by Greg Curtis
On cue the First Officer held up a crystal cube and depressed the memory chip's button on its base. Instantly the ground in front of them was filled with a hologram of his two professors, who quickly started telling him about how great an opportunity he was being given, and how warmly they supported his expedition. Behind them he could see the High Marshall of Earth Fleet, waiting patiently, and it came as no surprise when he in turn echoed the professors’ words.
Daryl groaned, as quietly as he could, realising he was doomed. At least a year and a half on board an alien ship, with no human companionship, light years outside of all human space, and surrounded by aliens who detested him.
And yet it wasn’t a total loss. He was also going to be able to join, though surely only in a most incidental way, the hunt for the answers to the greatest mystery in xeno-archaeology. Perhaps there was hope.
Chapter Two.
Life on board the Spaceship Targ was slowly becoming more predictable for Daryl by the end of the first week. Though not necessarily any more pleasant.
He had a place to sleep - his cabin on board the Sparrow - and a position to report to each day - “the library” for want of a better term. He also had a roster of duties. They’d actually given him a schedule that at least told him what he should be doing most of the time, and though it might be something that was about as natural to him as wings for a fish, he didn’t mind it for the time being. It actually helped him to find his bearings in this alien wonderland.
And it was a wonderland. It had taken him days to stop walking around in shock with his mouth hanging open as he saw the wonders the Force had at their disposal. But they had so many. Each time he thought he’d surely seen everything, they sprang another shock on him. Another scientific impossibility. Another miracle that the Earth simply didn’t have.
It had begun with the shuttle bay. A shuttle bay so large it could launch a hundred ten man shuttles in well under a minute. And each shuttle was nearly half the size of the Sparrow. As he’d walked down the Sparrow’s gangplank into the docking ring they’d already built for her, he kept thinking he couldn’t possibly be on a ship. It was simply too big. It had to be a space-port. But not a human space-port. It was simply too big for that as well.
Most impressive though, were the doors to the shuttle bay. It actually had some; huge alloy monstrosities as big as a mountain, and it could open and close them. It was just that mostly they didn’t bother. So the great ship flew through the infinite darkness of space with huge gaping holes in its side wide open to the vacuum. What sort of confidence did that speak of in the incredible force fields they must have holding the air in?
After that there were the endless hallways and corridors. More than enough to get lost in. The ship was a maze in three dimensions. He’d actually been given a small locator to guide him round the ship. Speak the name of wherever he wanted to go, and the little machine would plot a course and guide him to it. The Targ wasn’t a ship he’d quickly decided. It was a massive building that somehow flew. Nearly a city in its own right. Many of the hallways were over a klick long, and wide enough to be a city street. And it had another thirty decks the same size, just for the people. He ached to see engineering, just to gain some idea as to how massive the drivers had to be to get this monolith moving, though he knew he’d never be allowed such a luxury.
Two more decks were devoted simply to the duty of transporting people and machinery along and across the vessel. If the walk was too long, or the time critical, or you had something heavy to transport, all you had to do was to go to the seventeenth and eighteenth floors and catch one of the perpetually circling trains. A ship with its own internal railway. That would have his people reeling.
After that there were the recreational facilities. Things that not only did the Sparrow not have, but nor did even the largest Earth Fleet cruisers. But then they too would have fitted in the Targ’s shuttle bay. For a start there was a gym, which he was not only allowed to use, but was expected to. A full sized gym which could accommodate two hundred people at once, and which was apparently only one of three on the Targ.
His first day on board the ship he’d been abruptly informed that it was time for his physical assessment and an officer had quickly led him to the gym, where a Myran in what could only be described as the most ridiculous looking gym gear he’d ever imagined, had worked out a programme for him. One that included swimming in the indoor fifty metre pool, hand ball with the auto shooter, some weight training, and a five klick run around the indoor track. And his trainer was serious about it too. Day one had nearly killed him.
The people perhaps were more wondrous still. Wherever he went he was surrounded by aliens. More than he’d ever seen before, and in fact of more varieties than he knew existed. Many he couldn’t even identify, but thanks to the wonders of the translation programmes - they’d upgraded his Earth Fleet unit immediately he’d arrived - he could speak with them all. And some of them even deigned to speak to him in return. If only to tell him to get lost.
Aliens were everywhere. When he walked through the corridors they were everywhere, almost like any city street on Earth if Earth had been peopled by aliens. When he went to the library they’d be there, aliens of every shape and size, filling the work stations. And in the gym there were hundreds more, working out in every conceivable way. The running track for example was filled with everyone from the six legged Alers to the unbelievably wrinkly Myrans, and the tiny, scaled Regularans, all making good progress. Some were running, some sprinting, some hopping and some doing a strange mixture of all three. Most of them he couldn’t help but notice, were faster than him.
