Waking Olympus (The Singers of the Dark Book 1)

by Peter Yard

  twenty-four

  Q and A

  The ship descended to 1,000 meters and increased speed. He had some spare time and a million questions. He felt himself shake with excitement, after all now he might just get an answer to a few of the big questions.

  "Zeus, about the repatterning…"

  Do you still want to know what the repatterning was like?

  "I've heard so many creation myths, I would like to hear something closer to the truth."

  Here is a fragment, in the words of one of your own people.

  A section from: Executive Summary 23 — Overview of Repatterning of Neti

  The Neti intelligence, codename Zeus, began the task it designates as 'repatterning' over three years ago on the computed simultaneous Earth date: 2244 day 188. Zeus issued a statement saying that all of our forces and assets should leave the planet for our own safety. Orbital systems and stations continued to monitor the process.

  Initially there was little change. Some sensors we left behind showed unusual biological activity in the elts (our biologists' shorthand for biological 'elements') but that was all. After about 20 days we noticed a sudden increase in activity. The elts had vastly increased in numbers but were hidden below ground, now they swarmed out devouring any living creatures they came across. The old Ecasian ecosystem was destroyed within a few days. Then the elts started building what first seemed like termite mounds but on closer examination by robotic probes seemed to indicate they were machines ranging in height from one meter to twenty meters. At the same time there was activity in the seas. Plumes of gas rising to the surface were seen in many places along the continental margins and even far out at sea. Significant ocean chemistry changes were also measured.

  Over the marine environments some objects started to come to the surface. These were elt constructed machines ranging from hundreds of meters in diameter up to several kilometers across; there were hundreds of these artifacts in the first few weeks, later thousands. Shortly after this we lost contact with our probes, we believe they were 'devoured' for resources. We still had airborne probes though they came under continuous attack from flying elts ranging in size from insects to pterodactyl like creatures with a four meter wingspan.

  Heat and neutrino signatures indicate the presence of fusion generators in the marine structures, and color changes in the surrounding seas suggest extensive chemical processing is now underway.

  On land the environment changed rapidly. Giant mushroom like organisms up to forty meters tall proliferated, their purpose is unknown, suggestions include: chemical factories for new materials that will be required, breeding centers for new forms of elts. The ground between the mushrooms is carpeted with a deep green layer of plants though the type is unknown. Strange flying creatures the size of small eagles fly from continent to continent in flocks numbering in the tens of thousands, their purpose is not known. Sometimes great vine-like structures are observed to propagate between the mushrooms and may grow downwards, it is still not known what their function is; are they roots, are they nerves?

  The planet is now more alien than any world we have ever visited and is unrecognizable from the world we first discovered. The process is still in its early stages according to Zeus and we have seen no evidence yet that any of the biological samples we have supplied have been used. It is likely that we will not see tangible benefits for decades.

  In the next section we will discuss the process in detail looking at a particular region around the body of water named Lake Baikal by Dr Pyotr Klenova.

  Mikel's curiosity was still not satisfied.

  "Why did human civilization fall on other worlds? Why did the Cities languish afterwards? I want to know the truth? I've come a long way, I've heard lots of stories, myths and legends. Now I just want the truth."

  What is Truth? Your people often regarded me as godlike. Does a god need to ask questions about what humans are doing? Does it need to send out agents to find out? Does it confess ignorance about what is happening to other worlds? I have no access to some pure Truth. All statements about the world are conditional, tentative unless they are a tautology. Some statements are supported by evidence, some less so. But we can never say they are True.

  "The Method, or part of it anyway. Sorry, I was caught up in my own fairytale I guess. You make predictions and try to break your hypothesis, others try to replicate it. There is evidence but never certainty, the best we can hope is that our evidence based theories make predictions that are borne out by new experiments. Often it isn't enough, sometimes the acceptance of an idea is more about art than prescription and the final judge is always reality. Of course some things cannot be tested, or tested yet, then we just have to muddle through and manage somehow."

  The humans who first came here sought such absolute Truth. They extended the neural links to hook directly into the memory of others via the brain region called the amygdala and around the temporal lobe. They created something called Communal Presence. You saw a bit of it when I showed you the scenes of Tanten and the Plains. They thought it would give them some kind of Truth and some protection against others of their kind manipulating them. This is a problem of all societies I have seen, everyone tries to solve it differently, some get it right apparently but I haven't seen it myself.

  "Are you saying they could examine the memories of others as their own? But then, where does my sense of self end and theirs begin? How can I remain me?"

  Yes. That was the problem, I warned them, they would not listen. They were too close to the problem to have any perspective, they thought that the truth they were after was in each other.

  "No wonder the Cities never recovered, they lost themselves. It was just as Maria had guessed."

  The links are both dangerous and incredibly useful. Take care.

  "I understand. Communal Presence, it's a contradiction isn't it? Communal Presence is not about community at all. And yet … Who else is here Zeus? With us, now?"

  He could feel it, another identity on the link, close but unknown.

  You are sensing the formation of the Other, the combination of our interaction. Memory and processing has been set aside to act as a gateway between us, that behaves like another persona. It is not, it is more like a reflection of your own, changed by my interaction.

