Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three) (82 page)

The group reached the far end of the chamber and stopped in front of the second great set of doors.  They were identical to the first, massive and etched with concentric rings.

‘So, how do we get inside?’ said Steelscale impatiently, still visibly shivering from the cold.  ‘Aaokon, are you also able to open this door?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said the voice of the AI. ‘I am accessing the lock systems now.  One moment.’

There was a grinding sound behind them.  They turned as one and saw the circle of grey light and swirling snow beginning to rapidly close.

‘Shit! We’re being shut in!’ cried Katherine and tried to turn and head back the way that they had come, only to slip and fall on the slick floor.  It was a pointless effort in any case.  As Rekkid hauled her to her feet she looked up and saw that the circle of light had become a thin, vertical sliver, and then it disappeared entirely with a hollow boom.  They were shut in, in total darkness.

Light flared in the darkness as the drone illuminated the space for them with lights on its head.

‘Aaokon, what the hell is going on?’ Rekkid demanded angrily of the drone.  There was no answer.  ‘Aaokon?  Eonara? 
Shining Glory
, this is Professor Rekkid Cor.  Please respond!’

‘
Shining Glory
, this is Dr Katherine O’Reilly, are you reading us?’ said Katherine into her comm.  She was met with a similarly stony silence.

The drone deployed weapons and appeared to be scanning the vast hollow space.  It said something incomprehensible in Arkari.

‘The drone’s gone back into autonomous mode,’ said Rekkid.  ‘Its contact with the ship has been severed.  Well that’s wonderful’. 

‘Mentith will send others after us,’ said Steelscale.  ‘They’ll get us out of here.’

‘Assuming that they can get through that outer door of course,’ Rekkid replied, glumly.

They stared despondently into the darkness, the drone’s lights providing meagre illumination in the large, drum shaped chamber.  There was a sudden thud from the inner door behind them, and then a crack of light appeared with a hiss of equalising atmospheres,  the crack widening slowly until they could see beyond into the brightly lit, pristine interior.  Curving walls of gleaming white composite and glass and a seamless white floor comprised a broad corridor littered with trolleys stacked with equipment that looked as if it had been left there only yesterday.  The corridor extended far back into the mountain, leading off into chambers both to the left and right and in the middle floated two figures, a Progenitor male and female.  It was Aaokon and Eonara, their avatars rendered in holographic form.

‘I am sorry for that,’ said Aaokon.  ‘I attempted to open the inner door without closing the outer, but was overridden by the locking system.’

‘It was a little unsettling,’ said Katherine.

‘Yes of course, however it was not possible to open the inner door without first pumping the atmosphere back in the facility.  In any case, Eonara and I have gained access to the Life Forge’s main network from the
Shining Glory
.  We are currently undertaking the methodical process of unlocking and re-activating the systems.  All knowledge of the interior of this place was of course wiped from our memories and we have no knowledge of what hidden traps and security measures may be buried within these ancient devices.  We must be cautious.’

‘This place looks pristine,’ said Steelscale.  ‘After four billion years... how is that possible?’

‘It has been perfectly sealed ever since it was abandoned,’ said Eonara.  ‘With the atmosphere pumped out and the base buried and hidden beneath a mountain of rock and ice, it has lain undisturbed ever since, frozen in time for all those years.’

‘Incredible,’ said Katherine.  ‘Just look at this place...’

‘If you choose to explore the facility, you should exercise extreme caution,’ said Eonara.  ‘We cannot vouch for what may have lain dormant here, or what you may discover, though we will not move to stop you.  We have re-established our link with the ship’s drone and will attempt to defend you, but understand that the Progenitors may have left things to guard this base that we cannot stop.  Tread carefully.’

The three of them headed deeper into the complex, the ship’s drone leading the way and scanning for anything recognisable as a weapons system or booby trap.  So far, it had found nothing.  As they walked, the facility started to come alive around them as Eonara and Aaokon restored the various systems.  The air was still freezing, however, and their breath formed wispy clouds in front of their faces as moved onwards.

