Ekwan Nipiwin took a step toward it.
“Stop!” Justine roared.
As one, they turned to her.
She got off the ATV and picked her way down to them. It was a difficult task, considering the treacherous path, and her inability to take her eyes off the artifact for more than a couple of moments at a time.
As she came closer to it, she realized she could see through the semi-transparent surface of the monument. A hectare large at its base, and easily sixteen floors high, it was a massive structure of alien construction.
Justine stared at the behemothic artifact, her imagination running away with her. Thoughts of other life in the galaxy filled her mind. She had no doubt about it. They were not alone in the universe.
What were they like? Where did they come from? How long ago did they visit Sol?
Was this monument a calling card?
Here is where we are … come visit us.
Or a flag?
We were here.
Or some kind of warning?
Go no further puny humans!
She was sure the thinkers back on Earth would be up twenty-four hours a day trying to answer those same questions, once she transmitted her report. As mission exec., Justine had little in the way of scientific background, compared to the others in the science crew, each of whom had no less than two Ph.D.’s. Her training was more technology based, but even that education did nothing to help her solve the puzzle in front of her.
“It ain’t doing nothing, Captain.” Helen broke off from the group to join Justine. “Just sitting there. Could have been here for a hundred million years, doing nothing.”
“I want to know for certain. If there is even the remotest possibility of danger to the crew, then I’m going to declare this area off limits until we get instructions from Earth.”
“Don’t be so dense!” Ekwan’s lips twisted. “I’ll show you.” He reached down and grabbed a sizeable chunk of ice and hurled it at the artifact before Justine realized what he was doing.
“Stop!” she commanded, but the ice ball impacted on the artifact and shattered into a million tiny fragments.
The artifact remained a noble, immovable object.
“See, Captain! I already tried that before. It’s just there, like Helen said, doing nothing. If you are going to report this to Earth, the least we can do is take some surface measurements, perhaps a mass spectrometer reading; the usual stuff.”
The pain-in-the-ass geologist was right, as usual. The immensity of the artifact itself, and the deep-seated awareness that there were others out there, numbed Justine, slowed her reactions. This discovery shook her to her core.
“What do we call it?”
“Dis Pater, of course.” This from George Eastmain.
The name was apropos. There were many meanings of the word, but the one that came to Justines’ mind was “Lord of the Dark Realms.” The Romans had called their god of the underworld Dis Pater, and later changed it to Pluto. Justine had done her homework on all things Plutonian.
Henrietta mimed blowing George a kiss.
Glad that her helmet obscured the sour look she directed at the two of them, Justine nodded. “Very well. Let’s get as much data as we can in one hour. Then we’ll have to return for oxygen, and I’ll transmit my report.”
Like wind-up toys, the team jerked into action and began to set up their instruments.
They spent the rest of the hour taking measurements, readings, still photos, videos, and forming hypotheses. Within minutes, Dale Powers yelled out.
“What is it?” Justine asked, out of breath from running to his side despite the chance of slipping.
The astrogator raised his arm and pointed his finger. Centered on one sloping face of the monument, Justine could see thousands upon thousands of etched glyphs. When she moved to another of the bubbles, she saw it also had strange writing on the surface.
“My God!” Justine turned, looking for the engineer. “Henrietta! Get over here. I need you to get a picture of this. And tell me what you think.”
With her camera, Henrietta took a few stills, and then ran the data through her palm puter.
“Forty-nine columns on this bubble,” she announced. “One-hundred and seventy-five rows. I can’t make anything out. I have to take a closer look.” She waited for Justine’s nod before turning on her anti-magnetos.
The engineer repelled off the planet’s surface and hovered before the engraving, taking photos and video.
“Each column and row represents a unique set of glyphs, maybe like a sentence or something. I can’t make out anything here.”
“How many sets?” Justine asked the group as they all peered up at their floating colleague.
George, the astrophysics genius, replied, “Eight-thousand, five-hundred and seventy-five lines of glyphs.” The figures came to him with little effort. “On each face.”
Taking a quick spin around the circumference of the nucleus, George counted, “At least thirty-five neutrons. That’s over thirty thousand lines.”
“Yeah,” confirmed Henrietta. “And I think each line is in a different language; each style is markedly different, and I don’t recognize any of them.” She measured a few with her palm puter. “Each row is twenty centimeters in height, and each column is seventy-one centimeters in width, separated by forty-two millimeters of blank space. The whole encryption encompasses a square area on the face 35 meters by 35 meters. Here, I’m transmitting the image to your puters.”
They all pulled out their palm puters, and reviewed the images. Each line had a varying number of symbols, ideograms, dots, squiggles, or glyphs, from ten to a few hundred characters. Some specimens were simply a thousand or so straight lines inscribed side by side.
At the bottom of the last column, by itself, was a single line of glyphs. Justine thought it might be a signature of sorts.
Justine knew in her heart it was a Rosetta Stone of an interstellar collection of languages.
Imagine! Over thirty thousand other species out there in the vastness of space!
