Listen, freak. There’s more to this rotten world than they let us see. Did you know there’s a ticking clock in the heart of the city? You can hear it if you dare face the Immortal’s daemons and take a plunge into ghost-space.

The silverline addicts say it’s kept count for as long as life’s crawled over this ruined world. No doubt about that. Well, what’s it counting to? When did it start? Who the fuck even knows at this point.

I don’t think we want the answers. One thing’s for sure, though. It’ll still be ticking long after you’re gone. Heh heh heh...

CHAPTER 4: TEN THOUSAND YEARS IN THE MAKING

“Are you ready?” She asked over the radio. “This is where things get wild.”

The habitat inspection drone swung around the lonely brick tower overlooking the sea, listening to their conversation. Nearly two metres long, with a sleek arrowhead shape and a collection of manipulators and tools clustered in orbs beneath its nose, the drone was an extension of the tremendous orbital space platform — their home.

Finding no one in the tower, the drone darted away above the granite cliffs that hung over tumultuous, frothing waters. Then, feeling adventurous, they dipped down further, zipping between the tall trees that reached out over the cliff and into the briny wind with their leafy arms, before swinging out over the bay.

Drifting banks of mist concealed the sea’s largest inhabitants. The whales broke the surface, bodies arcing as they slid into the air. Jets of vapour burst from their blow holes, expelling salty waters before filling their lungs. Their majestic elders kicked their fins and circled their youngest, who played oblivious to the silent aircraft above.

The drone swept its senses over the scene. LiDAR and scanning eyes flickered. They picked out a flock of birds accompanying the pod, climbing in the fog and screaming at one another over the wind. Below them was a seacraft, floating at a respectful distance from the wild animals.

“Beautiful,” her companion finally broadcasted.

The drone found them a little way out from the seacraft, submerged in the cool waters, kept warm by drysuits and able to respire with chemical rebreathers. They quickly scanned the humans’ equipment whilst they were distracted by the passing giants. Then, determining that everything was in order, the drone took one last survey of the scene. They knew the peaceful animals posed no threat to the tiny humans joining them in the sea, so the drone skipped upwards, out of the fog and into the sky.

Feeling eager, the drone accelerated again once it was a safe distance from biological life. They kicked hypersonic, causing the air to shock against their metallic shell. Then, they reached the expanse of the upper atmosphere, slipping in and out of layers of feathery cloud backlit with soft, pink light. The light came from all directions up here because this was not an ordinary world.

Above the drone hung the planet of Merlinst, Hos Tes Desht TonDer NILE. With a population of 3,134,006, it was long terraformed with verdant continents, dotted with ancient habitats of gold from when Caretaker Desht first arrived and started seeding human life. Around the planet wrapped a ribbon of light, extending from the broad span of the entire horizon out to beyond the needle-thin distance. The drone recognised it as the expanse of the orbital they were flying through, which they dutifully helped maintain.

Caretaker Desht’s orbital was an artificial ring circling the world from above. Most of the life in this solar system resided in this space habitat. Though the planet below supported a paltry few million people, this ring system supported tens of billions of humans and even more archived flora and fauna living in artificial paradise.

However, something troubled the drone’s senses. Distantly, the orbital shuddered. All along its span, lights flickered and dimmed before going out.

That wobble reached the thousand-kilometre platform, which the drone flew over. Below them, they detected a series of sharp impacts by watching vibrations in the simulated planetary bed. Though distant, the drone could sense further impacts through the diamond shell walls of the habitat’s upper sheathe and its primary and secondary substructure. Radio emissions burst into life, and alarms issued in sound before quickly failing, falling back into silence.

Unable to understand what they were sensing in the electromagnetic spectrum, the drone threw up their virtual field antenna. At 55km, simulated, they noticed no unexpected gravitational waves. Kicking it up to 11,111km, there was no sign of remarkable neutrino sources.

8ms had elapsed since the alarms died when the habitat inspection drone decided to flair their engines, turn sharply and direct themselves back down towards the surface. One question burned in their mind: What was happening?

Shouting through electronic channels, the drone transmitted handshakes in an attempt to make contact with the larger network. When they received only noise, they urgently pinged every address that should have been locked as essential services. But, again, the drone received nothing that passed even a simple checksum. As they broke the cloudline again, they decided their only recourse was to try to make a hardware connection with the orbital’s network and receive further instructions.

The atmosphere pulsed again. Another series of impacts kicked up a crosswind. The screaming air brought with it vaporised metal, burned carbon fibre and diamond film, and the exotic compounds issued from subliming superconductor cabling. Following soon after came the heavy molecules from burning organic matter. Even as the drone rushed down, the clouds were pulled up around them, the air suddenly bursting upwards.

Turning a sensor to scan in their wake, the drone saw the diamond walls that contained the habitat’s surface-atmosphere peeled away. The destruction exposed everything around the drone to the hard vacuum of space. Swinging their sensors in every direction, they saw massive sections of the reinforced superstructure that reached over the horizon splinter and break, portions of the inner surface border walls cast spinning out to the void.

Still, despite the damage occurring within plain sight, the drone found nothing to explain it. There was no indication of any kind of missiles or cutting fields. There weren’t any remnants from high-speed collisions in the orbital system that might have caused it. Whatever assailant was responsible was all but invisible, except for the ruin it left behind.

The drone rushed down towards the bay, kicked their braking surfaces and gimbaled their engines at the very last moment. With a heaving turn, they cut an arcing path over the water. The sea’s surface boiled as the pressure dropped, with the atmosphere quickly dispersing into orbit. All around, the briny foam froze in mere moments, ice stained red with violent decompression where the animals now struggled, whales gulping as their blowholes burst, and sea birds flapping and convulsing on the splintering surface.

