The Firmament of Flame, page 15
“So you’re saying this place is pre–Golden Age?” I asked, just to make sure I was hearing him right.
“It’s … a working hypothesis, but yes,” he admitted. “As you said: nothing we would build, especially in a place like this, would generate that much waste energy, which means it’s either very old, or the waste energy has a purpose—creating the storms, in order to power the generator through the very atmospheric churn the energy creates. A kind of ad hoc perpetual-motion engine in the form of an entire planet, like JackDoes said. And that’s still not something that would be necessary, not if a fusion reactor—or even a magnifying solar array—could simply be built in orbit. Ergo, it must be older than perfected fusion tech; that’s the only explanation I can think of.”
“So this was built by one of the seventeen species before they encountered any of the others,” Javier said, something close to awe in his voice. I could understand why: the homeworlds of most of the sentient races had been lost forever during the chaos of the sect wars—either figuratively, when their locations had been wiped from all known databases in an attempt to protect them, or, in the case of the Klite, the Vyriat, and the Grailt, quite literally, when the worlds had been destroyed by the very same sort of planet-killer weapons the Justified had built the pulse to prevent.
And if we were truly hovering over a world—over a machine, somewhere in the atmosphere—that had been built by one of the seventeen, that meant we were at least relatively close to one of those lost homeworlds. Early hyperdrive tech had been extraordinarily cumbersome, and comparatively slow when held against the engines we used today; the territory “claimed” by the species before they encountered one another would represent a relatively small slice of the galaxy, not very distant from where they’d each originated. Still hundreds upon hundreds of systems, of course, but not the millions upon millions that were reachable now.
“Whatever it is—whoever it was—that built this place, that’s a question for academics and intellectuals,” Sahluk reminded us all.
“I am an academic,” Marus reminded him, a little wounded; he’d been a historian with the Justified before he branched out into field duty.
“And I consider myself something of an intellectual,” JackDoes added, something almost breezy in the little Reint’s tone; I couldn’t help it, I barked out a laugh, and heard JackDoes hiss in reply, gratified by the fact that somebody finally found him funny.
“My point is,” Sahluk continued, “the Bright Wanderers came here for a reason, and we’re here to find out what that reason was. So what’s the plan of attack, here? What’s the approach?”
“It’ll have to be Schaz,” I told him. “Maybe Bolivar could handle those storms, but neither Shell nor Khaliphon can. Plus, whatever it is that’s causing them is also causing a great deal of disturbance in the planet’s magnetic fields, and that means we’ll have instrument troubles before we even hit the atmosphere: the same reason Bolivar can’t lock onto that energy source’s signature. That means once we’re in that mess, we’ll have to rely almost entirely on dead reckoning. I mean no offence, Marus, Preacher—”
“—but you and Javier are better pilots than we are,” I could hear Marus nodding as he said the words. “No offense taken.”
“If I had a better ship than this Pax reject, you might think differently,” the Preacher grumbled at me; apparently she’d taken offense, at least a little. I just grinned, and took no offense my own self—the Barious hated admitting someone else was better than her at something; it was just in her nature.
“So—an expeditionary team, then?” Marus suggested. “Jane and Esa on Scheherazade, Javier, JackDoes, and Sho on Bolivar? And the rest of us stay on-station in orbit, feeding you information—if we can—on the storm’s patterns, and keeping watch for anyone else arriving in-system.”
“Oh, you’re not taking any kind of expeditionary team out minus me,” Sahluk said. “That’s my job description, remember? I’m no good in a space fight, but I can blow shit up real well on the ground.”
“I don’t know that you’ll have anyone to shoot at once you reach your destination, Sahluk,” Marus told him. “There’s no hyperspace radiation in the atmosphere, no hot vectors leading in—if someone’s been here, it hasn’t been in the last few weeks, at least.”
“All the same—still more useful down there than up here. Maybe they’ll need something, I don’t know, picked up. Or crushed. Those are … those are pretty much my two skill sets, outside of ‘explosions.’”
