Antares Crucible

by Warwick Gibson

Unfortunately, there was great interest among the cells in the core of the galaxy about the new cell in the outer regions. The Plenium Council was likely to be swayed by pressure from them to see the new cell succeed.

  Kalken began to fear for her cell, for her clan, and for her as yet unborn child.

  CHAPTER 12

  ________________

  Finch and the Prometheus heads of department sat around the long, oval table in the boardroom at the top of the admin block in Prometheus. The overhead dome was displaying scenery from the Amazonian jungle, one of Cordez’ favorite backdrops, in honor of his presence. He was too busy these days to attend in person, but a hologram representation of him sat beside Finch, and he was ready to participate fully in the discussion.

  A 3D display of the Spiral Arm filled the air above the table, and every person in the room was looking at it with interest.

  “We’re refining our understanding of the sub space traffic in our part of the galaxy all the time,” said Matsu Fujimi, tapping commands into the processor under the display.

  “But the problem until recently,” he continued, “has been that we only have one site with receivers for ripples in the sub space field, the one here at Prometheus. I’ll bring up an example of the information we get from one receiver.”

  A tangle of short lines filled the space between the stars, like so many pieces of cotton. Each line was a message segment, but it was impossible to find out where it began or where it ended.

  “Now we’ve set up more sites – receivers on Alamos, Rok’H’Rok and Neerok – the situation is a lot clearer, but we still lose track of individual messages if they pass near the gravitational fields of anything larger than a moon, like this.”

  The four receiver sites showed up as blue dots, and the tangle of segments through the Spiral Arm became a mass of overlapping lines. Individual messages blinked in and out of existence between star systems or out to star ships in transit. There were concentrations of lines near certain sites – they all knew that Prometheus was the cause of one such concentration – but what was causing the others?

  “Then I thought of trying something new,” said Matsu, tapping in more commands. “Something that would allow us to track sub space messages through gravitational fields.

  “Meeaniro finally convinced me there was something not quite right about our version of string theory, so I tried a few applications of her interdimensional field studies.”

  All eyes turned to the diminutive Mersa, who wriggled uncomfortably in her seat. Matsu tapped in some more commands, then seemed to be having some difficulties. He swore, realized where he was, apologized, finished his corrections, and finally said with a flourish, “and that’s what we get!”

  All of the partial lines joined up, and the points of origin were now abundantly clear.

  “This is the sub space traffic for the last four days,” said Matsu, as layer after layer of lines built up, joining points of origin with points of destination. Many of the lines finished somewhere in space, presumably at a star ship in transit.

  But some places solidified to become central hubs for sub space traffic. Prometheus was one, and the Invardii armada around Uruk was another. Minor concentrations showed up around Alamos and the Sumerian colonies, who now used the sub space technology regularly. Equally present were the known sites of the Invardii shipyards.

  But there was one mega-site, a torrent of sub space traffic that connected to each of the Invardii sites and then off in a hundred well-beaten paths to sites in the Core.

  “What in the name of all the gods is that?” breathed Finch, craning forward. He was barely able to stop himself from reaching in and poking the nexus point in the 3D animation with his finger.

  “That, is the Invardii central city,” said Cordez’ hologram, equally on the edge of its seat. “It has to be. It’s what Celia discovered at the Rothii archive. One city per cell she said. It’s the only place they congregate in large numbers, apart from the flagship crews.

  “What did she say? The city could be for admin purposes, it could be for government, or it could also be a production center. Its ultimate purpose is still unknown to us.”

  He paused. “But she said it was always in something like a red giant, one of the cooler stars.”

  “This one’s inside something a little bigger than that,” said Matsu. “That nexus is inside Antares. It’s a red super giant in the Scorpius constellation. It has a mass 17.2 times that of our own sun, but a radius 800 times larger.”

  “That must give it a very low density,” said Carlos Paula, reaching for a digipad to do some calculations.

  “Less than one twenty millionth the density of our sun,” said Matsu, “which means Antares is very near the end of its life. Surface temperature, though, is still 3500 degrees Kelvin.”

  “And the Invardii have built a city inside it?” said Ursul Vangretti, in disbelief.

  “Inside the surface layers, I’d say,” continued Matsu. “It’s not that it’s so much hotter further in, but the turbulence away from the surface is going to be fierce. I’d want to build in the surface layers.”

  “Am I missing something here?” said Sallyanne in frustration. “I know I’m not a ‘hard science’ person, and I understand the Invardii use plasma technology at thousands of degrees, but they couldn’t exist as cylinders at that temperature, could they?”

  “Possibly,” said Matsu, “but that’s not the problem. Energy processes get too unstable at high temperatures. So, no, they would want their city to be ‘air conditioned’ to a more moderate temperature.”

  “Then where would they get the necessary coolness from?” persevered Sallyanne.

  “Heat can be shifted around,” cut in John MacEwart. He was used to dealing with scientific principles in common language. “It’s what allows us to take the heat out of refrigeration units and transfer it to the air outside.

