by Dan Worth
For those that did not succumb, their loss only strengthened our resolve. We gathered ourselves about the site of the portal, watching and waiting until the day when we shall have our chance again. We shall not make the same mistake twice.
Chapter 11
Strictly speaking, Bridgetown was not a new settlement, it had merely been built on and around the previous village that had existed in the canyon for centuries, flourishing and acquiring its new name as a result of the building of the railway network. There had been equatorial settlements on Maranos for many millennia. The tidal stresses produced by the opposing gravities of the system’s two stars had caused the planet’s midriff to bulge outwards on either side, producing a double set of striations that rose gradually upwards out of the surrounding desert towards one star or another. The higher altitudes of the plateaus and canyon formations produced a climate more conducive to life. Water was plentiful and the sheltered gorges provided a more pleasant environment than the harsh desert that surrounded them.
Bridgetown was built up the side of one of the larger canyons. The flattened canyon floor was used for farmland that fed the growing settlement that clung to the rocky wall like lichen. The town lay at the junction of five major railway lines, including the main line about the equator. The station had been built on the plain above on the western side in an ostentatious style. From its mouth, four gigantic single span bridges leapt across the settlement that nestled within the shelter of the gorge, giving the place its name and an impressive skyline.
The train rumbled slowly into the large, canopied station. Upon braking to a halt the gargantuan vehicle was set upon by gangs of Dendratha wielding powerful hoses and long brushes who now began removing the tonnes of sand that had accumulated on the train and had resisted being swept away in the slipstream. This done, the doors opened and the passengers inside were allowed to emerge from the wetly glistening carriages into the surprising coolness of the platform.
The trio of off-worlders stepped out of the first class carriage where they were greeted with a combination of stares and appreciative noises from the locals on the platform.
‘You know, this is getting to be bit irritating,’ said Rekkid testily as he lugged his bags. ‘I feel like a fairground attraction.’
‘Like I’ve said before though,’ said Steven. ‘It means that no-one Commonwealth or Arkari can sneak up on us.’
‘I don’t suppose they see many aliens out here,’ said Katherine.
‘Not since the railway was built no,’ Steven explained. ‘They regard off-worlders rather fondly here I gather; we’re seen as benefactors for bringing prosperity.’
‘So where are we staying?’ said Rekkid.
‘The House of Foreigners.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s the name the locals gave to the accommodation built for the railway construction workers who came from the Commonwealth; it’s now a hotel-cum-tourist attraction, people visit or stay there to see how us off-worlders live. It’s the only place that has thick curtains to keep out the light and suitable beds, although prepare to have people gawp at us when we’re there.’
‘Oh good,’ said Rekkid. ‘We’re staying in a zoo, wonderful. Tell me, when we have dinner will people stand and watch?’
‘Possibly, yes.’
‘Oh, marvellous. Remind me to fling my dung at them won’t you?’ he snapped and stormed off down the platform.
The hotel turned out to be only a short walk from the station, situated as it was just below the lip of the gorge. It was a collection of blocky, characterless buildings of Commonwealth construction which looked somewhat out of place amid the tiers of more organically formed Dendratha-built dwellings that clung to the sides of the precipice. Some attempt had been made to make the utilitarian architecture more attractive: trailing plants and flowers draped the sides of the hotel and a pleasant tree-filled garden had been planted about it.
The trio made their way through the steep cobbled streets that thronged with pedestrians and animal hauled carts, and tried not to attract too much attention. This proved to be a fruitless task since their bipedal alien forms stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the native crowd. By the time they reached the House of Foreigners they had attracted quite a following: a small horde of Dendratha children undulated excitedly around them and people gawped from open shop doorways and the tables of pavement cafes. One grubby infant made the mistake of grabbing Rekkid’s trouser leg with a sticky hand. Katherine saw his expression and carefully removed the grip of the small gurgling alien.
They entered the hotel-museum’s lobby, followed by their entourage, and were met with a series of excited noises and much pointing and staring from the assembled guests and visitors, who crowded them at the reception desk as Steven negotiated for the rooms.
Rekkid turned to Katherine. ‘Any idea what the Dendratha phrase for ‘sod off’ is?’ he said irritably.
‘I thought you were the language expert?’
‘That’s true. I ought to make a point of learning it.’
‘Where’s your translator?’
‘At the bottom of my bag, I can’t reach it with all this crowding.’
Katherine stumbled slightly as the press of aliens around her jostled them. Rekkid’s face wore an expression of barely concealed rage as the throng pawed at him.
‘Look, bugger off will you? And stop touching me! No, that’s mine you can’t have it. No! Look will you stop grabbing my clothes, and me? Thank you.’
Steven returned with three room keys, he saw Rekkid and laughed.
‘Having fun meeting the natives, Rekkid?’
‘Oh I’m having a ball, and please tell me that we’ll have privacy in our rooms.’
‘We will.’
‘Good. My fan club will have to stay here then.’
They pushed their way through to doors marked ‘Guests Only’ in several languages, Dendratha and Commonwealth, and hurriedly squeezed through it. Rekkid made an intensely rude Arkari gesture toward the disappointed looking crowd they left outside as the doors swung shut behind them.
