"Hmm, I'm sure it does remind you of things. Is this story so long that it will keep you from eating?"
"Okay!" he said meekly, and carefully took another mouthful of the revolting stuff.
Tebrey was the doctor's only patient.
Johnson had been transferred to the Agamemnon pending his trial. The commodore felt that having the traitor in the same med bay with the man he had tried to kill might be stretching Tebrey's willpower a bit. Tebrey was ready and willing to kill the man, but he couldn't get out of bed. Still, it was for the best that the temptation was removed; there was Hunter to consider. His companion would have gleefully torn Johnson apart if he could get within claws' reach of him.
The private's fate wasn't in question. There was too much damning evidence for a military tribunal not to find him guilty. The punishment for his crime would be death. He would simply be escorted to the nearest airlock. The fact that the commodore was giving him a trial was unusual enough. With the evidence, Ffoulkes would have been well within his authority just to have the man executed. Tebrey suspected that the commodore was one of those by-the-book officers who couldn't conceive of improvising when a situation got bad.
Tebrey sighed again at the doctor's reproachful glare and, ignoring his much-amused cat, finished his meal quietly.
Dr. Anderson was secretly relieved that Tebrey was out of his way. He kept his opinion to himself, though. It seemed that the lieutenant commander had become something of a celebrity on the ship. He wasn't sure what was so special about a person who managed to get himself blown up and injured that badly. But then, he never had understood the military mind.
The digs were proceeding nicely, with no more incidents with artifacts. He was beginning to think that the two students had gotten themselves killed doing something illicit instead. After all, those strange devices had been in the ground for twelve thousand years. It wasn't as if the power sources would still be functioning after that much time. All of the tests they tried said the objects completely inert. Anderson didn't think they were weapons at all.
If he could prove it, he could make the military finally leave him alone.
There had been an unusual discovery the day before at the beta dig site. Dr. Seshadri had discovered animal skeletal remains at one of the excavations. Seshadri insisted that they were, in fact, alien remains from the early builder period of the site. Anderson told him in no uncertain terms that he was to keep such claims to himself. He didn't need the military finding out about that.
On a dig of this importance, there could be no leaping to conclusions. Each fact had to be carefully weighed and considered before any theory could emerge. Claiming some strange skeletons were the remains of intelligent aliens was preposterous.
Anderson privately thought that the good doctor had made an error and was refusing to admit it. Dr. Seshadri was a brilliant scientist, but he let his imagination run away with him. He had gotten into trouble on Earth over his outlandish claims of ancient human technological civilizations. Anderson had only allowed the man to come along on this expedition because his wife had been friends with Seshadri's wife before her death. Linda had convinced him to give Seshadri another chance.
There was no evidence of aliens, and no evidence would ever be found.
A good scientist had to be prepared to throw out anomalous data no matter how attached to it they were. They had to learn to separate personal bias from their science.
"Anderson is a fool," said Dr. Ramon Seshadri. He was standing by the open dig of grid G-17. The exposed bottom layer of the hole was littered with bones and the faint glints of weird, rectangular metallic objects. There were also two or three artifacts that were undeniably weapons of some sort.
"That has little bearing on the identification of the bones, Ramon," Dr. Patricia Haraguchi replied softly. "We'll need to extricate a set of the bones for analysis." She was a small woman, and the cool morning air made her shiver uncontrollably.
"I can do that." He began programming the digging machines for the complex extraction process.
"Do you know what the rectangular metallic objects are yet?" she asked.
He shrugged. "I'm hoping that we will have a better understanding of that once they're removed. I have asked Dr. Walsh to examine them. His assistants Hanna and Akira will be taking them up later today without letting anyone else know. They could be power packs for the weapons, but I really couldn't say."
Dr. Haraguchi gave him a knowing glance. He had been subjected to a lot of public ridicule on Earth when he had claimed to have discovered artifacts that indicated humankind had had an advanced civilization in antiquity. His artifacts and data had mysteriously vanished when it came time to show them to the world. She had been on his team then and had seen the artifacts in person before they disappeared.
No one listened when they tried to say that the artifacts had been stolen.
They had come along on this expedition as much to get away from the negative publicity as anything else. And now here they were, once again having to defend their opinions from the academic community. They would not let it happen again.
Dr. Haraguchi personally suspected that Dr. Anderson had stolen or destroyed the evidence in order to discredit Ramon. They had both been up for a coveted scientific advisory position, and Ramon would have gotten it. They had to prove that the artifacts were alien, especially since some of the artifacts appeared to be so similar to the ones they'd found on Earth.
Jane Svenson was working near the edge of the beta site, near the sheer granite cliffs, when she heard Douglas cry out. Her first thought was that one of the fierce carnivores had come back. She still had nightmares about that attack. But the cry had been more surprise than terror.
Standing up, she looked around for him, but couldn't see him. He was right there, she thought warily.
"Douglas?" she called out.
"Jane?" came the muffled voice. "Jane!"
"Where are you?" She looked around some more, but still couldn't see him.
