Terra and Imperium (Duchy of Terra Book 3)

by Glynn Stewart

  They watched all of that move, seemingly of its own accord, and add itself to the pile of debris created by the surveyor’s sonic disruptors and their own work. As it moved, it revealed a smooth, unbroken surface underneath.

  The hull was a waxy gray material with a slight sheen. There was none of the pitting or scoring Harold had expected from a crashed ship. It was perfectly smooth, with no sign of any kind of entrance, and he looked at it with a sigh.

  “I suppose it was too much to ask to uncover an airlock straight away,” he admitted, then glanced over at Wolastoq. “I don’t suppose your sensor pylons can give us some kind of interior map?”

  “I’m barely able to register that the hull exists,” she said. “I’m getting nothing clear from inside the ship—from these scans, the inside might as well just be dirt, but I think that is just this material screwing with me.”

  She reached out and tapped the hull, her eyes glowing with wonder. “That’s much softer than I would expect,” she murmured.

  Harold joined her in touching the hull, running his fingers along the impossibly smooth surface.

  “No metal or ceramic I’ve ever seen,” he agreed. “But…tough. Obviously very tough.”

  “We have debris from it across the plateau,” Wolastoq objected. “Can’t be that tough.”

  “There’s not much that’s harder on anything than unplanned reentry,” he said. “And if there was any damage, it repaired itself.” He hesitated, considering. “Oh, what the hell. Corporal!” he shouted back to the Guards. “Bring me that handheld!”

  “What are you doing?” the archaeologist demanded.

  “Science,” he replied with a big red-bearded grin. “I’m testing a hypothesis.”

  The handheld sonic disruptor, linked to its power source by a long cable, landed perfectly in his outstretched hand, and he saluted the Ducal Guard with it.

  Before anyone could stop him, he turned it to full power and activated it on the hull.

  The waxy material rippled slightly but otherwise was undamaged. He held the focused beam of sound on the hull for several seconds, then released it.

  “That hull isn’t going to be bothered by the sonic disrupters,” he told Wolastoq calmly as she glared at him. “I suspect it might even laugh at Liberty’s missiles. I suggest we bring up the other surveyor craft and sweep the entire ship clean.”

  He shook his head, stepping back to study the mound.

  “I want to see just what this planet was hiding.”

  #

  There were seven of the surveyors available in total, a sign to Harold that CDC really had taken this project seriously, as there were only ten on the entire planet.

  He and Wolastoq retreated from the mound as the aircraft moved in. A dozen or so meters and ear protection were enough for one set of sonic disruptors, but seven of them needed a far larger safety radius.

  “Double-checking the safety perimeter,” Douglas said over the radio. “Is everyone clear?”

  “Check,” Harold confirmed. “I have confirmed with the Guard: they’ve swept the area on the ground and surveyed it from the air.”

  “All right. This is gonna be fun. Initiating synchronized disruptor sweep.”

  Even from a quarter-kilometer away, the vibration rattled Harold’s teeth this time. Seven sonic disruptors opened up with carefully targeted full power, sweeping around the buried ship with constantly varying waves of focused sound.

  A sonic disruptor was an utterly ineffective weapon, but when it came to reducing mountains and hills to dust and loose dirt, there was no better tool. Entire chunks of the mound disintegrated, exposing the strange ship section by section.

  The flying-wing comparison was apt. It was a slightly off-centered triangle, with the south side longer than the north in its current position. There was no visible cockpit or bridge, the entire ship being the same smooth, waxy gray material.

  Some of the dirt underneath the ship disintegrated, and Harold inhaled sharply as the ship slowly settled. The advantage, however, of turning the mound that had covered it into loose dirt and soil was that the ship now had a soft bed to settle into as it slowly leveled out, sliding down to rest on the Corellian Plateau.

  “You can move into the safety zone,” Douglas announced. “We’re done here. One…whatever the hell that is, cleared of dirt and ready for investigation.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Douglas,” Harold told him. “I don’t suppose you can see an access point from up there?”

  “Captain, all I see from up here is gray wax. I’m half-expecting the thing to be full of old cheese at this point.”

  Harold chuckled. “It has power,” he reminded the pilot. “There’s something in there.”

  “We’ve cleaned her off. Getting in…getting in is up to you.”

  #

  Chapter 16

  The strange waxy hull material resisted Harold’s fingers. It felt soft and waxy, but there was no real give to it as he pushed.

  “How safe is that, exactly?” Wolastoq asked from a couple of meters behind him.

  “Potentially not in the slightest,” he agreed cheerfully. “But I’m running out of ideas and getting pissed off.”

  With the rock and soil removed, they’d moved the sensor pylons closer to the now-level starship, pulsing the hull with every sensor they could think of to try and learn something about the ship.

  Anything.

  “It’s cold,” he told her. “Feels soft, but I can’t put my fingers inside it or anything like that. Laughed off our sonics, and I hesitate to try real weapons on it.”

  “That does strike me as a bad idea,” the archaeologist said dryly. “I would prefer to get into it with it still intact, after all.”

