Worlds long lost, p.11
Worlds Long Lost, page 11
“I think we are seeing something created and maintained by a Kardashev Type II civilization. That’s one that can use and control all the energy radiated by its own star. To alter the orbit of planets and keep them stable would require energies beyond anything we can currently contemplate. They built up these planets by using the excess raw material left over after the formation of the system, turning all the leftover asteroids, comets, planetary moons, and rings, whatever they could find, into the triplanetary system. What we found was constructed by intelligence, not nature.”
“That fits the data, sir,” chimed Griggs-Snyder. “I’ve done some calculations and I think the varying gravity we are seeing could be caused by oscillating, super-dense masses at the center of the gas giant.”
“When you say, ‘super-dense masses,’ do you mean black holes?” asked Stockton.
“Not necessarily. They would have to be very small black holes, micro black holes, but that’s unlikely. Theories say they aren’t stable for long periods of time and would long ago have either swallowed the mass of the planet or evaporated. It could be masses with the density of neutron stars. It could be anything. But it probably is not natural. To balance the forces just enough to keep the system stable for such a long time would require forethought and active control.”
“If that’s the case, then we are in a first contact scenario beyond anything we can imagine,” said Stockton. He had long ago come to the private conclusion that the planetary system they were studying was artificial but had not wanted to say anything before he had more data. He had also contemplated what that meant should they encounter its creators. It scared him.
“My imagination can be rather fertile,” said Cardoso. “It’s possible that any beings able to harness this much power might be so far beyond us that we might not even notice them or vice versa. How often do you pay attention to the bacteria growing on your skin? You don’t. There are thousands of species just living there and they don’t pose any serious risk unless your system gets out of whack. Then we use antibiotics, bacteriophages, and UV sterilizers to kill those causing the problem. The same might be true here.”
“Lucas, in your analogy, we’re the bacteria and whoever created this system might decide that we need to be sterilized,” said Stockton.
“Yes, sir. All we did was fly by, stay for a few orbits, and now we are on our way. But those that follow will likely be here for months or years. And they will almost certainly go to the surface of the two terrestrial planets to explore. I think they need to be cautious and not draw the wrong kind of attention to themselves. I’d hate for whomever is here to think we aren’t so benign and decide to scrub us away.”
“You think they, whoever ‘they’ are, are still here?” asked Stockton.
“I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t appear so. Any civilization capable of doing what we see here would be hard to miss. Why would they go to the trouble to move entire planets, create a self-sustaining triple planetary system, and then disappear? It is also difficult to imagine that they would modify this star system and not do something similar, or equally miraculous, elsewhere. Yet so far at least, we’ve seen nothing else that even comes close.”
“And if they did go somewhere, where would that be?” asked Achebe.
Staring at the head of his beer, watching the bubbles of gas form new foam and then disappear, Stockton took another sip and replied, “Where indeed?”
NEVER ENDING,
EVER-GROWING
Erica Ciko
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that when seeking stories about lost civilizations and ruins among the stars, a lot of our contributing authors turned to HP Lovecraft, least of all that Erica Ciko gravitated toward that Eldritch direction.
Few authors have proven more dedicated to modern cosmic horror than Ciko, be it stories that have appeared in places like Cosmic Horror Monthly and the Tales to Terrify podcast, or her work editing Starward Shadows Quarterly. Many are quick to use Lovecraft as a brand, but she can count herself among the authors who really know the roots...as in a grim way, so shall the protagonist of her story.
***
On paper, we were “contractors” for Verdant Dreams, one of the original forty-five mega-corps to survive the Great Implosion. But everyone from the anxious arms dealers hanging out at the spaceport gates to the underage kids running drinks in the casinos knew what we really were: Mercenaries, and shitty ones, too. Why else would we be bumming around in the Nightside’s stagnant backwaters drinking and staring at our comm-bands all day, waiting for the static to crackle through?
