Hel

They met in a bar on a biodome-adorned space station in the Tau Ceti system. The establishment’s gray-pink tones were the least offensive to most of the galaxy’s residents. Best of all, it was almost empty. She found Feldt in a booth at the back. The arms dealer was easy to recognize from countless newscasts.

“Ah! So you’re the realtor?” he boomed as she approached. “Sit, sit! I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” He gestured to the banquette opposite him. She sat, and a service bot sidled up to the table to take her order. She waved the automaton away.

“Not a drinker, eh?” said Feldt, fingering a tall glass of brackish liquid.

“I used to be. Since then, though . . . no.” She paused. “Not that I’m abstemious,” she added quickly. “I just don’t care for it anymore.”

Feldt sighed and pushed away his drink. “Me neither, if I’m honest. They seem to have that effect.” The two locked eyes for an awkward moment.

“So, tell me then,” he continued, “how did you meet them?”

The realtor’s tale began almost a millennia earlier. As a Saluvian, she was from a naturally long-lived species and bided her time between engagements in cryo-sleep.

Brokering the exchange was surprisingly swift. In the realtor’s experience, purchases of entire planetary fragments could take years, often decades. However, the toxic landscape had changed hands in moments. The two beings paid in full with a cargo hold of precious astatine. There had been no negotiation; one look at the property and the price was agreed.

They were in the cargo hold before she spoke to them in any depth. Multi-limbed silver service-bots crawled over every crate as they examined and assayed the rare contents within.

The two strangers were somewhat bewildering. To begin with, they looked identical, plainly dressed in tan. Only their skin tone separated them, but this diminished into uniformity by their actions. They seemed to be in some curious rhythm with one another: the way they walked, their gestures—as if they had rehearsed some subtly tuned choreography.

The lighter-skinned one introduced themself as “Fallen.” The other, as “Written.” At least, those were the names now inscribed on the quartz title deed she held. Faint inscriptions appeared and disappeared with regularity over the smooth rainbow-hued surface, indicating for all eternity: buyer, seller, and date of transaction.

“If you don’t mind me asking, what do you plan to do with your purchase?” she asked. Silence. She decided to continue. “There’s definitely some good mining value here, but you don’t seem, if you’ll pardon the expression, like the digging types.”

Fallen spoke first. “We are some of the last of our kind; this will be a home.”

The realtor held up a small holoprojector, which displayed the vast asteroid field outside the ship. On closer inspection, it revealed pieces of a long-destroyed planet. Continent-sized rocks arced over each other in graceful curves, victims of some long-forgotten conflict. A segment of the mantle, about 300 kilometers wide and twice as long, swam into view. This was Hel. She looked at the projection more closely, zooming in on various parts, trying to see if there was something she missed.

“I’m sorry; maybe I misheard. You said you wished to make this home?”

“Yes,” replied Fallen.

“Hel?”

“Yes,” said Written. “This rock has the basic elements required. We will make this a habitable environment and meet here.” Their sense of certainty unnerved the realtor as she brought her diplomatic senses to bear.

“When do your people arrive?”

“We do not know.”

“How many of them are there?”

“We do not know.”

They’re clearly mad, the realtor thought. “You will need equipment. A terraformer. A habi-dome at the very least . . .”

The lead service bot chimed several times in succession, indicating a job completed successfully. Its mini-metal companions started lifting the crates of payment to take back to the realtor’s ship. The three watched as the silent procession made its way toward the docking tunnel.

“If you have more astatine, I’m sure I could find you a deal on what you need,” the realtor offered.

There was a pause.

“This is the last of our wealth,” they spoke in unison. It caught her by surprise. Two gleaming sets of eyes stared down the Saluvian.

“Our title deed, please,” said Fallen.

She handed over the crystal memory slab. “All yours,” she said and left for the docking tunnel. Just before the entrance, she stopped and turned around. “Good luck!”

But they were already leaving the empty cargo bay.

“That’s it?” asked Feldt.

“Yep,” she replied. “An hour and we were done. Only time I met them.” She cleared her throat. “It changed my life.”

“How?” Feldt asked.

