James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 03

by Bodicea

  “The face of the enemy,” Honeywell said grimly, as the image of the alien intruder stared back at them from a display in the forward conference room.

  “Alien… bi-pedal, cranial structure with sensory organs clustered near the brain, apparently augmented by cybernetic enhancements,” Lear was saying with a certain drama.

  “Except for the bones and the outer dermal layer, all the tissues were destroyed by the pathogen. We couldn’t even recover any DNA … if the creature even used DNA,” Specialist Mastermind offered.

  “From where the creature was found, we theorize that he was a specimen, captured by one of the planet’s militaries,” Honeywell offered.

  “Is there anything like this in the historical records,” Lear asked.

  “Sure… fictions, legends, myths, and really scary campfire stories,” Commander Keeler said. “I think we can definitely qualify this creature under the genus ‘booger man.’ When it comes to alien encounters in our historical records, it’s very difficult to sort out fact from fiction. Our ancestors were very imaginative. I think it’s safe to assume, that this is something new.”

  Miller was still a little skeptical. “We still haven’t found any alien ships.”

  “It had to get here somehow,” Keeler suggested. “Unless anyone wants to propose that it’s native to this planet.”

  No one wanted to propose that. Commander Keeler stared hard at the image. So, these were the guys that trashed the place. “We don’t have a clue where they came from, or what they wanted, do we?”

  Silence answered him adequately enough. Lt. Commander Miller also stared at the image, but didn’t seem to be really looking at it. Again, his mind was elsewhere.

  “It’s a shame no tissue survived,” Lear muttered.

  “Have we recovered anything else alien? Technology? Weapons?” Keeler asked.

  “We’re not sure if we can differentiate it from the native weapons and technology,” Kennecott answered, running her hands through her hair. She was tired. Everyone was tired.

  Not simply because of the overload of work analyzing the data from dozens of remote landing sites and airborne probes across the planet, but because the prolonged post-mortem was wearing down the soul of everyone who had to study this dead and dismal world.

  “Our probes will continue to amass information for years,” Lear said. “Our next step should be to put a Tachyon Pulse Transmitter in orbit so they can transmit their findings to the home-system.

  “At which point, the investigation will become entirely one way,” Alkema reminded them.

  “The homeworlds won’t have the ability to transmit commands in real-time.”

  “We’ll lose our sympathetic link,” Keeler muttered. Then he spoke more strongly. “Still, I think our AI systems can direct the probes in our absence. I don’t see the point in remaining here very long. This is a dead colony, our mission is to find the ones that survived. We leave behind some and/oroid crews to gather data. Eventually, the homeworlds will send a scientific team to study it further, meanwhile, we push on to the next world, a world where we might actually find life.”

  Keeler looked to Lear and Miller to see if there was an alternative point of view. Miller shook his head and turned away. Lear’s expression was inscrutable.

  “Very well, then,” Keeler said. “Have Navigation begin plotting a course for the next colony. We will remain here another ten days, but I want to collect every scrap of data in that time. Lt. Kennecott, double the number of teams on the surface, and work out long-term protocols to direct the and/oroids in our absence.”

  More machines were coming to the surface of Medea carried. One pod, bearing identification marking “Escape Pod EEV-49510-Pakuna Pathfinder 003 Pegasus,” landed at the side of the fourth largest surviving city, which stretched across a vast piedmont, backed up against a worn down mountain range and above a narrow coastal plain. The Medeans had built here because of three rivers, and three sets of waterfalls, which they harnessed for power.

  Its buildings faced the sea, and many, even the tallest, were faced with polished sea rock.

  Two hatches on either side of the escape pod slid open, and six and/oroids stepped out.

  The and/oroids divided into three teams of two, and each team moved toward separate buildings. The first entered an elaborately designed structure of crystalline walls. It moved first into a great round entrance chamber, from which a glass dome cast starlight on the floor.

