Ringships

by Peter Claisse

  About the author

  Peter Claisse is a retired Professor of Civil Engineering. He divides his time between building and using wooden boats, acting as a consultant for major construction projects, editorial work on academic journals, and writing books. Please see www.claisse.info.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to acknowledge the many helpful comments made by patient members of the creative writing group in Leamington where I have read out parts of this book, on and off, over the last 20 years.

  ISBN-13: 978-1986027076

  ISBN-10: 1986027074

  This book has been assigned a CreateSpace ISBN.

  Copyright Peter A Claisse 2018

  RINGSHIPS

  Peter A Claisse

  Map 1 for part 1

  Map 2 for part 2

  Part 1 Landing

  1

  He walked up to it and kicked it. Paul’s frustration was borne from months on the ship followed by this, which threatened it all. It was really nothing more than a square stone about a foot high. But the metal ring, inlaid into the top, showed that it was utterly alien.

  The bulldozer came towards him pouring out acid smoke as it ploughed away the grass, leaving deep tracks in the black earth. This was the first machine down from the mothership and the earthmoving foreman had decided to drive it himself. Paul ran towards it, shouting: ‘Leave that stone. Work around it.’

  ‘Who put it there?’

  He shrugged.

  The man was leaning out of the door of his cab looking down at him in the rain, ‘You mean somebody's been here already?’ He paused to scratch his beard. ‘Uninhabited planet. That’s what you said. Uninhabited.’

  ‘That’s what we thought.’

  ‘Does anybody else know it's there?’

  ‘I don't think so. The surveyors are so useless they missed it’

  ‘What do you want to do with it?’

  ‘Have a good look at it. Try to work out what it is.’

  ‘This isn't a bloody school trip. It could threaten our bonus. If we can’t dig the mine here we could be going home with nothing.’ The cab door slammed shut.

  Paul turned away. The rusty blade of the huge machine scarcely shuddered as it pushed the stone away. It was soon buried in the pile of soil which would be moved by the fleet of dumpers that would be arriving when the shuttles had time to bring them down.

  He couldn’t ignore the stone. He crossed the muddy compound to the deserted communications office. The site offices were prefabricated huts with faded paintwork and scratched windows; tired relics bought cheap to be used one last time and left behind. Logging on to the terminal, he checked the duty rotas. Like everything else, they were in a mess. Arranging a three-day period in the following week during which he would not be missed was easy.

  His desk had arrived a few hours earlier and on its battered surface the smartly printed cover of his report, that had been prepared in the ship's print room, looked out of place. The content of the report was, of course, complete guesswork. From orbit the sensors could just about tell if there was a heat source as big as a steam train but, for almost everything else, all they had bothered to do was to look down with simple telescopes. The thick cloud cover obscured some areas, but the rest of it had looked clear enough.

  The mission director had scarcely looked up when he had taken the report to his office.

  ‘What’s this about? I thought I told you not to waste time with the magnetic sensors. They’re for the drives not the planet.’

  ‘We can land the Atlanta.’

  The man looked up, suddenly diverted from the papers on his desk. His assistant was despatched to find the captain and first officer who arrived almost immediately.

  ‘Your responsibility is down there; this is my ship.’ The captain was clearly annoyed by being summoned without notice.

  Paul showed him the data.

  ‘So, what’s causing this magnetic field?’

  ‘Eddy currents in a liquid core, like on earth.’ He tried to sound as if he knew it. Nobody had time to ask how it could be so strong in just one place.

  ‘Is the field strong enough? Can we land?’ The mission director looked animated.

  ‘Technically it looks as if it might be strong enough’. The first officer replied. ‘We could check it and do some detailed investigation and analysis.’

  ‘It’s either strong enough or not. I assume that it is. The shareholders will be delighted. We shall land and load all the ore directly onto this ship. This will be twice as fast as using the shuttles. Paul, this was your idea, so making sure the landing field is safe enough for the captain will be your responsibility. And we want it quickly. Time is money. You say it can be done in six months, any longer than that and every man on this ship will be wanting to know why’.

  Setting out at first light, he drove through the gate and waved to the security guard. Rules about staying in the compound except when working had been forgotten when the site had been established. The guards were used to engineers who went out at all times to try to work in the quagmire of mud without being menaced by the machines.

  He skidded along the rutted haul road to the exact centre of the field where the stone had been, and stopped the Jeep to look round. Enough trees had been cleared to see the distant hills that surrounded the flat area around the landing field. In some places they were lower, giving hope of a valley beyond. He could see little of the terrain that he would have to cross to get to any of them, so he headed for the lowest point.

  At first, the forest resembled the woods he had known at home, with ancient oak and beech trees blocking out the light and leaving the ground clear below them. They seemed to have been planted in lines; leaving clear straight paths for him to drive along. As he went further from the field, the familiar trees became less and less common and the enormous thickets of giant ferns were too big to go around. He had to take the Jeep through them, trying to avoid the thickest stems. The dense fronds hid everything, before bending down as he drove into them.

  Suddenly they were gone. He stopped. Just a thin screen of a few leaves in front of him then nothing. He walked up to the edge – a sheer drop into a pit – completely hidden by the ferns. Pushing his way through, he worked along the edge. It curved away. He carried on round. Minutes later he was looking across at where he had started. He stopped and slowly realised what he was looking at. The pit was perfectly circular. At the bottom, he could see the ground in the centre was far higher than at the edges. A meteorite or even a bomb could not have caused this. A giant ring-shaped object had crashed here, shaped just like the giant torus that encircled the mother ship and held her fusion drive. This was far smaller. The ship was two miles across and this was only twenty yards.

  The crater was obviously old; there were some ancient oak trees in the bottom that must have been growing there for hundreds of years. If the makers of the ship knew about fusion drives that long ago, where were they now? He felt slightly reassured; if they had ships, perhaps they had used them to leave. The planet was probably uninhabited after all.

  Suddenly, he panicked. A fusion drive had broken up. Running back, he grabbed the instrument box from the back of the Jeep and threw the lid open. His heart racing, he switched on the Geiger counter and frantically pointed it at the crater. There was nothing. No radiation. Absolutely nothing other than background. If the mother ship crashed the radioactivity would kill everything that lived and take thousands of years to decay. This had never been a fusion ship; it was ring shaped but flew without fusion.

  Whoever built it had obviously known about the magnetic anomaly, but, if they could build ships, surely they would have been able to locate it accurately enough to avoid crashing. He pictured them arriving at the planet and relying on the magnet
ic field to slow their descent but just accelerating, and finally realising that they were not going to stop in time. He looked for signs of the hub and saw nothing. The hub was the heaviest part of the mother ship; everything was there except the drive. If it crashed, the hub would make the deepest part of the crater and the giant struts that held it like spokes on a wheel would leave their own marks. Here there was none of this; what had crashed was just a ring.

  Driving around the edge of the crater, his determination to find the builders of the ship overcame his fear. The terrain was flat, and the Jeep went across the open spaces quite easily; the difficulty was with the ferns which grew in thick patches. He saw more craters, several smaller ones but none larger than the first. All of them were the same shape. Had a whole fleet of these ring ships crashed here? Had the survivors from the crews carved the stone at the landing field?

  Navigation in the Jeep was easy. As he moved away, his compass pointed straight back to it the landing field. By the end of the day, he was close to the hills and, in the fading light, he ate some food and lay down to sleep on the back seat.

  Early next day, he came to an abrupt halt. A massive trench was barring his way, extending in each direction as far as he could see. It did not take him long to see what it was. A ring ship had crashed here, but it had not come straight down. It had come over the horizon and ploughed across the landscape for miles before stopping. The mother ship would never do that; it would break up on impact. He struggled to imagine the technology required to build one that would survive.

  The Jeep could not cross the trench, so this was a good place to leave it. He parked it under some ferns to make it less conspicuous, put on his backpack, and climbed down into the trench and up the other side.

  As he moved closer to the hills, he saw stone structures lying low to the ground. They were round and very large, some as big as the biggest craters he had seen. Moving cautiously towards them, he saw more marker stones like the one in the centre of the landing field forming a line across his path. Behind them there was a roadway paved with massive stones. Deep ruts in the slabs marked the passage of innumerable metal wheels, but he had no way of telling if the last one had been hours or centuries before. Just beyond the road there were the structures. Their size was all the more impressive because of their simplicity. They were circular troughs with surrounding walls rising a few feet above the ground. As he approached, he saw that they had been dug deep into the ground. They were full of debris; trees were growing through cracks in the stones, breaking them away and drawing the eye from the perfect shapes. There was, however, no mistaking what they had been built for. Each structure had held a ring ship. The ships had not been passing visitors; they had either been built here or, had come and stayed a very long time.

  He moved slowly from one structure to the next; all were spread out between the hill and the line of marker stones. He came to the last one. Climbing up to check it. Then he saw the iron. A great expanse of it, deeply pitted with rust, filling the trough. He looked for a hatch, some way in, perhaps he could break it open, find clues inside. There was nothing, just the same surface. It fitted neatly into the trough, a colossal ring of heavily rusted iron without any sign of any features on it at all. He found a large stone and dropped it on the surface. Listening for an echo, some sign of how thick the shell was. But there was no hollow ring at all. Just a dull thud. This was thousands of tonnes of solid iron, far more than any drive he knew of could begin to move.

  Moving a short distance away from the structures, he sat down with some food from his backpack to decide what to do next. What he had found was obviously significant, but it probably did not represent a threat to anybody. All the company wanted to do was to get in, get the ore, and get out. If somebody wanted to start investigating this lot that was up to them but the people on his ship were not interested. If he just checked a bit further to confirm that the owners of the ringships had really gone, he could go back and get on with his job. He set off up the hills to get a view of the valley beyond. He would camp there for the night and, with luck, get most of the way back on the following day.

