He would very much have liked to stop worrying. He’d pinned so many hopes on this meeting, on this arrival. He very, very much wanted it to mean something.
The lack of any response from the planet made that impossible.
“We’ll do one more orbit, then I’m putting us down,” he told Valk. “What kind of scans have you done of the planet?”
“Visual, with every pattern recognition algorithm I could think of. I’ve scanned for radio emissions and laser-based communications. Object-oriented infrared analytics, predictive vector matching of every moving object down there, backscatter emitted positron scanning, forward-looking magnetic resonance interferometry—”
“Sure, sure,” Lanoe said, to shut him up. He knew Valk had been thorough. The stakes here were too high for anything else. “You find anything? Anything I want to hear about,” he qualified.
Valk nodded. “There are definitely buildings down there, though they’re hard to find. They’re covered in vegetation or buried in sand—nothing sticks up more than a few meters.”
Interesting. Well, paranoid people might want to hide in bunkers, right?
“Looks like there are a bunch of cities along the coastlines, big, high-density areas that show heavy restructuring by human activity. I’ve seen what look like artificial islands and canal systems. People live down there, a lot of people, enough that they’ve redesigned half the planet to suit their needs.”
Lanoe could hear that Valk wasn’t so certain, though. “What’s the problem?”
“I haven’t seen … them. The people. I haven’t found a single human being. No silhouettes, no body heat signatures. No ground or air vehicles, either. It’s like everybody’s locked up tight indoors and refusing to come out.”
Lanoe considered that for a long time. Tried to figure out what it could mean. The conclusion he reached, after furious pondering, could be summed up by one simple word.
“Weird,” he said.
“Yep.”
“I’m taking us down.”
Lanoe brought the cutter down across the peaks of a mountain range, the spacecraft’s crescent-shaped shadow running on ahead of them in the sunlight. He dropped lower still until they were just above the tree line. The full-circle view in the cutter was still new enough to keep his adrenaline spiking—he felt like he was flying on an exposed seat over a long and fatal drop—but it also made it damned easy to contour trace.
Below, the trees gave way to a meandering river broken here and there by what looked like carved stone bridges. Up ahead the river cut sideways at a sharp angle and then dropped through a series of low hills to the sea. Right where it met the water was a vast and sprawling city, though one with more green space than any city Lanoe had ever seen before. “Give me a good place to set down,” he said to Valk.
“There,” Valk said. He pointed and a yellow rectangle superimposed itself on a stretch of grassland right in the midst of the city, perhaps a park, surrounded by long, low buildings.
Lanoe cut his speed and dropped the nose of the cutter up a few degrees, spilling air across its upper surface so that he slid in right above the rooftops. He banked hard to make an S-turn, then another, to cut his speed even more before he tried to come in for a proper landing.
When the cutter was on the ground, and Lanoe could look down and see grass growing under his feet, he switched off all of the ship’s systems except its displays. For a minute he just sat there, listening.
Valk fidgeted in the seat next to him. “What are we—”
“Shh,” Lanoe said. “It’s quiet out there. What kind of city is this quiet?”
“Maybe we should go outside and find out.”
Lanoe nodded. Still he waited another long minute before he said, “Sure,” and unstrapped himself from his seat.
The marines piled out of the cutter first, moving fast across the yellow-green herbage to establish a perimeter. When they were done pointing their rifles at absolutely nothing, Lanoe and Valk crawled out from under the cutter and looked around. Lanoe kept his helmet up, despite the fact that the atmosphere read as perfectly breathable.
He had a bad feeling, perhaps.
The grass crunched reassuringly under his boots. White clouds scudded across a sky that was the appropriate shade of blue. The trees he could see were a little odd—instead of leaves they seemed to have long, curved needles, as thick as his fingers. He didn’t know anything about trees, though. Maybe they were just some transplanted Earth species he’d never seen before.
