Chapter 4: Change of Plans

Laura. 2

To a Mariner, ship security was second nature. It had to be; Mariners were a nomadic space-born civilization who lived in flotillas of heavily modified starships rather than on planets. So defending those ships from harm, infiltration - or, in this case - outright theft wasn’t simply a matter of skill; it was a necessity of existence. But Laura Dondarion, wandering the brown, dust-covered wasteland of Xnios, was a master of that craft even amongst her own people, and her ship - the Seren - was a fortress.

She had been on the planet for three days, and her ship had been left unoccupied and unprotected since the moment she had sealed it behind her. With the shattered remains of a civilization sprawled out around her, she found it hard to imagine that some poor, desperate fool hadn’t tried to hijack it within half an hour of her leaving it.

But to get onto the Seren would require a feat of effort beyond the capabilities of even the Imperium’s renowned ISD. Firstly, they would need her DNA to satisfy the standard issue palm reader. Then they would need to speak the password into a comm channel that only she had the frequency to; the password itself was a very complicated sentence in a very old dialect, of a very obscure language, that only a handful of mariners still used regularly enough to be able to pronounce the words.

In effect, the password was nonsense, which made it harder to guess, but basically could be roughly translated as “The grand oaken tree fits very nicely up the domesticated cat’s ass, unless on a Tuesday when it sings too loudly. But if you pay the cheque, the dog will take over.”

There were all sorts of vocal inclinations and quirks that communicated sarcasm and humor - a mistake in which would change the entire meaning of the word - designed as it had been to be communicated over audio-only comm frequencies before the development of visual communications and the use of facial expressions and body language. It was an extraordinarily difficult language to learn unless you had been brought up using it from childhood. To make matters worse for any would-be thief, the computer was programmed to only respond to Laura’s own voice.

And if a potential thief kept poking at the system or made an attempt to hack it, there were a few point-defense lasers near the hatch - capable of swatting strike craft down like bugs - to convince them to go away ... or, you know, shoot them if they didn’t.

But let’s say the thief got creative and decided to take the brute force approach and cut directly through the hull. If the security system at the main hatchway had not been deactivated, an intruder would find all manner of nasty surprises waiting for them. Forcefields and closed blast doors around critical compartments were pretty standard, as were the automated anti-personnel weapons in almost every room, but Laura had taken her precautions to a whole new level. The one she was most proud of was that for the entire time that the security system was active, the artificial gravity system built into her ship’s deck plates would stay active...

At five hundred times the normal force of gravity.

If someone cut through the hull and climbed inside, their body would instantly weigh enough to crush them into jelly under the weight of their own skin. Their skull would weigh the equivalent of approximately a ton and would snap their spines like a toothpick, and every vein and blood vessel in their bodies would instantly burst as the blood within them was suddenly and violently yanked downwards, shortly before the blood vessels themselves. Unless they broke into her ship equipped with an exceptionally strong suit of powered armor with its own ridiculously strong anti-grav field built into it - which were actual things, just rarely seen outside specialist military units - the life expectancy of an intruder on the Seren would be measured in fractions of a second.

But assuming they got past that, managed to power down the security fields, cut through the blast doors, and made it onto the bridge, they would be faced with a similar puzzle to the one on the hatch, which, assuming they’d had to break into the bridge, to begin with, they clearly hadn’t already cracked. This one was a different password in the same language, using only her voice while punching in a sixteen-digit code into the only holo-interface that would be powered up. The password, incidentally, was a detailed list of complaints Laura had about the cock of her ex-boyfriend, including a description of a rather unfortunately located mole.

To be honest, if they got past all of that without being killed, then they deserved to have the fucking ship, and she would have to try harder with the next one.

With all that in mind, it wasn’t the security of her ship that had her feeling uneasy; it was the fact that she wasn’t on it. For thousands of years, sailors have talked about having sea legs, and it was always a difficult concept for their mainly land-going contemporaries to understand. Basically, a ship moves on the water; the rougher the seas, the more it moves. Anyone forced to live on those ships for any period of time compensated for this by developing subtle but distinctive differences in the ways that they walked. They would keep their knees partially bent, for example, placing the strain of their body weight onto the muscles in their thighs rather than on their knees. This allowed them to maintain balance as the floor essentially moved beneath them. If, then, for whatever reason, a sailor was required to go ashore, this now habitual way of moving became a hindrance. The lack of movement in the ground, compared to the pitch and roll of a ship’s deck, felt strange and uncomfortable, and - more urgently - the strain in the muscles of their thighs would actually cause physical discomfort. Sailors used to spending months, if not years, at sea found it difficult to sleep on dry land, and they found that being away from the sound of the ocean was distressing. There was a whole myriad of eccentricities that simply didn’t translate between being on solid ground and being at sea.

