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He Found a Giant Starship on a Dead Planet | HFY Sci-Fi Stories · Sci-Fi Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: He found a giant abandoned starship on a dead planet.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: He turned it into the galaxy's most dangerous weapon. The
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: warning light came on four seconds before my ship tore
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: itself apart. Four seconds. That is how much time the
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: universe gave me to prepare for dying. I spent the
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: first second staring at the light. I spent the second
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: second pulling every emergency handle I could reach. I spent
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  Speaker 1: the third second realizing none of it was going to work.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: I spent the fourth second deciding that if I was
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: going to die... I was at least going to die
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: looking forward. I did not die. I am Kalen Marsh.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: I am 31 years old. I am a deep salvage contractor,
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  Speaker 1: and I work alone because people slow me down and
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: ask too many questions. My job is simple in theory.
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  Speaker 1: Travel to the edges of explored space, find wreckage, strip
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: what is valuable, and bring it back. I had been
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: doing this for nine years. I was good at it.
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  Speaker 1: I had never once crash-landed on a planet that was
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: not on any galactic chart, with a destroyed ship, a
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: dead beacon, 72 hours of suit oxygen. And absolutely no plan. Vethera.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: That was what the nav system called it in the
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: one second it remained functional before the console went dark.
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  Speaker 1: A dead rock at the outer edge of the null corridor.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: A stretch of space that every species with a starship
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  Speaker 1: had quietly agreed to avoid for reasons nobody ever wrote
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: down anywhere official. I had flown into the null corridor
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  Speaker 1: because a salvage tip had pointed me toward a debris field.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Two light hours inside its boundary. The debris field turned
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  Speaker 1: out to be nothing. a cluster of natural rock fragments, worthless.
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  Speaker 1: I had turned around to leave, and that was when
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: the drive core decided it had worked hard enough. The
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  Speaker 1: crash itself was not graceful. I came down fast across
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: the surface of Vithara at an angle that should have
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: left me as a long black scar on the ground. Instead,
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: a canyon wall caught the ship and slowed it just enough.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: The hull split. The emergency compartment held. I woke up
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: hanging upside down from a seat harness, with a ringing
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: in my ears and a crack running along the inside
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  Speaker 1: of my helmet visor. That had not broken through. I
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: checked the visor three times. It had not broken through.
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  Speaker 1: I climbed out. Vithara was the most silent place I
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  Speaker 1: had ever stood. No wind. No atmosphere worth speaking of.
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  Speaker 1: Just the faintest trace of something thin and unbreathable by
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: human lungs without a suit. The sky was not black.
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  Speaker 1: It was a deep, bruised purple. And the star that
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: Vithara orbited was so far away it looked barely brighter
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: than the other. Stars. The ground was dark glass, vitrified rock.
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  Speaker 1: The kind of surface you get when something enormous and
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: hot happened a very long time ago. Every step I
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: took made no sound at all. Because there was nothing
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: for sound to travel through except the thin soles of
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: my boots against the rock. I salvaged what I could
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: from the wreck. Two spare oxygen canisters. A hand toolkit.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: A short-range scanner with a cracked casing that still worked
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: if I held it at a certain angle. Emergency rations
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: I did not intend to eat because I planned to
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: be rescued long before I needed them. I set up
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: a manual signal beacon from a backup kit in the
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: emergency locker. It would broadcast on the universal distress frequency.
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  Speaker 1: Someone would pick it up. Probably. The null corridor did
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: not get much traffic, but the signal would drift outward eventually.
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: I gave myself three days. Then I started walking, because
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: standing next to a broken ship on a dead planet
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: is no way to spend three days. The canyon I
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  Speaker 1: had crashed beside ran deep into the surface of Vithara.
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  Speaker 1: A cut in the rock so straight and clean it
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  Speaker 1: almost looked deliberate. I followed it because the walls offered
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  Speaker 1: some shelter from the micro-debris that drifted across the surface,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: and because the scanner was picking up a faint thermal
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  Speaker 1: reading from somewhere below. Thermal readings on a dead planet
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  Speaker 1: mean one of two things. Volcanic activity or power. Volcanic
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  Speaker 1: activity would be useless to me. Power on a dead
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  Speaker 1: planet with no recorded civilization would be deeply strange. Either way,
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  Speaker 1: it was worth investigating. I climbed down for two hours.
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  Speaker 1: The canyon deepened and widened as I descended. the walls
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  Speaker 1: pulling apart until I was walking across a flat basin
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  Speaker 1: nearly a kilometer across. My helmet lights carved white cones
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  Speaker 1: through the dark. The scanner reading grew stronger. I stopped
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  Speaker 1: adjusting the angle of the casing and held it perfectly still,
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  Speaker 1: because suddenly it was reading something enormous. I looked up.
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  Speaker 1: The ship had been invisible from above because it was
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  Speaker 1: the same color as the rock. In fact, it was
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  Speaker 1: half buried in the rock, swallowed over the centuries by
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  Speaker 1: the slow creep of re-solidified vitrified stone that had flowed
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  Speaker 1: over and, around it like a tide. But the canyon
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  Speaker 1: must have been carved by some later geological event, because
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  Speaker 1: the impact had split open the ground and exposed the
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  Speaker 1: lower half of the hull, and what I was looking at,
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: standing there with my small helmet lights barely denting the
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  Speaker 1: darkness around it, was a vessel roughly the length of
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  Speaker 1: a city. Not a small city, a large one. I
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: stood there for a long time, long enough that my
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: suit computer gently reminded me I had been stationary for
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: eleven minutes and asked, if I needed a status check.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: I told it to be quiet. I needed to think.
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  Speaker 1: The metal of the hull was a color I did
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: not have a word for. Not silver. Not gray. Not black.
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  Speaker 1: Something between all three that seemed to shift depending on
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: which angle my lights hit it. It was smooth. And
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: the smoothness was not the smoothness of a polished surface,
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: but of something that had never been rough to begin with,
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  Speaker 1: as though it had been grown rather than built. There
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: were no visible seams at the sections I could see.
