He hit the material with his ancient sword a couple of times, which added a couple of shallow nicks to the door and dulled the blade for a moment. Even as he looked the edge came back on the blade, something to do with the alien tech of the object that was beyond his, and everyone else for that matter, understanding.
“We could bring down some laser drills, sir,” said one of the marines.
“And do what, you idiot,” yelled Chung, turning on the man. “Spend the entire reactor core of our ship so we could burn a third of the way through. They’ll be gone by then.”
The marine took a step back, terror flitting across his face. Chung gave the man a cold smile, knowing the man’s thoughts that an angry officer could have him executed on the spot. Chung was almost tempted to do so. But he was in another system without any chance of reinforcements, so men were a valuable commodity. He stayed silent for a moment, letting that terror in the man be the teacher.
“What do they have in there, sir?” said another of the men, a nervous look on his face, but enough courage to ask the question.
“I think it is an ancient ship,” said the Colonel, looking back at the door with a scowl. “Too bad that fool of a Monk didn’t find the access earlier. He wouldn’t have known what to do about it. And we could have come in here and taken it before they, or anyone else, knew what they had.”
Chung stared at the door for a moment longer. “Back to the ship,” he finally ordered, looking around at his men. “We’ll wait for them to lift, if they can find out how.” He had little doubt that Alyssa Suarez would figure it out, in time. “Then we’ll either disable them in the air, or use the brother of that Monk to convince them to land.”
“Will that work, sir?” asked the marine as they headed up the hall to the stairs.
“Maybe,” said the Colonel, internally talking himself to calm. “Maybe not. But there’s not a whole lot more we can do except drop some kinetic weapons on them.” And after that damned Admiral is through with his tussle in space I may just have to do that. I would rather neither of us come away with the prize than those damned effeminate Pubies get it.
Chung smiled an evil grin as he walked after his men. One way or the other, that Monk would pay for his affront. If not at the hands of Chung, then his swirling atoms would pay the price.
Chapter Twelve
The tunnel continued straight for about a hundred meters. Alyssa was supporting Derrick the whole way, and the man’s internal nanites seemed to have done enough to keep him from bleeding out. Patrick was happy to see that the man would survive to get to medical attention. He still didn’t like the confrontational ex-marine, but had to admit that he was a good warrior. And outnumbered as they were, they could use all the manpower they could get.
Lights came on at intervals, and Patrick gauged that they always activated when he was the proper distance from them. He told this to Alyssa, who experimented by having him hang back while she and Derrick advanced. The lights didn’t come on for them, and Alyssa flashed him a smile in congratulations for his detective work.
At a hundred meters in the tunnel started to curve and slope down, until it formed a wide circular ramp that moved them down without strain. It bottomed out a hundred meters further down and opened into a large room, forty by forty meters, with areas of couches and tables that must have seated a hundred people at one time. There were planters scattered around, but not even the stem of a bush, which must have all rotted away millennia before. The entire area was clean, and at first Patrick couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t dust on everything.
“Will you look at that,” said Derrick right after Alyssa lowered him onto one of the uncomfortable looking couches that had tuned out to be anything but. Shadow jumped up on the couch next to Derrick and settled in.
Patrick turned to where the man was looking and pulled his sword from his sheath. It looked like a very large spider, with a metallic gleam to its skin. He thought it a monster, and that it was coming for them.
“Put the blade away, hero,” said Alyssa, putting a hand on his forearm. “That’s a maintenance bot if I’ve ever seen one.”
“A what?” asked the Monk, still staring at the arachnid looking thing and not sure that he thought it harmless.
“It’s a robot that cleans up the place and makes repairs,” said Alyssa, her tone that of one speaking to a child. “That’s why this place is so clean.”
“A robot?”
“A machine made to move around on its own and do things,” said Derrick with a disgusted sigh. “You can be such a primitive, Patrick.”
“Go easy on him,” said Alyssa, walking to stand beside the Monk and watch as the robot extruded a tube and ran it over the floor.
“You have such machines in your world?” asked Patrick, staring at the robot.
“We have them on our ship,” she said with a nod. “I don’t think you’ve seen one, but they’re there.”
“Like that one?”
“We have cleaning and maintenance bots,” she said with a smile. “But nothing that advanced. Nothing that could continue functioning for thousands of years while performing its own maintenance.”
“It’s time for us to go,” said Derrick, pushing himself up from his couch with a grimace of pain. “We can’t afford to stay here and let them drop kinetic ‘heads on us.”
“What are kinetic heads?” asked Patrick, feeling much more out of place now that things were being revealed to him.
“Let’s just say weapons powerful enough to drop this place around our heads,” said Derrick, using the back of the couch to get around.
“Under all this rock and magical material?” said Patrick, his nervousness peaking at such a thought.
“Even here,” admitted Alyssa with a frown. “Derrick is right. We need to find what we came for and get out of here. Come on.”
They made their way to one of the hatches that actually looked like a hatch. Patrick ran his hand over the wall to all sides of the hatch, then to the hatch itself, with no result. A red light started to blink over the hatch, and Alyssa looked around.
