Price was his ever-ominous presence in his black Marine combat armour. He had his carbine slung in his arms, rather than locked in its thigh holster. The sight of it out and ready to go was a little unnerving, another reminder of the potential danger of what they were about to do. The locals might be the most dangerous of the lot. If they’d been making a decent sideline in smuggling artefacts off the planet, they might not prove happy at the prospect of losing the source of income. Samson nodded to Price, put his helmet on, pressured up his suit, and set off down the landing ramp.
The farmstead was burned to the ground.
In his excitement at discovering the void with his sensor sweep, Samson hadn’t paid much attention to the farm—he had just assumed it would be as he expected. That was very definitely not the case.
‘What do you make of that?’ Samson said.
‘It’s burned down,’ Price said.
Behind the concealment of his helmet, Samson grimaced at the looseness of his question and his expectation that the galaxy-wise Price might have an answer for everything. Price took pity on him, however.
‘Can’t see anything that looks like weapons fire from here,’ Price said. ‘If it was an orbital bombardment, there’d be charred craters. If it was a ground assault, I’d expect the damage pattern to be different—things blown up and outward. This all looks like it just burned down. With that much space between the buildings, I’d say it was done deliberately.’
Samson smiled to himself—perhaps Price did indeed have all the answers.
‘Maybe the farmsteaders abandoned the place, and burned it down before they left.’
‘Maybe,’ Price said. ‘But construction materials are at a premium out here. More likely they’d have left it up to be dismantled and sold, if they were planning to move on.’
Another mystery, but this one wasn’t Samson’s to solve.
‘Let’s move toward the void, see if we can find our way to the spot where it looks like they were digging.’
The ground was dry, crunching underfoot, and Samson didn’t envy anyone trying to make a life for themselves in agriculture. It would take a lot of effort to get a good yield out of that ground. What made it worse was that the surface was uneven, undulating hollows and rises quickly giving way to larger, craggy features that jutted up from the ground. They reminded Samson of termite mounds, or a soft landscape that had been carved into unusual shapes by the wind.
Samson surveyed the crags as he walked. They looked ancient—features of the planet’s surface shaped over millennia. It was entirely possible that they were ancient, but to Samson’s surprise, his scan indicated they were definitely not natural.
He went closer to one of the ‘termite mounds’ and gave his scanner the opportunity for an in-depth investigation. There was a metallic, artificial structure beneath the crumbling mud shell. Samson looked up across the landscape. There were thousands of mounds. If every one of them was an artificial structure, this site would be as big as the largest of human cities.
It took a very long time to completely cover up a city—longer still for that covering to look as worn and weathered as the landscape here. Samson felt his skin tingle with the magnitude of it.
It hammered home to Samson how fleeting everything was. They might well be standing over the remnants of a civilisation that had existed here well before man had even discovered how to make fire. He remembered the old conspiracy theories of how the Nexus was actually an artificial construct. If so, might this have been the home of the race that built it? The possibilities seemed endless.
Caught up in his imagination, Samson forgot that Price was standing behind him with an expectant look on his face.
‘Whatever’s under here,’ Samson said, ‘someone built it. Something. Let’s get to the earthworks site.’
‘Don’t know what I was expecting, sir,’ Price said, ‘but this ain’t it.’
‘No,’ Samson said. ‘It’s not really what springs to mind when you say “ancient alien ruins”. Still, who knows what’s beneath us.’ He raised his wrist console and opened a communications channel.
‘Samson to Bounty.’
‘Go for Bounty.’ It sounded like Corporal Féng.
‘We’re going to explore for one hour,’ Samson said. ‘If we’re not back in two, your orders are to get back to the depot and wait for the Peterson.’
‘Acknowledged, Commander,’ Féng said.
‘We better move on carefully,’ Samson said. ‘The ground could be thin enough to fall through. The earthworks are this way.’
‘Over there, sir,’ Price said.
Samson followed the direction of Price’s pointed finger, and saw what appeared to be a hole in the muddy crust of one of the crags. Samson scanned the ground between him and the hole, as he had been doing since entering the termite mound area, but it appeared to be thick and solid enough to walk on. Content that he wasn’t going to fall into a bottomless abyss, he and Price made for the hole, which looked too small for a man to crawl through. He crouched next to it and peered inside. The torch on his wrist console didn’t penetrate very far into the darkness—which went on for a long way.
‘I can’t see anything,’ Samson said, ‘but that’s the void we detected on the other side. Wonder what’s in here.’
He looked up at Price, who shrugged.
‘Only one way to find out, sir.’
Samson nodded and started to carefully break away the edges of the hole. The mud was windblown and sun-baked, and he was able to pull off large chunks with little effort. It wasn’t long before the hole was large enough for him to get through. He put his head in and looked around, but it was still too dark to see anything. He couldn’t tell where the floor beneath him was, nor how far down the void went. Not knowing anything about the biology of its original inhabitants, there was no way of guessing what the internal layouts of the structures would be like. He thought back to the objects they had found on the Bounty. They were utterly alien, and he knew trying to make any kind of predictions would invite disaster.