“I’ll join the expeditionary force as well,” the Preacher offered. “Sahluk, join Bolivar—I’ll go with Jane and Esa on Scheherazade. That way, between JackDoes and myself, each team has a qualified mechanic on board, in case we hit trouble in the storms.”
Now it was my turn to frown in the general direction of the comms systems. “Who the hell do you think has kept Schaz flying all these years?” I asked her. “I’m a perfectly qualified mechanic.”
JackDoes just started hissing again, in Reint amusement; I regretted laughing at his joke earlier, the little bastard. “You’re … adequate, Jane,” the Preacher said primly, sounding for all the world like she was a schoolmarm dealing with a difficult student, one who thought she was smarter than she was. “At least, adequate for emergency repairs and for when your ward manages to overload the hot-water system on board—”
“That happened one time!” Esa protested weakly—she was lying; it had happened twice. She was mildly obsessed with hot showers, I think because they’d been a paradisical luxury on her homeworld.
“But at best,” the Preacher continued, ignoring Esa entirely, “you can manage to keep your vessel limping, not soaring. Without regular maintenance at Sanctum, we both know Scheherazade would have fallen apart years ago.”
“I mean … she’s not wrong, boss,” Schaz told me. “I pretty much always feel, like, worlds better after we’ve had, you know … actual mechanics work on me.”
“Fine,” I said sourly—Esa was trying not to grin at me, the hot-water jab forgotten in my sound rhetorical beating, and she was failing miserably in doing so. “Get over here,” I told the Preacher, “and get on board; slave Shell’s systems over to Khaliphon when you do.” That way, the Preacher’s ship—lacking an AI of its own without the Barious on board—could be controlled by Khaliphon if something happened. Not controlled very well—Khaliphon would be too busy dealing with whatever was happening to spend too much processing power trying to fly the former Pax craft—but more so than if it were just … floating. “Marus, Meridian, you offload Sahluk to Bolivar, then hang tight, and keep a close eye on the approach vectors. Once we’re down there, we’ll be blind; we’ll be counting on you to react if someone else drops out of the stars.”
“Good luck,” Meridian said softly, one of the first times she’d ever felt brave enough to pipe up on one of these comms sessions, and now it was my turn to grin at Esa, who was scowling right back at me. We both knew it wasn’t me the pretty Avail girl was wishing good luck to.
“Descending into a tempest-cloaked, pre–Golden Age storm world,” JackDoes said moodily. “Why do I feel like my talents are going to be needed very, very soon?”
I would have tried to come up with some sort of rejoinder to that, but the truth was, he probably wasn’t wrong.
CHAPTER 7
Jane
“Oh, god, I’m blind!” Bolivar wailed.
“Calm down, buddy,” Javier said soothingly. “You’re not blind. You’re just not used to flying with most of your sensors down.”
“I am, I’m like … three-fourths blind! That’s more blind than not-blind!”
I hated being right. We hadn’t even hit the atmosphere proper yet, and the strangely warped magnetic fields were already playing merry hell with our instruments. Schaz didn’t have it quite as bad as Bolivar, mainly because Bolivar had a much more precise—and therefore delicate—suite of sensors to begin with, but it was still disconcerting; we were flying into a raging tempest using only dead reckoning, and all we had to guide us was the fixed equatorial position of the heat output coming from whatever theoretical facility had been built in the atmosphere of the storm-choked world.
Still, nothing else for it: I tightened my grip on the stick and dove us downward, toward the cyclonic churn of the blue-black atmosphere. “Schaz, I want full shielding, even if you have to steal output from the engines to do it,” I told her, the command provoked by another bloom of shining red, a hellfire glow on the edges of the clouds: the aftereffects of storm-born electric discharge coursing through the neon skies. If one of those lightning strikes hit us, we might as well have been targeted by a frigate’s laser battery. “And cut the running lights on, too. Give Bolivar something to follow.”
