The Eyes of the Huntress

by Niall Teasdale

  She shook her head and went back to watching people. There was the armil couple trying to regain that spark in their marriage. He, Shil decided, had cheated. She had said that she forgave him, and that they should try to save their marriage. He had bought her a lot of expensive jewellery recently and he thought everything was good, but she was going to make him pay. Oh yes, she was going to make him pay so much. It was not helping that he could not keep his eyes off their waitress’s arse.

  There was an abson couple who looked newly married. He had the look of someone used to being in such surroundings, she did not, and they both looked young. So, he was from a rich family, and he had fallen in love with someone a lot less well off. It looked as though the family were okay with the marriage, because they were still bankrolling their son; he looked like he had never worked a day in his life. Shil gave it two years, tops, before one of them dumped the other. Either he would find someone newer and more outrageous to test his parents, or she would realise he was a shallow bastard.

  The navidad on his own was a concern. T’ney was a navidad, and he had been a relatively stereotypical member of his species. Most people thought that if a navidad was not actively engaged in crime, they were planning some. It was a stereotype, but they were some of the galaxy’s more prolific evil-doers. This navidad had dark-brown hair and eyes the colour of blood, but that meant nothing: red was not an uncommon colour in navidad. But he was alone, and he had a look about him that suggested he was up to something.

  And then the lurian walked in. Like Rayan, he had green skin, but hers had been ageing and his was a beautiful, emerald colour, almost iridescent under the overhead lights. His hair was a dark shade of green and hung in unkempt ripples to his shoulders, his bangs partially covering his eyes. His eyes were green, a really beautiful shade of green to go with his skin. Like all lurians, his nose was fairly flat, his nostrils wide. He had quite full lips, sensuous, and his face had a hard, bad boy look about it which went with a muscled frame clad in dark jeans and T-shirt. He was not trying to look like he fitted in. He was here to relax in a warm climate. Relax from… Shil decided that he looked military, maybe a mercenary if he could afford the resort’s rates, but there was something a little understated about him. He was confident, but not the kind of confident that needed to show off.

  His gaze flicked around the room as he walked in. He lingered a little longer over Shil than the others and she felt her nipples stiffening under her dress. Just under her dress: the neckline on the microdress was just high enough to hide her areolae. Then again, the back was a ladder which showed off her lack of bra and her lace thong, but he could not see that yet. But his eyes moved on and she recognised a fellow professional: he was a cop, not a soldier. Interesting.

  Shil’s meal came, and the lurian moved on to his table, which was behind her. Anyway, the fish was excellent; enough people-watching, it was time to enjoy the food.

  17.3.632.

  Shil had found herself two swimsuits in the resort shops, along with a couple of dresses she liked. She had selected all of them with a single consideration: would Sheila have felt comfortable in this? If the answer was no, she had gone ahead and bought the item in question. Still, she had selected one swimsuit with swimming in mind: it was red, high-hipped, had almost no back, and there was a mesh plunge panel dropping from between her breasts to her navel, but it would stay on while swimming. The bikini she had bought was also red, but it was largely string, and she had doubts that it would stay in place through any vigorous motion. She was also fairly sure it would turn embarrassingly transparent when wet. Not that she would be embarrassed; embarrassment was a Sheila thing.

  She had worn the suit down to the nearest of the two pools when she had gone swimming just as the sky was lightening, but when she returned to the pool after breakfast, she did so in her bikini. She was also coated in sunscreen, because she tanned like a lobster and the sun, even this early in the morning, was hot. Karvonay circled around what Earth astrophysicists would have called an F8 main sequence star, more massive than Earth’s star, hotter, and brighter. It was a young star, only half a billion years old, and by rights the planet should not have had any form of ecosystem, but it had been terraformed a long time ago by people who really knew what they were doing.

