Remorse, guilt, anger and cold, cold isolation, all swirling together, became like a heavy stone lodged in his head, weighing him down. He was alone inside the prison cart, heard only the rattle and creak of the wheels, the sough of his breathing past the cloth gag.
Dead, he thought. Dead.
That was when he heard a new noise amid the cart’s chorus of knocks, rattles and poorly oiled axle squeaks. It was a rhythmic grinding sound and it seemed to be coming from directly beneath his bench. He shifted round a little and craned his head to the side for a better view, but it was too dark to make out any details. His shoulder slumped and he sank back against the rear wall of the cart, thinking that the noise was probably some grit that had worked its way into the primitive axle bearings.
Pyke had buried himself into a sombre funk for less than a minute when he heard a couple of raps, and a soft wooden clunk. If he hadn’t been gagged, he would have laughed out loud.
Well, I am a prisoner so it only stands to reason that there’ll be a rescue attempt, just to keep the Legacy’s story ticking along …
Then a familiar small wooden shape flew out from under the bench and hovered before him. It was RK1, residual proxy for the Construct drone, Rensik.
“Captain, please hold still while I loosen your gag.”
The mechanical bird, he noticed, no longer made a clattering noise as it fluttered around, instead emitting a soft hum. Upgrades, he thought. Could come in handy.
The gag was loosened enough to slip below his mouth, the first hint that this was not a rescue.
“I can’t help noticing that you’re not cutting me loose,” he said.
“My apologies, Captain, but we are rushing towards several crisis points—the crux of the storyline concocted by the Legacy, and the situation with regard to your shipboard colleague, the female Dervla.”
He stared at the humming, hovering drone-bird. “You’ve heard about that, then.”
“I have penetrated several key oversight systems which allows me to piggyback a wide range of update feeds.” The bird glanced around the cart’s interior. “I am not releasing you because the situation at the palace will allow you to enable Dervla’s real personality, to free your compatriots and to destroy the blood-poison vial, thus ending this particular simulation.
“But I have other news that you must hear. While exploring the boundary of the simulation partition, trying to find any weakness that would permit scans of the deep regions beyond, I was contacted by my progenitor, the drone Rensik!”
Pyke straightened at this news. “He’s still around? But is he still himself? I thought he’d been enslaved by the Legacy and its body snatchers.”
“Drone Rensik managed to create a plausible shell person which would be a convincing captive for the Legacy to break and convert to its cause, all the while masking his own real core. The fake Rensik’s subjugation opened doors to parts of the higher macro-data systems closed to a mere interim stopgap such as myself.”
“What did he say?”
“Firstly, he informed me that further analysis by me of the partition boundary was unnecessary as he had obtained manifest surveys of the interior from a secure archive.”
“All those blacked-out stars and planets,” Pyke said.
“Rensik passed on to me a number of those surveys—I can show a brief compendium of what they hold so that you may understand what we have become involved in.”
There was no mistaking the gravity of RK1’s words and Pyke found it a relief to put aside his dark mood and focus on something else.
“Okay, so how are you going to show me your movie? Beam it out of one eye onto the inside of my executive, first-class coach?”
“It’s quite simple, Captain, just hold out your hands.”
“You’re going to project a screen in front of me? That’s … Whoa! What the bastarding hell!”
The moment the drone alighted on Pyke’s outstretched, tied hands, his view of the cart’s interior vanished, instantly replaced by an immense, ash-grey spire looming right next to him as he hung suspended above a dark planet …
His senses swung with vertigo, along with feelings very much like nausea welling up from a stomach he didn’t have. As the panic receded he could see that the ashen spire wasn’t part of some orbiting structure but actually originated down on the planet’s surface, along with several others clustered together. Not spires, he realised. Cables. The view of the planet’s curve revealed other similar clusters jutting up from the surface and outwards.
Instinctively, he wanted to cross from this cable cluster to the next, but the viewpoint he was being shown began to glide away from it, a shallow trajectory descending into the atmosphere. This flight built up to a good velocity and surface details soon became visible—repeating patterns of blocks, curves and spirals resolved into stepped structures of what looked like black basalt encrusted with further patterned growths in shades of silver, dark blue and dark green. Some of the largest conglomerations of these recurring forms were gathered and stacked around huge arched buttresses which swept up to become part of the huge cable clusters which themselves reached up into the sky.
During this smooth and swift flight, Pyke noticed patches of cloud whipping past, sometimes as a pale haze, sometimes as a denser grey blur. As the viewpoint passed through a clear stretch Pyke got a good look right across this titanic, fractalised landscape and saw other low clouds hanging near the apex of spires and towers. Steady scrutiny revealed that they were not moving. The same went for vapour clouds boiling up out of a sawtooth-fringed fissure that glowed a fiery orange.
