Retho sat down beside him and squinted at the monitor as the pilot worked the controls.
"There have also been twenty-nine reports of unusually severe neutrino and delta radiation disturbances in that area," Moela's voice echoed within the confines of the small cockpit.
Nicraan pressed another panel and more data wavered on the holoscreen; Retho interpreted for Nicraan faster than he could read it. It all boiled down to the fact that something very odd was going on out on the desolate plain.
"I've been trying to correlate all these reports in one analysis grid," Moela said from her upper deck station.
Nicraan pressed another icon on the control panel. Retho leaned forward to study the three-dimensional grid that appeared on the holoset, brightly delineating a small area of the planet near Base Camp.
"Tidal stresses?" Retho asked darkly.
Nicraan shrugged. "It's worth a look." He stood up, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. Reaching over with the same hand, he tabbed his commpin and called, "Nicraan to Commander Capel..."
CHAPTER FOUR:
Half a node later, Nicraan was exiting the upper deck's observation-ready room. He headed directly for the hangar entry across the way. Moela met him half the distance as she exited the airlock from the mini-bay.
"Last checks are finished," she said, looking up from a portable data pad grasped purposefully in her right hand. "All systems are green, should be ready for a field run by morning after the onboard completes its diagnostic..."
"I can't wait until morning. I'm moving out now."
"You are? To where? But I thought we were field testing..."
"No time for that. I'm going right to the location of that neutron surge."
"You're not going to field test?" Moela said, with a worried look. "I think you better shake it down, Nicraan. We made some pretty complex modifications here, and ...”
"There's no time," Matasire said, moving on. "I have to go right away." He stopped and turned to Moela. "I'm very worried about these anomalous radiation influxes."
"Does my sire know about this...?”
"Yes, Moela. Now please, begin launching protocols."
"Nicraan, I still..."
"Just do it." And he turned and walked away.
"Fine." Moela said, not looking back as she headed for Ops. Tabbing her commpin she called out, "All senior personnel to the flight deck."
The major sat in the refurbished reconnaissance Passport-class shuttle's cockpit. The craft was a medium-sized vessel, sturdy, meant for orbit to planet or land-based survey missions. It sat patiently within the utilitarian designed shuttlebay – there had been little point in making the bay attractive or comfortable. The deck area had markings on it to establish where the shuttle could be safely stored and where it should line up when ready to launch. An operations control console situated before one of the bulkhead walls bay aft provided the ideal workstation location for the coordination of shuttlecraft’s take-off and landing.
Nicraan felt a strange mixture of excitement and regret, felt as if he were teetering on the brink of a great precipice: on one side lay security, his responsibility to Retho, complete with the long-awaited launch; on the other lay the unknown, adventure, meaning, and the hope that he could be an explorer on an alien planet filled with mystery. Moreover, the next few nodes would determine which way he fell, which way the entire crew would settle.
Standard operating procedure dictated that the Eland guided into or out of the bay by a low-powered tractor beam automatically. The emitter for this tractor beam was inserted into the outer perimeter of the bay doorframe and would guide the shuttle far more accurately and far more safely than any pilot.
Once Matasire had established that the shuttle was ready for take-off, he waited to obtain clearance from the ops station on the flight deck before initiating the tractor beam that would launch the Eland. “Confirmed,” he said to the audio-pickup of the shuttle’s pilot console. “All necessary preflight checks have been made. Shuttle Eland is ready to leave.”
Commander Capel Perezsire's voice filtered through the comm grid on the shuttle's control panel: "You're in business. All systems confirm with Pioneer as green. It looks as if the shuttle's maiden voyage is a Go."
Nicraan grinned and ran his hand through his auburn mane, the waves of molten-metal hair neatly falling back into place after being momentarily disturbed. A tendril of nervousness found its way up the pilot's esophagus and he swallowed the phlegm that threatened to rise along with it.
Officially, it was true that the renovated shuttle had not been flown since its repairs following the crash landing of the Pioneer Pod. There was really no way of knowing that the spare parts salvaged from the wrecked System ships found at Pylon Crater, before the destruction of its station, would really work under flight conditions -- simulations were one thing, actual airborne maneuvers were another. Nicraan refused to let himself think about that.
