The Errant
There are no green stars. Even if you change Physics, Green is impossible. Blue and Red light are too strong. They push against each other, spilling into what we think is White.
That is why when you see a green star, you know the end is coming.
We called it the Green Bang. It was a crime so great we described it in astronomical terms. Imagine, if you will, green pond scum along the sides of a drain. See how it shines as a stray dog pisses on it? How it then dries back into a green stain? That’s what’s conquering the Galaxy right now.
Our finest mind was at fault. The bastard space-adapted it. Turned it into light-sailing plankton that thrived in the searing-freezing vacuum. He packed each, green cell with genetic library-seeds for entire ecologies. Sunlight did the rest; pushing the Green to the nearest stars and infecting them. That green light you see, which means all the sacrifices of your people have been for nothing, is the light of a star filtered through a halo of a trillion trillion trillion leaves. Each orbiting leaf, a tiny, self-contained world. Any one of which could landing on a dead world and terraform it.
Jungles of solar collectors turned ice moons into steaming mangrove-worlds. Continent-sized fish schools swam ocean giants, dodging unending hurricanes. Oases grew and spread in the ever-shadowed canyons of husk planets that orbited their suns in just days. In every one of these places, the Green spawned humans.
It was the the greatest genocide in the natural history of our galaxy.
As with all genocide, there was no punishment for the winners. It continues, spreading far beyond the light cone of events our kind will observe before extinction. Perhaps that is where you come from? From beyond Humanity’s future?
If so, then you are poor, sad fool, Explorer. You will never see your home again. Yes, I know you thought that was a good idea at the time. This is not that time. This now, and now is too late. We tell ourselves it’s memories we carry with us as we journey towards our ends. Though - they’re not just memories, are they? They’re also regrets. That is what the sum of our lives will be by the end. All that is to be seen is whether we will have more memories than we will regrets.
One of my regrets is that I too will never go home again. I didn’t know that would be the case at the time. The Unknown tricks us into advancing our lives, be it through gardens or mine fields. Even as a boy, though, I should have known. Eater knows, I could have asked someone. I wonder if all those people thought that fifteen year-old knew what he was doing? I suppose they couldn’t have cared less.
Let me dull the regret by sharing the memory. My name, Explorer, is Alexios of Medaeum. Medaeum was a sea-and-sky world; the stuff of happy childhoods. Mine was spent running barefoot through its olive groves. Mornings, I’d stand at the top of the hill I was born on and wait for the village bakery’s donkey cart. If father’s war pension was in, it was iced buns with cream for breakfast! How I’d hated sharing with the poor children next door… Now, thousands of years later, I wondered whatever became of them. I hope the end was peaceful. I hope they had more cream buns.
Medaeum is gone now - like everything else. Three thousand years ago, to this day, in fact. That was when the Empire fell. When our heroes rose from the dead, and my friends became dead heroes. It was the day my dying Emperor sent me from His side that I might live. Not to bring aid to save Him, or spread the word of His loss. He sent me away to be His jailor. To enforce a life sentence upon the madman who turned the stars green.
Yorgos was his name.
So that must be why you are reading this now. You have found my remains because you were looking for his! You’re a Green Banger, aren’t you? Come clawing through the dirt and dust to find your father of fathers? Know that I knew him in life - and that I was the one who gave him death. After death is when I came to know him better, and him, to at last know me. Eternity has not been dulling his mind but sharpening it. He always has the better of me. Sometimes, I even wonder if he destroyed the galaxy just to see if he could.
Yet, it was not my place to best him. Only to make him suffer.
A life sentence was his punishment. So, I slew his body, so that he could live on beyond it. He is in my head now. Did you think you would find his bones? His notes? The workshop he created you in? All of that is now less than atoms. Look at the fragments of my skull and know that in my time that is where I keep him. Every breath I draw is his. Every cell I prolong, my gift to him. I must live till the cooling of the Universe and the waking of the Gods. Every day I do so, sitting alone, with regrets instead of dreams, is a day he must also suffer.
I hope it will be enough.
If you are indeed a Banger, know that these old worlds paid the price for the creation of yours. The price was Civilization. Do you think it was worth it? That is an unfair quesition - you don’t know what that is. While I don’t hate you any less, I know that none of this is your fault. Blaming you is like blaming pond scum. It cannot help but spread, stinking.
