Nova Byzantium

by Matthew Rivett

“What’s Al Fadah Madina like, Uri?” he mumbled.

  “The orbital colony itself?”

  Sava nodded.

  “Bizarre, detached, autarchic. Al’ Madina’s beautiful in its own way; floating gardens, quiet spaces, a synthetic oasis. It’s a strange place, but comfortable.”

  “They couldn’t wait for paradise, eh?” Wilco said. “It sounds like they’ve built themselves quite the afterlife.”

  Uri hadn’t thought about it, but that’s exactly what the sheikhdom had done. Kilometers above, they peaceably studied the forensics of humanity’s failings, documenting and accumulating. Unlike Nova Byzantium’s manic longing, Al’ Madina had moved on. The caliphate’s timelines were vast, centuries, maybe millennia into the future. For them, civilization’s dreary post-mortem was archaeology, a transitory hiccup.

  “So, why’d they build this nuclear sarcophagus? I appreciate the effort, but we’re nobodies, expendable mercs.”

  “Like bugs in a fucking jar. It’s some kind of experiment and we’re guinea pigs,” Wilco added.

  Uri didn’t have an answer.

  He laid out the gear on the chamber floor. The stage bottles he tied to a sinker line at pre-measured lengths for ascent. Like an anchor, he lowered the deco-tanks one by one through the open grate and down into the well’s ultramarine water, tying the line off to the ladder’s upper rung.

  The dry suit offered little protection itself, but his exposure time to the nuclide-heavy water would be minimal. Wilco rigged his mask with a UV shield. Stuck to the inside of the Plexiglas visor with epoxy, it would protect his retinas from the fissioning decay. But it was the water’s 32ºC that worried him most.

  “What was your elapsed time during Odessa’s demolition trials?”

  “I was too hungover on vodka to remember,” Uri replied, “They said regulators could handle vomit, but I’d never actually tried it until that morning.”

  Sava smirked. “You ready?”

  “Let’s get on with it.”

  Once in the pit, Uri heaved on the massive buoyancy vest, the fifty-kilo tanks lashed to its backplate. He read the plaque below the alcove’s trefoil shrine. It was a cryptic warning. Purposefully ambiguous and written in the poetic style of an Arabic Qit’ah, it spoke of risk and reward, of dark times and redemption. The nuance was lost on Uri.

  “Godspeed, brother. Good luck.” Sava offered his hand, more bones than flesh. “We’re counting on you.”

  “I’ll see you in five or six hours, eh?” Uri said, reaching up for the handshake.

  “Aye.”

  Dropping his fins and mask to the floor grate, Uri stepped into the watery shaft. Like a hydrothermal spring, the heat was overpowering. He bobbed in the cramped space and strained to strap the fins to his feet. Sticky sweat trickled down his back from the struggle, the sting of perspiration filling his eyes.

  Exhausted, he paused and breathed deep.

  The regulator’s hiss and bubble flume replaced the cavernous echo as he descended. The blue Cherenkov filled the narrow tunnel with an uncanny glow from below. Hand-over-hand, Uri pulled himself down the ladder rungs. Ears popped and squeaked with the depth. Twenty meters down, the pressure intensified to three atmospheres, every breath consuming more gas.

  He stopped and checked the dangling deco-tanks to ensure the yoke valves were properly loosened. Crippled and brain damaged from embolism—his blood boiling with nitrogen—was not an option on Jan Mayen. With no time to spare, he dove.

  Entering the reactor chamber, he saw the honeycomb matrix spread out across the floor just as he envisioned. Zliva and Pravo were tucked cozily in the hexagonal cell’s center, packed in with their fissioning neighbors. Careful to avoid the superheated floor, Uri inflated his vest and hovered weightless in space. The depth gauge’s LED read sixty meters, but he doubted the glitchy device’s accuracy. The draw from his regulator was unsteady; the pressure felt deeper.

  In the chamber’s center, an obelisk rose a decameter from the indigo floor. Uri finned down from the ceiling to investigate, floating just above its vertex. Sensing his proximity, the monolith blossomed, its steeple revealing a stamen-like hub of fiber optic interconnects and digital gauges. He rested on one of its six triangular petals like a honeybee. Technical script written in Arabic and Norse hinted at detailed instruction, utterly indecipherable to him. With no distinguishable symbols and no hornet-hash warnings, Uri gave in to intuition.