Although it was not quite as acute now as it was back then, the same issues still applied. When her deck plates weren’t squashing intruders, they were set at a few degrees of measurement lower than Earth’s standard gravity; the air was recycled, and - no matter how subtle - the tiny vibrations that ran through a ship from even the most well-maintained engine caressed the bottom of her feet whenever she was onboard. A vibration too slight for almost any other race of people to detect was what lulled her to sleep at night. More than that, it was the sense of freedom that she missed. It was strange to think that she felt more claustrophobic on an open, desolate planet than she did locked inside the hull of a one-hundred-meter ship. But that ship had the entirety of the cosmos to wander. This planet, by comparison, was a spec of dust on the galactic breeze. Xnios had no vibration that ran through her feet; its gravity was a touch higher than Earth standard, and although the air in her environmental suit was still recycled, it was not in the same way as on her ship.

More than that, planet-dwelling people of almost every race instinctively thought in two dimensions. Forwards, backward, left, and right. Up and down were considerations, but most space-faring species couldn’t naturally fly, so up and down were rarely taken into account. Mariners were born in three dimensions. They were born to thinking that way, to thinking of pitch and roll. Concepts like “up” didn’t really translate, it was just another vector. It was evolution in its most basic form, and having one of those dimensions robbed from her made simply moving around a conscious and exhausting mental exercise. Those little things added together to make her a little antsy, but what really threw that up to the level of downright discomfort was one simple fact.

She couldn’t see the stars.

The stars were everything. They were her light, her map, her guide, her home, and her destiny; she believed that with every fiber of her being. Her eyes had developed to see by the light of them, her body clock no longer relied on the passage of a sun to dictate her waking hours, constellations, old and new, were like lifelong companions, and she was able, with very few exceptions, to find her way back to the home fleet simply by looking for familiar groupings of stars. Yet every single time she was forced to make landfall on a planet, she knew she would spend part of that time being cut off from them by daylight, painting the sky - in most cases - with that sickening shade of blue. But Xnios was worse. That oppressive, wet-sand-colored cloud that smothered the entire planet didn’t even give her the welcome relief of nighttime, and three solid days of it was more than enough time for her to feel the weight of their loss. It was like losing one of her senses, and she could feel it grating against her sanity.

It was little wonder that Mariners avoided prolonged periods of time planet-side wherever and whenever they could.

Still, she was here for a reason, and the expulsion - now that the relief effort had stalled - offered the perfect opportunity to carry out a mission that had been the wish of the council for centuries. The Imperium, predictably, had laid claim to the planet, loudly announcing that they had been the first to discover this paradisic oasis in the vast, barren expanse of stellar nothingness, but they had been wrong. Whether they knew that they were wrong or not was another matter, but the Mariners had stumbled across Xnios almost a century earlier, they just had no desire to colonize it, so they had charted it and moved on. They, however, had found the planet as the last major expulsion event was coming to an end. It hadn’t been quite so paradisic then. It had taken the more cautious Mariner cartographers less than a few hours to determine the harmful properties of the last compound cloud, but they had detected something interesting.

If they had taken their chances with the diminishing cloud back then, they would have saved themselves - or more specifically, saved Laura - a whole lot of trouble. But of course, they had no idea what they had found all those centuries ago, just a strange, unexplained reading on topographical scans. As the centuries rolled on, later discoveries educated them as to what those first readings had meant, but by then, the Imperium colonization effort was well underway, and every Mariner alive knew the consequences of trespassing on Imperial worlds ... those that didn’t weren’t alive anymore.

The Mariner home fleet, when taken together, was one of the most powerful fighting forces known to this part of the galaxy. Mariners were not naturally warlike; they didn’t recognize - nor even really understand - a society’s need to claim territory and had never been involved in anything that could be called a war. Their scientists and engineers were good, very good in some cases, but the astonishing levels of technological advancement they had achieved had very little to do with their research or their abilities. No, it all came from one activity.

Locating, exploring, and then ... liberating ... long-lost ancient data vaults.

Some people would call it looting, but those people were easily ignored. If they had the means and the inclination to hunt the quadrant for those vaults themselves, they would have done it too and used the technology for something a whole lot less innocuous than being able to live in space more safely.

