Jolk backed away, suddenly smiling. “Maybe someday soon, ruleman. Maybe real soon.”
“Don’t wait too long, kiddo. I’m not getting any younger.” Korolev looked over at Benexx, who was almost exactly at his eye level, and held out his arm. “Walk with me?”
Benexx put zer arm through his. “Of course, uncle.” They walked, Korolev holding zer up so no one would notice zer knees shaking.
“Walk straight, keep your feet under you,” Uncle Korolev said so only ze could hear. “Don’t let them see you shaking.”
Benexx nodded. Ze’d been lucky in the people who had insisted ze call them “uncle.”
“Are they still watching us?”
“Of course they are. They’re like an ulik pack, looking for weakness. Show them strength and they scatter.”
“How can you be so sure? You’re not even the same species.”
Korolev hung his head. “I was young and full of testosterone once too, or whatever you guys use instead. Some things are universal, I think.”
“What happened to that headstrong boy, uncle?”
“I grew up.”
Benexx giggled. “Have you, now?”
“Mostly. You hungry?”
“Starving!”
“Sushi kabob?”
“No. Hot dog. I want a damned half-meter Chicago dog buried in so many onions and tomatoes and peppers and mustard that I can’t taste the soy meat.”
“Redd’s Hots it is.”
Six
“Is ze mad at me?” Benson asked.
“Of course ze’s mad at you,” his wife said. “Ze’s a teenager. We just talked about this, Bryan.”
“But why?” he said, trying to hide the hurt and disappointment he felt. “I spent half the month’s food allotment on this meal.”
“It’s not about the meal, Bryan,” Theresa said as she picked through the tastier bits of her salad. “Which was a little overcooked, by the way.”
“Then what is it about?”
Theresa shrugged. “Fuck if I know. I’m still amazed we kept zer alive this long.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I wasn’t joking,” Theresa said as she poured herself a fresh glass of red wine. “We’ve been raising an alien, Bryan. Forget ear infections and colic, remember when ze almost died when ze was three because zer salt gland wasn’t purging properly? Who the hell knows to look for that?”
“Well, we do, now.”
“And we’re never, ever, doing it again.” Theresa shook her glass at him. “Do you hear me?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, even if my boys suddenly remembered which way to swim again.”
Theresa drained the contents of her glass in an impressive gulp. “Do we have any ice cream?”
Benson shook his head. “Sorry, I finished it last night.”
“Wine for dessert it is.” Theresa poured the remainder of the bottle into her glass, nearly to the top.
Benson raised an eyebrow, then slid down onto the couch beside her. “You should’ve told Benexx to be back at midnight.”
“Oh yeah, big boy?” Theresa rested a hand on his thigh and started stroking it. She was almost fifty, but damn if she hadn’t aged with the same grace and subtlety as the wine she was drinking. Benson was pushing fifty-three, but he too had been fighting a gallant battle against old age, a battle he was still winning, even if it seemed to get exponentially harder with each passing decade.
He ran a gentle hand through his wife’s raven black hair, only recently tinged with silver, tickling the back of her ear with each pass. “How long has it been since we really enjoyed the living room?”
“Hmm, good question. I think it was Benexx’s first summer in G’tel, so, four years?”
“Far too long.” Benson leaned in and kissed Theresa’s pouting lips with the same sort of passion and hunger she’d elicited for twenty years. She kissed him back, hard, grabbing a handful of his hair as she drew his body closer to hers. Within moments, his manhood strained at the confines of his trousers, eager for escape… and release.
Theresa, only too happy to oblige, shifted herself underneath his body and threw a leg around his waist and started to giggle as her blouse came undone.
Benson lifted off her to take a moment to enjoy the view. “We have to stop meeting like this,” he said, quoting some dumb movie she’d made him watch in the little classics theater back in Avalon module when they’d first started dating. He couldn’t remember the title, but he did remember the end of the date.
Theresa smiled, grabbed him by the lapels, and pulled him into her waiting skin.
“What’s wrong?” Theresa asked.
Benson pointed at his head. “Chao.”
Theresa’s nose wrinkled. “Seriously? Tell him to call back and hang up.”
“What a wonderful idea.”
That gave Benson pause.
Benson sighed.
Benson snorted.
Benson looked at his wife. “Cover up, dear. We have to take this.”
“We do?”
“Yep.”
Theresa buttoned up her shirt and growled like a dog who’d just had her bone stolen. Which, Benson realized, she had.
“To be continued, dear.” Benson transferred the call to the living room’s far wall and scaled the picture down so Feng’s head wasn’t two meters tall.
“This better be good, captain,” Benson said, putting just a hint of strain on the last word.