  2

  On the day Lynella was ten years old, the steward gave her the jewel. It was as big as a walnut and felt heavy and cold in her hand. It looked a dull red colour; but when she held it up to the window it had a golden glow. This might have come from the setting, which was itself gold, but in the sunlight, she could see flecks of gold in the jewel itself.

  ‘It came from the mountain’ he said as she took it. ‘The mountain is full of jewels like this, but few have the gold threads in them, they are the key.’

  He showed her how to put a silk cord through the eyes in the setting and fix it around her head, so it rested neatly in the middle of her forehead.

  ‘You should try to see if you can use it. Your father could do some of the things you can do but he could not use a jewel.’

  ‘What things?’

  The steward smiled. ‘There’s no need to be shy about it, at least not with me. Your governess has told me. Just the other day she said she saw you lift a coin off the floor to save having to reach down for it.’

  Lynella looked away. She didn’t know why she always tried to hide what she could do.

  The steward continued. ‘One of the girls in that picture you like in the corridor is wearing this jewel. She looks as if she was about your age. You should try to see if you can find the pathways in it; but if you can you must promise me you won’t try to do anything with it until we have arranged for somebody to teach you how to use it safely.’

  She asked who would teach her, but the steward hesitated and never replied.

  The picture fascinated her. It showed three girls sitting in a small window alcove looking out over a city. There were many pictures of the city; it had apparently been at the source but was gone now. This picture showed so many different things - lots of people and horses and even a great ringship in the sky. But what fascinated her most of all was at the edge of the window, a doll's house. It was far nicer than the one the carpenter had made for her to play with. The one in the picture looked like the wooden houses in the city outside. Everything was there: doors and windows and even little lights inside. The lights weren't just there; they were actually glowing.

  In the corridor, next to the picture there was a door. It was an ordinary looking door, but nobody ever used it. She tried to open it. It seemed to be locked. There was no keyhole or bolt. She turned the handle and pushed as hard as she could until her governess turned and scolded her. She didn't know why, but she was sure that the doll's house was in the room behind the door.

  She never told anybody about the jewel. It was her secret with the steward. He was the steward of the castle and second only to her father the King, so she was sure she was meant to have it; but it looked so special, so precious, so deep. She would wake at first light on her own and quietly put it on without disturbing her governess in the next room. From the start she could see the patterns, she couldn’t imagine how her father could have missed them. At first all she could see was pathways in all directions but then she could tell that somebody had been along them before and arranged them, so they joined together reaching down. She tried to find the bottom but each time she went deeper it seemed harder to get out and left her drained and exhausted. But the jewel was soon part of her. She couldn’t tell the steward about it. He might take it away until the teacher was found.

  In a small wooden box in the bottom of a cupboard she found a set of iron rings. They were a few inches across, about an inch thick, and so heavy that she couldn’t move the box at all, but she could pick up the rings one at a time. With a bit of practice, she found that she could use the jewel to move them and once she made one fly across the room and crash into the wall; bringing her governess running in to see what had happened.

  With the jewel it wasn’t just easier to move things about, it also helped her see things. Under the polished veneer surface of the wooden dressing table o
pposite her bed she found she could see rings. Lots of them, in patterns she couldn’t understand. When she probed out from her room she could see more and more different patterns waiting for her to explore and understand. The power of it scared her. She knew that she was seeing things that had not been seen for hundreds of years and nobody knew what they were. Even moving things with the jewel was frightening with its uncontrollable power.

  One night, soon after the harvest, she waited until all the sounds of movement had gone quiet and crept out of her room; wearing the jewel. She didn’t need a light; she could sense the walls around her from the patterns in them. Along the corridor everything looked so different. In-stead of rugs and wooden boards the floor was made up of pathways and nodes. In-stead of blocking her view, the walls seemed to help her understand what was behind them. Just ahead, she could see the faint star light from the window illuminating the picture but, as she crept towards it, she sensed an image that fitted exactly with her jewel. It was the door. Each of the pathways she had found was precisely matched by one in the door. She found a mechanism behind the handle. She tried to control it, to take her time to see what it was and then just to give it the slightest push to make it work. Minutes passed. Standing alone and motionless she finally felt she could do it. A small pulse. No response. Now just a fraction more, she steadied herself with a hand on the carved door-frame. With a loud click that echoed away down the corridor, the door was open. She stepped quickly through and tried to close it, but she had damaged the intricate mechanism and it would not latch.

  Standing in the room looking at the doll's house in her thin night-dress and bare feet in the cold room, she began to play. The two dolls that she had brought with her were her favourites; she thought that they looked like the girls in the picture. With beautiful porcelain faces and fine soft dresses, they went everywhere with her. She often spoke to them and now she was telling them about this wonderful new house. As she moved them from room to room, she found that, if she wanted it, the lights came on. They were minute glass spheres, each one hanging from two silver wires. They gave a good bright light; her dolls loved them.