As they suited up, Ildiran engineers and warrior kith studied the Kolpraxa’s design plans to familiarize themselves with the external airlock placement, discussing their plan of rescue.
From the flagship’s command nucleus, the Adar watched his crew make their way over to one of the exterior airlocks. The controls were sealed with the ebony film, but when the rescue team used their lasers, the intense light peeled away the coating, turning it into smoke and shadows. They worked at the hatch for more than an hour.
Osira’h fidgeted beside the Adar. “I’m trying to let him know that help is coming, but Gale’nh can’t sense us, can’t sense me, though we’re so close, even with the thism of so many Ildirans aboard these warliners. I can’t detect any crew aboard the Kolpraxa. None at all.”
“There were thousands,” Zan’nh said.
“And now I sense none.” Impulsively she added, “I want to suit up and go over there with the rescue crew. I need to be there for Gale’nh.”
“Not until we know it is safe,” Zan’nh said.
“When I was a child, I saved our entire Empire.” Her eyes flashed. “My presence on the Kolpraxa will help keep us safe.”
When the Adar could not dissuade her, he and Osira’h both suited up and jetted over to the silhouetted ship. By now the engineering team had forced open the airlock’s external hatch, but they waited for Zan’nh to join them. Moving with extreme caution, they entered the Kolpraxa.
The interior of the lost ship was dim and only the grayish blue emergency bioluminescence lights glowed, giving the corridors a surreal appearance. The temperature measured as cold, but not intolerable. The searchers carried brilliant blazers that shone into every corner, bleaching away the shadows, but creating a flood of new ones behind them.
When sensors indicated that the atmosphere was breathable, one of the engineer kith risked opening his faceplate. After he breathed without difficulty for several minutes, the warrior kith followed suit, but made the Adar and Osira’h wait while they too verified that the air was safe.
Zan’nh inhaled, trying to place a strange smell. A warliner’s atmosphere was always scrubbed and processed, but this smelled cold and lifeless. Except for the small group accompanying him, he detected only a resounding silence in the thism. Everything about the Kolpraxa was drained of energy, devoid of life.
“Where has the crew gone?” Osira’h asked. “There’s no thism here at all.”
The team moved forward. The corridors were empty, as were the chambers and meeting rooms, the dining halls, the crew quarters. All deserted. Osira’h struck out in the lead. “To the command nucleus—I feel Gale’nh there.”
The interdeck lifts were nonfunctional, so the team climbed stairs and ladders, deck after deck, until they reached the command nucleus. The transparent observation dome was entirely obscured by a blackness that allowed no glimmer of starlight inside. The control panels were dead and dark. Even the faint blue emergency lights barely functioned here.
They found Tal Gale’nh, all alone in the dark. He sat on the floor beside the command rails. Although he faced the searchers, he didn’t react to their arrival, didn’t seem to see them.
He huddled next to five bodies, the only other Ildirans they had seen aboard the Kolpraxa. His arms were outstretched, as if trying to encompass the fallen crewmembers next to him. They were all completely drained of color, bleached into near nothingness.
In the pale blue light, Adar Zan’nh did not at first recognize the difference, but Osira’h ran to her brother. “Look at his hair!”
Tal Gale’nh had once had dark locks and a deep greenish gold skin. Now, the color had been washed out of him. His skin was ghostly pale, his hair the color of ivory. His eyes stared ahead.
Zan’nh shone his handheld blazer on the Tal’s face. Osira’h wrapped her arms around her brother, clung to him—and finally Gale’nh stirred. Osira’h touched his forehead, cupped his cheeks in her hands, and closed her eyes as she concentrated.
Eventually, Zan’nh felt a flicker as Gale’nh’s presence returned to the thism. The pale and devastated Tal looked at his sister, then at the Adar. “They’re all gone.” His voice was a hoarse whisper, like stone scraping on stone. He indicated the bodies around him. “I tried to save these, used all my strength to hold them, while the shadows took the others away. Not . . . enough left.”
