'This is what Merlin would have seen with his naked eyes, just after his ship left the Way.'
'Very pretty.' She had meant the remark to sound glib, but it came out as a statement of fact.
'And large. The object's more than ten light-minutes away, which makes it more than four light-minutes in cross section. Comfortably larger than any star on the main sequence. And yet somehow it holds itself in shape - in quite preposterous shape - against what must be unimaginable self-gravity. Merlin, incidentally, gave it the name Brittlestar, which seems as good as any.'
'Poetic bastard.'
Poetic sexy bastard
, she thought.
'There's more, if you're interested. I have access to the sensor records from the ship, and I can tell you that the Brittlestar is a source of intense gravitational radiation. It's like a beacon, sitting there, pumping out gravity waves from somewhere near its heart. There's something inside it that is making space-time ripple periodically.'
'You think Merlin went inside it, don't you?'
'
Something
happened, that's for sure. This is the last log Merlin filed, on his approach to the object, before a month-long gap.'
It was another mumbled soliloquy - except this time his sobs were of something other than despair. Instead, they sounded like the sobs of the deepest joy imaginable. As if, finally, he had found what he was looking for, or at least knew that he was closer than ever, and that the final prize was not far from reach. But that was not what made Sora shiver. It was the face she saw. It was Merlin, beyond any doubt. But his face was lined with age, and his eyes were those of someone older than anyone Sora had ever known.
The fifth and sixth planets were the largest.
The fifth was the heavier of the two, zones of differing chemistry banding it from tropic to pole, girdled by a ring system that was itself braided by the resonant forces of three large moons. Merlin believed that the ring system had been formed since the Flourishing. A cloud of radiation-drenched human relics orbited the world, dating from unthinkably remote eras, perhaps even earlier than the Waymaker time. Merlin swept the cloud with sensors tuned to sniff out weapons systems, or the melange of neutrino flavours that betokened Husker presence. The sweeps all returned negative.
'You know where the gun is?' Sora asked.
'I know how to reach it, which is all that matters.'
'Maybe it's time to start being a little less cryptic. Especially if you want me to help you.'
He looked wounded, as if she had ruined a game hours in the making. 'I just thought you'd appreciate the thrill of the chase.'
'This isn't about the thrill of the chase, Merlin. It's about the nastiest weapon imaginable and the fact that we have to get our hands on it before the enemy, so that we can incinerate
them
first. So we can commit xenocide.' She said it again: 'Xenocide. Sorry. Doesn't that conform to your romantic ideals of the righteous quest?'
'It won't be xenocide,' he said, touching the ring again nervously. 'Listen: I want that gun as much as you do. That's why I chased it for ten thousand years.' Was it her imagination, or had the ring not been on his hand in any of the recordings she had seen of him? She remembered the old man's hands she had seen in the last recording, the one taken just before his time in the Brittlestar, and she was sure they held no ring. Now Merlin's voice was matter-of-fact. 'The structure we want is on the outermost moon.'
'Let me guess. A white pyramid?'
He offered a smile. 'Couldn't be closer if you tried.'
They fell into orbit around the gas giant. All the moons showed signs of having been extensively industrialised since the Flourishing, but the features that remained on their surfaces were gouged by millennia of exposure to sleeting cosmic radiation and micrometeorites. Nothing looked significantly younger than the surrounding landscapes of rock and ice. Except for the kilometre-high white pyramid on the third moon, which was in a sixteen-day orbit around the planet. It looked as if it had been chiselled out of alabaster sometime the previous afternoon.
'Not exactly subtle,' Merlin said. 'Self-repair mechanisms must still be functional, to one degree or another, which implies that the control systems for the gun will still work. It also means that the counter-intrusion systems will also be operational.'
'Oh, good.'
'Aren't you excited that we're about to end the longest war in human history?'
'But we're not, are we? I mean, be realistic. It'll take tens of thousands of years simply for the knowledge of this weapon's existence to reach the remotest areas of the war. Nothing will happen overnight.'
'I can see why it would disturb you,' Merlin said, tapping a finger against his teeth. 'None of us have ever known anything other than war with the Huskers.'
'Just show me where it is.'
They made one low orbital pass over the pyramid, alert for buried weapons, but no attack came. On the next pass, lower still, Merlin's ship dropped proctors to snoop ground defences. 'Maybe they had something bigger once,' Merlin said. 'Artillery that could take us out from millions of kilometres away. But if it ever existed, it's not working any more.'
They made groundfall a kilometre from the pyramid, then waited for all but three of the proctors to return to the ship. Merlin tasked the trio to secure a route into the structure, but their use was limited. Once the simple-minded machines were out of command range of the ship - which happened as soon as they had penetrated beyond the outer layer of the structure - they were essentially useless.
'Who built the pyramid? And how did you know about it?'
'The same culture that got into the war I told you about,' he said, as they clamped on the armoured carapaces of their suits in the airlock. 'They were far less advanced than the Waymakers, but they were a lot closer to them historically, and they knew enough to control the weapon and use it for their own purposes.'
'How'd they find it?'
'They stole it. By then the Waymaker culture was - how shall I put it - sleeping? Not really paying due attention to the use made of its artefacts?'
'You're being cryptic again, Merlin.'
'Sorry. Solitude does that to you.'
'Did you meet someone out there, Merlin - someone who knew about the gun, and told you where to find it?'
And made you young in the process?
she thought.
'My business, isn't it?'
