Juanita Coulson - Children of the Stars 04

by Past of Forever

  “Enough theories and hypotheses!” Sheila cried. “We know what we’re up against. How could we not, after all the years we’ve worked with the N’lacs! We’re in a war for humanoid survival. And this expedition is on the front line!”

  Dan sighed. “Do I hear Captain Derek Whitcomb’s daughter talking? You sound like Adam, straight out of the Space Fleet’s battle manuals. Hit ’em hard before they hit you. Hit ’em with what? Where? How? We don’t even know if the Evil Old Ones still exist. They could have died out centuries ago. This robot could be the final gasp of a dead race ...”

  “And if it isn’t?” the blonde retorted. “How the hell can we postulate such an alien species’ life span? Or their motives?” “Exactly! You want us to strike half-cocked, with no info at all?” Dan said.

  “We have to stop that thing before T-W 593 is invaded again!” “Urgency must be tempered with reason,” Praedar said level-ly. “All of us share Sheila’s apprehension. Time is of the essence. What will the robot do next?” he asked the team’s xenomech.

  Dan wished he could wipe the cobwebs and fog from his mind. “Self-repair. A lot of self-repair. I’m betting it’s already done plenty of that, during the weeks it’s been on this planet. Remember, indications are that it’s gone through hundreds of landings and launches. It’s amazing it’s still functioning at all. If we’re lucky, it’ll never achieve its original readiness—”

  “And if we’re lucky,” Kat cut in, “you’re right about the Evil Old Ones being extinct. But...”

  “If they’re not, pray that robot doesn’t get itself glued back together sufficiently to send them a message and show them what it saw last night.”

  Rosie stammered, “Is—is that possible? Sector Fleet scouts have ranged parsecs beyond this solar system. The Old Ones’ stellar regions must be very far out. Could even a brand-new robot of that type send a coherent message such a distance?” “Yes,” Dan said flatly. “Some of Terra’s servo scouts have subspace capability. No bets on what an alien technology may have put into that thing’s guts. Compressed holo signal systems ... anything! As I say, I hope it’s too messed up to mend itself. If it does, it could throw something a hell of a lot heavier at us the next time we meet it.”

  “How long will this self-repair require?” Praedar wanted to know.

  “Maybe if I get a close look at it, I could tell you. We’re dealing with systems no humanoid engineer or inventor has ever seen,” Dan said.

  “Except in a slave community,” Kat reminded him.

  “You shall examine it, yes.” Praedar’s gaze was unfocused and remote. “To preserve it. To study it.” His teammates eyed him with alarm. “You are the only one here with the requisite knowledge to analyze this object, Dan. You must instruct and advise us.”

  “If we could examine it...” Rosie murmured dreamily.

  Dan retorted, “You’d better catch that perambulating accident zone before you make plans to exhibit it—or before the Evil Old Ones’ spaceships start arriving.”

  “He is correct,” Praedar agreed. “The long view. First we must locate the robot.”

  “Where do we start?” Baines demanded. “The plateau measures at least fifty square kilometers...”

  “It could have gone in any direction ...”

  “If it left footprints ...”

  “Hey, yeah! Let’s get up on the cliff!”

  The group split up along specialty lines. As it did, Dan noticed Kat and Sheila conferring in whispers, smiling conspirato-rially. An utterly human reaction intruded on his concern about the robot. What were the women discussing—comparing notes on their mutual lover? His ears burned. He exited the cook shack in a hurry, following Praedar to the skimmer hangar.

  Early-morning sunlight was streaming into the valley now. Sleeg was maintaining his vigil below Dome Hill. Chuss and Meej had returned from the village and sat beside him. The shaman glared at the offworlders. The adolescents, though, were oblivious to anything but the ancient structures. Their rigidity was a striking contrast to their earlier hysteria.

  Dan had to run to match Praedar’s pace. Then the Whimed stood by, fidgeting, while Dan ran obligatory checks of the skimmer’s systems. Minutes later they lifted, swooping from the hangar and climbing steeply. The scene beneath them was a humanoid hive. Scientists prowled the dud pits with recorders and casting materials. Joe and volunteer aides were busy in the village, soothing the N’lacs. Armilly and a team had reached the top of the cliff from the access road. Dan hovered, watching them unload gear. The wind hadn’t disturbed the robot’s tracks much yet. Telltale marks leaped from Armilly’s monitors to the interlinked screens aboard the skimmer. A trail! For a few minutes the cliff-top team and those in the flyer exchanged words, coordinating plans. Then Praedar pointed to a splay-footed, weaving trace farther to the southeast on the mesa. “To find. To examine,” he ordered.

