The Lost Star Gate (Lost Starship Series Book 9)

by Vaughn Heppner

  In the control pit of the Great Machine, as the vigor of the tainted varth elixir gave him greater concentration, Nay-Yog-Yezleth targeted the Omega Nebula nexus. This was a moment for uncanny precision. He sighted the fantastic distance and tapped a control, releasing the scream of ghosts.

  The swirling mass of supernatural energy lofted into the cosmos like a pure beam of light. But it traveled incalculably faster than any light or even thought. It flashed across five thousand, eight hundred and twenty-one light-years. The ghostly scream speared at the nexus. Since the beam had neither mass nor matter, being entirely formed of metaphysical energy, it easily passed through the nexus’s walls.

  That caused a tripping chain-reaction within the Q9 charged M-energy. As though activated by a sorcerer’s spell, the bizarre energy began to coalesce and take shape. That caused ethereal power to shed from it in misty wisps. A strange and inexplicable process—to humans, at least—began. Bit by bit, as if by the hand of God, pieces of matter and mass fit together into a pattern, a three dimensional puzzle. A white cloud enshrouded the process, so no more could be seen—were there an observer.

  Seconds passed, and in that time, the white cloud dissipated. A form twitched, and residual ethereal excess faded away as if it had never been.

  At that point, Mako 21 and her Spacer thruster-pack appeared, fully formed, in the Calling Chamber inside the Omega Nebula nexus. She stretched, breathed from the suit’s tubes, and knew herself to be alive again in the normal, accepted manner.

  Mako was aware that she had made an incredible journey. Perhaps equally incredible, she’d been reassembled. She recalled other data. The Strand clone was dead. The Forbidden Planet was over five thousand light-years away. She would likely never see the Visionary again. It was possible she would never see another Spacer. At least not in the next thousand years.

  As Mako inhaled her tank’s air, she realized that the final step still lay before her. At this point, strangely, she seemed to have forgotten about Nay-Yog-Yezleth. But no matter, Maddox was here, or so she deemed likely.

  Mako moved in a slow circle, examining the chamber. The idea of crossing from one spiral arm to another might have wilted the old Mako. This Mako, the Spacer egg Mako, accepted the journey as part of the process.

  She’d faced Maddox on Usan III and then again in the Usan System. He would believe her long dead, if he thought about her at all. Instead, he was about to face his doom at the hands of the Spacer he’d refused to rescue.

  “I am here, di-far,” Mako said aloud.

  Then she stopped talking as she climbed into the thruster-pack. Once she wore it, she activated the controls, lifted off the floor and thrust toward the exit in the ceiling.

  This would be the day of her great metamorphosis. She would finally transmute into the being she was destined to become.

  -89-

  As Maddox followed the professor’s instructions, he squirted a bit more thrust, turning “down” at a helmet-lamp-lit intersection.

  Like all nexuses, this one was huge, with a feeling of great antiquity. The sensation was different from a Nameless-One-created Destroyer. There wasn’t that pervading sense of death and evil that the giant craft of the Nameless Ones had emanated. Yet, there was a sense of inhumanity to this place, an alien-ness beyond anything of Earth.

  Maddox had expected that much. What he hadn’t expected was a continuing premonition of otherworldly danger. It reminded him of meeting the Ska in the Alpha Centauri System. That had been an awful confrontation. The fight had cost him in ways he didn’t yet understand. It wasn’t like facing overwhelming odds where you knew your enemies could maim and possibly kill you. No. That had been more insidious, a demonic sensation, he supposed.

  Within his helmet, Maddox’s face twisted wryly. Was he becoming superstitious like the others? He told himself that it was just that he was far from home. That was all. Who knew what strange forms life took in the Sagittarius Arm? The Swarm thrived here, but he’d faced the Swarm before and defeated them. So the bugs didn’t really count as something unwholesomely different. He’d met a Builder in the ancient Dyson Sphere and had survived to tell about it. So the feeling couldn’t come from a Builder. Just how different would a Sagittarius Arm Builder be from an Orion Arm one anyway?

