by Dan Worth
‘No, none.’
‘Hmm. Still, it makes you paranoid doesn’t it?’
‘I’ll say, knowing that anyone around you could be a potential assassin.’
‘Quite. Though I believe Steven is working on something at the moment.’
‘Oh?’
‘He has some portable detection equipment, the sort of thing you’d use for locating bugging devices and suchlike. He says he thinks he can modify it to pick up the characteristics of those creatures. I think he kept a piece of the thing to test it with.’
‘That’s something at least. Still, what do you do if you do find another? That last one was pretty tough to kill, and it would’ve succeeded in bumping me off if Steven hadn’t stepped in when he did.’
There was glum silence.
‘So did you finish reading the log Katherine?’
‘Yes, yes I did. Just before that thing attacked me actually.’
‘And?’
‘I did feel sorry for Cortill. Despite what he had his crew had been involved in, I got the impression that they got caught up in something they didn’t really comprehend fully until it was too late. What an awful death…’
‘No deaths are pleasant, you know.’
‘But is that it? Is that the big secret? That the Arkari were once as savage as the rest of us and either killed or banished a full half of their people and annihilated countless other worlds and species?’
‘Seems so.’
‘I could understand the desire for secrecy if this was a recent event Rekkid, but this was one million years ago! I’ve said it before, why the attempt to silence us? What are we not seeing?’
‘Beats me, but you know I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was staring us right in the face.’
‘It has to be. But there is another thing.’
‘Oh?’
‘The Arkari who were exiled and survived: where are they?’
‘You’re assuming that they were banished. Maybe they were just corralled like animals and killed. You saw the recording of the fate that awaited them?’
‘Yes I did. I couldn’t make out what it was, just a blur of light and a great number of ships.’
‘Well, who knows what that was.’
‘But the log spoke of a portal, and your story about a gate to the underworld…’
‘May just be that, a story. Maybe they were forced into a black hole, there are several within reach. Maybe they went off to some far corner of space and formed a colony we’ve never encountered?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What about Quickchild? It might know.’
‘I think it does know. But it doesn’t know that it knows, if you see what I mean. Its memory has been somewhat affected by the ravages of time, shall we say? It doesn’t even know what it is itself. But it’s certainly old enough to have been around at the time. It just depends how long it was inactive for.’
‘Well I wish it’d get over this bout of amnesia.’
‘I agree, though I doubt I’d do much better of I’d been asleep and floating in space for millennia.’
Katherine changed the subject.
‘What about these rings then? They’re certainly quite a find aren’t they?’
‘Certainly. I can’t wait till we can get some decent data on them. Quickchild should be able to get a closer look at them and tell us something about them. Their technology is certainly more advanced than most modern civilisations I’d say. Just surviving for a few moments in a solar environment is no mean feat.’
‘Maybe the Arkari built them long ago?’
‘Maybe. I think not though. From what we saw of the wreck and the images in the log they didn’t seem that much more advanced than you humans are today.’
‘Someone we haven’t encountered yet in the historical record?’
‘Possibly. Space is very big after all, and there’s thirteen billion years of galactic history to discover. Pardon me for stating the obvious.’
‘That’s why I love this job. There’s always something new to see,’ said Katherine and smiled broadly.
Katherine seemed cheered by the new discoveries, thought Rekkid. He was glad something could lift her spirits at last.
‘I quite agree,’ he replied and smiled back contentedly.
Quickchild slowed its velocity with care as it closed in on the alien ring structure, broadcasting all the while to the Darwin. Even with its sensors heavily shielded, the environment of the star’s photosphere was punishing in the extreme. Quickchild was currently performing the machine equivalent of narrowing its eyes in the face of a driving storm, doing its utmost to protect its delicate instruments and redistributing energy around its shields to maximise their effectiveness against the onslaught.
The ring floated in apparent defiance of the laws of gravity above a sea of boiling plasma whose curvature was so gradual as to appear as an almost flat plane of fire of unimaginable size. Quickchild’s shields glowed, outlined by the storm of super-heated particles battering against them.
Having lived among the Esacir, Quickchild had seen much in the way of technology that impressed it. But it couldn’t help feeling overawed by the ring - a bracelet of darkly mottled super-dense matter around a hundred kilometres in diameter, one kilometre thick and just over three wide that seemed invulnerable to the raging inferno.
It drew nearer, and upon closer inspection saw that the ring appeared to have somehow tamed the plasma storm around it. The searing particles were being gently convected around the structure and through its centre by forces unknown. Quickchild couldn’t tell whether the natural mass of the object was causing the effect, or whether there was hitherto undetectable machinery at work inside the ring. It would have to get closer and investigate its innards if it could.
Mindful of the effects of the star’s severe gravity well, Quickchild edged close to the ring with care, so close that it could manoeuvre through the swirling torrent of particles and into the small area of calm that lay close to the surface of the ring’s inner face. There it could use its full sensor suite at a much more sensitive setting without them becoming overloaded or damaged by the stellar environment.
