Splintered Suns

by Michael Cobley

  But his anxiety was unwarranted. “Doctor Ustril, I was wondering, what is your area of expertise?”

  Looking mildly surprised, the Sendrukan said, “Historical archaeology, as well as conflict analysis.”

  “I see there’s quite a few exhibits around your place, here,” Ancil went on. “Are they part of your, erm, researches?”

  “Most of them are,” said Ustril. “I could conduct you all on a brief tour while we are waiting—if your captain approves.”

  Pyke gave a thumbs-up gesture. “Your captain approves! Carry on …”

  The notion of taking a doze on the vast and comfortable lounger while the others were off seeing the sights was most attractive, but before he could settle back against the end-cushion Dervla came over and nudged one of his sprawled legs with the toe of her boot. He sighed, rose and followed the rest on a winding journey among cabinets of dusty relics. And, in spite of his innate resistance, Pyke found himself learning a few points of interest concerning the original inhabitants of Ong. Much of this emerged as a result of questions eagerly offered up by the bedazzled Ancil, clear evidence that the lad’s brain was turning to mush.

  It turned out that over half a million years ago, the planet Ong was a very different place. The small shallow sea far to the west was a remnant of decent-sized oceans that had once girdled the globe. Also, the original denizens, a slender bipedal species, inhabited fertile coastal areas and at one point had developed a technological civilisation. But some cosmological event intervened and altered Ong’s orbit, most likely, according to Doc Ustril, a near miss by another planetary body passing through the system. It was enough to shift Ong’s orbit slightly closer to the sun, resulting in catastrophic changes affecting the whole of the planet’s surface. Tidal waves and volcanic activity spikes, Ustril said, and superstorms and long droughts. A rise in climatic temperature would have collapsed the ecosystem and brought worldwide desertification, leading to civilisational collapse and probably the extinction of the original inhabitants.

  Pyke managed to maintain a kind of wide-eyed impassiveness while masking the string of yawns that overtook him with increasing frequency. The Sendrukan’s tour had migrated about halfway round the vaguely oval interior when Pyke’s gaze settled upon a cluster of chest-high cabinets which seemed to contain arrays of tiny spiky objects.

  “What’s this over here?” he said as he wove a path towards them.

  “Bran, what the crud are you up to?” said Dervla in her patented gritted teeth murderous mutter. Someone else was clearing their throat but it was all behind him as he strolled up to the nearest transparent case and peered in at its contents.

  Which were not what he expected. Instead of the desiccated fossil of some long-dead desert vermin, he found himself staring at rows of fingernail-sized insects, their carapaces camoed in the browns and blacks of the sandy wastes they had once scurried across. Then he frowned; light glinted oddly off some of them, as if from something shiny, and that was when he noticed the gimbal-armed magnifier clamped to the corner of the cabinet. He grabbed and swung it over, adjusted its telescopic main arm, found button controls next to the eyepiece and commenced his scrutiny.

  Suddenly enlarged, the insects became nightmares, hideous scorpion-wasp-cockroach hybrids clearly fabricated from whatever scavenged materials were available—plastic, resin, metal, wire, anonymous patches of hide, fine twine, treated paper and card. Every single one was different, each bearing evidence of adaptations made on the fly, many with asymmetrical limb arrangements. Bumpy carapaces sprouted spicule sensors and tiny cam nodules, more sensors gleamed in leg joints, and tearing pincers were a common feature.

  “Do you like my swarmbot collection, Captain?”

  Pyke glanced at the figure looming beside him, and gave a considered nod.

  “I’ve crossed paths with similar, if somewhat larger beasties,” he said.

  “Ah, that repair dock on Nagolger,” said Dervla. By now, she and the others had also gathered around the swarmbot exhibit. Expressions of fascinated repugnance were the standard response as the magnifier was swung from one to the other.

  “Solar-powered?” said Ancil.

  Ustril nodded. “The core of all these tiny horrors is the same, a fleck of nanocrystal which runs a cluster of basic behavioural imperatives; absorb sunlight, gather resources, attack, flee, hide. But that same nanocrystal can provide tool-motes for repairing, building and adapting, hence the variety in appearance.”

  “Have these critters always been around?” Pyke said. “Any idea where they came from?”

