Last of the Treasure Hunters

by Warren Dean

  "Good thinking," said Ant. He made Connor memorise a set of co-ordinates and quickly clambered back into his cell. After a couple of nervous glances in the direction of the Journeyman's cell he seemed satisfied that his brief absence hadn't been noted. He gave Connor and Christina a wolfish grin and then dived back into things with renewed vigour.

  "Come on," said Connor. "If nothing else, he feels relevant again. That should give him a new lease of life. Now, the next question is; how are we going to find our way to these co-ordinates?"

  "We open a portal to take us there," said Christina, giving him a blank look.

  "Really?" Connor couldn't help raising his eyebrows. "It's that simple?"

  "It's that simple." She turned and walked towards the portal in the corridor beyond the platform.

  "Wow," said Connor as he followed. "Treasure hunting is a lot easier here than on Earth. My father wouldn't approve."

  She turned and smiled at him as they reached the portal. "I suspect that mine wouldn't have approved either."

  "So, do we key the co-ordinates in here?"

  "No, this is a local portal with a few set connections. We need to go to the one on the roof."

  When they got to the roof, Christina stood in front of the bigger portal, making a series of hand gestures. After a while, she asked Connor to repeat the co-ordinates, which he did. When she was finished, she took his hand. "Ready?" she asked.

  He shrugged. "Everyone else is busy; let's go."

  Hand-in-hand, they stepped through the portal and Connor again felt the sensation of falling, although the intensity was a fraction of that he had experienced travelling between planets, and he did not feel so woozy at the other end.

  In the fading light from the portal behind him, Connor could see that they had arrived in an underground chamber; although he could not see how big it was before the light faded to black and they were left standing in darkness. The air had an oddly musty odour to it, but was otherwise perfectly breathable.

  "So, have the greatest treasure hunters of all time forgotten to bring a torch with them?" he asked sheepishly.

  "This store has obviously not been accessed in some time," grumbled Christina as she made a succession of increasingly extravagant gestures towards the roof and sides of the space they were in. "The lighting should react to our presence."

  As she spoke, lights began to flicker on and soon they were able to see where they were.

  "Wow," said Connor. He had been saying that a lot recently. As far as the eye could see was a bewildering array of articles of every description. At first there seemed to be no order to them, but as he moved around to get a better look, he saw that they were arranged relatively neatly in piles and stacks, which were themselves laid out in relatively straight lines.

  "This is one of the Repository's artefact stores," said Christina. "I know of them, but have never seen one before. This is where the Constructors keep the physical sources of the information they have collected over time."

  "It's amazing," said Connor. "How big are these places?"

  It was her turn to shrug, a gesture she had picked up from him. "I don't know, other than that it's vast and we would have little prospect of finding something in here without having sourced its co-ordinates first."

  "How closely do the co-ordinates bring us to the drone itself?" he asked.

  "Using a unit of measurement from Earth, I believe that they are accurate to within a hundred yards."

  "A hundred yards! In each direction?"

  "Yes."

  "Holy smoke, do you know how much stuff there is within a hundred yards of us?"

  She smiled at his exuberance. "There's a lot of 'stuff', it's true."

  "So, treasure hunting around here is not as easy as I thought. How do we go about doing this? Do you want to start at one end and I'll start at the other and we'll meet in the middle?"

  "We could do that, or we could find the nearest local sensory point and search using that."

  "Would it be quicker?"

  "A little, perhaps, although neither of us is familiar with the workings of such points."

  "Do we know where the nearest one is?

  "No, we would have to find it first."

  "And there may not be one within our hundred-yard radius?"

  "Not necessarily, no."

  "Then I say we start the old-fashioned way. If we come across a sensory point at some stage we can give it a try. You go that way and I'll go the other. If we can't find the drone, we can always go back to the 'hive and see if some of the Nerds will come down and help us."

  "How do we measure out the distance in yards?" asked Christina.

  "A hundred long strides in as straight a direction as you can make them," he said.

  "But my strides are nowhere near as long as yours," she said a little doubtfully.

  "That's true," he conceded, "you'd better make it a hundred and twenty on those pint-sized pins of yours."

  "Is a pint the same as a yard?"

  "No it's… er, never mind about that. Just make it a hundred and twenty paces and you'll be fine."

  They turned back-to-back and strode away from each other like duellists, both counting under their breath.

  Connor took a hundred and ten paces, just to be sure, and then stopped to look around. He was standing between two relatively straight lines of artefacts separated by an irregularly shaped corridor. He estimated that the corridor was about ten yards wide. That meant that the overall search area was twenty lines wide, each line roughly two hundred yards long. That was a pretty large area for two people to search.

  To make matters worse many of the artefacts were stored in stacks or containers and it wasn't just a matter of walking along the lines until he spotted what he was looking for. He had looked closely at images of the Seeker that Ant had shown him, so he knew that it was similar in appearance to the drones which had, until recently, been terrorising Earth; a predominantly silver body in the shape of an elongated teardrop with a tightly packed assortment of stubby protrusions at one end. He wasn't entirely sure of its size, however.

