Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

“Maybe.”

  “Still…” The captain grew thoughtful. “It would be nice.”

  “It would be very easy to do.” MacAllister saw that he had judged his man correctly. Nicholson was not greedy for money. A suggestion that he pirate some artifacts for himself would have gone nowhere. But the notion that upper management might see their way to appreciate him a bit more. Ah, yes. That was working nicely.

  The captain fingered his glass. “I wouldn’t want you to misunderstand me, Gregory. I abide strictly by the policies and procedures laid down for the safe operation of this vessel.”

  “As any competent commanding officer would.” MacAllister refilled both glasses. “Erik, I’m sure you have certain prerogatives, conditions which in your judgment allow you to interpret procedures in a manner that would benefit TransGalactic’s passengers, and the corporation itself.”

  “Yes,” he admitted, “that’s certainly true.”

  MacAllister gazed admiringly at the ship’s schematic and let his companion consider the situation.

  “You really think,” said Nicholson, “that stuff is just lying around on the ground?”

  “Oh, I’ve no doubt. Just pick it up and cart it off. That’s all it would take. And I ask you, when that world is gone, gone forever beyond any power to recall, what do you suppose, say, an idol from a Maleivan chapel would be worth?”

  “Oh, yes. I’d think so. You’re quite right on that score.”

  MacAllister could see him wrestling with his fear of getting in trouble. “This would seem to be your opportunity, Erik.”

  “You don’t think the archeological team that’s down there now would object?”

  “I can’t imagine why they would. As I understand it, they’ve only got one lander. How much can you haul away in one lander?” He tried to look thoughtful. “There’s an excellent place down on B deck, near the pool, that would serve nicety as a museum.”

  “The hyper wing.” It was an area currently given over to displaying the ship’s various propulsion systems, especially the FTL drive. “Yes,” he said. “It is tempting.”

  “If you wanted to do it,” said MacAllister, “I’d be willing to go along. Cover the story. Give it some credential, so to speak.”

  “You mean you’d write one of your commentaries?”

  “I’d do that, if you like.”

  “We could put the artifacts—”

  “In the museum.”

  “Stage a ceremony. Would you be willing to participate? Possibly say a few words?”

  “I’d be honored, Erik.”

  Nicholson nodded sagely. To himself, more than to MacAllister. “Let me think about it, Gregory. If there’s a way to manage it, we’ll go ahead.”

  Marcel kept the speaker on so he could follow what was happening on the surface. That gave him access to all conversations that took place on the allcom. The transmissions were relayed out of the lander either directly to Wendy or to one of the commsats.

  He was uncomfortable. Living worlds were unpredictable places, and this one especially, as it drew closer to Morgan. But they should be relatively safe for the present. Beekman was certain that gravitational effects from the giant planet would not be felt until late in the process because the collision would be direct, like two vehicles hitting each other head-on. No gradual spiraling in here.

  He’d been listening while Hutch and her people prowled through the tower, watching the images being transmitted back by the microscan Hutch wore on her vest. The place wasn’t much to look at, just bare walls and floors covered with snow and dust.

  They’d cut a hole in the tower wall at ground level to preclude having to climb through the window. Hutch had posted Chiang by the newly made door to watch for signs of potential predators. She then stationed Toni at the window in the astronomer’s perch, with the same responsibility.

  Meantime she, Kellie, and Nightingale were trying to cut through the door on the bottom level. They weren’t talking much at the moment, but he could hear the hiss of the laser working on stone.

  Beekman came in, looked at him, frowned, and sat down. “Marcel,” he said, “are you all right?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “You don’t look happy.”

  Kellie’s startled voice came over the speaker: “Look out with that thing, Randy.”

  Marcel folded his arms across his chest in a defensive posture. “Somebody’s going to get killed down there,” he said. “If I had my way, we’d just write the damned thing off and let it go.”

