The Gardens of Nibiru (The Ember War Saga Book 5) (2 page)

“The dark energy field grows stronger as we near the system’s primary, say five days at best. But that’s not our real problem.” The engineer tapped a flat screen and multicolored bar graphs formed in the tank.

“Damn it,” Valdar said with a shake of his head.

“Excuse me.” Hale raised a hand next to his face. “A little help for the uninitiated?”

“I can’t keep the cloak up,” Levin said. “If I cut power to everything but life support, we’ve got no more than ten days until we’re basically flapping in the wind for all to see.”

“The engineers on Titan Station said the power leak was fixed.” Valdar hit the edge of the table with his knuckles.

“In their defense,” Levin said as he clasped his hands behind his back, “we’re using a Toth cloaking device pulled out of the
Naga
’s wreck. The device is bastardized Karigole technology, which we re-bastardized to mesh with our systems
and
the jump engine that I’m not allowed to touch. It’s a miracle that we haven’t been warped into three-headed tentacle monsters, but the day is young.” He knocked on the tank’s railing.

“So what does this mean for the mission?” Hale asked.

Valdar pulled the power graphs close to him, his eyes darting over the readings.

“I can give you two days on the surface before we have to drop the cloak. Maybe another twelve hours, but if I do that, then we won’t have enough battery power to fire the main guns. Not a risk I want to take if Mentiq has anything in the way of orbital defenses,” Valdar said.

“What about a bombardment? We brought nukes,” Hale said.

“There’s no guarantee that would work,” Steuben said. “Nuclear war was quite common amongst the Toth before Mentiq brought them all under his control. He’s certain to have bunkers that can withstand anything. Better to get in close to kill him.”

“Turning his island into glass with nuclear fire would get our point across,” Valdar said. “Everything we know about the Toth is that they’re business-minded, not prone to blood feuds. I’m OK with de-cloaking, dropping ordnance and jumping out. That should convince the Toth to leave us alone.”

Steuben’s hands balled into fists. He sucked in a deep breath and bared his teeth.

Hale grabbed Steuben by the shoulder and shook his head.

“But the decision isn’t made yet,” Valdar said. “Steuben, where is Lafayette? If there’s anyone in the galaxy who can make Toth, Karigole and human technology work together, it’s him.”

Levin gave a defeated shrug. 

“He maintains the vigil. I will relieve him immediately,” Steuben said and walked away.

“This isn’t the plan,” Valdar said, addressing the ship’s senior officers. “We should have had weeks to scout out Nibiru and come up with the best course of action possible. Now, we have a few days—at best—to make this happen. The
Breitenfeld
’s never failed before and we’re not going to start now. We will find a way to kill Mentiq and get back to Earth in one piece, or we will make one. Dismissed.”

****

Lafayette sat in front of a small shrine in his workshop, his feet tucked beneath his legs, hands resting on his knees. The shrine was a simple wooden box. A small bowl filled with opal-colored beads and a comb made from bone—personal effects of the Karigole named Rochambeau who’d died on the
Naga
—sat on one side of a melted down and sputtering candle. On the other side of the candle was a burnt scrap of a flight suit, the only thing recovered from the wreckage where Kosciusko rammed his fighter into a fleeing overlord’s command bridge.

The candle fluttered, its light shining off the pool of liquid wax just beneath the flame.

He hadn’t bothered to keep track of how long he’d knelt before the shrine. His cybernetic body knew neither fatigue nor discomfort. Lafayette’s cybernetics remained hidden beneath a set of naval rating coveralls, hiding his disfigurement from view. Much of his body had been burned away by a Xaros disintegration beam years ago. Replacing what was lost had been a painful journey of trial and error. All that was left of his original body was his brain and a few organs in his chest cavity. His face was a mask of polymers over a scaffolding that mimicked expressions and speaking.

Steuben knelt beside Lafayette and matched his pose.

“I relieve you,” Steuben said. “I take up the watch.”

“They’re almost gone,” Lafayette whispered. “Let me stay.”

“Have you heard them?”

“No, but I don’t have ears anymore.”

“Ghosts whisper to our souls, not our bodies. If they are silent, then they are at peace, confident that you and I will complete the mission.”

The flame danced against the wick, growing fainter. The two warriors sat for several minutes more in silence.

The fire sputtered, then went out with a hiss. The Karigole placed their hands on the deck in front of their knees, then leaned forward to touch their foreheads to the ground.

