by Jim Rudnick
“Here’s the background, Captain. Years ago, when Captain Rossum and her ship appeared with the Roma gypsies and asked for refugee status—you will remember, that happened just before the battle with the reaper aliens over on Memories?”
He nodded. He knew and he was still a bit nonplussed as the Exeter had not been a part of that task force.
“When we took over the gypsy ship, we transferred all their cargo and personal effects to the naval base here on Neres. A part of what we stored were ore and rock samples they had found along their trading routes. From moons and asteroids and planets—each carefully cataloged and coordinates recorded as to where they had been found.
“One of those samples, a dull red ore, was found on an asteroid around a barren world in Pentyaan space. Sometime perhaps a billion years ago, a meteorite had smashed into the asteroid and half-buried itself in the crust of same. We tested that sample—as a matter of course, we tested all the samples they had found—and we are very interested in that red ore.
“We want you—well, the Exeter—to go and find that asteroid and that meteorite strike and mine that ore for us. We need as much as you can find and bring back, Captain—and all at TOP SECRET level too. Not a word to anyone—but me, Captain. Interested?” she asked as she downed the glass of juice and waved at the steward across the room for more.
As the steward hustled forward, Magnusson was silent until the newly filled glass was full and the steward had returned to his post far enough away to not overhear.
“Ma’am, I’d be honored to carry this out for you. Say the word and as soon as I have coordinates, we’re off,” he said.
She nodded as she sipped the blue juice, and he waited for almost a minute.
“Fine, Captain. I will send you the needed information, via the Exeter, and it will be on your console before you even get back to the base,” she said, still sipping blue juice from her glass. “But there is a deadline—we need the ore as soon as possible—no later than, say, a month from today ...”
He nodded and took a sip of the coffee. It was strong, black, and had a taste he’d never tried before—almost like chocolate and luwak flavored at the same time. Of course, it would be the best, and he took another sip of the still very hot coffee.
“You like the coffee,” she asked, her head tilting to one side with a smile.
He grinned at her and said, “Oh, yes, Ma’am, this is wonderful.” There was nothing else to say as it truly was just that.
She nodded and while he didn’t catch a gesture, the EliteGuard major was now standing off to his left.
He cleared his throat.
“Captain, if you’d accompany me, please, once again,” the guard said and he knew the meeting was over.
As he walked with the guard, retracing his steps, he realized this mission was outside of the normal navy flow of rank and orders. He’d have to find a way to let his admiral know that he was off into Pentyaan space—somehow—without spilling the beans ...
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Major Stal sat bewildered at first. He’d been told about a new find on Ghayth, something that was both unexpected and hidden but right in front of anyone who approached the spot from the south. Due south.
As the shuttle once again did a flyover of the tip of the landmass pointing directly south to the Ghayth south pole, he could see nothing different from what he expected to see. This was the tip of the southernmost continent on the planet and here it narrowed as it fell into the sea. Still, at least a few thousand feet wide before ending on the cliffs that the sea now crashed upon, it was a brutal land for sure. Two peaks jutted up a few hundred feet from the tailing into the sea range of cliffs.
More high ragged peaks with slides of rubble and scree and whole layers of the rock substructure were sliding off the final cliffs. It’d take centuries for the rubble to clear so that the layers underneath would then be treated to the rains and storms to crack and then become rubble themselves. The rocks he saw were all of the hard granite type, plutonic, he thought they were called, where they cooled slowly over millennia even. But what was even stranger was that he could actually see the cliffs, the rocks, and the sea itself here.
“Pilot, put the audit tape on from one year ago—these coordinates, please?” he said to the pilot who sat on his right.
The lieutenant nodded, and moments later, the big view-screen up front split in half. The left side showed the view from the shuttle, and the right side held the same view but from one year ago when the drones had flown this same area.
Today, he could see everything in the gray cloudy day.
But from a year ago, there was nothing to see at all. Gray skies too, but the skies were filled with driving rain in sheets. There was a hint from below of the edge of the cliff maybe, but he couldn’t be sure. There were no twin peaks either, which today stuck up a few hundred feet above the range of cliffs—but back a year ago were just a gray mass.
“Looks like the changes that the science guys are working on work,” the pilot said, and Alver grunted a yes.
The pilot turned hard to starboard and zoomed down to about twice the height of the cliffs. He continued to turn in a big circle to come back at the cliffs from due south. “Major, this is the view you gotta see,” he said as he leveled out about two miles away.
As the shuttle now flew directly at the end of the landmass, those twin peaks ahead changed. They seemed to move away from each other and dip slightly backward from this angle and away from the cliffs and the sea.
“What the hell,” Alver said as he leaned forward to get a better look.
“Navy science guys think that those two peaks ain’t real. On gimbals maybe, that have some kind of a motion detector built in and turned on. Approach from anywhere other than due south, and they ignore you,” the pilot said.
Alver nodded and as they moved at moderate speed toward the now separating peaks, what lay below was now not hidden anymore.
