“Any sign of other ships?”
Jackie turned back to the controls and ran a quick comm sweep. “No signals. Of course if they were running silent we’d have to see them or get a radar bounce, but I don’t think there’s anyone here.” She turned back to face the others. “There should be farmsteads on the southern continent, the data bank mentioned a Mennonite settlement, but they’ll be at a low tech level.”
“Well, let’s go in, then.”
Jackie turned back to the controls and started setting up the flight sequence.
∞ ∞ ∞
Thirteen hours later, Chara III loomed large in the forward window screens. The coloring was Earth-like, with deep blue oceans, dark green vegetation on the three large land masses, mixed with the browns of desert and the white of snow-capped mountains and polar ice. The south polar region was ocean, with patches of sea ice reflecting white. A large, roughly peanut-shaped land mass stretched from the equator to over the north pole, covering perhaps a quarter of the northern hemisphere. Patterns of white cloud swirled about the planet.
∞ ∞ ∞
Jackie brought the ship into an inclined, low orbit around the planet. They’d map the surface first and plan from there.
“Okay Carson,” she said, “now what?”
“We look for a previously inhabited area, then try to identify landmarks,” said Hannibal.
“Previously inhabited area? I take it you’re not talking about the Mennonite settlement on the southern continent. Are we going to pay them a courtesy call, by the way?”
“Do you have any cargo for them?”
“No, I didn’t want to reveal our destination, so I didn’t even ask—although I should have according to my courier license.” She hadn’t been too worried about that. The odds of packages destined here from Taprobane were minimal; it would all have been sent to a closer jumping off point, probably Sawyers. “I do have net updates, if they even have a net. I’ll hail them when we’re in range—assuming they have a radio they keep on.”
“Sure, as long as it doesn’t slow down our search.”
“For a previously inhabited area. What exactly do you have in mind?”
“I’m assuming that the Spacefarers wouldn’t have come here unless there’d been an intelligent species for them to interact with. Of course I could be wrong about that. Since we know there are no intelligent natives now, we look for where they’ve been. There should be some signs even after this time. We look for straight lines, areas that look like they were once cultivated, and so on. I’ll feed the images from the multispectral scanners into the archeological software.”
“What multispectral scanners? This isn’t a survey ship, professor, it’s basically a yacht. But—”
“What? Oh, damn, of course. This will take forever if we have to eyeball it. What sensors do we have?”
“As I was about to say, we have conventional imaging. We’ve got infrared, and radar, but they’re not registered to each other, the sizes and pixels are different.”
Marten interrupted. “Not a problem. I have worked with imaging before. If you have a standard software load, I can create a set of software filters to combine those into a format Hannibal’s program will take.”
“Okay,” Jackie said, “you can use this terminal. Let Carson know when it’s ready to roll. Carson, you and I really need to talk about your plan. Let’s get all the hidden assumptions out now.”
∞ ∞ ∞
“No response from the colony to my hails,” said Jackie several orbits later. “That doesn’t surprise me, there’s no reason for them to keep their comm gear powered on, assuming they have any. No echoes from network pings, either. They take this low tech approach seriously.”
“Some sects more than others, I think,” Carson said. “But they probably don’t want to rely on something they can’t easily replace.”
“I suppose. It’s just a little creepy, though. I’ve taken expeditions to some pretty isolated spots, but there are always signs of other people in the system. Radio chatter, automated beacons, something.”
“Well, we didn’t come here to chat. Anything interesting on the scans?”
“Not so far. Next orbit takes us over the colony anyway, then the middle of the northern continent.”
∞ ∞ ∞
“Carson, take a look at this.” Jackie’s voice held a mix of curiosity and urgency.
“What is it, did we find something?” Carson pulled himself into the cockpit area, gliding in above the chair Jackie was strapped into. Marten followed, hand over hand along the corridor grab rail.
“No, these are scans of the colony site,” Jackie answered. “I know what cultivated fields look like from orbit, and these aren’t it. Look.” Jackie put several images up on the main screen.
“You know what they look like if they’re cultivated with automated machinery, but . . .” Carson’s voice trailed off as he examined the images. “That’s odd, these fields are overgrown. Marten, what do you make of this?”
“Hard to make out from this altitude, but you’re right, nobody has worked these fields this season. The vegetation is too random. The paths are becoming overgrown. What about the buildings?”
Jackie tapped out a sequence and several different images came up on the screen. “This is the area around the fields.” She pointed at the side of one image, where there were several smaller rectangular shapes. “There, buildings on that side.”
“Can you zoom in?”
“Somewhat, we don’t have a lot of resolution.” She zoomed the image. “No obvious damage.”
“No. In fact that looks like it might a person walking between those two buildings. See the shadow?”
“Show us the rest of the area around the buildings,” said Marten. “Perhaps you just happened to see a fallow field in the first image.”
“Fallow?”
“Yes. No industrial or bioengineered fertilizers, right? So they probably do crop rotation, leaving fields unplanted for a season to recover. Check the other side of that village.”
