The Centauri Surprise

by Alastair Mayer

  “Wait, you said a couple of days ago? Why wasn’t I released then? Am I being released? What was with all the questioning?”

  “Slow down, Rico. Bannon, can we get those chains off? He doesn’t need them.”

  “Of course.”

  Rico stood up as Friday, or rather Bannon, unfastened his chains.

  “Sorry about that,” Bannon said. “It was necessary for yo—”

  “For my own safety, yeah, yeah.”

  “It really was. If you’d decided to make another break for it before we’d explained everything. . . .”

  “I get it. And that incident with Meatloaf outside?”

  “Meatlo—? Oh, the guard. That was for verisimilitude.”

  Rico’s eyes narrowed. He looked at Ducayne. “This was a test, wasn’t it?” he said, his tone accusatory.

  “Sit down, Rico, and relax. You have answers coming.”

  They all sat.

  “Well?” Rico said.

  “Yes, Rico, the last three days were a test. Don’t feel picked on; all our agents go through some kind of test. You did well on Earth, and I was genuinely sorry when I thought we’d lost you. What happened after that was a monumental fuck-up we’re still unraveling, but we think it involved Sawyers World agents operating on Earth.” He turned and eyed Bannon.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Bannon said, all wide-eyed innocence.

  “I’m not blaming you, or your organization. I’d probably do the same,” Ducayne said.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “once we realized you hadn’t been killed, we put tracers out looking for you. Meanwhile ACTO here was trying to figure out who you were and what you were up to. Eventually the connection was made.”

  “So you decided to take advantage of the situation and see if I’d turn?”

  Ducayne nodded. “Something like that. Things have changed a bit while you were in cold storage. I’ve got another mission for you, but I wanted to be sure we could rely on you.”

  “And?”

  “Bannon says you passed. It might be different if you were being worked over for real—everyone has their threshold—but neither did you sell out easy. And that was without training. We’ll get you some of that before sending you out again.”

  “Out where?”

  Ducayne looked at Bannon, who asked: “Want me to leave?”.

  “You’ve probably got this room bugged anyway. No, special relationship and all that, you might as well hear the gist of it,” Ducayne said before turning back to Rico.

  “You spent some time on Verdigris when you were with Hopkins, didn’t you? In fact, I think that’s where you first met Carson.”

  Rico remembered. “It was. And I did. Why?”

  “I imagine you still have contacts there? Contacts in the, ah, less savory side of society?”

  “You mean crooks and smugglers. I might know a few. Just in passing, mind, I wouldn’t normally hang out with unsavory characters myself.” Rico grinned and winked at Ducayne. “What’s happening on Verdigris?”

  “That’s what we’d like to find out. The Velkaryans have a big presence in New Toronto, and news out of there is sketchy and filtered of late. There are rumors of arms build-ups and native put-downs.”

  “The Velkaryans are bastards. And I have a personal grudge against a couple of them. So, what do you want me to do?”

  “First, get you out of here and get you back into shape. Several months in a traumapod is no good for anyone. The machines can only do so much to keep up your muscle tone and bone mass.”

  “No kidding,” Rico said, remembering how he’d felt when he’d made that escape attempt from the wheelchair.

  “You’ll get a full briefing later, but mainly we want you to blend into the background on Verdigris and keep your eyes and ears open. If it comes down to it, maybe kill people and break things, but let’s hope it doesn’t.”

  “Sure, Boss.” Rico said, although after what he’d just been through, there was a certain appeal to killing people and breaking things, especially if they were Velkaryan, and one Velkaryan in particular.

  CHAPTER 39: PYRAMID CONCEALED

  Pete’s Pyramid

  HANNIBAL CARSON FINISHED clearing the dirt off the engraved surface of the pyramid, then used his omniphone to take pictures of them. “Yep, there’s our proof.” He touched an icon to tag their precise location.

