by Kyte, Adrian
He did question the offensive capability of his ship. All he received was a list of technical data, which didn’t mean much, but knowing anyway there was no chance of protection against the Kintra onslaught once they identified this vessel.
‘Take me down to the planet,’ he ordered. ‘Maximum speed.’
He expected the ship to warn him of the dangers but instead it simply tilted towards the planet and surged forward. As a ship for biologicals it provided protection from the huge gee-force by some form of counter-inertia. And surely their swiftness meant if not avoiding detection then at least the Kintra had not bothered to target such a puny vessel.
Within the atmosphere the computer asked him for further instructions.
‘Locate any high intensity EM field, and especially any gravitational warping.’
Keep battling away, he thought. Don’t even plan beyond today, don’t consider the aftermath.
Of course, he knew for the Elusivers it was all about protecting the one site, though surely hidden deep underground.
Inevitably there were false positives, just ordinary power generators. It was not that the Elusivers were wasteful; they took most of their power from the planet’s magma and the rest from solar, but now that power generation was being employed to shield the planet from high energy attacks. Torbin couldn’t help but take a certain pleasure from seeing a species he once regarded as god-like now under siege. Maybe there were even yet more powerful entities, doing what what the B’tari once did: remaining in the shadows, watching it all play out. But he suspected it was only the B’tari, retreated as they had been so adept at doing, glad to become an irrelevance in the eyes of these titans. Not that being an irrelevance had served humans well, he reflected.
Torbin now, though, remembered something of his association with the Elusivers all those years back, had a sense of their mindset, knew they would not allow themselves to be drawn into such attrition, despite appearances. Any prospect of their losing and they would expedite the plan, whether it was ready or not.
Then something large and complex in form loomed above the planet. First his ship’s sensors alerted him to it, showing its heptagonal shape within the floating status graphics that followed his gaze wherever he looked, before the thing itself – more like a cross between a spider’s web and a snowflake – passed overhead.
The Elusiver outpost. He tried to imagine how many B’tari could still be alive within. Or, if any, what type of beings had they been turned into?
They were lost, he concluded.
The complex was heading towards the surface. It made sense. The Elusivers had hesitated when they saw their own base, just long enough for it to pass within the atmosphere where a high yield missile could not safely be detonated.
Yet Elusiver craft gathered round the humongous complex, like insects around a dying animal. The shots they fired seemed to have no discernible effect; it continued its descent. Surely it would simply be destroyed on impact with the surface, he thought. But of course, he now realized, that didn’t matter. On zooming in – where the insect-like ships became powerful, multi-nascelled battleships taking large chunks out of the station – he saw them escape. Silver spiders, many of them shot to pieces by the fast reacting Elusiver weapons. But there were several hundred if not thousands of these arachnids. Many may have been disguised as service drones, or at least causing the mass hallucination. And maybe more had hitched a lift as if in some Trojan horse.
Hundreds escaped, only a few needed to get through. He ordered his ship to track them. They would not waste their time trying to kill Elusivers; there could only be one place to seek out. In spite of every measure the Elusivers took to hide their final solution, Torbin knew the Kintra would find that place. And so he followed the swarm, just near enough to keep them in sight, and watched as smaller Elusiver craft picked off perhaps hundreds. When he noticed the spiders hadn’t even bothered to retaliate, he ordered the ship to get closer to the swarm.
They headed into a woodland of sequoia-like trees, blasting them with a weapon that didn’t appear in any visible spectrum into no more than pulp. Then, seemingly without hesitation the spiders dove into the ground as if the surface was merely a reflection on a lake. He ordered the ship to get yet closer; the AI warned him against it, told of how the spiders were producing enormous amounts of energy. Each, as it was about to plunge into the surface, created a distortion effect that simply obliterated anything before it. Eventually enough soil was displaced for the remainder to follow more swiftly, flowing in perfect sync like part of a single organism.
Where were the Elusivers in all this? Nowhere to be seen. Perhaps the danger here was genuine.
Still, Torbin ordered the ship to follow them.
‘I am hereby relinquishing protocol 84b,’ it informed him. ‘Thereby responsibility for passenger safety protection is no longer a priority.’
‘Fine. Then call me captain. And follow those spiders.’
They headed through what had become a tunnel; completely dark save for the wireframe image. This seemed like a very long tunnel.
Torbin jumped out of his seat when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked round. Those obsidian eyes, the spindly form leaning sideways to study him the human interloper.
‘Did you come here to die?’ the creature asked.
Torbin considered the question after wondering how an Elusiver could have boarded his ship. No, of course, their ship. Torbin shook his head. ‘Not today,’ he said, a slight tremulousness in his voice. ‘I came here to help. I came here because I am responsible … at least in part.’
