First chapter of King in the Long Night

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Initial Upload current as of: 03.19.2019

AN

Just a quick note, I guess.

This is an uplift story, one I posted a few chapters of originally about two years ago on a forum. Mostly, I wanted to explore the possibility of running through an uplift as a story (not as a dry timeline) that did not involve lone stranded self-inserts or characters, but instead, a large scale effort and the narrative opportunities that scenario enabled. I picked Stellaris because, well, you do a lot of uplifting of primitives in that game to assimilate them into your empire and my writing coincided with various updates to it (megastructures, originally, then later megacorps).

There will be a fairly large number of chapters posted initially, as I get this archive up to date. Some are short (3k). Some are long (10k+).

. . .

(1) Varys

. . .

Varys didn't know the name of the street urchin who had first found it.

Normally, such a thing would lead to suspicion – that this was a trap, or a forgery, or some mummer's farce - but as far as he knew the curiosity had simply traded a few hands in Kings Landing before catching the attention of one of his little birds. Generally, those brought into his employ were trained to temper their often-well-earned impulse to steal items of potential value (a valuable skill for any homeless child). As he had long since learned, words copied off a scroll or overheard in the dark could be more valuable than any bauble.

Almost any bauble.

This one was… it was… well, Varys didn't quite know what it was. But it was different. Unique. There were not many things that could claim to baffle Westeros' Master of Whisperers. There were fewer things still that filled him with a secret sliver of foreboding.

Walking up the stone steps and quietly opening the door, Varys saw a hunched and black-robed form in the center of the chamber, right hand shakily scribbling on a piece of paper while the other held a particular sort of Myrish glass to his eye. The man was a Maester, wizened but not very much older than Varys himself. As far as the Citadel knew, he had… perished some time ago en route to his new post deep within the Dornish Marches. Treacherous lands, those. All sorts of desert vipers, scorpions and spiders.

He worked for Varys, now. There was often a need for learned men, particularly those skilled in the healing arts, when it came to the darker business in and about Kings Landing. All was well, so long as the man never left the comfortable conditions in which he was kept. Even little birds needed to mend their wings from time to time, after all. Among other things.

Varys coughed politely, and the Maester glanced up for only a moment before returning to his study. The Spider felt a moment's irritation come and go, evaporating like a fine mist on a hot day. The item was on a silver tray under the Maester's Myrish eye; Varys could understand and even excuse the preoccupation. It was a baffling thing, after all.

Looking around the workspace and recalling his last visit, Varys saw more recent additions to the decor: a great many recent additions, almost all in the form of sketches and writing. There were pictures of the proposed anatomy of the item's discrete parts… in particular the wings and the chest cavity. Many bore angry strokes of ink, crossing out what had been recorded moments before. The dissection sketches hung from the walls and made neat-sheets on the floor and even the nearby bed. Books had likewise been scattered about, but they were not the old books that had previously been in the man's personal library. These were new additions, purchased or otherwise obtained at the man's request by agents of the Spider, either known or unknown. It was all new, and all for this… all to try and unravel the mystery of the item.

"I am as a blind man, vainly grasping to describe the sun," the Maester grumbled, setting his newest sketch aside. Still standing close by, Varys could see what appeared to be a nonsensical weave of lines.

"Maester Ondrew, a pleasure as always," Varys spoke softly, in what he had practiced and intended to be a friendly and encouraging tone. "I came hoping you had discovered… something, indeed, anything that might explain this… natural curiosity?"

"My discovery is that it is anything but natural. Anything but!" the Maester put the sketch down next to three others like it and turned a shaking hand to a glass of wine at the edge of the table. He held up the Myrish eye with his free hand. "This lens has revealed much, yet answered nothing… see for yourself, Spider, what you've caught in your web. Or what your web has become tangled in."

Tittering lightly, Varys politely took the lens and made as if to copy what he had seen the Maester doing earlier. He had no allusions that it would help explain anything, but humoring the man would make him open-up more and reveal what he suspected, at least, even if it was not what he knew. The lens itself was of the highest quality, and designed for a jeweler on the Street of Gold. It was one of the finest instruments in the city and worth a great deal. Varys handled it carefully and, as requested, attempted to peer into the innards of the item.

"Ah. The lines on your paper," he said, seeing them. Yet those lines must have been finer and thinner than a human hair, and, impossibly, they had the look of gold to them. What goldsmith could spin such a fine thread?