He could ignore the trees. It was the buildings that really bothered him. They didn’t look right. “Come on,” he said, and the others followed him as he marched across the lawn to the nearest structure. A long, low building made of thin bricks, with a wide-open entryway. He ducked under a hanging creeper and stepped inside, into darkness.
In the second or so that it took his eyes to adjust, he could hear water dripping somewhere far away. He stepped down a pile of broken stone into a large room that seemed empty except for piles of dead needles, whole drifts of them as if the place hadn’t been cleared out in years. There was no furniture inside the room, though the walls rose around them in a series of steps that reminded him of the seats in a theater.
“Valk,” he said.
“Yeah. This place hasn’t been used in a long time. Before you ask your next question, no, one empty building doesn’t mean anything. Let’s look at some more of these buildings before we start making assumptions.”
But the next building they checked was just as empty. Just as decrepit. It looked like one wall had been decorated with an elaborate mural, but the paint had crumbled away until it was completely unrecognizable.
The third building was in even worse shape—its ceiling had collapsed, and a stand of trees grew inside, touched by yellow rays of sunlight that showed nothing moving at all.
“This place is deserted,” Lanoe said. “The whole city—right? You didn’t see any movement on our way in. The whole planet—”
“Yeah,” Valk said. “I’m afraid so.”
“All this way. We came all this way,” Lanoe said, “and … and there’s nobody home.”
“Hold on,” Valk said. Then he turned and walked out of the building. Lanoe hurried after him, protesting his quick pace—Valk had such damned long legs, and he never got tired.
“Another thing I noticed,” Valk said, without slowing down. “There’s not a lot of metal down here. I mean, there’s plenty of iron in the soil, that’s normal. But I didn’t see any steel bridges, or metal skyscrapers. No foamcrete, either, or any carbon fiber construction. It’s all natural stone and brick. I’ve been keeping my eyes open, so to speak, looking for any kind of advanced materials.”
“You found something?” Lanoe asked.
“Not exactly. A concentration of ferromagnetic stuff, but that could mean … Wait, there. It’s there.” He pointed at a clump of trees growing out of the side of a collapsed building. It looked exactly like any other clump of trees Lanoe could see. Fat needles hanging from crooked branches.
Valk dropped to his knees by the roots and started digging in the dirt with his fingers. His hands moved faster than human hands should. Soon he’d excavated a meter-deep pit under the trees. He reached down into a tangle of roots and tried to pull something loose. “Damn. It’s caught. Hold on, I’ll switch more power over to my arm servos.”
“Your ‘arm servos’?” Lanoe asked. Remembering when Valk’s arm had stopped working, because he’d realized it wasn’t there.
“I’ll, uh … use some elbow grease,” Valk revised, sounding a little embarrassed. Regardless, he reached both hands into the pit and dragged something loose, centimeter by centimeter. Dirt pattered down into the hole and the trees shook crazily, but eventually Valk’s prize came loose and he pulled it up into the light.
“This is what I think it is, isn’t it?”
Valk nodded. “Yeah. The leg of a worker drone.”
Specifically, the leg of one of the
worker drones the two of them had seen—and fought—at Niraya.
“The Blue-Blue-White have already been here,” Lanoe said, staring at the claw in Valk’s hands. He didn’t feel the horror of it, not yet—though he knew it was coming. “The thrice-damned aliens came here. They came here and they—they wiped out everyone, they killed every human being on this planet. They won here, Valk. They won …”
“It looks like it,” Valk said, very quietly.
Lanoe took the claw from Valk’s hands. Felt its weight, felt how sharp its tip still was, even after a long time in the ground. “The message we followed must have been prerecorded. Sent out before this happened, before they all died. We’re too late. We’re too damned late!”
He pivoted on his heel and threw the claw as hard as he could. It bounced off the side of a ruined brick building and disappeared into the vegetation.
“We’re too fucking late!” he shouted, and his voice echoed off the broken stones.
