by Tim Pratt
“They’ve erased planets in the past,” Stephen said. “Even if we fought them and won, the casualties would be incomprehensible. It wouldn’t help, anyway. If word got out about the Axiom, people would go looking. Humans being what they are. Personal wormhole generators? Mind-control technology? Those are just a couple of things we know for sure the Axiom have. Humans would lust for such power. They’d go pillaging the tombs of the Axiom like the grave-robbers of old, looking for treasure… except these ancients aren’t really dead. They’re just sleeping. Their pyramids really are cursed. Our strategy, insofar as we have one, is to creep up on the Axiom facilities one by one, learn about them, and quietly disable them or disrupt their plans, without alerting the aliens themselves to our presence. Lantern has infiltrated the cult of truth-tellers, and though their organization is highly compartmentalized, she hopes to assemble a comprehensive list of known Axiom facilities, and we’ll pick them off strategically. The Axiom are dangerous… but they don’t know humans exist, and they still slumber. We think we have a chance to kill them in their sleep.”
“But if you die?” Q said. “Not just you, but the whole crew? If some alien security system wakes up and smears you to goo? If the next swarm of nanobots you encounter doesn’t have a lucky flaw in its friend-or-foe detection system?”
“We do have a failsafe in place – if we go missing for too long, crucial information will be transmitted to some people in the church, and to Callie’s ex-husband, and a few others we can trust. Knowledge of the threat won’t die if we do.”
She nodded. “Good. Well. Now that I know this, what, am I sworn to secrecy? If I talk, I die?”
That hurt. “I’m not threatening you. I hope we can make you understand the importance of secrecy. We’re not the ones you need to worry about if you start talking about the Axiom publicly. The truth-teller cell in this system went quiet, possibly fallen victim to the same swarm that ate the surveyors, but their central authority will be sending a new branch of the cult here soon. If you so much as say the word ‘Axiom’ over an open channel, they’ll investigate you, and if they deem you a threat, they’ll kill you. They’ll kill everyone you might have talked to. They’ll kill Owain itself, if they think it’s necessary, and as an organization, the truth-tellers err on the side of overkill.”
Q slumped. “That’s a lot of weight to carry.” She reached out and took his hand. “And you’ve been carrying it yourself, all this time, without a congregation? I’m so sorry, Stephen.”
He stared at her. “You’re wonderful. I tell you these worldview-destroying secrets… and you’re concerned about my wellbeing.”
She laughed. “I don’t know how wonderful I am. Maybe I just can’t face the bigger implications. But as for caring about you… we’re connected now.”
“The power of drugs,” he said lightly.
“That helped, but I’ve shared that sacrament with others, without feeling this level of attachment. The shapes of our souls aren’t identical, but they’re complementary. I want to fix broken systems and make them work. You fix broken bodies and make them work. We’re both pulling in the same direction. I like the idea of us pulling together.”
Stephen kept the elation off his face. “I like that, too.”
“So. We’re following a breadcrumb trail to the witch’s house?”
“Essentially.”
“How long until we–”
Callie’s voice cut in over the PA. “Turn on your screens, everyone, and take a look at this.”
Stephen obeyed, putting the external camera view up on the largest screen in the infirmary. Q leaned forward to look, and winced in pain from her injuries. Stephen winced in sympathy.
Callie said, “The image is a little grainy, because we’re zooming in from a long way off and doing some enhancement, but… that’s where the swarm is going.”
“Is that what the other Axiom space station looked like?” Q said. “It’s incredible.”
“No,” Stephen said. “The station we found was like a jumble of branching corridors, cylinders crossing at odd angles, more like a tangle of tree roots or a nest of snakes than anything humans would make. Immense and organic and strange. This… this is beautiful.”
The structure on the screens – machine? space station? – looked like an immense silver-white gyroscope, with half a dozen unconnected rings all spinning lazily in different directions around a spherical floating hub that looked like an oversized ball bearing. The outermost ring of the structure was still being constructed, and it grew visibly larger as they watched, the ends emerging from a fuzzy blur of matter in motion.
