The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (56 page)

Nivy drew a breath and looked him squarely in the eye. “I’m sorry,” she finally said.

With that thoughtful reassurance, Reece pressed t
he Spinner flush with his skin, and he was yanked away from his body with a stab of dull familiar pain.

XXVI

Truth
Be Told

Before either The Heron or The Kreft, there were the ancestors
.

The voice rang like a bell in Reece’s head. Or he
thought
it rang in his head; being on this end of the Spinner’s functions was disconcertingly dreamlike. He saw things and heard things, but from an unattached place, as a floating observer. As far as he knew, he didn’t even
have
a head in this foggy world.

Before he could more than wonder if Nivy had neglected to provide him with some key instructions—like what the bleeding bogrosh he was supposed to do now—the real images started, and he felt his body gasp, felt it like he might feel himself jerk in his sleep: as if from a million miles away. He’d thought he would prefer being on the receiving end of the Spinner, where there was no dizzying whirlpool drawing on his memories, turning his brain into a husk. That was before he’d realized how much worse it was to be the recipient of a flash flood of staggering information. Forget the husk. His brain felt like it had been wired to a pyroic thermal generator and fried to a
crisp
.

What he now saw…what he
knew
…changed everything. No wonder Nivy hadn’t had the words for this. The scale of it was harrowing and ungainly; he couldn’t fully comprehend it, but he understood it well enough to feel soaked to the bone with cold dread.

Before either The Heron or The Kreft, there were the ancestors. The first true inhabitants of the Epimetheus galaxy. In Nivy’s memories, they were faceless, humanoid blurs. Reece automatically understood that to mean she didn’t know what they’d looked like any more than she knew their real name. No one did. They’d been extinct for a thousand years.

But once, they’d been a brilliant people of explorers and innovators who thought the singular purpose of their existence was to irradiate every last corner of The Voice of Space to harvest knowledge for the advancement of future generations. Because they were so brilliant, they lived in fear of one thing only: dying out, and taking all their incredible knowledge with them.

For many years—longer in whole than the Epimetheus galaxy had even been civilized, as far as Reece knew—they fulfilled their purpose. As they quested, their entire people moving as one nomadic space tribe, they made advancements the likes of which the rest of the Epimetheus had yet to improve upon. They crafted technologies that eliminated the need for steam or coal in engines, that revolutionized irrigation and pollution problems, and stopped decay altogether. Technologies that weaved human biology and automata, to sustain life almost indefinitely. They were next to immortal, living six, seven, sometimes
eight hundred
years.

And they needed every year of that time to account for travel from one galaxy to the next. They were living in a time before the Streams; even with their sleek, black ships that could have outstripped a Nyad with only one wing and half an engine to boot, the very thing they were living for—exploration—was taking too long to accomplish. They needed something to speed them along, because regardless of whether or not they lived for eight hundred years first, they were still dying. In fact, they were dying
faster
. Too many of them had grown old without children. Too many had sacrificed the ability to procreate for automata parts that could sustain them just a little bit longer.

So they set up an outpost on the very edge of an empty galaxy, on a good sized planet in the middle of a ring of snowy moons. For the first time, they built themselves something that would stay behind even when they moved on—a home.

Settled in for what they thought would be a long haul, the ancestors tackled the problem of their travel, and in their laboratories, created a self-aware, sentient tool, organic but programmed with a single directive: to spread out across the galaxy, leaving trails in their wake that would catch up any object with mass and bear it along indefinitely.

They called them The Kreft.

For the first hundred or so years, their plan worked. The Kreft obediently set out to pave roads through The Voice of Space. At first, the roads wouldn’t hold; they faded unless a Kreft traced them again and again, setting them like a well-worn trail. This took time. In that time, the ancestors noticed The Kreft changing…evolving. Thinking for themselves, writing their own moral code, their own laws. One feature of their unique physiology was that they could compress their membranous selves and animate humanoid bodies by putting down roots in the neurons of a brain. They took to wearing bodies borrowed from the ancestors and assisting them in their laboratories. Trying to learn, unbeknownst to the ancestors, how to perfect themselves.

By the time the ancestors decided The Kreft had become too independent, hundreds of them had been bred, pitting the creations evenly against their creators, who were still dying out. War seemed immanent, and it would be a massacre. The Kreft had access to the ancestors’ technology, the one thing that would have given them a fighting chance. Not only that, but over the fifty years the ancestors’ alliance with The Kreft had been
deteriorating, civilization had begun bleeding out into the rest of the galaxy from all different sides. Thanks to The Kreft’s trails, new peoples were finding homes on the once-silent planets closer to the sun. If The Kreft won the war, the peoples would be left to suffer them alone.

So, in a desperate attempt to reverse what they’d done, the ancestors poured their collective resources into one final technological wonder. A failsafe. A weapon that would, as a very last resort, simultaneously destroy all The Kreft at the cost of great catastrophe for the sake of eradicating them once and for all. They constructed it in secret, and as their moons were one by one overtaken by the invading Kreft, sent it beyond the edges of the galaxy, into the uninhabited Voice of Space. Its key they kept for themselves on their home planet Icarus, fearing both the weapon and the means of activating it falling into Kreft hands should their plan to bring the weapon in at the last possible bell stroke fail.

As The Kreft overthrew the last moon, the ancestors sounded the retreat and ran for the weapon. They were obliterated in the pursuit. The weapon drifted, unmanned and undiscovered, lost between galaxies forever.

Upon their victory, The Kreft were freed from the ancestors. But not, as it turned out, from their directive. Deep inside of them, written into their genetic code in a precise hand, was a need to
go forth
. To pave roads. To conquer. They abandoned Icarus, left the galaxy that had been their prison, and disappeared.