  He took a few more pictures of the engravings they’d uncovered, then stepped back. “All right,” he said, “let’s fill this back in.”

  “After all that work to uncover it? Are you joking?” Finley demanded.

  Carson shook his head. “No. Much as I would love to start excavating this properly, we can’t. This was just a quick reconnoiter to verify whether this was a pyramid or the remains of a volcano. We’ve done that. We need to regroup before we can do a more thorough excavation”

  “Okay, we can’t stay. But why the trouble of covering it up again? It’s not like anyone is going to stumble across this by accident.”

  “They might. Poachers, wardens, who knows who might come stumbling through here? But they’re not who I’m worried about.”

  “Then who, grave robbers?” Finley asked. Dundee, still sitting upslope on the side of the pyramid, was listening to the conversation but staying out of it.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Carson said, “but no. Velkaryans.”

  “The political party? Why would they care?

  “Political party and religious, or quasi-religious, fanatics. They want access to alien technology, if there is any in there.” Carson had to watch what he said. “I’ve seen them make a mess of archeological sites before. I don’t want it to happen to this one.” He hoped that would satisfy Finley and Dundee.

  “Oh, all right,” Finley said, picking up a shovel. “But it’s going to be pretty obvious someone was digging here, no matter how you try to disguise it.”

  “You’re right. So, we’ll just have to dig in a few other places to confuse the issue. But don’t worry, it won’t be as deep.”

  Finley looked disgusted. “I had to say something, didn’t I?” He tossed a shovelful of dirt into the hole, covering Carson’s boots. “Oops,” Finley said, not looking sorry at all.

  “Hey!” Carson said as he scrambled out.

  “Just trying to get a move on. Apparently, we have more holes to dig.”

  Carson took it with the humor that was intended. “If I ever have to bury pirate treasure, I’m not inviting you along.”

  “That’s all right. Just remember me if you’re ever digging it up.”

  CHAPTER 40: ARTIFACTS

  Homeworld Security, Sawyer City

  TWO DAYS LATER, Carson was back in Sawyer City, the evidence of his quick look now disguised, and the remainder of the Office of Land Management team—he wondered how many of them were legitimate OLM employees versus plants from some other government agency—continuing with their ecological survey. He was at Ducayne’s office now to fill in the details after the one word report he’d sent from the field: “Confirmed.”

  “So it is a pyramid,” Ducayne said when Carson finished briefing him. “That raises new questions, not least of which is how we get into it before anyone else does.”

  “I don’t see how you can avoid bringing the Sawyers World government in on that,” Carson said. “They already know something is up, and it would certainly be much easier with their help.”

  “Oh, I agree. I’d pretty much already decided that. It would be difficult to keep them out. In fact, they may want to keep us out, but I think they’ll be cooperative. This just raises the urgency.” Ducayne gazed off at the wall behind Carson, then turned his attention back. “But that’s my problem, not yours. I have something else for you. Walter Black is back from Chara, and he brought a souvenir.”

  “He did? What?”

  “I’ll let you see for yourself. Black is in Lab C with it right now, I’ll tell him you’re on your way.”

  ∞ ∞
∞

  Lab C, Homeworld Security

  Carson found Walt Black examining a large, boxy-looking piece of equipment on one of the benches in the Lab, with alien markings on it. Carson leaned in and peered at it closely, without touching it.

  “This came from the pyramid on Chara III?” he asked Black.

  “That’s right,” Black said, “from the hidden room you mentioned.”

  Carson nodded thoughtfully. “This must have been what they took from the pyramid on Verdigris,” he said, “or rather, one like it. It does look like it would fit the empty console we found.”

  “Probably,” Black said. “The room we found it in matched the one you described and photographed, complete to the access shaft off the main corridor, so we assume so.”

  “Do you have pictures of it in situ?”

  “Of course. Here,” Black put a series of images up on the large monitor on the adjacent bench. They showed a rather stark interior chamber, with stone walls and the ubiquitous low intensity lighting of the style they’d found inside both pyramids. The placement of the dais, or console, was as Carson remembered, but this one had an object on it, the same object now in the lab.

