“WE WON’T FIND a Smitty on this world,” said Jon.
“Probably not.” Rudy wasn’t ready to give up quite that quickly. “But let’s at least take a look.”
“Lot of critters down there,” said Hutch. “It’s not safe.”
“Who gives a goddam, Priscilla? What did we come for? To cruise past and wave?”
Antonio looked accusingly at her, too, but said nothing.
She could have insisted. Even if she couldn’t bully Rudy, she could have directed Matt not to go, and that would have ended the idea. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that. “Let’s find a place.” She sighed. “There should be something out of harm’s way.”
“Very good.” Rudy rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re making sense.”
Jim started flashing images on the screen, cities buried in thick forest, buildings that might have been cathedrals or city halls or power companies overgrown with hundreds and maybe thousands of years of thick vegetation.
“There’s something,” said Rudy. An enormous structure that could have passed for an Indian temple, with broken statuary, shattered columns, balconies and porticoes.
“Jim,” said Matt, “show us what it would have looked like in better times.”
“Okay,” he said. “Meantime I have news.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a space station in solar orbit. No indication of power.”
ANTONIO’S NOTES
As we left orbit, Hutch blinked the ship’s lights. When I asked her why, she just smiled and shook her head.
—Thursday, January 17
chapter 28
THEY REMAINED ON the McAdams, left the Preston in orbit around Far Silvestri, and made the jump out to the station. Matt brought them in less than an hour away from their target. It was, he thought, a remarkable tribute to the precision Jon had built into the Locarno.
The planetary system was extensive. There were at least six gas giants and a handful of terrestrials. Sigma itself, seen from this distance, was no more than a bright star, and they needed Jim to locate it for them.
As they’d known it would be, the orbiter was dark. It was larger than Union by about half, an agglomeration of spheres linked by shafts and tubes. It was an asymmetric maze, reminding Matt of a child’s puzzle, the sort you start on one side and have to find your way out the other. “Not the simplest way to construct one of these things,” said Jon, as they approached. “It must have appealed to someone’s sense of aesthetics.”
They watched as it tumbled slowly along its eleven-hundred-year-long orbit. Antennas, scanners, and collectors were fixed to the hull. Some were missing, others broken, trailing at the end of twisted cables. They could make out viewports and hatches, and there were barely discernible symbols in several places across the hull. The characters might have been at home in an ancient Sumerian text. “No power leakage,” said Jim. “It’s dead.”
No surprise there.
They drew alongside, and the navigation lights fell full on the orbiter. He looked across the arrays of pods and connecting shafts and radio dishes and spheres and wondered how long it had been there.
Rudy was sitting up front with him, his face creased, utterly absorbed.
“What do you think happened?” asked Matt.
Rudy shrugged. “No way to know. The most obvious explanation would be that it was blown out of orbit during a war. But I don’t see any damage that would suggest that.”
“The hull’s pretty badly beaten up.”
“Collisions with rocks.”
“How old you figure it is?”
Rudy appeared to be doing a calculation. “A few thousand years, at minimum. The Cherry Hill signal was sent fifteen thousand years ago.”
“You think it came from here? The Cherry Hill transmission?”
“Who knows, Matt? Probably. But it’s all guesswork at this point.”
Hutch appeared in the open hatchway. “Rudy, we’re going to go over and take a look. You want to come?”
“Of course. We leaving now?”
Matt noticed the invitation had not been extended in his direction. “Me, too,” he said.
“One of us has to stay back here, Matt. In case there’s a problem.”
“How about you?”
Hutch delivered one of those smiles. “Look,” she said, “I’ll make a deal with you.” She turned to Rudy: “When we get back to the Preston, did you want to make a landing somewhere? Take a look around?”
“Hutch,” he said, “I’d assumed we’d already decided to do that.”
“Okay. I’ll sit that one out, Matt, if you want.”
“You’re pretty generous. You get an ancient space station, and I get somebody’s farm.”
“R.H.I.P.,” she said. “And you never know what you might find on a farm.”
JON AND ANTONIO announced their intentions to go, too. Hutch pulled on a go-pack, and Rudy, strapping on his e-suit, looked admiringly at the thrusters. “We don’t get a set of those?”
“You don’t need one,” Hutch said. She wore a white blouse and slacks, and Rudy had a white sweater that probably belonged to Antonio. Jon had a gold pullover that read RAPTORS, and Antonio wore a red and silver jacket with WORLDWIDE stenciled across the back. The idea was that they be as visible as possible. Each of them carried an extra set of air tanks.
Hutch had attached an imager to her harness, so that Matt could watch the action. And, of course, he could listen in to the conversation.
There wasn’t much to hold his attention. While Hutch used a laser to cut her way inside, Jim announced he could not raise an AI. They’d have been shocked had he been able to do so.
The interior was, of course, pitch-black. The boarding party wore lamps on their caps and wrists. Rudy was excited, but was trying hard to behave as if he broke into alien constructs on regular occasions.
