by Patty Jansen
The ground was dusty, with little sign that anyone had been here recently.
The site bordered a field that sloped down to a shallow gully.
Mountains in the far distance were purple against the late afternoon sun.
The buildings closest to us were still intact, but at some point in the past, squatters had been in here, and built a campfire and collected pieces of wood into a stack.
The roof of one shack had fallen in, and the wall of another was sagging. I didn’t think those buildings were important.
We stood in an area that might once have been a carpark. Years’ worth of dust had blown across the paving and various shrubs had taken a chance at colonising it, and had failed, judging by their dead skeletons.
“Well, here we are, for what it’s worth,” Junco said. “A friend of mine will be along shortly with dinner and the extra camping gear. We’ll set up a camp and you can do... whatever it is you want to do.”
My team took their gear and set about doing just that. First Deyu and Veyada set up the communication hub so that the solar panels would catch the last of the day’s light to charge. Then they went inside the closest building. They each had their work plans. It was my task to ask questions.
“What do you know about this place?” I asked. “I understand from Swallow that you grew up in this area.”
He nodded. “I lived in town. We used to do things here that weren’t allowed when we were young boys. Jumping on the motorcycle, smoking, drinking. My folks are all pretty strict, you know. No smoking, no drinking, no girls until you’re married. Not that it ever did me any good.” He chuckled.
“Have you ever seen anyone else here?” I asked.
“Apart from us kids, no. This place was abandoned before I was born.”
“Did anyone else in your family know anything about what used to happen here?”
“Not much. They made parts for ships. They put the ships together, and then they took the ships away.”
“Space ships.”
“Yes, but they built boats, too. People would come here for the lake. The family who owned this place used to also own the marina.”
“Used to?”
“Yeah, hardly anyone comes out there anymore. We get stinking green algae in the lake in summer. Some people still come, but they’re the foolhardy ones. It’s pretty disgusting, to tell you the truth.”
“I noticed that. Do you know what happened to the people who worked here?”
“Word is they all left to another factory. A friend’s grandfather used to work out here when the factory was still in operation. My friend always said he grew bored with his grandad talking about it, about how wonderful it was and like nothing would ever be better.”
“Have you ever seen pictures?”
“Oh, I have, but I always call bullshit on them. The pictures are all doctored to make it look bigger and more important than it really was, we know that.”
“If I show you some pictures, would you be able to tell me what you know?”
“I can try, depends on what you want to know. Just so that you know, I was a kid when I lived here. I left before I finished school. My mate who’ll be along later should be able to tell you more.”
I showed him the pictures, and he was able to tell me where the buildings were and what used to happen inside. His observations coincided with many of ours. Occasionally he would tell me there used to be other structures that had not survived the test of time. I wrote his comments on my reader, and Deyu’s hub made it so that my team would see them immediately.
Junco and I also wandered into the closest building through a large roller door that had become stuck halfway in its frame.
It led to a tunnel that looked like a loading dock, with a concrete floor and sides and a crane on rails still hanging overhead.
“I’m surprised all of this is still here,” Junco said. “I haven’t been here for ages.”
“There is a canyon outside Athyl on Asto where the remains of a civilisation have lain in caves and under collapsed rocks for more than fifty thousand years. As long as there is no water, there is very little deterioration.”
This area was like Asto in reverse. This place was becoming a desert, a living museum of times past. Humanity was witness to it. They were the cause of it.
According to the pictures, the main hall had been the factory floor, not as empty as I would have expected it to be. The towers that had surrounded the central space craft assembly pad that I’d seen on the pictures were mostly gone—sold for scrap metal, I assumed. The set of rails that led to the other end of the hall, that could be opened to allow the ship or ship compartment to be taken out of the hall, were still in place. Most of the calibrating and testing equipment was damaged, but the empty housings still lined the rails.
The members of my team had fanned out across the hall.
Deyu and Veyada had opened a panel and were studying the content. Reida, Nicha and Sheydu walked around the remnants of a piece of equipment. Ynggi had climbed onto a metal construction while Anyu threw him a handful of leads. That was an interesting pairing.
The concrete floor had collected years’ worth of dust, blown in through the open roller door. Over time, the ceiling cladding and insulation had cracked and peeled. Bits of foam from the panelling lay in heaps in the corners.
A group of little birds sat on a ceiling support beam. By the look of things, they had made nests in the ceiling foam.
One picture I’d been able to find of this facility in the past had been taken at the door where I stood. Today, holding the picture up against the real thing, I could still recognise the shape of the building, and the positions of the machines in the assembly room. In the picture, a gleaming spacecraft sat on the assembly pad, ready for launch. This had been at the height of the spacecraft production.
I meandered through the factory hall, comparing my pictures with the remnants of equipment.
Sheydu and Reida had found something that interested them. They stood inside the deep and round pit with metal walls that would have been underneath the assembly pad.
