The Lambian NCO peered at her badge. "Your clearance?" Laisha produced the papers from her bag and waited nervously. "Come with me. I will take you to the security gate out front. You two, carry on."
"Sir."
Laisha emerged with the NCO from the passage just in time to see Mera Dukrees being led back in through the outside door at the far end of the corridor.
***
The figure looking out of the main screen on the Shapieron's Command Deck was lean and hawk faced, with dark, mobile eyes like a bird's and a pair of tapered mustachios. He wore the uniform of a Lambian field marshall. More figures were standing in the background, some also wearing uniforms, others in civilian clothes. He seemed about as composed as anyone could be expected to be, who within the last few minutes had found themselves talking to a company that included beings from a race that had vanished long ago, speaking from a starship standing somewhere out in space. In fact, Hunt thought he seemed too composed; it was almost as if something like this happened every week.
"The king is at this moment out of the country on state business," Freskel-Gar informed them. "As First Prince of the Realm I am fully able to represent him." News reports from Minerva had confirmed that the plane carrying Perasmon and Harzin had left during the time it had taken the Shapieron to establish the right contact.
"You must have a means of communicating with him," Frenua Showm said.
"By our constitution, I am the official acting head of state in the king's absence," Freskel-Gar replied smoothly. "I welcome you on behalf of the Lambian Crown and its dominions on this truly momentous historic occasion."
"Insisting on going over his head could be offensive," Danchekker said from the side. ZORAC would edit it from the outgoing audio. "We don't know enough about their ways to be able to judge. I wouldn't advise risking it."
They knew that as Perasmon's successor, Freskel-Gar would eventually take a harder line in his dealings with Cerios. But that didn't mean he was committed to such a course today. There was nothing that specifically linked him with the assassinations. All kinds of factions and intrigues abounded on both sides on Minerva, and Freskel-Gar would succeed as king whoever had been responsible.
"The most significant factor, perhaps, is that Broghuilio and the Jevlenese have not arrived here yet," Shilohin offered. After two years of being stationed on Jevlen as planetary administrators on behalf of the Thuriens, the Shapieron Ganymeans had no doubt who had been the cause of the deterioration to all-out war that had followed. "It will be four years before Broghuilio overthrows this Freskel-Gar and proclaims himself dictator. A lot can happen in four years."
Monchar, Garuth's second-in-command on the ship, endorsed the point. "The assassinations would be enough on their own to send things into decline, even without Broghuilio. Especially if each side suspected the other. Preventing them from happening could be the single most important result we could achieve. Failing to do so could make everything else futile."
Showm took a long breath while she composed her words. Then she looked back up at the screen showing Freskel-Gar. "How we know the things that we know is a long and complex story that is better told at a more fitting time. The fact of our appearance should be enough to give ample weight to our words. The aircraft that has just departed from Melthis carrying your two heads of state is in imminent danger of being destroyed. I don't wish to harp over details. There may not be time. But it is imperative that you issue orders immediately for the flight to be rerouted to the nearest safe landing facility until the circumstances are investigated. Then, there are events shortly to befall your world that will have calamitous consequences for all of Minerva if they are not averted. After those things are dealt with, we can talk about the uniqueness of the occasion and the development of relationships between our races."
All eyes around the Command Deck were fixed on the main screen. Freskel-Gar's features knotted as he took in the strange mixed company of vanished aliens and unfamiliar humans. They could almost read his thoughts. Appearing from nowhere and claiming to know our future? And then, again, But beings whose civilization was advanced before we even existed, and a craft that travels from the stars?
"How can you know such things?" he demanded.
Showm emitted a sigh that conveyed impatience being controlled only with difficulty. "I have already said, there isn't time now. All will be explained in due course. For now, just do as we ask. Call down the flight."
