Melchior's Fire tk-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  “What’s the matter, Doc? See something you don’t like?”

  “Probably nothing,” she responded, continuing to take samples at random points in the complex. “But either this went before the silence or there should be some remains of something here. We know there’s nothing intrinsically caustic in the atmosphere, so if one of us were to drop dead here and be left in place, we’d find a skeleton, certainly, or at least identifiable parts of one depending on the exposure to the elements, and probably clothing or parts of clothing and personal stuff.”

  “Yeah, so? I’d be surprised to find any bodies around here. Whoever wanted out sure seems to have gotten out, and this don’t look like anyplace other folks would be living. Most of the complex is automated—you can see the mag tracks and signs of robotic tending. We’ll probably find the robots themselves, power depleted. I hope so. Those would be the most valuable finds yet.”

  “Yes, well, that’s what I mean. In conditions far more primitive than this, and less protected, there’s always the remains of plant matter of some kind. Dried remnants of vines, that sort of thing. I don’t know of anything we grow in this kind of setting that would leave not a single trace behind.”

  “Maybe it was raiders,” he suggested. “I mean, they’d strip the food out of here just like we would if it had any. Or, this is one of—what? Seventy, seventy-five buildings, each around a kilometer long, just in this valley? And the last one out at that. Maybe it never got put online. Maybe it was down for maintenance. Unless we find some kind of record we’ll never know.”

  “You’re right, of course,” she sighed, wondering why she just felt that something was very, very wrong here. She couldn’t shake it, and in this business you lived longer if you trusted that kind of instinct. “Still, I’ll feel better if we find more normal things in the others. I really wish we knew what went on here.”

  “If you ask me,” came the deep, gravel voice of Sark, one of the ground detail, “anybody who’d come and live on a hole like this place in an armpit like this had to be nuts from the start.”

  “I’ve seen worse and I’ve seen it work,” Queson told him. “Back in those days they even had means of controlling weather and climate on a planetary basis. They didn’t do that here, but I think that was the ultimate goal. Take a place with all the elements but in the wrong places and forms, prove it and mold it, then eventually create out of an armpit, as you call it, a garden of beauty and plenty. Some of the best worlds we still have were created that way by these kind of people. This one just failed, for some reason.”

  Now she badly wanted to know what that reason was, too. Not just because she had to weigh any threats against the salvagers from all this, but also because it was another chapter in the story of humanity. She hadn’t gotten her degrees to go into the salvage business; she’d gone into the salvage business to provide a means to satisfy her curiosity.

  “Tag this building and prepare it for dismantling,” Nagel signaled to the salvage team through the intercom. It would take a few hours to fully analyze the site, but then less than two to salvage anything of and in it that might be of value. The robot deconstructors were very efficient once they’d been told what was what.

  “Going into the next building,” Queson told them. Even as they progressed, slowly and methodically from building to building and throughout the site, business would be going on behind them. “Achmed, take this sample case back up to the base and have it fully analyzed,” she added, speaking to one of the nearby team. “Then return to us.”

  The big man took it and frowned. “Yes, ma’am, Boss Lady,” he responded with a slightly mocking tone. “Um—you don’t think there’s anything dangerous here, do you? I mean, like germs and stuff?”

  “Possibly. I shouldn’t worry about it. If it can get through these suits we’re already infected anyway.”

  Achmed took the case and hurried off, never sure when she was kidding.

  Nagel chuckled. “I love it when you’re so fatalistic.”

  “He deserved it. His faith says to accept what happens as the will of Allah. It’s one of the most fatalistic religions we have. I’m doing him a favor, allowing him to test his obviously wavering faith.”

  “Maybe he’s just worried where he’s going if his fears pan out,” the engineer noted. “That’s why I keep a hard-nosed atheism inside. The alternative is so much worse than obliteration I find a lack of faith one of my dearest comforts.”

  They went through a connecting tube, seals pretty well loose from all the wind outside beating against it and the lack of maintenance, but serviceable to get where they needed to go. From this point, the buildings went in three directions, and they’d have to decide on a route.

  The eerie light of their personal torches revealed pretty much a carbon copy of the first building, as they expected. This building, however, still had all its panels in place and so was very much the way it would have been abandoned.

  It looked as clean, even sterile, as the first would have been without the hole.

  Nagel checked his instruments, and sent three small probes down the wide aisles. He checked his screen and saw nothing he didn’t expect. Even as he was recalling the small probes he said, “Nothing at all here. The stuff’s almost too new, even with a lack of power and maintenance. You think they built these but never got to actually use them?”

  “That’s been my thought,” she responded. “But, then, what was somebody doing running out through that last one and blowing a hole in it rather than simply exiting via the door? I don’t know. I’d almost prefer the crumbling rot of ancient vegetation and a dead body or two to what we’re finding. Something here just isn’t right.”

  “I agree. Still, we’ve got a long, hopefully boring examination of all these buildings, and sooner or later we should turn up something.

  “I’d almost prefer that howling wind outside to walking blindly through here,” Nagel added, sounding uncharacteristically nervous. “I don’t like going down dark corridors blind.”