  When Shil had been swimming, she had been on her own, which suited her fine. Now there were people at the pool, sunbathing. Most of them were armils, better able to handle ultraviolet light than many of the other species, and happy to flaunt it. Several of them were flaunting more or less everything; apparently, nude sunbathing was allowed. One of those was the woman from the restaurant who Shil thought had been cheated on. Her husband was nowhere in sight, and she was chatting to another couple lying beside her lounger in a manner which suggested she was trying to pick them up. Maybe Shil had misjudged the marriage, but she suspected that this was part of the revenge plan.

  Just as Shil was selecting a place to lie down, her gaze skimmed the pool and she realised that there was someone swimming. Doing fairly fast lengths of the pool – though the pool was a sort of kidney bean shape and ‘lengths’ was probably not the right term – was the lurian. He was diving after each turn and then swimming most of the distance under the surface. The man was certainly fit. Looking around, she spotted a towel sitting on a lounger with several empty loungers around it. Well, that seemed like a good place to set up shop.

  About ten minutes later, as she was lying on her back with her eyes closed, she heard the wet slap of feet on the tiled pool surround and the rustle of the towel being picked up from her left, and she opened her eyes, shielding them from the sun with an arm to look up at the green-skinned man in the tight swimming briefs. His muscle definition was more obvious without the obscuring T-shirt. The man had muscle, long and smooth, or maybe that was his skin, which appeared unnaturally silky with the water still coating it. His thighs were like tree trunks, and his biceps flexed as he rubbed at his thick hair. And unless he padded his trunks, the man was not underendowed there either.

  He noticed her after a couple of seconds and grinned. ‘Good morning,’ he said in Gadek Taved.

  ‘Morning,’ Shil replied, smiling back. ‘I didn’t think anyone else did exercise here. I was out earlier, before the sun got hot.’

  He settled onto the lounger and glanced briefly in the direction of the sun. ‘Probably a good idea. Perhaps I should try that tomorrow. I’m not really used to the days here anyway.’

  Shil frowned. ‘Lurisar has a slightly longer day than here.’

  ‘I haven’t lived on Lurisar in years. I spend a lot of time on ships, with StarCorps standard days. This is long.’

  ‘Huh. I’m used to about the same.’ StarCorps based its days on the Nattonly day, which was a few minutes over twenty-four hours. Of course, they divided it up differently.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t recognise your species. I thought I knew all of them by sight.’

  ‘I’d be a little surprised if you knew mine. We call ourselves humans.’

  ‘You look remarkably like a–’

  ‘Veda. Yes, I know. Not that I do, exactly. They were paler and never had dark hair, but I get that a lot. It helps that humans aren’t often seen off their own world.’

  ‘Ah.’ He lay back on his lounger and she thought that might be the end of the conversation. ‘You’re here alone?’ he asked after a few seconds.

  ‘Yes. I take it you are. You were alone last night, and now, so I assumed…’

  He laughed. ‘I barely have time to get a holiday once in a while. A relationship is almost entirely out of the question.’

  Shil giggled in turn. ‘I know the feeling. I’ve barely been in the same system for a week recently. No time for complexity.’

  ‘In that case, since we’re both alone, I was wondering whether you’d like to be alone together? I’ve booked a trip out to see the vedan ruins in the north of the island. It’s leaving in a couple of hours and you seem like someone who would appreciate a l
ittle archaeology.’

  ‘Vedan archaeology, sure. I’ll see if I can get a place on the tour. Uh, I’m Shil, by the way.’

