Pelquin's Comet

by Ian Whates

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Old Oily is now one of the big noises in the ‘greater sharing’ integration programme, and he has been persuaded…” Bren snorted. “… to arrange for the Comet to be officially registered as one of the ships involved.”

  “You mean that, as of now, we’re all on official government business.”

  “To an extent… yes.”

  “Good Lord,” the doc muttered.

  “I know,” Pelquin said. “It just goes to prove that there really is a first time for everything.”

  This time they were in RzSpace for a while, and it showed. It wasn’t that passion and urgency deserted you at the flick of a switch, more that it seeped away bit by bit, as if by osmosis; compulsion and the ability to feel anything strongly leaked away, like colour draining from an old photograph left exposed to the full glare of sunlight. Drake tended to look back on extended visits to RzSpace as time spent in a sepia world.

  Had he been a religious man, he might even have suggested that when you entered RzSpace you were stripped of your soul, only reconnecting with that most intangible facet of self on returning to normal space. RzSpace possessed an implacable sense of dispassion which seeped into a person to replace all the intensity that bled away.

  Scientists insisted that this much-reported phenomenon had no substance in fact, but Drake wasn’t so sure. He believed himself a rational man capable of telling the difference between delusion and perception, and he had experienced the effects of RzSpace too often to discount it so glibly.

  RzSpace was a mathematical construct that demonstrably worked but which continued to defy physical definition. Turn a ship’s monitors on in RzSpace and all they reported was static. The same was true of every type of sensor, receiver, collection device or monitor, in fact for anything that mankind had yet thought to try. All produced the same result: nothing. Abstract formulae remained the only quantifiable definition available.

  On this trip to date, Pelquin’s Comet had done little more than dip in and out of RzSpace in short bursts, giving few opportunities for the malaise to take hold. This final stretch, however, was a little longer, and Drake was treated to one of the most blatant examples of the phenomenon he had yet seen.

  When he might otherwise have expected to see excitement among the crew ratchet upwards, the opposite held true. Within moments of emerging into normal space, however, all that changed. Enthusiasm that had been suppressed in Rz rekindled. Bren in particular seized upon this return of spirit. Drake heard her laughing, quickly joined by somebody else – Nate, he thought.

  Drake was one of the first to the bridge following the return to normal space, Bren and Nate close behind. Pelquin had announced in advance that as soon as they came out of Rz he was going to activate the Ptarmigan, and everyone was curious to see the cloaking device in action. They needn’t have bothered; it proved to be something of an anti-climax, in that there was no discernible sign of it working at all.

  “Is that it?” Bren asked. “No fireworks, no sizzle of energy, no strange new vibration in the air, not even a tingle?”

  Ignoring her, Pelquin told Anna to activate the viewing screens.

  Drake had been on ships where the entire front-facing wall would turn virtual-transparent and display a magnified image of what lay ahead; but an old comet class cargo hauler enjoyed no such luxuries. Instead, screens in front of the pilot seats blinked to life – three virtual windows, all currently showing the same section of space dominated by a blue and white orb, still too distant to discern much beyond that.

  “At least in Rz the monitors go blank so you know that something’s happening,” Bren muttered. “I reckon they’ve sold you a dud, Pel. I mean, how do you even tell when this Ptarmigan is on or off?”

  “Have a little faith, Bren. The systems say it’s on line, so let’s go with that, okay?”

  “If you insist. When somebody takes a shot at us the first time we try to sneak past them, it’ll be too late for me to say ‘I told you so’.”

  “Magnify,” Pelquin instructed Anna, again ignoring Bren. The image jumped closer, gaining definition. It now looked like a dark blue ball over which somebody had melted a candle, the melted wax congealing to form a tattered and irregular white coating.

  “And again.” The image leapt closer still, now filling the majority of all three screens. Brown and green could now be seen amongst the blue; land masses glimpsed in the cloud breaks.

  “Wow,” Anna said.

