Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three)

by Worth, Dan

  ‘Yes, I believe your assumption to be correct,’ replied the ship. ‘If it is any help, the crew have recovered further scraps of text from the remains we found in the asteroid belt. I’ll transfer them to you now, Professor Cor. You can add them to the dictionary that you are compiling.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Rekkid. ‘Are we any closer to finding out what happened to that second planet?’

  ‘No, unfortunately. Any residual radiation has long since dispersed. There are signs that the rocks were subject to intense heat and pressure and there is far less debris than one would expect for a planet large enough to be habitable.’ To illustrate its point, the drone projected a map of the asteroid field along with estimates of the total mass compared to the mass of Earth and Keros.

  ‘Either a significant portion of the planet underwent a mass-energy conversion, or was simply removed say, by a singularity based weapon or catapulted out of the system. Both of which I would say are far out of the reach of the former inhabitants of this place. Either someone else came here, or the people of this system got their hands on a weapon that someone else had built.’

  ‘Like a Progenitor device?’ said Katherine.

  ‘Possibly,’ the ship replied. ‘It remains to be seen. In any case, destruction appears to have been rapid. We have found a few bodies intact, but also very large amounts of carbon residue, indicating that the surface of the planet, and all life on it, was immolated in a planet-wide firestorm. Remains of artificial structures, buildings and whatnot, still remain in places, but most have been shattered into small pieces or are unrecognisably melted and are only identifiable as artificial due to the purity of the metals. It would have been a massacre. I severely doubt whether anyone could have escaped.’

  ‘Then perhaps we owe it to these people to uncover what happened here,’ said Katherine. ‘It doesn’t seem right that billions of lives should be snuffed out and forgotten. We have to continue our exploration of this place. For their sake, and ours.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the ship. ‘Allow me to assist you.’

  They were deep in the abandoned tunnels now, the ship’s drone mapping their progress as they went. Picking one of the exits from the large chamber, they had at first passed through a maze of abandoned spaces that appeared to have functioned as offices. They were filled with the crumbling remains of furniture and primitive looking computer equipment. Rekkid had seized on anything that looked like it had scraps of dual language text. Although books and papers had long since rotted and crumbled, there were devotional plaques and inscriptions on many of the walls, allowing him to gradually expand the lexicon of words that he had in his possession. Everywhere was thick with dust.

  Beyond the offices they found one of the ramps that led down to the level below. This lower level of the complex resembled a barracks, with a grid of corridors leading to large dormitories filled with the collapsed remains of what looked like beds, as well as smaller, private cells. They found smaller intimate chapels down here too, each with decoration and inscriptions similar to those that they had found elsewhere, but which again allowed Rekkid to add words to his collection. There were also weapons lockers, concealed behind long rusted metal doors and filled with row upon row of odd looking firearms and crates of ammunition that had almost rotted away. They also came across larger chambers resembling gymnasiums and firing ranges, though it was difficult to guess at their true purpose. In any case, the sheer size of the place made it clear that at one time an entire army had sheltered down here. According to the range finding done by the ship’s drone, some of the longer main corridors extended for several kilometres.

  It was whilst crossing one of these main thoroughfares, broad enough to drive a tank down, that they again saw the flickering, shadowy image of the being that they had seen before. He hovered about half a metre off the ground in the distance, his ghostly form glowing eerily in the darkness. He was beckoning to them again.

  ‘Our friend has returned,’ said Rekkid, as the spectral figure caught his eye and he suppressed a shudder. ‘I wonder what it wants?’

  The figure mouthed silent words and waved for them to come closer.

  ‘I think it wants us to follow,’ said Katherine.

  ‘Are you sure that that’s a good idea?’ Rekkid replied. ‘Maybe it’s a trap.’

  ‘Maybe, but we do have the drone with us and Steelscale too.’

  ‘I can confirm that the apparition is nothing more than a projection,’ said the ship. ‘Some sort of micro-engineered device clinging to the walls is generating it. It’s no bigger than an insect and quite invisible from here to the naked eye in this light. It is very difficult to see even with the sensors of this drone. However, this appears to be another example of technology being used that is jarringly so much more advanced than that of the native civilisation.’

  ‘See? Not a ghost. I knew all along,’ said Rekkid and laughed nervously.

  ‘I am also detecting a power source in the levels beneath us,’ the drone added. ‘It may be safe to assume that this may be the source of the signals being beamed into space. We should press on. Perhaps this image is meant to guide us?’

  Cautiously, they walked towards the projection, their footsteps echoing in the dark, forbidding passageway. As they approached it, the apparition vanished, and for a fleeting second a silver mote was caught in the light from their torches as it sped away from them. Seconds later, the figure reappeared further down the corridor and they dutifully walked towards it as it repeated its earlier actions of mouthing silent words and beckoning to them. Again, as they approached, the figure vanished and then reappeared further away at a junction of corridors. This sequence of events repeated itself over and over, the elusive apparition leading them further and further along the passageway for hundreds of metres until the barracks complex appeared to come to an end and the passageway doubled back on itself and angled steeply downwards into the earth. As they looked down the smooth slope, they saw the elusive figure once more at the bottom, glowing with a spectral light.