“How big is that thing?” Stephen asked.
“Big,” Callie said. “We’re still pretty far away. The central sphere is almost the size of Earth’s moon, and every successive ring is larger than the last. It’s still growing, as you can see. That’s what the swarm is doing. It’s converting matter in the asteroid belt, bringing it back here, and rebuilding that matter into… more of that structure. I have no idea why. Theories?”
“It could be a habitat,” Ashok said. “Though the way it’s spinning in all those different directions is weird. They don’t need spin gravity anyway. They have artificial gravity.”
“Artificial gravity?” Q blurted.
“Ah. Did I not mention that?” Stephen said.
There was silence on the comms for a moment, then Callie said, “So. Q. You’re awake. And Stephen filled you in.”
“He did, captain.”
Another moment of silence. “All right, then. It is what it is. I hope he told you the importance of maintaining operational security here.”
“He did, captain,” she said again.
“Let me tell you again anyway. Loose lips explosively decompress ships. If you go around telling people what you know, that endangers me, it endangers my crew, and it endangers Lantern. Believe me, Doctor Fortier, you don’t want to put my people in danger, because then you’ll be in even worse danger – from me.”
“I understand, captain. Don’t worry. Stephen made the stakes clear to me. I want to protect Owain. We’re on the same side.” She paused. “And it’s just Mx Fortier, if you want to be formal. No doctor.”
“Really? I just assumed. I’m used to being the only human on this boat who doesn’t have an advanced degree in something. All right. Ashok thinks it’s a habitat, and it’s certainly big enough to house a sizable population, but it’s not like the Axiom are big into having babies these days, so what do they need more room for? Why are they building additions?”
“The structure could be some sort of machine,” Lantern said. “I have heard rumors about some of the mega-scale Axiom projects, operations with matter and energy requirements that would require pillaging entire systems over the course of hundreds of millennia.”
“What would a machine that takes a million years to build even do?” Callie said.
“Provide the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything?” Elena said.
“What do you mean?” Callie said.
“Never mind,” Elena said. “Literary reference. Nobody reads the classics any more, I guess.”
“It could be a machine meant to punch a hole into a neighboring universe,” Lantern said. “Supposedly there was an Axiom faction that wanted to do that, as a way to escape their inevitable extinction due to heat death here. I’d heard that project was shut down by a rival faction of the Axiom, because attacking the structure of reality that way would threaten both universes, and almost certainly cause a chain reaction that would destroy this one. But there are just scattered references to the conflict in the records I’ve been able to access.”
“Oh good,” Callie muttered. “Like worrying about the fate of one universe wasn’t enough for me? So, it could be a habitat, or it could be a trans-dimensional drilling machine. Other ideas?”
“Maybe it’s just an art project,” Q said. “The Axiom had the power of gods, it sounds like. Maybe they just wanted to create som
ething beautiful. It could be a kinetic sculpture, or some kind of monument.”
“That is… unlikely, Mx Fortier,” Lantern said. “We have a few examples of surviving Axiomatic art, in my sect’s museum of subjugation. They mostly depict the enemies of the artists in the midst of unimaginable torments.”
“Ah,” Q said. “Carry on.”
Callie said, “How about you, Sebastien? You had Axiom tech deep in your head for a while. Does this spark any associations?”
“I have no idea what it is, captain,” Sebastien said. “But it scares me.”
“Who’s Sebastien?” Q whispered.
“Long story,” Stephen whispered back. “Tell you later.” He briefly muted his mic. “Just… don’t go anywhere alone with him.”
Q gave him a look that was more quizzical than alarmed.
“It’s real interesting to try to figure out what that thing is,” Janice said. “I’m real interested. You’re all really interesting, with all your really interesting theories. But I know a way to remove all doubt. Let’s fire every weapon we have at that pretty spinny thing, and blow it up, and then we’ll know for sure what we’re looking at: an expanding ring of irradiated debris.”