They entered a moderately sized chamber, with shelves and cabinets lining the bulkheads. Everything was a bit higher than convenient. Rudy tried to open some of the cabinets, but the doors were stuck fast, and Hutch had to cut into them. Inside they found fabric and tools and lumps of something that might once have been food.
Jon moved smoothly through the zero-gee environment, surprisingly agile for a big guy, occasionally reaching out to touch a bulkhead or one of the objects they found—on one occasion, a gauge—much as one might handle a relic.
They passed into a corridor. Some debris was loose, afloat, drifting in an orderly fashion around the interior as the station continued its slow tumble. “There don’t appear to be any remains here,” Hutch reported.
Antonio was quiet throughout. Matt suspected he was on his private channel, recording his impressions.
They spent several hours in the station. Hutch reported back that the circuitry, the power links, everything was fried. “Looks as if they had an accident of some sort. Or were attacked.”
“Maybe somebody tried to seize the place?” suggested Matt. “And things went wrong?”
“Don’t know.”
“And no bodies? Nothing that looks like a corpse?”
“Nothing like that, no. It’s hard to tell, but I’d say whoever was here did not get taken by surprise.”
Jon broke in: “Hutch, I think we’re looking at some data storage. This was an operational center of some sort.” They’d wandered into an area filled with screens and black boxes.
“My God,” said Rudy. “You think there’s any chance at all we could recover something?”
“I suppose there’s always a chance, Rudy. But you’re talking about electronic storage. How long does that last?”
Matt knew the answer to that one. If you want data to survive, carve it in rock.
“Anyhow”—Jon was examining the equipment—“this stuff looks burned out. All of it.”
The furniture, chairs and tables and a few sofas, suggested that the inhabitants were bipeds. They were somewhat large. When Hutch sat down in one her feet didn’t reac
h the deck.
They broke into narrow compartments that must have been living quarters. They found a system that had provided food and water. “Also burned out,” said Jon. “Something odd happened here.” He started taking electronic equipment apart, moving from chamber to chamber. “It’s the same everywhere. It’s all so old it’s hard to be sure, but everything looks fused to me.”
“What would cause something like that?” asked Rudy.
“An electrical surge.”
And, finally, Hutch’s voice: “Lightning.”
Matt understood. The omegas.
“That would also explain,” she continued, “how it got blown out here.”
There were telescopes, although nobody could see through them because the lenses were coated with dust that had become permanently ingrained.
There were a concourse and meeting rooms. Four globes had once occupied choice locations. They were about three stories high and had been filled with water. All were shattered. Where one had stood, an icy sphere remained intact. The others had apparently broken before the water froze. The deck around them was still icy.
ANTONIO’S NOTES
The station is the most utterly lost place I’ve ever seen.
—Friday, January 18
chapter 29
THEY SPENT THREE days looking for the right place to send down a landing party. Hutch insisted they stay away from forests and jungles. Too easy to get ambushed by Far Silvertri’s efficient-looking predators. They also wanted a site that provided a relatively recent target. And, finally, a place where they wouldn’t have to do a lot of digging.
The ruins were not as widespread as had at first seemed to be the case. “It doesn’t look as if the population ever got that large,” said Jon.
They sat around in the McAdams, the five of them, searching the displays, discarding all suggestions for one reason or another. Too old was the most common complaint. Probably been there for thousands of years. Or it didn’t look like a place that would provide information. Or it looked like too much work to get in.
Toward the end of the third night, Antonio spotted something along the southern extremity of the turkey continent.
On the side of a snow-covered mountain, about a quarter of the way up, a broken tower jutted out of the ground.
And nearby, buried—
“There’s a building.”
It was a three-story structure, seemingly intact, the roof just about even with the snow cover.
The top of the tower was missing. Parts of it lay scattered under the snow. There was no way to know how high it had been. It was squat and heavy, rectangular, with sharply defined corners, and a stairway leading to a platform.
Below it, the mountain sloped away in a long, gradual descent to a plain that appeared utterly lifeless save for some scattered vegetation and a few birds.
RUDY WASN’T AS excited about making the descent as he pretended. The place looked wilder than the chindi world had. The forests were darker, the rivers more turbulent, the skies more ominous. Where the chindi world had cities and even traffic lights, Far Silvestri had ruins and vast empty plains, and the only light on the nightside came from electrical storms. It was strange: He’d expected ultimately that Hutch would say that a mission to the surface was too dangerous, but she seemed caught up with the general fever, too, had changed, had become in all the strangeness someone else, someone he didn’t really know. So when he’d voiced his enthusiasm for going along she’d said okay, and, of course, the others had joined in. No one was ready to get back inside the ships and start the long voyage to the black hole at Tenareif. They needed a break. So they were going down, and he’d made all the noise, done it because it was expected of him. He was the researcher on the mission, the scientist. Jon was a specialist, a physicist. He’d done his work with the Locarno. His reputation was forever secure. When this journey was recorded, became epic material for future generations, he knew it would be Jon who would stand out. For good or ill. Whether Rudy liked it or not, that was the truth of it.
