Planet of the Apes Omnibus 2

by John Jakes

  The rocks around the ruins were cracked and tilted, as if some ancient volcanic force had been at work here. Davidson noted all this only in passing. All his concentration was still reserved for his messenger unit, which was still cheerfully assuring him that there was a beacon from the Oberon broadcasting right here.

  He hadn’t found it yet. But he’d tuned the unit to alter its volume with the distance between its own location and that of the mysterious signal, turning it into a crude sort of directional signal locator.

  The variations in tone had led him here, to the mouth of the cave he stood before, holding the messenger in his hand and staring at the darkness beyond. If he understood what the messenger was trying to tell him at all, it was that the beacon was inside this cave somewhere.

  He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, stepped past the cave mouth, and found himself heading down a dark, stone-crusted tunnel.

  Within a short time, he had to slow his progress. The footing was uncertain, and though some sunlight filtered in, what illumination there was was dim and murky. The faint glow cast by the messenger’s screen didn’t help much, either.

  The tunnel abruptly made a sharp downward turn, a feature that would have also struck Davidson as bizarre, if he’d bothered to think about it. Natural underground caves were mostly caused by running water, and water didn’t of its own accord decide to suddenly dig nearly vertical corridors…

  But he didn’t really notice. Every fiber of his being was concentrated on the messenger, and the mysterious messages it was announcing with ever louder beeps. Amazing as it seemed, whatever it was sensing was buried down here, or at least the messenger thought it was.

  He descended in a shower of scattered pebbles, mini-avalanches that accompanied him all the way to the bottom. He stumbled slightly at the end, and as he paused to dust himself off, he could hear muttered imprecations and more gravel-like flurries as the rest of them followed him down.

  He didn’t care. They meant nothing to him now. He ignored the sounds they made and plodded on, only noticing that the tunnel had widened into a larger chamber here, one that sent back faint echoes of his own passage.

  And then he grunted, struggling to catch himself as his foot plowed painfully into something half-buried in the tunnel floor. He looked down and saw a small round shape that gleamed white in the light cast by his screen. Something familiar about that shape…

  He dropped to his knees and began to dig in the dirt around the form until he had it free. Then he stood, brushing bits and pieces of detritus away, to find that he was holding a skull.

  A human skull.

  His mind lurched, gave a sudden yawning tilt as everything he thought he knew slipped and slid away from him, leaving him teetering over an abyss of incomprehension.

  A human skull? But that was impossible…

  Thunderstruck, he dropped the ancient artifact and gazed slowly around the chamber. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he saw them: a half-buried rib cage, a pelvis, assorted tangles of other bones, even a spidery hand peeping up from the dirt.

  All human.

  He hadn’t been wrong when he thought of Calima as a graveyard, but never in his wildest nightmares had he suspected that it was a human burial ground.

  In the dim light, the chamber walls slowly became visible to his bulging eyes, and once again he experienced that bizarre, impossible sensation of familiarity.

  Deja vu. The deepest part of his mind was telling him: you’ve been here before.

  But he hadn’t. He’d never been here. What was happening? For the first time, he began to fear he was losing his mind.

  Then his eye caught a familiar pattern. He stumbled closer to the nearest wall, snatched up a rock, and began to hack at the soft stone. He worked with frantic, maniacal intensity. Stone and gravel flew.

  Something was under the rock!

  Then his makeshift scrape made a different sound, hollow and sharp, as it bounced off some new substance. Something metal?

  He pitched the stone and began to claw at the loosened stone matrix, ripping large chunks of it away with his bare hands. Bit by bit, the pattern that had first caught his eye as only a ripple in calcified limestone now revealed itself.

  Something in the back of his mind had already recognized that pattern, but his conscious mind refused to accept what he knew, until, with a final gasping heave, could no longer deny.

  The pattern. Oh yes, he knew that pattern. How could he not? He’d been looking at it dead on just a few days before.