  “I suspect, my dear Dr. Wolastoq, that we could line up Emperor of China’s main proton beam batteries and not make much of an impression,” Harold said. “It’s deflecting every sensor we send at it. I’m impressed by the battery of tools you have available, but all they are telling us is that there is a ship here.”

  “And that there is a source of heat and odd gravity waves inside,” Wolastoq reminded him. “There has to be some way into the ship, doesn’t there?”

  “I can think of a few reasons there might not be,” he admitted, studying the massive gray shape. “If the builders had some form of short-range teleporter, they wouldn’t need an airlock. Or the self-repair mechanism that fixed the damage from the landing accidentally closed over the entrances. Or if we aren’t looking at a ship at all.”

  The last thought was disturbing and he laid his hand back on the waxy hull, listening for something he hadn’t checked for before: a pulse.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If this was alive—or was alive, once—then it wouldn’t have crew or an entrance,” the red-bearded Captain said. “There are spaceborne life forms out there, after all.”

  Most of them were very large, very delicate creatures that lived on sunlight and ice and had roughly the intelligence of a placid herd beast.

  A stoned placid herd beast.

  He’d never heard of any space creatures that could move particularly quickly or survive a crash into a planet, but after the last five years, Captain Harold Rolfson was not going to assume humanity knew everything about the universe.

  Wolastoq stepped up next to him, carefully pulling her braid back and laying her hand on the waxy hull as well. She was doing the same thing he was, feeling for some sign of life.

  “I don’t think it’s alive,” she admitted. “I feel like we’d be able to tell—we’d feel something.”

  Harold nodded, looking over the ship thoughtfully. They’d been making the assumption that they’d be able to see the airlock, but this hull material had clearly repaired itself. What if it was self-motile in other ways?

  It would require power, but their scans suggested there was power.

  “If it’s a ship,” he said slowly, “I don’t know anything about the builders, but at this point…”

 
“Harold?”

  “I speak fluent starship,” he told Wolastoq with a grin. “And if I was building this thing, I’d put at least one of the airlocks here.”

  It wasn’t exactly where they were standing, but it was pretty close. Right beneath what they thought was the “front” point of the triangle. He walked over to the spot, studying it, and then tried to slide his hands into the wax again.

  This time, the wax responded. He felt the hull warm under his hands, the strange material coming to life and moving against his skin. One moment, he was touching another expanse of gray wax—and the next, a ten-foot-tall by four-foot-wide opening had appeared in the hull.

  All he could see inside it was a featureless, gray cocoon-like space. Probably the airlock.

  “Well, that looks welcoming, doesn’t it?” Harold said cheerfully. “That said, I suggest we go get oxygen masks and lights.

  “We have no idea what the inside of this thing is going to look like.”

  #

  There was enough space in the cocoon for one Guard in power armor or two unarmored people, and Wolastoq wasn’t letting anyone else go inside the ship before her.

  “We may need to find additional controls to open it from the inside,” she noted after overruling the trooper protecting them. “It may not open again without being fed more power. No offense, Corporal, but I don’t want a soldier with no archaeological training being the only person inside the ship!”

  “What about you, sir?” the Guard turned to Harold, who gave the trooper a grin.

  “I, Corporal, am going armed to make sure the good doctor is safe,” he told them, patting the heavy plasma pistol slung on his hip. “And since I’m the only starship officer down here—and I’m the one who worked out how to get in.”

  Most of his argument was half-directed at Wolastoq, who he was expecting to argue. Either she had been planning on bringing him with her already or he successfully convinced her, as she simply nodded and gestured for him to enter the opening in the side of the ship with her.

  Both of them put breathing masks over their faces, hanging the compressed-air supply—two days’ worth, to be safe—on their backs. They also had wrist-mounted flashlights, and Harold still had his Militia earbuds, which normally gave him communication to Liberty in orbit.

  He was quite certain his earbuds could reach outside the ship.

  Wolastoq was carrying a bag of tools, and with the confined quarters of the airlock, the bag was the only thing stopping them from being fully pressed against each other.

  Which was a far more distracting position than Harold had expected. In the three years since Elizabeth Sade had died, no other woman had even caught his eye, and the xenoarchaeologist crammed into the side of the ancient spaceship with him couldn’t have been more different from the gracefully ethereal woman he’d loved.

  “So, Captain, entertaining as being squeezed into a coffin with you is,” Wolastoq said after a moment, “how are we getting into the ship?”

  Thankfully, it was already shaded enough that he was relatively sure she didn’t see him flush. Starship captains weren’t supposed to blush like guilty schoolboys, after all!

  “If it works the same as the outside, I should just be able to… Here.”

  He tried to slide his hand into the wax on the middle of the inner wall, hoping it would respond. For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then the whole opening seemed to warm up and he half-felt, half-saw the outer “door” close. That was when Wolastoq’s coffin comment really began to take on a life of its own. There was no space, no air. No light.

  You could, thankfully, not be a starship captain or a xenoarchaeologist if you were a claustrophobe. It still wasn’t a comfortable experience, and if a readout on his contact lenses hadn’t been telling him the atmosphere was changing, he might have panicked for reasons that had nothing to do with claustrophobia.

