Discovery of the Saiph (The Saiph Series)

by PP Corcoran

  The plasma torches should have cut through the walls like a hot knife through butter but instead it had taken forty five minutes to make a hole large enough for a human to fit through. Well, the moment of truth, thought Robert. “Rank has its privileges,” he said. “Recorders on and let’s go have a look at what was so worth protecting.” With that Robert entered the building.

  Robert circled where he stood. He stared at the walls covered from floor to ceiling in storage racks holding small crystals, no bigger than a finger, crystals of every colour. In the centre of the room was a small raised podium with what looked like a lectern standing on it. The lectern had a small keypad on the right-hand side and a slot on the left. Robert mused, “If I’m not mistaken that slot looks about the size of one of those crystals.”

  Sarah looked at Robert incredulously. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you, sir?”

  “We are here to find out everything we can about this place, and this looks like the next logical step to me.”

  Sarah pronounced slowly, “You’re the boss...” looking apprehensively at Robert as he selected a crystal at random and carefully placed it in the slot in the lectern.

  Nothing.

  There was a collective sigh, as much of relief as disappointment. Then Sarah reached over with a wry smile, glancing at Robert who was watching her every action, she carefully removed the crystal and reinserted it the other way round.

  A million sparkling pinpoints of light encircled the podium.

  “Oh my God!” Sarah exclaimed.

  “Whoa,” said Robert.

  “Now there’s an understatement,” commented Sarah. She wasn’t sure where she should look or what she was looking at.

  Robert flung her a shrivelling look and then went back to staring at the lights. “Do these look familiar, Sarah?”

  Sarah paused to re-examine the lights, trying to focus on an image, writing, something familiar… “Eh, no I don’t think so. Random light, a visible language maybe?”

  “You diggers. Try looking up now and again. These, unless I am mistaken, are stars. This is a map of our galaxy. We, Sarah, have hit El Dorado.”

  #

  Robert compiled a hasty report and forwarded it to the Magellan for onward carriage to Earth by courier drone; then finding himself feeling overcome with exhaustion, he realised that he had been on the go for thirty six hours.

  Stimulants could only keep you going so long, so with strict instructions to the scientists, who were virtually salivating at the mouth to take the other Block Houses apart, to touch nothing until he returned, he left for the surface and his quarters to grab a few hours’ sleep. His head had seemed to just touch the pillow when the incessant beeping of his Comm woke him. “Yes, what is it?” he barked.

  The face of his chief xenobiologist stared at him from the Comm. “Sir, I think my team may have found something quite interesting. Would you come back down here please?”

  Robert rolled himself into an upright position “With what I’ve seen in the past two days, this wants to be good, Ivan.”

  “You need to see this for yourself, Robert. Trust me.”

  Robert just let out a grunt then. “Okay I’ll be there within the hour, Ignico out.” Robert headed for the shower in the hope that it would infuse some energy into his tired body.

  Thirty minutes later, Robert found himself inside Block House Five. “Alright, Ivan. What’s up? I would have thought that the astronomers and physicists would, if anyone, have been the first to come up with something.”

  Dr Ivan Kulibin smirked. “We do what we can to play our small part, sir.”

  Robert smiled back. “Get on with it, Ivan.” he had that ‘cat who just got the cream’ look about him, Robert thought.

  “Didn’t it strike you as strange that you were able to stand at the lectern?”

  Robert felt the penny drop. The position, the size of the lectern – he hadn’t paid much attention at the time Damn... he thought. Out loud he said, “Of course. Why would an alien race construct a lectern that would fit the human form and posture so closely?”

  “Well it was Sasha from ergonomics who first noticed it,” began Ivan. “No one else even thought about it. When Sasha had a closer look at the control panel on the lectern she practically fell on her rear end. Funnily, that’s when we all noticed. She stood back up and naturally placed her hand onto the keypad. The keypad is designed for five fingers, Robert. Five!”

  Robert stood there in stunned silence, trying to let his logical, scientific brain process the implications. Eventually he recovered the ability to speak. “Are you telling me that whoever or whatever built this was approximately the size and shape of a human, even down to having five fingers?”

  “It would certainly look that way, sir.”

  Robert closed his eyes in concentration for a moment then. “Alright, Ivan. I want your team to work on that assumption. But split your team in half: the second half will play Devil’s Advocate and try their best to find fault in your logic. There’s no way we’re telling Earth about this ‘til we can firm it up, understood?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll get on it right away. May I make a suggestion which could speed things up?”

  “All suggestions are welcome, you know that”

  “Well we could open one of the other Block Houses in case this is just a one-off.”

  Robert thought for a second. “Okay, so authorised. Get Sarah back down here. Pick a Block House at random and proceed. I’m going back to bed. I can feel a long few days ahead for all of us.” Patting Ivan on the back, Robert headed back to the drill shaft and bed.

  #

  Innes Base - Planet III - Proxima Centauri

  “Ivan, you look like crap. When did you last sleep?” Robert looked at the figure slumped in the chair in front of him.

  Ivan smiled and replied, “In another life, sir.”

