She thanked him and headed to the observation area to wait.
Chapter 9: Secrets Revealed
Sawyer City Spaceport
Ducayne led Carson along the catwalk outside the row of offices to the stairs, then down to the main level. Carson noticed a few doors in the wall across from the path he had walked in along, still rather shabby looking. They were headed for one. As they approached, Ducayne clicked a button on his omni and one of the doors opened inwards, revealing as far as Carson could tell a rather dingy office. They entered, and the door closed behind them.
“What . . .” began Carson, and stopped when he realized that the floor was descending. This was starting to seem remarkably similar to a secret facility he had been posted to once as a reservist.
“Elevator,” said Ducayne, in a tone that suggested he knew that he was stating the obvious. “The, ah, briefing rooms are downstairs.”
Carson felt a mild jerk as the elevator/office stopped, and the door opened again. This time the door opened onto a brightly lit lobby area, quite clean, with corridors leading off. Glass doors isolated the corridors from the lobby, and a guard station faced the elevator door.
“Welcome to Homeworld Security,” Ducayne said in a dry tone.
“Does the Sawyer government know you’re here?” In theory Sawyers World, unlike most other settled planets, had been autonomous since the first landing. In practice the planet was dependent on trade with Earth, and the Union des Terre had a military base on Sawyers.
“Of course they do, Carson. Don’t be naive.” Ducayne walked over to the station, presented a card, and thumbed a print scanner. The guard checked his screen, pulled out a badge and handed it to Ducayne. “There you go sir, thank you. And who is this?” The guard gestured at Carson.
“Carson, Hannibal, Doctor. There’s an entry for him.”
“All right,” the guard said. “Sir?” calling to Carson “Would you step over here and give me a thumb scan please?”
Carson did so. He had been through similar procedures, years ago, but was a bit bewildered by all this, here, now. What was this place?
“Okay, Doctor,” said Ducayne after Carson had his badge. “This way, please.” He held out an arm to indicate one of the corridor doors. The hall they walked down was unremarkable, except that none of the doors had the windows one might expect in a typical office setting, and they bore just numbers, not identifying names like “Conference Room” or “Research Lab” or even “Men”.
Ducayne obviously knew where he was going, though. He stopped at room identified as 2-7 and palmed the scan panel beside the door. The door slid open, and they stepped through.
The small conference room held a table at which two men were already seated. The walls held several large screens along one wall, and there was a holodisplay installed across the room from the door they had entered. To Carson, the setup said “briefing room” more than anything else.
Ducayne made the introductions. “Gentlemen, this is Dr. Hannibal Carson. Dr. Carson, this is Mr. Brown and Mr. Black.”
“Which is which?” asked Carson as he sat down.
The two men glanced at each other, and then to Ducayne, who smiled wryly. “It doesn’t really matter, those aren’t their real names.”
It soon became obvious that whatever their names, they were highly knowledgeable about their fields—and his.
“Dr. Carson, your proposal mentioned some structures on Gliese 68 and a possible relation to other structures on Zeta Tucanae,” Brown said.
“That’s right. The Zeta Tucanae pyramids appear to date back about nineteen thousand years or so, well before the locals would have had the capability of building them. They’ve only had neolithic-level civilization for about five thousand years, at most. In fact, Zee Tee was probably in the middle of an ice age twenty thousand years ago.”
“But those two systems are over thirty-six light-years apart,” said Black.
“Yes. Troubling, isn’t it.”
“Very. But that’s not really why you’re here.” Ducayne motioned the others to silence. “Dr. Carson, you found something on your recent trip to Verdigris, didn’t you?”
“We found a pyramidal tomb, odd because the customary design there is a dome. Unfortunately we were robbed by an illegal antiquities dealer named Hopkins. He took all the artifacts, and the mummified body of a Verdigran.” Carson decided to hold off on mentioning the radioactive talisman for now.
“You’re sure it was Verdigran?” Brown asked.
“Yes. I convinced Hopkins to let me take a DNA sample. It checked out.” Carson looked Brown in the eye. “Why, were you expecting something else?”
Brown looked down at his screen on the table.
Ducayne broke in. “Carson, you’ve been doing extensive image-matching searches on the net recently. Why? And where did you get the image you’ve been using as a target?”
Carson should have been shocked at this indication that someone had been eavesdropping on his computer searches, but he had already suspected something from the fact that none of them had returned any hits. “You’ve got a monitor program running, you’ve been waiting for somebody to look for that kind of image. Why?” Carson saw Ducayne’s jaw muscle flex. He had guessed right.
“Answer my question first, Dr. Carson.”
“All right. After Hopkins left the tomb I found something he’d missed, a piece of a broken talisman. It looked vaguely familiar, so I was trying to track down where I might have seen one like it before, or any others, and where they were found. What is your interest?”
“Do you do this kind of search for everything you find on a dig?”
“Ultimately, yes, to correlate with other collections, trace cultural influences, that sort of thing.” That was true enough, but usually happened months or even years later, as part of a grad student’s thesis work.
And apparently Black knew that. “That sounds like something you’d assign to a research assistant at a later date.”
