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One Million Years – Extract

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One Million Years

Nate Crowley

The First Hour

Almost every planetary culture gives names to the stars it is born under. Some name them after their own esteemed dead, or after the hunting-beasts of ancestral gods. Some name them after the bloodiest of battles, or the rarest of gems. But the proto-kings of the Thokt Dynasty, as the old gag went, had never bothered naming the stars of their demesne at all; instead, they had given their crypteks merely the order in which they were to be harvested, and left the conclaves to their work.

The conclaves had worked. By the genius and the arrogance of the plasmancers, a thousand coronas had been breached, a thousand flux-seas siphoned, and a thousand deep cores drained, in order to provision the dynastic armouries, until only the mighty blue hypergiants of the Hyrakii Deeps had remained untamed.

It was to this frontier undertaking that Prae had dedicated herself when she had taken her apprentek rites before the royal conclave all those years ago. And it was by that dedication that she had won the place where she stood now – on the harvest deck of the Mesekt-class Dawn-swallower vessel One Million Years, facing down the formless wrath of a star’s heart.

Each of the dynasty’s great solar barques was a legend in its own right, uniquely armoured to its task. But the One Million Years was hallowed as a sun-diver beyond even the court of Thokt. No other vessel, from the high crystal berths of the Sautekh admiralty, to the mad crimson sprawl of the Novokh voidyards, could dive so deep, for so long, nor bring back such immense weights in treasure from the depths as the Million.

When Prae’s long-ago flesh-self had been given the honour of crewing this very ship, she had glowed hot with pride. And when biotransference had freed her from the traitor husk of her body, extending the privilege forwards into eternity, that pride had ignited like a supernova in her.

It was an appropriate time to reflect on pride, Prae decided, as the harvest deck’s cavernous ingress aperture began shutting at last against the divine glare beyond. For the last full cycle of decans, she had guided the Million through the deep photosphere of this nameless blue star, on a flawless execution of a standard harvesting dive.

The ship, built in faint semblance to some armoured, deep-marsh scavenger of the home world, had beat its way through the searing ocean with the shielded delta-wing of its head section, impelling long, dense streams of matter into the aperture at its leading edge. From there, the most valuable and exotic compounds had been teased from the rougher hypermatter in the open space above the harvest deck, by the work of Prae’s own hand. The rituals of electromagnetic ligature involved could require hours or even days of sustained concentration, and even for a mind that no longer knew fatigue in the tradition of flesh, it had been exhausting, ceaseless work.

But now, at last, the final battery of stasis containment bottles in the terminal segment of the barque’s armoured tail section had been filled with the last drops of stellar plasma it would hold, and the time to ascend from the solar sea had come.

Silent as a cloud, the aperture closed on the last actinic speck of sunlight. For a few moments there was a fleeting twilight, cast by the last phantom streamers of starfire whipping down the ship’s cavernous throat. Then, save for the soft halo of icy blue cast around Prae herself by the light of her core-flux, there was darkness in the temple for the first time since the dive had commenced.

The Second Hour

There was, Prae knew, still one more task which propriety demanded she undertake, before she could begin casting an ascent shaft. It was a formality, whose completion would no doubt be chained to the commencement of Szarekh-knew-how-many fresh tasks.

She would need to summon Baknephet.

It could not be put off for long. And yet, Prae thought, if I cannot not allow myself a moment now to bask in the majesty of this work, then when shall I?

‘When we have sucked the night sky black,’ snapped a voice like a blunt, rusted blade, from the darkness behind her back. ‘When every spark of sunlight, from edge to wretched edge of this galaxy, comes from within the belly of the dynasty’s engines.

‘Then, oh wicked and lazy disciple,’ said Baknephet the Fathomless, prime solarmancer of the royal conclave of Thokt, Drinker of the Radiance by personal commission of the phaeron, and shipmaster of the solar barque One Million Years, ‘we might both consider a moment’s rest.’

Shamed, Prae went through with the entire casting of the ascent shaft before she could master her chagrin sufficiently to face Baknephet. Flickering her consciousness between rapid-collapse scry-points in the storm above as she laid down the shaft’s gravitic anchors, she was able to escape the presence of her mistress in a very real sense, and by the time her perspective had consolidated, so had her composure.

‘The way lies open to the touch of your staff, oh fathomless one,’ said Prae at last, when the funnel-shaped field that would hold the storm back from their ascent became stable. Then, with care to ensure the light from her discharge nodes remained level and nondescript, she turned to acknowledge her mistress.

When Baknephet materialised by hard-scry in the temple, the scale to which the chamber was built no longer seemed as unreasonable as it did when Prae was alone there. The cryptek was colossal, seeming large enough to shoo assault monoliths away from her shins like scarabs. It gave the impression of immense bulk, despite the spindled attenuation of her frame, thanks to the heaped folds of her woven sapphire robes, and to the broad, half-spiral crests which jutted from her faceplate like horns. Lit dimly from above, with her hypermatter-infused core-flux rising in chilly blue puffs from her shoulders, she resembled nothing more than some ice-bound, unscalable crag, towering above Prae.

Spreading her crooked arms in the gesture of entreaty-for-passage, Baknephet turned her rosette of pinprick oculars upwards to stare into some distant radiation squall beyond the hull, and began to move the ship towards the open mouth of the shaft. As she progressed through the stages of the ritual, scratching obscure aide-memoirs in wriggling light across the temple’s interior, she began muttering to Prae once more.

‘How much sooner might the way have been opened, and our cargo sent on its way, I wonder, were it not for the vanity of younger minds? Was it idleness? Or error? Did you perhaps presume I was lost in dreaming, and thus disinclined to care for the death of a minute against that massacre of years?’

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