by Greg Curtis
Naturally he’d asked the captain for his help. A Force officer who turned out to be surprisingly agreeable, despite his little stunt, as he termed it. It was vital because, as Daryl pointed out, neither he, nor to the best of his knowledge, any of his peers knew anything about the destruction of the colony. They’d been taught the official history of the tragedy as it was called, the outbreak. They’d even been shown the recordings made by the colonists as they were dying. One in particular by the colony’s head, Mayor Stent, which probably every school child on Earth had seen at least once.
As he told them, his people couldn’t even begin to find out the details of the attack, or make any kind of amends, unless they actually knew the truth to begin with. Without that, the stand off would continue, until something finally did go wrong. And his people didn’t even understand that there was a stand off. They, like he, had believed that they were simply being unfairly treated. Besides, natural justice dictated that they at least know that they had been charged and convicted of a crime.
As such he’d asked the captain to speak with his superiors about releasing the evidence and the details of the crime, not just to the World Council who must surely know, but to the entire world. Once it was out there, truly out there, a billion curious minds and billions more official ones would begin digging through ancient records and hunting for the truth.
The captain had no objection in principal to his request, simply the same doubts that his predecessors had had, when they had released the evidence before, and heard nothing back apart from bare faced lies. And that in itself was scary. To know that only seventy years ago there had been enough evil people in power to first do such evil, and then to lie about it so blatantly to their own people.
But he had said he would try.
That had been nearly a week before, and Daryl had heard nothing more since. But then he’d figured it would take time. For a start they were out of communication range so the only way a message could get back to Unity was via the message torpedoes. Travelling at terrig twenty five or more, they could make it back in just under a week, and then it would be at least another before they got a reply. Needless to say he wasn’t expecting a response for some time.
In the mean time though, he was for the first time, at his leisure. Apart from being called over every so often by one of the patrols who worried that they’d found another trap, he was free to wander around and explore. Something he was rather enjoying.
The only proviso was that he take someone with him, and so at all times he had an escort in Scientist Ryal. Uriah Ryal. They were on an occasional first name basis after surviving the mass bolo attack, though Daryl wasn’t sure that it meant the same thing as it would in his culture. Ryal preferred being called by his second name but for some reason wanted Daryl to know his first even if he didn’t use it.
Ryal himself was in a similar position to Daryl. At a loose end. The other scientists had refused his help as well in examining the artefacts. But in his case the reason was much more obvious and cynical; professional jealousy. Ryal was already part of the team that had defeated a Calderonian city so easily. His name was famous within the ship, and sure to become more so when they started writing up the expedition records. Any more discoveries and he would eclipse the various head’s of the expedition, and they couldn’t have that.
Ryal took it stoically though. Unlike Daryl who would be fuming in his position - actually he was in his position but had too much else on his plate to give a damn about it - Ryal simply accepted the decision with his normal good grace and carried on. There was something simply wrong with such calm, and Daryl had done his best to snap him out of it for days. But the peaceful Xetan psyche was simply too strong for him, and in the end he’d given up. For a while.
So the two of them had simply been wandering around the city for days, for all the world like tourists.
Most of the city was of course abandoned. The Calderonians hadn’t left much behind, and why Daryl asked himself, would they? The city surely hadn’t been left as some sort of depot for others to shop at. It was simply a rest stop where millions upon millions of their people had had a chance to get out and enjoy the view while they refuelled their ships and stocked up on provisions. Except that they surely hadn’t needed to do either of those things. Trying to explain that to the other scientists however, was not a good plan. If he was unfortunate and they actually listened, the result would always be the more senior scientists calling him a lot of untranslatable names. It was easier to let them believe their own foolishness.
Unlike any of the other cities, this one was intact. Ten thousand years old and it was in perfect order, as if its inhabitants had only gone away for a short walk. And that was a worrying thought. What, he wondered would the owners make of them invading their home? And considering the nature of their defences after ten thousand years, what would the ones they’d brought with them be like? After all, what they’d encountered were only the leftovers. Things that they’d left behind to protect their camp presumably just in case they needed to return one day. Fortunately in ten thousand years they hadn’t needed to.
The buildings were fascinating to Daryl. Not that he was in any way an architect, but to him they reminded him most of the quarters on a space ship. Thin alloy walls, which were both very strong, and somehow treated to block both noise and vibration, they were clustered together in giant apartment blocks, surrounding central community areas. It was as though when they’d gotten off their spacecraft, some of the craft had come with them.