Justine shook her head.
“All right. We have to get back and send a report. Besides, our oxygen is low. In ten hours, we should have a reply to our report, and then we’ll go from there.”
Justine had to cajole every member of the team to return to the ship.
She, most of all, was the hardest to convince to leave.
8
[Event Report : Form ER-102] :
Date:
21-08-2090 / 13:23 GMT
Filed by:
Captain Justine C. Turner, Orcus 1
Navigator Helen Buchanan (CSE)
Scientific Team:
Joahanne Belcher (ESA), Ekwan Nipiwin (JAP), Dale Powers (NASA), Henrietta Maria (NASA), George Eastmain (NASA), Sakami Chin (PRC)
Nature of Event:
Discovery of unknown artifact. Scientific team named it ‘Dis Pater’ after the Roman god of the underworld, who was later renamed Pluto.
Origin:
Unknown—not of human manufacture.
Age:
Unknown.
Location:
Pluto. Longitude 120:14:04. Latitude 42:98:31.
Composition:
Unknown. Specific gravity of 100+. Impenetrable by ion bombardment (laser drill ineffective). Spectroanalysis inconclusive despite repeated test. Uncharted, or unchartable atomic composition.
Dimensions:
35.02 meters NS by 49.38 EW at base of nucleus. 168.27 meters in diameter including electron cloud. 75.91 meters in height.
Remark:
Foundation/base rests on surface of planet; no indentation identified.
Mass:
Estimated 1.44 teratons.
Apparent color:
Translucent. There is a subtle disruption of light flowing through object.
Animation:
None. Object is inert.
Distinguishing Marks:
Every curved surface of the nucleus is covered in glyphs, inscri
bed by unknown means. Extensive photo catalog included with appendix to report.
Observations:
Obviously of alien origin. We’ve tried every test we can think of, but none have given us any more than cursory data. Until we can interpret the glyphs we have no idea who the architects are, or for what purpose they erected this monument. Ekwan Nipiwin believes the shape is meant to represent an element, though it is nothing like anything in our current table, or like anything we have ever encountered.
9
USA, Inc. Exploration Site :
Mission Orcus 1 :
Pluto :
“Captain.”
It was Helen.
In her command chair, Justine, lost in thought, blinked and turned her attention to the Canadian.
“Yes?”
All eight of them had been maintaining a silent vigil, waiting for a reply from Earth. Occasionally, someone would point out a reading or an image and make a comment, but in subdued tones. The enormity of their discovery sank in deeper as the day progressed.
To pass the time, Justine had composed a few messages to family and friends, and one or two colleagues. At a time when a single person’s existence dwindled to near-insignificance compared with the knowledge of over thirty thousand alien races out there, Justine felt she needed to reaffirm the connection to the ones she loved and respected.
It made her feel better knowing she was a part of something that might reveal the awesome secrets of outer space. Never in her wildest imagination had she believed the Orcus Mission would bear such cosmic fruit.
The others perked up as Helen spoke. “We’ve got a binary EPS from Mission Control. Huh.” She glanced up, her eyes wide in disbelief. “And a confirmation of translation of glyphs on Dis Pater!”
There was a moment’s hesitation. George Eastmain blinked rapidly.
Ekwan’s mouth opened in a silent O.
Then Justine spluttered, “A what?”
“I repeat: A translation.”
“That can’t be!” Dale Powers stood up. “Those glyphs prove there is life out there, and they’ve visited here.” He pointed to the ceiling, and his voice took on a note of incredulity. “But I know for a fact that our life has never been to Pluto!”
Justine regarded him for moment, contemplating his tirade. “I tend to agree with you, Dale.” She scanned the group. “But if Mission Control says they have a translation, we’d best hear it before discounting its validity.”
“Helen?”
“I’ll put it right through.”
They all turned their attention to their workstation monitors.
10
Luna Station :
Luna :
Chow Yin had spent every one of the last seventy-nine years of his life on Luna. If anyone was aware of that, it would certainly make headline news, and break records. That was the last thing Chow Yin wanted, however.
At the age of three and a half, accompanying his parents on a posting to Luna Station, he had laughingly escaped the grasp of his mother one day and run off. As most accidents happen, he had run through a construction zone and fallen under the tires of a terraloader. His legs had been crushed, his bones splintered into thousands of pieces.
Reconstructive surgery and extensive physiotherapy, combined with the easy Lunar gravity of the time, had given him back the ability to walk, but with a very pronounced shuffle, and only with the aid of crutches; his awkward gait was far beyond a mere limp. Throughout elementary classes on Luna, he had been called troll, troglodyte, Quasimodo, and a host of other unwanted appositives.
He resented his peers—hated them.
Popularity was too far from his grasp to even be considered a dream. Acceptance was unattainable. He was an outcast.
The physicians told him he could never travel to Earth—the bones in his legs would shatter like toothpicks under the hard Gs of a re-entry shuttle, and walking in gravity six times that of the Moon was an impossibility.
