by Anthology
“Head for that,” Jase said, frowning at Tenzo, who was now hovering over Ranael to study her displays. He addressed the fleet. “Stay farside until Zio finds a place to land.”
It took only moments for the ships to return to a tight formation and swoop toward the moon on the other side of the planet. Zio displayed an overlay of the broad sweeps of the planetary detection system. Jase exhaled sharply when the indicators showed their own defensive system scattering the beams around their shielded hulls and out into space.
“Nice work,” he breathed. “Echo? Feedback? Did anything make it back?”
“Unknown,” Zio replied. “I am still probing their communications systems. Deciphering them will take time.”
Jase nodded to Ranael to work directly with Zio. There was nothing she could do more quickly than the AI, but she would add the sentient intuition Zio lacked to catch nuances and patterns in speech and symbolism.
“Look,” Ocia said, at almost the same time as ex-soldier and now-pilot Naka aboard one of the other ships. She switched the main screen to focus on the moon’s surface. “Structures.”
“Scan that,” Jase said.
“No life there of any size,” Zio said, not distracted by the question while working with Ranael. “Microbial, at best, but air quality is marginal for such growth now.”
Tenzo turned to Jase and began to speak, perhaps forgetting that none of them understood his language.
“Translate, Zio,” Jase said, wishing he had insisted that their passenger stay below until they had secured their arrival in this space.
“Mister Tenzo says that those structures belong to his people. He recognizes the Chidean markings on the exteriors.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. And that ribbed hull design is unique to Chidea.”
“Guess we’ve found the Kasant mission.” Ocia grinned. “I say we check it out.”
Jase signaled the others to circle the shallow crater, where the tangle of structures revealed itself to be the remnants of several black sky exploration ships parked close together and joined in several places. “Touch down over by that escarpment.” He directed the ship to cozy up next to Naka’s cruiser. “What’s the weather like, Zio?”
“You want to go out there?” Ranael said, looking up from her data.
“Of course he does,” Ocia said. “Finally something to do on this jaunt.”
“Atmospheric conditions are acceptable,” Zio said. “Point five gravity. I recommend the haz shield suits until we’ve scanned the interior more thoroughly.”
“Hear that, Naka?” Jase said. “Suit up and let’s go take a look. Meet us by that round portal. Looks like it might be the way in.”
Aga Tenzo gestured wildly while Zio translated his demand to accompany them to the station.
“We can probably use him to make sense of the place,” Ocia said. “I’m not that up on their tech.”
“Three-hundred-year-old tech. I doubt he is, either.” Jase motioned their passenger to follow them into the narrow hallway outside the bridge and then down into the lower level of the ship. “Zio, anything off-planet?”
“Nothing outside the atmosphere,” Zio replied. “And nothing on the long-range scanners. No other ships or satellites.”
“Send a few drones to the surface, speed up your findings. Stay dark. I want to know why the Kasant group decided to land up here.”
“Probably hostiles on the planet,” Ocia decided.
“I’m guessing pathogens,” Jase said. “Or some other environmentals.” He nodded to Tenzo. “They seem a little chunky with all that blubber they’re carrying. Could be air pressure or gravity, too.” He winced when he heard Zio chatter in Tenzo’s rapid language. “You don’t have to translate everything I say, Zio.”
“Understood, Jase.”
The trio stepped into the airlock to slip into loose-fitting suits—simple layers of protection relying on an envelope of shielding generated by a series of patches front and back. “Is that necessary?” Jase said when Ocia added a projector to her exocortex assembly, giving her mental control of the weapons embedded in it and at various points of her suit.
“Zio’s been confused before, if you recall.”
“Not by a simple life-sign scan,” he countered, but he said nothing more. After all, their welfare was her job and she did it best fully armed. He had to admit she looked rather heroic with the two slim barrels at her temples.
The ship’s lock opened, and they stepped outside and onto the arid surface of the moon. Not sure if Aga Tenzo was quite familiar with gravity variations, Ocia kept her hand on a strap dangling from his belt.
