Cosmic Savior: (A Space Opera Adventure) (Interstellar Gunrunner Book 3), page 28
“Nobody does. Welcome to getting old, kid.”
“Bodhi,” Ruena called from Umzuma’s pit, drawing my attention, “get over here. You need to see this.”
At first glance, Ruena’s must-see discovery was far from impressive. Three of the panels lining Umzuma’s pit had glazed over with static, streaked with scattered bars of red and purple light. One of many systems that had been fried by the sun-swallower.
“This isn’t news,” I told the crew. “Just a reminder of our fair ship’s slow, painful demise.”
Ruena shook her head. “It’s not a malfunction. Tusky was playing around with the input frequencies, trying different counter-bands, and—”
“Remember what I said about not understanding complicated things?”
“Well, to put it in layman’s terms,” Tusky said, adjusting a few knobs to sharpen the image, “I believe this is a signal emanation. You see the color bands? Those are—how shall I say it?—an ancient form of identification. A signature, if you will. The treatises I’ve read on pre-Hegemony human history refer to them as chromatic differentiation.”
“I could’ve done without the jargon, but thanks,” I said, studying the screens more intently. “Let me get this straight. Somebody’s transmitting these color bands?”
“No, not quite. They’re merely signifying the identity of a particular entity—the tomb, in our particular case.”
“The tomb is transmitting?”
“It appears so.”
“What’s it spouting? Some sort of prerecorded ‘abandon all hope’ speech?” I shook my head. “Tusky, I know you’re not much of a seasoned deep-space prowler, but try to stay levelheaded about this. Almost every derelict vessel has its last transmission on loop.”
Tusky and Ruena shared a wary, almost conspiratorial look. I’d just touched the tip of an iceberg I wanted no business with.
“It’s not emitting a recorded transmission,” Ruena explained quietly. “It’s trying to establish an active line with us.”
A chill wriggled up my spine. I was gripped by the sudden sense that the Untraversed was gazing through the viewpane, burrowing into me with millions of unseen eyes.
“How’d you reach that conclusion?” I asked. Tusky gestured to a simscreen chock full of data, at which point I raised my hands to nix the initial question. “Forget that I asked how. What I want to know is, what does it mean? Is that tomb sentient?”
Tusky exhaled shakily. “It could be anything. The data is scant. It could be a chitta of some sort—this would be sensible, given the Maker’s fondness for them—or it could be an early progenitor of nonbiological artificial intelligence, or—”
“Or something worse,” I said, giving voice to the look in his eyes.
He nodded. “What I can say with certainty is that it’s intelligent. It’s adaptive. All evidence points to it being millions of years old, yet it found a way to interface with relatively contemporary transmission systems in a matter of minutes. It… it seems to have a desire to speak with us.”
I looked to Ruena for a counter-opinion, but the ligethan was lost in her own thoughts, staring absently out the viewpane. A rare and very not-great thing.
“Okay,” I said finally, “let’s give them a ring.”
“Just like that?” Tusky whispered. “Bodhi, I must implore you to use caution in this situation. This entity could be capable of anything.”
“Like what? Frying half our systems? Oh, already done. Next.”
“I just think—”
“My dear friend, the time for thinking is done. We need to finish this.”
As I spoke, I noted that Tusky’s eyes continually swung toward a key on the far side of Umzuma’s pit. He watched it as though fearful it might leap up and bite him. That key, I gathered, was the key. The hotline straight to Mr. Tomb.
I pressed it.
Now, Ruena didn’t seem overly shocked by my decision—on account of that time-piercing twosight, I’d imagine—but Tusky looked ready to leap right out of the viewpane and begin swimming away from the ship. Should it have worried me that the smartest creature in the room was concerned? Probably. Did it? Of course not. After enduring back-to-back stints in a mind-shattering, eternal prison and a space-snake’s mouth, one is fazed by very little.
Which is not to say that what came next didn’t make my heart lock up in my chest.