“Come on, Carson,” added Ducayne. “Stop playing games, this is important. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
What? His? “All right. It was slightly radioactive.” That got their attention. The others at the table shifted in their seats and leaned towards him. “It turned out to contain technetium-99, and from the isotope ratios it was about fifteen thousand years old.” Brown and Black began conferring with each other in low voices. Carson interrupted. “Now, why were you monitoring my searches?”
Ducayne digested that for a moment. “Not yours in particular, Carson, but anyone who was looking for something like this.” He brought up an image on the main wallscreen. It wasn’t a photograph, or rather, it was a photograph of a hand sketched, rough drawing. An object, flat and roughly square in shape, but with rounded corners and slightly curved sides. An indistinct pattern decorated the edge. From the sketched-in shading, there wasn’t enough detail to tell if it was metallic, ceramic, or just what. On its face, there were several dots or small circles spaced irregularly around a central dot, with radial lines connecting to it. The handwritten dimensions showed it to be about four inches across. If broken in half, it would resemble exactly what he had found on Verdigris.
“Where is this from?” Carson demanded.
“We’ll get to that. You said you thought you had seen one before. Neither your searches nor ours have turned up anything like it. Where might you have seen it?”
“It must have been off-world. If it had been in the university’s collection here my search would have found it, even in the private catalog. On the other hand, if it were in another university’s or a museum’s private catalog it wouldn’t show up in my search.”
Ducayne nodded. “And even if it were public, the data just might not be here yet.” With ships the only fast way to transfer data between stars, the content of each systems’ net was always a little out of sync with that of every other planetary system.
“Right,” Carson said absently. He was staring at
the image on the screen again. Seeing the whole piece, even in sketch form, it looked more familiar. There had been so many artifacts. He couldn’t remember them all, that was what computers were for. If it were like the piece he’d found, those dots were colored gemstones. Then he had it. “I remember now, I have seen another one. Why? What’s the significance?”
“And where is this artifact now? And the broken one?”
“Ducayne, if you want my help, you have to answer my questions once in a while. I’m getting tired of your constant evasion. You’ve cleared me, so tell me. Why do you want to know? What’s so important about it?”
Ducayne’s eyes narrowed and he gritted his teeth. He clearly wasn’t used to being the one having to answer questions. He glared at Carson. Carson glared back, challenging. “Your life might be in danger,” Ducayne said.
That took Carson aback. He didn’t think Ducayne was threatening him, it hadn’t sounded quite like a threat. But if not, then what? “My life’s in bloody danger nearly every time I’m in the field, between blood-thirsty alien creatures”—all right, it had only been mosquitoes, that last time, not even truly alien—“and damned tomb-raiding bushwhacking artifact smugglers! What have you got that’s different?”
“Ever hear of a group called the Velkaryans?”
“Valkyries?" Carson wasn't sure he'd heard it right.
“No, Velkaryans, although they may have chosen their name to sound similar.”
“I'm not familiar with that name. Who are they?”
“What about Heaven’s Gate, or the Raelians?”
Carson had heard of those. He had found references when researching possible evidence that Spacefarers had ever visited Earth. That was part of what had sparked Matthews’ tirade about Von Danikenism.
“Yes,” he answered, “late twentieth and early twenty-first century UFO cults. Pre-war. The Heaven’s Gaters committed mass suicide when Comet Hale-Bopp approached Earth. Even stranger than most religions, they borrowed ideas from Christianity, other UFO cults, and some of the popular space-themed entertainment of the time. Is that what these Velkaryans are? A UFO cult in this day and age?”
Mr. Brown cut in. “There’s nothing special about this age. There has been an extraterrestrial component in a lot of religions, from Ezekial’s flying wheel in the Old Testament to the Scientologists’ Xenu, from the Raelians to the Nazi’s Vril Society. Even more cropped up after the first space flights. Some benign, some bizarre.”
“That’s right,” Ducayne said. “We’re not clear on the Velkaryans’ roots, but it seems to be a fairly recent organization, or religion, that has drawn elements from both Christian tradition and from the teachings of Hubbard, Smith and even Applewhite.”
“Applewhite? Heaven’s Gate?” Carson let the implications sink in. These were some serious, and dangerous, whackos. “Yes, that did have a monastic element, but . . .”
“Yes, ‘but’. Monasticism isn’t what worries us.”
“All right. And what does any of this have to do with this artifact?”
Ducayne took a breath, weighing what information to give out. “Very well. One of my agents infiltrated a Velkaryan cell. Routine surveillance, we like to keep on eye on the more extreme religious groups. Our civilization is too vulnerable to not watch anyone with ideas that odd.” The Unholy War last century had proved that. “Anyway, my man began to suspect that they were planning something big. He sent a report indicating they were desperately looking for this object,” he waved at the image of the talisman, “and that it was the key to something.”
“Key to what?”
“We’re not really sure.” Ducayne expression was a mixture of worry and embarrassment. “We have some theories.”
“Can your agent find out?” asked Carson.
“No. He was killed.” Ducayne paused, a shadowed look crossed his face and he clenched his fists. “We think they found him out.”
“I see,” Carson said. If the Velkaryans had killed Ducayne’s agent, then he wasn’t kidding about them being dangerous.
