Hundreds of eyes glittered wet with tears like crystal. Hundreds of palms were pressed flat against the glass surface of the viewing windows, a hundred lips spoke the name of the celestial body that presided over the universe .
Revelation
They said, the words tasting with a new familiarity, their bodies filled with a sense of homesickness that was so painful it was almost a physical expression. It was like that moment when you are trying to think of a word, but is just on the tip of your tongue, just out of reach. Looking outside they felt as if they knew where they were going, how to navigate, what to do but it was..... difficult to conjure up the memory that should have been there.
Adam was glad tat Conn had chosen not to join this for this mission.
He had thought it was too dangerous to be near behemoth with his ability to read minds, and he might have been right, but to experience the thoughts and feelings of an entire ship as they looked out over Revelation and the axis of the universe.... Adam didn't see how they wouldn't be too much for anyone.
Standing on the bridge of his ship, in a welling pool of golden light, he was glad he was wearing a helmet as unbidden and unwanted tears sprang to his eyes and wetted his cheeks, almost involuntarily.
He had to keep his hands hard at his sides against their futile desire to wipe at his face.
Before him others were doing just that.
He could have stood there and looked at this view forever, longed to rejoin it, as looking upon it somehow made things feel.... Better.
The pain of life faded away, all the bad memories, pain and hurt, were simply trivial under Revelation.
It was a powerful feeling, one that might have taken other men and women in, but Adam forced himself to shake off the feeling.
"Alright, enough gawping, we have work to do."
The tremor in his voice was nonexistent under the modulation that Fealty placed over it, and Adam could hear the AI humming to itself in pleasure as he took his seat, making a note to get the seat restraints fixed when he had the chance, "Everyone clean yourselves up if necessary and then get back to your stations! Remember why we are here and what we are dong."
The crew continued to look longingly at the glowing star before them, but slowly, one by one they went back to their stations and their work, a few people standing to hurry out of the room before returning some minutes later, generally wearing a fresh pair of pants.
"Someone throw up a filter over that screen, I can't concentrate."
There was reluctance, but the crew did it, and the world before them was robbed of it's golden light. The filter they used took most of the yellow out of the scene before them, muting the star itself while leaving the blue nebulae and the planetary systems intact.
"I want an analysis on the planetary system as soon as possible, how many planets, energy signatures, the whole nine yards, do what you have to do."
The crew got to work and Adam tapped his fingers against the armrest.
"If I was a weapon of mass destruction created by celestial beings where would I hide?" He muttered to himself elbow resting on the chair arm. He turned once to glance at Lord Avex, "Lord Avex are the cloaking shields still up?"
"Yes, cloaking shields are still up, though what good they will do against Maker technology remains to be seen"
Yes their new cloaking technology was a marvel of Celzex engineering, the newest and best tech, the sort of thing the Celzex weren't likely to share with them in times past, but now, specifically for this mission Lord Avex had mane an exception, but even the technology of the most advanced species in the galaxy was questionable up against this.
Whatever this was?
For it couldn't have been a natural planetary system. The planets were to close together, and their orbits were too regular. With such a thick cluster of planets, you would expect things to be colliding right and left, for orbits to be wobbling in one direction or the other as they passed each other, but that didn't seem to be the case.
"Sir, preliminary analysis finished."
"Bare bones, what do we have?"
"Sir there are well over two thousand planets in the system, most of them rocky, but there are a substantial number of gas giants, this Is counting the moons as well. Our spectroscopy tools indicate livable atmospheres on all of the rocky worlds within range, and both the inner and the outer sides of the rings."
"No shit."
"Yes shirt, sir. As far as power output.... Well its hard to differentiate, the power signatures are off the chart. This entire system is like one big lightbulb, hard to see anything."
"Can you set to filter out the weakest signatures. I am assuming the smaller ones are going to be from anima, and there must be thousands of people, of Makers living here, so they will show up as energy sources on traditional scans."
"Of course sir."