Valk came around to stand right in front of him. The AI reached over and put his hands on Lanoe’s shoulders. Lanoe started to pull away but Valk held him tight. He lacked the strength in his human muscles to pull away from that grip.
“Whatever you’re going to say,” Lanoe told him, “belay it.”
“No,” Valk said.
“I gave you an order. I’m not in the mood to—”
“No,” Valk said again. “Lanoe. No.”
Lanoe stared right into that black opaque helmet, trying to figure what Valk was getting at.
“You’re wrong,” Valk said.
“I’m what?”
Valk wished he could take a deep breath. He’d given that sort of thing up, though. “Wrong,” he said. “Not about—about the Blue-Blue-White. Yeah, they were here. And I’m sure that’s why this place is abandoned. But the message wasn’t prerecorded. How could it be? It included footage of our fight with the queenship at Niraya. Look at this place, Lanoe. It’s been abandoned for … I don’t know, centuries, maybe even longer. Long, long before you’d even heard of Niraya.”
“And?”
“The message included footage of you blowing up the queenship. Think, Lanoe. If the people here died centuries ago, how could they have that footage?”
Lanoe couldn’t dispute that logic. “So … so the people who lived here, the people who were slaughtered. They didn’t send the message. Damn it, Valk—who did?”
“Somebody who wanted us to see this,” Valk suggested.
Valk could see in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. He could tell that Lanoe’s face was growing hot. With frustration—or maybe with rage. Valk wasn’t sure which Lanoe was feeling more. “What are you saying? Someone dragged us all the way out here just so we could see what the Blue-Blue-White could do to a planet? That they could kill people? We already knew that, damn it! Are you suggesting that the help they offered was just giving us an object lesson? Because I refuse to believe that.”
“No,” Valk said. “No.” Though he’d half come to accept that that was exactly what the mysterious message sender had in mind. “No.”
Maybe—maybe there was something else. Maybe.
“Back to the cutter,” Lanoe announced. “We’re going to search every square centimeter of this place. There’s something here. Maybe … Maybe …” He shook his head.
“What are you thinking?” Valk asked.
“We know that the message senders are paranoid. Maybe they’re too cautious to actually want to meet us face-to-face. Maybe they left something here for us, though. Some weapon we can use against the Blue-Blue-White. Maybe just another message—some information we don’t have.”
“You have any guess how to find it?” Valk asked.
“None,” Lanoe told him.
They took the cutter up a couple of kilometers and Valk flew them south, toward the planet’s equator. Lanoe had no real plan as to how to survey the place. Searching every nook and cranny of the ruined cities alone could take months. If they had to search the countryside as well … Lanoe wouldn’t let himself think such defeatist thoughts, though. There had to be something here.
There had to be.
“How are we on fuel?” Lanoe asked. “How long can we stay up here?”
“We’re good,” Valk replied.
Lanoe nodded. He hadn’t really wanted real numbers. Just a little reassurance that Valk was willing to look with him.
For an hour neither of them said anything. Lanoe stared down at the ground, looking for anything out of the ordinary. The planet refused to provide him with anything useful. Maybe there would be a spaceport, he thought. Maybe an entire fleet of warships sitting down there in the jungle, waiting for him to command them. Maybe there would be a hermitage built up in the mountains, a final bastion of humanity on a dead world, even just a hut where an ancient mystic waited for him, ready to share some wisdom.
He was letting his imagination carry him away. Valk had already scanned the whole place from orbit. He’d seen no sign of continued habitation. No vehicles moving around, no cities that looked like they might still be inhabited, no smoke from any chimneys, even.
Whatever he was looking for, it would have to be simple, he thought. Simple and obvious. “If there is something here, we’re supposed to find it. They wouldn’t have buried it in the dirt or dropped it in one of the oceans. It should jump out at us, right? Or at least—I don’t know. It should be something we can figure out.”
“It would help,” Valk suggested, “if they painted a big arrow on the ground. You know, to point us in the right direction, at least.”
“Yeah, that would be nice.”
