“What is this?” she said, her voice hushed. She took a few hesitant steps into the room, and suppressed the urge to leap back into the preceding room as Mer slid the door silently and heavily closed behind her. She pointed at the … thing … on proud clinical display in the centre of the space. “What is that?”
“According to the files,” Mer replied, “it’s called a Damorak.”
Bason stepped cautiously up to the bulky insulation-clad table, establishing as best she could that the thing was dead, or at least inert. It was … horrible.
It lay in the sliced-open remains of a heavy black robe that now formed a sort of ragged tablecloth over the central display, as though the creature itself was an unspeakable meal that had been laid out and then left to mummify. It had two arms instead of four, a gleaming reptilian hide and a bodily configuration that must have been broad and powerful when the thing – the Damorak – was alive. Now, it looked like a badly-maintained piece of taxidermist legend, all ridges and scales and jaggedly-articulated joints.
Bones, or some awful metal-composite approximation thereof, jutted from the skin in several places and its fingers were long, wicked things like knives. Its face was a sunken and puckered mess on the front of its elongated and bulbous skull, dominated by a wide mouth full of thick, gleaming, terrifyingly healthy-looking fangs and a pair of charred eye sockets that appeared as though they had burned out from the inside.
Bason walked around the Damorak’s table several times before looking at the assortment of unrecognisable equipment and larger, glossy obsidian banks of machinery surrounding it. Then she stopped, and cast an accusing, disbelieving look at an arbitrary point on the nearest wall. “Is this one of the aliens–?”
“No,” Mer replied, “I told you – I know nothing about the aliens that might be expanding in this direction … except that this might be a relative of theirs.”
“Gandicon and the Heart said something about them being the children of our ancestral enemy,” Bason said thoughtfully, looking at the great dark hulk of a creature on its black-draped examination table.
“Well, this fellow would certainly apply,” Mer said. “Your people brought him with you. On the Grandis 459.”
“And?” Bason prompted, knowing there was more.
“Well, like I said, I’ve been studying the ambient energy patterns of this region of space for … well, ever since we arrived, really,” Mer explained, “and before I was even really aware I was doing it. Before I was even aware that I was me, in a sense–”
“Go on.”
“My study included the output and signal – so to speak – from the collapsed Portal, since it was our only even remotely practical way out of here at subluminal speed. And I know I said that the aliens – the aliens of the Heart’s warning – were likely responsible for the destruction of the gate and the ongoing damage being done to it … but there’s an even higher likelihood that these guys are the ones who sealed the Portal in the first place.”
“These … Damoraks,” Bason said, looking at the body with a completely irrational and unconscious distaste roiling in her belly.
“Yes. It’s just the connection between the Damoraks and the aliens the Heart mentioned that is … something of a missing link,” Bason didn’t trust herself to reply, and after a moment Mer went on. “It might even be why the settlers brought him with them. It’s an insurance policy, you see.”
“I don’t see.”
“This fellow is your ticket through the ranks. Past the aliens. Through the gate. Through everything. His tech will make the Fleet invisible, even if the Worldship configuration and the bypassing of superluminal physics isn’t enough.”
“How will his tech make us invisible, exactly?”
“Unknown,” Mer said apologetically. “But maybe the Heart was right, maybe the aliens threatening Dema are relatives of the Damoraks. The assumption I’d been operating under was that after the Damoraks sealed the nearby Portal, it allowed a hostile alien species to evolve and develop in local space, and then the Dema’i settlers – you – stumbled into the outskirts of that civilisation when you flew here. But perhaps the connection goes beyond my data. The short version is, if the civilisation threatening Dema is in any way developed on a foundation of the Damorak species, as suggested by the energy data from the sealed Portal…”
“This is the short version?”
