“One thing I think is certain,” said Shana. “I have a feeling that we aren’t the first race to come near these creatures or the mine. I mean, think about all of the defenses we’ve encountered on this trip. We’re surely not the only reason those exist.”
“I think Shana’s right about that,” said Tanya unexpectedly. “The thing that amazes me is that these Saucerites have let us colonize Hope. I mean, that they don’t seem to harbor any particular hostility or concern; they could have stopped us long ago.”
“Yeah, I agree,” said Elton. “It’s pretty clear they could have stopped us if they’d wanted to. So perhaps the smartest thing we can do is leave, show our willingness to be good neighbors, and go figure out how to navigate non-space so we can get in touch with Prometheus.”
“Agreed,” said Shana. “Gemma, take us home.”
They accelerated out of the atmosphere with regret that they would have to wait until they got an invitation—if ever—to meet their small blue neighbors, but they were sure that pushing the issue could prove unwise.
“Before heading back to Hope we need to land on the nearest chunk of rock and resupply the Synth and fuel mass,” informed Gemma. “All of this flying around in atmosphere has rather depleted our reserves. I’ll start looking for a likely place, and you all should get some rest.” They agreed, and found that sleep came quite easily after the excitement of the day.
At breakfast, Elton sighed, “I can’t help but keep thinking about that city. I really wish we could have met those people.”
Shana nodded in agreement. “They are humanoid, and their city pattern suggests a similar cultural structure to ours. I’m sure we could communicate with them and have friends in the system.”
“We’ve already talked this out,” Kelsan said, sounding aggravated.
“True,” said N’ixie slowly, then perked up. “But perhaps we can get a message to the Saucerites and ask permission,” she suggested perkily. “I mean, they’re surely monitoring us? We’ve been seeing the saucers for years and if they’re anything like us, having decoded our language, they’ll be listening in whenever they do a fly-over.”
“It’s worth trying,” said Gemma. “I’ll try the next time we have a sighting of them and I’ll even send a message to the mining colony while we’re here in hopes that they will pass a message along to whomsoever makes the decisions.”
“Perhaps we’re being denied contact because the blue people have a different DNA than we do, like the Untrans,” said Elton. “Perhaps it’s even as much to protect us as them?”
“Good point,” Shana said. “Our DNA tests were only on the native creatures, which we seem to have settled the blue people are not.”
“Still, it never hurts to ask,” Tanya said amiably.
The truth of the matter was that the reminder of the Untran catastrophe did in fact, sober them up and bring home the potential consequences of their actions. Everyone seemed friendlier, closer than they had been in a long time, perhaps a consequence of the excitement and the reminder of past losses that brought home how important they were to one another.
“There’s a moon world near us that has very odd readings,” Gemma reported. “Lots of surface metals and such. Not just iron but a blend; alloys of various sorts. It’ll be a good place to reload, and may be of some interest in other ways.
“That sounds good,” answered Shana “Let’s get refueled and get home. And while we’re there, maybe find out why the readings are so unusual. After all, anomalies are the very things we’re out here to see.”
“Look at the readings,” said Gemma, as they began to circle the moon looking for a place to land. “See how there are clusters of really specific materials all over the surface? The only time I’ve seen anything like them is on an occupied world, but this is an airless moon. Although, it does have a few active volcanoes that I would attribute to the fact that it’s close to Goliath. It has approximately the same elliptical orbit as the little planet or moon with the Blue people on it. You would think it would be identical but it’s just plain dead.”
“I expect it just never got its act together, geologically speaking,” said Shana. “As for the odd distribution of metals and such, perhaps it changed its obit somewhere back in time so it cooled in an odd way. That’s the only explanation I can come up with unless it’s a capture. Anyway, we’ve seen stranger things in our travels.” She thought of the various alien worlds they had visited before Hope.
“Not really,” refuted Gemma. “Most things we have discovered, no matter how bizarre, made some sort of sense, followed an expected pattern of physics and geology—except for the crystals, of course. This moon is something we haven’t encountered so far at all. We had best be alert for the possibility that there’s something there that survives without oxygen. Even the insectoids didn’t live in a complete vacuum. If something lives here, it may not be familiar to us.”
Shana stared at the screen, the dead gray moon beginning to look menacing. “Are you trying to scare us or what?”
“It sure sounds that way,” said Tanya. “I mean, even if there is something that can live and handle the radiation of an airless world, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad or evil.”
“No, but it may be something of a nature that doesn’t understand us, or even know if it’s doing us harm,” said Gemma in response. “As we did with the Untrans.”
Elton objected, “Must you bring that up again?”
“I’m just saying, let’s be extremely cautious in our approach,” said Gemma, with a conciliatory tone.
“Fair enough,” said Shana. “I certainly don’t want to be shot down on our approach; I sure wish we had the shielding the Saucerites have.”
They were now in close-up visible sight of their destination. It looked absolutely desolate. Gemma selected a landing site with lots of easily accessible material for replenishing mass. They deployed the mining bots to begin gathering stores.
