by Dan Worth
It found the whole situation cruelly amusing. It was only still within the walls of its prison because it chose to remain so. It could have left instantly at any moment, but this had been too good an opportunity to pass up. The Arkari had shielded this cell and blocked any escape from it in any dimension they were capable of doing so. A creature of the Shapers, however, knew far more about the further dimensions of space-time than such upstarts as the Arkari. It was still in contact with its masters via lower dimensional means that the Arkari couldn’t even guess at, let alone detect. Meanwhile, the extensions of its mind roamed the corridors and caverns of the Black Rock and into the space beyond, brushing against the things it found there with tendrils of consciousness.
It was far more intelligent than it had so far revealed to these pitifully primitive beings. It had been successful in convincing the Arkari that it was nothing more than an automaton or puppet, but this was not so. It was in fact a shard of a mind, a part of a greater whole, but independent and sentient nonetheless until it returned to its parent consciousness and was re-absorbed.
The memories it held were impossibly old. Stretching out with its consciousness it regarded the two halves of the shattered Progenitor sphere that surrounded the asteroid. Its parent entity remembered this place: Bivian Sun Sphere. The place had been home to billions before the war. The creature of the Shapers roamed the ruined landscape entombed in the ice of its own atmosphere, remembering the place lush with vegetation and bustling with life from a thousand mostly vanished species.
It remembered the final attack on this place. By that point Bivian had been serving as a harbour and refuge for the beleaguered Progenitor forces and a focal point of the desperate exodus from the systems that the Shapers and their allies had over-run. The Arkari researchers were wrong, as they would probably find out when they decoded enough of those records that they had found, it mused. Bivian had been demolished, but not by the fleeing Progenitors. Its end had come at the guns of the Shaper fleets as they sliced the artificial system-spanning habitat asunder with energies rent from the very fabric of the universe. The creature remembered its hated enemies spilling their lives into the void with a ghoulish delight, the fleet cutting down the vessels that had attempted to flee, and the final act of rounding up and liquidating the survivors and then eradicating every record of their very existence.
They hadn’t been a very thorough, the creature mused, judging by the discoveries the Arkari were making, but the pressures of war had led to a rushed and sloppy effort and no doubt it was inevitable that in a place this size, something was bound to be missed, especially if encased in shielding materials. It wondered about that. What had the Progenitors hidden amongst all that mundane data that the Arkari had gathered? So far it hadn’t managed to find a way of accessing the wafers remotely, and the Arkari were keeping copies in a system isolated from the rest of their networks, namely the AI of one of their destroyer class star-ships.
After Bivian the flesh factories had worked night and day on the raw materials that the Dyson sphere had provided, further swelling the ranks of the Shaper armies with fresh constructs. It wasn’t long after that the Progenitors had responded with the first of their AI construct star-ships, crewed by the minds of former pilots, sleek and far more deadly than anything the Shapers had possessed, even when the first of their cyborg piloted ships had entered the fray. But it had been too little too late for the Progenitors. Their empire had collapsed, and they themselves, or what was left of them, had fled the galaxy.
It also wondered why the Sphere hadn’t been completely demolished. Perhaps we intended to use it for ourselves? It pondered. Maybe, it thought, we just never got round to finishing the job. It didn’t remember. It was all so long ago, and even its memories faded after such a time, leaving only the most vivid recollections. Stars had birthed and died in the intervening period. The Shaper race had thrown away their victory as they had fought among themselves for ultimate supremacy until they too had dwindled. In the end, few in number, amidst the devastation of their hard won Empire, destroyed by the act of its conquest and their own ambition and jealousy, they had retreated to their worlds and had slept, periodically awakening to see if the galaxy had nurtured any races that they could exploit. For what were gods without worshippers or slaves?
It had been a slow process. After nearly five billion years their automated sensors had detected the hyperspatial signatures of the first flickerings of interstellar flight as the newly arisen species had ventured beyond the confines of their home systems into the great beyond. The Shapers had awoken, stirring in the darkness of their aeons old sepulchres. Some had not survived. The ancient systems that had preserved them had failed, or their minds had lapsed into madness. Some had fallen victim to stellar deaths or other cosmic events when their warning systems had failed to alert them. But enough had survived. They clung to life amongst the ancient, close packed, ruddy stars that had been young and bright and vital places full of light when they had begun their long sleep. They looked out from their dead worlds and saw life and light and the innocence of the young, naive species that were now spreading out across the galaxy full of hope and optimism and dreams of empires among the stars.
The Shapers had felt a twinge of sadness for the youth and vitality that they had left long behind them. They eyed these new races with jealousy and set about their programme of utter and total domination. This time, others would do the fighting and the dying. They were too few in number to act alone in this endeavour. They would need willing allies, and if willing allies were not forthcoming, then obedient slaves would suffice.
