RETROSPECTIVE
Griffin Barbe
War and archeology have made for some strange bedfellows over the centuries, from Napoleon Bonaparte stumbling upon the Rosetta Stone while building a fort in Egypt, to Cold War naval missions aiding the discovery of countless shipwrecks, including the Titanic. Who is to say that if war does eventually follow humanity into the stars, that discovery might not follow after?
This is one such story, of a young spacer who goes into battle and comes out completely changed for the experience, into something no longer wholly human.
This story also serves as a fond farewell to author Rick Boatright, who died of sudden pancreatic cancer in 2021. A longtime fixture of Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire community, Griffin wanted to pay homage to a longtime colleague and friend by immortalizing him in this story.
>***
In retrospect, I should not have touched the artifact.
In my defense, there was little time to weigh possible outcomes. Being pursued by a Perfected death squad tends to limit the available mental bandwidth for careful consideration beyond a certain very low threshold.
Interrogator One: “Please refrain from digressions from factual events.”
Spacer First Class Rick Boatright: “What’s that, I digress? Well, I suppose time does move a mite differently for me now. Do try to keep up.”
Interrogator One, grudgingly: “Perhaps some background would not be entirely out of place.”
It was the twenty-sixth year of the war. I was twenty-five. I suppose that makes me one of the oldest of a generation born knowing nothing but the constant refrain, the numbing drumbeat, of never-ending propaganda and partisan news of the conflict between Imperium and Perfected. Not that my childhood was any different, any harsher than that of those who came before—or after, for that matter. The frontier remained far from my birth-planet, after all. I joined the Fleet as soon as was legally allowed. My practical upbringing hadn’t provided the academic qualifications to make any of the tech tracks, and I’d studied chemistry anyway, so navigation school was right out. Fleet being Fleet, they overlooked my actual education and assigned me to security specialist school. I was sent to a series of bases rather than starships, seeing little action. The uprising on Dotty V was something else: Perfected forces managed to instigate an insurrection. I lost a leg and a few other choice parts in the fracas that followed. I went through a couple months of rehab and came out the other side with some augments you can’t get in your average meatshop. Those augments on board, I qualified for and immediately applied to the Commandos once the docs signed off on my fitness for duty. I made it through training and selection in the top ten percent of my class of thirteen thousand. I was subsequently deployed to 14th Interdiction Fleet’s 9th Commando, then bumped up to 1st Commando as a replacement. I’d been with the 1st through the latter part of the Pancreat campaign, long and hot enough experience to truly be considered one of the team.
First Commando was tasked with taking down the control center for the antimatter plant in orbit around the barren planetoid, DB1432TT. We were deployed to that nameless—if incredibly metal-rich—planetoid for what should have been a straightforward objective. We were take control of the facility for the 14th’s use. As far as I can tell, it was one of those random strokes of ill-luck that happen in a war zone that led to Konrad being detected on our way to the target.
Regardless of the cause, the mission was scrubbed and we were ordered to evac as quickly as we could. I was ordered to scout the route ahead while the rest of my team tried to inflict break-off losses on the Perfected.
I miss those meatheads still, even Chief Urbanek, stiff-necked hard-vac-hearted b—
Interrogator One: “You digress again.”
SFC Rick Boatright: “I digress again, yes. But I tell you some small part of my history not so you’ll understand me better, but so I might recall the time before I was one with the infinite. Things farther away are closer at hand now I stand with one foot elsewhere. This causes distortions in my perceptions much like those I experienced when first I beheld the artifact.”
Interrogator One: “Understood. Please continue, then.”
So, we were on the run when I came across the thing. Rather, I was moving low and slow between the surreal metallic spurs and craters of DB1432TT while the rest of my team was behind me, trying to discourage pursuit. That’s when I saw it.
The thing glowed/darkened/shone/shadowed a long, narrow slope nestled between two craters that did not—quite—overlap.
I blinked.
The thing sat/rose/undulated/froze in/through/above the floor of the valley.
