by David Ryker
Their curiosity led them to a deserted planet, once inhabited but long since dead. They dug deep down into the scorched earth and found nothing. They dug deeper and deeper and found nothing still. They burrowed almost all the way through the crust of the planet and there, they uncovered an artifact.
They brought the strange device to the surface. An orb as big as a man, covered in indecipherable writings. It did nothing, it seemed, and became a species-wide obsession, the one curiosity they could not explain. Entire generations grew up researching and investigating the ancient device and its home planet. One day, the child of a researcher came on to the site. Somehow, her curious touch unlocked the artifact.
After dormant centuries, it awoke, bringing the planet to life. The Exiles sensed their obsession was about to be satisfied. The ground quaked, the world became fierce. The researchers saw the crust and scorched earth of the planet quiver and crumble and then collapse. They died. The Exiles’ greatest obsession had become their curse.
Loreto watched the ghosts in the mist but he understood the story on a deeper level. The emotions were within him: fear, dread, guilt, shame. He knew them all as they resonated from within. Hertz and the rest of the crew were watching but not understanding, not comprehending the story in the same manner. He turned, again, to the tale.
A corruption spread, the Exiles explained, destroying their numerous worlds, driving them into the far reaches of space. They had been exiled by their own curiosity. The forces which chased after them became known as the Symbiot, a corrupting, malignant influence which spread from galaxy to galaxy, birthed from the precious artifact.
They gathered together what was left of their species and decided on a plan. They would run as far as they could, ripping open the fabric of time and space and throwing themselves blindly into a new, faraway location. In doing so, they would give themselves time to work on a means to destroy the Symbiot. A weapon, one which could subdue the evil they had unleashed.
For centuries and centuries, they threw themselves through the universe, desperately staying ahead of the Symbiot. But other species were not so fortunate. All that was left of them now was the graveyard of broken ships, a reminder of the price that had been paid. Loreto and the rest of his crew stared up into the shifting shapes of the Exile history. There was a familiarity to the storytelling and a regret.
“They’re chased by the Symbiot,” Hertz said. “That’s what I can figure out.”
“No, they made the Symbiot,” said Menels. “That experiment thing.”
“Quiet,” Loreto muttered. He turned to the Exiles, his throat dry. “They found you quicker this time. That’s why so many came with you. That’s why you didn’t check properly when you jumped.”
The vertical line in the air.
“You were betrayed by one of your own,” Loreto continued, as though the words already existed, and he was just giving them voice. “Tired of running. Tired of fleeing. You were compromised.”
Another line in the air.
“So,” Loreto croaked. “What now?”
The Exiles looked up as one into their mist. There was Fletcher’s Fleet, now just wreckage. Loreto could see the corruption spreading through like a virus. One by one, the ships became organic, stitching together like the dried blood scabbing over a wound. He shivered and felt cold.
“Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?” O’er Combs to Nails aired another recording.
“Ad-mir-al,” gargled Of the Hanged Tree. “List-en to Levi-a-than.”
“What’s a Leviathan?” asked Menels and Hertz hushed him.
“The Symbiot.” Loreto understood. “They’re calling for their friends. Reinforcements.”
The vertical line was drawn. The mist above them began to take on more abstract forms, the shapes of planets and then the planets crashed into one another, a long, thin beam rifling all the way up to the stained colored wall which covered them all in different shades.
“They’re going to build a device, a communication device,” Loreto said. “They’re going to tell the rest of their forces where we are.”
The vertical line.
“I don’t get it,” Menels complained. “Why don’t they just jump? They can outrun these things…”
“Probably not,” disagreed Cele, her voice still hollow. “That kind of travel requires a lot of resources. They can probably only do it at the absolute last moment.”
Loreto trusted Cele’s judgment; she was one of his best analysts. Besides, he just knew she was right. There was an understanding in him, one he hadn’t felt before. He recognized the pain of this species.
“They’re stuck here,” he said. “For now, anyway.”
“So they’ll fight?” Hertz asked, full of enthusiastic bluster. “They don’t want those things here, surely?”
The line was horizontal. No.
“They won’t.” Loreto said. “They’re waiting. They have this weapon they’re building but it’s not ready. It won’t be. So they’re just going to run again.”
“And leave us here, with those things?”
“Yes.” Loreto grew angry just thinking about it. “They don’t care. They just want to survive.”
The lights behind the leader’s mask began to spin. Loreto noticed that this happened when consultation or thinking was required. It was like trying to read a human face. Of the Hanged Tree pressed unseen buttons and the voice became louder and human. More of their plundered recordings.
“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way?”
They’ve spent far too long in our network, Loreto decided. They’ve got access to stuff I don’t even understand. I wonder if – But before he could finish his thought, he was swept up in the words booming around the vast room, almost as though they played through the walls of the ship itself.
“Behold,” the recording continued, “the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? None is so fierce that dare stir him up.”
And the words died away and echoed and Loreto was left gazing as the leader talked again.