“Farewell, Rochambeau,” Lafayette said, “you gave me a blood transfusion after I was injured. It kept me alive so that I would not be the last.”

“Farewell, Kosciusko. You were the best of us. Your will kept me going, saved me from despair so that I would not be the last,” Steuben said.

Lafayette placed the balls of his feet against the deck and stood up, his cybernetic knees whirring. He picked up a small trash bin and swept the last bits of candle, beads and fabric away. By the ritual, Kosciusko’s and Rochambeau’s spirits had lost their final attachment to the mortal plane. Keeping their possessions only served to attract malevolent entities.

“The ship’s power systems are out of balance,” Lafayette said. “I feel it in the deck plating, see it in fluctuations from the lights.”

“The captain requests your assistance,” Steuben said.

“Of course he does. His engineer is quite capable when it comes to human technology, but ask him to recalibrate the quantum field stabilizer on the cloak generator and he looks at me like I just offered to procreate with his sister—isn’t that how humans do it? Male to female?”

“Yes, their Internet archives are full of reference material. I don’t recommend researching the topic. It’s very confusing.” Steuben got to his feet and went to a workbench. He picked up a slightly curved flat box and examined it. “There’s an issue. The ship can’t maintain the cloak for very long. Our time on the surface will be limited.”

Lafayette dumped the contents of the trash bin down a chute and stopped to examine a tool display with several hand and forearm prosthetics. Each set grasped a metal peg sticking out from the wall. Lafayette grabbed a wrist for a hand with five fingers instead of his usual four, and the prosthetic released the peg. Lafayette grabbed the peg with his other hand and detached it from his arm. The new hand went on with a snap.

“What happens to the ship once we’re on the surface is irrelevant,” Lafayette said. “I will not leave Nibiru until Mentiq is dead.”

“Nor will I.”

“The humans will accept this?”

Steuben ran two fingers across his chin in annoyance. “No, but I am not concerned. I would rather die in the course of our mission and come before our brothers in the afterlife with pride, than pass away from old age on Earth trying to please Hale and the others’ sense of honor.”

“Hmm…old age.” Lafayette swapped out his other hand. “I doubt that will be a problem for either of us.”

The doors to Bastion’s stellar cartography lab opened for Stacey. The immense lab was empty but for a single, unsupported staircase extended to a small platform in the center of the room. A holo projection of the Milky Way filled space around the platform as the shadow of a slight figure moved within.

Stacey walked up the stairs, her eyes glancing over the thousands of star systems marked by icons for known Crucible star gates. Thick tendrils of billion-strong Xaros drone fleets advanced into the last unconquered swath of stars in the galaxy, each moving inexorably toward an inhabited system.

A single Crucible marking glowed blue just behind the tip of a tendril: Earth. A dashed line of a projected Xaros invasion reached from Barnard’s Star toward Earth, still more than a decade away. Her home world was behind enemy lines.

“Stacey,” said a young woman with coffee-colored skin and curly hair as she waved to the human ambassador, “thank you for coming so quickly.” Stacey hurried up the stairway to join Darcy. The other ambassador looked human, an illusion projected by Bastion to help the many different species on the station better relate to each other. The Ruhaald alien beneath Darcy’s mask was an amphibious species with segmented flippers and toothy feeder tentacles in place of a mouth. Not for the first time, Stacey wondered what her Bastion-provided Ruhaald form looked like.

“You said it was urgent.” Stacey stopped next to her fellow ambassador on the raised platform and looked across the galaxy. Bastion’s hologram of the hundreds of billions of stars was as near perfect as science could achieve. Qa’Resh probes scattered across the galaxy constantly fed data to the space station. The lab could zoom in to each star and access a lifetime’s worth of data on the stellar system and known planets.

Stacey had loved the stars and astrophysics since before she could walk. To have such an immense font of knowledge at her fingertips was beyond her wildest childhood dreams.

“It might be,” Darcy sighed, “if the data is right. I don’t know what you did, but while you were on Earth, the Qa’Resh removed the data locks on the graviton surveys.”

“The data we thought might help us find the Xaros colonization fleet,” Stacey said, “if there is one.”

“The initial data was a bit inconsistent.” Darcy’s fingertips danced across a floating control screen. “Then I used your idea for filtering raw graviton data through a brane simulation…”

The holo field shifted to bring the edge of the galaxy in front of the two ambassadors. A Crucible marker floated amongst a halo of stars along the galactic rim.  

