The Starkahn of Rhada Read online

  The radar image increased in size, but so did the stellar scatter. The nebular mist danced and sparkled. It was beautiful but frustrating.

  “How about a holograph?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” Ariane said.

  I would have to wait until the range closed.

  “Search the literature,” I said.

  Ariane was good at this. She responded almost immediately. “In the Draco Nova of 9670, several dark companions to Lambda Draconis were formed, but nothing this small. There’s the Nav Chaturgy paper on stellar spume that was given in Algol in ‘86, but nothing I can scan so far fits the data. Chaturgy was only hypothesizing, in any case. And Nav Setsumi observed librations in Sigma Serpentis back in ‘16 that suggested a dark companion at a distance of one hundred mega-K. Exploration failed to back his observations. Astrophysicists say that what we are recording now is impossible. The implosion that forms a white dwarf scours the stellar temperate zone. That’s the accepted view these days. So much for the literature.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time the literature was disproved empirically,” I said, sounding like an academician.

  Ariane let it go. It was her job to believe what was in her memory banks, not to argue about it with the human component of the team.

  The air in my pod was growing gelatinous under heavy acceleration. Ariane was closing the contact rapidly. She reported: “The mass return now reads out at approximately one billion metric tons. Too light to be any amount of stellar material. Range closing.”

  “Too light for a planetoid, too,” I said. “Check the unconfirmed SW reports. Maybe there is something there.” Ariane hummed to herself. “A somewhat similar sighting was reported two years ago by Senior Lieutenant Marya Bel-Lorquas and Marcus Cyb-ADSPS-409 in Cygnus. Close recon and flybys were made by Captain Lord Alban in Bellatrix and Senior Commander Florian in Nonesuch. They reported a tightly grouped cluster of trojan asteroids in balance between Cygnus Beta and Cygnus Beta VI, an ammonia-methane giant. The total mass of the trojans was ten times what we are showing now, and there was a substantial planetary population in the system. That’s the only remotely similar case.”

  “Nothing else in the Fleet banks?”

  “No matching natural phenomenon,” Ariane said positively.

  “Are you suggesting we’ve picked up something man-made?”

  “Insufficient data,” Ariane said primly.

  Suddenly I had a dreamer’s vision of being the discoverer of something truly wonderful in the heart of the galaxy: perhaps some artifact of the mythical Third Stellar Race.

  “Close to one half mega-K,” I said, with rising excitement.

  Ariane said, “More readings coming in from our probes now. Object is metallic--”

  My heart began to thump.

  “--metallurgical analysis not possible at this distance. Length is 17,000 meters exactly. Diameter at widest point is 5,000 meters. There goes your dream about discovering the Third Race.”

  She was absolutely right, as usual. Only a fool would hold out for a system of measurement that would match exactly the metric system human beings had used since long before the first man orbited the home planet.

  Then the import of the thing’s dimensions penetrated my history-saturated brain. “Are you suggesting we’ve found an artifact? An artifact seventeen kilometers long and five wide?”

  “That seems to be what I am saying,” the cyborg declared, sounding exactly like Lady Nora. “Dead mass is 1,000,906,098,006.00752 metric tons. Wait now--I can suppress a bit more of that stellar scurf on the S-band.” The radio image on the display sharpened, and the scatter decreased in intensity. I was looking at a tapered cylinder, familiar in outline, conical on one end, tapered through the waist, and bobtailed. “A starship?” I said unbelievingly. “A starship seventeen kilometers long--?”

  “Obviously,” Ariane said. “If you think we can risk moving in really close to it, perhaps I can produce something more useful than just information on its size.”

  “Close the range,” I said.

  Ariane went to .3 light on a helical approach--what SW pilots called the “skittish corkscrew,” a pattern of flight that makes tracking difficult without prior knowledge of the maneuver’s foci. It is standard procedure for investigating unknown phenomena in space.

