by Chad Huskins
“Have your people tracked the World Serpent?” she asked conversationally, leaning her head on his shoulder. Not like lovers, for they were never that. Co-conspirators, to be sure, with a vague student-teacher relationship, and one that was relatively friendly.
“No,” he said. “It vanished with only a small trace of some quantum distortion, what our sensor specialists believe may be tachyonic condensation. The leading theory of Primacy Intelligence is that it escaped into bulk space, where only the Isoshi can track it. I and my Visquain tend to agree. But we’ll let the Isoshi keep that little secret for now, if they have it at all. Once they realize what power we have in the Weapon, we will have a greater bargaining chip, and they will gladly tell us whatever we want.”
“You have it all figured out, don’t you, Holace?” she sighed. “Just like they’re saying about you. A mastermind.”
Kalder hated that word. “I’m no mastermind,” he said. “Mine is only a mind that recognizes mastery in others. The warriors and the diplomats, the killers and the talkers, the disgraced and the noble. I’m able to bring those forces together, all the while in service to a greater cause.”
“Is that not mastery of its own kind?” asked the duchess. “To bring together so many disparate souls?”
“If you like,” he said.
She looked up at him, then at the stars. “It’s all coming together, isn’t it?”
“Not yet, my dear. But,” he added, thinking of Dwimer in the Eaton System, and the ghosts he knew lay there, “the Crusade continues, and the truest gift of the Strangers awaits us.”
: The Crab Nebula – Epilogue
“Demons…All demons…”
Lyokh listened to the recording for the dozenth time. He had been listening to all the files that Moira had collected on Dwimer over the years, and he had read the research she had compiled on the worlds that she had lined up for the Crusade’s itinerary.
He sat in the cockpit of the Series Seven, in a seat just behind the pilot. Moira was there, but she wasn’t flying. She had her daughter in her lap, and she was pointing at the map panes on the plasteel window, asking her daughter to tell her the difference between a planet and a moon. Judy was smart, and played well with an interactive game that taught very basic cosmology.
“Another stellarpath in the making?” Lyokh asked. He paused the Dwimer audio recording.
Moira gave her chair a quarter turn so she could look at him. She looked good as a mother. She wore it well. “If she wants to be. I just want her to get used to being out here. It still doesn’t come naturally to us, even after all this time.” She smiled and nodded towards the floor. “We don’t have the advantage of hundreds of years of specialized breeding.” Lyokh followed her gaze to the Vac Hound. Pritchard was resting at Lyokh’s feet, his nose propped up on his boot like a pillow.
“He likes you,” Moira said.
“We’ve gotten to know each other pretty well. And it’s nice to have someone to talk to,” he joked.
But Moira took the joke the wrong way. “We could’ve brought your friend along, there’s plenty of room—”
“Nah, Takirovanen’s a by-the-numbers kind of man, he needs to report in. I mean, he would’ve come with me if I asked, but he would’ve secretly hated not reporting back in for duty. And he doesn’t need to see this as badly as I do.” He shrugged. “Besides, I really do need the Knights to know I’m alive, even if it’s just Meiks and the others who know. Takirovanen promised he won’t tell Kalder or anyone else until I decide to return.”
Moira looked at her daughter, who was waving at phantoms only she could see. Judy was getting her first taste of interacting with imtech menus. “When we get there,” she said to Lyokh, “you’ll need to prepare yourself for…it. Just like we weren’t built like Vac Hounds were to understand the void better than terra firma, human minds weren’t created to be able to take in all of what you’re about to see.”
Lyokh nodded. “I’ve watched the vids. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And, like I told you, wherever it is you’re taking me, I think I’ve already been there. I just took the long, scenic route.”
“I hope you’re right, because the planet itself…and the things you’re going to see there…”
A chime sounded.
Moira looked at her control panel. “Speaking of which, we’re about an hour away. Want to help me run through the last systems checks before we dip back into normal space?”
