The Rylerran Gateway

by Mark Ian Kendrick

  Four minutes later Orin ended his argument.

  Darreth was instructed to remain seated as the principals left the room. Sefana and Orin went through one door and Darreth’s superior officer and the judge went through another. The room was completely silent except for an occasional beep from the flimsy the court secretary was reading as she scrolled through it. Darreth amused himself by taking apart one of the nav consoles in his head. It was an interesting exercise in that he had to slow down quite considerably as he visualized what he was doing. It was modular and had to be disassembled in a particular order. It was a simple diversion that served its purpose. He had removed three of the components when, not more than five minutes later, the side door slid open. Sefana and Orin took their seats. Moments later Yoon came in and seated himself.

  The judge took another minute before he returned. He read through the flimsy he was holding and pressed several icons on it before he spoke. “It is officially judged that all charges are dropped,” he announced.

  It was as simple as that. His direct declaration of acquittal was all Darreth needed to hear. But there was more.

  “It is also officially judged that Lieutenant Commander James-Po is on probation and will stay grounded until an official recommendation can be made as to his fitness to command a ship.”

  Definitely political, Darreth thought. And petty. The question he harbored now was who was this political statement aimed at? Himself? His father? Most likely Dad, Darreth realized. But why?

  It suddenly occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, the subtle talk about independence had a far larger audience than he was aware of.

  The judge tapped on a tiny silver bell with a small gavel and let the gavel drop to the tabletop with a decided thump.

  Chapter 24

  Authorization to remove the alien bodies from the cavern took place the day Darreth and Merek had returned to Andakar. Olton Avela assigned three of his best men to set up lighting inside the large interior cavern, and to provide stasis chambers to put the bodies into. Plenty of equipment to perform live rescues existed on Rylerra. After all, two to three men and women a month had to be removed from cave-ins, ice crevasses, or from storm-covered outposts. The hazards of living on this Inhab were continuous, numerous, and would only get worse. The loss of Rylerra’s planetary magnetic field wasn’t new information. Rylerra’s nickel-iron core was cooling faster than normal for a planet of its composition. That had been known for decades. The complete loss of the planet’s magnetic field wouldn’t happen for centuries. Only then would the entire surface become downright deadly. In the meantime, Olton foresaw a long and lucrative career in this industry, that is, if he himself weren’t killed in some accident or frozen solid in an ice storm.

  The bodies of the dead aliens had been carefully removed from the cavern and sent to the same facility Darreth and Merek had been processed through in the Ready Response Department. They had several large domes and plenty of ready cold storage. The stasis chambers had transparent tops, which provided the local news access to take plenty of vid and still photos. Those vids and stills were being sent to the entire human population. Within two months, the news would have been received on every Inhab. It would have been impossible to keep something like this a secret.

  There were no archeologists or anthropologists on Rylerra. There were none on Andakar either. With no previous civilizations ever having been discovered on any of the Inhabs, someone with the appropriate background who would be willing to trek to Rylerra was going to be difficult to find, at least in the short run.

  Olton stood on a gangway above the throng of news people in the building that housed the aliens. He was particularly curious because the aliens had been killed. The pathologist at the clinic had established that even before a basic forensics examination. But who had shot them? And why had evidence of whoever had done it never been discovered on the planet? Was it possible that glaciers had completely obliterated all trace of a previous Rylerran civilization? The area where they were found had been ice-free for at least fifteen hundred years, so they thought. Olton speculated the bodies had to be at least that old. That would predate the colonization of Rylerra by nearly a millennium and a half. Ultimately, someone would figure it out.

  The detailed result of the forensics scans took another day. They debated the results for hours. It wasn’t a matter of how to interpret the results, but rather how to explain what they conclusively discovered. The forensics experts determined their morphology didn’t resemble any of the body type patterns found on Rylerra. Indeed, no sign of any sentient creatures had ever been found on the planet. Their conclusion was that the bodies had to have originated off-world. Speculation as to what world could possibly have produced the creatures abounded.

  Luckily, Olton’s office was in close proximity to where the bodies were being studied. As a result of the pathologists being so close by, he managed to have several discussions with them about their conclusions. It wasn’t difficult to cull from them what they had discovered. Apparently, they had decided that the aliens could only have originated from somewhere beyond the Tovar Nebula. An astro-cartographer had even come up with a theory that they had come from one of the stars that lit up the nebula. But what was potentially more challenging was trying to determine who had killed them since no weapons had been found. They certainly didn’t shoot each other. One of the aliens had an object lodged behind a rib bone. It was a fragment made of a simple titanium-lead alloy. It was quickly determined that the object was a projectile from some sort of weapon. No other projectiles had been found in the cavern or in the other bodies. Olton was enough of an armaments buff to know that projectile weapons hadn’t been made for hundreds of years. In addition, humans had only occupied this part of space for not even one hundred years. Thus, he reasonably concluded that no humans had caused their death. Ultimately, he had to speculate that the dead creatures were the ones who had made the projectile weapons. It was a curious and delicious mystery.

