The Tomb World Ch3 (Patreon)

Eliza spent the rest of the meeting absently listening to the four captains debate the best way to approach the situation. It was ultimately decided that the best course of action was a slow united approach. Relying on the stealth abilities and speed of their ships while staying close enough to aid each other. Throughout the whole meeting she kept glancing towards Daniels, during the long months they spent far from any conflict he seemed to be very relaxed and easy going. But now the man who had named an entire planet after a weed was gone, in his place she found the same wounded warrior who had stoically faced his own death during the mutiny.

This was Daniels the Marine, conditioned for combat from a very young age, hardened by the fires of battle, and broken from the loss of his brother. Her heart sank as she saw the steely look in his eyes as he spoke of orders that was sure to get them all killed.

When the meeting was over Daniels stood and walked out without glancing back, Eliza had to sprint just to catch up “Wait!” she called to his back before he walked onto the suspended catwalk.

He looked confused “What, I thought I made everything clear.”

“You did, but are you sure we really need to do this? We’re explorers, not soldiers.”

The steely look hardened “That’s where your wrong, we’re soldiers on a mission of exploration. We’re scouts, and we found a potentially apocalypse-class anomaly.”

Eliza felt frustrated “Right, apocalypse-class, as in way out of our league. We don’t have the power to deal with something like that.”

He scowled “I’m not sure anyone has the power to deal with something that can strip planets like that, but our mission isn’t to destroy it, its to learn as much as we can. Lory is equipped with a large quantum communicator, if we’re killed in the line of duty our findings will be sent back to the fleet. Besides, the nature of the anomaly is still unknown, it might not be as dangerous as we fear.”

“But your still acting like it is.” Eliza said pointedly.

Daniels grimaced, “Prepare for the worst, hope for better.”

Eliza stared at him incredulously, this plan seemed to be incredibly reckless, and if he hadn’t been given explicit orders to explore this anomaly at all costs then she doubted that he would be putting their lives at risk like this. Eliza felt her stomach roil in anger at the snake Astarte, she didn’t how Elizabeth could befriend such as blood thirsty and callous as that woman. Her one meeting with the pirate had left seething and reconsidering her decision to join the Hellworlder fleet.

Astarte had made the Regalia protocol knowing full well that it could get them killed, and Daniels was too loyal to disobey.

