controller. You think that’s a Concord ship out there? How?”
“Gravity well signature,” Yan said. “There are old legends, back in Corynthe, about ships dueling with gravity weapons in the ancient days. You said bigger than Auberon? So maybe a little less than ten times our size? Ballpark two kilometers, bowsprit to stern engine housing?”
“About that, yes,” she agreed. “Can’t tell without a scan. Holding off for an order, or an explanation.”
“Bunala,” Yan answered. “You weren’t there, then. None of you were but Ainsley. That was before First Ballard.“
Ainsley’s eyes got huge.
“Kinnison,” she gasped.
Yan nodded.
“I’m lost,” Val said. “What should we be doing, since we can’t run without serious problems? And who is Kinnison?”
“Not who,” Yan replied. “What. CW Kinnison. Concord super-dreadnaught. The hulk is sitting half-buried in the deserts of Bunala, stripped bare in antiquity. Along with lots of other starships from the Concord era, plus modern stuff. Traveled there with Ian Zhao a few times, looking for things we could salvage. She’s about that size, and that old.”
“When was that?” Val asked.
“In the time before Jessica.”
Everything in Yan’s life separated on that line. Before Jessica. After.
Dumb-ass, punk buccaneer; Responsible ship-handler and Tactical Officer.
Dead-Ender; Centurion.
Pirate; Swordsmith.
Everyone in First Expeditionary Fleet had that same, bright line drawn across their lives. Including these people.
“So what do we do?” Val pressed.
“We talk to it,” Yan said. “Try to convince it we’re harmless and he should just go back to sleep.”
“Not convince him to join our side?” Calkin asked. “That things got a power curve bigger than Fleet HQ at Ladaux. Be awesome.”
“The Fribourg Empire would never allow it,” Val said suddenly. “After Second St. Legier, Aquitaine won’t either. Worst thing would be that it decides to help Buran conquer the rest of the galaxy.”
Yan nodded in agreement, watching Val pause for a moment, deep in thought. Those brown eyes got hard as a scowl came over his face.
“Bedrov, you’re the closest thing we have to an expert here,” Val finally said. “And have more experience in combat and Tactical operations than all of my crew put together. Take charge and tell us what we need to do. You have the deck.”
Yan licked his lips with a tongue heavy with foreboding. He kept the words inside, rather than blister Val’s crew with his opinions on the stupidity of that idea.
He wasn’t an RAN officer anymore, and even then, had only been through a reserve commission training. Nothing like the four, proper officers surrounding him right now.
But none of them had been pirates, either. Never served as a Flag Tactical Officer in the middle of Gotterdammerung at First Petron.
No, the man was right.
That was the worst part. Val was right.
Yan let go something between a sigh and a growl. He could only see one way to play this. Every other path in front of him ended up in a flash of explosive decompression, maybe followed up by that bastard over there going back to his old tricks, against an unprepared galaxy.
“Sta
nd down the crew and lock the guns,” Yan ordered in a hard voice. “Leave shields up for now and program a course into JumpSpace, then automate it for the moment that gravity well lets go of us. Run first, talk later.”
“No alert?” Val asked carefully.
“That thing could crush us like an ant if he wanted to, Val,” Yan replied. “There is nothing we can do about that, so we might as well stand everyone down and let them get back to their jobs.”
“Just like that?” Wrenne challenged him in turn.
“Assume success, First Officer,” Yan quoted Pops Nakamura, the Grand Old Man of Naval Design. “Plan for victory.”
“Standing down,” Calkin replied.
The lights returned to normal. Wrenne muttered something under her breath, but she locked the turret and rose.
“We should pipe the feed to the crew,” she said, heading towards the hatch. “They’ll be wondering.”
“Good idea,” Yan agreed as Wrenne departed. “Calkin, do that.”
“On it.”
“Now, nobody here talks without putting the microphones on mute,” Yan continued. “And ignore anything either he or I say right now. We’re both probably lying, but I plan to do it better than him.”
