The central market at the Elpis transit station was always busy with mixing crowds of a hundred species pushing past each other to grab at wares from as many stars. The smells of spices and perfume shouldered their way past the aromas of cooking meat and hot dough, a heady blend that the station’s environmental systems never quite seemed to overcome.
It was perhaps the closest thing remaining to civilization in this patch of old Terran space, a nexus of commerce and transit that persisted through regime changes and territorial squabbles through sheer necessity and entrepreneurial spirit. Although nominally under Arrigh administration at the moment, outside governments never had much of an influence on station operations. Nothing aboard happened without the approval of the powerful business and crime syndicates that kept money and trade pumping through the station’s veins.
Long residential blocks stretched away from the market in a radiating skein of hanging laundry and laughing children, a colorful gauntlet of obstacles for Anja, Jesri and Rhuar as they made their way deeper into the station. The two women had changed from uniforms back into their old hooded cloaks, allowing them to slip anonymously through the milling crowds.
Qktk was not present, having stayed to watch the Cormorant in her berth. Although the corvette offered them a lower profile compared to arriving on the Grand Design, the gleaming 138-meter warship still attracted quite a few curious looks as it loomed beside the patchwork freighters at its slip. The Htt captain had stayed behind to deal with anyone who moved beyond mere curiosity. Dockside thieves and cartel thugs couldn’t put a scratch on the Terran battle alloys, of course, but everyone wanted to avoid the highly energetic unpleasantness that would result if someone managed to trip the ship’s perimeter defenses.
Jesri didn’t think Qktk would have enjoyed the station much anyway. He tended towards solitude, she had noticed, something that was in short supply on Elpis. The three of them were forced to drop into a single file as they squeezed past a knot of fiercely arguing Arrigh who barely registered their presence. She breathed a sigh of relief as they edged by into open space again and their oddly spicy aroma faded. She didn’t mind crowds, but they were decidedly not relaxing for her.
This far from the souk the hallways were darker, dimmer where light fixtures had been cannibalized to replace broken ones in more affluent stretches of corridor. Disused side passages branched off at intervals, each with rows of doorways obstructed by debris or simply never unlocked for new owners. It was at one of these doors where the small group eventually stopped, Anja fiddling with the door’s mossy access plate for a second before it opened to reveal a small and dusty room.
It had been a local security substation for the residential block, mostly a command post to allow diagnostics on the automated drones that made up the bulk of station security forces. It was cramped and dark inside, but as Anja swept the dust away from the post’s large display screen it lit up brightly to show five smiling figures seated around a table. Their modest conference room looked like any other room on the station, save that it was clean and well-maintained rather than a dilapidated ruin.
“Major Tam, welcome,” said a woman with short-cropped grey hair. “Captain Tam and - Rhuar, wasn’t it? It’s good to finally have a chance to talk. My name is Helene Chartres.” She gave them a mildly puckish grin. “Welcome to the resistance.”
“Dr. Chartres,” Anja said mildly. Behind her, Jesri was scanning the other faces on the display. She mentally matched each one up with the names from David’s story as Anja went through pleasantries with Helene. There was Chris Flores, tall and thin with a perennially wide-eyed look. Deepti Banerjee, with a friendly round face and threads of silver streaking through her long black hair. Yetide Adebayo, small, serious and unreadable. And-
Her eyes widened a bit seeing the last figure, slouched casually at the table. He wore David’s face, but the man at the table was a complete stranger. Trim and muscular with short grey hair, his smile held a hard chill to it. Jesri had been somewhat amused when their jovial, wisecracking David had revealed he worked in Naval Intelligence, given her experience with the flint-eyed members of that agency. She found little humor in this man’s appearance. The sound of her name interrupted her close study of his face.
“...was when Jesri made contact with David,” Anja was saying in her briefing-room manner. She inclined her head to the rather more alarming version of David on the monitor, seemingly unperturbed by the differences. “Should I be referring to him as Zeta Two?”, she asked politely.
David laughed, the dry sound doing nothing to change Jesri’s first impression of him. “No need,” he said. “We know where all the relevant deployments are, so we should be able to keep everything straight by context. We’re all Deltas, in case you’re wondering.”
