We swooped down toward the fragment, which was bigger than many of the others I’d seen so far. “It’s huge,” I noted to Chet as we skimmed along, scouting for dangers. IR scans indicated no body heat signatures, though I’d learned not to be careless about that.
“Indeed,” he said. “I now understand why some are so much bigger than others. They’ve been growing for longer.”
“This…” Dllllizzzz said over the comm. “Here… I was… Here…”
Again, it was more than she normally said, and got Shiver excited. I was focused, however, on the ruins I could make out at the fragment’s center, and I navigated toward them.
“Yeah, I remember this place,” Peg said. “We visited it when it first drifted into our region a few years back.”
“That’s right, Captain,” Maksim said. “So why are we here again, Spin?”
“Historical investigations,” I said. “Chet here is an archaeologist.”
“A right noble profession, my good man,” Chet said. “Ancient artifacts can tell us much about ourselves!”
“Uh, I guess,” Maksim said. “But—”
“Leave it be, Maksim.” Peg cut him off. “Their reasons are their own. The rest of us will search for salvage while we’re here.”
I narrowed my eyes. Peg didn’t seem the type to let our reasons be “our own.”
“Spin and I will need time to study those ruins directly at the center,” Chet said. “I’m circling them on your monitors.”
“Dllllizzzz is vibrating uncomfortably,” Shiver said over the comm. “Though she’s excited, I think she doesn’t want to land. She feels…anxious? Maybe the two of us should stay up and keep watch.”
“Fine by me,” Peg said. “Maksim and I will stick near, Spin, while you do your…archaeology.”
Our group landed in a ruined courtyard, while the two resonants stayed in the air. There wasn’t a lot left of most of the ruins—fallen walls, the outlines of buildings. A few somewhat-intact stone structures.
I popped the canopy and climbed out, meeting Peg on the ground. “This place is old,” she said. “Not a lot of wind in here, and no rain, so things don’t weather much. If something looks this bad, it’s probably seen thousands of years.”
Chet and I shared a glance, then started toward one of the mostly intact structures, helmets under our arms.
“Doesn’t look too promising, Captain,” Maksim muttered from behind. “This place must have been picked over hundreds of times.”
“Agreed,” Peg said, “but keep growing delens just in case. We’re here to keep our promise to Spin.”
I remembered the structure ahead—it had been injected into my mind by the previous step on the Path. We walked up to it, and directly inside I found my first surprise. The wall behind the small foyer had a faded old mural on it—and the figures it depicted were most certainly human.
“Amazing,” Chet breathed. He rushed up to it and leaned in close. “Our own people, Miss Nightshade. All these years, I never found any ruins that I could identify as human…”
I couldn’t make out much of the mural. Just some figures holding baskets, maybe?
“I could not guess at the culture,” Chet whispered. He reached out to the mural, then paused—perhaps not wanting to touch it and further contribute to its degradation. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t remember much about where we came from. Our homeworld. I must have once known…”
“Earth,” I said. “Humankind left there a few centuries before you were even born. It’s lost now. Vanished.”
Together, we moved farther into the structure. The roof had long since fallen in, so we didn’t lack for light—and from the refuse on the floor, it seemed the place had been ransacked over the years, and had possibly been in a firefight.
I felt an…eerie, haunted sense. There were so many signs of life, but no people. We found the portal in the last room, built straight into the wall, the characteristic flowing lines carved into it. But this one was cracked down the middle. Broken. Would it still work?
I glanced at Chet, who lingered in the doorway. “Courage,” he said, stepping forward. “I am an explorer—it is what I decided to be. I can face these secrets…”
He joined me beside the portal. I touched it, opened up my cytonic senses, and sought answers. At first nothing happened. This portal appeared to be damaged, unusable. But I pushed a little more, using the subtle care I’d been practicing, and…yes, I could feel them inside. The memories…
Everything around me faded to flimsy transparency. I remained in the ruins physically—I could feel the broken wall beside me—but they had been overlaid by a vision of the belt as it had existed long ago.
Chet breathed out, turning around. The lightburst was tiny in the distance, little more than a star. The sky was dark, and I counted maybe two dozen fragments floating in the expanse. So this seemed to be the ancient past, like the previous vision.
Our current fragment was much smaller in the past—plus it was empty of structures save for the portal, which stood free and whole, not cracked. It was smaller too, lending further credence to the theory that the portals grew a little—with memories—whenever cytonics used them as transfer points between dimensions.
Moments after the vision began, people popped into existence directly in front of the portal. I stepped away from them in surprise. Humans? They were talking, though I couldn’t understand the language.
“Can you make out any of that?” Chet asked.
“Afraid not,” I said, circling them. They wore robes, and something was kind of familiar about the headdress one was wearing. “I once saw a drawing of Gilgamesh in a book from Old Earth, and he wore clothing and a beard like that.” I pointed to one of the men. “Maybe they’re from somewhere near his civilization?”
Chet hopped back from the portal as something else materialized in front of it. Stones? Yes, a pile of building materials. People began using them to construct something.