  It was the large emblem that was the symbolic representation of the Oberon. And not a copy, either. It was the exact same one he’d seen on the wall before the bridge.

  His mind reeled. He let out a soft whimper. “No… no…”

  But it was still there, no hallucination, but hard, cold reality emblazoned on enduring steel. And as he stared at it in horrified disbelief, his subconscious mind, still rummaging busily in the more obscure depths of memory, found another terrifying, inexplicable little shard, and cast it up for his horrified inspection.

  Slowly, he stripped up his shirt and exposed the brand that Limbo’s handlers had seared into his flesh. The scab had cracked away in places, exposing the bright pink glisten of healing scar tissue, but the shape was plain enough. Too plain…

  The two were the same. Not precisely, but the resemblance was undeniable. The brand was only a section of the Oberon’s full emblem, but there could be no doubt at all as to its source.

  Because the Oberon’s emblem had a purpose more specific than simple decoration. Every ship in the fleet had a different sigil, each one designed by computers to be unique, and to serve as a visual identifier of each vessel. That a planet full of apes could stumble on even part of that shape by accident was… well, it was impossible.

  But so was everything else.

  For a long moment, his mind simply shut down for extensive recalibration. When he awakened, he was more or less sane again, though no happier. But at least it was better than just standing there pointing at a pattern on a wall and screaming silently.

  He turned, lurched away from the emblem, and put his shirt back into place. But now that he was seeing with new eyes, everything looked familiar.

  He even knew which way to go.

  He found the animal cages right where he remembered them to be. They’d been crusted over, and took a bit of chipping to see clearly, but there they were, coated with a thick layer of limestone, and beneath that, metal bars smelted to last in pristine purity a thousand years, now rusted and pitted with corrosion.

  On a nearby wall, a warning sign still peeped through, or at least part of it did. He’d seen it fresh and bright not long ago, in the animal labs as he held Pericles’s trusting hand.

  CAUTION: LIVE ANIMALS, that sign had read, in bright, clear letters. Now, after God knew how many years, much of its message had been scoured away, or obscured by the slow growth of stone across its face.

  Only a few of the original letters were still visible. They spelled out a single word: CA… LI… MA.

  Calima. The city of the First Ape. For the monkeys, the city of the creator, literally the city of Semos.

  He didn’t want to think about the implications, in fact, he refused to think about them, at least not until he’d seen the rest, not until he’d confirmed that his hopes were as dusty and dead as the wreckage he now knew surrounded him. He left the cavern that had once been the animal labs and headed back past the emblem he’d excavated from the cavern wall. Not far away was a wide, smooth expanse of stone, but thin here, barely coating the familiar shapes he could make out beneath.

  He found what he was looking for and chipped away the rocky carapace that covered it, to reveal the Oberon’s bridge lock control mechanism, and the hand reader that activated it.

  Trembling, he extended one hand over the identification plate and waited.

  Nothing happened. He let out a long breath. Why should anything happen? The Oberon had been designed
for the ages, made with impossibly obdurate steel alloys, powered by a source that had no moving parts and should last for millennia, but how long had it been?

  Evidently too long.

  A deep hum filled the chamber, as if a long-buried, deeply hidden giant had begun to grumble up out of slumber. He knew that hum.

  He sensed a building tension, a strain, as if some secret power strained against invisible chains. Then, with a sharp crack, the thin layer of stone on the wall before him shivered, cracked, and fell away, revealing the wide glass barrier of the bridge itself. Beyond that wall, light began to glow.

  Then the whole thing was sliding open. A billow of stale, dead air blew out into his face, as a thick layer of dust, undisturbed for centuries, swirled up in a hundred spreading clouds.

  Hacking and wheezing, half blinded by the acrid dust, Captain Leo Davidson staggered on through into the entombed bridge of the vessel he’d departed in such hope and valor only a few days before.