Countless red lights winked to life among the drifting flotsam. Within seconds, well before I even had the presence of mind to consider we might soon be joining the other wrecks, the lights coalesced and began swimming forth through the debris clouds. They moved in unison like a vast crimson nebula, drawing closer and closer until we saw nothing but their mass.
Only when we were completely engulfed, bathed in that hellish light, did I realize what these things were. Biomechanical drones, more or less. Each was squid-shaped, about ten meters long, packing autocannons that remained folded up and dormant—for now. Judging by the graveyard behind them, they weren’t too shy to put their firepower to use.
“Marvelous,” Tusky breathed, staring at them in wonder. “Just as the treatises and legends describe… I daresay we’re looking at the Maker’s last surviving creations. These are the very beings that carried out his will.”
My body had never felt so rigid. Each breath was a chore. “Tusky… you are aware of what the Maker’s ‘will’ was, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course! To subjugate all beings, to force upon them his designs for cosmic order. He—” And then, in a miracle of self-awareness, Tusky understood what I was pointing out. He trembled and stole a step backward.
Gadra, in defiance of both her hangover and common sense, proceeded to wander up to the viewpane and press a hand to the silicate. “What’s ‘subjugate’ mean?”
“Gad,” I hissed through clenched teeth, “if you keep making sudden movements, you might find out firsthand.”
“What’s the problem?” she shot back. “How come only you guys get to talk with the cool aliens?”
“Because we’re professionals.”
“Uh-huh…”
“Gad, you need to—”
“State your species, name, and age,” a voice rumbled over the bridge comms. Not particularly loud, but enough to shut us all up. Enough to stop the blood in my veins, even. It wasn’t reminiscent of a man, nor a woman, nor a machine—it was something in the middle, yet something far beyond any of them. Something truly ungraspable. Hell, my linguistic implant couldn’t even tell me what language it was translating from. Several seconds of stunned silence elapsed. “This is your second instruction. State your species, name, and age.”
Struck by the premonition that we wouldn’t get a third instruction, I took the initiative. “My name is Bodhi Drezek. I’m a human. And my age depends on what space-time layer you occupy.”
Ruena elbowed me in the kidney.
“Your reply is understood,” the voice replied. “Tell me about your ship.”
“My ship? Well, see, it’s called Stream Dancer, and it’s a Sama-class vessel with—”
“Why did you name it Stream Dancer?”
“It’s… just something from my childhood. A long story.”
The voice hummed, and the drones beyond the viewpane drew closer.
“Did you want to know something else?” I asked.
“How does it feel when you cut your finger?” the voice replied.
Baffled, I looked at Tusky and Ruena—only to find they were in the same boat. If this voice did belong to an artificial-intelligence construct, there was a serious and damning possibility that its logic systems had gone sour over millions of years. Nothing good comes from a superintelligence that’s lost its marbles.
“How… does it feel?” the voice repeated.
“Uh, not pleasant,” I said. “It hurts. Especially paper cuts.”
“When was the last time you got a paper cut?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“How did you receive it?”
This was bordering on the absurd, but what else could I do? I thought back to that fateful moment… and instantly regretted it. “Well, I was perusing a fine vintage book intended for gentlemen.”
“What was in it?”
“… Gentlewomen.”
“Why were you looking at it?”
“I was bored,” I said, increasingly worried this was some sort of morality inquisition. If it was, I’d need to start lying, and fast. “Maybe we can talk about this fine… tomb… of yours?”
“Why did you come to this place?”
“Funny you should ask. We’re here to stop a superorganism known as Kruthara—you know, the Maker’s old, long-dead nemesis. Only it isn’t so dead anymore.”
“Describe the color green.”
“Green?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a… color… and a lot of things are… it. Like trees or grass.”
“But what is it?”
“A color.”
“Do you like it?”
“Honestly, no,” I said, recalling that hideous green dot on the wall of my virtual cell. “I think it’s got a false nobility to it. Now red… there’s a color.”
