by Bodicea
This seemed incredibly risky. “Can’t you develop a counter-agent without live samples?” Keeler asked. “We have computer models. We know what it does.” Lear shook her head. “We could never build a totally reliable counter-agent without testing it on the real thing. Indeed, we will make it our prime objective. We will assign a team to secure an actual sample under extreme quarantine protocols.”
“Absolutely not,” Keeler told her after seeing Alkema give a slight, subtle shake of the head.
“We have protocols for this, commander. We simply isolate the pathogen in a highly secure environment. We could refit an Aves as a mobile laboratory, isolate it from the ship. At the end, the team abandons the ship in escape pods and we send the Aves back to the planet, or better yet into the sun. The crew decontaminates for forty-four hours and we jettison the escape pods. It would be extremely safe.”
Keeler looked to Miller and Alkema. Alkema looked very doubtful. Miller looked bored and morose, but also disapproving. “Negative. Oz has spoken.”
“Commander, this pathogen is virulent and deadly. The fact of its existence warrants extreme measures. We must develop a counter-agent.”
“I said, ‘Oz has spoken.’ You will have to make do with remote data from the probe. We can test the counter-agent on the surface.”
“We can’t reliably develop an antigen without a live pathogen,” Lear protested.
Alkema had the answer. “And/oroids.”
Keeler and Lear looked him. “Explain.”
“A surface team of and/oroids with a sympathetic link to technicians on board Pegasus can achieve the same thing as bringing samples of the pathogen to Pegasus, with zero risk to the crew.”
“Sympathetic link?” Keeler asked. This was a new term for him, probably referring to something technical that he, as commander, usually did not need to concern himself with.
Alkema explained. “A person on the ship can establish a sensory link with an and/oroid on the surface. Everything the and/oroid sees, feels, hears, and smells, the person on the other end of the link would as well. The link was designed for work in extreme environments, like repairs inside the reactor core, or recovery missions on planets with hazardous atmospheres. It could work on this planet, too.”
“The and/oroids go down, they never come back?”
“Just their sensory data.”
Keeler liked the idea. “Should ought to be enough. I’ll authorize it.”
“Ghosts,” Lt. Commander Miller muttered quietly from the rear of the room.
“Excuse me?” Keeler said.
“We’ll be like ghosts, haunting a dead world, moving about, seeing, hearing, feeling, but not really being there, and never leaving.” Miller said.
“That is a romantic way of thinking about it,” said Lear, “but not a useful one.”
Keeler wiped a damp cowlick from his forehead, depositing a few drops of water on the table. “Don’t make me have to separate you two. Miller’s attitude may be sentimental, but it’s proper. What happened to this world is nothing less than a crime and a tragedy … that gives lie to any way we could have to express it. Let us not go in like scavengers and pick their bones, but let’s try to give them some honor. We owe it to the colony to develop a thorough record of everything we can learn about it. We will have to explore the surface by proxy.”
He looked around the room. “Lieutenant Mastermind, well-done. I want you to begin on this immediately. You’re dismissed. Dave, Lieutenant, I mean, Specialist, Alkema, will assist you when the rest of us are finished here. ” He pointed to Partridge. “Doctor-guy, you too, you’re dismissed.”
Mastermind and Partridge left, leaving Keeler alone with a group of people small enough, expert enough, and with a range of opinions wide enough, to help him sort out the big question on his mind. Lear looked suspiciously at Alkema. Why was this young pup sitting in on this meeting. She decided not to challenge his presence. The commander himself has requested that he stay. Who was she to argue.
Keeler spoke gravely. “Correct me if I am wrong, but based on limited knowledge of microbiology, I am assuming there is no way this pathogen was part of this planet’s natural environment.”
Lear was quiet for a moment, and looked distracted. She took a deep breath. “Commander, if what Lieutenant Mastermind tells me is true, this pathogen has characteristics that make it look… very doubtful that it occurred naturally.”
