“Rhuar!” yelled Jesri, dashing around to kneel down beside the twitching, keening dog. His eyes were open, staring wide and darting in crazed patterns around their orbits. Qktk swarmed over to stand beside him with his antennae vibrating in concern.

Anja bent down to examine him, then met Jesri’s eyes. “Jacksick?”, she said, getting a nod in return.

“Definitely,” Jesri replied, wincing. “He’s a good pilot, but I forgot that he’s never used mil-spec feeds.” She turned to reassure Qktk. “He should be fine in a couple of minutes. We just need to wait and provide some repetitive sensory stimulus to help him focus.”

“Stimulus?”, Qktk buzzed. “Like what?”

Rhuar was a mortal mind stretched suddenly, brutally into godhood. Light, color and sound poured over him in a synaesthetic waterfall that whirled in eddies along the recesses of his skull. Shapes appeared and vibrated through his being, his bones resonating like a struck gong with every pulse. His apotheosis drove liquid starfire into his eyes like a thousand tiny needles shining from the deepest radio wavelengths to the fizzy sparkle of gamma radiation.

He reached with a thousand arms and grabbed a thousand stars to steady himself. The swirl of reality rushed around him in a vortex, each glowing mote of space with the void of hyperspace behind it stretching precariously back into infinity. He grabbed at the onrushing tide of space-time and the points collapsed to a paltry three dimensions.

His senses regaining themselves, Rhuar’s mind was presented with the precise details of everything occurring within a quarter light year radius. Dust billowed gently around them and he felt its every contour against the scarred metal of the hull. Starlight played over them and out into the abyss. Every lump of rock, scrap of debris and twisted hulk of abandoned mining equipment pirouetted in a slow waltz around him, each one a bright node of thousands of years of observational data.

Rhuar clashed against the flood of information and shattered it, sweeping fragments into categories, generalizations, hierarchies. Information fled and hid within its wrappings, shrinking and folding to abstract representations that stretched in endless rows away from him.

Suddenly it was still. Rhuar floated in space, one kilometer long and millions of tons in mass. The vast sweep of the universe stretched around him, stars and dust jumping with perfect clarity into his mind. Layers of data flickered tantalizingly before his eyes, flooding him with knowledge when he reached out to brush them and receding when he pulled back. A light pressure flitted across his fore and he moved his mind across the ship’s sprawling decks to pursue it. Beams stretched through the superstructure, the minute flex of gravity waves sending rippling shocks through the metal. Dust-covered floors held dust-covered bodies sprawled beside chairs and beds throughout the ship.

A stronger pressure beckoned him farther aft, and he swept into the engineering section to bask in the star that was his beating heart, the warm light of fusion kept calm and controlled in a steady pulse. Power surged from his core to permeate every corner of the ship, flowing through a million kilometers of conduits and wires.

Pressure, irresistible, pulled him upwards to the bridge. He saw with a thousand eyes the huddled forms of Anja, Jesri and Qktk standing over his body. Every spark of a nerve and twitch of a muscle drew bright lines along their forms, the layers peeling back to show biological status, chemical composition, biographical profiles.

A tickle of curiosity sent him deeper into the biographical information, pulling up a swirling cloud of images around Anja as he focused. He suddenly knew the full details of her birth, her military service, her hundreds of sisters. He reeled away from the burning tide of information and refocused on the Anja standing over him on the bridge. Lightning raced through her arm as it stretched forward, a thin finger arcing fire and pointing forward to touch-

“Boop,” said Anja once more, poking Rhuar in the nose.

“And then I was the whole ship, just sitting there in space but it’s not just space, you can feel the space behind the space-”

“Rhuar,” Jesri said patiently.

“-tell you that military sensors are better but who actually has a military sensor anymore? I thought it might be a little better but like holy fuck! It’s like I’ve never looked at anything properly until now-”

“Rhuar,” rattled Qktk.

“-could actually visualize the plasma flow through the reactor torus, get down inside and see the magnetic field lines. They seemed like they were fluffy, but that’s probably just some extraneous tactile crossover I need to nail down-”

“Ensign Rhuar,” said Anja, “Shut up.”

Rhuar shut up.

After some time to let Rhuar come down from his momentary godhood, Jesri cleared him to reconnect to the ship. “But don’t just drink from the sensor feed like before,” she scolded. “Every pilot should know that. I’m not going to let you turn into a jack zombie just because you can’t keep your paws off the feed.”