“Keep it simple,” Ruena whispered.
“There’s nothing simple about this,” I hissed back. “If conversation is the only thing keeping it from turning us to ash, I’m going to keep it talking.”
“Thank you for your answers,” the voice said. “Now I will kill you.”
In that instant, my crew and I provided an emotional medley that covered the entire inner spectrum of a sentient being. I, for example, shrieked incoherently. Ruena didn’t move a muscle. Tusky fell to his knees and began bawling. And Gadra, well—she cheered.
(As an aside, I would later learn that Gadra reacted in such a manner because her linguistics implant was incapable of properly translating the voice. The words “kill you,” in her mind, were translated as “embalm you.” If you’re wondering why Gadra cheered at the prospect of being embalmed, I have no clue. I can only suspect, and hope, that she didn’t understand this word in her own tongue.)
Then, cutting through my blubbering, the voice said, “Self-aware consciousness has been confirmed. Please enter this shrine.”
All of us mortals shared uneasy looks for the next minute, unsure if the voice was “joking” and in the process of loading up a ten-kiloton punchline. But sure enough, the drones’ red lights faded to cool blue, the universal indicator of nonaggression. The army of squids then shifted in unison, gradually forming a dense, squirming tunnel that led straight to the Maker’s tomb.
“Well, I’m glad we all kept our composure,” I said, daintily smoothing out my jacket. “Onwards it is.”
As Umzuma guided us toward the diamond-shaped structure at the end of the drone tunnel, the scrap metal around us was cast in a new and sinister light. It stood to reason that most, if not all of these vessels had failed the voice’s “consciousness test.” Which raised the question… how much “life” in this universe was truly sentient? How many beings were simply strings of code, or some sort of philosophical zombie pretending to be self-aware? Judging by the sheer number of wrecks, it was higher than I’d ever imagined.
Perhaps I was being too morose about the whole thing. The others were celebrating as we proceeded, and rightfully so. We had, after all, passed the test. We’d been given a proverbial red-carpet invitation to one of the oldest and most sought-after locations in known space. And most crucially, we were one step closer to unwinding the nightmare of Kruthara.
But the implications of that test still shook me to the roots. All these visitors, all these ships, yet almost none had made it through. Perhaps not too startling on its own, but bear with me.
The Untraversed resided in just one tiny patch of the universe—a patch that also happened to contain just about every human and conscious being ever recorded in modern archives. Sure, there could be other forms of consciousness halfway across the universe, but we’d never heard from them. We had no way to know if they existed. Ergo, just point-zero-zero-zero-two percent of known space was absolutely confirmed to contain consciousness.
What did that mean, in the grand scheme of things? It meant consciousness was rare. Rarer than rare. If you buy my theory, it means consciousness was closer to an anomaly than a standard. Indeed, as I sat in my chair and studied the tomb, I began to think of consciousness as a bubble in an endless ocean. Perhaps Kruthara would be the finger that popped this bubble. And once it popped, who knew if it would ever arise again? And who would care? If a star goes supernova and nobody is around to see it, did it ever truly happen?
Bottom line, the notion made my skin crawl. If we didn’t succeed here—if Kruthara gobbled up every last source of consciousness—the universe might play out like a silent, blind film for the rest of eternity. There would be no art, no music, no fear, no love. Just chemical interactions experienced by nothing and nobody.
If we didn’t succeed, oblivion.
The end of everything.
“What’s our plan?” Ruena asked, shattering my rumination.
“We get in, get some weapons, get out,” I said. “Easy as pie.”
“Something tells me you don’t believe that.”
“Because you can see the future. Cheater.”
She sighed. “It’s not about that. It’s just… a feeling. But thanks for confirming my suspicions.”
“Hard not to have feelings about this.” I pointed out the viewpane, indicating the ever-growing mass of the tomb and its purple-energy fountain. We’d already been moving toward it for ten minutes, and we were nowhere near docking. Even so, the structure had already stretched past the edges of sight. Interplanetary distance has a way of throwing scale into a blender. “Ru, do you really think we’ll win this thing?”
