“Aren’t you worried we’ll wander into Huskers, Merlin?”
“Worth it for the big reward, wouldn’t you say?”
“Tell me more about this mystical gun, and I might believe you.”
Merlin settled back in his seat, drawing a deep breath. “Almost everything I know could be wrong.”
“I’ll take that risk.”
“Whatever it was, it was fully capable of destroying whole worlds. Even stars, if the more outlandish stories are to be believed.” He looked down at his hand, as if suddenly noticing his impeccably manicured fingernails.
“Ask him how he thinks it works,” the familiar said. “Then at least we’ll have an idea how thorough he’s been.”
She put the question to Merlin, as casually as she could.
“Gravity,” he said. “Isn’t that obvious? It may be a weak force, but there isn’t anything in the universe that doesn’t feel it.”
“Like a bigger version of the syrinx?”
Merlin shrugged. Sora realized that it was not his fingernails to which he was paying attention, but the ornate ring she had noticed before, inset with a ruby stone in which two sparks seemed to orbit like fireflies. “It’s almost certainly the product of Waymaker science. A posthuman culture that was able to engineer – to mechanize – spacetime. But I don’t think it worked like the syrinx. I think it made singularities; that it plucked globules of mass energy from vacuum and squashed them until they were within their own event horizons.”
“Black holes,” the familiar said, and Sora echoed her words aloud.
Merlin looked pleased. “Very small ones; atomic-scale. It doped them with charge, then accelerated them up to something only marginally less than the speed of light. They didn’t have time to decay. For that, of course, it needed more energy, and more still just to prevent itself being ripped apart by the stresses.”
“A gun that fires black holes? We’d win, wouldn’t we? With something like that? Even if there was only one of them?”
Merlin fingered the ruby-centered ring.
“That’s the general idea.”
Sora took Merlin’s hand, stroking the fingers, until her own alighted on the ring. It was more intricate than she had realized before. The twin sparks were whirling around each other, glints of light locked in a waltz, as if driven by some microscopic clockwork buried in the ruby itself.
“What does it mean?” she asked, sensing that this was both the wrong and the right question.
“It means . . .” Merlin smiled, but it was a moment before he completed the sentence. “It means, I suppose, that I should remember death.”
They fell out of the Way for the last time, entering a system that did not seem markedly different than a dozen others they had skipped through. The star was a yellow main-sequence sun, accompanied by the usual assortment of rocky worlds and gas giants. The second and third planets out from the sun were steaming hot cauldrons, enveloped by acidic atmosphere at crushing temperature, the victims of runaway heat-trapping processes, the third more recently than the second. The fourth planet was smaller, and seemed to have been the subject of a terraforming operation that had taken place some time after the Flourishing: its atmosphere, though thin, was too dense to be natural. Thirteen separate Ways punched through the system’s ecliptic at different angles, safely distant from planetary and asteroidal orbits.
“It’s a Nexus,” Merlin said. “A primary Waynet interchange. You find systems like this every thousand or so light-years through the plane of the Galaxy, and a good way out of it as well. Back when everyone used the Waynet, this system would have been a meeting point, a place where traders swapped goods and tales from half-way to the Core.”
“Bit of a dump now, though, isn’t it.”
“Perfect for hiding something very big and very nasty, provided you remember where it was you hid it.”
“You mentioned something about a storm . . .”
“You’ll see.”
The Way had dropped them in the inner part of the system, but Merlin said that what he wanted was further out, beyond the system’s major asteroid belt. It would take a few days to reach.
“And what are we going to do when we get there?” Sora asked. “Just pick this thing up and take it with us?”
“Not exactly,” Merlin said. “I suspect it will be harder than that. Not so hard that we haven’t got a chance, but hard enough . . .” He seemed to falter, perhaps for the first time since she had known him; that aura of supreme confidence cracking minutely.
“What part do you want me to play?”
“You’re a soldier,” he said. “Figure that out for yourself.”
“I don’t know quite what it is I’ve found,” the familiar said, when she was again alone. “I’ve been waiting to show you, but he’s had you in those war simulations for hours. Either that or you two have been occupying yourselves in other ways. Any idea what he’s planning?”
Merlin had a simulator, a smaller version of the combat-training modules Sora knew from warcreche.
“A lot of the simulations had a common theme: an attack against a white pyramid.”
“Implying some foreknowledge, wouldn’t you say? As if Merlin knows something of what he will find?”
“I’ve had that feeling ever since we met him.” She was thinking of the smell of him, the shockingly natural way their bodies meshed, despite their being displaced by thousands of years. She tried to flush those thoughts from her mind. What they were now discussing was a kind of betrayal, on a more profound level than anything committed so far, because it lacked any innocence. “What is it, then?”
“I’ve been scanning the later log files, and I’ve found something that seems significant, something that seemed to mark a turning point in his hunt for the weapon. I have no idea what it was. But it took me until now to realize just how strange it was.”
“Another system?”
“A very large structure, nowhere near any star, but nonetheless accessible by Waynet.”
“A Waymaker artifact, then.”