We sulked in the shadows of Torvyn Station’s rickety black hangars and crumbling apartment blocks for so long that we started to think that our corporate overlords had moved on and forgotten about us—they probably had, for a time—but just like the Tier-1 species they’d sent us to eradicate so many times on our terraforming missions, they always came crawling back in the end.
That’s how we ended up here, on a rickety ghost ship with one foot in the grave, on the way to a world that was already six feet under: A world no one else dared to go to but us.
“Once the last holdout of the Arachni Plasmadroids, Vaenmyr is now one hundred percent sterilized of all alien life and terraformed to the Verdant Dreams standard,” the ship’s infostream reassured us over the comms, conveniently forgetting to mention that our destination may have now been sterilized of all human life, too. “Its rich Terridium reserves make it one of humanity’s most valuable outposts in the Nightside Arm. Level 8 Clearance is required for access to all ports in its capital prefecture, Eleventh City.”
“Must be the first time a twisted old hunk of garbage like this ever got Level 8 Clearance...” I muttered to no one, staring out the window at the gargantuan turquoise planet far below, its misleadingly tranquil seas of mist hypnotizing me across the sea of stars. By the way its writhing clouds and stagnant seas ominously swallowed up my entire field of vision, I was surprised we hadn’t already entered Vaenmyr’s orbital space. Any minute now...I thought with a sigh, for a moment imagining I could hear the hum of its thousand tiny, pulsing rings.
“All it takes is one glance at the ugly thing to know there’s something wrong with it, eh?” A perky-but-rough voice piped up from over my shoulder, distracting me from the doomed world’s enigmatic beauty. It belonged to Valison, one of the few Verdant Dreams rejects I’d actually bothered sharing a pint with back on Torvyn now and again.
“Up until a couple weeks ago, people used to call this place Blue Heaven,” I replied coolly, staring her down. There was something I liked about her curly red waves licked with white-blonde streaks, and the somber, soul-penetrating stillness of her glassy blue eye almost made up for the fact that her other one was bionic and hideous. She was different—alluring, even—but something about the way she smiled made me wonder if I’d wake up missing a kidney if I let her advances go too far.
Besides, I was probably kidding myself thinking she’d ever fall for a guy like me. The only thing I had going for me was a razor-sharp jawline: At least, that’s what my mother always called it when I was a kid—and she meant it as an insult because it “matched my wise-ass mouth.” You could find my messy brown hair on every other guy at the spaceport, and it wasn’t like I was in great shape or anything, either. Maybe she had a thing for dead and perpetually bored grey eyes?
“Yeah, yeah...” She shrugged as if she cared more about the dirt caked between the treads of her boots than she did about Vaenmyr. “I read the brief, Alyx. ‘A dreamworld sanctuary for the richest, smartest humans while the rest of us rot, no one but diplomats and celebrities ever gets in.’ Blah, blah, blah.”
“Bet they never guessed it was a one-way ticket.” I smirked, feeling my stomach drop as the orbital balancers finally lurched on.
“If you ask me, bastards got what they deserved.” She scowled, her tight-fitting expedition suit forming a sharp silhouette against the haunting blue sphere. “They walled themselves off for all those years, living in their precious little ‘heaven’ and locking us all out: But the second things go south, they’re begging the outside world for help.”
“They aren’t begging for anything anymore,” I teased, clutching the guardrail of the viewing deck until my knuckles turned white. Even after all those years, I still hadn’t gotten used to the nauseating, scrambled-egg effect the landing drivers had on gravity. “Thought you said you read the brief: After the distress signals started popping up all across the globe in tandem, everything went black all at once. No one’s heard a word from anyone on Vaenmyr for three weeks, and no one has any idea what the hell’s going on down there—even the President’s Mansion in Eleventh City is giving off nothing but static, I guess.”
“Huh...Weird,” Valison muttered, her robotic red tangle of an eye suspiciously studying the behemoth world eclipsing the backdrop of howling stars far below. “Could it have been some kind of new Insavatu WMD, or...?”
