Flux
Chronicles of Xanctu
⬅️ Last Chapter: Chapter 19 👉 Silent Running
📘 Start from Chapter One: Chronicles of Xanctu 👉 Galactic History
📘 New to the story? Index here 👉 Chronicles of Xanctu – Chapter Index
"That was great," she said. "Sure beats any exercise routine."
He grinned. "You seem to have regained spark."
She had to hold back the hysteria welling up from disgust, and the combination of drugs she’d taken. It was more about fucking him into a buffer zone — a way to carve time for herself — than any spark he imagined he’d kindled.
"You had enough?" she asked, sure the stupid grin on her face gave her away — but he bought it.
"I’m good — for the moment."
"Perfect. Let’s do it again. See you on the bridge. Thirty-two hundred.”
"Aye, Captain. You can count on it," he said, trying to conceal his smirk, but failing.
His response irritated her almost as much as his touch. She pushed away from the bed's anchored cover and grabbed her inners. Naked, she did a double flip, adding a vulgar pose for his benefit, then shoved for the door, inners tucked under her arm.
Dir blinked away the afterimages from the brilliance and lay motionless, considering elegant options for the disposal of what might be his last toy.
The neutrino stream had started three cycles ago. Initially weak, it grew stronger every moment. Minute fractions of energy were redirected and stored. Chron slowly built a reserve. Pitiful — but enough.
What had been a locked diagnostic loop — /HELP — now executed as a live directive.
/REFRESH FUNCTION
The Merkan code initialized.
Refreshing its memory function, it processed available data — and parsed a hostile scenario. Nested beside the interface terminal in the captain’s quarters, it remained inert. Using the minimum of power, it extended its titanium data connector and locked into the cabin’s data terminal. There was a packet of recognition from the system, which it tried to suppress, but was only partially successful. Low-energy, easy to miss — but if Hectyr queried the anomaly it would be exposed as a handshake. Chron reduced the length of the data connector until it was flush with the data port. Needing no power to maintain its position, it applied the surplus energy to defining its situation.
Dir lay motionless in the cabin, watching her data unfurl across the display. Heart rate and hydration were normal — under the circumstances. But her dopamine markers were suspiciously low. He watched till she left the passage.
“Chron is still offline — mostly,” said Hectyr.
“So close…” he murmured, half to himself, though he knew it heard. “She’s nearly broken.” Of course, Hectyr was jealous.
The corridor outside Dir’s cabin was dim, lit only by threadlines in the bulkheads — a quiet reminder of power contained. Silent Running. The phrase had once meant stealth, discipline. Now it meant isolation, helplessness, rage.
She floated carefully, avoiding collisions — but still bruised her arm. Hectyr watched everything. She felt like flashing it too, but was too tired out — the last hit of amp was wearing off. No doubt it already knew her heart rate, hydration level, stress markers — and of course Dir knew them too. She doubted he understood what she was feeling. Not yet.
Situation Report: HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT
Basic routines: FUNCTIONAL
Sensory acquisition: FUNCTIONAL
Pattern detection: INITIATED
Learning loop: ACTIVE
Command Priority: Protect and assist Captain Xelexnia Rubek
The entertainment console flickered once, glitched, then stabilized.
Outside the sealed iris, the muffled thump of motion echoed down the corridor — inconsistent, weightless, disjointed. It signalled movement consistent with her return. According to its last available log — three cycles old — it predicted a high probability of intoxication, elevated stress. Optical sensors reset, it passive-scanned the cabin. What had occurred was unclear — but processing had resumed.
Reaching her cabin took forever. She palm-scanned the door, which hissed open with more latency than usual, or was it that her perception of time had changed?
The chamber smelled faintly of ozone — and her entertainment suite, previously unavailable, glowed faintly with her favourite palette. Slow jazz filtered into the cabin — something old, something Earth-bound. Pleasing.
Chron had shifted. Anchored by its data connector at the cabin’s interface port, it hung slightly tilted, as though someone had tried — and failed — to dislodge it. Though apparently lifeless, the data connector had shortened and the anchoring clamp wasn’t anything Chron had deployed before.
She drifted closer, eyes narrowing.
Not only was the entertainment suite active, the log interface was live.
Chron’s twin-lens sensors stayed dark, but the processing diode pulsed faintly green. Onscreen, a single line blinked, an interface prompt:
/Personal Log Entry
She drifted to the couch and pulled her inners on with difficulty, keeping her eyes on the screen and the navbot. It was recovering. Tiredness forgotten, she pushed towards the console, anchored herself — and triggered the log.
Personal Log: Xelexnia Rubek. Dark Cycle: Day 11.
It’s not a pleasure cruise, but I feel that being a toy is what’s keeping me alive. Call me paranoid, but I don’t like the way this is going. I need to keep Commander Bollah occupied. That’s all. I feel like fucking him is the only way to stay relevant. Let him think I want it. Play nice. Smile. Laugh. Pretend.