“Yes,” Mer replied, and Bason was sure it sounded impatient. “The really short version is, there is tech here that will help mask what little of the Worldships will be detectable. This Damorak might have even been Dema’s ticket to safety – that might have been one of the things your ancestors planned, I don’t know. Damorak tech might have hidden Dema from whatever’s coming … but I doubt that. The numbers don’t add up. The Worldships are tiny in comparison to a planet. They’re rocks, with all the machinery hidden deep. Dema … not so much. If that was what they were planning, then their implementation strategy went the same way as the superluminal drive schematics. Tossed away when they made their no-return decision.”
“Okay,” Bason said, taking another slow tour around the display table, noticing the hard gleam of a preserving seal across the Damorak’s visage for the first time. It wasn’t sleeper tech – the creature was definitely preserved, not in any sort of storage from which it might wake up – but she was still unsettled by it on an animal level that she found unpleasant to confront. “Okay,” she repeated, “so we brought an alien with us and left it up in space when we settled the planet. And everyone forgot about it.”
“Nobody spoke of it,” Mer said, “I don’t know if it was as simple as forgetting. Not many Molren knew about it in the first place.”
“Is there more I need to see, Mer?” Bason asked, not wanting an answer.
“This is about it,” Mer said innocently, “unless you want to inspect the sleeper hives and the subluminal engine piles.”
“Plenty of time for that once we’ve started boarding,” Bason said. I’ll probably have time to become a fully-trained and accredited Worldship engineer in the time that will take. “No more loathsome aliens, though?”
“Absolutely not,” Mer said. “But … listen, it’s not going to be enough on its own. This … loathsome alien … isn’t going to keep the Fleet perfectly safe, indefinitely. Especially not if you increase in size, which may be a social necessity. You need to be careful. You need to be so careful, Bason.”
“I’m not exactly sure what that means,” Bason said, “but I don’t think I like it.”
“What it means is, I’ve studied your early life, as it appears in the data. The idiosyncratic info-echo of Bason Karturi. I know that you have faced … difficulties … dealing with the Dema’i reality. Technology, communication … secrets.”
“You probably noticed the part where I have issues with cryptic nonsense dressed up as wisdom,” she remarked.
“I did deduce that,” Mer sympathised. “Gandicon Ghåål and his Bharriom phantom must have been irritating.”
“You have no idea.”
“There is a lot you are going to need to hide, Bason,” Mer warned. “This is what I’m trying to tell you, by showing you the Damorak, showing you everything. You can handle it, as an individual, but individual psychology – and your psychology specifically – is different to large-group and wider social psychology.”
“Putting that obvious fact aside,” Bason said, “what about my psychology specifically?”
“It wasn’t just your tinkering that allowed me to contact you,” Mer said. “Your synapses are like an extension of the pattern underlying my own. I lack the processing complexity to philosophise about it, though. You can deal with the information I am giving you, but there are things you’re going to have to hide from the others.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re not going to accept this,” Mer said. “I haven’t known many Molren, but I know Molren. They will not just blindly go along with this, even once you convince them of
the necessity of boarding.”
“Once I convince them?”
“Well, I suppose I could have a go,” Mer said delicately, “but I don’t think I’d be well received. Gandicon might be better received than I would be – and when I say ‘Gandicon’, I mean his deceased body…”
“Mer.”
“The Molren of Dema will not go unquestioningly into this danger,” Mer said. “They won’t go through the Portal knowing that unknown alien tech is making it possible. They’ll want to study it and this technology will not be studied. They need…”
“They need to have no choice,” Bason said.
“I was going to suggest that the best way to get the population into storage is to make them think the planet is already under attack,” Mer agreed. “I even made some preliminary examinations into the Damorak technology, to see if there was some way to fabricate a threat. But it will not be studied.”
“Now when you say you were trying to ‘fabricate a threat’–”
“I am neither trained nor programmed to conduct tactical operations on this level,” Mer said. “Another reason I’m glad the Lawkeeps are active in many parts of Dema.”
“More than a little Lawkeep in me,” Bason said.