Someone stirred behind Lanoe. He heard the noise of a soft impact, as if one of the marines had hit another one. “Shut up,” someone said, very quietly.
Lanoe swiveled around. One of the marines—a woman with blue and blond streaks in her cropped hair—was leaning forward, looking worried. The man next to her grabbed her arm and tried to pull her back into her seat.
“Sir,” she said.
“What is it?”
“It’s not an arrow,” she said. “But—” She fell silent and shook her head.
“Go on. I’ll take any suggestion right now,” Lanoe told her.
“Yes, sir. Like I said, it’s not an arrow, but maybe—maybe that’s something?” she asked. She pointed through the wall of the cutter, at the coastline below. “Or maybe not, I just thought … I guess …”
Lanoe unstrapped himself and clambered out of his seat to get a better look. There was a city down there, definitely. It looked exactly like the other cities they’d seen from the air. Lots of low buildings covered by vegetation, nothing taller than a few stories.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to see,” Lanoe told the marine.
“Like I said, probably nothing. Only, look at the roads.”
“Hmm?” Lanoe asked. It was true, a number of roads intersected inside the bounds of the coastal city. Wide highways, it looked like, and narrower tracks just scratched out of the dirt. But all cities had roads. “Go on,” he said.
“Only—the last city, the one where we landed? There were no roads there. Why would there be? The trees would have grown over them years ago. But this city has roads. Right? Um, I mean, right, sir?”
Once she’d pointed it out, Lanoe couldn’t not see it. The roads—roads had to be maintained.
Someone had been there, and recently.
He looked over at Valk.
“Already looking for a landing spot,” the AI told him.
The marines moved forward first, wide awake now. They advanced little by little, their rifles out in front of them. Their helmets up and silvered.
Lanoe followed close behind them. He’d lowered his helmet now, apparently having thrown away caution in his desire to find something here, anything. He was almost treading on the marines’ heels, he was so anxious.
The city opened up before them, looking very much like the first one they’d checked.
Lots of long, wide buildings. Valk scanned a few of them and found they were just as empty as the ones he’d seen before. No furniture inside, even in the best-preserved buildings. Those weird terraced walls showed up everywhere he looked, as if every building on the planet was some kind of amphitheater.
As for the roads, they had definitely been cleared at some point. The bigger paved roads were in poor shape, though, and weeds groped upward from cracks in the pavement stones. Weird little plants, clusters of thin, short stems, each of which ended in a spherical growth, maybe a seed pod or the bud of a flower yet to bloom.
There was so much about the planet Valk didn’t get. So many mysteries. Foremost in his mind was the question of when it had been settled. Even after centuries of terraforming, many planets didn’t have the sort of biodiversity or comfortable climate he saw everywhere he looked here. There was a reason why humanity had named its new planets after visions of the underworld—when the first pioneers had seen the worlds for the first time, every single one of them had been uninhabitable. They had been hellish, in fact—either too hot or too cold, they’d had too much atmosphere or not nearly enough. The polys had done amazing work turning them into suitable homes for men and women, but in many places the adjustments they’d made had been just enough—and on others, like Hel, it had been deemed easier to reengineer the people rather than fix the planet.
Yet this place … it wasn’t quite earthlike. You couldn’t say that; everything was just a little off. Yet Valk had never seen a more pleasant world. Or a cleaner one.
“Look,” Lanoe said. “Look, there—you see?”
It took Valk a moment to realize what Lanoe was referring to. The buildings ahead of them were different from all the others they’d seen so far. Chiefly because they weren’t covered in vines and creepers and little strands of the needle-bearing trees. These structures weren’t half-buried in the dirt, either. They stood in neat, tidy rows, one long building after another with a flat roof and a carved stone entryway. Valk peered inside a couple with his expanded senses and saw the terraced seating was intact, immaculate—there still wasn’t any other sign of furniture, but the seats in these buildings didn’t even have as much dust on them as he might have expected.
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