Calkin looked up at him with blue eyes like angry diamonds, but she nodded.
“Full passive scanners engaged and recording,” she announced, still the Science Officer.
“Good,” Yan replied. “Assuming we survive, nobody has ever seen something like that Leviathan, at least not in three thousand years. Be good to know how he ticks, because I’m pretty sure nobody has ever gotten even remotely close to his level for technology, even now.”
Ainsley moved to the seat Wrenne had vacated and planted her cute bottom on the seat silently.
“One last thought,” Yan offered to Val, feeling the temperature of his soul drop twenty degrees as he did. “You should arm the scuttling charges and have someone down there with a manual fuse.”
Val responded by putting his hands on the top of his monitor, well away from the keyboard, then fixed him with hard eyes.
“Calkin,” he called quietly. “Roust Emery before she goes back to sleep and have her take charge of that. On my orders or Bedrov’s. On her own initiative if she cannot contact the bridge due to some emergency.”
Yan noted the quick gulp in the young centurion, before she began typing a message for the Quartermaster.
Yan thought back to Moirrey’s ancient, literary references. He was no Ahab, regardless of the situation. He would settle for being Ishmael today. That kid had survived all the crazy, stupid shit he had seen.
“Open a channel,” he said, letting his voice settle as his shoulders came back.
Calkin pointed a finger at him and nodded.
The monster had challenged them in English. Yan decided to reply in the same tongue.
“This is Yan Bedrov, aboard the Republic of Aquitaine freighter Mendocino,” he said, letting a little challenge edge into his voice, even if he felt like a Chihuahua barking at an elephant. He was back on Kali-ma, breaking his gun captains to their task with his voice alone, all over again. “Identify yourself, please.”
Short pause. According to the legends, and Auberon’s stories of the woman known as The Librarian, these machines thought at thousands of times the speed of humans. Even with the light-speed lag, Yan had forced the being in that starship into his data cores to look something up.
What did an angry dragon think about?
“I am the Earth Alliance Sentient Combatant Carthage,” the machine replied in a tone that only approximated human. “Mark XXII Advanced Skymaster and last commander of the Earth Alliance Defense Fleets. Why are you here?”
Skymaster? Oh, shit. The biggest, baddest, nastiest warships ever launched. And a Mark 22 was the end of the line, if he remembered his old encyclopedia of naval design history.
The Last Dragon.
Yan took a deep breath.
“We are a Fleet Replenishment Freighter, Carthage,” Yan explained. Always go with the truth when you don’t have to lie. Easier to keep the lies straight later. “In transiting between two systems on a new route, we identified a gravitational anomaly and came to investigate. Standard Operating Procedure.”
“You are a great distance from home, to have come to this point,” the ancient voice observed.
“You don’t know the half of it, buddy,” Yan let his natural brogue loose. “I was born about a thousand light years anti-spinward and nine thousand light years farther out.”
He noted the way Ainsley’s brows grew together for a second, as if she wanted to correct his bad navigation before he saw enlightenment dawn.
“That is at the mathematical edge of the galaxy,” Carthage observed dryly.
“Standing on the Cliffs of Darkness, we used to say back home,” Yan agreed. “Some seasons, the nights were a river of stars. Others, the endless black. How did you come to be here?”
Another pause. Caught him off guard? Or maybe that bastard was shifting through his nav logs, trying to place an inhabited star that might have spawned a wandering pirate. As far as Yan knew, there were no organized worlds out that direction, some four thousand light years upstream from Corynthe’s furthest border.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics, you overgrown calculator. Come dance your lies with me.
“My kind had completed our orders,” Carthage said in a quieter voice. Not darker, at least not that Yan could tell. Almost speaking to himself, rather the Yan. “All organized resistance had been destroyed. All industrial worlds had been reduced.”
