by J. N. Chaney
And here, Dash thought, is the things going completely to shit part.
Something like a segmented metal ball unfurled, opening and stretching into a battle drone that immediately opened fire on the Archetype. Shots slammed into the shield, quickly saturating it with energy. Dash returned fire at almost the same time as Leira, striking the drone in turn with dark-lance shots and nova gun blasts. The drone spun under the impact, still firing, its shots pulsing in all directions through space. Then its weapons went silent and it began accelerating away, hard.
Dash raced after it, grabbing a chunk of rock along the way. Before the drone could break orbit, he spun the Archetype, flung the rock after it, then zoomed along in pursuit. He’d meant the rock to merely be a distraction, something to deflect the drone’s attention, even for a second or two, but it slammed squarely into the drone, sending it spinning out of control.
“Lucky throw,” Leira said.
“Nuh-uh. I totally meant to do that.”
He closed on the drone, which was now drifting, apparently dead. When he was about a hundred meters away, something detached from it—a much smaller device, only a couple of meters long. Before he could react, it flashed away, its acceleration enormous, then vanished into unSpace.
“Shit,” Dash said, stopping the Archetype just short of the drone’s remains. “Whatever that was, it got away.”
“Another death call?” Leira asked.
“Maybe. Or maybe something worse.”
“Well, we can’t do much about it either way, so we might as well do what we came here to do and score ourselves some Dark Metal.”
Dash grunted his assent and turned to the task of breaking open hidden Dark Metal ingots. They ended up finding five, which, together with the wreckage of the weapons arrays and the drone, made for a truly impressive haul.
But brooding worries tempered Dash’s satisfaction. Just what the hell had flashed away from that drone? And where had it gone? Even their spectacular Dark Metal find started to bother him. The Golden seemed to have so much of the damned stuff.
Just where the hell was it all coming from?
4
Dash leaned on the railing of the gallery that overlooked the fabrication level, watching the Dark Metal ingots he and Leira had brought back to the Forge being tractored to the smelters. He found it immensely satisfying seeing the stuff that had been liberated from the Golden being tossed into the furnace and made into weapons to use against the Golden.
Serves the miserable, life-hating bastards right.
That made him think of the Golden corpse they’d laboriously lugged out of the crashed ship on Gulch, which was now held in stasis here on the Forge. It was mostly machine, but enough of an organic being remained that it was clear the Golden had, at one time, been living things themselves, similar to lemurs. Or apes. Or maybe both. Sure, they’d been reshaped, corrupted into what they’d become by an even older alien race, and that was too bad. But that ancient crime fell a long way short of justifying an obsessive desire to exterminate all life in some sort of twisted revenge.
“Messenger, your presence is requested in the War Room,” Custodian said.
Dash straightened, suppressing a sigh as he did. Definitely no rest for the wicked.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“We are receiving a distress signal. It originates from a system very close to Rayet-Carinae, the home system of the Gentle Friends.”
Dash nodded and left the fabrication level, heading for the War Room. “On my way.”
As he traversed the corridors, he thought again about the Dark Metal they’d retrieved. It was satisfying to steal it from the Golden, yes. But the nagging question that had occurred to him at the time they’d retrieved it also came back to him.
“Custodian, am I right in thinking the Golden seem to have an awful lot of Dark Metal?” he asked, entering the elevator that would take him to the level hosting the War Room.
“That is an extremely imprecise question,” Custodian answered. “However, I have learned enough about the context of your questions to discern the essence of what you are attempting to ask.”
“Yeah, that sounds like a fancy way of saying I ask dumb questions.”
“That is an uncharitable way of looking at it, but—”
“That’s fine, I get it,” Dash said, raising a hand. “How about just answering my dumb question.”
“That is the problem. It is not possible to give an answer. At least one that isn’t just speculation. There is no objective standard against which to measure the amount of Dark Metal the Golden possess, so there is no way of judging if it is an excessive quantity.”
“Custodian, let’s try something. Let’s accept that there’s no firm answer to this question. So, tell me what you think.”
A pause followed. It was unusual for these AIs to actually have to assemble their thoughts, or take time to consider something, so it was striking when they did. Dash waited, bemused.
Finally, Custodian spoke. “This is a purely qualitative, subjective statement—”
“I know, that’s fine.”
“Yes, the Golden seem to have amassed a considerable quantity of Dark Metal. The amount you’ve recovered to date far exceeds the Forge’s ability to have smelted a similar amount, in similar time, even if such material was available.”
“Okay, so if their level of tech is similar to that of the Unseen, then that suggests they either have a lot more places making it, or they’re getting it from somewhere else.”
“It could also mean they have been making it in small quantities continuously, for a long period of time.”
“In other words, they might have had something like the Forge, somewhere, that’s been working all this time to make Dark Metal,” Dash said.
“That is possible, yes.”
Dash sighed as he exited the elevator. The bottom line was that, while they had to scrimp and scrape to scavenge every bit of Dark Metal they could find, the Golden seemed to have so much of the stuff that they had to stash it in hidden caches all around the galactic arm. It was something they needed to look into much more closely.
