I paused to zip up my jacket against the wind, and stared down into the stream. There were tiny animals in the water, I’d seen them in the science team’s microscopes. They were hardy creatures, and I felt sorry for them. If the science team was right, and I’d seen their evidence with my own eyes, Newark had once had abundant life. There had at least been flying insects or something similar, whatever had spread pollen from flower to flower. Then the planet had somehow become locked in an ice age. It was now a frozen, chilly, icy, rainy, thoroughly miserable place, but once it had been a decent place for life, at least around the equator. Likely, I would never see Newark again after we left, and I couldn’t imagine another species was choosing the planet for a colony.
A gust of wind shook me out of my daydream. I tried to step on rocks to cross the stream, but the rocks were slippery, and I skidded off into the cold water up to my knees. Crap. Whatever reason Adams wanted me at the cathedral, it had better be damned good.
Adams was waiting for me at the entrance with a big flashlight. Even with Skippy controlling the satellite images, we didn't like to use artificial light in the open, it was too risky. Whatever she wanted me to see, it didn't have her scared. The expression on her face was, I thought, excited. And sad. A deep sadness. "What's the big secret, Adams?"
She turned and walked toward the back of the cathedral, toward the large, flat stone we called the altar. "You'll see, sir."
We had to clamber over stones, and squeeze around a large boulder that had once been part of the ceiling, I had never been this far back into the cavern before. The science team, with a lot of help from soldiers who were bored and had nothing else to do, had excavated a huge pile of stones that had blocked the way into what we thought might be a much larger chamber. There was not yet any large cavern, there was a path has been made to get by the big boulder. Then we had to walk steeply up through a long, low-ceilinged passage, and into a tall, narrow chamber. As I crouched down in the passage, nearly scraping my head on the ceiling, I grumbled “Adams, if this is surprise party for my birthday or something, there had better be a big goddamn cake.”
There was no cake. There was a well-lit chamber, square, roughly ten meters on a wide, and it was tall, perhaps six meters. It was square. Square. Like, almost precisely. In some areas, there were indentations in the walls, that had once been filled with some sort of brick and plaster, the plaster had weakened over time, and some bricks had tumbled onto the floor. On the floor, there was a stacked pile of bricks, and another stack of carved stones. Carved. Artificial. None of what I saw could have been natural. I gasped, and looked up at Adams. She nodded. "I know, sir. Dr. Graziano found it this morning."
"And you waited until now to tell me?"
Graziano explained. "We wanted to be certain, that these stones don't simply give the appearance of having been carved. These stones are old, Colonel. Old. They would have flaked off and looked like much of nothing, if this chamber hadn't kept them dry all this time."
"All what time? How long ago?" If there were other sentient beings on Newark, I wanted to know immediately.
He shrugged. "I don't know. Not yet. I'll need Mr. Skippy to assist with the analysis. Very old. Hundreds of thousands of years, at the very least. Probably more." He ran a hand lightly along one carved edge. "Whoever made this, they are long gone from here.”
“Huh,” I said, glancing around the rock chamber. The years had eroded it somewhat, still I could see the stone walls had been shaped, smoothed, by someone’s hand long ago. “So, what, you think some aliens took shelter here? They got stuck on Newark, and created this place to take shelter, while they waited for rescue?” Enlarging a chamber is something that I could see a stranded starship crew doing, especially if they didn’t have powercells for heat like we did. Why they would carve stones into blocks made little sense. Why would they need to build a wall? “Were they Kristang?”
Graziano glanced at Adams, and she gave a little shrug. “He doesn’t know,” she said to the scientist. “I thought he should see for himself.”
“We found it only a few hours ago.” Graziano explained to me. “Come this way, please, Colonel Bishop.” He pointed to an opening in the far wall that was so low, he needed to get on hands and knees and crawl. The opening had at one time been blocked up by stones, which Graziano and his team had carefully removed. I followed on hands and knees, with Adams behind me. Graziano and Adams had lights, I should have brought one along. That was stupid of me, it was growing dark outside anyway. The passageway we had to crawl through was only twenty feet long, it soon opened up into another chamber, this one far larger. It had also worked by sentient beings, the walls were smooth and straight.