“Fair enough,” replied Anja. “Any rate, David helped us deal with our sister,” Anja said with a subtle tremor in her voice, “and with freeing the Irri. He is currently overseeing the rebuilding efforts back at Nicnevin, although he copied himself over to the Grand Design as well.”
A murmur went up from the display and significant glances were exchanged. “He was able to establish himself on a shipborne computer?”, David asked intently.
Anja nodded. “It seems he had to downsize his environment a bit, but he has been quite happy about the arrangement.”
“I’ll bet,” said Chris somewhat enviously. “We’ve never found a mobile substrate large enough to use before this. He can go anywhere now.”
“I’d rather he had been an Epsilon Seven than a… Are there any other David Etas yet? Would it be Eta One?”, David mused. “Yes, I guess it would be. I’ll take it, though,” he said with another chilly smile.
Jesri directed her gaze at Helene. “Our David thought you’d find our sister’s research to be of interest. We have all of her notes and logs here,” she said, producing a data chit from her cloak.
“Excellent,” Helene said, her eyes practically glowing as she looked at the chit. “Go ahead and plug that into the second console on the left there, we’ll get to analyzing it. David, would you mind…?”
“Not at all,” he said cheerfully. The scientists filed out in a rush of excitement, already murmuring amongst themselves as Jesri pulled some dusty, corroded chairs from a thin closet for their group. David laced his fingers behind his head and looked at them appraisingly.
“So,” he said, “have my other instances told you anything about the lay of the land? Overall strategic situation and all that?”
“Not much,” Jesri responded as she settled into her seat. “He said his assignment was outside of need-to-know for most major operations, and that he didn’t want to give us outdated info.”
He gave them a toothy grin. “See, the worst part of all this is that I can’t even compliment him on excellent information protocol without seeming somewhat boastful. But that’s good, it means we can start fresh with the general basics.”
He stood up and tapped a few times on a tablet, overlaying a map on a portion of the display. “Okay,” he coughed, “The Gestalt. Permanent base of operations is at the system colorfully designated ‘Apollyon’, here.” He tapped again and a red halo appeared around a blank point on the screen.
“Then there’s us,” he continued. “We’ve got a load of human installations in various states of disrepair. Most are completely defunct, unfortunately.” A wash of faded grey dots speckled the map. Out of the corner of her eye, Jesri saw Rhuar’s eyes widen at the sheer number of stations.
“We’ve got two hundred and five stations with enough active support systems that people are still living on them,” he said, adding some brighter dots to the mix. Anja exchanged a look with Jesri - that was more than they had known about. “Only about half those are worth writing home about, the rest are basically surviving on scum they scrape out of the vent ducts.”
“Now,” he grinned, rubbing his hands together. “Here’s where it gets interesting. What do you notice about the distribution of stations?”
They stared at the map for a while, Jesri’s mind running through patterns. Nothing jumped out at her, although she had never claimed a talent for analysis.
“It’s… lopsided?” Rhuar said uncertainly. “There should be more active stations coreward based on the total population, but the active ones are skewed rimward.” Jesri looked at him in surprise, then turned back to the map. The total number of active stations looked pretty evenly distributed, but if you took the increased density close to earth into account...
“Correct!”, David beamed, “in particular, the proportion of active stations increases the farther you get from Apollyon. Any guesses on why?”
Anja rolled her eyes at him. “Are we briefing you?”, she asked tiredly. “You obviously have theories.”
“Unbiased viewpoints often yield new insights,” he tutted. “And we’re perennially short of fresh viewpoints in here.”
Anja gave him a blank stare and he relented with a sigh. “Fine, fine,” he said disappointedly. “We’re fairly certain that the distribution was less skewed right after the Gestalt’s attack. At some point during the intervening years, however, stations that weathered the brunt of the Gestalt attack with very little major systems damage were targeted for a follow-up action. Not further gamma-ray bursts, I might add, but visits from Emissaries.”
Jesri blinked. “You’re sure?”, she asked incredulously. Emissaries had been rare even when they were in active contact with the Gestalt before the attacks. Their appearance was nearly always noteworthy.
David grinned at her. “We do have something of an inside line on the Gestalt, remember. But, no,” he said as his grin faded. “This wasn’t something we came by via our normal intelligence channels. We first discovered it when we tried deploying people to one of those stations. Preliminary checks showed nothing wrong, no worrying signs of activity. It was a relatively intact station despite being abandoned, so we were going to start with a two-person deployment and see if we could scale further upward.”