For all purposes, he became the only orphan on Luna, since no one besides him was permitted to be stationed there for longer than a year for their own biological safety—his parents included. Yin had fended for himself reasonably well. His parents had visited once a year, but had granted the People’s Republic of China legal guardianship of him.
Over the years, as he entered adulthood, his contact with his parents lessened to the point where Chow Yin no longer cared to accept their attempts at contact. To this day, he had no idea of their fate.
When Luna Station installed magnagravs for artificial gravity, only Chow Yin went without the lead-lined outfits. The pressure would be too much for his crippled body.
A lesser man would have let it get the better of him; perhaps even ended it all.
Not Yin.
He had turned his disadvantage to an advantage. The one thing he noticed about everybody who looked at him, especially once he reached his late teens and early twenties, was that their looks of horror and pity and revulsion were their central fixation. If he happened to be lifting their credit flecks from the folds of their coats, they did not notice, for his crippled and pathetic self was their only focus.
At twenty-three, he had been no longer satisfied with the pickings of transients’ and tourists’ credit flecks; those sums were enough to get him by, but what he really longed for was wealth: enough wealth that people would look at him with reverence instead of revulsion.
As the only permanent resident of Luna, Yin was more familiar with the station than anyone else was. He had converted a low-G storage bay on the bottom-most level of the station to his private quarters. With the help of a young and bored computer whiz whose parents had been stationed on Luna for a year, he erased traces of the storage bay in the main computer, changed security logs, created new access codes to keep out undesirables, and altered the entire computer system of the sector to suit Yin’s needs and desires.
From this base, he ventured forth among the teen population of Luna. Most of them were bored and disenchanted with life on the Moon, and Yin recruited them to his cause, especially targeting those with skill in computers and technology.
Set up as a launch site to destinations beyond Earth, Luna Station, by its charter, was a cooperative venture of thirty-two country corporations. As such, no single government had absolute jurisdiction. The main computer was programmed as an administrative governor, and would enforce the policy voted upon by the station’s board of directors on Earth.
It was only a matter of time before Yin and his cyber gang cracked the computer’s defenses.
Yin’s young protégés created a dummy file to accept instructions from Earth, run simulation reports on those initiatives, and send those dummy reports back, keeping the Earth council ignorant and happy.
As far as things went, by the time Yin was twenty-eight he owned the Moon in all but name. The wealth and power he had gathered to him rivaled that of the country corporations themselves. Every pleasure was his; every luxury was his with barely a thought.
Nothing happened on Luna Station without Chow Yin’s fingers in the pot, and the only people that knew it were those that worked for him.
Lord of his little empire, Yin watched over the comings and goings of all transients at Luna Station, had his finger on the pulse of the country-corporations who docked their shuttles and temporarily installed their people on Luna.
If Yin wanted, he could have the Luna Computer ground all outgoing flights, or restrict any incoming shuttles from any country or private corporation that displeased him. He could hold all of outer space ransom, if he chose to do so.
He did not do that, however. Discretion, he had learned from experience, was the better part of increasing one’s personal wealth.
…And information was the most powerful tool in the pursuit of that goal. He used the information he gleaned in productive ways; revenge and petty tyranny was not his business. Besides, abusing his power would only get him noticed, and he preferred to operate and luxuriate in anonymity.
As part of his campaign to dominate Luna Station, when the last Chinese station director had rotated back to China, Yin had the computers manufacture an identity for the director’s replacement and bounce it into the Hong Kong data base. A non-person had been transferred to the Moon, and the big bureaucratic machine that was the PRC did not even notice, so wrapped up in their petty politics and closed-door communistic efforts. It was a coup d’état, as far as Yin was concerned, though yet an unpublished one.
The entire Chinese Sector was firmly under his control, and the rest of the station was at his mercy.
Classified government documents were his to peruse and use as he wished, and he did so with impunity. He had corrupted the shuttle port governor, diverted tariffs and fees to his own private bank accounts, and appropriated nearly the entire budget allocated to the Chinese Sector from the PRC. So far, he had gathered a net worth that numbered in the trillions. He had invested heavily in many of the Earth nations’ private corporations; and with a little manipulation, managed to secure a healthy return on his employed capital, as well as letting him keep his thumb on the pulse of Earth industry.
As part of his daily routine, while slowly consuming breakfast, he enjoyed reading some of the top-secret government communiqués his young techo-wizards intercepted.
When he read one such missive directed from Earth to Pluto, he nearly choked on his orange juice.
Immediately, he rang his secretary and told him, “Call a meeting of all our top snoops. We have a new priority.”
11
Macklin’s Rock :
SMD Mine Number 568 :
Sol System :
Asteroid Belt :
Taking a break at noon for a bite to eat, Alex slipped off the thought-link patch and ocular caps, blinking his eyes as he focused on the small TAHU. Adults always tried to tell him that too much VR would make him go blind, but if that were true, Alex had never seen any evidence of it.
Forbidden The Stars (The Interstellar Age Book 1) Page 4