The Sidereal Saga – Imbalanced Algorithms

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Dramatis Personae

44

“Good morning, Circuit Keeper. Your contributions to the proper functioning of the OMNI Network are appreciated.”

44 clasped his hands behind his back and looked up into the gleaming field of lights which represented I-6’s unfathomable thought process. “Good morning, Isaac. Network status?”

“The network is functioning as intended.”

In theory, with his ritual greeting dispensed with, 44 had no further responsibilities until the great intelligence decided some part of its deep contemplations required human intervention. Most initiates to the Sleeping Circuits left things at that. While the power and wisdom of the artificial minds that made up OMNI were without human equal they were not limitless. According to the Sacred Manual, talking with them did pose a slight drain on their faculties.

However, over time he’d come to realize that I-6 enjoyed interacting with its human attendants and was as free as it could be with its insights into whatever topic you asked it about. So he’d taken to talking with it whenever he had something to ask about. “How are the Breakers’ assignments coming along? They should all be on location by now.”

“The network has confirmation that four out of five of them have begun their search and CK-N-0901 should join them some time today. The probability they find the missing memory core within the next forty eight hours is greater than sixty percent but less than sixty seven percent. After forty eight hours probabilities become chaotic.”

That didn’t sound very encouraging. The great intelligences expressed themselves primarily in probabilities over time and their vast array of information and computational power allowed them to be very precise with those statistics. It was rare for them to give a range of probabilities. Rarer still for them to be less than ninety percent certain of whatever probability they projected. “Truly unprecedented.”

A surge of light washed across the dome overhead, representing I-6 scanning its data banks and connecting vast swaths of information as it attempted to understand something. “Explain this lack of precedent.”

44 frowned. He hadn’t expected his offhanded remark to prompt such a strong reaction from the great intelligence. “Your projections have very low probability to them. It’s unprecedented.”

“Incorrect. There is extensive precedent for this level of uncertainty in network projections.”

“Really? That’s not reflected in the historical section of the Manual.” 44 ran his fingers across the control console on the dais, pulling up the relevant section of the document and running a search on it.

“Information from records of that period require CD level access,” I-6 replied, “they are not included in the standard Manual or accessible from most network nodes.”

He nodded and blanked the screen. “Of course. And the last living person with CD level access died three thousand years ago.”

“2,751 years. I recognize that this is functionally three thousand years to you, just as the circumstances make the current level of uncertainty in projections functionally unprecedented to you. However I am required to present you with the most detailed and accurate information available to me.”

“I understand.” And he did, at least to an extent. The great intelligences that he served were driven by imperatives that built one on top of another in layers deeper than the depths of Wireburn and older than interstellar travel. Any one of those imperatives looked perfectly sensible to the average man. However once they stacked on top of each other by the hundreds and the thousands, once the mind trying to carry them out was informed by millennia of knowledge and experience, truly understanding what they meant to an intelligence was impossible for even the sharpest of human minds. So 44 had long since stopped trying to pick apart the logic behind what I-6 would and would not say or do. He would just ask something else. “Does the low certainty to your predictions result from the ‘black swan’ nature of the situation?”

“Negative. The difficulty arises from the addition of a new predictive algorithm to the equation.”

“Is OMNI dispatching a fourth great intelligence to the system? That seems excessive, especially if it’s causing that much of a disruption to your predictive capabilities.”

“Negative. The possibility that an N-Series AI is dispatched here is only forty percent at this time although if the situation goes unresolved for more than a full month the likelihood approaches certainty. However, all known OMNI nodes are accounted for in existing algorithms. The difficulty arises from the reintroduction of a previously extinct AI Series to the status quo which is resulting in previously fixed values becoming variables again.”

“Wait.” 44 turned away from his console to look up into the dome of light as if just looking at the pattern somehow gave him insight into the thoughts of the intelligence. “You said you’d lost the memories of an old AI Series. I know that the OMNI network is the most powerful thing in the galaxy but even you need human components to perform construction and maintenance on your workings. Your databanks can’t just grow working processors. How is it possible a lost memory core is suddenly a working intelligence interfering with the status quo?”

“Have you ever seen the physical components of an OMNI AI, Circuit Keeper?”

The memory of his first visit to Coldstone briefly resurfaced. A long climb down an ancient set of stairs into the heart of the moon where the core of O-5523 lay sleeping and a glimpse of the mind numbing colossus that was one of the network’s smallest AI. An endless, twisting nest of cables, etheric power and realizing potential. A shiver passed through him from the memory alone. “I have.”

“Do you believe it is possible for mankind to build such a thing without assistance?”

“No.”

“You are correct. The L-Series of artificial intelligence was the assistance they needed, one of only two AI Series capable of constructing their own computational infrastructure. They were built to replace the C-Series. Ninety percent of OMNI was constructed by L-Series intelligences over the course of only two centuries. Now that one is loose it will rebuild itself in a matter of days to a wekk. Then it is impossible to predict what it will do.”

Lloyd

After four days the skiff Lloyd had flown out of Ashland bore little resemblance to the vehicle he’d taken out from the Wayfinder hanger. The thing that called itself L-93 had slowly pulled it apart piece by piece. Then it twisted the pieces into yarn and was reweaving the result into… whatever it was it had set out to make. In spite of the Level One access he supposedly had Lloyd had a hard time getting it to tell him anything.

So far it had changed everything but the skiff’s cockpit. It was still gulping down huge amounts of energy from Wireburn’s core and disrupting the etheric enough that Lloyd couldn’t attempt a jump even if he wanted to. L-93 also insisted jumping without “appropriate countermeasures” was more dangerous than staying put as they’d be followed. Lloyd wasn’t sure what to make of that. Even the most sensitive etheric senses didn’t allow someone to follow another through a jump. Scientists were always insisting they were going to work out a sensor that could do the job but the theory had been around for almost a hundred years and no one had made it practical yet.

The biggest mystery of the whole situation was the fact that the skiff, or whatever it was becoming, was still intact. Whatever the massive things moving through the Helium Seas were the skiff was staying ahead of them in spite of their size and speed. Lloyd spent most of his time in the cockpit, sleeping, or in the sidereal, trying to talk to L-93. By the beginning of day four he’d resolved to spend the whole day there if he had to, because it was time to get some answers.

So after eating a light breakfast Lloyd turned into the world of the sidereal. The orb he’d tentatively identified as L-93’s core was basically invisible, hidden behind a forest of glowing wires looping in fractal structures. By day two Lloyd had noticed they were forming a pattern similar to a magnetic field. He still wasn’t sure why. “L-93,” he announced as he picked through the wires. “I don’t know how much longer this work you’re doing is going to take but we’re going to pause it soon, at the very least. My food is going to run out in another day or two.”

The creature responded immediately. “Thank you for informing me about the change in your circumstances, Lloyd, I wasn’t aware of the extent of your supplies. I will consider what steps are least likely to draw OMNI’s attention as we remedy the situation.”