Over time, the rest of the galaxy settled into itself. Planets were named. Cultures sprung up out of peoples that had come as saplings cut off a larger tree. The galaxy became the Epimetheus. And even the frigid Ice Ring with its long-dead cities couldn’t stay uninhabited forever.

The first people to discover the skeletal remains of the ancestors’ civilization on Icarus were a browbeaten troupe of travelers who had fled their planet on the back of famine. Browbeaten, but resourceful and shrewd. The Heron.

The ruins of the ancestors’ old cities provided The Heron with a building block for their fledgling culture. They flourished, but were perfectly content to remain removed from the rest of the Epimetheus, because they were proud,
so
proud, and when they’d inherited The Ice Ring—the arctic little corner of the galaxy no one else had wanted—they’d also inherited a wealth of knowledge and power, two dangerous weapons in what they considered less capable hands. The other inhabitants of the galaxy were disorderly, struggling to build themselves cities and governments, fighting amongst themselves, and mostly—probably unwisely—ignoring The Ice Ring altogether. As The Heron had rebuilt the ancestors’ cities, they’d also rebuilt their story, and if nothing else, it had taught them to be careful who they trusted with their secrets. And they suddenly had
a lot
of secrets.

In the end, it wasn’t the Epimetheus The Heron should have been keeping an eye on. Less than three hundred years after The Ice Ring had been rebuilt, The Kreft tracked rumors of a great weapon back to the home of their old enemy. They suffered no illusions that the weapon was the Heron’s; they knew if such a thing existed, it had to have been inherited from the ancestors. They determined it would be no one’s if not theirs.

War raged as The Kreft were caught off guard by The Heron’s resistance. Whole planets were destroyed; others were damaged beyond repair. The Heron held fiercely to their small piece of the galaxy, because they were terrified of what they knew, afraid of The Kreft discovering the means to finding the lost weapon—something that still alluded them, even after having the ancestors’ information at their fingertips for three hundred years.

After a bloody campaign that lasted half a century, The Heron, on the cusp of defeat, deployed two ancient airships of refugee Heron to the distant planet of Honora. The Kreft rose to power shortly thereafter. With nothing to stop them, they turned Icarus and its moons on their heads looking for the rumored weapon. The Heron, they finally decided, must have destroyed it in lieu of letting it fall into enemy hands. Their first act of victory was to enslave The Heron settlements and erect their largest outpost on Icarus as a symbol of their power.

Their plan for ruling the Epimetheus was simple enough. Shortly after reclaiming The Ice Ring, they set out to break down and then rebuild the cultures they deemed worthy of advancement. They would work from the shadows to neatly unite the galaxy under their rule. The alternative was more war, something they might not be able to afford. With the ancestors' laboratories in disrepair, they had no immediate means of creating more of themselves, but using the Epimetheus, they could build an army of expendable foot soldiers not only capable of wiping out the straggling Heron rebels, but all other opposition they might encounter as their conquest branched into other worlds and galaxies.

And that had been the state of things in the Epimetheus for almost five hundred years.

With a growl of pain, Reece jerked and found himself hands and knees on the laboratory floor. The Spinner pinched off his temple and fell with a quiet tick to the marble. He stared at it blearily, panting as his brain tried to catch itself up to speed. It felt like a muscle, sore after a long day of tearing itself apart.

After a moment, Nivy knelt beside him and
met his eye. “Are you alright?”

Reece considered as he slowly leaned up on his haunches. It was like someone had slipped him a pair of bifocals, and suddenly, he could see the fingerprints of the ancestors plainly stamped all over the Epimetheus, transferred from The Kreft and The Heron through Aurelia to Honora and so on.
Bleeding bogrosh. Honora seemed awfully
young
all of the sudden. “Not even remotely.”

Nivy nodded, eyes on the Spinner.
“I thought about just telling you, but I don't know if I could have.” Almost as an afterthought, she stood, nudged the Spinner out into the open with her boot, and stomped on it. It crackled and sparked as it died. “That history has been passed down by memory since the first wars…it's too dangerous to be kept anywhere accessible. There probably aren't more than ten Heron who know it at a time. If The Kreft got their hands on it—”

“
They would know the truth about the weapon,” Reece finished, still a little breathless as he scrubbed the back of his forearm across his forehead. “They'd realize it was never hidden on Icarus to begin with, and that it needs a key.” He'd always thought The Heron Underground was a little crazy for going to such lengths to make sure their spies, if caught, wouldn't be able to talk under duress. But if collaring their people kept The Kreft from finding out they could still get their grubby hands on the ancestors' weapon…a weapon that could wipe out an entire
race
…then he could see the need.

Nivy nodded again, watching him as he stood. He was just remembering some of Eldritch's more confusing words from the night of the masquerade.
We cannot leave until Epimetheus is ours, Reece. It is…how would you say…a part of our peculiar genetic code.

“
I need a minute,” Reece muttered as he began to pace. Nivy sat on a desk and pulled up her knees to watch him work out the wrinkles in his thoughts in silence.

Reece was only a strategist when it came to flying. In a war council, he'd probably be about as useful as a cricket stick. But he couldn't stop thinking that The Kreft's biggest blunder hadn't been their assumption that the ancestor's weapon had been destroyed. It had been the overlooking of the two airships that had found their home on Honora at the height of a war when all hope for their opponent had otherwise seemed lost.

Turning on his heel, Reece pointed at Nivy and said, “So what I just saw…that came directly from the memories of The Heron who first fought The Kreft?”

Nivy waggled her head.
“
In
directly, but yes.”