He lifted his head and looked at the now rather sheepish officers and one petrified civilian. Mister LIA had rushed himself into the life support bay and was crouching against a console there as if attempting to take cover.
‘I think perhaps,’ Alex said, very evenly, ‘We might keep that sector…’ he indicated the place where Trilopharus had appeared, ‘clear.’
He left it to the officers to sort themselves out over that and looked at Eldovan, who was staring at him in amazement.
‘That’s what you’ve been seeing?’
Alex nodded. He had done his best to recreate his memory of the image using forensic reconstruction systems, but had never felt that it was accurate, or adequate, in conveying the experience.
‘Dio, Dio,’ said Eldovan.
The expression was not, he knew, gratuitous. It might be the equivalent of ‘My God’, but Eldovan had used it with a purpose.
She had been on the visit to Camae with him, aboard the Assegai. One of the reasons they had gone there was that Silvie was fascinated by the fact that Camag and quarian languages were so close as to be mutually intelligible, which was not the case with any other human language. Camae, too, had intriguing roots. According to their oral history, their ancestors had originally lived on a different world, a world which was being consumed by plague and fire. Angels had appeared and taken them to Camae, gifting them their lovely world before ascending to heaven. The fact that this had become the foundation of religious belief did not mean that it hadn’t happened. Archaeological evidence supported the sudden appearance of several small colonising groups simultaneously round the planet. And there were the Chambers, too, vast underground spaces that were clearly not a natural formation, dated to almost half a million years before humans arrived.
And Eldovan was referencing that, deliberately, because the figure which had just half blinded and stunned them bore an uncanny resemblance to human concepts of what an angel looked like.
‘What?’ Davie was looking around at them all, perplexed. ‘What are you seeing?’ he asked. ‘There’s a light – fractals, a noise, but nothing like a person speaking!’
Everyone looked at him in surprise and several voices at once told him that he was wrong, that they had all seen the figure of Trilopharus and heard what the Chethari said.
‘Ah,’ Davie realised at once what the problem was and a look of regret crossed his face. His own senses were significantly more sensitive than those of homo sapiens and the way his brain processed information was profoundly different. He, it seemed, was unable to process the Chethari projection in the same way as Alex and the others. ‘Never mind,’ he said, recognising that there were more important things going on right now than his own inability to see Trilopharus.
‘Alex.’ Buzz spoke softly, putting his hand onto Alex’s arm as he drew his attention to screens, ‘dear boy.’
They were on a planet. Shuttle six had risen directly above them and shone a powerful spotlight down, showing them exactly why they couldn’t open the hangar bay doors.
The ship had been landed in a perfect oval of ground which had been cleared of all vegetation. The ground was dark but reflective – geologic scans were indicating that it had similar properties to volcanic glass.
Outside that seared oval, though… well, they certainly weren’t going to need the fine settings on the biological scans. No question here of scanning for potential microbes lurking at the bottom of oceans.
There were trees, all right. Standing even higher than the ten deck warship, they clustered around so thickly it was like being surrounded by a hedge. A closer look would reveal a lot more structure to it than that, but for right now, it was enough just to see that they were surrounded on all sides by massive vegetation.
And as they watched, Shion lifted the shuttle up high, till the stark oval landing spot was no more than a dot in the landscape. And as she adjusted the light sensitivity, they could see.
They were on the night side of a planet and all there was to see, everywhere, in every direction, was forest.
‘Oh.’ Silvie had finally woken up to the fact that something a little unusual was happening and called Alex as he was gazing silently at the unfolding view. ‘Is that where we are?’ She sounded interested, not scared. But then, quarians didn’t have the physiology necessary for fear.
‘Yes,’ Alex said, with an apologetic look, feeling guilty for having left her in ignorance. ‘Trilopharus has brought us to a planet,’ he said, ‘and landed us.’