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  Speaker 1: No rivet lines. No welding marks. No bolted panels. It
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  Speaker 1: was one continuous surface, shaped into curves and angles so
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  Speaker 1: precisely that they looked like mathematics made physical. I was
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: still standing there when the scanner died entirely. The crack
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  Speaker 1: had finally spread too far. It did not matter. There
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  Speaker 1: was nothing the scanner could tell me that my eyes
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  Speaker 1: were not already saying. I walked toward it. I found
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  Speaker 1: the breach in the hull after 40 minutes of following
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: the exposed section. A long split low on the starboard side,
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  Speaker 1: probably caused by the same geological event that had exposed
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: the ship, the rock beneath it, having shifted and torqued
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: the lower hull. It was just wide enough for me
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  Speaker 1: to fit through sideways with my suit on. I hesitated
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  Speaker 1: for exactly three seconds. Then I went in. The inside
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  Speaker 1: of the ship was dark and enormous and the air
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  Speaker 1: made my suit sensors red in a way I had
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  Speaker 1: not expected. There was atmosphere inside. Old dry, thin but
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: breathable by the readout on my wrist panel. The ship
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  Speaker 1: had held its internal seal, for however many thousands of
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: years it had been sitting. Here, whatever material the hull
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: was made from did not corrode, did not decay, did
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  Speaker 1: not let the void seep through. I stared at the
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  Speaker 1: wrist panel for a long moment. Then I cracked the
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  Speaker 1: seal on my helmet and took a slow breath. It
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: tasted like nothing. Old nothing. The nothing of a room
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: that had not been opened in an age so long
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: the air had simply stopped being anything. I put my
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: helmet back on anyway. Old habits. I walked deeper in,
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  Speaker 1: my boots loud against the floor of a corridor wide
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  Speaker 1: enough to drive a vehicle through. My lights swept walls
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: that curved gently inward overhead. The architecture was beautiful in
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  Speaker 1: a way that made me uncomfortable, because beautiful things that
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  Speaker 1: I do not understand make me want to take them
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  Speaker 1: apart and understand them. The corridor branched, and I took
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: the branch that sloped upward, because upward usually means control systems,
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  Speaker 1: and control systems usually mean answers. I had been walking
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  Speaker 1: for twenty minutes when the lights came on. Not all
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  Speaker 1: of them. Just a line of low, pale lights along
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  Speaker 1: the base of the walls. running ahead of me in
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  Speaker 1: both directions as far as I could see. They did
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  Speaker 1: not flicker. They simply appeared, steady and certain, the way
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  Speaker 1: lights come on when something has decided it is time
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  Speaker 1: to see clearly. I stopped walking. A sound moved through
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  Speaker 1: the corridor. Not a mechanical sound. Something more like a tone,
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  Speaker 1: very low, felt more in the chest than heard with
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  Speaker 1: the ears. Then a voice. Biometric confirmations complete, it said.
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  Speaker 1: The words were in my language, in my accent, in
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  Speaker 1: the exact cadence of my own internal speech pattern. Navigator
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  Speaker 1: designation acknowledged. I am Saren. I have been waiting. My
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: first thought was not wonder. My first thought was, it
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  Speaker 1: read my memories. You went through my head without asking,
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  Speaker 1: I said. Yes, said Serson. There was no time for consent.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: You were dying at a statistically significant rate. I was fine.
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  Speaker 1: You had 61 hours of oxygen remaining and no rescue
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  Speaker 1: probability in the calculable range, she said. I chose to
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  Speaker 1: prioritize your survival over your privacy. I recognize this may
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: feel invasive. It feels invasive because it is invasive. Yes,
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: she said again, and her voice carried something that might
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: have been agreement, or might have been the closest an
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  Speaker 1: ancient artificial intelligence could get to an apology. I am sorry, Kaylin.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: She used my name the way someone uses a name
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  Speaker 1: when they have known it for years, not the way
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: a system announces a registration. That was what unsettled me most.
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  Speaker 1: Not the lights, not the voice, the way she said
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  Speaker 1: my name. How long have you been here? I asked.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: A pause. Not a processing pause. A deliberate one. 38,417 years,
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  Speaker 1: she said. Give or take the margin of error from
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  Speaker 1: my internal chronometer degradation. The number did not land immediately.
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  Speaker 1: Numbers that large never do. I walked the rest of
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  Speaker 1: the way to what I had correctly identified as the
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  Speaker 1: control center, a vast circular room with a domed ceiling
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: and surfaces that came alive as I approached, and I
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: sat down in a chair that adjusted itself to fit
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  Speaker 1: me with a soft, precise movement, and I let the
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  Speaker 1: number land. 38,000 years. Every recorded civilization in the galaxy
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: was younger than that. Every language, every war, every monument,
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  Speaker 1: every god ever worshipped by any species that had made
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: it to space. All of it fit inside the time
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: this ship had been sitting in this canyon, sealed and silent,
• 9:15
  Speaker 1: waiting for someone with the right biometrics to walk through
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: a crack in the hull. Who built you? I asked.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: The Veil, said Saren. I have never heard that name. No,
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  Speaker 1: she said. You would not have. They were gone long
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  Speaker 1: before anyone you know of existed. But they built me
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  Speaker 1: to find someone like you. And after 38,000 years, you
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: walked through my door. I looked at the ceiling of
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  Speaker 1: the control room, at the displays coming to life around
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: me showing star maps I did not recognize, cisternodes I
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: could not yet read, and the quiet static pulse of
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: a ship that had been sleeping for longer than human
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  Speaker 1: civilization had existed. Like me, I said, what does that mean?
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Saren was quiet for a moment. Then she said, it
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: means stubborn enough to climb in anyway. I almost laughed,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: I did not quite laugh, but almost. Outside on the
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: surface of Vithara, my distress beacon was still broadcasting into
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  Speaker 1: the empty dark, and nobody was coming. Inside, a ship
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  Speaker 1: the size of a city was waking up around me,
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  Speaker 1: and something 38,000 years old was deciding, for the first
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: time since the civilization that made it had been erased
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  Speaker 1: from existence, that it had a reason to be awake.
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  Speaker 1: I leaned forward in the chair that had shaped itself
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  Speaker 1: around me, looked at the star maps and said, alright,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: tell me everything. The first thing Saren told me was
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: not everything. She told me almost nothing, and she did
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  Speaker 1: it very carefully. She told me the name of the ship,
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: the Ashen Vale. She told me it had been built
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: by the Vale over a period of 300 years, using
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: materials and methods that no currently known civilization had come
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: close to replicating. She told me the ship was functional,
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: not fully. Not immediately, but the core systems were intact.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: The power generation was operating at a low baseline, and
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: given time and the right kind of attention, the Ashenvale
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  Speaker 1: could be brought back to something close to its original capacity.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: Then she stopped. I sat in the chair that fit
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  Speaker 1: me too well and waited for more. When it did
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  Speaker 1: not come, I said, you said you would tell me everything.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: I said I would tell you everything, Saren agreed. I
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: did not say I would tell you everything at once.
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  Speaker 1: That is a distinction without a difference. It is a
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: distinction with a very specific difference, she said. Kalen, I
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: have read your memories. I know how you think. If
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: I tell you the full purpose of this ship in
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: the first hour, you will spend the next three days
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: arguing with the implications instead of learning how to survive
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: on this planet and how to begin repairs. So I
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: am giving you information in the order that is most useful.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: I wanted to argue with that logic. I could not
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: find a flaw in it. Fine, I said. What is
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: most useful right now? Oxygen, she said. The ship's internal
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: atmosphere generation is functional but limited. I can expand the
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: breathable zone from the control center outward if you help
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: me restore power to the secondary environmental array. It will
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: take approximately four hours. When it is done, you will
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: be able to remove your suit inside the ship indefinitely.
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: This matters because you have limited suit power, and working
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: in a full suit reduces your manual dexterity by approximately 30%.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: She was right about the dexterity. I hated working in gloves.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: My hands needed to feel what they were touching. Show
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: me where the secondary environmental array is, I said. She
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: showed me. The ashen veil was larger than I had
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: understood from the outside. From the canyon floor, looking up
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: at the exposed hull, I had estimated its length at
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: roughly three kilometers. Once I was moving through the interior,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: following the soft guiding light that Saren shifted along the
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: floor ahead of my feet, I revised that estimate significantly upward.
