The room was chaotic, but the chaos that came from long-term untidiness rather than any attempt to ransack it. A dozen used coffee cups were arrayed on a table by the wall, and the monitors were displaying incomprehensible scientific data. Bartlett headed over to the computers, starting a quick inventory check, while Salazar made his way to the equipment lockers on the floor, kneeling down and opening them one by one.
Lots of sample jars, each carefully labeled, presumably not by the person in charge of this office. Samples from the surface, from the moon, even from a couple of the other planets in the system. Whether in the interests of science or simply in an attempt to stave off boredom, they were conducting a pretty thorough research program out here.
Three of the lockers yielded similar treasure troves, samples ranging from grains of sand to large rocks, with no sign that some of them had been disturbed for months. He looked around the room again, at the equipment scattered around. He’d had the usual Introduction to Space Science course at the academy, and even the new Introduction to Paleontology in his final year, the last thing he’d been expecting, but some of this stuff seemed new. As though it had been custom-built, rather than simply fabricated from stores.
“They’ve been busy!” Bartlett said. “Lots of stuff requisitioned in the last two weeks. A big backlog as well.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“They were just about to manufacture some sort of message laser. I’ve never seen tolerances like this. It’s as though it was designed to only be used over meters, not millions of miles.” Shaking his head, he continued, “Massive data capacity, though. An order of magnitude greater than what we normally use.”
“Someone’s come up with a data transmission breakthrough out here in Shangri-La?” “Where?”
“Never mind.”
“No, anyway. I could knock this together. It’s all a question of range, and why would you build a message laser that can only transmit a signal across a small room? Doesn’t make sense.”
Turning back to the lockers, he opened the next one along to find a dirty jacket, covered in grease and grime, and pulled it up to the deck. Inside, tightly wrapped and sealed in protective wrap was a green crystal, cracked down one side but still beautiful, the unbroken sides perfectly smooth. He squinted at it, and could make out a series of small lines inside it, thin filaments made of some sort of silver material that interlaced through it.
“Ben,” Salazar said. “Come take a look at this.”
“Data crystal,” he replied, looking over. “Broken, though.”
“Have you ever seen a data crystal anything like this size? They’re usually about as big as a finger joint. This must be two feet across, and I don’t think it’s a quarter of the whole we’ve got here.” He looked at the label, reading, “Harriett Crater. Some co-ordinates. Down on the planet below. See where those shuttles came down. I want to know if these readings match.”
Nodding, Bartlett turned to the nearest terminal, typing in a sequence of commands, and said, “Within three miles. That can’t be coincidence.”
“No it can’t.”
“That man they found on board, he didn’t say anything about this.”
“He was a junior officer, and in a state of shock to boot. He might not have known about it, and even if he did, he wasn’t in a condition to talk. I think he’s still under heavy sedation.” Tapping the jar, he said, “This would have to be classified. The station commander would know, but he’s dead, and the station geologist died on the planet.”
“You think they were working together?”
“I think we just found the reason for the attack on this station.”
“One chunk of crystal?”
“This isn’t just a crystal. This is raw data, and a hell of a lot of it. Yottabytes, maybe. We’ve never built anything that big.”
“Of course we haven’t,” Bartlett replied, shaking his head. “That’s more storage capacity than in the whole of the Confederation. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket.” He frowned, then said, “You think that’s what our friends out there did?”
“I think they found something down on that planet, and were in the middle of investigating it when the station was attacked. They hid it as best they could.”
“No wonder they haven’t destroyed the place. They were looking for the crystal!”
“Don’t be too confident about our immunity,” Salazar said. “They could easily conclude that we haven’t found it after all. Hell, if they were that certain it was still here, they’d have sent a boarding party across.”
“Alamo would stop them.”
“Maybe they would, and maybe they wouldn’t. I’m not sure they could.” Shaking his head, he said, “We can’t use this as a bargaining chip, and we can’t even tell Alamo that the crystal is on board.”
“If the crystal is all they want, couldn’t we do some negotiating ourselves, offer to trade it in exchange for our lives? Or even the system? If it was just this bit of jewelery, wouldn’t it be worth it?”
Looking up at Bartlett, he said, “Yottabytes of data. As you pointed out, more than the entire storage capacity of the Confederation. Who knows what could be on here. Weaponry, starcharts, engine designs?”
“A billion bad novels.”
“Unless we can find out what is stored here, we don’t dare hand it over to the enemy. In fact, this just means I have to do something else.” He pulled out his communicator, and said, “Salazar to Cook.”
“Go ahead, sir.”
“I’ll be sending this order to you in writing in a minute, but I want you to get started on it right away. No questions, no hesitation. Am I understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go down to Weapons Control and fabricate warheads for twelve Mark IX missiles.”
“Bunker-busters?”
“Twelve of them. Then position them so that they will destroy the station if detonated, and rig an arming switch in Operations. Set it so that only I can activate it, use my DNA and voice print.”