“Levi-a-than, Ad-mir-al.” The leader switched back to its familiar rasp. “Rip out the he-art…”
Fletcher had given the Symbiot a Fleet and they would use those resources to gather even more. Once they had enough, they could communicate across lightyears, bringing the rest of their forces—this Leviathan—to the Federation. Whatever small chance he had of saving his species would vanish.
Finally, Loreto thought, I understand why they’re so scared. He rubbed hard on his temple, trying to force his brain to process everything at once.
“You’re not going to fight alongside us,” Loreto announced and walked right up to the Exiles. “But you can help us in other ways.”
The Exiles lined up behind Of the Hanged Tree. They didn’t breathe; they didn’t move a single muscle. Loreto stared into the smoke-filled masks, desperate to see something. The smoke stared back and gave him nothing.
“I want copies of the codex,” he told the aliens. “As many as possible.”
Distant lights spanned inside the leader’s mask in a slow, clockwise manner. Behind, the other Exiles did the same. Loreto heard their rustling, creeping speech. He turned to O’er Combs to Nails.
“It’s you who’s been searching through our systems,” he said. “I don’t care about that, I just need more copies.”
“Sir,” Menels muttered from behind. “Sir, is that wise? The Vela…”
“Flies faster. Shields are stronger,” Loreto declared. “We need the help, Menels.”
“He might be right about the security, sir –” Hertz began and cut himself short when he saw Loreto arching his eyebrows.
Loreto hoped the Exiles were yet to understand body language. Hertz hushed up and Menels followed suit. Cele watched him with suspicion, the gears strain
ing in her mind. Hopefully, he thought, she’s read stories about Greeks and wooden horses.
The mist began to settle again around their feet. The dappled light fell across their skin, coloring them like rainbows, surrounded by the mausoleum of a hundred dead species. This wasn’t how I pictured myself saving humanity, Loreto thought. But it might have to do.
19
Hess
The walls reverberated as Hess thundered in through the door, past the short window and the decorative waterfall. A squat collection of pillows in one corner of the room functioned as a makeshift bed. He swung his foot and a cloud of feathers burst into the air. As they floated around him, Alison leapt to her feet.
“What the hell happened?” She tried to grab Hess’s arm as he spun in furious circles.
Hess shrugged her off. Their Spartan quarters were practically bare, the furniture sculpted from lightened concrete and painted in dry colors. He felt the desperate need to snap necks and he had nothing to break. He balled his fists, leaned back, and shouted.
“Hess!” Alison urged. “Please!”
In the ten minutes it took to calm him down, his blood sank from a frothing, monstrous fury to a simmering boil. Ten hours spent locked in negotiations, he told her, wasted. Spartans on one side, the Senate on the other, and neither relented, not even slightly. A waste of everyone’s time, especially considering the grand scale of Fletcher’s failure. Hess felt his nerves fraying at the edges; he was pumped full of so many stimulants he wouldn’t be able to sleep for a week.
Alison sat him on a stiff concrete bench, on top of a hastily re-stuffed pillow. Hess felt embarrassed that he’d caved to his foolish emotions so quickly. But ten grinding hours, coupled with the medication cocktail, had shattered him.
He lay still and listened to Alison explaining Loreto’s message. Nothing surprised him anymore. Invading aliens reanimating the dead, threatening the Federation, and it wasn’t even his biggest problem. He took comfort in the notion that an admiral still existed somewhere in the universe, one so reviled by the Senate that he might actually be worth a damn.
Alison dusted a feather from Hess’s shoulder. They were real, he noted, likely bred on Sparta. Legitimate breeding programs were one way to circumvent the cloning ban but they cost a king’s ransom. His tantrum might have fed a colony family for a month. The guilt added to his embarrassment as he wondered what his mother would say.
“What’s this?” Alison dragged him back to reality. “Here, on your neck.”
Hess lay on his side on the bench, facing the short window with views of the distant black mountains above the clouds. He covered the scab with his hand.
“It’s nothing,” he murmured.
“It looks serious.” She sounded worried. “I thought the doctors–”
Hess sat upright and looked into her eyes, debating whether she needed to know. There’s an alien invasion about to crush us and I can’t even organize a trade meeting, he reasoned. What’s left to lose? He lowered his hand, allowing her to see. The toenail-sized wound still hurt.
“It’s right on top of your pip,” Alison exclaimed. “You’ll damage it!”
Shaking his head, Hess removed her curious fingers from the scab. It ran deep into his neck, a half-centimeter at least. It had taken an hour to carve the little glass bead out from under his skin. All the liquor and basa in the world couldn’t numb that pain. He told her the story, how he’d wallowed in self-loathing after losing the election, how he’d blamed every part of himself, especially his colonial past.
“Earthbound or not, it’s the same basic DNA,” he explained as he stared at the wall. “Just some of us have this pip fitted at birth and some of us get gold wriststraps.”