She brought up an interesting question, but the hum of the landing drivers—or maybe it really was the ethereal, eerie rings that ensorcelled the dying planet—was growing so loud that there was no way she ever would have heard me if I bothered answering her. And besides, I didn’t want to ruin the “true midnight” of our arrival, as my father used to always say. He was talking about that fleeting, precious liminal space that exists only in the infinite void in the moments before you touch down on some unknown world you’ll hang out on for a couple of days and then never see again.
There was nothing like it in all the universe.
Most of us had the gut feeling something was off when we noticed the huge, blue tendrils covered in spikes that wove an impenetrable cage across the planet’s smog-filled atmosphere—but by the time we realized the pulsing net of energy was designed to let outsiders enter but not leave, it was far too late. The only way out was down.
Every sensor on the entire rig had gone haywire from the moment we passed through that electric blue nightmare veil, and as soon as the screeching started, all the essential tech but the landing drivers had gone totally dead. From the moment our derelict ground into the half-collapsed hyperhangers of Eleventh City, it was chaos.
Blue lightning tore down wildly from whatever those things were in the sky, seeming to pierce not only the rolling jet-black clouds but the core of the planet itself. Half the crew cowered in the bowels of the ship, and something told me right away when I smelled the burning ozone and sick, static decay that they were better off rotting there—this was going to get ugly, and cowards would only slow us down when shit got serious. The rest of us staggered out onto the doomed ghost of Vaenmyr—once the crown jewel of the Nightside arm, but now just a mind-bending cacophony of rubble—like something straight out of a painting done in a psych ward by someone on a bad acid trip.
“This can’t be Vaenmyr. We’ve slipped through the cracks to another dimension,” a gruff female voice behind me rasped. I ignored it. What use was it wasting time on other dimensions when all that mattered, all that ever would matter, was the one I was trapped inside right now?
So I kicked my way through the twisted rubble of the metropolis with all my breathing gear strapped hastily to my face—far more careful than half the crew, who decided to forsake their respirators since Vaenmyr was “Verdant Dreams Standard.” Idiots, all of them. Whatever those glowing blue flecks of dust in the air were, emitting static electricity and vibrating weirdly, I didn’t want them anywhere near my lungs.
But soon, my filters locked up like the rest of the equipment we’d dragged out of the ship—all the minor tech was as dead as the fission drivers, so we had no choice but to stagger alone into this energetic storm that was somehow strong enough to tear down countless skyscrapers, but gentle enough that it felt like little more than a summer breeze against our expedition suits.
“No wonder HQ hasn’t heard a peep from Eleventh City for the past three weeks,” Valison muttered. “What the hell happened down here?”
“Looks like the innards of s-some kind of monster!” wailed a hopeless greenblood from behind my left shoulder. “That’s what they’re saying on the ship! We’ve been eaten!”
By the way those pulsating, crystalline blue tendrils of energy rippled through everything from the pavement below to the ruined sky bridges far above, I half-wondered if he was right. But logic soon prevailed over braindead fear, and I spun around and grabbed him by the scruff of his suit and hissed into the nuclear winter, “That kind of fearmongering bullshit isn’t helping anyone, you know that? This is where we are, whether you like it or not, and we’re still alive for now. And until we get our GeoTech working again, we need to keep our heads clear. Stop panicking or crawl back to the ship to die with the rest of them.”
He didn’t whimper any more, then—I’m not sure if I’d actually scared some sense into him, or if he only kept his mouth shut to avoid getting smacked.
Soon forgetting he existed, I pushed my way through the rubble, pausing every now and then to gaze up at that sickly buzzing blanket that seemed to envelop the entire sky. Ghastly tendrils snaked down from it, some thicker than the largest building I’d ever seen, and others thin and wispy. Something about them reminded me of the spindly webs of neurons on posters in the back-alley plastic surgery clinics back at Torvyn Station.
