The Dream of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  As the vehicle slowed, Aaron continued to stare straight ahead. “This facility is made up of natural volcanic chambers that have been enlarged and made airtight,” he explained flatly. “When it became clear that the other Fractalist outposts would soon be destroyed, we began digging tunnels to connect to other chambers in order to expand the volume of usable space. Our soundings indicated the presence of a large void some thirty meters in that direction.” He pointed toward the gathered crowd. “So we dug through the rock. What we found was an artificial vault that was sealed off from the rest of this facility. It appeared that someone—presumably the original builders of this place—had built a room that was completely inaccessible. Eventually we did find a hatch like the one you entered through, but it was buried under three meters of rock that had been camouflaged to look like the rest of the surface.”

  “I think I get the idea,” Mallick said. “These Izarians went to a lot of trouble to hide this thing. This ‘artifact.’”

  “They intended to make it impossible to find. It was only through a fortuitous series of coincidences and a lot of effort that we uncovered it. And as you see, although the original guardians are long gone, there are those who still believe strongly that it should not be disturbed.”

  “But you disagree.”

  “I know what will happen if the war continues as it has been going. Follow me.” Aaron opened the door and got out, taking the black case with him.

  “All right, folks,” Mallick said. “I don’t know what we’ve gotten ourselves into, but stay cool and follow my lead.” He got out of the vehicle and the other two followed. Aaron, leading the way, stopped a couple meters in front of the group. The Cho-ta’an directly in front of him raised his left hand and spoke something in a low growl. Aaron responded similarly. A heated exchange followed—one that was completely incomprehensible to Mallick.

  The three humans waited nervously behind them, as Olivia and Richard brought up the rear. Mallick turned to Stauffer and said quietly, “Are you following any of this?”

  “The dialect is difficult,” Stauffer said. “But it’s pretty much what you’d expect. These guys really don’t want us to see whatever’s back there.”

  They listened for another moment. If anything, the exchange was getting more animated.

  “Are they going to get violent?” Mallick asked.

  “Hard to say. I’m hearing the word ‘traitor’ and ‘genocide’ thrown around a lot.”

  Chapter Four

  Mallick nodded grimly, forcing himself to take a deep breath. If things got violent, there was little they could do, being unarmed and on enemy territory.

  Finally, the group parted, making room for Aaron.

  “Let’s go,” Aaron said to the humans. “Do not waste time.” He turned and walked through the opening in the crowd. Mallick went after him, followed by the other humans and Aaron’s two watchers. Soon Mallick saw where Aaron was headed: a roughly circular opening in the cavern wall that had been carved out in front of them. The tunnel, which curved slightly to the left up ahead, was dimly lit by small glowing disks like the ones they had seen elsewhere in the facility. Aaron ducked his head and climbed into the tunnel, which was barely large enough to accommodate him. The humans had a somewhat easier time of it. The group traveled twenty meters or so through the tunnel before coming out in another chamber. This room was roughly dome-shaped and significantly smaller than the one they had just left, maybe seven meters in diameter. The walls looked like natural volcanic rock, but the floor had been ground smooth. A circular stone pedestal about two meters in diameter and a meter high dominated the room. On either side of it was an armed Cho-ta’an. Their hands were on their weapons, and they visibly tensed as Mallick entered the room. Aaron said something to them, but they didn’t relax until the other two Cho-ta’an entered the room.

  Aaron moved to the left to allow the humans to see the pedestal—or rather, what was on it. Resting on the smooth gray stone was a framework of the same bluish metal that they had seen on the walls of the corridor on the way into the facility. The framework formed a cradle in which was nestled a cylindrical object made of a dull gray material. The cylinder, about two meters long and half a meter wide, was comprised of three segments of equal size, which were only discernable because of the rings of rivets holding them together. An access panel had been removed from the middle segment, exposing the artifact’s innards. Light discs overhead revealed bundles of translucent conduits inside. A flat, curved piece of the same dull gray material—the access panel cover—lay on the ground next to the pedestal.

  “What is this?” Mallick asked. Reyes and Stauffer remained silent, regarding the oddly archaic-looking device.

  “Surely you can devise a hypothesis,” Aaron said, still holding the black case in his right hand.

  “My guess, based on superficial observation and the manner in which we were brought here,” Mallick said, “is that it’s a bomb. You found it here? Is it a nuke?”

  “It was left by the previous occupants. As for what it is, we have our own theories, but I would prefer not to bias your examination.”

  “Our examination? You want us to look at it?”

  “That is why you are here, yes.”

  Mallick looked from Aaron to the other two Cho-ta’an. Their expressions were unreadable. “What about these two?” he asked. “Are they going to give us any trouble?”

  “They have been instructed to stand down,” Aaron said. “Please, feel free to examine the artifact as you see fit. I only ask that you hurry. The situation here is… volatile.” He glanced at the Cho-ta’an he had called Olivia.

  “All right, Reyes,” Mallick said. “You’re up.”

  “Sir?” Reyes asked.

  “You’re the closest thing we have to a bomb expert. Take a look, tell us what you think.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and moved closer to the pedestal. It came almost to her ribcage. She rested her fingers on the surface. “Can I…?”

