“I’ve seen cratered worlds before,” Carpenter replied. “What’s the difference?”
“You’ve never been to Earth, have you?”
“No.”
“Go over Australia, or north India, and it looks a lot like that landscape out there. The difference there is that nature’s at least making the attempt to reclaim the terrain. Here there isn’t even that blessing.”
They finished suiting up, and stepped into the airlock. Clearing the atmosphere from the outside was going to be a real challenge for the scrubbers, and they all crowded into the space between the hatches, anxious to restore the double hull as fast as they could. A red light flashed on, and the outer door opened, allowing Orlova to stumble out into the devastation.
“Chief, do you read me?” she said.
“Just about, Lieutenant.”
“Try and get whatever you can from that datafeed while we’re down here. I don’t want to disturb anything too much. The owners might come back.” Gesturing towards the heart of the crater, she said, “Come on, Susan.”
“I thought you’d never ask.” Looking around, she continued, “You’re right, though. There is something here. I know it’s just my nerves, but…”
“Yeah. Let’s get this over with so we can get out of here.”
The two of them stumbled forward, the wind tugging at their suits as they struggled to make forward progress. Angry clouds loomed overhead, a storm obviously building, just another reason why they needed to leave as soon as they could. Carpenter almost tripped over what looked like a piece of stone, then slumped down to her knees as she got a closer look.
“Found something?” Orlova asked.
She looked up, then said, “I’m afraid so,” and pulled out a long bone. “There are some tatters of material around, probably some sort of spacesuit.”
“Get some for analysis, and take the bone with you. Any first-glance thoughts?”
“Looks human. Human-human, I mean, not Neander. I’ll know for sure when I get it back up to Alamo. I know one thing, there must be bodies all around here. Principle of mediocrity.”
“Think it’s worth doing a dig?”
“Probably not. Let’s go and look at that tower.”
The remains stuffed into a bag, hanging at Carpenter’s belt, they walked forward, towards the looming structure. In a way, this represented some sort of optimism; someone had to have built this after the devastation, or it would never have survived the impact. If their civilization had tried to make a last stand here, though, then it had failed. No-one had been here for centuries.
As they approached, Orlova’s eyes widened. The tower hadn’t been damaged as she had thought, it was intentionally angled; some sort of mechanism was guiding it. She could see it moving, just a little, and not buffeted by the wind. There was an element of control.
“Look on the ground,” Carpenter said, gesturing at a mound with a piece of metal sticking out of it. She reached down for it, brushing the soil away, and pulling her prize out. “We can take this back for analysis, but this looks like a camera.”
Nodding, Orlova said, “Someone wanted a front-row seat. I wonder where it is pointing.”
At the base of the antenna, she could see a pair of spheres that almost had to be controls of some kind, sealed shut against the environment. Looking up, a trio of boxes identical to the one Carpenter had found were still operating pointing in three directions towards the horizon.
“I wonder what’s powering it?” Carpenter asked.
“Wind, geothermal, maybe? I can’t imagine a battery lasting long enough.” Orlova reached towards one of the spheres, her gloved hands reaching to find a catch. Something triggered, in any case, and the sphere cracked open, revealing buttons, switches and gauges, as well as the sand that had forced its way in over the centuries.
“That reminds me,” she said. “We’d better start taking soil samples. Might as well make as thorough a job as we can.”
She knelt down, scooping some dirt into a container, then looked up at the clouds still looming menacingly overhead. Shaking her head, she turned to Carpenter.
“We might need to get out faster than we thought,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” she replied, a scanner in her hand. “I’m getting something buried here, maybe a meter down. I think we can get at it.”
“Something?”
“A container of some kind. Maybe whoever built this left a message.”
With a glance up at the sky, she said, “Let’s make it quick.”
Unstrapping small shovels from their sides, they started to attack the soil, small mounds of dirt rapidly appearing on either side. The exertion rapidly began to tire them, and after a few moments, Orlova paused, panting.
“Lieutenant, I don’t like the local atmospheric pressure,” Wilson’s voice echoed. “We’re going to have to cut this one short.”
“Start pre-flight, Chief. We’ll be back in a minute.”
Carpenter was still working, and she grinned as she struck something with her spade. Reaching down into the pit, she grasped a protruding handle and started to tug. Orlova peered down with her torch, then joined her friend, easing the object free of the grasping soil. Finally, with one last tug, it came loose, almost sending them tumbling.
“That’s it, Susan. We’re leaving.”
“At least I think we’ve found what we came for now,” she said. “Hopefully this will tell us what we need.”
“You can spend all the time you want examining it in your lab up on Alamo. I’ve got to get us there. Let’s move.”
“Fine, I’m coming.”
With one last glance up at the silent tower, still working for its masters after centuries alone, they started to make their way back across the bleak terrain to the shuttle. Neither was willing to put up an argument to stay, to wait the storm out.
“We need to name this rock,” Carpenter said.
“Any ideas?”