Zan’nh spoke in a crisp, commanding voice, hoping to get through. “What happened to your crew, Tal?”
Gale’nh’s eyes flickered, but continued to stare off into an inconceivable distance. “The shadows took them and unmade them . . . but they said I was different.” He heaved a deep breath and let it out. “All my people are gone, faded to black.”
SIXTY-ONE
DALE REEVES
The ragtag group of Retroamer ships arrived at their isolated destination: an incredible and majestic alien city in space, built and abandoned long ago. Clan Reeves could call this place their own.
Dale Reeves and his wife rode with the bearded patriarch in the convoy’s lead ship. After investing so many years of work at the Rendezvous site, Dale had been uneasy about this great exodus, but he knew he would never change his father’s mind. Olaf Reeves was like an asteroid on a collision course, and those who got in his way would suffer from the impact. Garrison had proved that without question.
Sendra came to the forward compartment with their two sons. “The boys want to watch as we arrive.”
She was a good mother, patient with Jamie and Scott—more patient, in fact, than she was with him. Sendra was a strong woman, ready to fill her role as the wife of the future clan leader. The only problem was, Sendra had expected Garrison to be the next head of clan Reeves. Dale had never aspired to be a leader and did not quite understand why she had married him anyway. Maybe Sendra thought she could change him, strengthen him, make him into the right sort of person.
But Dale Reeves wasn’t malleable in that way. His father had attempted to bully, poke, and prod him into becoming a leader. Dale had tried—he truly had—but it didn’t work. He remained a quiet, amenable person who liked to listen more than he liked to talk, which was good when he sat next to Olaf Reeves, but didn’t bode well for making tough decisions of his own as clan leader.
Now, the Retroamer vessels decelerated as they arrived at a large, strange habitat built out in space, far enough from the parent star that it had remained unnoticed and empty for millennia. Dale had never seen anything like it—a giant self-contained alien metropolis, completely dark, bristling with towers.
The space city was built on a five-point pattern; separate arms of varying lengths radiated from a central hub so that the structure looked like a spiny, metal snowflake with swollen polyhedral modules—habitation areas? Storage chambers? Ildirans had a very distinctive architectural style—as did the Klikiss—but this station had a completely different origin. Someone, something else had designed this.
“Do you think it was built by some unknown alien race?” Dale asked. “This could be the find of the century. Shouldn’t we report it to the Confederation?”
Olaf grimaced with disdain. “Our green priest will share the necessary details, but I’m not having hundreds of scholars and xeno-archaeologists crawling all over our home. We found it. The right of salvage is clear.”
Dale thought he remembered that the Confederation Charter—which the Roamer clans had signed, so therefore clan Reeves was bound by the terms—classified alien artifacts and archaeological sites as “gifts to civilization” for the study of all. But maybe the wording specifically referred to “Klikiss artifacts,” because there were no other known alien races. He didn’t press the issue, knowing that his father would find some way to insist that he was right, nevertheless.
Dale considered it remarkable that anyone had found the derelict structure out here in the dark between the stars. One of their scouts had stumbled upon it during a wandering trip back from the closed-off neo-Amish planet called Happiness. The neo-Amish refused
to deal with any outsiders, except occasionally for Olaf Reeves and his Retroamers. Clan Reeves wanted to create a similar home for themselves in the derelict city.
Dale found it uncharacteristic that his father would go to an already-extant city, even an abandoned one. He would have expected the old man to insist on building their own place from scratch, making every component with their own hands. When Dale pointed out the seeming contradiction, his father had frowned. “Roamers take advantage of valuable resources, wherever we find them. Why would I let this go to waste?”
As the Retroamer ships gathered around the huge, silent city, Dale studied the readings. “Gives off almost no thermal signature. That city’s been abandoned for a very long time.”
“What is that place?” asked Jamie, his older son.
Dale tried to think of the right way to answer, but his father spoke first. “That is the new home of clan Reeves.”