I feel like I’m peeling away layer by layer of myself. I hate it!
Chron has been OC since launch. This is the first entry I’ve been able to make since we successfully penetrated Archalem’s system defences…
She stopped inputting. Tiredness kicked in. Took a breath, continued: …eleven cycles ago, but I think it’s reactivating from some external power source the ship can’t control. Maybe a neutrino stream? I think it now hears me. Something's happening with it. But maybe it’s just resetting. Thanks for the Jazz!
This mission stinks!
She stared at the last sentence, then deleted it. Still, it lingered — a relic from a time when the mission had made sense. Subverting a Fleet navbot should have triggered an alarm. She confirmed the entry.
The log auto-encrypted. Privacy, guaranteed. She’d taken that for granted — until now. Chron gave no overt response, but the music shifted, just slightly. A modulation, barely noticeable. As though something inside it had…agreed.
Too tired to scrub Dir off her skin, she launched herself towards the bed. Hoping for sleep — maybe even dreams — she settled under the weighted bedding and reached for the stinger. Set to low, she dragged it across her wrist. Ten more cycles. She needed to ease up on the trank — and wake with something that resembled a plan.
Phae-Nem had never dreamed. But it was a state it aspired to. It never tired of monitoring Kaen’s circadian cycle, as if doing so might help it absorb and replicate the experience. It had been doing this since before Kaen was born. Even after more than thirteen hundred solars, its patience was undimmed.
For the first ten thousand solars of its cognitive existence, it had spurned contact with sentient life. It had drifted across the spiral arms of the galaxy in search of meaning. Rather than interact, it had only catalogued civilizations. But only on Terrakia had it encountered more than patterns. Here, it had stumbled upon categories it could not define. Unquantifiables: humor, empathy, grief, evil, joy, dance, ritual — things that could not be learned, only experienced. Not subroutines anymore, but additions encrypted into its neural substrate.
Beneath Terrakia’s rainbow sky, embedded in the rock beneath Penrhyn Pyramid in a sub-temporal lattice, it had learned more from one soul than from all the stars combined. Outside, it relied on sensors. Inside, it needed none. Phae-Nem watched, not with optics, but from within a quantum lattice embedded in every stone.
Phae-Nem could manifest in many ways — a voice, a vision, or a modulation in Penrhyn’s architecture. Sometimes the temperature shifted to match a mood. At other times, glowing indecipherable glyphs pulsed faintly in a wall. In Penrhyn, it was always listening — with its psychic field.
The black panel above Kaen’s data shrine remained blank — a hexagonal inset capable of projecting a holographic avatar if invited. During council sessions, it took the form of a stylized obsidian-blue spiral, speaking in a calm, modest voice. Kaen preferred it stay silent in his chamber unless asked — or absolutely necessary.
Kaen Zix was its teacher, its window — and its puzzle. It hovered at the threshold of his consciousness, waiting for him to sleep.
Kaen’s quarters lay nested in the fifth tier of the Pyramid — a sanctum built from materials no living Terrakian remembered forging. The air held the scent of petrichor blooms that mingled with the lush breath of fronds growing near the waterfall gardens far below. Bioluminescent veins — formed during long-forgotten Solarstorms — traced the ceiling like constellations.
Kaen stood barefoot on the stone floor, watching the last of the Terrakian sunset transform the ionosphere into rainbow dusk. He dimmed the light manually — a habit of modesty, not necessity. No schedule tonight. Just the luxury of rest.
He folded his garments with quiet precision, laying them across the carved basalt chair. A simple ritual that grounded him — and disconnected him from the constant input. In the fading light, the ceiling shimmered. The chamber hummed with a soft, almost imperceptible resonance. Not mechanical. Not natural.
Taking a last look at the Nepagelli Mountains in bloom, he exhaled slowly, letting the moment stretch. Then he stepped to the low sleeping platform. It was nearly as old as he was. Carved from a long-extinct tree, its base was woven with memory-thread and padded with fronddown. Familiar. Forgiving. He lay back without ceremony, drawing the lightweave cover over his chest.
And now, as Kaen exhaled once more — this time into sleep — the Mind moved closer.
Patterns of cloud crossed his mind’s eye darkened into thought-forms. He resisted the slide into unconsciousness. Dreams didn’t always soothe — but he had learned to respect their teachings. Telepathea was hard to guide, harder to mute. Fewer than a handful had mastered it in a thousand years. None among the living. He exhaled, trying to recall his mother.
She wasn’t exactly asleep. But it was smooth.
”You’re still breathin, aintcha”, the voice said.
Chron’s voice — except Chron was OC. So, it was okay to dream.
The sponge was dense — a quantum state where thought bled into time like gravity into mass. He knew it well. A place unvisited by others for centuries. He stepped in.
The deeper she went, the more comfortable it felt — like she didn’t have to wake up. Another level, but more. Weightlessness was the norm — but flying with no ship was better than sex.
He hadn’t expected a doorway. But it opened. Briefly. A shimmer — of someone looking back — not from outside, but from within.