“Sir…”
“That’s an order. I don’t like this any more than you do, but the tactical situation has just changed for the worse. I assure you that I’ll give you all a chance to get away before I set it off. And make sure one of those warheads is in the geology lab.”
“I’d like to register a formal protest to this action, sir.”
“Noted and logged. Now execute my order.”
“Yes, sir.”
His face pale, Bartlett asked, “Would you do it?”
“If it came to it, yes. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Next question. You said you could put together that message laser. Were you serious about that?”
“Are you doubting my abilities as a communications technician, sir?” he replied.
“Then get to work, right away. I want that laser, or an improved version, ready as quickly as possible. If there is any chance that we can find out what is on that device, we might be able to settle this whole thing once and for all.”
Chapter 21
The ground opened up ahead, the trudge up the rise to the crest of the hills seeming never-ending. Orlova was constantly jumping over fissures and cracks, some of them dangerously wide, breaking her stride. Up ahead, Carpenter was managing somewhat better, eating up the terrain in long, loping jumps.
“Come on, Maggie,” she said. “We’re almost there.”
“Being stranded down here doesn’t bother you at all, does it?”
“The Fleet will come back and pick us up. Eventually. And we’ve got plenty of supplies until they do. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Up in orbit.” Glancing around, she said, “I don’t see anything behind us. Not that it means very much. We need to get hold of one of those suits if we can.”
“That might be difficult if we’re going t
o keep throwing plasma bolts around, and if you want to try hand-to-hand combat in suits, feel free. I’ll give you covering fire.”
“Thank you very much,” she replied, panting. “We’ve done about six miles. We must be almost there by now.”
“A few more steps, and we’ll be at the top.”
Nodding, Orlova pushed on, taking a sip of water through her helmet dispenser and climbing the last paces to the ridge. Finally, she made it, standing beside Carpenter and looking out over the barren landscape beyond.
“This looks a lot like the desert we’ve just passed across.”
“I marked the position on my navicomputer, Maggie. It’s out there, somewhere. I’ve got it down to a radius of a mile.”
“That’s still a lot of area to cover on foot, especially if hostiles are around.” Pausing, she said, “Let’s go back to the shelters. We can break camp in the morning and move one of the domes to this side of the ridge, and some of the supplies as well. Build up a base of operations.”
“All of this sounds worryingly long-term,” Carpenter replied, shaking her head. “I’ve still got forty hours left in my suit, and you must be about the same.”
“Ever tried to sleep in a spacesuit?” Orlova said.
“That’s what stimulants are for.”
“Susan, this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. I thought archaeological digs were supposed to be slow and cautious.”
“With people chasing after us, I feel an increasing need to sprint.”
“Nevertheless,” Orlova began, before catching something out of the corner of her eye. She looked down on the plain again, and a glowing blue light shone from the ground, as though part of the desert itself had turned into a searchlight. The beam turned, rotating towards them, shining right in their helmets.
“Do you see it, Susan?” Orlova asked, nothing but static for a reply. “Susan, do you read?” She could see her friend’s lips moving, and a series of alerts began to sound in her suit computer, something trying to hack into the software. Trying and succeeding, but as rapidly as it began, it faded away, and the interference stopped.
“Maggie, come in,” Carpenter said.
“I hear you now,” she replied. “What the hell was that?”
“I think we found what we came for. A quarter mile ahead, at the base of this ridge.”
Frowning, Orlova said, “We found something damn dangerous, Susan. Something that I suspect could turn off our spacesuit controls at will. I’m not sure that we shouldn’t go back.”
“Go back? To what? We’re committed, and given the power that...whatever it is...must have, what makes you think that we’ll be any safer on the other side of that ridge. For that matter, we’d be going back to the…”
“Exactly,” Orlova said. “If we saw that, and they are following us, then I’m willing to bet that they saw it too.”
“Then we’d better get there first.”
“I’m not sure they’ll respect a salvage claim,” Orlova began, before shaking her head. “Nevertheless, you are quite right. Let’s go and take a look. One thing, though. If I say we pull out, I don’t care if you are on the threshold of the greatest discovery since Howard Carter, we pull out at once. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Then let’s go.”
The two of them bounded down the ridge, the descent proving far easier than the climb had been, and stepped towards the source of the light. The ground turned into a series of bumps, and it gradually occurred to her that they were regular in shape, a pattern carved into the surface.
“I see it too,” Carpenter said. “Ruins, at a guess. Some sort of surface settlement, like the adobe shelters the first Martian settlers built.”
“They built half a dozen of them to shelter sensitive equipment from dust storms,” Orlova said. “This must be a mile across.” She gestured into the distance, the pattern noticeable as far as she could see. “This was a city, and a large one.”
“Aliens, Maggie. It could be almost anything. Look at that.”
Opening up in the ground up ahead was a chasm, perfectly round in shape, heading vertically down. Orlova peered down it, nothing but inky blackness beyond, then looked at her computer. Down to the millimeter, this was the source of the light.