The Life Forge was vast.  From the main corridor that they had entered at first, branching corridors led off on both sides in a grid system of seemingly endless laboratories filled with gleaming and enigmatic equipment -  containment tanks which presumably once held samples of some kind, surrounded by what looked like complex monitoring equipment, banks of machines filled with tiny phials and capsules, holographic displays that now showed error messages in the Progenitor script, and everywhere, pallets, shelves and trolleys of one kind or another stacked high with equipment.  It was as if everything connected to the Shapers and the planet seeding program had been hastily stashed in this secret bolt-hole, the miraculously preserved condition of everything making it look as if the owners had only just left.  Some of the containment tanks held desiccated biological remains, of what it was impossible to say, though some suggested the forms of primitive animals, perhaps test subjects long abandoned to their fate.  Eventually they came across tanks that held more familiar looking forms: mechanical things formed of gleaming metals and crystal shards, with segmented bodies and snaking tendrils.

‘Shaper agents,’ said Katherine. 

There was no mistaking them.  The remains of the Shaper agents were more primitive looking than the ones that they had encountered before, but there was no mistaking their horrid larval forms.  They were inert. Dead.  One was still crusted with the terracotta colouring of long dried blood.  Perhaps it had been removed from its host to study.  Too late, the Progenitors had realised to their horror what their creations were doing, how they had infiltrated their society and brought about its collapse, and had made a desperate attempt to study their new enemy.  It had been to little avail.  Too little, too late.

At the far end of the same laboratory they found a larger containment tank set away from the others. It was heavily armoured, placed behind several thick layers of transparent composite and surrounded by pieces of heavy equipment that could have been field generators of some kind and others that looked distinctly like automated weapon turrets.  In the bottom of the tank was a pile of motes like fallen flakes of silver.  Rekkid peered through the thick transparent panels and tried to make out what they were.  It was difficult for him to see the drift of glittering things through the armoured layers, but he got a distinct impression of legs and segmented bodies of different sizes.

‘It’s one of them,’ said the drone, speaking in Eonara’s voice.  ‘One of the Shapers.’

Rekkid took a sudden, horrified step away from the tank.

‘Don’t worry, it’s quite dead.  If such things can ever have been considered to have been alive,’ Eonara continued.  ‘Ordinarily it would appear as a mobile swarm of millions of individual entities.  The records show that it was captured with some difficulty during the later stages of the war and imprisoned here for study.  It was killed by high powered electrical fields when it tried to subvert the security systems guarding it.’

‘
That’s
one of the Shapers?’ said Katherine.

‘Yes.  Whilst the Shaper hive-mind comprises many different types of entity, the one you are looking at could be said to typify the actual Shaper race.  It is these individuals who command the lesser creatures, such as the ships, agents and other parasitic organisms.  Were this thing still active and free in this chamber, it would be able to tear you apart or take control of your mind and body with little difficulty.  They are as deadly now as they were then, probably more so, given that they have evolved since.  The Shaper race was born in this facility, but when allowed to roam free they succeeded in rapidly reprogramming and redesigning themselves until they reached what they appeared to deem a state of perfection, diversifying into various forms.  Since then, they have merely refined this design, though they have been dormant for much of the intervening period, waiting for suitable races to populate the galaxy that they could enslave.’

‘And what did they originally look like?’ said Katherine.  ‘How different is this thing in the tank from your original creations?’

‘Follow the drone,’ said Eonara. ‘And I will show you.’

The drone scuttled ahead, leading them onwards through the network of bright corridors that were silent save for the rhythmic ticking of the drone’s many limbs against hard white floor and the footsteps of the human, Arkari and K’Soth that followed in its wake.

‘We have accessed several of the key data stores within the facility,’ said Eonara.  ‘Consequently, I have recovered much of the information that was wiped from my mind.  Aaokon and I have not yet penetrated the vaults that hold the innermost secrets of the Shapers’ creation, but we shall reach them in time.’