“It won’t be boring, I promise you that,” the head floating on the wall said.
Theresa sipped her wine, simmering.
Feng cleared his throat. “As you know, two days ago we launched the shuttle Atlantis on a mission to the radio telescope project on the dark side of Varr as part of the Early Warning network.”
“Yeah,” Benson said. “Benexx told us all about it. Jian is leading his first mission, right?”
“Indeed.”
“You must be very proud of him,” Theresa said genuinely, her annoyance at the coitus interruptus set aside for the moment.
“I am, thank you. But there’s more you probably haven’t heard. Along with the telescope service mission, Atlantis was also tasked with repairing one of our Helium-3 harvesters on the other side of Varr.”
“You’re right, we didn’t hear about that,” Benson said.
Feng shrugged. “I’m not surprised. One of the harvesters got stuck in a hole a couple days before launch. We threw a small crew of techs together that would be dropped off to deal with it while the Atlantis delivered the receiver to the telescope crater. We put out a press release, but I doubt it got much traction on the net. Pulling a harvester out of a pothole just isn’t very sexy compared to the Early Warning network coming online or progress on the Alcubierre prototype.”
“But…” Benson said, “something changed.”
“Yeah, you could say that.” Feng’s head shrank to a corner of the display
, replaced by what looked like orbital photos of the surface of Varr. “When Atlantis inserted into Varr’s orbit earlier today, they found the harvester all right.” The image zoomed in to a speck in the center to show one of the now-familiar six-wheeled vehicles working overtime to keep the Ark’s fusion reactors burning along and Shambhala’s lights on. Its front starboard side wheel hung out over a black, roughly circular chasm.
“That’s a heck of a pothole,” Theresa said.
“Indeed,” Feng agreed. “It turned out to be a ceiling collapse. The hole goes down some thirty meters.”
“An old lava tube?” Benson asked.
“That was our first thought, but it’s not the right geology for it,” Feng answered. “Too much ice in the top layers of Varr’s crust. So we ordered Atlantis to a lower orbit for a closer look and…” A new, larger image appeared. The hole was no longer black, nor was it empty.
“Are those… Are those structures?” Theresa said.
“Yes indeed,” Feng replied. “One of them seems to be a small outbuilding, but the other is considerably larger, and extends quite a way into the ice. The hole only represents a small percentage of the total cavern.”
“What the hell are buildings doing buried on Varr?” Benson asked. “Who built them?”
“That’s the billion-dollar question, isn’t it?” Feng said.
The image switched again, this time to a video feed, probably coming from a helmet-mounted camera. The structure was centered in the frame at ground-level, bleached out in the harsh light of LED lamps. But, right in the middle of the video, two suited crewmembers stood on either side of a circular indentation in the wall, a line running diagonally through the middle of it that looked suspiciously like a door.
“You sent them into the hole?” Theresa said, barely containing her disbelief.
“We needed to survey it,” Feng answered.
“Send a damned drone!”
“There weren’t any packed onto the shuttle. Nobody anticipated needing one.”
“Is this a live feed?” Benson asked.
“Yes, well, a couple seconds delayed because of distance and buffering, but it’s effectively real-time.”
“Where’s the audio?” Benson said.
“There isn’t any right now. Some software glitch. We can talk to the shuttle, and the shuttle can talk to them, but something’s gone wrong in the relays between their suits and the shuttle and the shuttle to here. Techs are working on it.”
“What are they doing?” Theresa asked.
“Trying to get inside,” Feng said.
“Are you crazy?” Theresa snapped. “That’s your son down there.”
“It was his idea,” Feng answered. “He’s commanding the mission, and he’s more than a day away by shuttle. He’s making the calls right now.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Are you kidding? I’m scared shitless. But our people here have already analyzed the images for freeze/thaw cycles, dust accumulation rates, et cetera, and come to a tentative determination that these structures are between a few hundred thousand and a few million years old.”
“That’s a pretty broad estimate,” Benson observed.
“Yes it is, but there are a lot of variables to account for, some of which we don’t have great data sets on yet. Still, a few hundred thousand years is the low end estimate. It’s pretty doubtful any monsters are going to come charging out at them.”
“But why is it there at all?” Theresa said.
“We have three working hypotheses.” Feng held up a finger. “One: At some point in the distant past, the Atlantians were far more advanced than we’ve ever suspected and had an active space program.”
“Which they just misplaced?” Benson said. “Along with anything more technologically advanced than the wheel?”
“We know they have gone through several mass die-offs due to asteroid impacts. It’s conceivable they had achieved a much higher level of technological development, but a sufficiently-sized rock literally knocked them back to the stone age.”
“OK, number two?”