He scratched at his chin. “We didn’t hear the response we expected after we sent the data packet, and when we tried a follow-up the station’s communications were disrupted. It was only two days later that we got a message, dribbled out in chunks so small they were almost indistinguishable from the background noise.”
Text flashed on the screen in glaring red: SECURE STP COMPLETE.
Anja frowned and looked to David for clarification. “Self-termination protocol,” he explained grimly. “They didn’t think they could stay on the station undetected, so they destroyed any trace of their own universe on the ship’s computers. We assume they were successful because the Gestalt hasn’t moved to eliminate all of us yet.”
“That’s a lot to extract from such a short message,” Rhuar observed. “How do you know it was the Emissaries and not another issue forcing them to shut down?”
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David gave them another chilly smile. “I know what it means because I’m the one who sent it. Deepti and I were the two volunteers for that deployment. If we got that particular message from a team I was a part of, it was Gestalt activity and we were confident in our ability to scrub the system cleanly.”
“Fair enough,” Rhuar admitted, although Jesri could spot a slight shiver when he spoke. “Still, it’s sparse information.”
David nodded. “I admit it’s not much. However, we started doing research after that. We heard stories passed down through the generations where people talked about being driven from their homes by faceless soldiers, by ships with incredible destructive power.” He drew a circle around Apollyon on the map with a finger. “Where we could trace an origin for the story, they all led back here.”
“But why?”, Jesri asked. “What could the Gestalt possibly want with a bunch of burned-out stations? Its own tech is thousands of years beyond ours.”
David’s face was a humorless mask as he spoke. “It’s the continued success of Project MANTRA, of course. Humanity’s last and most successful endeavor. They tried to make themselves notable in the eyes of the Gestalt, to inspire it to study human thought with simulations and ultimately to self-infiltrate with human consciousness.” He shook his head. “I suppose I can’t fault them for that, since the plan worked perfectly up to that point. We came into being and created the inside advantage they were looking for.”
He looked back up at them, his eyes narrow and cold. “But it didn’t end there,” he hissed. “First they call into question the validity of the Gestalt’s existing models by acting unpredictably. Then, knowing it would seek to gather more information to improve its simulations, they seed their own networks with undetectable poison pills designed to awaken groups like ours. Every simulation gently sabotaged, every predicted outcome rendered invalid. A long-shot psyop that would only work against one enemy.”
Anja nodded. “When we talked to the Emissary Trelir, he mentioned that the simulations they ran were unpredictable. He said it was quite disturbing for the Gestalt.”
“He said we were an unknowable variable,” Jesri agreed.
“Hah!”, David barked. “Perfectly phrased. Yes, we were unknowable - because we maliciously made ourselves that way. The problem is, we didn’t think about what that would mean to the Gestalt. We underestimated ourselves, overestimated our opponent. How could we not? Here it is, an ancient and powerful entity that has persisted for tens of thousands of years. It uses its vast resources to predict the perfect action to take in any scenario. Simulations guide it in every. Single. Action.” He jabbed his finger at them to emphasize the point, and Jesri’s heart sank.
“Oh shit,” she whispered, remembering something else Trelir had said. For an entity like the Confluence, discovering an ‘unknown unknown’ is significant. It calls into question every assessment, every predictive-
She looked back up at David, who was watching her expectantly. “We scared it,” she breathed.
“Yes!”, David said triumphantly. “We took the most ancient and powerful entity humanity has ever encountered and unintentionally called into question the cornerstone of its fundamental decision-making process. They thought it would eventually realize that simulations weren’t working and dig deeper, learn something new, but they were thinking too much like humans. This is an entity that hasn’t been wrong about anything since we were eating mammoth for dinner. It hasn’t even had to consider the concept of being wrong.” David grimaced. “Then, inexplicably and without warning, the simulations fail. It’s wrong and, worse, it doesn’t know why. It panicked.”
“And then it moved to eliminate the threat,” Anja concluded, grim-faced.
“It did,” David agreed. “And afterwards it moved on to identify and address the faulty predictive models.”
