The Lost Colony Series: Omnibus Edition: All Four Volumes in One

by Andrew C Broderick

  Dammit, John thought. Best chance yet to save them, and it’s not going to happen. He cursed under his breath. Disappointment registered on all the other tired faces.

  “So what’s the plan now, Captain?” Nandi asked.

  Weber ran his fingers through his hair. “Ulysses is due to head back to Earth in two days. About all I can think of is to send a request to the IDSA to build and launch a flotilla of probes to blanket Hydra and its moons with eyes and ears. But, that would take years, unless we got lucky early in the search.” There were nods from the others. “Honestly, I think we’ll all feel better after some sleep. Then maybe with clear heads we’ll have some inspiration for other avenues to try.”

  * * * *

  The wind was picking up and Nandi could just detect a slight change in the olfactory profile of the land. Even in the short time the Atlas had been there, the onset of fall had accelerated. The scent of it was in the air even though there were no trees in the immediate vicinity. Nandi prided herself on her very sensitive nose.

  Away from Serenity Bay, she had taken a solitary walk to the west of the colony. After a kilometer or so, the rocky foreshore gave way to a bed of pebbles that crunched with every step. It had been three days since the manic excitement of discovering the ruined city. Ulysses had departed for Earth the previous day, carrying news of this discovery, the CM-1 crew’s having encountered aliens, and the EMP attack. Within twenty-eight days, Andromeda or one of the other probes would arrive while Ulysses was overhauled on Earth, the new probe bearing instructions on what to do next. But here, now, Nandi couldn’t get the city out of her mind. She’d studied its layout. She had projected the topographic data into a 3D virtual landscape, minus the trees, and taken walks through it. The mound in the center was truly impressive at 100 meters high. The plaza around it was also a sight to behold, radiating 200 meters in every direction, before the start of more piles of rock, the ones intersected by the radiating roads.

  “Call John,” Nandi said.

  “No signal.” Nandi frowned and climbed a rocky outcrop. Once she was higher up she tried again.

  “Hi Nandi.” She could hear the tiredness and frustration in his voice, even in those two words.

  “John, that ruined city. It’s got to be the key. Besides the spots where their engines gouged holes in the ground, it’s the only other thing in this entire star system that we know was made by intelligent life. It’s got to be, important doesn’t it?”

  John sighed. “I know how much you want it to be. But, I don’t see how it can. There’s honestly more mileage in continuing to try and pick up alien radio transmissions.”

  “That hasn’t worked at all—we haven’t detected a single one! I’m starting to think that one probe’s antennas are faulty, and the one Andromeda reported didn’t even exist.”

  The wind was starting to change direction, to blow in from the sea. Nandi tilted her head back and let it blow her hair around her shoulders, enjoying the cool freshness of the air.

  “And how do you propose that we get to the ruined city?” John asked.

  “I’ve thought about that one: I propose we fly Atlas there.”

  * * * *

  “Captain, I think it’s our best chance,” Nandi said. “It’s a long shot, but it’s all we’ve got.” Her cheeks were still red from the bracing wind and the exertion of the walk.

  “I get where you’re coming from,” Weber said. “But, Daniel and I have made up our minds. We’re leaving for Hydra in two days.”

  Nandi worked hard to hide her shock. “Don’t you want to wait for directions from Earth first?”

  “They’ve given us a lot of autonomy due to the communications lag. We won’t hear back for nearly four weeks. By then we could be at Hydra and starting to tour the moons.”

  Nandi’s brow furrowed, and she nodded. She wondered whether she should have brought John along for backup after all, however lukewarm he’d been on her plan. If she had, this would at least have been an even playing field, what with Daniel Golden at the Captain’s side. Still, Nandi was nothing if not tenacious. Defecting to the West during the Straits War had been almost impossible, and she’d only managed it by proving to the CIA how brilliant a scientist she really was.

  “It’ll only take one day, Captain. We fly there, check it out, and return. Then we refill the water tanks and we can still leave for Hydra.”

