Pumpkin and I land beside an old, utterly dry fountain and send the cord back up to Kieran with the motorized descender. The light coming in from above is faint, so I only get a good look at things when my headlamp is pointed at them. My circle of light runs over desks, dead-screened computers, chairs—maybe—with seats so small they cast doubt. Cracked and crumbled openings in varying stages of decay mark five equidistant points along the back wall. Above them, engraved into the ancient marble, is the shockingly universal sign for the atom. Not shocking because it’s the symbol for the very observable thing, but shocking for how pronounced the symbol is, how utilized it is across all these dead civilizations, as well as our surviving one. Stumbling across it is like seeing home.
Aside from the debris and the markings, the only other thing of note is that it’s eerily dark and cold, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary in our line of work. So I let a very feisty Pumpkin out of his straps. He hits the ground like a shock trooper and bounds up the tiers of the fountain like he’s chasing a mouse. He’s moving so fast that maybe he has found something, but he hasn’t. He gets to the top tier and meows.
“The real trick is getting down,” I tell him as Kieran lands beside me.
“Whoa,” Kieran says. “Little dark.” He turns on his headlamp—an afterthought—and anchors the hanging cord to the floor so that it doesn’t fly away, or whatever else an idle cord might do to inconvenience us.
“There’s a couple paths going deeper,” I say, and point them out with one hand while I pull the computerized tracker off my belt with the other.
“Will they get us to the cache?”
The tracker links back to the Waning Crescent in orbit, which is locked on to the cache we’re here for. A grid map constantly scanning our new terrain projects the possible path each of the open tunnels could take to the cache, less than half a kilometer away, give or take. I study each theorized route with the tracker and my own eyes, then put the tool back on my belt.
“We’re definitely in the right place,” I say and lead the way to the second opening I pointed out, directly opposite the spire’s devastated front entrance.
We pass under the circular arch and into the ravaged hallways beyond. The halls have a similar circular shape. The maze of them reminds me of a network of veins. It’s utterly different from our home worlds’ architecture, not to mention the architecture of every other dead planet in the cosmos. We’ve become good at navigating alien spaces, though. It’s part of the job.
Pumpkin alternates between trailing behind us and leading us, his tail shooting straight up like an antenna. Even though there’s a big helmet on his head, his pink nose and whiskers twitch constantly as he sniffs along the ground. All our helmets come equipped with exceptional filters (courtesy of the Archivists’ common decency), but maybe Pumpkin and his peculiar cat nose can pick up smells anyway. We turn one long, lazy bend, and I swear to all that is good in the universe there is a noise ahead. A clatter. I do not like clatters on dead planets.
I pause. Pumpkin pauses. We get along on our suspicious spirits alone. Kieran keeps at it a few paces before realizing we’ve stopped.
“Probably just settling,” he says, like he’s talking about a new house instead of a millennia-dead structure. “Scout, seriously?” He chuckles, a little brother making fun of his older sibling. “This happens all the time.”
He’s not wrong. Settling happens, sure. But other things can happen too. Like Remnants. I’ve read all about them and have therefore adopted a just-in-case mentality, which I believe to be quite prudent. Pumpkin’s not well-read, but he seems to feel instinctually that something is off.
“Remnants?” Kieran asks, bored, a little impatient. Before I can even nod, he smiles and says, “They’re so rare. We have thousands of Archivists out in the cosmos. How many have died due to Remnants?”
“Twelve last year,” I say.
He relents a little because he can probably see I’m spooked. “Twelve out of what? A hundred thousand?”
I think a moment. “Roughly sixty-three thousand...four hundred and...fifteen?” I’m often equipped with useless trivia info. It’s what makes me a half-decent archeologist, I’m told, nearly verbatim.
“Sixty-three thousand four hundred and three now, I guess,” he jokes. I sigh. He sighs. “Scout, c’mon. If it was Remnants ahead, we’d already be shredded, right?”
That’s not strictly true. Based on what I’ve read, Remnants are the only surviving entities of whatever likely obliterated life on all these dead planets, since they’re the only things on these dead planets aside from ruins, and they don’t exist anywhere else. They’ve only barely been dismissed as the actual cause of planetary annihilation because, technically, it’s possible to escape them—enact a shield, shut a military-grade armory door, other such terrifying tales from some scant few survivors—whereas whatever happened to all these dead worlds was clearly inescapable. Instant.