Freskel-Gar stared uncertainly for a few seconds longer. Then, seeming to make his mind up, he turned and conferred with the others who were with him. They murmured and gesticulated among themselves for what seemed ages. Hunt caught Danchekker's gaze and just raised his eyebrows. Chien watched impassively. There was nothing for any of them to say.
The deliberations on the screen ended finally, with nods and a couple of people hurrying away. Freskel-Gar advanced the forefront again. "Very well," he said. "Instructions are being issued in accordance with your wishes. We are calling the flight controllers now, and making alternative arrangements for landing." The sighs of relief aboard the Shapieron were audible. Frenua Showm had to put out a hand to steady herself. "And now, perhaps we can give consideration to hearing the rest of what you have to tell us in more propitious surroundings befitting to the circumstances," Freskel-Gar suggested. "It shall be our honor to receive you here, personally, as guests of Minerva. We await your account with considerable impatience and limitless fascination."
***
Silence endured for a while in the communications room at the Agracon after the screen showing the transmission relayed from tracking stations had cut out. Troops of the Prince's Own Regiment who had secured the building stood at their posts by the doors. Perasmon's staff had all been removed. Freskel-Gar's people manned the consoles and monitor panels.
"Are we done?" the communications major who had taken temporary charge checked.
"Link down. We're off the air," a technician confirmed. Freskel-Gar relaxed and looked inquiringly toward the screen showing Broghuilio and his staff on the bridge of the Jevlenese ship on lunar Farside.
"Splendid!" Broghuilio acknowledged. "An impressive performance, Your Highness. I could almost have believed it too. But I do you a disservice; it is 'Your Majesty' now… Or very soon to be, anyway."
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Freskel-Gar advised that the aircraft carrying the two national leaders was on its way to a safe landing ground, and he had received a message of compliments and respects from them to pass on to the Shapieron. They would receive a deputation from the ship jointly, possibly in Cerios, as soon as their own revised itinerary was put in order. In the meantime, a preparatory meeting at Melthis would facilitate arrangements greatly, and the landing there should proceed as he had suggested. It was neither Calazar's nor Caldwell's style to insist on being involved in every stage of every decision. The strategy for the mission had been set, and it was up to the people on the spot to determine the best way of implementing it. Frenua Showm sent a report to Control at Thurien via the primary beacon on the latest happenings, and turned her attention to preparing for the meeting with Freskel-Gar.
***
They made the descent in one of the Shapieron's general utility shuttles-a craft larger than the reconnaissance probe that had rescued Jissek, but smaller than a surface lander, which would have been too large for the helipad area inside the Agracon complex, where the Lambians had directed them. Eesyan and Showm were the principal Thuriens, accompanied by a small staff; Hunt and Danchekker represented Earth; Monchar and two of the ship's officers went too, on behalf of Garuth. The Shapieron moved closer in to launch the shuttle but remained within the Moon's cone of visual eclipse from Minerva. It seemed fitting to let the planet's governments announce the vessel's presence to the population in their own time, rather than have it revealed prematurely by an outbreak of pandemonium among the astronomical community.
Hunt was quiet as he sat in the cabin of the shuttle, watching the orb of
Minerva enlarging on one screen, while the Moon, which they had passed close by, slowly shrank on another. His mind went back five years to the discovery of "Charlie"-the spacesuited corpse on the Moon that had been the first trace of the Lunarians to come to light. The subsequent investigation, orchestrated mainly by Gregg Caldwell while the rest of the UNSA chiefs were trying to draw lines between who should do what, was what had first brought Hunt and Danchekker together. One of their first major achievements had been the reconstruction of Charlie's world from information contained in documents found on his person and other evidence that had shown up later. That was when they had christened it Minerva. Hunt's group had built a six-foot-diameter model of it in his laboratory at Houston, from where the UNSA investigations had been coordinated. He remembered spending long hours gazing at that model, trying to bring to life in his mind the picture of a lost world that had existed fifty thousand years ago. He had gotten to know every island and coastal outline, the mountain ranges and the equatorial forests, the inhabited areas and major cities sandwiched between the advancing ice sheets. What he was seeing on the screen now looked entirely familiar. But this wasn't a model in a lab or a computer's reconstruction. It was real, and it was out there. They were on their way down to its surface.
