Pelquin's Comet

by Ian Whates

  Mounds of artefacts surrounded them, heaped on top of each other like some mad pirate’s haul. There was nothing neat and tidy about it; objects tilted, spilled over and leaned against one another, and they came in all shapes and sizes – from tiny trinkets that glittered and winked in the light cast by the stickalamps to solid-looking blocks. It was all overwhelming, too impressive to focus immediately on any single item. Drake knew from experience that some of these things would be no more than baubles – still intrinsically valuable because of their Elder origin but of little scientific value – while others would be gimmicky little novelties such as the ‘gonk’ Pelquin had given to Terry Reese. But hidden among them were likely to be a few true marvels – things that human science had never encountered before and, quite possibly, never even dreamed of. These were the real prize. Even one such item would be enough to turn a small fortune into a large one, and in a cache of this size there was every hope of uncovering several. If not, the trinkets alone would still amass a tidy sum, but everyone would be hoping for the rarer artefacts that might just qualify as ‘priceless’.

  They had all climbed out of the buggy now, except for Anna.

  “It’s going to take us all day to get this lot on board,” Bren said.

  “Just think of the money totting up while we work,” Nate said.

  “Then what are we standing around gawping for?” Pelquin asked. “First we need to get the powerlifter ready and then, Anna, turn this jalopy round and let’s get on with it, shall we?”

  Nate and Bren took charge, unloading the powerlifter and sliding a number of light but deceptively strong pallet bases from the back of the buggy, where they had sat flush with the floor.

  Anna proceeded to do as instructed, manoeuvring the vehicle back and forth a few times in the confined space until she brought it around to face the way they’d come.

  Pelquin had already started clearing some of the smaller items to clear one of the larger, bulkier ones. Drake went to help him.

  “Is there any way of telling, just by looking, which the really valuable pieces are?” the captain asked.

  “No, not usually,” Drake told him. “You can sometimes tell by touch – some of them respond to organic contact…”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “…but even that’s not reliable. Often you don’t know what you’ve got until you bring it back home for analysis. And don’t worry; most of this stuff is bound to be dormant or inert.”

  “Thanks again. ‘Most’… that’s very reassuring.”

  Privately, Drake reckoned they had bigger things to worry about. Not that they were doing this entirely blind. Anna stayed in the buggy, her gaze glued to its screens, and there was also Leesa back on the Comet. Yet, for all their vigilance, Drake doubted whether the two women combined would be enough to cope with whatever was coming.

  TWENTY

  Leesa continued to feel as if she was the only sober person at a party. She watched, from the limited viewpoint provided by the buggy’s camera, as the others efficiently loaded up first one pallet and then another with Elder artefacts, using stasis tethers to keep the teetering loads in place. Nate then stepped into the powerlifter and loaded the first full pallet onto the buggy’s flatbed – and presumably the second, though by this point her view was obscured by looming artefacts. She could still hear them, though: laughing, joking, clearly having a ball. She could always switch one of the minicams built into the stickalamps if she felt the need to see more. She chose not to.

  “Leesa,” Pelquin’s voice came through, “Anna’s on her way back to the ship. Go to the hold and be ready with a powerlifter your end to help unload the buggy, so that she can get straight back here with a minimum of delay.”

  Unload the buggy? Wasn’t she supposed to be the guardian angel watching over the intrepid explorers? And what happened to keeping an eye out for more Xters? What if another shipload of aliens came roaring down from the heavens while she was in the hold wrestling with the controls of a powerlifter? Of course, all she actually said was, “On my way, skip.”

  She got there a few minutes ahead of Anna and so had a chance to practice with the unfamiliar powerlifter before the heavily laden buggy dragged itself up the loading ramp.

  Seeing the artefacts on the viewing screen was one thing, seeing them with her own eyes was a different matter entirely, but she didn’t have time to gawp.

  “You ever used one of those before?” Anna asked.

  “Nope,” Leesa admitted.

