TREASURE

John Waterman, who lives in CO, works in Aerospace (not the 'boomy' bits, though) as a Quality Engineer. He enjoys reading science fiction, writing science fiction, playing TTRPGs, and being a raconteur. Served in the 11th Armored Cavalry, US Army, back before the glaciers melted.

Art by Paul Schuurmans

TREASURE ~ by John Waterman

CHAPTER ONE:

Ektor strapped down the last body and then just let go, drifting limply. He was so tired . . .  He did have one last task, though, before his water ran out and he joined the ranks of his followers now strapped to the wall of the corridor. He snorted weakly, once more struck that of all the things that could kill him out here in L4 it would be thirst that doomed him.

He’d grown up a privileged scion of the Technic State and had served it six decades as a Conservator in the Academic Society at the Prime Level. Then The Rock was detected, barreling in towards Earth from the distant Solar System, and everything changed. Technic Society and its science had solved every problem facing it over the previous two millennia, but the Primary Technic Council could not decide on a plan to handle The Rock. Groups formed, anathemas uttered, and then outright warfare erupted between factions espousing radically different agenda.

A tiny, measured sip of water soothed his aching throat. Ektor was down to 750ml of water every day and had that much only because he’d stripped the suits of each of his dead followers for every pitiful gram left in their recyclers. His suit was so degraded that it had to crack a significant fraction of the water he’d scavenged just to provide him with make-up oxygen. It made him chuckle. He had everything he needed for survival here- heat, power, food, shelter- except for water and oxygen. The irony was not lost on him.

The Rock struck Earth twelve years ago, hitting in the Apulian Sea. Ektor was in space for over a year by then, trying to secure a place for his Conservatory’s Archive off-world. He remembered his first and only boost off-Earth; missiles had landed around the laser launch complex even as it powered his capsule into orbit. The follow-on capsules with the Archive survived the bombardment, but the launcher did not. Ektor’s followers left on Earth somehow removed the Archive to ‘safer’ locations with the promise that they’d be able to boost them later by some other means.

Ektor had done his best to arrange boost and find a haven for the capsules containing the Archives someplace off-world; the Moon, L4, L5, even Ceres in the Main Belt. Events, though, as they do, intervened. He couldn’t have imagined, back then, where the next twelve years would put him. ‘General’ certainly hadn’t been in his imagination then. He’d given up on trying to lift the Archive off-Earth long ago, having to settle for his people left on Earth putting it in a deep refuge that they hoped would survive the effects of the Factional Struggles as well as the impact of The Rock itself.

He strapped himself to the wall of the corridor next to the body of the last of his followers. They were all here now, his ‘Deathless Cohort’, the last twenty-six to survive the final attack by the Handed forces a week ago. Some had later succumbed to radiation exposure or trauma, others from failed suit systems. Those that could sacrificed what they could at the last to keep the others alive and then shut off their suit heaters to pass quietly from hypothermia. Jerek, the last, had died just a few hours ago. Or was it days? In his near-death state, Ektor couldn’t make sense of the chronometer anymore. It had ceased to matter once they determined that the last lander taxi could not be repaired, and thus they were trapped in this failing habitat deep in wreckage left over from the last attack. No, it must have been a while; Jerek had frozen solid.

Death did not frighten him anymore. It had been a long time coming but his death in space had been inevitable from the day he left Earth. “Where was the fire before it was lit? Where has it gone now that it is out?” That was one of his favorite quotes from the writers of Antiquity, those of the First Civilization that had launched humanity’s first reach beyond Earth in The Emergence. That had been his vocation before the detection of The Rock, researching the First Civilization and specifically its literature, mythology, and tales.

The successive Re-Emergences, including the Sixth (his own), had relied on the preserved records of engineering and science left by previous civilizations to return to space. The records of their cultures were not as well preserved, though, and those of the most remote of them, the Emergence, were the hardest to find of them all. He’d spent six decades poring through ancient databases, opening old archives, discovering others lost to time, visiting ruins, and training other Conservators to seek the same.