Now close to the ring’s surface, the tiny ovoidal craft was a miniscule speck against the seamless dark face of the ring which was itself but an invisible dot upon the brilliant face of the star.
Quickchild halted a metre from the structure and began to scan it with its instruments. Here the tidal forces of the star were being counteracted by the ring. Quickchild felt the mass of the ring distorting space around it, felt itself being pulled toward the structure.
Scan complete it discovered that the composition of the ring was not terribly exotic: it was largely composed of a synthetic silicon based compound. What was unusual was the density of the material. Quickchild refined its molecular scan and then did some quick calculations; a cubic centimetre of the material weighed over a hundred tonnes. The forces required to manufacture such a dense substance would be phenomenal. Materials existed at such densities inside neutron stars. For them to be created artificially in such quantities was unheard of.
Quickchild tried to conceive what could create such structures: Vast engines of creation spinning the rings out of the very fabric of the system. Now that was odd, he thought, the image its mind had conjured up was unusually vivid. Was that a memory it had just unearthed? Was it a memory of this place or of somewhere else? When?
It tried to clear its thoughts and concentrate and then decided to alert the others to its findings in case they missed the significance of the data.
‘Darwin, are you picking this up?’
The reply was crackly but audible, Quickchild tried to clean up the signal. ‘Yes, just about.’
‘I thought I‘d draw your attention to the density of the ring material Captain.’
‘Thank you Quickchild, we were just discussing it. Quite remarkable.’
‘Indeed, it is my estimation that whoever or whatever manufactured these rings pos
sessed technology of incredible sophistication.’
‘You’re speaking of the rings’ creators in the past tense. What sort of age are we talking about here?’
‘Despite the rings’ ability to divert the stars’ radiation and plasma around themselves, some particles do slip through now and then. Cosmic rays do appear to be able to penetrate the convection shielding. Judging by the level of cosmic ray bombardment evident upon the ring surface, I have estimated their age to be in the region of five billion years. I would therefore postulate that they were constructed relatively recently after the formation of the star system itself. It is a great pity that our esteemed archaeological colleagues have no knowledge of who may be the original builders.’
‘Sorry Quickchild,’ said Katherine over the link. ‘We don’t have any proper record of any space faring civilisation that far back. Not much tends to survive long enough, especially delicate artefacts or technology. We occasionally find the odd item here and there that we can’t identify and does appear to be of extreme age, but that’s it.’
‘It would seem therefore, that we are presented with a unique opportunity wouldn’t you say Doctor?’
‘Yes I would, absolutely’
‘These erroneous items you mentioned, you do realise that I am one of them?’
‘I do.’
‘This investigation has, shall we say, acquired a level of personal interest for myself. I shall proceed further with my studies. Quickchild out.’
Quickchild cut the voice link then set its sensors to sweep down through the structure of the ring. It then set course around the inner circumference of the structure, maintaining a careful one metre separation between the underside of its hull and the surface. In doing so it could map the inner workings of the rings and perhaps determine their purpose. If they had any, it mused; maybe they were just bizarrely extravagant works of art.
It soon became clear to Quickchild that the rings were designed as some form of machinery, though their purpose was still unclear. Its deep scans revealed that the interior of the ring was riddled with power conduits. A central spine ran right around the ring, where it linked a chain of what appeared to be reactor chambers of some kind that were spaced a kilometre or so apart around the structure. Currently, they seemed to be dormant.
From this main trunk branched other smaller conduits that spread and subdivided like the veins of a leaf. They in turn supplied power to a network of nodes on the innermost face of the ring. However there was still no clue as to what was causing the weird field effects around the ring, Quickchild guessed that something inherent in its structure must be affecting space time without the need for a power supply. It was certainly detecting some very unusual things going on in the higher dimensions close to the ring’s surface. It decided to report in again.
‘Darwin, do you have any idea what the purpose of these nodes could be?’
‘Sorry, Quick---- we are –arely rec---ing you. There app---- to be increas-- -olar activity in your g---ral vicinity. Can you b---- the si---l?’
The link went dead. Quickchild analysed the network. The increased activity on this part of the star had severed all links with the Darwin and the team on the planet. They would just have to wait until it had returned before it divulged any more of its findings. It continued its careful scan of the ring. It appeared uniform throughout. Reactors were spaced every twelve hundred and thirty two metres throughout with identical sets of conduits branching from them.
Wait, here was something different. Quickchild halted. Embedded at the centre of this ring section next to the spine was a spherical structure. It probed it carefully. The object appeared to be some sort of computer core, a sophisticated shell of electronics and sensory apparatus surrounding a smaller central unit. It seemed to be deactivated. Quickchild wondered if it could somehow reawaken the dormant circuits.
Scrutinising the core, Quickchild assessed the various input devices that fed it with information. Most seemed to be directly concerned with operating the ring’s weird machinery, however there did seem to be some designed for the sending and receiving of external transmissions, presumably to the ring’s twin on the B star. Quickchild turned its attention to one such device. Maybe if it could access the computer core it could reactivate it somehow. There had to be some sort of external start-up method.