  Weber chuckled. “Very persuasive, Nandi. Every day we delay going to Hydra is precious, but I’ll think about it.”

  Nandi nodded slowly. “Fair enough.”

  * * * *

  “John, why on Earth did you suggest going to Hydra that first day we were brainstorming?” Nandi asked.

  John looked stunned. “I was trying to come up with any and every possibility of finding them. Someone else would have suggested it sooner or later anyway…”

  Nandi rubbed her forehead. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. I’m just disappointed. I got the classic Weber ‘I’ll think about it,’ so that’s a no. He’s taking the ship to Hydra instead.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. He just hasn’t announced it yet.”

  “I know how much you want to see the lost city; you always loved history.”

  “I do, but that’s not it. I want to go because it’s got something to do with their disappearance. I just know it.”

  “That’s interesting as hell, but how do you know?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know how I know. If that even makes sense. It’s a gut feeling. You remember when we talked years ago about how some things just transcend the intellectual?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, this is one of those things.”

  “I trust you implicitly, always have. But intuition doesn’t give you a case you can make to the Captain.”

  “I honestly don’t know how I can get him to change his mind.”

  * * * *

  John awoke to the room rocking ever so slightly. Bad weather? He mentally commanded the walls of his room to turn clear. Dark, threatening clouds raced by above.

  He got up, put on his robe, and headed to the upper passenger compartment. A knot of his fellow crew was already gathered. “Are we being rocked by high winds?” John asked.

  “Yup,” Jake said. Gusting up to 130 kilometers an hour!”

  “Holy crap!”

  “Yeah. The storm whipped up overnight, almost out of nowhere.”

  “Shows how little we understand about Epsilon’s climate,” Daniel said. “We’d have seen this brewing over a week ago on Earth. Needless to say, we’re not taking off any time soon.”

  “Right. Anything productive we can do while we wait it out?”

  “More searches of Hercules,” Catherine said, as she nursed a cup of coffee. “If we can get over there without getting blown away, that is.”

  “Not to mention combing the rest of the area,” Daniel said. “There might be clues we’ve missed.”

  “Major storm, huh?” John turned around to see Nandi behind him.

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “No leaving for Hydra yet.”

  * * * *

  After three days, the wind was beginning to let up. They would be able to take off again soon. The livable area inside Atlas wasn’t huge, and cabin fever had begun to set in during the bad weather. This was part of the motivation behind most people’s braving the fierce gusts to head outside. Hercules had been scoured from top to bottom again. She yielded no further clues, even after three more days of searching.

  Grace had opted to stay indoors, scouring the satellite pictures of the area around the ruined city as new ones were sent down. The uplands hadn’t been touched by the storm, and the skies there were clear.

  “Check this out!” Grace exclaimed, shortly after dinner, on the eve of their departure for Hydra. “There’s something shining a bright light there!”

  She brought up the image on the main display at the front of the upper passenger compartment. The circle of the city’s outer wall was de
noted by an oval, as the image had been taken at an oblique angle. “Right here, see!” Grace pointed to the dead center of the city, where a very bright point of light blazed.

  “Wow…” Captain Weber said, stroking his chin.

  John raised his eyebrows. “Any explanation?”

  “None yet,” Grace said. “It only appears on this particular image. The next one, from twenty seconds later, doesn’t show it.” That picture appeared. There was no light to be seen.

  Michael exhaled loudly. “It’s obviously a very tightly focused beam. There’s either something there shining a laser, or it’s a reflection from a shiny surface.”

  Grace nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Then as soon as it’s safe to fly again, given Nandi’s theory about the place plus this discovery, that’s where we’re going,” Weber said.

  John looked over at Nandi. She grinned widely, and gave a thumbs up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Atlas thundered above a wide, rocky lava plain in the uplands of central Tectonia. Thousands of tons of ship were balanced on a wide column of white fire as she hovered. Jake DiMaso was doing something that few pilots had to do any more: flying the ship by hand. He rotated the vessel slowly as he searched for an area flat enough to land on.