  "But magnified … No wonder I can't understand them. If they lived in this environment most of the time then they were really not like us at all."

  twenty-five

  Legacy

  He felt strange, as if there was a pressure behind his eyes. He became aware of a multitude of voices, like a party or a bazaar where the conversations merge into a constant background din, it reminded him of the market in Tanten but infinitely stranger. A clamor of voices seeking his attention. Like a river within. It rose as a mass, broke its banks and suddenly, he — was not himself.

  The Yechaf Activation: date 143,700 Years Ago (Earth Standard Years)

  Galactic Calendar: 11.11.63.14057

  He was walking down what seemed like a purple canyon, in dim red light. But the cliff walls were too regular to be natural. They towered above him as if he was in a giant's hallway, the giant away, the canyon silent. The walls were regular geometric forms, the symmetry broken by attached aerials and devices, beneath him the ground he walked on was a crystalline road paved with diamonds, or something very like them, glinting with a red fire amongst the ever present purple. He looked up, to see the angry sun Yechaf, baleful and red, spitting prominences into a black sky as if it could stop them at the last moment.

  At the end of the road was an elaborate arch, like an old temple waiting for worshippers, just an illusion as one saw more closely that it was not covered in fine artwork but elaborate techwork. Around the gate and beyond, the red desert of Fechri spread to the horizon, and above that a black sky with unwinking points of light.

  Now there was a rumble, he could feel it through his feet, the canyon walls glowed a brighter purple, while the far gate, for that is what it wa
s, now glowed deep blue, a warning: it said simply, leave or die. He turned away from the gate and walked toward his small flittership. The diagnostics were all good, soon the gateway would be established above Fechri, held between the sun and the tidally locked dead world.

  The Ciwuyaxe Hive Contact: date 755,343 Years Ago (Earth Standard Years)

  Galactic Calendar: 11.11.55.59890

  She saw the team in the distance, they were collecting their equipment in a large clearing of the open forest. The vehicle that had brought them here lay in the distance, like some great flattened silvery egg. It radiated strongly with various energies when it first landed, there had been a great deal of EM across almost the whole range, she was collating the energy / wavelength measurements but suspected it wouldn't tell her much. Very inefficient, it wasted energy. There seemed to be even some particles, some telltale gammas from particle annihilation. Wouldn't it have been much easier to breed some flying forms to bring them here? Most mysterious of all was that the vehicle didn't 'fly'; there were no flapping wings, no rocket exhausts, no propellers, or jet intakes. She and her sisters had never needed these things but inventing them was a hobby they shared.

  The creatures were about 1.6 meters high, bipedal. They all seemed the same, no specialized forms, encased in what at first seemed to be exoskeletons but now appeared to be a separate constructed material, like a mobile cocoon. Were they trying to establish a new nest? There were too few for that even though they were very large. This was her territory, normally that meant a battle to enforce her rights and enter into some negotiation, the other party would retreat but now know the boundaries; perhaps trade in various commodities could be arranged to gain future trust. But the technology these creatures had brought with them suggested this was not simply a matter of colonization by a new sub-species of her kind. This deserved investigation. But they moved so much faster than she could think.

  She looked at them scurrying and came to a conclusion. They didn't move or interact the way her carpis did. Each carpi was a small reptilian creature about three centimeters long with specialized chemical sensor organs, her very body was made of thousands of them. Her carpis slowed down at night, due to the drop in temperature, so she started changing the network of nests, increased nest heating, extra flow between nests to get greater and faster cognition. It would drain her fuel and food reserves if she persisted but she needed to solve this to prevent bad decisions.

  The strangers appeared to be individual creatures, like food animals, but they had built this vehicle. Individually intelligent and aware, how could that be? She understood the concept of machines, sometimes she had designed and built such things: dams, windmills, electronics factories. These creatures were an unknown, but how to talk to them …

  Above Earth: 2201 CE (Earth Calendar)

  Galactic Calendar: 11.11.64.60389

  He had picked the right moment by accident. Now the Earth lay before him, giving the impression of Earth and Space as separate layers of the universe like some medieval cosmology, minus an intricate clockwork mechanism, he wryly noted. It looked calm and peaceful, which it was not, just as Space and stars seemed empty of humans, which they were not. Something caught his eye, a star winking out, then back on, a platform occulting a star, not a rare phenomenon at all, it should be quite common. There were many, many solar mirrors in orbit, highly inclined orbits of course; trap and reflect sunlight for power generation, reduce insolation on various critical areas to trigger snow buildup, part of the long term plan to reverse the warming. Fast by Earth's standards, he almost thought 'glacial by human standards' but that was too bitter an irony for him to complete the thought, yet there it was. In thought the act is complete even as the conscious questions it, but in the physical realm painful effort was required. The orbitals were a testament to a great effort, humans could be proud that they had managed to get back into space, and in such a dramatic way, to aid the planet when they had been so hard pressed.

