by Hans Kneifel
"Not only us but the pieces of the ark," Ameda Fayard added.
"That's true," Solina said. "What should we do? Or rather, what can we do?"
Rhodan grinned cheekily. "Go have a look, I think."
"And the spindle creatures?" Solina waved her arms helplessly. "Won't they prevent us from doing that? They seem to be real masters at draining energy."
At least Ameda seemed determined to set out at once.
Shimon indicated the furious snowflurry in front of the viewports. "I'm even considering the possibility that the energy beings could have caused the crash of the ark." He me the intent look of the tall Akonian woman with half-translucent white hair for some seconds. "Perhaps they aren't as perfect as Solina thinks."
"It's bold theory, Isaias," Kealil answered. The Akonian pilot also towered over the Terrans by a head. "We've found only one place where we might possibly get in under the ice."
"You mean that small ice-floe mountain?" Rhodan asked. "Well, the crawler landed on the opposite side of this ice-covered base. If the storm isn't too severe, we should risk it. Despite the loss of power, we'll have a direct view of each other in daylight tomorrow morning."
"A sub-ice expedition?" exclaimed Ameda. "Right now? Count me in!"
Rhodan took stock of the faces of the Shift occupants and tried to estimate the possible dangers that threatened them. The golden spindles, he told himself, would no more attack eight strangers without heavy energy weapons than the survivors of the LEMCHA OVIR. They would observe what happened curiously—just as curiously as he would himself. He hoped his limited optimism was justified. "We have to take into consideration the fact that we might not be able to take off or reestablish contact with our ships for quite some time," he said thoughtfully. "So we'll occupy ourselves with good, old-fashioned research work. There are certainly enough scholarly specialists among us. Shall we set out once the snowstorm dies down?"
For Denetree this experience, in such technologically advanced surroundings, was entirely new to her. Before now she had always turned for help to Harriett Hewes but now she leaned on Solina. Literally, since both women sat next to each other in one of the wide, fold-down auxiliary seats. She seemed to be waiting for Rhodan's invitation. "I, too, think these beings aren't evil. We probably only frightened them," she said after some hesitation.
Solina nodded. "Or they've had a bad experience with earlier visitors."
Rhodan also nodded. "That would explain their excitement," he said, half agreeing. "We're approaching something left behind by earlier inhabitants. But there still isn't any certainty that these fire spindles are to blame for our situation. Or responsible, if you want to put it more kindly."
"Perhaps the ark inhabitants had trouble with the fire spindles?" Ameda slapped the handbeamer at her belt with her palm and grinned. "Let's avoid trouble. Then they'll light our way on the march to the ice floes."
"Agreed!" Arsis Tachim said. Up to now she had listened silently and passed out cups full of a hot, dark-brown liquid that had a strong similarity to a Terran coffee-cocoa mixture. "It's gotten a little brighter outside. The snow isn't reflecting any light from the glowing spindles. Shall we move out?"
The Akonians opened wall cabinets and outfitted themselves with gear for the expedition in the Shift's narrow confines. Like Rhodan's team, they avoided high-tech equipment. They all thought more of the plunge into icy, slippery, and dark places than of conquering an ancient, ice-encased, high-tech base.
Precisely 37 minutes after they started out, they stopped in front of two ice floes that had been tilted upright against each other and formed an almost equilateral triangle. Scattered flakes swirled through the light beam as Rhodan, Solina, and Mahal switched on their spotlights. The ice shone bluely, shimmering at the edges with sparkling crystals. Solina slowly approached the apparent entrance and the others followed. There was enough room that three people could walk carefully side by side, one step after another. Except for the crunching footsteps, it was deathly still. The energy beings hovered overhead. The shining swarm circled directly above the ice-crusted rocks that reared some twenty meters high out of the tangled mass of ice floes and fragments.