But only after they’d dealt with things like mysterious distress signals.
He found Leira, Benzel, and Wei-Ping waiting for him in the War Room. Yet another of the big holo images depicting the galactic arm gleamed in the middle of the room. Benzel and Wei-Ping were studying it and muttering.
“So what’s this distress signal all about?” Dash asked.
Leira shrugged. “I just got here myself. Benzel seems to know something about it, though.”
“Indeed I do,” he said, spreading his fingers to zoom the view in on a system about a light-year from Rayet-Carinae. The distress signal emanated from it, a brief message that simply requested help, and then repeated. “At least, I know this signal is pretty strange, because there’s not much in this system—just a fuel refinery in low orbit around a gas giant, processing deuterium scooped up from its upper atmosphere. And it’s mostly automated. Besides a tanker that shows up every couple of months to pick up the deuterium, a maintenance crew visits maybe once a year?” He shrugged. “Anyway, Wei-Ping knows a bit more.”
“Yeah, we heard rumors about a water-harvesting operation working the Oort Cloud, mining comets. Went to check it out, in case it was—” She smiled.
“Worth pirating,” Leira said.
“We prefer—”
“Yes, I know, privateering.”
“Anyway, it wasn’t even worth the effort of going to check it out,” Wei-Ping went on. “It was a small operation, owned by something called the Aquarian Collective.”
“Okay,” Dash said. “And just who are they?”
Benzel and Wei-Ping both shrugged. “Some conglomerate or corporation or something,” Benzel replied. “Once it became clear they weren’t rich, dangerous, or both, we kind of lost interest.”
“Very pragmatic of you,” Leira said.
Wei-Ping grinned. “Our line of
work is all about being pragmatic. You know—”
“Privateering,” Leira said again, grinning and shaking her head.
“Exactly.”
“Okay, so what am I missing here?” Dash said. “It’s a distress signal, sure. Someone should go and help whoever’s sending it, yeah. But we’ve got to be far from the only ones receiving that signal. And based on what you guys are saying, this system isn’t even especially interesting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for helping out spacers in distress, but it seems like a pretty…I don’t know. A distraction, at least as far as we’re concerned?”
“Perhaps this will serve to show why this may be of significance,” Custodian said. “This is the system from which you and Leira recently returned.” The view expanded again as the AI spoke, and an icon lit up a star system. “This is the extrapolated trajectory of the Golden super-luminal sub-probe that fled the system.” A line appeared, leaving the system and extending directly to the origin system of the distress signal.
Dash studied the projected trajectory. “So it passes close to, oh, about a dozen systems, but the first one it directly intersects is this one.”
“And now there’s a distress signal coming from it, yeah,” Benzel said.
“Okay, well, that changes things,” Dash said. “What do we know about this Aquarian Collective?”
Shrugs were the only response. Custodian said, “There are few references to this organization in available databases, including those of your own people. They seem to operate a series of outposts through the galactic arm but otherwise have little engagement with other societies.”
“I may be able to shed more light on this,” a new voice said.
Dash turned to see Kai. The monk had managed to slip into the War Room without drawing any attention. It reminded Dash that, in addition to being scholars, the monks of the Order of the Unseen were damned capable fighters.
“Custodian asked me if we had learned anything about this Aquarian Collective during the course of our research into various data sources.” He looked at data-pad he was carrying. “The Aquarian Collective is an autonomous group who are based in a system about”—he paused, studying the data-pad—“about fifty light years from here. They seem to have a particular interest and expertise in harvesting resources from cometary bodies. It is in relation to this field that they are best known, because they provide consulting and contracting services regarding comet mining.”
“Huh. Sounds like they’ve got a nifty little niche business going for themselves,” Dash said.
“Indeed. Anyway, their home world is based around an artificial ring world, constructed around a large cometary body in their home system. They are somewhat insular about their home, preferring to conduct their business through their outposts.”
“A ring world? Really?” Dash crossed his arms. “I thought ring worlds were just pipe dreams, something about them being unstable.”
“They are inherently unstable structures,” Custodian said. “Even minor perturbations in their orbits accumulate and are magnified over time. They can, however, be stabilized artificially through the use of thrusters or other technology.”
“Sounds like an awful lot of effort. Why not just settle on a planet?”
“Because they are constructed, ring worlds can be tailored to the specific needs and wants of their builders. Moreover, they offer orders of magnitude more usable living space than a conventional planetary body, while allowing the efficient use of much more energy from their star.”
“But this one’s around a comet?” Leira asked. “That seems strange.”
“It is,” Custodian replied. “Ring worlds are normally constructed around stars. However, such structures are extremely large, with a diameter measured in hundreds of millions of kilometers.”
“Yeah, I think that’s Unseen or Golden levels of engineering,” Dash said.
“The home world of the Aquarian Collective would seem to be much smaller,” Kai said, again consulting the data-pad. “The best available estimate has about thirty-five thousand people living there.”