“Can do,” he said, hopping out of his chair, much to Pritchard’s dismay. “At the very least, I should check on the circuitry bay, make sure we don’t have another short in the exhaust manifold.” Lyokh happened to catch Judy’s eye. She was smiling and waving at him, probably painting him with the brush and paint bucket setting on her lenses. He winked at her, and stepped into the short corridor leading to the operations room at the back.
In Lyokh’s periphery, it showed the ancient recording on pause. He blink-clicked the play button.
“Mannick says he’s hearing a voice down in Tunnel Three,” a strained voice said, “like a recording on repeat. Three’s got a collapsed portion, so we might have to do some digging…[static]…dead…[static]…all dead. They knew something…[static]…demons. All demons…”
The voice of a long-dead man haunted Lyokh more than he had been prepared for. It was the cadence and awed way in which he spoke. He waved his hand, turning off the recording. One mystery at a time.
WHEN THEY EMERGED from the FTL bubble, Lyokh sat in the chair just behind Moira. Pritchard had hopped up onto Moira’s lap, his eyes intent and unblinking as he looked forward into that scattered blue mess of light. It looked like an artist had spilled several droplets of blue paint into a bucket of his blackest mix. A sea of stars surrounded this still blue sculpture, which, according to a holopane Lyoky was looking at, spanned three light-years in almost all directions.
“I’m going to have to pump extra power into our plasma shield,” Moira said. After a few buttons were pressed and her hands waved the air like a magician, the power to all nonessential systems dimmed, and their plasma shield became so intense that the stars began to fade, as did the blue sculpture. “Intense radiation here. There’s a magnetar nearby.”
Lyokh had been traveling the stars long enough to know about the dangers of magnetars, which were neutron stars with an extremely powerful magnetic field. “That’ll upset navigation systems, won’t it?”
“It’ll do more than that if we get too close, but we’ll be skirting right past its outer limits on our way in.”
“Our way in where?” asked Lyokh.
“Where do you think?”
Pritchard growled at the supernova remnant as though warding off a dangerous intruder.
The shuttle began trembling like a puppy in freezing rain.
“Hang on,” she said. “We’re hitting heavy plerions.” She looked at him. “Pulsar winds. Not nearly as powerful as when it was a few million years ago, when it all blew up, but the shock wave is still being felt. The X-rays and gamma rays are so intense that this nebula is the strongest persistent source of them in the night sky on Earth Cradle.” She reached overhead, flipped a few switches. “We’re passing through it now.”
“Through what?”
“The Zero Star that the Mormons in the Vlodonsk System were talking about,” she said. “The aftermath of an explosion that brought about the World Serpent, or powered it, or gave birth to it.”
Lyokh watched as she nudged the controls, sped them up, corrected their course, then took them through a series of short microjumps. By the eighth such jump, Lyokh was starting to get a little nauseous, his guts fighting the inertial dampeners.
On the tenth jump, though, Lyokh nearly shot out of his seat. They had passed through the blue curtain and were now deep, deep inside the nebula. He saw a star, blue and distant, alone and coming to pieces. He recognized it. It might have looked like any other star to anyone else, but he recognized this one. “Blue Father,” he whispered.
Moira looked at him, but didn’t say anything about it. “Judy, could you do Mommy a favor and push the…good girl.” With a smile, Judy pushed a blinking yellow light.
She set their final jump, and brought them within visual range of an ochre-and-green planet, one surrounded by a vast ring, and three moons, one of them occulting the other from this angle. Blue Father was there, but White Mother was gone. And instantly, Lyokh knew what had happened. White Mother had been the supernova’s progenitor star, the one that exploded in the first place, releasing all the energy they had seen on the way in. But somehow, the planet had been shielded against that devastating explosion. Lyokh could tell by its stark greenery, visible even at a distance of half a million miles.
“Only Blue Father remains,” Lyokh said, shaking his head in disbelief. He had seen the birth of this system, had witnessed it with agonizing slowness, but had (thankfully) forgotten most of it, or else his mind might have melted from the sheer timescale. “This must be where it all started.”