Abruptly the view flickered and suddenly he was sweeping through abyssal space towards a vast orb, a planet he at first assumed. Like the previous world the surface was mostly dark and glimmering, except that here bright lines were stitched across the surface like a planless patchwork. Here, too, cables rose from the surface, sprouting in the hundreds, no, thousands. And as the viewpoint flew closer so the bright stitch lines grew thicker and brighter, then looked like linked canals of incandescence, then strings of molten fiery lakes …
Pyke gazed in uneasy awe—this was a sun, and the chains of burning lakes were just gaps between vast plates that floated on the sun’s surface, feeding on those stupendous thermonuclear energies, channelling them away …
This time the viewpoint did swing round and Pyke swore at the sight—some of the energy cables reached out to join with an immense ring structure which encircled the shackled, splintered sun. Other cables fanned out to link up with other structures, hanging suspended over this captive star. Smaller artificial rings, as well as triangular and hexagonal edifices, all developed on the same dark proliferation of pseudo-fractal patterns yet clearly directed along functional lines that were beyond Pyke’s comprehension.
Still further out, beyond the great ring and all the lesser structures, the energy cables stretched up to many other worldlets like the one he had seen at the start. Moons, asteroids, planets, all the bodies of this system were drawn together by this glittering web.
The perspective changed and this time he was hurtling through a starless black void, plunging past one star system after another, every one woven together by dark nets. Even the great gulfs of this void were spanned by strands and bonds of gleaming obsidian. All these caged stars were almost impaled by the pitiless mesh, their burning fires drained away to serve enigmatic purposes.
Again the view flickered to something new, the surface of a planet again, only here were the recognisable signs of civilisation—a city by the sea, mass-transit vehicles, tall buildings faced with glass, cars on roads and in the air. But this citadel of life was under attack from a wave of the same dark, glittering material, rushing across fields towards the city from inland. As with the cloud formations earlier, all motion was frozen. The inhabitants—slender, gracil humanoids—were trying to escape, some in vehicles, some by sea, in families and groups, and Pyke could read the terror and desperation in their faces.
A
nother viewpoint switch. He was back out in the black, gliding leisurely alongside a series of huge alcoves in a long structure. Huge articulated arms hung over the deep recesses, grabs bearing unidentifiable chunks of machinery towards indistinct shapes lurking within each one. Some kind of assembly was going on, it seemed … then suddenly he realised that he was looking at shipyards, a long, long line of them, turning out ship after ship. As if to confirm the revelation, a completed vessel was rising out of its construction bay on heavy tow lines and even before it had cleared the upper sides mobile assembler units had moved in to lay down the underhull of the next. A tableau just as motionless as the others.
The viewpoint then swiftly twisted and surged along a new heading, a curved path which revealed that this rank of shipyards was one of six spaced around a supply spine which fed resources to all of its yards. But this cluster was just one among scores protruding from an immense armoured sphere, possibly a planetoid.
All this, he thought numbly. Contained within that skagging crystal.
The last thing he saw was the armada. Lines of completed ships led away from the mega-yards and converged on a vast block of open space stippled with vessels. His perspective flew nearer and nearer and the sheer numbers became staggering. He gazed up at a towering cliff of close-packed ships, thousands upon thousands, and the products of those yards had scarcely filled in a couple of corners …
Then in an instant he was back in the jolting, rattling cart, staring wide-eyed into midair, blinking.
“Did you comprehend what I showed you, Captain?” said RK1. “Did you recognise the threat?”
Pyke grunted. “I’ve sucked up my share of vee-dramas—I think they call it a nano-tide, something like that?”
“The Construct refers to it as an Omnivorous Devourer and I know for a fact that my progenitor has encountered one such infestation during his current duty iteration. Did you notice how everything was frozen in place?”
“That I did.”
“This is because the original crystal, the Essavyr Key, was broken in three soon after its creation, a deliberate act.”
Pyke mulled this over, along with all he’d seen, then laughed darkly.
“Can’t help noticing that you’re not volunteering much free information there, Arky, ould son. But I’ve got a question that needs answering—that crystal, the whole thing, it’s actually a prison, ain’t it?”
“Full marks—if I had hands I would be applauding wildly.”
“So what is the Legacy—one of the inmates?”
“Originally it was a failsafe guardian entity,” said RK1. “Not an AI but coded to be more than a mere watchdog program. Unfortunately, over time, emergent characteristics began to manifest, curiosity, mainly, which prompted it to scan some of the shadow-data held in the frozen Devourer mentation cores. Somehow it managed to read the unreadable, then made modifications to itself according to schematics it uncovered, and that was that.”
“But hang on, what … no, where did all these twisted stars and planets come from, and who put all of that into the original crystal—and how …”
“You will soon be arriving at the palace so there isn’t time to fully brief you,” said the bird-drone. “Suffice to say that as long ago as half a million years, perhaps even longer, a lab-created Omnivorous Devourer self-uplifted, broke out of the lab and proceeded to proliferate. Most Devourer outbreaks erupt in an exponential wave of consuming and generating more converted mass, then push the leading edge further out to absorb still more—and so on. But this one appears to have initiated its expansion according to a plan. It knew about the sinews of civilisation, the webs and channels of resources that weave it all together. Corroborated stories from this far back in history are sketchy at best but it appears that the Devourer took about a month to assume control over the planet of its birth, and that was largely surreptitious. In the next month it had another half-dozen nearby worlds and their systems under its command. Macro-scale engineering projects commenced while entire populations were subdued with airborne implants linked to subservient versions of the Devourer.
