by A. Omukai
The heck was going on?
She grabbed it, picked it up, pulled it in front of her eyes. No question, this strand of hair was white as snow.
What had happened?
This seemed to be a recurring question on this planet, ‘what has happened’. She scowled.
It didn’t change the facts, though. Had this place somehow aged her? Deirdre remembered it going after her life force. She didn’t know. She didn’t feel so much different from yesterday, apart from the white strand in her air. And that was not a feeling anyway, it was just an outer appearance thing. Or was it?
The other problem was or had been, Cailean. But he seemed to be around, and she could feel his movement, him gaining distance, coming back, running off again in a different direction. It seemed like he was already trying to find the next place of power. Was that what places of power looked like? Nah, probably not.That valley had seemed dangerous, and Brilann wouldn’t send her into such a situation without warning her. Even if she assumed the worst, which she didn’t, but hypothetically, they still had the same goals. It would make zero sense for him to risk her failing. That valley might once have been a place of power, but whatever it was now, she better approached something like it more carefully.
All those idle thoughts, and they were just sitting there, passing time. Something inside her urged her to move on, and to speed it up. How many places of power did a planet have?
“Whatever, we should try to get this mission done before the transporter gets back. I would like to have something of substance to show when we get back to the Tuatha De Danann.”
Adams nodded.
“I agree. It would be a waste if we didn’t use our time as efficiently as possible. Not much I can do, though. Most of my equipment is beyond repair, and now we lost the one person who could have done some repairs.”
The xenobiologist had come all the way, and would go back on board with empty hands. Maybe not quite empty-handed, even so, he had lost significant parts of his stuff, and he didn’t look very enthusiastic. She wasn’t sure what he could still accomplish with what he had.
She looked back into the mirror, at the white strand in her hair, then shrugged it off.
“Switch it back,” she said, gesturing at the display.
The Wisp did, and it was a relief to see the landscape come back into view.
“By the way, we will have night soon. That’s going to be five full days of darkness until we have sunlight again. Maybe we should use what’s left of our time in the sun to finish our business here,” Adams said.
Deirdre didn’t care. Even the daylight wasn’t very strong, anyway. It reminded her of the early morning or the late evening, just bright enough to see, but long shadows obstructing everything. There were not so many tall objects on this planet, though. Most of the ground was covered with mushrooms and the mossy stuff. So while she could see very far, things down there were sometimes difficult to make out.
She depended on the Cu Sidhe to find a usable place of power for her, and Cailean could see perfectly well both by night and day, so for her, it was all the same.
But for Adams, it made sense to use the daylight.
“All right,” she said. “What are we waiting for?”
Adams looked at her quizzically.
“For you, of course.”
“All right,” she laughed.
13
Cloud Chasers
Adams was sitting near the steering wheel, looking out of the pseudo-window, only paying a minimum of attention to the landscape outside the vehicle.
Their decision to make most of the remaining time of the day had led him to speed up the Wisp.
His gaze glided over the landscape, the endless parade of rolling hills, the same fungi over and over, no matter where they went. He had yet to take samples, but he was almost finished assembling his mini lab inside the Wisp and could start work on it soon. He couldn’t wait for it.
When he looked up, something in the sky seemed unusual. He couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but hadn’t he seen something move up there?
Adams, whose hands had been busy assembling a set of analysis equipment, stopped fidgeting and narrowed his eyes.
Was there something moving along the clouds? It wasn’t easy to see anything in the bright orange sky with its even brighter clouds of the same colour. The only way to make sure was to direct their scanners skywards.
His hands raced over the keyboard of the console, even though he could have given the commands via his own personal AI. He watched the values move, but the usual biometric measurements didn’t pick up anything special. Was it a range problem? He checked the system to determine how far the small vehicle could reach out, and its range turned out to be roughly fifty kilometres. It seemed to be plenty, but telling the distance wasn’t quite easy on Gliese 667 Cc, where everything had a size that differed from its equivalent on Earth, starting with the very curvature of the planet.
If he remembered correctly, Earth’s atmosphere was about five hundred kilometres thick, probably less. He checked the data — Gliese 667 Cc sported an impressive seven hundred kilometres. The air pressure was indeed higher than at home, but still not to a degree that made it hard to breathe. What this meant though was, the scanners didn’t reach up as high as he had hoped.
What else could he try?
Losing corporal Hill meant Adams had to do the scans, and he did not know what he was doing. He switched to energetic scans, which had a much longer range, and maybe the movement he had thought he saw hadn’t been caused by anything living. It could be a different phenomenon, maybe weather. Now there were brief spikes on the scale, but he couldn’t make sense of the data. He couldn’t see any electricity visually, and there was no flowing energy on the display. What he could see looked more like tiny reactors flying through the atmosphere.