  Several halls radiated outward from this structure, and statuary was arrayed around its perimeter. The and/oroid began moving down one hallway, and was soon forced to switch to night vision. The hallway was lined with glass cases, behind each of which was a canvas covered with layers of petro-chemical based pigments.

  “What is it?” asked the Specialist monitoring the and/oroid’s progress.

  “An art museum,” Tactical Lieutenant Commander Miller observed. His voice startled the two technicians at the monitoring station. He had come up behind them, like a ghost.

  “Good Afterdawn, Commander,” one of the technicians said.

  Lt. Cmdr. Miller looked at the and/oroid feeds, which covered an entire wall of the laboratory in vivid displays from a dozen of the planet’s ruined cities. It was high noon in some places, and a red-orange sun hung serenely in a lavender sky, oblivious to the destruction it illuminated. Elsewhere, it was dusk, and the lowering sun was an unbelievable fuchsia that stretched across half the horizon.

  He looked back at the board. “Would it be okay if I just linked into one of these guys and just… walked around for a while.”

  Shepherd Omaha was a specialist in the Anthropological Survey Situation. He could have been the older brother of Matthew Driver, same dark curly hair, pleasingly angled chin, thoughtful brown eyes, but much taller. “Which one?”

  “What have you got?”

  “A lot of them we’ve put down in the largest city, the largest intact city. There are seventeen. 8912-KNL is in the subterranean utility tunnels taking samples of excrement for data on the vermin species.”

  “Mmm, delicious.”

  “To the Zoological Survey it is. There’s a lot of theory on dispersion of earth-native faunae and competition with local species. 6751-DEF is exploring what we think was an education complex, maybe a university. Looks like it was abandoned long before the catastrophe.

  6935-DKL is exploring a communications complex. 7770-FST is in what we think was either a library, or a museum, or possibly connected to its justice system. 9213-PTB is exploring a large building we believed to have fulfilled a governmental function… oh, wait. Someone’s already linked to 9213-PTB.”

  “Who?”

  Omaha brushed his fingertips across a panel. “Exec. Lear.” Miller raised an eyebrow? “Really? Any way I could… cut in?”

  “Neg, that would be … that isn’t allowed. Everything she records is a matter of record for the ship.”

  “I’ll want to look at her recording when I’m done…. but I’ll take…” he studied the holographic map of the planet, and the feeds from the and/oroids and automechs on the planet’s surface.”

  He pointed to a feed from one of the lesser cities, where night was coming on. “What’s this one?”

  “2527-JKW is exploring a residential complex.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Omaha handed him a headset. “Have you done this before?” Miller nodded and activated the headset. The ship vanished around him like a morning mist in retreat, and he was standing on the surface of Medea. He was on a balcony, that stretched off 52.37 meters (according to a readout at the upper right of his field-of-vision) in front of him, fronting an expanse of dwellings, each separated by a few meters of space from the one next to it. He turned outward and saw that the balcony faced a sea a few hundred (327.02) meters away. The setting sun was dappling over choppy crimson waves.

  He walked down the crossway. He could hear Omaha speaking to him, distantly, a voice on the wind. He had to concentrate to he
ar.

  “This city was one of the ones hit by some kind of ionizing energy weapon. Every living thing was vaporized.”

  He nodded, and the and/oroid nodded as well. He understood devastation more than anyone in the crew. Such destruction on a planetary scale should have stirred something with him, anger, terrible awe, or contempt. Instead, he could not help but feel detached from it. As he reviewed report after report of demolished cities and broken plains, he had almost felt as though he were grading the homework of a mediocre, unmotivated student.

  Something moved next to him and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He turned and saw the reflection of the and/oroid staring back at him from some kind of mirrored edifice. He raised a hand and waved at himself, (everyone who linked to an and/oroid did this, sooner or later) then looked through the wall to see what was behind it.

  The building was a residential structure, nearly a honeycomb of inhabitations, almost interlocked but separated by narrow empty spaces in between. There was no obvious entry into any of them, but as soon as he thought this, a pattern enhancer showed him a millimeter-thin seam in the reflective front, outlining a doorway, hidden from view. He reached out and touched it.

