Nandi was hit by a dank smell as her light illuminated a chamber about the size of a two car garage. “There’s an open space here,” she called back. “The ceiling’s just as low though. She sat cross legged at the other side of the room as the others filed in. Their combined head lights illuminated each other’s bright eyes and dirty knees. “The way out’s over there,” Nandi said, nodding towards the wall that was on her left as she had entered the chamber. That opening was no larger than the tunnel they had just used, and she crawled through it without waiting for anyone else to beat her to it. “Whoever they were, they were short.” The dirt layer on the floor gradually grew thinner. Nandi noted that there were no footprints in it. So far so good: no animals. This passage was only about five meters long, and then she was in an open space again. The far side was around seven meters away. Not only was the ceiling twice as high, but she couldn’t see either end of it!
“Much more room in this one,” she called back as she stood up.
“Even I can stand in here,” John called back to the others as he rose to his feet and rubbed the small of his back. They looked along the chamber’s length. It was long; both directions led into murky darkness that seemed to have no end. “That direction leads further into the structure. I say we go that way,” John said.
“I agree.” The others appeared one by one, and they moved further down. Once everyone was inside, they shuffled slowly and carefully along the passageway.
“Look at the walls and ceiling!” Grace said. Patches of gold shone. Every seven meters along the ceiling was a beam, carved from the stone. These formed a square, together with the sides, each one of which had a cornice of gold around the top. The ceiling and walls bore only patches of their former gold leaf-covered glory, fragments of which lay on the dirty floor. There were half-height doorways, like the one they had come through, spaced every few meters, for as far as they could see into the gloom.
“This was likely a very high ceiling for these beings,” Michael observed. Nandi set down another yellow glow stick.
“Your footsteps are uncovering ceramic tiles,” Weber said as they slowly proceeded.
After another fifty meters of identical corridor, there was a larger door on the left. “I’m going to take a look in there,” Michael said, ducking inside. “Much larger room in here. There’s rust all over the floor—maybe machinery rotted away to dust—and at the back are three ramps that go down to God knows where. The walls and ceiling are tiled, not gold.”
“I want to explore this entire place,” Grace said. “There’s obviously a deeper part to it.”
“I think we should keep going, further into the center of the structure,” Nandi said. Michael ducked back out of the side chamber and John peeked into it as the group moved off again. They continued in their careful pace past more doorways on both sides. Quick reconnoiters revealed all the spaces to be about the same size, with openings to the rear.
“Check that out,” Nandi said, looking up at and illuminating a white rectangle with red symbols on it. Some of the paint had peeled away and cracked. “A sign, probably, that’s survived as long as some cave paintings on Earth. It probably says something mundane like ‘Exit’.”
"I have to keep pinching myself to see if this is real," John said. "Am I really exploring a lost city on an alien world?"
"Let's hope it is actually lost," Michael said. "I hope there aren't any cave dwellers who decided to stay behind."
"No kidding," Haruka said.
"How far do we want to go?" Weber asked.
"As far as we can," Nandi said. "For one thing, we're probably only gonna come this way once, and for another we're more likely to find some form of intel the harder we look."
"Watch your heads," Oliver said, ducking around a sharp spike protruding nearly half a meter from the ceiling. The floor below it was covered with brown and gray discoloration. "Probably an old light fitting."
The team shuffled slowly forward, staring in wonder at the endless parade of doorways. Some still bore fragments of what could once have been hinges.
"I wonder what went on here?" Daniel said. "Living quarters? Administration?"
"Maybe religion," Nikolai said. "This was probably the most important building in the whole place."
"Unless they had separation of church and state," Jake said.
"Then maybe this was just the church!"
"Heh."
Nandi added another glowstick to the line that now resembled cats' eyes in a road at night, stretching into the distance.
"It's much cooler in here," Weber said. "Quite a relief."
"Look at the mosaic on the wall," Grace said.
"Looks like two slugs dancing with each other," Nikolai.
"There's another of those rooms with the ramps at the back", Michael said, peering into the next doorway on the left.
"Ooh, check this out!" Nandi exclaimed. "This is… huge! And totally different!”
“Whoa!” John said. The corridor intersected yet another, the latter of much greater height and possessed of an arched ceiling. “Looks like it might be circular,” John said. Looking both left and right along it, they could only see perhaps twenty meters before it curved out of sight.
“Your voice is echoing,” Nandi said, her own doing likewise. She stepped into the curved passageway. “Holy cow! There’s… just a big space right there!” What she had thought to be the opposite wall was in fact just the column between two arches. These repeated around the inner circumference of the corridor, fading away into the gloom. What lay beyond—
Nandi stepped gingerly across to one of the arches. “Hello?”
“Hello, hello, lo, lo,” the replies came.
John stepped into the next arch. “I can just about see the other side,” he said. His light shone on a vast circular floor mosaic, stretching to the dim ghosts of arches on the opposite side, perhaps forty meters away. He walked out onto the pattern of cracked tiles, with a millimeter of grout in between, and looked up. “We need more lights,” he echoed.
“Wow!” “Holy crap!” “Good Lord!” came the exclamations as the others stepped into the giant chamber.
