Chapter 1: Shadow Man (Part 2)

Find Samuel Matthews

The screen went dark and the door behind the boy whisked open. He spun around just as three men came rushing through the door, each of them holding small silver rods; the ends point at the boy glowed red, and the rods made a low buzzing noise that grew louder and higher until the whole room was filled with a piercing whine so awful the boy covered his ears almost without meaning too. The men in white spread out as they piled into the room, their dark eyes focused on him, and the boy stepped back, pressing his bare back against the smooth, cold surface of the pedestal.

More men in white crowded the corridor outside the door, he could see them milling about and shouting at one another, and at the three men already inside the room. Why didn’t they all come in to catch him? He’d never be able to escape so many. They must think three men more than enough to corner him. Even if he made it past these three, he’d never get past the others.

The door slammed shut behind the three men—one of them cursed under his breath but none made a move towards the boy. Which was good, because the whine from the three red-tipped rods was making it hard for him to focus on anything. The sound was beyond painful, it felt like a pair of the sharp needles the Watchers used to poke and prod him during examinations were being pushed into his ears. He couldn’t move . . . he could hardly breath. The whining buzz rose even higher, and the boy fell to his knees. His vision blurred and doubled as he gasped for air, but still the men stayed back, huddling close to the wall. Why didn’t they come and take him? At least that would stop the noise.

The man standing between the other to pointed at the boy and shouted, “Get him! Get him now!” He sounded so scared that the boy would have laughed had he been able to breath. The other two men glanced at each other, one of them shaking his head. Neither moved. Red in the face like he’d been running all day, the first man grabbed the one on his right by the shoulder and pushed him forward. “Take him now, dammit! That’s an order! Hurry before something happens!”

The man he’d pushed muttered some word the boy hadn’t ever heard before and took another step forward. His partner on the left glanced one more time at the first man, the followed the other man towards the boy. When they were two steps away their rods clicked loudly, and the pulsing red light at their tips flashed to bright blue. The piercing noise vanished with the red light, and the boy gasped in relief, falling forward on his hands. The blue light coming from the two rods grew brighter and brighter and began to crackle and pop, tiny flashes of light leaping from the tip and snapping in the air.

“All right you little freak,” one of the men said, “Don’t move.”

The other man reached out slowly with a trembling hand, moving to grab the boy by the back of his neck. He didn’t understand what was happening—too many weird things had happened today for him to understand any of it—but the boy did understand one thing: if the men caught him, if they even managed to touch him, they’d put him back in his tube. He’d be stared at and pocked and prodded and cut by the Watchers, and he’d never be free again.

He couldn’t let that happen.

The man’s fingers were inches from his skin when the boy jerked back, rolling up onto his feet faster even than he would have thought possible.

He’d never spoken to another person before, not that he could remember, but he put all his strenght into one word, one sound that he screamed as loud and as long as he could:

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

The room exploded. The banks of screens running the perimeter of the room shattered, jagged shards of glass and metal ripping through the air. The computer pedestals dotting the floor burst open, sparks racing across their bent and twisted surfaces, monitors and screens flipping through the air, crashing and rupturing against the walls and ceiling and floor. Fire, smoke and steam boiled out of the broken pedestals and gaping lines of missing screens, throwing the whole room into an even deeper darkness. The two men who’d approached the boy barely had time to scream before they were blown away, caught up in the rain of glass and heat. Then, almost faster than it had started, the storm was over.

The boy stood alone in the middle of the room, heart thumping so hard it felt ready to jump out of his chest, bits of glass that lodged in the ceiling tinkling down through the smoke aorund him. A screen that had somehow remained upright during the explosion crashed to the floor behind him and the boy jumped with a strangled shriek, hurriedly stepping down from the raised pedestal, bare feet crunching painfully across chips of broken glass.

The room was a disaster, every monitor blown, every light out. The four walls bowed outward, like a giant or something had pounded them out of shape. Smoke still swirled in the air, lit now and then by the harsh glare of sparks leaping from exposed wires. Alarms were blaring again, but they sounded thin and hollow, like they were far away. Air hissed loudly somewhere off to the right and the boy shivered. He could feel it getting colder. There were three limp shapes huddled against the walls, two to the boy’s left and right that he tried not to look at, and one slumpled against the door.

As for himself, the boy thought he was okay. His arms and legs were trembling, his feet hurt where the glass had cut him, his chest was still heaving, but other than that he was fine. Something, a quiet voice in the back of his head, whispered that this wasn’t right, that the glass and fire should have cut and burned him, that he should have been thrown from his feet like the three men where weren’t moving anymore. He shouldn’t just be . . . well, fine.

The man crumpled against the bottom of the door didn’t move when the boy tapped him on the shoulder, but the door behind him tried to slide open. It got caught less than half way open, and when the boy bent closer to investigate, he saw that it had been bent outwards somehow, like something had hit it. With a squeal of gears the door tried to open again. There was a grinding sound from inside the wall and then a shower of sparks rained down around the boy and the door ground to a halt. It was stuck.

There should be just enough room to squeeze through, the boy decided, after studying the thin opening for a moment. Just one problem: the man was still laying in the way; one of his arms had flopped out into the hallway.

He tried pushing the man through the opening first, but his stomach was too big, so he settled on dragging the man by his thick wrists. Being so close to the man was unnerving, and as he pulled and tugged the body across the floor, the boy tried to keep most of his body as far away as possible. The man was heavy, and despite the chill that seemed to be creeping into the room from all sides, the boy soon worked up a sweat. To make things worse, the man smelled strange. The boy didn’t recognize the odor, but whatever it was it was strongest near the man’s face, and it made the boy’s stomach growl.

By the time he managed to get the big man away from the door the boy was shivering, despite the slick of sweat on his skin. His breath steamed in small white puffs in front of his eyes as he picked his way carefully through the glass back to the door. Unlike the man’s fat stomach, the boy slid through the opening without a problem.

Outside the room the hallway had gone dark, save for the still-flickering light directly above. He could see the nearest tubes on either side, but beyond them everything was shrouded in darkness. The alarms that had been blaring right after the explosion had been silenced, and the only sound the boy could hear was the faint sigh of air rushing past him into the room, nice and warm on his chilled skin. He frowned. There hadn’t been a wind before. At least it was warmer in the hall.

