ARCANUM
Anguistus’ ascent to the Iridium Throne was a long time coming. He was born in the first year of his mother’s reign and the public immediately took him to their collective hearts: Prince Angin waved to the court from his mother’s lap; crowds of chroniclers followed his every move from birth to adolescence to adulthood. He visited many worlds as mother Porfiria’s proxy. His storybook wedding to Margaret of Delphi was celebrated for months after as news and images made their way to the borders of the Empire. Billions grieved with him and his bride when their firstborn died after only a precious few months.
Public opinion turned against him when he and Margaret parted ways and he took up a very public life of dissolution and extravagance. Public approval returned when he gave up those ways, reconciled with Margaret, and their second child Martin III was born. The public grieved again when Margaret died soon after.
At age 45, Angin was given substantial responsibilities in the Moot: promoting the Armed Forces as the guardians of Imperial stability and peace.
After a lifetime of cycles of trial and triumph, Prince Angin finally reached his ultimate destiny when his mother died. He was 80.
333-402
Aboard BKF Kobokoon Above
Dene 2126 Arcanum B434866-5 Ph
I stood on the bridge of the flagship of the Deneb Fleet. Elements had been patrolling the system since the first reports and now, six weeks later, the fleet strike squadron was present in force.
I had been activated earlier today. The briefer, a professor of planetology, sounded scared as he spoke. Maybe it was the threat level; maybe he thought that I just killed people randomly.
We were in orbit above Arcanum, a poor world with a lot of people crowded into cities and towns within a few hundred kilometers of its coastlines, the interiors of its six continents impenetrable forest. The planet had no known indigenes, just Humans.
We could see the problem from here. As the world rotated below us, a silver dome a thousand kilometers across rose to near world orbit. Arcanum looked out-of-balance, like it should wobble as it turned. A few fast communications satellites had already bumped into the dome. Smashed into it.
It was a stasis globe. The shiny surface was the clue: it reflected all incoming energy. The interior was frozen in a moment of time some six weeks ago. We’ve met people who can make stasis globes; they wouldn’t sell us their machines and we found we couldn’t take them—or steal them. I am sure someone tried. The problem with stasis is that we can’t turn it off; its extinction date is inextricably set when it’s created. If a specific globe is set to end in seventy-four years, nothing (nothing we know of) will turn it off sooner.
Our sensors located the epicenter: a mining site in a coastal mountain range. The effect had a radius. At a thousand-kilometer diameter, we could gauge the hypocenter as about 100 kilometers below planetary surface: deep inside the mines. We had historical information, but now deep radar couldn’t penetrate the field to tell us anything more.
The planetary government sent us the mining permits and documentation, but they denied there was any clandestine activity at the site—as if the leaders would even know.
There had been a few deaths: people catastrophically sliced when the globe went on. Some were lucky and only lost limbs; one person lost his nose.
We worked on the evaluations and data analysis for a full day and quit only when fatigue made us too weary to function. I set a renewed meeting for tomorrow. As the meeting broke up, an officer approached me.
“Sir. Agent.” Agent was the correct form of address. I looked at him.
“Lieutenant Gilcrest, Agent. I am a reservist; and I just happen to be assigned to the fleet this month shadowing the intelligence officer. Can I share with you some thoughts?”
“Why is this not part of the formal briefing?”
“I am not part of the formal structure here, just a reservist. My job, to quote someone higher up, is to ‘shut up and listen.’ I have been, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking.”
I was skeptical. “Why is your insight so much different from the others?”
“Ah, that’s the point, Agent.” He pointed to a badge on his uniform, a small silver cluster with a stylized triangle. “I am psi-qualified; I’ve been to the Psi Service institute. In world surface life, I am a socialization counsellor in an adolescent school. I use psi in my work; we have found that there are psi approaches that help normalize outlier students.”
Fringe science, I thought. Hard, if not impossible, to disprove, or to prove; it flourished at the edges of real science. I was surprised that the Navy even had a Psi Service; I wasn’t surprised that no one would listen to him. Resisting a temptation to dismiss him abruptly, I invited him to a late meal before I quit for the night.