“Anyway, it had over twenty worlds in its thrall by the time the leaders of the nearest interstellar nation-domain realised that all communications issuing from this conquered region emanated from the same sentience, the Devourer itself speaking through its peripherals. This nation-domain (which might have been a remnant of the old Zarl Imperium) realised that they were in dire circumstances so they made approaches to certain godlike wanderers called the Ancients, last hermitic survivors of a vanished, near mythic civilisation. But only one of them, known as Essavyr, agreed to help—He/She/It or They swiftly undertook a journey in Their/Its own vessel, staking out a volume of space larger than that already occupied by the Devourer’s darkling empire. Power from the suns of uninhabited star systems was redirected into this vast cage. And before the Devourer could breach its boundary Essavyr activated its enigmatic technology. The deep structures of space-time-space were reconfigured while a lattice of exotic dimensionality blinked into being.
“Afterwards, Essavyr presented the Leader of this long-forgotten authority with the results of His/Her/Its or Their efforts, a crystalline object formed vaguely in the shape of a winged creature and, strangely, of an easily carried size. With a quanta scope Essavyr showed the Leader that same shipyard that I revealed to you, only it was in full, vigorous production, still churning out ship after ship despite being trapped in this exotic, singular prison. Then Essavyr shattered the crystal figurine into three parts, which froze that relentless, horrific adversary into immobility. Essavyr then gave the crystal fragments into the Leader’s safekeeping, and made him vow that the parts would never be joined together again.”
“Okay,” Pyke said. “Bit more exhaustive than I was expecting but, yeah, I get the picture. Real-world Pyke has his bit of crystal, and the others are … well, where exactly?”
“Real-world Pyke and the rest of the crew have been exploring an ancient shipwreck lost in the deserts of Ong—the missing crystal pieces were aboard it when it crashed millennia ago. Raven and her associates are likewise pursuing them, and there are suggestions that she may already have taken possession of one of them.”
Pyke nodded. “Well, that is the way our luck is going just now.” He shook his head, feeling almost dazed by the flood of information, and he refused to let himself get turned about by events beyond the simulation, events he could neither influence nor control.
“What happens here is what’s important to me—and I need to know if it’s possible to wake up the true Dervla, here, somehow.”
“It can be done,” said RK1. “The timing may be tricky but it’s essential that you also complete the solution to the scenario. I shall be there in the palace to help you and the others see it through.”
The swaying, rattling cart began to tilt back noticeably, as if it were being pulled up a sloping road. Like the one that led up to the Imperial palace.
“Won’t be long till we reach the Emperor’s official shack,” Pyke said. “Can’t wait to see what sort of welcoming ceremony they’ve laid on for me.”
“Whatever it is, I urge you to grit your teeth and bear it,” said the bird-drone. “I have to be sure that you are in the right place at the right time in order that the blood-poison vial is correctly destroyed.”
Pyke frowned. “You’re saying there’s an incorrect way?”
“Incorrect, no—longer and more painful, certainly. Now, please hold still while I readjust your gag.”
“You’re going to … wh-nng-fg-dn-mmf-ng-mmf!”
“My apologies—there must be no evidence of any intrusion or tampering,” said RK1. “There is one thing you should know—only a sorcerous object can destroy that blood-poison vial, and in the palace there is a very useful one! So, if all goes smoothly, we will resolve the scenario and move directly into the next one, which I and Rensik have subtly altered to aid our greater plan.”
“Gnnnr-vrnn?”
“
It will become apparent soon after the new scenario commences. At that point I will come to you with a very serious proposition, one vital to the aim of defeating the Legacy and the Devourer menace. Till then, hold your nerve.”
Pyke wanted to comment volubly on propositions and holding one’s nerve, but all he could manage was some muffled angry noises as the residual proxy drone left the way it had entered, via a gap beneath the bench on which he sat.
Hold my nerve? Yeah, well my captors and jailers better watch their step or I’ll be holding some throats before long!
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Pyke—the planet Ong, the wreck of the Mighty Defender, the forward section
Pyke was the first through the open door, first to enter the forward section of the Mighty Defender, and first to see the last of Hokajil’s time-zones up close. There were now people to be seen, wandering in and out of cabins, humanoids like Hokajil with that slight elongation of the skull. There were hints of fragrance drifting in the air and there was the muffled chatter of many voices, punctuated by laughter. In spite of himself, Pyke couldn’t help feeling a bit of a thrill at treading the corridors of a million-year-old vessel.
There were footsteps behind him.
“Huh,” said Dervla. “Busier than it looks from outside.”
After her came Ancil, hurrying ahead of Moleg and Kref. Hokajil still stood outside, concern in his features. Pyke retraced his steps, pausing on the threshold.
“Any final advice?”
“Stay close together,” said the old inventor. “Arm yourself as soon as possible. Try to avoid entering any of the time-facets, and be wary of anybody who emerges from one, regardless of what they say. Pay close attention to that map I gave you.” He gave a half-smile. “And if you can, try to have a little fun—enjoy the experience! The Mighty Defender is—was—a remarkable vessel.”
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