  Hmm… The more he tried to analyze the feel of the emanations, the more it reminded him of the Destroyers and the Ska. It did not have the same sensation as that, though, not even close, really. It was simply foreign in a fundamental way that…made his skin crawl and his heart pound unnaturally fast.

  Why would the Omega Nebula nexus be causing him to feel this way?

  Maddox hesitated to ask the others if they felt likewise. This was different than the first fears that both Riker and Ludendorff had articulated.

  Maddox thought about that, about his hesitation to ask the others about their sensations. Did he care what they thought about him? Was that what was stopping him? Yes. He supposed he did care, and that was odd. He’d been an island for so long that he never thought he’d ever really be used to being part of a team and caring what others thought about him.

  Still, worrying unduly about his image was weakness. Weakness led to defeat. Above everything else, he needed to win today. The necessity of victory meant he should gather information. One man could easily feel something strange because he was off. That meant—

  Maddox cleared his throat.

  “Something wrong, my boy?” the professor asked via helmet comm.

  “Maybe,” Maddox said. “I’m…I’m beginning to feel that you had the right of it earlier. I mean the odd sensations from our surroundings.” And he went on to describe the Destroyer-like similarity to this place.

  “I know you poo-pooed that before,” Riker said in a shaky voice. “But I’m feeling the same in spades. Something evil lives here. It reminds me of Kauai.”

  “What?” Ludendorff asked. “That makes no sense. Kauai is an island on Earth. It’s part of the Hawaiian Chain.”

  “I know where Kauai is, Professor,” Riker said. “And what I feel makes total sense. Kauai was where the Ska-infected person tried to infect me. I’ll never forget that night. I’d love to forget it, believe you me. My nightmares…”

  “And you feel the same thing here?” Maddox asked into the ensuing silence.

  “I do,” Riker said. “It’s giving me the willies. I can’t stop shaking.”

  “Bah,” Ludendorff said. “I’m actually ashamed about what I said earlier. I can hardly believe I uttered those words. This place has a tranquilizing effect on me. It’s uncanny, really. The more I travel around in here, the better I feel.”

  “That’s weird,” Maddox said.

  “Nonsense,” Ludendorff said. “The truth is that your minds, all three of you, are too malleable, too susceptible to impressions. A disciplined mind like mine rejects the impressions and logically deduces that it is nothing more than overwrought emotions. That is the trouble with most people—”

  “You no longer feel anything untoward?” Maddox asked, interrupting the lecture.

  “Surely you just heard what I said. I had similar sensations before. Don’t you remember your argument then?”

  “I remember,” Maddox said.

  “Exactly,” Ludendorff said. “You had the right of it, my boy. I believe the calming effect on me has been the hidden process of my rejecting any unease as I focus my logical mind on reality. Mystical pulsations such as you’re implying—”

  “Excuse me,” Maddox said, interrupting again. “Mystical pulsations? Is that what you just said?”

  “Do I stutter?” asked Ludendorff.

  Maddox said nothing.

  “Logic,” Ludendorff said. “Stick to logic. It will bring you greater calm every time.”

  Maddox wondered if he detected an odd inflection in the professor’s voice that had never been there before. It was hard to tell.

  “Logic is good,” Maddox said. “But I also have an intuitive side that often works from m
y subconscious. To ignore intuition is folly because sometimes our body or even our hindbrain recognizes something that our logical half is too dense to see.”

  “Bah, you’re spouting pure emotionalism,” the professor said. “I wouldn’t have expected that from you, Captain.”

  “You must be joking,” Maddox said. Then, he fell silent. What was wrong with him? Why would he argue like this with the professor during the most important part of the mission? Was there something in here influencing his mind, influencing all their minds?

  The captain looked around into the darkness. They floated slowly through yet another large corridor. The four of them had on their helmet lamps—their only illumination in this place. Otherwise, the giant nexus was as dark as a tomb.

  At that moment, Maddox’s lamplight struck a weird glyph on the nearest wall. He had no idea what the symbol meant, but he’d seen it before. Perhaps he should be concentrating on those. He’d seen many glyphs during their journey throughout the corridors. It reminded him of the symbols on the Fisher world.