Rhuar paused, shipjack in hand. “Uh. Say again?”

“Not literal zombies, obviously. That was what we called the pilots that spent every moment they could jacked in. If you ever caught them without their jack, they would just be standing around staring at the wall until they could hook up again.” She gave him a look, and Rhuar gulped. “This can fuck you up long-term if you’re not careful,” she warned. “Don’t overdo it. Set a timer, two hours, and whitelist your inputs. We can go longer after you’ve gotten used to it.”

He blinked. “Yep, nope, won’t stay longer than that. I hadn’t really thought about it with other ships, but with this one…” He shivered. “I could see that happening. I feel like I’m too small now to even remember it properly.”

Jesri gave him a pat on the head. “You’ll be fine,” she reassured him, “just don’t overdo it. When you’re ready, we need to access internal sensors and figure out where they’re keeping the weapon.”

Rhuar gingerly connected to the ship again, dipping his toe into the vast sea of data and sensation. He sought out the bright filaments of sensor feeds, drawing lighted corridors and rooms together into a shining facsimile of the ship. “Let’s see,” he murmured. “We’ve got a couple of areas marked specially here. What’s a ‘Heli-’, uh.” He frowned. “Helical Collimator Plasma Lance?”

A slight thrum of power vibrated the air on the bridge. Jesri gave him an alarmed look. “Rhuar, do not power up strange weapons systems,” she half-shouted.

The dog winced and the hum of power vanished. Jesri looked at Rhuar reproachfully and he shook his head. “Right, sorry, sorry. Guessing that’s not what we’re after. We’ve got, ah...” he trailed off, ears flicking back and forth rapidly. “Oh, here’s something. A cargo bay in the secondary hold is wired to draw an absolutely stupid amount of power.”

Jesri nodded. “That sounds like it.”

Jesri stood outside bay 17-C122 with a tablet in hand. She had been ready to compare door numbers, but there was no need - she was obviously in the right place. This hold had extensive extra security on the doorway, which had in turn been reinforced. A temporary placard sat below the hold’s designation, reading simply: “MANTRA: NO ENTRY”.

“Rhuar, can you pop this hold?”, she asked aloud.

Rhuar’s voice came from all around her with no obvious source. “Yeah, one second,” he said, echoing strangely down the empty hall. Some quiet clicks issued from the door’s locking mechanisms and it hissed open slowly. Inside the hold, sleeved bundles of cabling ran haphazardly beneath a carpet of dust to a dull grey pedestal. Complex folds and protrusions of metal adorned the top in a bowed chalice, reaching upwards to enclose…

Nothing.

Jesri stared at the pedestal, tapping her foot slightly. “Rhuar, am I missing something here?”

“Nope,” he said. “I’m looking over the logs for that room. The logs for the inside are security-restricted, but you’re the first person to open that door since they finished building, uh, whatever that is.”

Jesri’s foot tapped a bit faster, a bit harder. “Could the pedestal itself be the weapon?”, she wondered aloud.

“I don’t think so,” said Rhuar hesitantly, “but I can’t be sure. There are open power and network connections for it, but they’re just labeled “Interface” and don’t seem to do anything.”

“Shit,” Jesri observed. Her foot stopped tapping. “All right, don’t fuck around with the pedestal for the moment. It’s not here.”

Rhuar didn’t answer, and she stood quietly in the hold staring at the light sparkling off the razor-petal curves of the pedestal. After a long minute, she raised her head. “I’m coming back up,” she said, striding towards the door. She paused at the threshold, considering. “Hey, Rhuar?”

“Huh?”, came the reply.

Jesri sighed. “Let me be the one to tell Anja.”

A thick tension slithered over the bridge, winding its coils around the silent air. Qktk edged over to stand beside Rhuar, who was panting and exhausted after his latest dive into the ship’s systems. Jesri sat upright in the first officer’s seat with her eyes locked on Anja, who was sprawled lazily in the captain’s chair.

“Shit,” said Anja, looking mildly annoyed. “I was hoping it would be here.”

Jesri blinked. “I thought you were sure it was here.”

“No, sister,” said Anja, stretching and sitting up. “I merely hoped. The logs I could find were inconclusive as to where the loading port was.”