  “You’ll soon get the hang of it. It’s easy.”

  It wasn’t; at least not at first, not for somebody who’d never been behind a lifter’s controls before.

  She understood the principle: step forward into the lifter, legs and feet fitting snuggly into moulded indentations designed to accommodate them. The lifter clings to you like some grotesquely mutated suit of armour. You’re then faced with a choice of controls for the machines various functions. She opted for the forklift, which seemed a reasonable place to start.

  So far so good, but then things got a little more complicated. She raised the triple tines of the fork until her display indicated they were at the right height to slip between the pallet and the buggy’s flatbed, and started to walk forward; the bulk of the lifter sat in front of her like a vending stand at a sports game, but one that moved. She found it fascinating the way her own alternating steps were absorbed by the lifter, which rolled forward at a steady, even pace.

  Five steps and she reached the buggy; the tines of the lifter slid forward… and missed. Only by a fraction, but they were too high, digging into the stacked artefacts.

  “Careful,” Anna warned. “You really don’t want to bring that lot down on our heads. It was the walking,” she went on. “You need to stop and realign immediately before extending the tines.”

  Leesa shuffled back half a pace and followed Anna’s advice. This time the three long metal tongues slid home.

  “There, you see? Told you it was easy.”

  Leesa didn’t reply, determined to get the pallet unloaded without making a fool of herself. The fork rose slowly upward on its sliding mounting, lifting the pallet free of the buggy. Leesa swivelled round and delivered her prize to the floor, if not as smoothly as she might have liked. Fortunately the stasis tethers kept everything in place.

  The second pallet proved much easier than the first; so much so that Leesa dared hope she was beginning to get the hang of this. Anna didn’t stand on ceremony, but spun the buggy around as soon as the pallet was clear and raced down the ramp with a shouted, “See ya!”

  Stepping out of the lifter, Leesa took a few heartbeats to stare at the Elder artefacts stacked before her. They clung together as if vacuum packed, seemingly fused into two solid lumps thanks to the stasis tethers. Then she turned, hurrying up the stairs and back to the cockpit, to see what had been going on at the cache in her absence.

  Quite a bit, as it turned out. A third pallet had been filled and tethered and the crew was starting work on a fourth. Anna would be on her way back with another load almost before she arrived; it was a proper little production line, with Leesa as the spare part. An exaggeration, perhaps, given her newfound skills with the powerlifter, but it still felt that way.

  She switched briefly to the camera on the buggy but soon gave up and returned to the chamber. With no passengers, Anna wasn’t holding back. The view from the buggy was a jolting, mind-boggling blur.

  After a moment’s thought she reconfigured the screens, so that the buggy’s jarring confusion showed on her left and the view from one of the stickalamps took centre stage.

  Anna charged through the tunnel without appearing to slow, Xter suits showing briefly in the headlights and then sweeping past. As soon as she’d arrived and turned the buggy around, Nate loaded the next pallet onto the flatbed. In no time at all Anna was racing back again.

  The unloading went much more smoothly this time, with Leesa remembering to pause and adjust the tines before a
ttempting to extend them. Anna had been right, this was easy. She even managed to lower both pallets to the floor smoothly, without any danger of tipping them all over the deck.

  By the time the buggy returned with its third load she was almost beginning to feel a part of things. Her disappointment about being left behind had receded, while concern about the guardian entity and any sense of imminent danger had all but disappeared.

  Until she arrived back at the bridge. With no warning and no obvious source, Leesa was struck by a growing sense of foreboding. The auganic part of her mind stirred in a way that was both uncomfortable and unfamiliar. She was tempted to think that she’d never experienced anything like this before, but she didn’t yet know herself well enough to make such a sweeping assertion. It was as if something fumbled to commune with the techorg inside her head but lacked the proper connection through which to do so. The result was an ephemeral suggestion of a meld which never threatened to really take hold and an irritation like a mental itch. She wanted to reach inside her skull to give it a good scratch. She had no idea what was going on or who was doing this to her, but as an aid to concentration it sucked, and she was felt sure it was linked in some way to the cache chamber.

