DT 2024: Baoding Suns

Merlin, for the first time in his life, felt he reached out and touched the face of God itself. And yet he touched nothing. He was doing nothing but leaning against a railing in simple awe.
For days he watched the ripples of strange, seeming-black fabric forged by trillions of bonded smart matter nanoparticles, a thick goop with and without form. A grand contradiction to the rules of the universe. But the ancient and extinct Forerunners were no stranger to breaking the laws of natural physics. And their dark megastructure went on for several lightyears, an expansive blob from afar looked like an ordinary dark nebula.
The actual surface material seemed to vibrate under warship floodlights, weaving and fluttering like a wall of sleeping honeybees. For a second or two, light would bounce off the alien surface and reflect at the light battleship UNSC Arsenal, before extinguishing altogether. The smart matter did not reflect light, instead absorbing exposure and seeming even irritant when the light intensity shifted requiring it to readjust its opaque surface tension.
Dropping surveillance probes into the murky-metallic, and absorbent surface revealed further alien features. The drones would slowly lower with gas thrusters to the surface tension. However, upon contact, the smart matter near-fabric retreated at the strange contact, first depressing and then enveloping the machines whole like sinking into a deep sea. Radio contact seemed to vanish instantly with the drones, without warning and without fail. Merlin’s host battleship sacrificed four drones before giving up on that experiment.
Personally, Merlin was curious about a human touch to the experimentation. Forerunner technology seem to work in favor of human contact, most of the time. But as often, it seemed like a curse revealing ancient horrors beyond his comprehension. Of course, he could not touch the surface of the darker-than-black, darker-than-space construct. Rather, several obstacles lay in his way. The hard vacuum, UNSC Navy close approach protocols, and the aggressive radiation nursery of interstellar space. All these meant his superiors wouldn’t let him go for a spacewalk, Spartan supersoldier incased in the latest third generation Mjolnir powered assault armor, or otherwise.
Instead, he watched through the reinforced glass array of Observation Deck Three as the Arsenal went fishing. A giant crane lowered a drone and reinforced fiberoptic cable into the oblique alien superstructure. A crew member nearby whispered to another, “So how deep do you think the Forerunner cloak is?”
Merlin hummed to himself at the question. He guessed probably several kilometers to be safe. Personally, if he was in charge, he would prefer something quicker: attach a guidance cord to the back of an Archer missile and fire it into the cloak. It seems like the ancient alien material didn’t have any self-preservation or defensive properties so dropping a fast-moving missile into the unknown depths didn’t seem so strange. At the very least, it would cut back on waiting time and boredom.
After ten minutes of waiting though, a surprising new view superimposed onto the observation deck as the bridge crew allowed the observing shipmates to see firsthand what their tempted patience had wrought.
Merlin’s breath hitched. Staring back at him was darkness, but in the shadows lay the twinkling strands of rainbow lightning, crackling and trailing in silence and in the far distance of the unknown alien structure made from hard vacuum. And yet, it wasn’t the Dyson swarm-like texture or features that drew Merlin’s attention.
It was the dim balls the size of gas giants. No, stars. Micro stars of some sort, pressed together in a cojoined orbit with barely a distance between themselves to be a star diameter length. The stars were on the small size, dim blue requiring no degree of shading against a glowing hot ball of gas. It wasn’t the stars themselves that drew Merlin in.
No, a drop of horror poisoned his stomach and he gripped the railing so hard a popping noise indicated he dented the exterior metal. The stars were spinning in their orbit. What little objects in the space seem to roll, or extend and stretch as the stars spun. That didn’t make any sense, nothing material in space moved that fast. Maybe the bridge crew were accelerating the feed to understand the unknown phenomenon at some level.
But Merlin remained skeptical, discomforted by the idea of giant orbs spinning against one another like a pair of Baoding balls with a magnet between the two, repelling them from combining. They spun and spun, as if an invisible hand manipulated them into this permanent, confounding action. Repeating, repeating, repeating.
With growing horror, Merlin also recognized a pattern. Gravity waves. Spinning. Whatever the Forerunners were capable of, they managed to tame stars. And convert them into something completely beyond his wildest imaginations. The boy blinked, and looked away from the holographic display.
He stepped off the observation deck railing and retreated to the elevator. He needed to sleep on this one. Something about seeing stars turned into playthings for an ancient alien civilization made him feel so very small. Not in a long time had he felt such shock, he wanted to curl up and sleep and never wake up again.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories