by J. N. Chaney
It was kind of hard not to take something like that personally.
But then he’d mag-locked the Raven and the Slipwing together. When he’d rotated the conjoined ships to gain some protection from the smaller vessel, the beams had come up to full power, blasting her away, then returning to their varying levels of power. In other words, once it was obvious Leira and Viktor were aboard the Slipwing, the attacker’s aim had changed from turning Dash to a cloud of glowing gas to disabling his ship—just as they had Leira’s.
Whoever commanded that ship had wanted to take Leira, Viktor, or both, alive.
And there could only be one reason for that—the Lens.
“So, what were they after?”
Dash jumped. Conover’s question broke unexpectedly through his racing thoughts, just as Dash had thought about the Lens. Was this kid telepathic?
Dash offered a shrug. “No idea.”
“It must be those other two,” Conover said. “Leira and Viktor. They wanted them, or something they have.”
“Uh, what makes you say that? Maybe they wanted me.”
“No.” He jerked at thumb at the particle beam scar behind the cockpit. “They tried to kill you. Then you must have taken the other two on board. And then, instead of trying to kill you, they tried to disable you. So, they wanted something from those guys, not you.”
Dash looked back at the vid, just so he didn’t have to meet those grey eyes. Who was this kid? He had the attitude of a bored teenager, but his mind was like some sort of all-seeing computer.
“Well, if it was them they were after,” Dash said, looking deliberately at the vid and not Conover, “I don’t know why. Maybe those two are wanted or something.”
“Maybe.” Conover didn’t look convinced.
“Anyway,” said Dash, “I’ve got some boring work to do up here, and Leira and Viktor are probably going to be busy for a while yet, so why don’t you go clean off a bed and, you know, try to get some sleep?”
“I’m not tired.”
“Okay, well, there’s an entertainment system back in the crew hab. I haven’t used it for a while, but it should—”
“Dash?”
Dash looked back to the new voice. It was Leira, with Viktor right behind her.
They were going to be busy for a while, Dash had said…like five seconds ago. Figures. All he wanted to do was get away from Conover and his bizarre ability to know stuff, so he’d have some time to think.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, switching on his grin.
Leira flicked her eyes toward Conover, then back to Dash. “Can we talk for a minute? Like, in the crew hab?”
They wanted to get away from Conover, too. Yeah, this was getting increasingly awkward. Leira clearly wanted to keep the Lens a secret from Conover—who would never be more than a few meters away, as long as they were aboard the Slipwing, and would apparently be there for weeks, maybe months.
Not for the first time in his life, Dash kicked himself for not entirely thinking Pinetti’s price through.
He nodded and started to clamber out of the pilot’s seat. “Sure. The ship’s trimmed for stable flight, so—”
“Is this about whatever you’re hiding, that the ones in that ship that attacked you want?”
They all stared at Conover for a moment, then Leira glared at Dash. “What, exactly, did you tell him?”
“Nothing! He just kinda figured things out.”
“Really.”
Conover nodded at Leira. “Yeah. I did. Somebody really wants you, or something you have.” He scowled and muttered, “It wasn’t that hard to work out. I’m not dumb, you know.”
Dash glanced at him. “No, kid, you are not.”
Conover looked up at Leira. “So what is it? Did you steal it?”
“We didn’t steal it,” Leira said, before cutting herself off.
Dash chuckled and waved a hand at her. “Okay, that one’s on you.”
“So you do have something they want,” Conover said. “What is it? Where did you find it?”
Leira glanced at Viktor, who said, “It’s a device. And yes, Clan Shirna wants it. But—”
“But that’s all you need to know,” Leira said. “More than you need to know, in fact.” She turned to Dash. “Anyway, we need to talk to you about what happens next.”
Dash nodded. “Yeah, you do. But now I have a question.”
Leira’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Where did you find it?”
Her eyes again flicked to Conover. “This is something we should talk about somewhere else.”