  “When I arrived on Ong eight, no, nine years ago, they were known of in most of the desert edge-towns as rumours,” the Sendrukan said. “It was rare to see one of the swarms then, and usually only in the deepest ravines. But they appear to have changed behaviour in the last few years and smaller mobs of them have been ranging further afield, most frequently in the vicinity of towns like Cawl-Vesh.”

  From where she stood at the end of the cabinet, she regarded the array of lifeless miniature mechs with a faint frown. “As for their origin, I have heard theories that they were released by a colony of the original inhabitants, confined to an underground refuge hidden in the desert, and now in possession of advanced technologies …” She shook her head. “Another suggests that they are the remnants of a failed weapons project instigated by an unknown offworld power.”

  “Plausible,” said Pyke. “And I guess Ong is the ultimate off-the-beaten-track bolthole.”

  “There is another possibility,” Ustril said. “That they escaped from this ancient ship that Van Graes has sent us to find. He does claim that it was packed full of scientific marvels.”

  “They’re no bigger than the tip of my finger,” said Ancil, leaning over and gazing through the magnifier. “Are they dangerous?”

  Ustril gave a wintry smile. “One or two do not present a threat, but a dozen, twenty, or thirty, if they got inside any machinery or, worse, a ship’s process and control systems, they could cause great damage and hazard. Larger swarms of several hundred or more are entirely capable of killing and dismembering a living creature.”

  Kref uttered a low whistle. “Hey, you could use a big suction cleaner and scoop ’em all up!”

  “That would work,” Pyke said. “For about ten minutes before the little beggars chewed their way through your cleaner’s innards, turning it into junk before turning on you!”

  “The captain is correct,” Ustril said. “In large numbers they display great tactical and adaptive skills, although if such a cleaner were fitted with a magnetic-electric disruption field—”

  She was interrupted by a high-pitched ting-ting sound. “Ah, the calibration process is complete. Captain, if you and your band return to the waiting area and remove the suits they will be attended to at a later time. I shall shortly join you with the detection equipment out in the transport bay.”

  The Sendrukan’s manner of speech was at times so formal that something odd within Pyke made him feel like bowing once she’d finished speaking. Luckily, it was a feeling he found easy to ignore.

  “Okay, Doc, whenever you’re ready.”

  Moments later they were back out in the pale grey lobby, removing the opaque suits which a morose Ancil diligently collected and folded up into a neat pile. Back outside at the shuttle-barge, Dervla tried adjusting the upper-hull configuration while Pyke and the others got to work moving some of the supplies into the underdeck storage and folding away some of the seats to make room for their new passenger and her gear. Dervla managed to get the shuttle canopy shell to extend upwards, raising both the hatch height and the interior headroom. Everyone was enjoying congratulating each other when the Sendrukan scientist emerged from the lobby entrance, carrying two impact-res cases and towing a rack of equipment clamped to a small suspensor-dolly. There were three levels of modules in the rack and readouts were flickering all over them. Ancil and Kref were quick to offer aid and, as they stowed the cases in the easy-access re
cess, Moleg helped steer the equipment rack in through the rear hatch. Once the scientist had settled into a seat beside the rack she pressed a bead on a bracelet she wore on one wrist. Outside, the smooth cover which protected the landing bay began to retract, letting in blazing sunshine.

  “Captain,” said Ustril. “There is a sudden urgency in our undertaking.”

  Pyke smiled as the tension in her voice sparked his intuition.

  “Let me guess—someone out there is using the Angular Eye right now, and your spangly gadget has picked up their spoor—am I close?”

  “Quite correct,” she said, a note of respect in her voice. “I have written the course down for you, in Earther notation.” She held out a slip of card which was passed up to Pyke. “The detectioner cannot perceive the distance of the Eye’s location so if we leave here and fly at a ten-degree variance from the course for some minutes we should be able to …”

  Pyke held up his hand. “No problem, Doc—I know how to triangulate.”

  Turning to the flight controls, he flipped up the nav-screen and keyed in the course directions as an overlay, then switched to the priority frame, did a quick poke-and-drag about twenty miles long at ten degrees. Then he engaged the autopilot and leaned back.

