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Chapter Thirteen




The Neptune Belle slid across the three-hundred-kilometer length of the habitat, threading a path between a pair of diagonally oriented mirrors that reflected Sol’s light through one of three giant windows. The mirrors brightened slowly, dynamically increasing their reflectivity for the habitat’s dawn.

Nathan nudged the joystick to the side, adding a burst of thrust to maneuver them over one of the windows. He put the ship into a slow spin until the window filled their view on the right, then steadied the ship.

The sun-windows divided the interior into three habitable strips, while wide canals joined each section along the rims at the cylinder’s poles. Vegetation in this biome was a welcoming green that blanketed most of the many islands, each surrounded by calm, clear waters. The pyramid of a deifactory rose from the center of a particularly large landmass, and the lights of civilization twinkled around its base. Nathan spotted a second deifactory in a similar position on the second habitable zone, which led him to assume the third zone also featured one. The second factory didn’t appear to be in good shape, though, with one side sunken in. The lights on that landmass were noticeably more dispersed as well.

“Home sweet home?” Nathan asked, craning his neck back over the pilot seat. Aiko-Six sat at the copilot station, and the other three had floated into the cockpit for their first real look at the megastructure.

“Guess so,” Vessani breathed, sounding like she didn’t know what she was feeling—or what she should feel—at a time like this. “It looks more alien than I expected, if that makes any sense.”

“Of course it does.” Joshua put a reassuring arm around her and gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze. “You’ve never seen your home from this angle before.”

“Yeah.”

“Anything tickling your senses?” Nathan asked Rufus.

“Still nothing,” the cleric reported. “The habitat is slumbering. No active junctures of any kind, and no indication it considers us a threat.”

Nathan nodded. It’s what he’d expected to find, but it was still good to hear it confirmed. Some habitats could be—for lack of a better word—“touchy” when it came to objects passing near them. Not many of them, thankfully, but enough to make approaching an uncharted habitat risky in and of itself. The exterior of this habitat might have looked like an unbroken swath of solar skin, but he didn’t doubt for a moment the megastructure could defend itself if roused.

No one knew why some habitats aggressively protected the space around them while most didn’t. His personal theory was that some form of trigger event lay in the past of each “agitated” habitat: perhaps an errant chunk of ice or rock on a collision course or an unfortunate spaceship accident that placed the megastructure at risk. Or maybe a crew of pirates trying to blow a hole in the ultradiamond windows for whatever brain-dead reason.

Any of those could elicit a response from most habitats, and while some might “calm” over time, others would remain in a heightened state of alert, perhaps waiting for orders from the absent Pentatheon to stand down.

“What about the Black Egg?” Nathan asked.

“Nothing,” Rufus said. “Its juncture must have a short range.”

“Worth an ask. If you were able to do your thing from here, we could skip going inside.”

“But we’re this close!” Vessani said. “Would you really not stop inside?”

“The job comes first. It’s what you two hired us for, remember?”

“But you’d miss out on sampling the local cuisine. The fish is particularly good.”

“You like fish?”

“No.” She shook her head with a toothy grin. “I absolutely love fish!”

“You don’t say.” Nathan found his eyes drawn to her cat tail, swishing so happily behind her that she thwacked Joshua rhythmically in the hip.

“Fishing is a major industry in T’Ohai,” she continued. “That’s the capital city where I grew up. It’s nestled between the coast and a deifactory.”

“Which is where we’ll head once we’re inside.” Nathan glanced back through the habitat window. They were fast approaching the sunward pole. “Shouldn’t be too difficult to find, what with only two or three deifactories to check out. What’s the local language like?”

“The crafted tongue is spoken in most places,” Vessani said, referring to the language the Pentatheon had designed for humanity. All three of the gas-giant societies spoke the crafted tongue as their primary language, and most habitats Nathan had visited also used the language.

Most, but not all.

The crafted tongue could be found throughout the solar system—all vlass menus and deifactory interfaces used the language—and its ubiquitous presence in old technology, ruins, and records had provided a strong stabilizing counter to linguistic drift during the Age of Silence as humans left the cradles of the gas-giant shell bands and sought to rediscover and reclaim the solar system.

But some corners of the solar system lacked those stabilizing elements, and Nathan had been forced to hire a professional linguist on more than one occasion.

“There’s a local language, too,” Vessani said. “I’m a little out of practice, but I’m sure I can manage if it comes up. I wouldn’t worry about it, though. Most people stick to the crafted tongue in and around the capital.”

