Trigger Happy

Sharra had somehow expected the planet to be larger. In her dreams, when she finally looked out through the viewport onto the nameless homeworld of the Artificers, it always loomed on the screen like some sort of vast, unblinking eye. She pictured endless storms blasting its surface with lightning, blazing volcanoes that hurled molten lava high into the stratosphere, a world where only giants and gods could survive. Instead, it looked disappointingly normal. She knew it would, of course. A civilization as complex as the Artificers couldn't arise on a world too different from Earth-normal conditions. But as she looked at the culmination of her life's work, she felt disheartened at the way that reality sometimes turned out so different from fantasy.

In more ways than one. "Scan for power sources, Officer Deel," Captain Shore said. "As fast as you can, please--if there's anything down there that still has the potential to work as a weapon, the Union needs it now, not in three months' time."

Sharra realized she'd been woolgathering, and looked sharply over at Captain Shore. "Permission to speak with you in private, sir," she said, her voice tight with tension.

Shore looked at her strangely, but nodded. "In my ready room," he said, turning his attention to the helmsman for a moment. "Deel, continue scanning for signs of higher technology. The moment you find something, alert me." He looked back over at Sharra. "You have until he finds what we're looking for, Commander King." He turned and walked swiftly from the bridge.

Sharra followed him. She waited until the door slid shut before speaking. "Sir," she said, "I must once again express my reservations about this mission. I'm fully aware of the situation in the galaxy at large, but the homeworld of the Artificers is an archaeological find, not a weapons depot. By proceeding with such undue haste--"

Captain Shore rolled his eyes. "We're no doubt going to miss finding key details about how the Artificers lived, what they believed, what they ate for breakfast last week, and so on and so on ad nauseum. Believe it or not, Commander King, I do sympathize with your views to some degree. Back at the Academy, I was something of an amateur archaeologist myself. It would have been truly nice if we could have found this planet fifteen years ago, before the war. But we didn't, and that's all there is to it."

"That's not what I'm saying," Sharra responded, perhaps a bit more sharply than she'd intended. "I know that we're at war. And I know that I wouldn't have even gotten funding for my research, let alone been assigned to this ship, if the Praesidium hadn't considered this finding to have military importance."

"Then what are you saying, Commander?" The captain gestured to the door of his ready room. "Because we really don't have time to beat around the bush here. You keep saying you know how bad things are, but you really don't. Believe me, I wish I didn't either." He lowered his voice. "Between you and me, Commander...the latest reports aren't good. Dissident arrests are up even on Earth, three more planets have declared independence in the last twelve hours, and we've had reports of whole ships deserting en masse..." He sighed, momentarily revealing his exhaustion and worry. "The Union is falling apart. The Praesidium is considering, quote, 'drastic action' to enforce the Unity Edicts."

Sharra sighed. "Just the kind of people we want to hand the keys to the biggest weapons storehouse in the galaxy to."

"Ours is not to question why, Commander King," he replied firmly. "Our loyalties lie with the Union, and we swore an oath to defend it until death. If your protests are a way of saying your sympathies lie with the dissidents, then we can find a convenient place for you in the brig until this mission is over."

Sharra sat down and put her head in her hands. "Oh, for fucksake...sir," she said. "I fought in the front lines at Pandora, I'm not about to go rogue on you now. Whatever the current President's done, whatever he's considering doing, a coup d'état isn't going to fix anything. Whatever my personal feelings, I will hand over whatever we find to the Praesidium."

"Then what's the fucking problem?" Shore blurted out. "Ahem...commander. If you don't care about the findings, and you don't care about the politics, what do you care about?"

"Safety," Sharra said wearily. "The Artificers were a galaxy-spanning civilization, Captain, back when the human race had just figured out that walking upright had some potential benefits. Their artifacts can be found on just about every habitable planet in known space--hell, half our technology comes from reverse-engineering equipment designed tens of thousands of years ago! These guys knew everything. Absolutely everything. And then they vanished, almost overnight."

"Yes, thank you for the history lesson," Captain Shore said sarcastically. "I certainly wouldn't have learned that tidbit anywhere else without your enlightening recap."