  Arranged on each petal, he noticed two knobbed levers, possible remote actuators for the twelve containment cells. He reached for the handle and steadied himself. The lever felt sticky and pneumatic, like a hydraulic valve, but moveable. Pulling, he noticed one of the cylinder’s vanes had contracted: the kill switch.

  Floating to the next lever, he passed over the blossom’s nexus, a bright annular ring. Inside, beads of light orbited a pool of black liquid pulsing in sequential rhythm. Mesmerized, Uri abandoned the shutdown procedure and descended through the opaque liquid and into the flower’s heart.

  The onyx fluid, its density balanced between the water above and the heavier clear liquid below, functioned as a membrane, a gate of sorts. Another tunnel, smaller and smoother, dropped through the obelisk and into Jan Mayen. Uri exhaled and descended.

  The new liquid exhibited strange properties. The watery-mimic fizzed with dissolved gas like seltzer, fine and champagne-like. Hyper-dense, the weight of the fluid skewed his depth gauge; the barometric calibration offset by a decameter. The hum of the coolant pumps and impellers faded as he sank. Another twenty meters and the tube opened into an expansive half-dome. A thermocline brought cool relief as Uri struggled to adjust his buoyancy in the abyssal node. The floor was an intricate mosaic of pinprick lights, like a miniature city seen from above.

  This was the true vault, Uri realized. The nuclear reactor was just a dynamo built to power this ulterior cache. Looking around, Uri recognized familiar shapes, abstract but topographically recognizable. It was a geometric map of the Earth’s continents formed into a cartogram broken out into discrete cubicles.

  Fascinated, Uri vented his vest and sank to the floor. He noticed a plaque engraved into a metal cenotaph similar to the one in the vault’s antechamber above.

  He brings the living out of the dead and brings the dead out of the living and brings to life the earth after its lifelessness . . .

  —Surat Ar-Rum 30:19

  Next to the Qu’ranic verse was a legend and cipher, a Rosetta Stone of the world’s languages. Uri read the Latin. Most of the text referenced biochemistry and modern genetics, abstruse fields of which he was ignorant.

  He finned out from the cenotaph to a glowing cluster, somewhere in the sparsely dotted region of “Old Burma.” The dots were refrigerated compartments, small glass boxes sealing an array of hierarchical capsules. The coolers held chambers of yellow and red fluid, glass vents burnished for cryogenic filtration. He read what he could. The names were unfamiliar: Shan, Bamar, Mon, Thai . . . He swam across the digitized Bay of Bengal and saw other names: Bengali, Bihari, Sinhalese, Ghorka, Sherpa . . .

  After a moment, the logic synced and Uri understood the puzzle. These were people—human beings; their genetic extract collected into embryonic encoders and geographically organized.

  He remembered the slain centipede-turned-archivist the Rhine Vandals had used to lure the Antonov into Rotterdam. The Inquisitor had accused the archivist of blood theft. But it was biopsies, tissue collection that was the agent’s true quarry. Al Fadah Madina had spread its agents across the Khal Al Alam to collect humanity’s essence, an ark to outlast Earth’s turbulence.

  Uri’s eyes filled with burning tears. He was an unknowing agent of the caliphate’s grand design, and he had delivered its keystone. Without the unfailing power plant, the vault’s incubators would wither and its cryogenic manna would perish. The sheikhdom boldly planned to skip the Dark Ages entirely, preserving the constituents of homo sapiens’ vast diversity for the Post-Holocene.

  The project was
bold. But the plan hinged on an enlightened mind, far into the future, with the power to resuscitate the vault’s DNA constituents. Were Al Fadah Madina’s sheikhs preordained handmaidens of Allah, or were they conscious of their limitations? Locating the vault on Earth, as opposed to the orbital colony, spoke of a modest pragmatism. The sheikhs, despite their celestial detachment, were realists and aware of the caliphate’s mortality. All civilizations fall. Despite the meticulous planning, the vault was a bold gamble.

  Buried in Jan Mayen’s womb, pacified by the soothing bubbles of his regulator, Uri was overwhelmed by rare emotion.

  “I didn’t shut it down.”

  “Why, brother?” Sava croaked, eyes red and watery.

