by J. N. Chaney
“It was a pretty lousy shot—thankfully,” Conover said.
Amy pointed to a deep dent in its cylindrical hull. “I doubt Dash did that. It was probably damaged in the crash. That knocked its shooting off. Maybe internal damage?”
Someone pointedly cleared their throat. Dash turned to the sound and found Ragsdale, carbine cradled, staring at him.
“Dash, I think you’ve been holding back a lot more than you’ve been letting one. Like, who or what is this Golden you’ve been talking about? And what, exactly, is Dark Metal? And the Forge?”
“Like I said,” Dash replied, “they’re codewords—”
“No, no,” Ragsdale cut in, raising a hand. “Don’t bother. I’ve spent too long interrogating smugglers and other criminals to just take what you’re telling me at face value. I know you’ve been holding back. But what you’re holding back is something big. Something complicated.” He nodded toward the robot. “That thing took you completely by surprise. You knew nothing about it. For that matter, you don’t know anything about all the stuff we’re finding in here. You’re discovering it all as we go along. Now, either you are the most incompetent recovery team that your employers could possibly have found—or this isn’t your ship, or theirs, at all.” He ended on an especially penetrating glare at Dash. “So who does it belong to, Dash?”
“We’ve been through this. I can’t tell you.”
“What are you? Treasure hunters? Scavengers? Because if that’s what this is all about—”
“It’s not,” Dash said, shaking his head. “We’re here to retrieve—ah, things, but it’s not about profit or fame or anything like that. Believe me, I wish it was. That would definitely suit my style.” He gave Ragsdale the most earnest look he could. “But it’s not.”
“Okay, I believe you. So what is it all about, then?”
“I want to tell you,” Dash said. “I really do. But when I say it’s better for you to not know too much, I mean it. You knowing too much could put you in, well, really terrible danger. And I don’t want that.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of how much risk I should be willing to take.”
“I won’t simply—"
“You must,” Ragsdale said, imploring Dash with his tone. “I won’t be put off like this any longer. You’re neck deep in something really big and, yes, really dangerous. I know it.” He took a step forward and leaned toward Dash. “And whatever it is, it—or at least this part of it, this ship—is right on the doorstep of my home, Dash. Mine, and that of ten thousand other people. People I happen to be sworn to protect. Now—I have to know, Dash. This isn’t about profit. This is about ten thousand people and everything they’ve built.”
Dash glanced at Leira and Viktor. Both just shrugged.
He looked back at Ragsdale. “You’re right. There is a lot more going on here.” He looked down at his feet, then back up and drew in a calming breath. He had to maintain an icy cool, because Ragsdale was a potential ally. “Okay. I’ll tell you what. You’re right when we say that we’re discovering this place as we go along. We’re still answering questions for ourselves. But once we’ve finished in here, and done what we came here to do, we should have a much clearer picture of what’s going on. Then I’ll be able to tell you everything you need to know.”
“Why can’t you just tell me now?”
Dash didn’t have to answer. A distant creaking sound, like the one that had announced the arrival of security bot just moments before, had risen in the distance. There might have been more than one, in fact.
“Because,” Dash said, changing his carbine to a fresh magazine, “it’s going to take a while to explain. I’m afraid that, right now, that’s time we don’t have.”
12
Dash lowered his carbine, eyes narrowed, and studied the Golden robot. In a brief but savage fusillade of shooting, they’d punched all three that had appeared full of holes, leaving them shedding sparks like dying fireflies. But Dash wasn’t so quick to admit victory and just watched the trio of bots, waiting to see if they lurched back to life.
“How’s Viktor?” he called, without looking back.
A groan answered him, followed by Amy saying, “Just a superficial burn!”
“Superficial? You should feel it from this side,” Viktor said.
Dash smiled, kept eyeing the bots a moment longer, then stood. “Okay, gang…it just seems to have been the three of them. And I think they’re dead. Or whatever passes for dead among the Golden robotic troops.”
Still, he warily approached the wrecked bots, Ragsdale covering his right, Leira his left. By the time they reached them, even the sparks had stopped sputtering.
Dash cradled his carbine. “Well, that was easy.”
“Remember the fangrats?” Leira said, giving him a cool side-eye. “That swarm of cute little critters that turned out to be all awwww and teeth?”
Dash did. They’d encountered the fangrats when retrieving a power core for the Archetype. Blowing the little creatures off as inoffensive and even harmless had almost led to him and Leira being stripped clean down to their bones.
“That was kind of my point,” Dash said. “Fangrats gave me trust issues.”
Leira snickered. “Damn right they did. Little balls of fuzzy death.”
Conover, Amy, and Viktor joined them. Viktor nursed a nasty, reddened welt across his shoulder, in plain view through a charred hole singed in his expedition suit. It glistened with the first aid gel Amy had applied.
Dash winced when he saw it. “Is the pain manageable?” He knew better than to ask the veteran if it hurt. He could see that it hurt.
“Pain is nature’s way of telling you you’re still alive,” Viktor replied through a certain amount of teeth gritting. “Certainly better than the alternative, which was only about”—he glanced at his shoulder— “three centimeters to the right, maybe?”