  Through and/oroid eyes he saw the door’s internal structure, sensors were arrayed to check the identity of the whoever touched it. Tiny machines made the door slide away to the right. The power cells had long since died, but a kiss from the and/oroid’s power system could revive them.

  He lay both hands on the door. A pulse radiated outward from the and/oroid’s palms, imparting a charge to the power cells, which slid the door open. A blast of stale, warm air escaped from the dwelling within.

  Miller entered, and/oroid eyes adjusting to the diminished light level. As he surveyed the interior, he felt a strange dizziness rise from the pit of his stomach. There was an array of small couches in a pattern of teal and blue-green arranged around a square gray table. The walls were hung with abstract expressionist prints, except for one wall, which was done in pale teal with grey figures like petroglyphs covering it from floor to ceiling. A shelf along the back wall was covered with miniature statuary, perfectly arrayed and undisturbed.

  Miller had had a friend, Roman Ov, at the University of Sapphire at New Cleveland whose student apartment was not too differently appointed. Suddenly, the reality that this had once been a living world, inhabited by people he might have known, might have sat up with at night discussing beastshit philosophies, washed over him.

  He surveyed the rooms. There was what he supposed to be a kitchen off to one side. The and/oroid wanted to go there, but Miller was interested in something other. He scanned across the dwelling. Behind a type of screen was a chamber he would hazard was a kind of office or study. Behind another screen was what appeared to be a sleeping chamber. The latter would reveal more than he cared to know about the room’s previous occupant, the former might tell him just enough.

  He walked across to the screen. It was actually several sheets of metal, each a tenth of a millimeter thick, cleverly interwoven to permit air pass through, but not light, and picked out in patterns of trees and exotic birds. A strange choice for a treeless world, he thought. He reached out and slid it aside.

  He found himself immediately disoriented. Nothing here was analogous to anything he would have expected to find in any room on his home world. No desk, but a kind of oddly-shaped box, with several small oblong pads left across its surface. He scanned them, and found more microcirucuitry inside, and display areas on their outsides.

  “We have found those in every city. They are data retrieval and storage devices. Kind of like our datapads, but not quite as… advanced,” Omaha told him.

  Perpendicular to the wall of the box was a window. It was covered with more thin sheets of metal, but he could see that it looked out over the city. He wondered what the view would have looked like, when the city was alive with lights. On the opposite wall, were three shallow alcoves in the wall, oval shaped, framed with circuited metal. “What are those?” he asked.

  “We’ve found them in nearly every dwelling and most of the workspaces on the planet.

  Near as we can figure, they’re holographic communication nodes, for audio-visual communication, data retrieval, possibly even entertainment.”

  “Are there always three of them?”

  “Always. No more, no less. Don’t know why.”

  He turned his attention back to the box. He supposed it might have been a desk, but it only came up to his knees. It couldn’t have been a couch, because there would have been no way to get comfortable on it. Its surface was irregular and hard, it would have been like sitting on gravel. “I give up. What is that thing?”

  “We’re working on that. We’ve seen them in other places. We’ve ruled out desk and couch.

  It seems to serve a purpose unique to this world.”

  One of the oval-shaped pads had fallen to the floor. He picked it up and could immediately see that it was different than the others. It appeared to be much older. He couldn’t say how he knew this, except that its design aesthetic seemed to belong to an earlier era. He picked it up and turned it over. He used a burst of static electricity to clean the dust from its surface. It was light in his hands, even lighter than he would have guessed.

  He found the power cell in the back and had the and/oroid connect to it to recharge. It took a few seconds to power the unit, and a few more for him to figure out how to activate it.

  Strange characters began flowing across the screen, making words and sentences in a strange, twisting scrawl.

  “It’s a Mando-Anglish dialect, but it’s a little off the beaten path. The Lingotron is still working on a translation.”