“Yes,” Mer acknowledged. “You understand the risks, and why the Molren of Dema can’t be allowed to throw the species away asking stupid questions.”
“They’re unlikely to question the Bharriom,” Bason said, remembering the Lawkeeps of the Old Enclave. “That at least has found its way into Dema’i mythology. But … yes, pitching it as an all-or-nothing last-ditch attempt to salvage the species, with nothing less than a hold full of sleeping billions at stake … it could provide the focus we need to spend three stinking lifetimes hauling our civilisation to your fabulous gate.”
“Over time, it might make sense to build on the narrative,” Mer suggested. “A full hold of sleepers in every Worldship, so there’s no false prioritisation. I imagine the population will increase just as the number of pods will increase, provided new components and compounds can be located en route.”
“Another problem for the Lawkeeps to tackle,” Bason suggested.
“Indeed,” Mer paused, then went on. “What shall we do with Gandicon?”
“What are the Worldship systems meant to do with dead Molren?” Bason asked in return. “I assume their remains are intended to be broken down and recycled for nutrients and compounds?”
“Yes.”
“Then do that,” Bason shrugged, then added, “but … transport him to the Bonshoo, and do it there. The Bonshoo was his, even if he didn’t die there. He’d get a laugh out of being her first meal.”
XXIX
It took little over twenty-one years for Launch Day to arrive.
The dire pronouncement of the Heart, that the Molran Fleet would not get decades to prepare for its departure, had been – as Bason Karturi liked to point out in the privacy of her own quarters on the Grandix – technically accurate. The nineteenth year since her and Gandicon’s arrival at the shipyard had been drawing to a close when the first Damorakind ship had entered the Dema system.
The thorny grey-black vessel had appeared as if by magic in high orbit above Dema, where it immediately encountered several intrasystem transport routes and the fledgling Molran defence forces. It would be inaccurate to say they exchanged fire. The alien vessel had apparently rammed its way into the midst of the Molran spaceborne infrastructure by complete accident and the majority of the damage had been done by collision and associated collision-avoidance manoeuvres. The Molran warships, dwarfed by the gleaming alien monstrosity, had fired upon the intruder to absolutely no discernible effect.
The ship had peeled away from the larger orbital structures and vanished as quickly as it had appeared, but within an hour all of Dema was aware that their schedule had just reached its critical final phase.
Still, it had been another year and a half before the aliens returned. They had done so with a massed assault fleet that was fearsome to behold, and their blanket transmission to the cowering planet was immediately intelligible. Communication adjustment, even translation, had been unnecessary – or the first ship had cobbled together a working system for its fellows to use in the intervening months.
“This region of space is subject to the Damorakind,” the message had stated in a voice like fire. “You are not Damorakind. If you are not Damorakind you are the enemy and so you shall be unmade.
“We are the Dwellers in the Dark. We are the one true life. We are the black steel claws of the Gods.”
This was how the Molren had learned the name of the enemy. And it was how Bason, and a few of the Fleet’s inner circle of Lawkeeps, formerly of the Old Enclave, had learned the distinction between Damorak and Damorakind, even though they didn’t necessarily understand its full meaning. Gandicon’s words, that the aliens were the children of the Molren’s ancestral enemy, and that they came on silent wings of black steel, were now as fully explained as they were ever likely to be. There was no immediate sign of a Damorak presence, and the Damorakind force had appeared as unaware of the shipyard as Mer had once speculated they would be. But Dema’s time was up.
There had been no further communication. There had been no diplomatic overtures, no attempt at a peaceful compromise. The Damorakind had attacked, and Dema had perished.
In the two months that had followed the arrival of the first ship, transport of civilians and materials from Dema had ceased with a strangled abruptness. This, of course, had always been the plan when time inevitably ran out. It was just good fortune that they’d had so long, and that the first conflict had been a relatively minor skirmish. There was no further interaction between Dema and the shipyard on the far side of the sun.