He considered the situation for a moment, and realised Price was right. There was a point in many situations when technology simply wasn’t a substitute for boots on the ground—the whole reason the Navy and the Marines hadn’t been replaced by robots and drones. The only way they were going to find out what was down there was by seeing it with their own eyes. He turned away from the hole and fired the piton from the reel of line he had brought with him into the ground, then tested its hold. It had buried itself deep into the surface, and extended its barbs. The digital sensor on the piton took a moment to transmit its reading to the indicator on the reel. It flashed up ‘1000kgs’, which was far more than enough to support his weight, including suit and gear. He clipped the reel to the harness on his boarding suit and backed his way toward the hole.
‘I should really be the one to go first, sir.’
‘You should,’ Samson said. ‘But I’m not going to ask anyone to venture in there, let alone order them. If it’s safe, I’ll call you down after me. We can discuss alien city exploration protocols when we get back to the ship. I’m sure the Admiralty will be glad of our thoughts on the matter.’ He looked back into the darkness behind him. ‘Wish me luck.’ With that, he dropped back into the hole and released the brake on the reel.
He sank down into the bowels of the void, the torch on his wrist console still not able to reach a solid surface. He slowed the reel until he was descending at a more comfortable rate, and tried not to think about what might be lurking in the darkness. It wouldn’t be the first time impetuosity had gotten him into trouble. When his feet contacted with something solid, he jumped, and had to stop himself from gasping—Price and the crew on the ship were listening, and he didn’t want to embarrass himself.
‘I’m on solid ground, Sergeant. I’m going to take a quick look around, and all being well you can follow me down.’ He checked the locator application on his wrist console, which showed ‘searching’ as its status
.
‘Acknowledged. I’ve marked our position so the Bounty knows where we are.’
Samson flicked on the low-light function on his visor, but the spaces were too large for it to make any difference. The system was designed for use in the confined environment of a ship, and its sensors weren’t able to reach any solid surfaces. Above him, Samson could hear the sound of a second reel running out. He wondered for a moment if anything he’d said could have been misinterpreted. He looked up and saw Price’s silhouette descending against the backdrop of the opening on the surface.
Price released the reel as he neared the ground and landed on his feet with the ease of someone who had far more practise rappelling than Samson did.
‘Your transmission broke up,’ Price said. ‘Thought I’d best come down. Just in case.’
The draw of what might be down there was too great for either of them to behave as they should. Samson nodded. There was nothing to be gained at that moment by making an issue of any perceived erosion of his command authority, and in truth he was glad to have Price with him. His mind was painting every type of horror imaginable in the darkness surrounding him.
‘Let’s not go too far,’ Samson said. He looked at the locator app on his wrist console again, which showed it was still stuck in search mode. ‘The locator seems to be struggling down here. I really don’t fancy the idea of getting lost.’
‘That makes two of us, sir,’ Price said.
Price turned on the torch at the end of his carbine, and brought it to bear. It was far stronger than the one on Samson’s wrist console, and sent out a beam of light like a blade cutting through the darkness. But even its greater reach started to peter out before it landed on anything. Samson could make out the hulking form of something looming in the darkness. He gestured in that direction, and they both moved toward it.
When they reached it—a structural wall—Samson had to resist the urge to touch it. It extended up above them farther than Price’s torchlight could reach, and Samson presumed it was the base of one of the mud- and sand-encrusted protrusions on the surface. He scanned it, revealing an alloy of some sort. The scanner listed off the elements and the proportions, but it was largely meaningless to Samson, beyond the fact that the alien civilisation appeared to have abided by the same periodic table that humans did. He was sure the information he had just acquired would provide fertile ground for materials scientists for years, but it had already expended its interest to him.
‘How old do you reckon this place is?’ Price said.
An interesting question, but not one Samson’s scanner had provided him with. ‘Beats me. Old.’
‘It must have taken a long time to cover the place over so completely.’
‘I reckon so. Assuming it wasn’t done intentionally,’ Samson said, the thought popping into his mind.
‘You think someone tried to hide the place?’
‘Maybe,’ Samson said. ‘Or perhaps most of it was underground to begin with. This planet had a light terraforming when the first colonists arrived. I’m not sure what needed changing—I only gave the planet’s file a quick look—but maybe conditions back when whoever built this place started made an underground city the best option.’
‘Maybe they were a race of mole aliens.’
The deadpan delivery made Samson unsure if it was meant as a joke or not. Hidden behind the tinted visor of his helmet, Price was impossible to gauge.
‘Let’s just hope there’s none of them still here to greet two unwelcome visitors. Or whoever it was that destroyed the Sidewinder. We’ll look around a little more and then go back up to the surface. I think it’s pretty clear that we aren’t going to be making first contact this afternoon.’
21
Samson’s locator was still refusing to give him a solid position, making him reluctant to venture too far away from where they had entered. From where he stood, he could see the bright beacon of hope that was the opening to daylight they had come in through. As soon as they lost sight of that, they would be completely in the dark. Literally. There was something primally terrifying about venturing into an alien darkness and leaving the light behind.
‘I wonder what this place was,’ Samson said. ‘An outpost, or a major city? I don’t think we’re going to find an answer to that with these torches. Think it’s safe to use the floods?’