  Behind him, Daena and Ari, for once together without fighting, moved carefully across the outer chamber toward the glow of light they saw behind the strange transparent shield. They both noticed the emblem that had been partly revealed on the wall, but neither spoke of it. Ari knew that it represented Semos, and Daena hated the other things it represented to her.

  They crept through the opening onto the bridge, and saw Davidson standing in the center of the vast room, staring silently, deep in thought. He looked as frozen as everything else around there.

  The two females also looked around, understanding nothing of what they saw, but knowing that it must be very important to Davidson.

  Daena was the first to speak. She took a hesitant step toward him, paused, then said, “What is it?”

  Davidson gave a start. He hadn’t even noticed their arrival. He shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “It’s my ship,” he replied.

  Ari was lost. Apes feared water, and shipbuilding was not one of their primary interests. And even so, the few ships Ari had ever heard described—crude log rafts, mostly—bore no resemblance to this amazing, intricate chamber.

  “But these ruins are thousands of years old,” she protested, noting with some worry the wild, strange glint that had begun to gleam in Davidson’s eyes.

  Davidson started to laugh, but caught himself just before it could belch out in some kind of hysterical cackle. “I was here, just a few days ago.”

  Neither Ari nor Daena could make any sense of that, and Davidson was in no mood to try to enlighten them. He wasn’t sure he could enlighten himself, as far as it went. Though the few moments of intense thought he’d experienced before the females arrived had given him a few ideas…

  None of which, of course, he could meaningfully explain in a culture where human-drawn slave carts were considered a pinnacle of technological achievement. He sighed and left them to their puzzlement as he turned and headed for the main control boards. These had been primarily Commander Vasich’s domain, though Davidson, as a pilot, was as familiar with the control sets on the bridge as he was with all the rest aboard the Oberon and its pods.

  The touchpads and keyboards were covered with dust and a thin scattering of soil, but no stone had ever grown here. It took only a few moments of frantic dusting before he had a workable operation in front of him. The ship might now be thousands of years old, but his piloting reflexes were still fresh as new-picked petunias. He ran his fingers across one board with the skill of a concert pianist, and then began to press a complicated series of keys.

  The boards themselves began to light, and above them the screens, untouched except for some dust, also flared into brightness. Davidson punched one key and glanced at the nearest screen.

  A series of bright digital numbers began to scroll through a long, rising series, finally dialing to a halt on the figures: 5021.946.

  Fifty twenty-one, Davidson thought. Three thousand years. They sure knew how to build stuff back then…

  Okay. So they had power, and working controls. Let’s see what else they had.

  He played a few more practiced arpeggios, heard Ari and Daena gasp as the bridge lights began to flash on, section by section. His lips quirked. Outside of sunlight, this was no doubt the brightest light they’d ever seen, surely the brightest indoor light. These were thousand-candlepower shielded overhead fixtures, designed to light up the bridge like an operating room, which, in a sense, was exactly what it was.

  After he had the light he needed powered up, Davidson hesitated a moment over the next control board he turned to. What he wanted would require the ship’s computers, which were considerably more complicated—and delicate—than the remote subsystems that powered such things as the digital screens and the automatic clocks built into them.

  Well, there was only one way to find out…

  He tapped a few more keys, then reached over and pushed the red ship’s tracking lever all the way forward. Immediately the main screen lit up, as the ship’s systems swung into action and began to seek any remote beacon sources. Davidson watched a huge version of the tracking line sweep across the screen, and noted the single beacon point it illuminated.

  He sighed and glanced at the two goggle-eyed females. “This is what my messenger was picking up. The Oberon.” He made a gesture that said, This place. Right here.

  He found the lid to another control box and forced it open. He activated the boards inside and began punching in new codes.

  Ari moved closer, some of her confused stupefaction ebbing away, to be replaced by a lively, growing interest. “What are you doing?” she asked him.

