Ralston couldn’t hear clearly anything that passed between the two rehabs.
He made his way through the sucking mud to Yago de la Cruz’s shelter. One body inside. No sound. He moved on, hesitated when he saw Leonore’s shelter, then continued into the night, strides lengthening until the ground seemed to evaporate beneath him. Ralston checked the inertial tracker in his wristcom until the green arrow turned into a dot and began blinking.
Through the IR goggles he saw the warm outline of the copper-clad door leading down to the alien museum. Carefully, he pulled out the jacket still stuffed in the crack between door and frame, pushed open the door, and went down into the corridor. Again using his coat, he cleaned his boots. He closed the door to keep out the rain and, satisfied that he didn’t do undue harm to the hallway, turned and went deeper into the catacombs.
Ralston stopped and simply stared down the row of dioramas. Each held a slightly different scene. Each promised to give a clue to a different aspect of an alien culture.
Ralston swallowed hard as he mentally pictured the Alpha primary glowing whiter and hotter, expanding, the limits of its photosphere reaching out hungry tongues of plasma that eventually engulfed Alpha 3. The water began boiling off the planet’s surface, then the atmosphere exploded into space. Before many more microseconds the planet itself began boiling—or would it simply sublimate? One second it spun through space as a muddy chunk, the next it was only superheated gas, a plasma cooling as it expanded to infinity. No matter how it occurred, boiling or sublimating, all this would be gone in the wink of an eye. The heritage of a lost race snuffed out by a berserk star.
“No!” he shouted. His single cry of negation echoed along the halls and finally died in the bowels of the exhibit.
He wouldn’t let it happen. It couldn’t! Such knowledge couldn’t be lost forever. Ralston walked slowly down the corridor, came to a juncture, then reluctantly turned and retraced his steps. With his decision made to exploit this as vigorously as possible, using all seven of the graduate students, Ralston opened the copper door, exited into the driving rain, closed the door securely behind him, and followed the green arrow on the face of his wristcom back to camp. There’d be plenty of work to do in the morning.
Cold eyes filled with hate watched Ralston vanish into the downpour. With the archaeologist gone, he had nothing to stop him now. It proved only a matter of seconds to reopen the door leading to the treasure trove below.
SEVEN
Dr. Michael Ralston disappeared into the heavily falling rain. Yago de la Cruz let his anger smolder as he waited several minutes before going to the copper door leading underground. He pulled out his professor’s jacket and carelessly tossed it aside. De la Cruz descended into the alien museum again, smiling in grim recollection of how he had stalked Ralston here and struck him.
“Served the fool right,” he muttered. De la Cruz made no attempt to be careful with his entry; his every step left behind a fresh cake of mud on the floor. All de la Cruz wanted was the big find, the discovery that would establish him in the field of archaeology. All his life he had been ridiculed by his family.
“Why don’t you go into business?” they demanded. “Your father will finance it. Or your uncle. Or your aunt.” Always they dunned him with becoming a success. Their success.
Everything Yago de la Cruz touched turned to dust. Three businesses had failed because of bad luck. How was he to know of so many laws governing import-export? That business had to fail when the government seized it. And who but his family could blame him when the orchid importer stupidly allowed the Terran rust blight to destroy the entire nursery? So what if de la Cruz hadn’t kept the orchids in quarantine for the prescribed time? It had been the importer who had allowed tainted flowers to be starred to Novo Terra.
Of the third attempt, de la Cruz couldn’t even bring himself to remember it. But the crushing failure hadn’t been his fault, either. None of the chinging business disasters had been his fault.
The University of Ilium seemed his only refuge, his only chance for prominence and acceptance in his family’s eyes.
“I can never be like my brother and sisters,” de la Cruz said. The words echoed hollowly down the corridors. The sound finally died in one of the dioramas, swallowed by a distance both physical and temporal. “Arturo and Constance and Angelina are all in business. I’m not.”