  There was a slight shudder as the ship left the spaceport, drifting slowly like a feather on a breeze where there is no air. The pulse fusion engine started up. He felt like that feather now, slowly falling, must be about 0.01g at most. He felt the slight push as gravity returned when his feet came to rest on the floor, he still held onto one of the many cushioned grab rails. But his weight would build as the engines output increased and the acceleration with it. He would hold onto the zero-g hand holds for some time, he decided, he was still too used to Earth and Luna; only when it got to Luna grav would he let go.

  Destination Mars. He had never been there, few others had either, it was simply too far. He laughed at that, looked around to see if anyone else was in the observation deck. Alone, fortunately. Too far for casual or even moderately desirable travel, and he was going to the orbital labs around Mars to test a jump engine; destination Alpha Centauri, not far at all. He laughed again.

  Aboard the "Pharens Nee Ko" near SharTohSi (Neti) about 22.1M Years Ago

  Galactic Calendar: 11.10.57.8967

  He-She, whom the Exalted and Wise Elders called to this task, considered the display. Three fleets were arrayed, representing the Koelli, Ralewa, and his-her people the Lacak. He-She quieted his-her sub-minds. He-She could only be one-mind now, the shrewd fighter. He-She looked up at a suddenly darkened screen above, momentarily his-her dimmed reflection showed. Even through the suit the still healthy lines of his-her body showed: four legs, two tentacle arms, a hangover from his-her kind's squid-like ancestors. He-She wanted to blame all of this on some remote ancestor for adapting to the land, it was a very old joke.

  It would be here soon. The enemy ship had exited the portal hours before and set off alarms in half a dozen systems across a significant fraction of the galaxy. Everyone knew that after it had recovered it would make its way to the nearest life capable star, this one. The Intelligence on SharTohSi had already mobilized its drone forces, which were a fourth fleet approaching from an odd direction, also the automated systems on various moons and asteroids were now registering high levels of electromagnetic emissions; factoring in speed of light the SharTohSi systems had all activated together, whether they were under direct FTL control or had all responded to the superluminal transponder was not known, either way they were all powered up.

  The Dawn Ship materialized instantly close to the predicted location. At high mag it looked like a golden arrowhead, ten kilometers long and three wide. Much larger than theory said a starship could possibly be. Weapons systems, high impulse thrusters, short range jumpers were all hot. The fleets jumped to close range on the enemy, they were now much less than a one hundredth of a light-second from it.

  No one waited for the Dawn Ship to fire first, bitter lessons had been learned long ago. There was actually little to see in the first moment. The projectiles were invisible, the energy beams invisible, the return fire was also invisible. The particle beams hit first traveling close to lightspeed creating a dazzling effect over the skin of the Ship as some strange defensive screen protected it. Regardless of the high energy of the particles they couldn't penetrate it, somehow it still survived. The slower stuff was traveling much slower than lightspeed so would take several more seconds. Until the target was reached nothing seemed to happen. Then everything turned into a chaotic blinding frenzy.

  The outside of the Dawn Ship erupted in a blaze of light as multiple 5 and 10 kiloton rail gun projectiles detonated near the surface in spite of its defenses. The projectiles had shaped charges that deflected a lot of the energy into hardened projectiles that the explosions accelerated to tens of kilometers per second, devastating kinetic weapons. At the same time more heavy nuclei munitions, both projectile and particle beam hit the ship. Several of the nearby allied ships erupted in a burst of light and fire as heated gasses and escaping oxygen momentarily reacted, and then became simply dangerous debris. Many others he-she could not see but their symbols disappeared from the combat map. Twenties of squadrons of interceptors now matched the emerging Dawn intercepto
rs. Seemingly out of nowhere the SharTohSi ships arrived like demons with their integrated defenses firing. It was chaos, the only chance to survive was to keep moving, sometimes by reaction engines that are slow, sometimes by jumping short distances, though that was problematic of course, jump engines are fragile, short jumps are hazardous and energy draining. Fortunately, the Dawn Ship could not make such jumps as it was hammered by the disrupting rain of energy and particles on its hull.

  Some ships now resorted to heavy munitions; rail gun 5 and 8 megaton yield warheads detonated. They weren't the single instant flash of the kiloton stuff, these lingered for a few seconds like many new suns enclosing the enemy; a cage of light. They didn't do that much damage though, apart from some directionless intense photons they were almost useless, worse than useless because they threatened to vaporize incoming munitions. Many of their own ships were too close, their external sensor circuits were fried. The enemy, somehow, fired back through the expanding false suns. Closer ships flared, and were gone, their detonations not even noticed in the conflagration.

  Then there was a blinding light on the screens. There was a shudder, a concussive bang; the displays were dead, black, lights failed, emergency power kicked in, the sounds of motors and systems failing then restarting. Alarms went off; hull plating was damaged, there were hull breaches, systems were offline for several seconds. Displays came back. They had had a near miss. The previous round of heavy nukes had dissipated, once more there was black space. Then there was another flash on the large screens, not quite as bright, simply because it was so far away. The Dawn Ship broke up, its defense systems overwhelmed, liquid metal glowed as it sprayed from the breach, there were multiple detonations on and within the pieces as the allied forces made sure of the kill. In a few more tens of seconds it was over.