  At six million kilometers I shifted the display to Q-band radar holography. A cube representing several hundred thousand cubic kilometers of space materialized in the forward end of my pod. In the star-shot dark floated--the ship.

  It was very like the ancient starships in design, but with subtle differences. The angles and curved surfaces were wrong, slightly askew. The starships of the First Empire, the vessels of the Grand Fleet, were beautiful things. Not so this giant cousin. There was something ugly and menacing about it. It brought the short hairs on the back of my neck to attention.

  The metal of which it was constructed gave it an extremely low albedo, so that it appeared to blend with the galactic night, a darkness visible mainly because of the background of nebular mist and plasma. The scale of my holograph was too small to pick out details, but there seemed to be odd nodes and spikes dotting the entire surface of the vessel.

  I shivered. If such a ship had ever been built in any nation of the Empire, I would have known of it. As an officer of the Imperial Fleet, I could identify almost any vessel in commission in the known galaxy. That was the thought that chilled me. I was only too aware of man’s tendency to equate the Empire with the galaxy. Yet no educated man could make such a mistake. The Second Stellar Empire with its nearly nine hundred billion souls occupied only a fractional part of one spiral arm of the immense star cloud known as the Milky Way. And far, far beyond the Rim--that region of the galaxy’s edge where the night sky was empty except for the distant luminosity of other, infinitely isolated galaxies--lay the unthinkable stretches of the unknown.

  I forced myself to think calmly and logically. That vast ship in the holograph could not have been built by any race of weird aliens. It was a human starcraft: different, and built to a titanic scale, but human.

  I tried to use my historian’s sense. I knew that no such giant ship had ever been built by the First Empire. Still there it was: a thousand times bigger than anything ever seen in the galaxy. Enigmatic--and somehow dangerous.

  My primitive human instinct, that insight that had brought the race of men out of Earth’s primeval forests and across the sky, warned me that the black starship was evil. “Ariane,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “It’s big,” she replied with unconscious cyborg banality.

  “I can see that,” I said irritably. “What else?”

  “Period of rotation is 42.995 ESH,” she retorted. “And it penetrates the radiation belts around D2380 at periastron. If there is protoplasmic life aboard, that could be dangerous to it. Also, if the thing has a positronic brain it could be damaged.”

  “Is there anything alive on board?”

  “I can’t tell yet,” Ariane said. “I’m getting something, but it could be a harmonic from the solar-phoenix reaction of D2380.”

  “You think it is a derelict, then,” I suggested.

  “That’s an ambiguous term,” Ariane said primly. “I wouldn’t care to use it.”

  I sighed and activated the visual scan. Through the now transparent walls of my pod, I studied the blazing sky of the galactic center. We were still too far from the object for any visual sighting. Even D2380 was only a diamond-bright marble: a small star, even for a white dwarf. But the sky flamed with stars. It was no wonder, I thought, that the Order of Navigators had believed starships holy. Men who flew in space came to mysticism easily, and when the space pilots of the First Empire founded a religious order to preserve and maintain the ancient starships from the mob furies of the Interregnum, each generation of priest-Navigators in turn was given this glorious vision of the stars. Little wonder they guarded their privileges so fiercely, even (in Talvas’s time) with the rack and the
stake. The old religion of star and starship worship had all but died out in the Empire, but the Order of Navigators still existed, and there were times (such as now) when properly brought-up citizens unconsciously wished for their comfort and guidance.

  “Range is now forty mega-K,” Ariane announced. “I am going to .1 light. Scanners operating on high gain. Data is coming in more clearly now.” There was an overtone of worry in the cyborg’s thoughts. I could sense her deep concern.

  “Range is now thirty mega-K. Closing,” Ariane said.

  “Hold at .1 light and read out the ranges in kilo-K’s.” As we drew nearer the unknown craft, Ariane and I became more nearly one organism. The interfacing performed at the beginning of our association by the Fleet bio-mechs tended to adjust automatically under stress. In times of great danger the cyborg and I seemed almost telepathically linked.

