Deathstalker Honor

'I can't abandon him,' said Daniel. 'I'm the only hope he has.'

'There's no hope here,' said Captain Gideon flatly. 'This is the Forbidden Sector. Shub space. My ship and its crew are the only outpost of Empire here. No colonies, no Bases, no other ships. We alone stand duty here, to give warning if Shub finally starts its long-declared war on Humanity. We couldn't stop anything coming out, but hopefully we'd slow it down and last long enough to get off a warning signal. Give the Empire some time to prepare. Every man on this ship is a volunteer, prepared to give their lives if necessary, that Humanity might be warned. We have to be here. You don't. We'll debrief you, search your ship, and then send you home. Unless you give me any trouble, in which case you can spend the next few months sitting in my brig, waiting for our tour of duty to be over so you can go home to face trial.'

'Understood, Captain.' Daniel frowned, thinking hard. There had to be some way past this last obstacle. But he seemed to have run out of options. He couldn't fight, or run, or hope to talk his way past a Captain like Gideon. Daniel had encountered his sort before. Married to the job, sworn to duty, death before dishonor. Daniel had never really understood such people, but he did know they couldn't be bargained with, or bribed, which had been his only other thoughts. And then he heard alarms sounding, and looked frantically around for a moment before realizing the sound was coming from the bridge viewscreen. Captain Gideon had turned away and was barking orders offscreen.

'What is it, Captain?' said Daniel.

'I don't have any more time for you, Wolfe. My sensors indicate something really large heading out from Shub. I have to go check it out. Don't be here when I get back.' And then the screen went blank, and the sound of alarms was cut off sharply.

'You heard the nice Captain,' said Moses. 'At last, someone with the right number of brain cells in his head. I'll plot a course out of here.'

'No,' said Daniel. 'We go on.'

'But… didn't you hear the Captain?'

'Yes. He's been distracted, called away, so he couldn't interfere with my mission anymore. This is my father's doing, I'm sure of it. He knows I'm coming. Full speed ahead, Moses. You heard the good Captain. He doesn't want to find us here when he gets back.'

'If he gets back,' said Moses darkly.

'Shut up and set the course, Moses. We can't be far from Shub now. And I don't want to keep my father waiting…'

Shub turned up on the Heaven's Tears' forward sensors some six hours later. There was no visual image, only indications of a vast energy field, but it was the right size, and the mass and power levels were off the scales. It had to be Shub. Daniel prepared himself as best he could. He had his clothes laundered one more time and strapped on his sword belt. The gun on his left hip might or might not be more useful than the sword on his right, or they might be no damn use at all, but either way he found their familiar weights reassuring. He studied himself in his cabin's full-length mirror, and was struck for the first time how different he looked. Thanks to his regular time-killing workouts, he was in the best shape he'd ever been, but even apart from that, there was something about his face…

He wasn't sure, but he thought it might be signs of new character. He hoped so. Jacob Wolfe had always been big on building character. Daniel hoped his father would approve of the new him.

He hurried back to the bridge, running through all the things he meant to say to his father one more time. There was so much he'd always meant to say to Jacob while he was still alive, but somehow the time had never seemed right. And then suddenly his father had been taken from him, and it was too late. Daniel had come to Shub for many reasons, but deep down, if he was honest, there was only one thing he really wanted to say.

He'd never told his father that he loved him.

He strode onto the bridge and powered up the viewscreen. There was still nothing to see, just a vague swirling to mark the boundaries of the energy fields. Daniel sank into his command chair and wondered what to do next.

'Before you ask, yes, I have been broadcasting who we are on all frequencies,' said the AI. 'And no, I don't know what those energy fields are. They're like nothing I've ever encountered before. But they're certainly big enough to conceal a whole planet and protect it from anything I can think of. Just as well, when you consider how close they are to their sun.'

'I wonder what Shub will look like,' said Daniel.

'You've come all this way, and you're only wondering that now? Daniel, how much do you actually know about Shub's history, and the AIs that built it?'

'Only what's in your data banks, and most of that was classified, remember?'

'Damn,' said Moses. 'I was sort of hoping that as an aristo you might have had access to other sources than me. So we're both in the dark… Hold everything. I'm monitoring some unusual changes in the energy fields…'

On the viewscreen, space seemed to twist and turn, and suddenly a huge planet was hanging there in space before them. It was vast, easily the size of a gas giant, but composed entirely of metals. It had no definite shape, just a conglomerate of towers and spiked and thrusting protusions. There were great geometrical shapes like bunkers studded here and there in no apparent pattern. The various metals were all different colors, some shining so brightly Daniel could look at them only briefly out of the corner of his eye. Just looking at the planet made his head hurt.

'Wow,' said Moses quietly. 'My sensors are going crazy. They can't cope with the sheer amount of information that's coming in. Power readings are all off the scale, on all levels. Just sitting there, it's generating more energy than a hundred Empire factory worlds. The mass is frightening, but there's hardly any gravity… and what there is fluctuates from place to place. A world this big should be pulling us in by now, but I'm getting nothing at all on my sensors. It must be the energy fields—'

'Never mind all that,' said Daniel. 'Is this Shub?'

'If it isn't, I'd hate to think what it might be. There couldn't be two anomalies like this in the Forbidden Sector; space wouldn't stand for it. No, this has to be Shub. The level of technology alone guarantees that.'

'Put us into a high orbit, Moses. Maintain a safe distance.'

'Way ahead of you, as always. High orbit established. Though what a safe distance might be is anybody's guess. Personally, I'm not getting one inch closer to that metal monstrosity than I absolutely have to. And I shouldn't look at it directly for too long either, Daniel. If I'm reading my instruments correctly, this planet exists in more than three dimensions. I think it might be some kind of tesseract. And no, I'm not going to even try to explain that to you. Just take it from me that we have come to a very strange place. It's entirely possible that the interior of this world will turn out to be much bigger than its exterior would normally suggest. Which means… if my calculations are correct, Shub's interior could have as much sheer surface area as half the colonized worlds in the Empire put together.'

Daniel thought about that for a while, but couldn't visualize it. 'Any life signs down there?'

'Unlikely on Shub, but I can't confirm one way or the other. All but my most immediate sensors are being blocked.'

'They say nothing lives on Shub,' said Daniel slowly. 'That it's all just… machines.'

'Wouldn't be at all surprised,' said Moses. 'This is not a human place. Humans were never meant to come here. It might not be too late, Daniel. We could still try to make a run for it.'

'No,' said Daniel. 'My father's down there somewhere. I'm not leaving without him.'

The entire ship shuddered suddenly. Daniel grabbed the arms of his chair to steady himself. 'What the hell was that?'

'Our discussion just became irrelevant,' said Moses. 'Something has just taken control of the ship's engines and navigation systems. I'm locked out. We've begun a landing course. Looks like it is too late, after all.'

Daniel made himself let go of his chair's arms, sat back, and studied the viewscreen as it showed the huge artificial planet rising to meet them. Shub seemed to grow bigger and more intricate all the time, like a flower endlessly unfolding. Details became towering machines with details of their own. Strange vessels orbited the planet, huge and small and in between, performing unknown tasks and errands. And still Shub grew and grew on the viewscreen, endlessly complex and unfathomable. Looking at it made Daniel's head ache even more. He learned to look at it for only a few moments at a time, taking rests in between. The image on the viewscreen shimmered from time to time, as though even the sensors were affected by what they were seeing.