In the swimming pool the Xetans seemed to dominate, ripping through the water in some sort of eight limbed freestyle that churned the water like paddle wheels, but propelled them along easily three times as fast as him. Meanwhile the Regularans had made the weights area their own. Small but from high gravity worlds they could out press even the intimidating Myrans. As for him, a disliked human of questionable physique at best, he avoided that area like the plague.
Mixed in among them were other aliens from many more races than he’d ever seen, more than he knew existed. Some had fur or feathers, others scales or skin. Many of course were either bipedal or quadrupedal, surely the most common arrangements evolution had devised, but some had wings or other strange limbs thrown in. They ranged in height from a tiny one metre high four footed dear like being he briefly glimpsed in a hallway, to the massively tall Xetans. And despite the bulk of the Alers, he saw a pair of Elani in the gym one day who would make them look like infants. Actually they mostly resembled squat, elongated elephants, complete with trunks with delicate fingers on the end.
It spoke volumes about the nature of the Community that so many different species could all live and work in harmony on a single Force ship. Not even just the four great races, but all of the hundreds of lesser ones as well.
Once, he knew, from his history books, many humans had been unable to tolerate even tiny changes in skin colour among themselves. Though those days had been gone for over a century there were still a few people around who showed tendencies towards racism. The sights he was seeing daily would send such people screaming in fear. Perhaps, the Community’s greatest advance was in its tolerance of others. Excepting of course for humanity.
The library too was advanced, and a wonder to him, though in truth it wasn’t merely a library. “Research facility” would have been a more accurate description, but unlike any Earthly one. This facility had no labs, only books, data cubes, endless computational facilities, and of course the hard copies of every scrap of literature they’d ever pulled off the Calderonians. It had over a hundred full workstations and its own cafeteria, and better yet, everything in it was programmed to respond to him. All he had to do was speak into one of the stations, and it would display anything he wanted, run cross-references between digs, or even run any statistical analyses he desired. It seemed to have no limits.
Wha
t he really enjoyed about it though was the 3D suite. Reading a paper and trying to visualise the scenes from holo’s was old news for the Force. In the library, should he choose to, he could literally walk into a room, and find himself in the middle of the dig. Moreover, he could make the images as large or small as he wanted. Thus he could be a tiny ant examining an ancient artefact a hundred times his size, or a god surveying his domain. He could even be inside the artefact, examining its molecular structure. As research facilities went, it was advanced.
Unfortunately, as he kept getting told at every opportunity by Doctor Li of Regularas Prime, the chief librarian, he was not nearly so advanced. Unfortunately, the more he learned, the more he realised how little he really knew. Li might be prejudiced but he was also correct.
Daryl had spent most of his first week familiarising himself with the facilities, and then simply trying to broaden his knowledge of the Calderonians. It was a slow process, as he discovered for every little thing he knew about them, the great races had a volume, which naturally they hadn’t chosen to share with mankind. Naturally the same was true of everything else.
By the end of the week he was spending nearly all of his days simply reading everything he could lay his hands on, and recording most of it for later perusal on the Sparrow. The other users had learned to ignore him after a while, accepting him as part of the furniture, which was fine by him. If they ignored him and he stayed out of their way it would make the whole journey a lot more pleasant. Especially if and when they realised he didn’t agree with all of their findings. That was not going to go down well.
The Calderonians had turned out to be a lot more complex than he had realised. And there was a lot more to their exodus than simply the heating up of the sun, which the Community scientists had identified as their motivation for leaving. He had realised that after only a couple of days of study, but his colleagues clearly hadn’t guessed it even after many years. They’d simply accepted the theory as fact and moved on. It was he supposed, simply proof that even the most advanced scientists could have shortcomings, and arrogance and certainty were two of the most serious.
For a start the Calderonians had had at least two or three other options to the one they had chosen. Exodus from the entire known universe was surely a little extreme even for them. But the Community scientists hadn’t even considered the alternatives.
The most rational for them would surely have been to move their planet slightly further away from the sun as it heated. They clearly had the technology, and it wouldn’t have posed any major system dynamics problems. Calderon Seven was so distant from Six, that they could have increased its orbit’s radius by more than forty million kilometres without problem, or roughly half the distance from the Earth to Venus. And Calderon’s sun was extremely consistent in its heat increase. If they’d wanted to they could have simply let the planet’s orbit increase by a couple of kilometres per year for the next ten or twenty thousand years. And then when the sun’s hot phase was over, brought it back just as slowly assuming they were still alive. But they hadn’t chosen to do that, instead just letting the planet heat and heat until they couldn’t live there any longer. A total heat increase of only nine degrees Celsius, but more than enough to turn a tropical paradise into a desert world.