“All standard port authority channels are dead,” Aiko reported. “There’s no sign this place has been claimed by one of the Big Three.”

“Then it seems it’s up to us to let ourselves in.”

The Belle flew past the end of the cylinder, revealing the circular side facing Sol. Nathan eased down on the controls to place them into a slow descent along the rotating front of the colony, destined for the axial airlock door.

Aiko worked the ship’s commect, then nodded.

“I’ve got a connection to the airlock.”

One of the vlasses on her console turned black.

“Umm?”

“What’s wrong?” Nathan asked.

“I’m not sure. Have you ever seen this before?” She tilted the vlass toward him. A white cursor blinked on a black screen above a numerical keypad.

“It’s asking us for a number?” Nathan frowned at the screen. “What the hell for?”

“I have no idea.”

He twisted back in his seat. “You two know anything about this?”

“You’re asking the wrong girl,” Vessani replied, and Joshua shook his head.

“Rufus?”

“Don’t look at me.” The cleric held up two open hands.

“Right, then. Hmm.” Nathan turned back around and typed in 1-2-3-4 followed by the commit key.

The screen flashed access denied in red text and bleeped at him before it reverted to the numerical keypad.

He tried 9-0-0-3 next, with the same results.

“Vess?” Nathan released one of his shoulder straps so he could turn around more comfortably. “Did the people who grabbed you mention anything about a coded lock on your home?”

“Not that I remember. Then again, I wasn’t really in a position to ask questions.”

“They got in somehow,” Aiko said.

“Yeah, but the Jovians blew them up,” Nathan said, “so I’m not sure how them knowing the code helps us.”

Nathan hit the 9 key over and over again just to see how large a number could be entered. The string of nines eventually looped around the screen, and he concluded the input was open ended. He hit commit after he grew bored of tapping the 9 key, and the vlass buzzed at him once more.

“Well”—he threw up his arms—“I’m out of ideas!”

The cockpit fell silent for a minute, punctuated by thoughtful murmurs or frustrated grunts as both Rufus and Vessani tried entering numbers. Their efforts appeared random to Nathan.

After a long silence, Joshua cleared his throat. The others faced him.

“I believe I may have a solution,” he said in a cautious tone.

“Go for it.” Nathan spread his open palms at the vlass. “Be my guest.”

“It’s not the code itself, but rather a way to find the right number. Let me check something first.” He floated over the console, tapped in a number, hit commit, then began tapping in a new number while the screen flashed its error message, hit commit again, and repeated the process a few times. “Good. The interface still accepts inputs even though it’s displaying a message. That’ll save us a lot of time.”

“Time doing what?” Nathan asked.

“Searching for the code.”

“And how will you do that?”

“Through brute force.”

“I hate to break it to you, but a ship like ours couldn’t bust through that door if we tried.”

“No, not physical brute force,” Joshua corrected. “Computational power. But I’ll need some resources first.”

“Name them.”

“I know this is going to sound odd, but I need some of your money.”

Nathan gave him a long, doubtful stare, unsure if the man was serious.

“The hell you say,” he replied after his glare failed to affect the engineer.

“Plus, a small, waterproof container,” Joshua continued.

Vessani smiled brightly. She unsnapped the thermos from her belt and held it up.

“Yes.” Joshua beamed at her. “That’ll do nicely.”


It took a while for Nathan to come around to Joshua’s plan, but he didn’t have any better ideas, so what else was he supposed to do? Joshua asked for a little gravity to help him work, so Aiko searched for a flattened protrusion for the Belle to land on and picked a radiator vane situated about eleven kilometers from the dock. The vane was half a kilometer long and took the Belle’s weight without a problem. The landing placed them less than a third of the way to the outer circumference and gave the crew 0.3 gravities to work with.

Nathan joined the others by the workbench next to the microfactory on C Deck, a small bank box in hand.

Joshua had spread a tarp over the workbench to help organize his little project. He’d retrieved a small device from his vest pocket, which resembled a pocket watch composed of smoked glass, and set it next to a cable, a hand drill, and what looked like a turkey baster from the kitchen. Vessani chugged the coffee from her thermos, rinsed it out and wiped down the interior, then handed it over.

“Is this enough for you?” Nathan thumped the case of c’troni cylinders onto the workbench.

Joshua looked up from the drill in his hands. “Is that really all you can spare?”

Nathan glowered at him.