Shana stared at the landscape in shock. “Do you see what I see? There used to be life here; it must have had an atmosphere a long time ago.”
The landscape around them was riddled with bones—they looked to be of humans, not unlike themselves. The foundations and a few circular sections of wall were still standing; from above they had appeared to be crater marks. On and airless world the signs of ancient life looked out of place.
“It looks like there was some sort of disaster here,” said Elton. “I mean, what could possibly have destroyed this place so suddenly that the inhabitants didn’t even have time to take cover? A meteor or comet impact?”
“Or nuclear war?” Tanya suggested morbidly.
“Whatever it was, it wasn’t a single impact,” Gemma said. “Look at the scans that we took as we came in. There’s evidence of numerous impacts or explosions. But it was enough to burn away the atmosphere thousands or perhaps millions of years ago.”
“How long did they know they were losing atmosphere, I wonder?” Elton mused aloud.
“I expect it was suddenly—perhaps in a single day,” Gemma suggested. Elton looked at her a long moment, wondering whether she was trying to make him feel better.
The robots were already starting to load mass into storage even as they spoke. Material was so broken up that they’d be finished restocking in no more than half an hour.
“While the Bots are working, we ought to go out and look the area over,” suggested Shana. “My curiosity is piqued by the mystery before us. Perhaps there’ll be some clue that will tell us something of the former inhabitants, and of their demise?”
“I don’t know for sure but it looks as if anything really informative will have been incinerated at the time of destruction,” said Kelsan, and then added, “and time alone has likely taken care of the rest.”
“Well, I think it’s worth checking,” said Tanya. “There could be something to let us know if the people here were like the blue people, or big people like us. It’s hard to tell the scale of what we’re seeing
from in here.”
They all anxiously put on their suits and prepared to exit the ship for a little exploration of the area. With the desolation surrounding them and the silence of the airless world, it felt eerie as they stepped out of the lock, as if they were walking into a graveyard where the bodies had been disinterred.
They could hear each other breathing, but no one spoke for what seemed like a long time. “It’s really strange to be surrounded by the scene of so much death and destruction,” said Tanya. “It’s like the people left an air of fear and sorrow behind them as they died.”
“Yeah,” said Shana. “I know what you mean.” She shivered as she reached down and picked up a dust covered, charred skull from the ground at her feet. “These people weren’t the little blue people though,” she said, turning the skull to show the others. “It’s not quite human, but they were at least big as we are.”
The skull showed a slight pointed area on either side which may have been where the ears were. The top of the skull was flat, and with that raised ridge on either side, it bore an almost demonic look. Shana set it down gently, feeling somewhat like she was defiling a grave. She felt a little chill go up her spine.
The ruins were definitely the remains of buildings, though the exact size and shapes of the structures weren’t complete enough to know if the dwellings had been designed for humanoids. The only thing that was certain was that, based on the skulls littering the ground, the residents here had not looked exactly human.
“There are signs of radiation here, but then there usually are when there’s no atmosphere or magnetosphere to shield a planet,” said Gemma, her hologram moving gently along the ground, avoiding the bones as fastidiously as the rest of them did. “I have the distinct impression that this was a race that didn’t survive its own development of nuclear power and weapons.”
“How could you know that?” Zo’Rak asked.
Gemma shrugged. “Nothing specific. Perhaps the Saucerites gave me a little extra knowledge, without me knowing it.” That took them all aback for a moment, but then she shrugged again. “Or perhaps I’m allowing myself to be carried away by the mood of this place. It could have been a meteor strike, or a comet breaking up in the wake of Goliath.”
“I’d like to check out a little more of the planet to see if anything gives us a clue. I mean we’ve settled in this system and if there’s a hazard here that we haven’t seen I’d like some warning,” said Shana, fairly concerned. She didn’t want to leave Hope, but if the system was subject to violent meteor showers or other phenomena that they had not yet encountered, she didn’t want to leave the kids or farther descendents in danger, either. It was still within their ability to migrate with the whole colony even if they had to build a larger ship. They fortunately now had no shortage of crystals and the accompanying metal to work with and sufficient experience to know at least roughly how large a piece of crystal they’d need to use for a larger ship. It would always be better safe than sorry.
Gemma nodded, then cocked her head to the side as if listening to something. “Our robots are already done stocking and if we’re to do further exploring on this world we should get aboard and get going.”
They all boarded the ship but stayed in their spacesuits so they could go out if they found anything that looked remotely interesting. There wasn’t much to see until they were almost to the southern pole of the little moon. There was an almost intact building, minus windows; a concrete-looking cylindrical structure. If they were going to learn anything at all, they all agreed this would be their best shot.
Gemma set the craft down as close as she dared but it was still almost half a mile away because of a scan showing a large area of hollow ground surrounding the building itself.
“Exercise caution,” Gemma warned them. “There are hollow areas under the surface, and I detect long metal strips; I suspect this may have been some sort of underground rail system. I’ve selected the area we’ve landed so that you don’t walk over any more of those than necessary because that’s where the crust is thinnest and we don’t need anyone falling through.”