As the team stepped through the entrance, the swarm broke into agitated movement, darted closer, and whirled towards the entrance with their pointed ends. Just before striking, the lancet-shaped beings shot back up into the air and danced here and there. The shining creatures seemed to want to enter a second time, but they shied away once more and shot back upwards. The entire event hardly took five seconds, then the mass dispersed in all directions, and soon only a flickering, shining ring high overhead remained. Except for Arsis Tachim, who was the last to go inside, the team members had seen nothing of it.
Strangely, the helmet radios seemed to operate perfectly. The rest of the group heard Arsis' report on the light beings that she had observed.
Rhodan regarded the short stretch lying ahead of them. "We'll soon have to determine whether this mound of ice really is an entrance. But the behavior of the gold spindles indicates that it is. After such a long time ... ?"
For about fifty meters straight ahead, they moved with utmost caution behind the widely spread beams of the spotlights. Then, still on coarse snow, they began to head slightly downwards until a wall of ice blocked the way. It spanned the space between the walls like a bulkhead. Rhodan went up to the white, crystal-shimmering sheet and struck it with his fist.
It sounded muffled and at the same time there was a weak echo and a distant cracking. Rhodan took five steps back, drew his beamer from his belt, and fired a steady heat-ray. Within a few moments, it had melted a hole in the ice sheet that grew larger and quickly dissolved at the edges as he drew the beam in a circle. After three shots, the opening was large enough that they could step through one by one.
The ice sheet was about a third of a meter thick. Before them stretched a tunnel-like corridor through the ice. A crevice with rounded walls that led rather steeply downwards and in a tight curve. The Terrans, the Lemurian, and the Akonians jammed the points of their icepicks into the floor. Taking small, careful steps, they slid, staggered, and all but fell down to the end of the spiraling tube of ice. The illumination from the spotlights created surreal shadows around them. From the ceiling hung hundreds of icicles, from the size of fingers to half the size of a man. Rhodan and his companions feared that a loud noise could trigger a hail of deadly projectiles.
As they neared the end of their descent, Hyman Mahal ran into Ameda's back, held on to her tightly for a moment, and gasped, "Sorry. Slipped again."
"I don't know of any better method for close-up flirting," the tall Akonian replied, grinning at him.
After another fifty steps, they reached a hall of stone, rock, metal, and ice. Solina shone her torch upwards in all directions. Finally the circle of light lingered on the top of a column that, although thickly covered with ice and made of gray metal, melted into the rock. The column underneath was ice-free, smooth, and looked to Rhodan as though it was made of cast iron and included a densely entwined floral pattern as decoration.
"Early Akonian," Solina said. "Second Cosmophile Period, What do you think, Ameda?"
On either side, there were about twenty such columns, each some ten meters high, with a diameter of less than half a meter. They supported a massive ceiling of metal able to take a considerable load. It was probably Akonian Steel. Straight ahead, two wings of a gate stood wide open. Ice had built up everywhere; the water had frozen into curtains, arcades, icicles, and layers, which gave the scene a fantastic, unreal appearance.
Ameda Fayard's spotlight flitted up to the ceiling, reflecting itself in the mad decorations. They seemed to be made of white crystal cloths with a thousand folds, frills, and pleats. After a long pause for thought, while the team slipped and slid 50 or 60 meters across the reflective floor, she answered: "Designed and built for humanoids, in particular for Akonian proportions. So-called 'heroic style.' You could be right. But Old Akonian ...
I don't know. Not yet."
"We don't want to end up frozen remnants of Akonian history ourselves," Rhodan said, getting a mild dig in. "Let's carry on. These are hardly Terran remains."
Beyond the gate, a kind of frozen nightmare awaited the expedition members. They fanned out to the sides: eight spotlights tore their surroundings out of a thousand-year, icy paralysis. The floor consisted of a dark gray mass, smooth as a runway. On it were large, irregularly shaped patches of ice, but the facades of the buildings were mostly ice-free. They had massive canopies, from which only a few icicles hung. Between the canopies, water had fallen over the course of many years and had frozen and formed pillars with the diameters of fortress towers. The sides of the pillars seemed to show that they had melted and frozen several times.
