“It appears the Kranxans didn’t rely on graviton waves for communications,” the skipper announced after reading Lisbeth’s discreet message. “They used something like our Quantum Entanglement telegrams, but a much more advanced version, sort of like the difference between pre-Contact telegraphs versus full television. Some of those sources appear to be active.”
A moment later, Lisbeth wasn’t on the bridge of the survey ship anymore. A black tower, thousands of feet tall, reached towards the greenish heavens above her. She was on a busy street filled with bizarre creatures: Kranxans had once been humanoid, but most of the Marauders she saw had all kinds of bizarre deformities, everything from cancerous-looking growths to cybernetic limbs and even what appeared to be body parts from other species grafted directly onto their flesh. She watched one of them use a limb-mounted device and create a warp aperture; the unprotected being walked right into it.
“Major?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, sir. Some of those tachyon waves can trigger hallucinations.”
“I see. We’ll do a short warp jump to within a light-minute of the inner planets continue the trip in normal space; that will give us enough time to make a thorough examination of the system. I’ll meet with you, select department heads and the civilian advisors tomorrow at 1800 hours.”
Lisbeth wasn’t looking forward to that meeting, twelve hours from now. She’d never been a people person even before her close encounter with assorted alien minds had sent her flying over the edge: that shortcoming could have held back her promising career in the Navy, and she had been working on it until the Lampreys sank her ship and career at the same time. Telling a bunch of officers and gentlemen what to do was not going to be any fun at all.
She’d all but promised anyone who would listen that she could recover a small fleet of Corpse-Ships in mint condition. If one cobbled-together museum piece had been capable of that much, a hundred – or even a dozen – fully-operational models would be more than enough to win the war. Maybe a squadron or two had been stashed away on Redoubt-Five and escaped the destruction of the other two Kranxan worlds.
The possibility that using those monstrous little vessels might cost humanity its very soul and turn the known galaxy into a devastated wasteland had been mostly glossed over by everyone concerned. The War and Navy Departments didn’t deal in such intangibles as souls: they thought in terms of firepower and enemy tonnage ‘sunk,’ an archaic term that had survived the US Navy’s transition from sailing on Earth’s oceans to fighting in outer space.
If the only choices facing humanity were extinction or damnation, which was the right one?
Lisbeth thought there might be a third option, one she was keeping to herself, mostly because it might be construed as high treason and grounds for summary execution.
“Mama said there would be days like this, Christopher Robin,” her alien ghost companion said in its cheerful cartoon voice.
“Bitch be crazy,” she said, careful not to say the words out loud. If people knew she was hearing voices in her head, let alone replying to them, the jig would be up.
“Bitch be crazy indeed,” the alien said solemnly.
She wanted to giggle very badly, but refrained.
* * *
They should have called this expedition Operation Haunted Planet, Heather McClintock thought as the meeting came to order.
A holographic image of Redoubt-Five hung over the conference table. At that scale, there was nothing unusual about the green-blue-white sphere: it had less oceans than Earth, and a much more active biosphere, to the point that every land mass outside the polar caps was choked by thick forests and jungles, their teeming chlorophyll canopies adding a verdant tinge to the planet. Still, it wasn’t terribly unusual at first glance. There were dozens of similar worlds in American space alone.
The tiny purple spots popping in and out everywhere on the world’s surface were something else, however. Warp signatures, blinking like thousands of little eyes. Nobody opened doors into warp space like that, not even humans. Even if there’d been a good reason for doing so, it took a great deal of energy to punch a hole through spacetime even for a brief moment. A Marine assault catapult required about one gigawatt per launch at minimum range, the cost going up exponentially over longer distances. The display below her would take the energy budget of a large Starfarer city, and they hadn’t detected the telltale emissions of the power plants required to produce it. Gluon reactors – and their poor-man substitutes, antimatter, fusion and fission power plants – were hard to hide from passive sensors, let alone the full graviton scan the Humboldt had conducted a few hours before the meeting. The only sign of civilization they’d found were those mysterious apertures. That, and the maddening t-wave whispers only she and Lisbeth could hear.
Captain Darius J. Spears and the heads of the ship’s Operations, Supply and Science departments were all there. Most Navy ships didn’t have a Science department – only survey and research vessels like the Humboldt had those. Spears himself had spent most of his career on survey ships, exploring warp routes to find new worlds to colonize or new trade routes to exploit. It was a hard, often boring and potentially very dangerous job. His experience in handling unusual situations – his tenure aboard the USS Livingstone had been legendary – made him the right man for this job.
The Humboldt had started life as a New England-class battlecruiser, the USS Castle Rock. After the ship class was decommissioned, a handful of them were converted for survey duties. The redesign retained their armor, shields and guns (but not their missile batteries), added extra life support and cargo space for extended trips, and mounted additional sensors and an advanced stealth system. The mission of the rechristened vessel was to make multiple warp transits and extended real space maneuvers, study newly-discovered planets and, if potential enemies were encountered, remain hidden and perform a stealthy reconnaissance before leaving.
Peter was there as well, in his capacity of commander of the attached Marine company. Survey ships normally didn’t have Marines, and making room for over two hundred trigger-pullers, their vehicles and a set of platoon-level warp catapults had required a lot of work and aggravation. Given the chance of extended planetside operations to search for Lisbeth’s Corpse-Ships, having a ground force at hand seemed like a good idea.
She and Peter exchanged a brief glance; once again, they were going on a cruise together, and once again it was going to be all work and no play. It might be an improvement over being hundreds of light years apart, but not by much.
Heather was there as a civilian, serving in the role of Kranxan ‘expert.’ She had spent a good month soaking up every last bit of data she’d found in Starbase Malta’s libraries. It wasn’t much, but it made her the foremost authority on the legendary aliens other than Lisbeth Zhang, who knew a lot more but had a few problems communicating with others. Heather’s special, still largely classified ‘telepathic’ implants also played a role, of course. All Kranxan communications relied on tachyon transmissions; the poorly-understood technology would likely come in handy here.
Her role as an advisor was somewhat muddled, but that wasn’t anything new for her. When she’d become a Central Intelligence Agency field agent, she’d learned to wear all kinds of figurative hats: anything from fighting as an infantry grunt to acting as a corporate executive to running an alien space habitat, all while doing her real job. Which was to advance US interests in any way possible.
And that was what this expedition was all about.
The intentions of the other civilian at the meeting were less clear. Sophocles Albertus Munson, Ph.D. (‘should always be addressed as Doctor,’ his personal profile indicated) looked like he’d slept in his old-fashioned tweed jacket and had never used a comb in his life; the white mane on top of his head sprawled in every direction. She supposed the Albert Einstein look was still popular in certain circles, but in combination with the man’s morbidly obese physique, the hair style made him look like a distu
rbingly grotesque child’s doll. Nowadays you had to work hard at being overweight, given all the metabolic enhancers available, but Doctor Munson had managed the feat quite handily.
Maybe his age had something to do with it. Munson earned his third doctorate a few years before First Contact. As an Ancient, the man was a true civilian, someone who had never spent a day in uniform, as opposed to almost every American born after First Contact, who had the choice between undergoing a minimum of four years performing the Obligatory Service term, or four years in prison as a deserter, forsaking most citizenship rights in the process.
The old scientist had advanced degrees in a dozen specialties, including galactic history, linguistics and information technology. He also had friends in high places, the National Science Advisor to the President among them. Those contacts explained why he was the person in the expedition besides Heather who was equipped with t-wave implants. The top secret program had been suspended after a number of subjects suffered undesirable side effects (including death), but Munson appeared to have suffered no ill effects.
After the initial pleasantries were exchanged, Captain Spears nodded to the Operations officer.
“We have done an extensive orbital scan of Redoubt-Five. At this point, we have learned everything we can from above. We have analyzed the data and I can give a preliminary report with some confidence.
“Basics first. Redoubt-Five is a ‘near-Goldie’ planet. Local gravity is ninety-eight percent of g. Average temperature is seventy degrees Fahrenheit, closer to eighty in the area we’ll be concentrating on, which is near its equator. The atmosphere is a typical mix of nitrogen and oxygen and the local biosphere is Class Two, largely compatible with our own. Since we aren’t taking the time to conduct a proper analysis of the planet’s biosphere, there’s no telling if any of the local microbes will take a liking to us, so ground personnel will be issued haz-con suits. Full decontamination and quarantine procedures will be followed throughout the expedition.”
That meant that anybody who set foot on the planet would spend the return trip isolated from the rest of the crew, making the already-cramped conditions aboard the ship more uncomfortable still. Everyone had expected that, so there was no grumbling. Starfarer medicine was extremely efficient, but there was no point in testing it via exposure to unknown bacteria or viruses.
“Our initial assessments indicate there is no advanced technological presence anywhere in the system. There are no energy signatures congruent with the presence of a power infrastructure. We have found the remains of buildings in a handful of sites, but they are all buried under accumulated soil and silt, and all appear to have been abandoned for many thousands of years. There are no native sophonts,”
The Science Officer took over at that point.
“As Commander Green noted, we haven’t had time to conduct an extensive survey of Redoubt-Five.” He sounded almost reproachful about that; as a career survey officer, he probably found the haste to be unwarranted and risky. “But even our preliminary observations show a very high ratio of predators versus prey animals, and surprising levels of mutations – even members of the same pack exhibit enough divergent traits to suggest they are from different species altogether. Plant life is similarly affected, and only slightly less aggressive. We will need to take extreme measures to safeguard our shore parties.”
Heather could tell Peter was already thinking about ways to do that. Scorched-earth tactics, most likely. Marines were good at those.
Captain Spears took over.
“The initial landing area will be on the Southeastern quadrant of the planet, on the largest continental landmass.” A holographic planetary map reappeared briefly before the image narrowed down to the patch of ground they would be visiting, a roughly Australia-shaped continent. There was a noticeable circular divot on the lower western corner of the land mass in question. The captain highlighted it as he went on:
“As it turns out, Redoubt-Five did not quite manage to escape the disaster that destroyed its sister planet and rendered the third one uninhabitable. It looks like a number of fragments from Redoubt-Six struck in a number of places. The gulf on the southwest was made by the largest impactor, something roughly half the size of the ‘dinosaur killer’ alleged to have hit Earth during the Cretaceous Period.”