  Most there were hardened spacers who had approached dozens if not hundreds of worlds before, but this was a little different: a virgin Earth-type planet. No ships coming and going, no orbital stations, no satellites to clutter the approaches, no radio chatter or electronic pollution bleeding out into the vastness of space, no cities clustered around its rivers and coasts, no industry, no traffic control to identify incoming ships and guide them in, and no infonet. An unblemished world, with none of the trappings of civilisation, good or bad, just a great big blue globe swathed in a mantle of clouds, serenely following its predestined course around the sun.

  Even Nate, who had been here before, seemed a little awed. All of them knew they were unlikely to encounter anything quite like this again.

  “It’s almost spooky,” Anna said quietly.

  “But at the same time majestic and quite, quite beautiful,” Bren added. “It’s like a new Eden.”

  Drake had a feeling the name might stick, at least for those aboard the Comet.

  Pelquin clapped his hands, just the once but loudly, which caused Anna to jump in her seat and effectively broke the mood. He then rubbed palms and fingers together, saying, “And it will all become even more beautiful once we reach the cache. Focus, people, focus!”

  Suddenly Anna was all business again, reeling off length of time before they hit the planet’s outer atmosphere, expected time until landing, and confirming systems’ status. The screens returned to normal magnification and others started to drift away, doubtless to make their own preparations for planet fall.

  Drake stayed at the back of the cramped cockpit, mesmerised by this marbled jewel suspended in space. He was a little surprised when, after disappearing with the others, Leesa returned to nudge him and hold out a bulb of chilled water.

  What was this, a peace offering? He accepted with a quiet ‘thank you’, to which she nodded before turning her attention to the screens.

  Careful it isn’t poisoned, Mudball cautioned.

  Leesa stayed to watch. He sipped at the water, making a conscious effort not to stare at her, determined not to turn her fetching him a drink into a big deal.

  The world – Eden – drew rapidly closer, and it wasn’t long before they’d established a low orbit while Anna and Pelquin pinpointed the cache location based on Nate’s coordinates. Once that was done the ship began its descent. Although she could operate in atmosphere when required, the Comet was most at home in the far rarer medium of space. As with most interstellar ships, aerodynamics had been a low priority in her design, which left her with a high sink rate, especially in lower atmosphere. Descent was therefore far more rapid than it would have been with a purpose-built atmosphere-loving aeroplane. Drake should probably have gone and strapped himself in somewhere, but he stayed where he was, keen to watch this new world reveal itself as the veils of cloud drew apart. Leesa stayed too, possibly out of ‘anything you can do’ determination, though in fairness she seemed as absorbed by the images on the screen as he was.

  Watching the ocean and then the vast landmass rush towards them, and considering all that this world represented, Drake’s thoughts wandered a little, revisiting the enigma of intelligent life and its scarcity.

  Studies of human and Xter DNA had shown no correlation of any significance between the two – nothing that couldn’t be explained by chance and parallel evolution. It was a blow to those who had predicted a traceable common root, confident that the comparison would support their view that man’s development was something other than entirely
natural. Loudest among these was a sizeable minority lobby group who insisted that humans were merely one of several races seeded across the stars by the Elders before their departure. The DNA results proved to be far from a fatal blow to them, though, as they rallied behind the argument that such omnipotent beings would of course ensure the races they seeded were as genetically diverse as possible.

  None of which prevented those who maintained that man’s evolution was a purely natural Darwinian process from feeling a little smug.

  Drake had always favoured the Darwinian view, but seeing this pristine world caused him to wonder. A complex macro ecology teeming with life: highly developed flora and fauna, forests, abundant oceans, jungles, herds of grazers supported by vast plains of grasses, doubtless carnivores as well… yet no sign of intelligence beyond basic hunter-killer levels. Why had advanced intelligence developed on Earth but not here?

  Was it simply that they had arrived here too early in this world’s development? If left untouched for a few thousand years would a species with technologically capable intelligence emerge to shape the raw material of Eden to its will? Or had the denizens of Earth been beneficiaries in the greatest of all cosmic lotteries; had they simply been lucky? Another option, of course, was that mankind had received a gentle but crucial nudge in the right direction from benefactors unknown.

