And All The Stars A Grave.

by Greg Curtis

  The meeting of course ran longer than he had counted on. Far longer, as the Elders remembered and grieved once more. Healing was a slow and painful process. But in the end Daryl had gained as much knowledge as he was going to get. Once the facts were dealt with the emotion took over, and he knew it would be wrong to try and stop them. Instead he let them speak, hour after hour, recording everything in the hope that there might be a few grains of useful information in it. And he knew there might be. He already had a possible though thin motive in their religious extermination theory, and a second in the world’s mineral resources, which he would ask the Force to check into. It was the thinnest of comet tails, but it was still a tail. Perhaps more would follow.

  He also knew that despite his faint hopes that he would get all the information he wanted in one meeting, it would not happen. It would be weeks or months before he had everything. And it might be years before the Elders who, once they’d begun remembering, had run out of words. Not that he wanted them to stop. Even seventy years later their speaking was still part of the healing process, and as a human being he had an obligation to help them as best he could.

  But the Targ also left in the morning and he knew he had to be on it.

  With the admiral’s permission, he arranged for the Force to set up a continuing database of these records, and to continue holding regular meetings. Not just because he himself needed to find answers. But because he hoped it would become a valuable treasure to their descendants. A living record of what had been and what had been lost. He also gave them a contact address if they wanted to privately add more information to his meagre stockpile of facts. He made sure the contact was a Force officer who they knew and respected - one they could trust to keep their secret safe. Maybe some of them were beginning to look at him with new eyes, but not all. And he couldn’t ask them to trust him. It was just too much to ask.

  Instead he selected the highest ranking Edenite in the Force on Unity as his chosen guardian. One Captain Walmsly, a retired cruiser captain who he’d never heard of. On the Targ meantime, while he kept a copy his own captain would be the guardian. Someone else he hoped they could have faith in. It was a responsibility Daryl knew he would not take lightly. And if they did trust the captain, then it was a good bet he would keep getting more information over the coming days as the Targ shipped out.

  He also gave them his own solemn promise that he would do everything he could to find those responsible and bring them to account. But he also had to tell them that he was only an archaeologist, not a trained policeman, and that he could guarantee nothing. It hurt to say it, as he knew how much they both needed some form of answer. Only that could begin to give them the closure they needed, and only a trained investigator, which he would never be, would ever be likely to find it. It hurt more to realise how little they trusted him, though he could never blame them.

  Finally the pastor, realising that the meeting after its first six hours was not going anywhere more for a while, called it to a close with a prayer for peace and understanding. One Daryl suspected was partly drawn from the Edenites own oath sixty odd years earlier. As some of the odd phrases were spoken he saw ancient green eyes look up with surprise and understanding. Even then, being almost lectured to by a sprat less then a quarter their age, and from the people who had attacked them long ago, they remembered and were true to their oath.

  It was a true measure of their humanity that he carried with him all the way back to the Targ. He only hoped he could live up to it.

  Chapter Fourteen.

  QA 40 hadn’t changed a lot since Daryl had been there the first time. In fact it hadn’t changed at all. But the crew had. Mostly in the way they regarded him.

  Somewhere between his last visit and this, he had gained some status with them. Even with the Edenites among them. It was almost as though he’d become one of them for a while. Until he reminded them of his humanity. Of course there was no such thing as a perfect win for him, and if he’d gained status with the crew, he’d lost it, assuming that was actually possible, with the scientific complement.

  Li and Helos, who’d returned with them as the newly, unofficially crowned lead scientist and resident jail bird respectively, now apparently regarded him as a wild man, who occasionally had some insight, but no scientific rigour at all. A Davy Crocket of science. Thus they were almost willing to accept his theory of why the Calderonians had taken flight - after all it was the only one that fitted all the data - but then would dismiss it as incredibly crude. Unrefined. Without acceptable scientific validity, which of course they were desperately working on finding. If and when they actually managed to confirm any of his theory, he was fairly certain it wouldn’t be his name on any of the papers they wrote. If he was lucky he might get a mention as a contributor but he doubted even that.

  It didn’t actually bother him though. If they had no respect for him, he had little regard for them either. And he had far too much else on his plate to worry about his reputation. If at the end of this expedition he discovered nothing further but did his job well, he would be well pleased. Besides, Ryal and a few of the more junior scientists were friendly enough, provided their leaders didn’t notice. He suspected a few of them had actually been happy to see their leaders taken down a peg or two. If the lead scientists were rough on him they were often worse with their own people. From their perspective he might be both a rogue scientist and a human savage, but he was a thorn in the sides of their masters and someone who had far more freedom to do the research they could only dream of than they did. They were willing to spend a little time gossiping, as long as no one found out.