The vast majority of the human population had no comprehension of the existence of this historical race, even those who did, knew extraordinarily little about them, and that included the Mariners. It was, in fact, the Mariners who made mankind’s first discovery of an ancient artifact, and it wasn’t in the glowing blue eyes of a child - that particular occurrence was so rare as to only have happened a few dozen known times in history - nor was it an accidental stumble over the sort of vault that Laura was hunting for now. It was a ship.

The odds of the Mariners accidentally coming across the ancient hulk were astronomical, the equivalent of finding a single grain of floating sand in the vastness of all Earth’s oceans when you weren’t even looking for it. Even that ship, named the “Primis” by the captain who found it, as huge as it was, was less than a speck of dust in comparison even only to the small sector of space in which it was found. The Imperium flagship - The Dreadnaught “Imperator” - was a not inconsiderable 5km in length. The Flagship of the Mariner’s home fleet - A cobbled together, necessity-defined ship that could loosely be called a fleet carrier but was, in fact, a colony ship - was only a few hundred meters shorter than that, and she had heard of massive ships in the Khuvakian Empire that could reach up to 7km long. But the Primis had dwarfed them all. At 24km from bow to stern and 8km from port to starboard, it was a behemoth the likes of which had never been seen before or since.

Laura had spent incalculable hours of her childhood watching and rewatching the logs from that centuries-old find, marveling at the sheer scale of the gargantuan ship. Watching the recordings from the bridge of the first scouts to find it, its shadow blotting out the light of the stars as they approached, the cautious scans of the impenetrable, clearly ancient, potmarked, and pitted hull. The failed attempts to establish contact, and then, finally, as more and more of the Mariner fleet converged on the astonishing find before the first shuttles and their boarding parties inched courageously toward it.

Only to find it completely deserted.

Not even the bodies of the crew had been aboard. There was nothing.

It had taken more than seven years of scientists and engineers crawling throughout the derelict ship before they even managed to redirect power from their ships to it, finding its own power core completely indecipherable, another three before they managed to activate the computers, and then sixty more years of one dead end after another. What had stifled the Mariners so much had been the language found in those systems. Rather than the ancient language being as complicated as one would imagine for such a massively more advanced race, their language was startlingly simplistic, almost like it had devolved over time. Even now, centuries after finding the Primis, the Mariner scientists still couldn’t find a spoken or written word for any systems on the ship more complicated than a chair, let alone a detailed description of how the enormous number of systems interacted with each other. It had taken decades of research for the current theory to evolve; that theory postulated that the ancients had developed a way to link their minds directly to the computer systems, allowing them to not only ‘talk’ to the ship but also to each other.

There were astonishing amounts of data on the computers, enough data to keep the average engineer busy for a dozen lifetimes, but all of it was in the form of random packets of seemingly untranslatable data packets. Some of them were clearly related to curtain systems, but with no way of deciphering this incredibly complicated computer language, it was impossible to know what it meant or even what it did. And everything was in that language, from the internal systems that ran the ship to the logs of the crew themselves. All of it was there, and every single byte of it was infuriatingly out of reach.

For all the decades of research done - culminating in the hulk being painstakingly towed to a nearby nebula to be hidden from other wandering eyes and the home fleet taking up a near-permanent residence around it - there was no shortage of things learned from the Primis. The extraordinarily resilient armor was made of a compound that Mariner scanners couldn’t identify, the shields were based on a power source that couldn’t be replicated, and the manufacturing process used in the energy-based weapon systems was detailed - presumably - in that incomprehensible language. The engines had never been able to be powered up, and neither had the ship’s sensors. But all of these systems could be approximated, if not outrightly reverse-engineered - albeit with inferior materials and incomplete and, frankly, guessed manufacturing processes - but these admittedly substandard imitations of ancient technology had still made the Home fleet significantly more advanced than anything the Imperium could contend with.

The holy grail of these research efforts, however, was a way to translate the ancient computer language or at least a way to interface with their computers in a way that the Ancients themselves had done all those eons ago. With nothing even approximating this technology readily discoverable on the Primis itself, the search had to be extended. This hunt was based on a single irrefutable fact: almost all the ancient components were based on the same unidentifiable and unreplicable compound that was used in the hull. The Mariner scanners may not have been able to discern the elements or the manufacturing process used in its creation, but they were certainly able to gather an incredibly detailed reading of it...

A set of readings the Mariners had seen a few times before, including once, long ago, on Xnios.

That was Laura’s mission. Now that Xnios had been all but abandoned, and now that the people living on the planet had more important things to contend with than a Mariner digging around in their territory, she was free to look for and attempt to enter the ancient vault.