Naka, his face obscured by the visor of his suit, awaited them near the metal door of the Kasant structure. “Not locked.” He turned to operate a switch by the gate. “Solar generation still working, except for a wing over at the far side. I’ve got Senda’s crew checking out the debris field. Probably just garbage.”
The door slid halfway aside and then stopped with a shudder. They slipped into the airlock beyond and waited for Tenzo to squeeze his bulk through the narrow opening.
Jase tapped a com panel where a corridor branched off from this space. It came to life, but he recognized little of what was displayed there. “Zio?” he said, making sure the camera at his collarbone recorded the interface. He touched a sensor to it and waited while Zio browsed through the system.
“The Kasant AI is not available,” Zio reported. This was expected. Without an authorized, living sentient mind to give meaning to its operation, their AI would have shut down, a mechanism designed into these systems after the first of them went rogue. “The database is heavily fragmented. You were correct—they built this installation by converting their transports into a habitat. There should be six ships here, but I can only account for five. I’ve indicated labs and control stations on your device.”
Jase glanced at the map now hovering in front of him. “This way,” he said to the others.
Ocia walked beside him, peering suspiciously into every dimly lit corner as they passed. Behind them came Tenzo, nearly filling the corridor, which must have been uncomfortably tight for the Chidean crew. How long had they lived up here, Jase wondered. Why had they left? Naka followed a few steps behind, his eyes on the scanner feeding information to Zio for analysis.
“So where is everybody?” Ocia said. “I was half-expecting to see dead bodies everywhere.”
“Me, too. They had no way back home. But if they’re on the surface, why leave the ships up here?” Jase stepped through what had once been a pressure door into another vessel. The seal no longer held, but the transition from one to the next was little more than a step up. The passage opened into what looked to be some sort of lab space. “See if you can fix that database, Zio. Maybe we can access their logs.”
“What’s all this?” Naka looked around the high-ceilinged space. “Looks medical.” He pressed a tab on a foam-metal box, but the lid didn’t budge. He jumped aside when Tenzo reached over his head to tug a panel from the wall above. All watched in silent amazement when Tenzo activated an input window and then breathed on a sensor, perhaps to identify himself to the system.
“He’s downloading something,” Jase said. “Zio, can you tell what is?”
“No, Jase. This is new to me.”
“Try to get at it anyway,” Ocia said. “Whatever it is, our guest seems to know exactly what to do with it.”
Naka had wandered around the central counter that dominated the room to inspect a row of cylinders along the wall. “Want to bet there are body parts in here?” he joked. “Or dinner, maybe.”
“Can you identify those, Zio?” Jase directed his camera toward the bins.
“Embryos in stasis. Zygotes.”
Naka cursed. “What were they doing with those?”
“Dinner, maybe,” Ocia said, ignoring his grimace. She peered at the equipment suspended above a long work table, no doubt already adding up salvage profits. Their share of whatever
Tenzo hoped to find here was generous. “What do you think that is?”
“A gene gun,” Zio said after conferring with Mister Tenzo, who answered the question somewhat absentmindedly, still busy with his file transfer.
Jase tried to see into the eyepiece, but his visor got in the way. The device was inactive, anyway. He studied the cabinets lining the room and the equipment neatly tucked into shelves. “This mission was—mostly—scientific. They’d have engineers, physicists, biologists. Zio, identify the embryos in those tubs. Are they Chidean?”
Some lights blinked briefly on a strip of indicators above them. “Yes.”
“Are you still scanning the planet?”
“Yes, do you want a report? It is not complete.”
Jase grinned. A complete report of any planet with as rich a biosphere as this one could take a lifetime to scan, even with the help of their implants. “No, Zio. Scan for Chidean life signs down there.”
“You think they’ve gone to the surface, then?” Ranael, still aboard their ship, was heard through their earpieces. “The environment is not suitable. I’ve already accounted for a half dozen airborne particles that would harm them.”
