by Matt Forbeck
The director acknowledged him with a nod.
“What does it look like from the inside?”
“Well, if you can wait just a few more minutes, you’re going to find out.” Barton flashed a welcoming smile. “I could try to prepare you for it, but there’s really no good way to do that. I’ve attempted that a number of times with previous arrivals, but . . . I just can’t seem to do it justice. How about I let Onyx speak for itself?”
A light flashed to the right of the director, and he glanced at an image on a panel in front of him. “Talk about timing. If you all would care to watch, I’ll leave the cabin’s hull depolarized so you can take in your first view of this world in all its glory.”
Every head in the cabin lifted to gaze through the starship’s transparent roof. The lights inside the ship dimmed almost to blackness, which made Molly uneasy at first. It almost seemed that suddenly nothing at all protected them from the vastness of space, other than maybe the faith that the ship’s hull would hold. How close are we to Onyx? Have we already passed into the sphere itself? She could no longer see the stars behind them, which had to mean they were almost there.
Directly ahead of the Milwaukee, a faint blue glow appeared, and it grew both in size and brightness at an increasing pace as the ship approached it.
“To those who have seen similar Forerunner technology in the past, that may look like a force field growing within the Dyson sphere’s shell, but it’s actually the shield world’s physical doors over the access point,” Barton said. “The blue color you see there is a hard light barrier that shrouds the entire entrance, imperceptible until you are at this range. Once you get a bit closer, automated security systems will disengage, and you can move through it unhindered.”
As confident as the director sounded of that, Molly wasn’t quite as certain. It was one-hundred-thousand-year-old alien technology. How can he be so certain? As they drew nearer to the brightening swath of blue light, she found herself gripping Yong’s hand so hard he squawked in mock pain just to make her ease up. The wall of energy towered upward like an impossibly large gate until they were so close that Molly could not see anything else. The scale was bewildering and took her breath away.
Just as it seemed that the hard light barrier might swallow the entire ship, it suddenly faded out of existence. A moment later, complete darkness once again enveloped the Milwaukee, as though the energy shield had never even existed.
“And so, you’re in,” Barton announced. “As you might imagine, a structure as large as Onyx has a rather thick skin. However, you’re traveling fast enough that you should be through it in a matter of seconds. We’ve worked closely with Onyx’s native Huragok population to ensure that everything we do here is by their existing protocol and entirely safe. Keeping Onyx secure from outside threats is the highest possible priority.”
“Huragok?” Molly asked, unaware that it was out loud. Yong responded only by putting his finger over his mouth and smiling. Apparently, Molly would have to find out exactly what that was later.
Molly noticed that Barton hadn’t mentioned how many seconds it might take, and she found herself fighting the urge to count every single one of them. It was extremely difficult to tell what the interior of the sphere’s skin looked like, but buried in the thick darkness Molly thought she could see lattices and spires, vast trusses and gantries that crisscrossed like an endless web—or perhaps her eyes were only tricking her and it was completely empty. As their ship sailed through the blackness, another blue hard light barrier appeared before them, and this one grew even faster than the last.
As the Milwaukee approached the second field, it too disappeared, revealing a massive square of light so bright that initially it hurt Molly to look directly at it. The blinding square grew larger and larger until it occupied every centimeter outside the vessel. She had to raise her hand to protect her eyes, but a moment later, the ship was through. Everything began to slowly come into focus under the sudden, brilliant midday sun that broke through the carrier’s transparent hull.
“You’re now officially inside Onyx,” Barton said. A smattering of applause sounded throughout the cabin. “From here, Milwaukee could just head directly for the spaceport, but I’ve asked the captain to take the opportunity to rise up a bit higher so we can show you a small fraction of the place where you’re going to be living.”
Molly craned her neck backward to see the massive aperture fade away behind them, as though they had risen from the unseen depths of the world. A few large structures climbed upward on all sides, surrounding the enormous hole in the ground that they had come through. From this angle, she could tell that the ship was rising out of the ground much swifter than it had initially appeared to be. The Milwaukee ascended, and the towers quickly fell back behind the carrier, rapidly shrinking as the ship gunned by them.
“The thing about standing on the surface of Onyx is that it immediately appears to be flat,” Barton said. “Just like if you stood on Earth or any other habitable planet. While Onyx curves upward at the horizons—which is the opposite of what you would expect, of course—the distances involved are so great that you can’t actually detect this from any point on the surface. Not without specialized equipment at least.
“To fully appreciate that, you’d actually have to go much higher. In fact, you would have to leave behind the atmosphere that lines the interior surface of Onyx. Even then, it would still require long-range imaging systems to capture just how large this structure is.”
As Barton spoke, the sky around the ship began to fade, this time from blue to black. Molly assumed there would soon be nothing around them but utter darkness once again, with the exception of Onyx’s sun, which stared down at her from the direction of the Milwaukee’s nose.
“There aren’t any other stars inside here,” Molly said, somewhat stunned by the seeming emptiness of the space inside Onyx. That this world was entirely artificial . . . the very concept was almost unbelievable.
