The Chara Talisman

by Alastair Mayer

  “I wouldn’t mind standing on solid ground for a while,” said Marten. The air combat maneuvering had been particularly unnerving to him.

  Jackie brought the ship in and landed easily about twenty yards from the stream. She went through the shutdown sequence and turned to Carson. “Okay, I can refuel here but I’ll need to patch the tank first, and check the whole ship over for other damage.”

  “What can we do to help?”

  “Not much with the ship. You and Marten grab rifles from the weapons locker,” she turned back to the console and touched the control to unlock it, then turned back to Carson, “and guard my back while I inspect the hull. If any of Hopkins’ men weren’t aboard and saw his ship go down, they may decide that we’re their ride home. We don’t need that.”

  “No we don’t. There might be something out there like Marten’s saber-toothed friend, too,” Carson said. He got up and made his way to the hatch. Marten had already pulled two rifles and ammo packs from the locker. Carson took one of rifles, checked it over, then took the offered ammo pack as they left the ship.

  Jackie turned back to the console and set up the ship’s computers to run extended diagnostics. She started them running and got up and went to the tool locker. She pulled a portable console from its rack, and grabbed a handful of essential tools and a tool bag, which she slung over her shoulder. As she descended the boarding ramp, she muttered to herself. “Okay Sophie, let’s see what ails you.”

  She began her walk around going forward, taking a clockwise direction around the ship. She knew there was damage somewhere aft, given the fuel leak, but she would get to it. Sticking with routine made it less likely to overlook anything. She looked under the ship at the landing gear. There was a nick in the portside gear door—they’d been shooting up at Sophie as she took off—but it didn’t look like anything serious. There was also a scrape along the side, probably from when they’d been shooting at Carson. She patched both with thermal foam to preserve the heat shielding capability.

  Jackie continued her inspection, walking around the forward end of the ship checking the hull for any indications of damage. She pulled off inspection plates even if they didn’t seem harmed, just to be sure. If nothing else, they had a long trip ahead and the inspection needed to be done anyway. At intervals she jacked the console into a probe port on the hull to query its integrated systems. It was midway back on the starboard side she found the bad news.

  A bullet hole big enough to put her finger into penetrated the hull deeply. Jackie knew the layout of the Sophie as well as she knew her own body, that hole pointed directly at the lower right warp generator.

  Jackie tried to ignore the sudden knot in her stomach. If the warp module were damaged they wouldn’t be going anywhere, and there was no way to call for help. This is what every starship pilot dreaded. But that’s why warp modules were armored, to prevent accidental damage—although meteoroids rather than bullets were the expected hazard. Still, tough as a warp module might be, a sufficient shock could damage it enough to be unreliable, and something had had enough energy to make a hole in a hull she had been assured was virtually bulletproof. Jackie’s mouth was suddenly very dry.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Carson’s gaze swept the plain again, then he turned to face the mountains, checking everything in that direction. Chara III’s larger moon, looking about half what Earth’s Moon does from Earth, was low in the sky above the mountains. It would be setting soon. A bright spark of light near it caught his attention. Was that another planet in this system? Or the smaller moon? He dropped his gaze for a moment to scan the area again, then looked back. Had it moved? It was hard to judge movement against the cloudless sky, but it looked further from the big moon than it had before. Hannibal held up a fist at arms length, and measured off against the big moon. Two fists, about twenty degrees.

  He waited a minute, scanning the ground, then looked again. He held up his fist to measure again, convinced now that it was moving. A fist and three fingers. It was definitely moving. And it was descending. A ship?

  “Jackie! Marten! It looks like we’re going to have company.” He pointed up as the others turned towards him, and they looked.

  “Are you expecting anyone?” Jackie yelled at him. She stood up from where she had been squatting by the Sophie.

  “Of course not,” he called back. The spot of light was getting bigger, and the motion more apparent.