He'd even learned some of the Ur-languages, older than the Anglic and Putongguo in which all scientific information had been preserved over the millennia. Glossos Koine, Lingua Latine, Old Anglic, Russkiy, Deutsche, Español; he’d focused on the ancient languages of what had been known as ‘The Western Civilization’. Genetic manipulation from generations ago had given him quick mastery over them, as soon as he could discover lexicons and ancient media lessons, while wetware had given him a singular ability to focus at will for as long as his body could handle it. Ektor’s collection of ancient literature- including some preserved hardcopy! - had become the largest and best Archive of its kind.

When he heard of the coming of The Rock, Ektor put in motion plans to move the Archive off-Earth. He had no idea what the impact, if undiverted, would have on Terran civilization. There had been optimism, in the early days, that the Technic’s great science could forestall its impact. Ektor still had to plan for contingencies. He marshalled the Conservatory he led and used his influence as a Prime Technic and Advisor to the Council to try to preserve the Archive he and his people had assembled. He had no illusions that civilization in space would somehow survive, but there the Archive could, to enlighten a future Re-Emergence with literature and culture on top of the science and engineering already being preserved, once again, in deep vaults all around the planet.

No previous Re-Emergence had ever tried to preserve non-technical information, or if they had then little of it had survived. He was the only Conservator of what remained of it in the entire Technic Society. In the early days after the detection of The Rock, the Prime Council of Technics had not been worried about contingencies, so they did not offer him any extra resources. Ektor spent feverish months assembling the Archive and configuring it into a form that took up as little space as possible and proved portable. Scanning it all to digital medium would have required a trivial amount of effort, and most of it existed digitally already. As a Conservator, however, he was committed to preserving the physical medium of his collection. Within it existed manuscripts and carvings and stone tablets, some well over 20,000 years old, and he did not want them forever lost to the ages again.

He was probably the only person still alive who knew of the location of the Archive. A fifth of Earth’s population had already died before The Rock’s impact, along with half the population out in space, during the Factional Struggles. Some nukes had gotten popped, but most of the damage done on Earth and The Moon and in L4/5 had been from k-strikes or smart bombs or infestations both data and robotic. The impact had little direct effect on the situation in space, but it proved death to 99% of the survivors of The Struggles on Earth. A few million had retired to shelters, some remaining from the Fall of the Second and later Re-Emergences. Earth’s surface was now unsurvivable and would be for decades more.

Ektor didn’t have to worry about survival anymore. Everyone he’d known on Earth- his scions, handfasted, elders, lovers, students, peers- was probably already dead by now, turned to dust by k-strikes or smartbombs, or just gnawed bones in a dead arcology. He recalled another line from Antiquity; “By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quits for the next.”

 His life had gone on a while longer, and it had transformed him from scholar to warrior, from academic Prime to military officer. He had spent the first year in space trying to use his rapidly dissolving influence as a Prime to arrange a boost for the Archive. Once The Rock was going to hit no matter what anyone did, though, that became pointless. He’d also managed the contingency plans for on-Earth storage as best he could from up to two lightseconds away as he and his shrinking group of followers wandered space, trying to stay alive among the Factional Struggles.

The Rock definitively ended The Struggles, but smaller wars continued to burn in space as different groups off-Earth struggled for ever-diminishing resources. Some daring souls had opted to take landers back to Earth’s ravaged surface, but they were in the minority. They took a lot of space capability and resources with them when they returned to Earth to meet their fates, though, leaving less for those still in space. Even after two millennia, the Technic’s space civilization had still relied heavily on resources delivered up from Earth. It was easier and cheaper than developing self-sustained Habs, though there’d been a few experimental ones at L5 and a couple of limited biospheres at the Lunar South Pole. Almost all of those had gotten smashed during The Struggles as factions veered out of control and sanity while The Rock approached Earth.