Not only was the hallway dark, it was empty too. The crowd of men he’d seen through the doorway was nowhere to be seen. He tried to peer throught he darkness to either side, hoping to find some sign of where the men had gone, but he couldn’t see anything. It was too dark, and he didn’t want to step out of the dim light. Not at all.

The light flickered again, and something moved in the darkness beyond the tubes to the boy’s right. He gasped, spinning around to face the motion. He couldn’t see anything but the pitch blackness. Eyes wide, the boy kept watching, heart pounding in his throat.

Something moved again, a shape so inky black it made the shadows around it seem bright. The shape slid forward towards the boy, sucking in the shadows around it. The boy should have been able to see it better as it came closer to the light. Instead, the pale light seemed to retreat from the oncoming shadow. A wave of solid darkness rolled towards the boy, who scrambled backwards until he was hugging the far edge of the small circle of light.

Only once it was so close the boy could have reached out and touched it did the shadow stop, rearing up until it filled the hallway from one wall to the other, so dense and dark that the boy couldn’t even see the nearest tubes anymore. The shadow moved like steam, rolling and boiling inside of itself, thin tendrils like black fog waving gently in the air.

His eyes must have still been adjusting, because the boy suddenly realized he could see a person inside the black cloud. At least, it was a shape like a person. Only it looked too tall and too thin, with long arms and legs bent at odd angles. He could see eyes too, two points of light that glowed a sickly green-and-white deep inside the cloud of darkness. The sound of breathing filled the hallway, a long slow sighing that rattled the boy’s chest, and the Shadow Man took another step forward.

The boy was afraid. More afraid than he’d ever been in his entire life. Even the Watchers and their helpers in white uniforms hadn’t terrified him like this. He tried to scream, but his throat locked. He couldn’t run . . . he was surprised his legs hadn’t collapsed alread. The chill that had filled the room seeped out into the hallway, and his teeth started chattering, the snot in his nose froze and the sweat on his skin turned to ice.

Again the Shadow Man moved closer, leaning down to stare at the boy. Icey fingers that he couldn’t see ran over his bare scalp and then the boy’s throat unlocked and he screamed as those invisible fingers dug into his brain. He could feel the Shadow Man digging through his mind, searching, hunting. Hunting for what? The boy cried out again and fell to his knees as his mind was turned inside out.

The boy realized he was going to die.

And then the Shadow Man disappeared

The lights in the hallway switched on one by one, racing away from the boy on either side, bathing the tubes in their harsh white glare, and the boy squeezed his eyelids shut against the too-bright light. The air was warm again, so warm that it almost felt hot, and the frozen sweat on his arms and legs melted, running down his body and pattering on the metal beneath his feet.

When he finally opened his eyes, the hallway was empty except for the his brothers and sisters in their tubes, and himself.

Somehow, that didn’t make the boy feel any better.

Apologies, I know this is two posts in a week, but I wrote this out today and wanted to get some feedback.

Questons:

1) I'm trying to keep the writing a lot more simple in this book than in Spear of the Ancients. How does it read to ya'll?

2) are there any parts you got confused with?

3) How is my description of the surroundings? Confusing at any point?

4) Suggestions?

Chapter 1: Shadow Man (Part 1)

Hey ya'll, here's chapter one to my sci-fi story. I'll be getting lots more to you soon. My biggest question for this section is: The boy's name is intentionally left out during this early part of the story. Is it too confusing, or is it interesting? How does the whole thing read? Were you lost at any parts? How does the dialogue between the boy and the computer work?

Um, thats about it. Enjoy:

An alarm began to blare somewhere nearby, and the boy felt several things happen all at once. His tube leaned forward on its short robotic arms, jerking stiffly as the gears ground against each other. The tiny needles in his wrists and elbows and the base of his neck retracted with a ratcheting clatter, and the slim cables that suspended him in the middle of the tube let go of his arms and suddenly he was falling, slowly and gently, through the thick, warm fluid that was still sloshing about viscously, thanks to the bobbing tube.

The boy had been dreaming, like always, and he didn’t really wake up until his knee bumped the cold, curved wall of the tube. Then his eyes did pop open, and he knew instantly that something was . . . different.

The world outside of his tube was never clear, but usually their were huge leering faces peering at him through the tube, their features distorted by the amber liquid he lived in and the thick glass of the tube. Except their eyes, of course. Their cold eyes were never distorted, hard pinpricks that stared at him accusingly from between white masks and white hats. His tube never moved, he never woke up, without the Watchers being there.

Except today.

There was a quiet whine behind his head, and the tube began to tremble. Then, with a long, loud sluuurrrp! the liquid began to drain out of the bottom of the tube, taking the boy along with it. He closed his eyes with a calm sort of resignation, and waited for the hands to catch him like they always did. Only, this time they didn’t.

Falling amid a shower of golden fluid, he only had the chance for one strangled yelp before he flopped onto the cold, hard metal floor beneath his open tube. Stunned (but really more surprised than hurt) the boy lay there for a long moment, chest heaving, waiting for the Watchers to pick him up. A long, long time passed without any hands grabbing him, so finally he opened one eye to look around, only to find that he couldn’t see through the fluid that worked its way between his eyelides. Groaning, he pushed himself up until he was sitting and rubbed the last of the thick stuff out of his eyes.

All around him the jelly had piled up in thick blobs that were hissing and popping and dissolving in great clouds of steam. The stuff was even rolling off his own skin like smoke! He tried to brush the steaming stuff off of his shoulders, but it just stuck to his hands; and when he tried cleaning his hands off on his legs, the jelly just stuck there too. Finally, he gave up. The stuff was disappearing fast enough anyways.

Standing on wobbly legs, he looked around in growing confusion. He really was alone. Well . . . sort of, anyways. He was standing in the middle of a long hallway—so long, in fact, that he couldn’t see the end in either direction; instead, the far ends of the hall seemed to curve up somehow, like he was standing at the bottom of a circle so huge he couldn’t see all of it. And there wasn’t a person in sight, at least not anyone walking around.

