Zero Star

by Chad Huskins

  Later, they punched through a wall of chiton, destroyed a shield wall made of phosphor bright energy, and annihilated a horde of maggots. Heeten’s PBC boiled many of them alive, and as she did, Lyokh raised his sword in the air and roared. The others laughed at death. Bloodlust was upon them. Deathlust. One of his men ran screaming into battle, was impaled by the lance of a shapeshifter, and died laughing and firing his rifle into its face. It had been Eulekk, and from then on they shouted his name when charging into battle. Heeten even carried his corpse on her warhulk’s right shoulder, and flung his corpse around as both a shield and a weapon once her cannon’s battery was finally depleted.

  “Eulekk!” they cried, laughing and throwing themselves at the enemy like painted tribesmen from Earth Cradle. They used a mix of squad-based tactics and barbarism, forming tight lines at those moments they had learned were best, dispersing at those moments when they knew it would confound the enemy. “Eulekk!” Lyokh cried, and his people responded with thunder.

  “EULEKK!” they roared, a fugue of voices coming through as one, and grasping onto the name of a fallen brother as a rallying cry.

  They fought and rested, fought and rested, like that. Up and up they went, never down. They climbed, they broke through walls, they hacked at veins that were larger than ten men abreast. They trudged through bile and viscera that ran up to their knees, laughing, screaming for the wall, screaming for Eulekk, hacking, firing, strangling, always pushing upwards. Up, up, up. Never down.

  Soon, they stopped resting, just kept moving. They kept hydrated by injections from within their suits. No reason to stop. Just keep going, Lyokh thought between swings of the sword, between each step, between every breath.

  One of their group died from life-support failure—his oxygenator had been pierced during one of the skirmishes, and he hadn’t known until it was too late. He could not recycle his suit’s air and he could not breathe the putrid air of Kennit 184c, much less the toxic miasma that filled the bowels of this hive. He became hypoxic and died in violent convulsions, while the group’s medics looked on helplessly. He joined Eulekk on Heeten’s warhulk’s shoulder.

  No mourning. No slowing down. No sleep.

  They kept moving.

  Kill and climb, Lyokh thought, hefting his sword and rushing towards the next battle. Through halls of perforated steel coated with a fine mucus. Through hordes of spider-things, their limbs topped with patchwork bionics, and cannons that spat bolts of charged particles from their smoking barrels. Through a latticework of hardened resin that reinforced steel girders, forming a thick integument that only frags could get through. They moved, trampling the exoskeletons of their enemies beneath their feet.

  “The wall! Eulekk! The wall!”

  The PI map was completely outdated in some places, and Lyokh led his team, grunting and laughing and screaming, through labyrinthine passages where occasional holes opened on the ground. One of those holes swallowed two of his fellows.

  The remainder of their piecemeal company spread out in squad-line formation, pushing through the fog of emitted gases, wading through stinking quagmires and thick swamps of mucus. They communicated through hand signals, checking hallways by the book. Scuttling, leech-like creatures crawled harmlessly over them, and were swatted away easily.

  Then, after a full day of fighting and killing and dying, they finally emerged, blood-soaked and cackling, into a chamber of horrors many orders of magnitude greater than any they had yet seen. Fear and wariness dropped down on their camaraderie like a portcullis.

  Slathered in the viscera of friend and foe, Lyokh stepped forward, the ambassador for the group. A slab of flesh hung sizzling from his sword’s plasmetic edges. He gripped the weapon double-fisted as he approached the abomination in front of him. Lyokh lowered himself into a stance, and raised the sword in a testing gesture, the blue-glowing runes pulsing almost in time with his heart.

  On his visor, the sensor package was already highlighting all foes, prioritizing them according to their distance and his selection of weapon.

  “Release…her…now,” Lyokh panted, his lungs now straining with the effort of even simple speech.