There were also other techniques they could have used to cool the atmosphere. Certain molecules could have been slowly seeded in the upper atmosphere, to do the exact opposite of the greenhouse gases, reflecting more of the sun’s heat away while allowing surface heat from the planet to escape more easily. For him that would have been the best option, but given that the locals were apparently exceptionally sensitive to changes in air density and its chemical breakdown, perhaps it wasn’t for them. Even so he would have thought it at least a possibility given the level of their technology. They hadn’t chosen that option though.
Finally their technology was such that they could have easily terra-formed many other planets to their exact needs. Why did they have to travel right out of the known universe when there were other worlds much closer that they could have adapted to their needs? In fact they already had since the Community scientists had previously excavated three of their colony worlds? A little fact that seemed to have slipped past the other scientists’ notice.
Could it be that they so desperately wanted to meet with the Ancients that they’d just abandoned everything and left? It made more sense as theories went, but not a lot more. For a start it left him wondering why everybody? The whole population. Why not just a select few diplomats and scientists? And even if the whole race did want to emigrate, surely there would still have been a few holdouts? People who would have preferred to stay home and let the universe pass them by. But on Calderon Six there’d been no evidence of them, nor by the looks of things on any of their other worlds.
But that wasn’t the only riddle that had to be solved. The more important one was surely how they’d found the Ancients in the first place. Sure their knowledge in some areas was greater than that which he had been shown of the Community, but from his admittedly limited perspective, surely not that much greater. Top speed of their ships was maybe only a tad faster than those of the great races. The Calderonians could certainly build bigger ships, but despite that most of the technology in them appeared to be of a similar standard. They used standard antigrav drivers, with a slightly different coil design as the only significant difference he could find. They also used a standard power cell structure, much the same as any other, the same alloys and same basic structural design and layouts in their cities.
In fact the more he looked at their technology, the more he began to wonder if the great races had stolen their tech from the Calderonians. All of them. It would at the very least explain why their technologies were all so similar to each other, and to those of a race missing for ten thousand years.
Naturally he’d found no answers. Not in a single week. But he had at least realised that they had to be answered. For the others though, those questions had apparently never even raised their heads. Either they’d been asked and answered in some of their more esoteric works that he hadn’t yet found and though he’d done some thorough searching those questions hadn’t been considered in many centuries, so he would be looking for some very old research. Or else they were happy with what they thought they knew and didn’t want to rock the boat. He suspected the latter. The Community scientists were lax in their assumptions, and too lazy or simply unwilling to test their theories about the Calderonians.
Thus they had found Calderon six hundred of their years ago, realised it was the home world of the other colonies they were already exploring and done a cursory scan of it. But when the world had been shown to have become a desert over the centuries, its cities destroyed, they’d simply decided it was useless to them, and moved on, never considering that there might be the remains of their cities buried deep in the sand. And on their advice, the Force had apparently put the world on the permitted list for humans to study. And that was just the first of their many mistaken assumptions.
For all their technological advantage the great races seemed to have some strange shortcomings. Not to mention personality defects.
If he was having a hard time dealing with them, they in turn were also having a hard time dealing with each other. It had come as a shock to realise that the great races weren’t nearly as united in their greatness as he had thought. Except of course, in that they all agreed that humans, most especially himself, were at the bottom of the heap. But at the top they struggled and squawked with each other like bad tempered children fighting over their toys, while coming together to squash anyone from the other lesser races who dared to raise so much as a question.
It wasn’t so bad with the crew. In fact he’d never seen them argue or fight once, and they all treated him and the others almost as equals, which was naturally enough somewhere beneath themselves, whatever race they were of. They had their orders, their ranks, which he was still trying to put together into so
me sort of coherent whole, and their mission. That seemed to outweigh their people’s prejudice. But as if to make up for the crew’s tolerance, the scientists seemed to get worse by the day.
The first day out he’d listened to Doctor Li, as he’d insisted on being addressed, dressing down two crew members, both Myran, insulting Helos, who as the most senior scientist was actually in charge of the research expedition and his most hated enemy, and tearing strips off most of the researchers one after another. Daryl was almost the one least attacked by him. Probably because he was too insignificant to matter. Yet Doctor Li as he found out, was one of the least important of the lead scientists in charge of the research facility. In short he was the data analyst and librarian, a position he clearly found unworthy.
For all that he was damned aggravating. So aggravating in fact that at one point during their argument Helos had crossed and then folded up his middle pair of legs and was actually starting to crouch in preparation for leaping on top of the Regularan, and trampling him to death. Considering their size differential he suspected Li despite being from a heavy gravity world, would have ended up as a pile of mush under Helos’ steel clad boots. Li didn’t seem to understand that though, and the more warning signs Helos gave, the more venomously he attacked. Fortunately, a crew member, one of the Xetans, had stepped in and smoothed things over before they came to blows. They were naturally good at that, and gaining a lot of extra practice at it by the day.