The rooms turned out to be basic, but comfortable enough for a short stay, and thankfully they were not on the ground floor; there would be no chance of curious visitors peering in the windows to catch a glimpse of the aliens. They also each had balconies which looked out over the canyon. The bridges arched over in the sky above, casting long, permanent, curving shadows on the buildings below. The scene wobbled slightly in the heat haze.
They dumped their bags in their rooms then gathered in Rekkid’s. It was time to contact the survey vessel. Rekkid set his slender computer on the room’s sole table and they hunched over it. He tapped a few keys.
‘Quickchild, can you hear me?’ he said into the device.
‘Of course I can, did you have a pleasant trip?’ came the reply from the computer’s small speakers.
‘Not really, look has the Darwin arrived in the system yet?’
‘The survey vessel Darwin arrived in the system two days, three hours and fifty one minutes ago Rekkid.’
‘Good, can you put me through to their captain please?’
‘Certainly.’
There was brief pause before a slightly portly, though surprisingly young looking man wearing a HUD monocle and sporting a black neatly trimmed beard appeared on the screen.
‘Captain Spiers of the Darwin here. Good afternoon Professor Cor, Doctor O’Reilly. I was wondering when you’d call.’
‘Well here we are,’ said Rekkid. ‘Captain, we were wondering when it would be convenient for you to survey our dig site.’
‘Not for a couple of days I’m afraid, we’re scheduled to investigate the two stars in the system first.’
‘That works out fine actually, it’ll be at least two days before we reach Marantis anyway.’
‘Okay, what sort of survey would you like us to do? I wasn’t briefed fully about your project before we arrived.’
‘We’d like you to conduct a
geophysical survey of an area centred on the temple in Marantis, say, half a kilometre in radius at the highest possible resolution. We’re looking for ancient burial sites in the area. Any bodies and grave goods are likely to have decayed quiet considerably, so they might not show up quite as well as one might hope. I’d like you to look out for metallic objects and any unusually regular magnetic anomalies especially. From what I gather the Dendratha burial customs should produce roughly circular patterns in the ground at depths of up to two metres or so the magnetometer should pick that up.’
Spiers nodded. ‘Okay, that sounds feasible. We’ll do your survey before we begin covering the whole planet, it’ll give us a point to work from.’
‘Thanks. It would also help us greatly if you could present your data in an easily digestible condensed form? We’ll be working with people from the university in Marantis and they aren’t really used to too much technological terminology, all we really need is for you to give us a map with “dig here.” on it and we’ll take it from there. We ourselves will of course want the full version.’
‘Okay, that’s feasible. Will do.’
‘Have you found anything interesting here since you arrived, Captain?’
‘Yeah we have actually. We started off by having a look at the gas giants in the system, and well, they don’t fall within our equations for modelling the formation of planetary systems.’
‘Perhaps you need to revise your formulae?’ said Katherine.
‘Possibly, but we think something happened to this system, maybe a cosmic cataclysm of some kind in the distant past. The gas giants show signs of undergoing a significant loss of mass after they formed. We also noticed that there are no roaming asteroids in the system. Normally there are thousands of the things whizzing around all over the place, but we haven’t found one outside of the main belt.’
‘Show me would you?’ said Rekkid.
‘Certainly, one second.’ There was brief pause before the images appeared on the right-hand half of the screen, squashing the video feed of Captain Spiers into the left half. Rekkid's computer now displayed two schematic diagrams of the system, one how it actually was and the other how it apparently should be according to current formation theories. Spiers provided the commentary.
‘You see normally in systems that include such a closely orbiting binary of stars of equal size, any planets that form tend to orbit quite a way out, where the gravity exerted by the stars is more even. Occasionally we do find asteroids in the Lagrange points but generally the tidal forces are too great to allow for larger accretions of matter.’
‘You mean the stars would pull apart any planets before they formed?’
‘Yes that’s right. You see, according to our current equations, Maranos should orbit here, five AUs out from the two stars in a slightly elliptical orbit. As you can see there is a smaller rocky planet, Forganil, that does in fact sit one and a half AUs out and another, Istaron, than lies at around seven AUs. There’s something of a gap, so to speak.’
‘Yes I see.’
‘Then there are the gas giants. As I already mentioned they show signs of having lost something of their mass: we can tell that their moons have wandered outward.’
‘How?’
‘The innermost moons display all the signs of being subjected to intense tidal stresses and vulcanism, like Io around Jupiter, but this appears to have ceased after around a billion years. Our only conclusion is that the parent planets lost a substantial portion of their mass, causing a reduction in their gravitational attraction.’
‘That is odd. Any ideas why?’ asked Rekkid.
‘Well, one idea we did have was that the two stars were originally separate systems and that they got pulled together by each others’ gravity. It would have swept up a lot of debris in the system and burned off some the mass of the gas planets, and it could explain why Maranos is trapped in such an unusual location too.’
‘You mean it was formed in a normal orbit around one star which got perturbed by the arrival of the other?’
‘Yep, something like that, though we still can’t work out how come it didn’t end up orbiting one star or another or being destroyed altogether. We’re going to run some computer simulations once we have enough data. I’ll let you know if we draw any conclusions if you like.’