"Recon shuttle Eland to Pioneer. Beginning launch sequence," Nicraan said evenly, ignoring the fact that his heart had begun to beat faster, trying hard to ignore the premonition of the shuttle careening into a hillock. Quickly, the pilot worked the navigation panel with a calming efficiency.
BeeTee's voice came on: "Cleared for departure, Eland."
Capel's followed. "Maintain visual. Set comm to secure channel three-five-zero."
"Acknowledged," Nicraan said, feeling better. "Course laid in."
He drew a breath as the shuttlebay doors split aside to allow egress. Without further pause, the craft rose and sailed away from the Pod, into the future.
Theorized, mapped, and plotted for millennium, the evolution of stars had been anticipated. The origin of stars lay in clouds of interstellar gas and dust. Gravity pulled atoms together into protostellar nebulas, which then contracted and heated up and began to glow. The Dycoon and Boca Nebulas of The Outer System Frontier were such furnaces. As these clouds shrank, their centers reached millions of noches Heit, hot enough for the nuclear fusion that make a star's energy. Much of the surrounding gases then blown away and the star or stars settled down to the main part of evolving. Each star created was as individual as a thumbprint.
Stars that are more massive are larger and hotter, and live shorter lives. After millions to trillions of cycles, the star runs out of hydrogen fuel in its center and swells and cools to become a red giant. Sometimes more massive stars swell even more to become supergiants. Almost all stars eventually contract to become white dwarfs; a few explode as supernovas, leaving behind quickly rotating neutron stars called pulsars.
The supergiant sun that was creeping over the northern horizon was scarlet brilliance; its light was enough to shed crimson warmth across the planet's terminator. As the sun's rays passed through the planet's atmosphere, some were scattered, and a play of colors resulted. Usually blue rays were scattered most -- giving a clear sky of typically blue; but, because of the enormity of the supergiant, its reddish rays came through in large numbers.
The rose-hued light crawled across the jagged mountains of rock, fought to reach the amber-lit recesses of the stony gorges, and then finally came to rest on what at one time had been an alien race's global central command post -- now it resembled a gout, a cancerous impact crater. The sky grew steadily brighter, seeming to force the yellow light of the two waning morning suns over the western horizon toward the opposite side of the planet. The pockmarked area revealed. A cindery, dusty depression with a surface marred by deep cracks and broken ridges that had bright streaks extending in all directions that resembled burn markings.
Something else had invaded the late afternoon air -- a medium-sized, snub-nosed craft, with dark cockpit windows and laser guns mounted on each side of its bow. The phosphorescent-hue coming from the shuttle's concave anti-gravity circular projector added a bizarre tint to the light surrounding the bottom of the ship on its reconnaissance mission. It raced above the expansive hellish landscape and arced over the blackened contours of dunedrifts.
&nbs
p; Designed for a four-person crew, the long-range shuttle's only occupant was Nicraan. He flew the craft westward away from Base Camp and over an area he had not seen from this view. The terrain below riddled with mensae like an archipelago of stack islands, dotting a sand sea. His eyes took in a panoramic scan of the desolate stretches below. He hoped that the neutron radiation readings picked up back at the Pioneer Pod were the result of a faulty sensor in the relay probe positioned here. Privately, Nicraan wished that he would find the cause of the increased neutron count before he went glare-blind. Was it his imagination, or did the red supergiant seem to be getting brighter with each rotate?
Blushed sunslight washed across the pitch alkali flats. The sky illuminated with intermittent streaks of light, flaming tails of meteorites; chunks of debris from an unknown astral source burning down through the thin atmosphere.
Presently Nicraan heard a low beeping signal and the piloting board’s holosets flickered.
"Pioneer Pod," he called nervously into his cockpit commlink, "I've got something. It is a little more than the original readings, but it could be a sign of concentration. I am also getting increased delta radiation emissions in general. Main area affected is sector three-seven-zero by four-nine-zero. I'm closing in."