“Of course not,” Yong said. “Except for the sphere’s sun, that is. All the other stars are outside this place.”
Barton interrupted the crowd’s sustained awe. “If you look off to the starboard side, you’ll see Mackintosh looming out there, which is Zeta Doradus III, the closest of the three planets that now orbit Onyx’s stellar core. It’s at the point in its stellar orbit where it gets impressively close to the inner surface of the sphere and our research facilities directly below. According to our understanding of its path, this phenomenon can only happen once every few thousand years, so”—he grinned—“you’re welcome.”
As the Milwaukee rose higher above the surface, the entire vessel canted slightly back, probably both to block the brightness of the sun, which was dead ahead, and to give those in the cabin a better idea of the land spreading out below. The effect was disorienting: they were looking through the transparent ceiling of the ship at the ground they’d soon be walking on and calling home . . . but it was now absurdly far above them.
The ship continued to rise farther from the surface, cresting upward like a whale launching out of the water, and the breadth of the terrain below seemed to grow faster than any eye could follow. Soon the surface of Onyx consumed half the sky, the face of the world coming into full view. Not too long after that, with the top of the ship now facing downward, all they could see was Onyx’s surface sprawling out in all directions, seemingly infinite.
Molly’s mind struggled to make sense of it all. It was simply too big, too majestic, incomprehensible—it felt like something humans were never intended to process. Unable to absorb the immenseness of it all, she tried to focus her attention on smaller, more digestible things.
Through scattered clouds, Molly could see vast landmasses sprawling out far below the Milwaukee. Some of them featured rivers and lakes, while others included bodies of water so large she could only think of them as oceans. In other areas, there seemed to be no land or water at all, nothing but an unremitting darkness. Maybe these are pla
ces the Forerunners hadn’t quite gotten around to finishing? There was no way to tell, not from that distance, and Molly had no clue what it should look like outside of the little she had already seen.
Strangely, it appeared to be nighttime on some parts of the sphere, while others basked in full daylight. One or two areas seemed to be in transition, bathed in a golden twilight. Molly knew there had to be some rhyme or reason to it all, but she couldn’t parse it. Perhaps it’s a shadow cast from Mackintosh or by some machine in the upper atmosphere that simulates quasi-normal daily cycles? Much as she hated to admit it, some things were just beyond her, a sentiment she was confident many of the people on the flight shared with her. All of this was more than she could have ever been prepared for.
For the first time, Molly could see what had drawn her Newparents to this place—as well as anyone else on the transport, and all of those who’d come to Onyx before them. As she’d been told over and over, these researchers could literally spend their entire lives trying to explore Onyx and only scratch the surface. There was nothing else this vast or immense in all of human space.
Molly thought back to the worlds she’d lived on: Paris IV and Earth. Even though she had spent her entire life on those two planets, she knew so little about them beyond the cities and the streets she’d explored. She’d seen just fractions of these planets, even though she’d called them home. Places such as those felt insignificant next to the unimaginable scale that now spread out before her.
Onyx was the equivalent to half a billion of those worlds. That was more habitable living space than humanity had ever discovered anywhere—no, everywhere else combined.
Molly had never felt so small.
Asha reached over and squeezed Molly’s hand just when she needed it the most. That tiny bit of human contact brought Molly’s mind spiraling back down into her seat, and she gave Asha’s hand a grateful embrace right back.
Then Molly smiled.
Coming to Onyx was suddenly no longer just about potentially her meeting Spartans or even grinding through her last couple of years with the Newparents. Instead, she found her heart filling with excitement for everything this amazing world might offer.
Onyx would be an adventure. She knew that for sure now.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
* * *
Compared to any of the homes Molly had lived in before, her new house was at least four times as large. Most of the military-style buildings in Trevelyan—the ONI settlement that had grown up around the main entrance into Onyx—looked as though they had been slapped together in a single day by immense automated machines. They were those typical pale green prefabricated structures that the UNSC manufactured en masse. Molly assumed that they were easy to build and maintain over long periods, accomplishing what they needed to, but no one except perhaps a Spartan could ever have called them home.
Molly’s house, in contrast, had the architecture of a twenty-fourth-century colonial dwelling, at the dawn of the Domus Diaspora—when humanity began leaving the Sol system and its interplanetary colonies. The house had been built out of the same kind of material as most of the quarters in nearby Trevelyan, but instead of pale green, here the structures were mostly white with blue trim. They also sat on lush green lawns that lined freshly paved black streets.
Molly’s part of the city had probably been an open field before the UNSC arrived and began building what appeared to be a typical human subdivision on a completely artificial, alien world. The area humanity occupied sat on the outskirts of a Forerunner city that had apparently once been called the Citadel. Intriguingly, some people actually lived and worked in the Citadel, using the existing structures that had been an empty ghost town when the first human explorers had arrived here years ago.