“What about us?”
“We’re going down there?” she exclaimed.
“Not all of us.”
There was a brief pause during which, he imagined, she might have been silently voicing her worry for him. “Radiation,” she said finally. “Ultraviolet is far too high, for one. Also some radiation produced by them. Communication, I guess. Will interfere with our exocortices.”
“So nothing deadly.”
“Not immediately,” she said, somewhat primly. “What are you hoping to find down there? You know better than to try to walk into a place that hasn’t had a first-contact experience.”
“I think they have,” Jase said. “With slightly customized Chideans. Zio, what was the complement of the Kasant mission?”
“Two hundred and twenty-six.”
“Do you have a visual of the locals on the planet?”
A hologram appeared before them, stuck halfway in the lab counter until Jase stepped away from it. Naka, beside him, muttered an oath. “They sure look at lot like Chidis,” he said.
Jase let the image spin slowly before them. Bipedal, like all of them, upright, multijointed. Much of the male’s body was covered in hair, like Tenzo’s visible bits. And like Tenzo, it either had no exocortex or its species had not yet invented them. It seemed heftier than and not as smooth-featured as the Chideans, and there were remnants of claws on its short fingers. Creating a disguise by tweaking a few genes would not have been a difficult achievement for the Chideans. “Furry thing, isn’t it?” he said, watching the excitement on Tenzo’s face as he prattled with Zio. “What’s he saying, Zio?”
Zio abridged what was surely a longer conversation: “He wants to meet them.”
“No doubt! Not so sure the rest of us will fit right in, though.”
“Jase,” Ranael said. “I’ve found nothing to indicate that there has ever been any first contact. We haven’t got through the languages yet but, so far, this species seems to consider itself to be unique and superior on this planet. As is usually the case in places like these. If there are Chideans down there, they’ve not announced their presence.”
Jase nodded, mostly to himself. First contact was not in their contract. Dangerous, messy, and entirely too far out of their realm of expertise. “Zio, have you found Chidean DNA?”
“Yes, Jase.”
“Where? How many survived?”
“Unknown. I’ve located nearly eight thousand individuals so far, but we have scanned only one-fifth of the planet.”
“Eight thousand!” Naka snickered. “Looks like your people have been doing a bit of breeding, Mister Tenzo.”
“Would you like me to translate that?”
“No.”
“These are not just Chidean,” Zio continued. “They are technically hybrids.”
“What are you saying?” Naka looked at the stasis chambers as if with new eyes. “They bred with the locals?”
Jase tapped the gene gun. The suspicion that had wormed its way into the back of his mind didn’t seem so far-fetched now. “Nothing so mechanical, I think.” He turned to Aga Tenzo. “Translate directly, Zio,” he said before addressing their sponsor. “The Kasant expedition wasn’t just exploring the rifts, were they? This is no coincidence. They knew this planet had evolved a compatible species.”
Tenzo glanced from him to Ocia and back again. “Yes.”
“They didn’t run out of fuel. There was no distress call. They meant to come here.” Jase gazed at the mute containers of frozen life, perhaps no longer entirely Chidean, waiting for someone to wake it. “This was some attempt at colonization.”
“A successful one,” Naka murmured.
“And you’re here to find that out, Tenzo,” Jase added when Tenzo said nothing. “To see if they were able to survive down there. Even if it meant altering themselves to blend in. Isn’t that right?”
“Why would they do that?” Ocia said.
Tenzo finally raised his hands in a sweeping gesture. “Chidea U Bann is a dying world. We will bring our people here. Kasant was to prepare the way for us and to develop the gene therapies we need to undertake before landing. They served as a vanguard to seed the planet with our people, to learn how to live here.” He looked away from Ocia’s furious expression to appeal to Ranael, who just looked curious. “We feel that we belong here. This planet has produced our mirror selves. Look at them! We’re not here to create hybrids. We will make them better. Think of this as of a…a metamorphosis.”