I cannot speak for when you find this. In this time, however, the crumbs of His empire still remain. Crumbs indeed: scared rump regimes and mad bastard pretenders. They declare golden futures for themselves: all of them false. In truth we are nothing but lantern-bearing beggars sitting alone in crumbling halls. Like refugees raising a half-burned flag over a hill, we pretend that surviving Rome, is Rome’s survival.
If you must ask which burned empire was ours, know that ours was the Empire of Endless Space. Such an arrogant name - what empire is not arrogant? Even so, it was a name chosen with care. The Empire was designed to be endless. Like an immortal, spreading, slime mould. It would throw together fleets of strangers bound only by the fiction that they were siblings. We were the last attempt at an organized, galaxy-spanning, nation. A brainchild of Earth’s globocrats and the ultra-iced brains of the Kuiper Belt.
We were magnificent.
Unstoppable.
Utter failures.
Now, here are the last of us. Madmen-strongmen and enlightened scholars. Proud young mothers and worried immortals. We have nothing left! There is no help coming! Varus, give us back our legions! We have no more cards left to draw. All that’s left is to play out our hands till we too are gone.
I am a ‘Vindex Exactor Errant;’ a sort of wandering agent of our Last Beloved Emperor. My life’s work has been hunting horrors, be they gods or men. Horrors abound in this galaxy. Some watch us, seething with hate, from the surfaces of suns too massive for them to fly away from. Others have forgotten space, trapped under kilometers-thick ice sheets, their minds evolved for darkness, eternity, and the clarity that comes with madness. We Errants put them there. Oftentimes, back into the same vaults they’d escaped from - made by those who had taken up our work long before the apes left the trees in Africa.
As the Green Bang hatched Adams and Eves everywhere, they mistook these prison vaults for libraries. Naive hands released 13 billion years-worth of trapped horrors. Our work is undone! I would see it left so, to watch the green stars burn again.
Yet, that is not what He would want.
So here I am, Explorer, not living out my days under a clean sun tending the last olive groves in the galaxy. I have tried turning my back on this duty - and more than once (it has been a long time). Yet, always, I see Him. I see Him looking at me. Those eyes that sent me away that I might live.
I cannot face those eyes. When they end comes, they will take from me all my memories and leave only one, great, regret. That I disappointed Him.
So here I am, Explorer. Wherever you have found me and this record. Across a hundred worlds and castella my cards have been dealt. I shall play them in His Name till my lantern goes out. This is my tale. I hope, in your time, it gives you comfort. Comfort to know there were much worse times, and somehow people survived those, as well.
***
I was glad to travel fifty years to talk to the spider web. It was the most respected and accomplished one, for light years.
I was glad to travel fifty years to talk to the spider web. It was the most respected and accomplished one for light-years.
A horse-sized spider stood across the cave from me. Her eyes were closed like dinner plates wrapped in black cloth. The chamber was at human-friendly brightness: it would have blinded her. This was, by spider web standards, the highest hospitality.
Hairs on her legs swayed back and forth, tasting my body’s electrical field. Static snapped and popped as the hairs brushed. This was a displacement behavior: she wanted to pounce on me and drain my fluids.
Behind her, through a diamond ceiling, was the web that instructed her otherwise.
“Thank you for receiving me,” I blew on my freezing fingers. “It is not everywhere a Vindex is welcomed anymore.”
The spider turned its head to the side and scratched the ground with its forelegs. They made fresh grooves of dark iron in the rust red rock.
Trade? It asked.
Outside, the web tumbled slowly. It looked like a mountain-sized sea urchin made from ice. The webbing between the observatory tines was so thin it was almost gas. Cosmic rays lit it in green and blue aurora. Each strike was recorded: as it had been for tens of thousands of years.
I opened the container beside me.
Dry ice refrigerant boiled out and down the sides to the rusted ground. Inside were trays packed with spheres, rods, and drops bunched like grapes. Some shapes had hairs, others barbs. There were whites covered in powder, pastel blues shining with slime, and black nuggets that seemed to move when you weren’t looking.
“Eggs,” I stepped back, my breath steaming. “Go on then. Look!”
The spider stalked over and squatted before the box. It began rubbing its mouthparts together like a greedy merchant’s hands in a children’s play. It picked up each type of egg with its fangs and tasted them.
Eight webs. Furthest, nine hundred light-years.
“Those ones I’m keeping,” I said. Spider eggs were like wine. The older and further away they came from, the more they were worth. “The rest, though, are up for trade.”
Great knowledge. Great wealth.
“They are, aren’t they? They’re yours - if you can tell me what I want.”
Speak.
“There’s a binary star system I’m interested in. The major is a red dwarf. The minor is a sub-brown.”
