Seventy-six systems. The Union had twelve - eleven, now. Mir was long dead. Earth stood alone.
She swung Cherry around some of the massive Haint stations, larger than anything Ada had ever seen in space except the ring around Earth itself. Some were jumpgates, with scores of wispy white dots emerging and entering in transit with distant stars. Others were refineries accepting streams of mining ships with raw materials for processing, or factories churning out parts that were carried to the shipyards. There were shipyards producing wormships and Leviathans and hundreds of other craft. And there were others, the ones Cherry said were beaming out most of the signals into space. Communication hubs.
Each one was shrouded by a veil so thick they looked like they were entirely built from glowing white smoke; only the occasional construction girder or other functional piece of architecture jutted out. She couldn’t see most of the hulls. There was no way anything in the Union - or everything in the Union - could possible assault these and win.
I believe I have synthesized a functional basis of the Haint progenitors’ native language.
Ada turned to look down at the cloudy, grey planet, and the stunningly artificial green gashes scattered across its equator and tropics. This was a more alien world than any Union planet; its people were no doubt equally so. Her fists clenched as imagined what she might do to them. “Then let’s go say hi.”
I have been mapping the surface. Here are all artificial structures I can detect.
A representation of the world bloomed grey in front of her, ugly greens and browns growing in the creases. Long white lines represented those strange gashes, and smaller white clusters looked suspiciously like cities. She picked the largest on this part of the planet and pushed Cherry down into the world’s cold dawn.
As her shields lit up, she hoped the Haints weren’t looking down. Or up.
She broke clean into the atmosphere, fires fading, and passed through a layer of irregular, patchy grey clouds. She dove through another layer of cloud cover, and emerged above a rocky, grimy-looking shithole of a planet.
The surface was covered with… something . It could have been trees, or delicate rock formations, or strange mushrooms. Whatever it was didn’t look alive in any sense she understood. She saw nothing resembling plants or animals. “Cherry, what the hell is wrong with this place?”
The atmosphere contains only trace oxygen. You will need your helmet. I detect only basic biological organisms similar to algae, lichen, and microbial life.
The world looked like a corpse, dessicated and shrivelled in a wasteland. It made Ada want to whimper. What in the worlds lived here that had built the Haints? It was only stranger when a forest of towering glass spires jutted out from the raw, ugly despair of the world around it. A recognizable city.
It almost would not have looked out of place on Earth.
As she cruised closer, Cherry highlighted veins of energy through the city. She slowed down, carefully drifting through the spaces between the towers, looking down into the streets below, into windows on either side. Everything looked old. Empty.
She settled Cherry down in the middle of what looked like a public square, and took a deep breath. No good air here. She popped the helmet up from her suit, face covered by the visor, and stepped outside after Cherry drained their air, setting her feet onto the Haint planet.
There really was nothing here.
Her boots crackled on dust and stones as she walked through the square. There were ancient, dried-out trees rising from few very purposeful-looking holes in the stone that covered the square, but as she walked up to them and looked more closely, they looked like rock. “Are these actually trees? They look wrong.”
They appear to be petrified. Turned to stone through age and lack of oxygen. Isotope scans suggests they died between 2800 and 3200 years ago.
“What? That’s… gods.”
She kept her hand away from them, even though her suit protected her, and turned to the buildings. Alien scripts dashed across windows and walls, punctured by doors of various sizes and shapes, architectures of subtly distinct styles. There was nothing alive here, at least nothing that wasn’t a kind of green or brown slime, but it was all horribly familiar-looking.
Cherry lifted up and started hovering several meters behind her. Despite the fact that there was almost nothing here, she felt danger pressing down on her from all around. This entire world was something out of a nightmare. Grey clouds sprawled overhead, barely distinguishable from the glassy towers reflecting them or the dull concrete and stone and metal binding the glass together.
“Those power conduits - they’re active? Where are they going?”
Those that remain operational appear connected to a very large facility south of the city.
“What about here? What are all these… words?”
I am actively performing analyses to attempt to establish a dictionary. I cannot be certain of the translation.
“Guesses?”
They may be commercial or cultural in nature. Statements regarding activities and products found within the buildings.
“Where are the… the people?”
No lifeforms I can detect are ergonomically compatible with this architecture.
She sighed, watching her breath fog against the glassy helmet, and wrapped her arms around herself. She hated this place. She walked back towards Cherry, who settled down gently on the dusty ground and allowed her to climb in. They rose up into the sky, flying southwards through the forest of glass towers, towards that active facility.
On the way she passed a large, barren mountain that seemed to be covered in spines. As she drew closer, she realized they weren’t spines - they were more trees. Suffocated, mineralized, petrified. It hadn’t always been this way. This planet had died.
She reached the nearest facility that still seemed powered. Lights flickered along the roof and the entrance, but there were no windows. Indeed, the building seemed to plunge into a mountain. “This is it?”
Most of the region’s power and chemical conduits seem to be leading here, yes.