“Frankly, if this were natural part of the ecosystem, I don’t think they could have built a billion-level civilization here.” The words were out before Keeler was aware he was speaking out loud. “I apologize. We are talking about an engineered pathogen… a bio-weapon. It fits in with the war scenario. Lt. Honeywell, am I correct in assuming that this makes the alien attack hypothesis more probable?”
“Affirmative, commander.”
“So, we have crossed a hundred and seventy light years of space to find a human colony, one of our worlds, has been bombed, irradiated, and finally sterilized with a deadly artificial pathogen. Now, I have to ask you, and I really need to know, who did this? Was this an internecine conflict that got out of hand, is this a new enemy, or could it be that some of our alien acquaintances are also awakening after a long sleep.”
“Whoever unleashed this weapon wanted to make sure all human life was annihilated,”
Honeywell said. “That strongly suggests aliens to me.”
“No kidding,” Keeler deadpanned. “The attack seems too direct for the Theans, remember, they remained in orbit of Sapphire for nearly twenty years and never fired a shot.”
“The Irradiation of the southern hemisphere reminds me of the attack by the Tarmigans on Hyperion,” Honeywell suggested.
“But that was 6,000 years ago. We have not heard from the Tarmigans in all that time.” If there ever were any Tarmigans, Keeler thought again. He could not help it. His doctoral dissertation had been the Tarmigans were just a myth. “How long ago do you estimate this war happened?” Keeler asked.
Honeywell had been trying to chase that down himself. “We are still trying to estimate the exact date of the attack, but we have narrowed it down to between one hundred sixty five and one hundred eighty-five years ago.”
Keeler was stunned. “That’s practically nothing,” he said. “In space terms, we were a moment too late… just a moment.”
Lear cut in sharply. “If the attack was that recent, we need to send warnings to the Republic Defense Directorate and the Permanent Sapphire Defense Situation.”
“I know we can count on you to cover that Executive Commander Lear.” the Commander said drily. That Ex. Cmdr Lear sent clandestine reports back to her government was one of the ship’s most well-known secrets.
Honeywell drummed the top of the desk. “Everything I’ve seen so far tells me that the bombings and the fighting started years before this pathogen was released. It’s like the war kept escalating until somebody decided the war wasn’t going to work out the way they wanted. So, somebody released an ultimate doomsday weapon and killed off the entire colony.”
“What if it wasn’t aliens?” Keeler mused. “We only knew of a handful of alien races, but there were a lot of other human colonies. Maybe they were attacked from space, but by other humans.”
Alkema was almost floored by this. “I can’t believe humans would do that to each other.”
“They did that and worse during the Crusades,” the Commander assured him.
“Za, but we were so much more… primitive then.” Alkema’s voice fell off by the time he got to the end. The savagery he had witnessed on EdenWorld had proven that not all humans lived in the state of grace enjoyed by Sapphire and Republic.
“The first thought that occurred to me was the aliens at Meridian. Perhaps they tried to colonize this world as well,” Alkema said. “Perhaps the Medeans caught on more quickly, and fought back.”
Keeler turned to Miller. “What do you think of Dave’s theory?” He was surprised that Miller had not yet jumped
right in with a counter-analysis.
“It doesn’t look like Meridian,” Miller said.
“Could you elaborate?”
Miller sighed, as though half-distracted, as though annoyed at having to explain something they should have considered for themselves. “Meridian was about infection and colonization through transformation. Meridian provided the main requirement for the alien infiltration, the vector, if you will, by having a centralized computer system. There is no sign of such a central network on Medea. Furthermore, there is no sign of an alien probe, such as the kind that carried the alien contagion to Meridian. It doesn’t look like beastshit, and it doesn’t smell like beastshit, so it probably isn’t beastshit.”
Keeler found himself both relieved that his Chief Tactical Officer was contributing again, and annoyed that his tone remained sullen and irritable. He addressed him like a difficult student at the University where he had once taught. “Lt. Commander Miller, could you tell us what you make of the pattern of destruction here.”