  “We’ll do our damnedest,” Dan agreed.

  He tracked the spoor at low speed, giving scanners a chance to soak up every scrap of data. Time was of the essence, but so was information. The intruder’s drunken behavior hadn’t improved after it had scaled the cliff; its trail was a reeling zigzag. Dan corrected course constantly to stay with it. That was one sick machine, and it had hours of head start on them. How far had it gone while they were tending the wounded and debating options?

  Twenty kilometers from the landing strip, the tracks ended at a gray-black expanse that reached to the mountainous horizon.

  Praedar slammed a hand on the skimmer’s control panel. “Aaa! Lava flow! Bruska ji!” He played a symphony on detector gear. So did Dan, dipping into alternate search systems. Terran, Whimed, Vahnaj, and Lannon science all came into play, sweeping the alien terrain. After a time, Praedar conceded defeat.

  “Shielded,” Dan announced. “It’s absorbing our signals, not bouncing them. In fact, it could use them to detect us.” He hastily shut down the hunt beams. “Xenoarch equipment isn’t built for this job. We need one of my brother’s military eyes in the sky, preferably armed with an ultra-modern disruptor...”

  Praedar scowled, disapproving.

  “I’ll do a broad sweep,” Dan said. “We’ll eyeball check. Maybe we’ll see where it left the flow.”

  They didn’t. They crisscrossed, circled, and circumnavigated the badlands. The rugged outpouring was full of crevices where a sick machine could hole up.

  Reluctantly Praedar decided to abandon the search. He brooded as Dan flew a beeline back to the cliff and landed. The two of them stepped out into a rapidly heating oven.

  Scientists were on their hands and knees, staking out string-marked grids, dividing the section where the robot had been into individual territories. They’d taken casts of the prints. And they’d holo-moded those splay-footed indentations. Armilly had collected some minute fragments that appeared to be metal. The labs would have to break them down—if they could.

  Time! They needed time to analyze and to track the enemy.

  As Dan was thinking that, another tremor shook the valley and mesa. Team members waited it out stolidly. When it ended, Baines said, “So it’s still sending those out. And I still can’t find any epicenter.”

  “If you could,” Dan said bitterly, “locating the thing would be easy.”

  Praedar walked to the cliff’s edge. Dan joined him there, and they both gazed down into N’lac Valley. The xenomech didn’t have to ask what commanded the boss’s attention. Three tiny bodies—Chuss, Meej, and Sleeg—continued to sit on guard duty near the domes.

  “Not even that quake shook them loose,” Dan said. “They don’t dare leave their post, trying to hold back a repetition of the forever time...”

  “They tell us what we should have realized,” Praedar murmured. “The large dome, in particular, is the focus. Answers must lie within the temple of the many-fathers-ago. The secrets must be revealed.”

  Dan smiled ruefully. “Yeah. And that’s up to me, isn’t it?” Other scientists as well as Praedar were looking a
t him, once more putting all their hopes on his shoulders. He’d wanted to be a full-fledged member of the expedition. Now he was—with a vengeance. And inwardly, he knew he couldn’t guarantee results on the trust they had handed him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Outside Interference

  Five days later Dan was still sweating over the lock mechanism. As he had feared, the thing differed considerably from the one controlling the door between the entry area and the mural room. In addition, the N’lacs’ ancestors had done their best to jam this portal to the tunnel. And the lock also contained some odd, glistening filaments, totally unfamiliar to Dan. The stuff appeared to be annealed to the fluidics elements, and he was having no success in figuring out what the substance was.

  Quakes didn’t help his work or the work of his teammates. Tremors continued to strike, coming, according to Baines, from several points of the compass simultaneously. The constant tension of anticipating those shocks rubbed nerves raw. When Dan was in the insta-cell complex, he could sense the increasing friction scraping at tempers. He escaped most of that in the dome. That enclosed space intensified the quakes’ effect, but isolated him from arguments and debates raging in the insta-cells.