  ‘Araven,’ he replied. ‘Araven Tovar.’

  ~~~

  The resort on Leshona Island was on the south side. A random aspect of geography and atmospheric physics tended to make that side wetter than the north. As the tour’s gravcar flew out from the resort, the rather lush, tropical rainforest look died away as the ground also rose below them. Soon they were looking down at thin scrub poking up through black rocks and soil, but ahead of them, at the peak of the rise in the land, there was something else becoming visible.

  It looked like a vaguely conical structure with the top cut off, surrounded by smaller buildings and the remains of an outer wall. It was white, all of it, even after thousands of years of exposure to the storms which sometimes came in to batter the island. It looked like a small settlement, except for the central cone; with that added in, the place looked almost like a religious site.

  The guide, a resort employee, was not too much help. ‘No one has ever identified the purpose of the structures here,’ she said. ‘As with many of the vedan structures found throughout the galaxy, the technology used here is beyond our current comprehension.’

  It was because Venan died in the final years of the Vedan Commonwealth. Not that Shil was going to tell anyone else that, but it was. Venan had been the Virtue of Knowledge, the Scholar. He had gathered information, coordinated research, remembered what was already known, and disseminated what he knew, and he had died, leaving the galaxy a less understood place. Anoa could access the information Venan had collected, but it had never been designed to understand it. Hence, Shil could look down as the gravcar overflew the site, and she could recognise its purpose, but she did not really understand how it had done its job.

  ‘What we do know,’ their guide went on, ‘is that the large, conical structure you see here caps a shaft which drives deep into the planet. One study suggests that it actually pierces the planetary crust and provides access to the molten rock beneath. There are cables within the shaft, but their purpose is unknown.’

  ‘It’s a thermocouple,’ Shil muttered. Araven obviously heard the statement, because he looked around at her, frowning. She flashed him a grin and went back to looking out through the window at the white buildings.

  The car lowered itself down to land just outside the wall, at a point where there was an obvious gate. The gate itself was gone: it had not survived as well as the wall. The party of six tourists and their guide disembarked and headed through into the compound.

  And the guide kept on talking. ‘The walls here are composed of a silicon-based composite which material scientists are currently unable to duplicate. As you can see, it is exceptionally resilient. It has stood up to almost five thousand Karvonay years of weathering without any maintenance, and probably looks as good today as it did when the veda built it.’

  The walls, all of them, were not that good. Close up, the surfaces were pitted and worn, but still managed to hold their shine. Shil thought back to the Retreat, where the buildings did see maintenance and the walls were smooth. They probably did not take much to keep up to spec, but they needed someone to care. Here, someone had cared enough to fit metal doors over the holes left where the original doors had failed. But they were preserving… nothing much.

  One building, with a door added to keep the weather out, had been fitted out as a little museum. Shil recognised a fairly basic vedan house as she walked in: there was a large, open room which would have been lounge and bedroom, and two smaller spaces for the bathroom and kitchen. The veda had made extensive use of reconfigurable furniture and gravity control, and they had not considered privacy to be a major concern. Now, someone’s lounge had been converted into a space to show off the few artefacts found on the site.

  ‘When the veda left this site,’ the guide said, ‘they took everything with them. Very few artefacts remain and these are displayed here. Archaeologists tell us that this near-complete removal of equipment suggests that the site was vacated before the final end of the veda. Many sites occupied late in their period contain far more portable artefacts.’

  Shil nodded absently at the comment, her eyes on the plastic, hermetically sealed cases with their precious vedan contents. She had a good idea what the purpose of this site was, and there would have been no need to occupy it after the terraforming process was done with. She came to a case labelled ‘Possible Votive Offerings,’ and paused, looking in at the figures with a bemused expression on her face. The case held three dolls, for want of a better word, and Shil recognised them as soon as she saw them. One of them was Asharin, the first host of Anoa, posing with his sword. The two others were the original hosts of Meriti, the Virtue of Law, and Rasilli, the Virtue of Life.

  ‘Votive offerings?’ Araven said, looking down into the same case. ‘I did not think the veda were religious.’

  ‘They weren’t,’ Shil replied.