The pips tracked and documented workers like chattel. Move through a trace gate, the pip got scanned. Work on the towers, the pip got scanned. Commit a crime, stand against the Senate, or do pretty much anything else, the pip got scanned. Citizenry resided in the pip, essentially, unless you were from Earth.
“Without it, you’re persona non grata,” he told her.
“But you’ve still got yours? We passed through all those trace gates…”
He heard her pity and didn’t like it. He wanted reverence and respect.
“It’s here.” He tapped the pin positioned above his heart.
“The thing your mother made?”
It had been, once. The scrap metal was no longer visible, coated in stripes of gold and platinum. Right at the end, locked into a little diamond halo, was the bead of glass, the size of half a grain of rice. His mother’s gift, dressed up for the upper ranks of society, his entire history written inside.
“Nothing says it has to be under the skin.” He spoke low.
She placed her hand on his.
“It must hurt,” Alison said.
“It always hurts,” Hess replied. “That’s the problem.”
He wanted to end the conversation. It transported him right back to that night, on his bathroom floor with a knife in one hand and a bottle in the other, trying to root out all the colony stink from his body and make himself truly of the Earth. Even in the cold light of day, he hadn’t visited a doctor. It had been a dark place and no one else was welcome.
Thanking Alison, he stood and paced around the room. Her calming influence and her sincerity helped him and he thanked her again.
“Forget about it,” she said. “Just tell me what we’re going to do next.”
Between them, they devised a solution. They needed a new Fleet and the Spartans built the best ships in the Federation. So, they would return to the Senate delegation, visiting their quarters, reminding them of the extant threat of the Symbiot. Alison promised to play Loreto’s message to amplify the danger. While this was happening, Hess would pry and prod at any weaknesses, preying on Saito’s narcissism. The rest, they would improvise.
They walked together through the Spartan halls. Though the upper floors broke through the mountain peak, the bulk of the rooms and the hallways were carved from the rock itself. Inside, it felt still, as though the air never moved and there was always the sound of running and falling water. The sparsely decorated walls and the lack of natural light made Hess feel as though he were deep underground, rather than up among the clouds.
The architecture was alien to a boy who’d grown up in a tower’s shadow, in a red brick home, caked in mud to keep in the warmth. Here, the walls were made from a smooth clay and radiated cold. Even if the twin suns burned outside, no surface felt hot to touch.
Their ceilings were high and without decoration. Each entrance consisted of a tall, rounded arch and a thin bamboo door which vanished into the wall when the right person approached. Certainly, whenever a local approached a doorway, they simply assumed it would open. Conversely, those from the Senate delegation halted and stuttered, locking themselves into a nervous dance which made them all the more foreign.
The furniture was much like the people: rough, harsh and unforgiving but surprisingly accommodating. Benches and chairs were sculpted from the clay-like concrete which plastered the walls, their only concession being thin silk cushions laid carefully on top and stuffed with feathers. Hess noticed that many of the locals picked these up before sitting, preferring to lounge lazily on the hard surfaces, almost as a show of defiance.
Always, there was a distant tinkling of water, pumped from the rivers and lakes down on the surface of the planet. The Spartans sent men down into the desiccated depths to lift resources to the surface. They were inordinately successful in this regard, with waterfalls and fountains erected everywhere, a performative display of how happily they lived among the clouds.
Once, during the negotiations, it rained as they’d stood outside, light drops speckling on their cheeks. The entire Senate delegation ran for cover. In Providence, the acidic weather kept a tight leash on the population and burned through the protective gloss they painted on to their wonders. But the Spartans ignored the sudden shower. They watched curiously as the Eart
hbound covered their heads. Hess had joined them, eventually, and found the rain to be warm and refreshing.
Occasionally, Hess thought he might be trying too hard to read into every detail of the Spartan world, worried about deriving sweeping conclusions from their chairs or their windows. But everything about this planet intrigued him. Saito was not trying to learn any of this. He never even tried, he added, becoming increasingly incensed as he remembered the catastrophic negotiations collapsing.
With his mind elsewhere, he didn’t notice Alison’s disappearance. He backtracked and found her gazing up at a mural which stretched from ceiling to floor off one of the larger corridors. Hess watched as she stepped farther and farther back, trying to take in the entire scene, all five meters of it.
“You like this?” he asked, conscious of their limited time.
“It’s incredible.” Alison’s eyes greedily consumed the mural.
It was a crowd, painted in the old style.
“You know the story?” Hess knew the scene from memory; it was famous throughout the Federation.
“Please.” Alison arched an eyebrow. “I grew up on Mars. I know Assadias when I see him.”
“So you were distracted by a story you knew?”
“I never expected to see it here. Not this part of the story, at least...”
Hess laughed and looked up at the mural. It depicted a crowd of thousands, gathered around a distant platform. They were angry, their muscles tensed. The artist portrayed each of them identically, as though he’d only had one model.
“Why not?”
“On Mars, this is a tragedy.”
“And here, it’s a victory,” Hess finished the thought. “I suppose it depends on your perspective.”