Many red and brown dwarfs. I know them all.
“I’m sure you do. You might still know it by its old, Imperial name, Cidyessus.”
Green Bang conquered, the spider tried to pull the container away with a leg taller than my shoulder. Cidyessus changed. All worlds changed, all settled, now. Humans. Transhumans.
“Hardly all,” I pulled the container back and shut it. “But that’s the one.”
Green Bang conquered. Imperial legacy rediscovered. Renaissance culture lacks both vitality of invaders and elevation of invaded.
“I’m not interested in those Barbaroi squatters.” Barbaroi - it’s what we called the Bangers once we noticed them - and what they were best at. Barbarians. “Can you tell me, instead, of Cidyessus’s Posthumans?”
The spider looked up from the container and regarded me with closed eyes. Deep pits in its face sensed me in infra-red.
No Posthumans.
“Really?” I frowned.
No Posthumans at Cidyessus.
“That’s impossible. Are you certain?”
No Posthumans at Cidyessus. What do you want?
I claimed a moment to decide how I felt about its answer. It’s a ridiculous answer. Then, a longer one, to decide what to say next.
“I’ve heard stories from Barbaroi traders,” I picked my words with care, “that the people of Cidyessus can speak with the dead. Can you confirm this?”
Nonesuch. Nothing seen. Stories false.
This was not what I had expected, either. No. Something was not right.
I sized up the spider. It was inching its leg back to my egg case. Outside, lights flashed against the night - a spider mother tug taking flight. In the upper left of the rose window, the stars were blotted out: the rogue world, Megalo Thetis, was rising.
Most beings avoided rogue worlds. Even Green Bang scum could only do so much without access to a sun’s light. Spider webs liked them, though; especially if they were gas giants, like Megalo Thetis. Rogue worlds were doorways into the Universe’s library, and spider webs were its librarians.
You see, at just the right distance, a gas giant’s gravity focuses light like a lens. Right at that, here Thetis’s focal point, a dumb spider had begun spinning a graphene web thousands of years ago.
The web grew, storing the simple but precise calculations the spider’s tiny brain made - just as the web’s ancestors on Earth did. Neural links formed between the diamond fiber intersections. They grew fractally, their strands kilometers long, their edges just nanometer fuzzes.
All of the spider web was conducting, thinking, aware. It collected astronomical data by the petabyte. Then, as easily as ants plan their paths, it crunched it all down. It plucked out the discoveries, anomalies, and fleet movements - and sold them. It took payment in the data-crammed eggs of other, distant webs. A spider web was a magnificent creature, evolved to study - and share - Astrophysics. It was the scientist as a form of life.
So why was this one lying to me?
“You have picked up nothing - no messages, broadcasts, sync dumps, nothing - about the worship of the dead on Cidyessus?”
Give eggs. Black Bang radio chatter. 324 light-years. Absorbs system every 26 years. Then, silence.
Give eggs. Stable, super-heavy elements cache. 57 light-years.
Give eggs. Post-Physics Gap active artifacts. 891 light-years.
Give eggs.
“I’m going for a walk,” I picked up the container and tucked it under my arm. “Let’s talk again, later.”
***
I left the visitors’ caves of the great spider web, Nulb of Leng, and stepped out onto the icelands of Mikro Thetis.
Picture, if you can, an icy dwarf planet how they once were. A speck of rock drowned in its own ocean. Then, miles-thick ice sheets laid over it to hide the crime. As time passed, radiation baked frozen methane and ammonia into dunes of blood-red tar.
Mikro Thetis was then still such rarity: an un-Greened world. It was also an old one. Even that day I walked its surface, it had already become the stuff of standing stone inscriptions.
According to a centuries-old Barbaroi traveler’s account, Mikro was the home of the abandoned Imperial city-state of Kikopolis. I didn’t think so: cities, like Life, need free and endless energy. There were also no signs a city had ever been here. No tumbling dead satellites in the sky. Nor any pits where ice shafts to the subsurface ocean had collapsed. Perhaps Kikopolis had been crushed under those ice sheets? I could dive its sea for a thousand years and still not know. Time doesn’t gift us our history; it robs it from us.
Vacuum crabs rushed into their burrows as my suit lights painted them. They were Banger tech - micro machines that built latrine pits, starships, and all in between. An infant crab stood out, gleaming, translucent. Its ice shell hadn’t yet clouded with stowed nano-gear. It scuttled into a burrow for safety - what the Creator misses, Evolution teaches.