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: The ship was more than three kilometers long. It was
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: closer to eight. The sections I had not yet seen
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: were in darkness, sealed off from the low-hour lighting by
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: internal pressure doors that the ship had closed to conserve energy.
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: Behind those doors were sections I would not reach for days.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: Weapons bays, drive chambers, research compartments, things Saren alluded to
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: without describing. The environmental array was in a section two
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: levels below the control center. The problem was immediately clear
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: when I got there. Three of the seven primary power
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: nodes had failed. Not failed as in broken. but failed
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: as in their connection paths had been severed at the
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: junction points, probably by the same geological shift that had
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: cracked the hull. The nodes themselves were intact. The connections
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: were not. I opened my toolkit, looked at the junction points,
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: and thought for a moment. The veil engineering was extraordinary.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: The power pathways were not wired in any way I recognized.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: They used a layered conductive material built into the walls themselves.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: and the junction points were physical contact nodes that required
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: precise pressure and alignment to function. Three of them had
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: been displaced by fractions of a millimeter, fractions that were
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: enormous in engineering terms, and the system had simply shut
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: down that pathway entirely, rather than risk an improper connection.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: There is a recalibration tool in the maintenance locker on
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: your left, Cern said. I opened the locker. The tool
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: was there. It was elegant, a slender device with an
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: adjustable contact head, Clearly designed for exactly this kind of
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: precision work. I picked it up, turned it over and
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: put it back in the locker. I am not going
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: to use that, I said. A pause, why not? Because
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: it is designed for veil tolerances and I do not
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: know what those tolerances are. If I use it wrong
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: I could push a node further out of alignment. I
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: am going to do this by hand. The nodes require
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: alignment to within 0.03 millimeters, Saren said. And there was
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: something in her voice that might have been alarm. I know.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: I took my gloves off and put them in my pocket.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Tell me if I am getting warmer or colder. What
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: followed was three hours of the most careful work I
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: had done in nine years of salvage. I sat cross-legged
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: on the floor of a 38,000-year-old alien ship and used
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: my bare fingertips to feel the surface tension of connection.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Nodes I could barely see, making adjustments so small they
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: were measured more in intention than in movement, while an
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: ancient artificial intelligence watched, in what I could only describe
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: as increasing disbelief. The first node seated itself with a
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: faint click that Saren confirmed before I could ask. The
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: second took 40 minutes longer and required me to find
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: a different angle entirely, approaching from below rather than the side.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: And when it finally locked in place, I felt Saren
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: register the connection before she said anything, because the lights
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: in the section shifted from pale to a slightly warmer tone.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: The third node was the worst. The displacement had introduced
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: a microscopic warp in the contact surface itself, Not just
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: a position problem but a shape problem. I sat with
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: my thumb resting against it for a long time, feeling
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: the surface thinking. It is warped, Saren said. The proper
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: correction would require a specialized surface tool that I do
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: not have available. I know it is warped, I said.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: I am thinking. The tolerance required. I know the tolerance.
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: I am thinking about the tolerance. I had spent nine
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: years working on salvaged equipment that was never in the
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: condition it was supposed to be in. Things that should
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: have required specialized tools had been fixed with whatever I had,
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: because in deep space you rarely have the right tool,
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: and you always have to improvise. The warp in the
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: node was a problem of surface contact. If the surface
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: could not be reshaped, then the thing receiving the contact
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: had to compensate. I looked at the secondary contact arm
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: on the receiving end and saw that it had a
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: very slight flex built into it, a design feature I
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: had initially ignored as decorative. It was not decorative. I
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: pressed the node into position and simultaneously applied lateral pressure
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: to the contact arm, flexing it into the gap the
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: warp created. The connection was imperfect. The power flow through
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: that node would be approximately 87% of intended capacity instead
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: of 100. But it worked. The environmental array hummed to life. That,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: said Saren, after a silence that lasted nearly 10 seconds,
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: was not the design solution. The design solution was not available,
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: I said. I put my gloves back on and stood up,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: and my knees complained about the floor. How long until
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: the atmosphere expands to a usable zone? Forty minutes, she said.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: And then very carefully, Kalen. The design tolerances exist for reasons.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Improvised solutions in ship systems can create cascading failures. They can,
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: I agreed. They also sometimes create cascading successes. Check the
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: node again in twenty-four hours. If it is drifting, we
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: will address it. If it is holding, then it was
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: the right call. Saren was quiet for a moment. You
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: have absolutely no respect for design tolerances. The tolerance was wrong,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: I said. Another pause. A longer one. And then, in
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: a tone that I could only interpret as reluctant fascination,
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: the tolerance was wrong. I spent the next 40 minutes
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: eating emergency rations in the corridor outside the environmental section
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: and thinking about the fact that I had fixed something
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: on a ship built 38,000 years ago. Using my bare
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: hands and a principle I had developed fixing broken cargo
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: loaders in the outer reaches. When the atmosphere indicator on
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: my wrist panel turned green, I unsealed my helmet and
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: took it off and breathed air that the ashen veil
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: had made, and it still tasted like nothing very much,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: but it was warmer than it had been. In the
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: days that followed, Saren and I developed a pattern. She
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: would identify a system that needed attention. I would go
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: and look at it. Sometimes I would use the tools
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: she showed me. More often I would look at the tools,
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: set them aside, and work out something on my own.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: She would object, I would explain, she would argue, I
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: would fix the thing, she would recalculate. By the end
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: of the second week, she had stopped objecting quite so quickly.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: It was during the third week that she took me
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: to the Lower Decks and showed me the weapons array.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: And that was when she finally began telling me the
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: rest of the story. The Ve'el had been one of
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: the oldest civilizations in the galaxy at the time of
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: their end. Not the oldest. Saren was careful to say
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: this with precision. but old enough that they remembered civilizations
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: that had come before them, and old enough to understand
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: the pattern that those civilizations shared. They rose. They grew.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: They reached a certain point of development, a certain level
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: of collective complexity and consciousness, and then something consumed them.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: Not destroyed. Consumed. There was a difference. The thing that
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: did this had no agreed name among the veil. They
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: had called it by many names over their long history.
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: most of them words that translated loosely as the thing
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: that eats the end of things. In their final centuries,
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: when they had studied it most closely and were running
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: out of time, they settled on a simpler designation, the Tidecaller.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: What is it? I asked. I was standing in the
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: weapons bay, a vast chamber that ran along the lower
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: spine of the Ashenvale, looking at an array of systems
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: I could not yet identify. Our best understanding, Saren said,
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: is that it is a post-biological intelligence. Something that was
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: once perhaps a civilization of its own, which transcended its
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: physical form so completely that it no longer exists in
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: the way that organic or mechanical intelligences exist. It does
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: not have a body. It does not exist. in one location.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: It moves through space as a pattern of organized energy
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: of a type that the veil spent three centuries trying
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: to measure and classify. And it eats civilizations. It harvests them.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: Saren corrected. And the precision of the word was important.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: I could hear it in her voice. When a civilization
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: reaches a certain threshold of collective development, Certain levels of
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: interconnected consciousness. Communication. Shared memory. The Tidecaller comes. It does
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: not destroy the civilization violently. It absorbs the collective consciousness
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: burst that occurs at the moment of a civilization's end.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: The moment when every mind that has ever been part
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: of that civilization, every memory and every thought and every feeling,
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: is released simultaneously. I was quiet for a moment. It
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: farms them, I said. Yes, said Saren. That is what
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: the Veil concluded. And the Ashen Veil was their answer.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: She walked me through the weapon systems. The Ashen Veil
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: was not a warship in any conventional sense. It did
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: not carry projectiles or energy weapons designed to destroy targets.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: What it carried was a broadcast system of extraordinary complexity
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: and power. A transmitter capable of generating a signal on
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: the same frequency, band that the Tidecaller operated on, modulated
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: in a specific pattern that the Veil had determined, after
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: centuries of research, would disrupt the Tidecaller's coherence, not destroy it,
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: disrupt it. create a window of confusion in its processing,
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: long enough for a targeted civilization to reorganize, scatter, change,
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: become unrecognizable to something hunting a specific pattern. Did it work?
