The Lost (The Maauro Chronicles Book 3)

by Edward McKeown

  We reached the foot of a sky-soaring tower. From what I could see only the lower stories were occupied. “The technology for pumping water and waste around something so tall hasn’t been reacquired as yet.” I said.

  Maauro nodded. “They are only now reacquiring electrical power and their mechanical skills are very uneven, as you would expect. Some rediscoveries are more fortunate or easy then others.” Military preparations were going on all around us. Wheeled guns were being towed by on an elevated highway by a local herbivore. Small armored vehicles similar to the one we came in were lined up in the plaza next to the tower. Some trailed what Maauro confirmed where hydrocarbons, indicating fossil fuels of some kind. Everywhere brightly-colored infantry moved. Evidently guerillas wars weren’t an issue, or these were dress uniforms. Given the practical look of the weapons everyone had, I didn’t think so.

  Another vehicle moved smoothly onto the plaza and this one caused me a double-take. It looked of modern design like a Confed air transport, but a second look told me it as an ancient machine restored to some use with a combustion engine. Once it had clearly been meant to fly. Now it rolled on its ground wheels, but it looked quicker and more efficient than any of the recent make. Given the high tech metals and ceramics of its body, it might have been the most effective fighting machine present, for all that the gun in its turret looked more like the wheeled ones being pulled by animals.

  Our young officer made a gesture and gave a sharp command. We followed him into the sky tower, past groups of other soldiers and what might have been Seddonese civilians, who stared at us. We were ushered into what was clearly officer country and passed from company to battalion and to regiment in a tedious process. We retained the original quartet of Seddonese we came with.

  “Have you mastered their language?” I asked Maauro when we were given food and water and a place on a couch, by a window, overlooking the plaza and elevated roadway. Maauro checked the food and opined it safe. The officer and guards took some themselves and sat a distance away, watching us.

  “Only basics,” she said, drinking some water for appearances sake. “If someone points at or references an object in a clear way, I acquire a noun. However the word for food could be specific to this bread-like substance, or might mean food generally. It will take me only a little while longer to be able to do simple sentences. Minutes after that I would be fluent, but I am not sure I want them to realize that I know their language just yet.”

  “What have you picked up?”

  “The guards are very reticent, they have just been told to take us to various officers of increasing rank and have reported the circumstances of our meeting. The senior officer we last saw directed them to take us to what I believe is a scientific or political leader.

  “They aren’t acting like people who have never seen an alien before,” I said, “They were surprised, but unless I am not reading them at all correctly, they didn’t seem shocked or overly frightened.”

  “Your observation is sound. They are handling us as if they knew the capabilities of a human male and a small female. Yes, I believe they know of other races. They either know of the New Hope, the Isadora or perhaps humans survive here still.”

  “Yes. First contact is usually a civilization-shaking event.”

  “As it was the first time our kinds first met,” a voice said in badly accented Standard.

  We both turned to see one of the purple-eyed, green-skinned Seddonese standing near us. He wore loose robes and cut a professorial figure.

  “You speak our language,” I said, rising. Maauro stood as well and in the background the guards also climbed to their feet.

  “Poorly,” he said. “I am Dr. Parisha, a language master and I welcome you to Seddon. I speak the languages of my kind, the corrupted language of our extinct enemies and the main tongue of the humans who first came here so long ago in the New Hope.”

  “And you learned Gal-Standard,” Maauro said, “from Professor Bexlaw’s expedition from the Isadora.”

  Parisha looked at her in what seemed mild surprise that she addressed him. “Yes, it would seem that disaster, unintended, but disaster nonetheless, is always heralded by the arrival of your people.”

  “Trouble?” I thought. “What do you mean?” I asked, speaking slowly as he concentrated on my words.

  “First,” Parisha said, “tell me why you are here. Then if I deem it safe I will bring you to someone who can speak to you in greater ease and answer your questions.” Parisha was looking at me, I assumed because I was older and male he thought I was in charge. That was fine. It was always useful to divert attention off of Maauro, though nonhumans rarely detected that she was an android.

  “We were hired by the family of one of the Professor’s students to find and recover them,” I said. “The expedition was overdue and was not supposed to have left charted space in the first place. It was feared they were all lost.”

  Parisha was visibly surprised, if I interpreted his body language correctly. “You are the most diligent of rescuers to have come so far across the stars. Is the one you seek a prince that such an expedition was commissioned?”

  “Let’s just say his grandmother is no one to be trifled with,” I said.

  Parisha gave us a long and searching look. “It may be that you can rescue more than just the survivors of Bexlaw’s group. Please follow me.”

  Before I could follow-up on “survivors” Parisha turned and walked off. We rose to follow him and the three guards and their officer trailed us. We went down a hallway, then up a broad flight of stairs.

  “Look,” Maauro said, as we reached the top of the staircase to face a large open room before towering glass walls. I spotted what she was gesturing at immediately. A human male, gray-haired, middle-aged and wearing a Seddonese military uniform, stood with several of the green-skinned people deep in discussion. Other than the unusual feathery-appearing haircut, he would not have attracted a second glance on Earth. I noted the braid and decorations on his uniform that suggested he was a senior officer. He spotted us at that moment and stared at us.