“The stations!” Rhuar blurted. “It’s still trying to gather more information and correct its models!”
“It has no other choice,” David replied. A wry smile crept onto his lips. “Consider this: you’re the Gestalt and you’re working towards your project to nudge the universe into a lower vacuum state. You’ve even worked out how to survive the process - in simulations.”
The three of them stared open-mouthed at David, then Anja collapsed into laughter. Jesri felt a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth, but the whole thing was just too much for her to find funny.
“Holy shit,” managed Rhuar, sounding dazed. “It can’t make any big moves until it figures out what went wrong. It has no tolerance for error.”
“We won? We stopped the Gestalt?”, Anja managed, subsiding into another bout of giggles. “We saved the universe! Hooray!”
David looked out at them sadly from his viewscreen. “I wish you were right,” he said, his voice morose. “But the scenario is far from resolved. It’s true that we’ve cast doubt on all of its past predictions, forced it into indecision, but even if we can keep it in the dark forever-”
“Yeah, not with our luck,” Rhuar grumbled.
“-we still have to consider its recent actions, which are potentially even more worrying in the short term,” David concluded. “The stations. It’s trying to absorb human knowledge to ensure that it has all available data about our species. It has a fundamental need to identify and correct the error we introduced. Even in the time we’ve been on the outside, it has acquired several new stations and begun the process of stripping them for information. The rate of expansion is increasing as it acquires new data.”
Anja’s manic giggles vanished as quickly as they had arrived. “And it won’t find what it’s looking for,” she said. “If it could recognize the hidden instructions, it would have seen them in the existing simulation already.”
“Right,” David nodded. “So, knowing the Gestalt, it will simply keep searching. Every human station, every abandoned planet. The process will be methodical, patient. It will expand from station to station until it realizes what we did or runs out of stations. After that, your guess is as good as mine. Regardless of the final outcome, everyone still living in this section of the galaxy will die within the next few centuries.”
His words hung in the air for a long moment before Jesri spoke. “You’ve briefed us on the scenario,” she said, “but I assume you also have a plan that involves not dying.”
He smiled at her again, a bit less chilly than before. “We have some thoughts. The Gestalt is an incredibly resilient opponent. Resources and energy are beneath its notice, it will produce countermeasures to address any threat it can anticipate no matter what the scale. We are currently a threat it cannot anticipate, but that changes as soon as we attack. Therefore, we have exactly one chance to surprise it.”
Rhuar frowned. “So, what, we just hop into Apollyon and shoot everything we have at it?”
“Ah, no,” David chuckled. “I’m afraid you may be underestimating the magnitude of the problem.” He gave a little self-amused snort, then changed the display to show a large, spherical object in cutaway. “This is a basic structural diagram of the Gestalt,” he said.
Fascinated, Jesri studied it. It was surprisingly simple in design, an oddly-striated shell enclosing a smaller spherical structure. “What’s that at the center, a power source?”, she asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” David coughed. “It’s a G-type star.”
Jesri’s eyes blurred as her brain readjusted the scale of the diagram upward. Far upward. Beside her, Rhuar made a soft choking noise.
“A Dyson sphere?”, he sputtered. “The fuckers built a Dyson sphere?”
“If we’re being technical, it predates Freeman Dyson by several thousand years,” David said, adjusting his glasses. “Also, Dyson spheres are generally conceived of as being habitable on the inside surface. This is a pure computing construct, using both solar energy and temperature differentials to generate power.”
“A matrioshka brain,” Rhuar whispered, stunned. “No way. No fucking way. Those are impossible.”
David smiled again and waggled his fingers at Rhuar. “Not impossible, I was born there. Improbably powerful, though. The Gestalt is very likely the most powerful thing in this galaxy, including everything we haven’t met yet. It is perhaps the only individual Kardashev type-II entity in existence. It has access to energy and computing resources that stretch so far beyond our own that they are effectively infinite. So, no, we cannot just ‘hop in and shoot everything we have at it.’”
Jesri just stared at the display, trying to make the scale fit in her mind. It was unbelievably massive, impossibly big. The thin-looking shell around the outside was actually a kilometers-thick metal encasement. What she had thought were striations were in fact canyons that could comfortably hide a small planet in their depths.