  “Because there’s something down there besides the reactor.” Uri said.

  “What?”

  “Everything, absolutely everything.”

  When Uri surfaced, only two of the men were alive, Sava and a vegetative Wilco. The remaining corpses littered the passageways, standing in the tortured poses of their death throe. He’d found Sava in the control room, gazing at the contour swirls on the radar map. The dead zone—a blob of bruise purple—clung to Jan Mayen like blight.

  “You’re not making sense, Uri,” Sava slurred.

  “I know about you and Illithium, Sava,” Uri said, switching subjects. “I know about your side job with Morosov.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sava turned his head away.

  “Do you remember a girl, maybe fourteen or fifteen, burned at the stake in Baku? They stripped her naked, beat her, covered her in oil, then set her on fire. They said she was a witch —do you remember her?”

  Sava shook his head.

  “Or those children in Tindi, stoned by the mob, the honor killing. Do you know what it feels like to have your head caved in, your face crushed by rock, the sound of your own skull cracking and splintering? Can you imagine it?”

  “What’s this about, Uri? Why are you telling me this?” Sava pleaded, tears welling.

  “I know how it must have felt, every terrifying minute.”

  “No. No way.” Sava shook his head, childlike. “That’s impossible, Uri. How could you have—”

  “Vicariously. I relived the brutality through their eyes like it was preserved in amber. Just like you and Mach recorded it.”

  “How?”

  “I stumbled across it.” Uri shook his slumped head, shoulders hunched. “Someone in Al Fadah Madina asked me to procure an artifact—a mask used by a Thuggee death cult in Mumbai—adapted from an earlier variant of Morosov’s alpha-write technology, a gray-market MEG. So I tried it.”

  “Why, Uri? That sideshow wasn’t meant for you.”

  “Then for whom was it meant?” Uri shouted.

  Sava shrugged and said nothing, his face filled with shame.

  Uri stood and turned away, lighting a cigarette. “Goddamn it, Sava.” He sighed. “I thought you were better than all that shit. Why didn’t you and the men leave with me at Echo-Bravo, huh? Leave the life behind.”

  Sava quivered. “Because I’m not you, Uri. I’m a mercenary; it’s who I am. Alkonost are my people. Tiraspol’s my homeland.”

  “Every man has free will, comrade.”

  “Every man? Even those barbarian trogs Nova Byzantium paid us to fight day-in and day-out? Even them?”

  “Even them.”

  Sava said nothing, strands of saliva dangling from his lips.

  “Why did you do it, Sava?”

  “Why do we do anything, Uri? We’re mercenaries. If I could make a little money from recording those fuckers tearing themselves apart, it was the next best thing, right? What’re they to me?”

  “Human beings,” Uri answered coldly, lifting Sava’s lips to expose his removed canines. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and all that, right, Sava?”

  Sava limply batted Uri’s hand away. His eyes were graying over. He was fading as the last muscles hardened, squeezing the life from him. “You’re just the same, Uri. Taking money from those Arab cosmonauts, doing their dirty work,” Sava argued.

  “No,” Uri said. “No, I’m not the same.”

  “You don’t sound completely convinced.”

  “Earlier today, I don’t think I was . . . but now I am,” Uri nodded his head, then continued. “This is all part of the plan, Sava. It’s important that you die here, like this.”

  “How can you say that? Whose plan?”

  “The caliphate’s, Al Fadah Madina’s.”

  “To die like this?” Sava looked up, eyes blistered with hemorrhage. “Who the hell are they to judge me?”

  Uri shook his head. “It’s not like that, Sava. You’re part of the construction now, just like the concrete and rebar, a fully integrated facet of the sheikhdom’s design. With you, this place is complete.”

  “I don’t understand,” Sava wept, shaking his head, body rigid despite sobs.

  Uri continued. “The Morosov procedure back in Kharkov: Al Fadah Madina cut a deal with Alkonost to have something implanted into you and your comrades prior to Jan Mayen. The anti-toxins were, in fact, a fractal network of self-assemblers mutated from Illithium, then surgically introduced. It was done on purpose. No longer isolated to the cranium, the fibrous synthetics were augmented to spread to the rest of the body.”

  “Fucking hell . . . ” Sava whimpered.