"Be careful!" he called back. "The ground caved in under me. Do you remember where I was standing?"
"I think so!" She fumbled with her com. "I'm calling for help. Hold on."
"Hurry! It's dark in here, and I hurt my leg!"
Lieutenant Christopher pushed her way through the crowd of scientists. "I need space, people!" she bellowed. The scientists grudgingly moved back from the hole in the ground. It was about a meter across and pitch black.
"Can you hear me down there?" She was careful not to get too close.
"I hear you!" came the muted reply.
"This is Lieutenant Christopher. I'm coming down. I want you to move back as far from the hole as you safely can. If any more of the ground caves in, you don't want to be under it."
"Right," he said.
She heard the clicking of rolling rocks.
"Okay, I'm back as far as I dare go. I don't want to fall down another hole."
"Mills? You ready?" Christopher asked.
"Yes, sir," said the burly marine. He had been carefully setting up a tripod over the hole, with a pulley under the apex. "Here you are, sir." He handed her a thin reinforced cable.
"Okay," she replied. She snapped the cable to her climb harness. "I'm on my way down now!" She then climbed over the edge of the drop. There were some raw edges of what looked like glass around the hole. She cautiously kicked it loose, and once it seemed safe, pushed off.
Private Mills had been ready and waiting to hold her up. Using the pulley, he lowered her down into the hole.
Douglas Cain sat back against the wall and watched as the marine lieutenant was lowered slowly to the ground. The chamber he was in was dark, but the lieutenant's hand light showed him glimpses of truly extraordinary things. He forgot about the pain from his sprains and other injuries.
Once the lieutenant was down, she walked over to him. The floor was smoothly tiled in a rich, dark green. Dust drifted heavy in the air, but he could see counters and shelves. There app
eared to be objects on the shelves. Many things lay hidden in the shadows and showed just enough to promise hours and days of wonder as they were carefully cataloged.
"Are you okay?" the lieutenant asked.
"I think so," he replied. "I think I sprained my ankle and wrist, maybe busted my knee. A few cuts."
She knelt down and thoroughly checked him. He was covered with a fine layer of dust, but then, so was she. He didn't appear to have any severe fractures. His eyes were clear. She pulled her com from her belt.
"He's okay," she said. "A little busted up. I'd like to get a medic down here to check him before we move him. Also, I think that you'll need lights down here. There's going to be a lot of traffic."
Chapter Twenty-Two
It turned out that the hole had actually been a skylight at one time. The chamber was a five-by-ten-meter rectangle of fused rock. There were two adjacent rooms and a corridor that led off to the west and ended in a rock fall.
Douglas had been ferried back up to the ship for a quick trip to Medical. He'd come back the next day to see the wonders of the rooms he had discovered.
Dr. Anderson's team had to be lowered one by one into the hole, but that didn't stop them. Nothing could have kept them out. The main chamber was some sort of workroom. There were crumbling piles of what had probably been paper at one time. Many of the scientists railed at the unfairness of the lost knowledge those papers represented.
Not that they would have been able to decipher the writings. Without a common point of reference, no one had ever been able to decipher a dead language. It always required a Rosetta Stone of some sort. With an alien culture, there could be no hope of that.
The greatest find was in the smaller, second room to the left.
It was a map room.
Most of the maps were long since turned to dust, but a few of them were preserved in some sort of silica film. There was a large map of Cedeforthy on the northern wall. Marked on the map with accompanying alien script were what could only be cities.
Despite the differences in the coastlines and minor geologic features like rivers, they were able to find the current site clearly marked. There were dozens of smaller settlements and, curiously, two were marked in a deep blood red. No one was sure what that meant, but if there was a universal rule about alien cultures, it was that red meant warning: with the exception of the silicon-helium strangeness of the frigid Giclans, every alien species humans had encountered used a form of hemoglobin in their blood.
Comparing the maps to satellite photos, they saw that several of the original settlements were still occupied – or had been again, more accurately. Dr. Mason remarked that she thought one of the ancient cities, down on the plains to the southeast, was the site of the current capitol city of the Lyonan Empire. Three of the sites, including the capitol, were immediately scheduled for orbital deep scans.
"Damn, I hate being stuck in bed," Tebrey muttered.
"Well, that's what you get for almost getting yourself killed," Mason said teasingly. "Really, there isn't much to see that isn't on the data cube."
Tebrey sighed. "I just like to see things for myself. I'm guessing that Dr. Anderson didn't approve this." Dr. Anderson was still trying to block access to information from the dig sites. He'd called Tebrey's bluff. Tebrey knew he couldn't simply chuck the man out an airlock without provocation, especially with Ffoulkes lurking in the area keeping an eye on everyone.
Mason laughed. "I have no idea how you came by that information. You had it when I came to visit."
"Thanks."
"Don't mention it."
"Mention what?" Tebrey pretended to look around, bewildered. "Say, have you made any progress with your pale-skinned people?"
"No, we haven't." Mason sighed. "They won't talk to us. I guess we're going to have to wait until you get better and can come down and help us out. Assuming you'll still help? When will you be up and about, anyway?"