Miller stood and walked slowly toward the observation window. Once there, he zoomed in on the planet, so that it was four times larger and more detailed. He highlighted a pattern of one hundred and sixty seven craters on the surface. “This is an orbital bombardment pattern, not from a surface exchange.”
He highlighted a different area. “Then, there is a second wave attack, about ten years later.
Another twenty-six cities are destroyed, across the planet, but the military bases remain intact.
Five years later, the southern hemisphere is flash irradiated.”
“Then, we have this third wave of attack, much larger, and with higher-yield weapons than any of the first two. Then, it’s quiet for a while. You can see evidence of rebuilding in the cities the orbital bombardments partly, but not completely, destroyed.” Miller highlighted some other spots on the planetary map. “We reasonably believe these twenty-five positions are all military bases of operations. We have looked at eleven of them up close, and all of them were constructed just before the final extinction happened, each one near a major population center. Even when the population centers were destroyed by weapons of mass destruction, the bases came through without a scratch. Nations at war don’t attack cities and leave military bases intact.”
“We also see evidence of extensive destruction in between the orbital bombardments.” He highlighted another area of the map identified as Medea Landmass Kappa. It was an Island sub-continent in the temperate zone of the planet’s northern hemisphere. It was shaped like a portion of the human digestive system with a very serious ulcer. “There were forty-seven settlements here and six more that had not survived the initial bombardment of the planet. The remaining towns ranged in size from 4,000 to 163,000 people.” He brought up imagery from orbital and lower atmosphere probes. “We see the same pattern of damage in every settlement; every window shattered, the upper floors of each building splintered to bits.” They looked like tree trunks that had cracked in the middle, leaving sharp spikes of wood sticking up into the air. Most every street and roadway was cracked like parched earth. Even the rocks had split in half.
“You may be asking, ‘what could account for the pattern of damage?’ I will tell you, focused sonic disruption. Very loud, sustained noise at a precise frequency. Shatters everything, including human bone. I never tried it myself. Way too dangerous.” His voice sounded almost wistful.
“Finally, twenty or thirty years after the first bombardment, by my estimate, the pathogen is unleashed. That’s when it ends. All human… all animal life on the planet is wiped in … at the most… a day.”
“The pattern I see is a steady escalation of conflict that went from atomic weapons to quantum weapons to anti-matter to flash irradiation and finally total annihilation, punctuated by lower level battlefield conflicts. It went on for years, getting worse and worse until somebody unleashed the ultimate weapon, which tells me it wasn’t human. Humans would have stopped at some point, if not out of self-preservation then at least because their society was too wounded to go on fighting.”
“So, you think the attackers were from off-world.”
“They had to have. I’ve been sure of that since the first probe data came back. It didn’t make sense to me, though. Why would somebody cross space to come to this planet, fight a long-drawn out war, exterminate the population and then leave without a trace? That makes no sense. Not if your intent was conquest.”
“What other motive could there be?” Lear asked. “Animus toward humanity? Genocide?”
“If they just hated humans, they would have begun with the pathogen, or kept bombing until everything was leveled. Those bombardments not only destroyed cities, they kicked dust in the atmosphere, they poisoned the water, they killed the crops. They could have wiped out this colony with the first attack, if they had wanted to. So, why didn’t they?” He paused. He saw that he had their fully committed attention. You could have heard a neutrino collide with a neutron in that room. “If you were an alien culture, and you wanted to see how humans would respond and how long they were willing to fight, you might unleash a steadily increasing series of plagues and see how humans fought back, and how they rebuilt.”
Keeler was stung by what his officer was suggesting. “Are you suggesting this world was like alien target practice?”