But it was okay. Rudy was part of it, had come closer to realizing his dreams than he’d ever thought possible. So his role was to suck it up, strap on the belt and activate the Flickinger field, and pretend not to notice the strangeness, but just help dig his way into the building below the snow cover.
Dig his way into history.
Antonio admitted that, to tell the truth, he’d rather stay with the ship because it looked hostile on the ground, but he’d go anyhow. “Have to,” he told Rudy, admiring Rudy’s willingness, once again, to venture onto what he called another dark street. “This doesn’t feel the same as going down to talk to Smitty,” he continued. “But it’s my job. So let’s go look at the tower. And whatever else is on the slope.”
Matt held Hutch to her promise. He would pilot the lander. Rudy admired that. If Matt felt any concern about going down, he hid it well.
Jon was blasé about it all. He wasn’t really excited about a building on a mountain slope. It wasn’t like crossing over to a derelict station that might have been ten thousand years old. In fact, he told Matt, he thought it was dangerous. But he understood why the others wanted to go, and if they wanted him along, he’d be glad to accompany them.
“Your call, Jon,” Matt said. “We can manage okay. You do whatever you want.”
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely.”
So okay, Jon could think of a better way to spend his time, and as long as they didn’t need him on the ground, he’d stay put.
They’d use the McAdams lander. It was a bit larger, and somewhat more comfortable than the Preston vehicle. So they all got in, checked their gear, listened to Hutch tell them to be careful, and launched.
MATT WAS BEGINNING to feel like a veteran. There’d been a star pilot hero on kids’ programming when he was growing up, Captain Rigel, and he imagined himself now in that role as they came in over the plains, the mountains looming ahead. A herd of tusked animals were ambling slowly south. They stayed close together except for a few outriders on the front and flanks. A military formation.
“Looks peaceful enough,” said Antonio. “Are we getting a visual record of all this?”
“Yes, we’re getting everything.”
“Good.” Matt could sense Dr. Science mentally rubbing his hands. “Good.”
“Your viewers are going to take the same ride?”
“You bet, Matt. You know, this would be a more interesting run if we, say, flew through a storm. Could we manage that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Just kidding.”
The land began to rise. Snow appeared. Jim pointed out the target mountain. Fifteen klicks, dead ahead.
He slowed down to survey the area. It was free of forest, so they had good visibility. As did Hutch overhead. Except at the moment she was below the horizon and wouldn’t be back for an hour or so.
“Over there,” said Rudy.
The tower stuck out of the snow. It was probably iron, or steel, constructed of crossbeams. The sort of structure that, back home, might have supported a water tank.
“Jim,” he said, “how far down does the base reach?”
“About twelve meters.”
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go see what we’ve got.” He came down vertically, cautiously, about fifty paces from the tower. He kept the vehicle level, riding the spike, turning so the hatch, which was on his right, opened downhill. The port tread touched the surface, and a sudden gust rocked them and almost turned them over.
He held them momentarily where they were, until the wind settled, then he lowered them into the snow and shut down the spike by increments. The port side touched solid ground, and the lander began to tilt. Finally, it stopped, and he shut the power off. The slope was steep here, and the snow on the uphill side rose past the viewports. “This is the kind of place where I used to go skiing,” said Rudy.
Antonio held out his hands, pretending to wield ski poles. “You’re a
skier?”
“When I was a bit younger.”
They pulled on oxygen tanks and goggles and activated their suits and lightbenders. The lightbenders might, or might not, render them invisible to predators. The goggles allowed them to see each other. Matt opened the hatch. The wind blew flakes inside.
He had a good view downslope. The animals they’d seen earlier were gone. In all that vast expanse of prairie, nothing moved. “Okay, gentlemen,” Matt said, “let’s find out what we have.”
He signaled Antonio, who opened the storage compartment and removed two collapsible spades and some cable. Rudy and Antonio each got a spade; Matt took the cable. Then he picked a Meg-6, a rhino gun, out of the weapons locker. It was a projectile-firing weapon, with sufficient power to knock over virtually any kind of predator. He didn’t trust either of the others with one, but gave each of them a laser. “Be careful with them,” he said. Once they got into the building and started stumbling around in the dark, he suspected they’d become more dangerous than any local life form.
He climbed out into the snow and sank to his knees. “Okay, guys,” he said.
Rudy came next. He grunted and made some comments about how long it had been since he’d seen real winter weather.
Antonio waited until the director was safely down, then he followed.
Seen through the goggles, Rudy and Antonio were ghostly images.
THE SLOPE ON which they stood was relatively gentle, rising gradually for miles before it soared suddenly upward. In the opposite direction, it rolled out onto the plain, where the snow gave way to rock and brown soil.
Antonio closed the hatch.
“If anything unexpected happens,” Matt said, “and you need to get out of here, just tell Jim to open up. He’ll take directions from you.”
“You don’t expect a problem, do you?” asked Rudy.
“No. But I could fall into a hole or something. I just want you to know you don’t need me to get home.”
It was cold. Forty-five below, Fahrenheit. The wind sucked at them, tried to blow them off the mountain.
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