A narrow staircase wound along the outer metal wall and allowed me to go down to join them.
Reida was looking at some sort of schematic on his screen.
“Did you find something?” I asked.
“You know how we found that craft in Barresh?” he said. “There was a lot of rubbish that was too rusted to recognise, but other compartments had remained sealed and we found some intact parts. Look at this.”
He showed me two pictures side by side. They were both of identical electronic parts.
“Can you guess which one is from Barresh?” he asked.
One of the parts—a tiny cream-coloured blob of plastic with metal “feet”—bore water stains. I pointed at that one.
“No. The other one. I found the stained one inside a panel just now. The two parts are identical.”
“But how do you know they were both made here?”
“We just scanned it. Look at this.”
He reached over the screen and showed me a bar graph that involved bright lines of light that represented chemical components. There were two bars, and the horizontal lines ran across them at the same spots for both.
It was a scanning device that he had brought from the industrial powerhouse of the Eighth Circle in Asto, where people used these gadgets to test the purity of manufactured parts. Apparently, if you calibrated the device in a certain way, one could identify the individual factory where the parts were made.
After the discovery of the craft in the rainforest, Reida had employed a team of local Barresh youngsters to go through all the scans he had made, and had done a fabulous job of re-constructing a model of the craft. He had even been able to get one of the Asto military engineers to look at it and make comments about how the craft worked.
Reida was a very capable young man these
days.
“So this means that craft was made here?”
“Not necessarily. They use the same type of parts, which says more about who made them than where they were made.”
Reida said he was going to look for other similar parts. He said Veyada and Deyu had found a bank of old computers which they were going to scan. I left my team to do their jobs and walked with Junco through the hall to look for a place where we could put up camp.
I thought he meant outside, but it seemed he preferred to stay in the shelter of a building, because of coyotes.
A set of stairs led up to the second floor of the office building.
It came out in a large room with the remains of work hubs on the floor, as if this had once been a data centre.
A biting wind blew through broken windows, but Junco said that he had some sheeting that we could use to create a sheltered spot.
Several broken plastic chairs and couches stood in the corner. Someone had made a fire in the middle of the floor. Part of the floor covering had melted.
From the top floor of the building, out the broken window, you could see out over the surrounding plain. It was a pink desert landscape that reminded me of being on Mars. A few straggly bushes grew in sheltered depressions, but it was too dark and I was too far away to see if they were dead or alive. Other than that, the landscape was dead.
But, looking out over the valley, I was overcome by a strange sensation that I had seen this landscape before.
I remembered a picture in an article I read.
I flicked through the library on my reader to check, and found the article, but then wasn’t sure whether this was the same place. Junco looked over my shoulder.
“I wonder if this is the same place,” I said.
“It is,” he said. “I recognise this here.” He pointed at the hazy mountains in the distance.
Underneath the picture, it said, “view across the testing range from the head office.”
There was a small rise to the right of the building, but beyond that the plain was very flat. So this was where they used to test the vehicles?
The article was about how they built planetary exploration vehicles, not necessarily space craft. Although it implied that those were being built too.
The article never said what they intended to do with the ground vehicles, and where they intended to take them.
Most of the pointers were that the organisation had enjoyed a very brief period of success before vanishing. Surely there would be someone who remembered something? Who had seen these factories in operation?
“Ah, there he is,” Junco said.
I looked out the window.
A vehicle had turned into the dusty driveway.
I presumed it belonged to the mate he’d been talking about. We made our way to the stairs.
Chapter Eleven
By the time we got down, the vehicle had pulled into the space between the buildings.
It was a rough terrain buggy with an open tray at its back, containing many packs, a battered metal drum and a couple of boxes of the type I’d seen Junco use for food storage.
The driver was an old grizzled guy, wearing a battered hat. His grey hair hung in a ponytail over the collar of his jacket.
He stopped the vehicle and slid from the driver’s seat. A brown dog jumped off the back, catching something that the driver took out of his pocket and threw in the air.
The man came towards us. He wore tall boots made from well-worn dark leather and carried a hunting rifle on a strap over his shoulder.
He greeted Junco.
“This is my friend, Sage,” Junco said. “He’s going to cook dinner.”
“Nice to meet you all.” His voice sounded old and gravelly.
Contrary to what I’d expected, he was easier to understand than Junco.
He continued, “You all had a good day? My friend here tells me you went to the canyon.”
“We did,” I said.
“What did you think? Quite something, huh?”
“It was nice.”
No sense in mentioning the overwhelming feeling of passed glory I’d felt since coming here.
“Junco says there’s seven of you.”
“Yes, that’s right. I’ll do the introductions when they’ve finished working.”
“And you’re coming here to look at these old buildings, huh? All the way from...”
“Barresh.”