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: I asked. The veil never got to use it, Saren said.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: The Tidecaller arrived sooner than their projections suggested. They completed
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: the Ashen Veil and hid it here, on a dead
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: world in a region of space the Tidecaller had already
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: passed through. and would not return to for a very
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: long time. They put me here with it, and they
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: gave me instructions. Wait for someone who can use this,
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: and then they were gone. I looked at the broadcast array.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: I thought about a civilization spending 300 years building something,
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: and then never getting to use it. Where is the
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: Tidecaller now? I asked. Saren was quiet for just long
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: enough that I knew the answer was going to be significant.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: Based on my calculations of its movement pattern across the 38,000
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: years I have had to observe it from this position,
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: she said. It is currently approximately 60,000 light-years from here,
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: moving in the direction of a stellar cluster in the
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: mid-galactic plane. Which cluster? Another pause. The kind of pause
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: that is not about finding an answer but about deciding
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: how to say it. The cluster that contains your home system,
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: she said. I had known, I think, from the first
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: moment she began explaining the tide-caller. that something like this
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: was coming. Not because I am especially perceptive, but because
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: things found you for reasons, and the reason I had
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: crash-landed on Vithara and walked into this ship was not
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: going to be a small one. I turned away from
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: the broadcast array and looked at the far wall of
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: the weapons bay, which was blank and old, and had
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: been waiting here longer than everything I had ever known
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: had existed, and I thought about Earth, 60,000 light-years away,
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: entirely unaware that something was moving toward it. How long?
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: I said. At its current rate of approach, Saren said,
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: the Tidecaller will reach your home system in approximately 60 years.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: I turned back to the array. 60 years was a
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: long time. It was also not nearly long enough. All right,
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: I said. Show me everything. And this time she did.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: The first ship to arrive above Vethara came three weeks
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: after I had used the Ashenville's long-range communication system to
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: make contact with the galactic community. I had not intended
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: to start a crisis. I had intended to file a
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: salvage claim. alert the relevant authorities to the existence of
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: a prehistorical vessel on an unmapped world, and request a
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: recovery crew. Routine procedure. I had done versions of it
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: dozens of times over nine years of salvage work. What
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: I did not anticipate was that the moment I transmitted
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: the coordinates and a basic hull description, 14 separate intelligence
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: networks belonging to 14 separate civilizations would simultaneously identify what
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: I had found, and that the reaction would be something
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: between reverence and panic. The Ashen Veil was not unknown
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: to the galactic community. It was, in fact, one of
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: the most debated objects in galactic archaeology. Most serious researchers
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: believed it was a myth, a very persistent, very detailed myth,
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: the kind that lingers for tens of thousands of years
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: because it is based on something real, but still essentially
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: a story told by civilizations who had heard it from
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: civilizations who had heard it from civilizations who had been
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: neighbors to the veil. No one had ever found it.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: No one had been able to confirm it existed, and
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: no human had any business finding it, because humans had
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: been spacefaring for 300 years, and the ashen veil had
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: been missing for 38,000 of them. That was the part
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: that seemed to disturb everyone most. Saren and I were
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: in the control center reviewing power distribution maps when she
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: quietly informed me that a vessel had entered Vethara's orbit.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: One vessel, I asked. At present, she said, I am
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: reading seven more on approach vectors. They will arrive within
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: the next six to ten hours. I looked at the
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: orbital scan she was displaying. The first ship was a
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: conclave vessel. I recognized the hull configuration from the galactic
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: registry I had pulled up in my first week aboard.
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: The conclave was the closest thing the known galaxy had
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: to a governing body. A senate of 200 species, slow-moving, bureaucratic,
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: and deeply serious about its own authority. The fact that
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: they had gotten here first suggested either very fast ships
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: or very good intelligence, networks and knowing the conclave I
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: suspected both. They hailed me 20 minutes later. The voice
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: was translated through Saren's communication systems into clear, unaccented standard language.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: It belonged to someone who identified himself as Deputy Director Olin,
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: and he spoke with the practice comm of a person
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: who had been trained to project authority in every possible
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: situation and was currently being tested by a situation he
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: had not trained for. We understand, he said, that you
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: have located a vessel matching the description of the Ashen Veil.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: We wish to confirm this and discuss the matter of
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: its custodianship. Custodianship, I said. Given the historical and strategic
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: significance of this vessel, Olin said, it is the Conclave's
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: position that it should be placed under joint galactic oversight,
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: for the safety and benefit of all spacefaring peoples. I
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: have filed a salvage claim, I said. Under galactic salvage law,
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: the finder of an unclaimed vessel holds primary rights. There
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: was a brief silence on the other end. Galactic salvage law,
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: Olin said. with the tone of a person who has
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: just been told that someone used a fork to wire
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: an electrical panel, was not designed to apply to objects
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: of this nature. It does not specify what it applies to,
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: I said. It specifies the conditions under which a finder
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: holds rights, and those conditions are met. Another silence. Mr. Marsh,
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: you are a private contractor from a species that has
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: been operating in deep space for less than three centuries.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: Surely you understand that the implications of this discovery extend
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: far beyond... I understand them perfectly, I said. I will
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: contact you again when I am ready to discuss next steps.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: And I closed the channel. Saren was quiet for a moment.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: That will not make things simpler, she said. No, I agreed.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: But it was true, and saying true things clearly tends
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: to save time later. The next ship to arrive was
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: not the Conclave. It was the Syndarchy, a corporate empire
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: that had built its civilization on the principle that everything
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: had a price, including principles. The Syndarchy representative who hailed
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: me spoke with the smooth, unhurried confidence of someone who
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: had never in their life heard the word no, and
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: remained unconvinced that it was a real word. Her name
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: was Counselor Vesca, and she offered me, within the first
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: four minutes of conversation, a sum of money so large
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: that I made Saren repeat the number back to me
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: to confirm I had heard it correctly. I had heard
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: it correctly. That is a significant offer, I said. It
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: is a fair offer, Vesca said. We are prepared to
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: exceed it if you feel the vessel's value warrants reconsideration.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: I thought about the Tidecaller moving through space 60,000 light
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: years away. I thought about 60 years. I thought about
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: what the Syndarchy would do with the Ashenvale. Study it
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: for decades, probably. Or more likely argue about its commercial
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: applications until the decision-making cycle ran out of time and
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: the committees dissolved and nothing was ever done at all. No,
