The Gardens of Nibiru (The Ember War Saga Book 5) Read Free Page B

thing…something like this has to be a star, a large red dwarf perhaps. There are smaller catalogued red dwarves beyond the rim. Why can’t we detect this any other way?” Stacey asked.
    “It’s consistent with what we’d expect with a Dyson sphere, a habitable megastructure built around a star,” Darcy said. “There’s no record of any species in our galaxy ever building something so momentous, and it’s on course to Crucible 0-1 at almost ninety percent the speed of light.”
    “At that speed it won’t arrive for another…ninety-four years. Why haven’t you presented this to the rest of Bastion?” Stacey asked.
    “There’s something wrong.” Darcy crossed her arms. “Once I knew what to look for, I went back through Bastion’s survey data, thousands of years’ worth, and retraced the object’s path.”
    Darcy flicked a finger next to the red dot and a solid line traced away into intergalactic space. The line turned to dashes at the earliest recorded data point as the object’s projected course stretched though the galaxies of the Virgo supercluster. The path never came close to any galaxy.
    “This can’t be right.” Stacey’s brow furrowed as the line continued to the very edge of observable space, billions of light-years away. “Where did it come from? Bastion’s stellar cartography models are near perfect—that object had to start somewhere. Could it have changed course?”
    “Redirecting an object with that much mass and momentum would be more difficult than building the Dyson sphere,” Darcy said. “You see why I didn’t present this to the Congress. Someone would tear my theory apart and laugh me off the stage. They’d say the object is just some stellar anomaly…ignore it.”
    “An anomaly heading straight for Crucible 0-1? Wait…speaking of anomalies. Chuck?” Stacey said to Bastion’s AI interface.
    “Yes,” the AI’s voice was toneless and curt.
    Stacey lifted her hands into the holo and pulled the image down. A great black void in intergalactic space intersected with the anomaly’s projected path. The void had no rogue stars, no clouds of gas extending for light-years, none of the detritus common between the great expanse between galaxies.
    “This void,” Stacey said, “I’ve studied it before. There’s nothing we can see or detect now, but the gravity models for this filament running through the local supercluster show something was here, correct?”
    “Void designation A-9-2239 held a galaxy with a stellar mass twenty percent larger than the Milky Way. The gravitational effect of that galaxy ceased two hundred five million years ago. This is inferred, not observed,” Chuck said. “Recordings integrated into the Bastion stellar cartography library are no more than five million years old.”
    Stacey tugged at her lip. She reached a hand into the holo and twisted an imaginary knob, moving the timeline backwards and forwards. The Xaros object appeared just beyond the void when the galaxy that should have been there vanished.
    “That’s where it came from,” Stacey said. “The Xaros are from that void, or what used to be there.”
    “Galaxies don’t just blink out of existence, Stacey,” Darcy said.
    “Yet the math says that’s exactly what happened in that void. There was a galaxy. Its gravity left a legacy on the stars around it. Then it was gone in the blink of an eye. We need to talk to someone who could have seen what happened,” Stacey said.
    “You know someone that old?”
    “The entity from Anthalas. It’s sitting in a cell down in the Qa’Resh city. Time to go have a little chat with that thing,” Stacey said.

CHAPTER 3
     
    Euskal Tower, headquarters of the Ibarra Corporation, stood in stark contrast to the wine-colored storm clouds building on the horizon. Smaller high-rise office buildings and apartment complexes radiated out from the tower. Sections of the buildings on the outer edges of the silent commercial empire were exposed to the