  “The Invardii will do the same thing. They’ll create some sort of insulation around their city, then pump the heat they don’t want to the outside. So, they’ll drop the temperature inside the city by a few thousand degrees, and heat up the adjacent material of the sun by a few thousand degrees.

  “Actually,” he said, getting excited, “that’s going to promote solar activity on the surface above the city. If we look for an area of greater turbulence and intensified solar flares on the surface of Antares, we’ll be able to locate the city underneath!”

  “Good point,” said Cordez. “Finch, I want the Antares system mapped in detail, and I want it done from long-range. No point in tipping them off that we know where they are. Think you can do it?”

  “What else is in the Antares system?” said Finch, taking a closer look at the details in the 3D image.

  “Antares B,” said Matsu. “A companion star. It’s a hot blue sun in an almost 900 year orbit around Antares. There are no planets. The companion star has sucked in the material that may have formed planets around its super giant neighbor.”

  “We’ll see what we can do,” said Finch.

  Cordez’ hologram nodded.

  There was an air of excitement in the boardroom now, a strange exhilaration that affected everyone. At last, it seemed, they had all the information they needed. A name for their enemy, a place where that enemy lived, and an understanding of what the Invardii wartime capabilities were. Destroying the invaders suddenly looked feasible.

  “Well done, people. That’s a real breakthrough,” said Cordez, taking a moment to share the sense of achievement with them all. There was still so much to do, and the politics of getting the Alliance organized for war was going to give him a headache, but life was so much easier when you knew what you had to do.

  Every person in that room understood that they currently had no idea how to destroy a city inside a star, even a relatively cool star, but that didn’t matter. They would throw themselves into the task, day and night, until they knew how to do it.

  The Invardii were not expecting any such attack. To the
Invardii, the people of the Dark Ships didn’t have the technology to find out where the city was, or mount an attack on it. To think anything else was a sign of madness. If they had known Cordez named them arrogant and inflexible, they would not have understood what he meant.

  Somewhere above Uruk, Kalken-ar-wuyr was at the start of her working ‘day’. She downloaded reports from every Reaper ship in the armada, and set one of her subroutines to read them. The subroutine would let her higher functions know if anything needed to be attended to.

  The command center at the heart of the flagship was a perfect sphere, and hundreds of Invardii in their active state hung in zero gravity next to data stations. They gave the curved walls a blaze of orange like an inner skin of fire.

  In the middle of the command center five orange shapes hung together, wired into the matrix of functions that ran the huge flagship. Kalken had command of armaments and tactical, which gave her seniority.

  Twenty flagships had come from the galactic core to help the new cell at Uruk, but most had now returned to the cells they had come from. Individual cells were responsible for their own security, but deals could be struck – at a cost.

  It had been a strategic call on the part of the city mind to bargain for additional forces at Uruk, yet the collection of rock dweller ships had managed to evacuate most of the Sumerians off their planet before the flagships had arrived. The cells that had responded to the request could now make a call on Kalken’s cell, at any time, for an equivalent force to be sent to them.

  Such a call would drastically drain the reserves of the fledgling colony, and it might happen at a time they couldn’t afford to send their forces away. It was madness to have struck such a deal!

  Once again Kalken questioned the sanity of the city mind, and feared for herself and her soon to be born young. Yet the Invardii had never faced defeat, and even the thought of it paralyzed Kalken’s thought processes. Perhaps the same distress was making the city mind act so strangely.

  The flagship Kalken commanded had been in the galactic core strengthening political ties when the rest of the new colony’s flagships were destroyed at the battle for the Dark Ship world. Such political visits were constantly necessary among the suspicious Invardii. Another flagship had since been built by the new cell, but of the six that now hung above the Sumerian home world, four were due to return to their own cells in the core in the near future.

  More flagships were desperately needed to protect the new colony, but there wasn’t the time or resources needed to make them. The construction of the immense Invardii city inside the red giant sun, at the center of the new territory, took precedence over everything else.

  An urgent message came in from the city mind, and Kalken took it at her station. She was less able to concentrate on communications hooked into the flagship’s functions, but returning to the dormitory banks and her inert state was not an option at the moment.

  The message was a command to send a shadow copy of herself to the city mind when she next entered her cyber state. She noted the command in her time directory, and returned to monitoring the functions of the flagship.

  Part of her responsibilities included sub space monitoring of the armament levels of the Reaper ships in the cell. The subroutine she used recorded any drain in the Reaper ship reserves. When the reserves dropped to a certain level, Kalken planned for them to be renewed.

  A drop in the reserves of a large group of Reaper ships was drawn to her attention now, and Kalken guessed at once that it was due to the attack on the rock dweller accelerators on the ice planet. It appeared the attack was going according to plan.

  Then Kalken looked at the Reaper ship energy signatures, and found a number of them missing. Alarmed, she turned her attention to the action at the ice planet. As she watched, the Reaper ship signatures continued to blink out of existence, one after the other. Then the rate at which they were disappearing from her screens doubled.

  It couldn’t be a defect in the flagship receivers, or a temporary ripple in the sub space systems. The subroutine was losing energy signatures too quickly for that.

  Then Kalken made a dreadful connection. The rock dwellers must have a new weapon, and they had known about the attack the ice planet. It was an ambush. The precious Reaper ships of the new colony were being destroyed, one after the other, as she watched.

  The Dark Ships, thought Kalken savagely, it had to be them! The armada had failed to destroy the Dark Ship world, and now the Dark Ship savages had found some new way of fighting back against the Invardii.

  Then Kalken remembered her last few meetings with the city mind, and cold fear washed over her. All sub space communications were monitored by the city mind, and it would already have noticed the loss of energy signatures at the ice planet.

  The city mind was going to discuss ways to meet the threat from the people of the Dark Ships at their next meeting, and that could only mean releasing the Buccra!

  The new cell was struggling, she thought bitterly. With every event of the last few cycles it had found itself going backward. It was supposed to have been easy to establish themselves here. There was nothing but a few rock dweller civilizations in the area, nothing to give them any trouble.

  But it hadn’t turned out like that! And now the city mind was becoming more desperate, and more unstable. Once the Buccra were released, who would be able to put them back on their prison world?

  Kalken dreaded the end of her shift in the command center, and the beginning of her time in cyber space. Then she would have to visit the city mind – and discuss releasing the Buccra.

  HISTORIAN’S REPORT

  Life at Prometheus is vastly different to life on board Air Marshall Cagill’s command Javelin. For one thing I am not fixed in place on the back wall of the Air Marshall’s bridge. The mobile life support I used when attending social occasions on Earth rolls easily around the corridors of the research and production base.

  Everything here is new, replaced after the armada destroyed Prometheus as the Invardii ships were leaving the Solar System. That saddens me. Historians learn about their subjects from the many personal items that would have been scattered about the old base. Hopefully the traditions and social etiquette of the old base has survived the transition to the new.

  Above everything else, I find I am accepted here. People greet me everywhere I go, and the always inquisitive Mersa would have my life support in pieces, I am sure, if they could not see I am dependent on it. I had expected a return of my common name, ‘Herodotus the cripple’ – which I do not mind – but this has not been the case.

  Here I am ‘Herod the Great’, which as you can imagine surprised me. What had I ever done to be called ‘the Great’? Sallyanne, the social historian for alien cultures, eventually explained to me that the reference was to Herod Antipas, the governor of the Roman province in the time of Jesus Christ.

  That is very old history indeed, and factually incorrect. Herod the Great was Herod Antipas’ father, but I am used to such inaccuracies in everyday conversation. But it does illustrate something about the inhabitants of Prometheus. They are an intelligent bunch, and their minds are full of the most extraordinary information.

  Herod Antipas demanded miracles from Christ, and the people here imagine I am demanding a miracle from them as I write their efforts into history.

  On reflection I have to agree, although they are demanding a miracle from themselves. It will be a miracle indeed if they can find way to defeat such a vastly superior enemy.

  PART FOUR: THE INVARDII ALLY

  CHAPTER 13

  ________________

  The Buccra ambassador stepped out of the heavily-armored shuttle that had brought him to Kalken’s flagship. The shuttle alone, bristling with armaments, was capable of starting a small war. The ambassador looked around the docking bay with disdain. The immense size and power of an Invardii flagship did not impress him.

  The ambassador was surrounded by a million points of muted light, points tha
t shifted and stretched as he moved. His personal shield could withstand anything short of a nuclear attack.

  An honor guard of Invardii in their active phase formed up, and moved smartly with him to the bridge. He walked onto the bridge and snorted his displeasure, his bearing showing his contempt for this inferior fighting ship.

  His ultimate weapon, and he knew it, was the sub space trace that gave his exact location at all times. If he was harmed in any way, the Buccra warship that lay astern of Kalken’s flagship would empty its entire armory into the last spot he had occupied.

  Kalken welcomed the ambassador onto the bridge. She had dealt with the Buccra before, but that didn’t make the meeting any less unpleasant. This one was definitely male, the array of spines behind the head taller, and darker purple, than for the females. The poisonous spines of the female, though, did a lot more damage.

  The ambassador dropped onto his long front limbs. This was an aggressive fighting stance, his weight able to be taken on any of his four limbs, the other three all capable of dismembering anything close enough to touch.

  With his shorter rear limbs and sloping back, the ambassador looked like some of the powerfully-built primates on planets the Invardii had over-run, but that would be a foolish assumption to make. The Buccra were deadly, the only species to fight the Invardii to a standstill. They were only beaten, in the end, by sheer force of numbers.

  Why do we tolerate these killers, thought Kalken, even the limited population of them we allow. Then – for a brief moment – she realized the answer. The Buccra were so much like the Invardii. Their attitude to everything was so, so . . . extreme. They were loathed and secretly admired at the same time. To destroy them utterly would be like killing family.

  Then the insight was gone. To the Invardii such thoughts had no survival or strategic value, and so they were immediately discarded. There was no area of study remotely like psychology among her species.