The Handed had it the worst. They couldn’t flee to Earth like other humans, since they were adapted for free-fall and wouldn’t survive under a full G. Other humans could hang onto the hope, however fragile and foolish, of returning to Earth one day; but the Handed had no such option. They became the largest and best equipped force in space, their only goal now to secure as many resources as possible- and destroy anyone else who would utilize them. They’d organized and determined their course of action even before The Rock hit Earth, knowing full well that there was no other way that they could survive other than by dominating space and seizing whatever resources they could. Their seizures and later outright attacks during the pre-impact Struggles had helped to forestall the late, half-hearted attempts to deflect The Rock. The Handed had not wanted the resources used for deflection at such a late date, thinking them futile and wasteful.

They were implacable and brutal. Ektor had not ever known brutality or terror, few had for centuries- but he became schooled in it almost from his first moments in space. He was a Prime; people had looked to him for leadership within a framework of space society that had already begun to unravel. If someone provided calm and competent leadership, then people flocked to them, following centuries of ingrained loyalty to the Technic leadership. For over a decade Ektor was just that; an island of organization and direction as the situation devolved. Many military people, their command chains disrupted by the abject immediacy and direct violence of the Handed attacks, fell in with him. They brought ships and resources and weapons to his cause. That soon changed from ‘find a haven for the Archive’ to ‘help keep people alive against immediate assault and annihilation’. Including himself.

The transition from Prime Scholar to Warlord had not been that gradual but it proved fairly seamless. He had been exercising leadership and strategy for most of his life, just on a different battlefield, if one with fewer casualties. He’d had to learn how to fight tactically and even personally over the last few years. His lieutenants had taught him well. They felt that they needed him as much as he needed them.

He focused. There was one last thing he needed to do. He unpacked his scriber and began dictating.

*   *   * 

‘Hey, Senior Salvageer,’ the newby said, ‘come get a look at THIS!’

 

Neffer turned from the efforts of Salvage Team Eleven’s Techspec reading an ancient console’s telltales. ‘What is it, Dommo?’

 

‘Bunch of suits lined up in here,’ he replied as he stared into the hatch window of a side passage, ‘all strapped to the same wall in the same orientation. At least two dozen of them as far as my light shows.’

 

‘Just a suit morgue.’ He needed another task to keep him from skylarking.

 

‘Naw, I can see faces in the helmets, and there’s some debris drifting in there, too.’

 

The L4 structure they were assessing had been occupied about as long as any they’d found from the Sixth Re-Emergence, and it had battle damage from several skirmishes. Towards the end the last survivors had been scrabbling for mere hectoliters of water that they could take from anyone else. The last occupants must have had something that raiders wanted, and they’d defended the attacks hard. Plenty of bodies and the wreckage of a few bottle skiffs and a lander taxi had surrounded this last redoubt of someone, 1600 years ago. The assault force had been Handed, as most of them were at the end; they’d fallen upon one another once resources had gone skimpy.

 

Neffer switched to his helmet feed. She’d been on teams over her past four years in the orbital Salvage Patrol at Earth-Moon L4 and had seen plenty of stripped cubic and tiny pockets of last stands. His video feed showed her a long row of suits strapped to one side of the still-closed corridor . . . but none of them were Handed; they were mainly ‘Shorties’ like her and Dommo, with a few Originals thrown in at random. None showed obvious damage. There were emaciated faces behind the faceplates.

 

‘Just dunno what I’m looking at, Neffer,’ Dommo said. ‘Grave?’

 

‘Obviously, Salvageer,’ she said. ‘Go help Techspec Mik with that console, OK?’ She moved past him to hover before the hatch he’d been at. Directing her powerful headlamps in through the hazy window she counted 27 suits strapped in a row against one side of the corridor, all in the same alignment. There were both Shorties and Originals, in random order. At the far end of the corridor she saw some debris and the mangled suit of a Handed’s suit drifting free, motionless like the long dead usually were even unrestrained.

 

The tableau begged a question, so she looked at the hatch controls. Surprisingly they were still glowing slightly green, showing that some residue of power still fed them. It was as near to vacuum on the other side as didn’t matter, so she called ‘Opening Hatch Number Twelve’ and hit the controls . . .