‘Yes we’d be interested, certainly.’ Rekkid looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Maybe you’ll have more of an idea of what happened after you’ve investigated Maranos fully?’
‘We hope so, yes.’
‘Well thank you Captain Spiers we’ll speak again in a couple of days, I hope you find what you’re looking for.’
‘Likewise. Talk to you soon. Spiers out.’
His image disappeared from the screen. The computer gave Rekkid the option of storing the diagrams. He pondered them for a moment and then did so.
‘Well, I must say he seemed helpful,’ said Quickchild. ‘I wonder: could be of any assistance in their studies? My instruments are of a much greater technological sophistication than theirs.’
‘You,’ said Rekkid, ‘are supposed to be keeping a low profile, remember? Given a choice I would use you, but this survey mission was booked sometime before you decided to tag along.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Quickchild. Rekkid thought the AI actually sounded rather crestfallen. ‘I shall amuse myself in other ways, Quickchild out.’
Rekkid noticed Steven looking incredulously at the screen.
‘Something I can help you with Steven?’
‘Yeah, what the hell is inside your ship Rekkid? I know Esacir vessels have some autonomy but that sounded like you were talking to a person on the other end. I thought Quickchild was just a ship name.’
‘That’s an accurate description actually. Oh what the hell. Perhaps you can all keep one more secret. Quickchild is an AI of unknown origin, the Esacir were studying him at Riianto, but he hitched a ride, and saved me from several unpleasant fates along the way. I think he has his own reason for coming here, but he’s agreed to stick around and help me. Satisfied?’ he looked at the other two’s amazed expressions.
‘You are full of surprises Rekkid,’ said Katherine.
‘Yes aren’t I just? Remember, he doesn’t exist and my ship just has some dumb personality software in its computer core, okay?’
Steven looked at Katherine and gave her a despairing look.
‘Yes Rekkid, we won’t tell anyone about your new friend, though I’m a little hurt that you didn’t mention this to me of all people,’ said Katherine.
‘I apologise Katherine, it sort of slipped my mind that’s all, what with all we’ve had to deal with these past few days. Besides, I only found out what he truly was the day we left Erais and I needed time to think about the consequences of having it around.’
‘Such as?’
‘Attracting even more unwanted attention to ourselves, for one.’
Steven stood up and stretched. ‘I think it could be a great help to us,’ he said. ‘Any ship tries to arrive unannounced and I would think that Quickchild would be able to spot it no matter how hard they tried to be discreet. I’ve heard something of the sophistication of Esacir sensor equipment. I find the presence of our fugitive friend quite re-assuring, assuming he really is on our side. You got any more secrets Rekkid? Any alien armadas up your sleeve? No?’
‘Not last time I checked,’ replied Rekkid dryly and folded away his computer.
‘Well I don’t know about anyone else,’ said Steven. ‘But I could use something to eat I’m starving.’
‘Yes, it is indeed time to feed the animals,’ said Rekkid. ‘Tell me, how many guests will be joining us? A dozen? A hundred? The entire bloody town?’
Steven chuckled. ‘Afterwards, we’ll go up onto the plateau and I’ll teach you two to shoot those guns I gave you.’
‘Ah, shooting things,’ said Rekkid with an evil gleam in his eye. ‘Now there’s a thought.’
Katherine and Rekkid sat on the rocks that lit
tered this part of the plateau. The station lay a little way off, further up the road, and the sounds of hammering could be heard coming from the nearby sidings. Steven was down in the town buying some assorted things to shoot at; fruit, cans, whatever he could find. He would be back shortly. For now, the two archaeologists sat and admired the view.
The massif curved away into the distance, its cracked, bulging surface sloping down into the distant expanse of desert that lay on the shimmering horizon. The greener valleys clove the baked sandy plateau in numerous places, providing shelter and respite for life in the baking wilderness.
‘Rekkid?’ said Katherine.
‘Mmm?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Quickchild?’
‘Didn’t I?’
‘No you didn’t, you know that. Stop pretending that you don’t.’
‘Oh all right… I apologise.’
‘Apology accepted, but you haven’t answered my question.’
Rekkid sighed and scratched his cheek thoughtfully.
‘Well for one, I wasn’t sure about Steven at first, and I didn’t want to go shooting my mouth off within earshot of someone who might report everything to the powers that be. Quickchild’s capture would be quite a coup for the weapons research programs, of that I have no doubt.’
‘That’s true, so why didn’t you tell me in private then?’
‘Well, I wanted to get my facts right first. I’d hate it if you thought me a fool.’
‘Rekkid, come on. You know I respect you.’
‘I know but… there’s something about Quickchild that started ringing alarm bells as soon as I saw him. He’s connected to whatever’s in that log you know? He said so himself, but he can’t fully remember the details. Also there’s something else. How familiar are you with myths and legends from our culture?’
‘I’m a little rusty to be honest, that’s more your forte.’
‘Have you heard the story of the War of Two Brothers?’
‘Yes, yes I have. I thought it was the Arkari equivalent of King Arthur. Just a myth.’