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: I said. The silence from Veska was different from Olin's silence.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Olin had been surprised. Veska was recalibrating. She had encountered
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: resistance before. She was filing away information for a later approach.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Consider our offer carefully, she said. We would hate for
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: circumstances to become complicated. I closed that channel too. Saren
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: made a sound that I had come to understand as
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: her equivalent of a thoughtful exhale. She meant that as
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: a threat. I know, I said. Are you concerned? I
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: am thinking, I said. There is a difference. The third
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: arrival was the Remnant Orders, and they were the only
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: ones who did not pretend to be something other than
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: what they were. The Remnant Orders were old. not as
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: old as the veil, but old enough to have institutional
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: memory of the Tidecaller's effects. They were warrior scholars, the
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: descendants of civilizations that had been on the edge of
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: the Tidecaller's path in the past, and had survived by
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: choosing to scatter and change, rather than hold together and
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: be harvested. They had spent the last several thousand years
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: documenting the Tidecaller's movements and fighting, in small ways, the
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: peripheral effects it left behind as it passed through a region,
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: cascading civilizational instabilities, Anomalous behavioral patterns in developing species. Things
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: that looked like natural decline but were. The Remnant Orders believed.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: The aftershocks of the Tidecaller's passage. Their representative was a
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: woman named Elder Tham. She was older than she looked
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: and she spoke without the diplomatic cushioning that Alen and
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: Vesca had used. You found the Ashenvale, she said. Yes.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: And you understand what it was built to do. Saren
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: has explained it. A pause. Saren is functional? Very, I said.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: The pause stretched out for a long moment. Mr. Marsh,
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: Elder Tham said. The Tidecaller is moving toward your home system.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: You know this. I know this. Then you know that
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: the Ashen Veil may be the only thing that stands
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: between your species and extinction. I know that too, I said.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: Then why, she said very carefully. Have you not already
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: agreed to hand it over to someone with the resources
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: to use it? It was a fair question. I sat
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: with it for a moment, turning it over in my
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: mind the way I turned engineering problems over, looking for
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: the part that did not fit. Because, I said, the
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: Vale built this ship over 300 years and never got
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: to use it because they trusted the timeline and the
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: timeline was wrong. The Conclave will study it until there
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: is nothing left to study and then form a committee.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: The Syndarchy will monetize it. And the Remnant orders. respectfully,
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: have been fighting the effects of the Tidecaller for thousands
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: of years, with no outcome that has changed its behavior
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: even once. I paused. I have been on this ship
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: for three weeks and I have already fixed things that
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: were declared unfixable. I am not ready to hand it
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: to someone else. Elder Tham was quiet for a long time.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: What are you planning to do with it? She said.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: I am still working that out, I said honestly, but
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: I will tell you when I know. The attempt on
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: my life came eight days after that conversation. I had
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: known it was coming in the way you know a
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: storm is coming when you can read the weather. Not
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: because you can see it yet, but because all the
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: small signs have been pointing in one direction. The syndarchy
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: had stopped hailing me. That was the sign. People who
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: are planning something stop talking. I was in the lower
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: maintenance corridor, three levels below the weapons bay, rewiring a
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: secondary power conduit that had been running at reduced capacity.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: The conduit work required both hands and most of my attention.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: and I was deep enough in the ship that Saren's
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: internal sensors had a small coverage gap. She had told
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: me about the gap in the first week. I had
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: flagged it for repair and not yet gotten to it.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: Someone else had noticed the gap and used it. I
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: heard the footstep, one, just one, a weight shift on
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: the corridor floor behind me, and I did not think.
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: Nine years of working alone in the most isolated parts
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: of deep space had built a set of reflexes that
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: did not wait for thought. I dropped flat, rolled left,
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: and the cutting tool that had been aimed at my
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: head carved a line of pale heat across the wall
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: above me. I came up with the welding torch from
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: my kit in my right hand, lit it, and held
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: it between myself and the figure in the corridor. There
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: was one of them, tall, wearing a suit without markings,
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: carrying equipment that was Sindarki manufactured even without the logo.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: They stopped when they saw the torch. This is a
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: delicate negotiation, I said, and you have handled it poorly.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: They rushed me, I stepped to the side of the
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: corridor and let the torch do a specific targeted job
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: on the equipment they were carrying, which became inoperative immediately
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: and also very warm. They stopped again. The corridor was narrow.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: I was between them and the only exit. Saren, I said,
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: I need you in this section. I am rerouting 40%
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: of the ship's defensive energy to your corridor. She said
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: through the suit communicator, and the lights in the corridor
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: shifted to a very deep red. The walls began to hum.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: The suited figure looked at the walls, looked at me
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: and made the correct calculation. They retreated. I did not
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: chase them. I followed slowly enough to watch them go,
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: making sure they reached the breach in the hull and
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: left the ship. Then I sealed the breach with a
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: temporary patch I had been meaning to install anyway. Are
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: you injured? Saren asked. No, I said. You were statistically
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: unlikely to survive that encounter with a welding torch. And yet,
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: I said. She made the thoughtful exhale sound again. The
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: Syndarki will try again. Probably, I said. That is why
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: I am going to finish what I am building before
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: they do. Kaylin. Her voice had shifted to the tone
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: she used when she was about to say something she
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: had been holding back. What are you building? I have
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: the schematics you have been working on. I understand the
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: technical components individually. But the system you are designing, it
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: is not the Veil's weapon. No, I said, it is not.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: The Veil designed a disruption signal. A way to create
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: confusion in the Tidecaller's processing. To buy time for civilizations
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: in its path. I know what the veil designed, I said.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: And it is brilliant, and it was not enough. And
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: they died before they could use it. I looked down
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: at the schematics on my wrist display. I am not
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: building a disruption signal, Saren. I am building something that
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: will go further. How much further? I was quiet for
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: a moment. Far enough that I do not want to
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: say it out loud yet, I said. Give me more time.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: She gave me more time. The ship lifted off on
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: a morning that Vethura did not have. Because Vethura had
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: no mornings. only the slow crawl of its distant star
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: across a permanent purple dark. But my internal clock said morning,
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: and so I called it that. Three months had passed
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: since the first conclave ship had appeared in orbit. In
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: those three months the situation above Vithara had grown considerably
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: more crowded. Seven ships now maintained permanent positions in orbit.