  “Not blind,” Dr. Queson said from in front of him. She put her light on a wall plaque at the far end of the greenhouse, near the connecting tube to the next unit. He walked over to it and stared. The characters meant nothing to him; whatever language it was in was way different from the one he knew. Still, it was very clearly a drawing of the entire complex, and, right near the end, in one of the two units farthest out, there was the drawing of a stick figure inside a circle. The message was universal.

  “You are here,” he said, nodding. He looked over at the far end, which extended to and actually inside the cliffs beyond. By that point the greenhouses were twenty across and it would be easy to get lost without maps like this.

  “It’s gonna be a week before we get to the living quarters,” he commented.

  “Why wait that long?” she responded. “Looks like a standard layout. We should be able to pinpoint the master control building and get any records that might be there. We might even be able to get some power going again. It would make looking through this jungle of empty greenhouses easier and more tolerable. In fact, if you see the finely etched maintenance keys along each unit, and trace them back, I’d say that the control center was about… here.” She pointed to a section almost dead center and embedded in the cliffs.

  “Long walk,” he noted. “Want to bring in the shuttle?”

  “It’s a good hike, that’s for sure, but we’ve already seen the problems the shuttle has in flying low under these conditions, and it should be all inside. I’m not in the shape I used to be in, but this is eighty-six percent standard gee, and I think the exercise would do me good. Besides, I’m more curious to find out what’s going on here than to keep walking through deserted buildings for days on end.”

  Nagel sighed. “Okay, agreed. Sark, you take over here. Buzz if you find something out of whack, otherwise do a survey and mark ’em. We’ll see about turning on the lights.”

  “ ’Bout time,” Sark grumbled. “Why didn’t you do
that in the first place?”

  There were several possible answers to that one, not the least of which was that there simply wasn’t any safe place to put down the shuttle close to the cliffs, between the density of the greenhouses and the tremendous, swirling winds with their sandblasting effects, effects which were magnified close in to the cliffs.

  “Stay with me and move fairly quickly,” Jerry Nagel cautioned. “We still don’t know if anything’s inside ahead of us.”

  “You worry too much,” she told him. “Anything here is long dead.” But she wasn’t foolish enough not to heed his caution.

  Each of the greenhouses was connected by a flexible tube along which metallic flooring had been laid so that humans and robotic units could walk between without having to go outside. The seals had held remarkably well considering the constant buffeting from the outside winds, and the flooring was rock steady.

  There had been some initial worry that some of the robotic devices might well still be present, might even view them as invaders or interlopers, but orbital and close-in scans showed no sign that the power grid was active. It was cold and dead, save only well below and inside the cliffs where the fusion reactors were in the process of cooling down. It would take them another few hundred years for reaction to cease completely, though, so turning the lights back on shouldn’t be a problem. The real question was, why was everything turned off?

  They walked for some time, stopping only to check that there was still a plaque at each entrance/exit tube showing where they were and where they had to go.

  It was eerie, particularly after two hours, to still be walking in those great, dark halls beside empty racks that were designed to be the nurturers of abundant life. Here and there they found signs that once these places had in fact bloomed: not residue, but a wall on which hung protective clothing, rebreathers, and the like used when checking chemical mixtures, testing radiation levels, or doing maintenance on the automated equipment.

  Still, there wasn’t the least sign of wear and tear on any of the equipment, rails, robotic arms, you name it. Not even marks and rings where water and nutrient excess would have flowed down into drains to be reseparated and reused. In a sense, the place had the feel of being used but the look of being brand new. It didn’t really make sense.

  Before they could safely salvage any of it and take it aboard their ship, though, they would have to solve this puzzle.

  The maps held up; like everything else they saw, they looked so new it was as if they’d been put up yesterday. Sheltered from the outside violent weather, they hadn’t faded or lost any luster. It was a tomb, but it was an eerily new tomb, one so fresh it didn’t even seem to have any remains around.

  Still, in the protective suits and with no interior lighting, it was one hell of a long walk.

  “Nagel? Doc? You okay?” a high, reedy feminine voice asked.

  It was An Li, the operations controller when people were on the ground, the first officer of the Stanley when in flight. She was one of only three people who never left the ship while it was in search or salvage modes. No matter what they might find on the ground, it could not get to the ship, now in geostationary orbit well above them, nor to the ship’s controls. An Li could dispatch anything from heavy weapons to food and drink, assume control of any of the machinery below, including the salvage tug and its heavy robotic equipment, and do whatever was necessary to protect the crew on the ground if possible and the ship above in all cases.

  Queson wasn’t the only one who thought that An Li’s choice of positions stemmed more from the fact that she was fifty-eight centimeters tall—and then only when she wore thick work boots—and weighed at best thirty-six kilos. But at that control panel high above, she was the height of a constellation and the weight of a neutron star. In orbit and on station, she had all the power.

  “We’re fine, Li,” Queson responded. “But if we have to go much farther I’m not so sure.” Maybe I’m getting too old and out of shape for this, she thought, feeling the distance in her back and legs. She was never one to work out hard and regularly on the long space hauls.

