* * *
PH-1 thundered and rocked through a light reentry, turbulence fading as speed reduced. Nav feed showed their position closing on Teras Tihl, ETA ten minutes. There were five major archaeological sites on Merakis, but Teras Tihl was the centre, the one that everyone in the galaxy knew. Trace reacquired the visual feed as communications with Phoenix reestablished… that wouldn’t last long, low orbit would take Phoenix out of coms range soon, one reason Erik hated her being down here.
Lieutenant Dale wasn’t happy either, giving her a grim look behind his raised visor, restraint bars securing him opposite amidst a row of Alpha Platoon marines. Trace ignored him, visor down, observing the orbital feed. PH-1’s own feed replaced it as Lieutenant Hausler got a better view. From forty thousand meters the surface of Merakis looked barren, red-brown like a desert. Deep colours swirled, like liquids mixing, only nothing liquid had fallen on that surface for a hundred million years. Once, long ago, before a massive meteor strike had removed most of the atmosphere, there had been sparse life. Now, the only things living were visitors.
Upon the top of a plateau, many kilometres wide above the surface, small, flat structures made a pattern. They spread wide enough to make a town, but without the clutter. PH-1 dipped into a steep bank, spiralling about the settlements as it descended.
“Scan reads clean,” came the co-pilot’s voice. “Nothing else airborne.” The drone they’d sent down first showed nothing nearby, and Merakis surface was devoid of hiding places. The chah'nas who had been here were long gone over the horizon. They could return, but they’d give plenty of warning with the drone aloft.
One of the buildings below was smothered in smoke, drifting across the others in the faint breeze. As they dropped closer, Trace zoomed enough to get a clear look at whatever it had been. A central, circular foundation beneath smouldering rubble. Separate wings, also destroyed. In what might have once been a courtyard, temporary dwellings, metal and modern, torn and scattered across the landscape like the remains of a shuttle crash. Scientific settlements, where visitors might stay while research was done. Trace did not think the tavalai would normally despoil the site with a settlement even a few days permanent… but they’d been in a hurry.
“There’s another one,” said the co-pilot, Ensign Yun. “Over by the Father’s Pinnacle.” Trace looked. Sure enough, by the base of the pinnacle, more strewn wreckage. The pinnacle itself had been invisible from higher altitudes, the same colour as the red-brown ground, tall and thin. It did not look as though there would be anywhere near it to hide. Further about the monument ring, the Cho’ar’as, primary work of the Chah'nas Empire. Huge, monolithic walls of stone, casting several shadows in the mixed light of local ‘night’.
“Are there internal spaces in the Cho’ar’as?” Trace asked. It seemed surreal to be speaking of it in an operation. These were the great symbols of childhood textbooks, deep in tavalai space. When Trace was a child, Merakis had been far away from any human territory. Now, here they were… only somehow, the chah'nas had gotten here first.
A longer pause… clearly the pilots did not know. Nor did her marines. “Major, there are a few internals in the Cho’ar’as,” Kaspowitz confirmed from up on the Phoenix bridge. “Better check them to be sure.”
“Copy Lieutenant.” Looking at the mess chah'nas fire had made of tavalai temporary settlements, she didn’t hold much hope.
PH-1 came down before the Temple of the Tenth Caste with a roar of thrusters. Trace dismounted with Command Squad, Third Squad and a Heavy Squad, while PH-1 lifted once more to fly Lieutenant Dale and the rest over to the Pinnacle. They spread, and walked in the light gravity amidst the scattered wreckage, sections of once-pressurised habitat shining dull silver amidst structural honeycomb and civilian internals. Bits of furniture, parts of bathroom fittings. Tavalai bodies. A few wore environmentals, but all were dead. There were chah'nas footprints on the sand, and a few of the bodies had extra holes in them, delivered at close range.
