World Hammer Read online

  “Yes,” Tarkos said to his commander now. “I trust her. But she is not just a scholar of Ulltrian history. She works for Terran Exo-Intelligence. Her goals are not the same as ours. She is trying to report to Earth, and will continue to do so.”

  Bria grunted, a sound quite close to a growl.

  “But we can trust her not to betray us,” Tarkos said.

  Bria pointed, and in the virtual space the image of Eydis appeared. She sat in the seat behind him, hands held out as she typed at some virtual keyboard. “Codes,” Bria said. “Quantum.”

  Tarkos squinted in thought. Bria was telling him that Eydis was manipulating some kind of quantum computational codes, while they flew now toward the World Hammer.

  “She has embedded weapons, and other equipment,” Tarkos said. “She has abilities that… that I did not know any humans had. She was able to alter Tiklik’s mind.”

  Bria blinked each of her eyes in succession, a Sussurat sign of surprise.

  “She may surprise us by proving more useful than we suspect,” Tarkos said.

  Bria looked at the image of Eydis, and then at him. She considered for a long moment. Then she blinked acquiescence.

  Tarkos appreciated the gesture. Bria trusted no one, except for the most senior Harmonizers or members of the senior races like the Neelee or Brights. And himself, Tarkos hoped. She meant to give Tarkos a gift, by offering to trust Eydis.

  “Thank you, Commander,” he said.

  Behind Bria, the Ulltrian ships blinked out of the tactical display. They had left actual space, furiously rushing toward war at a speed that left light behind.

  _____

  It took a day at an acceleration of four e-gees—nearly two apparent e-gees inside, with the inertial dampers tuned to maximum differential—to slingshot and brake around the brown dwarf that composed half of the World Hammer. The dwarf was a superjovian world, nearly three times Jupiter’s mass, and had collapsed into something like a smoldering almost-star. It glowed a faint orange color, emitting heat and radiation as the gasses deep under its outer clouds churned and were crushed down into a sputtering near-fusion.

  After half an orbit, they saw the companion world. It glowed slightly, its high albedo reflecting the morbid luminescence of the brown dwarf.

  “Hurk-ka-Dâk-Ull,” Eydis said. “Seven thousand years ago, this wandering pair passed the Ulltrian home world, and the Ulltrians named them the ‘World Hammer,’ because they expected one or both of the worlds to hit their planet. The worlds passed close, but did little more than cause some quakes.”

  Bria released the last of their probes, a dozen fishlike ships that shot off to take low orbits over the world. Tarkos wished that Tiklik were with them. The AI had been created for the purpose of finding and studying planets like this one. It could have been useful.

  “It’s ice!” Tarkos said, amazed by the readouts that he was getting from the ship’s spectral analyses. “The surface is water ice. And it’s cracked everywhere.” He opened a magnified picture and showed it to them both.

  “Tidal heat,” Bria said.

  “Right,” Eydis agreed. “This tight, fast orbit around the dwarf must create incredible tidal forces. It orbits how fast?”

  “Once every four e-days,” Tarkos said.

  “So there is friction-generated heat. The water below the ice is likely warm.”

  They watched the images resolve into ever greater clarity, reconstructed from the incoming probe data. It was like having your eyes come into focus. The white surface revealed long canyons of fractures, and then finer cracks, in fractal detail. As they watched, a ripple went across the surface, a wave with a cracking edge that propogated in the crust.

  “What was that?” Tarkos asked.

  “Tidal waves,” Bria said.

  “But in ice? Thick ice?”

  Bria huffed, agreeing with his surprise.

  Bria increased the resolution of their view. The whole world was ocean, covered with a thick white crust. Black metal spires came visible, tall structures casting sharp shadows across the surface ice. Bria reached out and grabbed the image. She rotated it and expanded a portion, showing a region a few kilometers across, focussing on a single black tower. The metal did not seem to rest on the ice, but rather to pierce it from below. The cracked and fractured ice around the tower indicated some large shape below. As they watched, the tower began to sink.

  “I’m starting to see that there are hundreds of spikes like that, sticking up above the surface, all of them on the equator,” Tarkos said, reviewing images from around the planet. “Also, I’m getting better readings of the surface. It’s definitely ice, but over it is a layer of radioactive isotopes of short halflife, and a range of other gases and hydrocarbons.”

  “I don’t get it,” Eydis said. “Why?”

  “Vents,” Bria grunted.

  “Right,” Tarkos agreed. To Eydis he said, “They don’t seem to have built anything on the surface. And why would you? The ice is obviously unstable, with those tidal waves cracking across it. And the water beneath the ice is probably, as you already noted, much warmer. So they have structures under the ice. But they’ve been venting waste products out onto the surface for centuries. And those waste products freeze and fall onto the crust.”

  “Look,” Eydis said, pointing at other shared images. “Other vents are pulling back into the ice.”

  “Full active sensors,” Bria said, to warn them that she was about to light up the sky, from the perspective of any defense systems. Their orbiting probes began to apply a battery of radar and laser telemetry to the surface of the planet.