“Whatever I say will just be a guess.”
“Then make a good guess,” I said quietly. “I need it right now.”
She pulled on a weary smile. “We’ll win.”
Then, in the strangest gesture I’d ever seen Ruena make, she reached out and placed her hand atop mine. I didn’t pull away. We sat there for the next few minutes, neither of us speaking, only staring at the tomb and its oval docking passage.
But at that moment, I wasn’t focused on the Maker or the war or my very likely death.
I was just savoring the beauty of her touch. And more deeply, the beauty of feeling her touch. Of feeling anything at all. Consciousness. This was what we fought for.
Nothing else mattered.
Eighteen
By the time Stream Dancer had limped into the tomb’s long, lightless passage, we were more suited up than mercenaries in a radiation-baked war zone. Full-seal gloves and boots, triple-filter helmets, osmotic chest panels… the works.
This was largely thanks to Chaska, who’d scrounged up every last bit of usable gear from the armory. This was “the big one,” in her words. No debates from me. Even if we didn’t encounter any direct resistance from ancient guardian fabriques or the Hegemony, we were setting foot on ground that probably hadn’t been touched by human soles in centuries, if not longer. And if history has any lessons to teach, it’s that bad things tend to accumulate when left in a vacuum.
Bad things, here, refers to the obvious threats: microbial infestations, energy bleed from a ruptured core, unstable foundations, invasive species. Any one of these elements was capable of decimating our unsuited bodies the moment we stepped outside the ship’s pressurized womb.
I checked my glove’s embedded data link as we waited in the staging bay. Reserves were down to four percent in fuel, six percent in coolant. Splendid.
“So, who’s our local history buff?” I asked. Tusky looked my way, his eyes wide with fear—or exhilaration—behind his mask’s faceplate. “Tusky, how old do you wager this thing really is?”
“Nobody knows,” he said. “The Hegemony never officially unsealed their findings on the Maker’s empire. Though I doubt that even their records are complete.”
“Does it matter?” Chaska said.
I glanced her way. “Yes, yes it does.”
“Why?”
“Because if we get out of this place, I’d like to impress my audience with tales of the insert-age-here-old tomb.”
“Name-dropping the Maker should be enough.”
“You’d think so… but people are sticklers.”
“This… isn’t stone,” Tusky said, wandering closer to the staging bay’s edge as he studied the walls around us. “Nor is it metal. All the texts spoke of the Maker’s ‘miraculous edifices’… perhaps they were constructed from this very material.”
Now that he’d mentioned it, the structure did seem odd. It was composed of a dark, almost black substance that was neither porous, nor mottled, nor smooth like traditional alloys. Even stranger—especially considering this place’s status as a quasi-religious site for billions of fanatics across the cosmos—everything was pristine. No pockmarks, no scorches, nothing. I’d seen holy wars waged over suspiciously shaped rocks. What were the odds that nobody had ever fired so much as a bullet in here?
“Think we’ll see any mummies?” Gadra asked.
I blinked at her. “Mummies?”
“Yeah. Everyone says they live in tombs.”
“Yeah, well, those people are wrong.” Thinking further on my past exploits in the ice pyramids of Nallahi, however, I added, “Most of the time.”
“We’ll be fine,” Ruena said, kneeling beside Gadra to reach her eye level. “No mummies to worry about.”
I nodded in solidarity, but inwardly I, too, began to fret about mummies. Those things do not die easily.
Just then, Stream Dancer slowed and hobbled downwards. We crossed over a misty, flickering chasm, then came to rest on a matte expanse of the same spotless masonry that formed the walls. A landing pad, it seemed. As the vessel lurched back on its supports and quieted, I noticed just how high the ceilings were above us. Or rather, I tried to notice. The chamber we’d entered stretched up into pure darkness.
