“I’m told that the lights here are a bit uncomfortable for humans; your eyesight is better than that of the People and something about this hue makes it harder for you to adjust, but you will in a couple of minutes,” Isani said as his secondary eyelids slid in place.
“I’ll manage,” Tomas said, and stepped among the people moving around the bay. Most stopped and saluted once they recognized Tomas, and he returned their salutes with a nod and a smile. Isani led Tomas to a wall on the far side of the bay that had several markings about as large as a person on it arranged in a row. They approached one of the markings and it slid open in much the same way the ship’s hull had.
The two stepped inside the cylinder-shaped chamber that was only two meters across and the wall closed them inside. Tomas noticed that the walls of the chamber conveyor were see-through; above them, he saw a tube-like route with a few openings in the sides of the tube, presumably leading to different parts of the ship. Isani approached a smooth black plate with silver markings on them and put his hand on one. Immediately, it flashed with blue light and they started moving through the tube. Tomas felt no acceleration; the quick movements of the walls and passages outside of their chamber were the only clue that they were in fact moving.
Then, suddenly they were out in the open. The tube led their conveyor through the center of a large, spherical room. Tomas watched in amazement at the buildings and roads all around the walls of the room. There was even dark red vegetation and flowing water in between the buildings.
“Incredible,” Tomas said. He had known about the city, but it was nothing like seeing it in person. It reminded him a bit of the Guxcacul underground cities, only he knew that gravity was bent here in such a way that all the ‘walls’ were always the ‘floor.’ “I think that I can understand now why they called this ship the Enduring.” He looked around at the strange spiraling architecture, admiring the technology, knowledge, and artistry of its creators, and that was when he noticed shapes moving on the streets. Using his implants, he zoomed in and looked closely at one of them, a smooth sphere floating about a meter above the ground, with several tentacle-like limbs trailing behind it. It looked almost as if it was made of liquid.
“Are those…?” Tomas trailed off.
“Yes, the maintenance units,” Isani responded as he joined Tomas at the edge of the conveyor. “We stay mostly out of their way. We have access to their controls, but we don’t want to meddle with it. Their programming is obviously still functioning properly.”
Tomas nodded in understanding just as their tube reached the end of the room and plunged into another tunnel. They made a few sharp turns and then finally came to a stop a few minutes after. The front of the cylinder flowed open, followed by the iris-like movement of the wall, revealing a medium-sized room. They stepped inside and Tomas looked around. Most of the room was filled with workstations that obviously didn’t belong there—they were Empire technology, and all of them had cables stretched from them to the walls attached to seemingly nothing. A few of the workstations had cables leading to the middle of the room, attached to an ornate blue-and-black chair that seemed to be made out of thousands of thin spiral-like smooth branches melded into a shape of a chair.
From previous reports, Tomas knew that that was the true heart of the vessel, the command hub from which a single person could command the entire ship. Only to date they hadn’t managed to use it successfully, not as it was intended to be used.
“Have you made any progress?” Tomas asked, gesturing at the stations.
“Some. We have limited control of the drives. We can move the ship, but any kind of advanced maneuvering requires a person in the chair,” Isani answered.
“And you still haven’t had any success in making that viable?”
“No. Anyone can take command of the ship from here, but they still can’t do it for more than half an hour, and they need to focus only on one thing at a time. The strain is too great,” Isani said.
“Didn’t one of your reports mention a way for you to reduce the strain?” Tomas asked. He remembered reading that they were trying to implement a few tricks that they used in their Watchtower interface. According to the people working on this interface, the Empire’s Watchtower was both more advanced and inferior at the same time. This interface put all the strain on the user’s brain, while Watchtower used AI-guided computers and adaptive software to reduce the strain on the user.
“We abandoned that; we can’t even begin to understand how this thing works, not really. The only reason we can use it is because of our genetics; if anyone other than a Nel or a human tried, they would’ve fried their brains. The only one that might be able to take the strain for longer is Adrian,” Isani said pointedly.
Tomas nodded in understanding. Everything around him was so far ahead of anything that the Empire was capable of, so much so that it was laughable that he had thought that they might be able to tweak some aspect of the ship. This was the vessel of Axull Darr, his ship, his home. The labs on this ship were the true origin of Nel, humans, and Shara Daim. It had once been the People’s World-ship, a home to many, and as the People died off, it had become Axull Darr’s home. It was the pinnacle of their technological advancement.
“So,” Isani said, “why are you really here?”
“Because of Adrian,” Tomas said.
Isani twisted his palm in a gesture of curiosity. “Are you going to finally tell him about this?”
“No, I kept this from everyone for a very good reason, and you know that,” Tomas said.
Tomas had learned the location of the ship a decade ago from Axull Darr. The copy of their ancestor had told him everything—about the thing they’d created, about how they’d failed, how they’d contained them, and most importantly, the locations of the People’s remnants, this ship included. And Tomas had asked him to keep quiet about it while he pretended to not know. Now Axull Darr had revealed a few things to Adrian, and Tomas still didn’t know why he had done that, but at least he hadn’t told him the other things.
Tomas had studied the People, from Axull Darr’s stories and from records that Axull Darr made available only to him as the ruler of the Empire. He knew why they lost, why they couldn’t defeat their mistake. And he wasn’t going to allow the Empire to follow in the same footsteps. That was why the Empire didn’t copy technologies from the sphere, but learned and adapted and improved them to fit into their ways. They had been improving technologies of the equivalent level, of course—nothing like this ship. However, already there were breakthroughs, new paths that the People had never explored.
The People were crippled, in a way, by the fact that they were alone for so long, the only intelligent life in the galaxy. They’d had no competition, no way to see paths different than their own. And by the time other life joined them, they were so far ahead of them that they didn’t bother to learn from those who had different ideas than them. They looked at them as children, a stance that was not very far from truth.
Tomas had hidden this ship because he knew that if his people knew about it, they wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation. It was one thing to learn advanced technologies from records, to advance slowly with full understanding, and quite another to have the final goal in front of you, within reach with almost no effort. They would study the ship, copy technologies, jump so far ahead that they would’ve matched the People in a few hundred or less years. This ship was equipped with everything they needed. It could build materials that they could only dream about now, assemble ships smaller than their shuttles that could take on an entire fleet of the Empire’s ships of the line. They could have all the technology of the People in their hands.