There was a pause as Adam maneuvered the ship into a slow roll forward . They would never get anywhere going at this speed, but he needed to feel like he was doing something. When the time came he would start a warp chain. If the entire system was indeed a hot bed of energy signatures, than he was not going to worry about someone picking up their relatively low powered chain warp.
"Sir,"
"It work?"
"Yes sir. I am getting a massive power signature from a planet.... Well I don't want to say above the star, but based on the configuration of all the celestial bodies in the system, there is a pattern, sir, and there is a planet that has more room than everything else, and if you orient the view, than it only makes sense that it is sitting on top of the star relative to the other planets?'"
Adam nodded, 'And how much is that power output."
There was a pause.
"Well, sir it doesn't make sense, but on my readings, that planet is the source of almost all this system's energy. Relative to the star..... well it makes that power output almost negligible."
Adam felt a grim smile passing over his face, "Well lieutenant, that, might just be because you found god."
There was a soft sputtering noise from some members of the crew, but Adam nodded to himself.
"So avoid that planet?"
Adam turned to look at the crewwoman who said that, "Avoid it, most certainly not."
Now the entire crew had turned to look at him more confused than ever.
"Wait, you want to head TOWARDS the architect? Towards the most powerful being in the universe. The one that could probably unmake you with the snap of his fingers or worse?"
Adam laughed, "Look everyone, if the maker is as powerful as our original idea of the supreme creator of the universe, than he already knows that we are here. Not only does he know that but he's known it well in advance, and yet nothing has happened to us yet. So I am banking on the fact that if he hasn't dealt with us already than he doesn't plan to. I can't claim to know what he is thinking, but there are a few options, either we are to small and inconsequential for him to care, he finds us amusing and wants to see how far we are going to go, or somehow this all fits into his master plan, and he had no intention of interfering. Besides, we don't know how strong behemoth is, so it pays to try and find the most powerful ship in the axis."
It took them a moment to figure out what he was planning, "Wait... you think."
"I think it is reasonable to say the architect has a ship, and if he has a ship it is most definitely strong enough to destroy behemoth."
"You WHAT?"
He turned to look at maverick, who wasn't generally known for being incredulous of his plans, but even through her helmet he could sense the incredulity that was rolling off of her in waves.
Adam shrugged, "What's the worst that could happen."
"He could vaporize us/"
"I bet he won't. Think of it like this, we are the naughty children coming in to steal dad's car and take it out for a joyride, yes perhaps we may crash his new car horribly, and yes he might be mad, but that's hardly a killing offence now is it?"
"Adam I think stealing the architect's spaceship is a little more extreme than stealing your dad's car."
"What makes you think you can even fly a Maker ship?"
Adam huffed, "I don't know the power of love and friendship or some bullshit, just trust me on this will you. I CAN fly that ship." And he knew it too, it was hard to explain but he knew it, more implicit in his soul than he had ever known anything. He knew it in the same way he knew the name of that star. It wasn't something he was likely to share with the crew, but quietly in the back of his head it was more of a fact than it was a hope.
He kept the crew doing scans, as he initiated a chain warp towards the main planet.
The chain warp was a rather minor set of jumps designed to carry their ship across a system in minutes rather than hours, though their navigation was that much slower than it should have been as they encountered an absolute mass of obstacles as they moved forward.
Under the light of the glowing golden star, there was life in this planetary system so complex and lively that you couldn't turn an engine without almost bumping into someone.
They passed by a purple and blue gas giant on their left, and had to skirt hard around an accompanying moon. From the interior of the bridge, they could look down on the tranquil surface of the planet, and see the surface was covered in a blue violet color, broken up by ice blue inland oceans and turquoise swaths of other unknown biomes.
Below decks the crew continued to crowd against the viewing screen as they passed by.
And not only were there planets, but there were ships.
Hundreds upon thousands of ship in thousands of varying designs, some sharp and silver, many of them, sleek, and elegant, all of them powered by the same golden energy. Some of the ships were small, no bigger than a darkfire, and some ships were massive, cityscapes orbiting planets, or docking on stations big enough to be small moons.
And then, there were the makers themselves unencumbered by ships simply floating leisurely through space in the form of starborn or other alien creatures that he did not recognize.