"Soon, I hope. Dr. Rodriguez says I'm healing faster than she expected. I may be able to get back to work in a few days." He held up the cubes Mason had brought. "Thanks for these, really. I've been going out of my mind with boredom."
Hunter snorted loudly from the corner. What mind?
"Shut up, cat," Tebrey said, laughing.
Mason looked back and forth between them with a slight frown on her face.
Tebrey knew that she always felt a little uncomfortable when he and Hunter communicated telepathically. He could sense that she felt like she was witnessing something extremely intimate; she felt like a voyeur. He wanted to tell her that it was okay, that it wasn't any different from any conversation, but he didn't. She wouldn't have understood.
"Well," she said, clearing her throat. "I guess I should get back to work myself. If there is anything I can do for you, Tebrey, just let me know."
"I will. Thank you. I'll be up soon, and then I can get back to work, too."
Dr. Rodriguez looked up as Dr. Mason left the medical bay. She knew that the anthropologist had brought Tebrey all the current reports from the digs; Rodriguez had asked her to. Her patient was one of the most difficult and stubborn people she had ever met. But then, she reflected, he wouldn't be alive if he wasn't. Not many people could have survived those kinds of injuries and still have been mobile. It was nothing short of amazing, and she couldn't explain it all away by his training and augmentation, either.
She found herself attracted to him a strange way. It wasn't sexual, although he was quite handsome. There was a force about his personality that was almost magnetic. She was also intrigued by his medical file. He had survived massive trauma on multiple occasions. There was something about him that simply refused to die.
As a trauma surgeon, she found that interesting.
After a discussion with Dr. Haraguchi, she had looked up the particulars of the incident on the Kirov, where Tebrey had lost his previous neo-panther companion. Patricia had been one of the doctors who'd worked with the survivors after the attack. Maria couldn't help but wonder if was a coincidence that Tebrey had been assigned to this particular mission.
The details of the Kirov incident were classified, but a DEP request to the Admiralty had gotten her access to the files. She still held a high security clearance from her years in Fleet research. She had been horrified by the archive footage and firsthand reports of the rescue team that had gone aboard.
The Kirov had been declared lost after it failed to arrive at its destination within the allotted time. Two weeks later, the ship had shown up in the Frontier, blasting out of hyperspace and failing to answer hails. There was nothing external that suggested anything was wrong with the ship, so a marine rescue team went aboard.
They found dried blood in the airlock. It was the first sign that something horrible had happened on the ship. In making their way to the bridge, they found evidence of widespread slaughter, madness, and torture. None of the rescue team had ever seen anything like it.
There was no sign of forced entry to the ship. The logs showed the Kirov had not exited hyperspace since first entering it. Either something had come upon the ship in hyperspace, entered the ship by an unknown means, and tortured and killed almost the entire crew of over twenty-eight hundred – a clear impossibility – or the entire ship had been subjected to unnamable stresses and gone psychotic at the same time. Neither explanation was satisfying. It seemed more probable that the ship had been stuck by an unknown weapon just before entering hyperspace that caused paranoia, hallucinations, and psychosis.
It was clear that some of the crew, like Tebrey, had tried to fight against whatever that was. The survivors all claimed an alien creature had attacked them, but there had been no bodies other than those of the crew. A careful screening for genetic evidence found no foreign DNA.
The evidence suggested that many of the crew had killed each other. If there was video of those fights, it was classified at a higher level than Dr. Rodriguez had clearance for. Even still, it was one of the most frightening things she had e
ver seen or read. Tebrey and six other crewmembers had still been alive when the ship was found. It was clear that Tebrey himself had somehow managed to bring the ship out of hyperspace despite his devastating injuries.
There was no explanation of how he could have sustained those injuries. He'd been cooked alive inside his armor – fused to it in some places. No known weapon could do that, certainly no weapon found on the Kirov. Dr. Rodriguez supposed that extreme psychosis could have triggered latent psionic abilities in one of the crewmembers. Possibly a powerful pyrokinetic or psychokinetic attack could have done it. Such a talent would be almost unheard of, though. She didn't know of any confirmed pyrokinetic who could generate that kind of energy.
It was a mystery.
Dr. Rodriguez herself was inclined to believe Tebrey when he stated in the reports that an alien entity had entered the ship. He blamed much of the murder and torture on that creature, as well as the madness that had been so pervasive. There was evidence for such things having happened throughout history. That was what Patricia Haraguchi had been getting at. Patricia and Ramon Seshadri were both trying to prove that there was another alien species operating within the Federation – a species that had been around for thousands of years and influenced humankind in ways that they were only just beginning to understand.
Maria didn't know about all of that, but she was convinced what had happened on the Kirov was much more complex than anyone was willing to admit. There had to be an explanation, even if… it was one that no one wanted to hear. The idea of an alien species with technology sufficient to remain hidden for thousands of years and perverted enough to do something like what had happen on the Kirov… It was a nightmare.
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