Origins (33 page)

“We saw damage aboard the
Endeavour
,” I said. “On the Science Deck.”

“That's right,” Elena said. “Many of our labs were destroyed.”

“Then why didn't you come home?” Mason asked. “Why have you stayed here for so long?”

Elena pulled a tight smile. “We couldn't risk leaving what we had found to the Directorate. The
Endeavour
's quantum drive was damaged, and the Directorate attack had cost us most of the other FTL- and Q-space-capable starships in the fleet.”

Cook shook his head. “What happened here proves that the Directorate have infiltrated every strata of the Alliance. We couldn't risk communication, because to do so would risk the information being intercepted.”

“But if the Treaty wasn't your mission, why send you here?” I asked. “What's so damned special about this place?”

The Legion followed Elena and Cook through the jungle, deeper into the Maze. The canyon pressed in. With each passing second that sense of
wrongness
increased. It was becoming almost unbearable. Like psychic scratching at the back of my brain, an itching over every inch of my simulated skin: uncomfortable in a way that I found difficult to explain.

There were structures around us. Half-toppled pillars of obsidian, towers that had long crumpled into the jungle. It was obvious that this had once been a grand construction: part of the cave network, something much bigger and more complex. Time had eroded the structures to little more than dust, made them a true necropolis. Shards of muted sunlight stabbed through semi-collapsed walls, the remains of a roof. That did little to illuminate the place, and it was deathly silent. Not even the wildlife was interested in probing what lay down here.

We entered a chamber inside one of the structures. Shard glyphs lined the walls, painting the room in flickering neon shades. The floor had become metal plate, etched with the tight cuneiform patterns. Glowing scripture; the madness-inducing patterns that looked like arcane circuitry.

“I… I can't stay in here,” Jenkins stammered. Her eyes darted across every shadow. “I need my armour, now!”

“It's okay,” Elena said. She patted the long-barrelled prism-gun that she held across her chest. “I have a weapon.”

Jenkins didn't retreat, but she looked a lot like she was about to. The rest of the Lazarus Legion prowled the edges of the chamber with obvious apprehension. Elena lit a glow-stick, threw it into the corner of the room. Her slender figure was lit from behind by the green light, cutting a sharp silhouette.

“This is why the Krell don't come into the tunnels, to your camp,” I said.

“That's right,” said Elena. She spread her arms to the room around her. “This is a control centre for the original creators of this facility. What the creators called a ‘memory chamber'.”

“We called them the Shard…” Jenkins said. Her voice sounded distant, even though she was only just behind me.

“We are aware of the name,” Elena said.

It felt as though the veil between real-space and the Network was thinner here than ever before. I struggled to repress the mental trauma of travelling through the Shard Network; of my brush with the Shard machine-mind. As I looked at the walls – saw the rivulets of dark water running down the textured panelling, across the densely packed hieroglyphics – I couldn't shake off the impression that they were
sweating
. It was like the whole place was alive; as though it had taken an enormous breath, and was just waiting to exhale. There were ghosts here, echoes of the machine-mind, lingering at the edge of my perception.

“We've seen similar facilities on Damascus and Helios,” I insisted, trying to reassure myself as much as anyone else. “
This
is nothing new. It's just another buried wreck. Just another ruin for the Alliance and the Directorate to squabble over.”

“I wish that were the case,” Elena said, “but this is something much worse. It was our mission to study this site.”

Cook pulled a grimace. He almost fell over as he stumbled towards Jenkins. “Stay back from there, Lieutenant!”

Cook's sudden eruption was enough to put us all on edge. As one, the Legion responded. Jenkins had reached the edge of the room and was standing close to a pedestal-like feature that erupted from the wall. In the low light, I made out a shape atop the pedestal. Something like a misshapen blob of melted rock – the afterbirth of a volcanic flow – that glistened softly.

“Cool your jets, Commander,” Jenkins said, backing away from the wall.