He didn’t give up that easily and repeated the scans, changed angle and range frequencies, but the results didn’t change. For the Wisp’s sensors, something containing a certain amount of energy moved through the air, and no amount of scanning would tell him any more.
Maybe he wouldn’t get his results now, but he’d repeat his investigations later. He switched the scanners back, re-engaged the autopilot and turned his attention back to his analysis set.
Adams finished his work just when the druid opened her eyes and regarded him with a curious look.
“What are you working on?”
“This is a small sample analyser. It’s programmed to give me information about the atomic structure and certain chemical processes going on in whatever I choose to test. It can tell me many things, for example, if something is compatible with us and edible.”
“You can check if something can be eaten?”
“Well… I can see if we can digest it. I’m not specialised in nutrition or medicine.”
“Maybe it’s not a great idea to eat anything we find outside. It sure looks suspicious.”
Adams smiled.
“All the flora I’ve seen so far has been fungi. There’s a gigantic mycelium spread out over the ground, too. Most non-toxic fungi on Earth are very nutritious.”
“Guess it’s the toxic ones we should be worried about then.”
“I’d have to look up all the chemicals inside them to determine whether we can eat them. Since we’re not short on food though…”
He shrugged. He was more interested in finding out if the air was breathable, how far the mycelium stretched out over the planet, and if there were any animals on this planet.
Doctor Moan waved Deirdre over to the med scanning booth, and Adams turned his head back to the display.
Gliese 667 C was setting now, and would continue to do so for the next five hours. A and B would remain visible for longer, but their light made little a difference. Both suns combined produced more light than the full moon on Earth.
What he saw on the horizon though was fascinating. Rings around planet Gliese 667 Cf, their nearest neighbour, came into view
. Just a few more hours, and they could see the planet itself in the sky. It was close. So close, in fact, that it would take up a lot of real estate in the night sky.
Things changed dramatically when the long day ended and turned into an equally long night. After sun A and B set behind the horizon, darkness fell over the land, even though it didn’t get all that dark here. The nearby Gliese 667 Cf hung in the sky and dominated it completely, reflecting a good amount of light, even though it was less bright than Earth’s moon. The planet took over ten percent of the sky.
What had started as slight movements in the sky, as vague sensations, was now clearly visible. Actual sparks sailing through the air, like this planet’s very own version of will-o’-wisps. They moved around in swarms. Adams didn’t even try to count the group ahead himself, he left that to the AI, which informed him that the swarm closest to him contained twenty-four lights.
From the way they moved, they probably had actual destinations and followed actual goals. They weren’t just reacting to the wind or other external influences. Whatever they were, they moved with a purpose, with structure, and as a group.
They were driving through the night, following Deirdre’s directions. The young druid knew which way she wanted to go, and since it didn’t matter at all for him, he just went along with it. Each place was as good as the next, at least for now.
“What are those things?”
He shrugged. He wished he’d know himself. “If you find out, please let me know.”
“Very funny. They’re pretty, don’t you think?”
Yes, they were. He hadn’t looked at them this way, but she was certainly right. They looked pretty, like gigantic fireflies, only that they were moving together, which made it even more satisfying to watch them.
The Aes Sidhe didn’t comment on the phenomenon. Neither the doctor, who was sitting bowed over a display, nor the marine said a word. The Ghillie Dhu wasn’t even visible.
About an hour later, Adams made out a group of the lights hover over one plane, motionless. What were they doing there? He directed the scanners towards them, but got no results at all. The little vehicle’s scanners were very limited in their options, and there wasn’t much he could do about it.
“Let me drive closer, I’d like to see if they react to our presence,” he said, looking at Deirdre.
She didn’t return his look, her eyes still fixated at the glowing entities, but she nodded.
Adams changed the course of the Wisp, decelerated, then drifted towards the lights, whatever they were.
The little swarm of fireflies hung not over two meters over the ground. Below them lay a small forest of fungi. There was no discernible activity going on, neither from the floating lights, nor from the fungi. None of the scanner modes returned any usable data. Neither the biometric scans nor the energetic mode. The lights were neither energy, nor matter. That couldn’t be true.
Adams recorded it all. If he wasn’t able to get any results here, he would do his best to at least document these potential life forms.
The Wisp rolled through the night, slowly getting closer and closer to the lights. After they crossed a certain threshold, the entire swarm moved in unison. They formed a grid over the fungi, a hexagon pattern, as far as he could see. This group was much larger than the small swarm of twenty-four he had watched a while ago. He asked his AI to count, and the result was forty-eight. Eight seemed to be a relevant number here.
Forty-eight of these lights, all moving in perfect synchronicity, like a school of fish. He should give them a name. “Lights” was just not distinctive enough.
