by Chad Huskins
A short, stunned silence. A few whispers. One brave nobody shouted “Traitor!” from the back without really outlining his claim. The room remained quiet after that, and the floor remained Kalder’s.
Water dripped from overhead, smacking him on his head, trickling into his eye. If it had happened to anyone else, the Senate would have laughed. But not when it happened to Kalder. Because Kalder did not blink. He did not bend.
“Three years, my friends,” he said, continuing to pace. “Three years since the Brood cut us off from the Abrams System. Has anyone heard anything from His August Majesty, or the Elite Guard, or from anyone on the emergency QEC channels?” He waited for an answer. “Has anyone heard from his ship the Vigil Host? Has one word been heard in the three years since he and his Actium left?”
Silence.
“I have never declared that all the facts are on my side,” Kalder said carefully, “but I do believe I’ve made it clear that I am on the side of the facts. And the facts are clear. We are alone. And we are dying.”
“You want a whole fleet to go with you on this quest, don’t you?” someone shouted. Sounded like the same brave nobody as before. “Just as you’ve asked this Senate before! It’s always the same! We cannot make a decision of that magnitude without the Imperator—”
“Then we may have to elect an interim.”
Notombis now stood up, and fixed him with a baleful look. “In such words are the seeds of treason sown,” he said.
“Perhaps, but you should not avoid forever what could easily be fixed today,” Kalder lectured them all. “That was Man’s greatest mistake, after all, one that has led to our Decay. We forget that at our peril.”
“It’s never been done! The Imperator is the Imperator for life! Elected by the people and the Two Consuls—”
“Another reason we have allowed Decay to seep in,” Kalder replied. “We became complacent. We marveled at our own speed and grace among the stars, and we came to believe we were masters of all we saw. So we had no real contingency plans for an Imperator that becomes lost—”
“Nonsense!” Hash, wroth with the old man’s heretical speech, shot to his feet again. “Contingency plans have been enacted! The Consuls have power while the Imperator’s condition remains unknown!”
“Remains…unknown?” he said slowly. At this, Kalder’s scowl deepened. “Yes…yes, we do have the Consuls, don’t we? And they remain as effective as a eunuch’s cock.”
Gasps. Troubled rumblings. Had he gone mad? Had the old man finally, completely, irrevocably lost his good sense?
“If you’re going to continue speaking this way, Senator,” said the First Consul from behind him, “we will have to ask the Vigiles to escort you out.”
“You may have to, Consul,” Kalder said, not as a taunt but as a genuine warning. “Yes, you may have to. For if this Senate remains as naïve as it now sits, I’m afraid I will no longer be able to keep my civil tongue.” He turned back to face the senators. “Is there a man or woman brave enough to try an alternative method for saving the last vestiges of mankind? Is there one among you who will listen?”
Silence, except for someone clearing their throat.
“Very well.” He raised a hand, and pointed a finger at one of them, at all of them. “Remember this day,” he said slowly, “when I marked you all with this knowledge. Remember,” he said, “when you said no to me.”
Everyone went quiet, wondering if that had been a veiled threat.
Second Consul Ishmael Yon spoke up, “Senator Kalder, do you, at present, have any proof that these Moon Scrolls hold any sort of hope for humanity?”
Kalder turned and looked at him. “I have sent a woman to seek just the proof you’re asking for, Consul Yon. Indeed, she arrives at the Zhirinovsky System today, to explore the ruins there.”
“Zhirinovsky!” said Notombis. “That damnable hellhole? There’s got to be fleets of Brood starships that lay between here and there.”
“What fool did you send on this errand?” Hash chuckled, while others laughed.
“Moira Holdengard.”
“And who in the hells is that?”
Kalder did not respond. Why bother? he thought. One of the tenets of Zeroism was this: Let the fool stew in silence. He or she may yet learn something from the echo of his thoughtlessness.
“I leave you all with this,” he said. “If one day our beloved Imperator does indeed return to us, what sort of condition would you want him to find us in? Fleeing back to Sol, our tails tucked between our legs, and with only a plan to someday repeat our mistakes, or with fleet mobilized in the search for answers, attempting something that has never been done before? One last Crusade to save mankind. You decide.”
The room fell tomb-quiet, as all their humor died.
Kalder stepped away. They all watched him return to the spider’s corner, his robes whispering softly as his bare feet padded the cold stone floors.
: Zhirinovsky 373b
Moira’s eyes ranged across her displays. Her imtech was connected to her ship, allowing her to interface quickly with it. But implant technology always had its glitches, and sometimes hands were better. She waved at the holopanes all around her, shuffling the the planetary readout to the back and bringing up the ship’s diagnostics screen.
She looked out the plasteel window, at the planet looming ahead. A black, ominous world. Moonless, without any artificial light, and veined by flows of lava. It was surrounded by a cloud of ancient satellite debris, the result of a runaway Kessler effect—satellites left to drift for God only knew how many years, without course corrections, batteries going dead, slamming into one another, creating a cascade of destruction. From this distance, the star Zhirinovsky Prime turned that cloud of debris into a murky fog that made the whole planet appear like a bowl seen through smudged glasses.