“Or right here,” Dash said, pointedly. “You know, the kid was right when he said he’s not dumb. He looked at the particle beam scars from your…Clan Shirna, is it? Anyway, from your friends in that big ship.”
“They are not our friends,” Viktor said. “Clan Shirna are a vicious, hierarchical tribe of reptilian beings whose territory is in and around the Globe of Suns and the Pasture. They’re also religious extremists, notoriously territorial, and known for killing anyone they deem unworthy.”
“Yeah, I meant friends in the loosest sense,” corrected Dash. “Anyway, Conover here looked over the damage and, just from that, was pretty much able to piece together what happened. Clan Shirna there wasn’t trying to kill you, they were trying to take you alive. Now, unless you and Viktor are way more valuable than it seems, I’m guessing they were after the Lens.”
Leira’s eyes flew wide with indignant anger. “Why would you say—”
“What’s this Lens?” Conover asked, more interested than ever.
Leira ignored him. “Dash, you’re such a—”
“Charming guy, I know.” He shrugged. “One way or another, Conover would somehow figure it out. And, let’s face it, trying to sneak around and keep secrets on board the Slipwing would be like trying to hide in an empty cargo module. It wouldn’t work even if he was stupid.”
“I’m not stupid!”
Dash raised a hand at the kid. “No, you’re not. I’m on your side here, Conover.” Then he looked back to Leira. “Let’s just drop all the secretive bullshit and work out what we’re going to do.”
Conover looked from Dash to Leira. “You still haven’t said what this Lens is.”
Leira kept up the defiant glare for a moment, then looked at Viktor, who gave a shrug. She finally deflated and snapped, “Fine. It’s a piece of old tech we found.”
“Where?”
“In the Pasture.”
Dash glanced at Conover. The name obviously meant nothing to him, either. “Where, or what, is the Pasture?” he asked.
“It’s an area of space bound within the Globe of Suns,” Viktor explained. “On the other side of the Shadow Nebula.”
“Okay,” said Dash, nodding. “I’ve heard of this Globe of Suns. But no one goes through the Shadow Nebula.” His voice trailed off and he looked from Viktor to Leira. “It was built by the Unseen, wasn’t it?”
“The Globe of Suns?” Viktor shook his head. “We’re not sure. But the Pasture certainly is.”
“Okay, and what, exactly, is the Pasture?”
“It’s an artificial Oort Cloud—a massive expanse full of comets and other small bodies,” Victor explained, seeing Dash’s confused look. “Hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe millions. They seem to orbit in some sort of pattern, though we weren’t there long enough to figure out what that might be. It could be billions of years old.”
“And this Lens, you found it somewhere in there.”
“We did,” Leira confirmed. “I ran across some data during a job aboard the wreck of another courier’s ship. It wasn’t complete, and it took forever to reconstruct it, and then decipher, but the fact that it was kept so secure seemed to mean it was valuable. And it was, just not in any way I expected it to be.”
“The data pointed you to this Pasture.”
Leira nodded. “Exactly. It was too good for us to pass up. We needed to at least take a look. I’ve got no idea h
ow this other courier got the data, and the explosion that wrecked his ship looked like an accident, but now I’m not so sure.”
Dash put his feet up on the edge of the comms. “So, someone else was after it.”
“Maybe. It might have been Clan Shirna. Or their agents.”
“Okay. Great. Clan Shirna, owner of at least one massive warship, is after this,” Dash said.
“Did you steal it from them?” Conover asked.
Leira scowled. “I already told you, we found it.”
“Yeah, but one guy’s found it might be another guy’s stole it,” Dash pointed out. “So it really doesn’t matter if you think you found it, right? What matters is what this Clan Shirna thinks.”
“I can’t speak for them,” Leira said, her indignation at having this conversation involve Conover seemingly gone.
“Look,” Dash said, “I honestly don’t really care if you stole it. Hell, I’ve come into the possession of more than a few things myself by, let’s call it by creative acquisition.” He uncrossed and re-crossed his feet on the comms. “But I need to know how far they’ll go to get this back.”