  ‘Oh,’ the guide said, ‘but there are theories that some of them were. It’s believed they held the seven Dorihin, the Virtues, as their gods. There appears to be a lot of ritual significance to this site, and those may have been crafted to present to the altar in the central tower.’

  Shil frowned. ‘Why would you worship something you made? I mean, okay, gods are generally made by people, but not literally. And the veda had little regard for physical objects, because they could repurpose matter easily in any household replicator. Why would they give physical offerings to something they worshipped? Even assuming they ever worshipped anything.’

  The guide opened her mouth to reply, came up blank, and said, ‘Those are really good questions. Perhaps we can find some answers in the tower.’ She turned, heading for the door before anyone else could ask her any inconvenient questions.

  Araven was smirking, but he lowered his voice before speaking again. ‘You do make good points, but if they aren’t offerings, what are they?’

  ‘Toys,’ Shil replied. ‘Action figures. Three of a set of seven. Some vedan kid was probably pretty annoyed at losing three of her set. Especially the Anoa one, because Anoa was the coolest. He’s got a sword.’

  The lurian chuckled. ‘That’s a good story.’

  Shil smiled. ‘About as good as something involving rituals. Back where I come from, archaeologists were always keen to say something was of ritual significance if they didn’t know what it was for. Of course, they were probably right about some of it.’

  Araven gave a shrug. ‘We know much about the veda, but what we know is often handed down by word of mouth. Half of it is legend. The Virtues are a particular case in point. Most of what we know of them is legend.’

  Shrugging, Shil headed for the door. ‘Legends have to start somewhere.’

  The guide was not taking them straight to the building at the centre. Instead, she wandered from building to building, pointing out minor elements of architecture. About half of the points had been blown out of all proportion and given ‘ritual significance,’ and Shil was having to stop herself laughing aloud by the time they made it to the replacement door of the conical central structure.

  ‘One of the reasons for the theory that this site was religious is the inscription over this door,’ the guide said, pointing up at the lintel which had symbols cut into the concrete. ‘This is written in the phonetic Tavedic alphabet, and is believed to say “Only the worthy may enter.”’

  Araven noticed Shil biting her lips closed, and the twinkle in her eye. ‘You appear to disagree,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Gadek Taved is a less precise language than Tavedic, and that translation is based on Gadek Taved. It says “Authorised Personnel Only.” I guess “worthy” is a relatively valid translation, but it puts a religious spin on a sentence which is meant to be utilitarian.’

  ‘You appear to know a lot more about the veda than the people who studied this site. Are you an academic?’

  Shil shook her head. �
�Far from it, but everyone has to have a hobby, right?’

  Inside, the conical building was quite open, aside from a central column, maybe three metres across, which went from floor to ceiling. The floor was dotted with various holes, set in circular formations around the central column. The column itself was smooth aside from three points around it, roughly at waist height, where the material was formed into shelves, each with a thick hole leading into the column.

  ‘Archaeologists believe that this room was used in prayer and ritual sacrifice,’ the guide said, pointedly not looking at Shil. ‘The holes in the floor mark the positions of posts which held ropes to guide people toward the three altars. Sacrifices, such as the offerings we saw in the museum, were placed in the holes on the altars. The temperature at the core of the column is still several hundred degrees, probably powered by some form of geothermal system.’

  Araven frowned, a slight smirk on his face. ‘That seems… strange. Isn’t it more logical to assume that the purpose of the building is power generation? If you build a geothermal column like this, religion seems the least obvious reason for it.’

  ‘Give the man a cigar,’ Shil said under her breath.

  ‘Ah,’ the guide said, ‘but the power doesn’t go anywhere. All it does is heat the interior of this column. The, uh, structure of the column has quite amazing thermal insulation properties which–’

  ‘Has anyone tried looking under the top of the column?’ Shil asked.

  ‘Uh, using penetrative radar techniques, yes,’ the guide replied. ‘That’s how we know about the cable system in the core. Actually removing the top would destroy the site, and it could be dangerous, given that the temperature in there could melt rock.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Good point. But it does mean that they don’t know whether anything’s missing. There could have been something above what’s now visible. The holes in the floor could be where control equipment and thermal generators were bolted down. Those altars could, in fact, by console positions with cable holes leading into the core to monitor conditions in there.’