  Beekman had always maintained an exceedingly low opinion of the competence of Academy management. Marcel expected him to make an observation in that direction. Instead, he remarked that Marcel was probably correct, that the ground team was unlikely to find anything useful in so short a time, and that it was indeed dangerous.

  “Okay.” Hutch’s voice. “That should do it. Give it a minute and we’ll see if we can break it loose.”

  “You know,” Beekman said, “you might remind her that they should be more careful.”

  “She knows who she’s working with.” He folded his hands behind his head. “I’d rather not become a nuisance.”

  “What if something happens?”

  “We’ll let management worry about it.”

  Kellie’s voice: “Okay, throw some more snow on it.”

  “I’d feel better,” said Beekman, “if we had a bona fide archeologist down there.”

  Marcel didn’t agree. “We’re probably safer with Kellie and Hutch. They might not get all the details right, but I’d rather have them in charge if trouble starts.”

  “Still won’t open,” said Nightingale.

  “Let me try.”

  “How big’s the door?” asked Beekman.

  “A little more than a meter high. Everything’s on a small scale.”

  “I don’t think we cut all the way through.”

  Beekman leaned down and fingered the SEND key.

  “What are you going to tell them?” asked Marcel.

  “To be careful.”

  “I’m not sure they’ll be receptive to gratuitous advice. They’ve already threatened to cut me off.”

  Another laser ignited.

  “Stay with it.” Nightingale’s voice. “Here. Get it here.”

  It went on for several more minutes. At one point Hutch cautioned someone to relax. Take it easy. We’ll get through. Then Marcel heard the sound of scraping stone and some grunts. And finally cries of satisfaction.

  When things got quiet again he switched over to his private channel with Hutch. “What have you got?” he asked.

  “Used to be a passageway,” she told him. “It’s just a lot of ice and dirt now. I’m not even sure where the walls are.”

  Beekman got coffee for them and began to describe how preparations for the collision were going. Much of the detail was boring, but Beekman inevitably became so enthusiastic when he started talking about the Event, that Marcel pretended more interest in the details of the observations than he really felt. In fact, he didn’t understand fine points like gravity wave fluctuations, and didn’t much care how the planetary magnetic fields were affected. But he nodded at the right times and tried to look surprised when Beekman seemed to be springing some new piece of breakthrough data on him.

  Then Hutch’s voice interrupted the flow. “Marcel, are you still there?”

  “I’m here. What have you got?”

  “I think we’re into the Astronomer’s private quarters. They’re in pretty good shape. Looks like a suite of rooms. With cabinets—” She stopped a moment to caution one of the others to use care.

  “Cabinets? What’s in them?”

  “They’ve been cleaned out. But they’re in decent condition. And they’ve got symbols carved into them.”

  “Good,” said Marcel. “That’s important, right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s important.”

  As he had with Beekman, he tried to sound enthusiastic. “Anything else there?”
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  “A couch. You believe that? For a little guy. You wouldn’t be able to use it, but a ten-year-old could.”

  It was less than dazzling news. “Anything more?”

  “A table. Pretty badly smashed, though. And another door. In back.”

  He heard Kellie’s voice: “Hutch, look at this.”

  “Can we have more light?”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Nightingale.

  Beekman frowned with impatience. But while they waited to hear what was happening, the AI broke in. “Marcel? I’m sorry to interrupt, but we have an anomaly.”

  “What is it, Bill?”

  “Strange object adrift.”

  “On-screen, please.”

  Marcel couldn’t make it out. It looked like a long pin. Very long. It extended from one side of the screen to the other. And apparently beyond.

  “Bill, what is this thing? What are its dimensions?”

  “I am unable to determine its function. It’s three thousand kilometers long. Roughly.”

  “Three thousand klicks,” said Beekman. “That can’t be right.”

  “Actually, three thousand two hundred seventy-seven, Gunther.”

  Marcel made a face and pushed back in his chair. “That’s one odd-looking puppy, Gunny.” It was long enough to reach from the tip of Maine down through Miami and well out into the Atlantic.

