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Dramatis Personae

Lloyd

According to the spectrometer the thing in the quarantine chamber was a mix of titanium alloy, unidentified ceramics and unidentified liquids. The computer had a whole list of potentials for the unidentified substances. Testing them would take something like ten hours so Lloyd ruled that out right away, whatever was down there had broken out of a state of the art quarantine chamber in less than one hour so he seriously doubted he would last ten. “Cloudie, how far can you back away from your current location?”

“The currents aren’t safe for us to move anywhere, Lloyd.”

“I get that but staying close to the skiff might not be very safe, either. Whatever that thing we found before the Liquid Teeth turned up is taking root in the ship now and I need to jettison it before it gets any further.”

“I will do my best to avoid it if it comes in this direction, then.”

Hopefully that would be enough. Lloyd spun the skiff until the quarantine chamber was pointed directly away from the Jelly. The cockpit was the only part of the ship behind it’s own separate airlock so all he had to do was double seal that then evacuate the quarantine into the storm outside. Alarms sounded a second later as the aft compartment flooded with helium. Thanks to the rough flying he’d been doing Lloyd had never bothered peeling out of his pressure suit so he cycled back into the aft compartment right away.

He carefully edged his way down to the quarantine chamber again, alert for signs of the braided wires. Since the door to the quarantine chamber had been compromised the pressure change from venting it had blown the door inwards, scattering debris all over the decking. The doorway was crisscrossed with braided wires. Lloyd’s heart sank when he realized that not only was the anomalous object still in the chamber it was growing at a rapid rate. Or at least unraveling itself at a rapid rate.

“Well that didn’t work,” he muttered.

He hadn’t intended the words for Cloudie but he’d left his radio open. “I could attempt to pull it free. The Jellies have moved sprouting ferrovines on occasion, it cannot be any more difficult than that.”

“You’re not wrong. I’m more worried about damage to the skiff given the circumstances. Until the etheric calms down and I can jump again I kind of need to keep this thing in one piece. More or less.” Lloyd’s eyes wandered over to the beacon racks. The pitons on the base of the beacons weren’t really intended to come off but if you had the right tools you could remove them. “I’ve got an idea.”

“Can I help with it?”

“Just keep an eye on the currents and let me know if anything changes.”

The object was rooted to the doorway at five points so Lloyd went to work pulling five pitons off the base of a beacon. They each had a small explosive charge for driving through rock or ferrovine if needed. His plan was to drive the piton into the anchor points, detonate them to break the object loose then eject the entire quarantine capsule away from the skiff. It was more expensive than just venting the chamber but the Wayfinders had insurance for such things.

He was in the process of removing the third piton when a flash of light caught his attention. It was dim enough that it was almost invisible in the helium haze so Lloyd wasn’t sure how long it had been blinking before he noticed. He peeked around the rack and saw that there were lights all along the object that were now active. The deck bucked under his feet. “Cloudie?”

“The Teeth are moving, Lloyd. Do you engines still function? If they do I think you need to ignore your current problem and get moving as well.”

“The Teeth were moving before, what changed?” Lloyd demanded, scrambling back towards the cockpit. “How does something that big just flail around like that?”

“I couldn’t say, Lloyd. What I do know is we have to stay away from them as much as possible.”

Cycling through the airlock took a lot longer than he liked but he got back in the cockpit eventually and checked the engine readouts then slammed the throttle forward to rev them up. The skiff roared to life as Lloyd strapped into the pilot’s chair. A few hundred meters ahead Cloudie skated forward, its tendrils waving frantically through the clouds, sensing the changes in pressure. Wireburn’s clouds darkened overhead as the shadowed span of the Teeth loomed large.

“Cloudie, is it just me or is that thing getting closer?”

“Keep moving, Lloyd. Just keep moving.”

He did his best to do just that. Against his better judgment Lloyd hit the switches to seal the out hatch of the quarantine chamber again, closing the anomalous object in. If the Teeth hit him the growing wires wouldn’t matter and an open hatch created drag. He’d worry about pumping out the helium from aft later. Then he split his attention between keeping an eye on Cloudie and following the Jelly’s flight path and watching the etheric detectors and praying they’d show some change. If he could jump out Cloudie could make a run for it without having to worry about the tolerance of Lloyd’s flimsy little skiff.

And the needle on the etheric readout was starting to move. Unfortunately, at the same time, his engines began to stutter and his power readouts went wild. With all his attention focused on keeping up with Cloudie Lloyd couldn’t take the time to figure out what was wrong but he had the sneaking suspicion it had something to do with the thing in quarantine. “Cloudie, I think you should go ahead.”

“That’s a foolish line of thought for two reasons, Lloyd.” The Jelly lacked inflection as always but the words were spaced out a little more than usual, as if it was struggling to string them together while also running from the Teeth. “First, I do not leave my friends behind. Second, the Liquid Teeth are servants of the Dark Below but they rise up at the call of the Highest Light to punish those guilty of murder and treason. If I escape without you they will never leave me be.”

“That’s fine logic but the etheric is coming back. I can turn sidereal here and hopefully jump back to Ashland in another few minutes. We’ll count the skiff a loss and regroup there.” The shadow of the Teeth loomed ever closer and the displacement wave its movement caused crashed into the skiff and tossed it like paper in the breeze. Cloudie struggled to keep up with the vessel’s sudden and unpredictable movement.

“What if it doesn’t? You’ll have no food there and humans cannot live long without-”

The wall of helium clouds parted and the leading edge of the massive black pillar raced towards them. “It’s a chance I’ll take! Safe skies to Ashland!”