“Tombstone.”
Chapter 5
Marshall walked into the briefing room, sitting at the head of the table, looking around at his assembled officers. He paused for a second, still expecting to see Mulenga sitting opposite him in the chair now occupied by Race; it was a brief shock. A lot of people had come and gone from this table over the last three years. Cooper sitting in the chair that had briefly been Zabek’s, then Esposito’s before her, and Zebrova sitting in Dietz’s old seat. Strange.
“Carpenter, you can go first today. There’s only one order of business, Tombstone.”
Nodding, the sub-lieutenant stood up, tapping a display on the desk to reveal a hologram of the time capsule she had discovered, still in a protected environment in one of the airlocks. She tapped another button, and it seemed to open up, a high-speed recording of her progress over the last twenty-four hours.
“You all know what we found at the base of the communications array. My guess is that it was built some years after the...disaster on the planet, after the ambient radiation had fallen somewhat. This would have been left for anyone who managed to get through.”
“How does that work with the defense grid?” Zebrova asked. “If they wanted us to find it, then wouldn’t they have made it easier to land?”
“Probably they only wanted their own people to get through,” Caine suggested. “Maybe there was an identification code, or something they thought was obvious. For all we know, Alamo bears a resemblance to ships that attacked them.”
The thought sent a shudder of revulsion through Marshall, who said, “It’s as likely that we’re dealing with a malfunction of some sort. That computer has been guarding this planet for a long time. Carry on, Sub-Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir.” She gestured at the box, and said, “There are a few dozen data crystals, which we haven’t touched as yet, but there was also a selection of mineral samples. F
rom what we can tell by long-range analysis, they match all of the other worlds in this system, with one exception – there is one rogue piece, likely part of an asteroid.”
“Good way to tell us that they were spacefaring,” Quinn said. “Might be worth taking a look on some of the vacuum worlds, Captain. The artifacts there would be better preserved.”
“We can add this world to a long list of our discoveries meriting a xeno-archaeological research team, Lieutenant,” Carpenter said. “We had a look at some of the other asteroids in the system, and they match, but I think they were trying to tell us something more specific.” She rotated the view, showing a carving of the interior of the box. “That tells us something we already knew; the inhabitants of this system were human in origin.”
The image clearly showed a man and a woman, both naked, standing next to each other. It could easily have been an image from an early space probe, though this had been designed to travel in time rather than space. Carpenter tapped a button, and an image of the femur appeared.
“Initially, we thought that this was a casualty of the war, but I think it was left to tell us more about them. Give anyone who might follow something to examine, like a body donated for medical research. My guess is that a full excavation of the site would reveal a lot more bodies, probably in some sort of a pattern. The dating on this bone puts it about seven hundred years ago.”
“That’s all?” Cooper said. “We only just missed them.”
“As I said, that was likely decades, even centuries after the war. Chief Wilson was able to gather at least some of the data, and proved surprisingly easy to decode.” She tapped another button, and an image of the blasted surface appeared over the desk. “Just video, nice and simple, views of the surface around the antenna site.”
“That’s all? Nothing more?”
“There might have been more encoded in the data, but it looked like a surprisingly clean signal to me,” Nelyubov volunteered. “My presumption is that someone wanted to reduce the bandwidth as much as they could.”
“Nothing could get through that cloud anyway,” Zebrova said.
“That’s true today,” Orlova replied, “but it might have been different when it was established. Not only that, but the strength of the transmitted has no doubt degraded over the decades.”
“So we have a beacon, transmitting to...where?”
“I think Mr. Race should take over at this point,” Carpenter said. “All yours, Peter.”
The tall, aristocratic man nodded, smiled, and said, “Well, the beacon is transmitting towards one of our two routes home, the one we were planning to skip. I don’t for a moment think that it was intended to transmit that far, though.”
“Then what’s the point of it?” Marshall asked.
“I think it was sending a signal to a space ark.”
Quinn nodded, then said, “The asteroid.”
“Exactly,” Race replied. “There are a lot of small asteroids in the system. As impossible as it sounds, I think that the mineral sample on the planet is a portion of an asteroid they converted into a starship.”
“But the power required to throw something that big into hendecaspace would be several orders of magnitude greater than anything we’ve ever conceived of,” Orlova said.
“Not FTL, Maggie,” Quinn said. “STL. Very, very STL.”
Race smiled, then said, “Consider. The planet below is destroyed, all life wiped out. In space, there are survivors, scattered in colonies and outposts. Natural that they would all get together.”
“Then why not stay here? Why take the gamble of leaving their system?” Zebrova said. “It doesn’t seem logical. Over time, the planet below would be inhabitable again, especially with terraforming.”
“The system they are heading for has a world that is borderline habitable. Certainly with oxygen masks and shirtsleeves, even better than this one. None of the other worlds in this system are up to much; I’d be thinking about moving on as well. Besides, staying here in the system, looking at what they had lost, might have been even more difficult than making the big jump.”
