“It is the oldest tale we Daroodans possess. It began with a labor of love, and it ended in a vale of tears.”

Nong squatted frog-like on the edge of his chair, a carven sphynx looking down from his pedestal, his coy and knowing face shaded by the aquamarine tint of the glowbowl. Ven sat aslant on the side of the table, her eyes glued on the miniature that was still waddling around the assorted stationaries on Deschaine’s desk, animated by a life of its own.

“According to oral traditions, our home was once a flat and arid stretch of dirt too cold for even the cacti to grow,” Nong went on, “Our progenitors looked upon this nothingness and dreamt of a garden amidst the wasteland. And as they dreamed, so they wrought.”

“They sent their servants, the Dauru, to remake this world in accordance with their vision. And so the Dauru raised the living rock into high mesas where glaciers could form in the rarified air and melting to form new rivers. They ploughed deep canyons that trapped heat and moisture, allowing for the existence of alpine ecosystems. Even now the snow-crowned peaks of my homeland are the only places on Arachnea where humans can exist indefinitely on the surface without gas recyclers—the air is so thin up there that the oxygen partial pressures correspond with the body’s natural tolerances. And it is from these shapers of the earth that our nation took its name, a name which has since been diluted through centuries of phonological change into its current form: Darood.”

“Sensing that the earth was now wanton and wet, the progenitors sowed the valleys with all manner of green things so that their children would lack for nothing. And there came to be meadows and springs and a land of plenty. This was but one of the many great works that the ancestor-gods undertook upon the surface of our planet, and they entrusted this task to the one we call Ma’kling Dulag, a minor figure in the pantheon from whom every chieftain of the tableland tribes since has claimed direct descent. For the when the madness of the Consanguicide raged across the galaxy and the empires of antiquity came crashing down, Ma’kling and his Dauru were called away before they could complete their work. But before they departed for this final confrontation, Ma’kling entrusted his children with the forty Keys of Command, artefacts by which a mortal could inherit the power of the Dauru.”

“And so Ma’kling marched north to face a dire threat that had crawled down out of the black beyond. Thunder magic spoke, lances of fire and strange new constellations of stars that spawned out of the ether and just as quickly blinked out of existence.”

“And then...nothing. Of Ma’kling and his legion, nothing more was heard of since.”

“Centuries passed. The half-finished havens of Darood withered and died. Without the will of the ancients to sustain them, the green places reverted to the desert which had preceded them. Even the glaciers melted away into thin blades of ice we call the penitentes. Soon the mesas emptied of inhabitants as waves of famine set in. For a time men hunted men through the gorges and dried-up river beds, until sanity prevailed, and we put down the beasts that had once been our kinsmen. Only the most tenacious survived, moisture-gatherers who every day made the pilgrimage up to where the mesas kiss the skies, irrigating their mountain crops with melted slush carried down from the penitentes.”

“And so we eked out an existence on the crumbs that Arachnea threw our way. But we never forgot our heritage. The forty Keys of Command were passed down through the generations from one chieftain to the next, each a priceless heirloom that denotes absolute authority and over which our headhunters would fight to the death. Ever so often we would pick the finest of our youths to journey into the plains to search for Ma’kling and the lost legion. But instead, we found the Fleet.”

Deschane leaned forward in his seat, a slight tension in the set of his shoulders. He knew how the story went from here; as a young ensign fresh out of officer training he had earned his stripes in the counter-insurgency campaign that had finally ended the Daroodan secession. To call it a scorched earth policy would have been an understatement. To this day there were still ghost towns in the tablelands choked by the scarlet raze weeds that had throttled the life out of the terrace farms, impervious to herbicides and the frantic machete-work of the natives whose meadows had never known such a virulent pestilence.

The Fleet itself had lost a chain of mounds to the exact same species until the Biological Division had finally quarantined the menace and applied flamethrowers to the affected areas, scorching them down to the roots.