Tubes, just like his own, lined either side of the hall, stretching off into the distance and disappearing with the curve of the floor. More tubes than he’d ever imagined, and each one occupied. Like his, the tubes were each wide enough to hold a small person, and mounted from the ceiling on thick arms of metal and some kind of white, shiny plating. The boy stepped up to the nearest tube, the one just to the right of his, and stared up in fascination at the child inside. It was a girl—her head was shaved just like his, but he could tell because she was wearing a funny looking black wrap that covered her whole torso, instead of smaller piece like his, which just covered below his waist. Deciding it would be fun to show off a little—after all, no one ever got out of their tubes unless the Watchers were waiting—he rapped his knuckles against the glass. The girl just kept sleeping. Frowning, he reached up to knock again, harder this time, but then thought better of it. If he was too noisey, the Watchers would just come and put him back in his tube again.

A sudden grinding sound made him jump nearly out of his own skin, but it was just his empty tube retracting up into its socket. He laughed at the sight, then clapped a hand over his mouth, eyes wide. That was the first sound he’d ever made. At least, he thought it was.

A long ways down the hall, one of the long lights set into the ceiling was flickering, and the boy decided he’d better investigate. His bare feet made no sound on the cold metal floor, which was a good thing . . . he was too excited by his surroundings to pay much attention to being sneaky. He’d never seen the hallway before, not like this, not from outside his tube. The Watchers always covered his eyes as soon as they had him secured to the hard, wheeled table they used to move him around. This was way better.

Every single one of the children in the endless line of tubes was sleeping. Every once in a while the boy would stop and wave at a boy or girl, hoping they might be awake. Sometimes he even risked knocking on the glass again. But it never worked. They were all sleeping. It was kind of funny, seeing all of the sleeping kids. In fact, it was really funny. The boy started laughing again, and this time he didn’t stop. He liked the sound of his own voice.

By the time he neared the flickering light, his own tube was hidden by the curving floor. He wasn’t worried though. He could always just turn around and walk back to his tube if—

Right beneath the flickering light there was a door set into the wall between two tubes. He stopped beneath the winking light and stared at the door, and while he stared, a question began to worm its way into his head.

What was on the other side of the door?

His stomach twisted when he realized what he was thinking, and a cold knot formed in his chest. The Watchers wouldn’t like it if they caught him on the other side of that door, he knew that much, and it was almost enough to send him running back to his tube.

He turned away from the door, heart thumping, and took a single step back towards his tube. Then he stopped again. What would he do if he went back? He couldn’t climb up inside, not with the tube retracted. And who knew if the Watchers were even coming back? And then another thought struck him: maybe the Watchers had left. Eyes wide with excitement, he smiled. Maybe they were never coming back! In that case, he couldn’t just sit around in this cold hallway waiting for nothing. He had to find out where this place was. More importantly, he had to find a way to wake up the other boys and girls.

Gritting his teeth, the boy turned back towards the door and took a careful step forward. The door was wedged between two tubes, almost like whoever had put it there was trying to hide it. It was a plain, gray slab of metal, reenforced with thick metal bars. There was no handle that the boy could see, no way of opening it. Come to think of it, he didn’t even know why he’d thought it was a door. Maybe it wasn’t even a—

He’d taken half a step forward, when the door hissed open without warning, sliding soundlessly up into the ceiling to reveal a dimmly lit room beyond. Heart hammering in his throat, the boy edged forward, eyes and ears straining for any sign of the Watchers.

The room beyond the door was tiny compaired to the long hallway outside, with a low ceiling covered in dim lights and whirring fans. A dozen thick steel pedestals dotted the floor, each one coming up to the boy’s waist and topped with an assortment of screens: long wide screens, small round screens, blank triangular screens, and some screens that didn’t seem to be made out of anything . . . just rectangles of light floating in the air above the pedestals.

The boy crept into the room on the balls of his feet, barely looking back when the door shut behind him.

Only one of the consoles was active. It stood at the center of the room, and all of the other pedestals seemed to be oriented towards it. Light flooded from its half-dozen screens, blinking on and off as information flashed across the bright panels. Mesmerized, the boy angled between the other pedestals, hardly noticing the other banks of dark screens that lined the walls of the room.

The central console was raised up above the rest of the room on a kind of round step, which the boy jumped up on. He leaned in close to the screens, eyes jumping back and forth watching the flashing lights and shifting shapes that scrolled up and down, and sometimes across, the screens. He was so busy taking in the lights and colors and the little clicking sounds that came from inside the pedestal beneath the screens, that it took him a minute realize that something was written on the largest, center screen:

Hello

The boy laughed. “Um . . . hello,” he said nervously, and realized for the first time that he could talk.

He blinked, and the words on the computer had changed. You must leave this place

The boy blinked again, this time in surprise. “What?”

More words. You must leave now

“Leave? Why? Where would I go?” The boy shook his head. “I don’t even know where here is!”

You are in danger

That got his attention.

“Danger? From who? Are the Watchers coming?” He shot a glance over his shoulder, back the way he had came. The door was still shut. That was good. The thought of being pounced on from behind, was enough to make his knees tremble.

You will leave this place now

The air above the screens shimmered, and suddenly there was a floating picture rotating slowly over the boy’s head. He gasped, shrinking back instinctively, but the picture just stayed where it was, turning slowly in the air. It was made all of bright green bars, and seemed to show somekind of long . . . sliver, or something. There was a bulge around the middle of sliver, and at the base of the bulge, a pusling red dot. Next to the dot, written in bright read letters, were the words YOU ARE HERE.

“Its a map,” the boy exclaimed, surprised that he knew what the picture was, and even more surprised that he knew what a map was.

Correct

The glowing wire skeleton expanded and morphed, zooming in to focus on the blinking red dot. The new map, the boy realized, showed the outlines of the very room he was standing in, along with the surrounding rooms and passageways all around it. An arrow leapt out from the red dot and zig-zagged its way through maze of rooms and halls, the wireframe image expanding as the glowing trail grew longer. Thomas watched in growing consternation as the trail continued growing, leaping up elevator shafts and twisting round long empty chasms that he didn’t recognize.

