The Centauri Surprise

by Alastair Mayer

  He grew serious. “But enough of that, Carson. You came here to talk about my little mountain. Apparently, you think it might be a pyramid. Archeologist, eh?”

  “Yes. Teaching at Drake University. Several field expeditions, including to Ransom’s Planet, Verdigris, and Chara III, I mean, Saint Jacobs. It’s the latter where we found the first real pyramid, after the copy on Verdigris.”

  “Where the hell is St. Jacobs, or Chara?”

  Roberts answered. “Chara is a G-type star about twenty-nine light-years from here, on the far side of Sol. Also known as Beta Canum Venaticorum, near Ursa Major.”

  “What were you doing way the hell out there? Is that even part of T-Space?” He looked from Roberts to Carson, then back.

  “Chara III is indeed terraformed,” Carson said, “and there’s a small colony on it. They named the planet St. Jacobs. But we were following a star map on an ancient talisman like the one I found on Verdigris.”

  Finley’s eyes narrowed. He leaned forward, peering at Carson, studying his face. “Are you shitting me, boy?” he said, his tone almost threatening.

  “No sir. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone about this, but. . . .” Carson unwrapped his omniphone from his wrist, unfolded the screen and tapped out a sequence, bringing up an image of the talisman, a rounded-square stone—Jackie had called the shape a supercircle—with several small cabochon-cut gems embedded in its surface, and with engraved lines connecting some of them. He passed the omni over to Finley. “That’s the original talisman,” Carson said.

  “You’re saying this is a star map?”

  Roberts and Carson both nodded.

  Finley examined the image. “It does look a bit like one.” He handed the omni back to Carson. “What does that have to do with a volcanic neck near the Anderson landing site?”

  “It’s not really a volcanic neck, is it, Doctor?” Carson’s use of the honorific was deliberate, playing on the man’s scientific integrity.

  Finley looked up at him sharply. “Three geologists in the original landing team and we all decided it was a volcanic neck. Who are you to say differently?”

  Carson held firm. “That’s not what you said when you and Sawyer first saw it, was it? Did it really look like an old volcanic neck?”

  Finley sighed and sat back in his chair. “She told you about that, eh?” He took a swig from his beer and set the bottle on the side table. “Not like any other one I’d ever seen, no.”

  CHAPTER 8: REPORT FROM EARTH

  UDT Homeworld Security, Sawyer’s World

  “HOW WAS EARTH?” Quentin Ducayne asked the woman sitting across his desk from him, his second in command here. Regina Elliot had just returned on one of the regular passenger runs.

  She shrugged. “It’s as crazy as ever. Now I know why you delegate me for these visits back. Well, that and to minimize any chance of my interference with your little side projects.”

  Ducayne leaned forward to object, but Elliot continued, “What are Carson and Roberts up to these days, anyway?”

  He sat back with a sigh. “See, that’s what qualifies you for your position. You know me too well. If you must know—and I suppose you must—right now they’re meeting with Peter Finley.”

  “The Peter Finley? What about? And isn’t it a little risky letting them talk to one of the Founders about anything?”

  Ducayne shrugged. “Technically Carson is a Sawyers World citizen, so he has every right to, despite what I told him about the Official Secrets Act and re-activating his UDT military security clearance. As for what they’re talking about. . .you remember that report which had its classification lowered a few weeks ago, the one from Elizabeth Sawyer when the Endeavour returned to pick up her and the rest of the Anderson crew?”

  Elliot looked at him, her eyes narrowing. “The possible alien sighting? What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Carson paid her a visit a while back. Her alien matches a sketch he had made of the Kesh. She mentioned that Pete’s Peak may not be a natural formation. Remember, she was a geologist, so she would know.”

  “So Carson is talking to Finley about whether his peak is really a pyramid? Aren’t you worried he’ll let something slip?”

  Ducayne shook his head. “I was at first, then I realized that Sawyer, and Finley, and the rest of the original Anderson crew have been sitting on her alien sighting for fifty standard years without a peep. They know how to keep secrets, and more importantly, why.”