“It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it,” Marshall said. “A people savaged by war, all but wiped out, and they still manage to plan an expedition on such a scale.”
“This is all just a theory,” Zebrova said. “A chain of conjecture.”
“No, Lieutenant,” Race said, tapping a control to bring up a map of the planet and its moon system. “Today, this world has five moons, all of them small, probably captured asteroids. A thousand years ago, it had six.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I’ve run the simulations a dozen times. It was small, no more than eight kilometers, but it was there. They used gravity assist to get clear, probably some of the other planets as well, gaining whatever speed they could.”
“A starship dependent on gravity assist…,” Quinn said, shaking his head.
“How long would they take to get there?” Marshall asked. “Any guesses?”
“A few,” Race said. “Vague, though. I’d say centuries rather than millennia, probably between five hundred and a thousand years. Which means there is a good chance they are already there, assuming they made it.”
“There’s another possibility,” Zebrova said. “They might have been the ones who destroyed the planet, moving on to their next destination. We can’t determine the psychology of them; just because the people on the world below were humans does not mean the ones in that starship were.”
“True,” Marshall said. “At least we know that they didn’t have faster-than-light drive.”
“That was centuries ago, sir,” Quinn said. “In a time scale that saw us go from gunpowder rockets to the hendecaspace drive. I don’t think we can necessarily assume anything about their capability. From what we’ve seen so far, I’d rate them about a century behind us.”
“If they had hendecaspace drive, wouldn’t we have met them by now?” Orlova said.
“Another good point. There are a lot of unknowns here,” Marshall said. “The decision is very simple. Do we go and investigate, or do we go home? Comment is invited.”
“Going home is the safe option,” Zebrova said. “Undoubtedly a ship will be sent, maybe a scout ship. We can be at Spitfire Station in eleven days.”
“That’s a point,” Orlova said. “What about the Dumont? We know they traveled this way, and we can guess that they would have come to essentially the same conclusions.”
“I think Curry would have taken a look,” Nelyubov said. “Assuming she didn’t find something we didn’t.”
“Then we could assume that the situation could have already been investigated,” Zebrova replied.
Shaking his head, Marshall said, “I’m not going to assume anything about the Dumont. We have no way of knowing what Lieutenant Curry did, and there is no sense second-guessing her.”
Looking up at him, Orlova said, “You know I’m going to suggest going for it.”
“I presumed as much. Reasons?”
“If there is a populated world that close to our space, it’s an issue of Triplanetary security. Especially if it turns out that they were the ones that destroyed this planet. I don’t think that is something we can dismiss. As Quinn pointed out, they’ve had time to learn FTL, build an armada.”
“Another Cabal, right on our doorstep,” Race said. “I want to look as well, though I admit my reasoning is more personal. I don’t think they were the hostile party, and I want to know if they made it.”
“Anything to back that up, Lieutenant?” Marshall asked.
“Just a gut feeling, sir. Nothing that I can put into any more words than that, I’m afraid.”
Carpenter nodded, and said, “Science demands we go, sir. These humans didn’t come from Earth under their own volition, which could make them survivors of the wars with the Neander. If they hav
e managed to maintain an unbroken historical record, we could learn more in a day than after centuries digging through sand.”
“Deadeye?” Marshall asked.
“We haven’t got enough information for a strategic viewpoint, but I’d recommend going. It only adds another three days to our journey.”
“This crew is tired, Captain,” Zebrova said. “What’s more, we have critical information to get home. Should we jeopardize that for a look at a potentially hostile system? Not to mention the condition of the ship.”
Marshall smiled as Quinn visibly bristled, saying, “Alamo is ready to do anything the Captain orders it to do, and my technicians are nicely on top of the maintenance routine. I think we should go. That’s my vote.”
“This isn’t a democracy,” Zebrova replied.
“No, it isn’t,” Marshall said. “Work on gathering all the information you can. I’ll give you my decision in an hour.”
Turning to him, Zebrova said, “Captain, why make them wait? You know that you’re going to give the order to go.”
With a smile, Caine said, “She’s got you worked out, Danny.”
Looking sharply at her, Marshall replied, “I still want to go over this. Dismissed, everyone.”
The officers rose as one, and started to walk out of the room while Marshall remained sitting, frowning at the surface of the desk. Caine remained, lingering at the door, then walking back in, attracting a glare from Zebrova as the door closed.
“I’m not surprised she’s asking for a transfer, Danny,” she said.
“I need someone to hold me back sometimes,” he replied.
“One look at the logs would show that she has failed on that score.”
With a smile, he replied, “I have wondered what would have happened if I’d sent her back on that ship we captured at Spitfire. Kept John around.”
“I have a feeling things wouldn’t have been that different.”
“Maybe.” He paused, then said, “What do you really think?”
“That she’s right, and you are going to go – and that you probably ought to be having this conversation with her, rather than your Tactical Officer.”
Battlecruiser Alamo: Ghost Ship Page 5