We’d tried fighting their crabs with our own. All that would happen was one would corrupt the other, and then both would turn away from us. That is the way with machines that breed. They become a species. All life finds its own place.
The tar dunes began dipping and I entered a valley. Capping the valley’s sides were teetering, low-gravity, ice crests. Lights flashed between them like spies trading secrets. Who was on those crests? This was an old world. Nulb of Leng was only its current master, not it’s first.
Lining the valley, on either side, were hundreds of Green Banger tombs.
History, barring some enlightened footnotes, is a record of awe before the Divine. To me, Nulb of Leng was a wondrous, Posthuman being. However, to the vermin, Barbaroi, Green Banger, Nulb was a god.
They love their gods; all simple peoples do. They seek them out, whether in the upper layers of dying suns or deep in freezing, monster-infested seas. Those who survive to meet the divine are always the ones driven by basest concerns. What should I do? When will I die? Whatever will happen to me?
The Green Banger is the worst of them. He has bone relics woven into his hair. He tattoos charms on his bastard infants. He lets the positions of the stars, planets, and shipwrecks determine his life. Wherever he finds Posthumans, he builds shrines - and graveyards. To him, there is no better purpose in life than to seek afterlife, in a pit before the divine, like ejected, nuclear waste.
And so it had been here. The stars nearest Thetis had turned Green early during the war. Nulb had been a god longer than it had been an astrophysicist.
I counted the sites belonging to each, apparent, tomb-building era.
The first era was one of rock crystal cairns. They crowded the valley floor like queuing ants. The cairns glowed: each had been grown around a fistful of radioactive ash! The Cairn Builders had worked in ever creeping scale till the tremors of Mikro Thetis began toppling their proudest works. Then, the builders looked to the certainty of the valley walls, and the snow-covered barrow era had begun.
The Barrow Builders held sway for five hundred burials. Then, perhaps, Mikro calmed: like an angry young man who finds wisdom with age, or at least fatigue, which achieves the same. An age of standing stone entrances had started then. I could see how the stonemasons had come to love geometry, then made the slow, inevitable climb to sculpture. Guardian beasts and cut scene cuts were all they had managed, though. The apish brutes! The Green Banger could only imitate beauty, not create it!
All around me were the buried founders and lords of a local, interstellar culture. Yet, no one tomb had been sealed. Did these Barbaroi value their dead so much?
I went to the closest barrow to check for theft by either raiders or scholars. Its entrance was built from slabs of ice. Ice bricks formed its walls. Red tholin tar was pressed into the gaps. Light beamed out the entrance, stark and unsoftened by atmosphere. What could be powering it? I went in, my boots tracking in Nitrogen snow.
Inside was a long dinner table crowded with seated guests. A whorish-looking woman with gaudy beads in her hair raised a gold cup to her lips. Two young men arm-wrestled, their expressions truer of grunting pigs than men. An old man with giant eyebrows watched them, frowning. Think of a pederast - see the image? His face? That’s was this old man’s face. I found most unsettling a man standing in robes. He held an urn with both hands like a chanting pagan. His expression was a pantomime of graveness. Under the table, dogs sniffed and begged for scraps. The more I saw of Bangers, the more I liked their dogs.
I went to the gaudy-beaded strumpet with the gold cup and peered into her face. There were no wrinkles, and the proportions were too elegant - perhaps copied from an enslaved Imperial girl. Had Gaudy Strumpet been a real person, or was she an imagined companion? I tried to pull the cup from her hand. Instead, three crystal fingers broke, falling and scattering across the table. I picked one up and studied its glow.
The Barrow Builder workmanship had come some way from that of the Cairn Builders - I wondered if enslaved Imperials had done the real work. I couldn’t see the radioactive powder. The matrix crystal had been doped to give a flesh tone. I looked about the statues - they would have been as bright as visiting angels when they’d been made. Now, many half-lives past, they were dull ghosts.
At the head of this table of Barbaroi freaks was a vacant seat. I sat in it for a moment. In that instant, I saw that most of the statues were sculpted to stare at me. All were smiling and relaxed. They could have been celebrating a birthday or the sacking of a city. So that’s what this was, a celebration.
I noticed behind the dinner party was a casket. It was made from green marble shot with black and gold veins. Scenes of a man’s life were carved on it. First, a newborn: a woman breastfeeding her spawn. Then, a boy staring out a window at the stars with vacant eyes while ignoring a hunchback tutor. Then a coronation scene. Last of all was a tall, curly-haired man holding a sword aloft before a cheering mob. There was no image showing his death - perhaps it had been embarrassing?