“Which brings us back to my question. Where is this artifact now?”
“Off-planet. My dig partner took the artifacts back to his university to study and catalogue them there. They were providing a large piece of the funding.” Carson paused, thoughtful. “Wait, you said I might be in danger. Do you have any reason to suspect they were on to me? Or my partner?”
“To you, yes, that’s one of the reasons we called you in, that and the searches you were doing. To your partner, I don’t think so. Our agent never mentioned anyone else.”
“You mentioned some theories as to just what this was the key to locating. Care to explain them?” Carson leaned back in his chair, not really expecting an answer.
“From what we have been able to decipher—”
“Decipher? You have text? Glyphs? A bilingual?” Carson sat forward, eagerly.
“What? Oh, no, no, no. We don’t. We think that the Velkaryans do. I meant decipher from encrypted Velkaryan documents that our agent was able to copy. The language apparently uses the phrase ‘store house of powerful something’, where the word something seems to mean knowledge, tools, and/or weapons. We don’t know whether to translate that as archive, library, museum, tool shed, or arsenal. It’s that last that concerns us.”
“Wow. Understandably so. Any of those possibilities is awesome and a little frightening. So you think this artifact, this talisman, indicates its location?”
“Frankly, we don’t know what to think, but it is fairly clear that the Velkaryans think so, and no, before you ask,” Ducayne said, forestalling Carson’s next question, “we have no idea why they might think so or where they got that knowledge. Or knowledge of the alien script, for that matter.”
“Huh. Okay, tell me what you think might be in this arsenal, or archive, or whatever it is.”
“Well,” Black (or was it Brown?) picked up the explanation, “we strongly suspect that the Archive may contain an alien device of some kind, call it a Cosmic Maguffin, or perhaps directions to a location where the Cosmic Maguffin is stored. Needless to say we can’t let the Velkaryans find it.”
“Cosmic Maguffin? What’s that?” Carson asked.
“We had to call it something. This has to be fairly advanced technology. Think about what they had to do to build those pyramids, move and shape that quantity of stone.”
“Well, we can do that.”
Brown—or perhaps it was Black—took up the argument. “Ah, but not with what can be carried in a starship. Limited volume, remember?” The power needed to create a starship’s warp bubble increased faster than the size of the bubble; beyond a certain maximum size, no known source of sufficient energy was small enough to fit. “So, no heavy machinery, or at least not much, and the ship would have to be purpose-built to carry it. No, this had to be something small, vehicle portable at biggest, and with a very compact power supply.”
“Fusion?”
“Well, we can’t build a fusion unit into anything easily hand portable, at least not with the power output required. So whatever it was, it’s new technology for us, and potentially dangerous in the wrong hands.”
“The Velkaryans being the wrong hands. But why, exactly?”
“Right, you don’t know who they are.”
“You mentioned a UFO cult.”
“Yes. As I understand their basic dogma, sixty-five million years ago God—and it’s not clear if they mean the Judeo-Christian God or if they’re referring to something alien like Xenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster—anyway God wiped out the dinosaurs in a rain of fire and exploding volcanoes to make room for humans to evolve. At the same time God also terraformed planets in other solar systems so that we would have room to expand when Earth became overcrowded.”
“All right, so far that’s not much different than most other cults.”
“Right. The problem is that they are highly xenophobic, and believe that the existence of any intelligent non-human species is contrar
y to God’s Will, and that all the terraformed worlds are reserved for humans. They preach genocide, or rather xenocide, but they play it very close to their vests so that’s hard to prove. You have to get deeply into their organization before some of this gets revealed to you. They also take very harsh measures against any of their members who stray.”
“I can see why you would want to keep anything powerful out of their hands. They remind me of the Nazis or the Islamofascists.”
“Fortunately they don’t seem to have that kind of following, but economic disruptions in the colonies could add people to their numbers. But there’s more to it than that, something you’re in a position to appreciate.”
“Oh?”
“You’ve been looking for evidence of advanced spacefarers in this region ten to twenty thousand years ago.”
“And finding it.”
“Exactly. Suppose they’re still out there? What if these Velkaryans stumble across one of their ships, or worse, one of their planets? They could do something monumentally stupid and start an interstellar war. Look at how the Unholy War got started, or the First World War a century before that.”
Carson scoffed. “You don’t really think that a species that’s had star travel for that long would get sucked into something like that, do you? Besides, interstellar war makes no sense, the communications and logistics are too difficult.”
“Do you want to take that chance? More to the point, do you think Homeworld Defense wants to take that chance? Of course not.” Ducayne got up from his chair and paced the room. “I’ll tell you a dirty little secret, Carson, although it’s one you could figure out for yourself easily enough. The Union des Terre and the national governments that comprise it are very happy for people on Earth to remain ignorant of what’s out here. Sure, everyone knows about terraformed planets, we even call this little bubble of stars we’ve explored T-space, but most people don’t really think about it. Just like they don’t really think about what wiped out the dinosaurs. It was millions of years ago, whoever—or whatever—did it is gone. They don’t think about other civilizations, either—”
The Chara Talisman Page 5