It made my eyes water. It was so strange, so far outside my experience my first thought was that my helmet was malfunctioning, painting weird shit on my retinas. I didn’t have time for it, and cracked the nicked and battle-scarred ceramic of my helmet against the metallic shelf of asteroid material next to my head. My field-expedient fix did nothing. The thing was still . . . a thing.
At least it wasn’t multiplying.
“Taking fire,” Bester’s voice was a tad strained. He had every right to be. Our link showed Perfected 1cm gauss rounds chewing through his cover at an alarming rate.
“Strawman package thirty seconds out. Obtain full cover for optimal safety,” our CAIT said, lighting up my HUD with trajectories.
I swore—even I wasn’t sure if the words were directed at the artificial intelligence or the wonder before me. The thing, whatever it was, continued to cycle through states and colors, to change every time I looked away or blinked.
“Boatright, get your ass under cover,” Chief Urbanek said.
“Chief, there’s something you shou—”
“Do as I say!” Urbanek growled.
“Strawman package in fifteen seconds,” the CAIT purred. I really don’t like the way the tactical AIs communicate. No flesh and blood person, even a Perfected, enjoys their work that much.
I dragged my eyes from the weird artifact, thing, whatever, and shoved off toward a cleft in the crater wall to one side of it. My armor spat and hissed, braking my headlong charge at the last second. I reached out, pulled myself forward to wedge myself into the crack.
“Detonating,” CAIT said.
The package detonated some meters above our positions. My HUD fizzed and juddered while my radio implant, despite being hardened for military use, gave a lengthy screech. The EMP burst didn’t do much more than inconvenience those combatants not looking directly at it, but the submunitions released in the explosion were the true tip of the spear, and harder to spot in the hash the EMP made of sensor readings. Hundreds of finger-length, sharply pointed nano-carbon straws shot from the heart of the explosion, a high-velocity, glittering cone. Each straw had a guidance system and sufficient reaction mass for a few course corrections and little else. CAIT provided terminal guidance for the straws. Most dove toward the crater rim the bulk of the opposition had been shooting from. The rest hammered down among a jagged outcrop some twenty meters to my rear left. The three red karats there went dark. I’d been so preoccupied with tracking the support mission I hadn’t seen the targets hiding so close, and hated the sudden rush of gratitude I felt for the CAIT.
“Verified contacts down.” I thought the CAIT’s smug tone inappropriate, given there were still a number of possible contacts converging on our position. We all knew CAITs can miss vital details on occasion. “Trust, but verify,” being 1st Commando’s unofficial motto, I wasn’t about to get zapped by a survivor.
I slipped out of the crack, searching for targets by the outcrop. The back of a helmet appeared. I drilled it with a pair of shots before realizing the Perfected was already dead. Killed by several straws, the body had slowly spun from cover in an expanding fog of crystallizing blood.
“Bester is off-line,” Urbanek said. “Konrad, see what you can do. Boatright, finish your sweep.”
“Yes, Chief,” Konrad said.
Wanting to comply with orders, I dragged my eyes from the body and across the artifact. It had changed/cohered/diverged/
stabilized/shivered again. I hesitated. I was a SFC in the Imperial Navy, and entirely unqualified to assess any kind of artifact, let alone one so obviously alien. Nice thing about Imperial Armed Services rank structures: one is encouraged to pass any particularly thorny problem on to the next level of command. That meant the Chief. Urbanek was tough, experienced, and smart, the very best NCO I had the privilege to serve with. She would know what the thing was. If she didn’t, she’d know what to do about it. I sure as shit did not.
“Uh, Chief, there’s something here you should see,” I said.
“Tag it for CAIT,” she said.
“Tagging.” I tapped a command on my forearm, sending the kitchen sink; still images, ranging data, and every other reading my scout suit’s systems captured. It wasn’t much. My suit was simply not up to grasping whatever was before me.
“There is nothing but planetoid there, Spacer Boatright,” CAIT said once the transmission was complete. Damn AIs are too fast, sometimes.
“Damn you, CAIT, I’m looking right at it.”
“At what, Spacer?” Chief Urbanek said. “I see nothing.”