  Maddox frowned. Glyphs? What did he care about glyphs? They needed to reach their destination as fast as possible and make a hyper-spatial tube.

  “Professor?” asked Maddox. “Are we still headed in the right direction?”

  “Of course,” Ludendorff said. “Why would you think otherwise…?” The professor trailed off as his helmet swiveled back and forth, causing his beam to move like a searchlight through the darkness.

  “That’s most odd,” Ludendorff said. “We’ve taken a wrong turn. Yet, I’ve followed the same path as before, as I know the route by heart. But I’ve…I’ve forgotten to tell you to swing left at the last junction.”

  “Uh-huh,” Maddox said, his suspicions fully aroused. He’d talked a big game about following his intuitions. If ever there was a time to listen to his gut, this was it. He concentrated. It felt as if something…studied him.

  Maddox looked around wildly, causing his beam to flash here and there.

  “What’s wrong?” Meta asked over the helmet comm.

  “I-I don’t know,” Maddox said, the feeling of a sniper-scope trained on him fading away. What had he been thinking before he looked around? Why couldn’t he remember? He concentrated—oh, right, the glyphs.

  “Professor,” Maddox asked, “do you understand the meaning of any of the glyphs along the walls?”

  Once more, the professor’s helmet swiveled as his beam played upon various hieroglyphics.

  “Most are a mystery to me,” Ludendorff said a few seconds later. “A few I know precisely. Those—” The professor’s voice began taking on a shaky quality before he quit talking.

  “Are you experiencing emotionalism like the rest of us?” Riker asked.

  “This is an ill time to throw anything back into my teeth,” Ludendorff said. “Why, I have a mind to—”

  “Professor,” Maddox said, interrupting. “Something is trying to confuse us.”

  “Eh?” Ludendorff asked.

  “We’re not going to argue about it,” Maddox said. “You recognized two glyphs. What do they mean?”

  “Oh, yes, the hieroglyphs,” Ludendorff said. “I almost forgot about them. That’s odd, because the two I recognize are terrifying. One is an emblem for an ancient entity frozen in embryo. The Builders knew them as the Old Ones.”

  “That’s not an original name,” Riker said.

  “But it is apt,” Ludendorff replied. “The Old Ones were also called the Yog-Soths…” His voice cracked as it trailed off.

  “Are the Yog-Soths like the Ska?” asked Maddox.

  “The Ska are nonphysical entities,” Ludendorff said. “The Yog-Soths were as physical as you or I. They had terrifying powers of mind, however.”

  “Like telepathy?” Meta asked.

  “Not psionic as we think of it,” Ludendorff said. “They had great intellectual prowess and something more, something primordial. They could conceive of things that baffled the Builders. I do not know this except as an ancient memory. I must have kept this tidbit of knowledge from the nexus computer-core, the downloaded information.”

  “You said the glyph tells of a Yog-Soth embryo?” Maddox asked.

  “Precisely,” Ludendorff said. “The being is in stasis, in storage, likely has been in such storage for thousands upon thousands of years.”

  “Could the Yog-Soth be influencing our thoughts or our emotions?” Maddox asked.

  “It’s in storage,” Ludendorff said. “That would necessitate it being asleep. I don’t see how it could—”

  “Is the Yog-Soth alive?” Meta asked.

  “The hieroglyphic indicates that it is quite alive, if frozen in time.”

  “Is there a machine here that can thaw it out?” Maddox asked.

  “I would think so,” the professor said, “but I am not certain.”

  “What does the second hieroglyphic mean?” Riker asked. “You said you recognized two of them.”

  “That is correct,” Ludendorff said. “The second one means melding, a combination of different things that makes one.”

  “Uh…what?” Riker asked.

  “I do not understand completely,” Ludendorff said. “Part of the meaning is lost to me. A machine could cause the melding, though. Think of a teleportation device that breaks down atoms and recombines them at a different point in space. The idea here is a machine that breaks down atoms of various things and melds them into something new as it recombines all the atoms.”

  “Why would the Builders have something like that?” Maddox asked.

  “I have no idea,” Ludendorff said.