“Just kidding. That should be more than sufficient.” He slid the case over and pulled out a fat money cylinder.

“Explain to me again what you’re trying to do?”

“I intend to construct a makeshift computational engine.” Joshua fitted a small, circular saw onto the end of the drill and pulsed the trigger. The sawblade whirred to his satisfaction. “I’ll then program the engine to figure out the code.”

“Using my money?”

“Using the computronium stored inside it. I take it you’re aware of that?”

“Of course. That’s why it works as a universal form of currency. It has intrinsic value.”

“Exactly.”

“But the computronium isn’t inactive,” Nathan said. “It’d take a bank to switch it on.”

Mostly true.” Joshua flashed a half smile. “In my years of study, I’ve picked up a few tricks along those lines. Computronium is a fascinating topic, by the way.”

“Mmhmm,” Nathan murmured, not sure if he wanted to stick around for this or leave the man to his work.

Joshua braced the first cylinder in a vise and sawed the top off with the hand drill. He then used the turkey baster to extract the milky blue liquid inside the cylinder and transfer those contents to Vessani’s repurposed thermos.

“At the most basic level,” Joshua began, “this bluish liquid—the variant we creatively call ‘blue computronium’—is nothing more than a standardized and highly scalable network of machines, each about the size of a human cell. The more machines present, the greater the processing potential of the network. And I say ‘potential’ for a reason. There are whole Saturnian universities dedicated to unlocking computronium’s full suite of abilities.”

“But aren’t we already doing that?” Nathan asked. “I mean, plenty of deifactured devices have some of that goop in them. Stuff like vlasses and about half the Belle’s systems.”

“And your partner’s heads,” Joshua said. “Jovian minds use black computronium, you see. About a thimbleful in each head.” He tapped the money box. “Just that small amount could outpace all the blue computronium in these cylinders.”

“You’re not sawing open Aiko’s head.”

“Of course not, and I’m not suggesting it. Just making conversation. Besides, I don’t have much experience with black computronium, which shouldn’t be surprising, given how rare and expensive it is. I picked up how to code persona transfers, but that’s about it.”

“Did you really have to use my money for this?” Nathan asked. “Couldn’t you have used a spare vlass or something?”

“It’s easier if I start with an inactive base, which the money cylinders provide. The interface language for computronium is extremely complex, you see. We’re only just beginning to understand even its most basic command functions, a problem made worse because networks with preloaded programs add their own layers of complexity and specialization. We can use deifactories to load software written by the Pentatheon, but our ability to craft our own is severely limited. In fact, the one I’m about to write is almost comically simple. Just a basic counting routine with a few outputs.”

Joshua connected the cable to his glass pocket-watch-looking gizmo and plopped the other end into the thermos before taping it shut to prevent accidental spillage. A small vlass on his pocket device lit up with lines of incomprehensible text, and the rest of the device unfolded to reveal rows of keys. Nathan recognized less than half the symbols.

“Can you read all that?” he asked.

“Some of it, but not all,” Joshua admitted. “Maybe one day we’ll have a complete translation of the Pentatheon’s programming language, but for now all we can do is muddle our way through the best we can.”

He began typing out lines of code.


Joshua brought his bottled “computational engine” up to the cockpit after he finished writing the program. He cabled the thermos to the ship’s commect and observed with a satisfied grin as a digital 1 appeared and the error message flashed. A new number starting with twenty thousand blipped on the screen, almost too fast for Nathan’s eyes to catch, and the message reappeared.

“It’s spitting out random numbers?” he asked, turning down the commect’s volume. Those bleeps could be annoying!

“No, the program counts up sequentially. It’s trying every number starting with one, inputting them far faster than any of us could manage. I determined earlier that the error message doesn’t stop the next number from being entered, and it seems my other assumption was correct.”

“Which was?”

“There don’t seem to be any limits on how many times we can send the wrong value. Or penalties of any kind, such as a delay for when the next value can be entered. Really, quite amateurish when you think about it.”

“Lucky us.”

The value flashed again, now over three hundred thousand.

“How big is this number?” Nathan wondered aloud.

“We’ll just have to wait and see.”

Joshua left the cockpit after his program hit a million, leaving Nathan alone. He sat down in the pilot seat and watched the numbers blip upward, wondering who might have locked down the habitat and why.

And how, for that matter. The docks on sealed habitats either worked or they didn’t. He’d never come across one that had been locked, not even by Saturnians or Jovians. Though, now that he considered it, he supposed it wasn’t unreasonable that any group capable of restarting a deifactory could also adjust how a habitat dock worked.