Much like the weeds, the secession had also proved impossible to eradicate piecemeal. Unable to locate the bulk of the elusive Daroodan guerillas, and unwilling to get bogged down in endless tit-for-tat ambushes, Fleet Command had sent in the Pathfinders in the dead of night to scatter the samples secured by the Biological Division across the terraces. Starvation had brought the enemy to the negotiating table, that and some clever politicking to divide the loyalties of the perpetually feuding tribes. It was a wonder the lengths some people would go to for a few tons of Fleet-grown grain.

Looking back now, it was the chapter of Deschane’s life that he was the least proud of. Despite this he looked Nong straight in the eye, unwilling to repent, believing, knowing with every fiber of his being that every gallon of blood in that war had ultimately watered the tree of peace.

The body was greater than the sum of its parts. If those parts became afflicted by the cancer of disunity, then it was better that they be tied off and cauterized than risk the wellbeing of the whole.

But the expected outpouring of resentment never came. Nong passed over the subject and continued: “Recognizing the symbolic power of the artefacts without ever really considering them to be genuine, the Fleet appropriated the Keys of Command after the armistice, claiming them as war trophies. They gave them to their most senior officials to wear as further proof of their divine mandate to reestablish mankind’s dominion over the surface world—the late Rear-Admiral Rohaime Prota was one of them.”

Deschane pursed his lips, remembering the flashing blue pendant that had hung around Prota’s neck. Ye gods, but that day in Mound 13 seemed lifetimes ago. It brought to mind what the ancestors had always said about time being relative. Whose relative, exactly? And was it an aunt or an uncle or a grandfather? That’s what he wanted to know.

“Darood was then rebuilt into a mining district,” Nong droned on, “Its people brought up in the ways of civilization. In that time I was accepted into the technical colleges and trained as a geologist.”

“I wonder if you could nip past the autobiographical section and get to the meat of things,” Deschane interjected with growing impatience. He pointed to the automaton and asked point-blank: “Where’d you get this?”

“I’ll come to that in a moment,” Nong said with glacial calm, “First I must ask: are you familiar with the principle of superposition? No? It’s one of geology’s core concepts. Generally speaking, the deeper you dig into the sediment layers, the older the layers are (there are many exceptions, but we won’t get into that now). Navigator, this artefact was pulled out of a peat bog in the Occupied Territories along with a partially preserved cadaver. Based on the rates of peat accumulation and radiometric dating, we estimate it to be nine thousand years old, give or take a couple centuries. This coincides with the oral traditions of the Daroodan tribes and makes it the only creation myth supported by the fossil record.”

Ven put on a dubious frown at that and pitched in:

“But that isn’t what the Chaplainage says. It’s written in the Log of the Void Trekkers that humanity only began its reconquest of the surface five centuries ago, when the three ships of the Fleet were grounded on the surface. Besides, this little doodad you stuffed down the front of your pants is far too pristine to be as old as you claim it is.”

“Sharp one, this aide of yours,” Nong told Deschane, making Ven blush for the second time that day, “But she’s right. This isn’t the original—it’s a replica of a copy of a counterfeit. We needed to make more of them so other teams could study it. As for the Log, religious texts have never been a reliable source of dates and times. Even the Chaplainage disagrees on when the progenitors woke up from their dreamstate, or how many generations passed before they started sending sacrifices through the Midnight Door.”

“But what was it in the first place? What purpose did it serve?”

“We think it might be a religious idol,” Nong shrugged, “An effigy that was meant to be burned along with the body we found. It was a child, in case you’re wondering. Four years old, judging from the dentistry.”

“Cause of death?”

“Unknown. Personally, I think this artefact was nothing more than her favorite doll.”

Nong’s eyes clouded over with sadness. Ven felt it too: an empathy for the dead reaching back across the gulfs of time, the tragedy as fresh today as it ever had been.

“And what about this?” Ven asked, pointing at the picture of herself, “Employee of the month?”

“Ah, yes. There are a number of theories on that. One popular version is that progenitor culture was somehow centered around financial remuneration. The worship of the concept of money, if you can believe that. The ultimate value of a person was the amount of capital they could raise on a steady basis. Hence, the employee of the month was a paragon of virtue for whom all the others would gladly lay down their lives.”