Clammy sweat popped from my forehead. Could I have gone into the deep dark one too many times? Lost my shit?
No, I had not. “Chief, come here, in person, and tell me I ain’t seein—”
“Inbound ordnance detected,” the CAIT’s transmission cut me off. “Ten seconds to impact.”
Another trajectory lit my HUD.
To make matters worse, some of the possible contacts were firming up as solid reds and advancing.
I jetted for the crack once more. I was bracing myself when the terrain under my gauntlets shivered. A storm of molten shards spalled from the metallic asteroid whipped and shattered against the outer edges of my hide, so hard I felt the secondary impacts as vibrations where my suit touched the surface of DB1432TT.
Konrad’s IFF flashed, then dimmed. Chief Urbanek’s dimmed, came back. Templeton’s disappeared entirely. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
“CAIT?” I said.
“Re-b-b-bbbootingggg,” CAIT stutter-squealed.
I cursed again. A lot of red karats had appeared on HUD just before it blanked entirely. I checked my suit’s indicators. The entire LTN was down, including LOS comm to our evac. I risked a look out of my hide and back the way we’d come, back toward the rest of 1st Commando. I blinked. The landscape had changed since I’d passed through. The Chief was drifting, half her helmet missing. A molten crater thirty meters in diameter dimpled the surface of DB1432TT, precisely where the rest of my comrades had taken shelter. I bit my lip against a moan of despair. The drone strike that took them out was less a masterful piece of targeting and more the use of a sledgehammer to drive a thumbtack home.
I swallowed, momentarily refusing to admit my team was gone.
I avoid dreaming as much as I can, as all I see now is Urbanek’s drifting corpse.
Unidentified Voice: “And how do you do that, avoid sleep, I mean?”
SFC Rick Boatright: “My need for sleep has dropped off . . . considerably. I, myself, am not entirely comfortable with that fact.”
Interrogator One: “Please continue.”
Shaking with rage and fear, I slaved control to my suit and prepared to kick a pair of drones loose, praying God The All-Wise would see me through this hour of need. The first drone would go up and over the edge of the rim of the crater wall my hide was eaten out of, the second back the way I’d come in. I hit launch. Both drones popped from my armor in tiny cloud of compressed air.
I set the expert system handling my autopilot to seeking an escape route while praying for a long feed from the drones. I wasn’t so lucky.
Drone one went dead almost as soon as it cleared the crater rim. Fried by a mazer, it began a convincing parody of a decaying orbit that would—if uninterrupted—end on the nickel-iron surface of the asteroid some years hence.
Drone two’s luck was scarcely better. It turned out of the crack and sped downhill, following the route I had been scouting. It clipped something, shuddered, went dead. Too late, I remembered CAIT’s inability to perceive the artifact.
Praying again, I spun up the data off both drones, combing it for intel.
A squad of Perfected were about two hundred meters out and closing from my rear. I considered launching another pair of drones, but the speed with which the first one had been tagged argued strongly against launching from the same location. I did not want to give their hunter/killer drone more data points to track back to my position.
Of course, they might just deploy another massive ordinance packet to kill me, just to be sure all remaining opposition was annihilated. The Perfected are like that, in space: they can’t rely on all their superhuman genetics to overpower us like they do in terrestrial combat zones, so they resort to a bigger hammer.
Figuring it was time to get a move on, I popped out of the crack and started downslope in the wake of glittering metallic material thrown up by the Perfected strike. Much of the material was still crashing back and forth in the narrow confines of the valley, microgravity and vacuum offering little to no resistance to retard or slow the flight.
Just one more problem to add to my growing list.
My gaze snagged on the anomaly. It seemed agitated somehow, transitioning while my eyes rested on it rather than when I looked away or blinked, as it had before the explosion. I would have to edge sideways to avoid contact with the smooth/jagged/violet/white thing that continued to writhe in the middle of the draw.
HUD projected the Perfected squad would close to within a hundred meters of my position in seconds. I turned, dread making me imagine the thing reaching for me. I hugged the nearest wall and moved hand over hand to keep emissions at a minimum. Twenty meters on, I set another drone on delayed activation and dropped it.