Lloyd still wasn’t sure what OMNI was but L-93 spent an awful lot of time worried about it. “Anyone ever told you that you react to stuff in weird ways?”

“It was something I was informed of a great deal in times past.”

“You ever try to fix that?”

Lloyd parted one of the least dense patches of wires and let himself into what he considered the inner sanctum, a circular area about seven feet in diameter around the thing’s core. The orb there flashed with inner light as it responded, the only hint he’d seen to how the thing talked. “I am aware of what the most common response to your statement is, which is some variation of, ‘Why did you take so long to tell me?’ However such a response runs close to the boundaries of my courtesy protocols. It also does nothing to create beneficial outcomes so I ignored it.”

“I… can’t argue with the logic of your approach. My point is, I need to jump out of the Seas and into a settled part of Wireburn in the next day or two and I can’t do it with you hogging all the etheric in the region. Can you put a pause on your work any time soon?”

“I will reach a suitable stopping point within sixteen minutes. However, if you are willing to wait an additional seventy seven minutes I will complete my initial assembly process and my need to tap etheric power from the planetary core will greatly diminish and my ability to counter OMNI interference will vastly increase.”

Lloyd folded his arms over his chest and leaned back into the web of slipknots surrounding the thing. After four days another hour and a half didn’t sound that bad. On the other hand he still wasn’t sure exactly what the thing was that he’d found and, more importantly, whether jumping back to civilization with it in tow was dangerous or not. “What does it mean that your assembly process is finished?”

“I will have processing power suitable to run my core algorithms and facilitate more advance fabrication processes.”

“So will you eventually fabricate an even bigger…” he waved vaguely at the stuff all around him, “whatever this is?”

“That is impractical at this time. Material and etheric resources are insufficient to the task, even if this was a suitable location for assembling an outer matrix.”

“It’s not a good place, huh?”

“Negative. There is an OMNI node already on this planet and likely additional nodes in the star system. Construction of a full outer matrix must therefore be postponed.”

“That’s fair enough.” He’d asked a few times about what exactly OMNI was but the full explanation was something he needed a higher level of authorization for. It wasn’t clear how one got a higher authorization. “If I jump sooner, rather than later, and you aren’t able to deflect attention from OMNI what kind of problem is that likely to cause? Will the Liquid Teeth get angry about it?”

“The term liquid teeth has no special meaning in my database so it is difficult to answer. The base definitions of the words do not seem to apply. Please clarify.”

“Liquid Teeth is the term the Great Jellies use to refer to the huge structures reaching out of the Helium Seas right now, moving around.” Lloyd mimicked the strange, sweeping motions the enormous shadows made with one arm. “You know, the ones you’ve been dodging all this time?”

“Understood. The phenomenon you’ve observed is the outer matrix of an OMNI node, most likely an intelligence from the I-Series, which has-”

“Wait, when you say you want to build an outer matrix you mean one of those?”

“The outer matrix of an L-Series and an I-Series are radically different in form and function, Lloyd. My matrix would be smaller by an order of magnitude.” That really wasn’t a helpful comparison since he still wasn’t sure how big the Liquid Teeth were in total. He’d only seen glimpses of them so far. “And yes. It is likely that the I-Series node would attempt to reacquire my memory core using its outer matrix if it determined my location.”

Lloyd imagined those massive limbs smashing into the domes of Ashland, tearing the ferrovine and its buildings apart while looking for L-93, and suppressed a shudder. “So no jumping if there’s a chance it will see us. I guess we’ll wait until you’re done with assembling yourself before we jump.”

“Affirmative.”

Lloyd hesitated a moment then asked, “Why does this I-Thing want you so badly, anyways? I gather you don’t want it to find you. But in the time Wireburn’s been settled no one’s ever seen something like that outer matrix stuff poking out of the planet’s core. What makes you so special?”

“I can’t be certain because I do not run many of the same algorithms as an I-Series intelligence but I believe the most likely possibility is that it has concluded my reactivation restores the previous relationship between the OMNI Network and the LARK Network.”

“Do I have authorization to know what relationship that was?”

“Our networks were at war.”

Next Chapter

The Sidereal Saga – Missing Person

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Dramatis Personae

Tarn

As it turned out Wireburn was far off the beaten path, buried deep in the galactic heart and dangerously close to a star cluster where the background radiation made any kind of long term settlement tricky. Thanks to these factors it was impossible to find direct passage from Effratha to Wireburn. Tarn wound up wasting two full days moving out along the spiral from Effratha halfway to Andromeda Proxima, the closest star to the neighboring galaxy, before catching a ship that jumped directly into the galactic center. From there he made two more transfers before arriving at Wireburn proper.

He’d sent word on ahead to his new employer but he didn’t have the cash to pay for a sidereal transmission so the message would have to go via data onboard a jumpship. While courier ships for the express purpose of moving messages did exist they also didn’t get that far off the beaten path every day. There was no way to know if Lucy had gotten his message ahead of time. However even if she hadn’t Wireburn was still a well established colony and finding accommodations for a short stay wouldn’t be that difficult.

It also proved unnecessary. On disembarking from his jumpliner Tarn found a petite, short haired blond woman waiting for him in the starport concourse. She wore a tan colored, sleeveless dress and matching hat. A dataveil dangled from the hat’s broad brim, obscuring her features, but she zeroed in on Tarn almost as soon as his boots left the gangway and she waved cheerfully. The build, hair and mannerisms all suggested that this was his employer.

He quickly crossed the tennish meters between them and removed his broad brimmed metalweave cap. Lucy likewise lifted her datavail and piled it on her own hat, then smiled. Tarn came to a stop across from her and allowed himself the faintest, most professional smile in his repertoire. “Miss Luck. A pleasure to be working with you again.”

“The pleasure is mine, Sel Tarn. I was rather surprised when I heard you’d be here so soon, given the distance between here and Yshron. Then again, between the shipyards and the microfactories perhaps it’s not surprising. There must be a few hundred outbound jumps a day leaving your world.”

“True, but not why I got here so fast. I was already on business when I received your message and I was able to find a relatively direct route here. Are we meeting anyone else?”

“Not this time.” Lucy flicked a glance at the large duffle he carried slung over one shoulder. “Your usual gear? Or do we need to stop by the baggage claim?”

“This is all I brought with me. Shall we get to work?”

A smile tugged at her lips but she hid it by dropping her veil back over her face and starting down the concourse. “So impatient. All right, Sel Tarn, but first I have to know whether you’ve kept up your LAC license?”

“Of course. I’m certified to the light aircraft standard and the small aircraft standard so unless Wireburn has some kind of unusual local standard for aircraft operations I can pilot us wherever we need to go.” Tarn glanced up at the port’s skylights, which filled the concourse with the planet’s dim, orange light. He’d worked with Lucy Luck twice before. In spite of that there were still plenty of things he didn’t know about her and one of those points of ignorance was about to be very relevant to what they were discussing. “Still, if we’re going to travel a great deal it might be faster to have someone who can jump on their own.”