He watched Price play with his datapad for a moment, then his faceless black helmet nodded. ‘My low-light isn’t powerful enough to work down here. If there is anything out there, it’s likely used to the dark, and it’ll know we’re here long before we know about it. I reckon the floods will give us an advantage, if we encounter anything.’
‘Fair point,’ Samson said. He hit a button on his wrist console, and the powerful lamps in the shoulder pieces of his suit lit up, casting a wide cone of light out in front of him. He didn’t worry about blinding the Marine, as his visor would instantly react to control the amount of light getting through.
Samson did a slow turn, taking in everything around him. The light reached three or four hundred meters with good intensity, and gave a shadowy hint as to what was beyond. It seemed they had come in at the side of a building’s external wall, and were standing in a plaza of some description. It was bone dry and there was no light, which meant no vegetation or rot. Other than some scattered piles of debris, which seemed to be from collapses from the shell that had formed over the city, everything looked fairly intact.
The first thing that struck Samson was how similar this place was to a human city. There were boulevards lined with tall buildings, plazas, walls, steps. Steps—he realised there was a lot to be learned about the beings that lived here from that, and he headed for them. One thing that struck him as odd was that none of the buildings seemed to have any windows, or anything that differentiated a wall from other features. The whole place was eerily empty. He could be forgiven for mistaking it for a human city, and the absence of any people, or activity of any sort, was haunting. He had to keep reminding himself that it must have been uninhabited for a long time. Centuries, at least. Perhaps millennia.
He got to the steps and knelt beside them. He brushed off a layer of the dust that seemed to cover everything, until he got down to the surface proper, which appeared to be made of the same compound as the wall he had scanned. It was difficult to tell, and he realised that style played a part, but each step looked a little higher than he would expect those in a human city to be. Nonetheless, it suggested to him that whatever had lived in this city had walked about on two legs, or an approximation of them, and that they weren’t all that different in height to the average human. These were questions that would be explored by people far more qualified than him, but he liked having a sense of what the beings who had lived here were like.
‘How’d you reckon the city got cocooned like this?’ Price said. ‘Seems very strange.’
Samson followed Price’s faceless gaze skyward, and recalled how smooth the underside of the ceiling had been when he was coming down and could still see it. It was the complete opposite of the rough, craggy surface. It looked as though it had formed on a bubble that had later burst. He realised that was exactly what had happened.
‘A force-field,’ Samson said. ‘They must have had some sort of force-field over the city that all the sand and clay settled on, before it eventually failed.’
Price directed his black visor at Samson. ‘Why make a force-field that’s not big enough for the buildings it’s covering? There are hundreds—thousands—of them poking through the top.’
Samson thought for a moment. ‘It must have been pressed down under all the weight, or maybe once its power started to fail it retracted before dying completely, leaving the hardened build-up intact.’
Price nodded in what Samson assumed to be a thoughtful fashion. They walked down the steps, and Samson continued to look around, searching for any of the clues he considered the norm to a civilisation—writing or decoration. Would it be the same as what he had see
n on the metal artefact?
They wandered through a void of darkness, pierced only by the beams from their shoulder floodlights, until they came to what seemed to be a rotunda of some sort. Each step echoed out into the emptiness, dulled by the layer of dust that did indeed seem to be pervasive, occasionally falling from the ceiling like a dead drizzle on a dead city.
‘I wonder what all this was like when it was lived in,’ Samson said. ‘With light, and life.’
Price didn’t reply, but Samson wasn’t looking for an opinion. There was no way to speculate. Beyond the size of the steps, they’d seen nothing to indicate what the inhabitants had looked like, nor what they liked or were interested in. The city was the skeleton of a civilisation—a pencil sketch with none of the colours added. Perhaps there would be more to find inside the buildings, but none of the ones he had seen had any obvious doors or entry points.
He walked up to the nearest one, this time giving in to the temptation of placing his hand on it. It was a pointless act, as he could feel little and sense even less through his thick gloves, but it was a primal impulse, and in some way felt as though it connected him to the place, and the beings who had built it. The surface was made of the same material as everything else. It was like a blend of metal, concrete, and plastic, giving it a surface and appearance unlike anything Samson had seen before. His gloved fingertips slid across the surface with barely any resistance as they traced a path through the dust.
‘It’s so smooth,’ Samson said.
Price reached out and did likewise, but appeared less excited by the experience.
There were no grooves or seams on the wall as far as Samson could tell. Nothing that gave any hint as to how the city’s inhabitants got in and out of the buildings, or where light could enter. Humans had the technology and smart materials to create hidden doors and windows that could change from transparent to opaque, but they all required power, and that was something the city clearly didn’t have anymore. Finding a power source could take weeks, learning how to turn it on even longer—and the risk of destroying the city in the process seemed significant. That was a task for someone else, and Samson had to come to the regretful conclusion that he was going to learn far less about the place than he had hoped. Still, he had seen it all with his own eyes. Touched it. He had experienced something almost no one else had, and was among the first to know there was more out in the galaxy than anyone believed.
The Alpha Protocol: Alpha Protocol Book 1 Page 15