“Point your pocket flashlights up,” Weber said. As they winked on, the inside of a dome appeared, its sides rising vertically for a short distance before becoming a hemisphere.
“It’s like a cathedral,” Grace said.
“There’s another row of arches above this one,” Nandi observed. “Then, a row of large golden diamonds, and… writing everywhere!”
“Unreal,” Oliver said, looking up. He removed a thumb-sized video camera from his pocket, pressed it, and pointed it upwards. A midair display about the size of a cigarette packet extended from its left side. He zoomed in. “I can make out the letters, which look like they’re carved into the stone and then painted white, but they’re total gibberish to me. There are also boxes containing symbols.”
“Photograph all of it,” Nandi said.
“The very top has something like a compass rose. See,” Michael said, pointing to it. “You can just about see it’s not peeling, like the diamond patterns are, which says to me it’s solid gold.”
“Might indicate traveling was very important to them,” Oliver said.
“Good point.”
“The same thing’s repeated on the floor,” John said. “An identical rose in the mosaic, except it’s white.”
“Must be a site of worship,” Weber said. “I bet if we explored the perimeter passage, we’d find ways out in all four compass directions, going to who knows where.”
“I’d dearly love to check this whole place out,” Haruka said. “It’ll probably take swarms of microdrones just to map it all, and generations to decipher who the builders were. I’m sure a linguist, or maybe a team of them, could figure out the writing, given enough samples and a reference text if we could find one.”
“I don’t doubt that they were highly intelligent,” John said. “This place reminds me of Pompeii, except there
aren’t meters of volcanic dust and figures frozen in place.”
“Or the Incas, or any other former civilization that left its mark in constructions perfectly preserved,” Oliver said.
“I think we should get out of here,” Weber said. “This was a hell of an expedition, but I feel like we’re pressing our luck if we stay any longer.”
“Yeah. Just getting the rest of the inside of the dome on camera,” Daniel said.
An awed hush descended on the crew as they looked up, taking in the enormity of the space. Then, a sound like rocks falling on rocks echoed from somewhere far away, reverberating through countless deep, dark places, and ringing from the acoustic chamber the dome formed. The crew members illuminated each other’s frightened faces in fleeting glimpses with their headlights as they scanned about frantically for the source.
“Crap, let’s go,” Grace said.
They headed back towards the end of the passage they had come from. The trail of glow sticks stretched out into the darkness, and they walked quickly now, not stopping to look around.
“I’m glad they thought to make the ceiling higher here,” Michael said.
“No kidding. If they were like half our size, this would be a grand, wide passageway. Now we know why: it leads to the dome.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
"That was a hell of a day trip," Jake said, as they ate dinner in the upper passenger compartment, to a virtual glass view of a beautiful Serenity Bay sunset.
"No kidding," Captain Weber said. He held a glass of brandy, swirling it absentmindedly.
"Are you like some sort of pirate captain, there?" Daniel teased, eyeing the drink.
"First off, it's not rum. It's the finest thirty-year-old brandy. The IDSA was only going to stretch to ten-year-old, so I brought my own. And second, I'm only a captain of pirates if you guys consider yourselves pirates!"
Nandi smiled.
"There's going to be plenty of looting and pillaging when we track those suckers down," John said, with a hint of darkness. "Then we will quite properly be interstellar pirates."
The sober weight of John's tone deflated the merry mood.
Michael sighed. "I wish we could get these cave paintings off to someone on Earth who knows about these things, like an Egyptologist or something."
"Yeah, bad timing with the courier probes. Won't have another chance to send them anything for a month," Weber said. The fixed, forward-facing arrangement of the seats made eating and conversing difficult.
“Where the heck does one even start with deciphering an alien lexicon?” Mark asked.
“Well, what about the kind of approach by which we discovered the city in the first place?” Haruka said. “Some kind of pattern recognition analysis. Or maybe we can find out the statistical occurrence of the most often used symbols, and see if they match up to the same kind of stats for letter usage in our language.”
“For that matter, figure out what all the symbols are, and hence how large the alphabet is,” Oliver said. “If it’s like the Chinese one, we don’t stand much of a chance.”
“I’d have to agree,” Nandi said.
“Let’s just do a hivemind number on it,” Weber said. “We’ll all just start examining it, and let the ideas come to us. Often, with seemingly intractable problems, the answer comes out of left field. So, let’s all spend the rest of the night looking the images over, and then sleep on it. We have more than enough computing power and coding ability on board to hammer away at it once we come up with the right approach.”
“Makes sense,” Daniel said.
“Well, I can see one thing from looking at it right now,” John said. “Ignore the writing for now. The boxes with the symbols in them. If I’m not mistaken, the first symbol’s a stick figure. Of a human.”
“You’re right!” Grace said. “Then next to it are three concentric circles, each offset to the left within its parent, then what looks like a 3D cube, and finally a series of short straight lines, connected to each other at odd angles. All the boxes contain the same things.”
“Well, I think we know where to focus first,” Weber said.
Oliver asked the question that weighed on everyone. “So, are the stick figures them or us?”