  The two armed Cho-ta’an shifted nervously.

  “Go ahead,” Aaron said. He barked something to the two guards and they took a step back.

  In the low gravity, Reyes had no trouble pulling herself up onto the pedestal. She tested the strength of the framework and, finding it solid, leaned on it and looked through the opening at the top of the device. She tapped the button for the LED flashlight on her wrist cuff and spent the next few minutes peering at the workings of the device.

  “Well?” Mallick said at last. “Is it a nuke?”

  Reyes shook her head. “It has some superficial resemblance to a fission bomb, with a primary charge meant to drive one element into another, but the warhead isn’t big enough. You need a minimum amount of fissile material to reach critical mass. Whatever effect is achieved by detonating the primary, it isn’t a fission reaction.”

  “So what does it do?”

  “Impossible to say,” Reyes said. “It’s clearly a bomb, but of a sort I’ve never seen before.”

  Mallick noticed that Aaron nodded slightly at this.

  “Did we pass?” Mallick asked. “You could speed this along by telling us what we’re looking for.”

  “Your findings correlate with our own,” Aaron said. “We have spent nearly a year examining this device, and we have not been able to ascertain any more than your engineer. The primitive casing is deceptive. The technology inside is mostly foreign to us.”

  Reyes climbed down, landing lightly on the stone ground.

  “You’ve known about this thing for a year and you never took it apart?” she asked. “Or even took it out of this room?”

  “The matter is politically sensitive, as I’ve indicated. And we lack the expertise at this facility to conduct a thorough analysis. But we have mapped the interior with imaging devices, and our scientists are at a loss.” The other two Cho-ta’an remained silent, watching the humans.

  “If you don’t know what this thing does,” Mallick asked, “why did you bring us here?
”

  “On the contrary,” Aaron said. “We know precisely what it does. We just don’t know how it does it.”

  Mallick suppressed a smile, thinking about his conversation with Carpenter about the jumpgate technology. It was oddly reassuring that the Cho-ta’an had their limits as well.

  “You have additional information,” Stauffer said. “Something you haven’t shared with us.”

  “That is correct,” Aaron said. “I wanted you to see this first.”

  “All right, you’ve got our attention. What else is there?”

  “I apologize for the low-tech nature of this demonstration,” Aaron said, kneeling down and setting the black case on the ground. He touched a button and the top opened on a hinge, revealing a stack of papers inside. “Sometimes the stark nature of a physical photograph is the best means of communicating. He pulled a folder out of the stack and opened it to reveal several dozen photos. They were square, about twenty centimeters on a side. He handed several of them to Mallick.

  “What are these?” Mallick asked, frowning at the pictures.

  “Photos taken from low orbit around a now-uninhabited planet that we believe was the Izarian homeworld.”

  Mallick looked from one picture to the next. They showed the remnants of what once must have been a heavily populated city. Many of the structures still stood, but virtually all of them had been severely damaged. They were pitted and worn down, as if they’d been subjected to an immensely powerful sandstorm. There was no identifiable vegetation or other life; anything that once grew on the planet was now dead.

  “Are you saying a bomb like this one destroyed this city?”

  “Not just that city,” said Aaron. “All these as well.” He handed Mallick another stack. Mallick gave the others to Reyes. Stauffer looked over her shoulder.

  “These show the area surrounding the city,” Aaron said. “Our scientists have determined the region was once covered by forests not unlike the artificial one we drove through to get here. Now it looks like this.” The photos showed nothing but a bleak, rocky landscape.

  “Okay, so somebody nuked this planet,” Mallick said. “Or hit it with something like nukes. It’s horrible. So what?”

  “Look closer,” Aaron said. “Look for the pattern.”

  Mallick stared at the pictures, growing impatient. Why wouldn’t Aaron just tell him what he was supposed to be seeing? All he saw was destruction on a massive scale.

  “These striations,” Reyes said, staring at the picture in her hands. “It’s a blast pattern.” She knelt down on the stone floor, placing the picture in front of her. She placed another picture to the left of that one, and another above it. Mallick now noticed that on the edge of each photo was a set of figures in the predominant Cho-ta’an language. Only Stauffer was fluent, but all IDL officers received some basic training in the language—enough to identify numbers, at least. Reyes was arranging the photos according to location.

  When she’d finished, she took the stack from Mallick as well. After a minute of shuffling photos around, she had assembled an eight-by-eight grid. Three large clusters of buildings, connected by some sort of highway, were now evident. Faint lines ran parallel across the landscape from the upper left to the lower right.

  “How large are these cities?” Stauffer asked.

  “Each of these photos depicts one vokaut. Roughly thirty-six square kilometers. Many of those buildings were over a kilometer tall. Our best estimate is that each of these cities housed between three and five million Izarians.”

  Stauffer let out a low whistle. “That’s a lot of people.”

  “Are those striations really the blast pattern?” Mallick asked. “They’re parallel.”