Over the radio, the drone could hear both humans scream. The fearful sound broke into unconscious gurgles, so the drone dared scan them. Barotrauma filled their bloodstreams with gassy and fatty embolisms. It sheered their fleshy tissues with concussive force.

With less than moments to decide, the drone concluded that it was already too late to save them; the drone lacked the medical tools to help, so they looked away. Their mind core ached with grief.

Instead, the drone refocused ahead as it raced over the cliffs and towards the lonely stone tower. Beyond the building, horrifically, they saw the ribbon of habitat that stretched hundreds of thousands of kilometres ahead severed, swinging distant and delicate, trillions of tons let loose. A burst of light around the damaged section showed that the habitat was trying to stabilise itself with fields and subfields. However, it was all but futile in the face of the continued attack. The forces involved were simply colossal. It was the end of the world.

The drone would have to get off the artificial geography of the planet-simulating surface plate and make their way down into the main living and engineering volume within the space habitat. They could lock in a physical connection to the rest of the system there.

Quickly approaching the tower, the drone powered up the field-projecting ‘cutter’ device beneath their nose. The slicing tool — they were nominally considered an unarmed drone and certainly not a warcraft — rotated upon its mount as it manifested a ruby light.

Maximising its output, the drone dragged a hardlight blade, projected by the cutter, ahead in a sweeping arc. The tower was bisected diagonally in an instant. The upper portion began to collapse, spilling rubble and dust outwards.

Sparing not a moment, the drone committed to a half-aileron roll. Then, they kicked their aerobrakes whilst inverted, turning their engines in their gimbaling mounts hard. The underside of their chassis impacted the falling rubble, and the drone redirected and flashed sharp red hardlight downwards, shredding the floors and supports within the tower. Engines roaring, the drone tore their way straight down, falling with the collapse and then accelerating faster than it.

The drone threaded down through an accessway. The elevator below the tower was quickly blasted aside, giving the drone room to break into a cavernous space disguised as a crack in the earth. Dropping, then taking another hard brake, steering surfaces slamming out, the drone translated their momentum into a sudden turn. Rolling, the drone felt its chassis rattle and jar as it collided with the solid edges of a narrow companionway, barely fitting through a space designed for people, not small vehicles.

Accelerating again, the drone rocketed out of the collapse, past decoratively placed rock facades and into the exposed metal substructure. Turning again and again, the drone crashed through columns of air that pressed back against them as they breached accessways that fought to contain the vacuum above. Finally, a hundred more metres down, the drone exited into the upper echelons of the undercity.

Evading scrambling maintenance services and the movements of emergency materiel, the drone darted into a roll, narrowly avoiding a transport craft. Their exhausts scorched one another, smouldering with their mutual desperation. Then, screaming down on their engines, the drone came to a halt on top of one of the kilometres-tall living spires inside the main structure of the orbital ring.

There it met a ringed array, standing on a reinforced frame, which it met with a back-up port. Clicking into place, a cradle extended to support it. Now physically connected to the network, the drone’s sensory suite was flooded with alerts. An unexpected assault had been made upon the entire planetary system of Merlinst and its Caretaker. There had been no warning, and no terms had been given. The responsible party was unknown. All active infrastructure support drones, including this one, were instructed to provide emergency relief and support to humanity. The drone was assigned to an evacuation bay, so it plotted a course through airway control to the waypoint assigned to it.

Whilst sitting within its cradled port, the drone swivelled their sensors to the left. The drone in the adjacent connection mount turned their sensors to meet them in return. Attempting to flash a radio signal, they were met with more unintelligible noise. Assuming then that they must be actively jammed, the drone flashed up its hardlight controller and spun up an image to communicate.

📶

The drone on their left responded.

❌

A flash of light. They both swivelled their sensors to the right to see a third drone flashing in its port.

😭

After a brief pause, the drone flashed back sadly.

😣

On their left, the drone displayed another image.

😥

Then, all three flashed in unison.

🫂🫂🫂

Alight with resolve, the drone displayed one final hardlight emoji as they disconnected from the array, unseated themself from their mount, and swung back out of the port.

😡

The drone kicked back into the air and flipped back over the edge of the spire. Their engines screaming, they fell with gravity and then beyond it before swinging out between the vast towers of the undercity — weaving between the many bridges and transportways that connected them — until they broke out into the edge space of the living volume.

An accessway opened for them, and the drone blasted through. They entered the sealed evacuation bay. It was a wide shuttle bay hosting an old evacuation craft. The vessel was old and stained with a patina. Though it was regularly serviced, it was generally accepted that they were a demonstration of the many-fold redundancies that the Caretakers employed in keeping humankind safe. The drone couldn’t think of a single time one might have been used in a true evacuation of an orbital, not in the last 10¹⁰s, anyway.

The vacuum of space was held at bay by a silvery forcefield, featureless and pristine, one of the Caretaker’s projections that kept the interior of the orbital habitat safe for human inhabitation. It was a reassuring light — the field something only a Caretaker had the power and the higher dimensionality required to manifest.

A surge of activity filled the landing platform. Hundreds of people crowded, rushing to board the life vessel using its boarding ramps.

The drone picked up pulses of radiation blasting into the undercity from various directions. Stopping to swivel in the air, they extended its virtual field antenna and felt the habitat’s inertial field wobble uncertainly. Dread crept into the drone’s circuits. Then, a shell of neutrinos swept through the undercity, and they could only infer from analysis of the various spectra that the habitat — the Caretaker — was fighting back.