  “Come, come,” Parisha said.

  “This is good news,” I said to Maauro as we walked on in a widening pool of silence and stares. “A human, and he appeared to have both rank and respect among the natives.”

  Parisha did not comment on our observation, but we marched steadily down a series of halls until we came to one with bright, electric lights. Here an escalator took us further.

  “Welcome to our government center,” Parisha said with evident pride. “We have restored many levels and functions of it. This was once a hospital and functions as such again.”

  We emerged onto a guarded floor to see more humans, a man and woman. It concerned me a little, the local humans might spot that Maauro was not one. Still, they had been out of the galaxy for eight hundred or more years. They’d have little idea of what to expect of a human mutation.

  The humans called out questions to Parisha in a language I didn’t know, but he waved them off. We entered what was clearly a medical area with the usual and recognizable equipment of hospitals. It seemed that scrubs, gurneys and white coats were a staple of healers everywhere. Seddonese walked about, intent on their tasks, or giving us curious looks.

  We came to a door that Parisha knocked on, then opened. The guards deployed behind us and we followed Parisha in.

  Inside, a Morok lay in a bed. I thought it was a younger female. The blue-skinned goblin-like being was propped up on pillows, connected to an IV, and looked at us with bright-red eyes.

  “Please God,” she said in Gal-Standard. “Tell me you’re from the Confederacy.”

  “We are,” I assured her, “Captain Wrik Trigardt, SS Stardust, and Maauro.

  She coughed. “Ezlen Elgee from the Bexlaw Expedition.”

  “You’re sick, Miss Elgee?” I asked.

  She nodded her
head. “It’s a rare form of genetic disorder among Moroks. I need general spectrum genix drugs, but ours were destroyed with the ship.”

  “Destroyed?” Maauro said.

  “Do you have any with you?” she asked. The desperate hope on the young face was almost painful to see.

  “Yes,” I said, “aboard ship.”

  She struggled with her emotions for a few seconds. Moroks cry like humans do and tears trickled down the slate-blue cheeks. “Could you send for some? I’m in a bad way—”

  “Not necessary,” Maauro said. “I too have a condition that requires genix general spectrums. I always carry a supply with me.”

  Maauro, of course, knew the formula and must have been working on creating them inside her body from the second the girl revealed her problem. She’d have created the container and slid it into the pocket of her jumpsuit. Likely the container was still warm.

  Elgee gave a cry of joy. Parisha demanded something in his native tongue. Elgee rattled something back to him as Maauro handed the girl both the container and a glass of water.

  “This is a standard ten day supply,” Maauro said. “If you tell me more of your condition, I will come up with a course of therapy for you after I conduct some research. My memory is eidetic and I can supply the formulation to your doctors here.”

  Elgee, between tears, relayed this to Parisha, who demanded to know if the new wonder medicine would work for his kind.

  Maauro demurred. “Likely but it will require study. The drugs work on almost any creature that uses DNA or something similar. But as yet I know little of your biology. It will work on the local humans.”

  “Maauro is our ship’s medic,” I added as Parisha stared at her.

  “Impressive in one so young.”

  “She’s older than she looks,” I added, reluctant to out and out lie. “The work can be done. If not now by us, then by properly trained scientists who will follow us here, if there is a desire for trade and normal interstellar relations with our Confederacy.”

  “It seems,” Parisha struggled some, his grip on Gal-Standard slipping due to excitement, “that an age of wonders is upon us again. But, as always, it is on the doorway of such that the ax falls on us. It seems the doom of my people.”

  I turned to Elgee, who had finished the water and pills and lay back against her pillows, looking exhausted. “What’s happened here? Where’s Bexlaw and the rest of the expedition. What happened to the Isadora?”

  For a second I was afraid the young Morok might not be up to answering. She was after all, a young being who’d just received a reprieve from a death sentence.

  She drew a deep breath. “Professor Bexlaw and most of the expedition are dead.” She was dry-eyed now, but grief still showed on her face. “Our ship, Isadora, was destroyed by a reactivated ancient war machine of Kolzi, that’s the next planet out in the system.

  “Ancient war machine?” Maauro asked. I wanted to know who had survived from the expedition but bided my time.

  “I know,” Elgee said. “It sounds mad to think a war machine from five hundred years ago could still be dangerous.”

  “Less than you think,” I said dryly.

  “We found it underground. The Seddonese military had uncovered one of their old subterranean forts shortly before we arrived and in a great state of preservation. They couldn’t do anything with the technology, then we came. We were greeted like rescuers out of a myth. Evidently after the war, they’d sent New Hope back toward Earth with a mixed Seddonese and human crew, hoping for help. The ship jumped out but nothing was heard of until—”

  “We know about the lifeboat,” I said.

  Elgee looked startled but continued. “What do you know about the war here?”

  “Assume we know nothing,” Maauro replied. I shifted in impatience, but allowed her to lead the conversation.