“Incredible,” Tusky said. “The chasm seems to function as a moat… for what purpose, I wonder?”
“Bodhi,” Ruena called from Umzuma’s pit, drawing my attention, “get over here. You need to see this.”
At first glance, Ruena’s must-see discovery was far from impressive. Three of the panels lining Umzuma’s pit had glazed over with static, streaked with scattered bars of red and purple light. One of many systems that had been fried by the sun-swallower.
“This isn’t news,” I told the crew. “Just a reminder of our fair ship’s slow, painful demise.”
Ruena shook her head. “It’s not a malfunction. Tusky was playing around with the input frequencies, trying different counter-bands, and—”
“Remember what I said about not understanding complicated things?”
“Well, to put it in layman’s terms,” Tusky said, adjusting a few knobs to sharpen the image, “I believe this is a signal emanation. You see the color bands? Those are—how shall I say it?—an ancient form of identification. A signature, if you will. The treatises I’ve read on pre-Hegemony human history refer to them as chromatic differentiation.”
“I could’ve done without the jargon, but thanks,” I said, studying the screens more intently. “Let me get this straight. Somebody’s transmitting these color bands?”
“No, not quite. They’re merely signifying the identity of a particular entity—the tomb, in our particular case.”
“The tomb is transmitting?”
“It appears so.”
“What’s it spouting? Some sort of prerecorded ‘abandon all hope’ speech?” I shook my head. “Tusky, I know you’re not much of a seasoned deep-space prowler, but try to stay levelheaded about this. Almost every derelict vessel has its last transmission on loop.”
Tusky and Ruena shared a wary, almost conspiratorial look. I’d just touched the tip of an iceberg I wanted no business with.
“It’s not emitting a recorded transmission,” Ruena explained quietly. “It’s trying to establish an active line with us.”
A chill wriggled up my spine. I was gripped by the sudden sense that the Untraversed was gazing through the viewpane, burrowing into me with millions of unseen eyes.
“How’d you reach that conclusion?” I asked. Tusky gestured to a simscreen chock full of data, at which point I raised my hands to nix the initial question. “Forget that I asked how. What I want to know is, what does it mean? Is that tomb sentient?”
Tusky exhaled shakily. “It could be anything. The data is scant. It could be a chitta of some sort—this would be sensible, given the Maker’s fondness for them—or it could be an early progenitor of nonbiological artificial intelligence, or—”
“Or something worse,” I said, giving voice to the look in his eyes.
He nodded. “What I can say with certainty is that it’s intelligent. It’s adaptive. All evidence points to it being millions of years old, yet it found a way to interface with relatively contemporary transmission systems in a matter of minutes. It… it seems to have a desire to speak with us.”
I looked to Ruena for a counter-opinion, but the ligethan was lost in her own thoughts, staring absently out the viewpane. A rare and very not-great thing.
“Okay,” I said finally, “let’s give them a ring.”
“Just like that?” Tusky whispered. “Bodhi, I must implore you to use caution in this situation. This entity could be capable of anything.”
“Like what? Frying half our systems? Oh, already done. Next.”
“I just think—”
“My dear friend, the time for thinking is done. We need to finish this.”
As I spoke, I noted that Tusky’s eyes continually swung toward a key on the far side of Umzuma’s pit. He watched it as though fearful it might leap up and bite him. That key, I gathered, was the key. The hotline straight to Mr. Tomb.
I pressed it.
Now, Ruena didn’t seem overly shocked by my decision—on account of that time-piercing twosight, I’d imagine—but Tusky looked ready to leap right out of the viewpane and begin swimming away from the ship. Should it have worried me that the smartest creature in the room was concerned? Probably. Did it? Of course not. After enduring back-to-back stints in a mind-shattering, eternal prison and a space-snake’s mouth, one is fazed by very little.
Which is not to say that what came next didn’t make my heart lock up in my chest.