  The drone he had seen most clearly on Earth was the sentinel which had hovered above the portal on the banks of the Guadalquivir in Seville, which had been about the size of a standard SUV. Assuming that the Seeker was smaller than that, he would have to rummage through the bigger stacks and containers in order to avoid missing it.

  As soon as he started doing so, however, he found himself woefully distracted by the sheer strangeness of the things he came across. Looking around for the nearest stack which he thought might be large enough to contain a drone; he approached it with some caution. It was about five or six yards in diameter and twice his height. When he got to it he found that it was surrounded by a latticed scaffold and he walked around the structure, trying to see what might be inside. But the latticework was too small to see through and for the second time in a few minutes he wished he had brought a torch.

  He was about to give up and move on when he spotted a long seam running from the top of the scaffold to the bottom. Working his fingers into the seam, he managed to pry the structure partially open and gave a start when he realised that the whole thing was filled with water – or at least something that looked like water. The liquid did not behave like water, thankfully, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he realised that it was not going to pour out and make a large mess all over the floor.

  Defying gravity, the liquid roiled away from the breach in the lattice and he quickly closed the seam. As he pulled his fingers away, he realised that he had some of the substance on the tips of his fingers. For a moment he froze, afraid that it might be an acid which would begin eating into his flesh, but nothing like that happened.

  Instead, the liquid began to evaporate from his skin and he watched in fascination as it formed gaseous tendrils which floated away back towards the latticework container. As the tendrils formed, a series of vivid images flashed discordantly through his mind, as if the evaporation pro
cess was releasing them directly into his nervous system. What the images signified he had no idea and, thankfully, once his fingers had dried the effect ended. He breathed another sigh of relief and reminded himself that he was out of his depth in this place. He resolved to be more careful.

  Leaving the latticework behind, he moved along the line, trying to ignore smaller artefacts. But there were so many maddeningly curious objects on show that he couldn't help stopping to look at some of them. He pored over oddly shaped machines that appeared to be fashioned from the metals of ancient asteroids, scrolls made from razor-thin alloys which displayed incomprehensible information in holographic readouts as they were unrolled, and communication devices which looked for all the world like walkie-talkies.

  His recent resolution forgotten, he reached into the stack and unclipped one of the devices from the bracket it was connected to. It was heavier than he expected. Stepping back to see it properly under the overhead lights, he turned it over in his hands to get a good look at the array of buttons and dials set into its surface. He could see nothing that looked like a display or readout and wondered how the thing relayed and received messages. Perhaps it was an audio device, he speculated, and he thumbed one of the buttons set into the grip to see whether it would make any sound.

  What the device emitted was nothing like the crackle of static he was expecting, however. With a dull thud, a short beam of orange light shot out of the other end, ricocheted off the floor of the corridor, and disappeared over the top of a nearby container. A second later he heard it bounce off the roof and then hit something large in the middle distance, something which came apart in a resounding clatter of falling pieces.

  Connor stood frozen for a second and then carefully reached back into the nearby stack and replaced the device on its bracket. Backing away guiltily, he decided that the Seeker wasn't to be found in the immediate vicinity and walked quickly down the corridor. Seeing a gap between two stacks to his left, he crossed into an adjacent corridor. He slowed down and began scanning the lines of artefacts on either side.

  Nothing big enough to be, or to contain, a drone caught his eye and he kept moving quite quickly, determined not to be distracted again. On impulse, he crossed into the next corridor. It wasn't a very structured way of quartering the search area, he knew, but by then he was resigned to the fact that he and Christina were going to have to call for help.

  He continued along the new corridor until he judged that he was nearing the position of the floating portal and he was about go back to the corridor he hsd started in when he spotted a larger than usual stack a bit further along. He decided it was worth a look and carried on down to it. The stack consisted of a wide metal base about waist height off the floor – or ankle height if one was a Constructor.

  It didn't look promising at first as the platform was piled with various pieces of dilapidated machinery. But he couldn't see what might be in the centre of the stack so he circumnavigated the platform until he found a gap where he could climb up and have a better look. Beneath the assorted detritus was a larger shape covered by a thick fabric.

  Working his way over to a place where the object was least obsured, he spent some time freeing it from surrounding clutter, carrying things away and depositing them carefully on the floor alongside the platform.

  He had just lowered a large piece of machinery to the ground with a grunt when a voice spoke at his elbow. "Need some help?"

  He started and then turned the movement into a nonchalant back stretch.

  "Christina, I didn't see you there, yes, thank you, some help would be welcome. How did you know I was over here?"

  "The portal is close by." She pointed. "When I got back I heard noises coming from this direction. Sound travels well in here."

  "Does it? I hadn't noticed."

  "Yes, earlier I heard something fall, over that way." She pointed again, this time in the direction he had come from.

  "Oh, yes," he said, thankful that his face was already red from his exertions. "I, er, was a bit clumsy and knocked a few things over."

