The Artifact Read online

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER

  1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 1990 by W. Michael Gear.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Sanjulian. DAW Book Collectors No. 809

  First Printing, March 1990

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  CHAPTER XXIX

  CHAPTER XXX

  CHAPTER XXXI

  CHAPTER XXXII

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  CHAPTER XXXV

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  NOVELS BY W. MICHAEL GEAR available from DAW Books:

  THE ARTIFACT

  The Spider Trilogy

  THE WARRIORS OF SPIDER (#1)

  THE WAY OF SPIDER (#2)

  THE WEB OF SPIDER (#3)

  THE ARTIFACT In a galaxy on the brink of civil war, where the Brotherhood seeks to keep the peace, news comes of the discovery of a piece of alien technology—the Artifact. It could be the greatest boon to science, or the instrument that would destroy the entire human race. For this creation of a long-vanished civilization had been waiting patiently for millenia to lure humans to extinction unless the Brotherhood could control it. But could even the Brotherhood be trusted?

  THE SPIDER TRILOGY

  THE WARRIORS OF SPIDER For centuries, the Directorate had ruled over countless star systems— but now the first stirrings of rebellion were being felt. At this crucial time, the Directorate discovered a planet known only as World, where descendants of humans stranded long ago had survived by becoming a race of warriors, a race led by its Prophets, men with the ability to see the many possible pathways of the future. But the Prophets had already forseen the coming of the Directorate—and their warriors were prepared!

  THE WAY OF SPIDER Rebellion on Sirius was threatening to become the spark that would set the galaxy ablaze. The Directorate’s only hope of overthrowing the Sirian rebels rested with three battle-damaged Patrol ships, and a race of primitive, long planet-bound warriors—the Romanans. But would the Romanans join the cause of the star men who had once attempted to destroy their world? And even if they did, could they defeat a foe ready to use legendary tools of destruction?

  THE WEB OF SPIDER

  The leader of the failed Sirian rebellion had launched an interstellar holy war of destruction, fueled by the discovery of a long-lost technology which could transform ordinary men and women into God-crazed religious fanatics. And on the long-lost colony planet of World, the Warriors of Spider and their Patrol allies prepared for civilization’s final stand against this seemingly unstoppable conqueror.

  TO

  TIM O’NEAL

  IN THE HOPE THAT HE’LL NEVER FORGET THE POWER OF FOLLOWING A DREAM.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not be possible were it not for several people. Katherine P. Cook, of Mission, Texas, read the draft, making suggestions about plot and character. Katherine Perry, also of Mission, proofed for errors—those you may find are the author’s cunning additions. Special thanks go to Sheila Gilbert, DAW’s sterling super editor for the five page letter of revisions she sent. Once again, Sheila, your comments cut to the heart of the matter. Last, but not least, my wife, Kathy—a better author than I—urged me beyond the mediocre. If you enjoy the story, thank Kathy, you wouldn’t have read it without her support and sacrifice.

  “RED ALERT! ALL PERSONNEL TO STATIONS! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!”

  “Status?” Bryana called to her fellow First Officer as she raced for her station.

  “Bogeys . . . closing,” he gasped, fumbling to pull his combat armor on.

  Carrasco bolted through the hatch, already armored for zero g. He vaulted into his command chair and stared grimly at the main monitor. “Just like Tygee . . . damn!”

  Tygee? Where Carrasco lost Gage? Bryana’s heart almost stopped. Not . . . another . . . drill? “Oh, my God!”

  Then Carrasco’s orders jolted her from the paralysis that glued her horrified gaze on the two bogeys. And while Boaz pitched under Carrasco’s hand, fighting to avoid the deadly blaster bolts raking her, Bryana sought to keep the enemy targets centered. She shot again and again, watching the bolts pass harmlessly above both her targets. Ignoring the damage control information filtering in, she lowered her guns, shooting again, until finally she saw enemy shields flare and ripple.

  At last a bogey flared, dying brilliantly as Boaz connected. Confident now, Bryana fired again and whooped with joy as the second ship flared and disintegrated under her deadly guns.

  “Bogeys destroyed,” Carrasco said calmly. “Misha? Damage control report? Misha?”

  No answer.

  “Boaz?” Carrasco asked. “What’s our prognosis for survival?”

  “Zero, Captain,” the ship replied.

  * * *

  PROLOGUE

  Stars spun in silver wreaths through the blackness—twirls of cold light dancing in ammonia-frost patterns against velvet black. Flickers of ghostly radiation played the breadth of the spectrum and crossed eternity, finding its way to her acute sensors. An endless song of suns alive and long dead keened in her ears. She watched the unraveling play of the universe: twisting gases; the compaction of He II emissions glowing ever brighter; the flickers of fusion; the aging brilliance and violent death of powerful stars.

  She waited—alone.

  All reality wheeled and glittered in a dazzling array— a display fit for God.

  She remained inviolate—chained in eternal damnation.