* * * *
“The only thing missing is a dog, running along beside us, busily sniffing everything in sight,” Nandi said. White crested waves crashed onto the shore, as though the sea were constantly trying to leap onto land but never quite making it. “I’ve grown to love this walk. After this pebbly section, there’s another rocky part for a few hundred meters, which goes up a ways. There’s a cliff that gives a good view up and down the coast. Then more pebbles, as it curves around to the north, where there’s another headland of the same granite or whatever this is. That’s as far as I’ve been so far.” The blustery wind made the bottom of her red coat flap.
“I wonder if there are hot springs up in the jungle, fed by the geological heating,” John said. “It would be gorgeous to bathe in them when the weather’s like this at sea level.” He was bundled up tight in a ski jacket. “If this place has to have Iceland’s climate, it should also give us Iceland’s amenities!”
“Yeah,” Nandi said, wistfully. “So, how are you holding up?”
“Frustrated as hell, like everybody else. I wish we would have gotten answers yesterday, though I have to say I wasn’t expecting our own little Macchu Picchu-like place to give up the goods. Whoever lived there is long gone. My money’s on them being somewhere around Hydra, and the Captain will probably want to leave tomorrow if we haven’t come up with anything.”
“At least we have enough supplies for an extended tour of the moons. We might pick up a stray radio signal and figure out which one our little green alien friends are on.”
“Yeah. But supposing for a minute that the stick figures represent us…”
“How on Earth would they?” Nandi interjected.
“Hear me out. Supposing they do, what might the rest of the symbols mean? The concentric circles, the cube, and the lines?”
“The lines might be a diagram of a cluster of stars, or even Hydra’s moons in a particular orbital arrangement.”
“Very true. That one’s worth pursuing. We can run searches to test both those scenarios.” John nodded and smiled widely. “In fact, that’s the best idea, nay only idea, I’ve heard yet. Let’s head back. I want to check it out.”
* * * *
“So, we’re assuming the diagram’s a constellation, as seen from here,” Oliver said. “That ought to be easy enough to find, if it exists, since it’s just a projection of a shape onto a sphere that represents the sky. Although the distances of the stars could vary wildly. It’s still just a brute force algorithm, though.” He shrugged. “Code it up, John. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes at most to run through all the combinatories.”
Half an hour of programming and five minutes of searching later: “Bingo!” John said in triumph. “It exactly matches the stars Rho Persei, Zeta Aurigae, Gamma Tauri, Gamma Ceti, Beta Herculis, Delta Eridani, and Eta Pegasi. And what’s more, Delta Eridani has a habitable planet!”
* * * *
“That’s some awesome work,” Captain Weber said as the crew stood at the front of the upper passenger compartment. “No idea if they took their prisoners there, but Delta Eridani’s only thirty light years from Earth, and twelve from here, which is practically next door in cosmic terms.”
“So, we go home, and get them to mount a mission there,” Michael said. “Although, they’d have to get Falcon ready in the same kind of crazy time frame that it took to prep Atlas. But, we did it once…”
“And nearly died because it was botched,” Nikolai grumbled.
“How many warp restarts do we have left?” Jake asked.
“Two,” Oliver said.
“Do we dare just go there now, ourselves?” Haruka asked. “It would only leave one restart left to get home, which is pretty dangerous I’ll admit, but it would mean we can
check it out in days instead of months.”
“It’s possible,” Daniel said. “Our esteemed leader will have to decide if it’s worth the risk, given that the warp drive is still sucking down too much power.”
“We could go to Hydra and then Delta Eridani,” John suggested. “The cost/benefit seems like it would be worth it, since no warp is required for the first trip.”
“Although the extra would add a dozen light years of travel plus the other restart,” Oliver said. “I’ll have to run a projection of how much power margin that would leave us. My guess is it’ll be too tight.”
Captain Weber nodded. “Okay, Oliver. Assuming it’s not going to put us in danger, I’m leaning towards the two-stop trip. I’ll make my decision, with all factors in for consideration, tomorrow.”
* * * *
“Running the preflights,” Jake said, watching a readout in front of him. All were strapped in and ready to go.
“This whole thing’s ridiculous,” Michael said. “Vissan’s bigger than Mars, Entente is only a little smaller, and Celeste and Hyperion are both bigger than our moon. And then there are another thirty-one satellites. And we’re supposed to find them how?”
“Then what do you suggest?” Weber said, not even bothering to conceal his annoyance with Michael’s negativity.
“Well…” said Michael, buying time, not having expected the rebuke, “keep looking on Epsilon?”
“Flogging a dead horse,” Oliver said. “There’s nothing more we can do there. I agree with the Captain; we should be searching the rest of the Constantine system. As we already established, they used a reaction drive of some kind, so those are the kinds of distances they likely traveled. Not a hop to another point on Tectonia, and probably not a warp to Delta Eridani or some other star, since they had eyes on Epsilon. In fact, that rules out Delta Eridani entirely, since communications from any sensors that have been watching Epsilon wouldn’t have even got there until twelve years after the fact, and we’ve only had missions coming here for eight years!”
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