Sharra slapped the desk hard. "They vanished almost overnight!" she shouted. "Their civilization collapsed in a devastating civil war that wiped out the entire species! And now we've found their home planet, where all their most advanced weapons are located...and if we're going to go rummaging around and see if they've got any cool toys and hand them over to a bunch of people already involved in a civil war, then we should damn well take the time to figure out exactly what the hell we're giving the Praesidium before we give it to them!"

"Or ten thousand years from now, someone might be talking about the legend of the Humans? Looking for the lost planet of Earth?" He smiled at her.

She smiled back wryly. "Something like that, yeah."

He snapped her a mock salute. "Your reservations are officially noted, Commander King," he said. "Rest assured, we'll be proceeding with all due caution in securing any finds. Anything else before Officer Deel tells me we've found the Lost Treasure of the Artificers?"

She looked back at the door. "Only that I think Ensign Liu might have seen me coming out of your quarters last night, Tom," she said quietly. "She hasn't said anything, but she gave me a funny look when I got to the bridge this morning."

Tom groaned. "Oh, that's just perfect," he said. "Of all the people that could have seen us together...and you were still buttoning up, too. Damn surprise teleconference calls." He sighed. "God, I can't wait to get back home and get some shore leave. They don't allow junior officers in Hawaii, right?"

Sharra leaned across the desk and gave him a furtive peck on the lips. "I think they stop them at the border," she whispered, before kissing him again a bit harder.

Tom grinned. "You know that if we don't come out looking angry at each other, Ensign Liu will think we were in here making out." He kissed her this time, long and slow.

She opened her mouth to let his tongue in. "We are making out," she said reasonably, once she finally broke the kiss.

"Yes, but--" the intercom broke in with an attention-grabbing beep just as he was leaning in to kiss her again. "Damn." He pressed the send button. "You have something?" he said, his voice shifting back to business-like tones so swiftly that only Sharra knew it had ever been anything else.

"Yes, sir," Officer Deel replied. "A faint power signature near the equator. I think it might be shielded, though, not weak."

"Then let's prepare a landing party," Captain Shore replied. "Sorry, Commander," he said, making sure to leave the intercom on so that the whole bridge could hear the no-nonsense tones in his voice, "Looks like your time is up."

"I just hope we don't all regret it," she muttered theatrically. Only the two of them knew she was just kidding.

Only Sharra knew she really, really wasn't.

*****

What the planet lacked in size, the bunker more than made up for. Sharra recognized the style of architecture from other Artificer ruins she'd excavated over the years, but this one rose up out of the ground like a mountain, towering over the landing party in a way that even its bulk couldn't explain all by itself. It had been designed to intimidate. The people that had built this facility wanted to send a single, clear message for all eternity: We are powerful. And you are not.

It was only a little spoiled by the tree that had grown up in the main entrance. Its thick roots had buckled the ferrocrete with the patience of millennia, creating a gap in the bunker's doors just large enough for a person to squeeze through. "Is that going to be a problem, Commander King?" Tom asked. "We're going to need to bring things in and out of here sooner or later."

"It's only a problem if there's no power inside the facility, sir," she replied confidently as she approached the doors. "Most of our teleport technology was based on Artificer designs; in a building as big as this, there's bound to be a 'porter station somewhere." Of course, it might not be functional anymore, but the Artificers tended to build to last. She'd found working devices in just about every outpost she'd ever discovered.

"Alright, then, Commander," the captain said, gesturing to the gap. "It's your find. Go ahead and claim it."

Sharra gave a mock bow. "Thank you, sir," she said, sucking in her stomach as far as it would go and wriggling in through the gap. It wasn't quite as tight as it looked; apart from the initial squeeze, she was able to climb in relatively easily. Even so, she'd need to replicate a clean uniform tomorrow.

The lighting came on as soon as she entered, which was an impossibly good sign; it was flickering and dim, though, after thousands of years of disuse. "No dust," she said quietly as crewmates started to clamber out of the gap after her. "And the air's not stale, either. The cleaning devices must still work. God, this lab is still functional!"