The Moon, on the other hand, presented an unfamiliar countenance-one that was smoother and with less features than the pictures he had known from science books and encyclopedias since childhood. The Moon that looked down on the unfolding saga of human history, the emergence of its various races, the struggles of their earliest ancestors to survive, had carried the scars of the ferocious battle fought across its surface in the final days of the war before it was obliterated by billions of tons of debris when Minerva broke up. But those events were twenty years in the future yet. The Moon that attended Minerva was still unsullied and serene.
"A strange, circular course of events, don't you think?" Danchekker's voice said from nearby. Hunt looked away from the screens. "Long ago, Minerva's orphaned Moon traced its solitary course to Earth, bringing the ancestors of our kind. Now here we are, the descendants of fifty thousand years later, returning to where it all started. Rather in the manner of paying homage to our place of origins; a pilgrimage, as it were." Danchekker had evidently been entertaining similar thoughts of his own.
"A bit like salmon," Hunt said.
Danchekket clicked his tongue. "You really can be quite Philistine at times, you know, Vic."
Hunt grinned. "Probably a touch of New Cross coming through," he said. That was the area of south London where he had grown up. "'Every inch a working man, an' proud of it,' my dad used to say. He didn't have a lot of time for high-falutin fancy stuff. 'The 'igher a monkey climbs, the more of an arse 'e looks to the rest of us,' was another one. He could never fathom the kinds of things I got into. Said the only thing I'd be good for was going off into other worlds. I suppose he was right enough about that." Danchekker blinked through his spectacles, not quite sure how to reply.
Monchar and the two crew officers from the Shapieron were silent. They alone among all those in the descent party had actually seen Minerva before. They were not Thuriens. For them it was the lost home they had departed from millions of years ago-somewhere over twenty years by their own reckoning-magically restored once again.
The shuttle broke through a high layer of cirrostratus. Below, Hunt recognized part of the southern Lambian coastline showing intermittently against the gray ocean between patches of lower cloud. "You've got company coming up," ZORAC observed, speaking from the Shapieron but reading the shuttle's radar via a probe positioned off to one side of the Moon. The screens showed interceptor jets rising and spreading out into an escort formation around the descending craft-whether as an honor guard or to keep a wary eye on it was impossible to say. They were swept deltas design mounting side-by-side engines in a flattened fuselage beneath twin tail fins-uncannily like some of the Terran designs of the turbulent period around the late twentieth century. As with things like sharks and dolphins, shapes that worked were probably restricted within quite narrow limits and likely to be found universally, Hunt guessed.
"You're on course and looking fine," the Lambian ground controller who was seeing them down reported. "The landing area is clear."
"We have your approach beam," the Ganymean copilot acknowledged. "It's looking like just over three minutes."
"Check."
"Does it look familiar?" Eesyan asked Monchar and the two Shapieron crew officers.
"No," Monchar replied, staring at the images. "Everything has changed."
The city of Melthis took shape and resolved into progressively finer detail until a cluster of buildings that the descent radar identified as the Agracon steadied in the center of the view. They opened out and grew, transformed slowly into profiles of roofs and windowed facades sliding slowly upward on the screens showing the side views as the shuttle came down between them, and then were stationary. The mild humming that was all the shuttle produced to mark its exertions, died.
"Landed. Powering down. We are on the planet Minerva," the pilot announced.
"It's been a long time," ZORAC said, presumably for the benefit of the three original Ganymeans aboard. They seemed a bit too overcome to respond.