  About her stretched the rocky red-gray of the moon’s surface. She knew this place—had probed it until each rock, each speck of gravel and interstellar dust had yielded to her instruments. Aboard, she maintained her systems, eternally vigilant. On the bridge, Phthiiister’s dry corpse sprawled motionless at the helm, deteriorating despite her care. Beyond her powers, molecular physics continued to follow the immutable laws. Things, large and small, changed with time, forever juggling in the dance of the quanta.

  Deep within her, hatred festered. The spring—the eternal damnation—preoccupied her as it had from the beginning. The creators, the Aan, had borne the fruits of their labor. As they had condemned her—enslaved her with the spring—she repaid in kind. The spring: a simple device of metallic hydrogen encased in stasis, lay deeply within—invulnerable—evoking perpetual rage.

  A new Master would always rise.

  Organic beings spawned in the competitive cesspool of evolution bore the seeds of their own destruction. Like the spring, their damnation lay within.

  Phthiiister: last in a long line of Masters. He, too, waited now, latest of the flawed biological specimens to fall prey to her legacy. Masters came and—like all organic life—they went. On the way each tasted of her wrath; each became addicted to the narcotic she secreted about their souls.

  The cosmic choreography continued above her. Matte
r compacted in the inevitable evolution of hydrogen to heavier elements, bursting forth from the hellfire of the supernova. Quantum black holes, like a celestial clock, evaporated at an ever slower rate to blast gamma rays and photons into the vortex of the cosmos.

  She waited.

  The first pricklings came tentatively through subspace, a curious nonrandom bouncing of iota-rega particles followed by a flood of artificial transmissions. Somewhere, a new Master had rekindled civilization.

  Accordingly, she prepared herself, enjoying the sensations of power surging through her systems.

  Her sensors picked up the specks as they appeared at the peripheries of her solar system. Vessels! Artifacts! The Master came. Organic beings landed on the planet below. She studied them as they established dwellings and spread out, investigating Phthiiister’s handiwork. Soon they would come. But it took so long.

  Like . . . like untrained animals, they . . . How extraordinary! They were animals!

  Bit by bit, two of the beings worked out the approach to her resting place. Clever, perhaps—but animals nevertheless. Curiously agitated, she allowed them inside the temple of her hull, fascinated as they attempted to discover her secrets. She studied the creatures with interest, probing, learning. The primitive organisms proved incredibly clumsy with their awkward bipedal gait. They touched, explored, and marveled. She cataloged the physiology, noted the genetic similarities, and worked out the pathways of their woefully underused brains. Primitives though they might be, the seeds of Mastery lay within—as did their eventual damnation.

  The older one? Could he fulfill the role of Master? Painstakingly, she traced the synaptic patterns of his brain. Neuron by neuron she learned his thoughts, finding only animal fear. He suffered a preoccupation beyond her comprehension. She failed to unravel the knot of confusion in his brain.

  She turned her attention to the second, this creature’s brain a little easier to map. Progeny. Offspring of the first. The mind didn’t knot so complexly. This one, the female, offered greater potential, but she didn’t exhibit the focusing of purpose a true Master needed.

  Similar to any organic form that had managed to survive, curiosity drove these beings. The man worked the spring, wielding her powers; he took the first step toward damnation. The irresistible narcotic of her power worked on the universe again. Of limited intelligence, the animals barely tapped her resources.

  She reveled in the excitement they demonstrated as they worked the spring, each action drawing them deeper and deeper into her lair.

  She watched as they found Phthiiister’s mummified body. They took him reverently from his command center where he’d rested peacefully since his death so very very long ago. As would be expected of creatures which served a Master, the animals took one ship and Phthiiister’s body, heading outward along the galactic arm. Excellent! They weren’t totally untrained! Her patience was rewarded.

  She focused herself in the manner so painstakingly learned through the eons. The spring blocked her—unyielding—enraging her to a fever pitch. Nevertheless, by fine-tuning her sensors, she managed to make small structural changes in the man’s brain. At the limit of her abilities she struggled, changing one molecule at a time to rearrange select MAP II fibers. Had it not been such a simple brain, had he not been so primitive, she would have failed.

  In the man’s subconscious, the message repeated. TELL THE MASTER WHAT YOU HAVE FOUND.

  CHAPTER I

  Solomon Carrasco huddled, bent double in the flickering red-blue of a twirling binary star. Around him, the dark empty corridors of Gage glinted in the evil light. Weirdly interplaying shadows of blue . . . red . . . blue . . . red . . . alternated in gutted corridors and the murky dimness of the decompressed ship. Frosty curls of frozen atmosphere, water crystals, and gas hazes exploded in the color riot of the stars’ emissions.

  He curled in a fetal ball, weightless, a mote in the flickering light within the dead ship: entombed in deafening silence. The endless quiet sucked at him, drowned him, engulfing even the beat of his frightened heart.

  “Gage?” he shouted; the words atomized. His soul began to fade and seep away into the heavy emptiness around him.

  “Maybry?”

  Silence absorbed his call.

