That had to have been Kael’s decision, Damien realized. It was supportable, certainly, but he doubted the Legatans who’d been underwriting the lion’s share of the Andala Expedition were happy with the pottery and circuitry scraps that had been sent back. Those worthies wanted proof of technological FTL.
“He and I hadn’t talked about it, but I knew that we had one access to the lower levels that’s close to the base site, and he’d been going and, well, staring at it in frustration,” Zitnik admitted. “I went there to see if I could find him, and found that he’d opened a path.
“It was…impressive, to be honest,” he noted. “The professor had just…moved all the rocks and locked them into place. I’ve seen magic before, but wow.”
“And the professor’s body was past the new entrance he’d created?” Dragic asked.
“Yes,” the young man confirmed with a nod. “I’ll admit I was curious too. I couldn’t just open a tunnel into the lower levels, but I wasn’t going to turn around and leave when it was there!
“I saw his light pretty quickly and went to find him. He’d found some kind of gallery, probably an old market area, at a first guess—and the air was clean. The runes were still functioning. It was incredible…”
Zitnik sighed, shaking his head.
“And then I realized he wasn’t with his light,” he said softly. “There was a balcony. He’d gone over, fallen about ten meters. He was…” The student swallowed hard. “He was still warm by the time I made it down there, but he was dead.”
“The fall killed him?” Dragic asked. “Could it have been an accident?”
“Miss Volk has his body in cold storage; you can see it for yourself,” Zitnik told them. “He’d been burned, Inspector. Like someone had hit him with hot coals. And he was too far away to have fallen—he was thrown. Looked like magic to me, though I’ll admit I don’t know anything.
“He was a good man.” The student looked at Dragic and Damien desperately. “I…don’t know why anyone would kill him. Everyone liked him.”
“It does sound like magic,” Damien agreed. “Dr. Kael, just to confirm what I’ve been told, there are no Mages in your Expedition?”
“Without any runic artifacts or evidence of magic on the Strangers’ part, there was no need,” the Expedition leader replied. “Doctor Kurosawa was here for his general expertise in xenoarchaeology, not his knowledge as a Rune Scribe. Nobody here could have killed him with magic!”
“We’ll need to inspect the body to be sure,” Dragic said calmly, with a somewhat repressing glance at Damien that he probably deserved. He had, after all, agreed to let her run the investigation without interference.
“But first, I think I’d like to go over Doctor Kurosawa’s things, and then I want to interview each of you separately,” she continued. “We have a lot of work to do.”
“Of course,” Kael allowed. “I do ask that you interfere with our research as little as possible. Our work is important.”
Damien managed not to audibly snort, barely. The Andala IV site was important, but his study of the literature produced by Kael’s people suggested that their work wasn’t going to find anything of value anytime soon.
“The only interference that is unavoidable is one you probably won’t notice for a bit,” he told Kael. “As of our arrival, no one is permitted to leave or land here without my direct permission. We wouldn’t want our murderer to escape, after all.”
Kael swallowed.
“Of course,” he said faintly. “May I show you to Doctor Kurosawa’s room?”
#
Damien had brought along the Martian Investigation Service Inspectors for two reasons: firstly, while he was qualified to carry out witness interviews, he didn’t have the time to interview even the dozens of people in the research base who had worked directly with Professor Kurosawa, and secondly, because he was not able to do forensic investigation himself.
Entering Yoshi Kurosawa’s quarters, his main responsibility was not to interfere as Mara Dragic did her work. Barring Dr. Kael from the room was the work of a moment and a few quiet words, leaving him and the MIS Inspector alone.
Keeping his hands in the pockets of his tailored suit jacket, the Hand surveyed the room. He wasn’t sure how long the professor had been on Andala IV, but he’d tried to make his space homelike. A series of cloth scrolls with calligraphied Japanese poetry hung on the walls, helping cover up the plain metal walls of the prefabricated structure.
Everything else in the room was neatly organized. It wasn’t a large space, basically a bachelor suite with an office instead of a kitchen, but everything was neatly organized and appeared to have a place. The office screens had been shut down and rolled away, and the paper that was there had been neatly organized.
No clothes scattered on the floor, no dirty dishes, nothing. Kurosawa had hardly been an ascetic—there was a tidy little set of glasses around a half-empty carafe of what looked like whiskey to Damien—but he had been organized.
Dragic was making a methodical sweep, a set of tweezers in one hand and a case of bags and tags in the other, but she didn’t seem to be finding much.
The room was…too neat. Wondering, Damien reached for his Sight and swept the room again. He’d never met a Rune Scribe in his life who didn’t have some unique little trinket he’d charged with magic, and what it was and where he’d hidden could give the Hand insight into Kurosawa’s character.
He Saw nothing.
With a sigh, he focused more, looking for the glow of energy and channeled magic. If nothing else, a Mage had lived here. That left some signs behind.
They were there, but they were…muddled. Mixed up. The whiskey carafe was in the wrong place—Kurosawa had apparently amused himself by using magic to pour his drinks, but he’d done it in the office, and the carafe was next to the bed.
