Requiem (39 page)

The Doctor
played the recordings forward simultaneously. At first, the colours
began to dim and shrink back, shrivelling into nothing before every
fold and corner of the brains lit up and the strands of light
exploded once more. Seline could almost hear them humming. The
strands of light blended into one intense ball of light and then
extinguishing completely and dissolved into nothing.

The Doctor
spoke, 'It all goes dark at the exact moment these two fall back
into the secondary lab and the eye disengages them. I've fast
tracked through the rest of the recordings, which go on for another
fifteen hours before the suit battery dies, but they show no brain
activity whatsoever. They were dead the moment the eye shifted its
focus from them.'

Seline looked
up at the two brains floating in the centre of holo-display. She
felt it disturbingly intimate. To be able to see thoughts inside
someone else's brain, to able to trace their meandering paths
through billions of corridors and avenues and map them out in
individual strands of fluorescent light... as beautiful as it
looked, she was uncomfortable that someone else could know her
better than she knew herself, even if what she knew was equivalent
to a few grains of sand on an oil soaked beach. But... there was a
brain scanner inside her suit. Had they been able to see what she'd
seen? Did they watch her memory play out and see what she did? Did
they witness her betrayal?

No. They would
have said something. Belameir would've at least. It wasn't
betrayal. I was eight years old.

You keep
telling yourself that.

She dropped her
arms to her side, tried to relax her shoulders. She caught Sear
staring at her from across the holo-display.

'So it
overloaded their brains?' Tialus asked the Doctor. 'It
short-circuited them somehow?'

'That may be
part of what they did but not all of it. I've only glanced at the
readings but there's more to it than simply frying and dying. A lot
of the thought patterns, even before the synaptic explosions aren't
quite regular. I believe the eye may have been doing something else
inside there.'

Tialus leaned
forward on the edge of the panel, her face almost pushing into the
light from the holo-display. 'Do you think you could find out
exactly what it was doing and how it did what it did?'

'It would take
time. We have good equipment here but what we really need is a
fully kitted lab and at least half a dozen more specialists.' The
Doctor was looking across at Tialus but averted his eyes as if he
didn't like what he saw there. 'But I'll do what I can,' he said
and removed the two scanners from the console but remained where he
was. The recording of the scout ship's external camera feed
returned and kept playing

'Do you think
it was painful?' Belameir asked.

The Doctor
turned to him. 'Physically speaking, probably not. The Yurrick
brain doesn't have any pain receptors. As for what this must have
been like mentally? I couldn't say. I imagine something like having
every single memory and sensation you've ever experienced, and then
a lot more that you haven't, being played out in your mind
simultaneously over the space of twenty seconds or so.' He looked
back up at the models. 'I think Aris may have gotten the better end
of the deal in this case.'

'Aris?'
Belameir asked.

'The one who
lost his legs in the navigation room.'

Seline turned
back to the video display, to the recording of the ship's external
camera that had been left playing. The scout ship was left spinning
from the assault so that Obal's sun would slowly pass across its
vision. One minute of day followed by three minutes of night; the
sun at the top of the screen, only just in the camera's field of
vision.

'So what
happened afterward?' Athene asked. 'The star was still here when
the scouts were killed but it's gone now. There must be something
on this recording to tell us what happened.'

Sear had been
watching the video carefully, 'This is the scout ship's only
external feed, it's the only angle we have. From what I've seen of
the recording, the ship continues to spin like this with Obal's
star slipping out of the shot and after about an hour of spinning,
the star is completely g-' Sear stopped himself. He paused the
video and rewound, played again.

'What was
that?' said Seline.

The camera was
passing over the top corner of the star, the last useful shot it
would have of it before losing sight completely. There was a faint
distortion in the star's light, as if something were passing over
the face of it; the beginnings of an eclipse at the star's
edge.

Sear paused,
rewound, played. The crew watched the faintest of shadows pass over
the outer left side of the star.

'That's it,'
said Sear.

'Wait a
minute,' said Belameir, tapping his bottom lip with his finger.
'How do we know that isn't just a planet crossing the face of the
star?'

Sear pointed at
the screen. 'Look at the edge of the eclipse, it's far too
irregular to be the edge of a planet or moon. It's almost as if
there's a cloud passing over the face of it.'

Sear played
through the rest of the footage until the star was completely out
of shot. 'It's hard to tell from this shot if the ambient light is
being covered or not and the camera has no spectroscopy filter so
what we see is what we get.' The camera feed stopped and the images
disappeared from the centre of the holo-display. 'And it doesn't
matter anyway because the ship's emergency battery dies just after
the star is out of shot.'

Mercer crossed
his arms and looked towards Tialus. 'We arrived on the scene two
weeks after the fact, and, by the looks of things, the scouts
arrived just as this thing was getting started. So that means that
star and whatever planets were here were destroyed in a little over
two weeks.'

'How is a star
destroyed in two weeks?' asked Seline.

'Maybe some
kind of accelerated decay.'

'That would be
more than accelerated,' said Athene. 'This star
was
nearing
the end of its life but it still had a billion years left in it at
least.'

'Well, maybe it
takes them somewhere,' said Seline.

'What? And
buries them in a hole in the ground?' said Belameir.

'Maybe it opens
a wormhole,' Seline said defensively.

'We can only
guess at what it's doing,' said Tialus, 'because this footage isn't
going to show us.'

'Maybe-'

'I don't want
to hear any more speculations,' said Tialus.

Belameir
crossed his arms. 'Fine. Ruin all the fun then.'

'So what are we
going to do?' asked Seline. 'I mean... now that we've found the
scout ship.'