  Elgee nodded. “Kolzi, the next planet out, was a colony of Seddon. Bitter irony, Kolzi means Beautiful House of the Winter Sun. The Kolzi colony fell into a dictatorship generations before New Hope arrived. A dictatorship so thorough, that it rewrote their history. The Kolizens were like inmates in an asylum. All they knew of the Seddonese was the twisted fictional history the ruling family fed them. They produced a huge military, while the democracies on Seddon bickered about how to deal with it.

  “The situation was heading for a war, with one side armed and prepared for it and with the other, even though they had vaster resources, in a desperate scramble to catch up. Then New Hope came into the system. Her stardrive wasn’t like one of ours and she’d wandered in hyperspace with far more time out of the universe than we spend in a transit. Best guess is her various transits took her over three hundred years.

  “She encountered a Seddonese ship and was escorted here. That was too much for the Kolzi and their mad rulers. They attacked, fearing that with stardrive technology the Seddonese would dominate the future.

  “The Kolzi came down in waves, mobile land forts like ours, small tanks and armored vehicles and then something uniquely theirs. Giant machines in humanoid-shape, weapons of terror, thirty-meters tall. These were targeted at the civilian centers, spreading plague, chemical and radiological warfare. They weren’t robots. Each contained a Kolzi soldier mated to it as part of its CPU. Rumor was that they were suicide warriors. Once they became joined to the giant fighting machines, they seldom, if ever, came out.

  “We found one of those machines in the fort. It was undamaged. The pilot must have died when it landed. The Seddonese asked if we could get it going. They wanted to use it for construction and to excavate the rest of the underground fort, looking for more treasure.” The last came out dripping bitterness.

  “Bexlaw wanted to help. We’d been giving them information, technology and medicine from when we arrived but we had no heavy machinery with us. We did have a portable nuclear APU on the Isadora.

  “Bexlaw and Maximillian from our expedition worked with the Seddonese and hooked the, well they now call it the Destroyer, up to the APU. The auxiliary power unit had plenty of juice and the machine started up in just a few minutes.”

  “Maximillian Vaughn?” I interjected. “Is he alive?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered. “For his sake I hope not. You see he was in the machine when it reactivated. I heard him scream, saw wires and cables wrapping themselves around him as if they were alive. Then the chest cavity of it closed up and he was gone.

  “It started moving…we didn’t know… we didn’t know. It began firing almost immediately, attacking everything in sight. Seddonese started dying all around us. It must have released some bacteriological agent, or a poison gas specific for them. We fled, alerted the military but it was hopeless. When the machine emerged, it simply destroyed them. It must have either drained the reactor or incorporated it in its huge body.

  “We called for the Isadora, for help. But Isadora tried to flee. They were too close. The machine fired some form of beam weapon, blew off part of the stern and Isadora came down in a fireball, wiped out a town. Only I, Tomas Schim, and a Frokossi named Fitaz from the expedition made it out of the underground fort alive.”

  “Bexlaw,” I said, “was a reckless idiot.”

  “We cannot evade our own responsibility,” Parisha said. I’d almost forgotten he was in room. “It was we who pressed Bexlaw. He’d opened a box of wonders for us and like greedy children we kept pressing for more. Some feared a future where we would be wholly at the mercy of aliens, not even humans who we at least knew, but true aliens, who would dole out such technology as they chose to for us and at what prices and conditions we could not tell. We had been a great people and we sought to regain as much of that as we could before we came face to face with your Confederacy. Remember that the humans who came here were refugees from the cruelty of your own species. We did not know what to expect. Some feared the worst.

  “Bexlaw may ha
ve been a brilliant professor, but he was a child in politics. It was easy to trade him our past for his help in securing what we thought would be our future. In doing so, we may have killed both our kinds.”

  “The Destroyer,” Eljee said, “with Maximillian aboard as its new brain, has rampaged through their country for over a year, a festering vector of disease, poison and radiation. Their military has only slowed it, never turned it aside and they’ve have had to abandon city after city to its advance with untold casualties.”

  “Good God,” I said.

  “The only good news is that it seems to have exhausted it supplies of chemical and biological weapons,” Parisha added. “Still, with its size and other weapons, it remains a deadly foe. Our end is only delayed not averted. We have been driven north here to the capitol on this peninsula. Some have escaped past it into wilderness areas, but they have no future beyond mere survival there.”

  “Do you have weapons?” Elgee asked.

  “We’re not a warship,” I said slowly. “But we have weapons and a few tricks up our sleeve that may come in useful.”

  “If you can help,” she said fiercely, “then you must. We brought this on them, just when they were beginning to recover: tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, dead. The only reason it hasn’t been worse if they’ve been able to outrun it until now.”

  I reached for the water and another glass and poured some for myself, my head buzzing with all I had learned. “We were sent, hired in fact, to find the expedition, but specifically Maximillian, by his grandmother, Shasti Rainhell. Our first job would be to determine if he is still alive inside that thing.”

  She made a Morok gesture I guessed was a shrug. “We don’t know. If he is, then he has no control over it. Max was…is… a nice young man. He wouldn’t hurt anything if he could avoid it. He fled Olympia to get away from his father and that whole way of life. We tried reaching him by radio, no response. No one who’s gotten near the machine has survived trying to communicate with it.”