There were hints that something quite strongly magical had been kept in the desk, but it wasn’t there anymore.
“Are you finding anything, Inspector?” he asked softly.
“Nothing,” she replied. “The room hasn’t been touched since he died. The murderer didn’t come here.”
“Hmm,” Damien hummed stepping further into the room. “No, Inspector,” he said softly, “someone was here. The glasses have residual magic attached to them: Kurosawa was…playing with them, for lack of better description, before he died. There.”
He tapped the edge of the desk.
“A runic artefact was removed from the desk,” he continued. “I would guess…about a day ago. After the professor’s death. Check his file archive,” he ordered. “Full forensic sweep. I suspect you’ll find a number of his files were deleted very cleanly about twenty-four hours ago.”
Dragic stared at him, then looked to the glasses and back to him. He’d briefed her on just what his Rune Wright Gift entailed on the way there, but he suspected she hadn’t believed him. Now…she wasn’t so sure.
“Let me check something,” she snapped. Suddenly being much less careful, she stepped back to the door and yanked open its control panel, pulling a pair of leads from her wrist computer and plugging them in.
A moment later, she swore.
“Someone entered the room twenty-five hours and sixteen minutes ago,” she stated calmly. “They wiped any record of it from the main systems, but the door has a local log of when it operates to assist with maintenance.
“There were no physical signs in the room,” she continued. “My lord, somebody swept this room and did it so cleanly, I couldn’t find a sign. We’re not dealing with a crime of passion. This was a professional.”
Damien sighed.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he admitted. “Check Doctor Kurosawa’s files. See if you can identify what was deleted. We’ll touch base this evening and compare notes.”
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to go examine the only thing it makes sense for him to be killed for,” the Hand told her. “It’s time I took a look
at these alien runes.”
#
Kael was still waiting outside the room, his arms crossed and tapping his foot, when Damien emerged. The three Secret Service agents not so subtly blocking the path away suggested why he remained despite his clear irritation.
“Find anything, my lord?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Damien told him. “Inspector Dragic will continue her investigation here. I need to take a look at the runes Kurosawa found. Can you show me to the alien base?”
“I can have…”
“Doctor, please,” the Hand said quietly, “you know the Strangers’ base better than anyone here.” If he didn’t, Kael wasn’t doing his job, and that wasn’t quite Damien’s impression of the man. “I can read the papers everyone has written, but that doesn’t tell me much. I need your take on this.”
The Andala Expedition’s leader sighed. That was apparently the right tack to take, though, as the man nodded his agreement.
“All right, my lord Hand. Follow me.”
As he led the way through the plain metal corridors of the research site, Kael waved a hand around genteelly, taking in his entire facility.
“Our quarters and research labs were built in modules on Terra herself,” he told Damien. “The best equipment from across the Protectorate was loaded into them, and they were delivered here by a chartered ex-military transport.
“There’s only one site worth investigating on the planet,” he continued as they reached a different airlock from the one they’d entered through, “so we set up right next to it. We have a covered tunnel that connects our site to the stranger base, but we concluded that pumping breathable air into the old base could cause irreparable damage to some of the artifacts.”
“Could you?” Damien asked, curious. “It’s still airtight?”
“Not entirely anymore,” Kael admitted, “but it definitely was initially. Whoever the Strangers were, they were no more able to breathe Andala Four’s air than we are. We’ve found several air intakes with filters that, well, look blocky and obsolete to us now, but they were abandoned over two hundred years ago.” He gestured to a locker by the door out.
“Grab a breather, my lord…if you want, I suppose?” he considered aloud, clearly remembering Damien’s arrival.
Damien chuckled at the administrator’s discomfiture but grabbed a breather. He checked over its telltales and made sure it linked to his wrist comp, then put it on.
A few adjusted straps later, and he was breathing carefully filtered air. Glancing back, he confirmed that his three trailers had also put on the breathers. They were here to protect him, but he figured that responsibility was reciprocal.
“After you, Dr. Kael,” he instructed the other man.
The older scientist led the way into the airlock and cycled it with the push of a button. Since the only real concern with the planet’s air was the toxin concentrations, the outer door opened immediately and Kael led the way into a tunnel of flexible plastic.
“The Strangers built their facility with local materials,” he told Damien. “The domes are local rock, pulverized and cast in a chemical matrix. High-tech concrete, basically. There are six of them,” he said, pointing through the translucent plastic. “Each is roughly six hundred meters across and a hundred high—this was not a small facility.”
“But according to your papers, it wasn’t a colony?” the Hand asked, studying the shapes as they approached the closest dome. The tunnel had several forks, other covered paths heading out to the three further domes.
“It was a colony in the sense that they clearly aren’t from here,” Kael replied, more energized now that he was talking about what was clearly his favorite topic. “The degree to which the facility is sealed from the local atmosphere tells us that, as does the lack of any other ruins on the planet.
“There are also utterly massive fuel tanks underground here,” he continued. “There’s no evidence of cloud-scoop infrastructure on the gas giant, but it had to be there. This was some kind of refueling station with some groundside recreation and shopping opportunities. There are a dozen facilities like it in human space.”
