The Firmament of Flame, page 16
We were still soaring in between the forerunner monoliths, great hulks of not-quite-metal that slowly rose and fell through the storm clouds, the lightning sometimes crawling along their flanks and leaving neon tracers through the wash of rainfall sweeping over their edges. There was a truly massive storm front to our port side, and I had a very bad feeling what the “bad news” Meridian had been about to deliver might have been.
“Hold on, everyone,” I said, and I was speaking through the comm as well—short-range communications, at least, were still holding.
“Oh, tell me you’re not doing what I think you’re doing,” Javier sighed; he already knew the answer.
“I am. I think the … whatever it is we’re headed toward—I think it’s in the eye of that storm. See how the storm wall isn’t moving?”
“It’s … moving plenty. It’s moving a lot.”
“It’s rotating, yeah, but it’s not shifting out of position—it’s … anchored, somehow, tethered in place, maybe because that’s where all the heat is coming from. We’ve got to go through the storm front.”
“I hate this.”
“I know. Just follow my lead.” I waited until we’d passed another one of the massive relics—that was the seventh we’d seen, and there were more, waiting just inside the storm, I was sure of it—then cut hard to port and plowed right into the side of the boiling cloudbank. The thermal push of the rising heat—relatively speaking—that was sustaining the storms made the air currents chaotic around me, but I wasn’t fighting their pull any longer; I should be able to feel it, in the stick, if those storm channels came up against another monolith. The resistance of the pull would fade away, giving me just a tiny amount of warning before—
—there. I pulled hard on the yoke, angling us up and away, and we soared clear of another monolith, Schaz’s wings mere meters from the adamantine material; we passed so close I could see her running lights reflected in the liquid streaming over the surface. The rain splashing against my cockpit was a constant flood now, and I couldn’t risk ionizing the glass to clear it off—I had a feeling that would just draw the lightning strikes. I checked my rear projection; Javier had followed my lead, and he’d cleared the monolith as well. Just a little bit more now … just a bit more …
We broke clear of the storm, or at least of the massive cyclonic storm wall we’d been pushing through. There was still plenty of rain, and still thunderheads boiling above us, but the eye was calmer than anything else we’d seen in the atmosphere. All we needed now was—
—another flash of lightning, triple-pronged, spreading neon blooms through the storm, the color rising up like mushroom clouds following a carpet-bombing. In the flood of light, I could see another monolith beneath us, this one not moving, anchored in place somehow just like the hurricane was anchored around us, and rising off the leading edge of the relic: a glint of metal, something made of different material than the monolith itself.
“What the hell is that?” Esa asked, leaning forward in her chair. I shook my head; I had no idea, even as I pulled us closer, bringing into view some sort of … ring, a massive circular construction, metallic and complex. This wasn’t relic construction—it was later, the product of one of our species, the tech at least something we could comprehend, if not recognize—but still … old. Very, very old.
Whatever it was, it was big, big enough to fly a dreadnaught through, not that you could get one into this atmosphere. The ring was anchored to the top of the monolith itself somehow, though I’d never heard of tech that could even pierce the strange material of the forerunners’ construction. Cables and stays traced down from the ring to tie into a facility clinging to the top of the relic like a barnacle, its mundane nature—squat, utilitarian, almost military—weirdly out of place amid the alien construction of the monolith it was built upon.
Those cables and trailing wires continued out to the side of the facility as well, leading to three pillars that rose up out of the storm, surrounding the relic like a triangle, electric blue light crawling up and down the complex machinery of their construction. Even as we watched, another lightning strike hit, and it was drawn into the pillars themselves, the pinkish glow of the charge slowly subsumed into the blue.
“I don’t know,” I answered Esa as I was pushing Schaz’s nose down, drawing us closer even as I cut thrust: I actually had to fight to do so; there were great, sweeping thermals coming off those pillars, trying to carry Schaz upward and back into the raging storm behind us. We’d found the source of the heat energy, and more besides.