“Um . . .”

The arrow stopped in what looked like a huge room on the outer edge of the gigantic sliver.

The boy squinted, retracing the red path. “Is that how I get out of here?”

Correct

He stood up straight, leaning back from the weird screens. “I don’t think I want to . . .”

Find Samuel Matthews

“What?”

Have you memorized the route?

The boy scanned the glowing path one more time, almost without meaning to, then nodded reluctantly. “Yes. I guess.”

Find Samuel Matthews

The screen went dark and the door behind the boy whisked open.

Wrinkles in Time and Space

Ok, I know this is two in a row for me--sorry. So, this is a bit of backstory (worldbuilding, if you'll forgive me the phrase) that I've been working on for a sci-fi thingy floating around in my head. I posted it on my other blog (click on my picture in the upper left hand corner and you can check that blog out) but I thought I'd drop it here so you can take a looksie at it.

Here she be:
___________________________________________________________________________

Date: 357.01 ESD
Author: Lt. Alexander Cherkesov, FIA
To: Fleet Media Distribution Command (FMDC)
Subject: Information Packet regarding ISI-1 (Enigma)
Authorization: Interim Congress (IM) and Rear Admiral James Turner (UFMCOM)

The discovery of ISI-1 (Imperial Security Issue 1) or Enigma as those associated with the project termed the alien spacecraft, will surely be noted in the future as the genesis of Earth's nearly total destruction and the beginning of humanity's struggle for survival. However, in the grand scheme of a galactic history millions of years old, the discovery of ISI-1 is nothing more than the light dusting of snow on an iceberg hundreds of meters thick. The complex plans and chaotic chances that shaped the the emergence of the so-called '10,000' would fill more books than the former Library of Congress in Old Washington ever held. This brief essay will only attempt a general outline of the creation of the 10,000 and the long path that brought them to the icy margins of our solar system.

After the Battle of Graemarijii, only 3.5 petabytes of data were salvaged from the ruined Blade Ship that had been escorting the former Grand Imperial Fleet. For obvious reasons, the data could not be analyzed until sometime later, after the Battle of Nezpael XIII, when the Interim Congress of the United Fleet of Mankind created the Fleet Intelligence Agency (FIA). Using data collected from the Blade Ship and military installations on Graemarijii and Nezpael XIII, the FIA managed to piece together a tiny (~20 gigabyte) data collection concerning the 10,000 and their pre-Earth history. This brief outline is an extremely abbreviated summary of the Official Historical Report 1 that was submitted to the Interim Congress on 348.01 ESD.

All reliable records obtained from the Blade Ship and the military installations on Graemarijii and Nexpael XIII indicate that 540 Ma ±15 Ma, or roughly around the time the fossil record began on Earth, a revolution began that overthrew a pangalactic empire that had ruled nearly 95% of the galaxy. The revolution was headed by a mysterious race referred to only as the Architects, who--after achieving victory--took over the rule of the galaxy they had just freed. All of our records from this extremely remote age come from the Architects themselves (a purge of all non-Architect data seems to have taken place roughly 15 years after they had pulled down the former empire), and nowhere in those records is the name of their former rulers mentioned. Additionally, it is unclear whether the previous rulers practiced a harsh and violent, or a more enlightened form imperialism. It is even possible, according to some FIA analysts, that the previous empire had been some type of republic or democratic-analog. Nor do the scant data indicate whether or not the Architects were tyrants or popularly elected leaders. The tone and changing content of the preserved records do suggest that while the original government headed by the Architects was an open organization made up of thousands of different species, as time progressed, the government became closed to all but the Architects, who became the exclusive overseers of the galaxy.

Best estimates by the FIA suggest the Architects ruled their empire--albeit, a steadily diminishing empire--for nearly 100 million years. The records collected by the FIA cover only .5%, or 5,000 years of that time-span (in Old Earth dates, the period of the Architect's rule spanned from the middle of the Cambrian Period to sometime near the end of the Ordovician Period). And the 5,000 years of history the FIA has managed to reconstruct are not continuous. 80% of the records have to do with a low-level bureaucratic squabble between to interior government departments that somehow lasted 2,000 years. Yet, as luck would have it, the largest continuous record deals directly with the history of the 10,000; or rather, their creation.

Two thousand years before the Architect Empire collapsed, a single-star system with an O-class white giant at its heart was converted into a research facility. The seven terrestrial planets and fifteen Neptune-sized gas giants that orbited the star were decomposed down to the nano-scale and then rebuilt into nine laboratory worlds and an energy-collecting array reminiscent of a Dyson Swarm. The nine planets were equidistant from their star, and orbited along 9 different routes, all of which described an orbital sphere around the sun. The research system was staffed exclusively by Architects--an oddity even at so late a date in their empire.

For 1900 years the Architect scientists labored in secret, cut off from the rest of the galaxy. At the time, even priority communications were restricted to tight-beam bursts to currier ships that jumped to within 100 AUs of the system, recorded the scientists' communications, and then jumped away again. Additionally, records indicate that no less than seven civilizations whose homesystems were within 20 light-years of the research system were forcibly transplanted to new colony worlds, or--in the case of one species that refused to be moved--eradicated. The Architects kept such tight control of the research project that it is only through piecing together later events that we know the research system was in any way connected with the 10,000.

In the end, the lengths to which the Architects went to cover up their project proved futile. The scientists at the research system found that--cut off from their families and leaders for so long--their priorities and the aims of their government no longer aligned. A revolution ignited in the research system. The arriving government currier ships were destroyed, and the scientists converted their lab-worlds into vast military production lines. Desperate to maintain control of a project it had invested two millennia in, the Architect Empire dispatched an entire fleet to quell the researchers. The fleet jumped into the system and split into a dozen task forces. In less than twenty-four hours, the Dyson Swarm had been knocked off-line, and 8 of the 9 lab-worlds were effectively shut down.

