CHAPTER 14
It was nearly dawn by the time I got back to Arthur Carmichael’s safe house. It was too much of a risk to have SIS aircraft take us straight there. Instead, we flew past the outskirts of Delta City, out of the Crater itself, and set down on a rocky flat near a lonely stretch of highway. There, Carmichael’s two security men and his doctor were waiting for us with a van big enough to carry the medical isolation pod. It took us a couple hours of driving to get back to the safe house.
Once there, I showered, changed back into my regular clothes, and got some food. Stepping out onto a balcony, I called the Baron over an encrypted connection and gave him a quick rundown of everything that went down.
“I’m sorry I had to flash my credentials,” I said. “I didn’t see another way.”
“Easy, you did the right thing,” Deitrik said. “It will be much easier for me to explain this to my superiors, when the time comes, than to explain two dead Security Forces troopers.”
“It may have tipped our hand. I think those SecFor clowns were dirty and were there to stop anyone from trying to get Cassandra Carmichael out. I’m willing to bet there were more doing the same thing down at street level, and at the monorail hub. If they blab to Ascension about what happened, they’ll know the SIS is involved.”
“So, too, will the Nova Columbia SIS office,” Deitrik said. “There’s a risk but it was one we needed to take. What’s happening now?”
“Cassandra Carmichael is in an induced coma, apparently has been for some time. Arthur Carmichael has a doctor here who’s going to try and bring her out of it.”
“Excellent. Well done, Easy. As soon as you’re able, I need you to debrief Arthur Carmichael. Get everything you can from him on Project Isaiah, Site 471, and the Seraph. We took great risks to get his daughter out of that place and it’s time for him to uphold his end of the bargain.”
“I think he will. I can’t imagine that he’d try to pull something now.”
“For his sake, he’d better,” Deitrik said coldly. “Keep me apprised of the situation.”
“Will do. I’ll talk to you later.” I ended the call and went back inside.
That’s when I heard the screaming.
I raced to the second floor, taking the stairs two at a time. Around the corner and down the hall was the large bedroom where they had taken Cassandra Carmichael, and that’s where the commotion was coming from. I was ready to burst into the room with my gun drawn, but one of Carmichael’s bodyguards was standing in the hall. It was the big clanker, the one I called Truck. Stephen. His real name was Stephen.
“What’s going on in there?” I asked.
“They woke her up,” he explained, curtly. “Caught me off guard, too. I went in to check. The doctor said she’s in shock.”
“Is Dagny in there?”
“Yes,” he grunted. “Mr. Carmichael said you can go in if you want.”
“I’ll do that. Uh, thanks.” The hulking bodyguard stepped aside and touched the door control switch. The heavy faux-wood door slid open, quietly, and closed behind me. I found myself in a large bedroom that had been converted into a makeshift infirmary. Cassandra Carmichael was in bed. Dagny sat next to her, holding her sister as Cassandra sobbed into her shoulder. The doctor, a middle-aged black man with gray hair, hovered nearby, monitoring his patient’s vitals.
Arthur Carmichael turned and realized that I was in the room.
“How’s she doing?” I asked, taking my hat off. “I hope I’m not intruding.”
Carmichael stuck out his right hand. I took it and we shook, firmly. “I can never repay you for this,” he said, his voice wavering. I could tell he was struggling to keep his composure and I didn’t want to embarrass him.
“You’ve paid me plenty, Mr. Carmichael,” I said. “I’m just happy we were able to pull it off.” I looked over his shoulder at his two stepdaughters. Cassandra was still crying, clinging to Dagny tightly. Dagny was in tears, too, as she held her sister in her arms. “I came when I heard the screaming. Is she going to be alright?”
“Physically, she’s fine,” Carmichael said, quietly. “Her mind is another matter. Dr. Larson gave her a mild sedative to calm her down. It seems to be working.”
“What happened to her? What did they do to her up there?”
“We,” Carmichael said, correcting me. “This is what we did to her.” His face was ashen. I could see the regret and the shame in the man’s eyes. “Do you have kids, Mr. Novak?”
“Me? No.”
“Usually when a father fails his children as completely as I have, he doesn’t get a second chance. I have one, thanks to you and Dagny.”
“Like I said, I’m happy I was able to help, but we’re not done yet.”
“Of course,” he said. “I will tell you everything I know about Project Isaiah. Can you give me a little while? This is the first time I’ve seen Cassandra in weeks. I wasn’t sure if she’d be lucid enough to talk.”
“Sure thing. I’ll be in your conference room. I have a long case report to write and I need to get started. Stop in when you’re ready and I’ll debrief you there. If possible, I’d like to interview Cassandra as well.”
“I don’t know if she will be able to today.”
“I know this isn’t ideal, and I’m not trying to pressure her after she’s been through so much, but time is of the essence, here. I need to gather as much eyewitness testimony as possible.”
“I understand. I’ll talk to her about it later on.”
“Thank you, Mr. Carmichael. I’ll leave you alone with your family now.” He nodded, and I left the room as quietly as I’d come in.
To my surprise, the big cyborg was gone. In his place by the door was his young partner, the one I called Slick, looking cool as ever in a fitted black suit and dark glasses. His real name was James.
He surprised me when he asked me a question. “Is she gonna be okay?”
“What?”
“Mr. Carmichael’s daughter,” the bodyguard said. “Is she going to be okay?”
“She’s alive, conscious, and in one piece,” I said. “I don’t know what that girl’s been through, but all things considered it could be a lot worse.”
He nodded. “Thank you.”
I nodded back and turned to walk away. I didn’t get five steps down the hall before someone else called out my name. I turned to see Dagny hurrying after me.
“Hold up,” she said, putting a hand on my arm. “I wanted to thank you.” She hadn’t left her sister’s side since we got back to the safe house and we hadn’t really talked. Judging from the circles under her eyes, she hadn’t slept, either. “You risked so much and you found her. You did the impossible.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Turns out I didn’t have to say anything; she threw her arms around my neck, reached up, and kissed me, deeply. I could see James over her shoulder. The bodyguard raised an eyebrow and gave me a knowing nod. “All in a day’s work, I guess,” I said, looking back into Dagny’s eyes. “It was worth the risk.”
She looked up at me and smiled. “You’re a very sweet man, Ezekiel Novak.”
“Don’t go spreading that around,” I said with a grin. “It’ll ruin my reputation.”
“I need to get back to Cassie,” Dagny said. “I just wanted to thank you.”
“Come find me later,” I said. “I’ll be debriefing your old man. If you’re up for it, I’d like to get something on the record from you, too. Just to, you know, back up my account of things.”
“I will,” she said. She squeezed my arm, turned, and headed back up the hall.
I set everything up in advance so I’d be ready when Arthur Carmichael arrived. I placed a holographic camera on the conference table, set up so that it would be able to record both of us at once. A tablet was on the table in front of me, a list of notes and questions I wanted to ask displayed on the screen. We sat across from each other at one end of the rectangular table, so we could talk without having to raise our voices. We both had bottles of water nearby. With Carmichael’s permission, I began recording.
“My name is Ezekiel Novak,” I began, speaking clearly into the camera. “I’m a licensed private investigator in Delta City, on the colony world of Nova Columbia. I have been deputized as a temporary officer of the Terran Confederation, on the authority of Adjunct Inspector General Deitrik Hauser of the Security Intelligence Service.” I looked up at Carmichael. “Please identify yourself, for the record.”
“My name is Arthur Carmichael,” he said. “I’m a senior security administrator in the Technology Development branch of Ascension Planetary Holdings Group.”
“How long have you been with the company?” I asked.
“Thirty-two years. Local years, I mean. That’s . . .” He trailed off, doing the math in his head. “About thirty-five Terran years.”
