A Chain Across the Dawn

by Drew Williams

  Otherwise, all I would have been able to think about was that we were about to set foot in the place where my parents had died.

  I didn’t know much about them: they’d been scientists, studying the pulse, working with a primarily Barious sect of which the Preacher had been a member. Unlike the other gifted children out in the galaxy—children like Sho—my gifts hadn’t come about randomly, as some evolutionary response to the radiation of the pulse; they’d come about because my mother had been accidentally exposed to a super-concentrated dose of pulse radiation, when she was carrying me in her womb. That dose had killed her, and my father as well.

  That had happened on the station in Katya—where we were bound.

  The Preacher had told us she’d abandoned the station almost immediately after my birth, that as far as she knew, the rest of her former sect had abandoned it as well, shortly thereafter. She’d fled with me to my homeworld, knowing that eventually, because of the high dose of radiation I’d received so young—and therefore, the high likelihood that I’d develop powerful next-generation gifts—someone would come looking for me, to use me either as a weapon, as the Pax had wanted to do, or to further their studies of the pulse, the way the Justified had. In a very real way, she’d used me as bait, trying to lure those who knew more about the strange cosmic event that had rendered the Barious “infertile,” or close enough. So—yeah. That was one reason she and I weren’t exactly on the best of terms these days.

  I understood; I did. For the Preacher, studying the pulse and studying her people’s slow-motion genocide was all the same thing. The life of one child—even a child she felt responsible for—was nothing next to that responsibility. And she had come to love me, in her own way. But it was still hard to square the years I’d spent, in the orphanage, desperately wondering who my parents had been, with the fact that the Preacher had known, had been a quiet presence in my life, but had never told me, had never tried to give me the family I’d desperately craved.

  And now we’d learned that the Cyn had been seeking information on my birth as well, at the behest of whatever “goddess” he served. It seemed like everything came back to that, eventually—came back to Katya. Everything I was, everything I’d become since then: Jane’s partner, at least a halfway decent fighter, even the children I’d helped, working at her side—none of it seemed to matter. My life would always be defined by others who knew more about what had gone on at that distant, hidden station than I did.

  Mo had died because of something that had happened to me quite literally before I was born. Something I had zero control over, whose only remnants were the gifts it had given me and the circumstances of my life defined by the losses I’d suffered that day, losses I wasn’t even aware of. Everything I was—and wasn’t—stemmed from the system we were approaching, in one way or another.

  So when we dropped out of hyperspace, I was already sitting in the cockpit, ready for anything. What I got was a perfectly normal system, unremarkable in every way.

  I mean, it’s not like I’d expected something different—some glowing portal to an alternate dimension in the place of a sun, or the ruins of some ancient civilization broken to pieces in orbit around one of the planets. The whole reason the Preacher’s Barious sect had built their station here—Odessa Station, the Preacher called it; the place that had given me my name, in an abbreviated and differentiated form—had been that Katya was a wholly unremarkable system, the last place anyone would think to look for them.

  There was an inner ring of rocky worlds, none terraformed, none particularly rich in useful minerals; a thick belt of comets formed a river of ice through the middle of the system, interesting as an astronomical curiosity, perhaps, but not actually of any scientific value; three outer gas giants, each with a smattering of moons, none of which had anything to recommend them either.

  My heart was still in my throat as Schaz scanned the system, looking for the hidden station.

  “You all right?” Jane asked me quietly, sensitive as always to my moods.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “Hmmm. Strange. Our destination is not at the coordinates the Preacher gave us,” Schaz said. “It should be in a low orbit around the second gas giant—the blue one, there.” She pulled up a close-in view of that particular world, without even a name, just a scientific designation: K1401-AG492Z5B. Its “surface,” inasmuch as gas giants really had one of those, was a rippling sea of mist and storms, incredibly slow-moving hurricanes inching their way through the low gravity of the indigo atmosphere.