  Davidson didn’t look up. “Accessing the database,” he mumbled. “Every ship keeps a visual log.”

  Daena wasn’t about to let Ari hog all the attention, even if she didn’t know what to say. She could always say something. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  He shrugged off her ignorance. “A way for them to tell their own story.”

  Ari knew no more about what Davidson was doing than Daena did, but at least her questions seemed more sophisticated.

  “Will it work?” she asked.

  Good question, Davidson thought. He gave her the easiest answer.

  “This ship has a nuclear power source with a half-life of forever.”

  Maybe he thought that was a sufficient answer, but given that the words nuclear, power source, and half-life had no meaning whatsoever for Ari, all she could do was shrug and try to look as if she had some idea of what he was talking about.

  On board all USAF ships, the log was automatically classified top secret, and so it took Davidson several moments of trial-and-error code punching before he came up with the correct unlock sequence. Once that was started, he knew it would take a while for the ship’s computers, if they were still functioning properly, to sort things out and find the correct sections to display. He spent the time dusting off the huge primary digital screen.

  He’d just finished when the screen emitted a static-clogged hum and exploded with a flare of blinding white light. Davidson slammed his eyes closed, but not fast enough to prevent an after-wash of white stars across his vision, as he worried that he’d somehow managed to fry all the screen’s circuits. But when he looked again, the light had subsided, and it looked as if he apparently had full viewer capability.

  He returned to the controls and, with one eye on the screen, began to scroll backward through the visual log. As he did so, the date-and-time telltale in the lower corner of the screen also began to roll back. On the screen itself, a fractured jumble of pictures flashed past, interspersed with jagged interruptions of naked binary code, which wasn’t the best of indicators. It shouldn’t have been there at all, and Davidson wondered just how trustworthy the log would be after all these years.

  Suddenly he saw Commander Vasich’s face, but different than he remembered. Somehow the man’s face had become disfigured with prominent burn scars, and looked much older besides. The scars were like faded purple worm tracks across hi
s face.

  Abruptly the sound of his voice filled the bridge. It was tremulous and weak, as if he were making some kind of deathbed speech.

  “We were searching for a pilot lost in an electromagnetic storm,” Vasich whispered.

  Davidson pointed at himself and raised his eyebrows at Daena and Ari.

  “When we got close, our guidance systems went haywire,” Vasich went on, before dissolving in another burst of visual and aural static.

  “They couldn’t find me,” Davidson said. “Because I was punched forward through time.”

  Vasich reappeared, evidently speaking at a later date. “We’ve received no communications since we crash-landed. This planet is uncharted and uninhabited.” He coughed. “We’re trying to make the best of it. The apes we brought along have been helpful. They’re stronger and smarter than we ever imagined…”

  Davidson remembered Pericles and his bag of treats. I bet they were still lousy pilots, though, he thought.

  The screen blanked out again, wave after wave of static, and strange, blooping sounds from the speakers. Davidson went to work on the controls, looking for undamaged fragments of the log.

  He kept on working, trying one search after another, but with no luck for a long time. Then, suddenly, he struck pay dirt again when Lieutenant Colonel Grace Alexander’s face suddenly appeared on the screen above their heads.

  Davidson stared at the woman, shocked by what he saw. Vasich had been bad enough, but, even knowing what had happened, to see the woman he remembered as youthful and vibrant now shrunken and desiccated by age was a weirder thing than he wanted to deal with.

  Her hair was long, dull, and silvered, her eyes flat and dim with weariness. But some shreds of her previous determination still remained with her, and she faced the recording cameras with tough-minded stubbornness. The recorders were picking up ominous sounds issuing from somewhere behind her, a heavy, continuous thudding, as if something massive was trying to batter down the hatch into her compartment.

  “The others have fled into the mountains,” she said, her voice dry and husky with tension. “The apes are out of control. One male named Semos, who I raised myself, has taken over the pack. He’s extremely brutal.”