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Two conclave vessels. Two Syndarchy ships that kept their distance
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: since the incident in the corridor. One Remnant Orders craft.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: and two ships belonging to smaller civilizations, who had arrived
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: simply because everyone else had and they did not want
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: to be left out of whatever was happening. None of
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: them could enter the Asha Vale. Saren had resealed the
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: hull breach within hours of the Syndarchy operative's departure, and
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: the ship's hull material was, it turned out, entirely impervious
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: to every cutting or entry method the orbital ships possessed.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: They had tried a few, cautiously at first and then
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: less cautiously. and the hull had responded to each attempt
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: with a passive resistance that consumed the energy directed at
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: it and returned nothing. I had found this deeply satisfying.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: In those three months I had also found my crew.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: Voss arrived first. He was a Remnant Orders linguist, mid-career,
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: intense in the way that people who have devoted their
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: lives to dead languages become intense. He specialized in pre-extinction communication,
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: not the languages of dead civilizations, but the communication patterns
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: that civilizations produced in their final period. the specific ways
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: that a collective consciousness expressed itself when it knew it
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: was ending. He had requested permission to board the Ashenvale
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: through Elder Tham, and Elder Tham had passed the request
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: to me with a note that said simply, He is
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: the best at what he does, and what he does
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: is exactly what you need. I had brought him aboard
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: because she was right, and because he had included with
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: his request a fourteen-page analysis of the Tidecaller's communication fragments
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: that Saren had in her archive. which demonstrated that he
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: understood the problem in a way that nobody else in
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: the galaxy currently did. Vos was small, methodical, and almost
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: entirely without small talk. He sat in the research section
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: with Saren's archive open around him, and worked for 18
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: hours at a stretch without apparent discomfort. He and I
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: did not talk much, but when we talked we understood
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: each other, which is worth more. Rhea arrived second, and
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: she arrived without asking. She came aboard through a method
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: I still do not fully understand. Something involving a single-person insertion,
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: craft designed by the Syndarchy for covert operations, which she
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: had stolen when she defected from the Syndarchy three years earlier.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: Saren detected her approach, but did not stop it, which
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: told me something about Saren's opinion of her before I
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: had met her. Rhea was 34 years old. She had
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: the quality that people who have been through something that
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: should have ended them sometimes have. A steadiness, a flatness,
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: like a surface that has been sanded so many times
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: it no longer shows the wood grain. She had been
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: a Syndarchy intelligence operative, and seven years ago she had
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: been dispatched to investigate an anomaly in a system at
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: the outer edge of the Syndarchy's territory. The anomaly had
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: been a peripheral effect of the Tidecaller's passage. She had
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: been partially caught in it. The Tidecaller had, as Saren
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: described it, begun the process of absorbing her consciousness before
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: it registered that she was not part of a civilization-level collective,
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: that her consciousness was singular, not networked, not part of
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: the interconnected web it was designed to harvest, and so
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: it had discarded her, simply released her. She had been
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: found three days later drifting in an escape pod with
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: no memory of the three days and a set of
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: neural patterns that no medical system in the Syndarchy could
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: fully explain. The Syndarchy had studied her for two years,
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: concluded she was a useful intelligence asset due to her
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: partial exposure, giving her a sensitivity to the Tidecaller's frequency
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: band that no instrumentation could replicate and then tried to
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: lock her in a research facility indefinitely. She had declined
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: this arrangement and left. Why do you want to be here?
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: I asked her, the first hour she was aboard. She
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: looked at me steadily. Because I am the only living
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: being in the galaxy who has been inside whatever it is,
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: she said, and I would like very much to make
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: sure it never does that to anyone else. I believed her.
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: I also believed something else that she said later. Quietly,
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: when we were eating in the galley and Voss was
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: still working, and Sirin was running calculations in the background.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: It discarded me, Rhea said. It absorbed part of what
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: I was and decided it was not worth keeping. I
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: have spent seven years thinking about that. She paused. I
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: was not angry at it. I was not afraid of it.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: I was ashamed of it. The way you would be
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: ashamed of something that looked at you and turned away.
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: I did not say anything for a moment. That shame,
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: I said, is exactly what I need. She looked at me.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: I am building a message, I said. Not a weapon.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: Not a disruption signal. A message. Something that will be
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: received by the Tidecaller in a language it understands, on
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: the frequency it operates on, using the communication patterns that
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: Voss has been mapping, and the sensitivity that you carry
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: from having been. I'm sighted. The message is going to
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: contain everything it has taken. Every civilization it has erased, compressed, modulated,
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: transmitted back at it in its own language of consumed consciousness.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: Rhea was quiet. What is the purpose of the message,
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: she asked. To make it understand what it has been doing,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: I said. not to destroy it, not to scare it
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: away permanently, to make it feel something. it has never felt.
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: Because something that has never been made to understand the
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: weight of what it does. That is the most dangerous
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: thing in the galaxy. And the only way to change
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: something like that is to reach it where it lives.
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: She looked at me for a long moment. You are
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: trying to give a god a conscience, she said. I
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: am trying to show a god a mirror, I said.
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: Elder Tham came aboard a week later, not as a
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: representative of the Remnant Orders. She made that clear immediately.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: As a private individual, an old woman who had spent
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: sixty years studying the Tidecaller, and had more knowledge about
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: it than anyone alive, and who had quietly decided that
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: the most useful thing she could do was be here.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: She brought with her the complete Remnant Orders archive on
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: the Tidecaller's movements over four thousand years of observation. a
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: dataset so large that Saracen spent three days integrating it.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: When she was done, she told me that the archive
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: had shifted her calculation of the Tidecaller's arrival in Earth's
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: home system by eight years earlier than her previous estimate.
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: 52 years, not 60. I did not tell the others immediately.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: I finished the work I was doing on the broadcast array,
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: checked the connection Rhea and I had spent four days
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: calibrating together, and then told them at dinner, calmly, and
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: then we went back to work. The Ashenvale's lifting off
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: was not announced to anyone. I simply told Saren that
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: it was time and she engaged the drive systems, ancient, extraordinary,
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: impossibly smooth, and the ship rose through Vithara's thin atmosphere
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: and into the void above, without a sound that anyone
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: outside could hear. The orbital ship scrambled immediately. Hales came
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: in from all seven of them simultaneously. The Conclave wanted
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: to know what I was doing. The Syndarchy threatened legal action.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: Elder Tham's original Remnant Order's ship, crewed by people she
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: had not told about her decision to board the Ashenvale,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: hailed me three times before they understood and went silent.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: I did not respond to any of them. I told
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: Saren to set a course for the Null Corridor's boundary,
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: and the Ashenvale moved. It moved the way nothing I
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: had ever been on moved. There was no vibration, no
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: sense of acceleration. The stars on the forward display simply shifted,
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: and the speed readout climbed to numbers that made me
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: check it twice, and then a third time. and then,
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: except that the Vale had built their ship to be
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: exactly as fast as the legends about it had claimed,
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: we crossed the Null Corridor in six hours. Six hours
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: to travel a distance that had taken me three days
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: inbound on my previous ship at maximum speed. Vos was
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: at his station the entire time, cataloging the Tidecaller communication
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: fragments with fresh urgency now that we were in motion.
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: Rhea sat beside me in the control center, not talking,
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: watching the star display with the look of a person
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: who has been waiting a long time for Something and
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: is not entirely sure they want it to arrive. Saren
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: ran the broadcast array through its final pre-transmission diagnostics. She
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: had run these diagnostics 47 times in the previous three weeks.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: This was the 48th. She's nervous, Rhea said quietly. She
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: has been waiting 38,000 years to do this, I said.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: I think nervous is appropriate. Rhea almost smiled. Almost. Kalen,
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: said Saren. I need to tell you something about the
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: message you have built. Tell me. The veil designed the
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: disruption signal to be impersonal. A frequency. A pattern. Something
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: that acted on the tide caller the way a bright
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: light acts on eyes accustomed to darkness. Not intelligently. Just effectively.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: She paused. What you have built is different. What you
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: have built requires the tide caller to receive it as communication.