  The intrusive mental fumbling, whatever its source, triggered an unexpected reaction in her. Without any warning her consciousness shifted and the world slipped away.

  Dr Augustine Bruckheimer, preeminent cyberneticist, acknowledged genius, and the father of the techorg project, smiled at Leesa as the nurse ushered her into the room. If the nurse’s striking looks were intended to put new recruits at ease the ploy failed dismally on this occasion. Perhaps it worked on the male of the species but with Leesa it just made her starkly conscious of her own deficiencies.

  “Ah, Leesa,” Bruckheimer said, displaying a broad smile and the sort of sincerity that suggested he actually remembered her and hadn’t merely checked her file a moment ago. “A pleasure to see you again.”

  They had in truth met once before, but she was just one among a score of others and didn’t flatter herself that she’d made any lasting impression. The doctor was a consummate professional though, giving every indication that she had. “Now, there’s no rush. It’s important that you’re fully at ease with everything before we proceed.”

  Leesa glanced around her. The room was gleaming and white. Two svelte Medidocs stood to attention at the top of the operating couch, their slender arms currently retracted and upright above their gleaming white chassis, so that they resembled patient herons waiting for gullible fish to swim past. High above the couch and currently sunk into the ceiling was a grey pod loaded with an unfathomable array of further instruments; as if to emphasise that, in this room, they meant business.

  Her mouth was suddenly dry. She hadn’t been nervous up to this point, but now that she was here, now that she could see all the equipment gathered about her like scavengers around a corpse, the import of what she’d signed up for finally sank in.

  “You can still back out if you wish to,” Bruckheimer said.

  “No, I’m fine; this is what I want.”

  “Good. Now, do you have any more questions before the nurse shows you to the prep room?

  “Just one. Is all of this really reverse engineered from Elder tech?

  Bruckheimer’s smile took on a forced rigidity, and she felt sure he’d been asked this same question a hundred times before. “No, not at all. Don’t believe everything you hear. The Elders were a fabulously advanced race and much of their technology still baffles us today, but humans are by no means idiots. We made it into space all on our own, after all. These days, though, it seems that every advance we make in whatever field is attributed to knowledge gained from Elder tech and that simply isn’t the case.”

  “I’m sorry, I just…”

  “That’s quite all right. So many insist that we’re incapable of doing anything unaided; your question hardly comes as a surprise. We’ve always been like this, you know: self-deprecating. Were you aware that when mankind first bullied their way out of Earth’s atmosphere and made it as far as the moon there were those who believed the whole thing to have been faked?”

  “No, no I wasn’t.” Though it surprised her she hadn’t heard about it; this was just the sort of thing her fathers would have relished telling her.

  “Well it’s true. Computer science was advancing so rapidly in those days that within a decade the computing capacity available at the time of the first lunar missions seemed paltry; and there were those who simply refused to believe that mankind could have reached so far with such simple equipment.” He shook his head. “These people were making the same fundamental error that so many make today regarding Elder tech. They assume that because a capability is there now it’s essential and always has been. The truth is that man is a stubborn beast; and a resourceful one. Set him a challenge and he’ll bend heaven and Earth to meet it. The fact that ten or twenty years later there’s a far easier, more certain and a much safer way of doing things doesn’t invalidate the initial achievement. The fact that Elder tech is irrefutably here doesn’t mean that we’re now devoid of inspiration and incapable of developing our own technology. Far from it. Techorg is a case in point: human inspiration and human science, free of any taint of Elder influence, whatever the rumour mill might claim.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to imply any insult.”

  “None taken, but I do believe in setting the record straight. Now, if there are no more questions…?”

  “No, none at all.” She wouldn’t dare, and instead allowed herself to be led away by the unfeasibly gorgeous nurse.