‘And what do you think you can do?’
‘I can stop them.’
The Elusiver recoiled ever so slightly. ‘Torbin Lyndau: human, arrogant, an inflated sense of importance.’
‘Thanks for the compliments.’
‘Many, not least ourselves, bear responsibility from the Kintra ascendency.’
‘I have been amongst them.’ Torbin gathered up the words in his head to explain how he’d been a spy in their midst; not really believing he had learned more than had the Elusivers.
‘Be warned,’ the elusiver said. ‘We will destroy this area rather than let the Kintra commandeer our technology.’
‘No, you mustn’t!’ he protested. ‘There’ll never be another chance to rebuild. You will lose this war.’
‘Presumptuous indeed.’
‘I will stop them. I know their weakness.’ Torbin was uncertain the elusiver bought those words but certain that if this area was destroyed, his life would not be spared.
‘You have fifteen minutes.’
The ship wasn’t telling him how far under the surface they were, its designer had surely never envisaged such a thing. After following them for over ten minutes at Mach 2, thermal readings were reaching critical. He was starting to the believe they were simply heading for a trap, to burn up near the core. Or maybe the Elusivers thought how cautious they were hiding their technology so far underground.
A few minutes later he caught up with the tail edge of the spiders, and reduced speed by two thirds. A faint light illuminated their chromium forms.
Slowing now, and the temperature was dropping. The light became an oblong, became a vast and brightly lit hanger. And there he saw them, circling around an obsidian cone as if studying some obscure conceptual art. His ship persisted with a warning not to land, perhaps realizing that was his intention, but nevertheless complied when he ordered it.
He found an EVA suit, exited the ship knowing he should consider how easily his life could be ended … or worse. So far, as he approached the cone, they had not even acknowledged his presence, somehow captivated by the cone. The words from the Elusiver rang in his head.
Arrogant, yes, he thought, to think I’d make a difference.
An odd dissonance of scale; he had in mind it was no larger than him, but now it seemed to loom over three times his height. More details on it emerged: smaller cones jutting out. None of the experim
ents his virtual clone version had a part in remotely resembled this. Had the Elusivers only taken an element of his and Roidon’s model and made something radically different? No, but it had to be something the Kintra could not immediately identify, given the knowledge they must already possess of an earlier attempt.
Then it suddenly occurred to him: the Kintra were not merely caught in stunned contemplation, they were in a temporal dilation field; extreme localized gravity pulling them in. Perhaps they were resisting being clamped onto the cone’s surface. Torbin stopped; how far away, he had no idea. The device now towered seven or eight times his height. He feared if he got in any closer he would at best be caught in the same time frame as the Kintra, at worst crushed to a pulp.
How could they have been so easily trapped like this? Could they not have scanned it from a safe distance? Perhaps they were merely expendable drones. Or they were sending data back to their mothership preparing to strike. Maybe it was better to die now in the hope (albeit a remote one) that he’d awaken as his younger self. What he still retained from the info update, his clone self and Roidon were never able to refine the calculations enough to ensure that even the earliest humans would remain. All they knew is, theoretically time could be erased to before the existence of the Kintra. Only a model that worked within another model – of Earth. Yet it seemed good enough for the Elusivers. And what was to say they would even keep to the design parameters?
Now the nascent sense he and his clone had been strung along for the purposes of creating a false reality; not that for a second he believed the Elusivers would sacrifice their own existence in the process. No, they had a plan to avoid it. And while he suspected there must be somewhere, a safe zone, then surely so did the Kintra.
The thought struck him like a tidal wave in a storm: sudden, encompassing, overwhelming. This entire planet was simply a trap, and the device no more than a bomb!
Torbin’s wrist PDU only registered the device’s EM and thermal emissions; the first nearly off the scale and the second hardly above zero C. It was also vibrating but at such a rate as to appear static, only visible in recording played back. As far as he could tell that complied with the experimental model, so if a concealment of a bomb then certainly an elaborately hidden one.
Well, the Kintra would take some convincing before they risked their fleet. If they were to neutralize the device then it seemed they hadn’t long; from what he remembered, it was now in a late stage mode. The surrounding Kintra, trapped in the temporal dilation, were useless.
He scanned for anything resembling a door – the slightest disruption in the seeming smoothness of the surrounding hanger. Nothing detected, so there was no alternative but to leave.
Then a light caught his eye. It was emanating from one of the surrounding Kintra: a packet of light travelling towards the device at no more than a metre a second, and slowing still as it got nearer, until its passage became almost imperceptible. It was captivating; a moment caught in time, like the object at an event horizon.