Gilcrest told a good story; perhaps he had also been to persuasion school. His neighborhood youth co-ordinator took an interest in him; exposed him to a variety of experiences. He found that he was interested in the sciences of the mind. He took several remote learning sequences, even went away for a semester to an intense immersion experience. He ended up with a Second Stage certificate of completion from the local Psionics Institute on Thengin.
I asked if he could read minds. He laughed. “They classify what I do as empathy. I can sort of sense what people are thinking or more usually feeling, even from a distance.”
“And I am thinking what?”
“There’s a surface skepticism. I don’t blame you. But there’s also a genuine interest; you want to solve this problem.” Anyone could make that up.
“Oh, and there’s something deeper that doesn’t quite parse. It’s like there’s another part of you, flailing in a pit of pitch. I don’t understand what that means at all.”
I had not thought of where my host went when I took over. I thought he was just dormant. I pressed on.
“So, tell me your insight about Arcanum.”
“When we pass close to the globe, it feels like they are still there.”
We talked for a while; I listened to his opinions and noted his comm code.
We all met the next day on the bridge. Their consensus was that we should scrub the world before this effect spread. Not that that made a lot of sense: the effect wasn’t spreading; nukes won’t affect stasis, neither would kinetics, nor emps, nor high energy projectors. It wasn’t like we could hide that thing, if we scrubbed the whole world, turned the atmosphere opaque black with dust, it would still be a silver bulb rising 300 kilometers above the clouds.
Scrub this world, they said. I wasn’t convinced.
They located a mining engineer who had worked at the site; sent out of system on a consulting assignment and only now returned after some eight months. I expected a Human male; I saw before me a Newt. Newts aren’t mining engineers: they are co-ordinators and list makers.
“Tell me who you are.”
His voice squeaked. “Good day, Agent. I am Supervisor Patha, Tafa Patha. Of ThreeMinCo; we are a division of Naasirka.”
“Are you aware of the situation below?”
“In part; I have not been formally instructed.”
I asked the professor to repeat the latest iteration of his briefing. I signaled and someone brought Patha refreshments and a wet cloth. When the presentation was complete, Patha spoke.
“It appears that the hypocenter is at the Seng level of the mine, the deepest part. The other levels produce heavy metals; we process the ore in a facility near the surface. The site is unusually rich in elements that we cannot easily find in the planetoid belt.
“The Seng level,” he stopped, thinking through his words. “The Seng level is seeded with debris from a very old impact. We recover the pieces and ship them offworld for research.”
This cleared things up. Three hundred thousand years ago, the Ancients had fought a wide-ranging interstellar war amongst themselves, shattering worlds, destroying stars, destroying their own civilization in the process. Some of their technology was literally unimaginable. This was an Ancient artifact.
I jumped to that conclusion. “So, the Seng level dates to about 300,000 years ago? The Ancient era?”
“No, Agent. It is ten times that old. Three million years.”
I wiggled my fingers in battle language and the Marines started clearing the bridge.
I kept the key staff only: a few officers. I asked Gilcrest to stay as well.
I now felt it necessary to reconfirm basic information.
“Has anyone touched that field?”
“Several people lost limbs, Agent.”
“Has anyone touched that field recently?”
“No, Agent.”
I sent the marines on a mission. An assault lander dropped through atmosphere in minutes; they were adjacent to the field within two hours. I watched through a drone.
At touching range, the field was a flat vertical mirror extending from the ground to the sky. It was hard to see; the optics were tricky. It was a very good mirror.
334-402
Dene 2126 Arcanum B434866-5 Ph
Imperial Star Marine Captain Iileen Vump was philosophical. Long ago, she had observed that most Marines survived their enlistment and went home with a few medals and a small pension. She wasn’t foolhardy, but she followed the Marine slogan: Obey. Here she was next to something that killed people; she hoped it wouldn’t kill her. She had her instructions and she was smart enough not to do some of the tasks herself.
The first task was to touch the field. She told a marine to take off his gauntlet and touch it.
A stasis field reflects all energy and is impenetrable to matter. It should be neutral; not hot, not cold.
The assigned marine reached slowly forward, extended a finger, and touched the surface. “Nothing, sir. It’s solid.”
“Touch harder.”
He leaned into it, palm flat to the mirror. It flexed slightly and he let out a yelp. He pulled his hand away, surface burned. Stasis fields don’t do that.