‘And what precisely do you intend to do?’ said Rekkid.  ‘You mentioned before about finding the knowledge to destroy the Shapers.  What is your plan?’

‘Aaokon and I intend to craft a virus to infest the Shaper consciousness and destroy it from within,’ said Eonara.  ‘Our intention is to subvert the base level core programming of the Shapers and force them to turn on one another.  Of course, we haven’t yet established how exactly we will achieve this, nor how we can fool the Shapers into allowing the viral program into the hive-mind and allow it to spread across the galaxy.  However, once we are able to retrieve the original design specifications of the Shapers and the information gathered on their later forms, we should be able to properly formulate our plan.’

‘Is that how AIs say “We’re making it up as we go along”?’ muttered Rekkid, and if Eonara heard him, she gave no response.  The drone clattered along without saying another word.

Eventually, they arrived at a large circular door which irised open smoothly at Eonara’s command and allowed them to pass.  Inside, they found themselves in a large chamber, dimly lit by wall sconces.  As the lights started to come up, they gave a start, for the room was filled with ranks of humanoid figures, arranged in individual glass cases.  The three archaeologists were looking at a veritable museum of robotics.

At the front of the room were primitive looking things that would have been ancient even at the height of the Progenitor Empire:  crude things of wheels, pistons and hydraulics, bulky sensors and articulated arms that mounted tools or weapons.  They were simple, unthinking machines, designed for specific tasks.  As the ranks progressed towards the rear of the chamber, the mechanoids became ever more advanced.  These were sleeker, more graceful designs that more closely resembled stylised versions of the Progenitors themselves but which were still relatively primitive compared to the being that sat on the throne which topped the dais at the far end of the room.

The ranks of mechanoids had been arranged with an aisle down the middle.  Walking cautiously through the ranks of the silent army that had stood as if on parade for four thousand millennia, the archaeologists made their way towards the seated figure.  It too was a stylised figure of a Progenitor of indeterminate sex, but one that was rendered from black crystal and liquid metal.  A tapered head resembling the bows of the Shaper starships rendered in miniature sat atop a body that gleamed like onyx chased with silver in the light.  As they moved closer still and stood before the silent figure, patterns could be seen deep within the surface of that dark crystalline body, myriad traces of the Progenitor script that overlaid one another.

‘One of the first,’ said Eonara.  ‘This is what the Shapers looked like when they were created.  Idealised versions of ourselves, rendered in all their cybernetic glory.  The entire body is capable of processing data within its crystalline structure, just like the cells of a living body, and like living creatures, they were capable of replicating themselves.  It was the finest creation that our technology had yet produced - an artificial, independent form of life.  This one was never activated, never had a mind of its own.  It is a shell, a museum piece, little more.  Its construction material is a precursor of that used today by the Shapers to construct their warships, though they have refined its properties and melded it with the  inter-dimensional technologies that power their ships.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Katherine.  ‘A funny thing to say, perhaps, but it is.’

              ‘Beautiful, but flawed,’ said Eonara.  ‘Terribly, terribly flawed.  We were so proud of our children at first, not knowing what they would become, not realising that we had made them perfect and logical, but without compassion or mercy and that they had come to the cold and calculated conclusion that we were inferior and were to be eliminated or enslaved to their will.’

              ‘Eonara, you said that this facility, the Life Forge, was also the place where the program to seed worlds throughout the galaxy was undertaken,’ said Katherine.

              ‘Yes, I did,’ Eonara replied.

              ‘We have a right to know which worlds,’ said Katherine.

              ‘I would strongly advise you against acquiring such knowledge,’ said Eonara.  ‘It can only do harm.  Remember what happened to the Akkal.’

              ‘We have a right to know,’ Katherine repeated.  ‘What we do with that knowledge is our choice.’

              Eonara appeared to make sigh wearily and then continued.  ‘Very well.  The information is held in a system linked to a monitoring array built into the fabric of the Sphere that encases this system.  Access to the system controls can be gained from a control room not far from here.  Follow the drone, it will lead you there but I will assist you no further.  I cannot be held responsible for the consequences.’