“I don’t think there are enough buildings down there to call it a village, but okay.” Jackie had been flipping through images as she talked. She put another one up on the main screen. “I guess you’re right, these fields look more cultivated. Still a bit ragged, but like you said, Carson, they won’t have modern equipment. I don’t see anything that looks like people, though. Where is everybody?”
They scanned through several images. Individuals would barely register at this scale, but they ought to be able to pick out their shadows. But there were none.
“That’s just too weird, Carson. Something is wrong down there.”
“I agree,” Marten said. “There are no signs of people or animals either. In an agrarian colony, people should be out at this time of day, judging by the sun angle.”
“Could they be hiding from us?” Carson asked. It didn’t seem likely, but it was a possibility.
“I doubt it,” said Jackie. “They might have known we were here if they’d heard my hails, but why not answer? And the lighting is wrong for them to have seen us from the ground. It’s daytime, their sky is too bright right now. Why hide even if they did see us?”
“What about that figure we saw earlier?” asked Marten. “We know there’s at least one person down there.”
“Do we? All we saw was a shadow,” said Carson.
“What else would cast a shadow like that?”
“A scarecrow.”
“Okay, that’s just too weird. We’d better land and check it out.” Jackie looked at the navigation console. “We’ve done about a third of an orbit since we overflew them. I’ll land next time around. De-orbit burn in about twenty minutes.”
“Do we have to?” Carson asked. This was more wasted time. “What do you think we’re going to find?”
“Yes, we do. If there’s somebody down there that needs help, we have a duty to assist.”
“But, right now? Surely a few more days won’t
make a difference.”
“It might. But aren’t you curious to know what’s going on?”
“Of course I am. But I’m more curious about the possible alien archive, or arsenal, or whatever it is. That’s why we’re out here, remember?”
“And we’re still looking for it. Who knows, maybe the colonists found it and zapped themselves with alien tech.”
“What?” It sounded like Jackie thought she was joking, but as Carson thought about it, it wasn’t something he could just dismiss. “Oh, all right. We’ll land and take a quick look to find out where the colonists went, or what happened to them. But if we find a post or a tree with ‘Croatoan’ carved on it . . .”
Jackie and Marten both stared at him. “What in the world—” started Jackie.
“—are you talking about?” finished Marten.
Carson just sighed and shook his head. “Never mind.”
∞ ∞ ∞
The de-orbit burn was routine and Jackie had plenty of delta-vee to adjust for how much the planet had rotated under their orbit track. She brought the Sophie in for an inspection pass at 2000 meters above the settlement.
“I still don’t see any people. Things do look well-maintained, though, except for those fallow fields.” She scanned the area looking for a place to set down. She needed a clearing far enough from the buildings to not cause damage with her exhaust, but didn’t want to land in the fields. If there were still people here, she didn’t want to piss them off. There was one, a small meadow, with a broad stream along one side where she could refuel. “I’m going to set down there,” she told the others as she turned the Sophie and reduced altitude for an inspection pass. “Anyone see any cows or anything?”
“No, you’re clear.”
She glided the ship in, flared to a near stall twenty meters from the stream and touched down with just a brief burst of thrusters.
“Okay, we’re down, but nobody goes anywhere until I check the atmosphere. It should be breathable but we don’t know what happened to the colonists.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that, Jackie,” said Carson.
“Yes I—” but there’d been something ironic in Carson’s tone. She turned to look at him. “Why not?”
He grinned and pointed out the portside window. “We’ve got company.”
Crossing the field from the direction of the settlement was a trio of figures, clearly human, bearded, wearing broad-brimmed hats, white shirts and black trousers.
“I think we found the settlers,” Carson continued. “Or rather, they seem to have found us.”
∞ ∞ ∞
A few minutes later, Roberts and Carson were standing at the foot of the Sophie’s boarding ramp as the three men approached. Jackie could see several others at the far edge of the field.
“Hello!” she called out as the men approached the ship. “I’m Captain Roberts, this is my ship the Sophie. Nobody answered my hails. We landed to see if we could render assistance.”
The three looked at each other, then back at her. One of them, who looked older than the other two, perhaps in his fifties, took a step forward.
“I thank thee, and bid all of you welcome. We have no radio. Who would we talk to? And why do thee think we need assistance?”
“Uh, we couldn’t see anyone from orbit. The place looked empty.” Jackie looked around in confusion. “Why weren’t you working the fields? Where was everybody?”
The two men to the rear of the elder looked at each other. Were they smirking?
The elder drew himself up a bit straighter, as if offended. “Madame Captain,” he said, “today is Sunday. We were in church.”
Behind her, Carson made a choking sound. Is he laughing at me? thought Jackie. At least he had the grace to stifle it.
“But I do thank thee,” the elder continued, “for waiting until service was over before roaring in here in that noisy machine of yours.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Their visit to the settlement was brief, but enlightening. Carson got the impression they didn’t particularly want visitors, at least not outsiders, although they were certainly polite enough. For his own part he wanted to resume the search for something archeologically significant as soon as possible, and here they had been quite helpful.