  Elliot considered this, then nodded her head. “That’s fair. Since we’re on the subject of Carson, what’s the word from the team we sent to Chara?” A follow-up expedition to the pyramid discovered on Chara III had already been in the works when Carson reported his discovery of another hidden chamber in the similar pyramid on Verdigris, and the evidence that some alien technology had been forcibly removed from that chamber.

  “Nothing yet,” Ducayne said, “which means nothing urgent enough to expend a message torpedo on.” He checked a calendar on his desktop monitor. “According to plan, the Mandragore should have left there a few days ago, so it should be back here in about three weeks.” Chara, at the far end of known T-Space, was almost twenty-nine light-years away; it was a long trip.

  “Anyway, enough about that.” Ducayne continued, “What’s the news from Earth?”

  “I wrote up a report on the political situation while on the voyage here,” Elliot said. “You can read it at your leisure, but there aren’t any particular surprises. Venezuela under a Velkaryan government is doing about what we thought they would, with the expected results. Velkaryan sentiment is rising in some other countries. The UDT council is turning into a debating club.”

  Ducayne rubbed his brow. “Fantastic,” he said, without enthusiasm. He looked up at her. “Speaking of Velkaryans. . . ?”

  She shook her head, anticipating his question. “Nothing specific on Rico. I’m pretty sure they don’t have him. As to what happened after the shootout, well, that’s a story in itself. You won’t believe it.”

  “Did they recover his body? I thought they hadn’t.”

  “That’s the thing. The last anybody saw of him, the local cops had him in a traumapod, still alive.”

  “The last? What happened?”

  Regina sat forward in her seat and related the tale as she knew it, punctuated by Ducayne muttering, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” face-palming, and shaking his head.

  CHAPTER 9: THE CHARA PYRAMID

  Finley Estate, Sawyers World

  CARSON LOOKED AT Pete Finley expectantly, waiting for him to continue. Finley said nothing, instead taking another sip from his beer bottle.

  “You were saying,” Carson prodded, “that it wasn’t like any volcanic neck you’ve ever seen. How so?”

  “How’s your geology? I imagine as an archeologist you have some.” He looked over at Roberts. “What about you, Jackie?”

  “Basic planetology, why?” she said.

  “Okay, a volcanic neck is the hardened magma that fed a volcano, left behind after it goes extinct and the cone erodes away. Sometimes called a volcanic plug. They’re not common but not exactly rare either.” He paused for a moment to take another drink, collecting his thoughts.

  “There actually is a place on Earth where there is something similar, all covered with vegetation like that. The Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland, Australia, are a series of old volcanic necks. I had forgotten about them at the time, one of those things that was probably mentioned in class once, but I’m not a vulcanologist. Naomi and I came across references to them later. In particular, Mount Beerwah looks very similar to the Peak from some angles. But this one was different. I’ve never seen a plug erode away in such a regular, square pattern. Beerwah has one whole side that has fallen away exposing what looks like basalt columns. It’s really trachyte.” Finley paused and shook his head. “But I’m rambling.”

  Carson didn’t know or really care what trachyte was. He assumed it was some kind of igne
ous rock. He wanted to know about Pete’s Peak, not some mountain in Australia. “So it was the shape that made it unlike any other neck you’d ever seen?” Carson asked.

  “That was one odd thing. But like I said, not too different from Mount Beerwah. Anyway, the hardened magma usually extends vertically downward, to the original magma chamber that created the volcano in the first place, or whatever is left of it,” Finley explained. “Our geological surveys showed exactly that under the peak, until we lost the signal.” He looked at Carson. “I’d say that was proof it’s volcanic. Why would anyone build a pyramid like that?”

  Carson leaned forward in his chair. “Pete, I assume we’re secure here? No eavesdropping?”

