by J. N. Chaney
They reached the exit and tumbled outside, arms flailing and guns still out.
Fangrats swarmed out of the trees, the pervasive humming growl now seeming to make the air itself vibrate with their song of hungry rage.
Dash stopped, gaping and gasping. Leira skidded to a halt beside him.
Fangrats were everywhere, and closing in. There was no way they’d even make it to the nearest trees, much less the ten minutes it had taken to get through them from where they’d landed.
Dash shook his head. Really? This was how he was going to die? Eaten by a swarm of alien furballs?
Leira said, “Oh, look.”
Dash glanced at her. An odd choice for her last words.
A shadow swept over them. An instant later, the Archetype landed with a tremendous impact, shaking the ground and crushing dozens of aliens under its titanic feet.
“I suggest you lie prone,” Sentinel said.
Neither of them needed to be told twice. Both flung themselves to the ground as the nearest Fangrats, only a few meters away, closed in, teeth gnashing, then vanishing in a staccato series of dazzling energy blasts. The rapid-fire burst swept around the clearing outside the complex door, then pulsed overhead, detonating behind them. The discharges flung dirt, bits of rock, and smoking fragments of Fangrats through the air, the debris clattering against their helmets and pattering down on their damaged exosuits. The string of blasts went on and on, and Dash could only cringe inside his suit and pray that the Archetype’s aim didn’t falter.
And then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped.
Dash levered himself up into a sudden silence that seemed even deeper, now that the damned hum of the Fangrats had stopped. A fugitive gleam of the energy weapon still glowed in his eyes, the afterimage descending like a curtain of floating red stars. Then his vision cleared, and a slow smile crossed his face.
Because, he saw, there were no more Fangrats. As in none alive, save a few fleeing back into the forest, but the rest were just greasy humps of smoldering ash, heaped in a wide circle around him and Leira. For at least twenty meters in every direction, the ground had been seared down to bare dirt, trees charred and splintered, foliage blackened and still flickering with fitful flames. Smoke fumed the air grey. The only place not seared by the Archetype’s fire was a circle of ground only a little larger than Dash and Leira’s prone forms. Dash noticed, though, that if any of the shots had hit the Unseen complex, they’d left no trace.
Leira touched the toe of her boot to the nearest blast scar on the ground. It had been maybe half a meter from her head. “Okay. That was terrifying. But also impressive.”
“I am sensing a great many more of those creatures in the surrounding forest. They seem to be staying at bay, for now. Nonetheless, I would suggest a hasty retreat." Sentinel said.
“Way ahead of you,” Dash said, ash puffing up from his boots as he started toward the tree line. He’d considered just boarding the Archetype right here, but he wasn’t sure if Leira would be able to get aboard.
A few times, during the walk back to the beach, Dash caught flickers of movement and glimpses of fur, but nothing came any closer to them.
“About those things,” he said to Sentinel, “remember what I said about teeth and claws and my tender flesh?”
“I do,” was all the AI said, but if it felt at all chastened, it sure didn’t come through when it spoke.
Dash just shook his head and plodded on, trying to ignore the suit integrity warning glowing on his heads-up.
As they pushed through the undergrowth, Leira said, “Fangrats?”
“What?”
“You called those things Fangrats. A bit on the nose, don’t you think?”
Dash shrugged. “Cute-things-with-big-teeth-that-want-to-eat-us just didn’t seem to roll off the tongue, you know?” Saying it took the wind out of Dash, though, so they made the rest of the journey in silence, filled only by the ever-more labored sounds of breathing.
As they stepped onto the beach, Dash’s suit-pressure alarm shrieked, the damaged fabric finally failing. They stumbled aboard the Slipwing, practically holding their breath, then gasping in great, whooping lungsful of air once their helmets had popped off. It struck Dash that, without the Archetype’s intervention, even if they had managed to fight their way through the Fangrats, they still likely would have suffocated during the panicked flight through the forest as their suits gave out.
Not that it mattered, he thought, peeling off the rest of his ravaged exosuit. Dead is, after all, dead. Not dead was all that really counted.
5
Dash stepped around the cradle in the Archetype, his usual place aboard the big mech, and peered at the bulkhead behind it. It struck him that for what was now the many hours he’d been here, he’d never really taken the time to examine what he’d come to call the Archetype’s cockpit.
The bulkheads were mostly blank metal of some sort, but there were things that might have been power conduits, components, and maybe even pipes for hydraulic or other fluids—although he doubted the ancient machine actually used anything resembling hydraulics. But there was also a socket for the power core he and Leira had just managed to retrieve. There were other gaps and spaces that might have been receptacles for other cores, but Sentinel told him nothing about those.
All in good time, he guessed.
“Here goes nothing.” He slipped the core into place. It seated with a metallic thunk and was immediately engulfed in a faint, greenish-blue glow.
“The new core is now fully integrated into the Archetype’s systems,” Sentinel said.
“I see that. Does it yield an upgrade?” Dash asked.
