D’armic sat cross-legged on the floor of his small quarters, sipping yelic root tea to try to excite his nerves. Some in the drug-free movement considered the bitter root cheating, but he did not. While the tea was undoubtedly a stimulant, it worked indiscriminately across the Lividite nervous system, boosting perception and concentration for a time. It did not mimic any of the neurochemicals specific to emotions or try to boost receptor site sensitivity. So D’armic felt no guilt in drinking it from time to time. Of course, without a dose of Regretinide, he didn’t feel guilty about anything.
Yet I remain moral, he thought. How do I know to do that without guilt or compassion? Is morality deeper even than emotion?
The implications didn’t make sense. In fact, the thought served to reinforce his belief that his natural emotions were there, still influencing his decisions and actions, but too deep to make themselves known consciously.
If he felt anything, it was a powerful and growing sense of melancholy. His survey of the Human Wildlife Preserve buoy network had been, with the exception of the still-unexplained fate of Buoy #4258743-E, dull and repetitive enough to bore a dead Teskin. Yet he’d soldiered on through the assignment without complaint. The Teskin are one of the most specialized carnivores in the known galaxy. They evolved over the millennia to infiltrate cocktail parties, wedding receptions, and class reunions. Once inside, they corner their unsuspecting prey and regale them with hours of banal anecdotes about office politics, family vacations, and medical issues. A successful hunt ends when the target kills itself out of desperation. If you’re ever invited to attend a Teskin business conference, decline and immediately change your telephone number, email address, mailing address, and name.
D’armic reached for his cup to take another sip when the cutter’s proximity alarm chimed. Reflexes honed during many cycles propelled D’armic to the command cave. He was halfway there when the strangeness of the situation hit him.
The cutter was decelerating through high-space, on course for Culpus-Alam. His three-dimensional ship couldn’t actually collide with any of the four-dimensional matter native to high-space. On the rare occasions that his three-dimensional cutter did intersect high-space material, it sort of floated around it due to incompatible topologies, or something. He didn’t fathom how it worked exactly, but then, few could. Those that did were either institutionalized for their own safety, or became performance artists.
D’armic knew he couldn’t collide with anything of this dimension, which meant the alarm was warning of an impending impact with something from his dimension. The odds against that were … well, the usual superlatives weren’t going to cut it.
The cutter wasn’t in immediate peril. The ship’s sensor suite was sensitive enough to afford D’armic plenty of time to analyze the situation and take appropriate action, even at maximum velocity. As soon as he reached the command cave, he bonded with the ship’s computer, feeding a steady flow of data into his consciousness.
What he saw didn’t merely defy understanding. It snuck out of its bedroom window at 1:00 A.M., stole understanding’s prized collector car from the garage, and crashed it into a tree.
Ahead of his cutter, a titanic worm of fire twisted and danced in the vacuum. Its skin boiled, spitting chunks larger than his cutter into high-space. It was a nightmare monster of the deep caverns, straight from his race’s oldest, forgotten superstitions. It slithered toward his ship, intent on devouring him in its hellish, glowing lava maw.
At least that’s what his lower brain believed. His higher brain was having trouble forming an opinion. In the absence of a rational counterbalance, his lower brain acted on its own initiative and opened a portal back to the universe below. The cutter dove through the portal, emerging safely back in his native dimension.
He searched in all directions for evidence of the monster, but there was none. The single star of the Culpus-Alam system shone ahead of his bow like a milky jewel. An involuntary tremor ran through D’armic’s body, and his skin danced with electricity. He felt suddenly fatigued.
Was that fear? he asked himself. No, fear was the wrong word. There had been no time to be afraid. It certainly resembled the drug-induced feelings he’d experienced as a larva, but it was more raw and immediate. Panic, perhaps? He’d been in danger before, even mortal danger. Why was this time different? The question deserved contemplation, but not now.
The worm was a mystery to solve, but first he had to review the progress of the experiment on the surface of Culpus-Alam. The little cutter’s trajectory carried it deeper into the system while its counter-grav engines worked overtime to shed momentum. The planet slowly moved out of the eclipse of the sun.
Something was wrong. D’armic had never been to this system before, but his assignment files described it as a garden world of lush forests and deep oceans. The planet revealed by his cutter’s telescope was a tortured waste. The atmosphere was filled with carbon oxides, sulfates, and particulate indicative of massive volcanic activity. Vast webs of glowing cracks lined the surface, making the whole planet look like a shattered egg. Tracing the scars backward led to a massive hole in the world’s crust, from which a fountain of lava erupted, sending molten rock into orbit. An asteroid crater?
D’armic’s mind raced, seeking an explanation that would solve the disparity between the world described in his briefing and the shattered husk before his eyes. The orbital location and inclination was right, but everything else was wrong. He dug through the stream of data, correlating atmospheric sampling, crust composition, rotational speed, mass …
Mass. There wasn’t enough of it. He quickly worked up an estimate of the ejecta thrown clear of the planet, but the total was still short by nearly a percent. An asteroid impact would have added mass to the planet, so that hypothesis was tossed down the stream.
Something occurred to him then that sent an icy jolt through his spine. He thought of the worm, thought of its color and size. Hoping he was wrong, but almost certain he wasn’t, he dug into the sensor records from the encounter. The fire worm’s estimated mass matched what was missing from Culpus-Alam to six decimal places.
D’armic put a hand to his mouth, reluctant to believe what he’d discovered, but the conclusion was inescapable. The worm really was a monster from his people’s past, but it hadn’t risen from the depths of their imaginations.
Millennia ago, in the closing days of the Lividite war against, well, everybody, it became apparent their military had bitten off just enough to choke on. The Lividite war machine had overreached.