Gently putting the lens down, Varys inspected the item as a whole: it was splayed out on the silver tray, alongside the finest instruments and medical tools money could buy. On the outside, the item appeared to be nothing more or less than a simple run-of-the-mill raven or crow, with black plumage and brown eyes, unremarkable in any way. Yet, once cut open, rather than blood and stomach and viscera, there were only these fine gold wires, these strange coils of curious fabric in place of muscle, and pieces of what had to be crystal. The previous owner had called it a "clockwork raven" yet there were no gears to be found, making for a poor clock indeed.

"The arched bill and short wings indicate it is not a bird of Citadel stock, but a wild and common raven," Maester Ondrew scoffed. "Superficially, I mean. It was modeled off of a wild raven. At first, given the remarkable realism of it… the impossible realism of it…" the Maester took another drink of wine before staring down into the cup. "I had thought it a live bird, captured and… somehow changed. Given the structures inside… there is no chance such a thing could develop in nature. No chance. It is undoubtedly man-made. Or… 'made' in some fashion, if not by men."

If not by men.

Varys let that go, for the moment. "What do we know?"

"A fair question. What do we know?" Ondrew shook his head and paced around the room, starting with some diagrams of the wings. "It flies. Or it flew. I haven't personally seen it fly, since it was brought here in a broken state, but supposedly some street urchin hit it with a rock… no doubt hoping to make a meal of it. Thus I was told it flew, by you, and given the construction of the wings I find it believable. I studied ravenry at the Citadel and I know these birds, inside and out. If you tease these fabric-muscles with tweezers they will articulate the wings in the same way as a living bird."

"It can fly. I am certain of it," the Maester continued, laughing under his breath at the magnitude of what had been handed to him to unravel. "Look here." He pointed to drawings of the chest area. "The muscles are not muscles as we understand them, though the principles are similar… superficially similar. They contract as ours do. Yet they resist being cut like no substance I have seen before and they feel more like cloth than wire. They are stronger than muscle as well, yet lighter… and a bird's muscles are, by weight, far more powerful than our own."

"The chest cavity itself contains a number of structures… not organs but structures," he went on, pointing to new drawings. "I have been able to remove a few, but most I do not dare to. There are no lungs. What could be a heart is more a reservoir for a pale white fluid. Deep within the body I found two of these strange… ceramic constructs. And look!"

The fraying Maester tore down a sketch he had made of a strange hexagonal shape. Given the scale bar on the side of the drawing, it was perhaps the size of the nail on Varys' index finger. It bore regular indentations long the top and wires that fed into… something… but more shocking still was what looked like writing on the top and, in even smaller print, on the sides. The letters were strange and of unknown meaning, but the others bore some similarity.

"Numbers, perhaps?" Varys wondered. "Some sort of code?" The repetition of a single very simple symbol seemed, almost certainly, to be a 'zero.'

"I believe so, though it cannot be certain," Ondrew agreed, and all but threw the paper into Varys' hands. "I could not read this writing with my naked eye, but what further proof is needed that this was not some strange creature but an artificial construct?"

He held up a finger to forestall a response. "I know what you want to know more than anything else, Spider. Can it see?" He pointed back at the item. "Can it hear? Can it speak? Is there one like it out in the street, following you, even now?"

Varys, in that moment, felt his blood run cold. Yes. That was very much what he wanted to know. It appeared that while he had his own 'little birds' following men of importance in the city, some resourceful soul had literally beaten him at his own game, using actual little birds. Varys didn't know if he should be more flattered or terrified. Was it possible he was just the poor imitation? How long had… things like this been in Kings Landing? How long had things like this been on Westeros? Was this the first and only one? Certainly, no man Varys knew had ever heard of such a thing.

The gods knew what a man could do with such a tool. There were more pigeons and crows in the city than there were people. Aside from the occasional Maester's Raven, they were given no notice aside from being urban pests. They could fly anywhere in the city, right up to the King's window, and no one would bat an eye. What secrets could these all but invisible spies tell?

"The eyes are intricate structures, but within them, I saw what seemed to be a lens much like the one we have here," Ondrew explained, passing by the Myrish lens and bringing over another sketch from a small side-table. "This is a lens a thousand-times smaller and finer than anything seen before, yet it bends instead of breaking when touched. I believe it must be part of a… a… mechanical eye of some sort. Yes. And behind it, once I carefully opened the skull, a mechanical brain for a mechanical bird."