As both an archaeologist and an engineer he found their construction intriguing, for several reasons. The first was that he had to ask himself; where had they found the metal? For as far as he knew there was no evidence of a mine anywhere on the world and it had been scanned thoroughly. So, had they actually cannibalised a craft to build their city? A strange concept for a people on a pilgrimage, but he figured it would answer a lot of questions. Also, if they had cannibalised a ship, why hadn’t they reused the parts at least when they’d left? Or had they brought spare metal with them just to build cities?
The second thing that grabbed his attention was the noise damping properties of the alloy. There were no rattles or bangs when it got hit with something metallic, just a slight thump at best, and that was only on the side of the wall on which the banging was made. On the other side there was no noise at all. Yet it wasn’t using an energy damping field, at least none that he could detect. Despite the fact that there was still power, there was no evidence of a white noise field either. And the wall was single layer alloy, five millimetres thick. Samples had been gathered for more detailed analysis back on the Targ - by the “real scientists”, naturally.
As someone who’d spent years on space ships and lived with the ever present noise, he could see huge advantages to the technology. And he figured, it might even be technology he could be allowed to send home. After all, other than its strength, which wasn’t really that much greater than that of their own metal alloys, it had little military application.
He had to admit that the Calderonian’s apartments were far better quarters than any he’d seen in space. Very roomy, and all built with remarkable views. Top of the line apartments, designed for living rather than travelling.
While they might have been built with space ship technology they surely had never been designed as space ship cabins. If they were actually on a space ship, the wide open windows and terraces would have had to have gone, to be replaced with steel walls and holographic images, and the quarters wouldn’t have been a quarter their size. Even on a ship as advanced as the Targ.
The average Calderonian had an apartment of at least three hundred square metres, and some were much larger again. Married quarters he suspected. His own quarters would be lucky to be forty square metres, with a fold away single bed, that could double as a couch, a work station and a small bathroom. Throw in a basket for Scratch, and of course a scratching post, and he had just enough room left to open the door. Though
after the cell, it was still quite roomy.
So what did that mean? Had some of the Calderonians decided to settle instead of continuing with the journey? Or had they simply brought so many extra ships with them, that they could afford to turn a couple into holiday homes for their stopovers? There were of course, no answers, but endless questions, which kept his mind active as they explored the city.
As they went slowly through the apartments, they found bits and pieces that the residents had left behind. Small unimportant things that were probably forgotten about in their desire to leave. The odd holo image, usually of family or some place they’d once been, various knick knacks and even children’s toys. The Calderonians were the only people he’d ever known, other than his own, who had teddy bears. He knew that’s what it was when he found it, even if it had six legs and three eyes. A soft cuddly teddy bear, which even after ten thousand years was serviceable. A soft toy was in the end a soft toy, and that in turn told him more about the Calderonians than probably everything else put together. It told him for a start, that these were people he could have liked.
Occasionally they found the odd appliance, which usually wasn’t working properly. A food making device that actually prepared the food from atoms of whatever was placed in its hopper. The only problem was that the ready to eat food that came out of the other end had a tendency to either explode or melt. Something he suspected wasn’t intentional. Age had done something to its circuitry. There was a hair dryer that could only operate for three or four seconds at a time. Which surely wasn’t much use if you were a shaggy biped that looked most like the fabled Yeti. Ryal came across a sonic scrubbing brush - though what it scrubbed they couldn’t begin to guess - and which tended to shatter metal rather than cleaning it.
Naturally they recorded everything they found, collected some of the lighter stuff themselves, mainly the images, and marked a few of the larger more interesting pieces for others to collect, and then moved on.
So it had gone on for several whole, totally unproductive, though quite enjoyable days. In that time he estimated, they’d searched at least five hundred apartments and the only true treasure he’d found was an alien teddy bear. Still, once it was cleaned up, examined and cleared by the other scientists, he thought it might make a pleasant toy for Scratch. Something to go in her basket. And it was so good to finally have the cat back with him, that he simply couldn’t stop rewarding her enough. He even let her sleep on his bed at night, something he’d never done before. But at least she wasn’t taking the bed over. Yet.
Typically, just as he was just thinking about giving up for the day - twelve hours was a long day after what he’d been through lately - all hell broke loose. Though at first neither he nor Ryal understood how serious it was.
They were just returning from the top floor of the third apartment block they’d been assigned to search that day, when some static began coming through on the translator. Which was he quickly realised, unusual. In fact it had never had static before. He tapped it a few times, an ancient and often overlooked repair technique, but for once it didn’t seem to help.
Five steps ahead of him as was often the case, Ryal was trying the communicator while he was still tapping away vainly. But it was as he was listening to Ryal that he realised the translator wasn’t just static filled, it had stopped working all together. All he could hear was Ryal’s normal chainsaw buzz. No English translation was coming through his ear. And Ryal obviously had static as well, that’s why he was calling. It wasn’t an isolated fault in his unit.