“We can take a pause here, send you back.”
Viktor shook his head. “And miss out on all the fun?” He gestured at the corridor beyond the looming door. “We’re wasting time.”
Dash nodded and started to turn, but Conover spoke up.
“I’ve taken a look at that first robot, Dash—the one that’s still mostly intact. I’d have to take more time to study it, but it looks like pretty standard tech.” He meant for the Golden, but a flick of Conover’s eyes toward Ragsdale showed why he left that bit off. “The only thing that seems different is this.”
He held out one of the boxy, and apparently entirely interchangeable, modules that seemed to be the core of most of the Golden tech they’d seen. It was just a charcoal-grey rectangle, a little longer than Conover’s hand, somehow looking both crystalline and metallic at once. Dark Metal, probably, at least for its casing. But this one glistened with more of that strange goo they’d found, that itself seemed simultaneously both liquid and powder. Dash had come to think of it as liquid Dark Metal, as Viktor had mused. But he’d never seen it coating other Golden tech like this.
“Huh.” Dash reached out and took the module from Conover.
“Dash, are you okay?” Leira was standing just in front of him, staring into his eyes with obvious worry. Dash blinked and pulled back a bit. She had literally just appeared out of nowhere.
“Where did you come from?” he asked. “Did I lose some time, or did you suddenly just learn how to teleport?”
“You went entirely blank for about five seconds,” Amy said, nodding at the module in his hand. “As soon as you took that from Conover, you blanked right out—eyes unfocused, mouth kind of slack.”
Leira smirked at her. “I’ve seen you like that after a few parties.”
Amy stuck her tongue out at Leira, but Dash shook his head.
“I don’t remember anything at all.”
Conover took the module back. “Well, that’s worrying. You should probably leave handling the tech to us.”
Dash nodded. Aside from losing five seconds, he felt entirely fine. After reassuring
the others about that, he turned and led them onward, out of the big room full of the mysterious, crystalline tanks and deeper yet into the Golden ship.
“Okay, this has got to be somewhere important,” Viktor said. He gestured at the massive doors, almost as large as the huge set they’d encountered when they first entered the ship. Like those, these stood partly open. It would be a squeeze to get through them, but there was enough room that they could. And that was fortunate, Dash thought, because if they were closed, this would be the end of the line.
Dash looked back. “How’s everyone doing for ammo?”
A clatter of weapon checks led to nods of assurance, but at Ragsdale’s suggestion, they took a moment to redistribute ammunition anyway. Some of them had fired a lot more than others, so he had them all switch to fresh magazines. Dash had already done so out of habit, but he let Ragsdale work, watching the Security Chief as he moved among them, purposeful and competent. He had some actual military in him, Dash thought, and it reflected again how this was a good man, devoted to the people under his watch.
And that now obviously included Dash and his friends, leading to a twinge of guilt for continuing to obfuscate the truth—or at least some of it. He kept telling himself it was for Ragsdale’s own good, and that of Port Hannah—but that wasn’t going to last. He had to honor the promise he’d made and let Ragsdale know what was going on, and soon. Ragsdale seemed to know that too, and seemed content to just play along.
For the moment.
When they were all ready, Dash pushed himself through the narrow opening then moved aside and took up a position to cover the others as they entered. As they did, it gave him a moment to examine the space they’d entered.
Huge.
More than that.
Dash struggled to process the sheer sense of space embodied in this immense compartment. Had it been empty, it would have inspired vertigo. But dim, fitful lights allowed them to see that vast banks and towers of machinery filling it, mostly dark and silent except for rare examples hummed and flickered with quiet purpose. It reminded Dash of the fabrication facility aboard the Forge, except that hadn’t loomed with the same sinister menace as this gloomy cathedral of tech.
After a long moment of awed silence, Ragsdale said, “So…your employers liked building things big.”
Ragsdale’s wry wit was intended to break the brooding silence, but Dash just looked to Conover. “What do you see?”
Conover’s head swiveled from side to side and up and down. “Where do you want me to start?”
“I’m guessing main engineering, or something like it,” Viktor said. “At least, I can’t imagine any other engineering facility being more main than this.”
Amy nodded and gestured at the nearest of the towering constructs. “That seems to be almost entirely made of Dark Metal.”
“It is,” Conover said. “Most of this stuff, machinery, all this tech anyway, is made of it.”
Dash resisted a whistle of raw surprise. There had to be enough Dark Metal here to build another two or three Archetypes, with some ship parts made from the leftovers. How the hell could they even begin to recover it?
“This is all Dark Metal?” Ragsdale asked, incredulous. “The rare stuff?”
“Appears so. This is—it has implications, and not in monetary terms. We’re way beyond anything as trivial as money,” Dash said.
“You’re serious?” Ragsdale asked.
“Rarely, but now is one such moment. I promise you’ll understand. You have my word,” Dash said.
“Then I accept it. I don’t like it, but I’m starting to think—” and Ragsdale swept his eyes over the massive machines, “I might not even want to know.”