 

CHAPTER TWO:

Ektor activated his scriber, a model designed to leave indelible markings on any smooth surface, not just hardcopy medium. The interior of the tube where he waited to die had thermal lagging over most of its interior, but he saw an access panel concealing some electronics. Smooth, anodized titanium would do in this case. He calibrated on it and began dictating his draft.

“Here I scribe the last testament of Ektor per Kasellas, hereditary Padubi of the phratry of Mairas, born to them in the Year 1983 of the Technic State. I served as Prime Conservator of Ancient Culture, and Life Member Secundus of the Technic Council, and am the late Warlord of the Deathless Cohort and the last of their number, in this Year 2061 of the Technic State, twelve years after the impact of The Rock.”

 

He composed it in High Putongguo and selected the Common Scripting of that language, reviewing the alphabetic characters that filled a window inside his faceplate. It was one of the two formal languages of The Technic State, used for official documents read only by other members of the Technic Council. Translators used by the lesser servants of the Technic State or the general population could not parse the written or spoken versions of it without special dispensation. Not that it mattered anymore. Ektor was writing for the ages, not for the lost and self-exterminated Technic State.

 

“As a Prime Technic I undertook and supervised the efforts to preserve my Conservatory’s Archive of cultural data and items from earlier Emergences, focused upon that recovered from the original Emergence of our species into the space above the Earth. It was my wish and will that what I and my conspecifics had discovered be preserved after the fall of our State in the face of the coming of the Rock, these twelve years ago. It is our final work and our sole testament to decades of research. ‘If we saw farther, it was because we stood on the shoulders of giants.’ No later Re-Emergence, should one come to pass, should be without the works we have delved to recover from the grip of twenty millennia and more before our own time. They are neither science nor engineering, but should enlighten the Human condition; not merely its works.”

 

He paused, not sure if he’d felt the tube wall quiver, or had seen something move from the corner of his tired eye. Space structures always expanded and contracted, shifting their internal stresses around even when they hadn’t suffered massive battle damage. At this point even a full-on structural failure wouldn’t make a difference to him or his fate. Ektor took a deep breath, then turned back to his task. Even focused he found himself easily distracted from this, his final task.

 

“A full accounting of the Archive of my Conservatory is not possible here. Be it known that it includes much that we know of the cultures of the previous Re-Emergences, and among them especially a large collection of texts and objects from Antiquity, that period which led to the Emergence itself, eighteen millennia before us. These physical objects comprise the most comprehensive collection of such as has been discovered by our Conservation. They have been preserved in their actual forms as discovered, though text and image scans of them also exist in the Archives, in the Three Forms our ancestors used to preserve media digitally, along with translations into the Science languages.”

 

Ektor felt it for sure, this time. Some thumps and vibrations came up through his suit from the titanium mesh and aluminum skin behind his back. He paused the scriber and looked around blearily. Seeing nothing through the small ports in the hatches on either end of the corridor, he dragged himself back on task.

 

“I had intended that this Archive be stored out above the Earth in some facility or orbit intended to keep it safe for the centuries or millennia necessary for Humanity to return gloriously once more to space. This was not possible given the exigencies of the collapse of the Technic State even before our ‘Nemesis’, The Rock, struck our Mother World. Thus, the Archive was stored in a secure location on her, in its own refugium. Unlike other tech refugia, this deepness will not be easily opened by primitives. Only those who have reached space once more will be able to gain access to it, as they would be the ones most able to appreciate and be improved by its contents. The Archive is in five sealed modules within the deepness, each of fifteen cubic meters volume and three tonnes in mass. They are buried in foamed quartz surrounded by ferro-concrete. Once excavated, opening the modules will require decryption by a Class III or higher quantum computing array or free-fall fabricated aligned-lattice cutting devices, thereby limiting access to those with space-enabled computation and fabrication technologies. The primary entrance to the refugium is located at-”

 

Someone was definitely trying to get into the corridor, through the nearest locked hatch but three meters from him. Ektor hurried to complete dictating the coordinates as he muzzily went over his remaining weaponry. His botgun had no munitions left, and his personal shocker wouldn’t handle anything heavier than a civilian-use suit. It came down to his glass cannon and his arcfaust.