He looked round to see many others in the same situation. There were at least a hundred people down in the city, and he could see at least a dozen of them doing much the same as he and Ryal. Tapping their translators, in some cases, pulling them apart and looking for shorts, or talking rapidly on their com units.
None of them were working.
Jamming! It stank of jamming. That was his immediate thought. Some form of electromagnetic interference was being used specifically to jam communications and interfere with electrical equipment. And after that came the realisation that it could only be from one of two things. Either, someone, somewhere down here, or on the ship working on the artefacts had activated something. Or there was someone else out here with them. An enemy with a jammer.
And of course, while it could be devastating for them on the ground, in a space ship, where everything depended on millions of split second decisions made by electronic circuits, such a field could be far more dangerous. That was why every single piece of equipment that went into a space ship was carefully analysed for every bit of extraneous radiation it gave off. Too much, and it never left the ground.
First he realised, they needed to know where the interference was coming from. The city, the Targ or somewhere else. And he realised, they needed to know fast. There was only one place nearby that he thought might be able to help. The Sparrow. While it was far more primitive than anything else around, it was robust. He’d rebuilt a lot of the equipment with stronger electromagnetic shielding than it needed, working on the principal that if it failed in the middle of nowhere, it could be fatal. Plus it had a very strong if primitive com unit that could probably punch through most interference at least at close range.
Daryl grabbed Ryal’s closest arm and pointed at the Sparrow, which was only a klick away on the edge of the city. Once the city defences had finally been overcome, there had seemed no point in leaving it seven or eight klicks from the action, so they’d set up a base just outside the city’s perimeter, ringed with extra shields, and landed it there. In time, when the tunnel was wide enough, it would come in to the city itself, and until then it was near enough to serve as a communications post and tea house.
As a well trained unit they began running for the Sparrow. Or rather Daryl began running. Ryal moved into his race’s natural four legged lope, which was actually a lot faster than his best run, and soon was a hundred metres in front and quickly disappearing into the distance. He realised with some despair that all the fitness work he had been forced to undergo and the rest that was surely coming, would never make him a match for a Xetan.
It didn’t matter. Three or four minutes later and he was also at the Sparrow’s hatch, which Ryal was holding open for him.
Inside the static on his translator was still present, but somewhat less annoying, and he guessed the hull was shielding them from the worst of it. That had to be a good sign. It improved again when they closed the hatch. But even so he saw that many of the ships instruments were giving strange readings as the interference upset their circuits. The Sparrow could not fly under such conditions. But maybe, it could send a message. With some tweaking.
Boosting the outgoing signal strength by a factor of a hundred, and fine tuning it to its most accurate, he blasted a message through to the Targ. Just a simple hello and their identification. The various scopes indicated that the signal to noise ratio was pretty good, well over ninety eight percent, and he hoped that it would be good enough to reach their command ship. Of course, the operators at the other end would be cursing him for a while as their circuits struggled to cope with the signal intensity. A few fuses might even pop. But it was a price he was willing to pay.
“Steady Sparrow. Switch to channel 112 and cut your volume by at least ninety percent.” The answer was far faster than he had expected, and in English. He did immediately as ordered, although he only reduced the power seventy percent. It might still be too loud but quite frankly the signal to noise ratio still didn’t look that good, even in the shorter wave emergency bands.
“Done. Can you hear me?”
“Perfectly Doctor Daryl. Please stop shouting.” The captain’s dry tones were immediately evident, and he realised that even though their translators might not be working, the Targ’s one was, which had to be a good thing. Dutifully he cut the signal strength again.
“Sorry Captain. We have a situation down here. All our translators have packed up. And the coms are down. Some sort of
static interference. Also the Sparrow’s instruments are showing signs of advanced dementia, and I doubt it’s alone. There’s probably not a shuttle here that could take off. Also, can you translate into Xetan as well please.” He suddenly remembered Ryal standing there beside him, surely not understanding a word, and at least as worried as him.
“We know, and we’re working on it. The problem may take some time though.” Even through the translator Daryl sensed some frustration in the captain’s words. He could even sense it when he heard it translated into Xetan.
Ryal took over asking questions about then and Daryl was more than happy to let him. They’d only be asking the same questions anyway. Things like what the problem actually was and when it might be fixed. The captain though wouldn’t give them the specifics though. Just that they knew what the problem was and that it was being worked on. And one other interesting little fact; that one Scientist Helos was likely to be spending considerably more time in the brig.
Daryl tried hard not to laugh too loudly when he heard that, and from the strange hiccups that seemed to come from Ryal he guessed he was doing much the same. Neither of them had much liking for Helos.