“What is it that you’re doing for the company right now?”
“I’m the assistant security manager for Project Isaiah. My immediate superior is Blanche Delacroix. We both answer directly to Xavier Taranis. Supposedly he answers to the Board of Directors, but I’ve seen no evidence that they are engaging in any oversight of the project.”
“What is Project Isaiah?”
Carmichael was quiet for a moment. He glanced at the tablet screen on the table in front of him. I could tell he’d been contemplating what to say ahead of time. “Isaiah is the project name for an ongoing effort to study and communicate with a previously unknown extraterrestrial entity. It was found last year, buried deep beneath the Mount Gilead volcano in southwestern Hyperborea. We call it the Seraph.”
“What is the Seraph?”
Carmichael shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. You could describe it as a life-form, but it’s not life as we understand it.” He looked up at me. “Technically speaking, it isn’t alive. It isn’t even organic. It’s made of an anomalous quantum metamaterial that they’ve not been able to identify.”
“Did you know that Dr. Ivery was able to smuggle out a sample of the Seraph?”
“She did, huh?” He smiled, knowingly. “She was more clever than I gave her credit for.”
“Next question: How old is the Seraph, in your estimation?”
“We have no way of knowing how old it is. We do know that it’s been there since before Mount Gilead formed. Judging by the layers of rock it was found in, we believe it has been in place for approximately sixty-eight million years. That puts it in at least the Late Cretaceous period on Earth. Geological surveys indicate that the spot we found it in was on the surface at that time, but Hyperborea has been seismically and volcanically active for millions of years. Over time it was buried, sealed in a tomb of volcanic rock.”
“How did it get there?”
“We don’t know. It had to have come from off-world, that much is certain, but we have no information regarding its true origin. The COFfers thought we’d found a god.”
“Could you, uh, elaborate on that?”
Carmichael sighed. “Xavier Taranis is a major funder of the Cosmic Ontological Foundation. He brought as many members of the COF into Project Isaiah as he could, using what I believe are illegal discriminatory hiring practices. The Board did nothing.”
“Okay, but why a god?”
“It makes a certain amount of sense from their point of view. One of their core tenets is that all sentient life in the galaxy was artificially created by ancient, advanced beings billions of years ago. In studying the Seraph you can see how the superstitious would conclude it’s one of their mythical star gods.” He scoffed at the idea. “They’re fools.”
“I see you don’t put much stock in their theories.”
“Their theories are unfalsifiable pseudoscience. There is zero evidence that the development of sentience in life on Earth or anywhere else required an external origin. The COFfers mock religion but invented their own creation myth.”
“Can you recount the discovery of the Seraph? Were you there when it happened?”
“No. I was brought in after, as the security for the facility was ramped up. I have seen it, though.”
“Tell me, why do you call it the Seraph? Can you describe it?”
Carmichael didn’t say anything at first. “It’s huge.” He looked at me. “A leviathan.”
“Can you be more . . . specific?”
He chuckled knowingly. “I know how this sounds, Mr. Novak. The Seraph is difficult to describe, and I don’t have the talent to draw it for you. The body is nearly two hundred meters long from end to end.”
“I see. Why do you call it the Seraph?”
“We call it that because of the six elongated wings protruding from it, like the seraphim described in the biblical Book of Isaiah. They’re not actually wings, mind you, but they bring them to mind.”
“If they’re not wings, what are they?”
“They don’t know. One theory is that they’re heat radiators for whatever energy source could power something that big. Another is that they’re some kind antennae. Really, they’re just guessing.” He paused, took a sip of water, then continued. “The most striking thing about it, though, are the Spears.”
“The Spears,” I repeated. “Can you, uh, elaborate?”
“Yes. When they excavated the Seraph, they discovered that it had been impaled by a pair of hundred-foot-long spikes, made of an unknown black metallic substance. The spikes protrude all the way through it. They call them the Spears because that’s what they resemble.”