“So I was right about that?” Stacey reached to the marker and flicked her thumb and forefinger apart to zoom in. A deep-green star with two planets in its habitable Goldilocks Zone materialized, a Crucible orbiting a world with snow-covered mountains and wide swaths of desert.

“Yes,” Darcy said through grit teeth, “you were right and I was…not yet correct.”

“This is Crucible 0-1, isn’t it? The first the Xaros ever built,” Stacey said.

“That’s right. Mok’Tor colony world. The first advanced civilization to encounter the Xaros, and the first to fall to them,” Darcy said. “‘Xaros’ is the Mok’Tor word for ‘death,’ ‘balance’ and the number zero. They were a poetic species.”

“Fascinating, but didn’t you say something about this being urgent?” Stacey asked.

The holo shifted. The edge of the galaxy moved away and a red dot appeared in the deep space just beyond the galactic rim.

“I thought it was an error in the data,” Darcy said quietly, “but it’s there.”

Stacey tried to zoom in and got an error buzz in return.

“All we have is a depression in the fabric of space-time,” Darcy said. “No light, no heat, nothing on the electromagnetic spectrum at all from…it.”

Stacey swiped a finger next to the dot and a screen full of data appeared next to it.

“The mass on this thing…something like this has to be a star, a large red dwarf perhaps. There are smaller catalogued red dwarves beyond the rim. Why can’t we detect this any other way?” Stacey asked.

“It’s consistent with what we’d expect with a Dyson sphere, a habitable megastructure built around a star,” Darcy said. “There’s no record of any species in our galaxy ever building something so momentous, and it’s on course to Crucible 0-1 at almost ninety percent the speed of light.”

“At that speed it won’t arrive for another…ninety-four years. Why haven’t you presented this to the rest of Bastion?” Stacey asked.

“There’s something wrong.” Darcy crossed her arms. “Once I knew what to look for, I went back through Bastion’s survey data, thousands of years’ worth, and retraced the object’s path.”

Darcy flicked a finger next to the red dot and a solid line traced away into intergalactic space. The line turned to dashes at the earliest recorded data point as the object’s projected course stretched though the galaxies of the Virgo supercluster. The path never came close to any galaxy.

“This can’t be right.” Stacey’s brow furrowed as the line continued to the very edge of observable space, billions of light-years away. “Where did it come from? Bastion’s stellar cartography models are near perfect—that object had to start somewhere. Could it have changed course?”

“Redirecting an object with that much mass and momentum would be more difficult than building the Dyson sphere,” Darcy said. “You see why I didn’t present this to the Congress. Someone would tear my theory apart and laugh me off the stage. They’d say the object is just some stellar anomaly…ignore it.”

“An anomaly heading straight for Crucible 0-1? Wait…speaking of anomalies. Chuck?” Stacey said to Bastion’s AI interface.

“Yes,” the AI’s voice was toneless and curt.

Stacey lifted her hands into the holo and pulled the image down. A great black void in intergalactic space intersected with the anomaly’s projected path. The void had no rogue stars, no clouds of gas extending for light-years, none of the detritus common between the great expanse between galaxies.

“This void,” Stacey said, “I’ve studied it before. There’s nothing we can see or detect now, but the gravity models for this filament running through the local supercluster show something
was
here, correct?”

“Void designation A-9-2239 held a galaxy with a stellar mass twenty percent larger than the Milky Way. The gravitational effect of that galaxy ceased two hundred five million years ago. This is inferred, not observed,” Chuck said. “Recordings integrated into the Bastion stellar cartography library are no more than five million years old.”

Stacey tugged at her lip. She reached a hand into the holo and twisted an imaginary knob, moving the timeline backwards and forwards. The Xaros object appeared just beyond the void when the galaxy that should have been there vanished.

“That’s where it came from,” Stacey said. “The Xaros are from that void, or what used to be there.”

“Galaxies don’t just blink out of existence, Stacey,” Darcy said.

“Yet the math says that’s exactly what happened in that void. There was a galaxy. Its gravity left a legacy on the stars around it. Then it was gone in the blink of an eye. We need to talk to someone who could have seen what happened,” Stacey said.

“You know someone
that
old?”

“The entity from Anthalas. It’s sitting in a cell down in the Qa’Resh city. Time to go have a little chat with that thing,” Stacey said.