Fire with Fire, Second Edition

by Charles E Gannon

  He eased off the accelerator as he approached: Don’t want to look like I’m in a rush. He heard and ignored yet another page on the radio, thought a moment, then reached under the dashboard and disconnected the unit.

  He emerged into the clearing and, as he heard the spatter of loose rock under his tires once again, he realized that the road to this site was more worn, and smoother, than the one to the oil rigs. It either got more use, more attention, or both. Yet it led to the one location that was left off Caine’s itinerary. Whatever Helger didn’t want him to see was here.

  He slowed as he came amidst the cluster of prefab buildings: newer and better maintained than the ones out at the oil field. More vehicles, also. But it was the small groups of workers—two lounging against a truck, three more under the awning of an administrative prefab, another two walking slowly past a pile of white and dusty dig spoor—who were the most strikingly different. It took a moment for Caine to see what the difference was, as they looked up briefly over the rims of their coffee cups before resuming their casual chats. It wasn’t their crisply clean clothes, or their neatly groomed hair, or even their alert faces and scanning eyes: it was their postures of relaxed self-assurance.

  One or two looked up from their coffee again, matching Caine’s gaze. Christ: don’t stare. Get moving.

  He swung his legs out the door port that had been scalloped low into the chassis of the Rover, settled his hat on his head as he looked up at the sun, and then at his watch. He peripherally saw the watching eyes withdraw as he walked with a casual surety that was pure bluff; he only knew that he needed to get to the excavations.

  Caine hadn’t been sure what to expect in the way of challenges, but was utterly surprised by what he did encounter: nothing. Slowing to a stroll, he passed compact excavating equipment: caterpillar-tracked backhoes, drills, one small articulated hoist jury-rigged on the back of a large truck. One hard-hatted mechanic emerged from the truck’s cab, stared at him without nodding, went on his way.

  And that was it: no Cerberus guarding the gate to whatever buried secret CoDevCo had found here. Caine suppressed the urge to laugh at the anticlimax of the moment, kept walking forward—

  —into a litter of chalky white rock. Oval pits dug here and there, one of which was long and narrow. Beyond that was a high berm of loose dirt. Well, might as well start looking—

  “Hello there.”

  Caine managed not to flinch, turned to face the voice. A middle-aged man, half-a-head shorter than Caine’s six feet, was approaching. He looked more like a librarian than a machine operator: it wasn’t just his clothes—appropriate for a company picnic—but his soft, almost delicate face and bookish glasses. “Yes?”

  “Hello,” the man repeated. “Can I help you?”

  “You in charge here?”

  “Well, I—I have final authority over dig priorities and scheduling, so I suppose—”

  “Fine, then I can talk to you. I’ve got to check drainage and pump placement. We don’t have any details on it and the weather stations are confirming a possible hurricane. So I need to see a schematic of your flood-management systems.”

  Bookworm blinked several times. “I—but I don’t know about this. I mean, no one told me—”

  “It’s okay, I’ll take care of it. No one’s fault, really. Not the responsibility of the excavation crews, and the research teams wouldn’t know to ask about it if someone didn’t mention it. So here I am. Do you have any sump pumps in place?”

  “A few down in the main site, near the base of the columns—”

  Columns?

  “—but only one, just to handle regular rainwater accumulations. This hurricane: could it damage—?”

  Caine waved a dismissive hand. “Look: you don’t have anything tall exposed above ground level, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then the worst that could happen is that things will get wet.”

  “But there might be seepage. The soil we’ve removed was a barrier, prevented any water from getting as far down as the foundation. If there are sealed chambers, then—”

  “Okay, I get the picture. We’ll get the necessary machinery out here to take care of it.”

  “Thank you. Thank you, Mr.—”

  But Caine had already turned, and walking away, acknowledged Bookworm’s hand-wringing gratitude with a lazy wave. He also resisted the choking urge to race ahead, to run everywhere the ground had been torn up, looking, looking, looking. Columns. Foundations. Possible sealed chambers. A little bit more than just a line of rocks in the ground.

