NO THING BESIDE REMAINS

by Andrew Barber

Our spacecraft, Seeker, left the fourth, broken world behind us. No, it was not broken; it was shattered. The planet was rubble. Each of the previously inhabited worlds we passed had suffered worse than the one before. Matheson and his team theorized that each time the Ravagers were driven back, they employed ever more ruthless scorched-earth tactics, or perhaps the better term was scorched-whatever planet they were retreating from. Previous planets had been flattened by more and more extensive rains of megabombs. Of this last planet, nothing remained.

Almost nothing. A single asteroid station on the edge of the solar system had remained partially intact. It had been abandoned millions of years ago, or so we guessed. Time enough for its shattered home world's rubble to spread out into a wide ring around their sun. The remnants of the fortress were well preserved in the frozen vacuum. While its massive launch bay was empty, the asteroid's surface was peppered with the wreckage of ships belonging to the Coalition of Worlds, the dead planets we had explored earlier. The Ravager’s fighter ships were also there, destroyed (the pilot’s bodies automatically incinerated, as always), and based on the number of those, they’d likely lost the battle. The station held a few artifacts—one being a celestial star globe of sorts that gave us the vital clue to the coordinates of the Ravager home world.

A few days later, I saw Matheson in the mess hall, drinking tea and hunched over two pads of his notes, eyes and nose moving back and forth between them. Perhaps he wanted a change of scenery—everyone's cabin doubled as their office and required folding up their bunk on a long wall and folding down their desk from a short wall—you got tired of the same cramped view. But perhaps he wanted some company. I took a chance and approached his table.

“Dr. Matheson, may I join you?”

He looked up. He was a brilliant and driven man we all held in awe. A renown astrophysicist and the world’s leading space archaeologist. While he wouldn’t have minded, no one would have ever thought of calling him by his first name. He was also a quiet man. Not the type to seek out and make friends. But even his kind of personality needed to connect on occasion. He thought for a good five seconds or more and then nodded a welcome.

 Sitting down, I asked, “Are you still good with 66 million years?”

He paused for another five seconds—he was always like that—and nodded again. Turning his pads around, I could see his notes, which were meaningless to me. “Yes, 66 million. I've learned people don't want me to narrow the date more in conversation. I'm convinced the Ravagers dropped the Chicxulub asteroid onto our planet to partially sterilize it for colonization. Or occupation, since that seemed to be their hive mindset.”

“So you're convinced they had a hive mind?”

Another five seconds, perhaps even ten, and then the nod. “That’s Dr. Hildebrandt’s current hypothesis, and it seems sound. But she stresses it wasn't controlled by a queen, which is really only an egg-laying device for bees, termites, and ants. She now thinks a computer ran the hive. She cites the logic and precision of every one of their moves we can deduce. But that's all in her department, biology.”

I nodded. Rachel Hildebrandt had asked me some related computer questions. Computers were my department. I continued with the scientist, “Why didn't they attack with megabombs like we saw on the last four worlds or what was left of them?”

Here, Matheson shrugged after his long pause. “Resource or labor intensive to construct? Why waste a bomb just to clear out some dinosaurs? Or perhaps the bombs were not as clean as an asteroid? My hypothesis, although I doubt I can ever prove it, is that only one Ravager scout ship got as far as Earth. It may not have had any megabombs, so it shoved the asteroid toward our planet and went on its way. They were probably in no hurry. Fortunately for us, the Coalition launched their counter-offensive, and the Ravagers were defeated before they returned to finish the job.”

At that point, Captain Rostron's voice came over the loudspeaker. We were now 24 hours out from the Ravager's home world. At least, we thought so. The ship’s crew would inspect our equipment and labs to ensure everything was properly secured. My lab was small—I just tried to get data off very old and very alien computers—so far, with little success. Still, an inspection was an inspection.

***

The Ravager world was dead. We had worried we might drop out of our FTL space-fold into an angry swarm of their fighters. But everything was quiet.

Their world was farther from its star than Earth was from Sol. But closer in than Mars. And it was deader than Mars. Deader than the Moon. Just… dead.

It had been turned into a molten ball and then cooled millions of years ago. The edge of continents had flowed partway down into evaporated ocean basins. The highest mountains had melted from tall peaks into lower, wide hills. Sandy deserts and ocean floors had become glass. There was no water, no atmosphere, nothing. Of civilization, of course, there was nothing left.

I looked through a porthole and realized my computer knowledge would be pointless here. Instead, I'd be doing grunt work for the science teams, which had been required to leave their graduate student workforce behind. I listened to Matheson and some other scientists discussing the dead world.

“Not megabombs.”

“No, they’d have left something behind. Megacraters. Debris. And I’ve doubted the Coalition had them.”

"It's like they just melted this world in a flame."

“I think that's exactly what they did.”

“How so, Juanita?”

Our astronomer said, “They all had force fields, though we don't know how they worked. And we think they could manipulate gravity, though the energy needed would probably have been enormous even for them. I think somehow the Coalition channeled a solar flare, or even caused one, to hit this world dead on. Perhaps several flares to make sure.”

“Can flares do that?”

“Not on their own, no, but with the help of their technology, maybe.”

***

We found the intact site, a tiny circle of less desolation, a dozen orbits later.

A smooth surface, cement or the like, formed a perfect circle about a kilometer wide. It had not melted like the rest of the planet. Doubtless, a defensive force field had once protected the area. However, that shield was long gone as the surface was cracked from age and had been pockmarked by a few small meteorites over the millennia.