“This wasn’t their first visit here,” I said, feeling it was true. There were…sensations to the vision, not just sights. “They want to build a shrine, I think.”
Chet and I watched as time sped up, and walls sprang into existence. The people became blurs, erecting the very structure that Chet and I were standing in. They carved delicate art into the walls, then painted everything with vibrant colors.
Why put something so nice in this strange place? Time slowed again, and the humans—it seemed the construction had taken weeks, maybe months—gathered together out front. Chet and I joined them and saw another fragment swinging closer. This bore a group of people in vibrant red robes. They had pale violet skin, growths like horns, and pure white hair. People from ReDawn…Alanik’s homeworld.
“I know those people,” I told Chet. “They’re the UrDail. The one I met said they’d known humans in the past.”
“How far in the past?” Chet asked, rubbing his chin. “These humans wear ancient clothing.”
“Scud,” I said. “Could this be first contact? The first time humans met with aliens? I thought that didn’t happen until we were in the space age.”
Except Hesho had also told me that the kitsen people had met with humans in Japan centuries before either achieved space travel. They’d traveled using cytonics. Like these, it seemed.
In front of us, the humans greeted the UrDail—who stepped over to our fragment—and I realized this probably wasn’t first contact. The two groups looked familiar with one another, so their first encounters must have happened earlier. Now the humans had built some kind of meeting hall. It wasn’t a shrine, I realized as we followed the people in. It was a place where they sat together at tables, trying to…
Trying to figure out one another’s languages perhaps? Yes, they were writing words, gesturing, explaining to one another. Time sped up again, and I counted dozens of meetings in a matter of minutes—each time the two fragments aligned. I think I even saw some UrDail visit Earth through the portal, while some humans left on the UrDail fragment.
Then…the humans stopped coming.
An alignment happened and the UrDail arrived, but no humans were there to meet them. That occurred several more times, then eventually the UrDail stopped visiting as well.
“So…” I said. “What does this tell us about our powers?”
Chet frowned, inspecting the mural in the vision—which was colorful and vibrant then. “Alien species began meeting in the nowhere. Mixing. But then it ended. Why?”
That…had happened with the kitsen too, hadn’t it? Hesho said their cytonics had vanished for some reason. As I was considering this, a woman appeared out of the wall. She was middle-aged, with tan skin and colorful robes. I followed her as she walked out of the building, then over to the nearby edge of the fragment. There she settled down, looking out at the expanse.
Time passed. Months, maybe years. And still she sat there, as if waiting for something. Finally she rose and walked past us.
“Who are you?” I asked.
And the impression returned, I am the only one who was not killed by the beast.
Wait. Wait. Had she replied?
I followed her back into the building as she walked up to the portal. There she rested her hand—and lines in the stone began to spiral and flourish out at her touch.
I feel your questions, the impression said. It is my talent. Though I do not know any of you, I leave my answers in the portal.
“What happened?” I asked. “To the cytonics?”
A beast. Raised by an alien species who had technological marvels.
I saw something in my mind then. An assembly of thousands of cytonics—of a hundred different races—gathering to fight…something dark, something rising from a blackness, but with a set of piercing white eyes.
It…destroyed them, the cytonic said. We fought. We won. But the price was so high…
“How?” I asked. “How did you win?”
We made it become real, she said. I do not know how. I survived…and those who did know how…were consumed. She lowered her hand. She’d…inscribed her memories into the portal, which…were now reaching me somehow?
Chet walked up behind me. “Time is unnatural in the nowhere, but this is strange even by its standards,” he said. “I…have no idea what to make of this.”
I felt the vision begin to fade. It was coming to the end of its memories.
“Wait,” I said to the woman. “You kept your memories while living in the nowhere. How?”
Why would I lose my memories? the impression returned.
“That’s an attribute of this place,” I said.
Not in our time. You face a beast, like ours.
“Not one beast,” I said. “Thousands. Millions of them.”
Then you are doomed.
“No. There has to be a way!”
Find the memories…of the man who will come… Find the memories…of the man named Jason Write.
Then a different sort of impression came upon me, as had happened during the previous vision. I understood it better because I was stronger in my powers, better at listening. It felt like dozens, maybe hundreds, of minds reaching to me from within the stone.
Further…they encouraged me. Even further…
They presented for me something like a wall. I forced my mind against it and could not get through.
Stronger. But not harder.
I don’t understand! I sent.
You are not a tool to strike. Not a rock to bludgeon.
What am I? I asked.
You are a star.
And a light kindled inside me. A pure white light, the power of the nowhere. I became a flaming sword, and when I shoved, my mind pierced the barrier.
Good… Good… Continue.
A location popped into my head. Another portal? It was in what appeared to be a large building, filled with boxes? I frowned.
“Scrud,” Chet said.
“You recognize the place?” I asked, turning toward him.
“Indeed I do, Spensa,” he said, then took a deep breath. “That, I’m afraid, is the portal in the middle of Surehold, seat of Superiority power in this region of the belt.”