Feng counted off another finger. “Two: That a technologically advanced civilization developed independently on either Tau Ceti E or F at some time in the past, set up an outpost on Varr, then disappeared for whatever reason, maybe their own asteroid catastrophe, leaving this installation behind.”
“And how likely is it that we’ve seen absolutely no evidence of an extinct space-faring species on the two closest planets to us in almost twenty years of surveys?” Benson asked.
“More likely than you might think,” Feng said. “We’ve been pretty focused on exploring Gaia. There have only been cursory probes sent out to the rest of the system. F is coming out of a glaciation cycle, and its ice would’ve scraped clean any signs of cities. We know it has a relatively simple biome of algae and other single-cell scale plants around its tropical latitude coastal areas, so life has a history there. Meanwhile, E is still really volcanically and tectonically active, either of which could wipe out any obvious signs of civilization from orbit given a few million years.”
“And the third hypothesis?” Theresa asked.
“Do I really need to say it?”
“No,” Theresa said, confirming what they were all thinking. “I suppose not.”
“But,” Benson injected, “if it was built by the same race that torched Earth, why set up an observation post if they’re just going to throw a black hole at the planet anyway?”
Feng shrugged. “Without knowing why they chose to destroy Earth, there’s no way to guess. Maybe we had grown to a level of technological sophistication that they deemed too advanced and nipped us in the bud before we could pose a direct threat. Maybe they didn’t like how badly we were treating Earth in those last few centuries and were afraid we would expand that kind of exploitative recklessness to other systems. Or maybe they didn’t like our taste in music, who the hell knows?”
“And you think maybe they had one of these installations in our solar system and we never found it?” Theresa asked.
“Maybe so. It was pure dumb luck we found this one as soon as we did. Even while we were stripmining it for resources, we never directly explored more than a few percent of the surface of the moon, and most of that was at the polls and the Earth-facing side. We never got beyond three medium-sized cities on Mars, and only a few dozen asteroids. If there was one of these places hiding in the Sol system, there were a thousand places to put it that we never got around to searching.”
“So you think this is a sort of observation post, keeping track of the Atlantians to make sure they don’t get too smart or greedy?” Benson said.
“It’s certainly possible. Varr would be a natural place to put it. We’re building our own listening post on it, after all. Depending on how good its instruments are, it could potentially keep tabs on all three planets in Tau Ceti’s habitable zone. But as I said, that’s only one hypothesis.”
“What do you think the odds of each one are?”
Feng shook his head. “I haven’t the slightest idea how to start weighing all the variables and probabilities to even take a crack at guessing. Which is why we need to get inside it and look around.”
“Okaaay,” Benson said slowly. “But, aside from ruining any chance at a restful night’s sleep for my wife and I–”
“I wasn’t trying to sleep just now,” Theresa said angrily.
“Yes, dear. But as I was saying, Chao, why call off the record and tell us about this? You’re deliberately keeping it out of the media or we would’ve heard already.”
“That we are, for the time being. No, I called because Shambhala’s chief constable would need to be prepared for civil unrest when we do make the news public.”
“Thanks for that,” Theresa said.
“You’re welcome, but also because you, Bryan, have a rather annoying habit of getting mixed up in these sorts of things whether anyone invites you or not and I thought I would get a
head of it this time.”
“Thanks?”
“What are we going to do next?” Theresa asked.
“I’m open to suggestions,” Feng answered.
“You should pull your son and his team out of there and get them burning back for the Ark as soon as possible.”
“And then grab one of the leftover nukes in the bomb vault and drop it in the hole from orbit for good measure,” Benson added.
Feng was about to respond when something on the live feed caught all of their attentions. The circle in the installation’s wall glowed amber for a moment. The cameraman, Jian Feng according to the suit’s data readout in the bottom corner of the image, took a step forward and put a gloved hand on the doorway.
To everyone’s surprise, the surface gave way like quicksand as Jian’s hand sunk into it. He tried to pull back, but it held him fast. He instinctually stuck out his other hand to try to push away, only to have it too become lodged in the amorphous material. His heartrate spiked as the suddenly gooey material began to lurch up his forearms, pulling him into itself.
“Jian!” his father shouted. Hands flashed in front of the camera as other members of the team grabbed his suit and tried to pull him free. But it was useless. The undulating surface of the wall inched closer and closer to the camera even as Jian’s convulsions to free himself reached fever pitch. With a pulse, the liquid rushed out and enveloped Jian and the camera in blackness.
Then, there was only static.
Seven
Jian looked up from the small rubble pile he was still clearing to where Rakunas stood near the door. The circular depression they all assumed was an airlock glowed a faint amber color, pulsing gently.
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