“You will. Soon,” Dash assured him, then took another questing look at the area yawning before them. Then he narrowed his eyes, taking measure of the distant ceiling arching in the gloom far above them. The pronounced tilt in the wrecked ship they’d had to contend with when they first entered it had flattened out, leaving just a gentle slope downward in the direction they were heading. That was, he presumed, forward. It meant that the ship’s back had broken somewhere behind them, probably on impact. Even so, it must mean that many meters of earth now covered this part of the ship, and it would only deepen the further forward they progressed. But how much further would that be? They’d come hundreds of meters already.
How big was this damned ship?
“The ship is larger than anything you have experienced, but the design is logical. You are proceeding downward at an eleven degree angle, and have covered the first forty percent of the craft,” Sentinel said.
“That’s all?” Dash said to Sentinel. Even in his mind, he sounded overawed with the scale of it all.
“It is, and you are closing in on engineering, and then the bridge,” Sentinel said.
“Good. We need information. That’s where it will be,” Dash said.
He took a long breath, then said, “Okay, folks, let’s carry on. Same as before—watch the direction assigned to you and call out if you see anything that looks like it might be a threat.”
“Everything looks like it might be a threat,” Leira said.
“Okay, anything that looks like it might be more of a threat—as in, something about to shoot or eat us, instead of just looming ominously through the darkness.”
They made it to about the midpoint of the vast compartment when Conover said, “Yeah, I think this is probably the main engineering component.”
Dash motioned a halt. “What makes you say that?”
“Because the big machines that seem to be still working, like that one, are generating power.” He pointed at one of the soaring piles of tech, all fluted cylinders and pipe-like conduits wrapped around a central core. It flickered dimly with bluish light, while faint vibrations emanated from it, buzzing the deck under their feet. His finger lifted until he indicated the top of the towering stack of machinery, where it seemed to branch apart into dozens of cables and more conduits, part of a vast, intricate network sprawled across the ceiling. “There’s power flowing through those, in different directions.”
“Powering what?” Ragsdale asked.
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Dash said, signalling for them to resume their cautious way. “On me. Let’s find the end.”
After two corridors, a ramp, and another huge compartment, they reached another imposing set of doors. These weren’t as massive as the previous ones they’d encountered, but they were still at least a meter thick, and built for a battleground. They were also festooned with what was either writing, decoration, more cryptic tech, or some combination of all three. Again, they stood open; and again, Dash was glad, because they’d have no way of opening these ones either.
Beyond the doors, they found the bridge.
At least, they took it for the bridge. It sprawled around them, though nowhere near as high as main engineering. The tech was designed to be used, with interfaces and chairs, although the latter looked uncomfortable as hell.
“This is the bridge?” Dash asked Sentinel.
“It is, according to available data. You are in the command and control station of the craft,” Sentinel said.
They moved slowly and in silence, until they reached the first banks of screens and odd harnesses hanging from hard points overhead.
“Guess the Golden have narrow asses,” Leira said.
“If they have them at all,” Dash said, pushing a finger into the resistant material of a sling-like chair. Around them were screens, most dark, but a few pulsing and flickering, as though getting an inconsistent supply of energy. Strange symbols—which might be text, but might also be diagrams or, for that matter, even just decorative exhibitions or bits of artwork—crawled across them in a staccato beat, changing as swiftly as a moody child. Dash stopped to study one but could discern no commonality with the Unseen’s displays at all.
All of them paled in comparison to the forward wall of the compartment—a vast star-map, ex
tending probably thirty meters from side to side, and from floor to ceiling. Hundreds of stars were strewn across it; some, though far from all, had more of the strange, cryptic symbols highlighting them.
For a while, Dash, Leira, and Conover studied the star map, while the others focused their attention on the many displays and consoles. Finally, Leira’s face creased into a frown. “It’s our galaxy. At least, I’m pretty sure it is. But I don’t recognize nearly enough systems, not in a context that makes any sense.” She crossed her arms. “Could this map just be old and out of date?”
“I’d definitely buy old,” Dash said. “But as for out of date?” He shrugged.
“Hard to know,” Conover said. “We could try comparing it. Maybe Sentinel or Custodian can run a comparison. Maybe identify the stars.”
“There’s something else going on here,” Dash said.
“The map is only as old as the last battle,” Sentinel said. “The Golden achieved near-total victory. But it is important to remember this is a Golden map. Not Unseen. And not human.”
“Does that mean their reference points are different?” Dash asked.
“That is possible,” Sentinel said. “This map may be designed around the Golden home-world, or some other point. That makes it difficult—indeed, almost impossible—to transform into a recognizable configuration, at least without more information. Perhaps, if the view were expanded, and more identifiable reference points were visible, such a transformation could be undertaken. Even knowing the orientation and location of this view with respect to the galactic core would be helpful.”
Leira studied the star-map for a moment, chewing her lip, then pointed up and to the right. “I think the galactic core is that way.” She frowned. “I think.”
Dash opened his mouth to reply, but someone pointedly cleared their throat behind him. He turned and found himself facing Ragsdale.
“Dash? You gave me your word,” Ragsdale said.
“And I intend to keep it. Right now. Let’s discuss your view of the universe as you know it,” Dash said.