“Like a nightlight for a frightened child,” the Preacher said with the inflection of a smile in her voice; I smiled as well, just a little. Despite the Preacher’s occasional tendencies toward your typical Barious superiority complex, it felt good to have her back on board Scheherazade: with Esa in the gunnery chair and the Preacher behind the (currently useless) navigation console, it felt just like old times, especially with Bolivar at our wing, a reminder of the pell-mell chase we’d led when I’d first met the two of them, trying to beat the Pax to Sanctum.
Esa, meanwhile, was quietly humming to herself as she primed the weapons panel in front of her—we weren’t expecting trouble, but I’d trained her to always be ready for it, regardless. The song, barely audible under her breath, was something I couldn’t quite place, a strange, lilting tune, one I’d heard her sing to herself before. Out of the corner of my eye, though, I could tell that the Preacher did recognize the music, and she was looking at the teenager quite sharply. “How do you remember that?” she asked Esa.
“Remember what?” Esa asked, still focusing on the instruments; she hadn’t even realized she’d been humming.
“It was … never mind,” the Preacher shook her head, and let whatever it was lie.
“Brace for turbulence,” I told them; the storm clouds were coming up fast, the outer edges of the atmosphere full of massive breakers of boiling vapor. The rain-swept storms were as tall as cliff sides, each split by pillars of collapsing fronts and valleys of dead calm, the whole mess shot through with the neon blooms left in the wake of the near-constant lightning.
“That might be the understatement of the year,” Esa told me; my smile stretched to a full-on grin in response.
God help me, I loved this sort of thing.
We dove right into the storm, our running lights illuminating the cloud banks around us, making sculptures and faces rise out of the churning walls of tempest. Rain spattered across the cockpit, sometimes glowing slightly as it struck the edges of Schaz’s shields; the neon in the liquid was channeling the electric charge. “You on us, Javier?” I asked.
“Like a Reint on a fresh-killed merioc carcass,” he replied, then added, belatedly, “Sorry,” presumably to JackDoes.
“What?” the little mechanic replied. “I do love merioc meat. It’s tangy.”
“Focus, guys,” I told them, their nervous chatter receding as I searched out pathways through the clouds, finding twisting avenues between the storm heads, barely able to see farther than we were flying, except when the whole atmosphere came alight in the neon burn. I was starting to find a kind of rhythm there, though—not in the lightning strikes themselves; those were chaotic, random, leaving blooms spreading in their wake like ripples after a stone that had been skipped across a pond—but they came often enough that I could glance ahead to try to predict the movement of the storm, and thus keep us clear of the worst of the buffeting.
“Four-fifths blind,” Bolivar moaned softly, into the quiet that had stolen over the comms. Schaz’s instruments, as well, were dancing and leaping like mad every time we hit a wave of magnetic interference; I reached down and shut them off entirely, a distraction I didn’t need. Dead reckoning—it was how I’d been taught to fly, when my sect was still locked in combat on our homeworld, kept from the freedom of the stars beyond by orbital strikes and anti-aircraft cannons, and instruments would have been a dead giveaway to the scans of our enemies. If I could fly bombing runs on enemy fortifications—coming up under the defilade of their AA fire to drop refitted seismic charges right on top of the walls of their fortresses—I could do this.
“I’m going to start pulling us a few degrees port, every chance I can get,” I warned Javier. “We’ve been shifting away from our heading, away from the energy readings, thanks to the path we’ve had to carve through this mess.” I was actually sweating—or maybe that was just the beads of rain rushing past the cockpit glass, making me feel like the same liquid was running down my skin. I grinned again; I hadn’t had this much fun at the stick in years.
Esa was humming again, the Preacher still staring at her, and it wasn’t exactly distracting—actually the opposite, in a way, the sad little tune calming, almost meditative—but I was still zoning out a little, focusing too much on finding the course through the storm rather than what was around me currently, and that was when another one of the crimson lightning spikes splashed bright glowing pools of light through the cloud heads. I thought I saw something in the burst of the lightning, but it wasn’t until the bloom of neon that came afterward that I was sure—sure, and not sure at the same time, because what I’d seen had been … impossible.
