James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 06

by Crucible

  “I am hungry,” said Muffy to Matthew Driver. “Do you have any nourishment?”

  “You weren’t hungry the last time we stopped,” Driver replied, prying her hand from his thigh.

  “But I am hungry now,” she pouted.

  Matthew drew a foodbar from his pack. “It’s all we have, I’m afraid.” She took the small rectangle in her hand and slowly, luxuriantly stripped it of its wrapping.

  Fixing Matthew in a seductive stare, she gave the bar a long, slow lick with her fine pink tongue. Then, she slowly drew the food product into her lips, and finally bit off a small piece to chew and swallow hungrily. “Oh,” she moaned. “It’s so-o-o-o good.”

  “Anyway,” said Driver, turning to Christmas. “You were about to tell us about the colony of Bright Angel”

  Christmas continued, “Bright Angel was a beautiful, mountainous world, although a lot of it was rather chilly. There was a thriving human civilization there, most eager to remain contact with its human brothers. It was at Bright Angel that we realized that our ship’s Central Braincore had become fully sentient. The pattern of system glitches that had plagued us since launch were actually the first stirrings of its consciousness.”

  “Aye, the same thing happened to us,” Trajan interrupted. “And, Muffy, take your hand off my crotch.”

  Pouting, Muffy took her hand away.

  Christmas was perturbed by this information… the sentient BrainCore information, not the Muffy’s hand in the crotch information, “But you managed to prevent Pegasus’s Central Braincore from being controlled.”

  Driver answered. “We isolated Caliph from the Braincore. She’s now kind of…”

  “He’s kind of,” Trajan interrupted. “Caliph decided to adopt a male persona, last time I checked.”

  To Driver, it did not matter. “Either way, Caliph is an independent entity that inhabits her

  … its … own Braincore.”

  Christmas considered this. “We might have avoided this disaster had we managed that. We tried to shut Lex down, but it was too late. Only the damage to this ship’s systems enabled me to deactivate him after the attack. If your repair crew restore him, the results could be catastrophic.”

  “So you have said previously,” Driver reminded him.

  “Why do you think it was Lex who tried to murder your crew,” Trajan Lear asked. So far, Christmas seemed to be cruising on pure paranoia.

  An edge of frustration seeped into Christmas’s voice. “I suspected it since he revealed himself on Bright Angel, and I have been certain since the last colony Lexington Keeler visited, called ‘Archangel.’ It was not on our original itinerary, but we learned of it at Bright Angel. I was only peripherally involved with the mission. By then, I was known as an animated corpse cohabitating with a sex slave, and the rest of the crew was uncomfortable with my lifestyle.”

  “If you’re dead, can it really be considered a lifestyle?” Trajan Lear asked. “Just asking…” Christmas ignored him. “I observed the mission through telemetry reports delivered to my quarters. Archangel was… had been… a world of great beauty, of turquoise oceans and stunning landscapes. It was the first colony we had visited with its own ring system, which created very dramatic and beautiful vistas, especially in the equatorial regions.

  “There had been a human colony there, and it had built great cities. Crystalline materials and marble were abundant in the planet’s crust, and so many of the buildings were constructed as huge columns of glass. Cascadia was the largest, but it was in ruins. Its buildings were fallen, its streets full of rubble, its gardens… its gardens were in pretty good shape, actually, because the aqueduct system had been mostly undamaged.”

  “In their museums and libraries, we discovered they had generated an amazing amount of literature and art, and furthermore, had uncovered evidence of a previous civilization… a race of intelligent, avian creatures, who had inhabited the planet nearly 14,000,000 years before the human colonists.

  “What happened to the human colony?” Driver asked.

  “They had been attacked between 160 and 200 years before we arrived. There were great long gashes carved into the planet’s surface, exposing her underlying strata … crystalline, diamond, quarts, zirconium. The gashes made for long crystalline canyons, quite beautiful…

  making prisms of the white sun.”

  Driver’s gut sank. That sounded depressingly familiar.