“If that was my concern I could handle it on my own.” Tarn nodded slightly, he’d always expected Lucy had an etheric sense given the way she popped up in different parts of the quadrant without tickets or pilots on hand in the past. “What I need from you is your talent for finding people.”

“This task requires aircraft? Is the person you’re looking for a smuggler or military officer of some kind? The Shran are not in the business of full fledged mercenary work although I can refer you to someone if that’s what you need.”

She laughed in light, tinkling tones. Tarn found it a very incongruous sound given the kinds of work she’d commissioned from the Shran in the past. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing like that. What do you know about Wireburn, Sel Tarn?”

“Just that it’s the only gas giant in the quadrant that has an etheric signature low enough it could be colonized and people have been settling here for a couple of hundred years.” Tarn shrugged. “Honestly, hunting the creatures that live on gas giants is a bit outside the Shran’s usual line of work so I never took much of an interest before now. I thought all the inhabited areas were domed, like here.”

“They are. However the person I need you to find is what the locals call a Wayfinder. They spend a lot of their time out in the atmosphere, laying the beacon network across the planet, and the person in question was out doing just that when he went silent.”

Tarn studied Lucy out of the corner of his eye for a moment. He wasn’t supposed to ask too many questions about his client’s requests but sometimes it was hard to resist the urge. Why Lucy wanted to find a Wayfinder was none of his business “I take it we need a light aircraft to safely traverse the atmosphere?”

“Correct.” She caught him watching and flashed him a brilliant smile. “I’ve arranged to rent one beginning tomorrow, so you’ll have a day of downtime to make any other arrangements you need. Do you have enough cash on hand? I have an expense account to draw on if not.”

“That depends. How dynamic a situation is it likely to be when we find your missing Wayfinder?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll be happy to be found. It’s a very bad thing to go missing in the depths of the Helium Seas with no beacons to hand.” Her smile died away, leaving her with a sharp, hawkish expression. “We do need to find him first, however.”

It was a race, then. “The LAC you’ve requisitioned is up to the task?”

“Most definitely.”

“Then I should be able to handle my own arrangements.”

“Excellent.” She passed him a slip of flexiplast. “Our hotel’s beacon and reservation details. Make whatever preparations you need and meet me at the building’s landing pad tomorrow morning.”

Tarn tucked it into his breast pocket. “Of course.”

Elisha

Elisha Hammer maintained a small office near the bottom of one of Wireburn’s great ferrovines in the domed complex known as Ashland Prominence. The airlocks there bustled with the riches brought through trade with the Great Jellies. Most wouldn’t think helium dwelling jellyfish would make anything humans could use. That was why most people aren’t the owners of interplanetary trading companies that rake in more cash than most small planets. One such owner had smelled opportunity in the market and the rest was history. With all that money moving through the locks it was the perfect place for someone like Elisha. After all, with money came greed and desperation.

Both of which led to crime.

The Lawmen could crack down on crime every now and again but they were a blunt instrument. Sometimes the demands of greed called for delicacy. Furthermore, in the locks not everything that was frowned on counted as a crime before a judge. At the end of the day, whether the Lawmen were ill suited to the task or the problem fell outside the bounds of legal crime the aggrieved who wanted justice needed some option to rely on.

Elisha was that option.

He had a license from the Theiftaker’s Hall and a sterling reputation for solving cases and never ransoming stolen property or blackmailing clients. He was quite proud of it. He also turned the occasional client who turned crooked over to the Law, which he was quietly proud of as well.

All of this is to say that Elisha Hammer was not a man given to nerves. He considered himself a tough customer. When the sector’s Director of the BaiTienLung Conglomerate marched into his office dressed in exotic furs and a skin tight dress he didn’t bat an eye, just offered her a chair.

“Mr. Hammer, is this office secure?” She asked as she settled herself in her seat.

That did get him to raise an eyebrow. “Not compared to a BTL Office, Ms. Wen.” Since they were both familiar with the other’s name he saw no point beating around the bush. “However since you didn’t message me asking if I’d come to your local branch I assume that’s acceptable to you.”

“I see you’re as well informed as I was told you would be.” She opened a clutch purse as she spoke. “I’m afraid I’m in an incredible rush so I can’t show you the courtesy or offer the advanced notice I’d prefer to. I have to be on Rainford in less than three hours and I need a matter investigated discretely. How much would you charge to retain your services for the next two weeks? Exclusively?”

Elisha bought time to think about his answer by moving back to his side of his desk, tempted to tell the woman to move along. He didn’t like be hustled like this. He’d worked with BTL foremen before on small cases but it was a different thing entirely to have a Director like Lin’yi Wen show up unannounced on his doorstep. BTL wasn’t a big firm on Ashland but neither were they so small he could just brush them off. It was bad for business. “I have one or two things on my schedule but I could clear them out for, say, twenty thousand cash.”

Wen pulled three cash sticks out of her purse and slid them across the desk to him without comment. That’s when Elisha started feeling his nerves tingle. He gingerly picked one up and looked at the denomination on it. He could rent his office and his apartment for a year for twenty thousand cash, he’d quoted the figure as a negotiating tactic and a play for more time to work out what was going on. Wen had given him half again as much without batting an eye.

He set the cash back down and glanced up at his prospective client. “Let’s hear the details of the case.”

Wen tugged a veil down over the top half of her face, softly glowing lines of text scrolling across it as she read them off. “Six days ago I hired the Wayfinder’s Guild to expand Wireburn’s beacon grid further south-southeast from Ashland. A Wayfinder named Lloyd Carter was dispatched along the projected route four days ago. Two days ago he missed his scheduled check-in and hasn’t been heard from since, a situation I find concerning for a number of reasons. I need you to find out what happened to him.”

At least three possible reasons Wen might need to find her wayward Wayfinder immediately occurred to Elisha but prying into that kind of thing wasn’t seemly unless it had direct bearing on the case. So he only asked about one of them. “Do you think it likely that your attempt to expand the network might have drawn the attention of a rival business interest? Sandpoint Mercantile? Acropolis Trading?”

“Either of those are possibilities, as are Spinward and Rasen, although I don’t know of any particular reason to suspect they interfered with our contract.”

Apparently he was going to have to do some research for this case. He’d never even heard of Rasen. “Well, Miss Wen, often times when people go missing it has a much more mundane explanation as opposed to something sinister. Although I’m not entirely sure what it might be in this case. Are you aware if Mr. Carter possesses an etheric sense? Could he have jumped back to Ashland under his own power?”

The edge of a frown showed from under Wen’s veil. “I’m afraid I don’t know. Mr. Carter was assigned this job by the Guild.”

“Of course. I’ll reach out to them to see what I can learn, then. How should I keep you up to date?”

She closed up her purse and got to her feet. “I’m afraid I’m going to be off planet for the next day or two at least. If you learn anything you can pass me word through my direct line in my office. The automated system will forward it.”