  “Its diameter is seven and a fraction meters.”

  “Well,” the planetologist said, “seven meters across and three thousand kilometers long.” He looked at Marcel and shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

  “Are you sure, Bill?” Marcel asked. “We don’t think those kinds of dimensions can happen.”

  “I’ll recheck the results of the scan.”

  “Please do.”

  “Bring it up to full mag,” said Marcel. “Let’s see a piece of it up close.”

  Bill complied. It consisted, not of a single very long barrel, but of a series of parallel shafts. They could see between the shafts, see the night sky beyond.

  “The dimensions are correct as reported,” said Bill.

  Marcel frowned. “So what is it, Gunther? What’s it do?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Bill, is it a ship of some sort?”

  “I do not see how it could be, Marcel. But this is not a type object with which I have any experience.”

  “Is this typical of the entire construct?”

  “This is typical,” said Bill. “The shafts are solid. They are connected at regular intervals by braces. A few cables are adrift at one end, and an asteroid is attached to the other.”

  An asteroid. “Bill, is it doing anything? The construct?”

  “There is no sign of activity.”

  “You reading any energy output? Any evidence of internal power?”

  “Negative.”

  Beekman was staring at the image. “I just can’t figure it, Marcel. Object that long. It shouldn’t hold together. Stresses would have to break it up.”

  “Wouldn’t that depend on what it was made from?”

  “Sure. But something like this would have to be pretty strong stuff. Diamond, maybe. I don’t know. It’s not my field.”

  “Range is sixty-two thousand kilometers, increasing. It appears to be in orbit around Maleiva III.”

  “What do you think?” asked Marcel. “Want to chase it down?”

  “Hell, yes. Let’s go take a look.”

  Marcel gave instructions to Bill, and let Hutch know what they were doing. “It sounds,” she told him, “as if there’s more to Deepsix than the Academy thinks.”

  “A lot more, apparently. You sure that place down there looks preindustrial?”

  “It’s all stone, mortar, and planks. Right out of the Middle Ages.”

  “Okay,” he said. “By the way, it sounded as if Kellie found something a couple of minutes ago. But we got distracted.”

  Hutch nodded. “I don’t think what we have is quite as interesting as your pole. But it looks like an armored vest. It was in one of the cabinet drawers.” She turned toward it so he could see it. Like everything else, it was in miniature. It would have been secured from behind, and was designed apparently to protect as low as the groin. It was severely corroded.

  Toni Hamner hated to admit to herself that she was bored, but it was true. She’d expected the expedition to be exciting. But she should have known it wouldn’t work out that way: She’d been around the archeologists at Pinnacle and knew how deadly dull excavations could be. This, she’d thought, would be different. This time she would be with the first people in the door. She’d be there when the discoveries got made. But so far it had been just a lot of digging and dredging out of debris. Now, standing guard in the entrance to the tower, looking out across that flat dreary plain, she yearned for it to be over.

  A flight of birds passed overhead. They were brown, with long beaks, flying in formation. For a few seconds they filled the sky, and then they were gone, headed southwest.

  She let her mind drift back to the brief shipboard romance she’d been enjoying with Tom Scolari. She hadn’t thought highly of Scolari in the beginning, but she’d begun to change her mind and was actually getting quite caught up with him when they’d come here and she’d watched him turn his back on Hutch. That seemed to her to be mean-spirited. Or cowardly. She couldn’t decide which.

  She was anxious to get home. To see old friends and restart her life. To see a few live shows. Go to an expensive restaurant again. (How long had it been?)

  Below, the digging went on.

  Hutch was taking a break when Marcel called to tell her how difficult it was to explain the presence of the construct. Could she keep an eye open for anything that indicated the inhabitants were more advanced than we were giving them credit for? She would, but she knew they’d find nothing high-tech near the tower.