That wasn’t all. There were bones. Bones, and tools. Bronze tools. Axes, shovels, spears, swords, arrowheads. The tools were mostly upright in ceramic containers, with a few scattered on the floor, where their ceramic containers had broken.
None of the bones were scattered, they were all carefully laid on carved stone slabs. The bodies may have been dressed in fine clothing, or wrapped in ceremonial cloth, now they were only bones. Some had bronze shields laid atop them, some without. I knelt down to examine one set of bones. Bipedal, like us. Two arms, two legs, a head with holes for two eyes, and an opening for a nose that was more horizontal than humans. The leg bones were heavy. And they were short, shorter than the average human. Shorter than humans used to be, in ages past? I didn’t know.
The carvings on the slabs were eroded, their edges rounded. I reached out to touch a carving, when Graziano coughed. “Sorry,” I said guiltily, looking at the gloves he was wearing. “I wanted to see if these carvings show what they looked like.”
“They do,” he pointed at one slab, where Doctors Venkman and Friedlander were painstakingly clearing off accumulated dust with soft brushes. Graziano led me over to a shield which had been removed from the body it covered. The shield had been partly cleared of corrosion, exposing an area which depicted a figure, in highly realistic detail. The figure stood on two legs, it carried a sword in one hand, and some type of plant or branches in the other. It was overall more squat and bulky than a modern human, and what I thought at first was a helmet was, after close inspection, a bony ridge on top of its head. I glanced between the bones on the stone slab to the depiction on the shield, the bones also had a bony ridge. “They were shorter than us,” I remarked without thinking.
“The higher gravity,” Graziano noted, “thicker bones, also.”
“This was not a starship crew,” I said almost to myself, considering the bronze tools. Surely any species advanced enough to make starships would have tools of steel rather than bronze. Or they would have tools constructed of composites or exotic materials. Not bronze. “These creat-” almost I said ‘creatures’. These were not mere creatures. They created tools be working metal. These were people. “These people, were natives here. How is this possible? On this frozen planet?”
“Yes” Venkman said, standing up to brush the dust off her pants. “These were natives. Remember what I showed you about the plants that used to have flowers? Newark used to be warmer, significantly warmer. These people, as you say, are more evidence to support that conclusion.”
“And then, what?” I asked, peering intently at the figure on the bronze shield. “The planet went into an ice age, and they all died? Everything? Not only them, all planets and animals on land went extinct?”
“We don’t understand how,” Friedlander joined the conversation, he was a rocket scientist on loan to UNEF from NASA. “We may never know the mechanism, not unless we stay here and study this planet much longer than we plan to.”
“They all died?” I couldn’t process that. An entire species, and entire civilization, gone. Completely wiped out. “Because of an ice age?”
“Yes,” Venkman replied. “This is not unprecedented. There is genetic evidence that the total human population shrank to as few as five or ten thousand people, around seventy thousand years ago.”
“The Toba catastrophy,” Graziano started to say.
“That is only one theory,” Friedlander interjected, “and there is contradictory evidence.”
“Toba?” I asked, wondering if T-O-B-A was an acronym for something.
“Toba was a supervolcano in Indonesia, it erupted around seventy thousand years ago,” Venkman explained, “and left a thick layer of ash around the planet. There is a theory that the Toba event caused a global winter. And that event roughly coincides with a bottleneck in human genetic diversity. The point, Colonel, is that we came close to humanity going extinct perhaps several times. With the severe changes to temperatures on Newark, it is not surprising that a relatively advanced civilization would not have been able to adapt quickly enough to survive. Imagine if ice had advanced down from the poles to the equator on Earth, during the time of ancient Egypt or Sumeria. Would those peoples have been able to survive?” She shook her head.
“They all died,” I said quietly, and no one responded, they all knew I wasn’t asking a question. “We are near the equator here, they came here as the temperature dropped? To, what, try to survive in caves? Why wouldn’t they have chosen the caverns we are living in now? The cathedral is too open,” I pointed out. That’s why we weren’t living in it.