‘Cloud Chasers’ sounded good. The very first time he had encountered them was when he had watched the clouds and noticed the movement among them. Now that he was looking at the cloud chasers from a very close distance, and in the dark, he wasn’t surprised that he had had difficulties making them out at daytime. They glowed in the same dark orange light the clouds reflected during the day. Perfect camouflage, not unlike Sergeant Ailbhe. Not even unusual among animals, but could they be classified as such? He risked driving closer, and the entire swarm spread out two meters above ground and surrounded them. A perfect circle formed around the Wisp.
“This is fascinating,” he said.
He turned his head at Deirdre. She had a smile on her face and looked like a child staring at a Christmas tree.
“So pretty,” the druid repeated.
Doctor Maon muttered something he couldn’t understand, but he heard the marine chuckle.
The cloud chasers moved in a circle, slowly going up and down, keeping in constant motion. This went on for a few minutes, then the whole swarm ascended as one, formed their original hexagonal grid again, travelled over a short distance, and settled down over another unremarkable area not far away from the Wisp.
Adams would repeat the experiment. Again, he steered the vehicle towards the group of cloud chasers, then slowly got closer. This time, they ignored them. At least, until they got too close. The cloud chasers didn’t surround the vehicle, they just gained some altitude, hung in the air for a moment, and moved on.
They sank down to the same distance from the ground they had had the last two times, about two meters, again forming the same grid of hexagons.
He checked the scanner, but there were no new results for him to see. No activity he could measure with the Wisp. It couldn’t be helped, he would focus on watching and recording their behaviour. He would give his experiment one more try. When they got closer this time, the entire group not only moved up and moved away immediately. It also didn’t sink down to hover over the ground right away. It seemed as if the swarm was waiting to see if they would come after them again.
This could mean a lot of things, or none. Adams wasn’t sure. What he knew, though, was that he had the whole experiment documented cleanly. Maybe it would be possible to measure the cloud chasers’ activity by other means later, and maybe then, some of their behaviour would make sense in a new context.
For now, the xenobiologist was satisfied. This was the first actual research he had done since he had landed on the surface of Gliese 667 Cc. Strictly , only one day had passed so far, so he didn’t feel bad about it. Local time, that was. For the Tuatha De Danann, three days had passed. The transporter that had brought them here would now sit in the hangar and be under repair. They did not know when the little craft would return to them, but he assumed that the structural repairs would take a while. Now that he had finished building his mini laboratory, he could take and analyse samples. He could finally get something done here, and even though the results wouldn’t be as encompassing as he had originally hoped, getting really any data at all would still be progress under the circumstances.
14
Order
Cailean had been running for hours now, with no sign of exhaustion. Deirdre could feel his presence at around the same distance he had been keeping since he had started off in the northern direction. When they had stopped to examine a floating light, the Cu Sidhe had stopped, too. That meant that he was feeling around for her the same way she was reaching out for him, the connection was mutual. Of course, they were partners, and they had the same mission down here, on this fascinating planet. So far, they had accomplished little, but they had discovered a place that might or might not have been a place of power once. Deirdre couldn’t tell. There had been no power there, quite the opposite. There had been nothing where she would have expected a well, a pool or something of that sort.
Brilann had mentioned pools of magical energy, so chances were high, that the place they had visited had differed from what they were looking for. However, assuming that Cailean knew what he was looking for, and she knew that this was the case, she wondered what was going on. He had led them straight to the place, but then not moved on towards it. As they got close. As if he had been surprised himself.
All this was conjecture, of course. It would have been awesome if she could communicate with her Cu Sidhe friend the way Brilann had. Tha
t ability was definitely on her list of things to bug him about. She would have loved to have a talk with Cailean. The first thing she’d have done would have been to tell him off for listening to the old druid. Her friend having an actual talk with someone else still felt like betrayal to her. All these years of friendship, and she found out that actual communication was possible. Of course, this was not an intelligent way to see the situation, but she couldn’t help it. Deirdre was who she was.
The Wisp suddenly stopped, and the lights went off. For a moment, the four sat in darkness, when the small standard display of the control console switched on again and gave a muted, white light. The lamps followed, and then the large display.
“What was that?” She looked at Adams.
The xenobiologist shrugged. He walked through the vehicle to the controls and checked the system.
“Looks like we had a system crash. Some data got corrupted, and the AI had to do a hard reset.”
“How can an AI crash?”
Deirdre hadn’t heard of something like this ever happen. Systems were redundant and compartmentalised, they didn’t just ‘crash and restart’. That would cause horrendous problems.
“It seems there’s a hardware error somewhere. The self-diagnosis tool shows one of the storage devices is damaged.”
This was even weirder. Deirdre was no expert, but hardware breaking this fast was more than strange. The Tuatha De Danann was a newly built ship, and so was this land vehicle. Modern hardware was built to last, because the consequences of failure could be devastating.