Trace left her marines to the search for survivors and clues, and surveyed the wreckage of the temple. It had had great domes, she knew. The circular foundations visible from the air had suggested as much. All was gone now, just great piles of collapsed masonry. Away from the ruins, the great Tiras Plateau stretched as flat as the surface of some great boardgame. Only the surreal outline of other monuments broke the featureless expanse. Above, looming huge on the horizon, was Gorah — huge and red-brown like Merakis, in partial crescent from the system’s primary sun. The great bulk of the gas giant fell across those rings, casting them to invisible shadow.
Beyond, and above, several more visible moons. The largest was Shek, larger again than Merakis. They too were in crescent, and the light from them fell silver upon the sands. And far, far more distant still, the dull red glow of the system’s outer-binary stars, circling a common centre every three days, which in turn orbited the primary star every eighty-five years. It was night upon the Tiras Plateau, yet the sky was alive with light, red-brown from Gorah, silver from the neighbouring moons, and red from the far-off binary dwarfs. A magical display of orbital mechanics, the turning gears that ran the universe, beautiful, majestic and cold. This was a world that had never known darkness, just an endless play of colour and shadow upon the rock and sands.
Sand crunched as Private Arime came to her side. “Hell of a thing,” he murmured on proximity channel, looking at the ruins.
Trace nodded slowly, gazing about. “Fourteen thousand years ago,” she said. “Chah'nas built this thing. I finally get to see it, and I’m a single day late.”
“It’s like a bad marriage breakup,” said Arime. “Chah'nas and tavalai. This place was like a monument to love. Only the tavalai betrayed them, kicked the chah'nas out but kept the house and the jewellery. And now the chah'nas came back to destroy it in a jealous rage.”
“And we let them,” said Trace.
Arime looked at her. “Major, are you okay?” Trace glanced at him in surprise. “I don’t mean to… it’s just… well. You’ve been stewing.”
Trace smiled. Irfan Arime was just a private, and she was a major, but he’d been Command Squad for five years, and few knew her better.
“I have been stewing,” she admitted. “I miss Stitch. And I miss Fly, and all of them.” She looked back to the smoking ruins. “I miss knowing what I’m for.”
“We’re for Phoenix,” said Arime, with certainty. “That’s what I’m for.”
“I’m Kulina,” said Trace. “I’m for humanity. Five hundred billion souls, and all the trillions still to come. And in a place like this, I look about, and I wonder if even that isn’t too narrow a viewpoint.” She gazed across the monument-dotted horizon. “All these species. All these souls. The karma goes everywhere. We Kulina try to separate out the fates of humans from all these other fates. But this war is over now, and I’m no longer sure we can.”
Arime smiled. “That’s too deep for me Major. I’m just a grunt.”
She hated it when they said that. “No you’re not. No one is.” She put a hand on his armoured shoulder, and trudged toward the ruins.
The search for survivors was pointless. On tacnet, Trace watched as Lieutenant Dale led several squads into the small exterior doors in the massive, smooth stone walls of the Cho’ar’as. Even on vid screen it looked incredible, walls three hundred meters tall, sheer and smooth rock, cast with red and silver light in the Merakis night. Low gravity made it easier, but still it was hard to imagine how such walls had been put in place. Monuments on Merakis could take decades to build, even with modern technology. But once standing, they stood for tens of thousands of years. Usually.
“Major,” came Lieutenant Hausler’s voice from above, where PH-1 was maintaining a steady covering orbit. “It looks like some kind of vehicle has crashed over by the Ancients’ Meridian. It’s only small, looks like it might be a low gravity runner of some sort. You want me to come down and give someone a lift over?”
“No,” said
Trace. “You keep your orbit, I’ll go over myself.”
She called the rest of Command Squad and they set off at a jog. The Ancients’ Meridian was only a kilometre away. It was the reason all these other monuments were here, the one that had started the whole Spiral Progression on this world. Trace felt almost guilty for her eagerness to head this way, and ran easily in the low-G, as suit comp readjusted armour tension for more give in the joints.
Closer, and the low arcs of stone resolved more clearly. Three semi-circular bands, or arches, in ascending angles above the horizon. Meridians, of a sort. From a distance, they looked almost disappointingly simple.