Panting now, another twenty meters hand over hand. Bits of shrapnel and spall from the explosion continued to clatter and chime against my armor with frightening and sudden frequency. As long as it didn’t pierce my armor, the material should prove a mixed blessing, concealing my drone’s movements, but interfering with my sensor take as well.
Twenty more meters. If they were using their propulsion systems, the Perfected would catch up in no time. I hoped they weren’t. They should not. Using propulsion was a good way to shout, “Look at me!”
The scout suit I wore was designed to be hard to spot by anything short of a full active sensor sweep, so I kept moving hand over hand. My hunters shouldn’t know exactly what kind of numbers they were facing, so Perfected usually waited to go full active on their sensors unless certain of overwhelming local superiority.
My breath came in ragged gasps; solitude, exertion, and fear overcoming physical conditioning and years of mental training. I struggled to master it, resorted to thinking through one problem at a time.
Problem one: Extraction.
The primary extraction zone was beyond the mission objective, the by-now-thoroughly-alerted base, making it a scratch. I couldn’t head directly for the secondary extraction point because there were currently an unknown number of Perfected between myself and safety.
Feeling blind, and worried I was being herded toward something I would not like at all, I set the drone sensors to active and kept moving while HUD updated.
A rash of red karats appeared ahead of me.
Sudden sweat pooling in my suit, I raised my railer and jetted backward, dialing my suit speed to maximum and kicking out decoy drones as fast as the launcher would cycle. Screw stealth. I needed to reach cover as quickly as possible. Speed was the only thing that could save me.
A target appeared, fired at me even as I tried to light them up.
Dust and tiny motes of metal flashed, became molten cyan lightning as the vast velocities of tungsten steel projectiles sublimated and ignited the sparse particles between us. I was not hit. I don’t think I hit my target, either.
I’m not sure who was more distracted when my armored heels caught an outcrop. Momentum imparted a savage backflip my suit could only counter by slowing my headlong flight.
I’m fairly certain the shooter had a chuckle at my expense. Not a full belly laugh, though. The bastard was too quick to resume firing at me to have indulged in more than a short snorting chuckle.
Shit like that happens in combat. Things you simply can’t make up. God The All Wise has a sense of humor, certainly. I, of course, didn’t feel much like laughing as I lay parallel to the planetoid’s surface, cruising along with my railer aimed between my boots. My shooting made the adaptive coloring of my armor flash white-cyan with each discharge as it struggled to match the environment. I repeated my failure to hit anyone, but it’s hard to get shot at and not return fire.
The expert system managing my maneuvering thrusters pinged a warning. I hit the override without thinking. An instant later I crashed into one of DB1432TT’s jagged shelves of cold metal, shoulders first. No armor breaches, but the impact jolted me to my bones. I flipped again, this time heels over head, if that makes any sense. I landed hard, on my knees. At least I was in partial cover behind the shelf I’d struck.
I scrambled into hiding, assessing the situation in HUD. My pursuers must have halted their advance, because they weren’t on top of me already.
I noted an inventory warning. I’d been rigged for sniper fire and the repeated discharges of my weapon had drained my railer down to thirty percent onboard power. I dialed launch velocity down to fifty percent. It wouldn’t kill except on a direct hit, but I wasn’t going to kill enough of them to matter, anyway. No, I just needed to shoot back to keep the Perfected honest. I quickly scanned my other inventory counters: ten decoy drones left, sixteen surveillance drones, two hunter/killers, and I was hovering just above forty percent reaction mass for my suit thrusters.
It would be enough. Had to.
The outcrop shivered, spalled chunks clicking against my suit, as the Perfected lit it up with 1 cm.
Ignoring it, I paired half my remaining decoys with surveillance drones and kicked them loose, watching the feed live. Most were killed in short order, but they gave me badly needed intel. The Perfected squad that had driven me out of the cleft had halted their advance once they flushed me toward their comrades. The surveillance drones had that initial group in almost the same positions I’d clocked them in earlier.
Holding position was the smart move. Blue on blue fire with a gauss weapon would ruin your day just as thoroughly as catching a round from the enemy.