  Sadly though, and he’d kept apologising to both his colleagues and the captain over the month long journey back, he had another more pressing matter to work on, and hadn’t been able to give QA 40 the attention it deserved. Finding the identity of the people who’d destroyed New Eden and murdered so many of its citizens was far more important to him, and on so many levels. It was a chance to atone for his guilt, even if he had no valid reason to feel guilty, and maybe even put his people on a road to redemption. It was perhaps a way to finally be accepted by the Edenites, and maybe even by Karen. It might even be a way to find some small level of status within the Community for himself as a mere human being. Something that mattered since it seemed he was destined to spend the rest of his life in it.

  It hadn’t been an easy task. But then he’d guessed from the beginning that a seventy-year old mystery like this would require better investigation techniques than an archaeologist had. It needed a detective. Unfortunately since he was all that they had, that detective had to be him. So he'd set about becoming one, speaking with the ship's security detail, working through their old cases. He’d also started reading manuals on forensic techniques and criminology in a vain attempt to help his investigation. Except for the occasional headache though, they hadn’t really given him anything so far. But while he was perhaps no closer to an answer, he had managed - or rather the Force had managed - to dredge up some interesting information.

  First, with regard to the mineral deposits, it seemed a survey had been done, and the planet, and especially the continent where the Ednites had lived, was crawling with platinum and iridium. More so than any other planet in a hundred light years. To coin an ancient phrase, the place was a gold mine. But that didn’t help him any for two reasons. First the planet would be uninhabitable even for a mining operation, for at least another century. And second, if they ever did return to New Eden, the Edenites had first claim. So he could see no major profit from the bombing, except that it perhaps raised the prices of minerals from other colonies of Foothold and Hope. But they didn’t have any warships then or even today.

  On a hunch he’d also asked the Force to do some digging into the Kaiwhare. Not that he really suspected them in any way of complicity in the action, but he found it curious that they, themselves a junior race, should be the first to send an ambassador to what was basically an agricultural world. One who w
as fortuitously off world at the time of the attack. That and they sounded too good to be true. A race so peace loving that they actually had no military. Surely not. Of course, though he didn’t want to admit it, it was possible he was simply too jaded, too cynical to accept such a thing.

  They had as he’d expected, found little. The Kaiwhare were an incredibly peaceful people, then and now. They still had no fleet, no real defences of any sort, and were even now coming into their most important role in the Community as peacemakers and diplomats. Give them a conflict of any sort, and they instinctively tried to resolve it. Words were their weapons.

  He would have left it there, except for one curious little note that had been sent in from a lady by the name of Gladys Murray. She recalled that about a month before the bombing, though she wasn’t a hundred percent certain of the actual date, their resident sensitive had had a nightmare about the ambassador and claimed he was plotting evil. But everybody had simply put it down to her having had too much to drink, the ambassador included. But she’d had no more visions, or at least none anybody could remember, and she hadn’t survived the bombing.

  So while he could think of no way they could be related to the attack, he still wasn’t quite willing to let them completely off the hook as suspects.

  The other interesting fact that had come out of his investigation was a discrepancy he found from a closer analysis of the records. He’d actually only found it by accident. He’d been trying to get a clearer picture of the ships, hoping to find some identifying marks as they had no Fleet numbers. Identify the ships and find the criminals. But none of the images were clear enough on their own. So he’d tried to get the computers to put together the images they’d got from the Force cruiser as it arrived on the scene, with those of the weather satellites. To build a composite image.

  It should have been a simple matter given the advanced computing facilities at his fingertips, but the computers hadn’t been able to do it. At first he’d thought it was some sort of programming error, and had asked for some help from the technicians. But they’d had no better luck than him, although they had at least worked out what was wrong. The satellites and the ship weren’t seeing the same thing. The cruiser had seen all the ships in a star shaped pattern from behind as it had arrived, and then watched them take off one by one. The satellites showed something similar from the front, but the ship that they showed taking off first wasn’t the same one.

  But the discrepancies went even further. The satellite views of the ships and the cruisers showed variations in design. They both showed type 220 Earth cruisers. Of that there was no doubt. But the satellite images showed hatches and portholes where they couldn’t be seen in the cruiser images.

  That meant that there were two different records, and at least one of them had to be a fake. One of them had false information. He was sure somehow, that it wasn’t the Force cruiser, which meant that the satellites had been tampered with. But why? He could think of only one answer. The satellites, with a closer view of the ships, might have been able to give better data on them, maybe even something that might identify them.

  Naturally he’d sent out a request to the Force to see if they could retrieve the satellites, assuming that after all these years they were still in orbit, and perhaps see if they could find any evidence of tampering, or even any old records. What it would mean if they did he couldn’t be sure, but it was at least important. And it was always possible that the original images could still be somewhere in their memory cores. It was a long shot, but such evidence could pin point the offenders.

  He kept wondering how far the Force would be willing to go to help him in the investigation, but thus far no one had seemed to be too concerned about the effort he was putting them to, and when he asked the captain he just said not to concern himself with it. And that troubled him too, though he didn’t let it hold him back. While they were being so accommodating, it behoved him to accept all the aid they could give, even if it was too much.