  “How’s it going?” Sheila spoke with forced cheerfulness and set a food box down beside the xenomech.

  He leaned back from his work at the door and sighed. “Thanks. I tend to lose track of time in here. No night and no day. But lots of ghosts.” He gestured at the mural. Chuss, Meej, and their adolescent buddies squatted in front of the painting. Over the past few days a number of scientists had come and gone, asking questions Dan couldn’t answer and offering help he couldn’t use. The N’lacs were there all the time. Now that the youngsters had dared to enter the temple, they seemed obsessed with the place.

  As Dan munched and swigged the lunch package, Sheila regarded the N’lacs. “The best Kat and Praedar can get out of them is that they have to watch the door to the Big Dark.”

  “Or the entrance to hell,” Dan muttered. He washed down the last of the food and returned to his task.

  The blonde leaned over his shoulder, studying the equipment he was using. “That some of the stuff you cannibalized from the ship?”

  “Yeah. Wish I’d thought of it when we were tracking the robot—not that it would have helped much there.” Dan played a probe across the opened panels, watching readouts. “This isn’t what the gear was built for. It’s all a jerry-rig, like half the tools and vehicles on this world.”

  “You ought to know,” Sheila said, smiling. “You put it all back in operation. You weren’t kidding when you said you could do other things besides pilot.”

  “Feo made sure I won’t be piloting again soon,” Dan said. “Not that it matters, if our visitor... hah!” He peered eagerly at the cobbled-together scanner. “An anomaly in that range? Huh! Fine! We’ll just...”

  Engrossed, installing fluidics elements to'replace ones he’d guessed wrong on earlier, he didn’t hear Sheila leave. He did hear her come back, accompanied by Praedar, Kat, Ruieb, Armilly, and a dozen other scientists.

  “This may be another false alarm,” Dan warned. Why did they pounce every time he found a new tack to take? Hadn’t they learned, after these past few days, that most of his tinkering led to dead ends? This discovery, though, proved,successful. He was as surprised as the rest when he felt a subliminal tingle in the wall. Chuss and Meej, shivering, turned from the mural, staring at him fearfully. “Hang on...” Dan said, fine-tuning the installation.

  “Do we need any more proof his fluidics theory is right and Bill Getz’s wrong?” Kat asked, sniffing.

  A ready light warmed to life. Unlike the one at the outer door, this one shimmered. Its surface was strangely faceted, resembling an insect’s eye.

  Armilly had brought extra deep-probe equipment in anticipation of this. Now he scanned conditions beyond the door. The Lannon had already collected volumes of readouts on the same area. But Dan approved such caution. “Is air stuff comings,” Armilly said.

  “Pressurizing?” A glance at the screens confirmed that. Dan frowned. “I guess I woke something more than a door.”

  “Open. Open!” Praedar urged.

  Dan hesitated for a second, then touched the ancient trigger. The portal whispered ajar, the gap slowly widening. There was no abrupt shift of air, no draft. Dan shoved equipment out of the way, clearing access to the entry. Ahead, in the tunnel, light panels dormant for centuries were energizing.

  How? The solar panels that once had fed them had long since tom away in T-W 593’s sandstorms. There had to be a storage technology, a separate connection, one dismantled by Chuss’ ancestors and now reborn. Because Dan had repaired the lock? Was that a key to the entire system? Or... was the system being tuned in on by a hidden robot? Activating the door mechanism might well be cross-switched with alien remote devices. Feedback upon feedback.

  Praedar led the team inside. Armilly assured them the way was clear. No clutter. No “importants” they might step on. The tunnel was bare. Warily, each step an adventure, the offworlders advanced.

  The corridor was fifteen meters long. Like the small dome, its walls were covered with decorations and writings. Ruieb-An homed in on die latter, translating. “Place of... urr... hallway of many-fathers-ago. We... urr... re-tum... is ours... is Home of N’lac... urr... where we may... urr... live. Seal... urr... broken. Is not to... urr... for-get. Fear. Temple of... urr... Old Ones. They who... urr... were al-ways. Sacri-fice is... urr... was made. No more sacri-fice. Urr... stay not here. Death...”