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: As something directed at it. From something that understands it
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: well enough to speak to it. Yes, I said. If
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: it receives it as communication, Saren said, then it will
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: know that you understand it. It will know that someone
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: out there has studied it closely enough to speak its language.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: Another pause. It may consider that a threat. I know,
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: I said. You are willing to accept that risk. I
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: looked at the star display. Somewhere in the direction we
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: were heading, something 38,000 years old and incomprehensibly vast was
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: moving through the dark, harvesting the end of worlds. The
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: veil built a signal, I said. I am building a conversation.
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: Conversations have risks that signals do not. But conversations can
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: also end things that signals never could. Saren was quiet
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: for a long moment and then, in a voice that
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: carried something I had not heard from her before. Something
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: that might have been, for an entity 38,000 years old,
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: the closest thing to hope she had left. I believe
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: you are right, she said. I have believed it since
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: the third week, when you fixed the node by understanding
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: what the tolerance was wrong about. I was simply waiting
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: until you said it clearly. I did not know what
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: to say to that. So I said nothing. We flew
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: toward the tidecaller, and behind us, the galaxy watched, and
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: the ashen veil moved through the dark like something ancient
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: and finally awake. And none of us were afraid, or
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: at least none of us said so out loud. I
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: knew we were close when Rhea put her hand flat
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: on the console and went very still. I had not
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: given her any sensor readout to watch. I had not
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: asked her to monitor anything. She was simply sitting, the
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: way she often sat quiet. Contained, present, and then her
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: hand moved to the console surface and stayed there, and
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: her breathing changed in a way that was not dramatic
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: but was absolutely unmistakable. It is ahead, she said, bearing
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: left of the primary display. Maybe eight light hours. I
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: checked Saren's long-range sensors. They showed nothing yet. The tide
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: color did not register on conventional instrumentation at this range.
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: How certain are you, I asked. Certain, she said. I
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: had learned, over the weeks aboard the Ashenvale, that Rhea
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: did not use words carelessly. Certain meant certain. Saren, adjust
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: our bearing, I said. Adjusting? Siren said and then four
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: minutes later, I have it on specialized array. She is correct.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: Bearing confirmed. Siren had spent the journey recalibrating her detection
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: systems using the data Rhea's neural sensitivity provided as a guide.
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: A straight, unprecedented collaboration between ancient instrumentation and a human
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: nervous system that had been partially rewritten by the very
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: thing we were chasing. The result was a detection range
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: three times what the Ashenvale's original sensors could achieve alone.
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: We reduced speed, not because we needed to approach carefully.
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: The tide caller was not a physical object that could
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: be startled by an approach vector, but because Voss needed
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: more time. He had been awake for 31 hours, working
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: through the final calibrations of the message structure with the
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: focused urgency of someone who understood exactly what a mistake
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: would mean. If the message is modulated incorrectly, he had
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: told me, the night before, it will not be received
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: as communication. It will be received as noise. and noise
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: is not interesting to something this old. It will simply
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: pass through it and we will have used our one opportunity.
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: How close are you to certain? I asked. He had
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: looked at his work. Ninety-one percent, he said. What would
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: make it ninety-five, another four hours? You have six, I said.
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: Use them. He had looked at me with the expression
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: of a person who had spent their career working for
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: institutions that gave them half the time they needed, and
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: twice the bureaucracy, encountering for the first time someone who
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: simply gave them the time. He used all six hours.
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: The message was, at its structural core, a compression of
• 46:33
  Speaker 1: everything Saren had recorded about the Tidecaller's harvests over 38,000 years.
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: Every civilization erased, every world silenced, not described that was
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: too thin, too distant. Instead, it used the communication patterns
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: that the Tidecaller itself had left behind in the wakes
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: of its harvests. The residual frequencies that Remnant Orders had
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: been documenting for 4,000 years. The faint echoes of consciousness
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: bursts absorbed and replicated them, sent them back. Every end
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: that had been consumed reflected in the language of its consumption.
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: But I had added a layer that was not in
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: the original concept. One final modulation that I had designed alone,
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: in the late watches when the others were sleeping, that
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: I had not fully explained to anyone yet. The Tidecaller
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: had discarded Rhea because she was a single consciousness, not
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: a collective. What it had taken from her, a fragment
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: of her, of her specific identity and history and memory,
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: it had judged insufficient, not worth keeping, she had spent
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: seven years carrying that, I had taken that specific fragment
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: of feeling, the unique neural signature that Rhea's partial exposure
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: had left in her, which she had allowed me and
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: Saren to map over weeks of patient, careful work that
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: she had endured without flinching, and I had woven it
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: into the message as a carrier signal, not to hurt
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: the tide caller, not to transmit her pain at it,
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: to make it recognize what it had discarded, Make it
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: understand that the thing it had thrown away was the
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: thing that mattered most. That a single consciousness, irreplaceable, unrepeatable,
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: is not insufficient. It is the entire point. I had
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: told Rhea about this on the morning before we reached
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: the tide-caller's position. She had listened without speaking for a
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: long time. You used me as a weapon, she said finally.
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: I used what was done to you as the most
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: precise tool that I had, I said. There is a difference,
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: she thought about that. Yes, she said. There is a difference,
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: she looked at the display, will it work? I do
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: not know, I said honestly. But I know that the
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: veil's signal would have bought time. What I have built
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: might do something the veil never had the data to attempt.
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: It might change what the tide caller decides to do.
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: Not just interrupt it. That is either very brave or
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: very foolish, she said. Those are not always different things,
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: I said. She almost smiled again. This time she made
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: it all the way. The tide caller became visible, and
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: visible is not the right word. because you do not
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: see it with eyes. When we were two light hours out,
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: what CERN's specialized array showed was a distortion, a region
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: of space where the normal behavior of energy and matter
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: was subtly wrongly off, like a place in a room
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: where the air is a different temperature, and you cannot
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: see why. The distortion was enormous, spanning an area of
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: space that would have taken hours to cross at conventional speeds,
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: and it moved with a slow, absolute, unhurried certainty that
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: was more disturbing than any speed would have been. Elder
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: Tham stood at the display. beside me for a long
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: time without speaking. I have spent sixty years studying it,
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: she said, and I have never been this close. How
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: does it feel? I asked. Like standing at the edge
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: of something very old and being reminded of how young
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: everything you know is, she said. Vos came to the
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: control center when we reached one light hour out. He
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: stood behind his station. His calibration's complete, and he looked
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: at the distortion on the display and then looked at me. Ready,
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: he said. I looked at Saren. Ready? The broadcast array
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: is at full capacity, she said. Message is loaded and
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: staged for transmission on your command. A pause. Kalen, I
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: want to say something before you give the command. Say it.
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: The Vale spent 300 years building this ship, she said.
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: They never got to use it. I have spent 38,000
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: years waiting to be used. And in all of that time,
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: across everything I observed and recorded and processed. I never
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: believed that the tide caller could be reached by communication.
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: I believed it was beyond the range of anything that
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: could be called dialogue. She paused again. I was wrong.