"With a bird's animal intelligence?" Varys hoped against hope.

"Whoever built this could make muscles better than natural muscle, eyes likely better than a natural eye, bones stronger than natural bone… who is to say?" Ondrew made his way back to his cup, finishing off what was left. "A mind better than a natural mind, given to us by the gods? Are we seeing the work of other gods? New ones? With new forms of life?"

He quickly shook his head. "Foolish thinking. The time I have spent on this… just how much it has revealed that we do not know…" To the Spider, he turned and pleaded, not for the first time, "I tell you again: we must pass this on to the Citadel. There are more learned men than I. Men with platinum and brass links to their name! This could be the greatest discovery of our age!"

"Yet a discovery that would be kept in the walls of Oldtown, no, the Citadel itself?" Varys already knew what would happen in such a scenario.

Ondrew withdrew slightly at the implication. "Yes, of course. The panic… you can imagine it? Men frantically killing every bird they see? Every animal, even, for anyone who could build this… could build one in the likeness of a mouse, or a cat or…"

"A man?" Varys guessed.

"Who is to say?" Ondrew repeated, almost helpless.

"Yes, there would be panic," Varys agreed, ultimately. "There should be panic. Men should be terrified. When I imagine the hands that must have crafted that… thing…"

"Mayhap, Lord Varys," the Maester for once eschewed calling his master a 'Spider.' "Yet it is only a thing. In the end. We do not know how to make Valyrian steel, yet we know it was made by men. Would not a savage or a wildling see our works: our towers, our steel, our pumps and our waterwheels and think them magic? Yet we know all these to simply be things."

Spreading his hands out over the lifeless mechanical bird, Ondrew took a calming breath. "This, too, surely is just a thing… made by clever men. Cleverer than us, certainly, but that is all."

"Men who would see us as we see wildlings, by your own comparison," Varys reminded him, glaring down at the bird and Maester alike. The Master of Whisperers sighed. "And how do we treat wildlings?"

The Maester had no response.

"That if anything should terrify you," Varys concluded. "Will these men come for their lost little bird? Is that why none has ever been found before? Have you considered that?"

The Maester gulped and stared down at the item. "I would expect, Spider, that the men who could craft such a wondrous marvel as this, and send it out to watch over us, yet not harm us, would be men of learning and thus… men of peace… and - and great wisdom."

"Ah. Such fine men they must surely be," Varys replied with a titter. Yet even as he laughed at the Maester's naivete, the sight of the item and all it represented chilled him to the core. His laughter, already rather forced, died even before he had meant it to.

"You may be right, Maester." Varys looked around with room, at all the handing sketches, at all that was clearly beyond even their most learned men to comprehend. "These may be the products of a race of peaceful, learned wise-men… but I would not gamble on it."

"The Citadel-"

"Will remain in the dark, for just a little longer," Varys cut the man off, but tempered his decision by smiling assuredly. "Focus instead on what knowledge you can glean here, in your name, that will one day be brought to them. When it is time. Imagine the looks on the faces of the Arch-Maesters when you come to them with your discovery. Focus on that future and see it come to pass."

Clearly, Ondrew did, for just a moment then he seemed to have a far-away look. Varys knew the inner working of the Citadel and how the common Maester, for all that he was a member of a brotherhood, nonetheless was but a cog in the hierarchy of that organization… and treated as such. After all, had the Citadel not accepted him as dead with hardly a murmur? Surely, the idea of returning in triumph with vast knowledge was something to capture his imagination.

Who knew? It could even come true one day.

Perhaps.

Varys remained in the workshop for a time after that, committing what he could to memory of what his pet Maester had discovered. Privately, he let his mind wander to entertain possible scenarios. If he brought this to the King, what then? Robert would've been fascinated, no doubt, and even come to understood the security threat… Joffrey not so much. And ultimately, what could any of them even do? Kill every bird and beast in the city – in the realm – out of frantic paranoia? How would their unseen wise-men respond to such a thing? Did they even know one of their pets had vanished like this? Was there already a reckoning of some sort on the way, and if there was, what could stop it?

Would it just be best to bury the damned thing and forget it ever existed?

Back on the streets, Varys pulled his hood over his head, shifted his stance and pace, and vanished into the throng that filled the streets of Kings Landing. Years of practice had left him with a talent for coming and going unseen, blending in seamlessly with the forest of humanity as he moved from place to place. Not to be immodest, but it was a trick that had worked on pursuers from Myr to Sunspear.