  Finley looked puzzled. “Certainly not from outside. Naomi would be sure of that. I can’t say what she might have set up, but I have no secrets from her. Why?”

  That was good enough for Carson. Naomi Maclaren had been the engineer on the original landing crew. “All right. Let me tell you about the pyramid we found on Chara III. . . .”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Carson proceeded to tell Finley an abridged version of his discovery of the broken talisman on Verdigris, and how the break exposed its internal technetium battery, which had been isotope-dated to 15,000 years old. He omitted any mention of Homeworld Security, saying only that it had reminded him of an artifact he’d found earlier on Ransom’s Planet. He let Roberts explain how she had managed to decode the pattern on that one, which led them to the Chara star system.

  They hadn’t known exactly what they were looking for, but had spotted the pyramid from orbit, nestled on a plateau in the mountains adjacent to the plains of an ancient seabed.

  “Strange place for a pyramid,” Finley said. “It wasn’t just part of the mountain?”

  “No, this was clearly different. There was no debris on it, and when we hiked up to it, we saw the carvings on the side. The material it was made of was completely different from the native rock.”

  “Different how?”

  “The mountains were sedimentary, a hard limestone, maybe a dolomite. Sorry, my geology is very rusty.” Most of Carson’s geology background had been focused on topics helpful for an archeologist.

  “Probably upthrust from the old seabed, like the eastern foothills of the Rockies on Earth,” Finley said, “but go on.”

  “The native stone was dark gray. The pyramid looked more like a fine-grained granite. Maybe a feldspar, it was pinkish, but too hard for that.”

  “Pink, fine-grained granite, you say? Interesting. Polished?” Finley asked.

  “Smooth, but no, I wouldn’t call it polished, although it might have been at some point. It was worn. I was mainly looking at the engravings on it.”

  “Sure, of course you would. My volcano doesn’t have any engravings.”

  Carson wasn’t buying it. “How could you tell? Yours is covered in soil and vegetation.”

  “Yes, but I scraped some off. The rock underneath was pinkish gray, I’ll give you that, but there are granite intrusions all through that area.”

  “Where were you when you scraped the dirt off? The carving on the Chara pyramid didn’t extend much more than five meters up, above that it was smooth.”

  Finley frowned, trying to remember. “Twenty to twenty-five meters, I guess. We were about a quarter of the way up, although I slid back a bit. There was too much dirt around the base, covering the talus. Proves nothing.”

  Carson looked at Finley. Was he just being contrary, or did he really believe there was nothing to be found there? He was the geologist, after all. But Carson wasn’t done. “There’s more. Pete, you asked what kind of pyramid would have something that looked like a volcanic pipe under it. I’m getting to that.”

  “Oh?” Finley looked skeptical. “All right then, go on.”

  “We found a door.”

  “A door? You went inside the pyramid? What did you find?”

  Carson wondered how much detail to go into. Should he tell him about what they had nicknamed the Cosmic Maguffin, the alien tool which they’d surmised was used to make the carvings, because it functioned like a disintegrator? No, that would just lead down a line of questions and answers he didn’t want to get into, and probably Ducayne wouldn’t want him to either. He glanced over at Roberts, who shook her head slightly.

  “You’re the archeologist, you tell him,” she said, covering her head shake.

  No need-to-know, Carson reminded himself.

  “After some stumbling around, we realized that the talisman, which had opened the door, would work on an interior door we found. There was a passage leading down, spiraling around. The place was like a teaching museum, with simple mathematical and astronomical concepts on the upper level, getting progressively more advanced as we went lower, through simple mechanics, physics, chemistry and so on. By the time we reached the lowest level it was up to quantum mechanics. At least that’s what Jackie here said. I was out of my depth by that point.”

  Finley took a minute to digest this. “Well, that’s interesting.” He paused, then said, “You said it opened the door, and worked on an interior door. What did you mean, ‘worked’? It wasn’t just a map?”

  “No, it was also a kind of key. It had electronics and a power source inside it.”