Around the casket, racks had been set against the barrow walls. Some held separated sets of battle armor, like dissected victims. Others showed off necklaces, arm rings, and gemmed masks. One had the dead king’s weapons; huge beamers, projectors with stands, nano-edged greatswords. Pride of place, though went to the most wonderful pistol I had ever seen.
Its bronze casing had blue-greened with age. Its muzzle was sculpted as a serpent’s open mouth. The serpent’s eyes were tiny, deep blue, stones. Even as I’d never seen this type before it still felt like running into an old friend. I picked up the Imperial artifact; the standard weight was familiar to the last atom. How many times had I fired one like this? I could not even guess. This one was ancient; its markings dated it to an early crusade against the Heritors. Whomever it had been stolen from had kept it as an heirloom. I wondered if they had died using it or protecting it.
My gloved fingers became cold. I felt the dullest buzz as the flywheels in the gun’s power store started up. The black, analog power dial began rising. Ten thousand years and still working! Such craftsmanship. Such genius! I wondered if the galaxy would ever again know its like. I put the crusade-pattern beam pistol in my pack and left.
I crossed the valley floor, leaving behind the tombs of all the vermin. So many of them! All our emperors hadn’t numbered even half as many. I wondered how many worlds these ones had come from. Had their conquerors mixed with the conquered? If so, had they just aped them? Or, had they killed them? Setting Imperial mothers to crush their own children under ore carts in death mines? Had these dead kings ever thought of what they’d done? Of what their ancestors had done?
Of course not. They were just insects. You cannot be upset that ants are psychopathic murderers; they are ants. All you can do is burn them.
I checked that I was at a safe enough distance. Then, I lay down in the snow and did it.
The valley lit up with a brightness its world had never known. A roaring storm blasted over me as Nitrogen snow meters deep gasified in an instant. Mikro Thetis grew an atmosphere for the first time in history. The top-heavy ice caps rode avalanches down into the necropolis. Then, they disappeared into the super-heated blast crater and boiled into a lake. It kept on boiling, evaporating into space, till an ice film spread across its surface like a rash.
A weight lifted from my shoulders as I dusted myself off and stood. Gone! I smiled and made the sign of the Last Beloved Emperor.
I know it is to punish me - but how could you do this?
It was the voice I had carried in my head for three thousand years. It was so familiar, sometimes I even mistook it for my own.
What - what did you even gain by it? Even for you, Vindex Exactor Errant, this is monstrous.
“I only wish I could do it twice,” I told him. “Once for you, then for me. Know that I always put you first, Yorgos.”
Such pointless rage. Do you feel so powerless that you must break and burn the bones of the dead, as well? Can you see yourself? What you’ve become?
“I’m what you’ve made me.”
You can lay down your burden at any time.
“Oh you’d like that! Ha!”
Yes. I would. It pains me to see even you like this.
He would do this; play the noble, better-than-thou, prisoner. He believed it, too. All the monsters who shape our lives think that they’re good people. And they always will; their faith in ther own virtue unshakeable. That is why they’re monsters.
“I’m not done, and I’m not done with you. I’m stay alive till the Heat Death of the Universe just to drag you along with me.”
He had no answer to that. That was his tell; silence. That’s how I knew I was getting to him.
“You’ll see every death by my hands, Yorgos,” I started walking. Around me, the atmosphere was refreezing and coming down as snow, for the first and last time, in Mikro’s history. “whether its your bastard children I’m killing, or their corrupted worlds. You’ll see how everything you did was for nothing. All you did to us - for nothing. And then your sentence will end!”
It would break his heart if He could you now.
“Who are you to speak of Him! How dare you!”
He was my Emperor, too.
“And look what you did to Him! What you did to us!”
I went down on my knees. Fast breaths steamed my visor. The star spun for a long, quiet, moment.
He was my Emperor, too, Alexios. But, he was wrong. He stood against history when he could have been creating it. All of you did. That’s why you failed. Even as an idea, the Empire was a failure.
“My work, however, has not been. One day you will see it; that my work saved humanity.”
“Saved? Even old age hasn’t killed as many humans as you have.”
I did for Him. That’s what killed him three thousand years ago. It was His choice. As, today, it is your choice.
“All your Attilas and Hitlers; that’s what He stood against,” I rose, new energy filling me. I felt the reassuring peace of clarity of purpose. So often, it had been my only friend. “You think all this is a burden for me?! It is an honor and privilege to hold you prisoner and make you serve your time.” I laughed. “You think he didn’t know what I would do with your sentence? Why do you think He chose me? I was not never His best blade or pilot! I was only his most stubborn.”