Countless red lights winked to life among the drifting flotsam. Within seconds, well before I even had the presence of mind to consider we might soon be joining the other wrecks, the lights coalesced and began swimming forth through the debris clouds. They moved in unison like a vast crimson nebula, drawing closer and closer until we saw nothing but their mass.
Only when we were completely engulfed, bathed in that hellish light, did I realize what these things were. Biomechanical drones, more or less. Each was squid-shaped, about ten meters long, packing autocannons that remained folded up and dormant—for now. Judging by the graveyard behind them, they weren’t too shy to put their firepower to use.
“Marvelous,” Tusky breathed, staring at them in wonder. “Just as the treatises and legends describe… I daresay we’re looking at the Maker’s last surviving creations. These are the very beings that carried out his will.”
My body had never felt so rigid. Each breath was a chore. “Tusky… you are aware of what the Maker’s ‘will’ was, aren’t you?”
“Yes, of course! To subjugate all beings, to force upon them his designs for cosmic order. He—” And then, in a miracle of self-awareness, Tusky understood what I was pointing out. He trembled and stole a step backward.
Gadra, in defiance of both her hangover and common sense, proceeded to wander up to the viewpane and press a hand to the silicate. “What’s ‘subjugate’ mean?”
“Gad,” I hissed through clenched teeth, “if you keep making sudden movements, you might find out firsthand.”
“What’s the problem?” she shot back. “How come only you guys get to talk with the cool aliens?”
“Because we’re professionals.”
“Uh-huh…”
“Gad, you need to—”
“State your species, name, and age,” a voice rumbled over the bridge comms. Not particularly loud, but enough to shut us all up. Enough to stop the blood in my veins, even. It wasn’t reminiscent of a man, nor a woman, nor a machine—it was something in the middle, yet something far beyond any of them. Something truly ungraspable. Hell, my linguistic implant couldn’t even tell me what language it was translating from. Several seconds of stunned silence elapsed. “This is your second instruction. State your species, name, and age.”
Struck by the premonition that we wouldn’t get a third instruction, I took the initiative. “My name is Bodhi Drezek. I’m a human. And my age depends on what space-time layer you occupy.”
Ruena elbowed me in the kidney.
“Your reply is understood,” the voice replied. “Tell me about your ship.”
“My ship? Well, see, it’s called Stream Dancer, and it’s a Sama-class vessel with—”
“Why did you name it Stream Dancer?”
“It’s… just something from my childhood. A long story.”
The voice hummed, and the drones beyond the viewpane drew closer.
“Did you want to know something else?” I asked.
“How does it feel when you cut your finger?” the voice replied.
Baffled, I looked at Tusky and Ruena—only to find they were in the same boat. If this voice did belong to an artificial-intelligence construct, there was a serious and damning possibility that its logic systems had gone sour over millions of years. Nothing good comes from a superintelligence that’s lost its marbles.
“How… does it feel?” the voice repeated.
“Uh, not pleasant,” I said. “It hurts. Especially paper cuts.”
“When was the last time you got a paper cut?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“How did you receive it?”
This was bordering on the absurd, but what else could I do? I thought back to that fateful moment… and instantly regretted it. “Well, I was perusing a fine vintage book intended for gentlemen.”
“What was in it?”
“… Gentlewomen.”
“Why were you looking at it?”
“I was bored,” I said, increasingly worried this was some sort of morality inquisition. If it was, I’d need to start lying, and fast. “Maybe we can talk about this fine… tomb… of yours?”
“Why did you come to this place?”
“Funny you should ask. We’re here to stop a superorganism known as Kruthara—you know, the Maker’s old, long-dead nemesis. Only it isn’t so dead anymore.”
“Describe the color green.”
“Green?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a… color… and a lot of things are… it. Like trees or grass.”
“But what is it?”
“A color.”
“Do you like it?”
“Honestly, no,” I said, recalling that hideous green dot on the wall of my virtual cell. “I think it’s got a false nobility to it. Now red… there’s a color.”
“Keep it simple,” Ruena whispered.
