Chapter Twenty-Two
Deep Space, Shex system
The frosted interior of the derelict was high and vaulted, like a cathedral rimed with ice. It left Murphy with a momentary sensation of standing at the entrance to a crystal temple, forbidden to—and so, forgotten by—mere mortals. And that impression was reinforced by the change in the demeanor of the RockHounds after they’d entered the still-pressurized section of the gargantuan wreck and removed their helmets.
Upon arriving at this desolate place in deep space and the wreck that was thermally one with the darkness around it, the boisterousness that had prevailed since departing Shuqdu Station had begun quieting. The RockHounds became calmer, their exchanges shorter and less frequent. Finally, they settled into a silent trek through the frozen relic, their diminished pace hinting at something like reverence. Among the oldest, their upward glances at the glaciated masses around them were a strange mix of an anticipation and dreadful awe. And as they pressed deeper, Murphy understood why.
They began passing ruined machinery and controls that lacked the typical switches and levers and toggles of the technology they knew. Instead, there were smooth surfaces and great empty vertical rings surrounded by railings, as if something—a hologram?—might have been displayed there. Overhead, even conduits and internal struts seemed to follow graceful lines, though they hung and tilted like the skeletal remains of cubist giants who had witnessed the death of their own ship. Eventually, everything they passed echoed a technology as foreign to Murphy as what he’d seen in the almost surreal interior of the Dornaani ship Olsloov.
Arriving at a towering intersection, Ogweln gestured to the groined vault that the ice had formed overhead. “As I mentioned on Spin One, we found this just over one of your centuries ago. It has been here for many times that long. Except for the area we enter now, its power has failed and the temperature of the hull merged into background. Despite the small heat still within, it cannot be found with thermal scans.”
He moved with slow familiarity toward the only source of light in the area, other than what they held in their hands or were affixed to their helmets. Touching it, several previously unseen lights flared to life, revealing that the intersection did not merely join several passageways or even chambers, but three caverns that snaked their way through a still larger structure choked with debris.
“What was this?” Murphy asked his guides.
Several of them shrugged. “Likely it was a rotational habitat,” Fvaranq murmured, “like the ones inhabited by the SpinDogs but made from metal and what appear to be composites.”
The salvager shuffled past, his steps labored. “Probably a generation ship,” he mumbled. “This would have been the rotational core.”
“Not a ring?” Murphy asked. Not that he was especially versed in the technologies and architectures of space habitats, but he’d seen smaller rings used to provide equivalent gravity as well as the slow rolling spins.
“Rings,” Ogweln offered, “were typically discrete containers arranged into, or upon, a torus that rotated around a hub. But this seems to have been a multichambered tube. If so, it dwarfs any human construction of which I am aware.”
“This way,” muttered the shuffler as he slipped sideways through a thicket of wreckage. Following, they emerged into a high corridor that ran out like a strangled tributary from the icicle-draped monument to both human engineering ambition and impermanence.
* * *
They navigated many half-choked passages, some so broken that they had been severed and separated, compelling the group to lower themselves down from one askew section to the next. After much clambering in and around the gaps of the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, they came to an unusually intact door, larger and heavier than the mightiest bulkhead access points they had passed.
The two youngest in the RockHounds’ team reacted to Ogweln’s nod by manning a massive hand crank on the left hand wall. Putting their full strength and weight into the windlass-like device, it groaned and began to turn very slowly. Murphy moved toward them, intending to assist, but Ogweln extended a blocking arm. Apparently this duty was the specific charge of those currently performing it.
It took almost half a minute for their labors to produce a visible gap between the portal and the darkness unveiled as it slowly retracted sideways into the bulkhead. Another minute and the gap was large enough for them to pass through in single file, although Murphy and Fvaranq had to turn sideways to fit.
Between the ruin around him, the solemn demeanor of his companions, and the sepulchral vastness of yet another dimly seen chamber disappearing upward and outward into complete darkness, Murphy was glad for the glow of their helmet lights.