  “We’ll pick a real low-gravity planet next time,” the officer promised with a chuckle.

  “You want to rest?” Nagel asked her, suddenly aware that she was breathing hard.

  “No, I’m all right. I’ll rest when we find some sign in this spook house that something was ever alive in here.”

  “Like those, maybe?” Nagel responded, shining his light on the floor and stopping to look.

  She came over and stared. Clothes. Standard work uniforms like you’d find even now on hundreds of worlds—synthetic, automatically form-fitting, utilitarian, along with synthetic-rubber-soled work boots. There were several sets on the floor, spaced out in an unnerving fashion, as if each had once had an occupant who had simply, well, dissolved. As if they’d been balloons, pumped up with air, and suddenly punctured.

  Randi Queson studied them, and particularly the areas around where the head would have been. One figure clearly had earrings, kind of crudely placed on either side of an imaginary head, as if they’d fallen a small bit to the floor as the head had ceased to exist.

  Nagel picked up a work glove and shook it. A ring fell out and clattered as it landed on the smooth floor. He stepped on it, stopping its roll, and then leaned down and picked it up.

  It was clearly a wedding ring.

  One of the other phantoms also had a ring in a glove, this one a school ring from some far-off university or other. The cuneiform around the institutional crest was the same as on the signs in the greenhouses, and so far still unfamiliar to any of them.

  He looked at the anthropologist and frowned. “There aren’t two explanations for this coming to mind,” he noted, sounding a bit nervous.

  She nodded. “They were in these clothes, and then they weren’t. It happened fast and it was complete. Organic matter, animal and plant, was completely consumed. Nothing else was touched.”

  “You ever hear of anything that could do that?” he asked her. “I mean, come on! I’ve used a particle-beam disintegrator and there’s always some residue, no matter how slight. Nothing is converted so efficiently that it leaves nothing behind!”

  “There may be something there, but if so, it’s so minor it’ll take a full lab analysis to find it. Queson to Control.”

  “Yes, Randi? What did you find?”

  “The question is, what didn’t we find. Anything back on that sample I sent?”

  “Um, yeah. Ground lab says nothing. Brand new. No vegetable matter of any kind, nothing carbon. They don’t have full facilities there, but they’re pretty good.”

  “They’re good enough,” the Doc responded. “Whatever got this station consumes everything organic, and I mean everything. Run that through the computers and see if you can find anything that efficient and that selective all at the same time in the records. Any luck on the writing yet?”

  “Oh, yes. Turns out to be one of the Sanskrit family of languages in its original alphabet. This was either an ethnic or national extension, that’s for sure, not just a commercial one. Most of them used one of the widespread alphabets for centuries, but a few kept the old stuff for cultural cohesion. This was a really nationalist group, since the signs have no translations. The computers say it’s probably Laotian, possibly Thai—Siamese, but it may be an east Indian regional one. Impossible to get any closer than that unless you find the history records, though. It doesn’t quite match anything we have.”

  “But can you read it?”

  “Oh, sure. If you find anything more than directional signs and shit like that, we can make it out. You sure you want to go farther in without some kind of backup, though?”

  “I think it’s pretty unlikely that anything that got them made it through the years after it did,” Queson told her, hoping her logic held. “First, it was probably some sort of thing they either brought with them or that mutated, since anything that efficient with our kind of plants and animals ha
d to know us. It eats, therefore it has starved for generations because of its own efficiency. Any such organism would have turned on its own species to survive. Unless the ultimate survivor learned to eat sand or metal—and it clearly didn’t from the looks of this—it would finally croak. Still, this means high-level sterilization of any salvage and a Class A containment situation for everybody and everything down here until that’s confirmed.”

  “That’s affirmative. You hear that, everybody? Class A containment. Any violators get left down there and outside. And as for you, Doc, and you, Nagel, I want your helmet cameras on and audio key permanently open. I’m recording from this point if you’re going to go any farther in.”

  “Acknowledged, switching to permanently on,” Nagel responded. “This might cut power by a third, though.”

  “Well, then, keep an eye on it. Remember, the more in you go, the more distance you have to cover back.”

  Queson gave a low moan. “Don’t remind me!”

  Jerry Nagel stood up, shined the light around the ghostly greenhouse, and sighed. “God, I hate this part of the job!”

  “Well, as you pointed out, our shares of something this big are going to be enormous,” Queson said resignedly. “And even with all this, in this day and age, it’s a hell of a lot safer than robbing banks. Still, I wish we had an archaeologist on the team. Going blind into ancient graves is what they get off on, and they’re never happier than when they’re digging up and carting off some old graveyard. Come on, let’s see what’s what.”

  Finally, they made the cliff. At this point the complex ceased being a greenhouse or processing area and instead became a small self-contained city built inside the protective rock.

  As they expected, the amount of clothing absent owners increased with every step now, and often was so dense you couldn’t help but walk on them even though both salvagers felt, somehow, that they were stepping on bodies.