“You want to explain that?” said Moira, adjusting their yaw ever so slightly.
“I think the Strangers came through here,” he said. “I think they saw the wyrms and thought they had potential. Not potential to be ridden, like how we use them, though I’m sure that wasn’t lost on them. No, they saw them as a people. Because they were.”
He nodded.
“The Strangers came first, before anyone else. They discovered the wyrms and altered them. Some of them made it to other worlds, probably suffered societal collapse like us, lots of lost colonies like Taka-Renault, and probably a few of them ending up in regressive spirals, like the vorta.” He shook his head, laughing bitterly. “All this time, the wyrms we’ve been dealing with are the vorta of the wyrm species.” As he said it, he became more sure of it. “It all started here. I saw it. It started right here.”
Moira glanced over her shoulder at him. “That doesn’t match what Kalder said. He said the Strangers don’t even exist yet, that they built the Watchtowers using tachyonic antitelephones.”
“Maybe it’s both,” Lyokh said. “Maybe they straddle time like our bridges straddle a river. We drive back and forth, from one side to the other.” He snorted. “Hell, maybe they’re not even from this dimension. They could be from someplace else, where time has no meaning. Who knows?”
“But why are they concerned with helping us? I mean, that’s what the Watchtower was for, right? It came alive just to protect us.”
“Seems like it. If I had to guess, we’re not the first to question all of this.”
“The Worshippers?”
Lyokh nodded. “Them. Also the Isoshi, the Faedyans, probably the wyrms themselves, if they ever reached such an intellectual height.”
Moira gave him a most serious look. “Oh, they reached an intellectual height, all right.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “You mean they all survived? They’re still down there?”
“They’re still down there.”
“You’ve been to the surface?” Lyokh asked, incredulous.
“We both have!” Judy exclaimed suddenly.
Lyokh looked at the little girl. “What’s down there?”
Judy bared her teeth, and made claws with her hands. “Monsters! Grrrrrrrrr!”
THEY PASSED BY the largest of the moons, around which Lyokh stared, slack-jawed, at monuments far larger than any space station made by Man. They were all of similar shape, like spiral staircases, some of them built like double helixes, with elongated claws reaching out into the void, where massive serpents swam up and docked.
Docking. Like starships.
Castles in the void, some of these spiraling space stations appeared as bones and steel merged as one, with beautiful ram’s-head curls of scaly skin and pulsating lights, and were connected by tubes half a mile wide and transparent. Lyokh could see steady streams of the wyrms flying inside of them, and each tube’s wall was lined with varicose vein-like cords. The network of void castles was in geosynchronous orbit, and spanned almost the length of the planet’s rings. Exhaust ports occasionally vented white gases from each end of the void castles, and long claw-tipped tentacles moved rocks from the asteroid field and brought them into orbit around the castles, perhaps for later mining.
“What in the name of…?” Lyokh breathed.
He stood up, and held onto the overhead control panels as they descended into atmosphere. For thirty seconds the front viewport filled with fire, then cleared. The Series Seven passed through as smoothly as a hot knife through butter, then rocketed through a bundle of cumulonimbus clouds, and glided over a sky polluted with wyrms.
“Jesus.”
Giant mounds, obviously forged by intelligent minds, littered the ground and formed vast stretches of industry, but not by any human, Brood, or other xeno standard. The type of industry he saw here looked like bee hives, honeycombs of cities without roads, without trails of any kind, only gigantic portholes for the wyrms to come and go. There were hundreds of antenna-like protrusions on all sides, each one flashing iridescently, and some of them tipped by statues in the shape of wyrm talons.
What is it you think you’ll see out there? his father had asked, smiling derisively, utterly certain that Lyokh would find no wonders greater than Christ.
The skies were filled with more castles, though none so large as those hovering above the planet. Lyokh saw red anguises, blue vipera with wingspans of three hundred feet, and fully mature greatwyrms whose long, muscular bodies glowed with internal light and threaded through honeycomb fortresses in the sky.