“You never thought to mention this?”, Jesri shot back. “Seems like it would be an important thing to go over.”

Anja smiled infuriatingly. “I just said I had found the ship, and nothing about what I hoped may be on it.” Jesri slouched in her chair, conceding the point, and Anja continued heedless of her sister’s sustained glowering. Their unique constraints meant that all the Valkyrie developed a certain skill with indirect omissions, but Anja had always been the natural. “Getting to the ship had two purposes,” she continued. “The first was to secure the weapon, if it was aboard. I thought it unlikely that we would be that lucky, but I had hoped. We will have to pick up the trail somewhere else along the ship’s itinerary.”

Jesri frowned. “It had scheduled stops aside from Zephyr?”, she asked. “I always thought that was its final port of call.”

“That is what they told us,” confirmed Anja. “I checked. But when I found a batch of logs from the quartermaster corps on Hyannis, they had an entirely different list of stops. Several different copies were circulated, but from what I can tell there were fifteen planets on the route.”

“Fifteen?”, groaned Rhuar. “Even if they’re close, and I bet they’re not, that’s going to take weeks of flying to check them all.”

“I thought you liked flying?”, said Anja sweetly. “It will be faster than you think, though, since I have managed to confirm many of the planets the ship stopped at already. Aside from Zephyr, there are only three systems left to check.”

Jesri raised her eyebrows. “Four systems isn’t bad.”

Anja nodded. “Bartlett, Tengri and Apollyon are the other three.”

“Zephyr is closest, and Tengri is pretty close to that,” mused Jesri. “Not sure on the other two.”

Anja nodded and called up a map. Bright motes of light swirled into being above them, resolving into a narrow swatch of the Perseus arm. Their current position floated high above the starfield, marked with a light blue glow. A line of orange light pulsed down from Aurelius to intersect the Zephyr system, then veered outward to connect two more points. Finally, it reversed back to coreward and lanced through a fourth star.

Jesri frowned. “Why does the route have us doubling back? Wouldn’t it be faster to hit them like this?” She traced with her finger, drawing a smooth line through the four points.

Anja shook her head. “Faster, yes, but we have to visit Apollyon last.” She held up a hand as Jesri opened her mouth. “You’re about to ask why? I did research on all of the listed systems and they each have a military presence. Zephyr had the Prochazka Institute, Bartlett had the naval yards. Tengri didn’t have anything on the books, but I found some indications there was a listening post there.”

“Okay, that makes sense,” said Jesri, nodding. “But what makes Apollyon special? I’ve never even heard of it before.”

“It was new to me too,” replied Anja. “I was having no luck searching the name in the charts, the system does not appear anywhere. So, I widened the search to what was left of the station logs and still found nothing. I went back in desperation and started running the term through any dusty archive I could find, buy or steal.”

She grimaced. “And still, nothing. Eventually I gave up and started running searches on nonsense databases out of spite and frustration - compilations of recipes, children’s stories, things that could never be of use. But when I ran the search for topics related to philosophical history, I found thousands of hits.” She touched her slim black data archive within the folds of her cloak and tilted her head, querying with the ship. The starmap was replaced with a flat image of a few ornate lines of text on aged-looking parchment.

“And they had upon them a king,” Rhuar read, squinting, “the angel of the abyss, to whom the name in Hebrew is Abaddon, but by Greek Apollyon, and by Latin he hath a name Exterminus, meaning Destroyer.” He blinked. “Well, that sounds ominous. Who names a system that?”

“Nobody official,” said Anja. “The only place that designation appears is on the flight plan copy I found at Hyannis.”

“It’s a code,” breathed Jesri, realization striking her. “It wasn’t the last stop, it was the mission target.”

Anja nodded. “I was able to do some more targeted research once I realized. That system was our best guess at the location of the Gestalt.”

Jesri drew her breath in sharply, but Rhuar shook his head. “You’ve lost me,” he complained. “Who or what is the Gestalt?”

“What do you know about the years leading up to the final attack?”, asked Jesri. “The advanced species we encountered?”

“Anja told me the basics,” said Rhuar. “I filled Captain Qktk in on it later. The aliens are the Gestalt?”

“As best we could tell, just ‘alien’,” said Jesri. “There were a lot of competing theories, but the consensus was that most of their race decided to run with their technological singularity as far as it’d take them.”