‘Cool.’ Silvie looked pleased. ‘Can we go and…’ she saw the look on his face and did not need empathic awareness to interpret it correctly. ‘Okay. Code Q-Red, right?’
She had made that up herself, half playfully, for situations where Alex felt that the best and most helpful thing she could do was take herself to the aquadeck and stay there.
He nodded. ‘Thanks.’ He put his fingers to his lips and touched them briefly to the screen, as the best he could do over comms to show her how grateful he was for her understanding and how much he loved her. She blew him a kiss back, with a merry little wave and broke off the call.
‘Oh, my…’ Buzz was breathing out slowly, his face alight with wonder. Shion was taking the shuttle on an equatorial sweep, high and fast as they would for a preliminary scan of a planet under survey. Ahead of them, a line of sunrise lit the world up as a crescent – a green crescent.
It was all green. All of it. As the world passed under the shuttle’s wings they could see nothing but endless vegetation. It covered the planet, north pole to south pole, no oceans, no rivers, no deserts, just green.
‘The word for world,’ said Shion, speaking over the comm to Alex, ‘is cabbage swamp.’
He looked at the readouts from the scans and understood. Geological scans were in fact identifying many different habitats – there were oceans and mountains, high plains and even rivers. But they were smothered in greenery, massive vegetation even covering the oceans. And most of the land, more than sixty per cent of it, was reading as swamp.
As for the ‘cabbage’, air sample analysis had identified plants of the brassica family. And only plants of the brassica family. That and fungi appeared to be the dominant, if not the only forms of life on the planet. No animal life was showing up on scans, no birds. Shion was scanning for insects, too and coming up negative.
‘Whoever terraformed this,’ Davie observed, ‘wasn’t big on biodiversity.’ And then, with one of the leaps with which he could sometimes disconcert people who didn’t know him, he looked at Alex. ‘Give him a shout how, exactly?’
Alex was wondering that himself, with as much of his brain as he could tear away from looking at a planet covered in cabbage.
‘Oh – we have Chambers.’ Shion grabbed his full attention again with that, circling the shuttle around and descending to get a clearer look.
There was nothing to see, visually. Just more of the enormous trees which imagination boggled at as any kind of cabbage. But ground-penetrating scans were showing ovoid shapes deep below ground. They were so obviously of the same kind as those found at Camae that it hardly needed comment – one huge ovoid and a smaller one branching off its side.
‘Oh, wow,’ said Shion. Because these Chambers weren’t showing up empty. The larger of the two had a smaller solid version of itself within, apparently suspended in the middle of the space. Geology was reading it as an unidentified crystal.
Alex looked at once to see if there was a tunnel or a passage to get down there and saw that there was not. Six kilometres of solid rock topped with a hefty half kilometre of swamp and vegetation lay above the Chambers. No way down. ‘And there’s… yes,’ Shion was homing in on another reading, much smaller, buried much closer to the surface. It was a cuboid block of stone which had apparently once stood on the bedrock, but which was now under half a kilometre of sodden sediment. ‘That,’ Shion commented, highlighting the perfect symmetry and 4:2:1 ratio of the obsidian block, ‘is not natural. Do you want me to drop
a bore?’
‘No,’ Alex said. As fascinating as it was, they had more urgent matters in hand. ‘Not now – go up and give us a look at the system.’
‘Wilco.’ Shion lifted the shuttle up through the high thin clouds which covered the sky and after a moment said, ‘Oh wow,’ again.
There was silence on the command deck. Everyone was just staring at the feed from the shuttle.
This was not anywhere they knew. This was a firefall system – a binary with two suns, the larger drawing plasma from its dwindling partner in an arc which blazed and flashed like a million solar flares. That was a common enough sight in space, though this one was big and energetic enough for most spacers to acknowledge it as quite pretty. The super-giant gas planet in suicidally close orbit around them wasn’t that unusual, either, though spectacular in its way with its boiling atmosphere. It was a big system; twenty eight other planets with more than six hundred moons between them, two huge asteroid belts and the diffuse comet cloud before the heliopause, but again, nothing unusual about any of that.