Her Series Seven shuttle was making a parabola around the planet. On her front window, a glowing pane of datascreens had been superimposed over the planet, supplying an overlay that colored in certain areas that would otherwise have remained dark, sketching the outline of all continents, and showing, with clear arrows, the direction and flow of weather systems.
There was previous data, gathered by other stellerpaths like her, that filled in the rest, and though most of it was still relevant, it was usually best to do an updated scan.
Moira studied her scanners a moment, checking the limits of the system. So far, there were no signs of Brood activity, or any other starships. The Zhirinovsky System was known to be quite dead, its few worlds and moons depleted by at least three previous alien civilizations that had ploughed through here over the last ten thousand years, mining the largest asteroids for everything they were worth, leaving naught but scraps in their wake.
She swiped away one screen that showed the ecliptic coordinate system, then reclined, running her fingers through her short red hair, studying the readout of the planet on her imtech lenses:
Designation: Zhirinovsky 373b
Type: C; rocky, volcanically and tectonically active, Super Earth-class
Diameter: 18,702 km.
Year Length / Synodic Period: 23.27 days
That’s damn fast, she thought. Of course, she knew that before she came here. The planet was whipping around its parent star at breakneck speeds, which indicated it may not have been formed here, probably an extrasolar capture. Millions of years ago, it might have been a rogue planet, then came a little too close to the star, Zhirinovsky Prime. Moira read the rest of the data:
Gravity: 1.235 g
Temp Range: -195° F at poles; 46° F at equator in the day
Suns: 1 (Zhirinovsky 373 – “Zhirinovsky Prime”)
Moons: 0 (NOTE: one anomaly satellite)
Atmosphere:
41.0822% carbon dioxide
0.14% oxygen
25.5971% methane
20.0007% ethane
18 ppb hydrogen peroxide
[see other]
Aphelion: 149,760,000 km.
Inclination: 7.255° to star’s equator, 1.56° to invariable plane
Moira pored other the data for a few minutes, then looked to her left, where she had set the Moon Scrolls. She opened one, reviewed its alien cuneiform script, hoping her source had been correct about the interpretation. She swiveled in her chair and, with two gestures, brought up the constellation mapping on her windows. She looked at Moon Scroll IV again. It had been taken from the dead moon of Tyrannus, which hovered above the lifeless rock of Yuri in the Drenal System. It, and six others like it, had been found inside the downed starship of a dead xenos species, possibly the Worshippers.
Moon Scroll IV was an oval-shaped piece of paper, just like all Moon Scrolls ever found—the scrollmakers were thought to have been an ovoid-shaped race, with predilections towards making everything rounded, circular or semi-circular, and even the writing had no right angles, just wide, looping arcs. The script was not meant to be read left to right, archaeologists found, nor down to up, nor sideways, but rather in a manner starting from the center and spiraling outward. Reading it for hours on end had been known to leave historians and decryption specialists dizzy from strain. Nothing much ever came out of decryption attempts. But that didn’t concern Moira, who only needed the constellation map at the bottom.
“Let’s see here,” she whispered to herself, looking at the laminated copy in her lap. Laminated, because, despite whatever combination they had used for their paper, and whatever preservatives had clearly been added to give them longevity, the aliens that made the Scrolls had had their limitations, and the Scrolls were decayed and faded, almost to the point of illegibility. Carbon dating put them at around one million years old, but recent tests suggested they might be even older.
Moira ran a finger over the constellations on the Scroll, then looked at the notes her source had made on those constellations, then looked up at the stars around her. “Could be,” she muttered. “What do you think, Pritch?”
From the floor, Pritchard lifted his tiny black head. The Martian Vac Hound looked at her expectantly, wagged his tail once, then lowered his head back to the floor.
“Yeah,” Moira sighed. “Me, too. Alright, let’s look at it this way. If there’s nothing here, we still get paid the commission. We just need to go and check it out. The flight recorder will be proof that we came, we saw, we gave it our best shot. Kalder will have to be satisfied with that.”
Moira flipped a few switches, prepping the OMS to fire. Now she moved them out of orbit, flying over the serene, quiet dome of Zhirinovsky 373b, looking down into its dark-gray smog, which made up almost all of its upper atmosphere. Constant eruptions from cryovolcanoes pumped ungodly amounts of methane into the atmosphere, and those same volcanoes also pumped out tar-like organic precipitates called tolins. The planet had such bleak color. Moira was headed for its night side. The shuttle’s hull started popping as soon as she crossed the terminator line, where temperatures dropped suddenly and dramatically.
A hundred miles ahead, in low orbit above the planet, visible due to its great size, was the silvery cylinder also depicted in the Scrolls. It was also the single “anomaly satellite” that her computer had referenced. Some sort of space station, thousands of years old, abandoned for unknown reasons by an unknown people. The Strangers.
Moira looked at the immense, twenty-mile-long, oval space station. It looked just like all the others found elsewhere in the galaxy. They had been dubbed Watchtowers by xenoarchaeologists who explored every corridor, and came out supremely disappointed when they found hardly anything of interest left inside the giant stations. Not a skeleton, not any alien tech that could be reverse-engineered, not even a religious text or a bit of graffiti—even the Ancient Romans left behind some graffiti.