Anger grew within him again, a burning, ugly seed blossoming into hatred. How dare Ralston hide this discovery? It meant more than a simple paper to Yago de la Cruz. It meant freedom, it meant becoming his own man.
“If he won’t give it to us, I’ll take it,” de la Cruz said, smirking now. He strutted up and down the narrow corridors, shining a small hand flash into each diorama. The slow progression in the scenes went unnoticed by the man. All he saw was opportunity and acceptance. A dissertation, yes, but more!
The University of Ilium officials might have rejected his application to assist Valasquez on Proteus, but after he delivered this find to them on a silver platter like Herod presenting the head of John the Baptist to Salome, they’d never deny him anything in the future.
De la Cruz crossed himself and muttered a quick prayer for success. What alien technology lay hidden here, waiting to be exploited? He might not have the business sense of his siblings, but a good, solid piece of hardware didn’t require business.
Madre de Dios, he’d hire his family to market what he found!
De la Cruz turned a corner and explored deeper into the catacombs. Some corridors intersected while others ran a distance and came to a dead end. The graduate student frowned. Some sense ought to be made from the patterns. Only in that way would he know where to look first for the highest probability of finding something like Vegan spider steel or the fabulous refractory Lars Stormgren found in the devastated city on airless Prolix 11.
“Should be recording all this. Got to get it documented before Ralston.” De la Cruz’s smile turned even broader now. For whatever reason, Ralston hadn’t done more than shoot a few photos and run the analyzer on the first strange scene set in its alcove. He hadn’t ventured deep into the guts of this museum. The fool! Ralston might not have properly dated his photos or analysis, either.
“If he did, so what?” de la Cruz said to himself. “Photos can be lost. Analyzer findings can be erased.” He rubbed a hand across his sunburned nose. With the high UV on this planet, a good case might be made for the destruction of many records by radiation. De la Cruz thought it would be a shame if Ralston carelessly pulled out the block circuits from his analyzer and left them out in the sunlight where irradiation destroyed the electronically encrypted data.
Stranger incidents had occurred on digs. De la Cruz knew. He’d studied the reports, seeking ways for a smart, ambitious man like himself to get ahead. After the boring seven weeks as they starred to Muckup, he counted himself an expert in all those methods. Not a single report in the starship’s small library had gone unread.
For a moment, indecision struck de la Cruz. He shouldn’t wander alone in the catacombs. Danger never entered his fantasies; de la Cruz worried that he might need a witness to “his” find. But which of the other graduate students would be the most amenable?
Certainly not that bitch Leonore Disa. She was dunging Ralston for her chance to study this underground museum—and it worked. Doctor Ralston had allowed her inside to use the analyzer. She would not suit de la Cruz’s purposes. But he couldn’t trust either of the rehabs. Who did? Their brains had been picked apart chemically, electrically, and mechanically and restructured in patterns known only to their rehabilitation psychologist. The other three graduate students seemed no better choices for what de la Cruz intended. Abeyta y Conejo had no ambition; he wouldn’t fight his professor when Ralston challenged the validity—and priority—of de la Cruz’s claim to this museum. Fernandez and Butz had no strength, no coraje.
De la Cruz resigned himself to working alone on this project. No other course presented itself. He thru
st out his chest and strutted back and forth. With the proper altered records, he could claim all this for his own, even down to the last speck of the precious dust that Ralston seemed so solicitous of.
But the figures in the dioramas were the true find. Somewhere within them lay his future, his ticket to accolades!
He unslung a pack and pulled forth the cameras and portable analyzer he’d taken from the storage shelter. De la Cruz set up a few battery-powered xenon lights and turned the impenetrable murk day-bright. He switched off his handflash and slipped it into his pocket. Working as accurately as his eagerness allowed, de la Cruz set up the analyzer, slid in a fresh recording block and tapped a spurious date and time on the input keys. His claim now lay recorded a full two days prior to Ralston’s blundering onto the doorway. Without diurnal light cycles, who was to say that this wasn’t nine in the morning, local time? The analyzer, once started, ran continuously and no alteration of the start date was permitted without destroying the entire block circuit.