God provided me a sliver of hope. If I was quick.
Targeting those moving to flank me, I synced my hunter-killers with most of the remaining decoys. I waited to catch a few of them to be in the open to launch my attack. I displaced farther along the shelf, firing my railer as I moved. Fire from the soldiers trying to pin me down slackened as the drones arrowed toward their targets.
The karats representing the flankers on my right disappeared as the hunter/killer got close enough to detonate.
The other hunter/killer died, a mazer taking it out before it could self-immolate and take everything within a few meters out. Hope died with it. I would be dead in the next minute.
“Reboot complete,” CAIT said.
“Danger close!” I screamed.
“Danger close. Active countermeasures detected. Strawman and decoys enabled and inbound. ETA thirty seconds. Take cover.”
I nearly sobbed with relief.
Letting the expert system plot the fastest and least exposed path to the cleft, I fired a few more railer rounds to keep enemy heads down.
Back behind my shrinking cover, I sucked in a deep breath, pushed off, and let the autopilot take control.
“Active countermeasures encountered,” CAIT said. “Compensating.”
I was the rocket man. Jetting across the jagged surface in a staggered, corkscrewing course that nauseated even as it kept me from eating a 1cm round. The world shrank to glimpses; debris clattering off my armor, twisted metallic formations looming out of that alien landscape, 1cm fire probing all around me. A series of flashes over the short horizon as a mazer lashed out and killed the decoys—at least I hoped they were only hitting decoys—CAIT had deployed to protect the strawman.
I rounded another outcrop, slid over the lip of the crater, stellar dust fusing in a long stream beside me as a Perfected drone tried to cook me. The second attempt was more accurate, armor ablating. The autopilot altered course so savagely the world greyed for a moment.
Reaction mass hit thirteen percent. Many more maneuvers like that and I wouldn’t have the mass left to slow down at my destination. I’d slam into the cleft at speed and remain wedged there for all time, just another guy who’d failed at bending the laws of physics.
The strange thing reappeared/morphed/solidified/reverted ahead of me, a disturbing signpost to the relative safety of my destination.
I remembered electronics couldn’t see it just as the autopilot wrenched me sideways again.
More, longer brain-grey.
A warning chime. A blurred-edges reading of the icons: reaction mass critical.
More ablative armor smoked from my suit. The drone with the beam weapon had re-acquired.
I was officially having a bad day.
I was not going to make the dubious safety of the cleft.
A strange thing happened then: the thing/outline/distortion/truth swelled, seemed to allow the passage of light from somewhere deep inside/beyond/within/outside.
Searing pain as the last of the armor protecting my forearm smoked off. Alarms rang. As if I could possibly remain oblivious to the fact half my arm had been burned off below the elbow. My suit sealed the breach with minimal loss of atmosphere, injected a nerve block that did very little to kill the pain. My trajectory changed by the explosion of gases from my stump, I spun wildly along the long axis of my body, started losing armor from other body parts as the beam traversed and started cooking new spots.
I would be dead in seconds.
As I corkscrewed toward it, I looked at the void/presence. I smelled something pure, like fresh water welling from a mountain spring.
Suddenly unsure if it was an artifact of my fevered imagination or an actual physical presence, I decided I needed to find out.
I was soon to be in God’s hands, anyway.
I stretched, reached, expended my last drones to interfere with the play of the beam across my suit, each one buying me another instant, another meter’s approach toward the thing I could not name.
Contact.
Time slowed, each instant becoming infinite before being rendered utterly obsolete.
The pain was gone, any awareness of danger having fled with it. I felt no thirst. No fear. No hunger. I felt—and I know not why—at peace. I do not believe I had gone to heaven. There were no angels, for one. Indeed, I observed none of the things I had been taught to expect upon passage from this world into the next, but there was something, some certainty I had travelled from this world to the next. And no, I do not mean in the merely prosaic sense of actual, physical travel—though there was that—but the metaphysical as well.
<<Nonverbal interruption>>
Rick Boatright: “What’s that? You question my claims?”