  The oddest conclusion made by the pathologists was their time of death, more accurately, the century of death. They had determined that the aliens had been dead for more than two thousand years. The unique nature of the cavern’s constant climate, until very recently, when a crack had appeared in the wall, had preserved the bodies in a near perfect state of mummification. Enough desiccated tissues were available to determine that.

  It was a stunning discovery, to say the least. After all, if aliens had been sitting dead in that cavern for over two thousand years, why had not even a trace of their civilization ever shown up on the planet or anywhere in the general vicinity of the Kaskalon-Eratil star system. Surely, Andakar, with its much more accessible climate would have been the perfect place for their race to have colonized. Olton wasn’t sure what to conclude about that. It was just an amusing speculation for him.

  Olton managed to obtain a report that had him even more mystified. It had to do with the odd block of stone that was in the center of the cavern. The perfectly smooth cylindrical tunnel in it was giving everyone a headache. An academic headache, that is. It defied attempts to discern how it had been made. The entire block refused to show up on scans as to its chemical composition. All attempts to determine if a power source was causing the strange static that appeared halfway through the cutout, failed. Vid, holos and photos of the static showed only an opaque blur. It was impossible to photronically record a proper image of the odd static. The mystery was deepening. But Olton knew that mysteries had a way of being explained.

  The energy sources that fed Tokaias, as well as all of the municipalities in the rest of the provinces, were many and varied. The Andakar GeoWorks Energy Division had employed Caddo Nebbi for over eight years. Caddo’s specific job there was to oversee a team of technicians. They made sure the software that ran the sensor photronics for the pipes sunk into Andakar’s crust to access hot spots worked as efficiently as possible. The continental crust underneath the Kattan continent was particularly thin 18 kilometers south
of Tokaias. Finding hot spots was mostly a matter of drilling a hole deep enough, inserting the pipeline, cracking the nearby rocks, flooding the cracks with water, then drawing off the steam for power generation. Many Inhabs used this method of inexpensive energy generation. Caddo was one of the day shift supervisors. He normally didn’t bother to follow what the Planetary Director’s office did. But for the last several years he had been noticing that high-level Consortium rulings were intruding more and more into what should be purely local affairs. By the time the new energy generation tax was announced, he had sufficient access to his division’s databases to determine that a significant amount of money was being siphoned off world from his company. He was a software designer by training and a supervisor now. It wasn’t his place to decide how the funds were to be used. Regardless, it irritated him. It was just in his nature to be irritated by seemingly arbitrary corporate rulings. Thus, his discovery of the discussion group on Tokaias University’s campus. It gave him a forum to discuss topics he felt needed airing. The mainstream media wasn’t going to contradict anything a corporation said. After all, they were the mouthpieces of corporations. That much was a given. But he could at least vent with like-minded people.

  He had no idea he was about to get past the seemingly impenetrable shield that was Inandra’s office. Her private network codes were supposed to be unbreakable. Even the attempt to crack them would have landed him in front of the GeoWorks Division head if he’d been caught. But someone had left a gap in her security system. One that Caddo knew how to exploit.

  Caddo presented his findings to the discussion group the same night the news was broken about the aliens on Rylerra. He felt comfortable enough divulging such a clandestine effort due to the sentiments the group members all held. The Planetary Director’s office had been the subject of much discussion over the last several months. And he was not alone in his disdain for Director Alarr.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse. What Caddo had discovered rivaled, if not superseded, the announcement of what had been discovered about the alien bodies.

  During their meeting at the university, Julun activated the holoscreen on the wall. “Shh,” she told the group. “Here’s the announcement.”

  The reporter was wearing a parka, mostly for effect. It wasn’t all that cold today at the Ice Station. Plus, she was inside the huge storage facility, which was only just below shirtsleeve temperature anyway. In the background were several vehicles coming and going inside the building behind where the bodies were being housed.

  “Shani Kuhenvik reporting from the Nona Ice Station Search and Rescue headquarters fifteen kilometers from the Rylerran corporate capital. The alien bodies discovered here have been studied and analyzed in great detail for the last week. Evidence shows they’re approximately two thousand years old and don’t appear to have originated on Rylerra. Since there has never been any evidence to suggest an ancient civilization existed on either Rylerra or Andakar, the tentative conclusion is that they come from outside our star systems. No clues were discovered in the cavern to suggest their exact origin. Their clothing was ragged and torn and had mostly disintegrated due to their extreme age. A few items roughly similar to our photronic technology discovered next to one of the bodies suggest they had a highly developed civilization. They may have taken shelter in the cavern or they may have been dropped off there to die. Regardless, the possibility is that the cavern may have been the site of an ancient triple murder.”

  The reporter went on to discuss how the bodies had been mummified due to their long interment in the dry cavern and that holes from projectile weapons of an unknown design had been found on each of them.

  There was no talk or speculation by the reporter about the mysterious stone block, which Caddo was sure he’d heard about earlier. That made him even more suspicious about what the news decided to tell the public. As usual, corporate interests took precedence over public divulgence.