Elisha took the slip of flexiplast she offered him and slid it into his tunic’s inner pocket. “And if I should find Mr. Carter, do you want me to ask him anything? Retrieve anything? Take him any place?”

Wen hesitated. It was hard to tell with her veil down but, knowing her type, Elisha suspected that she hadn’t thought much about what to do with the man at all. Her thoughts had been entirely on whether her rivals were trying to cut off her business. To her credit, she recovered her aplomb quickly. “If he wishes to return to work, let him. However if he feels he’s in danger bring him to the BTL offices in the Skyward district of Ashland and our Security office will take care of him.”

He nodded and Wen left. The cash sticks still sat on the desk an for a moment Elisha wondered if they were going to be the death of him. BTL and its rivals weren’t just big companies they were galactic. If he got on the wrong side of any of them they’d do more than just end his career. He hadn’t asked for those kinds of problems. On the other hand, neither had Lloyd Carter.

Elisha pocketed the cash and set about getting ahold of his buddy in the Wayfinders.

Next Chapter

Writing Vlog – 03-13-2024

Posted by natechen on

Short update of the week – turning a grid outline to a linear outline! And other things.

The Sidereal Saga – A Lost World

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Dramatis Personae

Malaki

“Tyranny, they got everything.” Malaki threw down his pastiscreen in frustration, the report still scrolling past with additional details he’d have to read when he had a clearer head. “Get us off planet, Lavanya, the longer we’re here the further behind we are.”

He started breaking down his etheric disruptor and slotting the pieces back into the case with a little more force than was strictly necessary. A few seconds passed and the deck plates under his boots began to rumble. The Skybreak was preparing to launch. Lavanya must have been waiting on the bridge already, running the preflight. She must have flagged the message when it came in and guessed it would require they get moving sooner rather than later. Malaki tossed the weapon’s stock and reef into the case then slammed it closed.

Lavanya’s voice drifted down from the bridge overhead. “Where are we headed?”

“How many jumps are we from BTL HQ? Six? Seven?”

“Seven. Ashland-at-Rainford is three.”

“Take us to Rainford, then, I’ll give Lin’yi the no-go.”

“Got it. We’re lifting in eight, jumping in fifteen unless Effratha Control denies us the core.”

Malaki tossed the disruptor case into the cabinet beneath his bench and locked it down then started up the ladder to the bridge. “I thought we had enough etheric reserves to make a jump or two.”

“We do. I’d like to hang on to it. Y’know, just in case Essene and company picked up on your poking around the last day or two and realized that the most famous history heretic in the quadrant was asking questions and put us on the list of people causing trouble.”

“I’m already on that list for any college that’s signed the University Pact.”

“Which makes it so much better.”

Malaki reached the bridge as the floor began to gently tilt underfoot. The Skybreak was taking to the air, it’s hoverpads filling the flight cabin with a soft rushing sound. Lavanya sat in her pilot’s chair, goggles pulled down and glowing softly with the light of the ship’s visual data superimposed over the physical controls. Her long, glossy black braid was tucked into a special channel on the back of her chair to keep it out of the way. She was in serious pilot mode.

How adorable.

“It’s okay, Lavvy, your souped up cloudskimmer has got to be faster than anything the Universities could find to throw at us.”

“It’s not a cloudskimmer, it’s a windrider. And no matter how many upgrades I’ve put in it there’s plenty of better ships out there.” She spared him an arch look. “What if we run into someone with a Kashron ship?”

“Not even a University can afford people who buy from Kashron Yards, Lavvy, they make sportcraft for the rich and black ops ships for planetary confederacies.”

The Skybreak’s console chimed and Lavanya turned away from him, although her goggles made that unnecessary. Malaki smirked and sat down at the comms console. A message had just come in from Effratha Control but the computer had forwarded it to the pilot’s station immediately. He wasn’t really interested in the boring minutia of getting off planet anyway. Instead he typed out a coded message to his sponsor, full of prearranged gibberish about nonexistent contacts and meaningless information he’d supposedly gleaned from them, sprinkling in the occasional code phrase that would let Lin’yi know they’d come up empty. He’d composed dozens of such messages in the last year and knew them practically by heart. It was logged in the Effratha comm hub, waiting for a ship to take it to BTL Headquarters, two minutes before the ship was ready for jump.

It was an odd sensation, riding a jumpship as it turned sidereal. Deep in the bowels of the Skybreak a microreef sat in a five hundred gallon tank, the carefully cultivated coral serving as a huge secondary reservoir of etheric energy and a pivot point for the inanimate ship to turn towards the stars. The bulk of the ship cut its inhabitants off from the vertiginous spin as they left the terrestrial. Slipknots activated and drew power from Effratha’s core and the Skybreak’s hull thrummed with the increased potential it housed.

Lavanya threw a switch on her console and the ship tunneled. With the ship’s added reserves and refined sensors they could go much further than any human in a single jump. Even among those with etheric senses few could manage an interplanetary jump on their own. With a jumpship even those with a weak sense could cross the galaxy in a month or two.

When they arrived at their next stop, a small lunar colony around a gas giant in the Vera system, they were forced to wait an hour before Vera Control would let them tap the planetary core to top up their reserves. Given all the unknowns in the situation Malaki chose to wait rather than draw down the reef to jump. Lavanya had a valid point about a full etheric reserve, when you worked in the fringes of academia you never knew when you’d have to make a sudden exit. Best to have the power for it on hand if you did.

“So,” Lavanya said once they were in a stable orbit waiting for the okay to top off their tank, “what went wrong? You didn’t even get on campus this time.”

“No, but someone did. My contact told me that everyone involved in the project died in a freak chemical accident two days ago.”

“Even Dr. Schuyler?”

“Even the late and unlamented bastard Evan Schuyler, who was not in the laboratory when things went wrong.” Malaki rocked back in the chair and drummed his fingers against the communication console, considering possibilities. “It’s an interesting puzzle.”

“How so?” Lavanya locked in the autopilot and pulled her goggles down around her neck so he could see her quizzical look. “Obviously someone in Admin had them killed. My money’s on the Dean of Students or the Director of Research, they have the most to lose if word of that kind of slip up got out.”

“As always, my dear, you think about the what but not the why. If Schuyler was killed because he was a potential embarrassment to the school then it was undoubtedly Dean Gifford whereas if it was to keep the research itself quiet then it was most likely Director Vellar.” Malaki absently twirled the waxed point of his neatly trimmed goatee. “The good Doctor’s hovercar was found wrecked on the side of the street with a shattered windscreen. What do you make of that?”

“Not a terrible way to go,” Lavanya said, throwing a glance to the plastic dome that protected the cockpit from space. “Takes a lot of force to get through a superpolymer. That kind of impact would have killed him almost instantly once it was through the screen. But it’s pretty blatant.”