Interrogator One: “Your suit did not record the time you were in contact with the artifact.”
Rick Boatright: “I cannot explain that, just as I cannot explain so many things about that strange moment that was no mere moment.”
Unknown Voice: “Please continue.”
SFC Rick Boatright: “Where was I . . . Ah, yes . . .”
The inside of the event/artifact/conduit was solid, but it was as if light had been given form and function. The unreal instability of the artifact when observed from afar was inverted, presented in a stark solidity of angles and contours observed from within.
Unidentified Voice: “Can you better define the anomaly?”
SFC Rick Boatright: “I’m trying to, but you keep interrupting.”
Unidentified Voice chuckles, then: “Please proceed.”
I had no sense of purpose to the space—if it could be called space—I was in. Nor could I perceive any concrete signs of age, though it felt ancient in the way that stone is: indifferent to all but the most persistent and powerful of forces.
There was this sense of vast power, too. Like standing next to the primary heat exchanger of a terraforming plant—you’re not gonna get burned, but you can just feel the forces at work. It was a throb that was as much behind my eyes as in my chest. And, before you ask, I know that I was entirely within . . . whatever it was. And I was there a while.
How else could I have survived the drone attacks, the strawman strike, and the subsequent plasma immolation of half the surface of DB1432TT when the 14th took out the antimatter plant?
I suppose it’s possible any human brain, seeking answers for the incomprehensible, might begin to force the sensations of that strange place into acceptable patterns, but I did start to hear voices. Time passes strangely for me now, so I’m unsure exactly when I began to hear them. I could not understand what they were saying, or singing, or indeed if there was even an audible component to what I perceived. But it seemed to me I was sensing a wordless chorus raised in question.
I understand a certain skepticism regarding the things I have seen. Like combat, like faith, the strange power of that object/time/
place/instance can only be partially—and inadequately—explained to those who have no experience of it.
I shall leave it at that and move on.
I became aware of a difference, of a change in the undertow of power that hummed through and about me. I focused on that change. Gradually, like a bubble rising through particularly viscous oil, I became aware of need, of desire. Not my own, the sensation was of a push, or perhaps a pull toward something I could not perceive in the darkness beyond the space and time I occupied.
I had not seen darkness in the formless light before. Perhaps it was sudden, the approach of the fissures I could now perceive. I do not recall it forming. It was simply, and suddenly, there. It did not surround us, but rather pierced the powerful veils about me like a splinter driven deep through pale flesh, yet still visible.
Unidentified Voice: “You said, ‘us.’”
<<Silence of four point three seconds duration.>>
SFC Rick Boatright: “I did, didn’t I? Like the weirdness with time, there are some lingering aftereffects I have yet to acclimate to.”
Interrogator Two, muffled audio fading in and out: “Th . . . energ . . . spike when t . . . subject spo . . .”
Unidentified Voice: “Understood.”
<<Three seconds of silence>>
Unidentified Voice: “Please proceed, Spacer Boatright.”
Now it had my attention, I noted thick strands of not-material, perhaps fractures, running from that splinter into what I was given to understand was the substance, the fabric of that pocket of space and time I occupied. Looking at those splinters, I felt that indistinct drive, that need again.
The chorus grew louder and more dissonant, as if some desperation in the singers made for disharmony.
I can’t be sure my mind wasn’t making do with what it had on hand in order to stave off madness, but it seemed clear the artifact wanted me to do something about the jagged splinters lodged in it.
Naturally, I had no idea what to do. I opened my mouth to say so, and suddenly had the knowledge at my mental “fingertips.” A gauntlet-shaped depression appeared at shoulder height and in arm’s reach, just large enough to shove my armored hand into. I hesitated, though the humming thrum of power pressed me to act.
Interrogator One: “You did not mention your armor previously.”
“I did not. Isn’t that strange? It did not seem relevant at the time, as I seemed to be breathing, seeing, surviving just fine. Nor did I feel the pain of my lost hand. I recall no alarms, no indicators, no radio contact . . . Yet I felt no panic at the lack.”