Nearby they reached the vehicle that Hausler had seen — it was indeed a low gravity sled, powered aloft only by retros and flyable only on low-G worlds. It had been shot down, and several more tavalai lay in the wreck, dead beneath the arcs of stone they’d most likely dedicated their lives to study.
Trace left her marines to the examination, and walked beneath the great arcs. Upon the ground beneath them, several perfectly circular mounds. The tallest was central, directly beneath the stone arcs’ midpoint, like someone had buried a perfect sphere in the sand. At outer-lying points, where planets might circle a sun, smaller spheres emerged. Looking up, Trace could see how the moons and rings around Merakis followed these great, arcing lines across the sky. It was an observatory of sorts, a model frame from within which to view the great, complicated expanse of the Merakis system. At different times of the day or night, she recalled reading in her children's textbook at school, shadows from those worlds would fall at significant points among or upon these spheres. Times could be told, and certain mathematical formulas would repeat with endless precision.
But more than that, some scientists said — the Ancients’ Meridian modelled much of the near Spiral. Some of those formulas at play in the movement of shadows on the sand described exact distances of light between major systems where further Ancients’ monuments had also been found. Other formulas described relative motion of those systems, the kind of coordinates that starship navigators knew by heart. Kaspowitz was going to be so jealous, she thought, looking about in awe.
The whole thing was more than three million years old. What had happened to the race that built it, and other monuments like it across the Spiral, no one knew. Their homeworld remained unknown, and no working settlement, nor sign of actual civilisation, had ever been found. There were countless theories, but no one even knew what the Ancients had looked like. The Fathers had paid great tribute to them, this race that had made even them look like infants. Others had sent out great searches, or studied their monuments for more navigational clues to the direction of homeworlds or settlements. Some suggested they were visitors from other galaxies, brought to this one by wormhole portal technology known to no one else. Others had thought them beings from other dimensions, or dimensions yet to come. Others still had worshipped them as gods. Trace thought that last explanation might be as good as any, in the absence of better knowledge.
With no weather to speak of, the stone of the central sphere remained utterly smooth and hard. Trace climbed up it — to get a better command view, she told herself, although the truth was probably different. From atop the sphere, she could see in all directions. The arc of surrounding monuments, the symbols of Spiral history. The orbiting worlds, the great rings, and her marines amongst them, playing out the latest, great and terrible chapter in this story.
Suddenly there were tears in her eyes, and the tightness in her throat made it hard to breathe. Personal hubris or not, this felt very much like the centre of all things. For one who had given her life to karma, and to the belief that personal choices could make significant alterations to the flow of fates, it was overwhelming. So many lives she’d seen lost, so many friends gone, and so many lives she’d taken. And now she found herself here, questioning everything that she’d ever been taught, and everything that she’d thought she knew.
A man had sent her on this path — the wisest man she’d known. She should not doubt all of her people’s teachings on the instruction of just one man. And yet if the flow of karma had taught her anything, it was that no force was more powerful in the shapings of fate than the force between two people. This was her people’s teaching. So how was it that she was the only one to have followed it here?
She knelt upon the top of the sphere, for a lotus position was impossible in armour. But the armour took the weight of her legs, and made it comfortable enough for someone who had spent as much of her life in armour as she had. She breathed deep, but did not close her eyes, attempting wide-eyed meditation so as not to close herself off to this amazing and enlightening view. On the sandy ground about the sphere, her marines gazed up at her in wonder and concern.
21
Erik woke to Lieutenant Draper’s voice in his ear, telling him that PH-1 was back. The time read 0402, and he dragged himself from bed, opened the narrow closet and pulled his jacket from the press rack. Rumpled leather, Phoenix patch on one arm, First Fleet on the other. Still it was far shinier than the Captain’s had been, or than the one Kaspowitz wore now. In Fleet, an officer might be regarded well by the number of medals he presented on parade, but his true experience was indicated by how scuffed and faded his ops jacket looked.
