Introduction
This place was not made for us. Those that came before us, who came before there was an us, took this barren island in the void as their own. They ignited the tools of their industry in the stars. They brought air and water and life to the stone. They formed entire worlds and sent them spinning like marbles into an intricate dance of space and time that only they could see.
And then suddenly they were gone. Worlds shattered and torn. Their work unfinished. Their gardens left to grow wild.
We are not their children. We are not their inheritors. We are tiny things taking shelter from the night in the ruined cathedrals of ancient gods. But their great works are the salvation of our species.
And we should give thanks.
-Excerpt from the Jericho Book of the Ancients, Chapter 1
14 January, WY603 – Jericho
Prime Malachai Wheeler strides over to Angelica and takes her hands in his, stating it’s so nice to see her again, even under the circumstances. He pauses a moment, just then realizing that the crew is in their undergarments. He extols Benny, who responds by saying “people in their underwear calm me”, but then leaves to find “fluffy robes from the spa or something”.
Wheeler apologizes for the embarrassment and takes a seat with the crew. He pulls a handful of arnite sand from his pocket and scatters it on the table. Almost immediately, it reacts and begins to organize into a miniature version of the gate.
- He tells the party they built their entire society on arnite, manipulating it in more than three dimensions to create fantastic machines of unimaginable power that operated for eons without intervention.
- The scientists suspect the arnite amplified some latent natural ability in the aliens.
- Noting the miniature gate, Wheeler states that there was a cave-in some twenty years prior that damaged the Jericho gate and ever since it’s pulled any arnite back into itself to self-repair. Jericho doesn’t have rich deposits of arnite, so they’ve had to find it from elsewhere. (The crew speculates Jericho could be behind the mining operation in Foxglove.)
- When asked about the human cost of keeping the secret, he confirms that it does require a lot of bodies - but he also notes that everyone trusted to work on or near the machines are allowed to retire to a secluded community (he also assures the crew that’s not a metaphor).
- He confirms that it’s obvious that Anderson Exploration suspects an artifact is there on Helena, otherwise they wouldn’t be behaving the way they are. Later in the conversation they also acknowledge that the Council almost certainly knows of the secret, but isn’t talking either.
- When asked if there are any failed transits, Wheeler states that nothing unexpected has ever come through the gate until just that morning, there are extremely rare cases where expected cargoes have not arrived, “a few” in thousands of transits.
- Wheeler reveals that during the cave-in they recovered what they believe to be fossilized neural tissue from one of the ancient builders. He said it defied study, and the breakthrough of its multi-dimensional structure was made not by a biologist, but a computer scientist. Who since was allowed to turn science derived from that breakthrough into a commercial solution. Aiden correctly postulates that scientist is Florence Abinde of Allied Advanced Intelligences, the creator of Calliope.
Benny returns with, literally, fluffy bathrobes for the crew. Wheeler is interrupted by a noise coming from the center of the table, where the arnite has slid towards Tomoe and reformed itself into a tiny bowed instrument. Everyone stares on wide-eyed as the instrument keens out the melody of the song that Tomoe has been working on for months during the crew’s downtime.
Wheeler tells a story of how, 150 years past, one of their gate keepers went mad, telling stories of rooms with millions of doors. He reveals the man’s name as Gareth Wright, who is Tomoe’s great-great uncle. When asked if the man ever told stories of fireflies, a voice not entirely unlike Calliope’s comes from a speaker in the ceiling, confirming that the man was recorded telling a story about being surrounded by motes of light during one of his transits. Wheeler thanks the voice, referring to it as “Memnosyne” - noting wryly how amazing it can be to correlate so many facts so quickly.
Eventually Wheeler becomes more somber and offers the crew a deal:
- Tomoe will be subjected to non-invasive medical scans under Aiden’s supervision.
- The crew will attempt to return to Helena. If they cannot and end up at Demeter, they will be effectively imprisoned in the secluded retirement community.
- If they succeed, they will carry a message to the leader of Anderson Northwinds with an unspecified offer of sponsorship from the RoJ. The crew will be beholden to ensure the town earns its libration from Anderson Exploration.
- The crew is to take several charges and ensure the cave cannot be easily explored.
- The crew is to never speak of anything that took place in the cave, ever.
With no real choice but to agree, Tomoe and Aiden go to a medical lab for scanning, where she is examined with incredibly sophisticated instruments from many fields of medicine and physics. At one point, Aiden observes microscopic but faintly familiar gravity eddies in Tomoe’s brain.
After the scan, the crew’s gear is returned to them, but every system capable of recording anything has been rendered useless, leaving them with little but emergency orbital radios and basic life support systems. Benny escorts them to the gate, saying he’s personally glad he wasn’t asked to kill them.
After an uncomfortable false start, the crew falls through the gate.
During the transit, Tomoe sees herself submerged deep in an ocean. Above her she sees millions of little eddies in the water, the nearest ones aligning to the constellations of the Reach. She sees tiny streaks darting from one to the other, and a very few slightly deeper. She comes to realize she must be witnessing craft in jump space, along with the state-of-the-art grade two buoys. She’s then filled with an inexplicable sense of dread from the dark depths below her, and then feels herself being dragged into the dark.
Meanwhile, Dirk finds himself semi-lucid in a dreamlike state in a small room containing two familiar women from his past on either side of a clock reminiscent of the gates. He sees an apparition of Tomoe falling through the room, so he grabs her wrist, and chooses the woman he assumes coincides with Helena.
The crew emerges at the Helena gate to the sound of Tomoe screaming. Waves of force radiate from her, disrupting the arnite dust and sand around her until she runs out of breath and everything goes still. After she recovers she tells her story. Cara speculates that observations such as hers could conceivably have allowed Dauntless to intercept the Hamster in Roberts.
The crew works through getting their story straight for when they exit the cave, choosing to leave Wei Zhang’s body undisturbed and unrecovered. Roland uses the charges to close the crevice between the subterranean forest and the lava chute to the surface.
When they get back to the surface, they wipe out evidence of Izzy Cordova’s warning on the cave wall. A storm is raging on the surface, unlike anything that Helena typically sees. Swan and the marines are barely keeping the shuttle from blowing away.
The ferocity of the storm is eerily reminiscent of the one on Demeter.