But de la Cruz had learned well. He need only fill up a block or two and his claim would be firmly established.
“This is the first diorama,” he said, speaking so that the recorder built into the analyzer picked up his words. De la Cruz ignored it for further investigation. It had been the one Ralston had studied. Better to choose other, more interesting ones. That diorama held only two figures, both avian and neither posed in a dramatic fashion.
De la Cruz desired force in his photos, drive, drama. And, of course, the solid discovery of an alien technological gadget to exploit.
“The tenth diorama along the corridor holds several figures of interest.” De la Cruz almost chortled when he saw one figure holding what might be a weapon. What would the Novo Terra Defense League pay for an alien weapon that couldn’t be shielded against or circumvented?
De la Cruz placed the camera atop the analyzer and turned both to cover the diorama. He wanted his every move documented when he took the weapon from the birdman’s hands. Stepping into the picture, the graduate student said, “I am now examining the artifact held by the ge—by the leftmost native.”
De la Cruz took two quick steps into the diorama. For an instant, he felt as if he’d been returned to the freefall of a starship. The curious weightless sensation passed, not even leaving him with residual dizziness. But de la Cruz noted something peculiar.
“I… I smell burning organics,” he said. “It might be tree leaves. Or hemp. And a small breeze blows warmly across my face. I… the sun is so bright. Not a cloud to be seen anywhere in the sky. Where did the rainstorms go?”
Confused, de la Cruz stood and stared. It had been night—and a storm had hurled downward its rain—when he’d entered the catacombs. Now he stood on a small rise looking out over a burning city. Flames licked upward to a brilliant sky, marring its azure perfection with greasy black plumes of smoke.
“You, traitor, halt!”
Startled, de la Cruz spun. He faced the native clutching the long-barreled weapon. The avian lifted the sear rifle. Tiny blue sparks marched along the top and sides of the barrel to sputter and spark at the muzzle.
“You, Wennord of Lost Aerie, have been convicted of crimes against the Nest. No more will we tolerate your rebellion. You might have destroyed our capital, but we, the rightful authority for this country, have caught and condemned you to death.”
“Wait!” de la Cruz cried. He raised his hands to show he carried no weapons. The avian native aimed the sear rifle. De la Cruz stared into its black maw and saw tiny specks of red and white forming. The sparks coalesced into a miniature tornado that erupted from the muzzle. He felt himself thrown into the air, carried on gossamer wings, then dropped heavily.
De la Cruz screamed. He didn’t want to die. It wasn’t his fault! He knew nothing of this traitor Wennord. On hands and knees, de la Cruz pleaded with the native for mercy, to reconsider his dastardly crimes. But it had held such satisfaction for him to ignite the fuses that ultimately burned all of the capital.
He had conquered. Even in death, he, Wennord of Lost Aerie, had conquered by destroying what the tyrants held dearest!
De la Cruz slammed hard against a wall and fell prone. Sweating, heart pounding, he opened his eyes. It took several seconds for him to realize that he wasn’t dead. The native hadn’t fired the strange energy weapon.
And he wasn’t Wennord of Lost Aerie.
The graduate student wiped the fear-sweat from his contorted face and sat trembling on the diorama floor. It had seemed so real. It had been real. He had walked into this chinging diorama and the natives had come alive and he’d been transported to a different world in the first rush of spring.
“Where’d it go?” he asked, his voice grating and cracked with emotion. He crossed himself twice and prayed for mercy from the aliens stalking him in the catacombs.
Where had they come from? He’d seen no trace of any bird-geek in the corridors.
On shaking legs, he stood and faced the figure with the weapon. He turned and looked at the companion figure, the one obviously being held prisoner by the armed avian. De la Cruz reached out to touch the energy rifle—the sear rifle the birdman had called it.
He jerked his hand back along the barrel, its static charge biting him.