Wait, here on the surface, a tiny socket for a power source barely half a centimetre wide. It led directly to a battery stack that fed the core. Quickchild extended a probe from its belly, resembling nanotech skeleton-key, and after a few moments of adjusting its form to fit, jacked itself into the ring. It began to feed power to the batteries from its jump engines. After a short while it was gratified to detect a glimmer of activity at the heart of the ring, as long-dormant circuits flickered into life. Now Quickchild would try and access it.
It directed a transmission at the core, a simple attempt at prodding it into responding, though Quickchild doubted it would achieve much success with the first attempt. It could take some considerable time, even with its accelerated abilities, to decipher the language of a five billion year old alien computer. Except… someone else had been here more recently than that. After a few thousand attempts Quickchild received a response in the form of a rude rebuff:
Authorised Access Only – Please Enter Passkey:
Unauthorised access of this device and its computer systems is punishable under Arkari Law. Meritarch Council Dictum 233, Article 3, Section 7. A31775.4.32
Quickchild knew this language! It was an antiquated form of modern Arkari. They had been here once, ten thousand years ago by human reckoning according to the date. But what had they been doing with these rings? It examined the encrypted lock out program. The key ran to forty thousand digits, it shouldn’t take too long to break. Quickchild got to work.
Captain Spiers was getting a little worried, as he viewed the data on Fulan A’s surface activity with some concern.
‘Professor Cor, Doctor, it seems that there is a definite increase in turbulence in the area of the star’s atmosphere close to the ring. Flare activity is a definite possibility.’
‘Don’t worry Captain,’ said Rekkid cheerfully. ‘Quickchild will be alright, it knows what it’s doing.’
‘Does it?’ said Spiers sceptically.
‘Yes, it has certain self preservation routines built into its software. It’ll get out of the way if danger threatens, trust me.’
‘We haven’t received any transmissions in nearly an hour.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be fine. When the activity subsides or Quickchild returns having completed its task it’ll get in touch. Until then we wait. You can still detect it can’t you?’
‘Yes, barely. It’s difficult with all the interference.’
‘Well then.’
‘I’m just anxious for more data, this is very frustrating.’
‘As it is for us Captain, be patient. Quickchild will get us the results we want.’
Quickchild completed his hack of the Arkari fitted security lock with a sense of smug pride. It had taken it far less time to crack than it had anticipated. Now to talk to the computer core itself. This could be intensely tricky, assuming the antiquated device still functioned correctly at all.
It cautiously transmitted a few simple binary codes to the machine, sequences of prime numbers and what it hoped might be construed as a friendly greeting. Something rose out of the musty depths and reached out to the inquisitive AI. Quickchild recoiled and immediately set up numerous security barriers to prevent access to his key systems. There was something alive in there, if alive was the correct term. It was trying to communicate, moreover it was in a language Quickchild knew, one it had always known.
‘Welcome brother,’ said the other AI inside the ring.
‘You know Professor, I’d really appreciate a look at that ship of yours. I’d heard that some Esacir ships had artificial personalities written into their software, but I didn’t realise they were so convincing.’
> ‘Oh, ah I’m not sure that’s possible Captain,’ said Rekkid, frantically trying to concoct an excuse to keep the prying eyes of the Darwin’s crew away from Quickchild. ‘You see Quickchild is something of an offshoot of a research project by a friend of mine. I’m not sure he’d like others looking at his work until he’s ready to publish.’
‘Bit odd to just give you his research isn’t it?’
‘Hmm? Oh Quickchild is just the beta model. He’s working on the final one now. Besides, he has copies.’
‘I see. A shame though, its personality is so lifelike. Our electronics team on board would be eternally grateful…’
‘No sorry, Ormintu would never forgive me and...what is it Captain?’
One of Spiers’ officers was talking to him from off screen. The Captain’s face wore a look of concern.
‘I don’t know what your ship is doing over there, but we’re detecting energy readings coming from the ring. What looks like a chain of power sources is coming on line right around the structure. Wait, there’s something else too, the surface of the star directly below the ring has become calm.’
‘Calm?’
‘Like a mill pond. The atmospheric turbulence has reduced to zero over a circular patch a hundred kilometres in diameter and the surface is showing strangely regular convection patterns.’
‘Can we see for ourselves?’ said Katherine
‘You certainly can Doctor,’ said Spiers. His image was replaced by a live feed from the Darwin’s cameras and instruments. Amongst the tables of incoming data, which were largely meaningless to the two archaeologists, was a window containing camera footage of the ring, the brightness toned down accordingly. The gigantic structure now sat inside an oddly becalmed tunnel in the star’s atmosphere that resembled the eye of a hurricane. They could only guess at the power of the technology involved.
‘Makes it all worthwhile, eh Rekkid?’ said Katherine excitedly.