The views from outside showed that they were in an open space surrounded by high gray buildings that looked imposing and solid, with a scattering of gray, scrubby plants sprouting in beds by the wall and along paths across patches of gray lawn. Hunt was already forming the impression that this whole world might be a composition of grays, like an old black-and-white movie. Vehicles were parked around the edges of the area: an assortment of ground cars and trucks, and some helicopter-type craft crammed to one side as if they had been moved out of the way. The cars, like the buildings, looked solid and indestructible, but utilitarian and boxy. Detroit stylists would have despaired. The predominant colors seemed to be black, a kind of khaki… and shades of gray.
No Lunarians had been visible when the shuttle touched down. But after the engine cut, figures began appearing through what seemed to be the rear entrance of one of the larger buildings flanking the square and moved out toward the craft. For the most part, their garb was of the monotonous, tuniclike patterns that the Shapieron's previous visits had shown to be characteristically Lunarian, along with variations of common themes that suggested uniforms. A number of topcoats and hats were in evidence. "I think it might be cold out there," Hunt said.
"Nine-point-three Celsius," ZORAC supplied.
Frenua Showm and Eesyan moved up to stand facing the inner door of the shuttle's lock, with Hunt, Danchekker, Monchar, and the two Shapieron officers behind them. An indicator showed the lock pressures to be balanced. The inner door opened. They moved forward. Then the outer door opened. A wave of cool, damp air met them. It carried a hint of the odor of tunnels that pervades subway stations and was slightly pungent.
In a typically Thurien touch, Eesyan and Showm did not pause at the top of the ramp, where they would have eclipsed the two smaller Terrans squeezed in the lock chamber behind them, but descended at once to where there was space for all to spread out and be presented equally. Although basic information had already been exchanged via the communications connection, it seemed that the occasion required a few formal words. Showm gave the customary Thurien head-bow of greeting, introduced herself, and proceeded to name the others with her. The link back to ZORAC, via a relay connection in the shuttle, made it available as a translator, but the distance of the Shapieron created a turnaround delay of three to four seconds. Interacting was not as sophisticated as the methods developed later with VISAR. The party wore headbands carrying audio and video pickups, with information from ZORAC delivered through clip-on ear pieces and wrist screens. Showm concluded, "We have come from a world known as Thurien, a planet of the star that you know as the Giants' Star."
The central figure of the group facing them wore a uniform with lots of braid and a peculiar three-cornered hat-the u
niforms were noticeably more ornamented than those that would come into use later, when the war got serious. He was of stocky, rounded build, and light brown in countenance like the others, with a flattened nose and narrow eyes that lent a vaguely Asiatic appearance. He held himself upright and replied stiffly. "Gudaf Irastes, Commanding General of the Household Forces to Crown Prince Freskel-Gar of Lambia and its dominions." Iraste hesitated, his eyes flickering uncertainly in the direction of his retinue. Then, evidently deciding his wasn't about to go through the list of all of them, "Greetings on behalf of Minerva. Freskel-Gar is waiting inside to receive you. If you will follow this way…"
They proceeded in through the entrance that the Lunarians had emerged from. Hunt noticed several figures in the background following them with what looked like movie or TV cameras. Inside, a short hallway brought them to an open vestibule area of marbled floor, surrounded by square columns going up to overlooking galleries. Corridors led away left, right, and ahead, between clusters of alcove spaces and doors. They went past the main staircase leading up to the galleries, and behind it passed through an archway to stairs leading down. At the bottom were sturdy double doors attended by guards. Beyond the doors, they followed a stone-floored corridor through surroundings that seemed severe compared to the halls above. The thought was just forming in Hunt's mind that this seemed an odd kind of setting in which to receive the first diplomatic delegation from an alien race of another star, when they entered a room where a number of uniformed Lambians were working at desks and consoles. It turned out to be an anteroom to a spacious, brightly lit area filled with screens and communications gear. Armed Lambian soldiers were stationed along the walls. More entered behind the party and took up stations inside the door. Prince Freskel-Gar was waiting with members of his staff at the far end. His expression was not that of a host about to welcome guests, but stony and hard.
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