“What do they do?”
Carmichael shrugged. “As far as I know, neither their purpose nor what they’re made out of has been ascertained.”
“Huh,” I said quietly, typing notes into my tablet. “Do you have any recordings of any of this? Pictures, video, anything?”
“No. All recording equipment is strictly monitored and accounted for. When they finally let me leave Site 471, I was subjected to a full search and body scan. I couldn’t risk trying to smuggle anything out.”
“That’s okay. That’s a lot for them to chew on already. Tell me, what happened to your daughter?”
He took a deep breath and looked down at the table for a moment before looking up at me again. “How much did Ocean tell you?”
“She said you tried to talk to it via a direct neural link. I’ve got to be honest, that sounds insane.”
“It was insane,” he said. His hands curled into fists. “It was utter madness. It started when they tried to remove the Spears.”
“That . . . sounds dangerous.”
“Indeed. We don’t know what they do or why they’re there, but let’s yank one out and see if anything happens. Another brilliant idea from Xavier Taranis.”
“Holy hell. What happened?”
“The Seraph was found lying on its side. They dug a side tunnel from the primary excavation pit and constructed a huge, powered winch-and-pulley setup. It took a few tries but they dislodged one of them, pulled it out. That seemed to, I don’t know, wake the Seraph up. Shortly after, they began to detect trace electromagnetic radiation coming from it.”
“Well, how about that?”
“Yeah,” Carmichael said, knowingly. “Like I said, madness. They left the other Spear in place but started probing deeper and deeper into the Seraph. The signals became more active and more frequent. Eventually the technicians noticed a pattern, like a very basic binary language. We were communicating with it. Somehow it’s still able to do that, despite the state it’s in.”
“So they decided to try and plug a neural link into it? Whose idea was that?”
“Xavier Taranis’s, of course. It became an obsession for him. The more we interfaced with it, the more of a response we got, as if it were slowly gaining awareness. We could send signals and get responses, but we couldn’t interpret what it was trying to tell us. That wasn’t good enough for the old man. He wanted to actually talk to it, as you said.”
“I already know that didn’t go very well.”
Carmichael slowly shook his head again. “The first person who interfaced with it was a communications technician. After two sessions, he had an aneurism and died. After that, no one else would do it, so Dr. Ivery connected to it herself. She had better luck, but . . .” He trailed off, then looked me in the eye. “There were side effects. You spoke with her, you know what I’m talking about.”
The scientist hadn’t seemed right in the head, that was a fact. “She told me she couldn’t do it anymore and quit.”
“That enraged Taranis. He was going to refuse to let her leave, threaten her, force her if he had to. I talked him out of it. I convinced him that she’d come back, but she just needed time to recover, given the side effects. He let her leave, and we were going to pause the project for a while, but . . .”
“But what?”
“It demanded someone else to talk to.”
“What did? The Seraph?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. It was able to penetrate our computer network through the interface we connected to it and send a message.”
“What did it say?”
“One word, over and over again: Communicate. Taranis was going to force somebody else to do it. Cassandra volunteered so that no one else would have to do it.”
“That took courage.”
“Yes. She was always selfless like that. I tried to stop her, of course. I told her I’d go in her place. She wouldn’t have it. She actually wanted to try. We were making history, after all. I should have done more. I should have restrained her if I had to. I failed her.”
“Was she able to communicate with it?”
“Yes, but after a few sessions she started having increasingly severe neurological side effects. They put her in an induced coma to prevent brain damage, and transported her off-site to be monitored.”
“There’s something else I need to know,” I said. “Am I to understand that the Security Intelligence Service was at Site 471 during all this?”
