Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 18
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
The Commodore was relieved to be on a new subject: “We’re wrapped around the sum of our reality; our reference back to realspace is an event that we define as a superposition thread, observing everything between us and the last point in reality that we occupied before entering the Q-Field. We just move the other end of that thread to where we need to be, or as close to it as we can get, and re-enter realspace there.”
“We...just...move it,” incredulous, Benedict repeated.
“Granted, it’s a little more involved than that,” Baxter admitted, “And not without risk. Gravity is very powerful in the Q-field; we use it and probability mapping to essentially trick our threads into observing a different point in realspace than the one we last occupied. It’s possible – however unlikely – to get lost in space and even in time when breaching the Q-field.”
“What happens if that...super-thread of yours breaks?”
Baxter hesitated before answering. “We don’t know,” he said, “It’s happened a small number of times over the centuries. As I said gravity is extremely powerful in the Q-field. We use gravity to map other probable realities; gravity travelling from the Q-field back into our reality is what shapes the thread that tethers us. Sometimes another source of gravity within the Q-field–another nearby reality, perhaps–tears a thread away. We don’t know whether they reattach elsewhere, if they’re destroyed or if they simply remain adrift in the Q-Field. Nothing that’s been lost in a broken superposition thread has ever returned. We have no way of travelling into any nearby reality; we can only travel in parallel within our own.”
♦♦♦
Just as he felt himself stretched out and flowing in all directions at once Benedict felt the collapse back into himself. They’d left Q-field and for a frightening moment he couldn’t tell if they’d been outside realspace an instant or an eternity...for just a...time had lost all meaning when they’d left realspace...and he felt as though he were everywhere at once, the plane of existence collapsing in his center, carrying him throughout –
And he was back on the bridge of the Ouroboros.
“Jesus Christ!”
“It’s a strange sensation,” Baxter concurred, “You get used to it.”
“How long does that take?”
The Commodore chuckled and turned his attention to the Bow display. Ahead of them was a colossal star burning a luminous electric blue; the Ouroboros’ destination for this jump lay on the far side of the brilliant, burning orb.
“We’re very nearly home; that is the star, Anuket,” Baxter explained, “Parent of Anuket Station, our next port of call and Operational Command of the Phenex El-Ahur Starfleet. Half a light year further on is Heket and Midian.”
“I remember being able to see Anuket in the sky over Landing at night,” Benedict said wistfully, “The Esperanza’s route took us away from Anuket; I’ve never passed this way before. I’d hope to never pass this way again, knowing what I know. But I guess that’s not going to happen.”
“Your future self and I made this crossing several times,” Baxter said, “And I hope we’ll make the crossing again many more times in the long years to come; it was my honour to fight alongside him...alongside you.”
“I still don’t recognize the man you talk to me about,” Benedict said, “I still only see what he did...what you say I will do...to my Commanding Officer and to the Officers under my command.”
“You didn’t do anything to them,” Baxter protested, “He didn’t do anything to them! Bloom Margaret chose to lead the mission against the Zohor. The officers who left with you aboard the Esperanza were likewise volunteers!”
“And it’s my leadership that got them killed.”
“And your leadership will win us the Aeons’ War.”
“You don’t know that!”
“The Nai’Marak foresaw it!”
“FUCK the Nai’Marak!”
The exclamation was met with stunned silence. From the crew pit below them to the officers on the bridge around him, Jack Benedict had their complete and undivided attention.
“Mission Commander,” Heihachi began, “There is a difference between what you understand Prophecy to be and what Prophecy actually is for a being like the Nai’Marak.”
“Really? And what is that?”
“The Nai’Marak is not simply a soothsayer who pretends to see the future or imagines some grand delusion. It is able to see through time; the Nai’Marak perceives and experiences at least three more dimensions of spacetime than we do. What it is able to do is the equivalent of us spying upon a world halfway across the universe through the use of space probes or looking down upon a village from a faraway mountaintop through a telescope.”
“Yeah and all the Nai’Marak’s ever had for me or anyone I knew was bad fucking news.”
“Life is suffering,” Heihachi replied, “A lesson from the Buddha of Old Earth. Your life, Mission Commander and the lives of all who have died fighting the Aeon’s War have been sacrificed for the cause of the perpetuation of the Human Species, the perpetuation of Life itself.”
“Yeah, I know how this song goes; remember?”
“That doesn’t make it any less true,” Baxter said.
“Commodore,” a call came from the crew pit, “We are passing out of solar eclipse from Anuket Station.”