  Leesa shuddered back to the present. Well that was new. She had never before experienced such an intense recollection while wide awake. Not only that, she’d been concentrating at the time on the images from the cache chamber and was amazed that a memory could distract her so thoroughly. Presumably this had been triggered by that attempt to stimulate her aug.

  Pelquin, Drake and the others must have disturbed something, presumable the cache guardian, and it was reacting – reaching out to defend itself. Somehow, that had extended into her head, however marginally. The thing that worried her was what else it might be doing. Was there something in the cache chamber itself that would respond to such a call? Presumably so, or why initiate such a powerful summons in the first place?

  Again she felt that clumsy, insistent almost-touch, and she was instantly somewhere else…

  Leesa was standing inside the cache chamber, or at least in a cache chamber. She was surrounded by objects that her perceptions struggled to identify. A dazzling array of glittering, beguiling things were heaped around her. Wood that wasn’t really wood at all but equally wasn’t metal or glass or polymer or plastic either, and wood was the closest thing she could come up with; slender wands of the stuff, shot through with glittering veins that might have been silver if silver contained ground-up diamond dust. The material fooled you into thinking it was natural and might once have been alive, while deep down a part of you suspected that it was purely the product of artifice. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of these rods, stacked up, spilling over, leaning haphazardly against things or just lying around willy-nilly as if discarded. And they were merely one of the treasures that surrounded her. Feathers of filigree beauty that glowed with inner light; dots of iridescent colour that drifted on unfelt breezes and swirled in kaleidoscope eddies, one moment gathering to create a recognisable form and the next dispersing into nebulous beauty, all summoned back into a small matt-black box via a simple twist of its base; multi-faceted blocks that looked like mathematicians’ playthings, their faces decorated with molten inlays; small bronzed spheres that sprouted dragonfly wings and soared across the room leaving glittering rainbows in their wake; incredibly fine filaments that, when gathered together, pulsed with cohesive colour that shifted and melded to form images: one moment a mirror that reflected her face, the next a window onto an exotic alien world; innocuous
seeming cubes that collapsed and turned liquid when you picked them up, slipping through your gloved fingers only to regain their original form wherever they landed – becoming solid, edged and sharp cornered once more.

  All of these things and more she noted only in passing, for they weren’t what drew her; they weren’t what reached out to strum the chords of her soul… and something here did exactly that. It called to her, wooed her, singled her out and demanded that she respond. She found it at last, at the back of the chamber, folded and draped over the lid of a burnished not-wood trunk. A bolt of impossibly silver cloth. She didn’t think, didn’t hesitate, simply reached out and grasped it.

  Afterwards, she could have sworn that the cloth stirred a fraction before her hand touched it, that it moved in anticipation and rose to meet her questing fingers. Whatever the truth, the instant her fingertips made contact the material flowed up her arm, as dammed water might flow through a suddenly cleared channel. And she could feel it. Even through her gloves and her suit she could feel the soft, cool touch of its passage. Swift and true, the cloth advanced, suffusing her suit and disregarding all barriers intended to keep her safe from invasion.

  Invade her it did.

  “Leesa!”

  She didn’t turn, didn’t look towards the source of that call of alarm, that so familiar yet simultaneously anonymous voice. Her awareness was too focused on the progress of this liquid cloth to encompass anything else. It clung to her like a second skin. She felt it slide over her lips and teeth to coat the roof of her mouth, tasting metal and strangeness on her tongue, while at the same time conscious of it entering her ears and nostrils. She clenched her buttocks involuntarily as it slid across her anus. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe; she was drowning in liquid chrome.

  Leesa came back to herself once more, disorientated for a split second before organic and auganic components slipped smoothly into mesh and reasserted stability. She was frightened by this loss of control. Two vivid flashbacks in a row, could she prevent a third? It must have been the very thing she’d been studying – the images of the cache chamber – that stimulated the second. A brand new memory completely unlooked for. Did she want to resist another vision like that even if she could?