The most fierce resistance, however, was concentrated around a single world, where the shoddy, rag-tag fleet the researchers had scraped together was huddled, waiting to engage the Architect fleet. The revolutionary fleet was destroyed, to a being, during fierce sub-orbital fighting over the next 48-hours. Then, with their fleet gone, the dirt-side scientists played their last card: a kit-bashed planet-buster that cracked the lab-world into a billion pieces. The titanic explosion killed the surviving scientists and destroyed 95% of the Architect fleet. In the ensuing chaos, a single starship that had been idling in the darkness of inter-system space, powered up its systems and rushed towards the edge of the system.

Somehow--the surviving records are vague on this point--the ship was damaged before it could clear the debris field that was all that remained of the Dyson Swarm and jump to safety. The jump should have put the starship en route to the relative safety of the galactic core--a section of the galaxy that the Architects had lost control of several million years earlier; however, the damaged ship only made it 400 light-years before before its jump-drives failed and it experienced a catastrophic reversion into real-space.

There the Ship remained--its drive systems destroyed, its computer mind slowly decaying into insanity, and its secret cargo locked in stasis--stranded in deep space 300 light-years from the nearest inhabited system, for 200 million years.

Around the time the first dinosaurs were evolving in Triassic South America, the Ship--and its cargo--was discovered by an amphibian-analog species who called themselves the Yar'eeg. The group of amphibiloids that stumbed onto the Ship were members of an exploratory team--the first ever to leave the Yar'eegs' home system. The exploratory team towed the Ship back to their homeworld--no mean feat, when one considers that the Yar'eeg had yet to develop FTL capabilities. (the data is suspiciously silent regarding the physiology of the Yar'eeg and the nature/location of their system).

It took five centuries for the Yar'eeg to reach their homeworld, but upon arrival, the species immediately opened the Ship, and begun to first study, and then experiment on, the cargo they found within.

Records of the Yar'eeg experiments give us our first glimpse into the nature of the Architect's secret creation--a creation that very likely triggered the end of the Architect Empire, for--after the destruction of the research system--the Architects are never mentioned again.

The surviving Yar'eeg records have been heavily processed by the Great Ones--a blessing for humanity, as it turns out, because the Yar'eeg seem to have communicated primarily by color changes in their skin. The records appear to have been translated some 5,000 years ago by a Great One client-race--possibly the Bo'orami--into a text-based language that the FIA was able to render more or less completely into Standard English.

The Yar'eeg described the cargo they recovered from the Ship as a "quantum node". Apparently, the object wasn't an object at all, but a--for lack of a better word--'kink' in the fabric of the universe, a flaw in the space time continuum that the Architect scientists had somehow managed to isolate and sustain inside a [original = ich'thariim] stasis chamber. The Yar'eeg saw the quantum node as a means of achieving FTL travel, and once they had managed to link into the surviving Architect machinery, all of their efforts were directed at turning the quantum node into some sort of propulsion drive.

2,000 years after the node arrived on the Yar'eeg homeworld, the scientists made a break through: the quantum node was divided. At first, the scientists merely divided the node into two identical nodes that inhabited discrete locations in space. The scientists continued to refine the process, and eventually managed to divide the original node into 10,000 identical nodes. From the information pieced together by the Great Ones, it would seem the Yar'eeg were attempting to produce enough quantum nodes to power thousands of ships. Indeed, there is some indication that they did succeed in integrating a handful of the nodes into propulsion drives . . . thought whether the drives were ever actually tested, and whether the ships powered by those drives were for peaceful or military uses, is unknown.

Shortly after the 10,000 nodes were separated, the Yar'eeg were attacked by a marauding, spacefaring race. The nature of the attackers is unknown, but the end result of the attack was extinction for the Yar'eeg and destruction of their homesystem. Their homeworld was sacked, and the special orbital facility that housed the nodes was carried off by the marauders.

For 7,000 years the marauders carried the nodes with them, positioning it in the center of their fleet and worshiping it like a pagan god. Like the Yar'eeg, the marauders did not possess any methods of FTL travel. Instead, they traveled from one star system to its nearest neighbor, harvesting elements and supplies from uninhabited systems, destroying and plundering the homeworlds of inhabited systems. Dozens of generations passed while the fleet moved between the stars, and all the while, they carried the nodes with them. Little else is known about the marauders; apparently, even the technology that carried them through interstellar space was not their own. How and when they came by it is not known.

After 7,000 years, the marauders could no longer sustain themselves, and their society began to fragment. Intermittent fighting burned through the fleet, destroying one ship after another. As the population fell, vessels were scuttled and abandoned. Eventually, even the propulsion drives guttered out, leaving the fleet powerless and drifting. By the time the fleet drifted into the system it had been aiming for, it had become a veritable tomb--the marauders were dead.

The fleet had, by sheer luck, entered into an inhabited system only 78 lightyears from Earth. The denizens of the binary system were a reef-dwelling species semi-analogous to terrestrial crinoids. Because they communicate by passing complex pheromones through water, the species was never named. FIA has designated the species (now extinct) as Crin-1.

At the time the drifting fleet entered their system, the Crin-1 had barely reached a sentient state. 75% of the fleet burned up in the atmosphere of the Crin-1 homworld as its orbit decayed. The (by that time) ancient Yar'eeg vessel that still housed the nodes somehow settled into a stable orbit, circling above the dark world for hundreds of thousands of years as the Crin-1 continued to develop. When the Crin-1 finally began colonizing the low orbit of their world (a period of time techonologically equivalent to the Earth era called the Space Race), they quickly discovered, and began exploring, the wreckage of the marauder fleet.

The physiology of the Crin-1 forced them to build space habitats that could maintain an inner aqueous environment. The difficulties involved with lifting something as weighty as water into orbit proved a challenge to the Crin-1, and it took them several hundreds of years longer than the average species to develop a truly sytem-wide civilization. But, some 300,000 years after the Yar'eeg vessel had settled into orbit over their world, the Crin-1 were sufficiently advanced to begin experimenting on the vessel, and eventually on the nodes themselves.

Crin-1 technology was completely organic--a rarity in galactic civilization, and another factor in the unusually long time it took them to develop a spacefaring culture--and they altered the nodes in a fundamental way. Apparently, by the time they began studying the nodes, the Crin-1 had also made first contact with an alien race. A hostile, alien race. Naturally, the Crin-1 looked to use the nodes as a weapon and a means of defending themselves.