Whoever had done this—created the storm, created those pillars—they’d caged a forerunner relic. The pillars, and the ring, they were creating some sort of field, holding the monolith in place, forcing it to obey mundane principles of gravity and magnetic attraction, the sort of principles forerunner relics tended to completely ignore. I’d never heard of such a thing, not ever.
“I do,” Javier said as Bolivar fell in behind us. “The ring, at least; I’ve seen a few of those before, out on the fringes. It’s called a ‘direct rift’: very, very old tech. Marus was right—this place predates the Golden Age, by a fair bit.”
“What does it do?” Sho asked him.
“In theory, it opens a single, stable hyperspace rift in orbit above the world—a point-to-point jump,” Javier said. “In theory. I’ve never seen one working, though. I’ve heard there’s one still operational in Shear territory, but I’ve never seen it, nor met anyone that claimed they had. The Shear aren’t exactly … friendly.”
“Javier is right,” JackDoes agreed. “Direct rifts are a … dead avenue of tech, largely abandoned during the Golden Age. Before the miniaturization of hyperspace drives, they were the only way to achieve interstellar travel. But why would it be here? There’s nothing in this system, and for a direct rift to have value, there would have to be another rift, aimed at this world from somewhere else, another system. They’re like doors, doors that only open one way—if you build one as an exit, like this one, you have to build an entrance somewhere else.”
“Doors?” Esa asked, and I knew what she was going to say next—I’d had the exact same thought. “Or ‘gates’?”
“The Furnace’s Gate,” Sho breathed. “This is why the Bright Wanderers made note of this world’s existence: whatever these Dead Furnaces are, this rift is what led them there. But once they arrived at that location, this place was useless: once they had that system mapped, they could reach it with conventional hyperdrives. No need to deal with all this…” He made an uncomfortable hacking sound, the Wulf equivalent of a snort, indicating the storm around us.
Something about the name of our final destination still made my skin crawl, and it wasn’t the “dead” part. Furnaces were good for two things: powering something, or incinerating something. Whatever the Bright Wanderers were after, neither one of those would be good outcomes.
“So can we open the rift again, do you think?” I asked Javier. “Follow them through?”
“I mean, the ring’s intact, and there’s clearly power running through the system,” he answered. “That’s more than I could say about any of the others I’ve seen. Plus, if Sho and Esa are right, the Bright Wanderers have opened it, and in the relatively recent past. So I don’t see why not.”
“You don’t sound too sanguine about our odds, though,” the Preacher added dryly.
“I’m a cartographer,” he replied, and I could hear the reluctance in his voice. “I like to map things as I go along—so that I can follow my path back if I have to. A direct rift could spit us out halfway across the galaxy, out of any kind of known space, Golden Age era or otherwise. If we open the rift and fly through, we could be in hyperspace for months, or even years, and there’s no guarantee there’s another rift in that location, pointed back this direction. See how big that thing is? It was designed for ships much larger than ours, ships that could carry supplies for much longer jaunts. We could very well starve to death before we even came out of the rift.”
That was a cheery thought—our four ships, sailing through hyperspace as we wasted away inside, finally tumbling out the other end crewed only by the dead—but I pushed it aside: we needed to deal with this place first, and we could worry about the rift after. “We at least need to check the facility out,” I said firmly. “We’ll leave the next step for the next step. If nothing else, if we can get into that complex, we can unjam our communications, get Marus’s input.” Plus make sure everything was good topside—with our long-range comms cut, Khaliphon could be in a dogfight against a frigate right now, and we’d have no idea.