  After the report was over, vid of interviews of the pathologists, as well as a couple of the people who had pulled the bodies from the cavern, was aired. The five women and six men in the discussion group sat in stunned silence. The idea that the bodies were thousands of years old led to lots of speculation about why no one had ever come across this obviously spacefaring civilization. Had their species died out at the same time?

  After a half-hour of repetitive and circular discussions, Caddo decided to change the topic. He had brought a flimsy with him that contained a huge number of intercepted comms from the Planetary Director’s office.

  “You have what?” asked Grevi, somewhat loudly.

  Caddo held up the flimsy. “You heard me.”

  “You brought that here?” Ecca gasped, incredulous.

  “Where else would I bring it?” Caddo told him, somewhat impatiently.

  “You could have left it in your office,” Julun retorted. “It’s totally illegal to have that kind of data!”

  “No, it’s totally illegal for the Director’s office to tax our energy production. Don’t you get it? Something’s going on here that needs to be dissected. And we’re going to do the dissection.”

  Grevi had stated her concern because they were in a public part of the university. This was the student union building. The door wasn’t exactly sealed shut.

  “I’m going to divide up the comms for each of you. Just run the program I wrote and see what it catches,” Caddo told them.

  Caddo was becoming a lot bolder as the weeks went by, Omley noted, as Caddo copied a chunk of the comms to his flimsy via the wireless link. Caddo then cut and pasted eight more chunks of data to each of the flimsies the rest of the group had with them. They started the program and watched while specific comms were flagged on the left sides of their screens. The algorithm took fifteen minutes to complete for most of them and another five for Naram and Sked since they had larger chunks.

  Grevi scanned the flagged files as they were being listed on her screen. While they were waiting for Sked’s files to finish being analyzed, Grevi noticed a peculiar pattern emerging in some of the comms. They weren’t from the Planetary Director’s office. They were intercepted comms from local provincial manager offices. “Hey, look at this,” she stated, now quite interested.

  The comms were all sorted by date and time in one column. Images of the sender and receiver were part of the vidcomm headers and were all sorted next to the file names. Maps indicating the origination and termination points were displayed as well. But none of this particular batch was to or from Alarr’s office. That immediately raised a red flag with Caddo.

  “Pay dirt!” he announced triumphantly.

  Sopka had never heard that phrase before. “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “It means we caught her ass,” replied a thrilled Caddo. A huge grin covered his face. “Alarr has these vidcomms, which means her personal files contain intercepted ones from the Council. This is evidence of her not only meddling in our affairs, but doing it illegally.”

  Everyone was terribly excited about the find. Even Grevi forgot her prior cautiousness and began to search with renewed intensity. Now it was a matter of going through the files to discern what it was Alarr was after.

  Caddo took Grevi’s flimsy and adjusted some of the parameters of the audio output. He encrypted the data so everyone in the room would only be able to hear the audio portion of the vidcomms through their neural implants. Encryption would prevent anyone from eavesdropping on them. He started the first file and they all watched. By the time they had finished with the nineteenth file, most everyone was upset at what they had discovered. Grevi took the flimsy and shut it off. She took a deep breath.

  Everyone was looking at each other. Caddo had hoped to find some sort of incriminating evidence, but nothing as big as this. Secretly, some of them hadn’t really cared if anything was found. To them, this was just a mental exercise. But reality had rudely awakened them. It didn’t seem possible all these events could have converged as they had, but they had dire
ct evidence for one of the most egregious breaches of planetary trust they had ever even heard of.

  Caddo was the first to speak. “Not a word of this to anyone. Hear me? No one.” He looked at everyone in turn. “Grevi, you and Traig have got to get to Darreth as soon as possible. Like tonight.”

  “Why me?” Traig asked.

  “Because I didn’t sleep too well last night, it’s late and I have to get up early for work tomorrow.”

  Chapter 25

  Darreth had been in contact with Naylon’s parents several times over the last couple of days. Both Jaron and Temorrah Ress alternated between being concerned with Darreth’s state of mind and their own sense of loss over the mystery of their missing son. Darreth did his best to assure them that there was every reason to believe Naylon was still alive.

  Darreth’s mother insisted everyone come to their home and have dinner. She and Naylon’s mother were just about in tears throughout most of the evening. As far as Darreth was concerned, it was a very awkward evening since he was there as well. It was a nice gesture on his mother’s part. She had insisted. But it only served to deepen his own sense of despair. Scenarios of what could have happened to his brother and Naylon played over and over in his mind. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but bad ones outweighed the good ones by a fair margin.

  Naylon’s parents had left three hours ago. Darreth lay awake in his parent’s spare bedroom. This was the second time he’d awakened in the last hour. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t even be considering sleeping at their house. He had his own quarters and could have just simply gone home. But he was feeling lost and somehow felt more comfortable in the house he grew up in.

  It was the first time in his entire life he remembered feeling this way. Dread. Sorrow. Confusion. Anxiety. Unable to sleep. A terribly complex swirl of emotions was beginning to eat into his normally calm demeanor. Two people very close to him had simply vanished and he had no idea what to do.