“How-?”, asked Anja helplessly, staring at the diagram. Jesri could hear the incredulous defeat in her voice resonating against the same hollow ache in her chest. They had just learned that they had struck an improbably great blow against the enemy without lifting a finger, but that they could do no more. This was just…
“Too big?”, smirked David. “I get that a lot. Don’t worry, the plan doesn’t involve trying to blow up the star or anything, although I won’t claim we have all of the kinks worked out. The general idea is to split the physical and data layers into two fronts and execute complementary-”
He cut off as a low rumble vibrated through the walls of the room, looking around in confusion. “Was that on your end?”, he asked.
Anja and Jesri were already out of their chairs, looking around. “Yes,” Anja replied brusquely. “Sounded like an explosion, not close to us. Probably back at the main market-”
She stopped, gripping her chair tightly as a louder, closer rumble vibrated through the room. A light cloud of dust kicked up where the metal surfaces of the security consoles resonated sympathetically with the low tone.
“Right, David,” Jesri said in clipped tones. “We need to table the strategic discussion. Can you help us get back to the docks?”
David winced. “Unfortunately, the more inhabited parts of the station have been pretty thoroughly stripped. We have minimal cameras, the security grid is mostly broken-”
Jesri walked over to the door and slid it open, letting the bright light from the hall in. In the distance towards the residential blocks, she could hear the faint sound of screams. Anja gave her a grim look, then turned back towards David’s monitor.
“Any big guns?”, she asked.
“Ah, I think there’s a security armory nobody managed to raid about 200 meters spinward,” he said, rummaging through a station map on his display. “Can’t promise anything interesting is inside, but it’s the only thing close to your position that might be useful.”
“Hook into comms,” Anja instructed him. Jesri could see David instinctively straighten up at the note of command in her voice. “Provide help where you can. Warn us if you spot enemy concentrations or have intel on their composition. Otherwise, we’ll reconnect at the dock.”
David nodded and snapped her a salute. “Understood, sir. I’ll back you up where I can.”
Anja returned the salute, then gestured to Rhuar. “Ensign, on me. We’re going to move fast.”
Rhuar nodded, then dashed to follow her out the door as the trio sprinted down the hall towards the armory. David watched the door hiss shut again, then sighed and deactivated the monitor.
----------------------------------------
The central market at the Elpis transit station was always busy - why else would they have come? A robust and thriving economy was a rare thing these days, and the Arrigh had provided the hands-off touch needed for the transport cartels to truly begin moving products. Food, materials, fuel, weapons, drugs, slaves - it all moved through Elpis at some point, flowing through the darkened hallways and into abandoned rooms.
Now it would flow back out. His raiders streamed off their battered ships, fatigued and stinking from the long flight over. The prospect of a fight reinvigorated them, the chance to reclaim lost glory surging through them with restorative power. There would be time for sleep, time for food once the cattle of this merchant station were subdued.
He walked down the ramp of his own ship, feeling the click of his talons on the cool metal deck and resisting the urge to scratch at his face. He could see captains being hauled out of their ships up and down the dock, hear the chatter of weapons fire as some cartel enforcers resisted his troops in a doomed attempt to protect their goods. It didn’t matter. His men were trained, hardened, desperate.
“Warfather!”, shouted one of his junior officers, his face smeared with dust and blood. “Warfather Tarl!”
Tarl turned towards the man as he ran towards him, keeping his face neutral. “Just Tarl,” he said quietly. The right side of his face itched, but he held still. “What is it, spearbrother?”
“We’ve found a ship in the next segment, W-”, the officer said excitedly, barely stopping himself in time. “It’s smaller, but it appears to be human in origin.”
Tarl’s smile bloomed slowly over his face, revealing needle-sharp teeth beneath his yellow lips. His right cheek twinged in pain, the motion stretching the scarred flesh and causing it to dig into the metal patch over his eye.
He ignored the pain. Here, after wandering lost between desolate outposts and forgotten garrisons. Here was where his fortunes would begin to rise once more. How could they not? His fleet lost, his king dead, his planet devastated, his title stripped. He had nothing left save for his bloodied ambition, desperate soldiers and - above all - the sweet promise of revenge. Yes, that most of all. He looked down at the officer with his good eye and spoke, the clear tones of command returning to his voice.
“Show me.”