From the eastern side of the Pylon Crater there extended an array of parallel canyons. There were as many as forty of these fractures. Depending on how they were counted, as some of the indentations were canyons, others were only isolated ridges, deep cracks, or simply corrugations in the plain --- all running east. All cutting into a metallogenic province of great richness, a basalt mass rifted with all kinds of ore intrusions from below. It was from these deposits that the crew of the marooned Pioneer 4 had been able to mine essential repair materials. What had once captured the intrepid pioneers could now set them free. This thought flashed in Nicraan Matasire’s mind as he flew the Eland over the longest and deepest of the canyons. Its configuration was a strange sight – the relatively smooth plain was disrupted by what looked like a ramp that cut into the ground, making a trench about three kiloretems wide, and eventually about three hundred retems deep, running right over the horizon to the west in a perfectly straight line.
Matasire followed this landmark for it led directly to the Pylon Crater from whence it was born. Like all the fracture lines on the plain, the colossus of them all formed when the crater’s subterranean water reservoir had erupted and then sculpted across the desertscape half a cycle ago.
Quickly the striated plain gave way to a very large, blackened depression that resembled a cauterized wound in the skin of the planet. The Pylon Crater itself was the burned and crumpled remains of what once was a nested science station, surrounded now by battered and fried artifacts, the ruins of derelicts and construction materials alike. At its center, a rocky plain – rocky and round, as it lay at the bottom of an enormous crescent cliff, made so because of a collapsed eastern wall – extremely crescent, remarkably half-circular, in fact for a natural feature. It was some sixty kiloretems across the crater’s half-circle and five kiloretems to the floor. And all of it now completely empty, rocky, pockmarked with the remains of flooding, primordial – the volcanic rock as bare as if cooled the week before – nothing all of sentient in it – no sign of terraforming. So … alien. And big.
At its northern end an incredible cliff finally became less tall and less steep, and cut by a deep broad channel, which ran east through the surrounding rim, down onto a basin. A single glance from a high altitude and it was obvious that a very large flood had run down from the crater, until it reached a break in its eastern wall, a graben. The water had turned right down the valley and smashed through it with fantastic force, eroding the entrance until it was a smooth curve, slopping over the outside bank of the turn and ripping at joints in the rock until they were a complex gridwork of narrow canyons. A central ridge in the main valley shaped into a long lemniscate. Two canyons incised the inner bank of the watercourse; two meteor strikes on the highest part of the inner bank had completed the shaping of the terrain, leaving fresh steep craters.
From the ground level, flying just a few retems over the rise of the outer bank, Nicraan Matasire saw it was a rounded elbow of a valley, with the lemniscate ridge, and the round ramparts of the craters on the rise of the inner bank, the most prominent features. It was an attractive landscape in its spatial majesty; the great sweep of the main channel filled now with the running water of a shallow braided stream, coursing over pebbles and cutting new beds and islands.
Outside the crater proper, the region was largely barren except for patches of low, thorny vegetation set in the banks of thin creeks and small rivers. All the way in any direction to wherever the next crater or topographical depression might be -- there were plenty of those, but there had been enough time for the crew to investigate them, all had evidence noting that they had all been inhabited once, unknown millennia ago. There was nothing uncommon concerning that -- the planet, and the known galaxy for that fact, strewn with ruins about which nobody knew anything, there were a hundred such worlds for every archeologist who could even dream of scratching such a surface.
The prevailing winds in the region were westerlies. When these hit the Pylon Crater’s cliffs, towering updrafts resulted. Frequently cyclonic systems came by, bringing winds from the east, and when that happened cold air ran over the plateau, scouring earth and becoming denser and colder, until the entire drainage area funneled out through notches in the great crater cliff’s edge, and the winds then fell like an avalanche.
The crew of the podship had studied these katabatic winds for some time. Moela Darasiress’ calculations had led her to believe that when conditions were right sharp temperature contrasts developed a storm track east to west across the plateau. Very slight interventions in certain places would cause the downdrafts to turn into vertical typhoons, smashing down into the crater and blasting north and south with immense power.
All the same, this quadrant of the planet made Nicraan feel faintly edgy. Frantically working with the controls of the shuttle, he reduced its speed slightly and banked the craft over the crater's rim. He anticipated the sudden G-force pressing him against his seat and headed the recon shuttle in the direction of the faint signal.