  They were now deep underground. At the bottom of the tunnels, in the bowels of the earth, the figure floated ahead of them. There was a larger chamber at the end of the tunnel, an echoing, dark space that rang with their footsteps and swallowed their torch beams as they entered it. Then suddenly all of the lights came on. Stunned, the four beings looked about themselves and discovered that they were standing on the outer edge of a huge, circular chamber with a domed and intricately decorated ceiling. The floor of the chamber was filled with concentric rows of shelves and the shelves were packed with thousands of hermetically sealed, plastic crates. Each was carefully labelled and coded in the mysterious aliens’ language.

  ‘Looks like somebody’s still awake down here,’ said Rekkid.

  ‘The power’s still on, that’s obvious enough,’ said Katherine. ‘Either someone switched the lights on for us, or we tripped a sensor.’

  ‘What is this place?’ murmured Steelscale. ‘Some sort of storage facility perhaps? A weapons cache?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Rekkid. ‘Let’s take a look inside these boxes and find out, shall we?’ He walked to the nearest row of shelving and carefully pulled one of the boxes from it. Grunting from the weight, he set it down and set about opening it. Although the crate was securely sealed from the outside world, it was not locked. A series of clips around the edge held the lid in the place. Rekkid thumbed them open and then removed the lid, which came away with a hiss as atmosphere entered the vacuum within, and looked inside.

  ‘Well, this room isn’t a weapons cache,’ he said. ‘It’s something far more important than that!’

  ‘What then?’ said Katherine, peering to see what he had found.

  ‘It’s a library,’ said Rekkid, as Katherine now saw that the crate was filled with ancient, perfectly preserved books.

  There were thousands upon thousands of books safely stored here, protected from the ravages of time and war. It was a treasure trove of knowledge,
the entire culture of a people long gone preserved for thousands of years after their authors had been destroyed. But the archaeologists were only able to decipher disjointed fragments of the texts that they examined. Each crate of books that they opened contained volumes written in the dense, flowing alien script that they were only partially able to understand. They had yet to uncover any titles written in both the native language and Progenitor script. Nevertheless, it was clear from what they were able to comprehend that the library contained a wealth of information on the planet’s vanished people. There was history, science, art, literature, poetry and the biographies of great individuals now long forgotten, all of it unread for ten millennia.

  Rekkid squatted on the floor, a book of art prints open in his slender hands, the yellowing paper depicting a number of stylised pastoral scenes filled with strange creatures and unfamiliar vegetation. They were depictions of a planet long since ravaged and rendered lifeless.

  ‘There’s so much to discover here,’ said Katherine. ‘It’s a pity that we can’t read most of it.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ replied Rekkid. ‘I think that the Progenitor language had religious importance for these people. They seem to have regarded the Progenitors as gods, hence their language seems to have held particular symbolic significance for them. Perhaps words written in that language had particular power for them, which is why we keep seeing the use of both languages in their places of worship.’

  ‘So what we need to do is to find religious texts amidst all this,’ Katherine replied, sweeping her hand around to take in the entire library.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. These shelves are all labelled. Let me see if I can spot anything that may sound appropriate.’

  Rekkid got up and began to walk the aisles between the sections of shelving, scanning the faded labels affixed to them as he went, occasionally pausing to look up an unfamiliar word. The others watched him, and though the ship’s drone offered to help, Rekkid shooed it away. In the end they left him to it.

  ‘They must have anticipated the destruction of everything that they held dear,’ mused Steelscale. ‘Else, why build this place at all? It seems like madness to allow such a thing to happen. Clearly, they knew the risks. This place is evidence of that.’

  ‘I think you and I can both agree that people of all species are prone to such collective insanity,’ replied Katherine, as she watched Rekkid stalking up and down. ‘Humans, K’Soth, Arkari: there are moments in all our histories that seem insane even to ourselves. We’ve all almost destroyed ourselves several times over. Sometimes I think that it’s a miracle we’re still here at all.’

  ‘Political dogma, religious mania and general stupidity seem depressingly common throughout known space,’ said Steelscale and sighed. ‘I think my own people have been guilty of all three for quite some time. Perhaps one day someone will sift through the cremated remains of my home-world and wonder what happened to us, who we were and what we looked like. I don’t think that they’ll be too impressed when they find out, either. We brought nothing to the galaxy except violence and oppression.’

  ‘Then perhaps it’s up to K’Soth like yourself to change that?’ Katherine suggested. ‘Perhaps some good will come of the civil war in the Empire. There will be a power vacuum once the noble houses have finished fighting to destroy one another. Someone will need to fill it. Perhaps you can all make a break with the past?’

  ‘I wish I could be so optimistic, Katherine,’ said Steelscale. ‘From my knowledge of our history, our leaders usually climb over a pile of corpses to get to the top.’

  Rekkid had stopped in an aisle at the far side of the library from where they were standing. They saw him remove a crate from its space on the shelves and then set it down on the floor before opening it and lifting out a heavy volume. Carefully, he opened it at a random page, gave a cry of excitement and then waved them over.

