“I know, I know. But with all that, I keep going back to the nightmare.”
Nagel nodded. “I know. I can’t get it out of my mind, either.” Randi, Jerry, and even the less sociable Cross, had all used the stones to share the nightmare with the others, a nightmare they had experienced only once, yet could not forget.
She had been flying, flying through some strange, alien greenish sky with pink and yellow clouds.
Although it had clearly been a point in some kind of atmosphere, she could see through it to the stars beyond, the whole starfield laid out before her, not in the usual visual spectrum but through some other means. It was almost as if she were viewing some kind of photographic negative of the sky, an alien sky she’d never seen before filled with all the stars and formations of a globular cluster, but where light was dark and black was a kind of bright, soft pink.
Looking below, she saw a vast world that was heavily developed but long past its prime. Great domed cities stretched in uncounted number to the horizon, encapsulating ancient and dying masses whose shape and other details could not be determined from this height.
It would have been awesome if she hadn’t felt permeated with a sense of awful hopelessness, a feeling that all those billions plus billions down there were in total despair, creating so much unhappiness that it collected and beamed from every individual and every dome and perhaps every centimeter of the planet, and beyond, going to and right through Randi Queson. She felt tremendous sorrow for them, all the more because she knew that she could not help them in any way, only watch their decline into despair and death.
The others were all with her. She could feel them, sense them in a hundred inexpressible ways, yet she could not see her companions. They were wraiths, flying over a planet of the dead, but they were still wraiths, as helpless as any spectre.
And now they were off the world, and into the strangely inverted and bizarrely colored void.
There were others out here as well. Many others, but wraiths just like themselves, able to witness but only to witness, as they went from world to world, system to system, in a flash of darkness, instantly going from world to world and finding only the feelings of horror, despair, and death.
There were Others, as well, on some of those worlds, and going between them. It was no more possible to tell anything else about them than it had been to tell details of the first and subsequent civilizations, but this was a different realm, a different sort of sensory perception, and they were clear as could be.
These were the Bringers of Despair, hatching from the dark, hidden places and wrapping themselves around the worlds they found and helplessly sucking the life out of them. The ones the Others attacked wanted to fight back, wanted to push back this horror, but they could not. Once attacked, they progressively lacked the energy to push against this overwhelming darkness, a darkness that seemed both infinitely collective and yet of one mind and attitude.
They veered off, swallowing pride, running for their lives, flying through holes and folds in space one after the other, throwing off the pursuer or pursuers. All thought was gone; there was suddenly only panic, only fear, and a sense that they must return together.
And then it was all emotions, rising up like a giant wave and crashing down, washing over them, bathing them in a range so intense they could not bear it.
“Are the ones we head to the Bringers of Despair or those who fight and flee them?” Ann asked her.
“I don’t know. I can’t know. I certainly hope it isn’t the Bringers. If they’re real, and I deep down believe that they must be, then we’re doomed. Ones who sterilize the universe behind their waves of aimed cosmic ray storms… It’s too horrible!”
“Let’s go see,” said Ann, even as Maslovic gave the command from the center to break the ship out of orbit and head towards the small, dark moon of mystery.
XII: KASPAR’S BOX
At one hundred and eighty kilometers above the planet-sized moon, the instrumentation and cameras could do an excellent job. If somebody had stopped off there and left graffiti on a rock, they could read it. The trick was noticing the rock in the first place.
It was a forbidding-looking place in any event. The residual heat from the big and still officially unnamed mother planet plus pressure deep under its oceans, freezing around the coasts but still liquid for most of their expanse, allowed it to maintain a barely habitable temperature during its long semi-night, but it just gave an even more eerie look to the place.
“Not any signs of glaciation,” Nagel noted, feeling a sense of deja vu as he looked once more on the forbidding little world and said much the same to a new but at least more appreciative audience. “It must melt pretty good on the sunward leg. Lots of erosion in the regions against the mountains, but the main land masses have been so chewed up they’re just cold powdery desert. Those dunes and that wind would make it even nastier. And we thought that overrun colony’s choice of worlds was bad!”
“Atmospheric content?” Maslovic asked.
Darch checked the figures. “Very cold at the moment and dry as a bone, but the oxygen and hydrogen mix is within limits. I wouldn’t like to do it without a breather just to keep the grit from choking you, but the air would be okay. I don’t know what we’d eat, though, and any fresh water in those big lakes would take a fission reactor to properly melt for use. It’s probably as ugly but very different on the solar traverse. No way to tell until we can see it, and that’s still almost fifteen standard days, I think.”
“The subsurface scan will show you what we found,” Nagel told him. “Nobody’s dumb enough to live up here, but that’s not the only place to live.”
“It’s honeycombed, a vast cavernous system down there,” Darch noted. “Most of the interior caverns, some of which seem to go way down, appear to be relatively dry, and those figures there just might indicate some running water even at this point. That’s how you survive the cold cycle. Ten to one the caves maintain an above freezing temperature that’s either constant or nearly so. The surface is only comfortable half the year. Odd, though.”
“I’m sure you’ve already seen what we saw in the makeup there,” Nagel commented, kind of needling the tech.
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Darch responded, oblivious to the dig. “Caverns of that signature tend to be sedimentary rock, easily eroded away over time by the underground rivers and streams, and certainly all the makings are there for a classic setup. Note, though, that there are no such caverns within a hundred or more kilometers of the coastlines. They’re away from the oceans and in the highlands no matter where you look. There doesn’t seem to be a major change in bedrock composition in most of those cases that would explain it. The planet’s got a heavy but mostly solid core that’s maintained the gravity and kept the atmosphere, but a lot of the underground water doesn’t seem to obey the laws all that well. It’s probably scrambled data from all this interference, but on the face of it, it seems like as many of those deep rivers are flowing upward as are flowing downslope.”
“Yeah, I noticed the uphill flow when we were first here,” Nagel told him. “We never did figure it out. Li thought it was caused by pressure, using some of the caverns like pipes.”
“Interesting. Plumbing for a race driven from the surface? Fascinating concept, but we’re getting heavy organics but nothing that would suggest a civilization or even a big colony that would justify building works like that. If our master aliens are down there, then they’re probably long dead or reduced to a primitive existence. This is a planet you can survive on, it’s not one you ever want to try and live and work on if you don’t have to.”