The space below was lit with some kind of light source he couldn’t see. The space appeared to be a landing field, big enough to hold four shuttles of this size. The landing field was covered with some markings in spots too, and Alver recognized the writing—it was from the ancient aliens who’d come to Ghayth thousands of years ago.
He held up a hand for the pilot to stop over the field. He fluttered his hand back and forth, signifying for the shuttle to hover, and the pilot complied.
From up here, Alver could see there appeared to be a whole interior below-grade plateau, buried down at least a few hundred feet below the level of the cliffs to the south. From up here, he could still see fortifications, equipment, dollies, stacks of something on skids, and enormous interior panels of glass that looked like the walls of interior rooms. He really had no idea.
“And how, as a matter of fact, was this discovered?” he asked, but he thought he knew.
“Normal annual audit drones. One was acting wonky, the autopilot said, and he took it out for a spin around and came back from the south. Due south, the GPS said, and that got those peaks a-moving and voila,” the pilot said.
Alver nodded. Figures, he thought. We stumble into this kind of thing too, too often here on Ghayth; sure would be nice to know more.
Then he sighed. Not knowing what a planet had in store for its first immigrants was something all space-faring races ran into ... and Ghayth was no different.
“Okay, home, Lieutenant, and don’t spare the horses,” he said.
As the pilot zoomed up to go sub-orbital, Alver saw the twin peaks behind them slowly rise up to once again hide the outpost or whatever lay below. As the shuttle hit Mach 2 and then Mach 3, aiming up still, Alver had to decide whom to share this with.
Found by Barony Navy drones, handled by both the science team here as well as now the marines, of which he was the CC on the planet, meant it was not going to be a secret much longer.
Wish I had Tanner here to tell him—even if that is ethically a bad choice, Alver thought. He was a Barony marine�
�and had sworn an oath to be just that.
If ever the chance might come up to even hint at this to the new duke, I’d take it—maybe ... or maybe not ...
#####
As she ambled along the walkway, number nineteen, she thought she’d heard Professor Reynolds, head of her xeno team on the alien wreck on Ghayth, call it, she looked around. And up. And far to her left, and far to her right. And then she stopped.
“Professor—tell me again? If a ship is used to transport people or things from planet to planet—why then does this ship have such huge interior wide-open space? Nothing is ‘in’ here but air. Sure, I see the openings all over as I look up and around—but of what value might this unused space be to these aliens?” the Baroness asked, her voice a bit frustrated.
Reynolds nodded as he stopped and swung a hand in a circle. “Ma’am, the space that we see as unused—may be a very necessary part of the ship to aliens who fly. Perhaps it might be a space where they can take wing and, say, ‘stretch’ their wings. Perhaps it was used to hold thousands of these aliens all on those ‘alien ladders’ we’ve found—a way to house aliens with wings. Perhaps we just will never understand it. But one thing we do know is that all of those openings up and around this space have perches at the doorstep—so to speak. So the aliens flew to those rooms—whatever kind of room it was,” he said.
He too was unknowing when it came to the real reason for the vast open space in the middle axis of the ship, but like all academics, he put that aside for now. The knowing might come long after the finding, was how a professor of one of his undergrad classes had put it to him more than forty years ago. How true, he thought, but he did wonder why that might be important to the Baroness, but of course, one never asked a Royal to explain themselves or their questions.
She nodded. She was not satisfied with his answer, he knew, but he really didn’t have one. “Let’s move on,” she said.
He led the way ahead. When they reached a juncture of a side-branching walkway, she stopped. “And where does that lead,” she said, pointing at the walkway that appeared to lead hundreds of yards away from this spot.
“We, as yet, don’t know, Ma’am. When a xeno team explores, it’s done by us all—full video captures and, yes, even a squad of marines as well. That one is labeled,” he said as he peered down at the floor where the two walkways intersected, “as walkway number 133—with an extra icon behind that number. We’ve no idea what that icon signifies either yet, Ma’am—though that one is scheduled to be investigated next month, I believe.”
She looked at him, as she cocked each hand on a hip, one shapely leg in thigh-high boots canted off to one side. “Wait, Professor. Do you mean that there are many parts of the ship that you’ve not even been to as yet?”
“Yes, Ma’am. We’ve covered only about twenty-eight percent of the ship from what we can tell. Those areas covered, however, we know. We have indexed and cataloged. We understand and have tested and worked on all hypotheses that we can discern as to what and why they are here on the ship. We go slowly, Ma’am, not so much for our own safety—but to prevent doing anything catastrophic by accident. Via ignorance or stupidity, Ma’am. It’s the xeno way of discovering a whole new race of aliens—and judging by what we’ve found, these were very superior aliens, technology-wise.”
She just looked at him and frowned. “Surely, you want to just run down all of these walkways, as you call them, and look and see and find stuff, right?”
He grinned at her, as he nodded too. “Aye, Ma’am—we all do. It takes quite a bit of stick-tuitiveness to NOT do just that. But we know that our way works.
“Do you remember what happened up on the moons of Thrones just a dozen or more years ago, Ma’am?”
She shook her head as she motioned for him to proceed down the walkway ahead.