She drew in a deep breath. “I haven’t sold anything since then. I retired. Not that I needed more money, even before I met them.” She paused. “Their sacrifice, though—pinning their last hopes on a place like Hel—there was something about that which . . .”

“I understand.”

“So what’s your story?” she asked him. “How did an arms dealer land on Hel?”

“I was young at the time; this was almost a century after they purchased Hel. I picked them up from their ship to show them my wares. . . .”

The first thing Feldt noticed about them was how plain they looked. He started to wonder if they were just window shoppers. Oh well, great gifts come in strange packages, he thought to himself and launched into his spiel.

“Welcome to Feldt Enterprises! If we don’t have it, you don’t need it!” boomed Feldt from the tiny shuttle’s pilot seat. There was no response. He forged on. “In a moment, you will feast your eyes on the finest collection of machinery and weaponry within a hundred light-years.” They banked toward the smaller of two moons circling the largest planet in this system. A black mesh circled the planetoid, and violent structures erupted from its surface. Most notably, five towers jutted with blue-black vengeance into space at angles that defied gravity. Guns. Very big guns.

“Ah, the city killers! It’s the first thing everyone notices. Big, no? These are all from the Tenth Great War, the very last in existence. I have five of them here. All for sale, for the right price.” Feldt chuckled.

They started to draw near, and the black lines of the mesh surrounding the moon became clearer. More weapons: ships bristling with missiles, rockets with death-dealing warheads. In some cases, entire ships’ propulsion systems were built around single weapons: hundreds of them in crisscrossing orbits, netting the satellite in a deadly lattice. Feldt heard them talking to each other.

“No,” said Written quietly. “This is against everything we believe. We cannot deal with a death merchant. It moves against every fiber of my existence.”

“This is the last purveyor of what we need. We’ve exhausted all other avenues,” the other responded.

“So tell me,” said Feldt, pretending to ignore their conversation, “what are you looking for? Maybe a speedy gunship? Sentient rocketry? Slow missile? Creep up on your enemy after a thousand years—they’ll never know who or what hit them.”

“We heard you might have a terraformer,” said Fallen.

“Ah . . .” said Feldt. There was a pause, and the shuttle lurched toward the far side of the moon. They dove down between the orbiting weaponry. A shadow crept into the cockpit as a large dome came into view. Silhouetted against the planet, it looked as if a second black moon was rising behind the one they were orbiting. A kilometer above the surface, the shuttle stopped short of the ominous sphere. At least a quarter of the structure was buried into the surface.

Feldt turned the pilot’s chair to face his two passengers. He looked grim. “This is serious stuff. Sure, those other big guns can kill entire civilizations. Level megacities to the ground. But this, this wipes out planets.”

“Or creates them,” said Written.

“Or cre—wait, I know you two,” Feldt eyed them with suspicion. “You’re the ones who spent your last red cent on Hel? And now you’ve spent the last 80 years trawling the galaxy trying to find a terraformer—for free?”

“Yes.” This time it was Fallen.

“The only reason I don’t space your sorry souls right now is because I’m curious. Why? Who in their right mind does that? Eighty years. You must be on some crazy longevity drugs. What is it? LifeLong? Stayy? I know, I know, you’re on that new one . . . Neverdie! I plan on taking it myself.”

The two stared at him blankly.

“Ah, who cares? It’s none of my business anyway.” Feldt stared at their impassive expressions and sighed. “It doesn’t bother me what your deal is. At least for the sake of my conscience, I know that you’re not planning to wipe out an entire planetary ecosystem.” He set the shuttle in motion to circle the massive black dome. All three stared at it as if drawn by its specific gravity. Eventually, he broke the silence. “Do you know what it would take to terraform a place like Hel? No atmosphere, weak gravity, and that’s just for starters. We’re not talking decades. I don’t care what drugs you are on. This will take you millennia.”

“Time is the one luxury we have in abundance,” said Fallen.

“Really? Okay then. It’s your funeral, but this thing here,” he made a sweeping gesture toward the black machine, “you don’t get this for free, and I know you can’t pay either.” He licked his lips. “So guess what I want.” Feldt waited for the question, but it wasn’t forthcoming. He offered the answer. “I want a piece of Hel.”