As the watery, charred infinity of the terrain streaked under him, the Aidennian pilot switched the shuttle's sensors to a new frequency. The signal bleeped, Nicraan pulled in a fine-tune fix on the indicators winking on his cockpit monitor holoscreens. It was wrong to note that the caldera was untouched and primeval in its nature; an insignificant dot near a cliff-bottom talus, with some shiny pinpoints on it, was in fact the destination of his flight path. Then Matasire further reduced the speed of the shuttle, bringing it down close enough to the crater's floor so that he could see the small object standing out against the blast-burned plains.
The object appeared to be some form of alien organic life, its head a multi-orbed, skull-like dome, its dark-lensed blister eyes training their cold gaze across the barren reaches of the blast crater, its form showed it clearly to be a machine of some sort, possessing a large cylindrical trunk connected to a circular head, and equipped with cameras, sensors, and metal appendages, some of which terminated in crab-like grasping pincers.
The stationary machine was buried in the smoking crater and was the source of the signal being monitored from the hovering shuttle that floated across the dusty plain. Its radio antenna was extended and humming.
As Nicraan dipped the shuttle for a landing, he felt overwhelming dread as he saw that the probe appeared to be undamaged and was accurately accounting the ecological movements surrounding it. The once lifeless remains of the pylon station now showed signs of change -- magma was bubbling up and spilling over the crater floor's broken and cracked surface.
The rancid odor of sulfur and magma assaulted Nicraan's olfactory senses the moment he opened the shuttle's exitportal's hatch. Stifling a sneeze, the pilot unfolded a biocoder and activated its sensor array
. The hand-held device was the most versatile piece of System equipment. Designed to be a portable sensing and computing workstation with multiple uplinks to main Pioneer Pod Four computer banks, the biocoder could be adapted either internally or with add-ons to suit almost any need. Presently, Nicraan was studying the device as it provided lifeform, radiation, electromagnetic, and ionic readings.
Stepping from the shuttle's exitportal sill, the pilot's uniform boots crunched against the pulverized ash and gravel that at one time had been the building blocks for the quartz-like crystalline pylons and the alien alloys of spacers that had filled the crater before the explosion -- another memory Nicraan did not want to think about. Making his way toward the sensory probe, Nicraan ranged the biocoder in front and to his sides. The rectangular device's sensor emitted an on-going warble. The intensity of the sound fluctuated as Nicraan modified the input from geologic to biologic to meteorological; accordingly, the sensor operation indicators illuminated in ever-changing intensities. One scan sensor light caught his eye more than the others -- it was the delta wave scan sensor.
"Pioneer," Nicraan called at his commpin, "it's confirmed. The readings are not originating from the crater, only being amplified because of the radical changes the rocks and minerals have undergone in this area due to the eruption of the Pylon Base."
"The area's become a huge receiver?" came Capel's voice.
"Affirmative, Commander," Nicraan said with a sigh. "It looks like our problem is coming from Space."
There was a lull in the feedback from the Pioneer.
The ground began to quiver. Nicraan braced himself. The quake intensified, till the probe swayed and thumped within its hole with a low and hollow sound.
As the earthquake reached its peak, Nicraan heard a long and high-pitched hissing shriek, like nothing he had ever heard before. He started toward the noise, striding across the rocking surface. Gnarled black slabs of broken stone projected from the ground loomed over him. The world about shook with controlled violence. Nicraan rounded a bend in the slabs as the quake ceased to see a pit of oozing lava. The magma stretched out in all directions in a scarlet tangle that vaporized nearby rock outcrops in a crescendo that hissed and screamed. The volcanic crater rim was brooding, plumes of steam and ash vented high above the pilot's brunette head. Successive eruptions and earthquakes dirtied the crater’s crown and fractured its sides. The volcanoes that ringed the Pylon Crater seethed and trembled, their bruised northern flanks bulged morbidly. The great mountains were possessed by a seething ocean of magma and dissolved gas. Titanic pressures were beginning to test the mountain walls from within. Nicraan Matasire now stood beneath a time bomb filled with melted rock.
Sidereal Quest Page 5