“Janice always cuts right to the heart of things,” Drake said. “That’s why I love having her as a roommate.”
Callie said, “Total annihilation is tempting, but I want to know what I’m annihilating. We’re going to have to get closer, and figure out what we’re dealing with. My hope is, the swarm will keep thinking we’re authorized personnel. We need a better scan of that central sphere – maybe it’s a control center, or a barracks, or a cockpit, or something. Maybe there’s an on-off switch in there for the swarm. I want to shut the whole project down.”
“Exploding it would be a good start,” Janice said.
“I’m not sure blowing it up will be enough to stop the swarm, and if it is some kind of reality-cutting drill, exploding it could cause more damage than we intend. What if the swarm just starts rebuilding what we blew up? What if an attack doesn’t deactivate the swarm, but does disrupt the swarm’s protocols, so instead of doing a building project, it just grows exponentially and eats Owain and then everything else in the galaxy?”
“Ugh, fine, those would be bad outcomes,” Janice said. “I still think total destruction is a good fallback plan.”
“It’s my usual one,” Callie said.
“Hey, Janice,” Ashok said. “Are there some other masses, between us and the system?”
Dark shapes on the screen lit up green. “They’re asteroids,” she said. “Pretty big ones – all roughly twice the size of the White Raven. Huh. All nearly exactly the same size and shape, actually, within a couple percentage points of variance. That’s odd.”
“It’s probably not an ornamental rock garden,” Q said.
“There are a dozen of the asteroids arrayed around the station, if it is a station.” More green dots lit up on the screen, forming a spherical array of points with the silvery gyroscope in the center.
“Why hasn’t the swarm converted those into more of itself?” Ashok said. “They’re perfectly good multi-ton asteroids, sitting right here. We thought the swarm was chewing up the asteroid belt in passing, because it was valuable material conveniently in its path, but these space rocks are even more convenient.”
“I… don’t think those are asteroids,” Shall said. “I’m probing them with our sensors, and they’re nowhere near as dense as they should be. They’re not hollow, in the sense of being entirely empty inside, but there are large voids within them.”
“Are they mines, or something?” Callie said. “Full of tunnels?”
“That makes sense, but there’s no sign of any openings on their surfaces, though,” Shall said. “No doors, no hatches – it’s all rock and metal.”
The camera zoomed out and refocused on the nearest asteroid, a looming potato-shaped lump in their viewscreens. They all watched as it grew incrementally larger.
“It just looks like a rock,” Callie said. “Are we scared of rocks now?”
Then the asteroid on the viewscreen cracked open like an egg broken neatly in two.
Chapter 20
“What the hell is this now?” Callie zoomed the camera in closer, on the dark shape revealed when the asteroid broke open. “Give me some data, Shall!”
“It’s some kind of machine, hidden inside the asteroid. I’m getting energy signatures. Whatever it is, it’s waking up.”
“Like a nut in a shell,” Callie said. “Or one of those toy eggs with a surprise inside. Janice, are our countermeasures operational?”
“Of course,” she said. “Stealth deflection mode is engaged, and all the active systems are primed and ready.” The White Raven was equipped with a special mode that made it appear to be kilometers away from its actual position, capable of fooling even advanced sensor systems, and thanks to a series of projectors all over the hull, the trick even worked against direct visual observers. Of course, their displacement system had been acquired from Liars, and was quite possibly based on Axiom technology, so Callie couldn’t be certain it would work against… whatever this was.
The broken halves of the asteroid tumbled away in opposite directions, and the thing inside… unfolded itself. Janice adjusted the contrast and false color in the viewscreen image so they could get a better look, and what they saw was not reassuring.
The machine inside the asteroid was shaped like a teardrop, and it unfurled a score of spindly, many-angled manipulator arms, some of them tipped with hooks, others with barbs, others with spikes. The manipulator arms wriggled, and the machine spun slowly around. Spikes and pointed fins popped up along its (for want of a better word) back, and the new eruptions began to glow a deep and worrisome shade of red. Slits of yellow light opened along the machine’s sides, each slit a downward curve, like frowns full of fire.