“I’ve looked at the tactical reports from every angle and I keep getting back to that. The pattern of weapon use, the sequence of events, the final total annihilation … that’s the explanation that fits the evidence best. If you want to call it target practice, or a practice run for a war with humanity, then call it that, but, I believe that these humans were systematically annihilated. The pathogen was only the final blow.”
“As for who carried out this experiment,” Miller continued. “Five thousand years is ample time for other civilizations to arise. A species that was just learning to forge iron when humans colonized the galaxy could develop hyper-drive spaceships and world-killer weapons while we were sleeping. Now, they move out into the galaxy and find out we have all the good planets, and the only way to get them is to get rid of us.” He looked around the table for a bit. “I’m finished, if anyone has anything else to add.”
“Assuming you’re correct,” Keeler said, “How do we go about finding out who they were.
How do we test your hypothesis?”
“Send down more and/oroids and have them concentrate on the military installations.
That’s where the tactical data will be. See if we can find out who they were fighting.”
“We have three probes exploring probably military areas right now,” Honeywell said. “We should be getting data shortly.”
“We should also put the ship into a state of higher alert,” said Lear. “Whoever attacked may still be around, or they may return.”
Keeler nodded. “Put all stations at Alert Situation 3 until further notice.” CHAPTER THREE
The one-way ships dispatched from Pegasus to the surface were reconfigured lifepods; oblong cylinders narrow at one end, wider at the other. Each carried four and/oroids and a complement of less anthropomorphic probes. And/oroids mimicked the human shape, but would never be mistaken for people. Their skin gleamed like liquid metal, they had no eyes or faces, and no souls. Pegasus had launched six and/oroid quartets, to the surface, and was selecting the most promising locations to dispatch at least four more. One special team in a mobile laboratory, mind-linked to the Pathogenic Laboratory on Pegasus, was examining the pathogen, in hopes of developing an antidote.
Per Lt. Commander Miller’s suggestion, one pair of and/oroids was exploring one of the areas determined to be a possible military facility. A silvery one and coppery one made their way through a large fortified complex laying forty kilometers west of the nearest city. They had been directed to an underground set of buildings, sealed behind heavy blast doors, that was guessed to be a reinforced command bunker of some kind.
The and/oroids had gained access by attac
hing an energizer from their transport pod to the power feeds on the exterior of the structure, providing enough energy for lights and doors to work. (Across the planet, more energizers were being attached to buildings and data terminals, in hopes of retrieving more information about Medea, its inhabitants, and its killers.)
The and/oroid team entered an oval chamber and stumbled over some object on the floor.
The coppery one went to night vision and raised the object into its field of view to examine it.
A human skull gazed back at it from empty and hollow eye-sockets. The and/oroid gently replaced it on the ground and continued working its way inward. The bunker was cut through with a labyrinth of chambers and hallways. Humans would easily have become confused, but the and/oroids created maps as they traveled, never doubled back, never got lost, and never quivered in fear of what lay in the next darkened chamber. For forty-two hours, they made their way deeper and deeper into the core of the building until, 200 meters underground, they could go no further.
It was on this deepest level that the two man-machines came across a medical laboratory.
The skeletal remains of six individuals lay on the floor, around a huge and frightening lab table, surrounded by instruments for cutting flesh and bone, for collecting fluids, and probing into cavities. On top of the lab table was something not human.
Its flesh was thick, mottled green and black (although this may have been a natural state of decay) and dried like old leather left in the sun too long. Before it had died, the skin had been peeled back from one corner of its large, neckless head, revealing a shining metal plate that covered half of its skull. An artificial eyepiece (not unlike their own, but less advanced) wrapped around the left part of the head, covering the eye and ear and attached to electronic devices that occupied nearly a third of the volume of the skull. The portion of the skull that had been cut away was not to be found.
The arms of the creature were long, and ended in thick four-fingered hands. The outer digits were opposable, the middle two digits hyper-elongated, without fingernails, but with hardened points covering the tips. Its brain, soft tissues and organs had been eaten away by the pathogen.