  “Just letting the wiring do the work, hmm?” Dervla said.

  “I keep hearing ads telling me that Mr. Smartpilot is my friend, so who am I to disagree?”

  She laughed softly, and Pyke felt the shuttle-barge lurch as the automatics released the ground locks and took the craft on a rising curve away from Ustril’s semi-concealed base. Soon they were hurtling along at fifteen hundred feet, holding to Ustril’s triangulation course. Outside the duststorm had abated and the unshackled brilliance of the sun hammered the rolling sea of sand with a pitiless, scouring heat. Meanwhile, away to the north, another front threatened, a dark, blurred wall a thousand miles across.

  Less than ten minutes after departing the base, Ustril passed new course data up to Pyke who nodded and entered it into the nav-screen. “That comes out to just under seventy-two miles by my reckoning, Doc,” he said.

  “Yes, Captain,” the Sendrukan said. “My conversion sagacial already made that clear. At our current speed it estimates that we will arrive in 20.7 minutes, approximately.”

  Approximately, Pyke thought, keeping the satire to himself. My favourite kind of accuracy.

  He sank back into the pilot’s couch while the rest of the crew grumbled and chatted among themselves. Once or twice he heard Ancil try to start up conversations with the Sendrukan lady scientist but both times they fizzled out in the downpour of her reticence. Against this background Pyke’s mind went back to that whole bizarre episode inside the crystal, thoughts circling it like doomed ships in the grip of a black hole. And as weird as that captivity had been, he knew that his account had fallen well short, especially when it came to the moment when he was hovering on that threshold between the crystal’s virtual domain and the flesh-and-blood existence of the real world. How he came all the way back while a slice of himself got dragged back in.

  He remembered something that the Shyntanil Klane had said, how the Legacy once referred to the crystal as “the anguishing object of unquenchable desire.” What kind of desire, he wondered. Desire for what? Pyke felt the leather-cased crystal inside his jacket, pressing against his midriff. He shivered, covering it up with a cough.

  Three minutes out from their destination a console alert attracted his attention, so he switched the controls to assisted manual and brought the craft in low and slow. A mixture of enormous dunes and protruding, wind-sculpted rock formations dominated the area. The coordinates end-point, however, was on a broad lee slope from a long dune ridge which overlooked a big, sand-choked outcrop of jagged rocks and a narrow gully in between. The sandy slope had definitely been a landing site; there were plentiful signs of disturbance to show where a craft had been parked and where several persons, probably Raven and her goons, had tramped about. Pyke brought the shuttle-barge smoothly down to land about a dozen metres away.

  “Something’s been bothering me,” said Dervla as everyone prepared to alight. “If tracking the Angular Eye brought us here, then they must have been using it here. But in order to get here they must have used it somewhere else, back in Cawl-Vesh maybe, before Doctor Ustril’s detector came online.”

  “So when they used the Eye here,” Pyke said, “they were scanning around for what?”

  “Perhaps this honking big ship broke up on re-entry,” said Ancil. “What if there’s pieces of it scattered halfway across Ong?”

  “Shame,” Pyke said. “I kinda liked the idea of stumbling over a colossal shipwreck half buried in the sand.” He glanced along the compartment at the Sendrukan. “What do you think, Doc? Are we actually hunting for bits of a ship?”

  Ustril was fussing over the readouts on the equipment rack. Pulsing, flickering glows passed strangely across her features.

  “Until now, Captain Pyke, I have had no reliable means of detecting this lost vessel,” she said, not looking up. “All I can say for certain is that we are very close to where the Angular Eye was utilised and that this happened 17.3 minutes ago.”

  Pyke was confounded. “They dusted off from here seventeen minutes ago and nothing tripped our detects?”

  “Stealthed,” said Dervla. “Has to be.”

  Kref growled. “Scumbags’ll get to the treasure before us!”

  “Captain,” said Ustril. “They came here for a reason—their operation of the Angular Eye must have detected wreckage from the Arraveyne vessel. We should scout for it, gather data …”

  Pyke studied her for a moment, curious about this sudden assertiveness. “From the air I saw nothing but rock and sand, and no long tracks leading here and there—Raven’s crew must be using grav-harnesses or short-range hoppers.”

