About halfway down, he took time to study the obelisk as his non-suited companions caught their breath. From above, it had been difficult to comprehend just how massive the thing was. The pyramidal top, seen from the side, simply wasn’t all that impressive. The middle, however, gave an impression of girth and weight and made one dizzy as it stretched towards the chamber roof high above.
He couldn’t wait to reach the bottom. The thing must be dizzying from down there.
Tristan tore his gaze away from the rock to study the rest of the chamber. The semicircular balconies enclosed the obelisk and reminded him of a theater, with the obelisk standing where the stage would have been. It was a strange layout, as there was little likelihood of the stone column suddenly sprouting legs and giving a vaudeville act. Perhaps the balconies, with their benches that seemed strangely human-sized, were there so people could meditate on the meaning of the monument. Perhaps it was a religious place, not a place of entertainment.
Tristan checked himself. He realized that he was thinking along the wrong lines. The facility wasn’t human. It had been built by God knew what alien race an unimaginable distance from Earth. The balconies might not be there to hold people—or whatever equivalent of people had resided here—but might simply be the way things were. Perhaps the obelisk was the focal point of some colossal weapon and the balconies were part of the mechanism.
There was no way to know, and unless they found something truly unmistakable at the bottom, they would probably leave in the same state of ignorance they entered with.
After half an hour, they reached the bottom. Melina and Ian panted for breath and the banter had died down completely. It was clear that, whatever else the place might be, it was one of the most impressive things any of them had ever seen.
Blue light seemed to come from everywhere at once, giving an eerie, almost ethereal cast to the surroundings. The illumination must have contained some ultraviolet component, because Ian’s teeth shone brightly out at him.
They quickly discovered that the base was not made of light, but actually of some transparent material from which the illumination was emanating. It must have been extremely strong to support the weight of the obelisk, but after seeing how well the exterior walls of the facility had stood up to attack by the flying wings, that wasn’t surprising.
They split up wordlessly and walked around the column. Tristan estimated that the base was a square about ten meters to a side.
“Guys, come look at this.”
Melina’s voice made him jump. The chamber felt like a cathedral to him, a place where you should speak in muted whispers. Having someone shout from across the room came as a bolt out of the blue.
They rushed to where Melina was standing. She directed their attention to a square set into one end of the wall behind the obelisk, starting about chest high and maybe a meter tall.
Tristan could make out what looked like lettering in an unknown alphabet, sparkling white in the strange light. Above that was a drawing that depicted some insect-like creature with three arms and too many legs to count. It was holding a staff in one of its claw-like hands.
“Well, at least now we know who built this,” Melina said in a whisper.
“Yeah. Ugly bastards. Glad they’re not around,” Tom responded.
Tristan still didn’t feel like breaking the spell of the chamber by speaking, so he followed the wall towards the right. “Here’s another one,” he told his companions.
This time, the picture showed some kind of star field. Points of white were spaced along the grey background. It was hard to tell, but it also seemed to Tristan that the language was different, too. While the first inscription had seemed extremely organic, this one seemed to consist of straight edges and hard shapes.
“Another one here. And I think you guys really need to see this one,” Ian called from four meters further down the wall. Tristan turned to look, but it was impossible to see the pictures unless you were standing right in front of them.
They crowded around this one because it there was no mistaking the amorphous creature looking out at them. It was a perfect likeness of their implacable foe, the blobs. And the script was blob language. Pieces of the writing had been recovered after battles, but humanity’s best code-breakers and translators had had no luck making head or tail of it.
“I hate that this is here,” Ian said. “I hate it quite a bit.”
“But what does it mean?” Melina replied.
“Clearly, these are the races that built this place. The blobs. Those ant-things. And I guess the one in the middle probably represents some race that’s made of atoms or tiny pieces or something. Sentient gas clouds. It looks like we stumbled on the center of the unholy alliance. The blobs aren’t working alone against us.”
“If you’re right, we need to get back to the fleet and tell them about this. Tristan, are you recording this?”
“Suit is always recording, Commander. I can’t turn it off even if I wanted to.”
“Good.” Melina paused. “I don’t think Ian’s assessment is quite right. I think we’re still missing huge chunks of the puzzle. But I still want that recording to get to the admiral. We will need to leave as soon as we get back to the surface. In the meantime, let’s see who else has their portrait hanging here.”
The next species over could have been a cousin of the first, on a smaller scale, and with wings. It resembled one of those flying ants they had on Tau Ceti that lived inside the wiring and were impossible to eradicate no matter how many microbots you sent in after them. This one was studying the sky through some sort of complicated instrument.
At first, Tristan thought that there was no writing beneath the image, but his suit’s sensors alerted him to trace chemicals in the stone, and indicated that the origin was with over ninety-five percent confidence, biological. “I think this species communicates through scent markers,” he told his companions, and explained what his suit was showing him.