Regardless of not being designated the big cause, encounters with Remnants are deadly. So deadly that there have only been about twenty aforementioned survivors in two thousand attacks. And that’s just Archivist operator data. Black box recordings on archeologist equipment recovered from the sites of Remnant attacks are, frankly, harrowing, with their odd lack of sound, emptier than empty somehow, and the weird, distorted imaging. Survivors have talked about how cold Remnants are. Colder than tundra. Colder than space.
So, yes. Settling happens and Remnants are rare. But Remnants seem like an awful way to go, maybe one of the worst, and I’m not eager to sign up for the chance of being immortalized on the short list of victims. Plus—
Kieran is giving me a look like he thinks I’m overthinking things. He’s tapping his foot, crossing his arms, all the impatient little-brother stuff. Tragically, he’s right. We didn’t come all this way not to get the cache, and idle time is wasted air. I try to take solace in the lack of signs. It’s not too cold, certainly not for me and Pumpkin, and it’s not unnaturally, ear-poppingly silent either. There’s no frost on the steel of the stripped walls, no iridescent shine of something like, but not quite like, oil on water. Better yet, the first clatter was the last clatter. So I relent. I start walking.
Kieran smiles this big smile and gestures for me to go back to leading the way. Pumpkin meows and walks right against my ankles, trailing a few centimeters behind so he has the head start on any escape rush toward the exits.
We turn a few more bends, meet a few more dead ends, but eventually, after squeezing through a modest-sized fissure in the wall, we arrive at an enormous domed chamber. The walls are lined with computer screens. Some have fallen onto the dashboards below or the toppled, dusty chairs below them. Others remain on the wall but are cracked or completely crumbled, their inner electronics showing. The high ceiling and large amount of empty floor space make me think of all the boss rooms in the video games Kieran and I play, which makes me nervous. But there’s Kieran, walking straight up to one of the video walls to get a better look. Pumpkin, too, leaves my ankles to sniff at a steel cup on its side. It catches in my headlight, surprisingly undusty compared to everything else in the room.
My belt buzzes, and I pull off the tracker to see it pinging the cache within a handful of meters. The Crescent’s readings are muddled by the distance and blockages, so the ping is vague, but looking around the dome, I’m certain I know where the cache is. I walk up to the circular raised central platform, some kind of command deck also lined in dashboards and ruined chairs. I can see a storage core through the railing ensnaring the deck, narrow and table-topped, with a barely visible piece of off-colored metal sticking out from its lid.
I climb up and through the gap in the railing. On closer inspection, the off-colored metal is absolutely the cache, with a glass-ball emitter on top and a broken or powered-down signal light welded to its side. It’s stuck halfway out of the storage core with worrisome gouges in its sides, as though someone tried to forcibly remove it from the core’s containment locks. But it’s here. The cache is here and mostly intact.
“Found it!” I call.
Kieran bounds over right away, and I jiggle the cylindrical cache a bit to find that it’s stuck solidly in place. Meant to shield valuable data, the storage core is hanging on with its remaining undamaged physical locking mechanisms. Removing the cache the rest of the way with force could risk damaging the information inside.
“Needs extraction,” I say as Kieran arrives. He’s already pulling off his pack, getting out his tools, and laying them neatly on the ground. He looks at the storage core, runs his hand over the dust caking its sides.
“Electronic and likely passcode locked, but if the mechanisms are mainly mechanical, I can have it out in a few minutes.” He plucks a two-pronged tool off his mat and gets to work without waiting for an acknowledgment.
“Hey. Can we copy it first?”
For every cache where it’s possible, Archivist methodology suggests downloading and copying any accessible files before moving the cache or even activating external apparatuses like emitters, physical object stores, or stored audio playbacks. That way, if you mess up extracting something, it’s backed up. I wave my ship uplink at him, the device made for that very purpose.
He pauses his work to take it. “As soon as I find a safe way to interface with it, sure.”
“Okay,” I say, a little impatiently maybe. I want a guarantee the information will be copied, but he’s the expert on extracting precarious caches safely. I give him the space to work, jumping the railing back to the dome’s main level.
I make a long sweep with my headlight over the room. The ceiling is so high that even our combined ambient light doesn’t penetrate its shadows, so I sweep there too. There’s something reflective at the top of the dome that only shines when I tilt my head a certain way, but no Remnants.
I walk the room’s perimeter, tracing the dashboards and screens built into the walls. My hand finds its way automatically to my belt, to the slight magnetic pull of the metal handle of my pistol. Early astronauts dropped so much expensive equipment that, a thousand years later, our suits have a low magnetic charge to help with grip that can be turned off internally for electronics fiddling. As for the pistol, I’ve never had much use for the thing. It ejects pinpoint force, so once I used it as a last resort to clear some debris. All Archivists are required to carry some kind of weapon for defense on planet-side missions. It’s not like they’d really know if we didn’t, but there’s sound enough logic behind the mandate. Kieran has a sword.