Pritchard barked. The dog had noticed the large object appear in the forward window, interrupting his view of black space and stars. Vac Hounds had been bred for space, and they preferred their view of the stars to remain uncluttered, thank you very much.
“Easy, boy,” she said, patting his head as the ship bent its nose towards the planet. Moira was glad to be out of the Watchtower’s view. Being close to one always filled her with indescrible dread.
They watched through the forward view as it darkened. They heard debris dinging against the hull. Her ship’s external cams went dark for a while. They saw flashes of red lightning. In those brief flashes, they caught glimpses of churning clouds, and something pulsating within them. They traveled on like this for what seemed like an eternity, before the clouds finally peeled away like a black fog, and they saw the surface of the planet.
Pritchard whined. Moira swallowed a lump in her throat.
The surface was cracked and populated by atavistic buildings, but it was difficult to make out, for everything was buried beneath a black sky. And dust. Swirling dust everywhere, trickling down like ash and snow mixed. Lightning bolts fenced overhead, giving them a glimpse of a dead city, and machines that moved along the surface, making slow, lugubrious motions with their tentacled hands.
Moira flew beyond this city, into a vast and dark stretch of land.
Fields of black sludge, which LOG said were the Onyx Fields, lay sprawled before them. The fields went on for a hundred miles, a sea of black viscous liquid, here and there pocked by a building that fought to remain free. The structures were mere islands of some former industry, suffering in silent screams as they gave in to their natural but unwanted decrepitude. Structures that were mere shells, nothing more than blank façades, leaned and threatened to fall, their guts having been emptied by collapse, or else blown out by some ancient war.
The sludge all around them swam and occasionally bubbled, and even clawed up the sides of the buildings, like hands trying to pull each structure down into the jet-black pool with them. But mostly the Onyx Fields were black and flat, with the occasional swirl of movement, as though suggesting some life beneath the surface.
They came to a row of jagged mountains, which LOG called the Shattered Mountains, and they looked to have been bombarded by some ancient giant’s rage. Huge cliffs and fjords led into black chasms of indeterminable depths. Two or three of the mountain peaks had been blasted open, ripped and raped, left in the form of a twisted mouth. Sound analysis picked up unholy sounds, like screams, which filled Moira’s cockpit and dripped off its walls. It was the keening wind passing through narrow canyons, or else the eldritch screams of a dead people crying up from the depths, bemoaning their fate. It was easy to become superstitious when looking at a world as eerily bleak as this. Easy to imagine inimical forces lying just beneath the surface of things.
Hugh ancient machines moved lugubriously over the land, plucking at this stone, overturning that piece of rubble, in a pitiful search for something. Their tentacles felt along the surface, weakly, like the motions of an animal that had not been fed, its metabolism failing.
Moira deployed probes. Half of them punched through the clouds, the rest of them landed on the planet’s surface to employ ground sonar and take soil samples. Sonar revealed the existence of vast cities buried beneath layers upon layers of dust, soot, and an as-yet-unknown oily substance. There were also networks of subterranean tunnels, some of them surprisingly intact, indicating they might be relatively recent. No movement or heat signatures were detected. If the civilization had moved underground to escape fallout, Moira couldn’t see them.
Soil samples showed evidence of the fallout, the coloration and composition revealing a possible mix of fusion-fission explosions. Probes in higher atmosphere found clear evidence of Xenon-129; another telltale sign of ancient nuclear destruction.
Many of the probes in high atmo flashed messages of technical difficulties. Of those probes that touched down on the ground, all of them soon disappeared without a trace.
“Let’s not land anywhere around here, Pritchard,” she said. “What do you say?”
The dog held a worrisome growl in its chest.
&nbs
p; They came upon a city that LOG dubbed the High City. It was composed of buildings blasted in half, or else mere shells, like the buildings they had seen in the Onyx Fields. There were a few huge mounds which had obviously been some great buildings, possibly temples, now little more than heaps. Surprisingly, there were still connecting tubes between some of the structures, which looked eerily like the elevated highways of Earth Cradle. From them hung long, tenebrous arms of sludgy moss, which waved in a nonexistent wind as Moira did a flyby.
Here and there, her sensors caught sight of ebon shapes flitting from the windows, but her computer could not lock onto them long enough to identify them as life.
There were statues and monuments in the High City, but time and neglect had eroded them to nondescript slabs of blackened stone, covered in ash or else dripping with sludge. Impossible to say what the statues were of. Some of them had protrusions that might have been arms, but could just as easily have been swords, or a part of some important symbol, or nothing at all.
Every so often, an arc of red lightning would flash across the sky, tearing through the clouds and splintering off into other sub-arcs. When this happened, it revealed the ugliness of the world in its totality. A rippling ammonia sea of despondency and emptiness, punctuated here and there by buildings, remnants of what had once been. It was a terrifying display of lifelessness from life, a promise of great works undone, of a chance at eternal stupendousness that had been ruined by a people’s inability to understand, communicate, cope, or predict.
Pritchard let out a low, mournful whine.