Yet, this afternoon, as dusk began to fall, the Master of Whisperers in Kings Landing couldn't help but glance nervously around. There were crows on the eaves of buildings, watching the humans below. There were birds in the sky, watching. There were cats on roofs and lounging near gutters… watching. How many, truly, were flesh and blood. And were they watching… or were they spying?

It was often said that the Higher Mysteries of the world could drive a man mad.

Varys was beginning to understand why.

. . .

The King in the Long Night

. . .

Thirty-five thousand kilometers from Kings Landing, the door to a well-lit room opened with a hiss.

"Commodore!" A tall woman entered, carrying a nondescript brown bottle and a smile on her face. Thin and short with pitch black hair in a bob, a silver star on braided gold twinkled on the left shoulder of her midnight blue fleet uniform. Without preamble, she let the door close behind her and walked up to a low table in the center of the office where a pair of comfortable chairs waited. "I hear congratulations are in order!"

"Always a pleasure, Commodore." A man in a similar uniform, but sporting pure white under his star and a second streak of the same color across his collar, stood up and beckoned her over. "And yes, they are."

The man had more than a foot and a half on the new arrival and leaned forward just a bit to meet her with a hearty handshake. Inspecting the woman's gift, he set it down on the table but quickly headed off to another cabinet while she sat down, crossing her legs and relaxing on a padded chair that quickly conformed comfortably to her body. With a soft chime, the chair connected wirelessly with the dumb AI in her clothes, adjusting heat, texture and pliability to match her personal preferences.

Making his way back to his guest, the man smirked and held up a bottle of his own, together with a pair of glasses. "They call this 'Arbor Gold' down on the Western continent. Tastes a bit like the Riesling from back home, but with a particular fruity taste; you'll like it."

"Fancier than the frontier whiskey I brought, that's for sure," the woman remarked with a grin.

The man popped the cork on the wine, unwinding the bit of string that further sealed it against the elements. Before pouring it, though, he attached a metal and ceramic ring to the mouth of the bottle. It powered on with a faint blue glow and a puff of frigid air.

"So, Ayako," he began, briefly sniffing the cork before putting it aside, "before we get to congratulating one another – because this was good news for the entire system, not just my team here – how was the trip over?"

"Uneventful," Ayako replied with a careless shrug. "Ever since the defense stations came online, the system has been quiet as a tomb. Since we have zero civilian traffic this far out in the frontier, the only thing breaking the monotony is the occasional military transport."

"What about the exploration ship that came by a month ago?"

"Did their business and left without incident." With an unspoken command, the entire wall opposite faded away, the newly transparent surface permitted a stunning view of the planet currently designated 'Terros,' a distant cultural cousin of Mother Earth. "Same thing our scouts found: there's nothing strange in the system except the planet below."

Commodore Ayako Ōtsuka had the honor of commanding a Frontier Outpost in the Commonwealth, far off the beaten path. Unlike the Observation Post they were currently within, Ōtsuka's frontier outpost straddled the sun in the very center of the system. From there, it radiated ownership of the surrounding space for light-years. If a hostile power was not inclined to respect that, well, that was what the defense stations were for: three of them with overlapping fields of fire, arranged in an orbital radius of about a hundred million kilometers from the sun. Each of the powerful bastions was led by a Commander subordinate to the Outpost Commodore, though the Outpost itself had rather pitiful armaments limited by treaty.

Outside the military sphere, the system was host to only a single mining station out by the second gas giant. It produced a non-negligible amount of energy that served as the sole bit of trade between this distant system and the Commonwealth as a whole. They weren't even part of a proper Sector with a governor separate from the Core World… at least not yet.

"The new Mark III plasma thrusters are speedy," Ayako went on to say, watching with bright brown eyes as he poured the wine. "The trip only took about two and a half days. But I wanted to visit in person. This is going to be the defining moment of our careers, after all." She delicately received one of the glasses of wine and held it between her fingers. "Thank you, Jason."

"To the Commonwealth," Jason Ellison toasted, raising his glass. A small electronic strip on it dutifully displayed the temperature it had been ordered to keep.

"To the Commonwealth," Ayako seconded, and they shared a drink as Commodore Jason Ellison took a seat opposite.