  In the small dig pits, he saw what had caught the attention of the CoDevCo surveyors, and what one naval officer—a j.g. who had minored in forensic archeology—had noted in his analysis of close aerial imagery: right angles. Throughout this area, the ground rose up in low, flat, elbowed humps that looked like barrows for carpenter’s squares. CoDevCo had obviously read and heeded the j.g.’s report, and sent archeologists—not construction workers—to unearth the underlying mysteries: every hole had the carefully graded sides and the strange yet irregular precision of historical dig sites. The archeologists had evidently started by exhuming these old bones of isodomic wall junctures: moored upon large cornerstones, quoined blocks were stacked two, occasionally three, courses above that fundament.

  Caine sidestepped up the final embankment of dirt, backsliding slightly, finally digging in with a quick sprint to get him over the lip—

  —and which nearly propelled him into a pit where something vaguely like a partial floor plan of a half-sized Greek temple lay exposed to the sun. After several seconds, Caine realized his mouth was open, closed it. The half-buried stones at the oilfield and the nearby wall-fragments had whispered that a millennium of humanocentrism might need reconsideration. But this bone-white expanse of quasi-Classical architecture decisively rebutted any arrogant assumptions that humanity might be the center of all things, the origin of all causes, the denouement of all purposes.

  Caine sidestepped down to the base of the embankment, stretched his foot out onto the marble esplanade, thinking ridiculously, “One small step for a man—” Ridiculous because dozens of humans—hundreds maybe—had walked here before him. But he felt a narrow shiver arc up his spine, nonetheless.

  Starting at the extreme left hand of the facing colonnade, four one-meter-high remains of columns were the only vertical objects protruding up beyond the lateral plane of the stylobate. Lighter circular shadows completed the peristyle sequence that the extant columns predicted, all the way out to the far right hand corner. Leading up to them were steps—cracked, disintegrated in many places, but unquestionably steps—which spanned the entire frontage of the structure’s crepidoma, or base. Caine raised his foot, knowing he should not tread upon them, but drawn by an urge far stronger—and far more important—than the one which Consuela had inspired in him half an hour earlier.

  Movement to the left, from around the corner. Caine pulled his foot back, put his hands in his pockets. An unusually short man of late middle age seemed to emerge from the ground behind the left hand corner of the crepidoma. Tubby, hirsute, bespectacled, making smacking noises with his lips, the gnomish creature stopped when he saw Caine. “Oh. Hello,” said the Gnome. “It’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Something. Look. There might be a hurricane coming. I’ve gotta do an assessment for flood control: drainage, sump placement—”

  “Good, good,” said the Gnome, “glad to hear they’re taking the value of the find seriously. Although,”—he stopped, eyes dim through his round, dust-smeared glasses—“I suppose I’m being overly optimistic again. They don’t care about the history of this, or its significance. They just want to protect what they’re hoping to find—and the hell with the rest.”

  “And what is it that they hope to find?”

  Gnome—who had been standing arms akimbo, admiring the structure—turned to look at Caine again, eyebrows raised, “What else? Artifacts.”

  “Why?
For sale on the black market? Alien antiquities, that kind of angle?”

  “No, no, no.” Gnome shifted into a professorial head-wagging remonstration; he was doing his best to be patient with a slow student. “Not primitive artifacts. Advanced artifacture. Devices. They didn’t tell you?”

  Caine shook his head. At first, he couldn’t speak; he was simply glad he wasn’t gaping. Then, hoarsely: “So, how long—?”

  “How long has it been here? Can’t be sure; we’re still waiting for the radioisotope dating equipment. But I’m guessing—judging from the depth of overhead sediments, the speed with which they seem to accumulate here, the erosion—ten thousand years, at the very least. Instinct and experience tells me it’s twice that. I doubt it’s more than forty thousand.”

  “And you found their machines?”

  “Not yet. Frankly, I don’t think there’s anything to find. Stone weathers better than almost anything else. Intricate machines and objects—well, they are the first things to go. And given the priority list Mr. Helger gave us, I don’t think he’s particularly interested in museum pieces.”