“Not the whole time, but yes,” he said. Carmichael was sweating despite the fact that it wasn’t especially hot in the conference room. The conversation was stressful for him. “The normal reports of finding an alien artifact were not sent out—that much I can confirm. I believe Xavier Taranis contacted the SIS through some back channel, but I don’t have any details on that. Several people with SIS credentials visited the site. I memorized their names and will send them to you. The one who was there every time was a man named Leonard Steinbeck. Do you know him?”
“Never heard of him, but I’ll pass it on. Let me ask you one last thing, then we’ll take a break. Why is old man Taranis so hell-bent on talking to this thing? It’s already a huge discovery and he’s already the richest man on the planet. What more does he hope to gain?”
“Something all the money in the world can’t buy you,” Carmichael said. “Life. The old man is dying.”
“Xavier Taranis is dying?” I asked. “From what?”
“From what?” Carmichael repeated, looking at me like I was stupid. “Old age, of course. His body is riddled with inoperable cancers. Half his organs have been replaced with artificial ones. He sleeps in a life-support pod. Despite having the best medical care available anywhere, his health is failing and he doesn’t have much time left. He’s convinced that the Seraph holds the secret of immortality.”
“Immortality? That’s nuts.”
“Is it? The Seraph is a form of life that we don’t understand. Despite being buried for sixty-eight million years, it isn’t dead.” He paused, then looked up at me. “It isn’t alive, either, not by our current definition of the word, but it is . . . conscious. The science team believes, or at least claimed to believe in their reports, that one of the potential benefits of understanding it was what they called radical life-extension technology.”
“I think that will be enough for now,” I said, and turned off the holo-recorder. “This report is going to be strange enough as is. Thank you for sitting through all this questioning. I’m sure it’s not easy.”
“In a way it feels like a weight off my shoulders. I haven’t been able to tell this to anyone.”
“Believe it or not, I hear that a lot in my business.”
“What now?”
“I’m going to finish this initial report, then send it up the chain. After that, I don’t know what they’ll want you to do. I’ve never been a secret agent before.”
“Are you sure you can trust your SIS handler?”
“As sure as I can be,” I admitted.
“If that’s all, then, I’m going to go check on Cassandra.”
“I’ll be here if you need me,” I said, looking down at my tablet. “This is going to be one hell of a report.”
He paused by the door. “There’s one more thing. After they took Cassandra away, the Seraph didn’t want to talk to anyone else. Others tried to talk to it via neural link and it was unresponsive. It established, I don’t know, some kind of bond with her.”
“I see. You think Ascension will try to recover her?”
“They will. They need her. I need to move her soon, get her off-planet, if I have to. I suppose you’re going to tell me that I should wait, work with your SIS handler.”
“My employment with the Security Intelligence Service is a temporary expediency, Mr. Carmichael. You do what you need to do to keep her safe. That said, I will relay to him that you thinking getting off-world might be the safest bet. We’ll figure something out.”
Carmichael looked tired. “I hope you’re right, Mr. Novak.” He stepped through the door, leaving me alone in the conference room.
After sending off my initial report, I managed to find a spare bedroom and catch a few hours of sleep. I was out, completely dead to the world, and didn’t wake up until the early evening. After getting some food and a couple cups of coffee in me, I went to Arthur Carmichael and asked about Cassandra. He told me that the doctor still had her on some mild sedatives, but that she was awake, coherent, and eating. This was the first opportunity I had to speak with her and I couldn’t pass it up.
When I walked into the infirmary, Cassandra was sitting up in bed, slowly eating from a yogurt cup. Dagny had taken her shoes off and was sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed, facing her sister. She looked over her shoulder when she heard the door open.
“Easy,” Dagny said, smiling at me. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. “I’d like you to meet my sister, Cassie. Cassie, this is Ezekiel Novak, the detective who helped me find you.”
Cassandra considered me for a moment without saying anything. “It’s . . . it’s nice to finally meet you,” she said, slowly. She looked like hell. Her skin was sallow and there were dark circles under her eyes. It was clear that she’d lost a lot of weight while in her induced coma. “I understand you went to a lot of trouble for me. Th-thank you.”