Cook panned a glow-stick at the pedestal. The light caught the obsidian-black feature in a pool of illumination. The blob shimmered like metal, throwing out bizarre reflections.

“That,” Elena said, pointing at the pedestal, “is another example of the entity you know as the Reaper.”

Jenkins visibly recoiled from the edge of the chamber, her face crumpling in disgust. The chamber was peppered with pedestals: all occupied.

“They are in a dormant state,” Cook said. “But I would rather not bait them.”

“They won't activate unless you get too close,” Elena said. “And even then, their attack patterns are limited. You've seen that, if manipulated properly, they have their purpose.”

Elena's hands danced over a control console, caressing runes and impressions on the surface of the machine. At first I thought that she was activating the Reapers again, but instead the walls and structure around us began to pulse with light. The dark water that had been running across the textured surfaces coalesced, collected. Silvered metal swam across the walls: alive. I'd seen Shard tech do that before – on Helios, on the crashed ship that Dr Kellerman had shown me – but this was on a far grander scale. The atonal pulse in the background felt as though something truly massive was online, something so much bigger than the ruins at Helios or Damascus.

“This is a fully functioning Shard facility,” Commander Cook said. “It was the Shard's origin, we believe, in the Maelstrom.”

“But you,” Elena added, looking at me, “will know it by another name. To you, it is an Artefact. The whole planet is a Master Artefact.”

I wanted to question. Wanted to deny the truth of this, but the machines whispered to me. The black rock – the canyons, the ravines: the bizarre geometric terrain visible from orbit? The conclusion that those could be Shard creations was chillingly inevitable. We had been staring at the truth all along.

“The planet is artificial,” Elena said. “A true feat of engineering. At one time it probably provided docking facilities for thousands of Shard warships. Can you imagine it? This place was a major node in the Machine; a device capable of altering spatial dynamics on a scale that we can barely understand.

“But over time, it fell into decline. The war was won, at least so far as the Shard were concerned, and they perhaps felt that the facility no longer needed to be garrisoned. The Krell might be responsible for Devonia's subsequent terraforming, as they made their resurgence, or it could be a natural occurrence: the result of millennia in space. Either way, the Shard were here first and this is their facility.”

Cook nodded. “This is why Command sent us out here. Not to agree a Treaty, but to secure, and utilise, this Artefact.”

The imagery on the walls shifted. It showed a familiar spread of stars – the former Quarantine Zone, the star systems bordering that sector.

“Science Division discovered Devonia's location from ruins found on Tysis World,” Elena explained. “It was quickly identified as a location of key importance to the war effort.”

That name again: Tysis World. Professor Saul had mentioned it.

“We knew that we were searching for a weapon,” Cook said. “And that is exactly what we found. A world-weapon; a device capable of ending the Krell. All it required was a Shard Key. We haven't been able to find that, despite searching Devonia.”

“What we did discover, however, was that contrary to Command's intelligence the Shard were not dead,” Elena said. “And once we knew the reality of this weapon – the consequences of its activation – we knew that we couldn't allow the Artefact to be used.”

“What consequences?” Mason asked.

Elena's face was stern. “There will be a cost,” she said. “A dire cost, one that is surely not worth the gain.”

“The closest human analogue to this Artefact's purpose,” Cook said, “is a
summoning
. It will summon the Shard.”

I watched as a pictorial formed on the wall, sketched in molten metal. Dots of light were thrown across the display. More star systems: I could even identify some of them; realised that they were systems within the same galactic neighbourhood as Devonia Star.
Far too close to home
, I thought. The display showed something moving from Helios – from the world on which we'd found the first Artefact – to Devonia.

“The Shard were bringing the Key here,” I whispered. “That was the purpose of the activation on Helios.”

An icon, cast in glowing silver, moved across the Shard display: something crossing the gulf of space, moving towards our location, towards the Devonia system. The metal above us reformed at Elena's control. She zoomed in on a world now, on a single planet. Choked with vegetation and cloud cover, but the jagged black lines crossing the surface looked a lot like those banding Devonia's surface.

