“I wasn’t going to disturb you just yet,” said Andre, in his very obviously ‘I’m cross with you Jeneen and we will talk about this later’ voice.
“If you want to head back up the steps until we’ve cleared this up I will understand,” he concluded.
Habid looked down at the tops of the trees, now just below them, and through to patches of ground. He turned his head, and Celia could tell he was listening intently. He turned toward her and shook his head. He hadn’t picked up anything.
“We’re close, Andre,” said Celia. “The steps stop at some sort of alcove in the rock. I think it’s a doorway. There is a track leading away into the forest, a well-used forest trail perhaps, but it isn’t of Rothii origin. I think we’re meant to enter the mountain through the alcove.
“Keep scanning for Olongetti, and tell me the instant you’ve got something tangible,” she said to the shuttle. Then she had a brief discussion with Habid. The senior Hudnee nodded, and the two pilots moved to a state of readiness. Weapons appeared, looking small in their broad hands, and odd-shaped canisters and discs went onto a wide belt they fixed around themselves.
Celia had to force herself to ignore the thought there might be someone, or something, creeping up on them through the forest. She forced her feet to descend the last dozen or so steps. Then she looked into the alcove, and was filled with elation.
The recess in the rock wall had been machined smooth, and looked for all the world like a doorway without an outline of a door. The one feature in the smooth rock was a horizontal slot that looked the right size to take a human hand.
Celia and Roberto were looking at the recess when a long, low note sounded from the hills just above the plateau. They stopped talking, listening for the sound to be repeated, and then heard an answering call from the forest directly in front of them. It was hard to gauge distance, but it sounded like it was still some distance away.
“The natives know we’re here,” said Celia matter-of-factly.
“And I for one think we ought to hurry up and find a way into the plateau before we’re knee deep in Olongetti,” said Roberto. The situation was making him uneasy, even with the Hud pilots around and the firepower of the shuttle waiting on top of the plateau.
“Well, finding a way into the plateau has something to do with this slot,” said Celia, shining a light into the recess but making no sense of the ridges and bumps she could see inside it.
“Well, count me out,” said Roberto, grasping the implications of the slot in the wall immediately.
“Count you out of what?” said Celia, who didn’t understand the purpose of the slot yet. Roberto told her.
“Oh, move your idiot self over,” she said, pushing Roberto to one side and sticking her hand through the slot in the door. There was the faint hiss of hydraulics, and Celia yelped as her hand was held firmly between something like rubber rollers. Then her hand went completely numb. There was the sound of something impacting on human flesh, and her hand was released.
“Didn’t feel a thing!” she said wonderingly, looking at the place where a small wedge of skin and tissue had been removed from her middle finger.
“It’s not bleeding,” said Tunak, looking on in fascination. Then he hurried back to join Habid, who was scanning the undergrowth in the forest.
“There is something on the cut to stop the bleeding,” said Celia. “It’s probably shutting down the capillaries around the site, and it seems to have knit the flesh together.”
“I didn’t mean for you to put your own hand in the slot,” said Roberto, mortified he’d forced his boss, and friend, into being the test subject.
“Forget it,” said Celia. “It goes with the position and the pay. I wouldn’t have let you put yourself at risk.”
“That was a DNA test,” she continued, “to see if we’re descended from the Human population the Rothii transferred to Earth 200 thousand years ago.”
Roberto nodded. He had come to the same conclusion.
“It was more than a DNA test, I think,” she continued. “They wanted a sample of nerve tissue as well, to see what our speed and agility is like. They will be interested in how we’ve developed in the intervening thousands of years.”
Neither of them was ready to ask who ‘they’ were yet. A 200 thousand year old AI of some sort, most likely. What had it been told about them? What were its operating parameters? They were trusting it to be friendly – they didn’t really have any other choice.
Celia looked at the smooth rock of the alcove, and then Roberto followed her example. Nothing inside the alcove was opening, no handle was appearing. There had to be a Rothii installation on the other side of what was presumably a wall between them. How were they to get to it?
Their ponderings were interrupted by a shout from Habid, and the soft thumb of his weapon as he fired into the trees. Tunak pulled Celia aside as something spun through the space she had just been occupying and shattered against the inside of the alcove.
Tunak took less than a moment to push them both down to the floor of the alcove, and Celia was astonished at his strength. She would have bruises tomorrow, but he was just keeping them alive. A moment later Tunak had stationed himself in front of her and Roberto, and added the thump of his own weapon to that of Habid’s increasingly rapid fire.
Celia knew the Hudnee had been brought from Hud, and trained as pilots, because they could enter a state of extreme alertness for protracted periods of time. That was a huge advantage when they were piloting the new super-fast Javelins Cordez was building at Prometheus. His hope to protect Earth. Now she saw an example of the Hudnee capabilities.
The pilot’s rate of fire increased until their eye-hand coordination was just a blur to Celia, and their weapons fired what seemed like one continuous blast. She saw figures among the trees, so many of them, smeared in vivid colours, surging over their fallen comrades and stampeding forward. They were short, like the Kantari, but much stockier.
It seemed as if nothing would be able to stop them. Their main weapon was a kind of war club, studded with wicked projections, that they spun toward their targets. One whistled through the air toward her and Roberto, and Tunak swatted it out of the air without breaking his firing rhythm. It skidded to a stop in front of her, and she made a mental note to take it back to the shuttle for Andre to analyse.
Realising there was nothing she could do to help, she put her hands over her ears and curled up in the rubble at the bottom of the alcove, making herself as small a target as possible.
Then it was all over.
Celia lifted her head, and looked out at a scene of absolute carnage. Most of the damage to the Olongetti had been inflicted by their own weapons, and there was a fair bit of blood, though it was hard to see among the coloured grease that covered every part of their bodies.
The Hud pilots had kept their weapons on stun, in keeping with the security arrangements Celia had worked out with them. Weapons set to stun were also an enormous saving in energy. The nervous system of most creatures was easy to disrupt, while doing enough damage to kill a creature required a lot more energy, and greater accuracy to be sure the job was completely finished.
“Time to go!” said Habid, covered in sweat and still moving in a jerky, hurried manner. Celia got herself up off the floor in the alcove, and remembered the war club. She picked it up, and found it to be heavier than she expected. It was only then she realised Andre had been yelling in her ear for some time. She could hear Jeneen frantically asking him questions in the background.
“Okay! Okay!” she said into the commslink. “We had a bit of trouble with the Olongetti, but we’ve sorted it out now. All members of the team are accounted for, and no-one’s harmed. Heading back up the steps as fast as we can.”
The two Hudnee who had stayed with the shuttle met them at the top of the stairs, with their weapons ready for use. Celia’s team headed for the shuttle, and once they were aboard Andre called the rearguard in. Moments later they were airborne, and Cel
ia breathed a sigh of relief.
“You’ve got a lot of explaining to do!” said Sallyanne, when Andre connected Celia to the Orouth Freighter. “How did you manage to get yourself shot at? How did the Olongetti get that close to you and Roberto? What the hell have you been playing at down there?”
Celia smiled. It was rare to see Sallyanne this worked up, despite her Brazilian temperament, but it was a cover for the fact she cared about Celia and her team.
“Love you too,” said Celia. “We’ll explain everything as soon as we join you upstairs. We’re going to need your sociological perspectives on the Olongetti. There has to be a way to get them to leave us alone.”
Sallyanne snorted, and signed off.
CHAPTER 21
________________
Celia looked out of the diamond-laminated viewing window of the Orouth Freighter at the world below her. It was world of extremes, of turbulent weather that blocked out the sun, and baking desert, and icy poles. Unfortunately perhaps, it had no seas to moderate those extremest. Despite the differences, life thrived on the planet.
Celia had convened a meeting of all 23 members of the expedition in the cargo bay, the only space big enough to hold them in some comfort. It had taken quite a while to prepare for the meeting, but there were now enough chairs, and tables carrying light refreshments, to meet the numbers.
She had always believed that any team under her command would work at its best if the individuals were included in the decision-making, and this was an example of that idea in practice.
“We are very close to finding out if the Rothii left anything interesting on this planet,” she said, starting the meeting. “We just have a few small, um, problems to overcome.”
There were wry smiles around the group.
“Is there still no sign of anything on the scanners that might be an underground complex?” she said, directing her question to Andre. He waved toward Jeneen, indicating that she should answer the question.
Celia had to stop herself from laughing. Andre’s terseness with Jeneen on top of the plateau must have resulted in a little talk between them about equality in relationships. Andre was the senior technician of the two, but any power imbalance in a relationship rarely ended well.
Here am I, thought Celia, an expert on relationships and too busy to be involved in one. Or is that really the reason, she wondered idly.
“There is nothing on the surface or under it,” said Jeneen. “If the Rothii have hidden something inside the mountain, it’s well shielded.”
“We know what they’re like from the way they hid that archive on Ba’H’Roth,” said Andre. “Extremely good at keeping secrets.”
Celia nodded. His point was a good one.
“How come the shuttle wasn’t able to pick up the Olongetti in the forest?” said Ursul. She had wondered if her Mersa technicians, who normally worked on the K’Sarth shuttle with Andre, had missed something. But all the tests they had done on the shuttle systems since the expedition got back had checked out.
“The Olongetti shielded themselves from our scans,” said Habid, and Celia motioned for him to continue. All the Hudnee were very young by Earth standards, partly due to the Hud year being considerably longer than Earth’s, and it was good to see Habid growing in confidence.
“The grease they were wearing was probably just a coating of warlike colours to them, but it was keeping the heat in their bodies. The trees shielded them as well, and the combination of the two explains why the shuttle didn’t pick them up on infra-red.
“Maybe that was why the Olongetti use the stuff, to be fully warmed up for the charge they made. A ferocious charge seems to be their main military technique, maybe their only military technique when they’re attacking in large numbers.
“I don’t know how the grease works, but they must apply it just before they go into battle or they would overheat. The other point I think we’re missing is that it must have a mineral component to it that helps make them invisible to scanning.”
“That would be very interesting,” said Andre, sitting up in his chair. “Some of the greatest discoveries have been made by following up ancient traditions – old wives tales so to speak – and there might be something useful in this one as well!”
“So we need to get samples of it,” said Celia. “Roberto, put that on the list of things to do next time we meet them.”
Roberto looked up, and saw that she wasn’t joking. He made a note on his electronic ledger.
“Sallyanne,” said Celia, “we need ways to broker some sort of peace treaty with the Olongetti, or at least keep them away while we spend more time at the plateau. What have you got?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid,” said the off-world sociologist. “The plateau is almost certainly a sacred site to the Olongetti, and that means we can’t expect any rational thought from them.
“They will have learned about the traditions they perform on the plateau from their storytellers. Those traditions will be cast in stone to them.
“We can assume they’ve been going there for thousands of years, from the way the steps are worn down leading up to the plateau. That will probably mean there’s some ancestor worship involved, and beliefs like that are the hardest to bring out into the light of day.
“We have done one thing right, though, by stunning their attacking force instead of killing them. It will seem like a miracle to the Olongetti that those warriors are still alive, and it will plant the seed in their minds that we are, perhaps, benevolent gods.
“But any goodwill we’ve generated by doing that will vanish quickly if we continue to ‘despoil’ their sacred place with our presence.”
Sallyanne finished her analysis of the situation, and there was a long silence. No-one wanted to risk their lives by going down into a war zone, even with the heavily-armed Hud pilots along as security.
“Right,” said Celia, leaving that question for later brainstorming between Sallyanne and the research team.
“You mentioned you had some information for us on that war club I brought back?” she said, directing the question at Andre.
“Yes,” said Andre. “The throwing clubs are a nasty piece of work. They’re basically a throwing stick attached to a wooden disc at one end, and the disc is studded with lumps of bronze hammered down to a cutting edge.
“How they’re smelting metals, even at this primitive level, is beyond me,” he said, “but they are. It doesn’t look like they can properly mix the copper and tin yet, or even cast it very well. But that places them at an early bronze age in their development – if Earth classifications mean anything here.
“There’s a black, tarry substance all over the bronze that’s worked into the discs. It’s a neurotoxin. Not immediately deadly, but it would slow you down, possibly paralyse you, if you were hit by one of the clubs. I’m not sure about the long-term effects, but I would make a real attempt to avoid getting cut by one if you’re down on the surface!”
Celia nodded, then asked the last question on her list. It was one she addressed to the whole meeting.
“Why wouldn’t the door in the alcove open once we had identified ourselves as descendants of the Kantari transported to Earth so long ago?” she said. It was what they’d all been thinking.
Cantoselli was the first to offer an answer.
“The DNA that was gathered from you, Celia, just shows that you are of Kantari stock. It would have some evolutionary changes in it that place you some time after the group of Kantari was transported to Earth, but it doesn’t prove you are from Earth stock.
“It is equally possible the Kantari could have become the dominant race on this planet in the intervening time span, or perhaps they just established a trading post near the plateau. A DNA sample from them today would also how changes consistent with 200 thousand years of evolution, but it wouldn’t mean they came for Earth!”
Cantoselli was nearly dancing on the spot now. The little Mersa liked nothing better than a mystery, and she thou
ght she had this one beaten. All the Mersa were like this, very excitable once a train of thought had entered new territory.
Celia remembered the first time she had visited Alamos, the Mersa planet. Cordez’ special agent Fedic Vits had been visiting the planet without the inhabitants knowing – and quite illegally from an EarthGov point of view – for some time. Celia had been part of the team that first met the people of Alamos face to face, and in their own homes.
Celia remembered that time well. The first meeting was at Little Worthystead, or so the name translated, and it had been an experience for all those involved – on both sides!
The Mersa were at a level of technology equivalent to the early 1900s on Earth, and had been at that level for some time. Certain discoveries, in particular the move from electricity to electronics, had eluded them, and had been holding them back. But their theoretical understanding of the universe was 23rd century, and in some cases ahead of Earth’s.
“So you’re saying we have to show in some way that we are a space-travelling race,” said Celia, understanding now what Cantoselli was getting at. “Which would show we were different to any Kantari that had stayed on here on the planet.”
It was an intriguing thought, and the more she turned it over in her mind, the more she realised it was a sound idea on every level. There was a hubbub of noise as other people in the cargo bay came to the same conclusion. Celia called for quiet, and asked if there were any other explanations that might tell them why they hadn’t been able to gain access. There were none.
“Okay,” she said. “We need to go back to the plateau with every piece of advanced technology we have, and show the Rothii AI we’re a space-faring race. Maybe that will force the alcove to give up it’s secrets. Now, how do we keep the Olongetti at bay while we do that?”
There were no easy answers, and Celia was forced to put the question aside for the moment and let other concerns be discussed by the meeting.
Eventually it was time to wind up the gathering, and she suggested everyone stay put and take a bit of downtime together. She, however, retired to her office with Sallyanne, Habid, and Andre and Jeneen. They needed to put together some sort of plan to deal with the Olongetti, and she could only hope it would work long enough to allow them to get inside the plateau.
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