  “Pressure is dropping,” he noted aloud. “Oxygen percentage rising. Temperature rising. This is…impossible. The airlock is fully functional.”

  Then the interior wall flowed open…and the carefully balanced atmosphere and temperature that the airlock had created collapsed back into the general atmosphere of the ship—which closely resembled that of the outside Corellian Plateau. A bit warmer from insulation, but the same pressure and oxygen levels.

  “The rest of the ship, it seems, is not so intact,” Wolastoq replied. It took her several moments longer to extricate herself from the airlock—and Harold—than it probably should have, which his lizard brain enjoyed far too much for his sense of comfort.

  He eventually managed to focus on the here and now and look around with his light.

  “That makes me feel a lot better,” he admitted. The room the light showed was the same gray wax material as the outer hull, the walls just as clean and undamaged as the outer hull. The contents of the room, however, were not.

  At some point, it had contained a relatively normal-looking set of lockers and humanoid spacesuits, if scaled for bipeds eight feet tall with four arms. Those lockers had been smashed free and scattered across the room during the crash. They’d never been cleaned up, and several shattered suits filled the antechamber.

  “So, the ship isn’t entirely impossible,” Harold continued. “Self-healing, semi-motile hull. Presumably needs power, but we knew there was power.”

  He shook his head.

  “The hull alone, Doctor,” he told the woman with him. “If we could duplicate the hull alone, that would advance our materials science by decades, if not centuries.

  “What the hell else is in here?”

  “I don’t know,” she told him. “But I do think that if we’re going to wandering around an abandoned starship in the dark together, you should call me Ramona.”

  He laughed. She’d never asked his permission to use his first name, but he’d never dared to use hers.

  “Very well, Ramona,” he conceded. “Where do you think we should start?”

  She pulled a multi-sensor scanner pack out of her bag and started setting it up.

  “First, I want to get some readings and see what we can get from in here,” she told him. “Then, well, you’re the one who ‘speaks fluent starship’. I suggest we go looking for what you think is important.”

  #

  The pulses from Wolastoq’s handheld unit were both more and less helpful than Harold had hoped. Part of him had expected that the scanner would be completely useless, blocked by the interior walls as thoroughly as the hull had blocked the more powerful sensors outside.

  On a modern ship, however, the scanner would have given them a complete interior map.

  The end result on this strange ancient vessel was somewhere in between. The sensors appeared to be able to pulse through about one interior wall of the strange waxy material the ship was built from and down corridors and hallways. They had a map of their immediate surroundings but not much more.

  “Where are the gravity signatures?” he asked. “I’m guessing that whatever is still giving off power is in Engineering and related to that.”

  Wolastoq fiddled with the device and then pointed. “I can’t get an exact range, but that way.”

  “Well, then, shall we see if the airlock door still works so we can get out later, and then go take a look?”

  He stuck his hand in the wall, much the same as he had to get in, and was quietly relieved when it flowed away to reveal the cocoon-like airlock.

  “This ship is creepy,” he noted. “But to still be functioning, however minimally, after fifty thousand years…”

  “It’s unlike anything I’ve encountered in A!Tol records,” Wolastoq said. “It’s incredible.”

  “Are you recording?” he asked.

  “Everything,” she confirmed. “Everything I see, everything light goes on, and everything the scanner picks up. You?”

  “Same,” he said. He checked an icon in his contacts and winced. “I don’t have a live link outside, though,” he warned her. “The
hull is blocking my transceiver.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said calmly.

  “I am. That transmitter can reach Liberty from outside.”

  “And we couldn’t get a single detailed scanner reading through this hull,” Wolastoq replied. “We know we can leave, so let’s go check out what we find. Don’t touch anything.”

  “I’m a soldier, Ramona, not stupid,” he replied. “If the gravitic source is that way, then…” He studied the hallways. “…this way.”

  #

  Despite the strange material the ship was built from, the hallways followed a pattern that made sense to Harold. What made no sense, at least initially, was the complete lack of doors—until they hit the end of a corridor where he was certain there should be an access to continue.

  “Run your scanner again,” he suggested to Wolastoq. “See if there’s anything different about this section of wall ahead of us.”

  The xenoarchaeologist studied the device’s screens and shook her head.

  “Same material, same color, same…everything.”

  “We know that,” he told her. “Look for…thickness, temperature. Is there something to mark that this is a door?”

  “There’s…all right,” Wolastoq replied. “Right, speaking starship, huh?”

  “When was the last time you did archaeological work on something that was still half-functional?” Harold asked.

  “Never,” she agreed with a chuckle. “Okay, take a look at the screen. I’ve highlighted an orange section that’s about one point five degrees Celsius warmer than the hull around it and seven millimeters thinner.”

  The orange highlighted section on the screen looked vaguely like a doorway—if a doorway was nine feet tall and an even oval. Harold sighed.

  “Well, I guess there’s the method that worked on the airlock.”

  He pushed his hand into the center of the “door” area. It resisted for several moments, and then flowed away from him to open up the entire highlighted area.

  “That was much slower than the airlock,” he said. “That’s…probably not a good sign.”