His first impression was that of a checkerboard array of rectangular altars, stretching away from him in every direction. But as he remained still, taking it in, Murphy noticed one or two lights scattered among the long, dark objects. As his eyes became more accustomed to the dark, he saw that what he’d thought of as altars were more akin to serried ranks of sarcophagi.
But when Fvaranq found and activated the chamber’s lights, Murphy decisively revised his judgment. Yes, the chamber was certainly a resting place, and every bit as cold as the grave, but not so final. In fact, quite the contrary.
Murphy swallowed. “Are these all—all cold cells?”
“We call them sleep cylinders,” Fvaranq corrected. The others nodded.
Murphy shook his head. “I have questions . . . many questions.”
Ogweln nodded. “Of course you do. We knew you would. That is one of the reasons we chose to bring you here: that you might see this and know such things have existed. Or at least passed through this system.” He gestured for Murphy to follow. “Come: we dare not remain here long. We shall speak again once we have returned to the ship and are on our way.”
* * *
Fvaranq sealed the hatch to Murphy’s bunkroom. He joined Ogweln opposite Murphy, and gestured in the direction of the immense hulk they’d left behind. “Without revealing anything specific, it is well beyond Shex’s outermost orbit. There are other such wrecks, although none so large. But all of them are places where we may hide. Or, in the event of a long war, sites from which to observe or mount ambushes on enemies, arriving out of what they mistake as deep and empty darkness.”
“If they are that far out from Shex,” Murphy mused, “then during the Searing, they must also come unusually close to Jrar. Probably within ten A.U. That also means they could function as hidden staging areas from which forces can deploy into the enemy’s home system, or launch warheads or kinetic impactors toward Kulsis.” He paused. “Or R’Bak.” They nodded somberly. “All of which is very valuable information . . . but that’s still not why you brought me out here.”
Ogweln may have smiled. “So. You have puzzled it out.”
“I think so. It’s not simply that you’re looking for Kulsian wrecks for salvage. You’re combing the deep black for whatever was left behind by the waves of Ktoran exiles who came to this system before you. And who may have raided, or even fought wars against, each other. Just like we will against Kulsis.”
Fvaranq glanced at Ogweln, whose nod seemed to signify grudging approval. “I have not corrected any of your conjectures because, in general, they are accurate. Moreover, your perception is not only swift but unsurprised, so I must ask: When did you begin considering the possibility of derelicts that dated from the earlier Exodates?”
Murphy shrugged. “Shortly after arriving in this system. I might have become a historian instead of a soldier, and I’d learned enough to appreciate that every war leaves both social and physical wreckage. So I’ve been hoping that if you did come across salvage from the, eh, Exodates, that you might have gleaned some technical insights from them that could be useful to us now. Simply the repair schematics from such a ship as that one would be invaluable.”
Fvaranq frowned. “If we had such, do you truly believe we are too ignorant or lethargic to use them before now?”
Murphy shook his head. “No, but you might not reveal them to the SpinDogs. Which might be why you contacted me so surreptitiously: that you keep this knowledge as a bargaining chip. Besides, there are some diagrams and references that might now be unfamiliar to you, but recognizable to us.”
Ogweln crossed his arms with a frown. “You speak of computers?”
Not only computers, but we can start there. “Yes. For the most part.”
“Then I must disappoint you, Colonel Murphy. Exodate wrecks—if that is what we stood in—have even fewer such devices than Kulsian ships. These great vessels came directly from the Ktoran Sphere, so for those who built them, the edicts and lethal resolve of the Death Fathers was not legend, but reality.”
“But repairs—heck, just maintenance—is too complex to do from memory. If there weren’t simple data storage systems, then they must have had microfiches or paper manuals.”
Fvaranq sighed. “Such records were usually casualties of the battles that, quite literally, ripped these to pieces. Merely finding salvage that faintly resembles the hull from which it came is a great rarity. And what combat—or scuttling—did not eliminate, the ravages of space usually have.”
“But you have found a few such references?”
Ogweln nodded. “A very few. And they, along with what we find when we board—but do not remove—Kulsian wrecks are why there are several technological areas in which we hold an advantage over the SpinDogs. The past Ktoran outcasts and the present Kulsian Overlords are both the products of immense industrial complexes, that in turn gave rise to the economies and populations needed for true research and innovation.”