Lyokh whispered, “What the hell have you found? Is…is this…is it really…?”
“Ympherae,” Moira said.
He tried to ask more questions, but he couldn’t find the words. He started laughing to himself, and crying. It was like coming home again. He’d seen the world in its infancy, and seen it develop and evolve, but he had not seen it mature. The sheer monument of their progress was beyond words. At least, beyond Lyokh’s ability to enunciate.
Suddenly, a large eye appeared on the right side of the window. If Lyokh wasn’t so breathless from all he’d seen, he might’ve gasped at it.
“Monster!” Judy said, gleefully pointing. “Grrrrrrrr!”
The large eye, easily as big as Lyokh was, belonged to a greatwyrm. It was flying alongside them, peeking in. Its lidless eye burned with the inner fire of a galaxy, and did not move. Lyokh had only seen a handful of Greatwyrm-class dragonships in his lifetime, and had seen Nuerthanc and Nyphere, the greatwyrms that flew with Ecclesiastes and Vaultimyr, only from afar. He had never felt so fixed by any wyrm, never been so sure that he was being truly seen as anything besides a master-human. But this greatwyrm…it saw him, and no doubt.
Before he could approach the window to try and communicate, the eye pulled away, revealing the rest of the greatwyrm’s jagged head. The thing banked away slowly, and climbed higher to a perch jutting out from a sky castle.
Moira took them over mountains, over a volcano whose smoldering caldera was ringed by cities of more honeycomb structures. He saw a hatchery, a collection of eggs planted in the rock near pools of lava. Lyokh had never seen hatcheries with his own eyes; the ones the Tamers used were usually in laboratories on ships, planets, and asteroids scattered throughout the Republic. Homo Sapiens Eternaes, now.
Moira found a platform atop a ridge of mountains, one that was quite alone and without any sort of castle or spiral structure that the planet’s inhabitants seemed to favor.
“They left this here for me,” said Moira. “At least I think so.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lyokh.
“I’ve been back here a few times. They seem not to be afraid, and on the whole they aren’t very curious about humans. You see how all but the one has ignored us so far.” Moira nodded towards the platform. “When I first came here, I wanted to check out these mountains because of a Worshipper temple I spotted, but I had trouble landing on the slopes. Next t
ime I came back was a month later, and there was this platform. Like they were being accommodating. There’s no other platform like it anywhere else on the planet, as far as I can tell.”
“You’d think they would be suspicious of us, having never seen a human.”
Moira smiled as she began their landing cycle. “What makes you think they never saw one before?”
Lyokh looked at her. “If any humans had met them, they would’ve come back and told the whole galaxy.”
“They did. They tried. A man named Thulm came to speak with Kalder when I was on Monarch. He couldn’t get to the old man, so he sent me to Kalder with a message.” She played delicately with the controls as the Series Seven circled the platform for landing. She pointed out the window. “There he is now.”
Lyokh leaned over her shoulder, and just barely made out the man in the red robes walking across the platform. Once the shuttle landed, he came closer. He was bald, his face heavily tattooed. Pritchard was barking and wagging his tail excitedly at the man, like he knew him well. Judy pointed and said, “It’s Thumb, Mommy!”
“Thulm, sweetheart,” Moira said, going through the post-landing rituals. Once she was done, she looked at her daughter and the dog. “You two stay here.”
Lyokh followed her to the cargo ramp, which descended onto a cold, mostly frozen platform of some black alloy. He stood at he foot of the ramp, watching the robed man walk over, arms folded in front of him, hands disappearing into wide sleeves. He produced one of those hands, though, as he approached Lyokh, who took it with suspicion.
“Sir Captain Aejon Lyokh,” the man said, his breath coming out in a white cloud. “I am Thulm, and it is my great honor to meet you finally. We have been following your career for a few years now, ever since that business at Phanes. Bloody work, but an excellent job. Another great campaign at Taka-Renault. Simply amazing. It is for this reason d’Arhagen chose you.”