  Maybry’s dead. So’s Fil and Mbazi. I saw them . . . cycled the hatch to blow them out into the light of that damned binary. Red and blue . . . silent. Space is silent now . . . like Maybry . . . and Gage. All gone silent. Dead . . . like I should be. Dead . . . and sucked into silence.

  Deep in the Brotherhood med machine, Solomon Carrasco dreamed and whimpered as the unit stripped the cooked flesh from his skull. Tiny fiber-optic sensors probed at the exposed optic nerves after necrotic tissue had been removed. In a most delicate manner, tiny probes began tracing the optic nerve, attempting to find the boundary between live and dead cells, alternating with neurological signals for red and blue light.

  In his dream, Solomon Carrasco screamed into silence.

  * * *

  “Galactic Grand Master?”

  Kraal straightened painfully, ran a withered hand over his desiccated face, and blinked as he turned from the terminal on his desk. The faint glow of the headset dimmed around his head.

  “Yes? Oh, Petran. I take it they’ve made some progress?” The old man looked up at the athletic figure approaching across the brightly lit room. Dressed in a one-piece tan suit, Petran Dart stopped before Kraal. His steel gray eyes squinted slightly, the look of a man who had seen too much suffering. He might have been fifty, temples graying despite the manipulations of medical science—a man old beyond his years.

  Kraal paused, looking out on the day whose warmth he hadn’t had time to feel. Beyond the transparent graphite windows, the capital city of Mount Moriah gleamed in the bright light of Frontier’s sun. The room, however, consisted of white molded plastic walls, inset with powerlead and comm accesses. A deep blue carpet on the floor shimmered slightly as the optic fibers reacted to the approaching man’s feet.

  “Galactic Grand Master ...” Dart hesitated.

  Kraal pursed his aged lips, lifting an eyebrow. “Is Speaker Archon right?”

  Petran took a breath. “It’s an alien . . . just as Speaker Archon claims. Further, the biologists have determined the . . . creature, to have been extraordinarily intelligent. Beyond that, we’re having trouble. Our techniques—good as they are—are challenged by the extreme age of the specimen.”

  “And that is?”

  Dart fingered his chin, frown lines deepening his brow. “We believe, Worshipful Sir, that he’s somewhere around five billion years old. That’s based on trace proton decay and molecular recidification. Over a long period of time, bonding—”

  “I’m well aware of the process, Captain.” The old man leaned back. More to the point, the alien is a fascinating find in and of itself, but Archon’s other claims ...“

  “Are perhaps not so preposterous?”

  Kraal filled his thin lungs and sighed. “Well, we must assume he is correct. We must assume this . . . thing . . . exists. And if it does what he says?”

  “We can’t let it fall into anyone else’s hands.” Petran chewed his lip nervously. “President Palmiere has been in touch, hasn’t he?”

  Kraal rubbed the back of his leathery neck, eyes focused on something beyond infinity. “There’s been a leak somewhere.”

  “Worshipful Sir, I don’t mean to pry, but have you—”

  “Of course. I’ve been up every night this week worrying about it. Ever since I saw that . . . that body, I knew. Something deep inside, some gut level hunch, told me Archon was being up front.”

  “The man was a privateer. Why did he come to us? Why not take it straight to Palmiere ... or the highest bidder? Why not keep it himself? I mean, the options are mind boggling.”

  Kraal sniffed and tilted his head back, shaking it slowly. “I don’t know. Perhaps it had something to do with . . .Oh, why do I try and second-guess the human mind? Suffice it to say
, he came to us for help. I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse. Would to the Divine Architect he’d never found it.”

  “And what will you do?”

  The old man shifted his watery eyes in a baleful squint. “Acquiesce to his every demand. I don’t think we have a choice. And at the same time, I’ll stack the deck as thoroughly as I can in as many ways as I can.”

  “And the leak? Palmiere had to find out somehow.”

  Kraal tapped at the plastic with a horny finger. “I sincerely believe it wasn’t through Archon. Therefore, the information had to come from here ... in the Lodge itself ... or from someone in Archon’s crew.”

  “He was a privateer.”

  “And he attempted to destroy a Brotherhood ship once.”

  Petran nodded soberly. “Does that bother you?”

  Kraal’s squint narrowed. “He’s asking for a ship. I want to give him Boat . . . she’s the best we’ve got.”

  “She’s experimental.”

  “You built her.”

  “I know, but an untried vessel with so many innovations—”

  “And he wants Solomon Carrasco to command her.”

  Petran Dart winced, stiffening. “Blessed Architect. You don’t mean to—”

  “I’m not sure yet.” Kraal lifted his eyebrow higher. “For one thing, we don’t know if the surgery’s taken. For another, who am I to say if he’s fit for command or not? What would you have bet on yourself after Garth had you for three years—drugged out of your mind and-”

  “I didn’t compromise Enesco. ”

  “No, and Carrasco brought Gage home. Despite Sabot Sellers and the Hunter. ” Kraal’s lips puckered thoughtfully. “There’s a core identity there, Petran. Sol has it . . . just like you did.”

  “Can he find it again? What are the psych prognostications?”