  “There are… huge structures below the ice,” Tarkos said, “spaced out in a ring around the planet’s equator. Each roughly disk shaped. Each with one or a few of those vent spikes near its center, sticking up above the ice. There look to be a… two hundred of them, or so.”

  “Sinking,” Bria said.

  “Oh…” Tarkos said, his voice hushed with awe. “They couldn’t possibly….”

  “What is it?” Eydis asked.

  “These are whole cities down there, under the ice. And it looks like the Ulltrians are… scuttling all they’ve built on this planet.”

  “Sink their secrets,” Bria said.

  Tarkos knew what she meant: suppose Eydis was right, and the Ulltrians considered the World Hammer indefensible and left it now to scatter their forces, making themselves hard to track and kill. They would want to leave nothing behind that could tell their story, that could reveal their plans.

  “Report all data,” Bria said. “Use starsleeve.”

  Tarkos sent the command for a high priority data dump, bouncing all sensor information and ships logs from the cruiser to the starsleeve, which was winding down for a distant orbit of the dual system. He added a command for the starsleeve to tightbeam hyperradio their findings to the Neelee flagship The Savannah Runner.

  Tarkos sat back in his chair and took a deep breath. Their mission was complete. They had done everything they were asked to do: find the World Hammer, confirm the Ulltrian’s existed, identify the Ulltrians’ next steps. They could retreat and head back to the The Savannah Runner. They could send Pala Eydis home to Earth. They could turn Gowgoroup and Tiklik’al’Takas over to the Executive Intelligence units, for interrogation. They could survive what Eydis had called a suicide mission.

  But the Alliance was in danger. And they were here now, alone, the only Harmonizers who could investigate. Tarkos looked at Bria, knowing what to expect.

  “Prepare for acceleration.” Bria aimed the cruiser at the ice surface, and dove down into the gravity well, on a trajectory to collide with the vent tower of the nearest of the sinking cities.

  _____

  The tower was gone by the time they arrived. The cruiser skimmed just a hundred meters above the ice and then slowed over the gaping hole left in the crust. Delicate pale plates of ice formed over the black circle of water as they watched. Bria did not hesitate. The pull of the planet
was about 1.2 e-gees. She set the cruiser down in the center of the circular depression. The sheets of ice cracked, and the cruiser broke through and tumbled into the water underneath.

  “A few hundred meters down, it’s warm enough for a swim,” Tarkos said, reading all the incoming data.

  The ship righted itself, and Bria nudged the engines, which worked sluggishly in the liquid. She added sonar overlays to their tactical displays, and the city appeared as a huge ring below them that listed as it sank.

  “The deep sonar readings have still not come back,” Tarkos said. “The depth of water here is so great that the pressures below are incredible. At those pressures, water is like metal. And with this tidal heating, it will be thousands of degrees down there. With that temperature, and the tidal forces shifting and sliding everything around, the cities will be ground to fragments. The Alliance won’t be able to collect anything useful.”

  Bria dove the ship, following the city.

  The city was a ring with three massive spokes, and many smaller spokes and rings around the center. Structures became visible as they approached: short towers and irregular growths of metal erupting from all the surfaces. Bria told the ship to calculate the average density of the structure based on its rate of descent, and to compare this to the potential lift of one of the cruiser’s emergency vacuum balloons. But the data was not good. They could cut a big piece of the city off, and try to lift it away, but the effort would likely destroy whatever they removed.

  Bria steered the cruiser for the center of the city. Shimmering lights surrounded them as they passed through a school of luminescent organisms. These were the only light down here, Tarkos knew; their view, reconstructed from sonar and other sensor data, was falsely colored and lit for their benefit. But in the depths below, the sea glowed and shimmered with shining organisms.

  Bria sent commands for the ship to take samples of the ocean plankton. Tarkos nodded in approval: organisms that were used to seed this sea could also be used to tell them where the Ulltrian’s had been before, which worlds they had raided for biological stores.

  “It’s beautiful,” Eydis whispered. But her voice sounded fearful to Tarkos. He de-opaqued his helmet visor, the tactical display disappearing, and looked at her. Her face was pale, streaked with sweat.

  “You OK?” he said.

  She nodded. “Just… not used to the changes in gravity and the tumbling.”

  “Not to mention sinking in black alien seas,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m a little more used to black seas,” she said. “My brother is a marine biologist. I’ve been on deep dives with him. I wish he could see this.”

  Tarkos nodded, curious but drawn back to his duty. He looked over the latest data from the probes in orbit. “Commander, one city is not sinking. It’s not far from this one. Wait… yes, it’s confirmed. It’s the only one that hasn’t moved at all.”

  “A trap?” Eydis wondered.

  Tarkos frowned. “It’s possible that one city’s self destruct failed. Maybe it is stuck to the ice. I mean, you try to sink all these cities, it would not be surprising to learn one failed to drop.”

  Bria grunted. “Will deploy robots here, then investigate.” She sent the command to three of the ship’s general purpose robots, instructing them to locate the largest structure they could remove from the city and take back to the surface using a vacuum balloon. The robots climbed into the airlock, and the ship shuddered when the heavy water filled the airlock, pulling them off balance. Tarkos moved the cruiser directly above the hub of the city, struggling against the turbulence generated by the sinking structure. He watched the robots drop into the dark. They landed on the hub and scurried over the black metal. The cruiser righted itself, easing upwards as the water pumped out of the airlock.