Graziano spoke first. “We think, Colonel, that what we call the cathedral used to extend forward much further, we believe the canyon outside did not exist back then. It was probably an ordinary stream on the surface in that time. Over the years, glaciers advanced, retreated, advanced, retreated again, over and over, and the ice and seasonal melt flooding carved the canyon. The roof of the cathedral was underground back then, and with hot springs around, these caverns would have been one of the last places the natives,” he pointed to the dry bones, “could have survived the deep freeze. They held out here, the last of their kind, until the food ran out, or diseases took them. With the population clustered tightly together here, pathogens could have spread widely, especially with these people stressed from severe cold and poor nutrition.”
“The weight of the glacier collapsed the roof of the cavern?” I didn’t like hearing that. If one roof could collapse, then the roofs of our two caverns could be unstable, weakened by past glaciers.
“That is possible, yes, it is more likely that seasonal flooding of the stream slowly wore away material above the cavern, exposing the stones that formed the roof. It would have been weakened, water gets in, freezes, causes cracks. The cracks widen, more water seeps in. It is a slow process. Over the course of a hundred thousand years, perhaps a million years, water is unstoppable.”
“Millions?” I asked, surprised.
“As of now, we don’t know,” Graziano admitted. “This chamber was sealed until we broke in, the stones were set very closely together, using almost no mortar to fill the gaps. Moisture and oxygen were kept out, and this chamber is above the cathedral, it is protected from flooding, We see marks of flooding on the walls of the cathedral chamber, the flood marks reach only one third of the way up that low-ceilinged passageway you climbed.”
I looked around the chamber. “They didn’t live in here. This was a tomb. They left the bodies, and sealed it behind them.”
“We think so, yes,” Venkman said. “It may have been one of the last things they did. Perhaps the very last thing. I would not be surprised to find more bones, and more tools, beneath the floor of the cathedral. The items here, and in the chamber before this one, were preserved, because moisture and oxygen were kept out, after the chambers were sealed.”
“I can’t imagine this,” I said with complete candor. A civilization, an entire species, moving steadily toward the equator as the cold crept down from the poles, until they reached the furthest point they could go, and it, too, began to freeze.
“No one can,” Friedlander said quietly.
News of the discoveries at the cathedral complex spread like wildfire among our small population, and with news inevitably came rumors. By the following morning, so many people wanted to visit the cathedral complex that I knew I had to do something about it. Graziano, who had slept at the cathedral overnight, had come back to the main cavern for more supplies that morning, so I found him talking with Major Simms. "Doctor Graziano,” I said, “could you put together a briefing of what we think we know at the moment? There are a lot of rumors flying around, there's no reason for disinformation."
Simms snorted when I said that. I knew what she was thinking. "Sorry, Major," I offered, "there was a time when disinformation was necessary, on Paradise. I couldn't tell the truth about Skippy, without revealing it to the people who were staying behind. And we couldn't risk them telling the Ruhar, or Kristang, or whoever is in control of Paradise at the time. Besides," I gave a grin that I hoped would lighten the mood, "that was a damned inspiring speech I made, right?"
Simms snorted. "It wasn't your speech, sir. Frankly, given your, what little I knew of your reputation," she glanced at me to gauge my reaction, "I was afraid the special forces mission you claimed to be running would be some slap-dash operation, thrown together at the last minute."
"Like going after an invading force with an ice cream truck?"
"Yes, sir. I didn't know much about you, before you fell out of the sky onto my base in a stolen Ruhar spaceship. All I knew was, you did some rash thing on Earth, and got lucky, then you got promoted as a publicity stunt for the Ruhar. Sorry, sir, that's what most people were thinking, at the time."
"No apology needed, Major, I knew it was a publicity stunt. I was afraid UNEF would have me going around giving speeches to sell war bonds or something, before they assigned me to plant potatoes."