'Maybe once. Now, I'd say we're in this together. Equal partners. Fair enough?'
'Nothing's fair in war, Sora.' But he was smiling, defusing the remark, even as he slipped his helmet down over the neck ring, twisting it to engage the locking mechanism.
'How big is the gun?' Sora asked.
The pyramid rose ahead, blank as an origami sculpture, entrance ducts around the base concealed by intervening landforms. Merlin's proctors had already found a route that would take them at least some way inside.
'You won't be disappointed,' Merlin said.
'And what are we going to do when we find it? Just drag it behind us?'
'Trust me.' Merlin's laugh crackled over the radio. 'Moving it won't be a problem.'
They walked slowly along a track cleared by proctors, covered at the same time by the hull-mounted weapons on
Tyrant
.
'There's something ahead,' Merlin said, a few minutes later. He raised his own weapon and pointed towards a pool of darkness fifteen or twenty metres in front of them. 'It's artefactual, definitely metallic.'
'I thought your proctors cleared the area.'
'Looks like they missed something.'
Merlin advanced ahead of her. As they approached the dark object, it resolved into an elongated form half-buried in the ice, a little to the left of the track. It was a body.
'Been here a while,' Merlin said, a minute or so later, when he was close enough to see the object properly. 'Armour's pitted by micrometeorite impacts.'
'It's a Husker, isn't it?'
Merlin's helmet nodded. 'My guess is they were in this system a few centuries ago. Must have been attracted by the pyramid, even if they didn't necessarily know its significance.'
'I've never seen one this close. Be careful, won't you?'
Merlin knelt down to examine the creature.
The shape was much more androform than Sora had been expecting, the same general size and proportions as a suited human. The suit was festooned with armoured protrusions, ridges and horns, its blackened outer surface leathery and devoid of anything genuinely mechanical. One arm was outspread, terminating in a human-looking hand, complexly gauntleted. A long, knobby weapon lay just out of reach, lines blurred by the same processes of erosion that had afflicted the Husker.
Merlin clamped his hands around the head.
'What are you doing?'
'What does it look like?' He was twisting now; she could hear the grunts of exertion, before his suit's servosystems came online and took the brunt of the effort. 'I've always wanted to find one this well preserved,' Merlin said. 'Never thought I'd get a chance to tell if an old rumour was even halfway right.'
The helmet detached from the creature's torso, cracking open along a fine seam that ran from the crown to the beaklike protrusion at the helmet's front. Vapour pulsed from the gap. Merlin placed the separated halves of the helmet on the ground, then tapped on his helmet torch, bringing light down on the exposed head. Sora stepped closer. The Husker's head was encased in curling, matt-black support machinery, like a statue enveloped in vine.
But it was well preserved, and very human.
'I don't like it,' she said. 'What does it mean?'
'It means,' Merlin said, 'that occasionally one should pay proper attention to rumours.'
'Talk to me, Merlin. Start telling me what I need to hear, or we don't take another step towards that pyramid.'
'You will like very little of it.'
She looked out of the corner of her eye at the marble-like face of the Husker. 'I already don't like it, Merlin; what have I got to lose?'
Merlin started to say something, then fell to the ground, executing the fall with the slowness that came with the moon's feeble gravity.
'Oh, nice timing,' the familiar said.
Reflexes drove Sora down with him, until the two of them were crouching low on the rusty surface. Merlin was still alive. She could hear him breathing, but each breath came like the rasp of a saw.
'I'm hit, Sora. I don't know how badly.'
'Hold on.' She accessed the telemetry from his suit, graphing a medical diagnostic on the inner glass of her helmet.
'There,' said the familiar. 'A beam-weapon penetration in the thoracic area; small enough that the self-sealants prevented any pressure loss, but not rapidly enough to stop the beam gnawing into his chest.'
'Is that bad?'
'Well, it's not good . . . but there's a chance the beam would have cauterised as it travelled, preventing any deep internal bleeding . . .'
Merlin coughed. He managed to ask her what it was.
'You've taken a laser, I think.' She was speaking quickly. 'Maybe part of the pyramid defences.'
'I really should have those proctors of mine checked out.' Merlin managed a laugh, which then transitioned into a series of racking coughs. 'Bit late for that now, don't you think?'
'If I can get you back to the ship--'
'No. We have to go on.' He coughed again, and then was a long time catching his breath. 'The longer we wait, the harder it will be.'
'After ten thousand years, you're worried about a few minutes?'
'Yes, now that the pyramid defences have been alerted.'
'You're in no shape to move.'
'I'm winded, that's all. I think I can . . .' His voice dissolved into coughs, but even while it was happening, Sora watched him push himself upright. When he spoke again his voice was hardly a wheeze. 'I'm gambling there was only one of whatever it was. Otherwise we should never have made it as far as we did.'
'I hope you're right, Merlin.'
'There's - um - something else. Ship's just given me a piece of not entirely welcome news. A few neutrino sources that weren't detected when we first got here.'
'Oh, great.' Sora didn't need to be told what that meant: a Husker swarm, one that had presumably been waiting around the gas giant all along, chilled down below detection thresholds. 'Bastards must have been sleeping, waiting for something to happen here.'
'Sounds like a perfectly sensible strategy,' the familiar said, before projecting a map onto Sora's faceplate, confirming the arrival of the enemy ships. 'One of the moons has a liquid ocean. My guess is that the Huskers were parked below the ice.
Sora asked Merlin: 'How long before they get here?'
'No more than two or three hours.'