  “That’s it all right,” he said. “I think there are some minor differences, the color of the stone is a little different for one. That may be due to local materials or aging. Maybe even just the lighting.”

  “Good,” said Black. “Our next trick is to figure out what the thing is. We don’t want to do anything too disruptive unless and until we have a second one to compare it with.”

  “Well, we know there’s another one out there somewhere,” Carson said. “Probably more than one, if we find other pyramids.”

  “There’s a rumor you already know of another pyramid.”

  “Really? I can’t imagine why anyone would think that,” Carson said, his tone wry. He didn’t know what Ducayne had said about it, if anything.

  “Fair enough. Anyway, we had a long debate about even bringing it back here. We studied it on site for as long as we could, but I knew Ducayne wanted it.”

  “He’s not the only one. It certainly doesn’t look anything like the Maguffin we found.” Carson leaned over it, looking at it closely. There were few obvious controls, but they were labeled. At least, Carson assumed the markings were labels in alien writing. “Interesting.”

  Black guessed at what Carson was thinking. “That language isn’t anything like what’s on the walls in the lower chambers, is it? We thought that interesting too. Was your Maguffin labeled?”

  “It was, but it basically just had a power setting and an on-off switch, at least that’s all I remember. The symbols were close enough to the wall markings that we figured it out. I decided any differences were as much due to style or font as anything else.” He inspected the device further. “Look, here, this symbol looks familiar.” He pointed to it. “And this one.”

  “Yes, that’s pretty clearly an on-off switch,” Black agreed. But this whole section here—” he gestured to a panel covered with writing, what on a human-built device might have been operating instructions “—none of this text corresponded to anything we found elsewhere.”

  Carson nodded. “I think that makes sense. Assuming they intended the easily accessible areas as a teaching museum, they’d design a language to be easy to learn and understand, although probably borrowing symbols from their own where they made sense. This gear was in a hidden room only accessible if you knew where it was and had an access key, a talisman.”

  “Sure, so they’d just use their own language. But what about that Maguffin? That wasn’t intended to be part of the museum, right?”

  “Not likely. We only found it because we used the key. But as I said, it didn’t have much on the way of symbols on it. We don’t generally have long instructions on hand tools, either.”

  “I can go along with that,” Black said.

  “You’ve had longer to look at this than I have. Is there anything that gives even a hint of what it does?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh?”

  “Look at these symbols here,” Black pointed them out. “Does that look like the Pyramid Builder pictograph for gravity?”

  The symbol looked something like a tapered corkscrew, or a stylized tornado. “Yeah,” Carson said, “it looks like how someone might draw a black hole. Do we really want to be messing with this?”

  “Maybe we’ll take it to the back side of Selene before testing it,” Black said, referring to the moon of Sawyers World.

  “That’s probably a good idea.” Carson pointed out another symbol, one that appeared in several places. “These parallel lines, Marten and I thought they might represent parallel worlds or extra dimensions.”

  “Yeah, that fits with the lessons on string theory. At least, I think that’s what our physicist told me that was. Half the time I didn’t understand him, and he was speaking English.”

  Carson had picked up a bit of this from Roberts. “The theory is that gravity is such a weak force, compared to electromagnetism or nuclear forces, is because unlike those, it propagates into the hidden or ‘rolled up’ extra dimensions of string theory. I’m probably butchering the explanation. Anyway, that’s why we can pump a ton of energy into a warp module without evaporating the ship—it bleeds off as gravity waves.”

  “Why would anyone put a warp module inside a pyramid?”

  “I’m not saying that’s what this is.” As Carson said that, he found himself wondering if that’s what it might really be. The Kesh had pyramidal starships, too big to go faster than light, but from what Ketzshanass had said, you could make a warp bubble much bigger if you were content to go slower than light. But the Chara pyramid was no starship, it was anchored into the rock, and nothing they’d seen inside had looked anything like what a ship might. “No, that wouldn’t make any sense. But it does seem like it might have something to do with gravity waves.”