  “Can you imagine it?” Eydis whispered.

  “What?” Tarkos asked.

  “The will power of the Ulltrians. To move onto a sunless world, and somehow survive there century after century under the ice, living on only tidal heat, and all that time to still remained focussed on fighting the war over again. And then, after this was there home for five thousand years, they destroy it all just because it has been discovered. They cast it aside like an old shoe. It’s like… destroying Venice and Paris and London and Rekjavik and New York just to make a point.”

  “You admire them,” Tarkos said.

  “I’m in awe of them. In the old, real sense of the word ‘awe.’ They are terrible. Sublime.”

  “You think any are here, on the world still?”

  She frowned. “After battles, the Ulltrian left a single elder behind. If they see this as their first battle, we can expect to face an Ulltrian.”

  Bria took the controls and pulled the ship’s nose up. They shot for the thin ice that had already formed overhead. Luminescent creatures shot by, and then the cruiser smashed through shattering water and out above the surface of the sunless world.

  _____

  As best they could determine through the thick ice, the one structure not sinking into the sea had the same shape as the one they had just seen: a ring with three spokes and a central hub. But it was much smaller: a tenth of its diameter, and so not really a city so much as a station of some kind. A single black vent tower stood up through the ice, and gases had frozen and collected at its base, suggesting that the vent had not moved in centuries.

  “There is a patch nearby where the ice is thin,” Tarkos reported. “A ship likely came up through the ice a short while ago.”

  Bria gently moved them toward the area he indicated.

  “This cannot be an accident,” Eydis said, speaking slowly in her careful Galactic. “One station still here. It must be a trap.”

  Bria looked directly at her, lifting the shield on her helmet. Tarkos hoped Eydis could understand that this was a show of respect.

  “Yes,” Bria said.

  Eydis furrowed her brow. “But we’re still going in?”

  Bria set the ship down on the thin patch of ice, and, just like before, it cracked through and they fell into black depths.

  “Yes,” Bria said.

  _____

  They circled the station, the engines struggling as they pushed through clouds of glowing organisms that looked like squids with multiple clusters of eyes. Long black conduits hung down underneath the station, dangling off into depths far below. They glowed in the infrared and emitted strong magnetic fields: the station drew power from the heat caused by tidal forces churning stone and ice far below. The dangling cables made the station look to Tarkos like a vast, black jellyfish floating over a bottomless black abyss.

  They moved under the outer ring, and played lights along its underside, revealing a surface of metal spotted here and there with something organic, as if the hull had been patched with shell and bone. Or as if hives and sores covered the skin of the station. Windows placed at odd angles showed an interior of empty, dark rooms. If any being lived still in the station, it hid from these windows.

  At the end of the first spoke, where it met the outer ring, a long pair of parallel seams suggested a docking bay door on the underside. They followed the outer station ring, and found the same at the next spoke. At the last spoke, the two long doors hung open, and light glowed down from inside. Bria floated the ship below, and they looked up into the bay through the distorting waves on the surface of the water. Atmospheric pressure inside kept the water out of the bay. Dim blue lights and small, harsh white lights lined the ceiling above, giving a glow very like the Ulltrian homeworld, with its one wan sun and one bright but small secondary star.

  “No sign of movement,” Tarkos said.

  Bria brought the cruiser up, through the surface, and then forward into the bay. Water streamed off the hull and splashed on the empty deck. They hovered in a space at least a hundred meters on a side, with abandoned black machinery crouching against the walls. Bria set the ship down so gently they heard only the slightest creak of the landing gear. She stood immediately.
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  Tarkos turned in his seat. “We have an avatar suitable robot on board,” he told Eydis. “I want you to use that.”

  “Why don’t you use it?” she demanded.

  Tarkos hesitated, his mouth open. They lacked the time for him to explain the Harmonizer code, their belief that they might as well join the machines of the Lost Zone if they were going to send probes everywhere. A Harmonizer used her or his body to explore. And to fight. But also as a statement: life will not fall behind, life will not be superseded by machines, life will go out into the galaxy and survive.

  Tarkos settled for, “It… means something, that we go there personally. But you don’t have to. You’ll be safer here.”

  “There is no safe here. We just entered an Ulltrian ghost station, and the Ulltrians knew we were going to do that. They wanted us here. I’m coming with you.”

  Tarkos sighed. “Let me at least give you a weapon. Something that I can instruct to obey you.”

  “That,” she said, “I would gladly take.”

  _____

  The atmosphere matched closely that of the Ulltrian homeworld, only with a higher pressure to hold back the ambient ocean. They could breathe it, if they had to, for a short while. But they would remain in their suits, and Bria insisted they use the starboard airlock, which had the most safety precautions to avoid contamination of the ship. They climbed down the airlock’s ladder to a gray floor that felt to Tarkos like the surface of slick, algae-covered stones on a California coast.