The Pu’Lan were closest to the front lines. They’d handed the Lividies a string of defeats, the first in the history of their campaigns among the stars. Desperate to regain the initiative, the Lividite military hatched a plan to make an example of the Pu’Lan.
As it turns out, destroying an entire world was a simple affair, provided the culprits were without remorse. Simply fly a ship straight at the world, open a high-space portal, and allow the hole in the universe to bore a tunnel straight through to the other side. The resulting collapse of the magma tunnel set off mayhem on a scale that would ruin the surface, triggering two massive volcanoes at the entry and exit wounds, shattering tectonic plates, disrupting the planet’s core and magnetic field. It was an apocalypse.
The Pu’Lan were all but obliterated. While it was nearly impossible to truly eradicate a space-faring race, without their home world as a keystone, their culture and heritage crumbled. The ancestors of the scattered survivors grew into nomads, echoes of a once-proud race, and a constant reminder of the Lividites’ bloodthirstiness, to their everlasting shame.
It was called geocide, and there was no higher crime in Assembly space.
D’armic scanned the surface of Culpus-Alam for survivors. It was proper procedure, but he knew it was futile. Between the volcanic outgassing, massive ground shakes, the rain of molten debris falling from orbit, and the firestorms tearing through the forests, there was little chance any complex life would survive.
The chill in his bones was turning to heat. The population had been completely defenseless. They possessed nothing more advanced than flint spears and stone axes. The destruction of the Pu’Lan had been a galaxy-shaping tragedy, but that conflict had been between near peers technologically. The humans on Culpus-Alam were not equipped to understand what had happened to them, much less defend against it.
Even if there were no survivors, perhaps he could still find the killers. As was Lividite custom, all the planet’s research and observation stations were built into underground caves. There was one for each colony, twenty-seven in total. That gave D’armic twenty-seven chances to recover whatever data the planet’s sensor network had recorded before the attack. But there was too much interference at this altitude. Establishing a direct link meant dropping into the shooting gallery that had become low orbit.
He sent out a hail, hoping one of the facilities had survived. In fact, two had. They pinged back, requesting authentication codes while the little cutter dodged pieces of red-hot debris moving at orbital speeds. The uploads dragged on for what seemed like an epoch. Attempting to speed things up, he limited the data request to the last three days.
Even still, time ran out for one of the sites. Lava from a nearby flow broke through a natural dam and flooded the cave with liquefied rock. Not even Lividite technology could stand up to that sort of abuse.
The last site was more fortunate. It survived just long enough to broadcast what it had seen. Data retrieved, the cutter hastily climbed out of Culpus-Alam’s gravity well while pebbles ricocheted off the hull. In time, an accretion disk would form, perhaps even a small moon.
For the next several hundred cycles, the planet’s surface would be mercilessly bombarded by meteorites as parts of its own mantle returned. Whatever simple life survived would have a daunting climb ahead of it before it would return to multicellular complexity.
D’armic settled the cutter into a lazy orbit above the swarm of rocks and began scrounging through the data. Starting from the end and working backward, he learned the attack had come less than a day earlier. The quality of the tactical information was poor, owing to the sensors being optimized for ground-level viewing. The residents had not been expected to develop powered flight anytime soon.
Still, there was enough data to confirm the appearance of the high-space portal right before contact. However, the ship that opened it was obscured behind the portal itself. Moving further back through the time line, D’armic caught a break. A second high-space portal had been opened a few moments before the one that had delivered the deathblow, and two ships had escaped through it.
He sifted through the limited records, attempting to tease additional information from them, but the shoddy resolution persisted in beguiling him. There was no way to tell the class of the two vessels or even their fleet of origin. The bearing of the ships as they escaped and an approximate mass value were all he could glean, but with luck, that might be enough.
He continued backward until he saw two small atmospheric craft take off from the surface. A landing party, he thought. Another chance to put a face on the killers.
The first craft in the playback wasn’t much help. The occupants were covered in armor, their features disguised by helmets. They were bipedal, four-limbed, and of medium size, which narrowed the possibilities down to only six dozen known sentient species. Their armor and weaponry were an unfamiliar design, but the group was unmistakably infantry.
The occupants of the second craft wore no such obstructions. D’armic froze the image, wrestling with what he saw. It was a human female, judging by her chest protrusions and slim waist. She wore long hair of a shade far lighter than any of the tribes found on Culpus-Alam.
This presented a problem, for if she wasn’t native, it could only mean the ships had come from Earth’s systems, but that was plainly impossible. Humans were still centuries away from developing high … space …
The answer struck D’armic like one of the searing rocks erupting from the dying world below. Buoy #4258743-E. By a coincidence of cosmic proportions, they had stumbled onto it, stolen it, and used the high-space radio within to copy their own, doubtlessly crude, portal generator.
Which also led D’armic to the inescapable conclusion that the humans had slid right past him before he had mended the gap in the buoy network. That wasn’t going to reflect well on his performance review.
No matter. Pride is a consideration for other races.
As was anger, but despite the fact he felt none of the rage that had driven his ancestors, D’armic felt a responsibility to the dead of Culpus-Alam. His people had been the ones to hatch the atrocity of geocide into the universe. It was therefore appropriate that a Lividite be the one to return it to the grave.
He set about preparing a detailed report for his superiors, but even traveling through high-space, the dispatch would take considerable time to reach Bureau headquarters. As had been the case for many cycles, D’armic would have to move on his own initiative.
Leaving the broken world in his wake, D’armic set course along an identical bearing to the retreating vessels. His cutter would have to move swiftly before the trail overgrew. D’armic couldn’t fathom why, absent their passions, the humans had slaughtered their own people.
As the high-space portal opened ahead, he resolved to ask them. Personally.