  They’d opened a passageway behind the Astronomer’s apartment, and were now engaged in widening it. The work went slowly. Hutch had brought containers and digging implements so that they weren’t entirely dependent on the lasers, which were dangerous in the close confines of the corridor. They had to remove the rock, dirt, and ice, which entailed a lot of crawling around.

  It was only possible for one person at a time to dig in the passageway. A second carried away the debris, dragging it back through the Astronomer’s apartment. A third picked it up there, hauled it through the connecting corridor and into the bottom of the tower, where he, or she, sorted through it looking for anything of value. They found a few shards, a knife, a broken shaft with a blade insert, and a couple of pieces of stone with engraved symbols. In time, as the bottom chamber began to fill up with detritus, they started carrying it up to the next level.

  Eventually, they brought in a collapsible worktable and set it up in the ground-level room. A plan of the site was hastily put together, and the locations of the artifacts were recorded thereon. The artifacts themselves were brought to the table to be tagged and bagged.

  The cabinet they’d found in the Astronomer’s apartment was made of wood. It had inlays and metal hinges, a door pull and some fasteners. It also contained several scrolls, too far gone to risk trying to unroll. They put them in separate bags, and sealed them.

  “I can’t see that it matters much,” said Nightingale. “Nobody’ll ever be able to read any of that.”

  Hutch set the bags carefully off to one side. “You’d be surprised what they can do,” she said.

  At midafternoon, Chiang, Hutch, and Toni went back down into the tunnel. Kellie was posted topside, and Nightingale stood guard at the tower entrance. He’d been there only a few minutes when a thing came out of a patch of trees several hundred meters to the south. It was on two legs, and it had feline grace and a feline appearance. Nightingale, who’d been standing out in the sunlight, scrambled inside. The cat stood for perhaps a minute looking toward the tower. Toward him. He wasn’t sure whether it had seen him. But when it started walking casually in hi
s direction, he alerted everyone. Within minutes, they were all in the doorway.

  It was moving across the plain as if it had nothing whatever to fear. “King of the hill,” whispered Chiang, setting his cutter up a couple of notches.

  The creature was considerably taller than a human male and maybe twice the mass. It was a model of muscles and grace.

  “What do we do, boss?” asked Chiang.

  Right, thought Hutch. Remind me I’m in charge.

  It continued striding toward them, throwing a quick and unconcerned glance at the lander.

  Effective laser range was about five meters. They’d be able to smell its breath. “Randy,” she said, “you know anything about this critter?”

  “Nothing whatever.” Nightingale was standing well away from the entrance. “I’ll tell you this, though. It’s a cat. And cats are pretty much the same wherever you find them.”

  “Which means what?” asked Chiang.

  “Anything smaller than they are, they eat.”

  Marcel broke in: “Shoot it, Hutch. As soon as it gets close.”

  She didn’t have the option of firing a warning shot, because the cutter didn’t produce a bang, or anything akin to it. Not that this thing looked as if it would be scared off by a loud noise.

  She was suddenly getting advice from everyone: “Be careful.” “Look out.” “Don’t let it get too close.”

  She picked up some profanity from Nightingale.

  There came a moment when it paused perceptibly, when its muscles tightened, when its weight shifted slightly. It had seen her.

  “Hutch.” Marcel again. “What’s happening?”

  No point hiding. “Stay out of sight,” she told the others. And she stepped out in full view of the creature.

  The lips curled back, revealing more teeth. It came forward again. Hutch raised the weapon and leveled it.

  “Shoot, for God’s sake!” said Nightingale.

  Hutch told him to be quiet. The cat’s eyes brushed hers. She broke the connection, looked off to one side.

  She wanted to see a sign that it was in fact hostile. She wished it would drop down on all fours and charge. Or simply pick up its pace. Or raise its claws.

  It did none of these things. It just kept coming. And Hutch suspected it had no experience with weapons. It saw nothing she could do to harm it.