 

Glaring light flared through the hatch’s small viewport, from a thermite charge set to destroy the locking mechanism. It glowed first red and then white-hot on his side before it deformed and turned into a mass of bubbling titanium that foamed out of its slot. He didn’t bother shrugging out of the straps that held him to the corridor wall, because there was nowhere to go.

 

The scriber had finished etching his final words onto the metal plate across the corridor. The hatch popped open and a banger flew through it, detonating with a flash and a cloud of vapor. Ektor’s faceplate compensated for the flash and his synthetic imaging rendered the obscurative vapor useless. He gripped the controls for his weapons inside his gauntlets and waited.

 

Had he any bot munitions left, he would have triggered a spread of them just then. The fact that none came through the hatch at him told him that his enemy hadn’t any left either. Similarly, his foe had no granatoes to fling inside at Ektor, at least ones that wouldn’t also annihilate it as well. Such mass destructive weapons would also ruin anything of salvage value in the corridor anyway. There was only one reason such a foe would try to enter this space, and that was to salvage what little water was left in the suits and bodies of the dead, and one still barely alive.

 

Ektor almost laughed. Had this foe merely waited a few hours it could have salvaged what it wanted from him, what little was left to take, without a struggle. But he still lived, so he wouldn’t make it easy. After a time, as he waited silently, a thin camera stalk came around the hatch. He lay motionless but any thermal routine would see his suit still warm, and he knew how he would react to that. His foe could do no different.

 

The Handed wore a military suit not terribly unlike his, and it looked just as old and care-worn. It came over the hatch coaming in an assault free-fall roll, two hands anchoring it while the third reached for a handhold. The fourth held a weapon. Ektor recognized it as a vipper, an offensive and destructive weapon that fired sheaves of electromagnetically propelled one-gram slugs at thousands of meters per second, its recoil countered by pushing a one-kilo mass backwards along a long track anchored to the weapon and the suit of its bearer.

 

The arcfaust in his left hand fired, a cloud of spider-web thin conductive threads spreading out to contact anything metal or energized. Some struck his foe’s suit, and even his own. A few must have contacted the vipper just as it activated. The resulting flash of actinic light blanked out his faceplate and made his radiation alarm squeal a bit. Blobs of vaporized metal spattered everywhere, though they presented no danger to his hardened suit. He felt several harder impacts on his suit and helmet, some not just debris from the exploded vipper. Pressure alarms triggered momentarily until his suit sealed the tiny breaches. His faceplate was a bit starred when it came back online, but the telling breaches were in his body and his life support unit. The vipper had fired a sheaf before its rail and power source detonated under the mega-amp impulse from his arcfaust.

His foe snatched itself back around the hatch. It had to know that the arcfaust was a single-shot weapon, and it would take him long seconds to swap out its expended power unit for another; not that he had one. Ektor didn’t know what other weapons his foe still had, but it didn’t know what else he had either. He had only one weapon left that could affect someone in a military-grade suit, and that was also a one-time use; one that he probably wouldn’t survive either. Then again, even though his lungs would fill with blood more slowly in freefall than under G, he was going to die sooner than he had imagined. His suit’s aid-pack couldn’t do anything other than patch over the holes in his thorax and stop incipient pneumothorax syndrome. Any blood-coagulators it tried to use would throw clots into his pulmonary arteries and kill him nearly instantaneously. He had learned a lot of combat medicine in the past decade, though none would help him now.