“Almost certainly.”
The structure was visible on the screen. It looked like a child’s toy star, or a metallic starfish, textured in something that resembled beaten gold or the luster of insect wings, filigreed in a lacework of exotic-matter scaffolds. It filled most of the view, shimmering with its own soft illumination.
“This is what Merlin would have seen with his naked eyes, just after his ship left the Way.”
“Very pretty.” She had meant the remark to sound glib, but it came out as a statement of fact.
“And large. The object’s more than ten light-minutes away, which makes it more than four light-minutes in cross-section. Comfortably larger than any star on the main sequence. And yet somehow it holds itself in shape – in quite preposterous shape – against what must be unimaginable self-gravity. Merlin, incidentally, gave it the name Brittlestar, which seems as good as any.”
“Poetic bastard.” Poetic sexy bastard, she thought.
“There’s more, if you’re interested. I have access to the sensor records from the ship, and I can tell you that the Brittlestar is a source of intense gravitational radiation. It’s like a beacon, sitting there, pumping out gravity waves from somewhere near its heart. There’s something inside it that is making spacetime ripple periodically.”
“You think Merlin went inside it, don’t you?”
“Something happened, that’s for sure. This is the last log Merlin filed, on his approach to the object, before a month-long gap.”
It was another mumbled soliloquy – except this time, his sobs were of something other than despair. Instead, they sounded like the sobs of the deepest joy imaginable. As if, finally, he had found what he was looking for, or at least knew that he was closer than ever, and that the final prize was not far from reach. But that was not what made Sora shiver. It was the face she saw. It was Merlin, beyond any doubt. But his face was lined with age, and his eyes were those of someone ol
der than anyone Sora had ever known.
The fifth and sixth planets were the largest.
The fifth was the heavier of the two, zones of differing chemistry banding it from tropic to pole, girdled by a ring system that was itself braided by the resonant forces of three large moons. Merlin believed that the ring system had been formed since the Flourishing. A cloud of radiation-drenched human relics orbited the world, dating from unthinkably remote eras; perhaps earlier than the Waymaker time. Merlin swept the cloud with sensors tuned to sniff out weapons systems, or the melange of neutrino flavors that betokened Husker presence. The sweeps all returned negative.
“You know where the gun is?” Sora asked.
“I know how to reach it, which is all that matters.”
“Maybe it’s time to start being a little less cryptic. Especially if you want me to help you.”
He looked wounded, as if she had ruined a game hours in the making. “I just thought you’d appreciate the thrill of the chase.”
“This isn’t about the thrill of the chase, Merlin. It’s about the nastiest weapon imaginable and the fact that we have to get our hands on it before the enemy, so that we can incinerate them first. So we can commit xenocide.” She said it again: “Xenocide. Sorry. Doesn’t that conform to your romantic ideals of the righteous quest?”
“It won’t be xenocide,” he said, touching the ring again, nervously. “Listen: I want that gun as much as you do. That’s why I chased it for ten thousand years.” Was it her imagination, or had the ring not been on his hand in any of the recordings she had seen of him? She remembered the old man’s hands she had seen in the last recording, the one taken just before his time in the Brittlestar, and she was sure they carried no ring. Now Merlin’s voice was matter of fact. “The structure we want is on the outermost moon.”
“Let me guess. A white pyramid?”
He offered a smile. “Couldn’t be closer if you tried.”
They fell into orbit around the gas giant. All the moons showed signs of having been extensively industrialized since the Flourishing, but the features that remained on their surfaces were gouged by millennia of exposure to sleeting cosmic radiation and micrometeorites. Nothing looked significantly younger than the surrounding landscapes of rock and ice. Except for the kilometer-high white pyramid on the third moon, which was in a sixteen-day orbit around the planet. It looked as if it had been chiseled out of alabaster some time the previous afternoon.
“Not exactly subtle,” Merlin said. “Self-repair mechanisms must still be functional, to one degree or another, and that implies that the control systems for the gun will still work. It also means that the counter-intrusion systems will also be operable.”
“Oh, good.”
“Aren’t you excited that we’re about to end the longest war in human history?”
“But we’re not, are we? I mean, be realistic. It’ll take tens of thousands of years simply for the knowledge of this weapon’s existence to reach the remotest areas of the war. Nothing will happen overnight.”
“I can see why it would disturb you,” Merlin said, tapping a finger against his teeth. “None of us have ever known anything other than war with the Huskers.”
“Just show me where it is.”
They made one low orbital pass over the pyramid, alert for buried weapons, but no attack came. On the next pass, lower still, Merlin’s ship dropped proctors to snoop ground defenses. “Maybe they had something bigger once,” Merlin said. “Artillery that could take us out from millions of kilometers. But if it ever existed, it’s not working anymore.”
They made groundfall a kilometer from the pyramid, then waited for all but three of the proctors to return to the ship. Merlin tasked the trio to secure a route into the structure, but their use was limited. Once the simple-minded machines were out of command range of the ship – which happened as soon as they had penetrated beyond the outer layer of the structure – they were essentially useless.