In some way that not even the Great Ones seem to have understood, the Crin-1 linked the nodes to organic matter. The tissue the nodes were linked to, while wholly non-human, seems to have most resembled, at least in function, placental tissue. While the data is scarce, the FIA assumes the Crin-1s' intent was to create living organisms that somehow incorporated the quantum nodes into their neural network. Recent history has given ample demonstration to why such a creature would be of military interest.

However, war broke out between the Crin-1 and their alien aggressors before whatever process the Crin-1 had begun could be completed. Desperate to protect their research from the aliens, the Crin-1 moved the 'nodanisms' to an organic vessel that functioned both as a transport and a sentient laboratory that could continue the Crin-1s' experiments. The living ship was launched from their system back towards the galactic core--once again at sublight speeds.

Damaged as it fled the system, the Crin-1 vessel drifted through space for roughly 240 million years. The organic drives that powered the ship died after only 1,000 years. The creature-vessel was, however, completely sealed, and though its surface froze over, its critical systems and--more importantly--the storage zone, remained intact and semi-insulated. The nodanisms survived.

8,000 years ago, while mankind was busy inventing the wheel and colonizing the Western Hemisphere, the rest of the galaxy was divided by war. The Great Ones were 2,000 years into their conquest of the galaxy, and the only species that offered any real resistance to the Dark Conquerers were the Cham Nar.

The Cham Nar were an ancient race that had developed a far-flung theocratic society comprising some 10,000 star systems and 15,000 sentient species. At the time the Great Ones began spreading out from Tyrion, the Cham Nar were the dominant species in the galaxy.

Inevitably, war broke out between the Great Ones and the Cham Nar. Initially, the two species were evenly matched, and Great One expansion in the Cham Nar area of the galaxy was initially stymied. But as more and more systems fell to the Dark Conquerers, their power swelled, and Cham Nar controlled space slowly became an island in a galaxy dominated by the Great Ones. As their civilization fell about them, the Cham Nar began to search for a means by which they could oppose the Great Ones.

It was during this time that a slave-ship captained by a group of Ruus stumbled upon the dead and frozen Crin-1 vessel. By this time, the Great Ones had already discovered Earth and begun developing the human race as a secret weapon. The Great Ones collected thousands of men, women and children to conduct experiments on, and hundreds of these humans found their way onto the galactic slave market. The Ruus that found the Crin-1 vessel were transporting vat-grown human embryos that were bound for the flesh markets on Daragthar.

The slaveship was large enough to store the Crin-1 vessel within its hold. Logs recovered from the Ruus vessel indicate that the slaver-captain believed the Crin-1 vessel would fetch a high price on the black market. However, the Ruus did not have a chance to make a profit.

The curious Ruus, lured by the treasure they believed to be hidden inside the organic vessel, thawed the Crin-1 vessel out. The ship's neural systems woke up, and--finding itself inside an alien vessel--it initiated a series of defensive protocols. Neural tentacles sprouted from the organic ship and began working their way into the mechanical ship's electrical and computer networks, effectively rendering the Ruus vessel under direct control of the living ship. A biotoxin was released into the air, and within fifty minutes--the time it took for the toxin to permeate the entire vessel--the Ruus crew was incapacitated. The Chin-1 vessel then released a cloud of microscopic spores which, after falling on the comatose Ruus, worked their way into the beings' neural center, where they began to multiply. When the Ruus finally awoke, they had become nothing more than three hundred pairs of eyes, ears, and hands for the Chin-1 vessel.

Having secured its surroundings, the living ship set about fulfilling--as best it could--its secondary mandate: finish the process of transforming the nodanisms into living creatures. The human embryos the Ruus had been transporting made ready subjects into which the nodanisms could be implanted.

Surrounded by lightyears of empty space, the living ship happily went about its work, unaware of the galactic war raging all around it. It was there, hanging in the void of interstellar space, that the 10,000 were finally created.

2,000 years passed, and the failing systems of the Chin-1 ship finally died completely. The Ruus vessel--a shoddy thing of metal and wires--had gone dark centuries earlier. Slowly, both vessels succumbed to the freezing cold of space--only the embryonic chamber that housed the 10,000 remained sealed against the vacuum.

That it was the Cham Nar that found the Ruus slave ship and the Crin-1 vessel inside, and not the Great Ones, is a stroke of blinding luck that simply cannot be ignored. The power of the 10,000 wielded in the hands of the Allmind is too terrible to contemplate.

The Cham Nar, recognizing the power that lay dormant in the embryos, immediately brought the dead Ruus ship and its precious cargo back to their original homeworld, which was at that point, the only remaining world under their control.

It is at this point that the data retrieved from the Blade Ship, and the military installations on Graemarijii and Nexpael XIII, fail us. Circumstantial evidence found in the data (method of recording, timing, language, etc.) suggests that even before the 10,000 were discovered, the Cham Nar homeworld was under siege, surrounded by the full might of the Great Ones. What the Cham Nar intended to do with the 10,000 is a matter of pure speculation.

It is known that the Cham Nar enclosed the Ruus ship--and the Crin-1 vessel it still held-- inside a gigantic craft . . . the alien vessel termed Enigma by its discoverers. Evidence recovered from Enigma indicates that the enormous vessel left the Cham Nar homeworld roughly 6,000 years before the present. The ship sustained damage to its navigation and drive systems that is characteristic of a Blade Ship attack. Carbon samples collected from the damaged areas have been dated at 5987±5 years before the present. The ships' log--crippled at some point--suggests the ship jumped to no less than twenty random star systems before settling down in one undisclosed location for more than four millenia.

Critical systems affected by the final Blade Ship attack began to fail almost as soon as the ship made its first jump. The cursory research conducted on the ship indicates that the ship attempted to repair itself . . . some of the blast damage on the drive units has been repaired on the atomic scale. But the repair systems themselves seem to have been among the first systems to crash.

One thousand years ago the ship had become, for all intents and purposes, a ghost ship. Somehow, the critical systems that protected the Ruus and Crin-1 vessels had remained intact. At that time, the Cham Nar ship was infiltrated by an unknown group of beings who repaired the drive units and jumped the ship into our own system's outermost regions.