  Miller knew what it had to be though, as if by instinct. It was somebody’s diary.

  “Disengage,” Miller said.

  The surface of Medea jerked up and to the right, then vanished, replaced by the interior of the AnSS lab. Omaha was holding the headset. A little too personal, right commander? Miller thought he was thinking.

  “Have the and/oroid continue recording the entire contents of the data pad,” Miller order.

  “You bet,” Omaha said, not meaning, Miller reminded himself, to sound so chipper and enthusiastic. The poor kid had no idea what it all meant.

  Miller left the laboratory, and suddenly realized he didn’t know where he intended to go.

  He had not been back to his quarters in weeks. He had slept in garden parks, in the landing bays, and spent one memorable evening in a Null Gravity pod. Now, suddenly it became urgent to return to his quarters. He needed to be there. He needed to anchor himself again. He was through with being a fugitive from his own life. Something else he knew, Jones had been right about him. It had taken a planet full of ended lives, including the lives of people who had fought with their wives and never forgiven them, to teach him this. There might even have been someone among them who had refused to reconcile, because he thought feeling miserable was something he deserved and had a right to.

  He passed the transport pod dock, deciding to walk the distance to his quarters. He had much to think about it, and part of it was the planning of something he needed to do. He was an artist, who had always used explosions and destruction to express his inner self. Ironically, his inner self had always been secure and self-satisfied in the past. Now, that his inner self was in ruins, he knew he could only rebuild it by creating, not destroying. The mural at the Slam ‘n’

  Jam had been a beginning, but not nearly enough. Merely recording the story of this planet’s people would not be enough either, Miller decided. It would never be enough.

  As he walked the passageway to habitation decks, he had already begun to conceive a memorial that would be a thousand times more fitting.

  The image of the alien was projected on one of the displays in his office. Keeler stared at its eyeless face. Its destruction had been so thorough, no one had any idea what the soft tissues would have looked like. There were several imaginative interp
retations, each more demonic than the next.

  Keeler stared at one of them, a monstrous beast with burning red eyes and boiled red skin that fairly burned with hatred and malevolence. “You,” he addressed the image, “are one steel-curtain ugly shopper.”

  Keeler flipped through a few more possibilities, some with scales, some with fangs, all nastiness incarnate. The images reflected a certain naivete on the part of the bio-modeling crew. Evil, the commander knew, was seldom so obvious in appearance.

  His door chimed. It was Executive Commander Lear, and she had a data pad in her hand.

  He guessed it would be the final navigational trajectory to the next system. He had forgotten its designation at the moment, but he knew it was relatively close. He bade her enter, “Come.” Lear came in, reflexively brushed the sides of her uniform and took a position in front of the commander’s desk. “Commander Keeler, am I correct in my recollection that prior to your assignment to the Odyssey Project, you were a historian?”

  “Za,” she was leading to something. She knew his personnel file as well as her own. “Your recollection is accurate as usual. Where are you going with this, Commander Lear?”

  “I just wanted to know if your knowledge base included the Berserker Wars.” She set the pad on his desk.

  Keeler picked it up and looked it over. It was the consolidated history of the Berserker Wars, compiled and edited by a scholar at City of Temperance University on Republic. He was unfamiliar with this particular text, but smiled wanly. “It does.”

  “Humans fought with the Berserkers for more than a thousand years. Billions of people died, whole colonies were exterminated.”

  “And somewhere, there is planet called Anaconda, completely run by mechanoids, whose entire crust is the skin of a great world machine…” Keeler added. “It’s legend. There’s no substantial account of the Berserker Wars by any reputable, Commonwealth Era historian. It is possible they may just be an exaggeration of some events that happened during the Crusades, or, as some have suggested, a complete work of fiction. It could be no more real than the one with the Evil Empire and the ‘Death Star,’ that blew up planets. We thought that one was real history for centuries before Simon RaptorBoy proved it was all bunk. There were an awful lot of red faces in the History Department when that happened, I can tell you.”