N’ixie looked alarmed. “How much weight do you think it can handle?” The Striders weighed considerably more than the humans.
“Don’t worry too much,” Gemma said. “The crust isn’t that thin—I’m just being excessively cautious since it’s hard to tell how deeply the burning of the surface has made the stone brittle. It reads solid enough, but if you start to hear or more likely sense any sign of cracking or anything else, you get out of there.”
“Fair enough,” said Kelsan.
They exited Curiosity, and stared at the building before them. It was apparently five stories tall, a miracle it had survived at all.
There was a lot of rubble and larger obstructions to deal with as they made their way toward the building. They decided it was not from the little blue people because the doorways were the height that humans like themselves would have to build. The building structure represented an Earthlike culture, or they hoped it did, and they had great hopes of finding a more complete record—including skeletons or hopefully technology or even storage lockers with files or computer data—to assess the former inhabitants by.
Most of what they saw outside the building was incinerated to the point of being unrecognizable as ever having been anything at all; many things were buried under the dust of the moon, and only became apparent as they stepped on them. But every now and again they came across something that had had a clear purpose.
“This was definitely part of a surface vehicle,” said Kelsan, holding up a half of a spoke-type wheel, made of some sort of metal, slightly uneven as if it had melted and re-hardened in a vacuum. Which they assumed it had. “It’s skinny, like a bicycle wheel.” He looked at it grimly, then put it down and looked up. “If they were enough like us, they may have also migrated the way we have. Perhaps many of them escaped before the disaster, and are colonists elsewhere in the system, or galaxy?”
Shana shook her head. “With all of the bones we’ve seen? It seems like they were caught unawares by whatever it was. And we haven’t seen any evidence of any space ports or vehicles. They may not have had space travel yet.”
“This is all conjecture,” Zo’Rak said, a bit shortly. “Let’s not project our fears and hopes on these people.”
Elton brushed a hand against the smooth concrete wall of the silo structure and then looked up at the stars.
“You know, if this plant had an atmosphere like some of the others in this system of moons, they may not have ever seen the stars. The atmosphere may have been constantly cloudy. Can you imagine that scenario, to live your whole life not knowing what was beyond the sky?” Elton had a far off look in his eyes, almost as if he was seeing something the others could not. Shana had rarely seen him this way, and she found her heart aching with a tender affection that went beyond their romantic love. “I wonder if they had discovered flight? Then they may have discovered what’s above the clouds,” continued Elton. “Of course they may not have had time to figure out what they were seeing; I mean; if you’ve never seen stars before, you wouldn’t know what you were seeing. You couldn’t study them from the ground as our ancestors did. Mankind always knew the stars were there and had many years to find out with large and powerful ground based telescopes, what they were looking at before even building flying machines.”
“I really hadn’t thought of that,” said Kelsan, giving Elton a small smile. “Just imagine not being able to see beyond your own little sphere. It would most certainly have a major effect on how your technology developed. So perhaps these people had neither flight nor space travel; that would be a pity.”
During their conversation they had continued to walk carefully around the edge of the building to its entrance, and now they were there. The edges of the doorway looked to be fairly delicate; the concrete badly carbonized.
They had brought rope and linked each other together in case of trouble. “I’ll go first,” volunteered
Kelsan with a nervous little laugh. “If I holler, pull me out as quickly as you can. I’m curious as to what we’ll find but I would really hate to die for that curiosity.”
Elton agreed to do so. “I’ll be right behind you,” he said reassuringly. “I’m exactly ten feet behind so I’m pretty sure I’ll know before you even have a chance to yell.”
Kelsan entered through the wide open doorway, helmet light bright in the dim interior. The door, assuming it had had one, had burned away like almost everything else on the planet. Inside he saw absolutely nothing but ash, not even the solar dust that had accumulated over the whole planet the same as any airless world. If there had been wind from air the dust would have been inside as well, so it was definite that the atmosphere had burned away completely from the very start of the disaster.
“It’s creepy in here,” he said to the others waiting for their chance to enter behind him. “I can see an elevator shaft and next to it is a stairwell down and up. Down is probably our best or only chance of finding something that hasn’t been completely incinerated.”
Elton entered behind him and had about the same reaction, and they started down, the others trailing after them one by one, carefully, the Striders taking up the rear.
“If we get lucky, we’ll find something with teeth and we may be able to date things,” said Tanya. “That’s the only way we’ll ever know how human they were as well. We don’t even know if the skull we found was from one of the builders. For all we know, that was some sort of zoo where we landed first.”
The temperature was two hundred degrees below zero; anything they found should be preserved well, but only the condition of things by the time the temperature had cooled below freezing and that may have taken millions of years or perhaps longer. There might not be anything organic if there was anything at all to find. Nevertheless, they headed for the stairwell and started down one at a time. It was concrete or stone so seemed fairly secure for strength.
“Keep an eye out for booby traps in case it was a war and this was a military structure,” warned Shana. “We have no idea but if they had been in a defensive mode there could be something the farther down we go.”
Starborn Odyssey: Voyage of the Lost (The Starborn Odyssey Trilogy Book 3) Page 22