“They all have red lights over them with the exception of that one over there,” she said, pointing to a far hatch that had a green light over it.
“Can we assume they used the same light marking system as we do?” asked Derrick, his own eyes moving from hatch to hatch.
“What marking system?” asked Patrick, getting a little tired of having to ask questions about everything. He long for the connection with the computer he had had on the ship, when all he had to do was think of a question and have all the information flooding through his mind. Something so strange, and it had taken him much less than a day to get used to it.
“Our society uses red to signify, stop, closed or a warning,” said Alyssa, putting one of Derrick’s arms over her shoulder and leading him toward the far hatch. “And green to signal go, or open. If the ancients used the same system.”
“But the Theocrats don’t,” said Derrick, hobbling along beside his superior officer.
“That might be more to do with their philosophy,” said the woman, hurrying her partner along. “Or maybe we diverged. But right now this looks like the safest bet to play.”
The reached the hatch and it slid open as soon as they got within three meters of it, revealing another tunnel that led into the distance to curve away.
“Jackpot,” said Derrick, smiling. “I bet this leads to something.”
“Hopefully not another room with multiple entries,” said Alyssa, leading her subordinate into the tunnel.
This tunnel again led to a curving down slope. But at the end of this one was a single hatch. It opened as they approached, revealing a ten meter by fifty meter room. Something slightly curved made up the opposite wall, but it was made up of something other than the materials they had so far seen. There were no breaks at all in the material.
“This looks like something I have seen before,” said Derrick, excitement in his voice.
&
nbsp; “At the wreckage,” said Alyssa, her own voice cracking in excitement.
“Exactly,” said Derrick. “The remains of the ship on Tucon.”
“Tucon is a moon in my home system,” said Alyssa, looking over at Patrick. “There was the wreckage of a massive ancient ship on the moon. The hull was still partially intact, but all the internal workings were smashed beyond recovery. But that hull had openings, didn’t it?”
“And this one is intact,” said Derrick, hobbling up and putting a hand on the smooth surface. “And no openings.”
“Patrick,” said Alyssa, looking over at the monk. “Walk up to it and let’s see what happens.”
Patrick eyed the strange material with just a little trepidation. They aren’t even sure what’s going to happen, but they want me to stick my head in the Tyrannosaur’s mouth. He also knew they couldn’t just stand here doing nothing, so he said a calming mantra and walked toward the ship. He stopped a half meter away and waited for something to happen. Nothing did.
“Move along the hull a bit,” said Alyssa, motioning for him to move to the right.
Patrick slid a couple of meters to the right, then some more when nothing happened. He tensed and almost jumped back when seams appeared from out of nowhere on the hull. In an instant a part of the hull, a two meter by one meter patch, moved inward about twenty centimeters, then slid to the side, revealing a very short passageway into, something. There was a recognizable hatch at the end of that short passageway.
“Airlock,” said Alyssa, staring at the other door. “So this had to be a ship. Just like what we have been looking for.”
“Good job,” said Derrick, hobbling up and slapping Patrick on the back. He hopped on one leg into the ship and looked back. “Well, come on. Do you two need an invitation? Then consider this one.”
Alyssa smiled at Derrick, then walked into the ship, Patrick followed them. The other door opened as Patrick stepped up to it and they all went through into a room whose walls were covered in what looked like lockers. There were also some transparent cylinders that contained suits in the forms of people, and a couple that weren’t for people at all from their design.
“The damned outer hatch is still open,” said Derrick, looking back and scowling. “I wonder it he has to close it too?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” said Alyssa, walking to a panel beside the inner door of the airlock. She looked at the panel and the writing over it, then pushed part of the panel which lit up. The outer door slid closed and the seam disappeared, making that section look like a melded wall. She pushed another button and the inner door closed as well. “As I thought. The safety systems are such that anyone could close the doors in an emergency. They must not have wanted the system to only be accessible to the working crew.”
“Why could only I open it?” asked Patrick, confused at the whole concept that he was somehow a special one.
“As far as we can tell there were two classes of people among the ancients,” said Alyssa, looking over at the lockers. “The majority of the people were idle, having their every need met by the automated tech of the Empire. Then there was a minority of those who actually worked for a living. They had access to the inner workings of the tech, so that they could run and maintain it.”
“And I am a descendant of these people who actually ran the system?”
“In a way,” said Alyssa, opening one of the lockers and displaying a number of tools and pieces of equipment whose purpose was not readily apparent to the Monk. “The genes were passed down to some people through the generations, but never seemed to accumulate in the right combination, until your father and mother married and had you and your brother. But the combination is still not correct in Sean. It only bred true in you.”
Patrick thought on that a moment while the other two went through the lockers. Alyssa took some of the objects and hung them on her webbing. Patrick still wasn’t sure what they meant by genes. Something to do with heredity. He understood how plants and animals were bred to get the best traits of two parents, and that sometime the traits wanted came through, sometimes not. That gave him a basic understanding of what they were talking about. But…
“How come there are so few with the working, genes?” he asked, not seeing why there should only be one of him among so many millions.