“I thought Rendezvous was our home?”
“We left Rendezvous,” Dale said to the boys. “I explained that to you. We’re not going back. This will be our home now.”
“But who built it?” Scott asked.
Olaf said, “Nobody knows, but we’ll find out. The city is ours for the taking. There’ll be room for every clan member to have twice as much living space as we had on Rendezvous.”
“Do we even know if we can live there?” Sendra asked him. “Have all the systems been checked out yet?”
Olaf looked at her. “Of course we can live there. We’re Roamers. If something’s not functioning, we’ll fix it. If it’s missing a system, we’ll install it. And if it proves untenable, then we’ll build our own city from scratch and use this place for spare parts. That’s our Guiding Star.”
BO, the Teacher compy transferred to them from Academ, came into the cockpit to attend the two boys. “I will watch them, Sendra Reeves. It’s good that they’re seeing this with their own eyes. This is history—our clan history.”
“It looks spooky,” said Jamie.
Sendra said, “BO will protect you from any space-station ghosts.”
The boys giggled, knowing their mother was joking. The two had been born long after the Elemental War, but Dale certainly remembered the faeros, the hydrogues, the Klikiss invasion, the treacherous black robot attacks. He wouldn’t lie to his sons and tell them that monsters did not exist.
Like a conquering hero, Olaf opened a comm channel to all the convoy ships. “Welcome to a new beginning for clan Reeves. Let’s make this place ours. I need ten ships and some scouts to survey the exterior.”
The Retroamer ships scanned the derelict city, mapping the modules on the radiating spokes, identifying viable access points. At the first three door hatches the scouts encountered on the nearest spoke, bold but crudely drawn pink triangles marked the exterior hull. Nobody knew what that meant.
Until they found an intrinsic energy source, or hooked up their own power blocks to bleed heat into the complex one section at a time, the first groups would have to wear environment suits. Over the centuries of abandonment, it was possible—even likely—that the atmosphere had leaked away, but clan Reeves had plenty of oxygen generators, if needed.
The first suited Retroamer scouts inspected the hatch areas of the hub sphere, tried to decipher the exterior controls, and in the end dismantled them. Though they had no idea how the alien builders engineered their systems, basic physics and mechanics were the same. With a small power block, the scouts triggered the hatch to gain access to the city.
“Shouldn’t take us too long to finesse the controls so that we can open other hatches and some large docking bays. The hull seems intact, but there’s plenty to do,” the scout reported.
Olaf grinned. “Once we bring our ships inside, I’ll assign squads of workers.”
Four other scout teams reported in, and one announced even more exciting news. “There’s an atmosphere, Olaf! It’ll even be breathable once we warm it up.”
The clan leader issued orders throughout the convoy. “It’s a huge city, and we’ll be methodical with our exploration teams, but first things first. For now, give priority to the central hub and one primary spoke for our habitation. Engineering crews will make the place livable: light, heat, power, and air. We’ve got a lot of people waiting to stretch their legs.”
From all across the Retroamer exodus convoy, clan members shuttled over to the largest community ship to celebrate. The mood was light, and Dale felt his tension unwind. Though he had been reluctant to leave Rendezvous, he had to admit this alien city was truly remarkable.
Shelud, the green priest volunteer, joined them for the celebration. He was shy but smiled frequently, and Dale already liked him. Olaf came over. “I remind you, green priest, that when you use telink, you are not to reveal the location of this city—not yet.”
“His name is Shelud, Father,” Dale said, which earned him a sharp frown.
The green priest nodded. “I understand. I used my treeling to announce our arrival, but no one knows where we are. The worldtrees are waiting to hear further news.”