  "Are you well?" she asked with genuine concern. "Some of the things in here are more dangerous than they look. You must be careful."

  "You're right about that," he said. "Come on up and let's see what's under this tarpaulin."

  He clambered back onto the platform and turned around to help her up behind him. Together they shifted some of the bigger pieces of machinery that Connor hadn't been able to move on his own. In an hour or two of work they managed to clear most of one side of the object. Although it was still covered by the fabric, he was sure that they had found the Seeker. It looked to be the same shape as the images Ant had shown him, and he estimated it to be about half the size of the sentinel drone.

  When they had finished moving machinery, they got down on their knees and began trying to loosen the fabric underneath the object. Hoping that it was not a single sealed piece, they looked for a beginning or an end they could use to start unravelling it. Connor was about to suggest that they go back to the 'hive and return with something sharp, when he found a loose flap. By pulling it he was able to expose an edge, hitherto hidden from sight by old age and dust, and from there he and Christina were able to uncover about half of the drone.

  When they had pushed back as much of the fabric as they could, they stood back, both breathing heavily with their efforts.

  Their first look at the Seeker was not promising. The sentinel that Connor had seen up close had been sleek and unblemished. The drone before them was anything but. Its main body was dented, scorched, and battered, and most of its rear end had been sheared off. If its bodywork had once been silver it was no longer, and its solar overlay was scored and blackened.

  Connor couldn't help feeling disappointed. "I didn't expect it to be so beaten up," he said. "Aren't these drones supposed to be able to repair themselves?" he asked.

  "Yes," said Christina, "but the Journeyman told Azee this one sustained so much damage that it didn't have the power to regenerate. All it could do was emit a weak signal from time to time."

  They gazed at the gallant little machine for a while, strangely unwilling to accept that their discovery was nothing more than an interesting diversion.

  "Five hundred years," said Christina softly. She leaned forward and placed a hand lightly on the drone's shell. "Where did you go in all that time, little one?"

  "I guess we'll never…" Connor began and then broke off as Christina turned her face towards him, her eyes wide.

  "Connor, put your hand here, quickly."

  Galvanised by the excitement in her voice, he put his right hand on the shell alongside hers. "What is it?"

  "Shh! Can you feel that?"

  At first, the metal under his hand felt like any other, cold and hard. But after a moment, he felt a faint sensation. It began as a tiny vibration; so small that he thought he was imagining it. But then the part of the shell directly beneath his hand began to warm up and the vibration grew stronger.

  It was as if the Seeker was responding to the touch of the humans who had found it.

  "Yes, I can," he said. "You know, I think the little feller is drawing heat from our hands. It's tapping us as a power source."

  "That's not surprising," she said. "If it's been buried here in the dark since the Constructors recovered it, we're probably the first power source it's had access to in more than a thousand years."

  "Come on," said Connor. "Let's go and tell Ant that we've found it."

  Together they jumped off the platform and ran back to the portal.

  SIX MONTHS TO E-DAY

  Azee rubbed her temples, then her eyes. The breathing bubble around her head wobbled and she lowered her hands gingerly.

  She had never been this tired. In the three months since she had arrived at the Repository she had worked harder and absorbed more knowledge than she had ever done in her life.

  Why then did she feel like she had achieved nothing? Planet Earth's grace period was slipping away
and it felt like she was standing still. Even the Nerds were beginning to show the strain, which was something she had never seen before. They were usually impervious to pressure. Although they themselves were safe as long as they remained at the Repository, they all had family and friends who would share Earth's fate if their mission failed. Over the last few days their babble had become increasingly vituperative and dried up to a desultory trickle. The long silences were almost eerie.

  It didn't help that they were all fully aware of the fact that the Mars mining operation was on schedule and that E-Day – as some of the Nerds had begun calling it – was expected to take place in about six months. E-Day, short for Extinction-Day; how she hated that moniker. For her, the name signified failure and she refused to dignify it by using it.

  Even the Journeyman was becoming fretful. Although there was no real change in the broader picture as far as the Constructors were concerned, his empathy towards the little planet he had taken an interest in seemed to have brought the whole search to a head for him. He took to spending more and more time in the 'hive, his prodigious ability to concentrate enabling him to continue for long sessions of two and sometimes three days at a time. Sometimes he worked with the Nerds and other times alone, always trying to find a detail or an angle he had never considered before.

  She herself had become so anxious she found herself envying Ant his pet project; restoring the old Seeker Connor and Christina had found. It was not a sentiment she would have had a few weeks earlier. "There is so much work to do and you want to waste time playing with toys…" she remembered grumbling after the Journeyman had given Ant permission to go ahead.

  That the Constructor had been supportive of the request had surprised her at the time, but lately she had come to a different understanding of his motives. Until the Seeker had been found Ant had been listless and demotivated, participating peripherally in the Nerds' efforts, and more than once Azee had wondered whether he would rather go back to Earth. Since the find, however, much of his swagger had returned and he had thrown himself into the new endeavour with enthusiasm.