They reached the corner furthest from the obelisk, on the opposite end of the room from the balconies, and followed the adjacent wall for a little distance without finding any more portraits until they reached the center of the expanse. There, starting from ground level, and extending to about twice a normal person’s height, was the portrait of yet another species.
They all stood silently in front of it, unable to speak. The image wasn’t new to them. Regardless of what colony they were from, it was an image they’d first seen in Ancient History class in grade school. Even though the original image had been produced on ancient Earth, it had travelled to the stars with humanity and was as present in popular culture today as it had been when the species was still confined to a single planet.
It was an image that made no sense in the present context.
The image, of a single creature in two different positions standing on a circle and contained within a square, was unmistakable.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
Tristan was the first to react. “Am I dreaming?” he asked no one in particular.
“If you are, you have the weirdest imagination I’ve ever heard of,” the other trooper replied.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Melina chimed in.
“The text might tell us,” Ian said. “I’m not sure about the language, but those are human letters.”
They all bent to look and Melina began reading to herself, phonetically, as if tasting the content of the text. She would read a couple of words and then stop, thinking, as the rest of the group watched.
“I think it might be Standard,” she said, referring to the language that most of the human colonies—except for a couple of religious outposts and the Han Coalition—spoke. “Some of these words almost seem to make sense when you read them out loud, as if the meaning is right there and it would come to me if I only paid more attention to it.
“That one there. It says ‘humanity,’ even though it’s spelled unusually. And that one there says ‘star,’ almost certainly,
even though that character there looks strange.”
They all studied the letters. The inscription was short. Three sentences—at least they were three sentences if periods were being used as periods—long, and written in compact capital letters. The inscriptions beneath the other, smaller images had taken up much more space.
After a couple of minutes, only Ian was still studying it intently. Finally, he straightened. “It’s no use. It’s like Melina says. It feels as if the words are almost fully formed, but then they become fuzzy again. At least there’s one word which is completely identifiable.”
“Really? Which one?” Melina said.
That one right there. The very last.
They bent in unison to see where Ian was pointing. Clearly inscribed to close the final sentence was the word ‘PEACE.’
“I hope that means that same thing to them as it does to us.”
Chapter 16
The red dots on the screen suddenly began to approach the big blue circle representing the Heavy Gunship IV. The swarm of small points opened into two arms, poised to encircle the battle station.
The admiral turned to Cora. “If you’re going to go, now would be a good time to do so,” he told her. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir.”
She sprinted through the corridors, ignoring the flashes of pain from assorted muscles, legacy of the nano-repairs she’d undergone and the rest she hadn’t taken. She was almost out of breath by the time she reached the flexible tubing that connected the Banshee to the HGIV. “Seal this and let’s get out of here,” she told the crewman standing beside the hatch. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
He slammed the airlock door shut and Cora helped him to secure it. Then she headed for the bridge.
The Banshee wasn’t built to hold large crew contingents. It only needed about five people to fly it, and while it could carry up to forty more, they wouldn’t have a lot of room, and they would have to sleep in shifts because the tightly packed bunks could only hold twenty people at once.
“This went to hell fast,” the pilot told her as she entered the bridge.
“Can you get us out of here? Admiral says we have no combat responsibility.”
“I think so. Straight backward and then we’ll see how to get around the enemy. The Gunship should keep them pretty busy.” He maneuvered them away from the battle station as he spoke.
Cora hoped that the guy was as cool-headed and calm as he sounded.
“I hope it does more than that. Maybe they’ll break against it.”
“I’d love for that to happen, but I looked over the recording of the previous battle. We only held out because the enemy sent only part of its forces against us while the rest were spread over the whole system. I don’t think the admiral can hold against a concerted attack.”
Cora thought back to the man’s expression as he dismissed her. “Yeah, I think he knows.”
“Of course he knows. Why do you think he sent Tina with us?”
“Tina? His aide?”
“Tina, his daughter,” the pilot replied. “He’s not supposed to play favorites, but do you really think the most qualified person to assist you on getting this mission done is a civilian analyst? We’re not supposed to know she’s his kid, but it’s an open secret all over the fleet.”
“You can’t blame him, I guess.”
“No. Give me a minute.”
The pilot pushed forward on a thick lever and the ship accelerated, pushing Cora back into her seat. A third symbol, a bright green arrow, appeared on the screen and she watched as it moved away from both the blue circle of the battle station and the swarm of red dots.
He pressed the lever further forward, and the gap suddenly expanded. The force of acceleration took Cora’s breath away.
When they settled into a cruising velocity and the pressure subsided, Cora spoke again. “This thing can really move, can’t it?”
“You should come back sometime when a marine lieutenant hasn’t strapped a dropship to my hull. Then I’ll show you what it means for a ship to move.”
“Are you asking me on a date, Captain?”