“You might kill me,” Wennord told him, angrily clacking his dental plates, “but that won’t stop the rebellion. Look! Your precious capital city is in flames. We did that. You cannot halt the tides of progress. We will soar above your petty nestings!”
“Wennord,” de la Cruz said, grinding his teeth and feeling the nervous tension along his forearms as fingers tightened on the energy weapon’s trigger, “you are a traitor. It gives me great enjoyment to carry out my duty.”
“May all your eggs break!” Wennord tried to bolt and run. De la Cruz whirled, lifted the cumbersome sear rifle and fired. The energy discharge rocked him back. Wennord blasted apart into a million burning fragments. Little enough punishment for defying the Chief of Rules and Council, de la Cruz thought.
He looked over his capital and knew that civilization had triumphed over the powers of anarchy this day. And he had been an important part of defending the Nest. His duty had been clear, and he would be given the highest honors in front of the Table of Rules.
He preened and began walking toward the inferno that was his capital… and stumbled over his analyzer, falling heavily to the corridor floor. De la Cruz jerked spastically, as if he’d awakened suddenly from a nightmare.
Hands trembling, de la Cruz grabbed the analyzer and used its familiar, comforting bulk to support himself in an attempt to sit upright. He looked back into the diorama; nothing within it had changed. One alien figure still clutched the rifle and menaced the other. Neither had shifted position by even a millimeter.
“Wennord the usurper,” de la Cruz said. He licked his lips and swallowed hard. Moisture returned to his mouth. De la Cruz stood and stared. He knew what this scene depicted. No, he mentally corrected himself, he didn’t know, he knew. As if every nuance had been burned into his brain, he knew the story of the last of the great insurrectionists and the man who had stopped him.
“I was there,” de la Cruz said in awe. “I lived through it. I saw the pain, the destruction Wennord caused. But I know why he did it. He thought he was right. But he wasn’t. I see it all!”
Awed by the impact of such knowledge, de la Cruz stared at the diorama’s figures. He was galvanized into action by the sudden clutching fear that the analyzer hadn’t been properly adjusted, that the camera had failed to record the bizarre scene. De la Cruz ripped off the protective plate on the analyzer and studied the red flashing numbers revealed on an interior instrumentation panel.
He heaved a sigh of relief. The analyzer had been running during his stint within the diorama. It had faithfully recorded everything, every whisper of radiation, every flash of light, the entire spectrum from UV to IR, and had sampled other frequencies along the way. Even com frequencies for microwave and s
hortwave had been monitored intermittently. He had it all locked with the block circuits of the analyzer! And the automatically recorded date made this discovery his and his alone!
De la Cruz almost re-entered the diorama to take the energy weapon from the avian’s hand. Disorientation struck him again as he passed the plane formed by the front walls. He backed out, shaking like a leaf caught in a whirlwind. De la Cruz stood and stared until the tremors passed. He hefted the camera and analyzer and moved them along to the next diorama and the next and the next. He wanted to choose another which might give him the financially profitable discovery that would free him from familial guilt at not achieving all that they expected from a de la Cruz scion.
“The scenes show a definite progression in complexity,” he recorded as he walked to another scene. “The first ones in this hall contained one or two figures, mostly without props. Later ones are packed with them. I am going to enter another diorama and take a sample of the material used to construct the statues.”
De la Cruz experienced a thrill of possible victory in his search as he considered how these figures had endured at least ten thousand years. What material made up their bones and skin and turned them impervious to the passing eons?
De la Cruz entered an alcove with only four figures. He braced himself for the dizziness, but it didn’t occur. Sure of himself, de la Cruz quickly stepped into the center of the figures and reached out with the analyzer’s mobile probe. Using the device, he scanned the surfaces of the mannequin.
He jumped as an odd odor pervaded the scene. His nose wrinkled. He said, “I smell something. A cross between roses… and frying onions.”
[Weapons of Chaos 01] - Echoes of Chaos Page 8