The jump signature was detected by a Blade Ship that was monitoring our solar system. Briefly, the two vessels engaged; however, the battle proved to be mutually destructive. The larger, but derelict, Cham Nar vessel was all but destroyed, and the Blade Ship was completely destroyed. The unidentified crew that had piloted the Cham Nar vessel was wiped out in the action, but--again--the quantum nodes, housed in their human bodies, survived.

For a thousand years the Cham Nar vessel orbited our sun, until it was discovered by naval forces of the former United Empire of America.

The subsequent discovery of Enigma and the 10,000, along with the actions of the most notable of the 10,000 during the past few months, are the subject of continued study by the FIA and the Interim Congress.

As more information regarding Enigma and the 10,000 become available, the FIA will submit a revised report to the Interim Congress.

-End of Packet-

Authorized by Rear Admiral James Turner (UFMCOM)

Prologue . . . hopefully

U.E.S. Indiana Jones
201.-11

Sometimes, Santiago wished his brain would just shut up.

He’d been right in the middle of the perfect date—dreaming, of course; but hey, who didn’t?—a night of high stakes gambling in Las Vegas with a gorgeous blond Venutian—the new type being grown in the black market crèche pools on the Paradise World for the big timers down Earthside: mouthwatering blonde; dark skin that was the perfect blend of oriental, African, and Latina, smoothed out with some anglo genes; eyes the color of amber, or gold, depended on the light; and full lips that were just begging for attention—anyways, the point was the flaca was perfect. And he’d been perfect too, at craps, poker, black jack, Martian Hold’em . . . he hadn’t been able to touch a chip or card without walking away a whole order of magnitude richer. Gambling was one of the few pastimes that made Santiago grateful for his brain; the rest of the time, his super-sized cranium was more trouble than it was worth. No matter what the bigwigs at New Harvard claimed.


The point was, it had been the best kind of dream: way too good to be true. The kind of dream that could only be cooked up by the cocktail of drugs the U.E.S. Indiana Jones’ medic had force-fed him somewhere around Jupiter. Not that they’d had to—after that last slingshot past the Big Guy, Santiago had been bored enough to actually try striking up a conversation with the other flesh and blood weirdos that wandered around the ship—he’d slipped the IV without a moment’s hesitation. Not that his efforts at socializing had gotten anywhere. The only female-type in the whole ship who wasn’t crew—he’d made a promise to himself, years ago, not to get involved with Navy women—was some quantum physicist who was wider than she was tall. Not that he was shallow or anything.

So, basically, the dream had been a welcome relief. Until his brain had to go and mess it all up, that is. He’d been on the brink of a winning throw, the dice rattling in his hand, when the flaca had leaned forward and whispered in his ear—so close those perfect lips actually tickled, mind—“We’re decelerating at one g.”

“You outta your mind, chata,” he’d replied, grinning and rattling the dice some more, “I’m just warming up.”

But then he threw the dice, and instead of bouncing around on the table like they should have, they zipped across the board, fell to the floor, and kept on rolling until they hit the far wall, fifty meters away . . . exactly like they would have if they’d been experiencing one g of lateral deceleration.

He’d turned around, ready to give the Venutian an earful for breaking his concentration, when suddenly the vibrations started, like hands running up his legs and back in a gentle massage, and he’d thought for a millisecond that the Venutian was going to work on him—they were trained in that kind of thing—but no, she’d been a good half meter away from him, perfect hands at her side, full lips quirked in a knowing smile.

“You’d better wake up and find out when we’ll arrive at our destination.”

“Screw you sister”—at least, he meant to say that, but suddenly it wasn’t the Venutian anymore, but his mamita, hands on hips, squeezed into the Venutian’s tube dress.

“Santiago Zambrano Alcaraz, you wake ¡este momento! ¿Me escuchas? ¡Este momento!”

“Shut up, brain, er . . . mom? ¡Callete!”

But by then it was too late. With his mamita still screaming at him in the back of his mind, he cracked an eyelid, and the cold light of the Jones slapped him across the cornea. He squeezed his throbbing eye shut with a moan that rattled through his teeth, and fumbled for his sleeping bag’s zipper. And his brain, his brain wouldn’t stop yammering at him. The rhythmic pulsing that he was still vainly trying to pretend was the Venutian’s small hands working on his cramped muscles was rolling through the Jones’ bulkhead every 2.5 seconds, interlaced with a slower rumble that cycled through his aching body every 13.75 seconds, so loud that he could hear it. As if knowing that did any good. As if his vaunted brain was any help ninety-five percent of the time!

Almost smugly, his brain told him the deceleration was increasing, nearing 1.5 gs and still climbing. That little tidbit brought an involuntary frown to his face. 1.5 gs? At that rate, they’d have come to a complete stop in—his brain chortled and dove into the physics—in roughly 52.4897959184 seconds.

Unfortunately, it was at that moment that his hand—still functioning largely without higher direction because 50% of Santiago’s brain was asleep and the other 50% was cheerily crunching numbers—found the zipper and pulled. Hard. It was also at that exact moment that Santiago remembered that he’d ignored the boson’s stern warning to secure his sleeping bag to the bulkhead labeled with a big black 1, not the one labeled 2—a warning that he had promptly ignored, just to show the Navy muscle he could. After all, in null gravity, who cared?

The deceleration forces ripped him out of his bag with a strangled shout, and 0.521640530957 seconds later he slammed into the 1 bulkhead. Of course, half a millisecond before he actually hit the wall the Navy jerks up on the bridge decided to cut the burn, so instead of sticking to the bulkhead like he should have, he was bounced, screaming profanity the whole way, back towards 2 bulkhead, which he struck with enough force to finally shake the Venutian flaca from his brain and send her spinning back to Venus once and for all. He only barely managed to wrap his hand around one of the straps on his sleeping pouch, which kept him from dribbling back and forth between the bulkheads like a human basketball.

