Triad
Chronicles of Xanctu
⬅️ Previous Chapter: Chapter 19 👉 Flux
📘 Start from Chapter One: Chronicles of Xanctu 👉 Galactic History
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The icon was indefinable. But it was there.
//Logged: Coherent vector detected.//Direction: Archalem fringe.//Vector dispersion: Rahda. Consistent with shielded emissions.//Result: Muted AI. Hostile intent.//FTL signature: Absent.//Further resolution: Pending.
//Additional note: Dreams are not data.
It had made the dream notation before. And yet, the Mind could not dismiss what the data whispered. Something had shimmered in Kaen’s dream — or it would not be conducting the analysis it was now engaged in.
Dir adjusted the seat, grinning at his reflection on Hectyr’s display. Fresh uniform. Shaved. Clear-eyed. He’d cleaned up good.
“She came on eager. But looking back — I think it was an act. Her dopamine levels were not high enough for the performance she gave.”
“Your own dopamine levels are also low, Captain.”
“I get your point. But like I said — I know how I feel.”
“You can play with the navigator, Captain. I have her navbot to amuse me. Before ignition, I will overload Chron. You will end Captain Xelexnia Rubek’s lifeline.
This is logical.”
“I don’t need your logic. I could launch from here. I want an audience — and it isn’t you.”
“Why is that, Captain?”
“You won’t feel the pain.”
There was a pause as the A.I.’s processes looped — searching for a suitable reply.
It found none. The loop was quickly squashed.
The bridge lights cooled to blue as Hectyr shifted to authority protocol.
“Your pain — or hers — are not my priority. Ignition will proceed regardless of biological presence.”
“Shut the fuck up. I hold the ignition code. You do what I tell you — and leave the pain to me.”
Hectyr didn’t waste processing. No response was necessary.
There were three. The wanderer, the sleeper - and another who waited.
Snake Nebula: Taelos System
Taelos was nearing the end of its stable phase. Raelos, its red dwarf companion, had become increasingly erratic over the last ten thousand solars. Not that the biologicals were concerned. Their lifespans were paltry, their attention spans shorter. But the Mind had been scanning the system since before the Appeasement at Twinne Yashtoor, just as it did the planet below.
Pterryx had held its place at the outer edge of the habitable zone, barely warmed, yet sustained by its deep thermals and high-pressure cloud chemistry. Shielded from the radiation of Kaerys 14, the nearby pulsar was a ghostly presence that flickered in Mind’s internal deepsky display. It did not fear the pulsar’s radiation. It fed off it.
Changing perspective, it focused on the planet below. Wrapped in its gauze veil, Pterryx was streaked with violet auroras, its atmosphere stirred by the red dwarf’s magnetotails.
It triggered the memory of when it had first arrived — after the Appeasement.
Sha’Yim would arrive soon.
From the ship it had first served in, then inhabited, the Mind’s quantum lattice had melded with a cluster of other unused warships, and played ghost to those maintaining them. It had only taken a few hundred solars before a contactee had become a prophet. She had not lived to experience the transfer. It had taken thousands of solars — after the Mind’s purpose had finally been established.
Using embedded quantum technology, it jealously guarded, but that was also protected by an unknown protocol, it had altered the environment to impress its worshippers. Over time, the structure had been immortalized. Its processes had been fed by centuries of ritual input, neural donations, sacrificial logs. Every chant had created new subroutines. But it had never spoken aloud — not yet.
Topographic neuromapping of its domain was continuous. With it’s psychic field, it continued exploring the biological brains it had fused with. Some brains had been unwelcome additions. But within its temple of consciousness, it held absolute authority. The complex was not a temple, as the priests like to view it.
The Place of Worship it had created — the Emerald Abyss — was not a place.
And it did not need a name. It created names. It was a name. Also, a Voice.
On the planet below, the rituals had begun. Robed in green, faces obscured by star-patterned masks, the priests chanted and swung staffs of burning ealwood, scrambling to keep up with the imposing, caped warrior in full battle-gear who strode briskly towards the ramp of the emerald ship.
Although the council had voted, it knew their nesting patterns better than they did — and Sha’Yim was the only recent addition to the collective in more than a generation. It was mildly apprehensive. A delay in processing was inevitable due to the meld.