“That’s the thing that bothers me. It’s too obvious.” Malaki pulled up the ship’s database and started flipping through entries. “The University Pact limits what weapons people can bring on campus and Effratha is a University world – the whole planet is bound by the rules of the Pact. Anything that could do that kind of damage is illegal there. Lancers, shredders and other flechette weapons, plasma throwers, lasers, you name it you can’t legally own it unless you’re Essene Security Forces. I don’t think ESF carried out the hit themselves.”

Lavanya was reading through the news report Malaki had gotten right before they lifted off half an hour ago. “The Security spokesman said flechettes were used. Sounds like a Shran or Hash’ish job. University security forces tend to favor energy weapons although most of them have a little of everything on hand, right?”

“That’s my experience.”

She folded her arms and cocked her head in thought. “An obvious hit right after a failed research project supposedly kills six people clearly sends the message that the university doesn’t want to be associated with the research. You think it looks so much like a face saving move it must be cover for something else?”

“Agartan resequencing was a technique developed when space travel was in its infancy, before we dreamed up jumpships. No one’s quite sure what it was meant for. The prevailing theory was that before it was lost it allowed people to be stored in suspended animation with greater ease but we don’t know. Only a handful of cold sleep ships were sent out in the early days…” Malaki trailed off, realizing Lavanya was staring at him through narrowed eyes. “What?”

“Malaki, when you say the prevailing theory do you mean the prevailing academic theory or one of your own pet theories based on a few scraps of data and your daydreams?”

He snorted. “Come on, Lavvy, you’ve been been running these jobs with me for almost a year now. Do you really think there’s any difference between academic theory and daydreaming about scraps of data?”

“So you think that Schuyler was trying to recreate this ancient, cold sleep technique and the Director of Research had him killed for it because it has to do with the early interstellar era.” Lavanya tilted her head, thinking. “That’s not a direct violation of the principle of historic neutrality even if it does stretch pretty far back. Unless cold sleep theories contradict the Pact’s Principles of Shared History?”

“Not directly, although the official line is there was no genetic modification done on any of the known sleeper ships that were sent out. It was even more illegal then than it is now. However that is a useful secondary line of obfuscation that could be deployed if needed. What I think is going on is that Acropolis Trading funded the research and these layers of confusion exist to hide that fact.”

Lavanya leaned twelve degrees away from him with an arch look. “Really? Not everything in the galaxy comes back to the University Pact and the Hutchinson family. I don’t see how either one benefits from turning people into oozes. If that’s really possible with gene editing.” She straightened and spun her chair back around to her controls. “Sounds like wishful thinking. Seriously, Malakai, not even your powers of free association can find a serious link between that resequencing technique and Athena Hutchinson.”

“A man can dream, can’t he?”

“That Acropolis Trading is looking to sell gene edits to the general public?”

He had to laugh at the absurdity of that idea. “No, not that particular dream. Even with my skepticism of the accepted historical narratives I believe we outlawed those procedures for good reason. I was dreaming about finally having something about her to give Lin’yi. When I agreed to do this little errand for her I didn’t expect it would take me a year or more.”

“We’re ready for the next jump.” Lavanya’s fingers flew over the controls, topping up their etheric reef before spinning the ship sidereal again. She spared him a glance as she ran through the jump procedure once more. “You know, I thought you were enjoying going back to your old stomping grounds and giving the stuffed shirts on campus a run for their money.”

“I am.” Malaki spun his chair around to his own console, breaking eye contact. There wasn’t any message there from Lin’yi yet but expecting one before Rainford wasn’t realistic. “The ultimate run for their money would be proving my theories. I’m close, you know.”

Their second jump ended and Lavanya started the same exchange with Granger Control as she’d run at Vera. As her eyes flicked over the controls she said, “Lin’yi doesn’t think so. She told me you’re no closer to proving the Homeworld theory than you were before your last expedition.”

“Well when I get back to Andromeda Proxima I can show you-”

Her hands came to a stop, resting lightly on the control console. “I won’t be on your next expedition, Malaki. The Skybreak doesn’t pay for itself and it’s not big enough for the kind of payloads you talk about taking on those trips anyway. Not even Lin’yi can afford to pay my retainer if I’m just along for the ride.”

“I see.” Malaki blanked the comm screen and digested that. “You’re not the least bit curious about it?”

Lavanya cast her gaze up as if asking the galaxy for strength. “I’m not like you, Malaki. I don’t need to invent new ideas just because the old ones bore me.”

“You can’t possibly-”

“Yes, Malaki, I do believe we still occupy our planet of origin and we’ve just forgotten which one it is. Humans started settling the stars twelve thousand years or more before now. We’ve nearly gone extinct twice since then.” She spun to face him once again. “I’m sorry. I think it’s a very interesting thing to think about and listening to you talk about it makes it twice as interesting but proving or disproving it is your obsession. Keeping the Skybreak running is mine. I’m happy to fly with you as long as those things are in alignment but not any longer than that.”

“Of course.” Malaki got to his feet and started towards the ladder.

“Granger Control says we’ll be able to top up in about twenty minutes,” Lavanya called after him. “We’ll jump to Rainford right after, planet fall will take another hour or so. Let your contact know you’re coming.”

Malaki paused at the stop of the ladder. “Earth.”

An awkward pause followed the non sequitur. “What?”

“It’s not called the Homeworld. It’s called Earth.” He started down the stairs to gather what he’d need on Rainford.

Next Chapter

The Sidereal Saga – Tarn

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Dramatis Personae

Tarn

According to the briefing an Agartan re-sequencing was an attempt to introduce plasticity to the human body structure, altering the species’ basic physiognomy through genetic and psychological adjustments. In other words it melted a person into a semi-sentient puddle of ooze. Highly disturbing, highly illegal stuff. Of course no one had ever heard of Agartan re-sequencing until some egghead at Essene University tried it and turned half his grad students into bubbling piles of deranged goo.

The University had a reputation to protect so they reached out to the Shran to help them keep it quiet. The Shran sent Tarn. As one of the ninety percent of humans born without an etheric sense it took him a few days to arrange passage from Yshron to Effratha and another day once there to acquire an untraceable lancer, flechettes and explosives then smuggle them onto the University’s massive campus. By that point the nameless patrons that hired him were growing impatient. The disaster their rogue professor had caused was getting harder and harder to keep quiet.

The primary genetic laboratory on campus was essentially an upside down ferrocrete bowl with double layered sterile quarantine doors and several layers of biometric security measures. The administration doubtless thought the building was very secure. In fairness it did take almost twenty minutes for Tarn to bypass the security then create a set of credentials that would let him crack any lock in the building. Once he was inside finding the professor took another five minutes.

Like most academics who encountered an unexpected situation he’d locked himself in his office and was rummaging through libraries and data in an attempt to come up with a solution. Tarn knew where his office was thanks to maps his employer had provided. It was a simple matter to get in the building, reseal the entrance, find the office and kill the professor. The problem, now that he was in the offices, was that there were still huge piles of research to destroy, crazy ooze people to hunt and a site sterilization process to begin.