"I thought all Artificer outposts retained function to some degree," Ensign Liu said. Her voice was polite, but Sharra could hear the daggers in it.

Wonderful,

she thought.

She has the hots for Tom too.

That was going to complicate things.

"They're all intact to some degree," Sharra corrected, hoping she wasn't making things worse, "but no outpost has ever been found with an operational power core. Most scholars theorize that as the war went badly, they scuttled the cores to prevent the base from being used by enemy forces. This is the first lab that's ever been found with the machines still running. Sweet suffering fuck, this is amazing..." Her voice trailed off into reverent silence as she headed down the main corridor.

The landing party followed along behind her. "Catalog Team Alpha," Captain Shore snapped out, "I want you taking inventory of every room as we go. Catalog Team Beta, scan for power sources and head straight for your largest reading. Now that we're past the shielding, that should be the core. Catalog Team Gamma, your job is to find a 'porter station, and if possible, a comms center. Get on the horn with the ship and get some engineers down here. We need someone analyzing that core right away." He hurried to catch up with Sharra, who was continuing to follow the main path with an awestruck expression on her face. "Give me an overview, Commander King. We're not here to play tourist."

Sharra shook her head a little to clear it. "Sorry, sir," she said. "It's just a little overwhelming." She gestured to the left. "If this follows the basic design of a weapons storage facility, then that direction should lead to the living quarters. If there's a 'porter here, it'll be down that way." A team of men scurried down the hallways she pointed to. "Comms should be down there too!" she shouted after them, before turning back to the main group.

"Right should lead to the vaults," she said. "We've usually had to patch in a power supply to the doors to get them to open, but if this place is still active, that won't be a problem. If the security systems are still online, you should be able to work out the code sequence using escalating prime numbers. There's an essay on Artificer cryptology in your datafiles." Another team of men followed her finger down the hallways, practically skipping in their exuberance. Sharra didn't blame them; from the size of this place, it looked like it had more and bigger guns than any previous Artificer find. This might just turn the tide in the war, she admitted. Humans had advanced a lot since the Artificers had died out, but Artificer weapons still outclassed them. A single Artificer-built weapon could sometimes transform a defeat into a victory, and this place looked to have hundreds of them.

"And this elevator," she said, as she finished her walk down the vast corridor, "should lead to vehicular storage, and below that the power core." She gestured to a giant platform capable of holding two dozen hovertanks at once. "Let's see if it still works, shall we?" She waited until the remaining members of the landing party had gotten onto the elevator, then tapped at the controls.

They flashed into life. Sharra tried not to jump up and down, but inside, she was squealing with excitement. "Let's see," she said, deciphering the symbols with a skill born of long practice, "main floor--that's where we are now...vehicle depot, auxiliary power station, r-records archives..." She practically choked out the words. Artificer data storage decayed more rapidly than their technology, but if this place was still functional, there was a chance some of the records might be intact. Sharra shivered at the chance to read actual history of the Artificers in their own words.

She focused her attention back on the sigils. "Manufacturing...holy hell, this place has manufacturing facilities. If it's still working, we could turn out new Artificer weapons here." That alone could win them the war. "Main power station...hang on." Sharra pointed to another sigil. "According to this, there's another floor above us. That's not something you see in these facilities. This must be more than just a military base."

"Well, what does it say?" Ensign Liu snapped.

Sharra peered closer at the slightly unfamiliar sigils. "Research," she said after a moment. "I think it translates out to research and development. This must have been a lab of some sort. And it was still functioning, right up through the end of their civilization...and beyond." She shared a look with Tom as a chill ran down her spine. This was exactly what she'd been afraid of.

Tom looked at her, then looked at Ensign Liu looking at him looking at her. He stiffened. "Then we need to see what they were working on." He pressed a button. "Beta Team, we're dropping you off at the power core. Then we'll take a look at the R&D department."