An overall increased power flow for the mech, he knew—about five percent. The Archetype’s shield had also become slightly more durable and would regenerate a little faster. Dash also realized he now knew the Unseen language. Just like that, he could understand its written form. It was as though he’d been fluent in it all his life.
And that was it—a moment of wild clarity, seamlessly installed in his mind as if it had been his since childhood.
“Huh.”
“I have come to recognize that tone in your voice. You are concerned about something.”
“Uh, well, not sure I’m concerned, but…” He scratched the back of his neck. “Is that all this new core does?”
“It is fully integrated into the Archetype’s systems, yes.”
“Well that’s actually pretty…let’s call it underwhelming. I mean…” He shook his head. “Leira and I almost died getting this thing. Eaten by those Fangrats, or choking on that alien atmosphere out there—for that matter, incinerated while you were shooting up those chittering bastards."
“The chances of that were quite low." Sentinel said.
“Yeah, I know. Just hardly seems worth all the effort and risk.” He could easily imagine what Leira’s reaction was going to be to almost dying with him, just to get this—
Wait.
There was a whole, expansive bank of knowledge available to him that hadn’t been previously, fluttering into his consciousness at a sedate pace.
“Okay, what’s that all about? There’s like a whole pile of information just sort of there, that wasn’t there before.”
That information was kept in a separate repository. It is only available to the Messenger when this more advanced state of enhancement of the Archetype was achieved. It is also rendered in the native language of the Creators, meaning that even if it had been previously available, you would not have been able to understand it.
Dash could feel the new data flowing through Sentinel into his awareness; he could access and examine it at his leisure. Before he did, though, he said, “I won’t bother asking why this stuff wasn’t made accessible to me before this, because I know the answer—I wasn’t ready for it, I had to prove I was serious about doing all this, or some variation on that theme, and that’s okay. I accept that. But I do have a question. Is this it? Or is there more cru
cial information locked away that I don’t know about yet?”
“Would knowing the answer to that question provide you with whatever satisfaction you may think you would derive from it? Or would it simply leave you more frustrated?”
Dash opened his mouth then closed it again. It was a good question, a be careful what you wish for sort of thing.
“However, I can put your mind at ease, after a fashion. Until this new power core was installed, I had no knowledge of this information store. That was, presumably, by the Creators’ design. If there are other such stores that have not been made accessible, I likewise have no knowledge of them, either. We are, it would seem, learning together.”
“Probably for this very reason,” Dash said, dismissing his nibbling frustration over the way the Unseen were doling things out to him a bit at a time with a shrug. If Sentinel didn’t know, then it didn’t matter anyway, did it?
He turned and clambered into the cradle, a little awkwardly in the repaired exosuit he’d needed to walk across from the Slipwing to the Archetype. “Okay then,” he said. “Let’s see if this was all worth it after all.”
Dash thought about the new information store, which opened it to him, then began considering what it contained.
It was a story of war.
But it was war on a scale that was breathtaking. More than breathtaking. Absolutely epic. Cosmic in scope. It was far beyond what any of the ancient, planet-bound storytellers who had tried to envision what the universe sprawling around them would be like had even begun to contemplate.
Dash couldn’t even begin to grasp it.
Dash saw campaigns that spanned not just thousands of light-years and star systems, but were also spread across millennia. The Unseen and the Golden had been warring not only for the past two hundred thousand years, but for uncounted ages before that. This latest clash, two thousand centuries ago, had only been the most recent, and perhaps not even the largest. The vast spans of time between the great campaigns were a sort of “cold war,” when the two powers retreated from one another and maintained a hostile, but vigilant peace. Eventually, though, it would flare up again, and then the stars would begin to die, along with the two races locked in a battle to the very end.
Dash remembered, as though the memories were his own, a battle that had sprawled across the galaxy, vast fleets tearing at one another and even the space-time around them, blasting planets to dust in the titanic fire of weaponized stars. The battle had gone on for decades, only ending in a colossal stalemate when the orgy of celestial violence had begun to weaken the fabric of reality itself, threatening to plunge the entire galaxy—and perhaps much more than that—into literal, unbound chaos.
Things like the separation of events in time and space, and even the fundamental idea of cause and effect, had begun to break down. The past two hundred thousand years had given creation time to heal itself, slowly regenerating back to “full power” like the Archetype’s shield. Still, Dash knew where the wreckage of that vast conflict was, dust clouds and debris fields and entire nebula the collateral damage of the bitter—and apparently endless—war. A conflict for nothing less than the heart of life and the universe itself.
Dash let his mind roam across these memories that were both brand new, and yet felt like things he’d always known. He found it stunning, amazing, and terrifying all at once. And yet, he still didn’t understand it. The new data contained a lot of information about the ancient war between the Unseen and the Golden, but data was just that—facts, times, and places, a recounting of events. It was all, in the end, superficial, not offering any insight into the combatants, their motives, or who they were.
“Why?” he asked.
“I will need more context to offer any sort of useful reply,” Sentinel said.
“Why were they fighting? Why are they still fighting? What’s the point of it all?”
“I believe this has already been answered for you. The Golden wish to destroy all sentient life.”
“Yeah, I get that. But why? And why are the Unseen trying to stop them? What’s in it for them?”
“Ah. I’m afraid this is an area in which I have little understanding myself. I can only address the facts as they are.”
Dash frowned, thinking of tough interactions he’d had with people he’d encountered, whether shady clients, business opponents, competing couriers, or any number of others. One thing that was common to all of them was that he’d had at least some understanding of what drove them to behave the way they did. Even if he hated it, if it stood to do serious harm, he got it, more or less. This was just stuff happening—vast, galactic-scale stuff, but stuff nonetheless.
He finally shrugged. “Well, hopefully there’s more information locked away inside you that will offer some sort of explanation for what’s behind all of”—he thought about the whole cosmic sweep of events about which he now knew—“this.”
Dash figured that was it, but there was one more thing. It was a specific bit of new knowledge that stood out from the rest, because it wasn’t just things that had happened. This was something real. It was a place.
“Hey, what’s the Forge?” he asked Sentinel.
6
Dash made his way back to the Slipwing so he could discuss things face-to-face with the others. Once more, they’d crowded into the ship’s crew hab, and had brought Sentinel into the conversation over the comm.
“I still can’t believe that that’s a two hundred thousand year old AI we’re talking to,” Amy said. “I mean, that’s pretty epic!”
“I find it hard to believe, too,” Viktor said. “It’s hard to imagine that whatever substrate systems that AI runs on could last anywhere near that long.”
“Nothing we could produce would,” Conover offered.
Dash thought about the vast, celestial conflict that had raged between the Unseen and the Golden and said, “Trust me, it’s true—and it’s not even the most amazing thing the Unseen have done, not by a long shot. Which brings us to the matter at hand. Sentinel, tell everyone what you told me about the Forge.”
“The Forge is the place where most of the Archetype was built. It is a self-contained design, fabrication, and manufacturing facility. Among other things.”
Amy’s eyes went wide. “A super-advanced alien factory? The place where that Archetype thing was made? Oh, we need to go there, we so need to go there!”
“It would be interesting, I guess. I mean, it is Unseen,” Conover replied, nodding along.
Dash exchanged a look with Leira and Viktor. Conover, they all knew, would probably be enthusiastic about helping Amy wash her dirty socks.
“Well,” Dash said, “if we listen to Sentinel, you may just get your wish, Amy.”
“Your AI thinks we should go there?” Leira asked, narrowing her eyes. “Why? I thought gathering up these power cores was the priority, so you could get that Archetype fully powered up.”
“Unless this Forge has the ability to finish powering the Archetype up all on its own,” Viktor offered. “Perhaps this is meant to be the next step for you, Dash.”
“But why would the Unseen bother scattering all those other power cores around?” Leira asked. “That would have been pretty much a waste of time, right?”
Viktor shrugged. “They’re aliens. They do alien things?”
“Sentinel, do you know if we can speed up fully powering the Archetype by going to the Forge?” Dash said.
“I do not. The Forge is another level of technology, even for me.”
“That’s—another level? You mean more complicated than the Archetype?”
“It is, by definition. The Archetype is a beginning, not the end,” Sentinel said.
Dash thought for a moment, chewing on the implications. “Go on. I’m listening.”
“I suggest that because the Forge is not merely a remote outpost containing a single power core,” Sentinel said. “I acknowledge that it will be necessary to continue traveling to those, in order to finish powering up the Arch
etype. However, while I do not know what resources may be available at the Forge, it is a central, facility of the Creators. It stands to reason that much could be learned there, and perhaps assets obtained that will greatly assist the Messenger in the upcoming conflict.”
Amy said, “Upcoming conflict,” then crossed her arms, as though she was suddenly cold. “Have to admit, I’d find those two words pretty scary even if we weren’t talking about some apocalyptic, star-blowing-up cosmic battle between ancient alien races.”
Leira gave her a sympathetic look. “Second thoughts? We stopped once for fuel on the way here, and we’ll probably have to again on our way back into more inhabited space. We can drop you off—”
“No! Geez, cuz, just because the idea of a galactic super-war makes me nervous doesn’t mean I want to bail. I mean, put that aside, and this is all pretty awesome!” She turned to Dash. “I think you should do what Sentinel says and go to this Forge place. If that’s where they made your Archetype, just imagine what must be there.” Her eyes went a little dreamy as she pondered the possibilities of an alien factory.
Conover gave her a somewhat dreamy look too, but Dash knew it wasn’t just about finding advanced alien tech. He shook himself away from looking at Amy and turned to Dash. “I agree. It makes sense that there would likely be valuable information, if nothing else, at the place where the Archetype was built.”
Conover’s attraction to Amy aside, Dash knew that he was sincere. Before he could respond to either of them, though, Viktor leaned into the conversation.
“Far be it from me to pass up a chance to visit an Unseen fabrication facility, Dash,” he said. “But this might just be a distraction from the more important task of getting the rest of those power cores. Remember, we’re assuming we’re on some sort of clock here—except we have no idea how much time is left on it before things get really critical, by which I mean the Golden showing up.”