Does that mean the Union or the Everlife have been here already? he wondered. If so, what brought them here?

He leaned back and closed his eyes, and his mind fell upon an obvious—and potentially ominous—conclusion.

Did someone come here for the Black Egg? he thought. Are we already too late?

There were other possibilities, of course. The code lock could have been much, much older. Perhaps it dated back as far as the Age of Communion.

Maybe this is nothing more than a quirk of the habitat, he told himself. Maybe the habitat’s ancients wanted their neighbors to “stay off the lawn” unless invited.

He leaned the seat back and settled into its padding as his mind wandered. He pictured himself falling through a sea of long, flickering digits and flashing error messages, and he eventually dozed off.

His father scolded him in his dreams, and he watched in increasing horror as the man’s body oozed away like soft wax, becoming more deformed with each heated reprimand.

Nathan woke with a start, blinked his eyes into focus, and wiped away a line of drool trailing down from the edge of his mouth. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and checked the clock to discover four hours had passed. He smacked his lips and glanced over to the ship’s commect.

Green text that read access granted pulsed over the number 510,064,472.

“Oh, wow.” His eyes widened in surprise. “It actually worked.” He cleared his throat and switched on the ship-wide channel. “Would everyone please come to the cockpit? Looks like Josh found our way inside.”

It took a few minutes for the others to finish filing in.

“Well, would you look at that?” A broad grin crept onto Joshua’s face. “Now that’s a surprise. We should have spent more time trying to guess the number.”

“Why do you say that?” Nathan asked.

“Because that’s a holy number,” Rufus cut in, causing Joshua to pause with his mouth open.

“Well, yes,” Joshua said. “But it’s also the number of square kilometers in a unit of earth.”

“Which is why the Church considers it a holy number.”

“How holy are we talking here?” Nathan asked, only tangentially curious.

“Certainly, it’s not as holy as five.” Rufus straightened out of his slouch. “Or even less important numbers such as twenty-four or three hundred sixty-five, but it’s still a number with ties back to the Pentatheon. It represents one of the ways they ordered the lives of the ancients, providing a mathematical foundation for how they went about their days and perceived reality.”

“Have you heard that an earth might have once been more a unit of measure?” Joshua asked the cleric, his face lighting up. “That the value might actually have come from the surface area for one of the solar system’s original planetary bodies? Perhaps one consumed for raw materials?”

“Yes, actually.” Rufus provided a slim smile back. “There are some passages in the bible that hint at its existence.”

“Look, this is all super fascinating,” Nathan said, “but how about we get this ship underway already? Aiko?”

“You’ve got it, boss!” She climbed into the copilot seat. “Strap yourselves in, everyone. It’s time to visit Vessani’s home!”


The copy of Galatt Xormun, serving as apex for the Everlife corvette, didn’t know what to make of the Neptune Belle’s actions. Why had the ship spent hours sitting on a random radiator vane? The corvette’s telescope had failed to pick out any extravehicular activity, and the minimal commect output they’d detected made no sense to his analysts. They’d deciphered the signal, revealing it to be nothing more than a basic countdown.

Or count-up, in this case.

And when the counting stopped, the Belle lifted off and entered the habitat.

<Shall we pursue them, Apex?> asked the pilot.

<No,> Xormun replied, floating over to the telescope vlass. Without the zoom, the habitat was a distant, glinting shape that resembled a giant grappling hook. <Hold at this distance and maintain stealth running. We’ll keep an eye on them through the habitat windows.>

<Yes, sir.>

The corvette had been waiting for the Belle when it arrived at Faelyn’s Grasp and had tailed the transport to WC-9003, an unremarkable megastructure in an unremarkable part of the Habitat Belt. The corvette could have overrun and overpowered the Belle at any time, but such aggressive action brought risks. What if the nekoan had died during the boarding action? What if they inadvertently damaged or destroyed a key piece of evidence?

And now we know this random habitat is part of the mystery, Xormun thought. His patience had paid off, as it often did, but was there more to learn by holding back and letting events play out? The Leviathan of Io and most of its corvettes had been scattered across the Habitat Belt, now converging on WC-9003 at maximum thrust.

Time was on his side, and so he decided to wait and watch a little longer.

Why not let these organics do the hard work for us? he concluded. Nathan Kade’s little crew might find the prize first, but keeping it is another matter entirely!



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