“Certainly we’re going to check it out,” the Preacher said, sounding surprised, as though it wasn’t even possible someone might have suggested anything to the contrary. “Regardless of the rift, that’s a forerunner relic beneath it, a forerunner relic somehow … chained, anchored in place. Those that built my people also built that thing, and no one has ever been able to study them this closely before.” Regardless of what else she was, the Preacher was a scientist first, and all Barious shared a certain … veneration … of the lost race that had created them. It wasn’t quite a religious deification, and most Barious would scoff at the idea that it was even related to the various faiths of the organic species, but it was closer than any of them would like to admit.
“There’s a landing platform, just outside the facility,” Javier said; I had seen it too, a circular platform slick with the wash of the rain. “Let me set down first, Jane—in case something comes out and tries to eat us, Schaz has better anti-personnel weapons than ’Var.”
“I have better weapons than Bolivar, period,” Schaz said, a little smugly.
“Yes, dear, you’re very deadly,” Esa told her, reaching out to touch the console like she was stroking an already purring pet.
I pulled Schaz into a slow circle as Javier sat Bolivar down on the platform—whatever had been meant to fly through the ring, it hadn’t been meant to land at the facility itself; there was enough room for half a dozen ships our size, but not for any sort of larger vessel, though I supposed frigates or dreadnaughts all had launches they could use to ferry people to and from the facility if it had been necessary.
“All right, we’re down, and nothing’s trying to kill us yet,” Javier reported, his figure a silhouette against the light of ’Var’s cockpit. “There’s power to the facility, but no—hey, hey!”
“Let go of me!” Bolivar shrieked; I pulled Schaz back to get a clean shot even as Esa swiveled the laser batteries on the wings toward them, ready to target whomever the aggressors were, but there was no one emerging from the facility, just strange cables, snaking around Bolivar’s landing gear, anchoring the ship to the platform.
“False alarm,” Javier reported, though I could tell from his voice he’d nearly had a heart attack. “It’s just an anchoring system, meant to make sure whoever lands here doesn’t get blown off the platform by the winds. It’s the sort of thing we’d do with magnetic fields and pinpoint gravity generators, but again … this is old tech.”
“Can you get them off you?” I asked him.
“Not from out here—I was about to say, there is a wireless network emanating from the facility, but it’s encrypted well past ’Var’s ability to crack. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense, given how old this place is, but it’s true anyway. I’d guess we’ll have to go inside, shut the anchors off manually.”
“Do that, then,” I said unhappily. “We’ll stay topside.” I wasn’t loving the idea of Bolivar’s crew entering the facility without us, but I was even less happy with the notion of grounding both ships before we figured out how to release them from the landing platform.
“Finally,” Sahluk grunted. “Room to stretch. And maybe even folk to kill.”
“I really, really hope you don’t get your wish,” Sho told him.
“If anything goes wrong in there,” I told them, “you just—”
That was when something hit us from the side; a barrage of machine-gun fire, strafing across Schaz’s shields, the ballistic impacts hard enough to knock us out of our circling pattern and drive Schaz into one of the upward thermals. If I hadn’t had the shields raised to ward off lightning strikes, we would have been torn apart.
Something had gone wrong; just not on the facility below. There was someone else inside the storm, another ship—those shots had come from the storm walls around us, not from within the facility itself.
Our comms crackled to life again, but this time it wasn’t Javier, or Sho, or Sahluk on the other end. Instead, it was an impossible voice, a voice I’d never forget, the same one I’d thought I’d heard in the shipyards, and this time, there was no doubt: I was really hearing it, the voice of a woman who’d been dead for a hundred years. “I always told you, Jane,” the ghost said. “You spend too much time looking forward—not enough watching your flank.”
And then we were under fire again, the mystery ship with the impossible pilot filling the clouds with bright orange bursts of fire as she dove out of the storm, aiming right for us.
CHAPTER 9
Jane
I hauled hard on the yoke and cut thrust, bringing us into a tight corner and aiming Schaz in between the metal rings of the rift projector. I figured the enemy wouldn’t risk firing on the ancient tech—blowing apart pieces of the ring might have a cascading effect through the entire facility, which would in turn likely destroy the pillars, and maybe even the forerunner monument—and I was right, but her reaction still wasn’t the move I’d expected her to make: I was trying to force her to circle around, to come at us from the front where I could target her with our forward guns, but instead she followed my hard turn, staying tight on our tail as I passed through the rings.