  Robert smiled back and looked over at Sarah Boone, perched on the arm of the other chair in his spartan office located beside the control room on the surface of Planet III, or Rubicon as it was fast becoming known. Named after the Roman river – which legend said if an army ever crossed it then nothing would ever be the same again – nothing would be the same again if the snippets of information Robert was getting where anything to go by.

  “Sir,” Sarah began, indicating the holo cube in the corner of Robert’s office where a diagram of the cavern located five kilometres below them had appeared. “As per your instructions, we divided into two teams and began to assess the data from opposing views. With the opening of the second then, with your permission, the three remaining Block Houses, we found that the raw data was forcing the two teams to reach the same inescapable conclusion. If I could briefly go over the relevant points?”

  Robert nodded and the image in the holo cube changed to show the internal layout of Block House One.

  “As you know, the basic layout of each Block House is the same.” Sarah described the images displayed in the holo cube. “Four sides with floor to ceiling racks full of the data crystals and a lectern on a raised podium located in the centre.” The holo cube image changed to show the location of each of the Block Houses. “Working on the assumption that this layout was the same in each of the buildings, we entered Block Houses Three, Four and Five from above, keeping any possible damage to the data crystals to a minimum.” The Holo image rotated and settled on a three-D rendering of a single storey Block House, with a smaller cube directly below the centre of the structure.

  “Each Block House is independently powered from a source located below its structure, here.” Sarah pointed towards the smaller cube in the image, then continued. “And each structure appears to contain specific information. The easiest Block House to decipher was the one containing the Sciences – some things are a given constant, such as the composition of the atom – so once we had identified the key, things gathered pace.”

  The holo image expanded to show the other Block Houses, each numbered. As
Sarah described each Block House, its image was highlighted in turn in the holo cube. “That was Block House One, the first to be entered. Two seems to contain what we are assuming is art and music by the images and sounds. Three appears to hold enormous amounts of written data. Four is of a similar nature though it seems to contain more graphics, what appears to be planetary mapping but not all showing the same layouts. That one’s a bit confusing at the moment but we’re working on it. Using the data from Block House One as a common cipher, like our very own Rosetta Stone, the computers are slowly but surely beginning to identify key points. But the sheer volume of information is staggering.” Sarah took a deep breath. “That leaves us with Block House Five.” Sarah paused again, which caused Robert to look at her rather than at the scrolling data in the holo cube.

  “Go on, Sarah,” said Robert.

  “Sir…” Sarah began hesitantly, “upon examining the lectern in Block House Five, one of the technicians noticed a subtle difference in its keypad make up. It’s subtle but it’s there. So we decided that we had pushed our luck far enough for the moment. As you know, we have been randomly trying a crystal from one Block House in another Block House’s lectern and they all seem interchangeable.” Sarah paused. “All except those from Block House Five. No crystal from there will play in the other four lecterns, and we have been too afraid in case we damage them to try the modified lectern in Block House Five. In conclusion, sir, I would say that we have found an entire civilisation’s reference library.”

  “Thank you, Sarah. Ivan?”

  “I think Sarah’s conclusion is correct, Robert. We have enough data here to keep every scientist and researcher from every field of study on Earth busy for the next decade.”

  “But not from Block House Five,” said Robert.

  “Not yet, sir,” replied Ivan.

  Robert jumped to his feet, startling the tired Ivan. “Well, let’s go see what we can do about that, shall we?” He headed out of his office towards the shaft to the underground cavern, followed by Ivan and Sarah.

  Robert stood in front of the podium in Block House Five, looking at the seemingly innocent keypad on the raised lectern, with Ivan and Sarah standing behind him.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, sir?” asked Sarah.

  Robert smiled. “Well if it all goes wrong, Sarah, you get an instant promotion.” Without another moment’s hesitation he stepped onto the podium and place his hand over the keypad while inserting a data crystal (chosen at random) from the surrounding wall racks.

  He felt a faint tingling and a large, contorted shape appeared in front of him. No, not contorted: a spiral, with the groove on the left of the spiral being much larger than that on the right, he heard Ivan gasp behind him but was too entranced to turn around. Then it came to him, Ivan was a medical doctor by training, Robert was not, though he still remembered the image from biology.

  He was looking at a DNA helix – his DNA helix – and, as he watched, sections of the helix were highlighted by whatever computing machine drove the lectern. One area... two... three... eventually some ninety per cent of the helix was illuminated. But this wasn’t possible. How could this machine identify so much of the human DNA helix so quickly? At this thought the image disappeared. For a brief second there was nothing...

  Then images began to appear. Soon they were all around him, replaced every few seconds by another.

  “Schematics!” Sarah blurted, “Complicated schematics. Where’s Taylor?” Activating her wrist Comm, she shouted, “Control. Sarah. Find Taylor, tell him to report to Block House Five immediately!” Without waiting for a reply she signed off and returned to examining the schematics. She was a structural engineer but these weren’t building schematics. Taylor was a design engineer; he’d be clued in to what these were. Where is he? She asked herself impatiently.