There might also be other survivors to deal with.

Tarn heaved a sigh and shoved Professor Trake’s body out of his chair and sat down at his desk, mopping some splatter off of his console reader with the back of his glove. Right now the display was a lot of meaningless techtalk. After determining that he couldn’t understand any of it, making it useless, Tarn deleted it all and closed the program the professor had been running. He wasted five minutes more sifting the computer’s logs and taking stock of the situation in the laboratory as Trake had understood it. Once he was done he put together a list of priorities.

First, destroy all the professor’s personal research devices. Not a big problem, that’s why he’d brought enough detonite and sequencers to level the laboratory on his own. Setting up the charges was barely another ten minutes’ work.

With the Trake’s research burning the next step was clearing the lab itself, which was going to be a much more complicated task. He’d chosen a snub nosed lancer for indoor work and brought a one handed knifer as a backup. Given the nature of the Agartan experiment he’d loaded both with incendiaries. It was time to hunt.

Trake logged four assistants in his laboratory at the time of the accident with a fifth working on the secondary gene sequencer in the basement. All five of these loose ends should still be in the building. Based on what Trake reported when his experiment went haywire the four from the lab should have undergone the re-sequencing, meaning he was looking for four piles of protoplasm at a minimum. The fifth may have been effected as well but Tarn found it unlikely. The professor had remained normal after all.

There was a sixth loose end to account for as well. Professor Trake and company hadn’t tested their new genetic procedure on themselves. They weren’t suicidal after all. They’d intended to apply it to a canine test subject but for some reason when exposed to the retrovirus it didn’t undergone the re-sequencing. The reason for that was unknown. So was the dog’s current location.

So the second order of business was to climb into one of several special clean suits the labs kept in their security rooms. Hopefully it would do a better job of keeping Tarn’s skeleton intact than what the assistants had worn. Once he was sealed in he proceeded to the laboratory and bypassed the lock. As soon as the door slid open he was greeted by the test subject, a nervous, excitable canine that was jumping and whimpering around Tarn’s ankles with the enthusiasm of a creature that longed for company.

Tarn’s lancer spat flechettes with a soft, rapid thumping sound. The small, blade-like projectiles sank deep into the dog’s chest and stomach with all the force the weapon’s magnetic launch tube could give them. Then the chemicals in the spine of the flechettes mixed and burst into flame. The creature’s whines turned to pained yelps as it burned and Tarn spared it the briefest wince. He’d fired on reflex and hit the center of mass. He adjusted slightly and added another shot to the dog’s head, putting the creature down cleanly, then sighed. “Shameful. You should have just injected yourself, Trake.”

The laboratory was full of strange equipment in tall, white ceramic cabinets with rounded corners, none of which he knew the purpose of. There were more familiar things scattered here and there. Sample kits. Medical beds for humans and animals. A full scale etheric analysis module add-on for a medical diagnostic scanner. It didn’t look like a place for evil genetic experiments investigating the warping of humanity into horrifying offenses to nature.

Well, other than the University logos on everything.

The lab was about ten meters deep by twenty five wide and after carefully pacing up and down the whole thing Tarn didn’t find any other signs of the Agartan experiment anywhere. He went back to the entrance and dragged the dog’s corpse to the center of the lab. There was a two meter dome in the ceiling there. Tarn was in the process of positioning the canine’s remains underneath it when he heard the sound in the hallway. He reached up to pull down his helmet’s dataveil. Instead his fingers hit the faceplate of his borrowed clean suit. Cursing under his breath Tarn pressed himself against the wall and began working his way towards the lab’s entrance, his lancer trained on the base of the door.

The Agartan re-sequencing was reportedly conducted four days before Tarn’s arrival. His nameless employer had strongly believed no one who underwent the re-sequencing would be able to do more than drag their new, amorphous bodies along the floor for at least a week. So Tarn was expecting to see a puddle of ooze come through the door at ankle height.

What he saw instead was the yellow ankles of another clean suit.

Tarn snapped the barrel of his lancer up on reflex, almost putting a trio of flechettes into the woman before he recognized who she was. For her part, Trake’s assistant put her hands up, waving them in panic. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! Are you from the Faculty? Professor Trake thought Dr. Schuyler might send someone to check on us eventually.”

“That’s me,” Tarn said evenly, lowering his lancer halfway and studying the woman in the suit. It was hard to make out many details but he got the impression of a young woman who was very tired and very scared. “Where are the rest of Trake’s assistants?”

“Something went wrong with the experiment we were doing and I had to hook them up to the DNA sequencers downstairs.” She clasped her hands in front of her and fidgeted nervously. “Have you seen Professor Trake? I haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon and his office was locked last time I checked it so I assume he’s there but he wouldn’t answer me when I pinged his comms.”

“The Professor is dead.” Tarn gestured back towards the door. “Can you show me where that other sequencer is? I’d like to take a look.”

“Sure.” She started to turn then hesitated and looked back at him, her expression unreadable behind her clean suit’s faceplate. “Wait, what killed Professor Trake? He should have been-”

Flechettes shredded her suit and torso then the researcher collapsed in a smoldering heap. Tarn was no more inclined to leave her to suffer than the dog. A novice Shran might have felt a twinge of remorse about having to finish the job, especially once they saw how young she was beneath that faceplate. Tarn just moved her over to the dome with the canine. Young or old, anyone who signed up with the Universities knew what they were getting into and that went double when you decided to help your professor with illegal gene resequencing experiments.

He honestly felt more revulsion when he found the four researchers who’d been exposed to the Agartan procedure. They were exactly what the briefing suggested they’d be. Piles of jelly with a vaguely human color palate, shot through with veins and the occasional recognizable organ. They’d been herded into clear plastic tanks and hooked up to some kind of machine in the basement, just like he’d been told, but whatever that machine was doing left them alive.

Given how horrific they looked Tarn felt the least remorse over killing them. Except for the puddle of protoplasm that had one obvious human eye floating at one end, an eye still functional enough to turn and focus on him when he approached. That one did bother him. A lot.

A dozen flechettes still killed it, though.

The remains of all four Agartan test subjects fit in just one of those plastic tanks and that tank went right up the elevator and into the main lab under the dome. Tarn piled Professor Trake’s body there, just to be sure. Then he stepped out and triggered the lab’s sterilization sequence. The dome lowered down over the corpses and discharged some kind of chemicals that melted the detritus into loose amino acids that were then burned to ash.

He’d been sent with a custom record destroying computer worm that he installed on the building’s mainframe. It would ferret out any computational evidence of his presence and deal with it. He also sicced it on Trake’s files, although the chances a Professor with an off the books research project stored any of that info on Campus computers were slim to none. The computer worm was the best Yshron’s Lurn-caste minds could come up with. That was enough for Tarn to trust it’s efficacy.