But there was no point in arguing, all she could do right now was try her best to keep them all alive.

~~~*~~~

The three explorer ships remained in there docking pads as Galatea lifted off from the small moon and made her way to the anomaly. Captain Jahi had also approached Daniels in private to question the wisdom of their orders. He knew Jahi and Eliza were coming to him from a place of concern, and they kept their pointed questions within the realm of what was and wasn’t acceptable. But he had to sternly inform the Freighter captain that his mind wouldn’t be changed.

When Astarte had informed Daniels of the Regalia protocol she had done so with the direst of instructions. “Compared to what the Ancient Coreworlders could do we’re just caveman banging rocks to make fire.” She had said gravely. “There are sparse, obfuscated calamities with Ancient Coreworlder relics at the center. There is evidence to suggest that the Union used one such relic against the Kruhur to split their world. There are whole pre-contact FTL capable species that went extinct do to their proximity to these Relics. There is a reason the Union has such a slow and cautious approach to space exploration, we live in a galaxy seeded with landmines from an ancient hyperpower, bumbling into the void is a sure way to set one off. That said we need to be the ones to discover the landmines here in Orion, because every time the Union finds one they grow by leaps and bounds. I’m sorry for putting this burden on your shoulders, but it’s a risk that has to be taken.”

After that she had given Daniels a very incomplete dossier of known calamities. Landmines was an apt analogy, but woefully lacking in the proper scale. The remnants of the Ancient Coreworlders were like hydrogen bombs, just waiting for someone to set them off. He had no idea what kind of weapon could strip a planet of all organic life, but whatever it was he refused to let the Union get their hands on it.

One tense month later they arrived above the barren world discovered by Soo. With three explorer ships in orbit they did a much more exhaustive search of the planet. After two weeks of searching they learned that the people who once lived here had only recently advanced to using radios. They judged that the radio signals would have reached the anomaly system by about the same time everything ended abruptly. They found rusted alien rifles scattered about, along with large field cannons. The guns were fairly small and underpowered compared to what humans used during their own industrial revolution. But as the gravity of the Barren world was very low they probably weren’t built to handle a bigger caliber. After two weeks without finding a single body, they decided to call it quits. All they could find was evidence of who they were, but not what had killed them.

Daniels had decided that Galatea would remain behind while the three explorers flew towards the anomaly. The plan was to approach the system at a low warp that would leave little detectable wake, once they passed the systems Helio pause they would slow down to a slow .5 the speed of light. For their first pass of the system they would be grazing just outside of the gas giants gravity well, sensors primed to pick up any movement without giving away their position.

The three sister ships detached from Galatea and flashed their running lights before going dark. The gray hulls of Soo and Sheila went pitch mat black as they entered a state of low visibility, Daniels had to squint hard just to make out the outline of the two ships just meters away from him. Lory wasn’t equipped with the same color changing panels as the two former Frigates, instead it had a specialized shield generator that did its best to mask their presence. It was the higher tech solution to the Frigates dark camo, and while it was just as effective it wasn’t as reliable. He had Soo and Sheila take up a position on either flank of Lory to help hide her presence.

It would have been better to just send the two former frigates to investigate the anomaly as their stealth abilities were much better than Lory’s. But Daniels refused to send his fellow Captains into such a dangerous situation and not join them. He knew it wasn’t their wisest choice, but his old instincts to stand on the front lines arm in arm with his comrades wouldn’t allow for anything else. Besides, Lory’s passive sensors were much better then the former Frigates.

They crept towards the anomaly at what felt like a snails pace, even though they were still moving faster then the human eye could track. All the ships radiators and vents had been shut tight to prevent any heat radiating out and giving up their position. As such the temperature was slowly building within the Staff of Lore, not from reactors or shield systems like it would on the Astaroth, but from the ambient body temperature of the ships crew. Three days into the mission Eliza finally relented and stripped down to a simple white robe like the rest of the crew had, even Daniels had relented and now stood on the bridge in one of his workout shirts.

On day four they passed the systems Helio pause and they dropped to sublight speeds. Their equipment worked to scan the local system, picking up the small band of reflected light try and map out the local planets, moons, and asteroids. Nothing seemed very strange to them, but they were on the far side of the systems only gas giant, and it was currently blocking their view of the two potentially habitable worlds.

One week in they got an unobstructed view of the potentially habitable world closest to the local star. What they found was disturbingly familiar. A slightly smaller than Earth sized world with a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere with oceans of liquid water. They focused mirrors aboard the Staff of Lore focused in on the world and found no hints of life anywhere on the planet. This wouldn’t have been unusual since a good portion of potentially habitable worlds didn’t develop biospheres, but along with the bleak barren surface they also found many remnants of a long dead civilization. Long lines of what used to be highways crisscrossed the world, and large gray patches of land marked where cities used to be.