“Dendrites...” Valison whispered, making me wonder yet again who she really was before she threw it all away and joined our little circus. But what did it matter here, inside this neon broken snow globe that the richest diplomats in all the galaxy once called home? Here, we’d all die the same death whether we were brain surgeons or junkyard scrappers before we came to Verdant Dreams—and looking out over the dust-drenched mass graves caressed by hungry black veins, it seemed like the locals had learned that the hard way.
“Once the last holdout of the Arachni Plasmadroids, Vaenmyr is now one hundred percent sterilized of all alien life and terraformed to the Verdant Dreams standard.”
The ship’s infostream ricocheted off the walls of my mind in a mocking echo as I slowly absorbed that complete and utter failure of human domination—that dead, otherworldly hellscape that had somehow managed to strangle the apex of all mankind’s accomplishments and turn it inside out in a few short weeks. Goes to show how futile all of it is. The terraforming projects, the salvage missions, even the headhunts: None of it meant anything when you were staring straight down the throat of a nightmare ghost city threatening to swallow you alive—and with good reason, I thought, glancing down at the Verdant Dreams logo emblazoned into the chest of my suit with a gulp.
Those brilliant seas of azure that beckoned to us through the windows of the ship and lured us down into this mess to begin with haunted me even more than the graveyard of human accomplishment that rotted in every direction. Blue planets were so rare, especially out here so far from the Galactic Centriole: It seemed a shame to ravage them as our humble overlords had. Suddenly, I was swallowed up by a hollow well of sadness, and I wished more than anything that I could see this place—no, all worlds I’d ever walked upon—before they’d been tarnished and stripped and manipulated into the Verdant Dreams nightmare vision. But I knew in this lifetime that I never would, especially now that all of us were trapped here.
As if sensing that I was about to abandon all hope, the tendril that had been snaking its way across a nearby decimated sidewalk wriggled eerily close to the side of my head, radioactive dust still fresh on its shivering tip. It emitted a cloud of luminous neon spores, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that even though it didn’t have eyes, it was staring me down.
Before the Incinerator Mines crashed down, back in its glory days, did this place resemble the Earth in more than just color? I silently asked it, as if it was my dearest, oldest, only friend. But then I realized how stupid that was, and focused instead on some moron blowing into the vents of his handheld GeoTech navigator, like that would somehow reverse its static rigor mortis.
Each second that passed with this shaky-handed, wide-eyed basket case of a man fumbling with the useless hunk of metal, I felt my blood pressure rising another five points. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I reached out and snatched it away from him and began to mess with it on my own. He didn’t protest, simply retreating back into the shadows of some decrepit, halved skyscraper, as far away from the gleaming tendril as possible.
I, on the other hand, gave in to the indescribable urge to slink the slightest bit closer to it with the GeoTech in hand. If these things were dendrites, or at least some kind of bio-organic neuron system as it was slowly starting to appear, they must be some sort of conduit, right? The tiny little hairs standing straight up, as if caught in some endless wave of electrical charge, sure seemed to point towards it. And it wasn’t like things could get much worse at this point, so what did I have to lose by sticking my hand within gripping distance of this—
“Holy shit, it actually worked.” My mumblings were choked out by the violent BEEP—BEEP—BEEP of the GeoTech reboot, but when the screen fizzled to life once more, a strange and indecipherable mess of symbols had replaced the usual Verdant Dreams logo. My hope slurped down the cracks in the ground like water rushing through a storm drain, but soon, the weird messages faded away, leaving nothing but a faded map with a flashing red dot smack dab in the center of it.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: But even though I should have been overjoyed, there was no way in hell I trusted any of it. Then, my suspicion was quickly eclipsed by a brutal, metallic roar far off in the distance. I would have recognized that deranged howl in any alien hellscape, in any panic-fueled delirium. The ship’s thrusters were commencing their warmup sequence.
After we poured back onto the ship and examined all the Nav boards, everyone was shocked to find that, of all things, the ground-penetrating radar was one of the first systems to kick back on. A mysterious signal—not a distress beacon, as we all expected, but a landmark pin usually reserved for cave salvage missions—had popped up out of nowhere and flooded us all with blind hope again. But there was one problem:
