Invardii Series Boxset

by Warwick Gibson

  He paused. Hadn’t Sallyanne said the Sumerian changed to air breathers 8000 years ago? If these records were from before that time, what would the Sumerians look like back then?

  “If it is acceptable to all,” continued HobDurn, “we will show these records to you on the last day of our mission here. There would be time available for us to answer your questions before we leave.”

  And for us make our own copies of this, thought Manoba. It would also mean he would have to invite the other Regents. There would be too much political fallout for him to handle if they missed out on something like this.

  The day after the meeting, Manoba was back at his desk. He pulled up the personal details of the mining squad in the UOMC report that had interested him earlier.

  Two of them had the engineering backgrounds he expected, but after that it got interesting. One of them had been brilliant at the star drive academy, but hadn’t been officer material. The other one, the mining boss, had really made the news ten years back.

  Part of a research team at a Rothii site, he had been accused of pirating Rothii technology and selling it to Earth corporations by the Sumerians. For anyone getting Rothii technology to the trading blocks on Earth, the rewards were enormous, so it did happen occasionally.

  As he dug into the claims, the Regent’s experienced eye soon came to the conclusion that this was a set-up. Some discrepancies had indeed been found, and of course the Sumerians had to be appeased, so someone had to be the scapegoat.

  Florenchantaine, or – what was it – Finch, had been kicked out of artifact research and was now a mining boss on the fringes of the solar system. How interesting.

  What are you trying to hide, my friends, mused the Regent, and wondered when he would have time to follow this up. Mining boss Finch was in for one helluva surprise.

  CHAPTER 6

  ________________

  Three days later it was time to view the Sumerian recordings of the first ever contact between the two planetary races.

  “The Sumerians asked us for a power lead and a bare room,” explained Cordez’ head technician. “After that they wouldn’t let us near the project.”

  Fairly typical for the Sumerians, thought the Regent, keeping their secrets to themselves as usual. He looked around the room, now set up with some kind of projector attached to the ceiling and an odd blue coating on all the surfaces. There were chairs coated in the same material, three deep along one wall.

  He shrugged, and went back to the door to greet the viewing audience as they arrived. There had been no stopping the other Regents, and as formality dictated, they were to be seated first.

  Cordez took the time to personally escort Asura Ming to a position next to his own seat. It did no harm to keep the communication lines open with the only real competition he had for power on Earth.

  He always found the woman strikingly attractive, and very quick-witted. It was a combination that sometimes made it difficult for him to keep his mind on the political necessities of the moment.

  Shortly thereafter, the entire audience was seated. HobDurn, the speaker for the Sumerian delegation, introduced the event.

  “One of our survey ships visited your Solar System in your year 9280PM. Our directive from the Rothii has always been that there should be no contact with a developing civilisation, and we followed that directive in all ways, as you will see.

  “The following records were taken from a position on the edge of your star system. At the time they were taken the Sumerians were an ocean people. We did not see in the same electromagnetic spectrum Humans do, and in fact sight was secondary to touch and hearing. We have augmented the records you are about to see by increasing the light levels.”

  Goddammit, thought Cordez, they found their way around the galaxy by Braille!

  “Commentary is provided where the significance of a particular situation may be lost because of cultural differences. The personal logs of the officers on the ship have been consulted and all attempts have been made to see that the record is historically accurate.

  “Please enjoy this, our gift to you.”

  When the speaker was seated, the room darkened. Manoba felt an irrational urge to take the hand of Asura Ming, sitting next to him. It was an old habit from going to entertainment centres with girlfriends in his teenage years.

  The room brightened to show the bridge of a fairly typical Sumerian ship, with the usual complement of fifteen officers for a survey ship. The audience found they were observing events from the side of the bridge.

  The Regent wondered why the bridge seemed murky, even though the light was moderately strong. Then some sort of small seaweed drifted past, and he realised that the ‘air’ he was seeing was seawater. The recording was taken at a time before the Sumerians became air breathers. That was hard to get his head around!

  A deep space shot, fairly obviously added later, showed the survey ship clawing its way through vast interstellar distances on its way between worlds. A voice-over began to add details.

  Cordez relaxed, and settled in to enjoy the show. Between the commentary and the action in front of him, it seemed as if he was actually present on the ship.

  Then he was asked to pick one figure on the bridge. Once each member of the audience had done so, they would see the action from that individual’s perspective. Cordez chose an engineering station hidden in the murk at the back of the bridge. He didn’t like to be showy.

  The Par’Lock engineer he had chosen ran through a status check of the starship’s engines. It took a moment to confirm the decaying Orscantium rods in the containment chamber at the heart of the ship were folding space and hurling the ship across the galaxy as they had been designed to do.

  The engineer noticed a flurry of minute fluctuations in his systems. These had been coming and going since his shift had begun, but they were just minor variations in the curvature of space as the ship crossed through it.

  In the shadowy depths of the control room, a tubby shape detached from the far wall and coasted overhead. The engineer reached up and ran what for him passed as fingers along the side of his pet, tickling whorls of raised sensor lines. The creature arched its back and rolled over in delight, sinking to the floor as streams of bubbles whistled from its mouth. At this evidence of devotion, the engineer’s thick lips parted in what was recognisable as a grin.

  Cordez almost laughed out loud. He was coming to like the character he had chosen in the recording.

  “Long-range sensors are picking up life signs on the third planet, Captain,” said another engineer at the forward station. It seemed the audience could hear anything said on the bridge, but were only open to the thoughts and individual actions of the character they had chosen.

  The Par’Brahmad captain released the automatic pilot and switched to voice command. “Voice over-ride. Bring us to a stationary position on the edge of the system.”

  The Par’Lock engineer at the forward station stopped the long, slow pulses that were best for broad scanning, and shifted to the shorter bursts that could be focused on individual planets. As the results came in they were fashioned into sound patterns the Sumerians could ‘see’.

  The sound patterns began painting pictures. They showed air breathers, walking upright, and congregating in thousands around the low, flat structures they had built on a wide river plain.

  The engineer monitoring the star drive engines noted a number of sociological points. He was studying this new discipline at the Brotherhood, a society dedicated to expanding Sumerian interests and areas of study – not that he would ever admit to that.

  There were so few Sumerians prepared to look at ways of doing things differently. Everyone else stuck to the old ways that had worked for them for thousands upon thousands of years.

  Cordez’ engineer noted there was limited metal use, but almost certainly a centralised government, and the geometric areas of crops had canals to water them.

  These strange creatures had clothing and metal tools, and could
use naturally occurring materials like stone, but there was nothing to indicate they understand materials could be broken down to individual elements.

  They were at the earliest stages of technology then. It meant they had some control of their environment but limited understanding of matter and energy.

  Then he noticed domesticated animals, and the use of the wheel. The Masters of the Brotherhood had said that if more than three of the twelve pillars of sentient life were present, then the developmental stages that every civilisation must pass through could be occurring every millennia.

  If more than four of the pillars were present, then progress was twice as fast, and it was possible the time scale shortened in an exponential fashion for each additional pillar.

  The engineer had noticed seven of the pillars in the short time he had been observing these creatures, and that would mean . . . the development of a new pillar on average every four thousand years. That was impossible!

  He checked the numbers again. That would mean a nomadic tribe must have walked up this river and settled here less than thirty thousand years ago. It was an incomprehensible speed of evolution, something no Sumerian would be able to comprehend.

  Then the captain closed down any further scans.

  “Enough!’ he said. “We must obey the Rothii directive and not interfere with this system and its fledgling civilisation.

  “Second, make a note that another survey ship should check on these creatures in, oh, say ten thousand years. I doubt any civilisation will have advanced much in such a short space of time.”

  The Second dutifully noted that it should be so, and the engineer, acting out of loyalty to the Brotherhood, almost raised an objection. Then he felt himself weaken, and decided it was too dangerous a move on his part.

  Still, it was unbelievable, he thought. These creatures had ships spread across the oceans. Tiny scraps of wood, keeping to the coastline in the main, but here and there they ventured out many days from land. And they were air breathers at that!

  Foolishness, or bravery? What might they become if he had correctly estimated the speed of their development? We should have tagged the survey report, he thought desperately. But what could he do? He was a Sumerian on a Sumerian ship, and he was a lowly engineer. It was a hopeless situation.

  Cordez did a quick calculation using his personal diary. The Sumerian engineer was wrong. The people of that first city had been on that river plain less than a quarter of the time the engineer thought.

  Then the figures on the bridge froze in place. At first the Regent thought it was a technical malfunction, but the show was over. The lights dimmed, and then came up again, showing the audience blinking and looking around.

  Now that was candid, thought Cordez. The Sumerians usually try to hide things from us. Then he wondered if they had ever looked at the individual track of that engineer at the back of the bridge. Probably not.

  He turned to Asura Ming, and asked her what she thought of the show. She made some perceptive comments, and Cordez was about to share the revelations he had discovered by following his character on the bridge, when he hesitated.

  You didn’t share information if you were a Regent. All of the trading blocks were in a state of fierce competition with each other, and no-one knew where one piece of information might fit with an adversary’s understanding of a situation to give them an advantage.

  Cordez steered the conversation toward safer topics, and Asura fixed him with a penetrating glance. She smiled as if she understood that he was hiding something, and his heart sank. She always did that to him, seemed to look right through him.

  He tried hard not to let his discomfort show.

  CHAPTER 7

  ________________

  The vast shape of the abandoned Rothii space station loomed overhead, looking vaguely sinister as the black underbelly slid by.

  Celia turned the controls of the Europa over to the automatic pilot, and it guided them in on the navigation paths the Sumerian science team had put in place.

  Most of Ragnaroth remained as the Rothii had left it 200 thousand years before. The main power plant was shut down, but ionisation panels captured the thin stellar dust of the Magellan cloud and drove life-support and self-repair systems. One small corner of the space station had been adapted by the Sumerians as a science station, for their own research into the Rothii.

  Roberto joined Celia at the diamond polymer viewing window that spanned the front of the bridge. Force fields inside and out protected the massive viewing screen, but in fact a sheet of polymer glass was unnecessary.

  A relayed camera view would have done the job just as well, but it wouldn’t have been as well received. Some ancient instinct in a tree dweller adapted to the plains found the idea of uninterrupted light deeply satisfying.

  “You should be in web harness,” chided Celia. “Gravity-sum will shut off for a while as the Sumerians pull us into the cargo bay.”

  “What’s a little space walk?” grinned Roberto.

  Celia knew him well. Her alien artifact team had been the top European Community research team for the last three years. In that time Roberto had never suffered from the space sickness sometimes associated with zero gravity. Neither had Celia.

  The autopilot handed control of the Europa over to the Sumerian systems, and a faint glow of ionisation spread around the ship. Simple electrostatic attraction would pull them gently through the cavernous bay doors at the edge of the space station. Andre and Jeneen, the other members of the team, were back on the Europa’s techdeck. They would be uploading data and downloading protocol systems to the Sumerian command centre.

  “I can’t believe we’re here at last,” said Roberto, craning his neck around in an attempt to take in the impossible size of the black hull. It stretched away from them in all directions until it curved gently up out of sight. It was a credit to them that a European Community research team had landed this assignment.

  The Sumerians took forever to grant requests for access to Rothii areas, and it was usual for one of the trading blocks on Earth to use their immense wealth to put their own teams first. There was always the chance of uncovering some technological advancement that would be worth a fortune – if anyone could smuggle it past the Sumerians, who would be watching every move.

  “We’ve both worked with the Sumerians before,” said Celia, “and we know what a minefield of paperwork it’s going to be. I don’t think Andre and Jeneen know what they’re in for yet.”

  Roberto nodded. The two of them had been on the same team at RuaRoth, trying to make sense of the Rothii ruins there. That was before Creedo Shard retired to academia to write papers on the Rothii, and Celia had been put in charge of the team.

  She remembered their first day at RuaRoth vividly. It had been a privilege to stand in the room where the first treaty between the Sumerian and Human peoples had been signed, over a hundred years before.

  “Translator check,” called Andre over the vidlink. The two of them listened to their linguist earpieces while a simulated Sumerian voice snuffled and hacked its way through a long sentence, and a Human voice welcomed them to the space station. The voice confirmed that their protocol systems had been successfully copied to a partitioned section of the Sumerian command centre systems.

  Shortly after that Andre and Jeneen appeared on the bridge. Celia presumed they had finished their part in making the ship known to the Sumerians. And she knew she could trust them to do things right, they were the best technicians she had ever worked with. Andre’s age and experience balanced out Jeneen’s enthusiasm and sometimes rampant imagination.

  The Europa drifted into the cargo bay, setting down on a vast expanse of floor, and the huge doors slid shut behind them. For a moment everything was dark outside the bridge, and then lighting strips fired up.

  “It’s quite a shock to see a star drive ship like the Europa look like a toy in a Rothii cargo bay,” said Andre, and Jeneen nodded.

  Celia quickly scanned the proximi
ty settings. When she had confirmed the ship was down safely she shut off the deep space sensors and locked the ship into the floor. A Sumerian rover of some kind wheeled across the floor and closed around the Europa’s forward hatch.

  “Looks like they’re not going to pressurise the whole cargo bay,” said Celia, “which makes sense. Let’s go and meet our hosts, everyone. Best behaviour now, eyes open and be observant. I don’t want you to miss a thing!”

  She needed have bothered making the comment. Life on the giant Rothii space station soon became a matter of routine, and then boredom. Whatever the Sumerians knew about Rothii technology they had clearly been instructed not to pass it on to the Human research team.

  Over the following weeks Celia began to feel more and more like they were tourists at a holiday resort, not actually expected to do any work. At the start of the seventh week – half way through their allotted time at the station – she was telling Jeneen what she thought about it all while Andre ran checks on the Europa’s life support in the background.

  “We’re not allowed anywhere near the Rothii power plant,” she complained, “and the Sumerians have taken over what must have been the command centre for the whole station. We haven’t been allowed to work on anything of interest to us!”

  “Will the Par’Brahmad let us work on some of the old Rothii life support systems?” said Andre, who was off to one side.

  “One of our priorities is to find out what the Rothii looked like,” he continued, “and make some guesses as to how they got around. The life support systems might give us clues to that.”

  “I’ve already tried asking if we can look at the station’s old life support,” said Celia, “but EusBrahmad has denied us pretty much everything we’ve asked for. This Second they’ve got, SarSanni, sounded like he might help us at the start, but he’s saying no to everything now too. I guess he can’t help us much if his boss says no.”