Ogweln shrugged sharply. “We have no such capabilities. We may only improve upon what we glean from their wrecks. But there has never been anything among those rare finds that holds the promise of unforeseen discoveries. If there was, you may rest assured that the Legate would have brought them forward before the present cooperative autofabbing commenced.”
“So then . . . why have you showed me your”—what, holy of holies?—“greatest secret?”
The two RockHounds exchanged glances before Fvaranq explained. “At the outset, there was one practical consideration. Specifically, we heard that you—the Lost Soldiers—arrived in sleep canisters. We thought that you might be learned in their construction. Or that the mysterious Dornaani might have left such schematics with you, either when they departed or in one of their subsequent automated tranches.” When Murphy regretfully shook his head, they nodded. “We concluded as much long before we extended our invitation. But it was never the definitive reason for it.”
Ogweln leaned forward. “You risked yourself for us. On a day when it was revealed that several of our kin helped Kamara betray the mission to secure the corvette, and more were on the edge of execution, you interceded.” He leaned back. “You put forward your life—and with it, those of your Lost Soldiers—as bond for theirs.”
“Anseker would not have harmed me.”
“No, he would not have. But he was not who you had to worry about.”
When Murphy frowned uncertainly, Fvaranq picked up the explanation. “Anseker’s fortunes have risen along with your star. But he has many peers who wish it was them, or wish you’d never arrived, or wished the Kormak Family had prevailed in its attempt to exterminate the Otlethes Family. Publicly straining your relationship with Primus Anseker not only risks his aura of preeminence, but your own life.” When Murphy shook his head, Fvaranq shrugged toward Ogweln. “He does not understand.”
“I think I do, actually. Having challenged the primus’s judgment, I make it more likely that someone will risk assassinating me. Either because they believe Anseker will no longer investigate so deeply or harshly if I were to be slain, or that his position might actually be more secure without me around as a perpetual . . . well, nuisance.”
“That is correct. As is your conjecture why we have not shared all our technological insights and sources, but that we can foresee a time when it will be necessary.”
Murphy nodded. “Your secrets were your insurance, even if you couldn’t develop them yourselves. If the SpinDogs ever became too aggressive, too ‘preeminent,’ you could have taken one of their emissaries to the derelict and threatened to destroy it all if their actions became overtly or slowly genocidal toward your people. And that would have given them great pause, because they stand the best chance of analyzing the technologies and employing them.
“But now, with a lethal threat to all of you, you anticipate having to share both the knowledge and the locations of the deep space relics. Either as havens from, or a means to strike back against, the Kulsians. Or both.”
Ogweln nodded. “And now, it can be accomplished—with you as our intermediary.” Murphy blinked, began to protest, but the old RockHound raised a stilling palm. “It could not be otherwise. You have seen how we who live in space are divided into two camps. The fracture lines are so sharp that it is impossible to believe that any product of that divided world can be objective. Or, if one actually could be, no one would have believed them capable of an unprejudiced view and fair dealing.
“Then you came from the stars and not only lack any intrinsic alliance to either side, but have acted as a Justiciar who saved our families, though we are held to be the lesser beings in this system.”
Murphy frowned at the unfamiliar word. “A justiciar? Like a judge?”
Fvaranq leaned forward, very serious, and the emphasis he put on the word was unmistakable. “A Justiciar is a judge chosen by the acclaim of the people. More like an advocate.”
“Or a Legate?”
Ogweln nodded. “They have many similarities. They are positions that are not always filled, for they are not always needed. And even then, there are not always persons worthy of the titles. Consequently, the title of Justiciar has lain unconferred for many, many generations now.” He smiled. “We are resolved that the time has come to confer it, once more. But I am not now asking you to decide whether you would accept the title, Colonel Murphy. It is a profound decision for anyone to make, let alone an outworlder. Best reflect upon it during the journey back to Spin One. Regarding which: it is time to secure for thrust.”