Staring at the dead world Daniels was reminded of Kunan’a. But while they detected the remnants of atomic weapons and fission reactors, they didn’t see the telltale craters of nuclear holocaust. In fact it seemed like the natives head detonated their nuclear arsenal high above the planets surface, ready to weather the fallout so long as they destroyed whatever was invading from above.

Some further exploration of the system revealed some medium sized metal objects that looked suspiciously like space stations. Not the modern Union built ones that relied on gravity plating to hold people down, but the old kind humanity had used before first contact. There was even one such structure that resembled the old Mars B.U.S., a spindly spaceship used to transport supplies and personnel to the international research colonies on Mars before first contact. It was later replaced by the CHARRIOT system when humanity discovered gravity plating that allowed for more compact spaceships. The CHARRIOT ships were later used as the base model for Earth’s first cruisers and the Obama.

All signs pointed to a space age, pre-FTL species that was just beginning to explore their local system, much like humanity before they met the Union. But unlike humanity who had focused their efforts on a nearby world like Mars, these people seemed to skip right past theirs and went straight for one of the gas giant’s moons. Daniels had an idea as to why, and as the squadron of explorers passed one of the gas giants polar regions they saw exactly why the natives had gone straight for the distant giant. Within the middle of the giants ring of ice and metallic asteroids they found a world unlike any Daniels had ever seen in his career as a space sailor.

The moon was slightly smaller than Luna, but its gravity was higher than Earths. That was because the entire world seemed to be spun from a gray metal alloy. The planets mass was far higher than its volume would suggest, implying the whole world might be made of refined metal. It had a breathable atmosphere, and there were huge swathes of the planet coated in grey colored vegetation. Whole continent sized patches of city were obscured by dense grey forests. The planet was currently in the gas giants shadow, so little light reached the surface. Despite that the world had a temperature of 5~6 degrees Celsius.

Running along the world’s equators they saw several regularly placed pilons that reached well above the world’s atmosphere. The pilons had to be several kilometers in diameter to appear as large as they did from space, and the reached tens of kilometers above the world. The space elevators on Earth were spindly and fragile looking compared to those pilons, those used anti-gravity generators to stay up right while the pilons looked to be standing unaided. Several pilons had sections of an orbital ring structure connecting them, in places the ring spread uninterrupted for hundreds of kilometers. And in other it just stopped abruptly, seeming to have broken and fallen to the planet below.

“Its an Ecumenopolis!” Daniels gasped.

“A what?” Eliza asked, she had been staring at the screen with him as they got their first view.

“An Ecumenopolis, a planet wide city.” He said in wonder.

“I didn’t know there was a name for those.” Eliza said after a minute.

“Yeah, but they’re supposed to be science fiction. The amount of resources it would take to transform an entire world like that are astronomical. It would be cheaper to just colonize another planet, or build a space station.”

“Would it really be that hard, the Union has plenty of large stations, it wouldn’t be too hard to pool those resources.” Eliza offered.

“Yeah, but that’s like saying an iron age civilization could build a skyscraper. Sure they can make the steal, but they would need a ton. And then what, they wouldn’t have the economy or infrastructure to really get much use out of it. The only way a world like this would make sense is if it was at the center of a massive empire at least ten times the size of the Union.” Daniels explained.

“I see, should I ask how you know all this?”

Daniels felt his ears grow hot “Sci-fi books, I had a lot of down time on the Tartarus so I started to read some of the old classics.”

Eliza smirked and may have been about to tease him, but she was cut off by Nelson.

“Captain, I’m getting another weird reading.” He called.

Daniels turned away from the screen to look ant Nelson “Weird how?”

“That radio signal Soo was picking up, it’s not being transmitted by that world, but from somewhere nearby.” He reported.

Daniels rubbed his chin, “Redirect our instruments to the source, we’ll have plenty of time to scan that world as we pass, I want to know what Soo found.”

Nelson tapped away at his terminal and slowly the instruments facing the ruined Ecumenopolis refocused on the source of the strange brain wave like transmission. At first their sensors didn’t find anything special, just loose mountain sized asteroid slowly spinning in the ring’s inner reaches. But then they noticed one that was very different from the surrounding asteroids, its surface absorbed and reflected light in strange ways, and it was radiating a regular amount of heat into the nearby space. What was more perplexing was that they kept picking up strange interference, little flickers in the feed that seemed to indicate that there were hundreds of smaller objects flying around it.

As strange as it was, that was all they could detect with passive sensors. Anymore would require them to bounce signals directly off its surface, and that wasn’t the intention of this first probing mission. They did, however, get a murky enlarged image of its surface.

“Is it just me” Eliza said, breaking the silence, “Or does that thing look organic?”

The object was a roughly spherical shape, with plenty of open orifices that looked strikingly similar to arteries. The massive support frame looked more like rib bones that girders, and the silky yellow material that filled in the gaps convulsed and flexed like walls of living muscle.

“Yeah,” Daniels croaked, discovering that his throat had gotten very dry. “Its like a hornets made of bones and organs.”