“We don't have all of the answers,” Elena said, “but we can now understand enough of the Shard's language to decipher that if the Master Artefact is activated, the Shard Network will open. It'll allow whatever is left of the Shard to come through. It will summon the
Revenant
to Devonia.”

The graphic showed the
Revenant
coming down to the surface. Then darkness spread over the world, everything scorched away, leaving only a blackened, criss-crossed husk.

Leaving only the Artefact.

Revenant
. It wasn't an operation or a project: it was a starship. I had a name for the horror that had been stalking me. I had no doubt that this was the thing we'd felt in the Shard Network.

“Mass xenocide…” Elena whispered. “But we are all alien to the Shard.”

After it had ended Devonia, the Shard graphic showed the
Revenant
moving on. Showed the ship jumping between systems, igniting worlds and stars as it went. Using the activated Shard Network, the Shard Gates, the
Revenant
travelled light-years in an instant.

“The Shard didn't just wage war against the Krell,” Cook said. “They sought to destroy all organic life in the Milky Way Galaxy. If they are summoned here, their war will start again. Neither side has forgotten what happened millennia ago.”

“And they say that the fishes have short memories…” Kaminski said.

“The Krell, in fact, have a highly advanced species-memory,” Elena said, answering 'Ski's comment as though it was a serious scientific observation. “They pass down recall of specific events, through the leader-forms. The Collectives remember this war with the Shard, and they never forget. This, we believe, is why the Krell are attracted to operational Shard technology.”

They were preparing for war on Helios
, I thought.
The Krell hadn't forgotten what happened there.
The same could be said of Damascus. I wondered whether this might explain their advanced evolution.

“The Shard are just as bitter,” Cook said. “They are a species that has outgrown the flesh, shed it like a second skin. It's all here: recorded in these walls. The organic races of this galaxy are just a reminder of what they left behind, and an unwelcome one at that. To them, we are nothing. We are a scourge, just like the Krell.”

“The Shard are a far greater enemy to the Alliance – to the Directorate, to humanity, to everything organic – than the Krell ever could be,” Elena said. “And it is for that reason that this Artefact must never be activated, and it must never fall into Directorate hands.”

The simulation on the walls froze. Elena manipulated the controls again, and the glowing icon representing the
Revenant
vanished.

“How do you explain the Quarantine Zone?” Mason asked Elena. “The Collective stopped fighting for a long time.”

“Did they?” Elena said. “The Maelstrom is a big place. The Krell have other things to worry about, and you all talk about the Krell as though they are a single, unified race. That isn't the case at all. They panic and flee just like us, and their species-memory often dictates their actions without plan or strategy. What this place proves – what Shard tech proves – is that activation of certain devices allows us to manipulate their behaviour.”

“Billions dead, and it's all some big mistake?” Martinez said.

“That isn't the way I would put it,” said Elena, “but perhaps.”

“Command sent us here to end the war,” Mason said, more apprehensively. “Maybe they expected us to activate this weapon; to call the Shard here.”

That, I had no doubt, had been General Cole's plan. But because the
Endeavour
expedition had not reported, High Command had not been in possession of the facts. They could never have known the true consequences of the Master Artefact's activation.

“They must be more desperate than we thought…” Kaminski said. Though Martinez and Mason were still in denial, Kaminski seemed to have accepted Elena's explanation. “But we can't mess with this Shard tech. We have to close the door, for good.”

Jenkins nodded. She stood side by side with Kaminski. “I think that 'Ski's right.”

“So we hide like rad-roaches until Judgement Day?” Martinez queried.

“Rather a roach than dead,” Jenkins said. “That, or we make ourselves ready for when the Shard come looking for us.”

“While this place still exists,” Elena pushed, as though sensing the way that my mind was working, “the Directorate will just keep coming. They'll hurt all of us until we can't hurt any more.” There was no softness to her voice; only a steely dedication. “It has to end here, before any of us can leave this place.”