“Contact them and advise we are en route,” Baxter replied.
“As you say,”
The Commodore turned back to Benedict and Heihachi. “Mission Commander your future self made the choices he made not because he believed as we do, but because he believed that Humanity is worth saving. He made the choices he made, fought as he fought, because he believed that he could save it. We have come this far, Mission Commander, because of him. He sent us after you because he remembered that you took us the rest of the way.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No; but I believe it. I believe it, because I knew him; I fought with him and I would have gladly died for him. I believe it, because I recognize him in you.”
“I find it strange that I do not,” Benedict replied.
♦♦♦
The star Anuket was a blue giant, burning helium for fuel. Its mass and size were hundreds of times greater than that of the star around which the Old Earth had orbited. Anuket was girded by a vast field of debris that had never coalesced into planetary bodies. Instead a strange and unique system of rings had formed: large meteoroids and asteroids circled closest to the sun, with smaller rocks, then dust and gas circling in vast planar orbits around the star. Most of the asteroids existed in stable orbits around Anuket; only a few of the smaller rocks fell and ricocheted through the belt. Sometimes they struck one another or larger asteroids with enough force to send stones falling into new orbits or collisions. These smaller asteroids were destined to either fall in towards the star and be burned or impacted against one of the immovable larger bodies. Only a fortunate few would be pulled into more stable orbits of their own. Most remarkable about the system was that the inner ring of asteroids and the outer ring of dust and gas orbited around Anuket in opposite directions.
A distance between the star and its stones several hundred million kilometres wide was completely barren; everything in that region had either been absorbed into the asteroid field or drawn into the star and consumed. Just on the fringe between the asteroids and this stellar no-man’s land orbited a particularly large asteroid; it could have been called a moon if it weren’t surrounded by a ring of carefully organized and precisely coordinated tumbling rocks. This asteroid was home to Anuket Station.
“Unlike Bloom’s Point or the Fleetyard at Proxima Zeta, Anuket Station is our own,” Baxter Vincent explained proudly, as they watched an enhanced image of the still-distant space station, “It took us nearly two hundred and fifty years, but we mined our way into the rock to make our base. Then we turned our attention to the smaller stones around, wrangling them into stable orbits where we needed them and making them into branches of the main base. They serve a double duty as both a shipyard and a physical shield between the main station and the rest of the asteroid field.”
Benedict was impressed. “That is brilliant engineering, Commodore,” he said, “Colonel Bloom would have appreciated it better than I. She was an aerospace engineering expert, as well as being one hell of a pilot; she was also the finest leader I’ve ever known.”
“Your future self told me much the same many times,” Baxter concurred, “I feel the loss of never having known her.”
Benedict chuckled. “You probably wouldn’t have gotten along.”
“Your future self told me that many times, as well.”
The Ouroboros continued inbound, her approach to the Station across the void between stone and star. The light from Anuket produced eerie, luminous shadows in the asteroid field. The El-Ahur Starship banked up and away from the central base towards one of its orbiting perimeter stones.
“We’re far too big to dock at the main facility,” Baxter explained, “Once the ship is moored we’ll cross aboard a smaller vessel. We’ll be meeting the commanders of the Starfleet to brief them before continuing on to Midian.”
Benedict saw now where the Fleet was hiding: the smaller asteroids that had been towed into orbit around Anuket Station were lined with ships, moored to the inner wall formed by the asteroids themselves. As they approached, Benedict saw that a great many of the vessels were badly damaged, some irreparably. The serviceable ships were docked together, clusters of them spread throughout the docking facility. The irreparably damaged ships were likewise moored together, being cannibalized for materials used in the repair of the rest of the Starfleet.
“What happened?” Benedict asked, as they sailed past the wreckage.
“The Zohor evolved,” Heihachi replied, bitterly.
Baxter Vincent tapped a control plate and a section of the display magnified, zooming in on one of the wrecks. Benedict could now make out the bulky, insect-like form of the mechanized space suits the El-Ahur had worn aboard the Ship, when they’d come to repair it following their bloody encounter with the Zohor.
“When the Grandmaster came aboard the Old Ship,” Benedict said, “He was wearing one of those. What are they?”
“We call them Macronauts,” Heihachi offered, “They’re enclosed multi-purpose mechanized exoskeletons. We can adapt them for use as infantry; heavy labour; as environment isolation suits; to link into larger vehicles such as fighters or certain shuttles; whatever we need.”