  “We remained in orbit to investigate the disappearance of the colony. After our one-hundred seventy-seventh ship-day in orbit around Archangel, I asked the Prime Commander when we would be leaving. He looked at me quizzically, and said that there was far too much work to do, and we had only just arrived.

  “I found this to be a pervasive attitude among the crew. No one wanted to leave, or could even contemplate leaving the planet. I was perplexed, so I went to consult with Lex, and discovered that, due to an engineering mishap, his intelligence was no longer accessible within the ship’s BrainCore.

  “About this time, key systems on board the ship began failing. First, there were minor disruptions to water supply and waste management systems. They grew in scale until sections of the ship had to be depressurized and cut off from power, so that the remaining power and life support could support critical areas… the Primary Tower, the Habitation Levels, and the Hangar Bays

  “In time I learned that the crew were having dreams. They were dreaming of Archangel in the time of the colony… and some of the more sensitive individuals, like the navigators and the truth machines, faintly recalled dreams of the planet during the time of the Avian civilization.” As he said this, an image came to Matthew Driver’s mind… faint, like the washed out hues of a hologram viewed too many times. It was of a city, high and spiraling towers built among mountaintops, among which flitted beings like birds with overlong, albatross wings, small light bodies, and elongated bird-like heads.

  Christmas continued. “They were dreaming of lives among the colonists, and they awakened with a compulsion to remain on the planet, and rebuild what had been lost.”

  “My dreams were highly sexual… as they always are,” said Muffy, in a sultry tone of voice.

  Christmas continued. “I, being dead, was unaffected by this. I do not dream. Eventually, I learned that the disappearance of Lex was not a malfunction, Lex was sabotaging our efforts to leave the system. Some form of intelligence had reached out from the planet and convinced him that we had to stay, and he was systematically deactivating life-support in order to force us to the surface.”

  “What did you do?” Driver asked.

  “I hid myself in the UnderDecks, where I came into contact with a community of stowaways. They were less susceptible to the influence of the Archangel intelligence. There followed a long series of diversions… I was hunted by the ship’s security forces. I had to dodge down conduits and air ducts, avoided some killer toolbots, set off some diversionary explosions. The details are not interesting enough to relate here, in the time we have left.

  Eventually, I made it to the secondary BrainCore, where Lex had retreated.

  “With the stowaway’s assistance, I managed to insert myself into the dream-world created by the Archangel intelligence; the spirits of the planet. I spoke to the crew in their dreams.

  Argued with them. Cajoled them. And finally fought with the spirits of a dead planet, as they begged for humans to rebuild their world.

  “I finally reached a compromise with them. 1,600 of our crew would remain behind to begin rebuilding Archangel, and all 117 of the stowaways we found below decks. The rest of us would be set free to return our voyage.”

  “So, many of Lexington Keeler’s crew were safely on Archangel when you were attacked here,” Driver said. “How fortunate.”

  “Fortunate?” Christmas challenged. “Left behind as drones to rebuild a dead, if often beautiful world? Their minds only partly their own? The spirits of the planet said that those who stayed behind would retain their free will. I can only
hope it is true. After we were attacked here, we sent the survivors back toward Archangel, because it was the nearest world.” Chapter Fifteen

  The Surface

  Four Road Warriors roared up to the site of the Redoubt. They had followed along the banks, and sometimes the bed, of the broad shallow river that ran between the mesas and the plains. Fifty-seven clicks along, they came to an abrupt plateau that the river descended in two long, distinct steps, creating the two stage waterfall.

  A squad of warfighters charged toward the waterfall that hid the entrance of the redoubt.

  Determining that the area was clear, they signaled to the planetology teams.

  Magnus Morgan jumped from his ride before it had made a complete stop. He strode up to the mouth of the cave that was hidden behind the upper waterfall. He scanned it up and down, then felt a need to pull down his breathing mask and inspect it visually. No ash was falling here, but the smell of oil remained pervasive as ever.