  Ariane was reading out the data from the scans as the range decreased. The information brought a prickling sensation to my flesh. “At range twenty kilo-K we are getting a low level of radiation. Artifact is definitely a starship with protonic controls and old style super-light cores. Cores are apparently intact, but the controls are damaged. Transit systems and protonics are very similar to First Empire designs.” That gave me something to ponder. A starship of a billion metric tons (I could still scarcely credit that figure), a vessel that would tax the resources of a dozen star systems to construct--yet powered by engines of archaic design.

  “The control system’s main center is shielded. I can’t get a really accurate reading. But it is still functioning.”

  “Could that thing be a robot?” I asked.

  “It is likely. Not a true cyborg, in any case. No organic higher systems. But it has a brain, of sorts.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Anything else stirring besides the protonics?”

  “Main engines are inert, but undamaged as far as I can tell.”

  “The center shut them down?”

  “It would seem so. Wherever this thing came from, it has definitely arrived in the selected place. The brain damage didn’t impair the arrival procedures.”

  I stirred uneasily in my pod. “Range now?”

  “One thousand kilometers coming up on my mark.” A pause. “Mark.”

  “Hold here.”

  Ariane matched speed and direction to the derelict instantly, inertia dissipated by molecular reversal. It was one of her best maneuvers, and we used it often.

  The stars blazed in glory through the transparent shielding of the pod. The sky of the galactic center was like a field of diamonds piled in profusion against the velvet night. I darkened the walls and increased the magnification of the Q-band holograph. At a thousand K it was still impossible to give meaningful scale to the thing in the lasered space. But it was obviously, overpoweringly immense. It blotted out the nebular glow in fully two-thirds of the display. The cold light of the Delphinus star shone on the black hull. I could see that the projections I had noted before girdled the entire vessel. I could not guess at the purpose of the protuberances, but some intuition of mine or Ariane’s told me they were part of the great ship’s weaponry. The black starcraft was hostile--the cyborg and I could both feel it.

  Yet the historian in me was stirring. What a find! Warlocks from all over the Empire would want to inspect and study it. The clergy would want a look at it, as well, for though the Order of Navigators was now in the twilight of its great power, it had been the priest-Navigators of the Order who had kept alive the art of starflight and much else during our civilization’s Dark Time.

  “How far to the next commo beacon?” I asked.

  “That is CB-20 in 61 Omicron Draco. Eighteen hours at four kilolights.” No starship yet built, not even the ADSPS cyborgs, carried hyperlight radio. The equipment was too bulky. The drones we were launching periodically would home on the nearest commo beacon and dock to transmit their messages--but there was no way we could call for a Fleet vessel directly.

  I drew a deep breath and said, “Close the range to five hundred K.”

  She could tell what was in my mind because we were interfaced. “This really calls for a full-scale expedition, Kier,” the cyborg said. “We should chart it and head for CB-20.”

  She was absolutely right, of course. She always was. But I was overcome by a huge reluctance to turn our find over to the Grand Fleet without closer inspection. It occurred to me that I was looking at what was probably the most important discovery made in space for the last millennium. I couldn’t just chart it and turn away. I am a Rhad, after all.

  “We will,” I said. “After I make a personal survey.”

  “It could be dangerous,” Ariane warned, sounding like Lady Nora again.

  “It’s a derelict. We have a search and rescue responsibility,” I said.

  “You know better than that, Starkahn.”

  “Go to five hundred kilometers,” I ordered.

  “Older acknowledged,” she said, sounding annoyed. “My objections are on the tapes and in the next drone.” As usual, she was getting in the last word.

  Chapter Two

  Beware, O, beware, all you safe and lawful people,

  The deathmen, the spellwitches, the weepers

  And all the dreadful daemons of the night

  Dream of revenge--

  Whilst they watch you from The Cloud, yes!