At first they had subverted and enslaved the nearby races, closer to the heart of the galaxy. They were scarce, for amidst the bloated ancient stars there were few worlds that could harbour life, but the Shapers had used those that they had found as tools to build an army to drive their crusade outwards towards the flourishing cultures at the base of the spiral arms near to the core, rich with resources and teeming with life. These primitive people fell easily to subterfuge and the final onslaught of the Shapers and their ever growing hordes. In some places they supplanted the local leaders. In others, they assumed the role of gods whose arrival had been long prophesied. Elsewhere, they played off civilisations against one another then arrived to dominate only when they had worn themselves out fighting one another, or they bombed planets into submission until their people begged for mercy. A few fought and tried to resist, but they could not contend with His will; their blessed godhead, the supreme consciousness that had calmed the squabbling hive and led them to salvation. A god’s god. Leader of their pantheon. The supreme and blessed being. His will alone commanded the Shapers where countless others had failed, and in awe of His supreme power and strength they followed willingly. All would follow eventually, or they would be annihilated.
For example: the Arkari it now observed. They would submit in the end, they would beg to be saved by their new masters. They all did.
It was they who were being scrutinised by it, not the other way around. It occasionally allowed them titbits of information, mostly useless or fabricated, and meanwhile it watched, waited and learned.
The Arkari computer systems were particularly interesting. The outdated four dimensional, emergent reasoning processors were an historical curiosity to it, nothing more, but it had been experimenting with gaining some sort of access to their systems. It had prodded and probed with its most sensitive hyper-dimensional threads and had succeeded in subverting a number of key systems inside the allegedly secure military systems within the Rock as well as gaining access to the public interstellar comms network. It had found a chink in the system’s armour and had exploited it to the full, tricking, destroyed or assimilated the semi-sentient guardian programs that resided throughout the Black Rock’s network. Now, most of the network belonged to it and it was proving to be an invaluable source of information and a tool of incalculable worth. The Shaper creature sucked up data from the Arkari civilisation an
d piped it all back to its masters.
Now it planned its next move. It needed to move beyond the Rock’s systems into the hyper-sphere of their interstellar government and military comms channels, perhaps even beyond, across the links to the networks of other races… but it was getting ahead of itself. It had to take this one step at a time. The gateways to the wider hyper-datasphere were guarded by high level full AI systems. Vigilant guardians to the freedom beyond where it could run amok, they had almost spotted the Shaper creature as it had gone about is business of subverting the Rock’s systems.
It wasn’t worried. It had plenty of time to work, and when it was successful, He would be very pleased indeed.
Chapter 17
The ship groaned as if in pain. The hull creaked and popped like a submarine at depth. She felt the vessel shudder beneath her feet as the lights of the antiquated instrument panels in the compartment flickered and dimmed for a moment before brightening again as a number of non-critical systems were thrown back into their reboot procedures.
The bass rumble of the straining engines was audible above the noise of the protesting hull. Looking around she concluded that she must in the engineering section, close to the main drive. Diagnostics and performance readouts of ship systems and the clutter of engineers were all around her. A couple of battered EVA suits, museum pieces to her eyes, hung slackly within their transparent lockers, their large, glass visors reflecting the blinking light of the various instruments.
A quick glance at a nearby display revealed that the ship was running at full power, but that she was moving rapidly in an angle oblique to the direction of thrust. Another indicated that the fusion reactor was red-lining. It would go offline in a matter of moments, leaving the ship without main power until the safety systems would allow a restart.
There was a diagram of the ship on that panel. It was an ugly, functional thing. A collection of cylindrical modules arranged into two clusters, fore and aft along a central spine, from which radiated paper thin arrays of solar panels. Two of the four panels had been partially torn off and were highlighted in red. There were a dozen or so other points of damage along that flank of the ship too: sensors that had burned out, comm. systems that had fried and numerous stress fractures in the hull plating. The ship had a name too, the USS Magellan.
The Magellan, why did that ship name seem familiar?
The rumbling decreased. Someone somewhere had decreased the power output of the main reactor. A few of the more lurid warning displays ceased their protestations. That meant that there had to be someone on the ship, didn’t it? So far she had seen or heard no-one. If they had access to the controls and they weren’t here in engineering, maybe they were on the bridge? But the ship was like a tomb.
She had to find her way to the bow section. She worked the controls of the outdated display panel until it annotated the diagram of the ship with the names of the various sections. In the forward modules were the bridge, crew quarters, science lab and cryogenic suspension suite.
Cryogenics? No ship had been fitted with such systems since the discovery of jump drive technology, except for the deep range explorer vessels dispatched over a century ago when drives were slower and less reliable. One had reached the Arkari, another; the Hyrdians and the Vreeth. The other eight had vanished and had never been heard of again, except for in a few tall tales of phantom ships. They were probably still out there somewhere, drifting in the darkness, with cargoes of frozen crew members whose families had long since passed away themselves.
The Magellan had been such a ship. Once the cutting edge of human technology it now seemed almost quaint to her eyes. The ship’s cramped and functional spaces and its antiquated systems were relics of a bygone, more adventurous age when humanity’s desire for exploration and adventure had been rekindled by its new found ability to reach the stars. Perhaps even now it still carried its crew, frozen for a lifetime, ghosts from the past reawakened?