Rhuar gaped at her. “They transcended?”, he said, disbelief coloring his voice. Qktk looked at him questioningly. “There’s been theories about singularities since forever,” he explained rapidly, excitement coloring his voice. “Most of them predicted it’d happen a long fuckin time ago, before we knew about the Moore Limit. Dogs talk about it a lot because, you know-”

His exoskeleton gestured to itself.

“-but it’s one of those things that’s always ten years away,” he concluded. “I figure if we never did it when the humans were around, we’re sure as fuck not doing it now. One of the popular scenarios was a collective super-consciousness as people and computers became mentally linked through technology. Good in theory, but nobody’s been able to get past the practical issues.”

“We learned about the concept as well, because of what we are,” said Jesri, nodding. “It was a concern, obviously. It’s one of the reasons why we don’t have network links to each other. They apparently tried that before our generation with, uh, mixed results.”

“Insanity, delusions of grandeur, self-destructive behavior,” whispered Anja. “It turns out that it is rather easy to make a superintelligent being, past a certain level of technology. Making one that isn’t suicidal or homicidal is apparently much harder.”

Jesri leaned back in her chair. Their minders at the Valkyrie creche had never made a secret of what they were or why they were made. Far from a demoralizing or confining truth, Jesri remembered it lending a clear, cold flame of purpose to her daily life. Still, despite her unflagging vigor for her role the minders had been cautious after raising her predecessors. There had been regular counseling sessions to detect signs of instability or any of the psychoses peculiar to artificial neural nets.

Jesri had never developed any indications thereof, nor had any of her sisters. Those who didn’t know Anja sometimes thought her to be dangerously unstable or manic, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth - more than Jesri or any of their long-lost kin, Anja was anchored by gleaming purpose and inexhaustible faith. Jesri had shared in her fervor, before the fall.

But afterwards, unmoored, Jesri had spent years alone in the void feeling insidious, numbing tendrils squirming in the back of her mind. Many times, she found an eddy in the chaos left after the fall and simply…

Stopped.

She had passed decades motionless, speechless, staring sightlessly forward in a depressive haze of nihilism, apathy, or whichever flavor of jeering madness had found root in her head.

But every time she fell into darkness, Anja found her and pulled her back up. A befuddled courier would arrive with a message, a grizzled bounty hunter would wordlessly press coordinates into her hand. On certain memorable occasions Anja had ventured out herself, springing into Jesri’s life like a ray of sunlight lancing into a disused and moldering room.

She was certain that some of her sisters had fallen victim to that darkness. Being functionally immortal rendered the long years of the onrushing future in a harsh and uncomfortable light that was hard to face alone.

She had wondered, at times, about the mind of the Gestalt itself. Far beyond homicidally insane, it was omnicidal - set irrevocably against the universe with a lethal nihilism. Was that what waited for her as well, if they survived? Or was that all-encompassing purpose the ash that remained after a fire like Anja’s burned low?

Jesri looked over to her sister and realized that the conversation had continued while she was lost in thought. Anja was looking down at Qktk, who was gesturing insistently. “But you said humanity had met the aliens. Ah, alien.” He fiddled two of his legs together, then pressed the question. “You never found out where they were from?”

A strained look flitted over Anja’s face. “We only ever met its Emissaries. Artificial bodies that it created as its tools. They look like beings in their own right, but they all share a link back to the Gestalt.”

“Yeah,” added Jesri, catching up to the conversation. “After we figured that one out I remember some of the intel guys theorizing that the Gestalt’s true body had to be in some sort of remote, inconspicuous place.”

“That was the primary theory,” Anja agreed. “We surveyed the area where we met the first Emissaries. The reports I read say we found Apollyon when someone noticed that the gravitic charts had a system the electromagnetic charts did not.”

Qktk skewed half his eyes towards Anja. “A dwarf star of some sort?”, he asked. “Hot enough to sustain a facility but not to emit light?”

Anja shook her head. “Zero emissions. If not for the gravitic mapping probes, we would not even know a system was there.”

Jesri frowned. “The intel guys had a lot of theories about what the Gestalt actually was, but most of them involved really flashy, high-energy stuff. The sort of thing that you can see from light-years away because it’s radiating exotic particles. I don’t think I heard many theories about it being some low-energy stealth facility.”