  “I’m taking us in closer,” Jane announced. “Schaz, plot the orbital coordinates the Preacher gave us; let’s see if we can find where Odessa Station went off track.” She looked sideways at me, reached out to touch my wrist, briefly. “Breathe, kid,” she told me. “Just breathe.”

  I did that—hadn’t realized I hadn’t been.

  We approached the world at sublight, the starfield passing by on either side of us. At some point, my parents had seen this same view, on their approach to the station where they would spend their last years: at some point, the Cyn had as well, tracking me—or the Preacher’s sect—to this location, seventeen years before I’d known he even existed.

  “Hmmmm. That might be the problem,” Schaz said.

  “What’s up?” Jane asked her.

  “Remember what the Preacher said about the station’s first line of defense?”

  “A minefield in the upper atmosphere, sure.”

  “Yeah. It’s not there.”

  “She said the mines were cloaked; maybe we should—”

  “She also gave us the cloaking parameters, Jane—I’d be able to spot them if they were there, even if they were cloaked. They’re just . . . gone. The Cyn must have brute forced his way through them with that astoundingly ugly ship of his, the same way he pushed through the war satellites in orbit over Jaliad.”

  “So why would that make the station shift its orbit?” I asked.

  “Another defense mechanism,” Schaz said. “A kind of quarantine purge. Intended to destroy the research the Barious were doing there, before someone else could get to it. According to the schematics the Preacher sent, if the minefield was breached, the station was supposed to drop down into the gas giant and flood itself with atmosphere. The stuff’s not dangerous, per se: primarily nitrogen and xenon, some oxygen, traces of helium; nothing you’d want to fill your lungs with for long periods, but perfectly breathable, actually. However, exposure to unregulated atmosphere like that would still ruin the experiments being performed on board; the atmosphere carries a static charge, and most of the work was being done in a sterile station and in zero gravity for a reason. An atmospheric flood would also make the station approach trickier to manage.”

  Jane frowned at the viewscreen. “Give me an overlay of the prior orbit,” she told Schaz; obediently, Schaz calculated, and suddenly there was a shimmering line on the cockpit window, a path for Jane to follow: the former orbit of Odessa Station. Jane swept Scheherazade into the same flight path the station would have taken, scanning the slowly churning surface of the storms below as we went.

  “There,” Schaz chirped, zooming one of her cameras in on a tiny silver speck in the misty sea underneath us, a metal island half-sunk into the depths of the slowly shifting atmosphere.

  We’d found it.

  Only the highest towers of Odessa Station were visible; the rest was hidden in the clouds of mist and storms. It looked like nothing more than a shipwreck, just the tops of the masts sticking clear of the sea, except in this case the “masts” were steeples of steel and minarets of latticed alloys, probably containing the labs themselves, built away from the body of the station in case something had gone wrong.

  “Odd again.” Schaz murmured.

  “What’s up?” Jane asked.

  “It’s sunk into the atmosphere, but it should have descended even lower. As I understand these schematics, part of the purpose of the descent defense mechanism was t
o eject the station’s computer core, deep enough into the gravity well that it would smash to pieces on the core of the world below.”

  “And?”

  “And they’re not deep enough for that. K1401-AG492Z5B—”

  “We can just call it ‘K one four,’ ” Jane said dryly.

  “As you like. K14 has very weak gravity; again, part of the reason the station was built here was so they could orbit low enough to not be seen, whilst still maintaining zero-gravity labs in parts of the station. The station is currently not low enough to have ejected its AI core with enough force to have destroyed itself.”

  “You’re telling me their AI might still be intact?” I asked, my heart hammering in my chest. Another being—next to the Preacher—who had known my parents, who had been present at my birth.

  “I’m telling you that the AI was not destroyed in the manner of Odessa Station’s built-in defense mechanisms,” Scheherazade temporized.

  “If you had to guess?” Jane asked her.