The whole elevator ride passed in an agony of dread for Sharra. She imagined finding genetic weapons, targeted to wipe whole genomes from the universe; she pictured smart nanites, quantum-sized computers that already existed inside every living thing and just awaited the instructions from their long-dead masters to wipe them all out. A billion doomsday weapons haunted her thoughts, and the worst part was that no matter how horrible her imagination, it wasn't outside of the realm of possibility. The Artificers were master craftsmen with technology that still dwarfed human achievement, and this could well be the pinnacle of their work. Something here had wiped out their whole race in a matter of weeks.

The reports from the other teams didn't help. They had found smartguns, 'port-lock blasters, chain-lightning beamers, flensers and stasers and a few things that were just listed in the records as 'OFF LIMITS' ever since the research scientists that tried to figure out what they did had died screaming. They reported finding master 'porter stations that could beam whole regiments hundreds of light-years through space, solving mysteries about how the Artificers traveled in a single stroke but doing nothing to answer the disquieting chill in Sharra's gut. When they reached the bottom, Sharra almost wanted to break the controls to the elevator.

Instead, she let Beta team off (including Ensign Liu, thank God) and held her finger over the top button for a moment. "We don't have to do this," she whispered to Tom. "This facility, it's got everything we ever hoped for. We can win the war, Tom, just with what we've already found. We don't need whatever's up there."

Tom reached over and put his hand on hers. "Someone's going to go up there sooner or later," he said, pressing Sharra's finger down onto the button. "I'd rather it be you and I than one of the Praesidium's personal scientists."

The elevator went back up as smoothly as it had gone down. When it passed the main floor, Sharra almost wanted to jump off, but her curiosity held her there as much as anything else. If the secret to the end of the Artificer species did lie up there, then the archaeologist in Sharra King needed to see it, no matter what. She reached out and took Tom's hand, squeezing it tightly as she watched the smooth gray metal slide past.

They reached the top floor with an almost silent chime. It felt so normal that it was almost surreal. The two of them stepped off the platform and walked down the corridor just a short distance before they found a massive, sealed door. And in front of it...

"Oh, my sweet and merciful God..." Sharra whispered. She raced over to the corpse on the floor and knelt next to it in stunned amazement. It looked surprisingly human, even with the extra fingers and the third eye. "It's almost perfectly preserved," she said, still in a hushed tone. "We've never...after ten thousand years, even the bones crumble, Tom. We've never been lucky enough to find a fossilized specimen, or...oh God. Look at it, Tom. Ten thousand years, it's been waiting for us."

"And it had something to tell us, too." Tom pointed at the splashes of blood around the corpse. "That's not just random, is it? Those are Artificer sigils."

Sharra looked down at the splotches of blood, imagining the Artificer writing in them. She looked over at a nearby panel that hung open, tangled wires spilling from it. "He disabled the cleaning devices in this section," she said. "Then he wrote that in his own blood to make sure it wouldn't decay if the data storage failed. She shuddered. "Then..." She didn't need to say anymore. The gaping hole on one side of the skull and the strange handgun in his own hand said it all.

"What does it say?" Tom asked her.

Sharra looked at the writing. "'Arrich shal kachna diantic,'" she quoted. "They want to be used."

*****

It took Sharra the better part of an hour to open the door. During that time, members of the crew came and went, reporting the activation of the 'porter station and the arrival of a team of engineers (Tom was nice enough to put them all to work on the power core; he could tell without even speaking how worried Sharra was about whatever lay inside this vault.) A team of forensic anthropologists arrived, collecting the body of the Last Artificer--Sharra could actually hear the capital letters when they called him that--and bringing it back to the ship for further examination. "Leave the gun alone," she reminded them, six or seven times. "Don't even touch it. That thing isn't in any of our known records; for all we know, there could be a 'Blow Whole Starship To Hell' setting on it."

And then, finally, she got the door open. It unsealed with a decidedly un-Artificer creak; they might have built to last, but spending ten thousand years tightly shut had left it more than a little reluctant to open again. "Ready?" asked Tom.

"No," Sharra whispered, giving him a small, nervous smile before they entered.

Inside, the walls were creamy white instead of the utilitarian gray of the rest of the base. The lighting was brighter, but at the same time warmer. It almost felt friendly. They saw a sign that Sharra translated as 'Main Lab One', and went inside.