He took the time to run the electric over his jaw — there was only ten hours growth there, but the one thing they’d taught him in the Academy that he already knew from his father was that a man only got as much respect as he gave himself. On watch outside his quarters this time was Private Lewell, and together they took a left straight off the bridge and around to back-quarter, then down the main corridor to Assembly.
There was the crashing and clumping of arriving armour, marines shouting, Charlie Platoon on duty to help the returning Alpha stack and rack in minimum time. Erik waited on lower deck, whacking Alpha marines on the shoulder as they passed, giving thumbs up, exuding as much general encouragement as he could. They seemed pleased enough to see him, but knew that he wasn’t here for them, and passed word up to the Major that the LC was waiting for her.
She slid down a ladder railing nearby and swaggered to him with the aching legs of someone too long in armour, sweaty and exhausted beyond bothering to hide it. “No survivors,” she told him what he already knew from her report. “No encounters, the chah'nas shuttles are scattered. We could hunt them, but they’ve got weapons too and we’ve no real advantage down there. We documented everything…” she shrugged. “It’s all we can do.”
Erik considered her for a moment. Something was wrong, beyond the exhaustion. Normally she met his gaze with hard steel. Now she barely looked, distracted and avoiding eye contact. “I want to get out of here,” he told her. “I’m sorry to do it now, you need sleep, but for what I’ve got in mind I’m going to need your help.”
“You want to go to Heuron?” she said, walking and beckoning him after her. And to a marine in passing, “Fluffy, you’re looking after that shoulder yes?”
“Course Major.”
“Because I will put you on scrubs for a week if you keep skipping doctor’s advice, you hear?”
Private Sarah ‘Fluffy’ Andrews grinned as she retreated. “Sure you will Major.” The only time her marines ever doubted her word was when she threatened them with punishment for anything less than deadly serious.
“Remind me again how she got called ‘Fluffy’?” Erik tried to memorise them, but it was hard enough with Phoenix spacer crew, let alone the marines.
“Barracked on Shantara, on a live fire exercise she managed to put a practice-round between the eyes of one of those cute little… what are they called? Big ears, fluffy things…”
“Oh right, yeah, I know them. Too many damn fluffy animals in this galaxy.”
“Afterward she’d find little stuffed ones in her locker with a noose around their necks.” Marines and their sense of humour. And in passing to another, “Hey Porky, nice job down there.”
“Major, get some sle
ep,” Corporal ‘Porky’ Barnes said in reply.
“Yeah good luck with that,” said Erik, and Barnes rolled his eyes.
“Just lemme get some chow,” Trace complained, turning off to the galley. “Hey Beatle, I saw that new tattoo, it’s terrible.”
Ahead of her, Private Lars ‘Beatle’ Tuo laughed. “Hey kiss my ass Major.”
“Yeah make me,” she retorted with a glare and a whack on his shoulder in passing. Erik had no idea how she did it. Most people would just collapse into a shower and bed, possibly get some lower rank to bring them a meal in quarters so they didn’t have to deal with anything else. But Trace staggered through corridors chatting to all her people, and joined the end of the meal queue like everyone else.
“Now Beatle,” said Erik. “Isn’t he the guy who had an insect crawl up his ass on an exercise?”
“Yeah, they’re on New Dakota, they like to burrow.” She leaned on the wall at the queue, and saw Erik fighting a smile. “He’s lucky. If it had laid eggs, they’d have called him ‘Hive’. What did they nearly call you, LT?”
The man ahead of her turned, and Erik blinked, realising it was Lieutenant Dale. Erik was tired from a few hours’ sleep, but Trace was worse and she’d known who it was. “They called me Lieutenant,” Dale corrected her. “LC. Haven’t seen you for a bit.”
“Different life in first-shift,” said Erik. He’d found Dale intimidating, once. Now he realised he didn’t. Dale seemed to regard him differently, too. “Doc Suelo says you’ll get Yalen and Malik back in a few days, they’re healing well.”
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