  Jackie started back toward the ship’s hatch. “I’m going to to hail it. Do you guys want to stay out there or come back and sit in the target?”

  Hannibal and Marten, at opposite ends of the ship, turned and looked at her, then at each other. They shrugged. If the incoming was hostile, they wouldn’t be going anywhere without a ship anyway. “The ship,” they nodded at each other in unison, and headed back for the hatchway. Jackie was already inside, working the communications at the control panel.

  “What have you got?” asked Carson as he came up and sat down in the seat beside her.

  “Nothing. No response to hails. I swept the bands, no radio traffic. No transponder. I think I’m getting a skin paint with the radar but it doesn’t make much sense.”

  “Communications failure, perhaps? It’s coming this way for help?” Marten said, half suggesting, half asking.

  “Unlikely that they’d all fail simultaneously, but weirder things have happened,” said Jackie. “Should we take off? We can’t make orbit but we can leave the area.”

  Carson thought for a moment. “I don’t know. If they’re not in trouble they might interpret that as hostile. Can you get a visual on it?” It was starting to show as a bigger dot on the screen now, but the blurry shape didn’t make much sense.

  “No, the alignment scope won’t reach that angle unless I move the ship.” She turned back toward Marten, halfway between her and the hatch. “Marten, grab the binoculars from locker seven and take a look outside.”

  Carson followed Marten out, almost bumping into him as he’d stopped just outside the hatch and was looking up at the light. “Well, what do you see?”

  Marten hesitated. “I see . . . I’m not sure what I see.” He handed the glasses to Carson and called to Jackie. “Get out here, you need to look at this!”

  Carson looked. The binocs were out of focus, the fuzzy shape didn’t make sense. He groped for the control.

  Jackie, now at his elbow looking through another pair of binoculars, let out a long, low whistle.

  Carson touched his autofocus button and the image snapped clear. It still didn’t make sense. “A pyramid?”

  “Good, that’s what I thought I saw,” said Marten.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  They took turns with the binoculars, watching the flying pyramid, or whatever it was, for several minutes until it settled behind a mountain peak.

  “What the hell was that?” said Carson.

  “It’s no starship, that was way too big,” said Jackie. In the excitement of the moment she had forgotten her concern about the warp module, but the memory was back, and her voice held a grim note. The size of that pyramid had been beyond the theoretical limits for a warp bubble, so even if whoever—or whatever—was flying it was friendly, they couldn’t hitch a ride home. She needed to check the diagnostics; maybe her warp unit was okay.

  “Maybe they know something about warp technology we don’t?” ventured Marten.

  “Even if they did, where’d they come from? If our exploration of the archive triggered an alarm or something, they got here so soon they had to be nearby. There’s no such thing as faster-than-light radio.” Unfortunately, Jackie thought. “Anyway, I need to finish checking out the Sophie, we may have a problem.” She turned and went back into the ship, dreading what the diagnostics would tell her.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Carson and Marten looked at each other. “Problem?” Carson asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It sounds like there might be something wrong with the ship. You stay out here on watch
, and I’ll go ask her.”

  “Very well.”

  Carson turned and entered the hatch. Jackie was at the controls, her elbows on the panel, head propped on one hand, shoulders slumped. She started at Carson’s entrance, and sat up quickly. “Problems?” Carson asked again.

  “We took a bullet, heavy caliber, to our lower right side. Where the warp unit’s housed.”

  Carson didn’t like the sound of that. He didn’t understand all the implications, he knew that starships typically had three warp units, but the tone of Jackie’s voice said it was bad news, and, were her eyes red? “And that means?”

  “It should have meant nothing, but the diagnostics say that the module’s broken. They’re tough, but hit it hard enough and the shock will damage the nanostructure. The thing’s shot.” She grimaced at the unintentional pun.

  “But aren’t there two others?”

  “Yes, but we need all three to balance the warp geometry and control against Finazzi instability.”