  “Driftin’ to the right a little,” Zachary Polan said. Jake smiled at the Apollo 11 reference. Neil Armstrong had it better in one sense: the lunar module could come to rest at anything up to fifteen degrees from vertical and still be able to take off. Atlas was limited to eight degrees. Then again, he could hover for hours, whereas the Eagle’s fuel supply was counted off in seconds remaining.

  “What about over there?” Zachary said, pointing to an area half a kilometer in front of them. “Looks pretty much ideal.”

  “I’ll head over.” Half a minute later, Jake said, “Yeah, it’s flat enough. Now, we just have to hope this basalt-looking stuff is strong enough to hold the weight of the ship…”

  * * * *

  “This is an anomaly that needs to be investigated,” Mark said. “There’s something very weird going on here. It’s twenty-eight degrees Celsius, and we’re hundreds of meters higher than sea level, where it was about eight degrees.”

  Captain Weber said frowned and pursed his lips. “Could be geological heating of some sort. Whatever it is, jungles don’t normally grow in upland areas at a high latitude. Some sort of Yellowstone-like magma chamber festering below the surface?”

  “If that’s the case, this entire area might be blown to bits some time in the next few thousand years when it erupts.”

  “Let’s just hope it’s not today.”

  Atlas’ landing site was ninety kilometers from the city, and they had been lucky to find it. There was nowhere else suitable anywhere near it. A full forty minutes’ flight by vee-tol had brought them inside the perimeter of the city. “This is your show, Grace, since you discovered it,” Weber said.

  “The light source is at the central mound, plus or minus 100 meters, so put down as close to there as you can,” Grace said.

  “Hopefully we can find a big enough clearing,” Jake said, piloting the machine. “Although we only need something as big as half a tennis court to touch down in.” The maximum capacity of a vee-tol was nine people, so using both vehicles accommodated the entire crew.

  “This place was huge,” Nandi said. They had left the perimeter far behind. “It had to have been an advanced civilization. And it had to have been abandoned very long ago for the jungle to reclaim it like this.”

  * * * *

  “This is the base of the mound,” Grace said, looking at a map projected in front of her. They had slashed their way through jungle undergrowth to get there—mostly vines and creepers. They all wore their white flight suits as a first defense against any poisonous plants the jungle might have to offer. The crew’s foreheads were beaded with sweat and their cheeks red—the thick material of their flight suits, while allowing their skin to breathe, couldn’t cope with the high air temperature on top of the level of heat their bodies were generating with the exertion of having fought their way through 200 meters of choking green weeds. Now, momentarily at rest, a hill rose before them at a steep angle.

  “Look! I see the corners of stone blocks coming up through the dirt!” Grace pointed excitedly, and, indeed, every two meters or so a gray corner jutted through green earth.

  “I see,” John said, squinting. “Even thousands of years of dirt didn’t cover them completely. “The surfaces look smooth, like they were precisely cut. We’re looking at the craftwork of an alien civilization, alright.”

  “I hope we can find the light source,” Grace said. “With the margin of error, it could be anywhere between here and the other side of the mound. Worst case, we’d have to climb it and check the sides.”

  “That’s out of the question,” Weber said. “We’d need much more time and provisions to mount an expedition like that. We’re tiring fast as it is.”

  Grace nodded, pursing her lips.

  They were silent for a minute. “There’s no way to overstate how big a deal this is,” Oliver said, eventually. “But who or what was here?”

  “We’re not exactly equipped for archeology,” John said. “We have no way to dig, and no ground penetrating radar. So now what do we do?”

  Michael turned to face Grace. “You are tracking our path for the way back, right?”

  “Of course I am,” Grace snapped. “I think we should walk along the base,” she added, after exhaling restore her demeanor. Bird caws and chirps filled the air.