“Shall we?” Carpenter asked.
Nodding, Orlova secured a piton into the ground, attaching her safety line to the hook. She gave it an experimental tug, and then pushed it deeper, down into the rock. Another tug, and it came free in her hands.
“Too soft. We can’t abseil here.”
“Radar says it’s only a hundred meters.”
Looking down the hole again, Orlova replied, “We can get down with our suit jets to slow the descent, but we’ll never get back up again that way.”
“There must be another entrance, one that we can use to get out.”
“For all we know, these aliens of yours could fly.”
“We’ll think of something.”
After a second, she said, “Plant a beacon. If Alamo comes down for us, it’d be polite for us to let them know where we are hiding.”
Carpenter reached down into a pouch in her belt, then paused, saying, “You’re actually going along with this?”
“This is why we stayed down here. We’re marooned on this planet anyway, at least for the present, and I don’t see how we can make our situation worse.”
“The supplies…”
“If I was hunting us, I’d have had them staked out right from the start. It’s the only place on the planet they know we have to go, eventually. If I hadn’t simply destroyed them.”
“You think…”
“Actually, no. They’re as stranded as we are, and my guess is that they’ll want to make use of them instead. We’ve just got to trust to luck.” With a smile, she took a step out into the void, tapping her suit jets to arrest her fall. “Do you want to live forever?”
Carpenter leapt in after her, as Orlova dropped down into darkness, slowly rotating to get a look at each wall. Her helmet lights flashed over strange hieroglyphics, though some of them seemed oddly familiar.
“Looks human,” Carpenter said. “I don’t recognize it, though. If we can get a good enough sample, our computers ought to be able to manage a translation.”
“We might come across a native speaker down here,” Orlova replied.
The two of them continued to descend, pulsing their jets to slow themselves, careful not to make the bursts too long lest they cause damage to anything down below. Just as the bottom became visible, a dust-covered flat surface, the blinding light flashed on again, and as before, their suit systems failed, sending them dropping down to the ground, staggering to their knees. The whole floor was illuminated, an eerie blue, before abruptly winking out once again.
“Any damage?” Orlova asked, but Carpenter shook her head.
“I’m going to bruise, but my suit’s intact,” she replied, gasping. “Let me get my wind back.”
A single tunnel pointed north, more of the strange writing on the walls, and Orlova looked down at her suit radar display, not surprised when she didn’t get any reading.
“Same as Desdemona,” she muttered, and Carpenter looked up.
“I’ve seen the reports. Didn’t Captain Marshall almost go mad back there?”
“Severe xeno-psychosis. How’s your suit pharmacopoeia?”
“You think it might get that bad?”
“I think it might. Can you stand? We need to get moving. I’m feeling rather exposed out here.”
Nodding, Carpenter climbed to her feet, tugging on Orlova, and the two of them started down the corridor. The walls seemed to soak up the light from their helmets, and within a few minutes they couldn’t see the shaft they had descended, walking through a sea of darkness, the only sound their own breath.
�
��“We’re going down,” Carpenter said. “One-in-thirty gradient.”
“I wonder how deep we'll be going,” Orlova replied.
After what seemed like hours, the corridor started to open up, leading them into a huge cavern, small points of light illuminating key areas, the chamber decorated with intricate carvings on every surface. Kneeling down, Orlova swept the dust clear from the floor by her feet, and was greeted by a face looking up at her, unmistakably that of a Neander.
“I guess that solves the problem,” she said.
“We don’t know they lived here,” Carpenter replied. “Look over there.” She swept clear another section, and this time a human looked up from the floor, his eyes filled with an impossible-to-describe sadness, as though weeping for his lost world. “And another,” she said, this time revealing a smaller humanoid, barely four feet high, covered in hair but unmistakably with intelligence in its eyes.
“What the hell have we found here, Susan?”
Gazing up at the ceiling, she said, “A treasure trove. You mentioned Howard Carter? I want to let off a flare. See if we can get a recording of all this.”
“Be my guest,” she replied, and Carpenter pulled a small cylinder out of her pocket, placing it on the floor and resting a pair of datapads next to it, set to cover as much of the chamber as possible.
“Five seconds,” Carpenter said, and Orlova dimmed her helmet as much as she could. Even then, the glare made her eyes water for a second, but briefly she could see everything. Every surface had the same detail, figures and carvings interlaced with hieroglyphics, of humanoids and animals of a thousand types, some of them familiar, some strange. At the far side of the room, she could see someone standing, watching them.
“Over there,” she said.
“What?” Carpenter said. “He isn’t wearing a suit.”
Looking at her monitors, Orlova replied, “Atmospheric pressure is the same as it was.” She started to walk towards the figure, still standing and implacably watching them as they approached. He was tall, almost seven feet high, and willowy, thin arms and legs, but otherwise appeared human, wearing nothing but a thin black robe. His mouth started to move, and reaching down, Orlova turned on her exterior pickup.
Battlecruiser Alamo: Aces High Page 18