“Yes.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Don’t you have your own ruins?”
“We do, actually. Ruins tell stories of past civilisations.”
“They sure do.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that.
Evi and Nicha had heard us talking and had come out of the building to have a look. Sage gave them suspicious glances.
Evi was taller than most people, and the afternoon sun made his black skin glisten. It was so dark that a couple of patches of dust showed up on his arm. His moss-green eyes took in Sage and his vehicle. Nicha didn’t look as imposing or alien. Having lived in London for most of his younger years, Nicha blended in better.
The dog trotted over to them and sniffed at their legs. Nicha scratched the animal’s head, but Evi stood as frozen. He was not a fan of dogs.
“Don’t worry about the dog,” Sage said. “He’s as dumb as he’s harmless.”
Junco asked him about camping gear and Sage wanted to know where we were going to sleep. At least that was what I could decipher from the conversation in heavy dialect.
“On the top floor of the building? Pretty creepy place for a camp, if you ask me,” Sage said.
“I don’t want to have any trouble with coyotes,” Junco said.
Sage snorted. “I’ll be cooking outside, anyway. I’m not going to make a fire in that building. If you want to sleep there, that’s your problem.”
“I’ll take the blame,” Junco said. “I don’t want to have any trouble.”
Sage snorted again.
Why did I have a suspicion this was not about coyotes at all? Junco had also mentioned unruly locals. Did they sneak around at night trying to rob tourists?
The dog had decided that Evi wasn’t interesting and trotted off into the building.
Sage opened the tailgate of the buggy. “Well, better do some cooking before it gets too late. Those rabbits won’t cook themselves.”
“I don’t know if anyone told you, but many in our party are vegetarians,” I said.
“Don’t worry, the message got through. Did you see the pumpkins I brought? Grown by my own dear wife. But some of you might fancy a roast rabbit?”
I was about to say that I would not object to that, when the dog started snarling and barking inside the building. Someone yelled, and the bark turned into a growl.
Crap, what was that?
“What’s gotten into that stupid dog?” Sage said.
We all ran to the entrance, where Reida and Anyu stood watching Ynggi and the dog. Anyu had taken her gun out of its bracket and held it with both hands, ready for action.
Ynggi had wrestled the dog onto the ground, leaning on its back, so it couldn’t get up. The animal made soft growling noises. The whites showed all around its eyes.
“It tried to hunt me,” Ynggi said, his voice indignant.
“Let it go,” I said to Ynggi. “It was probably just trying to play.”
Reida shook his head. “That didn’t look like playing to me. Its hair was standing up, and it went straight for him.”
Anyu glanced from Ynggi, to me, to Sage. She was still holding the gun.
Sage whistled.
The dog lifted its head and continued grumbling.
Slowly, Ynggi backed away.
The dog remained motionless for a moment, then scrambled up and ran to its owner.
Sage gave me a wide-eyed look. “How did he do that? That dog’s vicio
us when he’s angry.”
And before he’d said the dog was harmless.
“You don’t mess with a Pengali. Meet Ynggi, of the Thousand Islands tribe.”
Ynggi climbed to his feet. When the dog had come for him, he’d been looking at a piece of equipment in a cabinet mounted on the floor and his scanner and leads lay scattered across the dirt.
The dog cowered and retreated behind its owner’s legs, uttering a warning growl.
Sage grabbed its leather collar. “And what’s gotten into you? Can’t you greet our customers politely?” He looked at me and Ynggi. “Sorry about that. Seems the dog’s met his match. His own stupid fault.” He scratched the dog between the ears.
He looked at me and nodded at Ynggi. “Does he understand?”
“No, but I can translate.”
I told him what Sage just said.
Ynggi looked confused. “The animal belongs to him?”
“Yes.”
Ynggi gave Sage a suspicious glance. Pengali didn’t own much, let alone other creatures.
“Was it wrong to hold it down?” he asked me.
“In your situation, probably not. Dog bites are not pleasant. He’s just surprised that you could do it.”
“The animal is strong,” he said.
The emotions warred on his face. On one hand, you were supposed to compliment a person’s belongings, but on the other hand, owning animals was a distasteful thing to Pengali.
He said, “Tell him that I didn’t intend to hurt the animal.”
I told Sage, and Sage nodded. He was looking at the fearsome knife that Ynggi wore on his belt, likely appreciating that he hadn’t taken it out.
“I’m sorry that the dog thought he was fair game,” Sage said.
Ynggi gave a small bow, mirrored with his tail.
Sage took in every detail of Ynggi’s appearance, his plaited hair, his simple clothing, his muscled arms, his belt with the knife.
“He looks like a good hunter,” he said, after a while.
“The tribe does a lot of fishing. They live in a forest and feed themselves through hunting and fishing and picking fruit.” And trading diamond, but that was a different matter.