“Well, either it’s a lot smaller, or its really sparsely populated,” Leira said.
All eyes turned to Dash. The decision about where to go with this, and what to do next, was his. Once more, the fact that he’d somehow risen from down-and-out courier to leading these people, and this war effort, was a true head shaker.
“Okay, well, that distress signal means that whatever happened there has already happened. Custodian, do we have a probe in the area we can send to check it out?”
“There is a probe approximately two days travel away from the origin system of the distress call.”
“Dash, you don’t want to send someone to help?” Leira asked.
Dash sighed. “I’d love to. I’d love to help everyone, everywhere. But I’m really worried about spreading ourselves too thin. Like I said, whatever happened to that outpost is done. There are lots of people, a lot closer, who can help. Hell, Rayet-Carinae is full of ships that could help, and they’re right next door.”
“So we’re just going to ignore it?” Leira asked.
“No, we’re not. We’re going to pay a visit to their home world.”
“Uh…and why?” Leira asked, incredulous.
“Because if these people were just attacked by Golden—people who have the know-how and capability to build a ring world—they might just make perfect allies for us.” Dash gave her a confident nod once he finished the explanation.
Leira opened her mouth, but closed it again. Dash knew what she was thinking—among spacers, the distress call was the last resort. It was the final attempt to survive in an environment that was the very definition of hostile and unforgiving. No one ignored distress calls, ever, because you didn’t want your own ignored.
And that was fine, until you slammed headlong into the reality of a galaxy-shattering war, upon the outcome of which rested the future of sentient life everywhere. Then, you had to start making some hard decisions. It was another aspect of this leadership role Dash suddenly found himself immersed in—and definitely one of the more unpleasant ones, at that.
He turned to Benzel. “You’ve been looking for a cause for the Gentle Friends, something to keep them busy. Well, here we go. Leira and I are going to visit the Aquarian Collective, and we’re going to take three Silent Fleet ships with us. I’ll let you decide which ones. We’ll leave in—” He glanced at the chrono displayed on Kai’s data-pad. Damn. He and Leira had only gotten back from their Dark Metal harvest four hours ago. “Let’s make it eight hours, so Leira and I can get some sleep.”
Benzel conferred with Wei-Ping until they both nodded. “We’re sending the Ardent, the Visible, and the Stalwart with you,” Benzel said. “I’ll command it, with Wei-Ping as my second. There’s no way I’m going to miss the Gentle Friends’ first expedition.”
Dash nodded. “Sounds good.” The Gentle Friends had put a lot of thought into naming the ships of the Silent Fleet, eventually settling on ancient names that apparently had proud, naval lineages behind them.
As the meeting broke up, Dash called Kai aside. “Do me a favor. Keep digging into this Aquarian Collective. I’d like to know everything I can about them before we meet them.”
“You’re worried they might be agents of the enemy?”
“What? Oh, no. It’s just that if I’m going to be negotiating with someone, I’d like to know what they’re going to bring to the table.”
Dash headed back to his quarters to try getting some of that sleep he’d mentioned. Along the way, though, Kai’s words stuck with him.
Agents of the enemy.
What if the Golden sub-probe’s very specific trajectory wasn’t an attack, but a rendezvous?
Dash sighed. He hoped he wasn’t just about to stumble into the path of another Clan Shirna or Bright—because it would be a shame to have to destroy a ring wold.
5
The Cygnus flotilla dropped out of unSpace a million klicks sho
rt of the minimum. It added extra Real Space travel time, but it was Dash’s way of attempting to show the Aquarian Collective that they weren’t a threat, right from the get-go. Sentinel reported comm traffic, but none directed specifically at them, so they started in-system, the two mechs leading the three ships of the Silent Fleet.
Cygnus flotilla. Dash wasn’t used to thinking of having anything at his back he could call a flotilla. For so long it had been the Slipwing and the Archetype alone, and always seemingly against long odds, that it felt strange to have the sort of power now arrayed around him.
“I am definitely having a hard time getting used to this whole leading a realm thing,” he said. It hadn’t been specifically addressed to Sentinel, but she replied.
“Your life experience to date has not prepared you for a complex leadership position, so that is understandable.”
“How do you know what my life experience is?”
“The Meld provides me with sufficient access to your memories, and the context they have created for your present character, to be able to gain some insights.”
“You’ve been rooting through my memories over the Meld?”
“Would you be offended if I have?”
“Well, yeah, of course I would. Not everything in my memories is meant for public consumption. Hell, there are a few things that aren’t even fit for public consumption.”
“If it makes you feel better, I cannot simply access your memories at leisure. However, every thought you have carries the context of all the memories that contributed to its formation. That assists in allowing me to understand the thought more fully.”
“So just a second ago, when I thought about my memories that weren’t fit for public consumption…”
“Yes, I gained some insight into those memories.”
“Shit. Keep that stuff to yourself, okay?”
“Your secrets are safe with me.”
They flew on for a moment, then Dash said, “About some of those, um, memories—look, I was young, and there was alcohol—”