“You’ll be trained on their use,” Baxter said, “Once our business on Midian is done.”
“I can’t wait;” Benedict said, dryly.
♦♦♦
The shuttle crossed the distance between the Ouroboros and Anuket Station. The canopy of the shuttle’s passenger compartment was like that of the Command deck, an imaging skin. Despite how close they were to the star Anuket, there was still another bright light in the sky far off beyond the visible edge of Anuket’s ring.
“That’s Heket, there.” Baxter pointed across the display field, “With the right magnification you could see Heruba. And at the right time of day you would even be able to watch Midian in transit across her surface. But of course, what you’re seeing is light from half a year ago; when you look at Heket and Heruba from here, you’re really just looking into the past.”
“It’s all so small...”
“As was our last home, so I was told.”
Benedict nodded. “We’ll go back there someday,” Benedict said, “Once we’ve done with the Zohor.”
“That’s what you...what your future self always told us,” Baxter said, “He told us we’d go back there to destroy it.”
“No choice,” Benedict said, “My understanding of this conflict is that the Zohor are a fucking distraction from the real war, against the Nimbus.”
Heihachi said, “What many ignore is that the Zohor were designed to fight the Nimbus.”
“Yeah, except they decided that the best way to do that was to destroy all life in the universe.” Benedict said, “Not exactly serving their cause is it?”
“Not so,” Heihachi said, “The nuance is that the Zohor decided to eliminate all organic life; all biological life.”
“What else is there?” Benedict asked. Heihachi and Baxter looked shocked a moment before recovering.
“Forgive us, Mission Commander; you come from an earlier time, with...more narrow points of view.”
“Are you calling me a bigot?” Benedict was incredulous
“No; merely...uninformed.” Heihachi replied.
“Life isn’t just flesh and blood, plant and animal,” Baxter said, “There are beings like the Nai’Marak; machine intelligences such as the Sentinels or the Zohor themselves; likewise there are still other forms of life and intelligence that even we can barely understand.”
“And isn’t the Nimbus after them all as well? Isn’t the Zohor out to destroy them, too?”
“No,” Heihachi said, “The Nimbus can only infect organic beings, biological life. While such life forms once made up the majority of life in the cosmos, what life is now left is either part of one of the Machine Races or Ethereal Beings, such as the Nai’Marak. Neither the Zohor nor the Nimbus has ever shown interest in them. Likewise, other than the Nai’Marak or the Sentinels, we have never had any meaningful contact with any other forms of life.”
“So, the Zohor think they’re serving their mission because by depriving the Nimbus of any living hosts, they’ll starve them to death.” Benedict said.
“From what we can tell it seems to have worked,” Baxter said, “Nowhere in the universe that we’ve been able to explore directly or through remote probes have we found signs of intelligent life. We’ve found evidence for many civilizations long-dead, but never have we found anyone else.”
“You think the Zohor wiped them all out?”
“We hope that they managed to flee,” Baxter replied, “We hope that the Exodus was successful, at least in part.”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
♦♦♦
Anuket Station’s walls were of the cold rock of space; everything had been mined out according to specification; bulkheads, infrastructure, hatches and airlocks had all been added later, built of the exotic metal alloys that the lost League of Worlds had favoured in their engineering ventures. Benedict was amazed at the scale of the construction. Though easily dwarfed by the Hub and even the Old Ship, Anuket Station must have been the single largest object ever constructed by Human engineers...or their descendants. The shuttle passed directly into the open landing bay, through an energy membrane that kept the bay pressurized. Once they had passed, the docking bay doors whisked shut with a thunderous slam.
“How is that field generated?” Benedict asked.
“It’s a plasmoid flow of charged helium particles,” Heihachi replied, “They’ve been magnetized to a frequency that repels the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere that we breathe, but allows other objects through. A similar field was briefly deactivated as we approached the station. That one is magnetically attuned to repel anything approaching the station from the starward side.”
“How well does it work?”
“We wouldn’t want to trust it with one of the larger rocks or if a planet-smasher fired on us, but otherwise we’re fine.” Baxter answered.
“That’s reassuring,” Benedict said, unconvincingly, “What about the radiation? That’s a blue giant out there; that thing’s UV output should be cooking us!”
“The composition of Anuket Station’s stone shields us here,” Baxter said, “And our ships and the Macronauts are shielded against nearly all forms of radiation.”
“I can’t believe we’ve accomplished all this in just fifteen hundred years,”