From the comms channel a thousand conversations warbled and chattered.
And despite not knowing the language, Adam understood what they were saying.
This was a system at war.
Troop movements, cargo transports, and mining vessels to harvest precious materials.
Adam kept his hands tight on the controls moving carefuly so as not to give away their position.
He had been right, even if someone could have noticed their signature, they were far to busy to care. At one point, Adam and the others were stopped in open mouthed gaping as, at first, he thought the leviathan had suddenly appeared, but his initial recognition was dashed when he realized.
This leviathan was.... About a thousand times bigger than Smaug, he had just been confused because it was further away.
It would have been hard to describe the size of this creature, in fact it shouldn't have been possible. Its own mass should have collapsed it into a ball long ago, however there it was. At first he had almost mistaken it for a planetary ring, but then he had watched it unfurl itself from around the moon it had been.... Orbiting?
The thing was massive. It could have accidentally swallowed the Hub station in Andromeda without noticing.
And it was massive, pearly white, with no limbs, but with wings that stretched well beyond the diameter of a small moon. One of its eyes could have fit the entirety of a megacity inside easily, and it was not alone. There were hundreds of strange, massive creatures clustered among the scattered and orbiting planets. For a horrible moment he almost thought he ran into the behemoth, but it was a short lived thought as his eyes rolled over the massive pearlescent octopus like creature gently dragging a space station behind it like a child might drag a teddy bear.
"Sweet mother of..." Adam's voice trailed off.
Just to their other side another planet appeared covered in a rocky terrain of jagged blue ice, shortly after another planet that flickered with fire
Habitable planetary rings were common and seemed almost mandatory.
With every step they took towards the Architects seat of power, the more wonders they saw.
It struck Adam that, after today he was unlikely to ever see anything as beautiful or fantastic in the universe ever again, and that thought was more saddening than he would have liked to admit, but he pushed it out of his mind when, starting on their last chain warp towards the Maker's planet, they encountered the largest space station yet.
It was well large enough to be the size of a moon, made up of multiple interlocking rings. It wasn't a completely solid construction, but was sort of ball shaped created from a hundred rings crafted together, every surface being habitable in one way or another,
It sure did make one feel small.
"Constructs." The word came over the comms as the lieutenant was filtering through the channels
"Wait! Stop on that channel."
The communications lieutenant went back one, and the group of them paused listening as the strange language came filtering in through the comms.
"Argent station be advised, we have unverified reports of construct energy being detected inside the system."
"Well shit."
"I thought you said they wouldn't notice us." Lord Avex said mildly from where he sat.
"I said they would be UNLIKELY to notice us."
"Its that what you said though/"
Adam held up a hand to quiet the room as the communication continued.
"Construct energy? That doesn't narrow it down, Reclamation. You are going to have to be more specific."
There was no static, the comm lines were completely clear as, "Its hard to trace, we are getting interference but..... It seems to be a power signature associated with the Polaris nursery ."
Adam cursed silently under his breath.
"Polaris?" The speaker from argent station seemed startled, "Well-" What followed next was, what Adam assumed to be some sort of curse though it didn't translate properly. When he tasted the word on his tongue it was something similar to, of all the dying stars, but it definitely had worse connotations then that. He would have compared it to the phrase, "well shit".
"Impetus, he's here isn't he."
Adam frowned leaning forward to hear the conversation better.
The woman from reclamation seemed almost as startled as the man had been when she had mentioned construct energy, "Impetus! What makes you think he'd manage to make it here?"
"What makes you think he wouldn't. You've met him haven't you; you remember what he's like, and you've heard the stories."
Adam continued to frown.
"But HOW?"
"Do I sound like I know, that bastard always manages to get involve. Chain of command has been notified."
There was a pause and then a sharp warning tone began to wine through their comms.
WARNING, CONSTRUCT ENERGY DETECTED IN AXIS AIRSPACE, PLEASE BE ADVISED. REPEAT CONSTRUCT ENERGY DETECTED IN AXIS AIRSPACE, PLEASE BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR POLARIS CONSTRUCT TECHNOLOGY.