I gasp a little as I accidentally kick another toppled cup. There are fewer than fifteen of them, but they’re littered all over the floor: out in the open, next to chairs, under dashboards. Everything’s dusty and quiet and...dead. It’s easy to see it as a ruin, as a piece of alien history—not only for it literally being alien, but for how far removed from reality it seems. It is hard to grasp, but impossible not to, that these chairs once held people; these dashboards were once alight with bright buttons and data; these screens once showed other people or vids or numbers. This place was once alive.
There’s a burst of static from the center platform and a flash of hazy blue light. Pumpkin hisses across the room, and my throat closes over a yelp. Light shoots up from the cache, and before I can see Kieran through the railing and screens and dashboards, the blue beam forms into a holographic figure.
“Kieran!” I call.
He stands up from behind the storage core, his face alarmed through the haze. “Sorry!”
“I am Organizer President and Interstel Councilmember Blyreena Ekstafor,” the hologram says, the translator in my suit turning the wispy, breathy syllables into something I can understand.
At this I sigh with relief. My shoulders drop away from my ears. My jaw unclenches. This is a message cache, a recording, and Kieran’s tripped a projector. I’m lucky that it’s not a multiprojector, one of those balls of light that creates several holograms, usually all around the room. I would have had a heart attack.
“Give me a minute.” Kieran ducks back behind the storage core.
“Did you start the copy?”
“That’s what I was trying to do,” he calls back.
Now that I know what’s happening, the pitting fear has given way to a rising lightness in my chest: the excitement of seeing it, finally. Proof of life. A species I’ve never seen before or met, and never will. A walking, talking other being, even if they are a hologram.
The speaker continues on about the usual stuff we’ve seen a million times in message caches, either in training or in person on missions under experienced explorers. The speaker’s station, their oath, information about the construction of the cache. It’s no less fascinating the millionth time than the first.
The alien—Blyreena, I mark in my field notes—has pale purple skin that’s slightly shiny, possibly due to an external mucous membrane or lots of oil. Their hands, four-fingered and slender, are held primly against their chest as they speak, their mouth a thin lipless line, their nostrils tiny slits. Their eyes are impossibly blue and iridescent, blinking with two sets of lids every few seconds.
They’re coming to the end of the usual introductory spiel, and I’m growing worried about the integrity of the cache and how long it’s taking for Kieran to turn the projector off. “How’s it going over there?”
“It’s being”—he makes a frustrated sound—“finicky.”
I’m about to make a joke at his expense when Blyreena says, “We know now what it is that threatens all life in the universe.”
My throat closes over whatever I was about to say.
“We know that what has destroyed the two ruined class-A civilizations we’ve found has been the same thing, the same entity, and we know now that it has come for us.”
I gape. My field notes, dictated by my verbal interaction, trail off with “...” in the silence. I manage to croak my brother’s name.
“I’m trying, okay?” he calls.
“Don’t,” I say. “Hold on.”
“This entity, which our scientific community has called Endri, is here in the Kyarmar system. It has already devastated Myr.” I make a note: what we call the Beta Creon system, they called Kyarmar. I can’t yet be sure that their body language matches my own species’, but the way Blyreena hangs their head pulls something in my chest taut. “As Panev’s Organizer President, I have authorized a worldwide evacuation effort of civilians and nonessential personnel to the Dremarius systems. Panev’s most accomplished experts on the Endri, however, will be sent to Nebul in the Iari system, where our civilization’s greatest minds are gathering to collate data points about this sincere extinction-level threat.”
Kieran catches on at last, looking wide-eyed at the projection. “Holy shit,” he whispers. Pumpkin is looking too, his tail flitting nervously.
“My people carry with them the last stand against this final darkness,” Blyreena says. “But my last stand will take place here.”
“Is the cache copied?” I sputter.
Kieran blinks. “Shit. No. Not all the way, but it’s almost—”
“Copy it!”
“I am!”
Pumpkin hisses. He doesn’t like it when Kieran and I tiff. He’s like an orange, fluffy therapist. But he isn’t hissing at me. He’s glaring at the ceiling, and I trace his gaze to an object that is falling from the shadowy depths near the center of the dome. Before I can make out what it is or warn my brother, it explodes in a rush of force, and Pumpkin and I are flying backward.