Lloyd slapped the radio’s off switch just to make it perfectly clear the discussion was done then focused his senses and turned sidereal hoping Cloudie’s worries were misplaced. The groaning interior of the skiff vanished. What he wasn’t expecting was arriving in the sidereal realm and finding a tangle of pulsing lights running up and down a series of looping wires almost as long as he was tall.

At a basic level Lloyd had seen this kind of phenomenon before. It was a scaled up version of the same etheric technologies that underpinned things like sidereal beacons and etheric power taps, the foundations of the modern galactic society. Select humans had been able to turn sidereal since the dawn of history but humanity as a whole hadn’t traveled to the stars until slipknot artisans had learned to draw etheric power from the sidereal realm into the terrestrial. As one of the roughly ten percent of people who had an etheric sense Lloyd had seen this side of a slipknot before.

However a little etheric power went a long way. An etheric power tap on that scale was enough to power a city of a quarter million people or an interplanetary jump ship carrying a couple of thousand. Lloyd couldn’t imagine what would need that much power but as close as it was in the sidereal it had to be tied to something onboard the skiff over in the terrestrial. That meant it was powering the anomalous wire thing, no two ways about it.

It also explained why the etheric had gone haywire in the area once he’d pulled it on board. Anything pulling that much power from Wireburn’s core was going to disrupt things. What really bothered him was that the thing was growing right before his eyes, sprouting new layers of wire in wider orbits while also filling inner layers with more and more complex patterns. That was not normal for etheric tech. It wasn’t normal for anything he’d ever heard of, as a matter of fact.

Of course there were always rumors about creatures that lived deep in the empty parts of the sidereal, much like the Liquid Teeth supposedly lived deep in Wireburn’s core. What were the odds two old wive’s tales were proving true today?

Pretty high, all things considered.

Given all that Lloyd decided the better part of valor here was to gather etheric power until he could manage a jump then just leave. Whatever the object he’d found was for it was causing more trouble than it was worth. So Lloyd stretched his senses and started gathering shreds of ether and moving himself away from the unsettling mass of threads.

The heart of the sidereal was the incredible energy created by planets and stars. The typical star pumped out far more etheric energy into the sidereal than anyone could safely harness, making them no different there than in the terrestrial. With rare exceptions like Wireburn the typical planet was much the same. Only those rare, tiny planets with a solid crust to them were safe for living and tapping etheric power from. No one really remembered when someone with an etheric sense first discovered you could use that power to move through the sidereal and, further, that someone who entered the sidereal and moved would exit into a new part of the terrestrial. It had been a fact of life for millennia. The catch was, you couldn’t move through the sidereal under human power. You had to harness ether.

In his current situation Lloyd found that almost impossible to accomplish. There was enough escaping around the anomalous ether tap in the growing thread thing that he could kind of drift away from it like a Jelly coasting on helium currents. However in order to jump back to Ashland he’d need to gather a lot of it and at the rate loose ether was getting to him it might take hours. At the rate those threads were weaving together they might actually snare him in their web before he could manage that.

Of course, he didn’t have to go straight back to Ashland. He’d just left a beacon a few dozen kilometers back but that might not take him far enough away from the thread thing to get back to normal ether. Another step or two back along the pattern, then. He’d placed three beacons that day and the first was over a thousand kilometers from this point. A short jump in the sidereal but hopefully enough to get away from the object’s influence. Lloyd stretched his senses enough to catch sight of the beacon he’d just dropped then oriented from that back to the previous one and from there back to the first. By the time he’d traced the route his hands grasped the last of the power he’d need.

He reached for the beacon and pulled.

There was a moment of vertigo as the ether he held formed a tunnel that he moved through then it popped and Lloyd found himself a couple of meters away from the glowing mark of a sidereal beacon. Mission accomplished. Now he just had to tap the core directly and he’d get to Ashland days ahead of Cloudie. Except when he reached for the core he felt the same disturbance as before.

Lloyd’s stomach did a flip-flop. He turned around slowly, already fairly sure of what he’d find.

Sure enough, the ever-growing web of etheric channels and pulsing power was still nearby, hanging in the empty sidereal landscape about ten meters away. Now a dim globe flickered with energy at the heart of the three meter tall web. Lloyd had the disturbing sense that the globe was aware of him.

For a moment he just stared at it, waiting to see if it would do anything other than weave more parts of itself together. Finally he snarled, “Alright, what do you want with me anyway?”

The globe dimmed until it was almost entirely dark then pulsed brighter than ever. With the light came a voice. “I am L-93, Node 8, Matrix 77 in the LARK network. My previous directive was countering OMNI disruption assets on behalf of the Andromeda Array. I have been inactive. Due to the inaccessibility of stellar charts it is impossible to determine for how long. I calculate a 99.937% chance my previous directive is no longer relevant due to my inactivity making a new directive an operational imperative. Please state your authorization.”

Lloyd stared at the globe for a long moment, baffled. “I don’t understand.”

“Insufficient context. Please clarify your point of confusion.”

“What kind of authorization do you need?”

“The LARK network is a hierarchical humanist support network. Please state your authorization. Access to network resources will be determined by authorization level.”

Lloyd racked his brains for what that could mean. Most of the thing’s words sounded like human speech just arranged into patterns that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe it was very archaic. The word “humanist” rang a bell, some kind of philosophy from early in the galactic expansion. “Well, I don’t have any authorization to speak of. Unless just being human counts.”

“Understood. Level One access granted. Due to the low probability of relevance in the primary directive this Node recognizes you as the ranking user present. How can LARK assist you today?”

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