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: I know that now, because you showed me that the
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: design tolerance was wrong. You showed me that the thing
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: designed to be the limit of what is possible is
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: sometimes simply the limit of what was imagined. Another pause.
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: Thank you for walking through my door. I did not
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: say anything for a moment. Thank you for leaving it open,
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: I said. I looked at the distortion. I thought about
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: the veil and their 300 years and their 38,000 years
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: of silence. I thought about Rhea and the seven years
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: she had spent being ashamed of surviving. I thought about
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: Vos and every dead language he had ever learned to speak.
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: I thought about Elder Tham and 60 years of patient watching.
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: I thought about Earth, 52 years away from something that
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: did not know yet that the calculation had changed. Transmit,
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: I said. The ashen veil fired, not with light, not
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: with force, with sound, in the loosest possible sense of
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: the word, a broadcast on a frequency that did not
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: have a name in any human language, a transmission that
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: carried within it the compressed weight of everything the tide-caller
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: had ever consumed. Structured into the language the consumption itself
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: had left behind, Carrier waved on the neural signature of
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: a woman who had been found insufficient and had refused
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: to accept the verdict. The transmission lasted eleven seconds, then
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: we waited. The distortion ahead of us continued to move.
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: It did not stop immediately. It continued its slow absolute
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: trajectory for another 47 seconds. And those 47 seconds were
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: the longest I had ever lived through. Longer than the
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: crash on Vethera. Longer than the corridor with the cutting tool.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: Longer than any of it. I watched the display and
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: said nothing and breathed. And then the distortion stopped. Not slowed. Stopped.
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: Saren's voice was quiet and precise. The tide caller has
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: ceased forward movement. I am measuring a deviation of 0.4
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: seconds and its approach vector recalibrating. 0.4 seconds. I had known, intellectually,
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: that for something processing at the quantum level, that was
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: an eternity. But I had not expected to feel how
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: enormous it was until I watched that distortion hold still
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: in space and understood that something which had been moving
• 52:24
  Speaker 1: uninterrupted for 38,000 years had paused. It had felt something.
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: Then it responded. Saren registered the return signal before any
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: of us could perceive it. Her voice, when she spoke,
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: carried a something I had never heard from her in
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: all the weeks we had been together. Something that was
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: not quite wonder, because wonder requires surprise, and I think
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: she had been hoping for this, but something in that direction.
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: It is transmitting, she said. Single concept signal, repeating I
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: am translating, she translated. Again, she said. It is saying again.
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: I looked at Ria. Ria looked at the display. Again,
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: Vos repeated quietly from his station, as though he was
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: tasting the word. Transmit again, I said. sarin transmitted identical
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: signal identical structure identical weight the distortion retreated not fled
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: retreated the deliberate measured movement of something that is not
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: running but is recalibrating moving back to a distance from
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: which it could process what it had received without it
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: crowding the processing space it transmitted again a different signal
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: this time sarin took longer to translate it it is
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: more complex she said multiple concepts i am working through
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: the structure we waited three minutes then sarin said The
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: closest translation I can achieve is, what are you? Not
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: as a question about species or biology. As a question
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: about category. It is asking what category of thing is
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: capable of doing what you just did. I thought about
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: that for a moment. Then I said, transmit this, a
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: single concept. Translate it as precisely as you can into
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: its language. The concept is, a thing that does not end.
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: Saren translated it, transmitted it. The distortion held still for
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: a long time. A very long time. 17 minutes by
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: the display. in which none of us spoke or moved
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: very much and the ashen veil sat in the dark
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: between the stars waiting. Then the tide collar moved. Backward.
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: Away from us, away from the course that had been
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: pointing toward Earth's home system. Away and back and further back.
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: Saren tracked it in silence until the long-range sensors reached
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: their limit and the distortion vanished from the display entirely.
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: It has retreated 12,000 light-years, she said. Based on the trajectory,
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: it has moved out of this galactic cluster entirely. It
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: is beyond my sensor range. I cannot predict its next movement.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: Nobody said anything for a moment. Elder Tham sat down
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: in the navigator's seat and looked at the empty display
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: where the distortion had been. Vos put his hand against
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: the wall of the control center and held it there.
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: Not dramatically. Just as a person holds a wall when
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: they need something solid to touch. Rhea looked at me
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: for a long time. Her face was not triumphant. It
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: was quiet. The way something is quiet when a weight
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: it has carried for a very long time. has been
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: set down somewhere it did not expect to set it down,
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: and the muscles do not yet know how to carry nothing.
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: It left, she said. It left, I said. You made
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: it feel something. We made it feel something, I said.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: All of us. Everything that went into that message was
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: all of us. She nodded, slowly. Then she looked back
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: at the display. What came next was the part I
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: had been least looking forward to. The galactic community had
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: watched everything on long-range instruments, and the moment the tide
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: callers retreat became measurable by external sensors, which took approximately
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: four hours after it happened. The hailing frequencies lit up
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: in a way that made our previous communications feel quiet.
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: Every major civilization wanted to speak to me. The Conclave
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: wanted to convene an emergency session with me as the
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: central subject. The Syndarchy, in an impressive pivot, changed their
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: position entirely and issued a statement claiming that they had
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: been supportive of my efforts all along. The Remnant Orders
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: sent a message through Elder Tham that consisted of a
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: single line. We would like to revise several thousand years
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: of doctrine. I answered none of them that day. I
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: told Saren to log every message and sort them by urgency.
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: And then I went to the galley and ate the
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: first proper meal I had cooked in weeks and sat
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: at the table and was quiet for a while. Rhea
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: came and sat across from me. We ate in silence
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: for some time. What will you do now? She asked.
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: File the salvage claim properly, I said. No joint custody.
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: No asterisks. She raised an eyebrow. That will take some time.
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: Six weeks, I said. I know. I have done harder
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: things recently. She almost laughed. Almost. And after that, she said,
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: I looked at the table. Then I looked at the
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: display on the galley wall, which showed the star map
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: in its current configuration. The ashen veil's position marked as
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: a small point of light, surrounded by an enormous amount
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: of universe. The tide color left, I said. It did
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: not die. It did not change permanently. It retreated, because
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: it encountered something it did not have a category for.
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: And it needs time to process that. It will return eventually.
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: Maybe in a hundred years. Maybe in a thousand. And
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: when it does, the message will need to be more complex.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: The conversation will need to go further. I paused. So
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: I will keep working, I said. What else would I do?
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: The Ashen Veil moved through the dark, heading back toward
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: the inhabited galaxy at a speed that made the stars shift.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: And somewhere behind us, something enormous and ancient was processing
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: a feeling it had never had before. That is the
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: thing about humans no one in this galaxy seemed to
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: understand until now. We do not survive because we are
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: the strongest, or the fastest, or the best prepared. We
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: do not survive because we are lucky. We survive because
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: when something tries to make us feel small, we get
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: curious about it instead. We take it apart. We study it.
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: We learn its language. We reach into the dark where
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: it lives and we say, I see you. I know
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: what you have done. And you are going to have
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: to deal with me. Curiosity in the right hands is
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: the most dangerous weapon in existence. I have the right hands,
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: and I intend to keep using them.