The group moved cautiously in all directions, ever deeper into the realm of the past. They passed between steel walls, rock and ice in every imaginable shape, and in fantastic patterns no one had ever seen before.
"Over there, to the right, Perry," Denetree said suddenly in surprise. "The ice has fallen in there and shattered."
"Where? Oh, I see it, too."
With every few steps, the group was confronted with new grotesque shapes. But so far they had not discovered anything that offered any explanations. A long time before, Akonians had apparently established a settlement which, from all appearances, had been intended as an enduring colony. Or at least a frequently used base. The massive amount of construction seemed to bear out that assumption. At some point this base had been abandoned. Why? The group all turned to look at the place where Denetree was shining her light.
As in so many other places, vertical curtains of ice stretched between cube-shaped buildings with narrow window slits and projecting roofs. Within the range of the spotlights were three such ice masses. Draperies of ice like theater curtains that had flowed from the height of a polar glacier. At the base, just above the floor, huge, jagged holes gaped. It was as though a projectile four or five meters in diameter had slammed through them in a straight flight. Debris and fragments had melted together.
"What's that?" someone asked.
Rhodan worked his way to the base, shone his light, and found shards and chunks of old ice. It had not been a melting process, but some relatively short time before, something had blasted through here. Rhodan identified four such breakthroughs, lying one after another in a straight line.
"I don't know," he said. Even as he spoke, something else happened that increased everyone's feeling of being at the mercy of events beyond their control. Of stirring up dangerous mysteries from out of the past.
Lights!
Points of white-yellow brightness.
Lights came on in a hundred places. Deep within thick ice, on the underside of roofs, behind round and angular windows, and alongside paths that the last Akonian must have trod thousands of years before.
"That's some of the energy we detected," Solina called, the echo making her voice sound shrill. "There's a power plant still working somewhere. The ice is alive!"
"So are we," muttered Kealil Ron. "So far." Rhodan came back to the group. "Don't panic! Solina? Ameda? Are you certain this base was built by Akonians?"
"Second Cosmophile Period," said Solina. "Definitely! That was when my forefathers swarmed through the universe and believed it was more or less their private property. As every student of history knows, they weren't very particular about their methods."
"Could it be that they did something terrible to the inhabitants of this planet?" Rhodan asked.
"Who knows?" Ameda said. "That many thousands of years ago? It's perfectly possible."
"That opens possibilities that at least don't surprise me," Rhodan said. "It's an old story, and it's always the same. My theory is that the fire spindles remember the conflict in the distant past. That makes them distrustful because they think we're the descendants of their enemies from back then and we're starting a new war."
"Maybe you're on to something there—but if so, how long do these things hold a grudge, anyway?" Ameda said with a slightly skeptical undertone.
The team had gradually made its way further. The more deeply they penetrated, the more closely the buildings stood together. That meant that the breaks in the ice between them grew fewer. The number of lights increased. Rhodan had little hope of discovering anything, but directed his multifunction wristband to the area in front of him and tapped a few sensor fields.
To his surprise, a tower-like building appeared on the flickering mini-holo, with an interior that was warmer than its surroundings and showed about twenty diffuse energy sources. But the wristband unit was still not completely functional.
"Maybe we'll learn a bit more there, if you'll follow me," he said. "Just 500 meters, diagonally to the left."
The members of the group instinctively drew closer to each other. Between tiny islands of milky light, between stalagmites large and small. Ice pillars, metal walls, pedestals of perfectly worked stone. Heavily hanging power cables weighted down by jagged ice, in a labyrinth of right-angled paths full of ice or completely ice-free. They went towards a tower that stood in the middle of a plaza, thirty meters high, merging with the icy ceiling above it. Huge trees stood around it in two circles in the plaza. Trees! Completely leafless, 25 meters high, with gigantic crowns and snow white. The trunk and branches down to the tiniest twig were perfect but fragile white ice sculptures. The roots disappeared into thick, circular sheets of ice.