  The voice of the warfighter squad leader came through on Morgan’s COM Link. “There’s an artificial wall behind the waterfall with a large hatch in the middle of it. Scans indicate it’s a heavy exotic alloy… steel, tungsten, palladium, and a few others. It’s going to be tough to cut through, and I wouldn’t recommend blasting it.”

  “Of course not,” Morgan said. “Anansi has an aptitude for figuring these things out. We’ll figure out how to get through.”

  Anansi dashed up the trail and met him and the two of them disappeared behind the sheet of water. Taurus moved out the warfighters and ordered them to recon the immediate vicinity.

  A few minutes later, the curtain of water parted as the immense steel hatch covering the Redoubt’s entrance parted and diverted its flow. Beyond it was a cavernous hallway where rows of dim yellowish lights were flickering to life.

  Technician Honda was amazed. “There’s still power in there?”

  “Za,” Anansi answered her. “That’s why the doors could open. My guess is it’s some kind of hydro-power system that keeps a bank of batteries charged.”

  “Move the equipment in,” Morgan called out behind.

  The exploration crews moved into the entrance chamber. A plate on the wall read (in the ancient language): Redoubt 31. 10,000 souls x 10 years.

  Morgan regarded this glumly. “That city we came from housed at least 40,000 people. Only 25 per cent would have been saved. Supposing this redoubt was exclusively for that city.” Next to it was a layout map of the facility. The exploration team was at the beginning of a long corridor leading into the mountain. It led to a three-level open chamber. “I’m just going to speculate,” Morgan speculated. “This was their command center, with habitation areas below and supplies below that.”

  “Not much of an existence,” Anansi said wistfully. “A cot to sleep on, some sort of survival ration.”

  Morgan tried to maintain their focus. “The top level, if it is the operations center, is the area most likely to have some kind of records of the planet’s history.” Honda spoke up from further along the corridor. “I think I may have already found a record of the planet’s history.”

  They moved toward her voice, shining their handlights on each of the wallpanels to supplement the dim lights of the corridor. Between each pair of support beams was a wallpanel, and on each, a mural had been painted.

  “This must be an account of their arrival on the planet,” Ing said of the first mural. Ancient starships were descending through a turbulent sky. They were quite simple in design, huge cylinders attached to structural metal cages. Far at the back were star-drive pods. On the opposite side of the hall was a mural, depicting humans taking one ship apart to build the first settlement.

  The next was a depiction of the city they had just come from … in happier times. Before it had been abandoned, and before the devastation visited on the planet had coated the city in gray dust. It looked like a dull, but decent enough place to live. There were families playing in the parks, visiting the shopping center together. It was grievously sad.

  Anansi stared at the legend in the corner. “Caledonia,” he said out loud. “The town we were in was called Caledonia.”

  The next showed a very different city. This one occupied the floodplain next to a broad, shallow lake. Out in the lake were derricks and extraction structures… pulling hydrocarbons from the muck. The city must have been subject to periodic flooding, because it was built atop huge metal supports that raised most of it several meters above the level of the floodplain. This one, according to the legend, was called “Crescent Basin City.” The view was from a long way away, and there were no human figures depicted.

  Magnus Morgan had moved to the next wall panel. In this one, a number of crescent-shaped ships were descending from roiling, turbulent clouds toward the larger city, the one beside the lake. The subsequent panel showed the ships attacking the city, at night, with energy beams. Smaller ships strafed the ground in three-ship attack formations. The smaller ships looked very familiar, blade-shaped hulls attached to torpedo-like drive cylinders.

  This world must have been defenseless from the assault. Sapphire and Republic had maintained militaries, even centuries after the collapse, for fear of Tarmigans, or aliens, or even predations from other colonies (but mostly each other). This colony had decided not to invest in self-defense. They had nothing to offer against the terror that descended from the sky.

  In the next mural, the invasion continued. The city was under the crescent ships, and an even larger ship hung in the sky over them. In daytime, now, humans fled the city, making their way across the plains, hiding in the scrubby trees and brush, taking shelter in the river bottom.