Simms nodded. "That Dodo you flew in, that was more convincing than any speech; being able to steal and fly an alien spacecraft was impressive. Oh, and when you came out of the Dodo, stunned those Ruhar, and they weren't able to shoot back. I saw that happen, one of those Ruhar was totally shocked that his rifle didn't work. That, and the message from UNEF HQ, that I now know Skippy faked," and her mouth turned down at the thought of being manipulated.
"Sorry about that, it was necessary. If it wasn't my speech, what convinced you to come with us?"
"The faked orders from UNEF HQ, and, you caught us at the right moment. You said you were going to hit the Kristang, not the Ruhar, we'd all heard rumors about what was going on back on Earth. I'd seen fortune cookies myself, we got them regularly enough when we opened boxes at the warehouse. You were the first UNEF officer who told us what we all wanted to hear; that we were taking action against the Kristang. We also, especially us in the supply corps, figured we didn't have much to lose."
"How's that?" I couldn't understand what she meant by that last remark.
"We knew, better than anyone else, how thin our food stocks were getting back then," Simms explained. "You sent Chang and Adams to the warehouse, to check on supplies, and they came back to the Dodo saying supplies were adequate, right?"
That was a while ago, I had to pause to think back that far. "Uh, sure."
"What they didn't know was the warehouse was a lot more empty than it looked. My aide and I would go into the warehouse, late at night, with a wheelbarrow of rocks, we used the rocks to fill food boxes that we pushed to the back of the shelves. Then we'd fudge the inventory records, so even my people didn't know how thin our supplies were. I gave orders that we weren't to issue the last two boxes of anything with my direct approval, so people didn't unknowingly issue a box of rocks to the field. When we loaded up the Dodo, I made sure we got only real food containers, not rocks."
That surprised me. "Major, I knew our food stocks were running low, I had no idea-"
"HQ knew," she said. "They were closing regional logistics centers, supposedly to consolidate operations as we cleared hamsters by sector, the real reason is that HQ didn't want people to see empty warehouses. You take what little supplies are left, concentrate the supplies in a few logistics bases, and when people see those bases have plenty of supplies, they
think we're good. They didn't see the overall situation. My base was scheduled to shut down in two weeks, before the Ruhar took the planet back. I was sweating that, by the end of two weeks, I figured all we'd have left is boxes of rocks. My CO knew about me faking inventory records, I got the idea from an intel officer with UNEF HQ."
"Intel," I said sourly. "Yeah, I know the type." As the words came out of my mouth, I realized that, however I'd felt screwed by my experience with Intel operations, I'd done worse, much worse. I had deceived people, concealed the truth, revealed only those parts of the truth I felt was convenient at the time. All for a good cause, of course. If I hadn't deceived people, we would never have gotten enough volunteers to capture a Kristang starship, a Thuranin star carrier, and to raid an asteroid base to get an Elder controller device to shut down the wormhole that gave the enemy access to Earth. With me initially lying to people, Earth would still be under the cruel control of the Kristang. It had all been worth it, I would do it again without regret. That didn't make me feel any better about having done it. Maybe all people who work in Intel feel that way, until they get used to it.
"Sir," Williams spoke up to defend me, "however you did it, we on Earth are very grateful. Things were getting desperate. It was bad enough what the lizards were doing on Earth, it was almost worse that we had no communication with the ExFor, we knew you had landed on Pradassis, that's all the Kristang told us."
Simms and I shared a knowing look. "We didn't hear anything from Earth," she said sadly, "until we got our first fortune cookie. You know about the fortune cookies?" She asked the question to Williams.
"Not until I read your debriefing," Williams said, "that must have been a closely-held secret on Earth."
"And then the fortune cookies stopped," Simms said, "because the Kristang stopped bringing supplies from Earth."
"Yes," Williams added. "We knew things were going south for the ExFor, when the Kristang shut down the space elevator in Ecuador. The thinking on Earth was, the only reason to do that was they didn't need to ship a lot of supplies offworld anymore. There were rumors going around that the entire Expeditionary Force had been wiped out, we knew the Kristang on Earth were pissed about something, I guess that must have been the Ruhar raid when your team shot down those two dropships, the Whales?"
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 25