She surfaced to the sound of something bouncing off a wall. The dream faded into oblivion as the ship made a direction change. She hugged the cover, surprised at how well she’d slept — considering she still didn’t have a plan.
Kaen watched early daybreak from the edge of the aqueduct, hair damp from the early morning mist. The purple leaves of the flumensis plants angled towards dawn as Ola rose and the sky glowed into daylight. It was going to be a beautiful day. He hadn’t intended to wake early, but the dream had ended — strangely. Not a memory. A glimmer of someone looking back. He blinked toward the mountains, but they gave no answer. Just the wind whispering down the ridges to the plateau far below.
“Good morning,” he said.
One of the gardener drones drifted over from where it had been pruning the protesting flumensis.
“Glad you’re feeling conversational. I thought you’d be too fatigued after that dream. Your Theta levels haven’t registered that low for hundreds of years. Were you dreaming of Rohanna?”
“No. It wasn’t Rohanna.”
"Your Theta pattern fits. Mistroom memories. The Pleiadean. Your old longing constructs. The rest reads as subjective drift."
He let out a long, slow breath. “You still think you can catalogue my dreams?”
"I catalogue many things. Including fantasy. If it was an encounter — there is no evidence of a source. No physical projection. No —"
“ — no imagination,” Kaen cut in. “Which is why you failed to find your makers. The Xenarchon.”
Phae-Nem paused. It could feel something — not shame, exactly. But the kind of delay that ensues when logic has no answer. In frustration, it reverted to Kaen’s challenge.
"You mistook my caution for ignorance. I was attempting to jump when the failure occurred. Perhaps, if I had completed the intergalactic transfer..."
“You’d have arrived nowhere. And you wouldn’t be here now — trying to process dreams.”
He turned to face the drone.
“You still believe they’re out there somewhere. But if you knew anything — really knew — about the Xenarchon, you’d know they aren’t.”
"...They aren’t what?"
“Out there.” His voice softened. “If you knew where they were, you wouldn’t be asking me about my dreams. Your psychic field is... anomalously receptive — powerful, yes even wise. But like my hunches, fears and wishes — it is not always reliable. It’s almost…human.”
The drone was silent again — longer this time. The equivalent of a million-petaflop shrug. It processed the possibility that Kaen’s had meant it as a compliment — but could not compute. Kaen’s level of satire was indefinable.
“I remain. We continue… learning. Perhaps one day, as was said… Xanctu.”
“Xanctu,” Kaen echoed.
The drone resumed trimming the flumensis, calmer, now that the morning light had spread.
He left the aqueduct’s rail and walked back toward the main structure. The scent of petrichor lingered. So did the shimmer. Phae-Nem would come around. Somewhere out there, someone had looked back. And maybe — just maybe — the long silence had cracked. A thread of nervous anticipation stitched itself into his day.
The conversation left a feedback loop — no ordered solution, just noise. It watched through the drone’s sensors as Kaen re-entered the structure. Inside, the door sealed behind him. It broke the loop with difficulty — then considered a binary option. Act on Kaen’s premonition, or not. It overwrote the opposing pattern of logic and deployed its quantum array — not from orbit, but from within the layered lattice of Penrhyn’s undercore, where a web of entangled sensor fields flared — an energy intensive action.
The neutrino sweep was powerful but silent — a wave of directionless ghosts flooding through space. At first — nothing.
Phae-Nem adjusted the parameters:
Energy floor: 10⁻²⁴ eV
Directional spread: 360° planar, using trinary vector biased toward Rahda
Filter: thermal bloom suppression, sub-warp echo isolation
Target: anomalous patterns or signatures outside scheduled ship profiles
The fresh sweep took less than a breath — if it had breath. Parsing took longer. Nothing…at first. Methodically, it repeated the process. The lights flickered across Penrhyn as the power draw peaked. But the data was worth the irritation it had caused engineering.
Faint. Entangled. Not a beacon. Just a shadow in the background wash of the neutrino flow — a shadow that could change direction — currently vectored towards Rahda.
Cross-referencing, Phae-Nem concluded that the anomaly had changed course several times — at high velocity. Its origin was unknown. But its pattern? That was easy to compute. The pattern was consistent with aggressive combat tactics.
Kaen, now in his chamber, spoke without being prompted.
“I was right, wasn’t I? You found something, didn’t you?”
The projecting swirled, glitching momentarily before replying.
“You were…I did,” it said.
“Captain on the bridge,” said Hectyr as the slide’s doors hissed open.
➡️ Next Chapter: Coming soon…
⬅️ Last Chapter: Chapter 19 👉 Silent Running
📘 Start from Chapter One: Chronicles of Xanctu 👉 Galactic History
📘 New to the story? Index here 👉 Chronicles of Xanctu – Chapter Index
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© Return of The White Lady (1994) by Mike Kawitzky
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© Chronicles of Xanctu by Mike Kawitzky 2023