“It looks like a radioactive mutant black widow spider with too many legs,” Ashok said.
“Oh no. Oh no, oh no.” Lantern’s voice was low. “I’ve seen a machine like this before, in the museum of subjugation. Half of one, anyway, ruined in some battle, the wreckage embedded in a transparent cube of unbreakable smart matter and put on display – but the machine was still operational, still glowing from within, still trying to escape. There is no right term for it in your language. It’s a sort of guard. But also, a deterrent? Its very presence is meant to frighten away any who might stray too close. You might call it… a terror drone. Does that sound right?”
“Unfortunately,” Callie said. “If we kill it, does it call for reinforcements?”
“I would imagine,” Lantern says. “Also… I do not wish to cause offense… you cannot kill it. The capabilities of your ship are very impressive by human standards, but the White Raven is a toy by the standards of the Axiom.”
“I’m aware of my limitations,” Callie said. “Even if I don’t like to acknowledge them. The drone isn’t doing anything yet. Maybe it just wants to say hello, or escort us to the station, if it’s a station – maybe it thinks we’re on the same team, like the swarm did.”
“Terror drones are much smarter than the swarm, I suspect,” Lantern said. “The Axiom fought amongst themselves, all the time. Teaching the swarm to avoid all Axiom vessels is good sense – you wouldn’t want to accidentally destroy the ship of an ally, or escalate a conflict with a rival faction by accident. The swarm has to be more conservative, because it goes so far afield. The terror drones can be more discerning, and if a ship they don’t recognize attempts to breach their perimeter–”
Lantern abruptly cut off as the terror drone moved toward them – or, rather, toward the place where they appeared to be – with incredible speed, its manipulator arms blurring into invisibility, its spiderlike ugliness looming in size and filling half the viewscreen. A white-bright burst of light flared off on their port side – dead centered on the illusory version of the ship, Callie was sure. The White Raven rocked, just from the backw
ash of whatever attack the drone had made, and Callie’s body bounced hard against the straps holding her into her seat. Janice and Drake’s chair stayed upright thanks to its fancy gyroscopic balancing system, but alarms blipped plaintively throughout the cockpit.
The false ship didn’t take any damage at all, of course, and the terror drone stopped abruptly – more abruptly than normal physics could account for. Some kind of inertial dampening technology? The terror drone extended a set of six manipulator arms, and began to slowly weave them around in a complicated pattern. “What is it doing, casting a spell?” Callie said. “Making a cat’s cradle with no string?”
“I don’t know, but it’s building up a lot of energy,” Shall said. “I think it’s going to unleash something bigger than… whatever it unleashed before.”
“Shit. We need to rethink our approach. Let’s pull–”
Everything exploded into whiteness, and then into black.
Elena woke up in the sick bay, weightless, head pounding, her body held down by straps. She blinked around in the dim red emergency lighting. “What happened?”
Sebastien appeared above her, floating. No thrust gravity here, or artificial gravity, either. “You’re OK. Oh, thank God, I was so worried.”
She groaned. “Where’s Stephen?” If anyone should be looming over her in the infirmary, it was him, and not Sebastien.
“He’s still unconscious. Everyone is. I was in bed, so when everything went spinning, I was more padded than everyone else, I assume. I think I blacked out for a bit, even so. I don’t know what hit us, but it hit us hard.”
Something was different about him. His head was shaved, so it wasn’t like he could have changed his hair – wait. “Where are your drones?”
He shook his head. “They went dark and floated away. The ship’s AI – Shall? – doesn’t respond at all. I think he’s offline. I dragged you in here, and Callie, and Lantern. Stephen was already here. Ashok was too heavy to move – there’s a lot of metal in him. I couldn’t figure out how to open Drake and Janice’s chair. I hope they’re all right.”