But this system was clean. This was no wild system with asteroids, meteors and comets hurtling about by the billion. Everything here was neatly and firmly in orbit, as if a giant hand had swept things into order. It wasn’t the first system humans had seen where stellar engineering was suspected, but it was by far the most blatant.
And beyond it, breathtaking, was nebula, dominating the starfield. Enormous and beautiful, purples and pinks like great folds of gauze, lit from within by a tumult of stellar nurseries. Looking the other way, they could see the galactic ribbon – a sight so familiar to all of them that it took a few seconds to realise that this was not, in fact, the view they were accustomed to seeing from League space. It was bigger and brighter than they were used to seeing it and lots of the features they knew seemed to have vanished.
‘Where are we?’ The astrogator was asking the question all of them were wondering. Dead reckoning systems were of no help at all, as according to them the ship was still at the meeting point. Lionard was trying to find any configuration matching star charts and failing.
Shion got there first. She found two known stars, then three, and as she oriented her charts more and more of them fell into place. Within moments she had their position pinpointed on charts.
They were on the far side of the Gulf, in the same galactic arm as Quarus. But where Quarus lay almost at the edge of the arm, this system was deep within it. It was far beyond the range that any Exploration Corps ship had traversed. They were, at a conservative estimate, at least three years from the furthest point human exploration had reached. And their ship only carried one year of supplies.
Someone said a word which would normally have got them a reprimand, but no-one even noticed.
Alex said nothing, but his face said it all. It was a look of sheer, radiant delight. In that moment he was not worried about his ship being stranded on an alien world. He was pure spacer, realising that he was further from home than any human being had ever been and loving it.
He was not alone. Shock and bewilderment at finding themselves parked on a planet was giving way to joy as they saw where they were. Someone whooped, someone clapped and within moments the whole ship was full of cheering, laughing people.
‘Dear boy…’ Buzz held out a hand to him, his own face bright with excitement and split by a huge grin.
Alex laughed too and shook hands with him, which seemed to be a cue for just about everyone else to start shaking hands with one another, too, or in the case of the more exuberant, punching one another on the arm.
‘You’re all mad!’ Simon had been attempting to calm the LIA officer, but seeing their reaction to discovering where they were had evidently pushed him over the edge. He was rushing at the command table, fists clenched, shouting. ‘What have you done? You’re insane!’ And then, wildly, as Simon caught him by the arm and started to march him off the command deck, ‘We’re all going to die out here!’
That sobered them, not because they believed him but because nobody liked to see a shipmate breaking down like that, even if he was LIA.
‘If we are colonising,’ Davie said, into the suddenly rather muted atmosphere, ‘I bagsy marrying Eldovan.’
‘In your dreams,’ Eldovan responded. It wasn’t her best riposte but she had a lot going on right then and was bantering on autopilot.
Davie, however, was not. He had said that, precisely at that moment, voicing the fear that most of them hadn’t even started to formulate yet, but soon would. If they were stranded here, worst case scenario, if Trilopharus never came back or wasn’t able to get the ship in space again, if they were stuck here, they would have to figure out ways to survive.
‘Nobody,’ said Alex, ‘is colonising. The Chethari brought us here, they will take us home. And the ship can take this, can’t it?’
Davie looked affronted. ‘Do you really want me to go through the specs?’
‘No.’ Alex said and flicked him a grin. ‘I know…’ he patted the console, lightly. ‘This is one tough chunk of duralloy.’
Davie rolled his eyes, but refrained from pointing out that this was a very insulting way to refer to the most highly engineered starship in production. Alex, he understood, was simply reassuring the crew.
‘Well, as long as we get to go home before we have to start eating the cabbage,’ he said and with an air of academic interest, ‘how are you going to give Trilopharus a shout?’