Olaf Reeves called for the attention of those gathered. He stood near a large viewing port, with the enormous empty space city behind him, but faced them all without looking at the impressive backdrop. “We don’t know who built that city or why they abandoned it, but our Guiding Star brought us here. It is our new home, our new Rendezvous. As part of the process of making it ours, the city deserves a name.” He paused, looking at the clan members there, and Shelud wondered if he was waiting for input. Before anyone could speak up, though, he continued. “I have decided we’ll name our new home Okiah, after the great Roamer Speaker who guided our clans for so many years before the Elemental War. Jhy Okiah steered us through good, independent years, kept the clans productive, before we were scattered, before we became outlaws, before we lost our soul by joining the Confederation.”
The Retroamers muttered, the tone of their voices clearly indicating they were pleased with the choice. Shelud said he knew about old Speaker Jhy Okiah, but promised that when he had a chance he would use his treeling to tap into the verdani database. He would learn more about the revered woman, especially since their new city would bear her name.
Dale looked out the windowport to see a few lights already shining in the derelict city, though most of the structure remained dark. Soon, they would make it bright and warm, fill it with laughter and hope. This strange city-station was their future and their new home.
SIXTY-TWO
LEE ISWANDER
Yes, things were definitely looking up. His son Arden regarded him with a genuine pride that eclipsed the defensive attitude the young man had shown in the past few months. Londa, who always believed in him, now had a shine in her eyes that showed she really meant it and was not just being a dutiful wife.
And Lee Iswander believed it too.
By the Guiding Star, he was going to reclaim the power, wealth, and prominence he had lost in the fires of Sheol, and he felt damned proud of it. A disaster that would have crushed anyone else proved to be nothing more than a setback for him—soon enough, the number 1,543 would be lost in the noise.
And these bloater extraction operations were so easy! The ekti was just there for the taking.
Iswander stood inside the admin module, looking out at the dimly lit islands of bloaters, countless cosmic bubbles floating in the emptiness. Though the cluster was moving closer to the nearby star system, no stars were close enough to shed substantial light. Iswander’s own factory operations illuminated the area like a swarm of phosphorescent insects: refinery stations, cobbled-together filtration chambers, workhorse garbage ships that had been converted to extraction pumps. He had added several more hab modules discreetly transferred from his off-books company stores, careful not to raise questions about why he needed the structures or where he was taking them.
New employees arrived weekly. They signed ironclad nondisclosure agreements and lived out in the habitation modules of the complex. I
swander paid them well enough that he was able to attract unmarried and unconnected employees who were willing to come here.
Elisa Enturi flew out to Ulio and other industrial outposts, acting as his recruiter to find skilled workers and convincing them to take a chance on Lee Iswander again. Many refused, but some took the risk. Their support would pay off extensively. The profits were already so breathtaking that Iswander intended to give a substantial bonus to the workers who had supported him from the beginning.
The complex grew week by week. Iswander’s team could barely keep up with the opportunities that presented themselves.
By contrast, the operations at Sheol had required incredible effort and investment to get up and running. He’d eventually turned a profit, but at such a tremendous cost. 1,543.
Roamers knew how to eke out a living under dire conditions. Some people, like the fool Olaf Reeves, took a twisted, defiant pride in enduring misery. Lee Iswander, though, saw no particular badge of honor in hardship and suffering—the Retroamers were welcome to it.
A moving light flitted about in the industrial field: the restless Alec Pannebaker bouncing around in a survey pod. Pannebaker reported in, “Two more bloaters drained in the past twenty-four hours, Chief. We’re going to need more storage tanks unless Elisa can distribute the stuff faster.”
Iswander responded, “I see no reason why we can’t do both.”
They could also slow down production, but Iswander would not even consider that alternative. He had lost everything on Sheol, and he had a lot of ground to recover. He watched as extractor ships hooked themselves to another bloater and began to siphon off the murky internal fluid. He shook his head just watching it all, feeling energized, as if a special kind of ekti-X filled his bloodstream with optimism.
That afternoon, Elisa returned from making her fifth delivery of ekti-X tankers to the transfer station of Ulio. The woman looked more content now than he had seen her in some time—still focused and impatient, but with less of an angry edge. She had quickly gotten over the loss of her husband and son.
The Dark Between the Stars Page 32