“There’s nothing simple about this,” I hissed back. “If conversation is the only thing keeping it from turning us to ash, I’m going to keep it talking.”
“Thank you for your answers,” the voice said. “Now I will kill you.”
In that instant, my crew and I provided an emotional medley that covered the entire inner spectrum of a sentient being. I, for example, shrieked incoherently. Ruena didn’t move a muscle. Tusky fell to his knees and began bawling. And Gadra, well—she cheered.
(As an aside, I would later learn that Gadra reacted in such a manner because her linguistics implant was incapable of properly translating the voice. The words “kill you,” in her mind, were translated as “embalm you.” If you’re wondering why Gadra cheered at the prospect of being embalmed, I have no clue. I can only suspect, and hope, that she didn’t understand this word in her own tongue.)
Then, cutting through my blubbering, the voice said, “Self-aware consciousness has been confirmed. Please enter this shrine.”
All of us mortals shared uneasy looks for the next minute, unsure if the voice was “joking” and in the process of loading up a ten-kiloton punchline. But sure enough, the drones’ red lights faded to cool blue, the universal indicator of nonaggression. The army of squids then shifted in unison, gradually forming a dense, squirming tunnel that led straight to the Maker’s tomb.
“Well, I’m glad we all kept our composure,” I said, daintily smoothing out my jacket. “Onwards it is.”
As Umzuma guided us toward the diamond-shaped structure at the end of the drone tunnel, the scrap metal around us was cast in a new and sinister light. It stood to reason that most, if not all of these vessels had failed the voice’s “consciousness test.” Which raised the question… how much “life” in this universe was truly sentient? How many beings were simply strings of code, or some sort of philosophical zombie pretending to be self-aware? Judging by the sheer number of wrecks, it was higher than I’d ever imagined.
Perhaps I was being too morose about the whole thing. The others were celebrating as we proceeded, and rightfully so. We had, after all, passed the test. We’d been given a proverbial red-carpet invitation to one of the oldest and most sought-after locations in known space. And most crucially, we were one step closer to unwinding the nightmare of Kruthara.
But the implications of that test still shook me to the roots. All these visitors, all these ships, yet almost none had made it through. Perhaps not too startling on its own, but bear with me.
The Untraversed resided in just one tiny patch of the universe—a patch that also happened to contain just about every human and conscious being ever recorded in modern archives. Sure, there could be other forms of consciousness halfway across the universe, but we’d never heard from them. We had no way to know if they existed. Ergo, just point-zero-zero-zero-two percent of known space was absolutely confirmed to contain consciousness.
What did that mean, in the grand scheme of things? It meant consciousness was rare. Rarer than rare. If you buy my theory, it means consciousness was closer to an anomaly than a standard. Indeed, as I sat in my chair and studied the tomb, I began to think of consciousness as a bubble in an endless ocean. Perhaps Kruthara would be the finger that popped this bubble. And once it popped, who knew if it would ever arise again? And who would care? If a star goes supernova and nobody is around to see it, did it ever truly happen?
Bottom line, the notion made my skin crawl. If we didn’t succeed here—if Kruthara gobbled up every last source of consciousness—the universe might play out like a silent, blind film for the rest of eternity. There would be no art, no music, no fear, no love. Just chemical interactions experienced by nothing and nobody.
If we didn’t succeed, oblivion.
The end of everything.
“What’s our plan?” Ruena asked, shattering my rumination.
“We get in, get some weapons, get out,” I said. “Easy as pie.”
“Something tells me you don’t believe that.”
“Because you can see the future. Cheater.”
She sighed. “It’s not about that. It’s just… a feeling. But thanks for confirming my suspicions.”
“Hard not to have feelings about this.” I pointed out the viewpane, indicating the ever-growing mass of the tomb and its purple-energy fountain. We’d already been moving toward it for ten minutes, and we were nowhere near docking. Even so, the structure had already stretched past the edges of sight. Interplanetary distance has a way of throwing scale into a blender. “Ru, do you really think we’ll win this thing?”