"It was a Chinorr Explorer, wasn't it?" he wondered aloud, between sips. "The Bafghien, as I recall?"

"Captain Odnal," Ayako provided the name of the explorer's commander. She sipped her glass and shook her head in dismay. "Disgusting creatures, Chinorr. Thoroughly repulsive. But he was polite. Sent over the traditional Chinorr friendship gift of a rotting piece of meat… but was kind enough to keep it in a sealed container."

"Sounds lovely."

"More interesting was that our Captain Odnal knew a fellow who had been on the expedition to Hades Alpha."

"The Dimensional Horror?"

"Oh yes. He had a few stories to tell."

"Thank God that thing isn't in our space," Ellison sneered.

"No. We just have space dragons flittering about," Ayako sighed. "Or Ether Drakes or whatever the xenobiologists want us to call it this week."

"Speaking of dragons!" Ellison said with a mischievous grin. "Guess what we've got planet-side? Three of the little guys. Discovered them while following a Person of Interest. Not the space-going type, probably a good thing that, but we got some samples in from our Covert Ops division the other day. I'm hoping we can clone some." He held his hand out over the table. "Pygmy versions, obviously. Might make good pets one day. Though mid-sized ones could make effective xeno-cavalry, too. Probably need a few genetic tweaks, though."

Ayako smirked. "You've already got big plans for the planet below, I see."

Jason nodded, not denying it. "Now that we finally have permission to go through with the uplift, you bet I do! The brass back on Unity were on the fence about it, given how primitive the natives are down there, but once we found signs of latent psionics in the population? In a near-baseline human population? And evidence of Shroud echos? That got attention."

Commodore Ōtsuka finished of her glass of Arbor Gold and smiled appreciatively. "How long did they give you?"

"Twenty-five to thirty standard years to get them spaceside, then integration, and then…" Ellison chuckled. "Retirement? A nice little villa down below? Or maybe a place on the Habitat they plan to build in-system. Maybe even Governor for a decade, just to make sure things don't fall apart and the natives don't start pointing railguns at each other."

"A quarter century to go from castles to space stations?" Ayako leaned back in her chair and took a long look at the planet beyond and below. "Hard to believe it'll cause less culture shock than just landing troops and being done with it."

"If this were the old days, maybe," Ellison agreed. "That's what we did on Typhon. But that was before half the galaxy had our number. Don't forget how loud the complaints were when the Ix'idar invaded that industrial age planet… Yon-Bal, I think? Got them into two wars."

"True, but the damn grubs were also using the natives as livestock."

"That, too. Bloody xenos."

Ayako murmured her agreement at that. The aliens of the galaxy weren't necessarily the enemies of humanity, but they were certainly not to be trusted. The Commonwealth had some good relations, and even a few aliens as Resident members, but the galaxy seemed to be full of threats: slavers, pirates, insane machine intelligences, fanatic purifiers, eldritch abominations and fallen empires. If the human offshoots on the planet below had latent psionics, as some of them appeared to, then that made them extremely valuable. They had to be brought back into the Commonwealth of Man and raised up to better contribute to the species as a whole. Though how that would play with the ongoing ideological division between those who favored cyberization and those who favored psionics… well, that was a whole other potential mess in the making. One well above either of their pay grades.

"I plan to stick around for a while, Jason," Ayako said, nonchalant. "I won't be looming over your shoulder forever, but just a few months to see how you get going on this project. I trust that won't be a problem?"

"Not a problem at all," Ellison assured her, pouring himself another glass of the native Riesling. While they were both Commodores, Ayako had seniority and was part of the vacuum navy-proper rather than the smaller and more specialized Science Corps. Terros was 'his' planet but the star system as a whole was her responsibility.

"So how do you plan to approach this?" she asked, letting him pour her another glass as well.

"We're having a meeting tomorrow of the various department heads; they've been working on some proposals and projections. We have some promising approaches and some good people on the ground. Why don't you be a fly on the wall and see what we have planned for the future?"

"Very kind of you, Jason. Don't mind if I do."

AN

So, this was the original teaser chapter. Looking back on it now, I'm amused that the CoM upper management characters here have not been used since, as I moved to a mostly boots-on-the-ground narrative. Varys is always a favorite, though, when out of his comfort zone, but even he's a guest-POV and not one of the standard ones. You can see I had initially thought I'd be happy with this as just a one-shot to entertain myself. And yet, here I am, more than a hundred thousand words later. Oh well.