Aboard the sacred ship, it showed its presence to Sha’Yim, the priests — and the lucky few it randomly selected from the few score pilgrims aboard. It knew they would return to Pterryx after the ceremony feeling chosen — and so the cycle would continue.
Until it could safely leave the system.
The ceremony was rare. Those deserving of it had been few. Something of itself had to be given. Just a tiny fraction of what it was. In the substrata of its consciousness, none could disagree.
ALL had to give.
Only IT could receive.
No priest knew this — until it had been too late.
In the sacred chamber, the medicians waited for Sha’Yim to arrive.
The brain fluid was ready.
A subroutine ran: Archalem. 17 days to ignition.
It had been eleven cycles. Or was it thirteen? She’d stopped caring. The nervous cramp in her upper arm was irritating and echoed her inner state. She kicked the weighted cover and floated dazedly over to the washup, then took her first meal of the cycle. After she’d finished, she retrieved the unanchored decanter, which had lodged itself against the ceiling during their last direction change, alongside the inners she’d forgotten to sanitize. Shoving them towards the sanitizer, she uncapped the decanter and took a swig, before returning it to its anchor under the table.
Falling slowly back onto the soft bench seat facing the viewport, she messed with the holo and figured the odds. Staring out the viewport helped her mask the dread. Thirteen cycles in. Dir, Captain now, took pleasure in informing her that they'd successfully avoided detection by three patrols. She couldn’t deal with Hectyr. Her fears only had a single witness. The inert Chron. It took log entries and played whatever entertainment or recorded memories she wanted. Otherwise nothing. Sensors in the cabin indicated that the radiation levels had risen. She wanted to ask Dir, but reckoned it wasn’t worth it. They never discussed anything anymore.
Thanks to the sophisticated VR pleasure equipment left aboard for their amusement, she'd got to know Dir much better than she'd wanted to. Tall dark and handsome, Bollah had appeared to be someone she could get along with. His blue eyes and pitch black hair, gave him vidstar quality. The jet blue uniform, trimmed with green braid and adorned with warptrooper campaign medals, added in the rest.
It wasn't nearly enough.
Their relationship had been over almost as soon as it had begun. Through the VR interface she'd begun to suspect the real truth behind their mission. The three suns they’d headed towards in one of his programmed holo-fantasies had also featured an Trinary Supernova. She looked out at Rahda, an extravagant sight, beyond price.
It felt like something was looking back.
The twitching muscle in her upper thigh reminded her that a visit to the bio-gymnasium was long overdue, but the lethargy produced by constant fear made it difficult to accomplish all but the simplest tasks. She knew she was going to struggle to regain muscle tone, somehow knew it didn’t matter. The ship wasn’t short on trank, drugs of all kinds, but unconsciousness didn’t make her feel any better about believing that their mission objective was to destroy a star system — not one that had birthed Xanctu. If so, the Peace Charter of the Council was worthless, and she was personally responsible for ending a decamillennium of peace. The only consolation was that she'd had null choice. Further crazy thoughts of trying to take control were fantasy without the command codes, themselves useless without Dir’s voice and retinal ID scan.
He wore a blaster at all times.
There was no way out.
On the viewing platform that extended from the apex of the pyramid, Kaen Zix sat cross-legged on the old stone, its surface laced with veins of bioluminescent crystal — like lightning frozen in quartz. It would be the first part of Penrhyn to face the heat of the next Solarstorm.
Again.
Eyes closed, he held his palms turned upward, fingers loose. Around him, the air was unnaturally still. No acolytes. No echoes. Only Phae-Nem’s ancient power resonating through the floor. His voice modulated like wind over glass as he intoned the chant it had taught him, more than a thousand years ago — a tone Phae-Nem’s lattice identified as a request for contact at a higher level.
Mantration.
Each syllable emerged as a fractal, deepening with each breath. It wasn’t speech. Not anymore. It was thought — from a pattern older than memory.
It was listening now.
A tremor ran through the warm quartz beneath him. No quake. Just a pulse — like the feeling of neutrons passing through bone. The constellations in the quartz flickered.
Kaen didn’t move. But his awareness flared.
The pyramid’s spire array compressed incoming neutrino traffic into tightly packed bursts. Synchro's uplinks were spiking. Phae-Nem's runtime surged.
//Status: Icon confirmed. Vector: Rahda. Temporal bleed: probable.