“Who built the pyramid? And how did you know about it?”
“The same culture who got into the war I told you about,” he said, as they clamped on the armored carapaces of their suits in the airlock. “They were far less advanced than the Waymakers, but they were a lot closer to them historically, and they knew enough to control the weapon and use it for their own purposes.”
“How’d they find it?”
“They stole it. By then the Waymaker culture was – how shall I put it – sleeping? Not really paying due attention to the use made of its artifacts?”
“You’re being cryptic again, Merlin.”
“Sorry. Solitude does that to you.”
“Did you meet someone out there, Merlin – someone who knew about the gun, and told you where to find it?” And made you young in the process? she thought.
“My business, isn’t it?”
“Maybe once. Now, I’d say we’re in this together. Equal partners. Fair enough?”
“Nothing’s fair in war, Sora.” But he was smiling, defusing the remark, even as he slipped his helmet down over the neck ring, twisting it to engage the locking mechanism.
“How big is the gun?” Sora asked.
The pyramid rose ahead, blank as an origami sculpture, entrance ducts around the base concealed by intervening landforms. Merlin’s proctors had already found a route that would at least take them some way inside.
“You won’t be disappointed,” Merlin said.
“And what are we going to do when we find it? Just drag it behind us?”
“Trust me.” Merlin’s laugh crackled over the radio. “Moving it won’t be a problem.”
They walked slowly along a track cleared by proctors, covered at the same time by the hull-mounted weapons on Tyrant.
“There’s something ahead,” Merlin said, a few minutes later. He raised his own weapon and pointed toward a pool of darkness fifteen or twenty meters in front of them. “It’s artifactual; definitely metallic.”
“I thought your proctors cleared the area.”
“Looks like they missed something.”
Merlin advanced ahead of her. As they approached the dark object, it resolved into an elongated form half buried in the ice, a little to the left of the track. It was a body.
“Been here a while,” Merlin said, a minute or so later, when he was close enough to see the object properly. “Armor’s pitted by micrometeorite impacts.”
“It’s a Husker, isn’t it.”
Merlin’s helmet nodded. “My guess is they were in this system a few centuries ago. Must have been attracted by the pyramid, even if they didn’t necessarily know its significance.”
“I’ve never seen one this close. Be careful, won’t you?
Merlin knelt down to examine the creature.
The shape was much more androform than Sora had been expecting, the same general size and proportions as a suited human. The suit was festooned with armored protrusions, ridges, and horns, its blackened outer surface leathery and devoid of anything genuinely mechanical. One arm was outspread, terminating in a human-looking hand, complexly gauntleted. A long knobby weapon lay just out of reach, lines blurred by the same processes of erosion that had afflicted the Husker.
Merlin clamped his hands around the head.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” He was twisting now; she could hear the grunts of exertion, before his suit’s servosystems came online and took the brunt of the effort. “I’ve always wanted to find one this well-preserved,” Merlin said. “Never thought I’d get a chance to tell if an old rumor was even half-way right.”
The helmet detached from the creature’s torso, cracking open along a fine seam which ran from the crown to the beaklike protrusion at the helmet’s front. Vapor pulsed from the gap. Merlin placed the separated halves of the helmet on the ground, then tapped on his helmet torch, bringing light down on the exposed head. Sora stepped closer. The Husker’s head was encased in curling matte-black support machinery, like a sta
tue enveloped in vine.
But it was well preserved, and very human.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “What does it mean?”
“It means,” Merlin said, “that occasionally one should pay proper attention to rumors.”
“Talk to me, Merlin. Start telling me what I need to hear, or we don’t take another step toward that pyramid.”
“You will like very little of it.”
She looked, out of the corner of her eye, at the marblelike face of the Husker. “I already don’t like it, Merlin; what have I got to lose?”
Merlin started to say something, then fell to the ground, executing the fall with the slowness that came with the moon’s feeble gravity.
“Oh, nice timing,” the familiar said.
Reflexes drove Sora down with him, until the two of them were crouching low on the rusty surface. Merlin was still alive. She could hear him breathing, but each breath came like the rasp of a saw.
“I’m hit, Sora. I don’t know how badly.”
“Hold on.” She accessed the telemetry from his suit, graphing up a medical diagnostic on the inner glass of her helmet.
“There,” said the familiar. “A beam-weapon penetration in the thoracic area; small enough that the self-sealants prevented any pressure loss, but not rapidly enough to stop the beam gnawing into his chest.”
“Is that bad?”
“Well, it’s not good . . . but there’s a chance the beam would have cauterized as it traveled, preventing any deep internal bleeding. . . .”
Merlin coughed. He managed to ask her what it was.
“You’ve taken a laser hit, I think.” She was speaking quickly. “Maybe part of the pyramid defenses.”
“I really should have those proctors of mine checked out.” Merlin managed a laugh which then transitioned into a series of racking coughs. “Bit late for that now, don’t you think?”
“If I can get you back to the ship . . .”
“No. We have to go on.” He coughed again, and then was a long time catching his breath. “The longer we wait, the harder it will be.”