Despite the handful who braved living in the place they were researching, most of those who had come to Onyx only worked in the Forerunner sites and then came back out to the human city to live. The UNSC had gone to great lengths to make this portion of the Citadel’s outskirts seem like an idyllic town in a nostalgic view of Earth’s past. That approach contrasted sharply with the ancient city, but it helped remind everyone of the awe and respect they should have as they worked to unlock Forerunner secrets. The name for this unlikely merging of human settlements with impressively tranquil, physics-defying Forerunner structures was Paxopolis.
According to Asha, that meant “city of peace.”
With all of the paradigm shattering Molly had experienced on arrival at Onyx—and her finally seeing the majesty of this installation firsthand—she desperately needed to take a step back and explore something normal and familiar. She decided to survey her new home.
Their family had three bedrooms on the upper floor. Asha and Yong had their own master suite, complete with an attached bathroom. Molly’s room was possibly twice the size of her room in Aranuka, but she wasn’t entirely certain if she liked that yet. On the first floor was a dining room, a kitchen, and a massive living room that took up the entire front side of the house. It all sat on top of a basement with plenty of storage space. To Molly’s surprise, the basement was built out of reinforced permacrete that was at least a meter thick and seemed to serve as a safety shelter too.
For some reason, that thought gave Molly a tinge of nervousness.
Their nearest neighbors on either side were at least ten meters away. While people lived across the street, her backyard let out onto a rolling field of grass that tumbled away into a pleasant forest in the distance. Molly wasn’t quite sure she wanted to explore any of that space yet. Her neighborhood and the surrounding terrain seemed so big and daunting, part of her immediately wished that more people would come so that there would be less open space everywhere. After living in Aranuka for years, the scale of even this small community was overwhelming.
To complicate things further, Molly had no idea what local wildlife coexisted with the community. This was an alien world with alien ecosystems—probably billions of them—so fauna of various kinds was certainly guaranteed, and even threatening predators seemed likely. Before Molly boarded the tram that took her to her family’s street, she overheard a conversation between two men about something large and mean, but she couldn’t be sure exactly what they meant. What little she’d gleaned made her think that even Paxopolis wasn’t entirely safe.
What catalyzed her uneasiness was that they hadn’t yet met anyone outside of the people at the spaceport and those who’d joined them on the ride out to Paxopolis. Even then, talk had been brief and fuddled, as most people were still recovering from the trip to Onyx. Now that she was in her new home, though, Molly began to feel lonely. She wondered if this place, despite all of the promise it held, would be worse than Aranuka.
Then a chime sounded.
Someone was at the door.
Molly could hear her Newparents stop unpacking and move toward the main living space to respond, but Molly was the closest, so she just answered it.
Three people stood on the front porch.
At least one of them was a Spartan. The man didn’t have armor on, but it was clear just from the size of him—he towered over everyone else—and from his confident mien. Though young, he bore in his eyes the look of an experienced hunter.
All three of them stood like soldiers though. The Spartan stood well over two meters tall, with broad shoulders and short black hair. He gave Molly an easy smile that told her she was safe.
The woman who stood next to the Spartan was slightly shorter than Molly. She looked strong and had shoulder-length dark hair and bright blue eyes. She seemed to be in her midtwenties, roughly the same age as the Spartan, and had a gritty concreteness about her. She seemed as if she could tear someone apart with her bare hands.
The man who stood in front of the other two was much older and entirely bald. He could have been their grandfather, although there was nothing soft or inviting about him. Although he wasn’t wearing a uniform, he was clearly UNSC to the core. The man stood at parade rest as
if he were ready to snap his heels together and salute at a moment’s notice. Despite his rough veneer, though, Molly thought she saw something elusively kind about him too.
“Hello,” the older man said in a gruff voice that completely matched his look. “I’m Director Franklin Mendez, and I manage the infrastructure and security of this research community and the facilities that exist in this part of Onyx. You must be Molly Patel.”
Molly could only nod. How do they know my name?
Director Mendez gave her a warm smile. “These are two of my finest people.” He gestured to the other man. “This is Spartan Tom-B292.”
“You can just call me Tom,” the Spartan added with a thin smile. “No need for such formalities out here.”
Mendez turned to the woman. “And this is Spartan Lucy-B091.”
Molly was dumbstruck and remained silent. Her first day here and she had already seen two Spartans. But when she looked again at Lucy-B091, she was even more shocked. Molly couldn’t believe someone so small and compact could be part of what she had envisioned as Spartans, yet here she was. Lucy gave Molly a gentle nod of acknowledgment, but she was still speechless and could only blush.
“Are your parents around?” the director asked.
Molly nodded again, still silent, but didn’t move.
He smiled. “Can you tell them we’re here?”
“I’m so sorry,” Molly finally said. “Yes, please, come in.”
She stepped back from the door and turned to call for Asha and Yong, but they were already there.
“Oh, hello!” Asha said with a fragile smile, slightly mortified by the state of the house. “Sorry. We’re still pulling things out of boxes.”
The adults all shook hands and introduced themselves to one another. “I hope you’re settling in well,” Director Mendez said. “If you find you need anything here that is missing, don’t hesitate to put in a requisition for it. We have large stocks of just about everything, and we can place orders for anything unusual to be brought in on the next transport.”