  “A detector, perhaps?”

  “But why?”

  “We use gravity detectors to sense ships going in and out of warp, but we deploy them in space where there’s less noise, not under a mound of rock.”

  “Might the rock also help filter noise?” And why was this conversation giving Carson a sense of déjà vu?

  Black shrugged. “Not my field. I’d think they’d be worried about normal ground movements, quakes and landslides mucking up the signal. Maybe they had something to compensate for that. Anyway, it’s awfully small for a gravity detector. Ours are huge things.”

  That was it! Carson remembered now where he’d had a conversation like this—it had been regarding the artifact Tevnar had pulled from a wrecked ship, possibly a Kesh scout, at Kapteyn’s Star. From what Carson and Roberts had seen of the wreckage, it would have been mounted at the center of mass of the ship, just where you might want a gravity wave detector. He’d have to pass that along to Ducayne.

  “What?” Black asked. “You looked like you suddenly remembered something.”

  “I did. Not sure I can talk about it though.”

  “The Kapteyn’s artifact? Ducayne briefed me.”

  “Oh? Then yes, that might be a gravity wave detector,” Carson said. “I don’t think this thing is, though. Or if it is, it’s not the same kind.”

  “Well, no. One was built by the Pyramid Builders, the other presumably by the Kesh.”

  So, Black had also been briefed on the Kesh. Carson wasn’t very surprised. “That’s not what I meant. I meant a different function. We use electromagnetic field detectors and generators in all kinds of gear, everything from motors to radios to ovens, to fabbers and autochefs, but they’re all different.”

  “Ah, I get you.” Black paused, his eyes widening. “Wow. Imagine a civilization with the same kind of control of gravity waves that we have of electromagnetic waves and fields,” Black said. “They might even have anti-grav and tractor beams.”

  Carson smiled to himself. He was pretty sure that the Kesh had both, but wasn’t going to s
ay anything. He just grunted noncommittally.

  Black shook his head in wonderment. “It’s too bad Algernon Brenke died when he did. Nobody since has had his grasp of warp theory and practice.”

  “Perhaps it’s just as well,” Carson said. “I’m not sure we as a species could have handled all that new tech at once. Look at the design of the pyramid museum. A species had to fully understand one level of technology before it could solve the puzzles that led to the next level.”

  “Good thing we have a master key. It’s too bad there weren’t any more levels. Although I suppose once the natives got to a certain point, they could just blast their way in.”

  “Maybe. Although the spacefarers might have booby trapped it. Putting traps in pyramids is a time-honored tradition, and not just in fiction.”

  “Ha!” Black laughed. “There is that.”

  CHAPTER 41: RICO RETRAINED

  Sawyers World, UDT Homeworld Security

  . . .BLAM! BLAM! RICO lowered his pistol and pressed the switch to bring the paper target he’d been shooting toward him. He examined the torso silhouette. Four holes with a lousy grouping centered near the left shoulder, and another two off where the right ear would be. He muttered a curse. He was more out of practice than he realized. The—months, had it been?—in a traumapod had ruined his muscles and hand-eye coordination.

  The last week of rehab and training had helped, but he wasn’t yet where he wanted to be. He was also getting tired of the routine, although it beat hell out of the little room Friday, or Bannon, had had him locked up in.

  He pulled the target down and replaced it with another, then sent it back downrange. He replaced the empty magazine in the pistol, a Maclaren 10mm, and took aim, cradling his right hand in the palm of his left. BLAM! He peered at the target. The hole was up and to the right of where he’d aimed. Well, there was part of the problem. He adjusted his aim and quick-fired three more shots. BLAM, BLAM, BLAM! He placed the gun down and pulled the target back again.