Okay, to be clear, it wasn’t really a vault; that is just what the Mariners had started calling them when the treasure trove of one-day-translatable data and lootable components was discovered in each of them. They had already found, excavated, and explored almost a score of these ‘vaults’ all over the space they had charted. Each time those readings were detected, a ship was sent to investigate. Sometimes it was a partially intact building, sometimes a crashed ship, all of them eroded by the unforgiving march of time and decayed by the natural forces found on almost all planets. But the things that had survived were invariably things that had been built to last, things that had been built to survive adversity, meaning that each of them had contained something that the ancients wanted to keep safe.

One building had been an underground research complex found almost a mile beneath the surface of a lifeless world; another building appeared to have been some sort of government center, closer to the surface - only buried by the sands of the now desert world on which it was located - but reinforced and hardened to a mind-blowing degree. The ships that had been found were never cargo freighters or smaller-class starships, either, but had been the remains of massive, almost Primis-sized warships. The impact craters those things had made when impacting the surface of their planets could be seen from orbit, and their death-fall may have even been what rendered those planets as barren and lifeless as they were now.

Laura’s job was to find out which case was true for Xnios. If it were a deeply buried complex, then a whole excavation team would need to be brought in - which would cause its own problems, considering the compound cloud overhead and the dangers that wrought to starships entering the atmosphere. If, however, it was relatively near the surface, it could be possible for her to enter the ‘vault’ herself, recover what was inside, and then get off-world, with the local inhabitants being none-the-wiser.

She sighed and checked her vambrace-mounted computer again. The uplink to her ship’s sensors told her that she was close, but how close was still something of a mystery as the compound cloud played havoc with short-ranged, narrower-banded, more detailed scans. She hadn’t quite spent three days walking in circles, but it was pretty close, and that is certainly what she would tell people when she got home.

According to her scanners, the readings that signified her objective were - at that moment - about two hundred and fifty meters straight ahead of her and about eighty meters below her current elevation. Cool, except she had already been there, and when she checked her scanners directly above the point the vault should be, it told her it was where she stood now.

Laura grated her teeth - an act that made a very strange sound in the confines of her atmospheric suit’s helmet - then shut off the computer, muttering obscenities about scanners, planets, and compound clouds as she looked around.

She was about thirty miles outside what could be considered the city limits of Merdian, on the edge of a ravine that overlooked a grand and presumably majestic river. She had no idea what the river was called, and she imagined that the people who had called this part of the world home had once considered the view from this settlement to be pretty spectacular. She didn’t care; things like that were lost on a Mariner who spent their days looking at the astonishing swirls and colors of nebulae. But she doubted the people who lived here cared very much now either, at least if the ruins of the settlement were anything to go by. This little town had been utterly obliterated by either the earthquakes or the tsunamis that followed it. Only a handful of what must have been hundreds of buildings were still standing, and she trusted none of them to be structurally sound enough to enter. Every other building was just gone, leaving only the footprint of their foundations carved into the ground. The thought that anyone still living here had survived when those calamities hit was utterly unfathomable. If there were a list of people who called this place home before the Expulsion, the only ones still alive would have been the ones lucky enough to get off the planet before the quakes hit or the ones who had somehow made it to the higher ground of Meridian and then miraculously survived there instead. Because there sure as hell wasn’t anyone around here now.

The terrain itself should have made the hunt for the vault reasonably straightforward. It was a broad, sweeping plain of relatively flat land that had been carved away by the river over millennia. It was, topographically speaking, comparable to the Grand Canyon on Earth, just not quite as big. The earthquakes, however, had torn huge rents into the ground, splitting the landscape with deep, scar-like cracks that made traversing it all the more difficult. To make matters worse, a lot of those cracks were spewing out hundreds of metric tons worth of the same compound that was currently fucking with her sensors and - judging by their readings - fucking with them even more. If that wasn’t bad enough, the tsunami and the recession of the floods that had followed it looked to have washed away huge parts of the walls of the ravine on either side of the river. Normally, that would have been a good thing, it would mean less digging for her, but it had not only washed a considerable amount of the town away but had made the prospect of any descent into the canyon a very dangerous proposition. The ground in several spots was simply too undermined even to support her weight, let alone the weight of her digging gear. She doubted half of these house foundations would still be here in a few weeks as natural erosion finished what the calamity had started.