  “Right, you mentioned a technetium battery. And it still worked? Amazing. Naomi would love to take a look at that.”

  While Carson was curious as to what the legendary engineer’s reaction might be to the alien technology, he wasn’t sure how Ducayne would react to the suggestion that she be allowed to examine it. He gave a noncommittal reply. “I can imagine.”

  Finley didn’t pursue it. “You said the passage went downwards. How far?”

  “Hard to say. No more than a couple of hundred meters, probably less. Apparently, the mountain they built it on wasn’t completely stable; there were cracks in the lowest floor. We found an opening into a natural cave, with a stream flowing through it.”

  Finley looked thoughtful. “Sure, sometimes you’ll get caves like that in mountainsides. Strange that anyone would build a pyramid on top of one.”

  Carson shrugged. “I thought so too. Maybe they’d already started building it when they discovered the cave. There weren’t a lot of other places nearby they could have built.”

  “But why build it there at all? Does St. Jacobs have intelligent natives?”

  “There’s evidence of them previously, yes, but no confirmation if they’re still around. There were signs of ancient agriculture, like terraces on the hills near the old shoreline, and stone fences near where we landed.”

  “Huh. So why would there be one on this planet? The native artifacts we found were hundreds of thousands of years old; they never got as far as agriculture. Do you have a talisman with a star map for Alpha Centauri, too?”

  “No, not yet,” Carson admitted. “Maybe the fragment I found pointed here, there wasn’t enough of the pattern left to tell. But there are more out there. My web search still turns up hits from time to time.” Like the one he’d recently received from an anonymous source. He wondered if Jackie had had a chance to follow up on its star chart.

  “So even if it is a pyramid—which it isn’t—you can’t get in without the key.”

  “Not quite true,” Carson said. “We discovered that the talisman we had works on multiple pyramids. There’s another one on Verdigris, Delta Pavonis III, but we couldn’t get to the lower levels. It’s partially buried.” That, and someone else had got to it first and used explosives to force an entry. Whoever had done that had been more interested in what was in the upper level, but Carson wasn’t about to reveal that information. He had something better.

  “There is one other thing,” Carson said. “The Chara star map was drawn from a particular point of view. That turns out to be somewhere near the star Zeta Reticuli. We got back from there a couple of months ago, before making another side trip.”

  “Let me guess,” Finley said, “there’s another pyr
amid there.”

  “Well, sort of.”

  Roberts coughed, perhaps to remind Carson about need-to-know. Oh well, too late for that now. Besides, there had been Dr. Sawyer’s report.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Finley said.

  “It was pyramid-shaped, but it flew. A spaceship. And we met one of the occupants.” Finley’s eyes widened, and he started to rise from his chair, his face reddening. Carson continued hastily: “He matched Elizabeth Sawyer’s description of what she saw.”

  Finley sat back in his chair with a thump, the color draining from his face. “You know about that?”

  “It has been fifty years since her confidential report. It’s still classified, but the level recently dropped. It was brought to my attention. I managed to meet with her, and she confirmed it.”

  “Did she put you on to me about Pete’s Peak? And how did you find out about her report?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “UDT Security,” Finley said, not asking. It was Carson’s turn to be surprised. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, Carson. Bobbi, my daughter, told me they set up this meeting. Maclaren Arms does business with them. We have our sources too. I’ll admit we don’t know everything they get up to, or I imagine I’d have heard about your expeditions before this, but we know—or we think we know—that they’re mostly on our side too. But the Sawyers World government is officially independent, so they don’t get quite the free rein they might on Union de Terre colony worlds.”

  “Uh,” Carson really didn’t know what to say to this, if anything. Officially, probably nothing.

  “Anyway,” Finley continued, “There was never any evidence that she actually saw anything. She was stressed out, being in charge of the landing party with no way to return to space. If she saw anything, it may have been a terror bird. They’re not uncommon in that area.”

  “I showed her a sketch of the alien we met. She said it matched what she’d seen,” Carson said.