  “Are you still with us, Drake?”

  Drake looked up to find Pelquin staring at him. “Yes,” he assured the captain. “I was just admiring the view.”

  It fell to Anna to bring everyone’s eager anticipation crashing down. “Ehm, skip,” she said. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but it looks like someone has beaten us to it.”

  “What?”

  “There’s another ship down there, parked right on top of the cache site.”

  NINETEEN

  “The ship’s systems are still active and judging by the residual heat around her drive she’s a recent arrival – been down a couple of hours at most,” Anna said. “But I’m not picking up any life signs.”

  The Comet’s crew had crowded back onto the bridge. Nate had pushed forward to position himself behind and between the two chairs, studying the displays intently, and Pelquin was conscious of the weight of expectation from those behind him. They couldn’t be thwarted, not this close to their goal.

  “I wonder who this other lot are,” Bren said. “Jossyren?”

  They didn’t have a visual as yet.

  Pelquin shook his head. “Doubt it. They’d have no way of knowing where the cache is.” He resisted the urge to look at Nate. “More likely to be local action.”

  “Xters, you mean?” Bren said.

  “Yeah, that would be my guess.”

  “Shit!”

  “That’d be my guess too, given these readings,” Anna chipped in.

  Nobody seemed inclined to expand on that. All present knew that the legality of their presence in Xter space was flimsy at best. Explaining how they just happened to pitch up at a previously undiscovered Elder cache site would bend credibility to breaking point.

  “Might whoever they are still be inside the chamber?” Pelquin wondered. “Would that shield them from our sensors?”

  “Maybe,” Nate said. “Anything’s possible given Elder technology, and I know from experience how difficult it is to get a signal through the walls of a chamber – but I doubt it, not completely,”

  “Which means that either the crew of that ship aren’t here anymore…” Bren said.

  “…or they’re not alive anymore,” Pelquin finished for her.

  “Pretty much,” Nate said. “And since the ship is very obviously still here, I reckon we can downplay the likelihood of option one.”

  Pelquin agreed. It seemed unlikely that anyone would park a ship next to an Elder cache and then simply wander off somewhere else. “Looks as if those cache defences you came up against last time have been reset and rebuilt.”

  “Yeah. Hardly a surprise.”

  A cheery thought, all the same.

  Any doubts regarding the origins of the other ship disappeared as soon as they saw it.

  The cache was buried within the steep slope of a hill, the mouth of the access tunnel gaping like a recently excavated cave; which, in a sense, it was. A ship, perhaps twice as long as the Comet, nestled on the ground a short distance away from the entrance.

  Pelquin had seen images of Xter ships, so what confronted them didn’t come as a total surprise. Unlike human ships, which boasted any number of variations dependent on model, manufacturer, place of origin, purpose, Xter vessels all seemed to follow the same basic design, differing only in scale. Very utilitarian, displaying a homogeneity that only helped emphasise their alienness.

  At the prow, a bulbous, tapering nose, pitted and layered as if by scales – access vents, sensor arrays, weapons systems: the layering could house all of those – the result made the front section resemble a squat pine cone resting on its side. From the ‘base’ of this cone a series of identical cylinders emerged – three in this instance, though Pelquin knew that these could run into the dozens in larger vessels. The three tubes were apparently fused together to form the ship’s fuselage – two currently in parallel closest to the ground, one resting above them – but in truth they were modular: detachable, transferable, replaceable; and, despite appearances, each served a different purpose. He guessed that in this instance one probably housed the engines, a second would serve as the hold and the third most likely crew quarters.

  This was the secret of Xter design – the modules were interchangeable. One ship, no matter which world it had been had built on, could be hybridised with any other to serve whatever purpose; all dictated by the selection of modules incorporated into its hull. There were people who didn’t accept this, who insisted that the aliens had to be holding something back. Surely somewhere deep inside Xter space, safe from any prying human sensors, they must be hiding specialist warships if nothing else. But, if so, no human had ever seen or caught a hint of one.

  Pelquin stared at the monitors as they approached, taking in the contours of the strange vessel.