  There followed three murals that were obviously painted by a different hand. Whereas the preceding ones had been almost photographic in quality, these next were impressionistic.

  Against black shadows and leaves, human figures were attacked by strange beings with cat-like eyes; shot, stabbed, hunted and carried away.

  “Those don’t look like Aurelians,” said Anansi.

  “Neg,” Morgan agreed. “This confirms our theory that the planet was invaded by aliens before the Aurelians arrived.”

  “Also, that the ships that attacked Lexington Keeler were aliens … not Aurelians,” Ing added.

  “Aurelians technically are aliens,” Honda said, but no one wanted to elaborate. They just sensed that their universe had just achieved an additional level of complication.

  The final panel had ten rows of ten human figures each. All but the last three were black, and three were red.

  “97% of the survivors died in the first year,” Anansi guessed.

  “And I don’t think the remaining 3% lasted much longer,” Morgan concluded grimly.

  “Let’s get set up. We have to learn as much about this planet as possible.” The Aves Susan

  The trip to Keeler was brief, only nineteen minutes of flight time. The Watchmen Churchill and Sukhoi took seats near the rear of the ship, and conversed through the neural transponders implanted in their brains.

  Interesting predicament, thought Sukhoi.

  And what leads you to that conclusion, TyroCenturion Constantine? Bellisarius replied in his thoughts.

  Sukhoi: Prime Commander Keeler has ordered us to take TyroCommander Lear into custody.

  Prime Centurion Lear wants us to undermine Commander Keeler’s command. Which of our masters are we to follow?

  Bellisarius: It isn’t obvious to you? Loyalty to the Notorium is always the first priority.

  Sukhoi: …

  Bellisarius: But you do not believe TyroCommander Lear is acting justly.

  Sukhoi: Her diatribe against Commander Keeler did not sound…justified. Commander Keeler’s decision to salvage the other ship was the right decision. We all agreed at the time. Keeler didn’t know about the aliens. None of us did. Whatever went wrong was not his fault.

  Bellisarius guarded his next several thoughts. When he finally projected them to Constantine, they were as
follows:

  It was inevitable that our situations would come to this impasse. We have to make sure, that at the end, we are on the right side of this struggle.

  The Surface

  As the exploration crew worked toward the center of the structure, Taurus’s Warfighters set up camp near the entrance; camp in this case being a portable tactical command post in the back of one of the Road Warriors, wherefrom she coordinated the deployment of their troops and weapons.

  “Around the mouth of the cave, create a sensor perimeter,” Taurus ordered. “Link in with the Accipiters. Also, see if Pegasus can spare us a couple more Accipiters for air patrol.” In the back of a nearby Road Warrior, Johnny Rook and Max Jordan consulted with Tactical Specialist Herald, a Sapphirean with a wrestler’s build and tawny curls of hair.

  “Thanks for doing this,” Rook told him, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’m almost sure I didn’t see anything, but I’ve got to be sure.”

  Herald nodded. “Transfer the imagery from your tactical gear’s memory files.” Rook had only to touch the machine’s data port and it was done. A screen projection of Rook’s imagery appeared on the back of the Road Warrior.

  “This is the Spex imagery from the time index when you thought you saw the creature.” Herald quickly isolated the critical sequence. On the playback, there was a brief impression of a shadow, scurrying into the scrub.

  “That’s it,” Rook said.

  Max Jordan studied the image. “I can’t really tell what it was. An animal, maybe?”

  “The probes didn’t detect any animal life in the area,” Rook reminded him.

  Herald froze and magnified the image, and added detail. There was an impression of a large cat-like creature, walking on its hind legs.

  Rook touched his COM Link. “Lt. Taurus, come and take a look at this.” Taurus looked a little pissed when she dragged herself away from the mobile command post. Her attitude did not much improve when she saw the playback.

  “There were no life signs were detected anywhere on the planet,” Taurus said dismissively.

  “And Lieutenant Morgan doesn’t think any advanced animal life could evolve because of the solar flares.”