“Pretty far,” Viktor said. “But they must not be allowed to get it.”
“You think? Nobody should have that thing.” He frowned. “That is, assuming it does what you claim it does, which I still find a little hard to believe.”
Conover, who’d been watching the conversation bounce back and forth, asked, “What does it do?”
Dash snorted. “Supposedly, it makes stars blow up.”
Conover looked at all three of them, then shook his head. “Unlikely. No device you could be carrying aboard this ship would have more than a tiny fraction of the power needed. Maybe, if you could tap into another star…” He frowned. “Even then, though, a device like that would have to be huge.” The kid lapsed into silence, and his expression took on a faraway look.
“That’s my thinking,” Dash agreed. “Something like that, if it actually worked, would be worth a hell of a lot. But it doesn’t matter if it really works, though, as long as Clan Shirna believes it does.”
“It really does work,” Viktor insisted.
“Oh? Really? How many stars have you blown up with it so far, Viktor?” Dash asked.
The older engineer hesitated before admitting, “Well, none. But we wouldn’t.”
“Clan Shirna certainly would, though,” Leira said. “They’re insanely dangerous, thinking that anyone who doesn’t abide by their belief system should be eradicated.”
“The whole universe, actually,” Viktor added.
“Yes. Anyway,” Leira went on, “they believe that only Clan Shirna itself should exist. No other forms of life are permitted. Otherwise, the purity of creation is diminished.”
Dash raised his eyebrows. “Wow. Sounds like a bunch of assholes if you ask me.”
“Maybe if it could somehow cause iron to start fusing in the star’s core, that could work,” Conover surmised, rejoining the conversation. “It would still take immense power, but…” He broke off, still staring, his mind obviously racing.
Dash lowered his feet back to the deck. “Yeah, that’s what Leira and Viktor said. This Lens uses wormholes, somehow, to make a star start producing iron.”
“So it undergoes gravitational collapse,” Conover said, almost more to himself than anyone else. “Then rebounds, creating an explosion. A nova-a supernova. If the star is big enough.” Dash got the impression the kid was somehow seeing it happen.
“Yeah,” Dash said, “but that’s not possible, is it?”
Conover shrugged. “It’s still extremely unlikely, but anything is possible. And if it was made by the Unseen…”
“Just imagine such a capability,” Leira said, “in the hands of an extremist group like Clan Shirna.”
Using exploding stars as a weapon? Yeah, that would be a quick war.
“Okay,” Dash said, “let’s assume this is all true. You said you found this in the…the Pasture, you called it, right? Could there be more of these Lenses there?”
Viktor shifted uncomfortably. “It’s possible. It was made by the Unseen, we think. There could be a lot more of their tech there.”
“We really couldn’t stick around and look,” Leira said. “Clan Shirna keeps a pretty close eye on the place. They seem to think it’s special, maybe even holy in some way.”
“Can I see it?” Conover asked.
Leira looked at Viktor, who sighed and dug the Lens out of his belt pouch. “We haven’t had a chance to study it much. I tried a few tests before Clan Shirna ran us down and attacked but wasn’t able to learn much. It’s pretty arcane I guess.”
Conover didn’t respond except to hold out his palm.
Viktor offered him the Lens, albeit reluctantly.
Conover held it in both hands, studying it. A long moment passed. When he finally looked up, he said, “It…”
Then he froze, his eyes turned blank white, and he toppled back in the copilot’s seat.
6
Dash hefted Conover and rushed him to the autodoc, Leira and Viktor hurrying along behind him, only to have the boy moan and start squirming halfway there. He swerved into the crew module and deposited Conover onto a bunk. He glanced back at the others. “I thought he might be dead!”
“You thought I was dead?” The kid looked around as if in a haze.
“I said, you might be!” returned Dash. “You sure seemed like it, anyway, with how you just collapsed back there.”
“What happened?” Leira asked.