  “The jungle’s just as thick either way. Pick a direction,” Michael said.

  “Left.”

  “No wonder there are hardly any birds down by the sea,” John muttered. “They’re all up here.”

  The undergrowth was no less forgiving by the base of the ancient structure. If anything, there were more creepers to cut through, as though the plants of the jungle floor had sensed daylight was available on the structure above and made a run for it. The trees had done the same, taking root in windblown soil on top of the blocks, and making a dense, impenetrable canopy. Roots that cascaded down to the jungle floor made the going even more treacherous.

  This better yield something soon, Nandi thought, or I’m gonna look really stupid. Tempers had gradually begun to fray as the team members’ professional demeanors were worn away by the continual battle against nature. Grumbling had turned into sharp-tongued barbs. Great hands of solid tree root reached out to stop them, as though the ancient city had sided with nature to keep all intruders out.

  “Five more minutes and we’re going to have to head back,” Captain Weber said.

  “Fair enough,” Nandi muttered, unhappy but accepting that she may have been wrong. Now that everyone’s hip flasks of water were nearly empty, lying back in her seat aboard Atlas while somebody else did the flying was starting to sound mighty good…

  Everyone was silent as the sound of hacking and snapping continued, only the calls of unusual birds echoing in the jungle. Until Daniel, near the front of the group, stopped. “Well, look at that,” he said slowly, emphasizing each word. He was pointing at a giant glass prism, lying on its side at the foot of the mound. Creepers had entirely avoided it.

  “Oh hell yes,” Grace said, running to it. She felt its perfect smoothness. The others joined her.

  Michael let out a low whistle. “God only knows where this came from or how long its been here. Either it’s much newer than the city, or the jungle’s just avoided it.”

  “Yeah,” John said in an awed, examining the prism, which was taller than he was. “I wonder if it was part of the pyramid and fell down here.”

  “I think we know where the light came from,” Michael said. “Reflected sunlight. The base is facing up at forty-five degrees. It’d make a huge and very effective mirror.”

  “I think so,” Grace said. “If anything, it adds to the mystery of this place.”

  Ol
iver had wandered twenty meters further along the base. “Look!” he exclaimed, pointing at an opening roughly one-and-a-half meters high and a meter wide, set in a creeper-covered wall of gray stone. Nandi wiped her forehead with her sleeve as she crowded in with the others to look inside. She hacked away the vines partially covering it; it was pitch black inside.

  “Who’s going in first?” Michael asked.

  Do or die, Nandi thought. “Me.”

  “You know, it would have been a really good idea to bring helmets,” Daniel said.

  “Yes it would,” Weber said, annoyed. “Everyone just be extra careful not to bump your heads. Or let anything fall on them.”

  “I’ll leave a trail of glow sticks,” Nandi said, pulling a thick bunch of the bendy plastic tubes from her pocket. She crouched down and entered the opening, having strapped a flashlight to her head. What could be down there? It stretched away further than the beam would illuminate. There could be anything waiting for her: predatory animals, poison gas that had seeped up from the ground and built up to lethal levels, or any number of other perils. This is your destiny, Nandi. Moments flashed past: riding a tricycle with a proud mom pushing her, Grandma’s tales of the many flavors of life from the pre-war days, high school, the Party’s putting the country into a state of emergency and rounding up anyone they considered a possible subversive, her desperate appeal to America and eventual acceptance as a political refugee, and then of course her selection as an interstellar astronaut. It all came down to this.

  Still crouching, she ducked through in that position, to leave plenty of room between her head and the annoyingly low roof. Her thighs were burning within a few meters. She set down a glow stick and called back, “Guys, it’s safe so far.”

  “Coming in,” John said. His headlight half-blinded Nandi just as her eyes were beginning to adjust to the dark. John had to crawl; there was no way his large frame could crouch. The floor was covered in vines, but these disappeared after the first few meters where no light penetrated. Nandi took a cue from John and bent down to crawl as well. Oliver entered the tunnel next.