 

He could do nothing but what he had been doing ever since he’d strapped himself down next to his deceased aide; wait to die. He wouldn’t mind taking down his last foe if he could, though. It must have been a survivor from the last group that had assaulted the remnants of The Deathless here in this abandoned structure, where they’d fled after ditching their last wrecked cutter. His foe was probably just trying to find enough water to keep searching for more, until it too died or was rescued somehow. Desperately clinging to life, which Ektor couldn’t even do now for more than a few more minutes.

 

Ektor just waited while he felt the blood bubbling into his lungs. Vipper slugs just made holes, but even four-mm holes could be lethal, and they would certainly do for him. “Not as wide as a church door nor as deep as a well,” as he remembered from a writer of Antiquity, “but ‘twill serve.” Being as dehydrated as he was slowed the internal drowning process down. There was at least one other hole in his body, but it wouldn’t kill him any quicker than the ones through his chest. He felt no pain, and his head was clearer than it had been for a while.

 

Eventually his foe carefully clambered over the hatch coaming again. It couldn’t see into his faceplate any more than he could see into its, so he kept perfectly still with his eyes open. It had a ratchet knife in one foot-hand and a lasgun in a true-hand. He had to let it think he was dead; he’d still show warm, but he felt that his foe couldn’t wait for him to cool off before it began to take his tiny store of oxygen and water. It had to be that desperate, he thought. It probably was down to the last few grams in its recyclers, worse off than he was. Slung over its back was a vampire rig, a crude but effective flash-dehydrator that it could stab into his flesh to pull all of the water from his body either before or after it drained his life support unit. It would use it on him first, and with the water that bought it could then take the time to heat up the frozen corpses arrayed next to him and do the same to them. It was ghoulish but effective, though Ektor had forbidden it and The Deathless wouldn’t have resorted to that level of cannibalization anyway.

 

Keeping the lasgun pointed at him, his foe carefully clambered over to him and readied the ratchet knife to cut away the tough layer of armor sheathing his suit. It either ignored the glass cannon in his right hand or didn’t recognize it. He waited for the ratchet knife to begin shearing into the outer layer of his suit before he snapped his hand up under its helmet and fired . . .

 

*  *  *

‘Looks like there was one last fight in here,’ Dommo said. He and Neffer had gone in through the hatch once the drone had traversed the length of the corridor, looking for quiescent weapons systems and unexploded ordnance.

 

‘Yeah, the rest of these guys got strapped in here already dead,’ Neffer opined, ‘but these two here at the end of the corridor had it out.’ They regarded but did not touch the drifting corpse of the Handed, barely kept intact by its shredded suit, nor the ‘Shorty’ at the end of the row of bodies. Its suit was hardly in better shape. ‘The hatch on this end is blown, thermite lock-melter, but this cubic was already under vacuum. Nasty last shootout, and they both died in it.’

 

‘Hey, there’s writing on this access panel, across from this dude. Looks laser etched.’

 

Neffer examined the panel. Characters covered it, neatly machine printed. Some holes and gashes marred them, though, made by the explosions during the last firefight. ‘It’s some form of Putongguo. Man, I wish I’d paid more attention in my Archaic Languages studies.’

 

Dommo laughed. ‘Remember, I was a Scholar before I went for Salvage. Let’s see.’ He turned a light on the pocked panel. ‘Late Sixth Emergence Formal Putongguo, in Modified Latinate Alphabet. So dirt-munching flowery, it’s hard to get through all the foliage for the trees.’ He muttered to himself for a while. ‘I think it’s the last testament of this chap here. Some sort of high-level academic, but a high-ranking military officer too, best as I can tell. Keeps talking about a cache of documents and relics of some sort. Hmm. There are some coordinates at the very end of it, where this cache is supposed to be- on Terra someplace.’ He stopped to punch some numbers into his wristpad. ‘Oh. Oh, wait. Oh, this is . . .impossible!’

 

‘What? What are you talking about,’ Neffer asked.

 

‘This-’ the newby cocked a thumb at the corpse strapped to the wall- ‘is, has to be, is Ektor Kasellas! The Blessed One who left the Cache of the First Ones! The Lost Eighth Messiah!’

 

FINIS

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