  The paintings were a visual feast. Portraits, perhaps, showed the escaped slaves. They weren’t as pop-eyed and flushed as the current villagers. Dan felt sure that if Joe were able to look into the portrait subjects’ retinas, he’d find far fewer hemorrhages caused by soroche than he did in Chuss’ people. The collision between genetic alterations and a hostile environment hadn’t yet taken effect on the N’lacs in these paintings. In places where later portraits had been added to the earliest ones, deterioration of the species was very evident.

  “They preserved,” Praedar said reverently. “They feared the large dome and this tunnel opening to it. But they did not forget it or destroy it.”

  “Even when it had been buried for God knows how long,” Sheila said. “When we arrived here, they called this the Valley of the Many-Fathers-Ago. And they practically pointed Armilly at this hill and told him to scan for buried structures.”

  “And here we are,” Kat said softly, gawking.

  The corridor was musty with age. Had Dan thought the mural room held ghosts? This was worse. There was a twisting ache in his belly that he hadn’t felt since he was a kid, terrified by a scary vid drama. What he was responding to now, though, was no fiction.

  “They couldn’t forget,” he said. “Not after what the Evil Old Ones did to them.”

  Some of the paintings were of Old Ones and their robots. That was a daunting reminder of the demon haunting the planet’s surface.

  But where, dammit?

  Xenoarch machines were designed to analyze minutely and scan within ancient monuments and graves. There were confining limits to the amount of conversion Dan could achieve on such gear—limits that in effect made searches for the robot futile.

  If the starhopper had military capabilities, he might be able to spot the intruder from orbit. But it was useless to speculate. The little ship’s fuel was so low he couldn’t launch. He’d get her to geosynch orbit—and then what? Park there and observe and report to the team, and wait for his life support to run out? A successful reentry was very doubtful, with such a skimpy fuel reserve.

  Damn Feo, anyway! Vengeful cheapskate! Starving Dan and his expedition, as Feo had starved his cousin Reid, years ago.

  But this time, more than a branch of the Saunder-McKelveys was at stake. And the crisis confronting humanoid life forms was a hell of a lot more terrible than bankruptcy.

  “Is bad bad place.” Chuss and Meej had left
their companions and crept into the tunnel. The brothers cringed, glaring at the paintings of Old Ones and robots. Chuss’ lips peeled back in a fierce snarl. “Bad place! Evil! Kill demon!”

  “We’ll pull its plug,” Dan said. “That’s as good as killing it and them.” Chuss ran to him and clutched at the Terran, peering nearsightedly at him, pleading. Rattled, Dan turned to Kat. “Why don’t you explain it?”

  “I’ve tried..She bent over, on an eye level with the N’lacs, talking in their tongue. They didn’t buy the plan. They wanted the robot-—all robots, and their masters—dead.

  Suddenly Chuss and Meej whimpered and dropped to the floor. They flung their skinny arms over their heads. From the mural room came more shrieks, other N’lacs, also reacting with terror.

  Twenty seconds later, there was a quake.

  When aftershocks ended, Chuss and Meej scampered back to the comparative safety—in their viewpoint—of the mural room. The scientists watched them go. “Sensitivity,” Praedar said. “They feel the robot’s functions before we do—before the terrain does.”

  “Canaries,” Kat said. “Earth peoples used to use pet birds to detect lethal gases in fossil fuel mines. Small avians were much more sensitive to the gases than humans. If a bird died, it was a warning for Terrans to make themselves scarce. What we have here is a N’lac early alarm system.”

  Rosie was appalled. “That’s outrageous! You can’t...”

  “She didn’t mean it literally,” Sheila said. “It was an analogy, , like handsome’s mangled metaphors. You didn’t think Kat was proposing to use N’lacs as a siren to tip us off when a quake was due?”

  “I wasn’t so sure. The callous way you recounted that, I thought you were planning to give Baines extra time to tune his I seismographs

  “We work together,” Praedar said firmly. “Offworlders and j N’lacs. We protect them. We do not exploit them. No one suggests we shall.”

  Cavanaugh broke in. “Dan and Sheila have both mentioned contacting the Fleet, and we all know what that would mean for the N’lacs..