“Ah, well, Ma’am, I was on that xeno team called to investigate the remains of a satellite that had somehow been wrecked on the Thrones2 planetary system—on their moon. We went everywhere and branched off and took working escalators up and down ... almost running to see and begin to understand what we had found. All went well at first, until one of us on the bridge was punching on icons and items. Nothing seemed to make any changes to the satellite that we could see, which was decided later at the post-mortem of the xeno team reports.
“No, we looked and spread out, and we dug and we forged ahead, and we entered the big remains—only to have a self-security system decide—for whatever reason it did—that we were invaders, and it automatically fired upon us with no warning. We never even found the thresholds that we’d breached—it just sent automatic plasma fire down the corridor towards us—and at the same time, we could hear the slow drone of what sounded like ‘tick-tocks’ as there was an automatic counter that was enabled by our breach. At least that’s what was determined later after the plasma blasts.”
She gasped. “What happened?”
“We lost four of the team that day—plasma took them full on as they were in the lead team positions as we were moving down the main corridor of the satellite. We realized the counter mechanism might signify something else was also triggered, so we all bailed out. We got up and into space about twenty miles away, when there was a huge flash of light, and the shockwave tumbled our shuttle somewhat too. The crater was almost a full mile across—and everything else within that blast radius was now just moon dust.”
She took that in. He had been honest with his reference to this event, and yes, she’d read the complete reports on same in her research on xeno teams. It had been his own culpability in the handling of the information after the fact, which had made her think he’d be the one to head this team. She’d not been wrong, it appeared, as she said nothing but continued to follow Reynolds as the walkway ahead disappeared into a new large opening.
“This is the area we call the rear cargo hold—one of at least the thirty-one that we’ve identified. Oh, that number—thirty-one—seems to be important to these aliens too. Many, many items that we see replicated, stacked, or identified—all are done in only thirty-one items.
“We don’t know if that’s a base of their math—we humans use a base-ten math or something else. But thirty-one is important, it seems,” he said as he stepped across the threshold and into a large cargo bay room.
On the far wall was what appeared to be a closed and sealed door allowing someone or something to open same, take or place cargo within the room, and then close up and seal it off from space. Inside the massive hundred-foot-ceiling-height room were boxes, cylinders, pipe lengths, and round barrels of items that all looked like they were brand new and still sealed. She pointed at same.
“Professor, I have read your team reports and noted that you believe that the age of this wreck—and its contents, I would add—are around twenty thousand years old. If so, then why are these cargo containers still so pristine looking? Not a single broken or rusted or cracked-open barrel do I see.”
Reynolds nodded and spread his hands out, palms up as if shrugging with his hands. “Ma’am, we just don’t know. But what we do know is that this wreck still is powered. There are occasional periods in the day when automatic things happen.
“Lights go on or off; up in what we think are personnel quarters, there are automatic air changes within the rooms, and the teeniest of robo-cleaners appear to vacuum up not the floors but the perches and what we think are food dishes.
“Down in other areas, there are larger robots who ignore us completely and appear to be doing some kind of inventory as they motor along each row of boxes, flashing out what looks like a barcode reader to inventory the goods it finds.
“But no matter what is on automatic, we’ve yet to see any evidence of any kind of rot or succumbing to time by anything we’ve found—as yet, Ma’am. I doubt that we will, but other xeno team members think differently, Ma’am,” he said, and his tone conveyed he didn’t believe those team members.
Ahead of her, he walked over to a stack of boxes, made out of
some type of metal, that stood about three feet high, and he pushed the stack enough that the top box fell off. He backed up and held out a hand for her to be still.
After almost a full minute, she could heard a something motorized coming toward them from around the corner. It was a robot. It looked like one at least, and it ignored her and the four EliteGuards who’d accompanied them as it made its way to the fallen box.
Her EliteGuard team leader had already drawn his sidearm, but she waved him to stop to watch.
The robot reached the box and seemed to be studying the situation; then it reached out a clawed appendage, picked up the box, placed it on top of the pile, and balanced it there. Two other claw hands appeared from its interior somehow, and they gently straightened the pile of boxes back into perfect alignment. As the arms withdrew back into its interior, a beam of light lanced out to read the codes on that box now replaced and then down the rest of the boxes in that row. All must have been well, as the beam of light suddenly disappeared, and the robot did a full swivel on its caterpillar treads and went back the way it had come.
“All of the cargo bays—well, the five we’ve investigated and indexed and cataloged, that is, work like this too. Interesting, yes?” he asked, and he got a nod back.
Very interesting, she thought and looked around the cargo hold. Opened up any of these as yet?” she inquired, but she felt she knew what the answer was going to be.
“Not yet, Ma’am. When we took down some to figure out how to open them—those cargo-bots appeared and re-stacked them on their own. We figure that we’ll bring in some anti-grav plates, hoist some cargo containers on same, and then move them out of the holds to see what’s in them. That’s scheduled, I know, for next month at the earliest, I believe. And yes, Ma’am, another example of ‘stumbling’ onto something that we did not foresee ahead of time. Lucky that there was no crater this time,” he said, almost apologetically.