“I don’t know about what it is thee are looking for,” the elder had said to him, “but the other continent showed signs of long ago cultivation, terraces and the like. One of the reasons we settled here is to be far away from all that.”
“You were concerned about contact?”
“Not specifically. There were no signs that the natives were still around, but we thought it best to separate ourselves on the chance that there were.”
“Probably a wise idea. Do you have coordinates?” asked Carson.
“That we do not. But it was mid-continent, along the western edge of a central plain.”
“That gives us a place to start looking. Thank you.”
∞ ∞ ∞
It was on the third orbit after leaving the settlement of New Conestogo when the computer, checking for regular features as they scanned, alerted them to a possible site.
“I think this is it.” Carson had a magnified image up on the main screen. The others huddled around. “Look here . . . and here” he said, pointing to several vague rectangular outlines in gently rolling plain in the northern continent, near the foothills of a north-south mountain range. “I think these are fields. The radar shows these areas as much smoother than the surrounding plain, and the outlines are more distinct. I think they cleared these of fieldstone and made stone fences—it’s typical of agricultural fields in a once-glaciated area. And here, see these parallel lines following the contour of this hill? I’m sure that’s terracing.”
“But why terrace the hills when they could just expand further out onto the plain?”
“Hmm, a very good question. That’s a keen observation. I haven’t a clue.”
“Maybe there were some plains-dwelling creatures they’d rather avoid,” Marten suggested.
“Or perhaps the land was too swampy, or a lake.”
“Huh. What about the landmarks?” said Jackie.
“There’s a stream cutting a notch through this hogback ridge here,” Carson said, pointing it out. “And this peak” he tapped the screen “looks high enough and is in line with the notch. Of course we won’t know for sure until we go down for a closer look.”
“Okay. Assuming that is the right place, where’s our destination?”
“There’ll be a large structure, most likely a pyramid, but it could be something else, a monolith perhaps. It will be on high ground, a level area. There’s something near the peak of this mountain,” Carson pointed at the screen again. “The lighting is wrong in this image so I can’t tell if this shadow is from something artificial or just the rocks. We’ll have to go down and take a look. Can you land us near there?”
Jackie examined the images thoughtfully. “Not on the mountain, no, and I don’t see any clear area except near the stone fences.”
“What about one of those valleys?”
“The mountain winds will be too unpredictable to try any of those narrow valleys, even if the valley floor is smooth and level enough, which I doubt.”
“How about flying slowly past it on the way in?”
“That I can do. Anything else?”
“Not for now. Let’s just get down there.”
“Right. Okay everybody, strap in and prepare for de-orbit.”
∞ ∞ ∞
The Sophie cruised a few thousand feet above the old settlement. At this height, Jackie could make out the low stone fences outlining the fields they’d seen from orbit. A cluster of small, rocky rectangles, overgrown with the scrubby bushes that dotted the landscape, indicated what had probably been houses, storage areas, or perhaps a meeting hall.
“Okay, this looks like it,” Carson said. “Can you set her down and we’ll check it out from the ground?”
; “Right. That field to the southeast looks clear, and it’s near the stream so I can top up. I’ll set down there.”
Jackie throttled back as she banked the ship around to line up on the field, then flipped a switch. She heard and felt the usual series of clanks, vibrations and a muffled hum as the gear doors opened and the landing gear lowered. She brought the ship in over the edge of the field at about fifty feet, then pulled the nose up to kill their forward speed, throttling up the ventral thrusters as she transitioned to a hover. The view below showed that the area was clear of large rocks, small trees, or other obstacles, and she set the Sophie down with a gentle thump in the middle of a cloud of dust kicked up by the landing jets.
The aft port-side thruster had started a small fire in the grass—or whatever passed for grass on this world—but a quick blast of water routed past the jet nozzle put that out.
They were down.
Chapter 21: Expedition
Surface, Chara III
Jackie pored over the aerial photographs they’d taken on the way in. She muttered to herself, then cross checked something against the radar altimetry data. “It’s no good,” she said, looking up at Carson. “There’s not enough room on the summit, and the ground nearby either slopes too much or has too many trees to land safely. We’ll have to leave the ship here and hike in.”
Carson studied the images, tracing out possible routes with his fingers. He noticed a clear area about a third of the way to their destination. “What about this valley here?”
“No, too risky. Look at the topography, the floor slopes, and it’s littered with small boulders. The winds will be unpredictable around those ridges, too. I’d rather walk than risk the ship by setting down in there.”
“Okay, you’re the captain.” Carson paused, turned to Marten. “That’s what, a two day hike?”
“Perhaps three. It’s unfamiliar territory and we have to climb a mountain at the end,” Marten said. He turned to Jackie. “Are you up for a hike or are you going to stay with the ship?”
The Chara Talisman Page 13