'We are going
to carry forward with the scout ship's directive,' said Tialus. She
looked over the room, gauging the reactions of the crew. 'We will
continue to gather information and investigate the findings of the
scouting party.'

'Shouldn't we
get reinforcements or something first?' asked Belameir.

'We will send
for them but in the meantime will proceed without. We cannot afford
to waste time sitting around here.'

'We also can't
afford to waste time getting killed,' said Belameir.

Seline nudged
him with her elbow.

'Bringing in
reinforcements would only create a bigger target and risk an even
greater number of lives. We already know much more about the
situation than the scouts did; namely that whatever it is we are
dealing with is hostile and very dangerous. This ship is the
closest thing we have to a dreadnought so who better to carry the
mission forward than us? We will proceed, albeit with a great
degree of caution.'

'And what if
that thing is waiting beyond the next gate like it was for the
scouts?'

'We will send
probes.'

'That jus-'

'If you have
further objections you can take them up with someone who cares or
we can drop you off at a nearby planet and you can hitch-hike your
way home.'

Belameir
shrugged. 'I'm just saying what the others won't.'

'They already
know the answers to your questions.
That
is why they say
nothing.' Tialus looked across to Athene. 'I want you to send the
video back to Saranture along with everything you can salvage from
the blackbox and a report on our own findings.'

'Yes, ma'am,'
said Athene.

'I want you two
to look over the video again to see if you can find anything that
could help us. If you
do
find anything, keep me informed and
add it to Athene's report.'

Mercer and Sear
nodded. 'Yes, ma'am.'

She looked at
the Doctor. 'Find out what you can from the bodies, add it to
Athene's report and send your findings to me.'

And with that
the group broke into their familiar roles and placements while
Seline and Belameir waited at the debriefing station. Seline looked
up at the video display. She thought of the red point of light from
the centre of the floating eye. It burned into her. There was a
cold sort of numbness wrapping its fingers around her spine. She
shivered.

'You alright?'
asked Belameir.

'Yeah. Just
tired, I guess.'

'So how was it
over there?'

'On the scout
ship? It was alright, I guess, until the bodies anyway. How are
they supposed to prepare you for that? How do you get used to
seeing something that... raw?' Seline shook her head to keep the
images out.

'I think Therin
knows how,' said Belameir. 'Maybe ask her.'

Athene yelled
across at Belameir and Seline from the cockpit. 'Would you two make
yourselves useful? Seline, go help Sear and Mercer. Belameir get
over here and check that the tracer on the scout ship is working
properly. The forensics team is going to want to look at that thing
at some point and we don't want to have to search for it all over
again.'

'Maybe that's
the answer,' said Belameir as he stretched his back and made to
follow Athene's orders. 'Maybe you just try and force the thoughts
out by occupying your mind with something else.'

'What's the
difference between forcing thoughts out and hiding them
completely?'

'Not much, I
guess but at least this way you can be more certain about what
you're running away from.'

When the
decision had been made to continue to search for the Threat there
was a sinking feeling that began to weigh upon every movement and
action and thought that followed the announcement. Initially, the
words and actions of the crew were terse. Fear was close to the
surface and was reluctant to leave once it had settled in.

They continued
for two more days through three more systems, all of which had been
scarred horribly. Two of the stars had been left intact. Two red
giants – staying true to the pattern already observed by the
scientists on Saranture. The crew encountered only three
terrestrial planets which had all been carved up and pillaged of
all they possessed. Left as colossal corpses to be dragged around
distraught parent stars behind the wheels of Apollo's chariot.

The most recent
of these destroyed planets, already known to the Yurrick as
Acyr14-5B and suspected for possessing an oxygen rich atmosphere,
ice caps, and bodies of liquid water at the tropical zones, had
showed possible remnants of a bronze age alien species. But every
piece of exposed landmass had been charred into inhospitable sheets
of fibrous black. The atmosphere had been choked with ash and soot
which rained down across the entire planet's surface, coating
everything in murky shadows and forcing the drones that Tialus had
sent down to change to night-vision.

A probe which
had been sent just north of the planet's equator had managed to
find and beam back video footage of what was once probably a
village settlement. The village itself comprised no more than a few
thousand individual dwellings or structures. Most of which were
built of mud and bits of rock in the shape of a dome or igloo. The
drone's self cleaning lens struggled to keep up with the ash fall.
There was no trace of bodies. The ash had risen to quickly.

As the drone
departed the planet's surface it offered a departing shot of a vast
undulating bed of ash. What had once been a liquid ocean was now
indistinguishable from land. The planet had become a ball of hot,
featureless ash.

'It torched
this entire planet. It set the whole thing alight,' said
Belameir.

'That's not all
it did,' said Athene. 'There's another planet in this system. A
dwarf planet. And judging from its estimated trajectory it's on a
one way collision course with Acyr14-5B. Estimates put the
collision at less than thirteen hours from now.'

'This thing
isn't just destroying this planet's civilization, it's wiping out
any chance of life springing up here in the future,' said Tialus.
'I'd be willing to bet that it pulled the dwarf planet from its
orbit and sent it straight for Acyr14-5B to save itself the effort
of destroying it itself.'

'Makes sense,'
said Therin. 'It got what it came for so set the timer and
left.'

'Maybe there's
still someone alive down there,' said Belameir, gesturing towards
one of the screens. 'Couldn't we help them?'

'That's not our
mission,' said Tialus. 'And we have neither the time nor the
resources to accommodate members an alien species, assuming any of
them could even survive a week without sunlight, breathing in an
atmosphere so heavily laden with ash.'

Belameir didn't
pursue the argument.

'I want one of
the probes to remain behind,' ordered Tialus. 'Two celestial bodies
colliding has never actually been witnessed on such a scale outside
of a simulation. I want to capture the collision.'