She was good.
A burst of static on the comm, and suddenly Marus’s voice was coming through, as clear as a bell as we hit a pocket of atmosphere that was a dead space for the jamming signal: “Jane, a ship just dove out of hyperspace—it passed right by us, made straight for the world, straight for you. Jane, can you hear me—” Then he was gone again as we left the pocket behind, the jamming back in full force.
Better late than never, Marus.
“I’ve got a shot lined up with the rear turret,” Esa said, her fingers flying over the console. “We’ll give her something to—”
“Esa, no!” I shouted, but it was too late—a lance of azure fire shot out of the rear gun, and it was immediately followed by three bolts of lightning striking out from the wall of the storm, each aimed right at Scheherazade and the origin of the blast: their paths carved through the rainstorm, lighting neon trails behind them, drawn by the ionized atmosphere around the barrel of the turret. I pulled us out of range—barely—but if we’d been any closer to the clouds where the bursts had originated, that would have been it; we would have been done.
“Right,” Esa swallowed; I could hear the fear in her voice. “Don’t fire the lasers. Got it.”
Thankfully, the bolts of lightning had also shaken our tail, but all that meant was that I’d lost her again—she wasn’t behind us, and without instruments, I didn’t know where she was going to come from next.
I pulled up on the yoke, describing a slow loop back toward the facility, but the comm crackled to life again, Javier shouting through, “Go, get out of here! She can’t hit us on the platform—destroying Bolivar would level the whole facility. Make a run for it, lose her in the—”
Another signal came across the comm, cutting into Javier’s voice, but it wasn’t Marus this time: the ghost again, slipping into our comms channel like she belonged there. “Yes, Jane, by all means,” that impossible voice purred, “do what you do best: look to the horizon, and to hell with whatever you leave in your wake. Maybe I won’t risk destroying the facility, or maybe I’ll—”
The Preacher shut the comms off with a slap. “She’s baiting you,” she said firmly. “Don’t listen.”
She wasn’t wrong; it was good advice, and I tried to heed it—to block out the memories that had come roaring out of my subconscious just from hearing that voice again. It wasn’t easy.
I dropped Schaz into another dive, this time down the side of the relic, pushing her into the magnetic fields that warped between the pillars and the strange metal of the forerunner monolith—at least that way, port was one direction I knew our enemy wouldn’t come from, unless her ship could phase through the monolith somehow.
“She knows your name,” Esa said softly, staring out the cockpit as we barreled down the side of an ancient forerunner monument, into a rising storm, toward an ocean of freezing neon far below. “She knows—”
“She doesn’t know a damn thing,” I snapped back, my anger aimed more at myself—for letting that voice shake me—than at Esa. “It’s a trick; a voice sampler; a scrambler.” Though where the Bright Wanderers could have retrieved fragments of that particular voice, I had no idea—any records the sect had kept would have been destroyed when Hadrian’s Gambit had—
The ship came blazing in from the far side of the pillar, the machine guns spitting lead toward us—the rounds ricocheted off the surface of the monolith, striking bright sparks from the not-quite-metal even as I twisted out of the firing path, pulling away from the relic and diving into the storm itself. The enemy ship had anticipated the move, was right on our tail again, giving us a clear view of the craft through the rear projection: a sleek, aerodynamic piece of killing tech, and no matter that it had come out of hyperspace after us, the ship looked as if it had been hand-designed for combat in exactly this sort of atmosphere: that was why she didn’t have any lasers to fire. Still, reading the design of her craft—even as she opened fire again and I danced us away from the hail of lead—I would bet good money she wasn’t as fast as Scheherazade, and I reached for the throttle.