“I couldn’t have done it without your sister and stepfather. I’m just glad that we were able to pull it off and get you home.”
“You have questions,” she said.
“I do,” I admitted. I had my tablet in one hand and the portable holo-recorder in the other. “If you’re up for it. It shouldn’t take too long.”
Cassandra smiled weakly. “You can ask me whatever you want.”
Dagny looked at her sister. “Are you sure? You don’t have to do this if you’re not ready. You’ve been through a lot and you’ve only been—”
She fell silent when Cassandra put a hand on her arm. “I’ll be okay,” she said. She looked back at me, her smile faded. “I can’t promise you’ll understand the answers to your questions.”
I shrugged. “Been dealing with that a lot lately.”
“I want to stay with you while you talk to him,” Dagny said. She looked up at me. “Is that okay?”
“Of course,” I said. “It’ll just take me a minute to get set up.”
A couple minutes later we were ready to begin. There was a wheeled cart next to the bed, serving as a nightstand, on which I set the holo-recorder. I dragged a chair from across the room, sat down in it, and began the interview. As before, I stated who I was, and had both Cassandra and Dagny do the same. I then had Cassandra recount, as best she could, the story of how she became involved in Project Isaiah and ended up at Site 471. Her story matched up with events of the case from when I became involved. She described leaving the drive in the safe deposit box, slipping the key in Dagny’s pocket, and her attempt to send her sister a message, all while being harassed and stalked by people she assumed were working for Ascension. Her testimony backed up the version of events Arcanum gave me, too, so it seemed like they had been telling me the truth.
In discussing Site 471, she corroborated much of what Arthur Carmichael told me, taking into account that she wasn’t involved with Project Isaiah for nearly as long as he was. It was when I brought up the Seraph itself that she became hesitant. That’s the best way I can describe it. She reminded me of a trauma survivor recounting the traumatic event. Her voice wavered. She blinked more frequently. Her hands fidgeted.
“D-did Arthur tell you about Dr. Ivery?” she asked. “He told me she’s dead now.”
I looked at the floor for a moment. “She is. I was there when . . . well, when it happened. She was murdered.”
Cassandra closed her eyes tight, but tears leaked out anyway. Dagny squeezed her hand.
“I know this isn’t easy,” I said. “I wish I could have done more for her. But . . . well, without her I wouldn’t have gotten this far. She provided the evidence I needed to get the kind of support that made getting you out of there possible. I guess what I’m saying is, it wasn’t for nothing.”
“I know she came across as strange to most people,” Cassandra said. “She didn’t have great people skills. She was very kind, though, and . . . brave. She was brave. She volunteered to connect her neural link to the Seraph even after someone died because of it. She did it for as long as she could.”
“Arthur told me that after Dr. Ivery quit, they were going to suspend the program, but Xavier Taranis changed his mind. Do you know why that happened?” I was hoping that she would corroborate what her stepfather had told me. If she didn’t, I was going to have to have another talk with him, and I really wanted this whole mess to be over.
“The Seraph wanted someone else to talk to,” she said, quietly, looking down at her lap. “We woke it up after millions of years and it didn’t want to be isolated again.”
“How do you know this?” I asked.
“It told me,” she said, quietly. “It told me a lot of things.”
“Okay, let’s back up a second. You volunteered to connect directly to the Seraph with your neural link, is that correct?” She nodded. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Cassandra admitted. “When we started probing it, it became . . . aware . . . of us. Slowly, over time. We . . . disturbed it . . . when we pulled the first Spear out. The substance it’s made out of, the silver-white stuff? Have you seen it?”
“I handled a small fragment.”
“It’s adaptive. It responds to stimuli. You must understand, we didn’t communicate with it. It realized we were there and decided to communicate with us.”
“You’re saying the Seraph initiated contact?”