So ... readings. There were three that she was dealing with. The first put her objective directly below where she was standing at that moment. The second reading was two hundred and fifty meters ahead of her, closer to the edge of the ravine and on the other side of the town. The third reading, predictably, was to her left, a spot in mid-air close to the other side of the ravine. Admittedly, that was a bit of an eyeballed guess; she had no way of crossing it at the moment, and the reading could possibly put that spot right on the opposite edge of it. But barely.

There were only two conceivable explanations. The first - and the one she was most inclined to go with - was that her scanners were fucked to the point of being useless. The compound cloud was putting so much shit into the air that the scanners were finding it hard to see through it with any sort of accuracy. It was like trying to look at something far away through a blizzard; you may get glimpses of it, but only through tiny gaps in the smothering snowfall. The compound cloud was - thanks to the new vents in the land - undeniably more dense here than it had been in the city.

The second option, one that an optimist would go with, was that the vault was fucking enormous - by far the largest that had ever been found - and the scan was simply picking up the edges of it. That meant that it was beneath the river at the bottom of the ravine.

But as she had already noted, that was what an optimist would think. Not a single person who knew Laura well would ever accuse her of being an optimist.

So, she was left with a choice, and neither option was a particularly good one. The first option was to make the thirty-mile trek back to the Meridian spaceport - a trek that was, literally, entirely uphill while wearing a full, heavy, and cumbersome atmospheric suit. That would take well over a day, would mean writing off the last three days as a loss and essentially starting again, either when she brought her ship closer to this site, hoping the scanners functioned better, or giving up and going home to come back another time with better equipment.

The second option was to find a way to make the climb down into the ravine and search the area no matter how ridiculously low the chances of finding anything would be. Optimistic or not, she could almost guarantee that her squadron commander would insist that she - or someone else - came back to search this area anyway, just in case. Plus, in that situation, she would have headed home empty-handed while her officers could possibly legitimately argue that she hadn’t searched well enough.

When viewed like that, it wasn’t much of a choice. “For fuck sake,” she muttered to herself, picked up her pack, and headed west along the path of the river. She had spotted an uncompromised rocky outcropping about five kilometers downriver the day before, and if she were going to have to rappel down to the base of the ravine, then she would be damned if she was going to do it in a place that could get her killed. She simply didn’t have the time, patience, or inclination to look for a better spot further east.

With the slightly brighter smudge in the brown sky setting behind her, she trudged onward toward her new goal.

Almark. 9

Pain is, generally speaking, relative. There are a lot of ways to mean that; there are the more obvious comparisons between, for example, a paper cut on your pinky and having your pinky cut the fuck off or between skinning your knee and having it crushed beneath the cockpit console of a crashed broadsword. But then there are the more subtle, nuanced comparisons. Emylee had struggled to comprehend the exact list of the things wrong with her - let alone their severity - even before she had passed out on the beach, and judging by the wave of nauseating agony that ripped through every inch of her body as awareness returned to her, she would have to guess at “a lot.” But compared to the emotional and psychological turmoil running in circles around her mind, the physical pain was nothing.

There was no blissful moment before the memory came back, there was no gradual solidification of recollection, and there was no heartbreaking moment when it all came flooding back to her. Emylee had been in a fever dream of reliving the deaths of her squadron, over and over and over again, for the entire time she had been unconscious. It was flashbacks and fantastical last conversations, regrets of words not said and actions not taken; it was the frantic mental search for things she could have done differently while knowing that even if that search was successful, it was too late. There was no blissful escape into the void of unconsciousness for her. Her mind had not stopped working for however long she had been out for.

It had been torture.

A torture that was mercilessly and savagely continued, without a break, the moment that her eyes started to flutter open. The rhythmic beeping of the machine monitoring her vitals started to beep a little faster as the physical pain - which thankfully had been muted by her encounter with soporose - renounced itself with a vigor that quite literally left her breathless. The beeping rapidly grew in frequency, and after only a few more moments, alarms started to go off.

A few figures, all of them dressed in white, rushed over to her bed. “Okay, lovely,” a gentle, reassuring woman’s voice went a little way to calming Emylee. “Just breathe. I’m going to increase your pain medication, but I need you to try to breathe for me. Can you do that?”

If she was being honest, she wasn’t sure. Breathing involved moving the muscles that controlled her lungs, which, in turn, would move her ribs, and those little bastards felt like someone had dropped a hover truck on them. But still, through a blinding pain which - she imagined - would make childbirth seem like a happy memory, she sucked in a groaned, agonizing breath ... and it was only a groan because a scream of excruciating torment was just simply beyond her at that moment.