  The husk of the Queen of Mothers hung in front of him, ten feet off the ground, amid a web of other human converts. They stood inside a massive spherical chamber, one adorned with dangling wires, from which hung the wet husks. Their faces mostly torn away, their bellies emptied of their guts and stuffed with gnarled wires that spread out from them, they stared vacantly at nothing. Each one was connected to neighboring husks by fleshy wires. It was all so random. A hose that came from one husk’s belly might feed into the mouth of another, and three husks might share one wire that passed through their brains and throbbed like a vein.

  Lyokh only recognized the Queen of Mothers by the tattoo, a house sigil, still noticeable on the wet tendrils of flesh dangling from her waist. She had just one eye left, the other had been seized, its socket infected by a tangle of silver-and-black wires and pulsating arteries. Her eye stared at them, lidless, a permanent look of terror written on what remained of her face.

  Hundreds of others adorned the spherical chamber, like ornaments strung together for decoration. Decoration without clear form or purpose or pattern.

  The Queen of Mothers, like all the others, was twitching, going through random spasms. The whole tangled web quivered like these people and their web of wires were nothing more than pieces to a larger organism.

  “Release her!” Heeten screamed from behind him. Her warhulk’s feet stomped forward menacingly.

  When the husks came at them, they moved as one mind, slithering on tentacles with such speed that they appeared to be like vid recordings with several frames per second missing. Erratic and convulsing, twisting and screaming at their own ruin, they came at Lyokh’s group.

  Lyokh raised his sword, and screamed, “Eulekk!”

  His people answered him.

  : Asteroid Monarch

  In his study, while awaiting the first of his colleagues to bend his ear, Kalder sat in his backless stone chair, staring at a pair of holopanes projected above a table carved out of rock. One of the panes showed PI’s latest updates on the Kennit campaign, and the other one was showing a documentary. Kennit didn’t look to be going so well. It was as he’d suspected, the Brood’s hive-cities were far too vast, too rooted, and too well-supplied. The odds of finding the Queen of Mothers were abysmal, it had been foolish to go off on such a doomed mission.

  We’ll be lucky to get half of Second Legion out of there alive, he thought. That concerned him, since the loss of an entire legion could decelerate his plans.

  Kalder glanced over at the other screen. The documentary showed the first stages of human space exploration. Currently, it was showing the first unmanned missions to the asteroid belt of Sol. Soon, it sped up, showing how the mining guilds had quickly formed, and corporations had spread across the asteroid belts, building repair depots.

  The vid illustrated the Expansion Era. Bases grew into cities, which spread across Ceres and Vesta, both of which established their own nations within four hundred years. Nickel-iron asteroids were gathered, superheated and melted to make gas bubble chambers, which were then cooled to make better living habitats. Then came the tiny farms, which were needed to make the asteroid belt self-sustaining. After 1,800 years, more than a dozen city-states had risen in the main belt alone.

  Now the documentary showed how all ships during this time were still using variations of standard rockets, using pycnodeuterium pellets for propulsion. Then came the A-drives, which warped spacetime and allowed faster-than-light travel. Now mankind was able to reach the Oort cloud, on the very fringes of the Sol System.

  For a while, human beings had spread across the Milky Way in search of other habitable planets—of the truly ready-to-go habitable worlds, called “eutopias,” only six were ever found, and only one of those had had any native life found on them.

  Then came the discovery that humanity hadn�
��t always been alone. There had been someone else—the Strangers. A flame of fascination had been kindled in humanity, which soon bloomed into an all-consuming obsession, resulting in more than a dozen separate religions, all of which held the common core belief: The Strangers were some kind of gods or architects, and had potentially created Man. There was no evidence for this at all, but then belief never required evidence.

  There were small, internecine wars that flared up here and there, most of them between corporation-states and the more informal governments of the Kuiper Belt, though quite a few civil wars had raged across worlds like Dayland and Forester. Out of this tumultuous past emerged the Skymich Empire, then the United Worlds, which soon became the Aligned Systems, and finally the Republic of Aligned Worlds.

  Now the documentary was revealing the centuries of rapid expansion, and how many ships and colonies had become lost due to distance. Back then, the fastest forms of communication had been either sending tightbeam transmissions, or sending a ship FTL through space to deliver the message in person. It wasn’t until QEC had been invented that humanity had the ability to communicate with every arm of itself throughout the galaxy. By that time, though, many millions of people had already been lost to the stars.

  Then came the Galaxy Keys. The height of human technology, they were wormhole generators. There had only ever been two of them. They permitted travel between galaxies, but the wormholes were unstable at times, making them dangerous.

  Still, for another three hundred years, humanity had continued to spread, into the Andromeda and Sombrero galaxies. At least, that was the legend. But one Galaxy Key, the one in the Centaur System, suffered critical failure, an explosion that generated a gamma-ray burst to rival a hypernova, and the resultant black hole was a permanent wound left in the Milky Way. Many attempts had been made to fix the Sagitarr Key, but the Brood now guarded all lanes leading to it. Some historians believed that two billion people had been trapped in the Sombrero Galaxy, probably never to return. Even more in the Andromeda Galaxy.

  And all this time, wars had been waged. Between the Sol and Grannet System. Between the Titus System and the Rembrandt System. Between the corporations of countless generations.

  When the Brood came, they were at first a curiosity as alluring as the Strangers. At last, proof that life was elsewhere, and that it was plentiful and large and complex! But the Brood made no attempt to communicate. They only swarmed and devoured. And now…

  “Now we’re spread all over hell,” Kalder said to himself presently.

  A knock at his door brought him out of his reverie.

  “Come in.”

  The iron door moaned on rusty hinges, and a frail, dark-skinned man stepped inside. Senator Kraf Cenagul was a man of advanced age—some said approaching seven hundred years—who had once been an obscenely wealthy man. His family had fallen on hard times lately. The Cenagulus were among the most senior Asteroid Mining Guild members, their money stretching back centuries, and once he’d inherited it, Kraf Cenagul had spent the bulk of it on life-extending measures. Regen meds and surgical procedures. But now, the very drugs necessary for the upkeep of synthetic replacements were in rare supply, so much so that the obscenely wealthy were finding their bodies fading. Cenagul, for instance, traveled with a telomere wash pack attached to his hip at all times, but the gene modifiers needed replacing. The old man’s skin and muscle cells were failing, withering. He rather looked like a willow slumped in the desert.

  “Cenagul,” said Kalder, rising slowly. It was the only gesture he still used for greeting, for Zeroists minimized everything. “So good to see you in my office again.”

  “Glad to see my own return,” Cenagul said, smiling with his lips, but not his eyes. He held out his hand for Kalder to shake, then seemed to remember that Zeroist’s refrained from physical contact, and slowly curled his fingers back in.

  Kalder waved him to a seat. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thank you,” said Cenagul, trying to hide his wince as he lowered himself into the proffered seat.

  “How are we today, my old friend?”

  “Better than you, I expect,” said Cenagul.

  Kalder nodded gamely as he took a seat across from one of his oldest adversaries. The remark could have been either innocent or biting, probably was biting, but it was the natural evolution of their longstanding rivalry. Cenagul had been on the Corporate Arm of the Senate for more than two centuries, and for almost that long Kalder had been standing across from him on the floor, rallying with his fellow Restorationists, inveighing against wasteful spending on new foundry worlds and almost anything else the Asteroid Mining Guild had tried to push through. Cenagul’s people were expansionists, and for much of his career Kalder had been trying to get expansion under control, refocusing resources on projects that might restore the Republic to its era of greatest democratic traditions.

  “You saw?” Kalder asked bluntly.

  “I was there,” Cenagul said just as bluntly. “And, if I may say so, it was you at your most feverish.” He smiled, and this time the smile did reach his eyes. Kalder offered only a measured nod of agreement. “Do you know, I think I will take something, after all,” Cenagul said.

  “Glass of spirits?”

  “Please.”

  Kalder got out of his seat and made his way over to his desk, made entirely out of compristeel salvaged from a wrecked dreadnought. He opened a drawer and took out the bottle of Old Staz’s Reserve. “I was surprised that neither you nor any member of the Corporate Arm voiced your opinions during today’s proceedings.”

  “We hardly saw the need, what with you doing our work for us.” Cenagul chortled. The man was certainly sure of himself and his party’s dominance. “No reason to fight the Restorers if they’re willing to let you rant all grandiloquent. Every time you speak you ring the death knell of the Restoration Arm.”

  Kalder poured a metal cup half full and handed it over to Cenagul with a companionable nod. “You may be right,” the Zeroist conceded. “It may be that my passion has been mistaken for fanaticism. I suppose it could not have been avoided.”

  “Wrong. It could have been completely avoided, had you not begun to slip. Had you not started down a path of isolation.”

  “Isolation?” Kalder asked, pouring himself a glass of water, freshly filtered from the community fountain.

  “You’re alone, Kalder. In more ways than one. You have been for a long time. You’ve been around for ages, some say you were even there at the start of the Republic, that you are centuries old, but I don’t buy into the theories of base proles.”

  Kalder said nothing, pacing over to his seat.

  “But if you were centuries old, I doubt you’ve ever been as alone in the Senate as you are now. Faith 6A shows just how out of touch you really are. Have you read it this week?”

  “I haven’t,” Kalder said. Faith 6A was the report that had been used for over a thousand years to measure public opinion. It was an index that tracked uncertainty, volatility, and public discourse through a combination of economists’ predictions, social media, and polls taken by the Census Bureau of each star system. The most accurate way of keeping track of many billions of people across dozens of worlds.

  “Faith 6A has the people turning towards the development of more foundry worlds, not less,” Cenagul said. “People want to build up the military, not have it retreat to Sol, for they foresee a need of protection. Nor do they want our military wasted on schemes from Kalder the Dreaded.” He chortled. “The tide is turning, my friend, and not in your favor.”

  “I see.” Kalder retook his seat and sat upright, enduring the discomfort of the imperfectly sculpted chair. “Well, I’m glad I called you here, old friend. To tell me these things, you see. I need to hear them.”

  “You called me?” Cenagul smiled and shook his head. “No, no, no. I called you, and you only dallied in responding so that you could make it appear as if you had summoned me.” He downed his drink, made a harsh face
at the bite of the spirits, then set the cup down on the side of Kalder’s desk. “You like to make everyone believe you’re above such games, Kalder. That you say what you mean and mean what you say, without any room for obscurity. But I know the truth. You’re just as likely to play games as anybody else in the Senate, you just like to clutch your Zeroism close, so that you can claim that you would never stoop so low, never, perish the thought. Try as you might, though, you cannot escape that cauldron of intrigue,” he said, gesturing at the door but indicating the Senate. Cenagul grinned. “And that just kills you, doesn’t it? Knowing that there’s no way to completely strip away the last vestiges of obfuscation.” He grinned wider.

  Kalder did not smile, he just pursed his lips as he found the notion food for thought. He drank his water in one gulp, and said, “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Fine. As long as you top me off?” He picked up his cup and wiggled it in the air.

  Kalder took it and refilled it. “So, when you extended your…invitation? What was it you wanted to discuss, exactly?”

  Cenagul snorted. “See? This is exactly what I’m talking about. Games. Don’t play coy with me, Kalder, you know damn well what I want to talk about.”

  “I can guess, Cenagul, but I assure you that I do not know for certain.”

  “The Anti-Expansionist Bill.”

  “You want me to amend it?”

  “I want you to kill it,” Cenagul said flatly, throwing his head back to down his drink.

  Kalder paused, looked at his old adversary, who was staring at him with supreme derision, like how a father might glare at his daughter’s unemployed suitor. Cenagul had lost all humor, false and otherwise. Kalder’s old enemy was good at many things—rallying Senate support for corporate interests, balancing his political and business life, scrounging what few life-extending meds were left on Monarch—but he lacked a mask. Under normal circumstances, Kalder would respect Cenagul for that. But Cenagul wasn’t without his mask because of any devotion to Zeroism. No, he was unable to maintain a mask because of his barely quenched ire, which he directed at all opposition. So, for a Zeroist, his open disdain was an attribute. But for a Corporatist? In the long run? Bad. Very bad.