"One loud word," Arsis whispered, "and all this splendor will come crashing down in a heap!"
"One more reason to enjoy it all in silent appreciation," Ameda commented with a hint of sarcasm.
"How can we get in?" Shimon wondered.
They found three doors that led into a round hall. The furnishings and the stairs seemed to be prefabricated building components. Rhodan thought of the practical simplicity of things intended for military use. As they stood in the middle of the hall, there was a loud crash from outside, followed by the tinkling of glass or shards of ice. Piercing echoes rang through the spaces of the building. Then silence.
Seconds later, individual circular lights switched on in the ceiling. An ancient system awakened hesitantly to new life as though it had sensed the presence of the visitors.
"I think I'm going to have to expand my knowledge of old Akonian technology," Solina said, almost in disbelief. "Some sensors are still functioning. There must be some power-generating system down here that's still working—or else started up again."
"That's what it looks like," Ameda agreed. "Perhaps we'll find some piece of equipment that will give us some information."
"Don't be too confident about that just yet," Mahal said. "Even so, a more focused search wouldn't hurt."
"Where do you suggest we look?"
Rhodan went up to the steps and pointed to the ceiling with the light sources, of which half were not functioning. A few of the bright circles flickered. It had become clear to the team that several hundred individuals might have lived in the base. What had the Akonians been working on or studying back then. Or what could they have been looking for?
"This is definitely not a Terran base," Rhodan said suddenly, thinking out loud. "But an Akonian base here in the Ochent Nebula?"
"It may seem incredible but the proof is all around us," Solina replied. "If we go on, we will find more clues." Ameda nodded in agreement.
As far as they could tell, the steps led through all the rooms up to the roof of the tower. When the group entered the next room, the incomplete lighting switched on there, too. Except for some control consoles that seemed to be solidly built in to the walls, the room was empty. Everywhere, moisture had condensed as ice. The crystals sparkled in the diffused light like myriads of tiny diamonds. Milky light seeped through windows that were covered with a thick layer of crystals. Solina and Ameda went to the consoles and tried in vain to wipe away the crumbly ice. They then aimed their beamers, set at minimum heat, at the panels.
Two, three shots melted the ice covering on the upper surfaces of the consoles, revealing empty casings underneath with all the electronics stripped out. No switches, lights, or any other instruments had been left behind.
Ameda muttered an Akonian curse. "Nothing. We'll just have to go on looking." Her breath formed long, white streams in the air. She closed her spacesuit and followed Rhodan.
He cautiously climbed up the ice-slick steps and was the first to enter the room directly above. It was completely empty. Rhodan shrugged and left the room; the others followed. It was virtually pointless to search the frozen installation. They would not find anything important.
There were nine rooms, one on top of the other. They found some broken pieces of furniture, some scrap metal, and a solidly frozen pile of rubbish. Once thawed with beamers, the contents confirmed the base's Akonian origin.
On the uppermost level, they came across a strange scene in white. On an icy carpet stood a white work table, an ice-encased high-backed chair, and two snow-covered lamps. The table stood in front of a glass bay window that they had seen from outside. The group slowly approached the back of the chair. There were no room lights here, so the beams of their spotlights struck the shimmering collection of furniture from eight different directions.
When they saw the scene from the front, they came to an abrupt halt. A dead man sat in the chair, covered with ice like everything else, his solidly frozen hands in his lap.
"The last guardian ... " Rhodan murmured.
It was a man wearing a kind of uniform. His narrow, aged, and sunken face with frozen white eyes revealed nothing about the manner of his death. On top of the table lay writing utensils, sheets of paper, and some small, unidentifiable objects.
"By Drorah's Nebula!" Solina exclaimed. "What a ghastly sight!"
Denetree looked at the corpse and was too shocked to say anything. Ron and Ameda picked up the pieces of paper and tried to remove the ice crystals without destroying the paper underneath. As they worked over the table, one of the lamps silently switched on by itself with startling suddenness and bathed the table and the chair with harsh light.