A voice he knew, but could not be real since she had long died. ‘Torbin, look at me.’
He kept focused on the light packet, just to see if it had made any progress. But still he couldn’t pretend she wasn’t there.
Finally he said, ‘Emelda, you can’t possibly be real. This is my mind subject to extreme conditions.’ Logic. Keep it rational, he thought.
Another voice from behind him. ‘Listen Torbin,’ said his erstwhile psychiatrist Raiya Fortenski. ‘You are becoming catatonic. You must leave this place.’
‘Must leave,’ he muttered, but couldn’t think why he had ever thought of leaving. He had to see what the light would do when it finally reached its destination.
‘Don’t sacrifice everything to the oblivion of non existence,’ said Raiya. ‘There is still so much to uncover.’
Uncover. She had meant within himself. She knew his mind better than anyone. There was never any pretence with her, no fronts to impress her with, just an open book for her to read; it was an intimacy he shared not even with Emelda.
‘Torbin.’ Emelda again. ‘There is a place of safety. I will guide you there.’
‘Listen to her, Torbin. She is the woman who loves you, who has a future with you.’
This made him angry, for it was clearly a lie. Raiya would never lie. He swivelled round to where the voices came, but there was no one there. The spell had been broken. He retreated back to the ship. It stuttered to reactivate as if it too were affected by the immense power of the device. Then at some ludicrously high gee took him back out to a scene not of war but of devastation. The remnants of ships scattered about the scorched earth, some still emitting smoke as if still fresh from a battle; occasionally a shard of metal fell from the dense grey sky. Torbin requested sound relay, but there was nothing beyond stirring air.
‘How much time has passed since I went below surface?’ he asked the ship.
‘Your question implies time from the perspective of this location, to which the answer: sixty-two hours.’
Subjectively it had been no more than two. If the war had ended – rather than some temporary quiescence for re-grouping – there must surely be a victor. Is there ever a war where the two sides simply blast each other to oblivion?
‘Check for life signs, max radius.’
‘Scanning. Heat signatures consistent with biolifeforms. Distance: thirty-five kilometres. East: twenty-nine. Below: six.’
‘That’s near the device. It has to be. They’re using it to shield them.’
‘Approximate location: seven hundred and eighty metres from TE device.’
‘Just take me there.’
* * *
82
The drilling had been the worst part. No more than ten metres of sea floor to reach through to the tunnel which housed data cables. The suit was telling Zoraina to conserve power by switching off the light; she couldn’t tell it she only really needed illumination to reassure her that she really was making progress and to banish what was otherwise the most profound darkness, the kind of darkness that eventually made you so desperate for something visual you begin to see forms that could not possibly be there. Her HUD display had even been deactivated for power conservation (for all the minute saving that made, but some AI’s could not be reasoned with).
The light at first dazzled, even though her suit kept it at safe levels. Zoraina was in a tunnel that illuminated in each section she entered, giving her the feeling that there was something monitoring her presence beyond some basic thermal sensor. And the message would go out: there’s an escapee. Maybe that was preferable to being left utterly undetected, or worse – forgotten. Worse still in a suit that constantly reminded her that its environment systems were unable to recharge adequately to sustain for more than an hour at her current level of activity.
Clearly she knew she’d not make it to any pod compound, there was none detected within scan range of twenty kilometres (the restricted limit in this bomb-proof tunnel). Walking felt like a pointless waste of power, so she stopped and studied the thick bundles of cable that must run for hundreds of kilometres. They connected up people across the globe in what was a perfectly simulated reality where in theory anyone could communicate. She wondered if it would be simpler just to group everyone in one area. But then … she decided to capture her thoughts, if only for posterity.
What they wanted was to preserve as much data as possible; destroying memory must, then, be an anathema. Memory is just another form of information to them, and it has always had an inherent benefit to the universe. Viewed that way, it’s funny how logical the Kintra seem compared to their arch enemy Elusivers. And yet forced to take sides I would choose the later unquestionably. Close file.>
Zoraina knew there had to be one and now she had found it, in fact almost tripping over the boxed off line running across the floor. An interface port at a junctioned off point along the cable. A simple lever hatch revealed a basic EM pulse relay panel; she was expecting something more arcane, unique to Kintra tech rather than a method used for centuries. Her PDU should have no problem talking to it, and it was possible for deeper full immersion, with the right equipment (which she didn’t have). But she hesitated. Was this just a bit too easy? A trap for any stray biologicals? No, the real reason, she had to admit, was her fear of what she might find within that realm, just how it might have degraded without any maintenance for so many years.