  “Still no answer, I take it,” he asked Anna, who had been hailing the other ship continuously as they approached.

  She shook her head. “Not even an automated response. It’s as if they just popped out, intending to be back in a minute or two.”

  He grunted; that probably wasn’t far from the truth.

  “When we land,” Nate murmured, “I want to scoot over and take a look at that thing.”

  “No,” Pelquin said. “We need you here. You’re the only one who’s been inside the cache chamber.”

  “Well someone ought to go across and check it out.”

  “I’ll go, if anyone does,” Bren said immediately.

  Pelquin didn’t reply. His attention shifted from the Xter ship to the gaping maw of the cache chamber’s tunnel. It beckoned like the open trap it was, as Nate and his mining buddies had found to their cost.

  Quite what they’d been doing in this sector of space was another matter entirely. “Exploring new opportunities away from the clutches of the big corporates,” had been Nate’s explanation when asked. Pelquin wanted to accept that, wanted to trust his old buddy without reservation, and yet…

  As if on cue, Bren said, “Remind me, how the hell did you find this place again?”

  “A little out-of-bounds prospecting,” Nate admitted. “You know how it is: the big cartels like Jossyren have all the rich pickings sewn up, leaving us independents to feed on scraps, scratching around the fringes of the asteroid belts hoping to strike it lucky.”

  “So you came all the way out here? There must have been easier options, surely; safer ones at least.” Good old Bren; where Pelquin might ponder a question, she just came right out and asked.

  “We were desperate. We’d had a run of bad luck; one trip after another which yielded sod all. Debts were mounting and morale was lower than Monkey’s IQ… We knew the next one ha
d to produce, big time, and the chances of finding anything rich enough in human space was pretty close to zero, so…”

  “Yeah, but Xter space?”

  “Yeah, Xter space. Live with it,” Nate said, evidently tiring of the questions.

  “It’s not as outrageous as it sounds,” Drake said. “It’s a big frontier out here. Slipping across unnoticed would be a lot easier than you might think, especially since RzSpace doesn’t recognise the arbitrary boundaries we’ve created.”

  What, the banker coming to Nate’s defence?

  “Right,” Nate said, clearly as surprised at this unexpected support as Pelquin was. “It was an all or nothing gamble, but we didn’t go in blind, we’d done our homework. Human-friendly worlds, just inside Xter space, uncolonised and with no record of mining or other activity; that’s what we were looking for. This one came out top of the list.”

  “Still sounds like a hell of a risk to me.”

  “Which is why we’ve taken a few more precautions than Nate’s crew did this time around,” Pelquin felt obliged to point out.

  “And when you arrived at this world, you just happened to stumble on the cache?” Bren prompted.

  “Pretty much. We were carrying out preliminary remote scans – surveying a number of potential sites for minerals etc – when we came across an anomaly, buried just beneath the surface, at the foot of a hill.”

  “The Elder cache.”

  “Lucky bastard.”

  “You think? Nate said. “I’m the only one left alive from that whole crew… You call that lucky?

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah… There is that.”

  Bren looked as if she were about to add something but evidently thought better of it. Instead she looked at Pelquin and said, “So what do we do now, skip, with another ship in situ and all? Tip-toe meekly away and give up on this whole thing?”

  “Like hell,” Pelquin said. “We wait.”

  “For what? More Xters to show up?”

  “No, to see if these ones do. If they are inside the chamber collecting artefacts and somehow our sensors have missed them, they’ll have to come out eventually. And don’t forget that if that is what they’re doing, the chances are they’re just as illegal as we are. The Xter authorities prefer to leave elder caches undisturbed from what I hear. And this lot have brought just one small ship with them. Does that sound like an official operation to you? Where’s all the support staff, the bureaucracy, the warnings for us to stay away as soon as we came anywhere close to Eden’s atmosphere? No, these are privateers like us. If they’re bringing stuff up then they’re doing so to sell. So, we’re much the same, them and us, and we’re the ones with the tactical advantage; our ship’s in the air while theirs is a sitting duck on the ground.”