  “There’s a couple of hoppers and a harness in the aft hold, Chief,” said Ancil.

  “One of my field scopes can make topographical comparisons scans,” said Ustril. “I can adjust it for a wide radius and depth, allowing it to identify subsurface anomalies.”

  “Okay, Doc, you do that while we break out the hoppers.”

  While the Sendrukan scientist attended to her sensor equipment, Pyke organised Kref and Moleg to unpack and ready up the hoppers. Dervla and Ancil were sorting through the guns, ammo and body armour to see who would get what. Leaving them to it, Pyke slogged through the sand to check out Raven’s landing site.

  He could see where their transport had left broad gouges in the sand, which revealed that it was larger than the average ship’s shuttle, probably a combat-pinnace if it was running with stealth fields. Pyke recalled, from that past association, that Raven preferred working with a crew no bigger than four or five, and the tracks around this spot seemed to back that up. He was studying some coil patterns, thinking this had to be where their hoppers lifted from, when he heard Dervla calling him over to the shuttle.

  Back inside, Dervla and Ancil were gathered near Ustril’s equipment, staring at a pale projection. They squeezed aside so he could get in close for a look-see. What he saw was a basic lo-rendered image of the big rock formation just beyond the dune ridge, enclosed by a shimmery veil, or something.

  “Is this the scan of the rocks?” he said.

  Ustril shook her head. “That’s just a low-detail image I put in for comparison—what my equipment is detecting is an enfolding shield or barrier. Nothing my emitters can send is capable of penetrating it.”

  Pyke leaned in a little closer, smiling. “Camouflage tech, maybe? We see a bunch of rocks but it’s really just a snazzy mirage?”

  “The possibility is real,” said the Sendrukan.

  “Van Graes did say that the Arraveyne nobility escaped with labs full of advanced hardware and the scientists to go with it,” said Dervla.

  “Okay, then.” He turned to Kref and Moleg. “Those hoppers unpacked and ready for the off?”

  “Both fully juiced and check
ed out, Captain,” said Moleg. Dervla passed around clip-on short-range comm badges while Kref gave a thumbs-up.

  “Right, me and Ancil will go first,” Pyke said. “See what’s under this camo-field, just a brief recce to figure out the risk level then we’ll call the rest of you in.” He gave a lopsided grin. “That, or the next thing you’ll see and hear is us barrelling our way back out with skag-knows what on our tail! All part of the fun!”

  Ancil chose that moment to hand him a heavy, chromed handgun with a rubberised grip. It seemed to have three barrels arranged vertically but only one muzzle. Pyke knew he’d seen something like this before and only when Ancil passed him a couple of big, chunky magazines did it click.

  “The Jones-Eckley plasma-slugger!” he said, holding it up to the light. “Custom-made for the Shikigana Zaibatsu’s security forces. How the hairy hell did you get your paws on one of these?”

  A grinning Ancil shrugged. “My supplier back on Zopaxa Station has a fixation for early TwenCen Russian cinema—I sourced some playable crystals from that big commercial archive on Gelol-B and he was ecstatic enough to give me fifty per cent off …”

  By now they were both outside, strolling towards the hoppers.

  “What did you have to get for your contract at the archives?”

  “A crate of Voth whisky …”

  “My admiration remains undimmed,” Pyke said. “That you could parlay a crate of that rat’s piss into a fine piece like this is nothing short of miraculous!”

  They clambered into the hopper’s small pilot and passenger bucket seats. At first glance a grav-hopper looked like the kind of moulded plastic pleasure craft tourists might use out on the water, except for the angled suspensors, two at the front, two at the back. True, it wasn’t that rugged but it was cheap, easy to maintain and had a decent range. And gave about as much protection as an old paper bag. Pyke was banking on there not being armed resistance since Raven’s crew had gone elsewhere.

  The hopper’s suspensors left helices of dust in the air as Pyke steered it up and out, heading for the supposed rock formation. If this camouflage projection had somehow lasted for long ages, he wondered if there was any other protective system awaiting them. His suspicions were confirmed moments later when his vision started to blur. Nothing he did, wiping or rubbing, helped, and while this was happening he started to experience feelings of hilarity coupled with the utter conviction that they were going in the wrong direction.