The observing drone told everyone to step back. There followed a new set of instructions.
A flat surface pressed against the field with a force slightly greater than local gravity penetrated slightly. Temperature probes showed no observable heat effect.
A long rod could be forced, with some effort, into the field. They succeeded in pushing a rod all the way in using another rod. They succeeded in fishing around with a grapple and retrieving it. They pushed in a sensor package and retrieved it: it came out inoperative, the circuits fried. They ran a series of other tests in response to instructions from above. Several of them seemed to echo the recruits’ lament: stupid, suicidal, and certainly without explanation, but like good marines, they obeyed.
Then they pushed a sensor package in, and the rod came out empty, except for a scrap of packing board scrawled with a short phrase: “Help Us.”
Fleet sent down a full-scale assault team with logistics train later that day and they worked through the night.
101-336
Core 2118 Capital A586A98-D Hi Cx
I met the emperor himself. In his private chambers. I was giddy.
He touched me with his hand and made me a Knight of the Emperor’s Guard, with my name recorded forever in the Galidumlar Dadaga: The Great Imperial Archive; the records that are never erased.
He spoke knowledgeably about our entire project and of his dream that it would protect the empire. He expressed appreciation for both my sacrifice and my contribution.
His words burned in my memory as he spoke. I have recalled them many times.
“Jonathan. Your knowledge is a great asset; the safety of the Empire itself depends on your wise use of that asset.
The core of your mission is to save lives. You will speak with my voice, and I expect that all will obey. Serve the Empire wisely.”
The personality harvesting process began the next day. I remember nothing after that.
335-402
Aboard BKF Kobokoon above
Dene 2126 Arcanum B434866-5 Ph
On the bridge the next day, we reviewed their findings. Later someone would write a report, probably classified Ultimate, which would make its way to Capital, never to be read again. For today, we needed to decide on the answers.
I led the discussion.
“Feedback and contradict, as necessary.
“First, do we know who wrote the note?”
“They haven’t answered.”
“Let me know as soon as you know.
“Moving on,
“This isn’t a stasis field. It stops energy,”
Someone spoke up, “Because it reflects light, heat, EM, just about everything they tried.”
“But it doesn’t stop matter,”
Someone else, “It just slows it down, strips away energy above a certain level.”
Another, “Just above the local force of gravity.”
“So, we can shove things through slowly, but the marines tried a shot and the ricochet dented someone’s chestplate.”
“Electronics are fried when they go through. Or when they come out. We weren’t sure which. Probably both.”
“That marine’s hand was burned. What was that?”
“Not really burned; it’s more complex than that. The surface layer of skin cells went into the field and didn’t come out.”
The discussion continued. After several more circuits fried, and various photon, fluidic, magnetic, and gravitic systems failed, someone tried a mechanical sensor: a clockwork thing that responded to sound and pressure. It came back with some readings engraved on soft metal. The anomaly was that time moved faster within the field: 60 seconds out here was 247 seconds in there. One of the Newts hypothesized that the outside-inside time elapsed rate was the square root of 17, or maybe the cube root of 73. Four minutes inside to one minute outside.
Those inside were already 24 weeks older than us.
One of the techs rigged up a mechanical linkage between terminals inside and outside. Things went quicker after that. There was a small group of people who needed help. We could send through some foods. Candles; mechanical igniters. Did I mention that it was dark? That their personal respirator batteries were wearing down? That there was nothing we could do?
The time came to decide.
Not only was scrubbing not required, it was ill-advised. There was too much that we did not know about this artifact: Who made it? How? When? Are there others? Are there others outside of the current field? Whatever could create a fast-time field? Is it useful? Useless? Dangerous?
I declared a Red Zone. Interdicted by naval patrols. No one could visit this world; no one could leave this world. The risk that someone would find another one of these devices was too great.
Cutting off almost a billion people from interstellar commerce was an inconvenience; some of those below might object. So might several off-world corporations with holdings on Arcanum. No matter. I already knew how the appeals process worked. It would be years before the matter came before the appeals magistrate on Capital; decades, even centuries, before there would be a contrary decision.
This time I hadn’t killed a hundred million people. Did it matter?