“Because, as far as we can tell,” said Alyssa, walking toward one of the doors out of the room, “the working class was virtually wiped out by whatever knocked the ancient civilization to its knees.” She stopped and looked back at the monk.
“You mean there was a war?” he asked, his mind imagining such advanced creatures as the ancients engaging in a war, and knowing that he was coming up short.
“Maybe,” said Alyssa, a frown on her face. “Something came in and toppled civilization. But all evidence points to an inside job.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Patrick, visions of traitors from within killing their own people, much as Rory had done to the Duke days ago.
“Because they targeted the working class, besides destroying much of the infrastructure,” said Alyssa. “They knew exactly who to take out, and only missed a few of their targets. Their having missing that few is the only reason you have the protein needed to activate the machinery.”
“And what the other death and destruction? If they targeted the working class, why were all the others killed?”
“Was mostly caused by the failure of ancient technology, when those who could access it were no longer in the loop. And a million inhabited worlds fell into barbarism, while hundreds of trillions of intelligent beings died in the chaos.”
Patrick tried to wrap his mind around those figures and failed. They were just numbers to him. Unimaginably large numbers, which he could not comprehend. Of one thing he was sure. Whoever had caused such a catastrophe had to have been an unimaginable monster, the worst in history.
* * *
“I am so happy you could finally join us, Admiral Grubber,” said Colonel Nathan Chung in his best sarcastic voice. Technically the Admiral outranked a mere colonel, and taking such a tone could be disastrous to the health of the Colonel. But Chung’s position in Theocracy Intelligence gave him much greater powers than mere rank implied. That and his close relation to one of the actual Theocrats.
“I had a battle to fight, Colonel Chung,” said Grubber, his angry eyes boring in through the viewer. “Because I was able to use all of my ships, I defeated the Republic force with minimal casualties.”
“And now we might have lost the prize your fleet is here to secure,” growled Chung, glaring at the man. “What will you tell the Theocracy Council when they ask what the casualties you did incur actually accomplished?”
The man’s face paled as he heard out Chung. He looked nervously at something off screen, then back at Chung. “Perhaps we can still secure the prize, and make the Council happy.”
“Perhaps,” said Chung with a scowl. “And perhaps not. But you will do as I tell you from now on. And maybe you can help to salvage this situation you got us into.”
“What do you want me to do?” asked the Admiral, his head hanging low.
“I want you to set up a blockade of the planet,” said Chung, pointing his finger in a pushing motion at the other officer with each word. “And I want you to station a ship for a kinetic bombardment of that monastery. I want it and anything under it wiped out of existence.”
“But they have the prize down there,” said the admiral, his eyes widening.
“That’s right,” said Chung in a growl. “They have the prize. And I don’t think we will get it away from them. I want it knocked out before it gets airborne and into space. And if it does get into space, I want your ships to fire on it. To disable it if possible. But if it looks like it is going to escape, I want them to destroy it. Is that understood?”
“It’s understood,” said the Admiral with a grimace. “And you understand that these orders are going onto the record, in case they are questioned later.”
“That’s fine, Admiral,” said Chung, a tight smile gracing his lips. “I would do the same. But just do as I say, and maybe we can salvage something from this.”
The screen went blank and Chung sat there for a moment. He checked the tactical display and grunted in satisfaction as he saw the fleet vessels moving to take up positions that would blockade the planet. The timer gave a count of twenty-one minutes before all were in position. And nineteen for the ships detailed to take out the monastery to move to their firing positions.
Chung turned to catch the attention of one of the marines that was on the bridge. “Get the other native up here,” he ordered the man. “The one named Sean.”
The marine saluted and ran off to follow the order.
“What are you going to do with him?” asked the Commander, looking over at Chung. “I thought you were going to destroy that ancient vessel.”
“Only if I have to,” said Chung. “Only if I have to. And he’s my ace in the hole.”
* * *
The bridge of the ship looked totally unlike that of the vessel that the two Republic agents had been using. It was a circular room with a curving ceiling, making it look like an internal dome. The floor was of the same white material as the walls and ceiling. There was nothing in the room when they first entered.
“Are you sure this is the bridge?” asked Derrick, still limping along with Alyssa supporting him.
“That’s what it said on the schematic,” said Alyssa, turning a puzzled look to the ten meter diameter room. “Unless they say this is a room to control something else.”
“Looks like a damned entertainment or holo room,” said Derrick, looking around. “Not even a place to sit. And what do you do if you’re dealing with acceleration?”
Patrick took a step into the room. As soon as his foot hit the floor the entire room lit up, a soft glow coming from the walls. A voice speaking an unknown language came out of the air.
“That’s ancient,” said Alyssa, looking toward the ceiling. She looked back over at Patrick. “That should have been implanted into you on our ship. Think about it, and see if you can access the language.”
Theocracy: Book 1. Page 13