  “Almost parallel,” Aaron said, handing him another large stack of photos. “The epicenter of the blast was roughly eight-hundred kilometers to the southeast. If you look closely, you will see that the lines are slightly closer together at the bottom righthand corner.” He paged through the photos until he found the one he was looking for. He handed it to Mallick.

  Mallick held the photo so that Stauffer and Reyes could see it. It showed nothing but the faint lines radiating outward from a central point.

  “Jesus Christ,” Stauffer said. “You’re saying a single bomb did this? When?”

  “Our best guess is around three hundred years ago.”

  “Who dropped the bomb?” Mallick asked.

  “Our understanding of the belligerents is fragmented. Apparently, however, these weapons were used by both sides. The Izarians once spanned several planets within a few lightyears of their homeworld, but now they all look like this. All Izarians—all life—has been extinguished.”

  “This makes no sense,” Reyes said. “These buildings are all still standing. And they’re all equally damaged, regardless of distance from the epicenter. No explosive works like this.”

  “It’s not an explosive, per se,” Aaron said. “We believe the device works by creating a chain reaction that temporarily weakens the covalent bonds between molecules. From the fragmentary descriptions we’ve found, it seems to turn solids into liquids, for only a few nanoseconds. Long enough to kill any living organism and weaken structures. The effect spreads outward from the epicenter, affecting any matter in its path. The range appears to be unlimited.”

  “Unlimited?” Stauffer said. “What do you mean?”

  “The chain reaction travels until it runs out of matter.”

  “It’s a planet killer,” Mallick said coldly. He felt a sinking sensation in his gut. “They liquefied the entire fucking planet.”

  “And you’re saying this thing, this artifact,” Reyes said, gesturing at the cylindrical device, “is one of these planet killers?”

  “We know the artifact is of Izarian design. We know they went to a lot of trouble to hide it. And there is something else. We translated the words on the casing. We couldn’t make sense of them at first. We assumed they were technical in nature. But then we realized they were a poem. Roughly translated, it reads, ‘The sea gives us birth, and to it all will return.’ Our linguist tells me that ‘sea’ can alternately be translated as ‘water’ or ‘liquid.’”

  “A prophecy,” Stauffer said.

  “Or a threat,” Reyes added.

  “If this thing really is a planet killer bomb,’ Mallick said, “why was it left here on this remote outpost?”

  “We believe it was hidden here to be used as a last resort. Probably they had several such hiding places. There may still be more bombs out there, for all we know. The outpost was hurriedly evacuated at some point, and the refugees never made it back.”

  Stauffer frowned. “If this planet is such a good hiding place, how did you find it?”

  “The Fractalists have devoted considerable resources to researching the Izarians. Our research was largely suppressed by the High Command, which wishes to maintain the story that the Izarians never existed. But our scholars persisted in secret, and clues we found led us here. When persecution of our sect intensified, many of us fled here.”

  “Using a jumpgate that had conveniently been constructed not far away,” Stauffer said.

  Mallick shot a glare at Stauffer, but Aaron acted as if he hadn’t heard him.

  “Why are you telling us all this?” Mallick asked. “Are you expecting the IDL to act as a go-between for you and the High Command?”

  “No,” Aaron said. “We expect you to take the bomb.”

  The chamber was eerily quiet for some time. Finally Mallick spoke. “You’re giving us the bomb?”

  “Our sect faces certain extermination,” Aaron replied. “This is not the path we would take if we had any choice. But the future of the Cho-ta’an rests with the Fractalists. If we are wiped out, the race is doomed.”

  “So you’re going to give us the ability to destroy the Cho-ta’an homeworld to save yourselves?” Stauffer asked.

  Mallick winced at Stauffer’s directness. Still, somebody had to ask the question, one way or another.<
br />
  “Yes,” Aaron said, with only a moment’s pause. “There is no sense in denying it. We are giving you the power to kill billions of our own.”

  “Surely you could negotiate with the High Command,” Mallick said. “If they knew you had this bomb…”

  “If they knew we had this bomb, they would devote all their resources to exterminating us. As I’ve said, the only reason we are still alive is that the High Command does not consider us an immediate threat. Given the political situation here, there is a good possibility that they have already been warned by someone who disagrees with the council’s decision to give you the bomb. There is no place for us to hide. The bomb is not safe here, and we lack the means to deliver the bomb to Yavesk ourselves. You must take it with you.”

  “So much for it being our choice, eh?” Mallick said.

  “Allow me to rephrase,” Aaron said. “If you do not take it, both the Fractalist sect and the human race are doomed. The choice remains yours.”

  Mallick looked from Aaron to the pictures on the floor and then to the device resting on the pedestal. He shook his head again. “You have to understand, we’re on an exploratory mission. We’re not military. Even if I could verify what you are saying, I don’t have the authority to—”

  “Do you imagine this is a ruse?” Aaron interrupted, his irritation evident in his voice. “With what conceivable purpose?”

  “Trojan horse,” Stauffer murmured. If he was hoping the idiom would slip past Aaron, he was disappointed.

  “We wouldn’t expect you to be foolish enough to deliver the bomb directly to the IDL headquarters,” Aaron snapped. “We assumed you would examine it somewhere far from any civilian population. Though of course that’s up to you.”