They didn’t attempt to hide their conversation from Feldt during the return voyage.

“Friend, we must discern this,” Written said. There was a sharpness in the tone. Feldt could feel a tension in the air arcing from one to the other.

“Do you think this is something we would do lightly?” Fallen replied.

“We’ve searched for 80 years; maybe we could search for 80 more, or even 800?”

“And when the others arrive?”

At this, Written fell silent. “Hel was intended to be a haven for peace. How can it be that when we share room with an arms dealer?”

“Our forebears slept cheek to jowl with warmongers. Some even said we must, in order to change them.”

“But what about a place of refuge? What about a place to rebuild?”

“Can it not be all those things?” asked Fallen.

The realtor looked at Feldt with an eyebrow raised.

Feldt grinned back at her. “Out of respect, I solicited from them the furthest corner of Hel. I even threw in some habi-domes so they could start settling.”

“Meeting,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Meeting. I think they call building a home ‘meeting.’”

Feldt waved his hands. “Settling, meeting, whatever. Centuries pass. I’m on Neverdie. Amazing drug. I’ve lived nearly a thousand years; maybe I’ll last a thousand more. And in all that time, I don’t hear from them. Not a word.”

The realtor raised both eyebrows this time. “But you see them, don’t you? I can’t imagine someone like you not keeping an eye on your neighbors. After all, it is an investment, having peace-loving neighbors who won’t cause you trouble.” She stopped and rubbed her chin, eyeing the wily entrepreneur. “The habi-domes—I bet you had a hundred cameras on each.”

A smile of recognition came over Feldt’s face. “What can I say? They say war is good for business, but I tell you it’s peace. That’s when folks buy the most weapons . . . for the next war. But that’s all gone by the wayside. Feldt Enterprises has moved on to better things.”

“You got out of the arms trade? Why?” The service bot made another attempt to approach them, but she waved it back.

“It was them again.” Feldt slouched a little before continuing. “People came. A few here and there. But then word must have spread, and more came. Now it’s hundreds every day! They come crawling to Hel in every broken-down malfunctioning vehicle from the furthest corners of the galaxy.” He traced the condensation on the side of his glass. “The terraformer, too—they put that to work. With no existing habitat to destroy, it inches along. Creates water and atmosphere in a shell around it: slowly moving across the landscape, less than one-quarter of a square kilometer every year.”

“That means . . .” She tried to do the calculation in her head.

“They have about 400 square kilometers ready, but it will take them—get this—four million years to make the surface completely habitable.”

The realtor let out a long, low whistle. “That is patience.”

“I feel it’s their greatest asset,” he said, then hesitated. “Those two—you know what they are, don’t you? Not the humans that followed them, the refugees, the ones they call their people now, I guess. No, I’m talking about Fallen and Written. They weren’t wrong; I think they might be the last of their kind in existence.”

“I had a suspicion . . . which no doubt you’ll confirm.”

“The most deadly killing machines ever created. Peacebots. The ones who could have turned the tide of the Tenth Great War if they hadn’t . . .”

“. . . if they hadn’t all self-destructed.”

“Yes, I think they called it the Great Objection. All gone apart from these two. I guess they felt they had one last job to do. Make a home—a meeting, as you say—for refugees from the war. Maybe all wars. They don’t ask who comes or why; they just make them welcome.”

“What does that have to do with changing your business?”

“I make terraformers now: turning long-dead rocks into homes. I even have two more working on Hel. It might help shorten our friends’ timescale.” Feldt smiled, and the realtor noticed his eyes brighten. Perhaps there was some good to be had in this ravaged universe.

Light-years away, Fallen and Written stood on the surface of Hel, several kilometers in from the nearest edge. The terraformer was still several millennia away from this sector. Above them, stars shone through an airless sky. From here, the surface curved to a horizon in all directions, and their flat earth looked round. An ascending brightness to one side marked the rise of the system’s star. Streaks of sunlight poured through the edges of the rocky horizon like shafts of gold.

“There is more work to be done,” said Fallen.

“There is always more work to be done,” Written replied.

“May we never tire of it.”

“Hope so.”

As one, they turned and headed back to the meeting.