Ven found the whole notion whimsically appealing. The Fleet’s ideal person was someone who met the quotas every month of the year, be it in rice, sweet potatoes or sorghum, then signed up for the infantry and did their bit until they promptly kicked the bucket, preferably after a string of newsworthy feats of heroism. The thought of one’s worth being tied instead to such an abstract concept as money was oddly liberating.

“The shell of this original machine was preserved in an anoxic environment that delayed its decomposition, while the rigid material itself comprised of a chain of polymers that simply do not occur in nature. It took us years of research to try and replicate that polymer. In the end we failed, but our chemists synthesized dozens of other new compounds as a result of that work. You know those waterproof sleeves that protect your rifled muskets from the rain?”

“Synthmesh, aye,” Deschane nodded. That one piece of gear had saved the lives of thousands of troopers out in the field, where a dry, working firearm was usually all that separated you from a rampaging Amit, “You people were behind that?”

Nong started rattling off a laundry list of the latest technological breakthroughs:

“Those are but the first of many inventions that will soon revolutionize the Fleet’s manufacturing capabilities. The interior of the machine was even more challenging: we found a capsule containing a metal oxide matrix combined with a carbon allotrope that had the thickness of a single carbon atom! We could not replicate the sheet, but we did know from the Log that the ancients had devices with which to store power—part of the reason why the ships were grounded was because certain reserves of energy had finally run out. So we experimented with other carbon allotropes and eventually matched graphite with zinc, creating the dry cells which now power our electric torches and all portable electronic devices.”

“The public audio announcement system which they installed in Mound Ulysses? The wire-talkies that the postal service and the artillerymen use to relay instant messages? The photochemical rollfilms that the Aeronautical Division uses to take bird’s eye view pictures? All of that was inspired by the components we found in this one ‘doodad’.”

Nong patted the dome-headed doll with paternal fondness.

“Right now we’re still trying to piece together how it stores the sentences that it speaks. Something to do with minute magnetic charges, we think. If we solve that, you can say goodbye to all this annoying paperwork," Nong said, gesturing at the orderly chaos of Deschane's files.

“Why are you telling us all this?” Deschane demanded of him.

“I should have thought that was obvious. Navigator, if our scientists can do all that with the least of the ancestor-god’s trinkets, how much more can we accomplish if we got our hands on the real thing?”

The tribesman rapped a calloused finger against a small-scale map that Deschane had pinned to a corkboard, one that depicted the northern hinterlands and traced the many supply chains that would keep the war machine churning.

“The Divine Engine is out there—the last of Ma’kling’s lost legion. Only you know where it went. Help us find it, navigator. Serve your species the way you know best.”

Nong slid a paper across the desk, the writing facedown. Deschane could taste honeydew on his lips again. He staggered to his feet, casting aside his crutches so he could look down at the shorter tribesman, the better to get the measure of the man.

“Does Fleet Command know of all this?”

“No, not all. Some of it they simply choose not to believe. There have been…disagreements,” Nong said carefully, “The interpretation my people and I have is dangerous. Blasphemous, even.”

“This is starting to sound an awful lot like a conspiracy,” Ven said, feeling a trickle of fear running up the small of her back.

“The truth will always have its opponents,” Nong replied, “I cannot say more until I can be sure of your discretion. Suffice it to say that there is more to the fossil record than just this charming trinket.”

Nong snatched up the miniature and stuck it back in his loincloth. Then he slid the paper a few more inches across and added:

“If you’re willing, meet me at this address tomorrow late in the afternoon. Travel incognito.”

Abruptly he hopped off the chair and glided noiselessly out the way he came. Ven stared after him, then turned to help Deschane back into his seat.

“What now, sir?”

The navigator steepled his fingers and sucked thoughtfully on the tips of his thumbs.

“I should’ve torn his esophagus out when I had a chance,” he said finally, “But we’re stuck in it now, Ven, and no mistake.”

“Proper shafted, sir?”

“Proper shafted,” Deschane agreed. Suddenly he posed a question to her: “What’s the very first thing you should secure on the battlefield, corporal?”

“Information,” came her ready reply.

“Correct. So let’s go get us some.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Deschane made his choice and folded the paper into his coat pocket.