“Yes . . . in a manner of speaking. I don’t think it was fully aware at that point. It was . . . it was dreaming, I think.”
“What means did you use to connect to it, exactly?”
“We used a high-fidelity, commercial-grade virtual reality headset with a neural link. It was Dr. Ivery’s idea, after the first person who linked to it . . . after he died. She thought it would be able to make itself understood better visually and that this might reduce the neurological strain. She was right. It worked.”
I paused for a moment. I knew what I wanted to ask next, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to word the question. “What . . . what did you talk about? You and the Seraph, I mean.”
Cassandra didn’t answer me at first. She stared off into space, blinking more often than seemed normal, her eyes rapidly darting back and forth. She fidgeted more.
Dagny leaned in and put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Cassie? Are you okay?”
Cassandra looked back at me. “Do you have a cat, Mr. Novak?”
I raised an eyebrow. “No. Why do you ask?”
“If you had a cat,” she continued, “what would you talk about with it?”
“I don’t understand,” Dagny said.
“You can talk to a cat, but you can’t talk with a cat,” Cassandra said. “You’re too different. Even if you could understand the cat perfectly, the cat will never be able to understand you. It’s just not on your level.”
“So . . . it was like talking to a cat?” I asked.
“In a way,” she said, “except I was the cat.”
“Okay, I see what you’re saying, I think.”
“It wasn’t even fully awake and its mind was so . . . so vast. Deep like the ocean, older than our entire species. It was like meeting a god.”
“A god? You, uh, wouldn’t happen to be a member of the Cosmic Ontological Foundation, would you?”
“I thought they were just misguided fools until I touched the mind of the Seraph. Now?” She slowly shook her head. “I understand how a person could look upon something like that and believe it to be divine. But . . . it’s not a god. It’s not mortal, but it’s not a god.”
“Uh, noted,” I said.
“After the first couple sessions it learned how to communicate with me in a way that I could understand, in a way that was safe. It was . . . gentle . . . with me, with, you know, my mind. It slowed down to where I could almost keep up with its thoughts. It asked me questions, and I asked it questions. Not . . . not for long. I could only go in for a few minutes at a time. More than that and it’s just . . . it’s just overwhelming. Y-you start to lose your sense of self.”
“Is . . . is that what happened to you, why you were put into the coma?” Dagny asked. “Did you stay connected for too long?”
“Yes,” Cassandra said, nodding. “I . . . lost track of time. They tried to pull me out, but I wouldn’t wake up. They were afraid to just sever the connection.”
I tapped notes into my tablet as quickly as I could. This was without a doubt the most interesting conversation I’d ever had. “Why did you stay linked for so long? What did it ask you?”
“It asked me what I was. That’s kind of a big question, you know? How do you explain what a human being is to something that’s never seen one before? I summarized as best I could. I think . . . I think it understood. Then I asked it what it was. I asked it if it was a god.” She smiled. “That’s how I know it’s not, because it told me so itself. Instead, it described itself as a vessel carrying a soul.”
“Huh. I suppose we all are.”
“I asked it why it was there. It told me it wasn’t sure where it was, so I uploaded a bunch of astronomical data for it to process. I think . . . I think it realized then how long it had been there. It was . . . it didn’t like that.”
“It didn’t like you answering the question?”
“That’s not it. It was . . . upset? That’s my best guess.”
“Upset? At you?”
“No, no, not at me. I think . . . I think it has an affinity for me, actually. It told me we achieved stable synchronicity, but it was upset that it had been there for so long. Frustrated, perhaps, maybe even . . . I don’t know, sorrowful? It’s like it forgot what happened to it and then remembered the truth.”
“Oh my god,” Dagny said. “This is incredible.”
“Communicating with the Seraph is incredible,” Cassandra agreed. “It’s almost like . . . I mean, I’ve never had a religious experience, but I imagine that’s what one feels like. It was so easy to lose track of time. It showed me so much.”
“What did it show you?” I asked.
“It told stories visually, presented its memories in a way that I might be able to understand. There was . . . there was a war, long, long ago. A war across space and time, over millions of light-years. It expressed this to me as the War of Wrath.”
“Who was fighting who?”
“I . . . I don’t know. The Seraph only described its side was we, so we started referring to them as the Seraphim.”
“My God,” I said. “That’s a huge discovery all by itself.”
“The enemy, the thing the Seraphim were fighting, it called the Constrainer and the Void Tyrant. I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means, either. I don’t understand what they were fighting over, or why. It didn’t show me how it where or how it started.”
“Well, what did it show you?”
“Destruction on a scale you can’t comprehend. Worlds burned to ash, stars collapsed into black holes, the fabric of space-time itself was torn open. They fought for eons, across the galaxy and beyond, backward and forward in time. Battles would end before they began, history rewritten over and over. The war came to a standstill because there was almost no one left to fight.”
“Who won?” I asked.
“It doesn’t know. It . . . fell, in battle. The Spear was the final blow. It didn’t kill it, because the Seraph can’t die, but it . . . it . . .” She trailed off, struggling to find the right words. “The Spear binds it. It leaves it not dead but not alive, its soul trapped in a prison it can’t escape from. It was left here, for millions of years, all alone, trapped in the darkness of its own mind.”
Cassandra’s eyes were wide. She was breathing heavily and sweating. “In the last session, it told me to remove the second Spear, to set it free. It commanded me. It begged me. I . . . I tried.” Tears were trickling down her face now. “I tried. I couldn’t make them understand. We need to set it free. It might be the last of its kind.”
“I think that’s enough for now,” I said carefully. She was getting too worked up.
Cassandra surprised me by grabbing my wrist. “You don’t understand,” she said angrily, her eyes glazed over. “It was lost in its own mind. It allowed itself to forget, so it wouldn’t go mad. The Spears restrained it, trapped it in its own body, not letting it live and not letting it die. It’s in pain, in agony, suffering in silence. Imagine needing to scream but not having a mouth, having an itch you can never scratch, horrendous pain that never subsides. Imagine being alone in the darkness for so long you forget the light. The Seraph is trapped in its own hell and has been for sixty-eight million years!”
“Okay but . . . are you sure setting that thing free is a good idea?”
“The Spears were there to bind it. Both are needed for this, one isn’t enough. It will take a long time, maybe years, but sooner or later it will grow strong enough to overcome the remaining Spear. Imagine what it’ll do if we torture it for years and years and then it gets free?”
Her heart-rate monitor was beeping at a rapid pace. “Cassandra, I need you to try and remain calm.”
No matter how you phrase it, telling a woman to calm down never works. “It’s capable of such wrath, such terrible wrath. That’s what happened to the First Antecessor Race! They sided with the enemy and they were wiped out, every last one of them, forever. This is a test, don’t you see? A test of our character!”
“I . . . think I have enough for now.”
Cassandra clutched her hands together, close to her breast, and kept ranting. “I tried to tell Taranis, I tried to tell him. He wouldn’t listen. He’s a frail old man, afraid to die. He thinks the Seraph will bargain with him, will grant him immortality. That’s not how it works! I tried to tell him, that’s not how it works! It’s not a genie to grant our wishes. It can’t give him what he wants. It’s not . . . it’s not . . .”
The poor girl broke down sobbing and buried her face in her hands. Dagny wrapped her arms around her sister and held her tight.
“That was rough,” I said. “I’m sorry about this.”
Dagny looked shaken. “I-it’s okay. What now?”
“Now I go sit down, write another report, and send it up. After that, I don’t know. The whole thing might be out of my hands from now on.”
Dagny looked up into my eyes as I stood up. “I’ll come find you later.”
I smiled at her as I packed up the holo-recorder. “Sure thing. I’ll be around.”