  “Whose what?” Carson knew what it was, but he wanted to help Jackie focus; she was visibly shaken.

  “Finazzi instability, named after one of the guys who pointed out that quantum effects could destabilize a warp field. Never mind. The point is we need three, we only have two, and we’re not going anywhere. We’re stuck here on Chara.” Her shoulders slumped again. “Unless . . .” she raised her head, looked at him. “Did you let Ducayne know where we were going? Will he come looking for us if you don’t report?”

  Carson paused, thinking. Things had been chaotic in their rush to leave Taprobane. “Yes and no. I did send a report in, couched in rather ambiguous terms in case it was intercepted, but Ducayne should be able to figure it out.”

  “That’s great!”

  Carson held up a hand. “But that doesn’t mean he’ll come looking for us. I didn’t give him an ETA. Heck, I didn’t know if we’d find anything here or not. Between whatever circuitous routing it takes my report to get to him, and the expected travel times of the kind of exploring we’re doing, it would be at least months before he decides it might be worth looking for us, and who knows how long before he gets here, if he does.”

  “Well, that’s it then. We’re stuck here.” Jackie turned to the controls and started aggressively flipping switches and slapping control pads.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Finishing the diagnostics and inspection. I can at least make Sophie airworthy. There’s the settlement on the other continent, if I’m going to be marooned I’d rather be somewhere a little more civilized than here.”

  “From what we saw before, I think ‘little more’ pretty much describes it.” Carson turned to leave, then turned back. “Look, what about the other ship?”

  “Hopkins’ ship? It’s destroyed.”

  “No, I meant the flying pyramid. But come to think of it, yeah, what about Hopkins’ ship too? Sure it crashed, but could we salvage parts?”

  Jackie looked thoughtful. “Perhaps. A crash might be a gentle enough shock that the warp modules wouldn’t be damaged. The rest of the ship would take the impact. Oh, the one nearest the explosion would be wrecked, but....” her voice trailed off.

  “So could we swap out the warp units?”

  “Too many unknowns. I’ve got sufficient tools to remove and replace Sophie’s, not that that’s something I ever planned on doing myself, but removing them from a wrecked ship is something else again. That’s even assuming they’re the same model; they can’t be balanced if they’re not. I didn’t recognize the make of Hopkins’ ship. It wasn’t a Sapphire, that’s for sure.”

  “So, not worth the trip, then?”

  “I didn’t say that. There are only a few different models of warp unit, so there’s a chance. That is, if at least one survived the impact, and if we can extract it from the wreckage, and swap it out for Sophie’s.”

  “What will it take?”

  “Let me finish with Sophie first. We can do a flyover of the wreckage and get a better feel for whether anything survived.”

  “All right, then that’s our plan.”

  “Carson?”

  “Yes?”

  “What about the pyramid?”

  “Good question. You’re sure it wasn’t a starship?”

  “Unlikely, but if it was alien, who knows? We know there’s technology out there we don’t understand. And it was flying.”

  “Yes, so?”

  “Carson, it was flying without rockets or wings. That implies antigrav. We can’t do that.”

  “We can do artificial gravity.”

  “That’s a byproduct of the warp balancing, we can’t do it without the warp on and you saw what happens if you try that in atmosphere.” She made a gesture to where they’d stowed the artifact.

  Carson nodded. “You’re right. Jackie, we have to get up there. They have to be aliens, and spacefaring, starship or not. How soon can Sophie be ready to fly?”

  “You want us to fly up there?” she gestured towards the mountains. “We don’t even know if they’re still there, and we know there’s nowhere for Sophie to land.”

  “We can at least do a fly-by.”

  “What about the warp drive? Can we focus on one thing at a time?”

  “Jackie, this could be the most significant event in our history, meeting another spacefaring species.”

  “Don’t let Marten hear you say that.”

  “You know what I mean. If they built the archive—and they must have—they’ve had space travel thousands of years longer than we have. Besides, didn’t you ever want to be in a first contact situation?”