  “The Cyn forced its way through the minefield, got on board, and gained access to the AI systems fast enough to prevent the discharge of the core,” Schaz said. “That would also explain why the third step in the quarantine protocols—the overloading and discharge of the fusion reactor—also didn’t occur.”

  “You’re telling me it might have power?” Jane was taking us on approach, skimming over the top of the seas of azure mists; as we closed on the towers of the station, lights began to appear—in portholes and on radar masts, the “wreck” of the station suddenly lit from within, the illumination shining up from the depths of the atmospheric ocean it had become half-drowned in. With those lights cut on—likely triggered by our proximity—I could see the shadowy outline of the station below the “waterline” of the fog, a massive metal structure built out from the central fusion reactor, silent for decades, now slowly returning to life.

  “I’m telling you it might have power,” Schaz agreed, somewhat unnecessarily.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jane slowly pulled us into a loop, descending into the atmosphere of the gas giant a good bit away from where Odessa Station was sunk into the mists. That way we’d be able to scan for a docking bay or at least an umbilical on our approach.

  As we sank into the fog, Schaz’s engines caused the atmosphere around us to glow with reflected light, a different shade of blue from the slow eddies that surrounded us. “Can you raise the station’s AI?” Jane asked Scheherazade.

  “I’ve been trying,” Schaz replied, somewhat testily. “He’s not answering. Nobody’s answering.”

  “We’re never lucky,” Jane muttered, mostly to herself. Down in the atmosphere, the station was invisible again—we could see the pinpricks of its distant lights through the murk, but other than that, we might as well have been surrounded by the deep blue nothingness of the gas giant on all sides.

  Until we weren’t. Something rose out of the depths of the storm around us, something massive, coming up on our port side; my first thought was that it was a goddamned dreadnaught, hiding deep in the mists, except it was even bigger than that, and none of Schaz’s sensors went off, no alarms sounded—the only reason we knew it was there was that Jane had cameras scanning all around us.

  “What the fuck is that?” Jane swore, swerving the ship away from the . . . whatever the hell it was. It had no running lights, like a ship would: no portholes glowing from within, no blinking proximity-warning indicators. More than anything it looked like a goddamned mountain, like we were approaching it rather than the other way around, except in place of a rocky surface it had clean, straight lines and razor-sharp edges; there was no broken stone or craggy peaks, just . . . metal, a massive precipice of metal rising up from the mists below us. It hung motionless for a moment, the fog eddying around it, then slowly descended, until it was like it had never been there.

  “What the fuck is what?” Schaz asked innocently. “You really don’t have to swear at me, Jane, I’m scanning on all—”

  “What do you mean, what the fuck is what?” Jane was doing her best not to screech; she wasn’t being at all successful. “You almost ran us into a goddamn . . . a goddamn . . .”

  “Jane, I promise, there’s nothing down here; just the station in front of us. I’m not picking up anything at all on my scans.”

  As if to give lie to her words, the obelisk rose up from the depths again, the pillar almost floating up from the fog like a cork bobbing in water in slow motion. It was on our starboard side this time: we couldn’t even tell if it was the same one, or if there were dozens down there, hundreds, rising and falling in the misty sea. I pressed my face right up next to the camera—I couldn’t be sure, but I could have sworn there was writing on the side, massive carved letters in a language I’d never seen before.

  “She can’t see them,” I whispered. “Schaz can’t see them at all.”

  “Schaz, check your damn camera feeds,” Jane swore. “There are . . . things, fucking things, coming up out of the atmosphere below us.”

  “Jane, there’s nothing—I’m reviewing the camera footage now, there’s just the atmosphere and the storms. Slightly higher static charges than usual, yes, but beyond that—”

  “They’re forerunner relics,” I told Jane, breathless. “They have to be. That’s why the Preacher’s sect built the station here—they thought the pulse had come from the forerunners, the lost species that built the Barious. They weren’t just studying the pulse; they were studying those . . . those whatever the hell they are.”