He laughed. “If we make it back, I just might. I know this great restaurant on Tau Ceti II.”
“If it’s still there.”
He sobered. “Yeah. A couple of hundred thousand years is a long time for a restaurant.”
“I meant Tau Ceti.”
She left the pilot’s control room and went behind to check on her exoskeleton. Tina was assigned to the diagnostics, but after what she’d just heard, she wasn’t certain she trusted the woman too far.
Cora considered how to broach the subject as she walked down the length of the Banshee. Like most spy ships, it was long—nearly eighty meters—and thin, which supposedly gave the craft its ideal sensor profile when being viewed head-on.
But when she arrived in the aft storage hold, she found her suit diagnostics completely green. “There were a couple of bugs in the attitude controls for the leg rockets, so I re-installed the drivers. I hope that’s all right.”
Cora gave the suit a cursory check. It had been prepped just like the manual said it should. Everything that was supposed to be on standby was blinking and ready, while the elements that drained power were all in energy-saving mode. “This looks really good, Tina.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’ve been reading up on Exo-suit prep procedure.”
“I can tell. And please just call me Cora. I thought civilians didn’t need to follow military protocol.”
Tina laughed. “No matter what she might be in her day-to-day life, an admiral’s daughter is never a civilian. I used to have to call my father ‘sir’ when we were in public, even if no one could hear us.”
“How did you manage to stay on the same timeline as him? I imagine he has seen action in far-flung places.”
“He has. But I emigrated to the colony at Mu Arae when I was old enough to get out of his life, and then retreated back through several systems when the war started. Before I realized it, I found myself at Tau Ceti, and people were telling me that this crazy old admiral had volunteered for a suicide mission. Turns out it was my dad, and that our relative ages were pretty much the same as they’d been when I ran off… give or take an extra decade on his side, of course.”
“What about your mother?”
“She was a fighter ace. The blobs shot her down during a battle. I sincerely hope she died in the explosion.”
Cora shuddered. That was one of the ways that the fighter corps stole recruits from the marines. They’d simply run posters saying: ‘No one wants to die, but if you can’t help it, isn’t a nice clean death in space better than becoming a meal for this creature?’ The fighter corps, of course, pretended that the ads were talking about civilian populations that were left behind. They never said that marines who were stranded on blob-invaded planets were the meals being referred to, but it wasn’t necessary to do so. People got the message.
“I’m sorry.”
Tina returned her gaze levelly. “No need. We were never close. I was always daddy’s little girl, even when daddy was an officer through and through. I just wish he’d have let me stay for the fight.”
“It’s probably better this way. You know the fight is likely to go very badly for the fleet, don’t you?”
“Yes. I’ve seen the simulations. We can’t win unless they pull away for some reason, or if they only attack with partial strength. My father has already ordered the Lapland to move as far from the fighting as they can get without leaving the system, and to run for the nearest star if the HGIV is defeated.”
“And he got you off of the doomed ship.”
“I wish he hadn’t done that. Everyone saw it for exactly what it was: a senior officer using his privileges to save his daughter.”
Cora said nothing. It sounded like the admiral wasn’t expecting to survive long enough to have to explain his actions. But she couldn’t say that to the man’s daughter.
“What I
don’t get,” she said instead, “is why he decided to stand and fight in the first place. Why not just leave?”
“That’s an easy one. Only the Lapland can leave the system. The rest of the ships haven’t got their stasis pods repaired. No one would survive the trip out. So he ordered us to fall back and to show that we’re not interested in fighting. Unfortunately, those things didn’t get the message.”
“Or maybe they just attack anything that moves.”
“Who knows? From what I’ve seen, you might be right. They’re vicious enough.”
A voice over the intercom interrupted them. “Guys, you might want to get strapped down. Things are likely to get bumpy.”
As Tina jumped towards a crew seat, Cora considered running back up to the control room but decided against it. It was too far away, and she might get hurt… and other than the fact that she wanted to be able to see what was happening, be in the middle of the action, there was no reason for her to be up there.
So she sat in the nearest empty seat, and had just finished buckling her five-point harness when the wall suddenly became the floor.
It was a strange sensation, and it took her a couple of seconds to understand what had actually happened: the crew had turned off the artificial gravity and then made an extraordinarily sharp left turn.
Cora, whose flight experience was confined to dropships and troop transports, yelped.
Tina spoke to her. “Relax. Let the harness do the work. Just concentrate on keeping your head pressed against the headrest and you’ll be fine.”
It made sense. The headrest was designed to hold a human head with very little space to either side. It couldn’t move around laterally, so as long as she kept it tight against the back of the seat, there was little possibility of injuring her neck.
It still took effort, especially when the other wall suddenly, unexpectedly, became the floor.
“What are they doing?”
“I’m not an expert, but I’d say they’re maneuvering to avoid letting the swarm get behind us.”
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 18