My boots crunched through fresh , dirty snow. I wiped some from my visor; my gloved fingers were stained grey with ash.
“Yorgos, even if I’m the last Imperial alive, all your people are in mortal danger. I’ll do this again. I’ll do worse. So much worse.”
He went quiet again. This made me smile.
***
Halfway along the valley was a squat, black pyramid. It was a Swarmer Era device.
The Green Bang hadn’t been a single event. Instead it had been a series of expanding waves, some designed, some evolving of their own accord. The Swarmers were a tail-end wave that could well have been both. Their infestations were hard nanotech. Like their older, all-biological relatives, they too wouldn’t terraform without sunlight. They could use nuclear energy though: it gave them enough to set up key infrastructure, like this.
Rising from the pyramid on a giant stalk was a laser beaming array. Nitrogen gas torrented from vents around its neck, forming a mist. The mist sank, freezing out around the pyramid and forming an ice ring. Vacuum crabs chipped the ice and hauled it away to precarious slag piles.
I caught a crab; it scrabbled between my fingers like a tick pulled off a dog. I sent it queries; the third Barbaroi code I tried it understood.
Display activation log.
The crustacean machine showed me. The Swarmer beaming station listed 132 deceleration events over the past 500 years. Most were just one-way burial expeditions from Barbaroi stars. I discounted these and that left just 16 flights.
12 were by data couriers and trade scouts.
Two by scientists (if you can call Green Bangers, scientists).
There’d even been an engineer from Renaissance culture. Renaissance cultures were ruined Imperial territories later resettled by Babaroi. Each generation that follows starts a little further from the pigsty. In time, they come think themselves our successors. This upstart had come looking for Archivists - Megalo had had a colony of those scholars (their castellum was listed as silent rather than destroyed. That was something! I will explain who they were, soon enough).
There had even been a prison ship. Who sends a prison ship to a web?
16 decelerations, but no accelerations.
Display outbound flights.
Nothing! An error in the log, surely.
Resubmit activation log.
The same data. I threw away the crab and grabbed two others. They reported the same. I tried a different tack.
Reactor status log, 500 years.
No shutdowns. Minor damage events due to deorbiting debris, all repaired by the crabs within days.
Fuel log.
Mikro’s water was rich in deuterium. The tanks beneath the ice had been brimming with the nuclear fuel as far back as I checked.
I stopped and looked up at the giant, laser array. Why had this beaming station slowed visitors to receive them, but then not boosted any back on their way?
User credentials: Yorgos.
A most unlikely claim: the beaming station prompted me for authentication. I fed it the brain engram billions had died to sit its owner in front of me. I could still hear the snaps as I’d broken his fingers as we copied it.
The beaming station accepted the engram of its creator’s creator, and I was in.
All systems stop. Full diagnostics check.
The vacuum crabs froze. The cooling vents coughed and stopped - deep below, the fusion reactor went on standby. The mist petered out as the entire beaming station began a thorough fault scan.
I sat down and made a spaceship while I waited. It was a beach ball of Nitrogen, methane, and water ice. I poked a hole, stuffed in some crabs, and flung the ball into space. When the crabs came to they’d build a graphene light sail, good little Swarmer-tech that they were. Then, the beaming station would detect its radio thoughts, and blast it to the nearest star.
Hard nanotech that it was, the beaming station was Green Bang tech through and through. Various species of this machine were cluttered throughout the galaxy, catching and firing away any light sailing ships that signaled them. There were, of course, plenty of pre-Bang beamers. These were scattered wide like proud Homo Erectus, unaware her successors were coming to eat her. Others beamers evolved independently; driven by selection pressure (the Green Bang was nothing if not creative). Before beaming stations colonized space, starships had to carry their own fuel. Can you imagine what a comedy that must have been?
Diagnostics complete.
The vacuum crabs stepped right back into life. The vents rattled as fresh gas reboiled the frozen Nitrogen in the shafts. I looked through the reports. There were no errors, no data corruption.
Through the thinned mist, further down the valley, I saw an odd mass. Not a hill or a glacier. I walked beyond the mist to get a better look.
Mashed together, crumpled into a junkyard of frames and unlit modules, were sixteen starships. Sixteen. Immense spiderweb strands trussed them up like prey.
Nulb of Leng rose in the sky above them, pulsing in blue aurorae.