  Chant from the Book of Warls,

  early Second Stellar Empire period

  The crimes committed in the name of a better world are legion! What if the victims of the Russian Purge Trials could speak? What if the millions murdered by Hitler could give tongue to their agony? What if the descendants of those tortured souls we have condemned to the intergalactic night could return to face us--their tormentors? Should we not tremble?

  Lord Megum, Chairman of the Concerned Coalition,

  late First Stellar Empire period.

  Tape fragment of a speech found in the ruins of Tel-Buda, Earth

  To approach the great dark ship was like a step backward into time. I had to remind myself that this was not the age of Glamiss and Kier the Rebel and Queen Ariane. This was now---the modem age. Fact, not fear and superstition, ruled. Not Glamiss the Conqueror, but placid Sokolovsky of Bellatrix governed the Empire from the Galacton’s throne in Nyor. Not Kier the Rebel, but a council of reasonable guildsmen directed the destinies of the Rhadan planets. The cybs and demons with which the Navigators and old warlocks used to frighten grown men and women were half a millennium out of date. There were no ghosts, and I was a modem man, an officer of the Fleet, a Rhadan nobleman and an educated person. Still, the dreadful ship made my blood run cold.

  At the reduced distance I had to lower the magnification of the Q-band holograph to keep the dark spaceship within the confines of my pod. It hung against the luminous sky, rotating ponderously, as enigmatic as the ruins of Astraris or the Sphinx.

  There were no ports or transparent surfaces that I could see. But there was nothing remarkable about that. Few of the ancient starships had glassine decks.

  “Any better readings?” I asked.

  “Mass distribution is interesting,” Ariane said. “That thing is almost solid.”

  “Solid? How could that be?”

  “The entire hull is packed with protonic and nucleonic hardware. The logic cards alone must number in the quintillions,” Ariane said. “I don’t know, Kier. The whole thing gives me a bad feeling. The ship is practically one immense space-born computer. I don’t know why I think so--call it female intuition if you like--but I think it is some sort of war-games device. A weapons system.”

  I tried to digest that, still staring at the holograph of the monstrous black hulk. “There are no life-support systems? No crew areas?”

  “None. The entire vessel seems to be automatic, guided by a low order of intelligence in the protonics. Wait, one. I’m getting a low-level sensor reading on the scan. Hold while I compute.”

  I dre
w an uneasy breath, and presently Ariane spoke again. “There is one free passageway leading to what seems to be a special area in the central core. But the chamber is only two meters by two meters by four meters. Except for that and the access passage, the hull is packed solid with circuitry and machines.”

  “Close to fifty kilometers,” I said, my throat dry. “Acknowledged,” the cyborg replied. No protest this time.

  I shut down the holography, and the walls of my pod grew transparent once again. I watched as the growing bulk of the dark starship blotted out the Delphinus star. I could feel Ariane maneuvering, tacking against the drift of the plasma winds from the white dwarf.

  At fifty kilometers the strange vessel’s size became overpowering. It was one thing to see the derelict’s holographic image inside my pod, it was quite another to see the thing itself, as long as the island of Tel-Manhat, blotting out the sky. We seemed, even at this distance, to be under the curve of the great hull.

  “Kier,” Ariane said suddenly. “I am picking up some indications of power consumption. Very low. Less than a thousandth of an ampere. But it is there. The readout indicates some sort of life-support system. Not more than one meter by two meters. Very sophisticated. And it seems totally independent of the main power sources aboard and distinct from the positronics.”

  I had the squeamish feeling that Ariane was describing some sort of coffin, and I was about to comment when the ship’s rotation slowly brought into view an open portal.

  The nebular glow painted the nightside of the hull with a vague, silvery light. But the portal was distinct: a darker darkness against the black bulk of the ship. I raised the magnification of the walls and zoomed in on the opening. It was exactly that, an opening. No hatch, no airlock--just an open hole.

  “Probe that, Ariane,” I said anxiously.