  After a few minutes, an out of breath Taylor arrived. “Yes, ma’am”

  At last! “What are those? Best guess will do,” Sarah indicated to the still changing images.

  Taylor watched intently for a few moments then shook his head and watched for a few more moments, turned to Sarah and said, “Ships, ma’am, and not just any ships. I would say warships… Pretty big ones at that.”

  #

  Office of the President of the Terran Republic - Geneva - Earth

  Bartholomew McMullen, by a special act of Senate, had been allowed to run for a consecutive third term as president and had won a landslide victory. In these rapidly changing times it seemed that the voters wanted someone familiar to trust their fate to, and that man was Bartholomew McMullen, twenty-third President of the Terran Republic.

  Bartholomew sat at the base of a horse shoe-shaped table, with his cabinet and trusted advisers arranged on either side of him. A holo cube easily ten metres across directly in front of him. He had just watched Robert Ignico’s follow-up report for the second time, having viewed it in private earlier that day, describing the contents of Block House Five.

  He had taken the opportunity to gauge the reactions of the group assembled around him as the report played out. Faces showed a multitude of reactions from enthusiasm at the prospects for the scientific advancement that the new information provided to apprehension as to why there was such detail on weaponry.

  At the realisation that it had required human DNA to activate the final lectern, an air of thoughtful silence settled around the table. The report concluded and heads turned to look at the President, waiting for him to speak. I knew I should have retired, Bartholomew thought to himself.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “Your faces look like mine did when I first viewed Dr Ignico’s report a few hours ago. It’s a lot to take, in so let me hit the highlights as I see them.” Bartholomew stood up and slowly walked around the back of table with his hands clasped behind his back. He summarised the salient points as he saw them. “Firstly, this seems to be an alien race’s complete reference library. Everything they have ever done or been is stored here.” Bartholomew paused his slow pace and brought his hands to his front, posing in a thoughtful manner. “Secondly, what is the significance of the massive and detailed military database? If I consider this with the obvious nuclear bombardment on the surface, I begin to wonder – is this library a last ditch attempt to preserve what was the accumulated knowledge of an entire civilisation? If so, preserve it for whom?” Bartholomew walked back to his seat at the base of the table and sat as he contemplated out loud. “Was it a threat from factions within their own society or some external force? And thirdly, Block House Five.” He looked in turn at each of the people sitting at the horseshoe table, catching the eyes of just a few who were brave enough to look directly at him, “How did the lectern in Block House Five recognise human DNA so quickly? And why did it trigger the release of the apparently encrypted information?” Bartholomew broke his gaze from those in the room and looked down towards the table. He shook his head slightly, before raising his eyes and addressing the room again. “This causes me the most concern and I am sure it will be the source of the most consternation and worry amongst our people.

  Nods around the table assured Bartholomew that he had hit the proverbial nail on the head with that point.

  “The only saving grace I can see, at this moment in time, is that – according to the Marco Polo’s initial assessment and subsequent work by the Magellan –– the nuclear bombardment on the planet’s surface occurred some seven hundred years ago. This point must be emphasised to the general population, to allay fears of any immediate attack. Whatever disaster overtook this unfortunate civilisation, we can rest assured it is not about to visit us tomorrow.”

  A gruff “We hope,” sounded from Bartholomew’s right.

  Bartholomew looked toward the source of the comment, straight into the eyes of Adm. Olaf Helset of the Terran Defence Force. Standing at a 180 centimetres tall, broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waste, blond, close cropped hair and chiselled jaw with grey eyes the colour of the North Sea (which his Viking
ancestors had traversed with impunity those centuries before). Helset was a man who spoke his mind and hated politicians of all ilk, in the way only a military man could.

  “Do you have something to say, Admiral?” enquired Bartholomew with a smile that did not reach his eyes.

  “I am a military man, Mr President, charged with protecting the Terran Republic. But for these past 150 years, the only threat to the Republic has come from the odd pirate attacking merchantmen plying their trade within the Solar System. The Defence Force is more like a coast guard than any sort of standing navy. There has simply been no requirement for such a force. So I truly hope, and I mean this with all my heart, that this civilisation destroyed itself. If it didn’t, and whoever did this comes calling on us, then it will be a very short, one-sided fight.”

  There was a stunned silence for a moment, before the room filled with a cacophony of noise as each cabinet member attempted to voice their concerns. Bartholomew banged his fist on the table and called, “Enough!” The room fell silent once more. Looking slowly around the room, Bartholomew said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we can all agree that without more information any statement to the public at this time would be precipitous. I suggest our course of action is to wait until we have examined the data more thoroughly, before we release any statements to the public. As I speak, our scientists at Stickney Base on Phobos are working on deciphering the Rubicon data, including Block House Five.”

  There was a general murmur from the room. “My decision is final: we wait.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Our Rosetta Stone

  Stickney Base - Phobos - Orbiting Mars

  Stickney Base was located in Stickney Crater on the Martian moon of Phobos. Phobos was only seventeen by fourteen by eleven kilometres in diameter and Stickney Base was five kilometres across. The base filled the entire crater. It had the effect of making the base look even larger than it actually was.