“Whatever I say will just be a guess.”
“Then make a good guess,” I said quietly. “I need it right now.”
She pulled on a weary smile. “We’ll win.”
Then, in the strangest gesture I’d ever seen Ruena make, she reached out and placed her hand atop mine. I didn’t pull away. We sat there for the next few minutes, neither of us speaking, only staring at the tomb and its oval docking passage.
But at that moment, I wasn’t focused on the Maker or the war or my very likely death.
I was just savoring the beauty of her touch. And more deeply, the beauty of feeling her touch. Of feeling anything at all. Consciousness. This was what we fought for.
Nothing else mattered.
Eighteen
By the time Stream Dancer had limped into the tomb’s long, lightless passage, we were more suited up than mercenaries in a radiation-baked war zone. Full-seal gloves and boots, triple-filter helmets, osmotic chest panels… the works.
This was largely thanks to Chaska, who’d scrounged up every last bit of usable gear from the armory. This was “the big one,” in her words. No debates from me. Even if we didn’t encounter any direct resistance from ancient guardian fabriques or the Hegemony, we were setting foot on ground that probably hadn’t been touched by human soles in centuries, if not longer. And if history has any lessons to teach, it’s that bad things tend to accumulate when left in a vacuum.
Bad things, here, refers to the obvious threats: microbial infestations, energy bleed from a ruptured core, unstable foundations, invasive species. Any one of these elements was capable of decimating our unsuited bodies the moment we stepped outside the ship’s pressurized womb.
I checked my glove’s embedded data link as we waited in the staging bay. Reserves were down to four percent in fuel, six percent in coolant. Splendid.
“So, who’s our local history buff?” I asked. Tusky looked my way, his eyes wide with fear—or exhilaration—behind his mask’s faceplate. “Tusky, how old do you wager this thing really is?”
“Nobody knows,” he said. “The Hegemony never officially unsealed their findings on the Maker’s empire. Though I doubt that even their records are complete.”
“Does it matter?” Chaska said.
I glanced her way. “Yes, yes it does.”
“Why?”
“Because if we get out of this place, I’d like to impress my audience with tales of the insert-age-here-old tomb.”
“Name-dropping the Maker should be enough.”
“You’d think so… but people are sticklers.”
“This… isn’t stone,” Tusky said, wandering closer to the staging bay’s edge as he studied the walls around us. “Nor is it metal. All the texts spoke of the Maker’s ‘miraculous edifices’… perhaps they were constructed from this very material.”
Now that he’d mentioned it, the structure did seem odd. It was composed of a dark, almost black substance that was neither porous, nor mottled, nor smooth like traditional alloys. Even stranger—especially considering this place’s status as a quasi-religious site for billions of fanatics across the cosmos—everything was pristine. No pockmarks, no scorches, nothing. I’d seen holy wars waged over suspiciously shaped rocks. What were the odds that nobody had ever fired so much as a bullet in here?
“Think we’ll see any mummies?” Gadra asked.
I blinked at her. “Mummies?”
“Yeah. Everyone says they live in tombs.”
“Yeah, well, those people are wrong.” Thinking further on my past exploits in the ice pyramids of Nallahi, however, I added, “Most of the time.”
“We’ll be fine,” Ruena said, kneeling beside Gadra to reach her eye level. “No mummies to worry about.”
I nodded in solidarity, but inwardly I, too, began to fret about mummies. Those things do not die easily.
Just then, Stream Dancer slowed and hobbled downwards. We crossed over a misty, flickering chasm, then came to rest on a matte expanse of the same spotless masonry that formed the walls. A landing pad, it seemed. As the vessel lurched back on its supports and quieted, I noticed just how high the ceilings were above us. Or rather, I tried to notice. The chamber we’d entered stretched up into pure darkness.
“Incredible,” Tusky said. “The chasm seems to function as a moat… for what purpose, I wonder?”