‘Don’t know yet,’ Alex admitted, but quite cheerfully. And as Davie quirked an eyebrow at him, he got to his feet, held up a finger as if to say give me a moment, took a deep breath and yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Trilopharus!’
Nothing happened and after a few seconds of waiting, Alex sat down again.
‘Worth a try,’ Davie conceded.
‘We’ll figure it out,’ Alex said and such was his easy confidence that everyone believed him. He was back to himself, now, confusion and alarm abated now that he knew where they were. ‘But no panic – let’s take a bit of time to catch our breath, finish checking the ship and take stock.’
And two hours later, indeed, they did have a much clearer picture. They had facts, now and lots of them.
What it amounted to was that the ship was fine. The engines had been shut down with the cores contained just as if their own engineers had locked them down in parking orbit. All the systems were working, other than the hangar bay which they were sitting on. They had precise analysis of all the forces the hull was experiencing and confirmed that it was safe, stable and in no danger either of crumpling or of toppling over. They had abundant power; air and water could be recycled almost indefinitely and they did indeed have more than enough supplies of all kinds to spend a year here, comfortably.
Outside the ship, the environment was weird but not hostile. The atmosphere was breathable, if rather smelly, the climate was mild and Simon reported no viral pathogens detected in the atmosphere. The preliminary scan had identified an astonishingly small variety of species – just a hundred and forty seven distinct species of plant life across the whole planet and all of them brassicas.
‘I need samples,’ Simon said and his tone added now!
Alex shook his head. There was an obvious list of things they wanted to investigate here, from sampling the plant life to those enthralling Chambers. But Alex was not going to allow any of that until he’d talked to Trilopharus.
‘Manners,’ he said. ‘We have to presume that this world belongs to the Chethari. A passive scan to establish where we are and that we’re safe here, yes. But we don’t start grabbing samples or digging things up without their permission. And that isn’t going to be the first thing I ask for.’
‘He’s right,’ Davie said, as Simon looked mulish. ‘We can’t do it,’ he told the medic. ‘We can’t do, ‘Hi, we come in peace, mind if we chop down some trees?’’
‘That’s a…’ Simon started to say, then looked from Davie to Alex and sighed. ‘You will ask?’ he pleaded.
‘As soon as you can?’
‘Soon as I consider it appropriate,’ Alex nodded and looked around at the others gathered for the senior command team briefing. ‘So – these are our protocols.’ He tapped his finger on a document which had been echoed onto all their screens. It was detailed, specifying the area on the command deck which was to be kept clear for Trilopharus and the conduct which was to be observed while he was present. ‘Any questions? Concerns?’
Murmurs in the negative, shakes of the head.
‘All right,’ Alex said. ‘Then we’ll work our way down the list of ideas for contacting Trilopharus…’
It wasn’t a very long list. For all the creativity of the Fourth in problem solving, there were only a limited number of options. Top of the list was a full bandwidth comms transmission at maximum power. At the bottom was a desperate firing a missile into space, like a flare.
In fact, the very first thing that they tried worked just fine.
TA-rah, ta ra RAAAA!
‘All right?’ The angelic form popped into existence with the now-familiar fanfare within moments of the broadcast commencing. Trilopharus looked round and seemed pleased. Nobody was running away this time, they were just sitting there quietly while Alex got to his feet.
‘Trilopharus,’ Alex got straight to the point, having had more than enough of the Chethari vanishing before he’d been able to say what he wanted, ‘Can you please stay this time and talk to us?’
‘Not for long,’ Trilopharus responded. ‘The transducer your end is a bit dodgy so it’s all a bit erratic. But I can do a few minutes.’ They beamed. ‘Is everything all right here? We didn’t park you upside down or anything?’
‘No, we are the right way up, thank you,’ Alex said. ‘Though this type of ship isn’t intended to land and I have to tell you we will not be able to get it off the ground again without your…’
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