The majority of Molren who’d intended to depart with the Fleet, of course, were already aboard the Worldships – the majority of them already settling into their sleeper pods. Of those that were left, most had no intention of leaving their homes and were prepared to meet their end if that was what it took. A certain amount of preparation for planetary defence had been made, but not so much that it interfered with the primary objective … and besides, the fate of Dema had already been decided by the new citizens of the Molran Fleet, and their counterparts in the hidden places beneath the surface of the sunlit world.
The rest of the Dema’i citizenry, those who’d wanted to evacuate but had not yet reached their allocated departure time, had been left behind with cold pragmatism. And when the Damorakind had reappeared and begun to demolish the surface of the planet from low orbit using their terrible whips of grey fire, the last members of the Old Enclave had coordinated with their counterparts across the underglobe.
A massive buried network of semiluminal accelerators had cycled up, and even as the Damorakind smashed the cities and nations of Dema into gaping craters, a ragged singularity-equivalent was generated in the mantle of the planet. Dema had collapsed into it without warning, a gravity well that was – albeit briefly – almost the rival of the star around which it had orbited for so long. And the Damorakind ships were sucked into the dark conflagration.
When the indrawn pulse of gravity released, spraying pieces of rock and cooling magma into a new debris field to match – and ultimately to merge with – the one on the far side of the system, not a trace of the enemy ships remained. The sharp shift in the mass gradient also drew a lot of asteroid, solar flare and general destabilising effects into the region, intensifying the destruction.
A few short months after that, without fanfare, the Fleet left the ruins of their home system behind them and surged laboriously into space. The scant remains of the shipyard were demolished in their wake, and the mobile manufactory and materials repository that would one day become a fourth Worldship flew alongside the Enna Midzis, the Grandix and the Bonshoo. They’d only had a few short months, not just because it was only a matter of time before the Damorakind returned, but because the wave of cosmic devastation centred around the
former coordinates of the planet Dema was swiftly circling the sun.
It was also only a matter of time before the Dwellers in the Dark returned, however, perhaps even brought the Damoraks with them to find out how their attack force had been eliminated. It would be immediately obvious to the Damorakind scientists – the Dema’i had triggered a super-acceleration event inside their planet’s mantle and destroyed themselves and the Damorakind in one stroke – but perhaps this disproportionate act of defiance would help to conceal the stealthy escape of the Fleet from the far side of the solar system.
And if it didn’t, they would just have to keep quiet and hope for the best.
XXX
By the time Bason Karturi entered her Second Prime at the age of two thousand and eighty, the Molran Fleet had settled into a new stability, a culture of its own independent of a homeworld many of the younger crewmembers had never even known. The myriad races and creeds of the Dema’i Molren were already all but forgotten, replaced by the squared-off monoliths of just two great cultural distinctions – cultural distinctions that had already begun to change into an interspecies gulf, in fact as well as in law.
Molran and Blaran. Law-abiding crewmember and assumptions-questioning civilian. The Twin Species, and the Social Code that dictated its smooth operation, was born.
It wasn’t a matter of generations, of lifetimes or mutations. The Twin Species took hold in the Fleet within the five millennia of a single Molran’s life … but the majority of the colourful citizenry of Dema slept in the Worldship holds, in the bellies of the great ships that were carrying them to safety. The Twin Species formed out of those who remained awake, those who were dedicated to the custody and care of the lost civilisation. The majority of them – soon the overwhelming majority – were born in space.
Even within Bason’s lifetime, the Twin Species came to outnumber the sleepers … but only a handful of them knew it. So the story grew, from the initial misleading data fed to the original crew, then on to their offspring. The story devised by the Lawkeeps, the Old Enclave, the guiding minds behind the generation arks of Gandicon Ghåål. And Mer, behind it all, unseen by any but Karturi – or so it seemed – and her children.
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