For a second he just hung there, contemplating the cruel nature of the universe, shoulder screaming at him like his mamita had been only a few seconds ago, his hand that had grabbed the strap burning. He was sure it was bleeding. He just didn’t want to look. His head was rattling and spinning like the dice he’d been throwing in his dream. He had to blink half a dozen times just to bring the cramped cabin into focus. Was that his blood on the far wall?

He ran his trembling free hand across his forehead, and then grimaced at the red stains on his fingers. More of his blood was floating free in the air between the bulkheads in shimmering spheres that looked like wine. Good wine, too. Maybe a Montpelier 1997.

“Lights at fifty percent,” he said. The room dimmed, and he hooked his left leg around the pouch so he could shake the sting out of his hand. “Exterior view on screen one.”

To his right, the cabin’s media console came alive, the main screen brightening into an impressive star field. Some people might have paused a moment to gaze at the . . . 147,678 stars that were visible in just this tiny slice of the universe, but Santiago didn’t care much about the view.

“Augment,” he commanded, and suddenly the starscape was overlain with a hundred different colors, texts, and lines. The pinpricks of light were separated by color into stars, galaxies, nebulae, planetoids, asteroids, unidentified Trans-Neptunian objects, etc. Text blocks that seemed to hover just above the celestial bodies indicated mass, relative velocities, relative distances, ages . . . the list went on. And the lines that swept across the screen tracked the orbits of the 10,000 nearest objects. A normal person probably would have had a coronary just looking at all the data. Santiago, on the other hand, had his brain, and his brain cobbled up everything the computer could shove at him, and more, in the half second it took Santiago to sweep his gaze across the screen.

Thanks to his brain, he knew where he was before the computer had finished painting all of the orbits across the screen. The Kuiper belt, roughly 6 billion klicks from Earth, give or take an astronomic unit. That raised his eyebrow. What in the world was out here? Ice . . . lots of ice.
Shaking his head—ignoring the eight hundred and ninety seven possible locations in the Kuiper belt his brain was suddenly suggesting as the Jones’ destination—Santiago unhooked his leg and pushed away from the wall, angling for the tiny sanitation unit on the bulkhead opposite the media station.

“Music,” he said absently once he reached the sanitation unit. A glance in the mirror, a tiny thing no bigger than his palm, revealed a haggard-faced eighteen year-old with a fan of blood spreading across the right half of his face. Lousy Navy. Some way to treat the world’s smartest person. And that was documented too, no bragging on his part. He had a certificate from the Department of Neurosciences of New Harvard. Where had he put that, anyway?

He groped around the tileplast station till he found the bath wipes, then started cleaning off his face. “Lets hear something from the ‘30s . . . make it alternative rock.”

His eyes drifted back to the screen, which was still tracking orbits and velocities; he barely heard the music, but his brain logged it away anyways. Coldplay, their last album.

Where was the Jones' going?

It had taken a long time for Santiago to get used to his brain. Heck, it still gave him the creeps some times. Who wouldn’t be creeped out by a brain that was faster and smarter than any AI ever invented? Santiago would like to meet the fellow. He’d shake the monse’s hand, tip his hat to him, and then switch brains without breaking a sweat. He really would. Most days, anway.

But now, with that empty starfield making faces at him on the monitor, Santiago’s brain had no answers, and he didn’t like, not one bit. The Navy boys—and the occasional Navy female-type he’d run into on the Jones—had been about as talkative as clams. And compared to the secret police that had busted into his flat in New Washington, three months and six billion kilometers back on Earth, the Navy crew was downright chatty. He grimaced as his brain replayed that night. The visit from the three police—all of them women . . . the nasty kind from the DAR—had gone from bad to worse: a break-in through his apartment window, followed by a long ride in a windowless van, followed by three weeks solitary confinement in a cement box with a bed and toilet, followed by another three weeks of psychological tests that made the hoops the New Harvard had made him jump through seem like cake, followed by a ride up the Western Atlantic Space Elevator, and finally ending with him being shoved into the United Empire Ship Indiana Jones like a sardine with only the clothes on his back . . . and his brain, of course.

He was still wiping at his face. Frowning, he deposited the bloody wipe into the trash recycler, and pushed off back towards the media station. His brain had been his only asset during the psych tests, and yet from those tests he’d learned more about this mission he’d been hijacked into going on than the doctors had learned about him.

The Navy was looking for something. Something that was, apparently, out here in the Kuiper Belt. And whatever it was, they needed a computer expert, the computer expert, to help them deal with it. And whatever it was, they wanted it bad. So bad, in fact, that the DAR—Daughters of the American Revolution, that is—was in on it. And if the secret police were in on it, the Imperial family was in on it. And if the Imps were in on it . . .

Well, if the Imps were in on it, Santiago Zambrano Alcaraz wanted to be in on it.

His brain pointed out, snidely, that the death rate among middle-class citizens that dabbled in Imperial politics was 15.78% higher than their less politically inclined peers, but he ignored it. After all, those statistics didn’t apply to him, a New-Harvard-certificate-carrying genius.

He extended his hands over the computer’s holopad, and the controls flickered to life around his fingers. Zero point two five seconds later he was deep into the Jones’ programming, cruising through lines of codes he doubted any Navy personnel had reviewed in years. Yeah, the DAR secret police might have all but stripped him naked before shoving him onto the ship, but that hadn’t stopped him from hacking into the network through a public, supposedly ‘safe’, terminal, and writing up three- or four-dozen programs that basically put every system on the Jones at his disposal.

Just thinking of how he was suckering the Navy and the DAR made him laugh out loud. Of course, that’s when his brain chose to remind him that he’d been abducted because he was able to do just this sort of thing, and that the Navy probably fully expected him to be doing exactly what he was doing right now, so he wasn’t really pulling a fast one on anybody, and they were probably blocking access to any really crucial systems through subroutines he hadn’t considered yet.

“Shut up you,” he muttered through his teeth. Stupid brain. Why couldn’t it just do as it was told?

Gently, he assumed control of the ship’s passive scanners, and began scrolling through the flood of data that the Jones was pulling in. As the information flooded passed him, his brain whistled in surprise—well, the lipless and soundless equivalent of a whistle at least. And for once, Santiago could only agree.

“Wow.”