  As they reached him, Rekkid held the book up for Katherine, Steelscale and the drone to see. It was a beautifully illuminated work. It had been printed rather than hand written, but each page dripped with delicate decoration. The borders of the pages were a riot of colour, still bright after a hundred centuries and pages of text alternated with colour plates depicting the scenes described. The text itself was in both the native language and that of the Progenitors.

  ‘Looks like you’ve hit the jackpot, Rekkid!’ said Katherine, excitedly. ‘This is wonderful!’

  ‘Yes it is! There’s a whole section of shelving here devoted to religious works. With these we can fully understand the language of these people. Finally, we can get to the bottom of what happened here! There are hundreds of historical works in this room, and we can read them all!’

  ‘It could take months, but...’

  The ship cut Katherine off.

  ‘No,’ it said. ‘It will not. I will have more of these drones sent down to the surface. They will be able to scan these works for you, assemble a dictionary of words and thus translate the volumes in this library.

  ‘Well, that just takes all the fun out of it,’ said Rekkid, only half in jest.

  ‘They will take care of these ancient tomes, I promise you that,’ said the ship. ‘The work will take days, rather than months. We could do it in hours, but... I wish to preserve, not destroy these works. They are very delicate.’

  ‘Very well, send down more of your pets and let’s get to work, shall we?’

  Katherine was looking over his shoulder. Rekkid turned and saw that the ghostly figure had returned. It was standing in the entrance to another tunnel that led out of the library. There was no telling how long it had been there. It appeared to be watching them. It beckoned once more to follow.

  ‘Clearly, this isn’t all that there is to find down here,’ said Steelscale. ‘It wants us to continue.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Katherine to the others. ‘We haven’t found the source of those signals yet. This isn’t over yet. Let’s go.’

  A broad passage, illuminated by lights that had partially failed and flickered forlornly, led off from the library for a couple of hundred metres before it turned left sharply, continued for another hundred metres or so and came to an end at another large and as yet unlit chamber. They began to hear the faintest of sounds. At first it was barely audible, but all of them could hear what sounded like deep, unified breathing which echoed down the dusty passage towards them. As they approached the end of the passageway it grew louder until, standing in the darkness at the edge of the chamber, they looked at one another nervously as all around them the as yet un-guessable vastness of the hollow space echoed to the sound of breathing.

  ‘What is this place?’ whispered Katherine. ‘What the hell is that sound? It’s like we’re inside the ribcage of some gigantic beast, listening to it breathe.’

  ‘The chamber is roughly spherical and around three hundred metres in diameter,’ said the ship. ‘There is a great deal of machinery in here, everywhere in fact, and there are life signs also.’

  ‘I can’t see a thing!’ hissed Rekkid. ‘Life signs, you said?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the drone, as was about to explain further when the lights suddenly blazed to full. Having become accustomed to the gloom of the tunnels, the three archaeologists now squinted against the sudden intense glare and gasped in amazement at the scene that now greeted them.

  The passageway had come to an end at the level where the chamber’s great, domed ceiling curved downwards to meet the rising edge of the bowl shaped floor. Radial banks of glittering, organic looking alien machinery rose from the floor and descended from the ceiling like stalactites, the huge assemblies skirted by access gantries. It was from this machinery that the rhythmic sounds of breathing were coming. Amazingly, it was still active and suspended within it could be seen hundreds of white pods, hanging like pale fruit amidst the alien growths, wrapped in tendrils of shining silver. Some of the pods glowed from some inner light source that rendered them near translucent. Looking closer at the nearer
glowing pods, the faint outlines of figures could be seen inside them. Others were not lit from within and their contents could not be seen.

  At the centre of the chamber, a thick pillar of machinery joined the ceiling to the floor, tapering towards its mid-point to form an elongated hourglass shape. Slightly below the mid-point hung another pod. This one was completely transparent and much larger than the others and it was embedded within a mass of root-like structures that cradled it. A humanoid form could be seen within. It was impossibly old. Wizened and wasted to the point of resembling an unwrapped mummy, its long, wispy hair and beard flowed over its chest and shoulders and shone like spun silver in the brilliant light along with the lines and feeds that snaked about its form and pierced its flesh in a dozen places

  Cautiously they walked down the concave slope of the floor between the towering machines towards that near skeletal figure, the sounds of respiration loud in their ears from all sides. Stopping at the foot of the pillar they looked up at the wasted form. There were no signs of decomposition and as they looked closely, they saw the figure’s chest rising and falling weakly with every sound of inhalation and exhalation that filled the chamber.

  Looking up into the age ravaged face, it was clear now that this figure was the same one that they had followed deep into the bowels of the earth, though the image they had been shown was of this unfortunate being as it had once appeared, not as it now was, emaciated by ten millennia of living death.

  It was then that the ancient being opened its eyes and tried to speak. The mouth quivered at first, dry cracked lips moving for the first time in perhaps centuries. It was apparent that the pod must contain audio equipment, because the faint sound of the creature’s voice began to emanate from somewhere inside the pillar. Even with such amplification, it was barely audible, like the rustling of dry leaves or the trickling of desert sands in the wind but, as they listened closely, the sounds of alien syllables could be discerned within the parched whispers.