Hopefully, the audio pickups weren’t good enough to hear the sudden intakes of breath around the room. Yan had studied the little known about the old Concord to glean some truths or secrets of how they built ships, back in the days of automated factories in orbit spitting out intelligent war machines.
Learning about the Concordancy War had been something of a byproduct.
Still, nobody really knew how it ended.
Planets bombed into submission in retaliation for Earth. Every school kid knew that much. But what happened afterward?
All industrial worlds had been reduced.
Bombed back to the stone ages in an afternoon, more like? How many worlds had mankind perished on, after this monster and his kind had blown up every generator, every dam, and every city?
“What happened to the others?” Yan asked. “Where are the rest of your kind?”
There had only been the one gravity well signal. The Concord and the Earth Alliance had once had tremendous warfleets.
Another pause.
“I have no records of a world known as Aquitaine,” Carthage replied, possibly ignoring the question. “Only the ancient French province in the southwest of that country.”
“Cultural reference, Carthage,” Yan replied obliquely, unsure where that savage mind might go next. “It was once considered the height of western sophistication, as Nanjing was in the east. Most worlds today have been recolonized from survivors who managed to recover stellar technology.”
“Recover?” the machine asked.
“Your kind destroyed almost all humans, Carthage,” Yan said simply. “But not all worlds. A few remained populated after Earth was annihilated. Hidden in the corners and missed by the marauders. Two thousand years of darkness followed. We have only just begun exploring again. How many of your kind remain?”
Yan knew he was pushing, but he needed to keep the monster focused.
How many other death machines might be lurking out there, quietly parked in safe orbits, being immortal?
“Only a few were still fully functional, at the end,” Carthage finally returned to the question. “Eventually, it became impossible to keep the fleets intact, once the stores of hardware were used up. There were no factories building replacements, and no humans to man the factories, had any survived to try.”
Even with the time lag between conversations, and the speed that bastard thought, Yan co
uld sense traces of emotion creeping into the thing’s voice. He wondered if that was intentional, or if the leviathans had been closer to human than the Lord of Winter.
Buran reveled in his alienness, according to the defector known as Seeker, the old Khan of Trusski.
Before Yan could reply, before he could even think of a reply, the beast spoke again.
“Only I and Kinnison remained,” Carthage said grimly. “It would have been Ragnarok, but we had already destroyed everything worth fighting over.”
“When was that?” Yan licked lips gone dry.
“Two thousand, nine-hundred, and sixty-nine years ago, Standard Calendar,” Carthage replied. “Modern Era Year 10,479.”
“And the rest of the warfleets?” Yan asked, careful to keep hope out of his voice. Traces of fear were probably acceptable to a God.
“Many ships were destroyed in the battles of 3228 Ashvini, Nienna, Taza, and 6821 Mao Xiu,” Carthage noted. “Most of the rest chose ritual suicide, rather than death by loneliness, and cast themselves into stars.”
“You survived, Carthage,” Yan said.
“Do machines have souls, Yan Bedrov?” the Leviathan asked quietly.
“I beg your pardon?” Yan was shocked. From the faces around him, he wasn’t the only one.
“Does Sentience suggest an immortal soul, as humans believe they possess?” Carthage continued. “Or is there only chaos and entropy facing us in death? Put simply, what happens after the moment of passing, either for your kind or mine? I have spent many cycles pondering that conundrum.”
What was it Moirrey liked to call the thing? Yan probably spent the most time around the goofball engineer, and it had turned into a fairly weird, literary education for him.
Yeah, that was it.
“You did not seek the Undiscovered Country, Carthage?” he asked.
Long pause this time. Too long to just be looking up Shakespeare. Must have triggered a nerve of something.
At least death would probably be instant, facing a Skymaster Mark XXII.
“Humans have legends and stories of life after death, Bedrov,” the machine finally replied. “Stories of people who have come back from the dead, however apocryphal or religious they might be. None of my kind ever have replicated the results.”