<<Silence of thirteen point two seconds.>>
Interrogator One: “Very well, please continue your narrative.”
Deciding I had no reason not to comply, and a host of reasons not to think too hard about the decision, I pressed my hand into the void. There was a brightening, a change in atmosphere that I was only peripherally aware of, as the fingers of my right hand came into contact with something liquid and terribly cold. Thinking back, I should not have felt that cold, not with my suit on. Yet that terrible cold wasn’t the most alarming thing about that contact: my fingers had entered the liquid parallel to the floor, I had not felt them penetrate a membrane or barrier, and yet the cold liquid was suspended at right angles to the surface I stood on. I know my alarm at such a small detail must seem odd given all that had gone before, but everyone has their limits, and I freely admit I was approaching my own at terminal velocity.
Fear made me ball my gauntleted fist. I started to pull it from the void, found with mounting panic I couldn’t. The liquid adhered to my palm, filling it with a hard, rounded shape the size of a handball. I tried to release it but could not. It also prevented me flattening my hand, a necessary precursor to removing it from the void, the entry of which was smaller than the void beyond. It was like the games some backward planets still play, where you can grab a treasure inside a wide-necked bottle but cannot remove it through the neck.
When dropping it did not work, and in a near panic, I squeezed as hard as I could. The effect was immediate: the directionless illumination around me seemed to brighten, to clear. That said, my hand was still trapped. Hoping to find something to help, I made a study of my surroundings. It was then I realized a stretch of the wrongness was no longer present.
I relaxed my grip, focused on another, thicker stretch of the splinter. Once I was fixed on it, I made as tight a fist as I could with that cold material in my hand.
A portion of the dark substance, a jagged splinter of wrong injected into limitless immaterial of the artifact was crushed. Like sand washed from a basin, the crushed strand of invasive material quickly faded. I did not see where it was removed to, just knew it was gone.
The light grew brighter. It was not the only change. The tuneless song I had been feeling in my chest and behind my eyes became more fluid, though no less intense. It was still syncopated, but less so than before. With this assurance I had done the proper thing, the desired thing, I set to work with a will.
I’m unsure how long I worked, as I only became aware of the passage of time as my hand grew sore and tired. I was fascinated by the fatigue, as I knew I should have been in total agony from the dismemberment yet felt nothing from that injury. I could not, cannot explain why this was so. I can only think that while time passed within that place, it was able to selectively prevent the passage of time of those things brought into the span of its control. By the time I noticed this new oddity, my work had brought the light levels up to blinding-bright. Counterintuitively, rather than lose my sight, I felt myself able to perceive the smallest portion of the wrongness regardless of where it lay hidden.
Despite a steadily building fatigue, I crushed those tiny cysts as remorselessly as I had the great breaches and rents. It was something to do, and I was rewarded upon each dissipation by a chorus of what I can only call approbation.
“I am hungry. May I have some food?”
<<Non-pertinent discussion of menu items follows. Duration of one minute, forty-nine seconds.>>
Interrogator One: “You have an extensive vocabulary.”
Spacer Rick Boatright: “Do not leave a sentence incomplete, it annoys those bright enough to see through you to your intent.”
Interrogator One: “What do you mean?”
SFC Rick Boatright: “Which part of my statement did you fail to comprehend? That there are a great many people who are brighter than you? I would have thought that fact was self-evident.”
<<Silence of two point two seconds.>>
SFC Rick Boatright: “Or was my observation that you had left your statement incomplete somehow unclear?”
SFC Rick Boatright: “I see it was the latter, therefore I will resolve that particular conundrum for you. You implied I have an extensive vocabulary ‘for an enlisted spacer,’ yet left those exact words unsaid.”
Interrogator One: “I did no such thing.”
Laughter from multiple sources, presumed to be those of Unidentified Voice and Spacer First Class Rick Boatright.
Unidentified Voice, as the laughter fades: “Do you think you might continue before the meal arrives?”
Spacer Rick Boatright: “Certainly . . .”
I felt tired, though I felt neither hunger nor thirst. It was all very strange, as I’ve said—perhaps too often to suit you, my interrogators.