  “The only way to stop the growth was through a steady dose of radiation.” Uri gestured to the walls around them and the reactor below. “But the result is mummification. The intricate networks of micro-constructs are fossilizing your body, preserving you like a mummified pharaoh.”

  “Is this revenge for Illithium? Is that what this is all about?”

  “No, brother.” Uri shook his head and held Sava’s skeletal hand. “Not revenge. Everything else—the Morosov side-job, your alpha-wave recordings—is circumstantial: wrong place, wrong time. You and your men are now this vault’s entombed protectors, its sentinels. That was the truth; they didn’t lie to you about that.”

  “Well, it’s God paying me back. Divine punishment. There’s no other explanation. It has to be.”

  “If you believe in God,” Uri winked.

  Sava paused, then spoke. “What’s in the vault, Uri?”

  Uri told him.

  Sava said nothing, eyes peaceful and unfocused. Seconds passed as he started to fade.

  “Thank you for saving me, brother,” Uri said, his hand caressing Sava’s cheek. “And I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”

  Sava’s mouth slackened as his eyes closed.

  Uri finished his cigarette and watched his friend die in the glow of the control room’s digital light. Sava exhaled a death rattle, long and slow. Then, like his comrades before him, he stood from his chair and froze with rigor mortis, perfectly balanced. Uri touched him; his flesh felt like rawhide. He could see the Illithium networks bulging under the waxen skin, spreading from his joints like a web. The network provided the scaffold for his cadaver, now malleable and able to be positioned.

  Regret and pity faded as Uri went to work.

  The Crown of Thorns, with its urchin-like iron spines, evoked a universal doom. Much as Al Fadah Madina had intended, Uri arranged the dead throughout the monument, posing their bodies into tortured scarecrows. Pain, horror, humiliation, shame, and desperation: the prime movers of the superstitious, This was the effect the sheikhs wanted to evoke.

  The sacrificed Alkonost completed the ominous set piece, warning future intruders that this place honors nothing or no one, that this place is taboo.

  Beyond the Post-Industrial Shock, archaeologists of a new enlightenment would disregard their vestigial fear, dismissing the Crown’s curse to exhume Al Fadah Madina’s gift. Passing through the bottleneck of extinction, a diminished few would resurrect humanity’s lost.

  This was the grand hope.

  In the drawer of an aluminum bureau, next to an unmade bed, Uri found the small plastic box. Inside were Sava�
��s chrome fangs. He polished them to a silvery sheen, admiring the tempered metalwork. Adjusting the wire bridge, he pushed the canines into Sava’s desiccated sockets with blobs of waterproof epoxy. Mouth open in a frozen hiss, eyes blacked over with necrosis, the effect was menacing. Sava, in death, was transformed into a pale wraith wrenched from a cold underworld. In the vault’s central chamber, Uri manipulated Sava into the Crown’s vampire centerpiece, then said goodbye.

  Days wore on.

  Waiting out the dead zone, Uri managed to recoil a transformer and jump-lead his console to charge the battery. Jan Mayen’s higher latitude attenuated the signal, but a brief spurt of bandwidth allowed him to download his long-delayed communiqués.

  With a pack of ration cigarettes and a bottle of fiery vodka, Uri sat vigil in the mess’s western lounge. A fog drew in with the arctic current. A cold front was forecast for the island as the carbon dioxide dipped below threshold. Nearly asleep, Uri stirred and looked out over Jan Mayen’s southern shore.

  Through a curtain of wet snow, the triangular shape of a sail emerged from the pale twilight.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  After graduating from Western Washington University with a degree in physics, Matthew Rivett went on to receive his masters degree at the University of Wyoming. He returned to his hometown of Seattle, where he has worked as an aerospace research and development engineer for the past fifteen years. Married in Scotland during the unseasonably pleasant spring of 2012, Matthew and his wife welcomed their daughter into the world in the summer of 2013. In addition to physics, Matthew also has a keen interest in the sciences of paleontology, anthropology, and computer science. A writer of science fiction on-and-off for most of his life, Matt sites Gene Wolfe, Philip K. Dick, H. P. Lovecraft, and J. G. Ballard among his influences. In his off time, Matt enjoys scuba diving, and on weekends he can usually be found exploring the cold green waters of the Puget Sound. Nova Byzantium is his first novel.