“Chemical conduits?”
A faint green glow suddenly illuminated a set of lines coursing through the world, and as Ada flew further south past the facility, she realized they were pipes feeding something into the facility. She kept going, flying as fast as she could, until she found the source - an incredibly vast, glass-covered vat of bright green sludge, stretching east to west as far as the eye could see.
“What is this stuff?”
It is morphologically similar to algae. It undergoes electrochemical processing before being pumped towards the facility.
She turned around and flew back to that facility, where the power and algae were being sent. They kept low to avoid being too obvious, and that slowed them a little, but it was better to be safe than sorry. She landed in front of it, looking up at the alien writing along the left side of the door, utterly uncomprehending. If it mattered, surely she would figure it out inside.
“Anything dangerous in here?”
I detect no lifeforms, nor anything I would recognize as a weapon. Your suit gloves should allow you to code, if you need to.
Small mercy. She walked up to the door and it opened immediately, sliding to the side as though expecting her. Really? No need to break in? No security at all? She walked into a broad room covered in more alien writing, with pictures and bright colours everywhere. Paintings. Scenes depicting strange creatures in fantastical places.
Nothing like the dead nightmare outside.
“You see all this? Cherry, I want to know what the fuck is going on.”
I am simulating and compiling data, and recording everything you see through the suit. Some of the pigmentation in the images is invisible to the human eye - the spectral range of their vision extends further into the ultraviolet than yours. There are also unshielded computer systems here; I will attempt to analyse them.
Ada walked towards one of the broadest doors, and it too
beeped and slid open as she approached. Everything here felt remarkably normal, except for the dull grey and the utter lifelessness. “Where should I be going?”
The majority of the energy conduits appear to feed into a large quantum network in the basement. Take the door to your right, down the stairs, to the bottom.
She looked and saw a remarkably human-friendly door, though its handle was a bit too low and its frame a bit too narrow. It felt locked. A quick disintegration sigil on the door allowed her to ram her shoulder through, and she found herself in a bare concrete set of stairs, going down. Small details like the spacing of the steps were all wrong, but everything was still horribly recognizable. When she reached a door at the bottom, alien writing scrawled down the left side of the frame.
“Any idea what that says?”
According to my current dictionary, it says Computers Main Control.
Hm. That was pretty straightforward. She found this door locked as well, disintegrated it, and shouldered her way through the crumbling metal of the door, stepping out into a vast space dominated on all sides by colossal metal boxes. Each seemed to be composed mostly of doors, and a few small floating machines gently bobbed from door to door, dwarfed by the emptiness. Nothing but the lights and the drones seemed active.
Ada walked to the nearest of the doors, at ground level, and popped it open. It didn’t resist at all, and the drones ignored her. What she saw was incomprehensible to her, a vast computer system that reminded her a little of what she had seen on the ring, in the heart of the gods. Everything was slightly alien, though, slightly off; the product of a completely different history still managing to arrive at a similar solution to a similar puzzle.
“What are these for? Are there gods in here?”
The computer architecture matches that of the Hornet, though these are more robust and are running more complex computations. It seems highly likely the inhabitants of this place created the Haints, perhaps before building these facilities.
“So where are they now?”
I do not know. Most of the structure is deeper in the building, and consists of large rooms filled with storage pods of organic matter. All the algae and most of the remaining energy are being fed into those rooms. I would suggest investigating there.
Good enough. She climbed back up the stairs, back into that eerie lobby, and walked deeper into the facility. She soon found one of the storage rooms, and it quickly put a frown on her face. “I don’t get it. There’s nothing here.”
Circular hatches honeycombed the walls, and she walked up to one of them. There was a simple control console on the side, made of solid buttons and a plain screen rather than the completely virtual kind she expected from Earth interfaces. She didn’t understand the symbolism on them, but apparently Cherry had figured it out.
The purple button will open the storage pod. I believe it will extend outwards like a shelf, so stand clear.
She stood clear and pushed the purple button. The hatch hissed, slowly extending outwards to reveal a glass cylinder a few meters long, lit up with a faint yellow glow, filled some kind of slightly bubbling fluid. And inside that fluid -
Oh, gods.
Ada took a step back, startled. Catching her breath. It was okay. It wasn’t moving.
The alien creature floating inside the cylinder, its head bundled in a great deal of technological gadgets - wires, plates, probes - looked like the ones etched into the lobby outside. It was green-skinned and scaly, as far as she could tell, and its large eyes were closed shut. It had a pair of long arms halfway up its torso and a second, smaller pair of arms where she expected its shoulders to be. Its legs looked like they bent backwards. A short tail stuck out of the back as well; it appeared entirely naked.
It was also decomposing, skin and flesh flaking off, exposing frayed muscle tissue and nearly translucent bone below. It was clearly, utterly, dead.
“Cherry.” She was breathing heavily into her helmet. “What the fuck is this.”
It appears to be a member of the species that created this infrastructure, and by extension, the Haints.