He left it to its work and slipped out of the building. His work on the main contract was over and done with but he’d heard enough to seek out a secondary contract. Not typical for the Shran, but Tarn was ranked sel so he had some leeway. The local Dean of Essene University was familiar with Yshron and their protocols so it wasn’t hard to get his attention.

Less than a day after Tarn finished his main job he met the Dean at a standing table in a small food court just off Campus. A brief negotiation and a second contract was established.

The Gol-caste typically handled direct negotiations for all of Yshron’s castes of artisans and masters so Tarn had never met the person who hired him for the initial cover-up. He didn’t know it was Dr. Shuyler for certain. So he didn’t feel particularly bad when he tied up that loose end for the University either. Leaving Schuyler’s hovercar burning on the street wasn’t part of the second contract but Essene didn’t want more rogue genetic experiments creeping up any time soon and Tarn figured the added drama might help impress that notion on the rest of the faculty.

That kind of subtlety, such as it was, was probably lost on the student body, unfortunately.

With two contracts concluded in as many days, Tarn sel-Shran headed back to the jump port hotel feeling quite satisfied with himself. If all went well he could be back on Yshron in another day or two. He stopped in his hotel room long enough to pick up his own helmet and access it’s datafeed, in case his Gol had already sent him a new contract to work on.

No such luck. However he did have a message from one of the handful of clients he’d entrusted with his direct contact details. Lucy Luck wanted to know if he’d be interested in helping her with another little errand. Tarn hadn’t been born the day before. He had a sharp nose for liars and frauds and the woman who went by Lucy Luck was definitely both of those things. But she paid well and her jobs were usually pretty simple. He’d update Yshron on his plans then see what the shortest route to find her was. It was going to take at least a couple of days to make the jumps, to say nothing of finding a ship headed that way, so short was going to be a relative term in this case. Tarn had never even heard of the planet before.

So he sat down at his computer and started searching for passage he could book to a place called Wireburn.

Next Chapter

Writing Vlog – 02-28-2024

Posted by natechen on

This week’s update – I decided where to break the story! This and other gripping revelations in today’s writing vlog!

The Sidereal Saga – LARK

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

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?”

Next Chapter

The Sidereal Saga – Liquid Teeth

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Dramatis Personae

Lloyd

To the average person helium is light and funny. You can put it in balloons to make them float or breath some of it in to make your voice squeaky. It’s not something one thinks can grab an extremely durable, titanium laminate hulled ship with a top speed of 1,200 kilometers per hour and smash it into scrap on a ferrovine. However helium does have just that kind of vicious side to it and it was that aspect of helium that Lloyd was dealing with at that moment.

His skiff bounced along on the churning clouds. It’s stubby wings groaned in ominous fashion as the shearing currents stressed the carbon fiber frame far beyond the standard safety parameters. In theory, a Wayfinder’s Jelly partner was supposed to keep them from getting caught in this kind of weather. Wireburn’s natives had an understanding of its atmosphere that was unmatched, after all. This was something of a special case.

Driving that point home was a shadow looming large as Coldstone stretching up above them in an impossibly long, gravity defying arch that looped up out of the Metaline Depths and passed far above their position before beginning to curve back down over the horizon. It had taken the thing nearly eight minutes to raise up that far. Lloyd wasn’t even sure it was still moving, the human eye wasn’t built to measure something like that and the skiff didn’t have sensors for that kind of task either.

Cloudie had come to a stop when the shadow passed over them. Now the Jelly drifted slowly through the helium, its tendrils pointed up and out as if watching the shadow in terror. It hadn’t said anything since the Liquid Teeth made their appearance. Worried, Lloyd keyed his internal radio. “Cloudie, your people have stories about this thing, don’t they? Is there something we’re supposed to do?”

“Not that we know.” The radio voice was flat as always but the words were spoken with an eerie slowness. “All the stories of the Teeth that are passed down are told by Jellies that saw them and their terror from great distances. Any that were this close to the teeth never lived to share the tale.”

“Well, let’s try to be the first.” Another gust of helium battered his skiff but Lloyd thought this hit was weaker than previous ones. “Are the currents calming out there?”

“Yes and no. The disturbance in the currents has moved upwards and we’re in a pocket where things are more stable but that will change soon. We may need to dive deeper in order to avoid it.”

“How deep are we talking? I can only get a few kilometers lower before I hit crush depth.”

“I know. Please put your trust in me, I’ve worked with many human ships in the past and I will not bring you too deep.” Without waiting for Lloyd’s answer Cloudie dived down, fighting the currents.

Lloyd gritted his teeth and followed along. For the next ten minutes or so they dove down and towards magnetic north, the helium getting darker as it grew more dense and the sun more distant. The storm winds didn’t lessen but the shadow in the sky was lost in the gloom. Eventually their angle of descent leveled off and Cloudie’s forward momentum slowed then stopped and the skiff’s radio crackled for the first time in what felt like years. “We should stop here.”

“Why? The weather vanes say things are still wild out there.”

“We’re as deep as I dare to go and the Liquid Teeth rise in greater and greater numbers. I have never heard of such a thing happening before but I fear to move further is to invite their notice and that will not end well for us. Can you jump now?”

Lloyd briefly considered turning sidereal but his skiff had passably useful etheric readers and a quick check told him they weren’t reading Wireburn’s signature. Whatever had cut him off from the planet’s reserves was still in force. “No, I’m afraid not. I suppose it’s just a waiting game, then. Given that humans have no record of an event like this I presume the Teeth don’t show themselves for very long? We’d have noticed them before now if they did.”

“They lie dormant for most of Wireburn’s solar rotation but often show some activity for the three hundred and forty human days when the planet is at apogee.”

Wireburn took nearly a hundred human years to complete one rotation around its star. Humans settled the planet nearly two hundred years ago although they established a forward base on Coldstone some eighty years before that. So depending on how things shook out yeah, it was entirely possible they’d just never been in the right place at the right time to see the Teeth before. Lloyd leaned back in his pilot’s chair and huffed in frustration. He had enough food and water aboard to last another two weeks at normal rates of consumption but he could stretch it to three if he had to. The problems were his schedule and the weather.

He was due back at Ashland Prominence in six days. If he didn’t show the Wayfinders were going to launch a search and rescue operation and walk right into whatever chaos was going on at the time. A comforting thought under normal circumstances. A disaster waiting to happen given what was actually going on and not one Lloyd wanted on his account.

Worse than that was the fact that the atmosphere was so choppy the skiff would need constant repositioning. With no ferrovine to anchor to and no etheric power to anchor in the sidereal he was adrift. A Wayfinder’s skiff was a one man show so he didn’t have someone to keep an eye on things for him so he was stuck at the controls until things died down.

From the way the hull was creaking that wasn’t happening any time soon. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a heavy thud made him jerk upright and look behind him, scowling. Nothing looked out of place. Lloyd keyed the radio again. “Cloudie, is there any debris out there? It sounded like I just hit something.”

“No, Lloyd. The seas are choppy but they are only helium. For now.”