  Caine had recovered enough to actively steer the conversation. “CoDevCo wants toys that work, huh?”

  “Yes, indeed. Weapons applications, I suspect—the blackguards. But I accept their pay, so I suppose I should remain a bit more philosophical about it all.”

  “They’re looking for weapons?”

  “Oh, no—not directly. But there are plenty of indications that—” Gnome stopped himself, mouth open in mid-syllable, as if he had checked his didactic enthusiasm at the last possible moment: he was concealing something. When Gnome resumed, his tone was more controlled, careful: “There are indications—historical indications on Earth, that is—showing that there’s a close relationship between new weapons and new technologies.” He hurried onward from that lame generality: “Personally, I think their hope to find advanced technology at this site is a pipe dream, and I wish they’d wake up from it. Until they do, we’re going to be isolated in this damn valley—leaves suspended, contract extension clauses invoked—until God knows when.”

  “Yep: it’s tough.” Caine wondered what Gnome had almost revealed, but a deep animal instinct told him not to exert any pressure.

  Gnome had evidently forgotten his near-misstep. “It is not merely ‘tough’: it is crippling. I am not permitted to submit reports, articles, or get proper equipment. And my old university would come back to me on hands and knees with the offer of an endowed chair if they knew half—”

  “Thanks,” said Caine. He turned and walked back the way he had come, bypassed the embankment, continued up out of the far side of the dig site and kept walking until he reached the edge of the forest. Fifty meters to his right, a trail wound up the slight incline that led into the alien foliage, sparsely peppered with startling red-purples and subtler mauves. Somewhere—in there—were creatures, presumed bipedal, who traveled in groups. Heat signature, speed, and inferred length of gait suggested something roughly man-sized. Who were being pushed out of their natural habitat. Or worse.

  But that jungle was, for all intents and purposes, still terra incognita: a heart of alien darkness. He stared into it, trying to see further, thought: And perhaps they are staring out at me. He thought he saw something move—sweep from the trees down to the ground, a blurred shadow—but it was too quick to be an animal of any kind, he realized. He laughed at himself, part of a fruitless attempt to displace the fear that rose up as he looked into the underbrush and thought: I must go in there.

  Alone.

  Chapter Seven

  ODYSSEUS

  Consuela didn’t meet him at the pool. Didn’t join him for drinks. Was not in sight when he entered the executive refectory—which appeared comparable to a three-star restaurant—and asked for dinner.

  “Very well—oh, you are Mr. Riordan, are you not?”

  “I am.”

  “I have a private alcove reserved for you. Courtesy of Mr. Helger. Would you please follow me?”

  The alcove was paneled in the same faux-ebony as Helger’s office. It felt like wood—but with a faint hint of increased surface flexibility. The maître-d´ smiled efficiently. “Your waiter will be with you momentarily. Is there anything I can do in the meantime?”

  Cheerful subservience accompanies all entrees. The house special both within and beyond the refectory. “Nothing, thank you.” He reached for a chair himself, forestalling the maître-d’s incipient lunge to help. He had his palmtop out before he sat, reopening the survey files that he was now ready to reassess.

  He ran the real-time aerial surveys collected by the USSF. The best of the thermal imaging scans—from a recon VTOL’s FLIR—was partially degraded by the foliage, but the results were still clear: a dozen, maybe fifteen vertically oblong signatures, holding together in pack movement. They had the long, rolling gait of bipeds, not the reach-and-pull movement of quadrupeds at high speed. Mass was indeterminate, but the sensors estimated maximum height to be just under two meters: the right size.

  The Navy had landed, looked around, found nothing definitive. In the hollow of a dense thicket of helical tubers, a rating—apparently seeking privacy for a moment of personal relief—discovered some spoor which suggested possible tool use: sharpened sticks, unusually smooth rocks that seemed about hand-sized. There were no anthropologists among that shore party, so they could only guess. The Navy marked the area for subsequent detailed study, posted it as off-limits to the first wave of Commonwealth colonists, and kept an eye out for similar signs in the other regions of Dee Pee Three.