  “Why wouldn’t the Preacher warn us about them?” Jane growled. “We almost plowed into the side of one, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Because she was expecting the station to still be in orbit, not down here in the atmosphere. If Schaz couldn’t sense them and we weren’t looking for them, we never would have found them at all. I guarantee you that they’re deep enough in the atmosphere you can’t see them from above.” Another one of the massive obelisks rose, then fell, back into the mists; there was definitely writing on this one.

  “She still should have told us.”

  “It’s the Preacher, Jane. She keeps secrets out of habit. Honestly, she’s worse than you.”

  “Thanks, Esa. Thanks so much.” Ahead of us, the station was finally visible through the blue atmosphere; two of the obelisks rose and fell, nearly in tandem, on either side of it, but it was like they were avoiding it on purpose. They had to be—otherwise, it was inevitable the station would have been smashed to pieces by one of the rising pillars at some point over the last seventeen years.

  “Why is there always weird shit.” Jane wasn’t really talking to me—it wasn’t even a question, just a tired statement. “Can’t just find the station, dock at the station, copy its logs and be on our way; oh, no. That would be too goddamned easy. It has to be sunk in an atmosphere and surrounded by ancient obelisks of unknown origin, unheard of on tens of millions of surveyed worlds.”

  “That’s actually not true,” Scheherazade put in. “I mean, theoretically—if you are seeing something that I’m not seeing—”

  “Unless you’ve somehow fucked up the oxygen mix coming out of life support and we’re both hallucinating, we’re fucking seeing this, Schaz—”

  “I’m saying if you are, that would match the obelisks found in the Oberon system, the ones uncovered by a Culda survey team about a thousand years ago, deep in the seas of liquid methane. No one ever knew what they were, just that modern technology didn’t even recognize their existence. They were destroyed in the sect wars a couple hundred years later—the whole world was, a casualty of the Crimson-Cardosi conflict—but there is precedent for—”

  “Just . . . just . . . just get us to the station, Scheherazade. Save the history lesson for later.”

  “You’re the one at the stick.”

  “I am indeed.” Jane had cut our speed back significantly when the obelisks had first appeared; now, she rerouted a little more power to the engines, and we floated again thr
ough the indigo mists, the massive stone pillars—Monuments? Tombstones? The cores of some ancient computer system that operated on some kind of dimensional wavelength we couldn’t comprehend?—rising and falling on either side of us, soundless even in the ocean of fog that should have carried the noise of their passage.

  Odessa Station loomed above us, its lights muted by the atmosphere. “There’s an open docking bay on the third level from the bottom,” Schaz informed us. “See? I can still see things.” The last came out in a defensive mutter, Schaz’s version of speaking under her breath.

  “Yes. Thank you, Scheherazade. Any luck raising the station?”

  “None. I don’t think anyone’s home.”

  “If there are lights, there’s power—if there’s power, that means at least some systems are running. Can you interface with their network?”

  “Not yet; there’s no wireless envelope for me to interface with. I don’t know if that’s on purpose, built into the station’s design to keep them hidden, or if something’s gone wrong inside. Once you dock, though, you should be able to hardwire me into whatever’s left of the system. If the AI is still present, I’ll be able to contact them from there. If not, depending on the level of damage, I might be able to take direct control of the remaining programs myself.”

  “You get to upgrade from a ship to a station,” I told her, smiling weakly. “Hell of a promotion.”

  “I prefer my ship, thank you,” Schaz replied primly. “It’s taken a long time to get it just like I want it, and I like being mobile. Winding up stuck here, floating alone in this gas giant—that is not how I’d choose to spend eternity.”

  “There’s the docking bay.” Jane was craning her neck to look upward as the metallic structure of the station rose slowly past our window, all interlaced metal piping and bulkhead walls lapped by the mist. The open bay doors came into view, and Jane eased us inside, guiding Schaz through the shifting fog, the glow of our engines lighting the interior of the ingress tunnel that was otherwise pitch black.