  “Husband,” Meta said. “Why are we talking about all this instead of backtracking and getting to where the professor needs to be?”

  Maddox looked back at Meta in her thruster-pack harness. She cradled a heavy rifle that launched small rocket shells.

  Maddox frowned. He was off, not himself. He’d already reached the reason why. “Something is diverting our thoughts,” he said.

  “What something?” Ludendorff asked. “Galyan did not detect any life-forms, remember?”

  “The AI has been wrong before.”

  “An AI malfunction?” asked Ludendorff.

  “Or something deliberately shielding itself from Galyan’s sensors,” Maddox said. “You’ve read the glyph warning us about a Yog-Soth entity. We’re all feeling something unhealthy. We’re not just imagining it, and it’s not emotionalism as you suggested before. Perhaps the Yog-Soth is the reason the Builders hid this nexus. Maybe the Builders wanted to hold the last of the Old Ones for reasons we don’t yet know.”

  “Perhaps,” the professor admitted. “But I don’t recall saying it was the last.”

  “You did,” Riker said.

  “No,” Ludendorff said. “I definitely did not.”

  “I feel that, too,” Meta said.

  “Feel?” asked Ludendorff.

  “That this is the last of the Old Ones,” Meta said.

  “That’s confirmation the Yog-Soth can influence our minds,” Maddox said. “Maybe it can do these things in its sleep.”

  “How?” asked Ludendorff.

  “I don’t care how,” Maddox said sharply. “None of that matters now. We’ll avoid the Yog-Soth or kill it if we run across it.”

  “Destroy the Yog-Soth together with the nexus?” asked Ludendorff.

  “Now that I know something is attempting to sidetrack us,” Maddox said, “I’m no longer going to allow it. We have one mission. We make a hyper-spatial tube before the Swarm fleet closes in on Victory. It’s time to backtrack so you can reach the Linkage Chamber, Professor. Once we’ve made the tube, Victory can be on its way to the next Swarm-territory nexus.”

  “It strikes me as a terrible shame to destroy such an ancient entity as the Yog-Soth,” Ludendorff said.

  “No more arguments,” Maddox said, realizing two things: First, he felt likewise. That meant the alien was still trying to sway him. The second truth was that he could no
longer fully trust the professor.

  “We stick to the script,” Maddox said, “so we can buy humanity an extra century or two from the Swarm.”

  -90-

  Mako 21 cruised through the depths of the nexus as she piloted her thruster-pack. The size of the Builder pyramid overwhelmed her. That she had crossed more than five thousand light-years in a bound struck her as technologically spectacular. The planetary machine that had propelled her to this exact spot in the Sagittarius Arm—

  Mako frowned inside her helmet. She cruised through the nexus’s corridors, knowing that she should immediately seek her destiny as the Spacer egg. She knew how to go about that, too. But a spark of…she would call it concern. Fear or worry was too strong for the tiny speck of—yes, she would call it concern. That was her decision and she was going to stick to it.

  In any case, the idea of Nay-Yog-Yezleth using the Great Machine on the Forbidden Planet to launch her to this location—something about the process troubled her, and she hadn’t been able to pinpoint why.

  Why had the Old One chosen this nexus in particular? Yes, this nexus held her destiny, but why did it do so? How could Spacer visions accurately foretell the future? What did Spacers possess that other humans did not that gave them this future-telling ability?

  Mako had her concern about this place and her part in it, and because of the concern, she wandered around the nexus, letting it awe her as she avoided her final critical decision. She didn’t want to go just yet to the place of transmutation. Besides, how many Spacers had traveled five thousand-plus light-years in a second of time?

  But I’m not a Spacer anymore. I’m the Spacer egg. I am Homo sapiens enhanced.

  That was an intriguing idea, and so was another.

  How did the Visionary learn or know how to modify me correctly?

  As Mako cruised from one huge corridor to the next, she pondered about the ability of visions to foretell the future. She wrestled with the concept and realized that such visions would need a source.

  Was there a being supplying the supernatural power, for want of a better term? Did that imply God? Not necessarily, she supposed. It could be any being with enough power.