  “To tell you the truth, no. There are too many opportunities for mistake, and possibly for dying horribly. Remember Captain Cook.”

  “Cook?”

  “HMS Resolution, Hawaii, Earth? Killed by the natives.”

  “Oh, him. That wasn’t a first contact, that was second. Anyway, the aliens seemed friendly enough from the archive.”

  “That was then. Anyway, there’s not much daylight left and I need to work on Sophie. The aft fuel tank still has a bullet hole in it. Let me get that fixed and then we’ll see about your flying pyramid.”

  Jackie gathered her tools and portable console and returned to the hole in the hull by the warp generator. If they could replace it, they’d have to remove this whole section of the outer hull. In the meantime she applied a temporary patch over the hole to maintain an aerodynamic shape while they were just flying in atmosphere. She continued her inspection around the aft end of the ship, finding another hole that was still dripping water. The fuel leak.

  Jackie set to work removing a section of hull to access the tank. She got the hull plate off and examined the tank behind it. There was a hole about a half-inch in diameter, still dribbling, with a spiderweb of cracks radiating from it. She took a small cylinder from her kit and inserted it into the hole, the water squirting out around it and soaking her sleeves. She pressed the stud on its end. Inside the tank the cylinder unfolded like an umbrella and she pulled it back to seal against the wall of the tank. The water slowed to a trickle then stopped. She twisted the protruding rod and the outer surface folded back flat against the outside of the tank, anchoring the patch. She finished up by covering the whole thing with sealant. It wouldn’t hold hydrogen again without a proper repair, but it was at least water-tight. She secured the hull plate over it again and patched that, then finished her inspection.

  Carson and Marten still walked the perimeter, rifles held casually, but one or the other of them always had an eye toward the mountain where the pyramid ship had descended. They hadn’t seen it again.

  “Okay, I’m ready to start tanking up, somebody want to give me a hand with the hose?” Jackie had returned her tools to the ship and now had a panel open on the side, from which she was unreeling a spool of hose.

  “Sure thing,” said Marten, and started dragging one end toward the stream near where they’d landed. The sun was starting to set and it was getting dim, bu
t to Marten there was still plenty of light.

  “How long to tank up?” Carson asked.

  “Couple of hours. It’ll be well dark by then.”

  “Any problem with flying after dark?”

  Jackie thought about that. There was no technical problem, she had hundreds of hours of night flights and hundreds of night take-offs and landings. With the windows in night-vision mode she didn’t even need landing lights. Still... “We’ve had a long and busy day, I’d just as soon be well rested before taking off again. We can do it if we have to, but do we have to?”

  Carson paused before answering, running a hand across his chin, thoughtful. “I’d really like to get up there and see what’s up with that pyramid. But you have a point. Could we do one quick high-altitude pass tonight?”

  Jackie considered. She did a few checks on the control console, came to a decision. “Okay.” She pressed a button on the console, and the sound of the pump stopped. Another button, and she said, “Marten, change of plans, bring the hose back please.” Her amplified voice could be heard through the hull.

  “So what are we doing?” asked Carson.

  “We’ve got enough fuel for a short flight. I’ll give you fifteen minutes, but we leave now. Night vision or not I don’t want that other ship to think we’re trying to sneak up on them in the dark.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “That’s why you’re paying me,” said Jackie, a smug grin on her face.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  “Prepare for takeoff. Is everything secure?” She heard the confirmations and started touching control pads on her console. The outside lit up as Jackie turned on landing and navigation lights, then brightened further as the thrusters powered up. The Sophie rose into the air, then accelerated forwards and banked toward the mountains. “I sure hope they’re friendly,” Jackie muttered to herself.

  Ten minutes later they were cruising a thousand meters above the pyramidal building they’d spent the last few days hiking to and from, the latter part of that journey within a cave in the mountain. There was no sign of any other pyramid, ship, or anything else.