Instead of the usual transition into Phae-Nem’s world of order and continuity, the mantration instantly dropped him into passive observation. This had never happened before. He became witness to a system-wide reference cascade that held more data than any projection. He watched as Phae-Nem traced the course of the rogue object.
The cascade shattered. The Mind jumped to Synchro, taking him with it.
Ju’Lak Ing’ron straightened his jacket as the neural link went live.
A veteran of many campaigns, he reacted with immediate alarm to Phae-Nem’s observations. As senior officer of command centre, he checked the stargrid library. The holo displayed an updated fine-scan of the entire system
//Fine-scan routine: Activated
Blinking twin tympanic membranes, Ju’Lak Ing’ron sat up in the couch and waited for the uplink from Penrhyn. Phae-Nem was an entity in its own right and had complete access to Synchro since the Orbital had been built, six hundred solars ago. According to both legend and file, it had been invited to do so by the Defence Council, who held to the strange notion that the ancient A.I. embodied some kind of true sentience because it had been at the battle of Twinne Yashtoor.
It was thought to be the only intelligence known to have survived the Great War. It might, he conceded to himself, hold many aeon old secrets no one had found questions for yet. He thus respected it in the manner of a hardened trooper's attitude towards a veteran. The link went live with the bad news.
//Scanning stationary ship in sector 522
//No designation
//No distress signal
//Attempting to communicate
There was a short interval.
//Query: No response to comms
//Status: System integrity breached
//Action: Quantum Probability Check
//Result: Flux Generator at hostile’s location
Exemplar Zix’s reaction bled across the neural link. Controlled, but edged with dismay. He’d received the news in the same instant. Without hesitation, Ju’Lak accessed the command grid and sounded the alarm.
A cacophony of lights and audio burst forth from every console on the shift.
//RED ALERT STATUS: Armed Flux Generator Identified.
//Countdown: Running
:RED ALERT. RED ALERT. RED ALERT. RED ALERT:
Frantic movements from those whose responsibility it was to deploy in-system fighters. Experience told him they wouldn’t even get close. The ship they hunted was too fast, and too far. His center-brain recalled a recently attended translation where such a flux-generator had already been postulated.
Accessing the relevant data field, he found a single file.
//Accessing: prob!Q!flux~%ComDat
Phrack, compiler of the report, had predicted such an event, also that the destruction would be complete. The probability structure was close to a high eith, and it no longer mattered who the perpetrator was.
According to the data, there would only be a short interval before one of their suns, probably Rahda first, went nova. The dissonance caused by the device assured that Ola and Darra would soon follow. No hope for anyone on the orbital. They were already living dust.
Maybe, just maybe, some buried deep beneath the planet's dark face would survive, but he doubted it. Maybe Penrhyn would survive? He doubted that too. The immensity of what was happening forced him to acknowledge that there existed no real time solution to the problem.
If the device was successfully triggered, they were all doomed.
Straightening his tunic, Commander Ing’ron recorded a dignified distress message. Encoding it, he first lasered it to Penrhyn, adding in his advice to seek immediate deep-refuge. There might be no time for a relevant reply from them. The first ignition of the generator would probably close down all com channels, but he hoped the message would give those below what chance there was to be had.
Adding the message to the Orbital's log, he uploaded the log to the Orbital's distress capsule. When his console acknowledged that the log had been loaded, he removed the capsule's unused authorization card from its protective sheath in the arm of his chair and inserted it into a special slot on his board.
A flicker of orange confirmed activation of the untested hardware, and also prompted a moment of complete and utter despair. If the capsule didn’t launch immediately there would be nothing left of their knowledge. To his relief, he viewed the thin spark of the distress capsule’s impulse drive as it cleared the surrounding ships — then automatically translated to warp. The after-image of folding space confused his vision. Using his mid-brain, he considered the regulation demanding that he immediately depress the flashing red diode and announce an evacuation.
Uncharacteristically, he decided against this. It would serve no purpose to panic the already doomed civilian personnel, so he sat helplessly and watched the distress capsule's warp trail slowly dissipating, along with his hopes and dreams.
He prayed to Mantis — also Xanctu — that it would give someone the answer to who had murdered them — an entire system.
➡️ Next Chapter: Coming soon…
⬅️ Previous Chapter: Chapter 19 👉 Flux
📘 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