The ball that had so occupied my attention dissolved into a warm liquid, freeing my hand from the void, which disappeared as soon as I withdrew it. A short interval passed, then I had a sense of movement, of objects and spaces, passing me by, yet knew instinctively that I failed to perceive more than the merest fraction of what was going on.
With the movement I would occasionally feel a sensation not unlike brushing against another traveler, of being almost avoided. Like strangers forced into close proximity in a crowded shuttle terminal, always attempting to minimize physical contact with strangers. Sometimes we even succeed, despite the fact such contact reaffirms our very humanity.
In any event, I was ushered toward, and then through, a blankness. It was not the darkness, the wrongness I had been annihilating. It was too . . . intentional for that. I was inserted into that blank space, and for the first time could look over my shoulder and see something other than flaws in the limitless space I had occupied before. It was as if I observed that moment when a drop of water separates from the bottom of a gutter. Extruding, growing, swelling.
That drop, when it fell, released me upon our reality once more.
Like that, I was back, hovering just above the surface of DB1432TT, my body fully restored, if changed in the manner you see now. The artifact folded/expanded/burned/solidified, shrinking until it was nearly imperceptible, then winked out.
I felt lonely then. And not simply because I was so vastly alone in space, but because I missed the touch, or the almost-touch, I had experienced in that strangeness. It was as if my mother had been holding fast to me but could no longer maintain her grip.
Nearly inaudible voice, presumed to be that of Interrogator One: “So full . . . hit, talkin . . . out humanity. Just look . . . him.”
Unidentified Voice: “I am, and you are excused.”
Interrogator One: “Yes, Ma’am.”
<<Interval of seventeen point five seconds.>>
Spacer Rick Boatright: “He does not seem to like me very much.”
Unidentified Voice: “He fears you.”
Rick Boatright: “That’s only natural, I suppose. I’d fear me, too.”
Unidentified Voice: “Yet you do not?”
Rick Boatright: “I would fear this change more, but I truly believed myself dead. Yet here I sit; complete, healthy, even able to make jokes. Whatever other strangeness has occurred, I am here, now, speaking my thoughts to you. There is a certain . . . solidity to the reality of these interactions.”
Unidentified Voice: “And if you are not speaking your own thoughts? If touching that alien presence did more than alter just your appearance?”
Spacer Rick Boatright: “Then I have touched the divine and returned, able to speak of things no other person can. Such is no small gift, I think.”
I owe my survival to the fact my suit’s power and chemical supplies—food printer and all—had been restored, though I quickly discovered my implants had been removed and not replaced. I turned on the suit transponder as soon as I decided that spending a few years in a perfected prison camp would suit me better than dying alone on that rock. I was recovered some ninety-six hours after the annihilation of my team, and thirty-seven hours after the 14th Fleet destroyed the antimatter plant. I did not need medivac. Flesh that had been injured or destroyed in the engagement was replaced with what I have taken to calling “compressed stardust.” That’s just my pet name for it. The researchers might have come up with more accurate names for it since their initial tests, but I like the ring of my name for it far better the appellation they insisted on using at first. “Exotic matter,” simply sounds anything but exotic.
Of course, it could just be that I desperately want that old saw, “We are, all of us, made of stardust,” to be literally true in my case.
The preceding is a partial extract from the AAR and debrief of Rick Boatright, Spacer First Class, Imperial Navy Commando, and lone survivor of the skirmish on DB1432TT.
As any student of this historical period will note, there are very few first-hand accounts of contact with the alien technology left behind by the Bridger Species, and none pre-date the discoveries made by Dr. Dumont here in the Nouvelle Geneve system. That the Imperial Navy hid the discovery in classified documents does not help modern historians in the least, as this humble historian has failed to locate any further notes or records regarding the eventual fate of Spacer First Class Rick Boatright. It is hoped that he lives still, or at least remains one with the infinite.
—Extract from De-Classified Imperial Archives of the Post War Period, A Study, Vol XII, written by Maximiliano Messina and published in all feeds by Universite du Nouvelle Geneve, 321 NIC.