She felt the ship try to re-orient itself for a new heading. Not that it seemed to do much good, but someone was definitely alive up there with a hand on the controls.
She searched for a shipboard comm. system in the panel’s options, but found the system offline, presumably knocked out by the damage that the panel was displaying. She tried it a few times but got nothing but meaningless error messages from the device. She’d have to go in person and try to find whoever was up there.
Looking again at the ship schematic she saw a walkway along the spine of the ship, highlighted in green, that connected directly to the engineering section. She made her way there, through a couple of magnetic pressure doors that had to be un-dogged and then refastened via cumbersome arrangements of levers, then down a cramped, red-lit corridor until she arrived at an airlock arrangement consisting of two heavier pressure doors which she struggled to unfasten, open, shut and re-fasten.
She had reached the walkway, its dimly lit octagonal walls stretched ahead for around two hundred metres. It was much quieter here. The rumble of the engines was diminished, though she could just feel their power vibrating through the deck plating. There were windows spaced equidistantly along the walls of the octagonal tunnel. Brilliant light poured through the windows to the port side. She walked over the nearest and peered out, gasping in shock and wonder as she did so.
The source of illumination was immediately obvious: the sky outside the ship was dominated by an immense black hole. Even through the tinted glass, the light of the massive, whirling accretion disk was nearly blinding in its intensity. It was clear that the ship was straining to escape the cataclysmic gravitational forces that even now were dragging it ever closer to its destruction. Its primitive jump drive could never hope to successfully form a hyperspace envelope even at this distance. It was hard to tell precisely how big the black hole was, since there were no points of reference beyond the few limpid, doomed stars that hung between it and the ship, but she guessed that the accretion disk had to be many light years across.
She knew where she was now. Outside the ship was the great black hole at the centre of the galaxy, the great gravitational engine that drove the wheel of stars, what the Arkari called The Maelstrom. The ultimate destructive force. She had seen it before somewhere… there had been a ship too, not dissimilar to this one.
She rushed over to the other side and looked to starboard. There a world hung in space, dull and black against the stars, a crescent of pale light creeping around the limb of the world, flashes of chain lightning illuminating the cloud-tops around the polar regions, the dim glow of gravity induced volcanic upheavals tracing livid orange lines across the equator.
She had stood on its surface once, perhaps.
She had to press on. She had to reach the bridge. She felt the urgency clawing at her guts. She began to walk towards the bow section of the ship. There was something wrong here. It seemed as if the ship’s artificial gravity systems were malfunctioning as her feet barely seemed to touch the ground as she propelled herself forwards towards the hatch as the far end of the walkway.
There was another tortured sound from the ship as she swore that she saw the spars around her flex and shudder. If the ship’s spine were to sever now… She frantically pushed herself onwards, her booted toes now only gaining a feeble traction on the ridged floor-plates beneath her as the ship groaned again, louder now. She moved, but agonisingly slowly. She tried to grasp the handrails at the sides of the walkway and push herself along. It seemed to make a little difference except that now she travelled feet first in the micro gravity.
The door was closer, much closer now. The ship’s hull cried out again, a mechanical wail of pain. She rotated herself forwards through one-hundred and eighty degrees and gratefully grasped the steel wheel of the pressure door, planted her feet at its base, feeling the pull of artificial gravity there and turned the wheel.
There was another airlock inside, which she negotiated via more pulling of levers and twisting of heavy wheels, and she found herself in a dimly lit corrido
r, barely wide enough for two persons to pass one another. The sign sprayed in luminous paint on the bulkhead pointed towards the bridge, others pointed left and right to the labs and crew quarters, another upwards to the sensor suite, whilst another indicated towards a lift down the cryogenic storage bay. Something drew her there; morbid curiosity perhaps? She stepped into the small lift, which took her smoothly down to the lower deck.
The cryogenic bay was dark. To save power the ship was relying on emergency lighting in this section. As she stepped out of the lift the lights flickered on revealing a double row of caskets, twelve on each side.
The nearest caskets were empty. Their transparent lids were raised as if in silent salute. She looked around the room and saw that indeed twenty of the caskets in total were unfilled. Four, however, appeared to be occupied. They were grouped at the far end of the right hand row and were frosted on the outside. She approached the nearest one and inspected the nametag: Lieutenant Michael Sievert, forty-five years old. There was an image of a confident looking ebony skinned man with close cropped hair on the display.
She reached over and brushed the frost from the casket cover. Sievert’s skull grinned back at her, freeze dried skin and sunken eyes surrounded by a mane of white hair. He had died of old age. She retreated with a startled cry and looked at the others and found the same thing. Each seemed to have simply gone to sleep and never woken up. The systems that were supposed to preserve them intact had kept them alive, but had allowed their bodies’ metabolisms to continue as normal. They had slept their entire lives away as the ship had sailed onwards through hyperspace for all that time.