“That’s why we’re sure they had interstellar travel?” Damien asked.
“There would be no other reason to have a facility like this,” Kael told him. “This is the only place we’ve ever seen which was clearly settled by aliens from a different system—we’ve never found ruins that weren’t clearly from aliens evolved around that star.”
And ruins were most of what humanity had found of other alien races, Damien knew. A tiny handful of races had been discovered with tech ranging from Stone Age up to one mid–Steam Revolution species, but anyone beyond that had died out. The intact races were carefully watched by quiet Navy pickets to make sure nothing avoidable happened to them.
The evidence humanity had was that a single system species was terrifyingly vulnerable to natural disasters on an astronomical scale—but the Andala IV base was the only place they’d ever found evidence of a multi-system species.
Reaching the end of the tunnel, they reached what clearly had once been an airlock. Without power, it had simply been forced open and wedged in place. The presence of the flexible plastic tunnel meant no more of the planet’s air made it inside than had already been there, but from Kael’s comments, the interior had been the same as the outside, anyway.
“The upper layers in the domes are built much as you would expect,” the scientist told him, leading the way into the alien structure. Tiny but powerful lights had been strung down the main corridors, providing the light the ancient facility’s systems no longer could.
“There’s a few open spaces, but mostly they’re buildings. Built of concrete made of local rock, same as the domes themselves. Dimensions suggest a species not much taller than us but noticeably wider.” He gestured at a door as they passed, and Damien saw what he meant.
While the gap in the concrete was only a bit over two meters high, not even out of the range for human doors, it was almost as wide as it was high, a very different set of dimensions than for a “normal” door.
“What do we know about the Strangers?” he asked as he followed the other man deeper into the dome.
“Mostly? They didn’t like to paint pictures of themselves,” Kael said, his tone irritated. “We’ve gone through the entirety of four domes and were working our way down toward the points in the tunnels where we were blocked off. There’s a surprising amount of art—probably more than we would have—but most of it is abstract. What isn’t abstract is landscapes. Not Andala Four’s landscapes, but no creatures, and certainly no aliens.”
“Inconsiderate of them,” Damien agreed. They were underground now, and the lights were getting sparser. He appreciated the scale on which the Strangers had built their base quite a bit!
Kael pulled out a pair of flashlights and passed Damien one. He seemed to have forgotten the Secret Service men, but they all produced small but powerful lights from inside their suit jackets. It was rare, in the Hand’s experience, for his bodyguards not to produce whatever minor tool was needed from inside their jackets.
Since his own jacket was of a very similar style and design, he wasn’t entirely sure how they did it.
“We’re passing the area where we’ve completed our sweep and set up lights,” he said. “This section is…safe, but it’s also where the collapses occurred. Keep your eyes and ears open.”
“This doesn’t look quite the same as above,” Damien noted, pointing his light at the walls. The stone was smoother now, with even the minor casting-mold lines the dome corridors had.
“Laser-cut,” Kael replied. “Or, at least, laser-smoothed. We could build something similar, of course—not sure we could have when this place was built, though.”
“The Olympus Mons Complex was built around then,” Damien pointed out. “Much the same way: blasted out with explosives and then smoothed with lasers.”
“I didn’t know that,” the older man admitted. “No
t many people go inside the Mountain, though, my lord Hand.”
“All relative, I suppose,” Damien said quietly. The Complex itself had a population of over a hundred thousand, and the city that sprawled across the slopes of the immense mountain was home to over twelve million souls.
“But we’re also not sure when this place was built,” Kael continued. “Easier to date when it was abandoned. We have a range of over a hundred and fifty years for when it was built—and at the high end…well, let’s just say it probably wasn’t built before nineteen fifty.”
The Hand whistled silently. That was five hundred years earlier. Before humanity had even launched rockets to orbit.
“What happened to them?” he asked. Andala IV was only twenty-two light-years from Sol. An alien facility had been occupied for between a hundred and two hundred and fifty years, basically in humanity’s backyard, but humanity hadn’t seen any other sign of the Strangers.
“We don’t know. They just…packed up and left. We have some evidence that it happened in stages,” Kael noted. “When they finally left, only one dome was in operation.”
He shook his head and gestured forward to where a bright light marked a collapsed tunnel and two guards carrying stun-guns.
“We’ve reached the collapse,” he told Damien. “Once we’re through here, we’re walking in spaces only a handful of beings have seen in centuries.”
Chapter 7
Waiting for his Secret Service agents to check the other side of the admittedly intimidating and dark tunnel that Kurosawa had made through the cave-in, Damien spent the time studying the tunnel itself. It was impressive: the Mage had lifted everything into place, moving hundreds of kilos of stone, then flash-transmuted it to solidify it there.
Damien would freely admit that transmutation was one of his weakest points, something he generally overcame by the sheer brute force that the Runes inlaid into his flesh allowed him. Kurosawa’s arched tunnel was anything but a brute-force approach—but had still required an immense amount of power.
Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) Page 5