Dash noticed she’d retrieved the Lens and was now clutching it in both hands, but much more warily than she had previously. Probably a good idea not leaving star-exploding alien artifacts just lying around, actually. But Dash understood her caution. What had the Lens just done to Conover?
Conover levered himself up and put his feet on the deck but remained slumped, looking drained. Viktor produced a cup of water for him, which he took slow, measured drinks of.
Dash waited for the kid to finish before asking, “Hey, what happened to you?”
Conover lowered the cup. “I saw stuff.”
“Stuff.” Dash dug deep and managed to find some patience.
The young man nodded. “Yeah. With these.” He pointed at his eyes.
“You saw stuff, with your eyes.” Dash glanced at Leira and Viktor, but they both looked as puzzled as he felt. “Well, that’s really impressive, but—”
“No,” Conover interrupted. “I mean, yeah, with my eyes. But not just my eyes. I got these a few years back, part of a deal that my aunt made with some trader. They’re lenses that let me see schematics, technical and scientific data, that sort of thing. I thought it’d be, you know, interesting to check out that Lens with them.”
“Your aunt bought those for you and then let you go with us?” asked Dash. “Seems like a poor investment on her part.”
He shook his head. “I spent so much time using them on different things that she started getting annoyed with me. I think she regretted getting them after a while,” he muttered.
“Yeah, well, don’t use them on that thing again,” Dash said. “It almost killed you.”
“No it didn’t. It was—” He paused, frowning. “It was more like there was too much data for my eyes. Like, when I looked at the Lens, some kind of link happened between it and my implants. A lot of data flowed across, really fast. Almost like—” Another pause as he searched for the words. “—like data was pouring right into my brain.”
“Ah,” said Dash, and looked at the others. He wasn’t really the scientific type; he knew enough to get and keep a ship running, make it maneuver and go where he wanted it to and do proper astrogation, but that didn’t mean he understood the underlying details, all the complex physics and math, chemistry and such, that made it work at some fundamental level. So he wasn’t especially keen on a long-winded talk about how the Lens worked. “So is it real?” he asked Conover. “Does it actually blow up stars?”
&nb
sp; Conover stared at his feet for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah, it does,” he replied. “And based on what I saw, it’s capable of a whole lot more.”
There was silence after Conover spoke, except for the thrum and rumble of the Slipwing’s systems.
Leira apparently thought so, too. “Conover, what did you see?”
“Yes,” Viktor put in. “Tell us as much as you can. What you remember, anyway.”
“I kind of remember it all. But I also kind of don’t. Ever had a dream just slip away, even though it seemed vivid? It’s like that.”
“I think we know what you mean,” Leira said, nodding. “Really, though, anything you can tell us could be useful.”
Conover sipped water. “I saw…that which is not. The Unseen. I saw them. They’re real.”
“Guess we can’t call them Unseen anymore,” Dash said, “if you saw them.”
He’d meant it to be funny, but no one smiled. Conover glanced at him. “Okay, I didn’t see them, exactly. I saw…the things they’ve done. This Lens is just one of them. A small part of something much bigger. It’s a tool. It taps into this…this much bigger thing, so they can use it to shape space, to make it the way they want it.”
Dash looked at the others, wondering if Leira and Viktor had known any of this. From the growing intrigue on their faces, he guessed that they hadn’t. That was fine. He probably had much the same look on his own. When blowing up stars was only a part of what this thing was capable of, shock and awe were going to be standard reactions.
Dash raised a hand. “Okay. Wait.” He gestured at the Lens in Leira’s hand. “What do you mean by that? What exactly is this thing?”
“It’s not just one thing,” Conover explained, his pale eyes going unfocused and looking far away. It looked like he might be accessing information through his artificial eyes, as though reading it off a vid. “It’s one, and its many simultaneously. There are a lot of them, but they’re all connected somehow. All of them are in one place together, but the area is huge, the size of a star system. Bigger than that, even. And everything is orbiting everything else.”