“No shit. Why the fuck is it… floating dead? In a tube?”
The quantum algorithms interfacing with the pods are extremely complex, and clearly involve neural-computational translation. The bodies are deceased and neurologically inactive, but a chemical stasis has prevented advanced decomposition by endogenous microbiota.
She stepped away from the body, looking back up into the storage room. There were hundreds - no, there must be thousands in this room alone, all packed away in narrow cylindrical tubes. And this was just one room. In one building. “Cherry… how many are there?”
The facility extends deep under the mountain. It could contain over six million individuals.
Six thousand thousand. She turned around, fleeing far faster than she needed to, returning to the lobby. She looked again at the remarkably brightly-coloured images along the walls, the soft and round fonts of alien writing. What was this place? What had happened? Had the Haints put them all in storage and let them die? Had they fed on their own creators somehow? Had the equipment malfunctioned?
She rushed out of the building, back to Cherry, and climbed back into the cockpit. There must be more to this. There must be answers. She took to the skies, searching for something more, searching for another city.
And they found more cities, and more facilities, just like the first.
Two million pods.
Eight million pods.
Six million pods.
Small pockets of settlement, smaller villages. Eight hundred pods. Two thousand pods. Five pods. Twenty-six pods. Four hundred pods.
Everywhere they flew, everywhere Cherry scanned, everywhere Ada stepped out looking for more clues, they found more of the same. For hours, and hours. Facilities great and small, each running the same basic technology, each housing pods of “organic matter” - the long-dead corpses of the Haint progenitors. Cherry dated them at between 3000 and 3300 years old - slightly older than all the other dead things.
The planet had been dead for thousands of years, but its inhabitants had died first .
They found the largest facility they could, a huge thing underground, a few klicks out from the massive, glassy ruin of another city. Ten million pods. Ada stepped out of the ship, walked inside, and finally found something a bit different. There was the usual - bright colours, rounded script, engraved images of aliens in fantastical places. But there was also a perfect cube-shape of Haint armor, floating in the air above a tall pillar of stone, its veil gently floating upwards like a candle flame. And that pillar was covered in alien writing.
“What is that thing?” She pointed to the cube.
It appears to be a piece of Haint veil armor, nothing more. Perhaps for demonstrative purposes.
“Demonstrating what?”
Shall I read you the inscription on the stone?
Ada blinked, looking at the odd vertical writing. “You can do that?”
Yes. Over the past several hours I have accessed enough computer records and made enough contextual observations of language use to build a definitive dictionary and grammar of the three major languages in use. However, my translations may lack the emotional quality of the originals.
Ada nodded, looking at the writing, hoping it explained something. Anything.
Hello, visitor. You stand here far from your home, so allow us to welcome you into ours. No doubt you will explore our world and discover what we have left behind; you are welcome to it all. We hope our guardians have treated you kindly in their vigil over our final resting place.
You may be wondering what became of our race. The answer is simple, yet invisible to you now. We built paradise. We can live millions of lifetimes, each more optimal and rich and sensuous than the real, before our bodies expire. And why wouldn’t we?
You may find our mortal remains, but know that before we died, we lived eternal and godly in the thousand worlds within the world. If you ar
e standing here, perhaps you have taken a different path. Perhaps you will judge us. Perhaps you will learn from us.
Either way, beautiful travels.
Ada took a step back and sat down.
“The thousand worlds within the world.”
She looked at her hands, tattooed with code underneath her black gloves.
“A million lifetimes in a lifetime.”
They had walked . These aliens had walked a thousand worlds of their own making, like the thousand worlds of Earth. They had lived there at incredible speeds - with time dilation. And they had died there, rather than continue their species. They had all died there. It had been their choice.
And they had left behind the Haints as guardians of this graveyard of a planet.
Why were the Haints attacking anyone, then? Why weren’t they staying put?
Why had they done this?
Why had they… given up?
Ada, are you alright?
She shook her head. This didn’t make any sense. None of this made any sense. “Why are the Haints attacking us if they’re built to protect their creators? If everything on this planet is already dead? ”
There are military databases at certain locations that appear to be receiving signals from Haint command stations. If we approach one, I can access its records and attempt to recover the Haints’ own strategic history.
She nodded, leaving the pillar and its floating, veiled cube in the atrium, leaving this vast, civilizational monument to despair and surrender. She felt hazy.
She flew with Cherry across dusty plains, petrified forests, mucky and lifeless rivers. For the few hours it took to reach their destination, she was slow - looking for signs, wherever she could, that somebody had resisted, had tried to live on. She found nothing.
Cherry guided her to a complex with broad, unused airfields and deep-dug bunkers, and Ada broke into them with ease. She soon found herself before a vast screen connected bound together to many complex machines, and Cherry started rummaging through the systems from a distance, linking through Ada’s suit to get past electromagnetic shielding around the computers. The screens lit up, data flowing past Ada’s eyes, meaningless.
The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4) Page 35