“Pull up, Javier!” I shouted into the comm, doing the same on my stick. Impossible or not, there was something there: something big. “Pull up now!”
I hauled back as hard as I could and pushed the throttle to full reverse thrust; all the same, it was a damn close thing.
We soared over the top edge of the massive monolith that had come looming out of the storm, rising from nowhere—if I hadn’t caught the edges of it, silhouetted against the swirling clouds in the bloom from the lightning strike, we would have smashed right into its surface, and that wasn’t just because I’d been zoned-in a little too far: the few of Schaz’s instruments still working should have warned us of an obstruction that close, and they hadn’t.
I didn’t need to see the strange glyphs carved into the monolith beneath us—though I could, as lightning again spiked through the storm—because I already knew what we were looking at: it was a forerunner relic, a floating remnant of the cosmos-faring race that had existed well before any of the current sixteen organic species, the same lost species that had been the creators of the Barious. I’d seen the monoliths before—miles-long stretches of floating stone that seemed to obey no laws of physics at all—during our approach to Odessa, and even there, without the magnetic soup currently making a hash of her instruments, Scheherazade had utterly failed to recognize their existence; she hadn’t been able to pick them up on any sort of sensors at all.
“That’s … not possible,” the Preacher whispered, and I could hear the metal of the console creak as she tightened her grip reflexively around it. She knew what forerunner relics were, of course: her sect had operated Odessa Station, before she’d fled with Esa, and so she’d be able to recognize them.
“Possible or not, it came damn close to smashing us apart and spreading the wreckage all across the ocean below,” I growled, leveling off and looking up for our rear projector feed—sure enough, there was Bolivar, right behind us, Javier tipping his wings back and forth to make the running lights dance, just so I knew he was still back there.
“Of course it is,” Esa said, her humming stopped, now, forgotten—she was leaning forward in her seat instead. “Of course it is,” she repeated. “The Bright Wanderers—the Cyn—they’re obsessed with the pulse, and the tech to build the pulse bomb, at least some of it, came from forerunner relics. It makes sense they’d note the location of a world with forerunner relics—”
“But what does that mean the ‘Dead Furnaces’ are?” Sho asked her over the comm. “And if the Wanderers were here studying the relics, where did they go?”
“These are all very good questions,” I told them. “And once we fucking find whatever it is that’s flooding the atmosphere with heat and creating these storms, hopefully we’ll find answers. But until we get there, do me a favor and keep it the fuck down, so I can concentrate on avoiding the massive hunks of floating metal that I can’t fucking see.” Where there was one relic, there were more—they’d been found on dozens of sites across the galaxy, and that had always held true.
Sure enough, no sooner had we finished passing above the rain-slick, weirdly even surface of the first monolith—it seemed like it went on forever, even bigger than the dreadnaught-sized relics in Katya—another one loomed out of the storm front, a lightning strike’s illumination coursing through the liquid neon that ran down its sides, making the whole thing look like it was dripping electric blood. It was like something out of a nightmare—ungraspable, unknowable, something beyond our very comprehension, massive and alien and terrifying.
I wasn’t having nearly as much fun anymore.
CHAPTER 8
Jane
“The good news is you’re closing in on whatever it is that’s pumping energy into the atmosphere, Jane, but the bad news is that…” With a crackle of static and a high-pitched whine that made me wince away from the comm, I lost Meridian’s voice; that was it, our eyes in the sky were gone, or at least blinded, temporarily.
“Can you clear up the interference?” I asked the Preacher, who had swiveled to the comm console set against the far bulkhead.
“Not possible,” she said; she’d already been trying. “Jane: this isn’t interference from the magnetosphere—it’s an active jamming broadcast. Whatever … facility is at the heart of all this, it’s blocking all transmissions out of this location. Unless we hit a dead zone in the signal, we’re on our own.”