He gave them a few moments to digest the information. Lisbeth was certain the extinction event hadn’t been an accident. Which meant someone had broken the Elder Races’ commandments about damaging inhabitable planets – or that the disaster was the work of the Elders themselves.
The Marauders deserved that, if anybody ever did. Problem was, digging around their ruins may place us in the crosshairs of whoever did that to them.
The map zoomed in onto a section of jungle surrounded by hills. A single flat-topped hill stood near the center of the valley, its shape clearly different from the rest of the other peaks in the range.
“Graviton scans have detected the remains of a large city buried in this valley, including a relatively intact tower. The mesa near the center also seems to be an artificial creation. There is some t-wave activity emanating from belowground, along with those miniature warp events
“We will set up a base camp on the central mesa and proceed to dig in selected spots. Our primary objective is to find any Kranxan combat vessels. Given their unique characteristics, there is a good chance those ships may be still operational even after all this time.”
A couple of the Humboldt’s officers all but rolled their eyes at the captain’s words. While nobody could dispute the reality of the Corpse-Ship Lisbeth Zhang had used at Xanadu, the idea that these buried ruins could hold anything useful after millennia of weathering sounded ridiculous. Even Heather thought the chances of finding those ships were slim at best.
“In the interests of speed, we are going to cut corners, which means we’ll be incurring greater risks. A normal Navy Survey vessel would spend months analyzing a new system’s planets for any possible hazards before a human being ever set foot on them. We do not have that luxury. Time is of the essence, and I don’t need to remind you that we are at war.”
“It’s going to be difficult enough to make any sense of any remains we find without adding carelessness to the process.”
Everyone turned to look at Doctor Munson, who had risen to his feet – with some effort – and interrupted the captain.
“I understand that preserving any artifacts and minimizing disturbances would be a top priority in a normal archeological dig, Doctor,” Spears replied in a more patient tone than Heather would have used in his place. “In this case, they are secondary to our primary mission. Like I said, we have to take shortcuts because we can’t afford the time to do otherwise.”
“This isn’t a matter of not disturbing ruins, Captain. What awaits us on the surface of the planet is not comfortably dead. There are active systems on that planet, as my fellow t-wave sensitives have indicated.” He nodded towards Heather and Lisbeth. “The Kranxans doubtlessly left behind several rather dangerous surprises for any intruders, and some of them may still be active. There is a reason their race-name has survived in several galactic languages as the root for various terms for ‘evil,’ ‘devious’ and ‘sadistic.’ We have to be very careful.”
“Needs must when the devil drives, Doctor.”
“Yes, this is all very urgent. But think of the knowledge contained in those ruins. By all accounts, there are buried buildings still in one piece, despite being over three hundred millennia old, and having been abandoned for at least half that long. Do you understand what that means?”
“I’m sure you will tell us,” the captain said.
Undeterred, Munson went on: “Even metal-ceramic honeycomb walls – the most commonly-used building material in known space – isn’t rated to survive more than ten thousand years without active maintenance. The only alternative is vivoconcrete, a nanite-rich compound that can regenerate damage somewhat like living tissue does.
“As y
ou may or may not know, vivoconcrete is extremely expensive, requiring Level Six fabricators to manufacture, which is why it’s only used in a select few buildings, even by the wealthiest Starfarer civilizations. The material also requires an energy source. Your scans show none are active. In other words, whatever those ruins were built with is something superior to the best construction materials we know of. Rather than merely blasting it apart, we should try to spend some time analyzing it. And that is merely one example of the amazing discoveries that we could carelessly destroy if we aren’t careful.”
“You have a point, Doctor. And we will try to record and analyze any finds as best we can – as long as doing so does not interfere with our primary objective.”
“Of course. Do keep in mind, however, that the activity below us emanates from warp interactions that only three members of the expedition, myself included, can even detect, let alone evaluate. And those emanations can be dangerous. We have to be prepared for such things as hallucinations, loss of concentration, possibly even psychotic breaks.”
Munson glanced at Lisbeth as he spoke.
Everyone suspects Lisbeth is not in perfect mental health, but I have a feeling the good doctor knows just how badly she is doing.
Heather’s implants hadn’t given her more than a few glimpses inside Lisbeth Zhang’s head, for which she was thankful. The traumatic events at Xanadu had left a lot of scars in the Marine pilot’s psyche, and t-wave implants didn’t allow you to read minds so much as to share what was going on inside them. Doctor Munson had received a second-generation set which supposedly protected its wearer’s mind from trauma. Heather wasn’t sure the new sets were any better than the last; untried technologies rarely performed as advertised. But if he could look into Lisbeth’s mind without losing his, those implants were damn good.
In Dread Silence (Warp Marine Corps Book 4) Page 10