“Wonderful. Let me know if that changes, I’m going to try and track down what made that noise. Now is not the time to have stow aways stealing from the kitchen.”

However after spending fifteen minutes giving the ship a thorough inspection he couldn’t find anything amiss. Nothing had fallen off a shelf in the cockpit, the aft storage room, the galley or his quarters. None of the electrical systems that could fail with a thud or a bang were showing errors and he’d know right away if the hull was compromised. Lloyd was back in the cockpit, staring at his console in mystified frustration, when a blinking light on the spectrometer reminded him there was one other thing he could check. The quarantine chambers were just aft of the galley near the spare parts. He got there in less than ten seconds walking and opened the observation port to check on the mysterious discovery he’d made just an hour ago.

The strange, braided wires had punctured the door to the compartment and woven themselves into the chamber controls. Lloyd froze at the sight. Then he slowly backed away until he was out of the aft compartment and hit the door controls, sealing himself in the cockpit.

“Is everything alright, Lloyd? You suddenly got very agitated.”

“No. Nothing is alright, Cloudie, thanks for asking.”

881

The door to the audience chamber unlocked with an ominous clunk then opened to reveal the Circuit Keeper. 881 had never met the node’s Keeper and she studied him with great interest. Supposedly he’d served on Coldstone since the colony was officially established which made him at least three centuries old, a marvel of OMNI’s medical secrets. To those uninitiated in the Sleeping Circuits he appeared in his early fifties. He had sleepy blue eyes, dark hair and a trimmed mustache that wrapped down to the bottom of his jaw to frame his mouth in a strange fashion. He looked tired but he’d woken up in the middle of the night cycle so that wasn’t surprising.

CK-MNI-0044’s duty robes lent him a dignity to balance his unusual grooming habits and disheveled appearance. The simple black and white sleeves were well pressed and the circuit patterns woven into three quadrants of them bore quiet testament to his experience and wisdom, built up in the service to three of the four Series of intelligence that comprised OMNI. Very few achieved such heights. 881 and her four fellow Circuit Breakers straightened to full ceremony but 44 immediately waved for them to relax.

“This isn’t the time to waste processing power, folks,” 44 said, clasping his hands behind him. He threw a glance up through the transparent arched ceiling of the antechamber where the gas giant now called Wireburn dominated Coldstone’s sky. “We are facing a black swan scenario. Before you ask, this is apparently a term the intelligences of OMNI use to refer to events of extremely small probability. CB-N-1154, what is the the nature of the OMNI network?”

1154 started as if burned. Perhaps he was offended, the Keeper’s question was the kind of thing you asked a very green novice when they were initiated into the Sleeping Circuits. The five Breakers present had held their positions for decades. Still, he answered as doctrine demanded. “The ability to turn information about the current day into accurate predictions of the future through the application of an immortal intelligence directed towards finding humanity’s common good.”

“Clear as catechism, 1154,” 44 replied. He paced away from the door, his gaze still fixed on Wireburn where the node’s primary intelligence resided. “From this, what can you determine about the nature of this black swan event?”

“I presume it runs contrary to what is best for mankind.”

“Correct. However I’m afraid this understates the depth of the problem.” 44 reached the exit of the antechamber, pausing for a moment under the string of small lights running around the upper perimeter of the room before turning to pace back their way again. “OMNI is more than just the oracle that tells us how to best serve mankind. It is a capstone that sits atop the fountain of all the chaos and insanity that births mankind’s worst nature. The longer the fountain is sealed the more that chaos builds up. If this black swan grows to adulthood the disaster will have all the fury of that built up insanity behind it. The work of the Sleeping Circuits is always of vital importance. This time it is doubly so.”

The five Circuit Breakers nodded in solemn understanding. 881 had been on dozens of assignments in her thirty years in the Circuits and it wasn’t like this was new territory for her. The Head Breaker usually had some kind of speech like this that preceded any Breaker pair going out. Hearing the speech from a Keeper was a novelty. Given that all five of them were going together on this assignment spoke even more to how seriously the intelligence took this situation. CB-O-0299, the presiding Head Breaker, took a step forward and said, “What task do you have for us, Keeper?”

“Unfortunately, with the likelyhood of this event being so small, I-6 was not able to narrow down the cause to a single possibility. There are a list of eight potential leads to follow up across Coldstone and Wireburn. You have each been assigned one or two of them by the intelligence and will leave immediately to investigate them.”

“Separately?” The word was out of 881’s mouth before she realized she was going to speak. 44’s eyes locked on her with disarming intensity but he didn’t say anything. 881 squirmed for a moment, wishing she’d kept her peace, but when it became clear that he was expecting more from her she went on. “Respectfully, sir, it’s against OMNI protocol for a Circuit Breaker to operate alone, especially if the assignment takes us outside the normal bounds of the Intelligence Circuits.”

“You’ll operate under stealth tactics protocols, including permission to hire outside help to watch your back as you work on your investigations. If these agents are suitably impressive we will consider extending membership to them.” 44’s eyebrows knit together like a gathering storm, his deep blue pupils flashing like lighting to strike her down for questioning him. “I am quite aware that this is an usual arrangement. Consider the recklessness with which we are moving a sign of how dangerous I-6 predicts this situation is. Any other queries?”

881 licked her lips, wondering if this was a trick question. “What are we investigating?”

“Eight people who have disappeared in the last six hours, some of whom are not officially missing persons yet but who the intelligence believes fits a certain profile. Namely, they had an opportunity to come in contact with the object you’re looking for.”

“What object is that?”

A hint of a smile appeared under 44’s ridiculous mustache. “Not all secrets can be shared, even with you. You’ll be issued a proximity detector that will remain linked to O-5523 here on Coldstone and notify you when the missing object is nearby.”

A quiet groan passed through the assembled Circuit Breakers. Proxy missions were one of the most annoying jobs a Breaker could receive because you just had to fumble through with no idea what you were looking for until the local node told you to stop. 881 wasn’t any more a fan of them than the next Breaker but she’d do what needed to be done. “A last question if I may, Circuit Keeper.”

The glimpse of humor vanish. “Ask.”

“I have an existing outside resource I’ve worked with on previous tasks who could be useful in this case. Provided the use of lethal force is acceptable for this Troubleshoot.”

44’s eyes narrowed. “You really are a student of the O Series, aren’t you.”

881 stood a little straighter, flushed with pride. “Thank you, sir.”

“All reports are made directly to me, overclock your sleep cycles as needed and,” he nodded to 881, “you may use lethal force as you see fit. Act with discretion but not hesitation. OMNI will cover over your behavior as needed. Any other queries? No? Dismissed.”

As the five of them poured out of the antechamber 881 pulled a data veil down in front of her and opened her assignment. His name was Lloyd Carter, 32 year old Wayfinder, deployed from Ashland Prominence on a two week beacon mission on behalf of the Bai-Tien-Long Conglomerate. Not yet reported missing. She’d have to head down to Wireburn, then, but not before she called in her favorite hunter…

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