“And what of the people down there?” Ranael said. “The ones who belonged there first? Kasant’s presence will have changed everything. Changed their evolution.”
Tenzo shrugged again, angrily this time. “Out of necessity. The Kasant group did not share our technology with them. They built the lab up here to keep it safe. But those who went to the surface would have had knowledge far beyond that of the locals. It was to help them develop more quickly. We will need landing sites and power sources that don’t exist now. And leaders among them who will ease our arrival. That, too, is evolution.”
Jase crossed his arms. “Then we’ll let them evolve without us,” he said, angry at having the entire company dragged into this. “We are not going down there. We’ve done some questionable things for fun and profit, but I’m not making this crew part of some planetary takeover. That belongs to ancient history.” He signaled Ocia to keep a careful eye on the Chidean. “Zio, delete whatever Mister Tenzo just downloaded from the system.”
“That research belongs to us!” Tenzo exclaimed. “I have to report back to my people.”
“Then hire someone else. This isn’t what I signed up for. We’ll return your fee.” Jase saw an objection on Ocia’s face. “Minus the transport expenses.”
“My people will not stand for this!”
Jase didn’t need Ranael’s intuition to recognize the desperation on the man’s face. He smiled grimly. “Your people don’t know, do they? Why hire a private prospecting outfit? Explorers do, even scientists do. But not governments trying to keep their species alive. You have a fine fleet.” He raised his arms to encompass the lab. “This experiment is still a secret. You think the end result will justify the means of achieving it.”
“How we operate—”
“I have located the last of the ships, Jase,” Zio interrupted, startling all of them.
“What?”
“On the surface. Not operational. The Kasant AI is there as well.”
“Active?” Ocia gasped. “On the planet?”
“Only the transponder is active. I’ve compared its output to the signature provided by Mister Tenzo.”
“Good God,” Ranael whispered.
“Back to the ships,” Jase said, heading for the exit. “Zio, pinpoint the exact location of the ship and the AI.”
The others hurri
ed after him, past the startled Chidean who was only now receiving the news from Zio.
Jase didn’t bother to listen to any reply he might have to the revelation that the brain of the entire Kasant mission was possibly in the hands of an alien species. “Naka, you and Senda ready your ships for takeoff—we’ll join you once we’re geared up. The nav-ship will stay up here. I don’t want another AI getting lost. “Ranael, are you there?”
“Where would I be, if not here?”
They slipped through the half-open exterior door and hurried to their ships. “We need you with us on this. Zio, see if you can find out who the AI is tied to, if anyone.”
“That model is fairly autonomous,” Zio replied. “As long as it detects Chidean brain waves, it’ll operate.”
“Can it detect any of these eight thousand you’ve found so far?”
“No. They would have to be in close proximity.”
“I’m guessing it is where the ship is. Maybe when they were done up here they took the last ship down, and the AI with it.” Jase nodded to Ranael when they entered the bridge and then looked up at the ceiling. “When you said that the AI wasn’t available, you could have said it was gone. That’s not the same thing, you know.”
“Noted, Jase,” Zio said.
Jase studied the display wall, which showed the dizzying viewpoints of several probes searching the planet. They seemed to be honing in on a flat, arid region devoid of populations. At least, wherever the Kasant crew had decided to land their ship, they had done so away from the locals. He reflected briefly that landing in a deep body of water would have been a wiser choice, given this planet’s primitive technology.
“If they abandoned the moon base, their studies must be complete,” Aga Tenzo said behind him through Zio, reminding them of his presence. “They will have joined the indigenous species to await our arrival. They were to leave the AI up here and destroy the ship.”
Jase did not turn to look at him. “Obviously, they did not.”
“There is no intention to harm the locals. Only to prepare them.”
“That AI has a self-contained power supply to last thousands of years. If someone down there manages to open it, it will poison the entire population. Pray to your gods that there are some of your people down there who still understand who you are.”