And parked just beyond the shielded area, randomly around the perimeter on the cooled basalt, we found a dozen of the Ravager's fighter ships. And there was what must have been one of their light battle cruisers, though it had taken a meteor hit that smashed it in two and spread much of its shattered remains for hundreds of meters.

Those would have been amazing finds in and of themselves, except that in the dead center of the protected area was the Ruined Cathedral. That's not what we call it now, but it was the perfect name back then.

The towering structure showed dark gold or silver or reflected a rainbow hue, depending on where one stood and caught the light of the alien sun. It was a mass of straight lines, horizontal, vertical, and sharp corners that gave the look of a towering spire, crenellations, and uneven steps. A lot of steps if they had been built for someone almost 20 meters tall, but these were just how it had fractured. This was a ruin, a fraction of what had originally stood. It had doubtless been a rectangle, 150 meters on a side to walk around, and twice as high. But much of it had decayed away.

“It's the size of Norte Dame,” Captain Rostron said.

“Or the Cathedral in Cologne, and it’s even bigger than Norte Dame,” First Officer Schmitt agreed.

“It reminds me of a tall Angor Wat, or perhaps Oz or Minas Tirith,” said Hildebrandt.

“Between the rainbow hues and its cleavage plane, it reminds me of a piece of fractured bismuth,” said Wambui, our geologist. “It's beautiful, even in this sad state.”

It had been solid, built of tiny cubes, each hardly larger than my closed fist. The rough shape came from where millions of the cubes had fallen away.

“Those ships must have returned after the Coalition's attack. That's why they're outside of the protected area. Maybe they were all that was left of the Ravagers. A few ships that did not reach the final battle in time. Perhaps they were very far out, since the rock beneath them had to have cooled solid again before they landed,” Matheson said after a long thought.

“They had nowhere to go and came back here to die. The force field must have still been working then. It obviously failed at some point," Juanita motioned toward one of the small craters littering what had been the protected area.

“There may still be bodies inside those ships,” said Hildebrandt excitedly. “We may finally learn what they looked like.”

I picked up one of the metallic cubes in my space-suit glove and examined it. There was a circle of small holes in the center of each face. “I think I know what this is.”

The others turned toward me.

“What we have here is Dr. Hildebrandt's proposed computer for the Ravager's hive mind. These cubes may be hexagonal vector neural programming components. It's an up-and-coming idea back on Earth. Some very basic H.V. prototypes are being developed.”

“What do they do?” Schmitt asked.

“Information passes through each cube and can go one of six directions—top, bottom, or the four sides. Way more than six if there are multiple connections on each side like this. The computing capacity is enormous for even a small number of cubes put together. Something like this,” I motioned toward the ruin, “the computing capacity was, for all intents and purposes, infinite.”

“Their battle computer,” said Schmitt.

“More like their everything computer,” Hildebrandt said. “The whole hive. Their whole civilization.”

“They could protect their computer," surmised Wambui, "but there was nothing and no one left for it to control.”

We all stood silently for a while.

“Did I see something blink?” Hildebrandt asked. She stepped up to a long, straight wall. “I saw a little dot of light. There's another one right there! A tiny violet flash.”

They were hard to see. We stepped around a corner of the massive object, out of its sun's direct light and into the shade.

“Several flashes,” Rostron agreed. Then looking toward me, “What do you make of it?”

I considered, looking at the cube in my hand again. “It's still computing. Or at least running.”

“It is?”

“Not well. If it was working properly, we’d see tiny flashes from almost every cube processing a trillion trillion trillion times faster than our best computers, passing calculations to a neighboring component at nearly the speed of light. That's not happening. Each flash we can see was meant to go into one of these.” I motioned to the millions of cubes that were now rubble around the massive computer.

“I don't think it was flashing when we first arrived,” Hildebrandt said.

“I'm sure it wasn't,” Matheson volunteered after a moment. “I was looking at that first wall quite closely.”

“Maybe it knows we're here, and it’s thinking for the first time in millennia,” I offered. “Look, the blinking is speeding up.”

As we watched, the violet flashes fired again and again. Soon, the shaded wall beside us was bright enough to produce shadows. A turn of my body confirmed I could see my space-suited shape on the ground behind me.

Then suddenly, it stopped. Nothing for several seconds. Then I saw a few random flashes and was reminded of how Matheson paused before venturing a thought. A few seconds later, one lone flash. Then darkness.

Again, we stood still for a long time, looking for any sign of activity. There was none.

Finally, I said, “I'm no engineer, but I think that was its last gasp. If so, it still had a little power left in it after 66 million years. I can't imagine how they managed that.”

“So ends the race that conquered and destroyed at least four planets,” said Hildebrandt.

“And perhaps the dinosaurs,” Matheson added. “And who knows how many worlds we haven't found yet.”

“The Coalition members must have perished soon after the Ravagers,” Schmitt said. “Otherwise, eventually, they would have disabled the force field and destroyed this thing. The war probably put them all on a fast path to extinction.”

“Ozymandias,” said Rostron, placing a gloved hand against the ruin’s surface.

“Captain?” I asked.

“A poem. It's about someone walking through a barren landscape who finds a large, fallen statue of a man. Time has broken it up. On the pedestal, it says, ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of kings: Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!’”

“Ah. Yes. I see.”

“Let's get to the ship for a meal and for your teams to plan your research,” Rostron turned and walked away.

We all followed toward our craft. To my great surprise, Matheson recited the poem to us, in its entirety. “I met a traveler from an antique land..."