“And yet here it is,” said Anja, spreading her hands in a shrug. “Intel obviously came to a different conclusion. To be honest, it may be simply because it was the only thing on the survey that they couldn’t explain.”

Qktk shook his head violently, his mandibles making a clattering noise. “That’s all we have to go on? It sounds like they were just making a wild guess.”

Jesri grinned over at Qktk. “Maybe,” she said. “We weren’t in the habit of questioning intel assessments. They always gave us the best information available, so there was no point asking for better. In the rare cases where they were wrong, well, we improvised.”

Qktk crossed his arms, a much more intensive process for a Htt than for humans. “And did the intelligence report say anything about what we’re supposed to do in the event that they’ve guessed correctly? Whatever we may find there, it’s obviously extremely old and powerful, able to wipe out entire star systems at will. The last time you tried this it knew you were plotting against it before you were ready to move. What plan do you have to attack it once you arrive?”

Anja giggled. “We use the weapon, of course. It was created specifically for this purpose.”

“What does it do?”, Rhuar asked skeptically. “Must be something special if it’d work on an entity like the Gestalt.”

Anja sucked on her lower lip. “There were no files on that,” she said.

The others stared at her.

“You don’t know?”, asked Qktk incredulously.

Anja glared at him crossly. “It was a secret project, you know. The combined effort of humanity’s best and brightest to confront an existential threat. They didn’t leave the specifications lying around on the mess table.”

Rhuar groaned. “So we don’t know what it does. We don’t know where it is, but we know a few places it might have been five thousand years ago. We know where to put it on the ship, once we get it. We maybe know where to take it afterwards, but not what to do with it or how we’re going to get close enough-” He paused. “Fuck, we don’t even know how close we have to get.”

“Let’s find the weapon first,” sighed Jesri. “We’ll worry about the ancient murdery alien after that.”

The four of them sat on the bridge for a moment, soft light from the wall panels mingling with the bright glow from unmanned consoles to paint their faces with strange color and shadow.

“What’s the second reason?”, said Qktk suddenly, addressing Anja. She gave him a quizzical look. “You said there were two reasons you needed this ship,” he said. “What was the second?”

“Oh, that,” she said dismissively. “It’s nothing strange. Like I said, the first was to secure the weapon if it was aboard. The second,” she continued, a predatory grin creeping to the corners of her mouth, “was so that we had the resources to secure it if it was not.”

She gestured expansively to the empty bridge. “This is the most powerful remaining relic of humanity’s might. Now that we have it-”

Jesri shot to her feet. “No, don’t-”

“-nothing can stand in our way.” concluded Anja triumphantly.

Jesri groaned. “Anja, goddammit.”

Far outside of Aurelius, floating invisibly in the interstellar void, a small knot of blackness drifted. Its matte surface was featureless and smooth, reflecting no light and showing no contour. It hung motionless in the black gulf of space, waiting and listening as it had for an eon.

A faint signal washed over it, a coded query sent from close in beside the star. The surface of the object did not change, but inside its midnight shell a flurry of activity took place. Sensors reached out and saw the hazy remains of a hyperspace exit, then another bright burst as a ship jumped into the center of the dust belt at the system’s core.

Minutes passed, and it patiently watched the system for further changes. Its sensors picked up the sudden spike of ramping power from a military-grade fusion reactor, the flare of emissions from a million kilometers of power conduits as they surged with energy. Pattern recognition routines locked on to the new signals, processed them and fired a tight-beam hyperspace message on an outward trajectory to the stars.

It was an impossibly dense information packet, with a complex mathematical structure buried under layers of encryption. If one were to strip away the stream of sensory data and mangle the rest down to the dull bleats of common language, it might conceivably be translated as:

REVISION REQUEST

SET TASK23093.STATUS = PENDING

SET OBJECT3902032559.STATUS = ACTIVE

It sat in silence for a few seconds before the answering burst came back.

REVISION ACCEPTED

TASK23093.STATUS (COMPLETE > PENDING)

OBJECT3902032559.STATUS (INACTIVE > ACTIVE)

LINKED UPDATE

CONTINGENCY.STATUS (INACTIVE > ACTIVE)

The object settled into an observation mode, silently logging data from the bright center of the star system. It had served its purpose. Now the Emissaries would serve theirs.