  The results of that haphazard monitoring effort were not encouraging. There were one or two possible contacts, but they were recorded by automated sensors: by the time anyone saw the results and dispatched a manned survey unit, the site was cold. Had there been hundreds, even thousands, of the creatures, Dee Pee Three was a big enough world that they could remain unencountered for years, maybe decades.

  Dee Pee Three’s size wasn’t the only variable that complicated the search. Despite being farther from its star than Earth was from the Sun—1.14 AU—Dee Pee Three was a hotter world. Although fractionally smaller than Earth, greater density gave it greater gravity, which in turn had led to a more dense atmosphere. Along with a slightly greater greenhouse effect, it also had less liquid water: sixty percent surface coverage, and those oceans were not very deep. Only a tiny spot on each pole failed to reach summertime highs above zero degrees Celsius, meaning that the ice-caps “migrated” with the seasons, just as they did on Mars. The net result was a planetary mean of about twenty-four degrees Celsius, almost ten degrees higher than Earth. And much of the deviation from an Earthlike baseline was relatively recent: spectral analysis and other indicators suggested that Delta Pavonis had undergone a small but steady increase in stellar luminosity over the last five to ten thousand years. With the sun lamp set a bit higher, Dee Pee Three’s thermic equilibrium had teetered a bit: there was plentiful evidence of a recent past in which the weather patterns had been milder, the poles had been small but permanent features, and the heat of the tropic zones had been merely punishing, not lethal. Erosion patterns indicated that in the relatively recent geological past there had been a far greater profusion of ground plants in the equatorial plains, which had held the soils in place: now there were deserts of superheated dust, often carried aloft by the cyclones that followed the changes of the seasons.

  Caine read this story of a planet wobbling at the edge of meteorological stability and wondered: is this why the local civilization collapsed, why they almost (or completely) died out? Dee Pee Three had achieved a new equilibrium now, but had there been a period of cataclysmic weather effects? Had an epoch of floods, tornadoes, hurricanes driven a fragile young civilization back over the edge of progress, propelled the survivors back into preintelligent primitivism?

  The Navy had expressed similar uncertainty about the climate, but not from the standpoint of forensic anthropology: they were concerne
d with long-term habitability. Therefore, after the early days of the survey—when the first tantalizing hints of unseen bipeds were trickling in—the official emphasis was shifted to meteorological data gathering. The combination of higher average temperature and lower hydrographics still created some ferocious—but fairly localized—weather anomalies. So, in order to avoid colonizing such areas, the assessment and measurement of regional weather and environment got first priority.

  Later travelers’ tales had been appended to the official Navy reports. Ruins (but it failed to say which) were first reported by a mixed group of Canadians and Irish who decided to go on a lark and see the off-limits Shangri-La valley for themselves. The apocryphal tale—retold in the clipped, unimaginative diction of Navy reportage—was that the group had started gathering rocks to build a windbreak for a campfire when they realized they were picking up chunks of dressed stone. Caine smiled: what a moment that must have been . . .

  “Did you find your independent excursion illuminating, Mr. Riordan? I’m sure you would have found it more informative—and enjoyable—had you remained with your guide.”

  Caine looked up: Helger and a companion. “The guide left the final, very illuminating site off my itinerary.”

  “An unfortunate oversight.” Helger sat, signaled for wine, looked to Caine, who shook his head. Helger did not extend the offer to his companion: an immense, square-shouldered man with pale blond hair and pale blue eyes, who sat immobile in trail clothes. He was the only male in the refectory wearing shorts, and who was not recently shaven. He either did not notice, or did not mind, Helger’s failure to offer him wine.

  Helger continued his unapologetic apology. “Had you so wanted to see that site, you could have simply requested it.”

  “So Ms. Rakir could call ahead and confabulate a closure, or flood the dig site, or report a quarantine? Thanks, no: I felt I was more likely to get a good look if I went on my own.”