  Access to secure databases, high ranking Force officers helping him, topographic surveys of planets and now even an expedition to find a couple of missing satellites, all at his request. Daryl had the odd feeling that just maybe someone far higher up in the Force’s chain of command than he had met so far had given the green light to his investigation, and until he said no, there would be no limit placed on him. He just wished he knew why.

  Earth Fleet however, hadn’t been quite so understanding. But he had approached them as well. Because as well as looking for a motive, which still eluded him, he also needed to know the means of the crime. And top of the list was finding out who in 2239 had developed the technology to allow an Earth Fleet vessel to hold half a dozen plasma based weapons without exploding. An achievement which he suspected they still couldn’t do seventy plus years later. Thus, he had them tracking down every single physicist with any experience in the weapons, most of whom of course, had worked for them.

  He was looking he guessed, for a rogue. A scientist surely, who had made a major breakthrough allowing him to do what was then impossible, and who ever since had surely gone to ground. But even so, there were surely only a few hundred scientists then alive who could have fitted the profile, and the sooner he found one who had soon after the incident either changed tacks, or perhaps vanished, the sooner he guessed he would have his lead.

  Naturally Earth Fleet resented the entire concept of working for a civilian scientist, and even more the idea of turning over such information to the Force. It ran against the grain. But diplomatic efforts - and Daryl still wasn’t quite sure who had undertaken the assignment or why - had convinced them that it was in humanity’s best interest to expose the truth. No matter how many top level Earth Fleet and Earth Gov people it implicated, it had to be better than leaving them all in a permanent dog house. Besides, those who were guilty should pay for their crimes.

  As part of his mission he’d also undertaken to give relevant information to the Edenites as and when it arose, and that last guess of his had been the first bit he’d considered holding back from them. He could almost see the way it would look. The human, desperately trying to find a scapegoat to blame instead of his own people. But there had been too many lies told already, and he wasn’t about to go down that path again. Thus far there had been no reaction. Even from Karen who he tried to see regularly.

  The news out of Earth though was perhaps of more interest to the Edenites, though it often only seemed to make them angrier. By the time the Targ had been a week out, and at the limit of its normal communication range with Unity, they’d received a report from the Earth Authorities of their progress. In some ways they were no further along than him. They still had no idea who had actually been responsible for the act. But they had finally cracked the entire conspiracy to cover it up. Over five hundred people had been arrested, most of whom were already at death’s door of old age, and trials were being set up, to which the Force was invited to attend. It wasn’t of course what they or anybody else wanted to hear. But at least it was a start. And the fact that Borris Metchner, First Councillor in 2239, was included in the list of those to be tried, surely showed that they were taking it seriously.

  He’d repeatedly asked Karen and some of the other Edenites as to their views on the progress, and gotten mixed reviews. Some thought it was just going to end up part of another cover up, and the offenders would be let off with a slap on the wrist and the whole thing would be swept under the rug again. Others accepted that it was at least a start, and as such more than they’d seen in seventy years. Over all he liked to think that they were mildly positive about it. Only a small step perhaps but still a step.

  Daryl’s best hope was that as the trials began, some of those involved would confess to more than they had already, and crack the case wide open. Despite the fact that they had all adamantly denied it to a man. He could but hope.

  Happily his worries had been able to be put aside for a while when they had finally arrived at QA 40 - again. Once m
ore he had to become a scientist, no matter how reviled by his peers, and turn his attention to the work at hand. He had to help them find the hidden chambers. But he didn’t mind too much. After his continuing failure to solve the murder of New Eden, it was finally a relief to be able to turn his mind to something he was actually competent at.

  For Daryl it was more than a scientific mission. If they didn’t find it, and he guessed it wouldn’t be easy, then his wild speculations as Li called them would lose their credibility. Once that happened, he was sure to be publicly denounced by them. That was something he truly didn’t want to happen. Not that he was in any way concerned about his scientific reputation. He was well respected as a professional who undertook meticulous research – at least in human space. But should this not pan out, he knew he’d never be accepted in the Community as such again. If he ever truly had been. Professionally he had a lot riding on it.

  They’d broken into teams to attack the problem. On Li’s orders. He still believed he was in overall charge while Helos continued his stay in the brig, coming out only to direct his team, and no one seemed to want to challenge him. But his approach was logical and well thought out, in keeping with his expertise as a researcher, and Daryl wasn’t about to challenge him on it either.

  The first group, led by Li himself, involved conscripting the Force technicians and running detailed scans on the planet’s surface, looking for any sign of an underground chamber in or around the city. The detail of the scans was enormous as they used every instrument at their disposal and as a consequence it was slow. It would take months at least. But Daryl figured, it should yield results in the end if nothing else did. It was an incredibly methodical, logical process. Everything he would have expected of the doctor.