by Rick Partlow
The mercenaries quickly spread into a defensive perimeter around the lander and Pete and Rachel took their place in the formation, weapons and eyes pointed outward. Pete felt his heart beating faster as he fell to the prone on a stretch of dirt, covering his sector with his weapon. He saw nothing and began to wonder if that was all the opposition they'd face. Behind him, further back in the square, he could hear the roar of the other landers touching down, could see the blast of hot wind from their landing rockets kicking up dust devils even though he couldn't feel it through his armor.
"This doesn't feel real," he confided to Rachel over her personal channel.
"None of this feels real," she agreed, but he wasn't sure she meant the same thing as he did.
Another group of the aliens ran out from a gap between walls, their digitigrade stride teasing at his mind with its wrongness. Only one of the group had one of the hand weapons and it used it before any of the mercenaries could respond. A blinding flare of green flashed out from the small, oddly-shaped device and Pete dropped down instinctively, closing his eyes and ducking his head. There was a crack like thunder that he could hear clearly even through his helmet and a wave of heat he could feel through his armor and he heard screams over the general comm channel and sensed more than saw men and women abandoning their positions and retreating backwards.
Pete forced himself to open his eyes, knowing he'd likely die if he didn't, and saw that at least four of the mercenaries in the perimeter to his left were gone, nothing but charred, black stains on the scorched ground. It seemed to him that he could still see the green flares of energy scintillating in the air, as if the power hung there, but he shut out those details, looking desperately for a target.
He saw the aliens advancing on them and opened fire by instinct, a wild burst that cut across the thing at waist level, nearly chopping it in half in a spray of blood superheated to steam. A weapon dropped nervelessly from its hands, but not one of the Predecessor weapons: this clattered with a ring of metal on concrete, primitive to his eyes. He saw another of the group of aliens go down to gunfire, but then the Predecessor device spoke again.
Pete's helmet visor darkened automatically, but not before the green flare left spots across his vision as the beam struck one of the landers fifty meters behind him. The shock wave from the explosion planted him face-first into the ground and the wave of heat that followed it made his armor feel like the inside of an oven. He felt a rush of fear that he was going to be burned alive, but the thermal wave passed over him and he forced himself to look up again.
The aliens had been knocked down by the blast too, and he wondered for a moment if they knew what effects their own weapons could have. He struggled to pull his carbine out from underneath him, trying to bring it around before the alien with the Predecessor device could get back to its feet, but he could tell he wouldn't be able to do it in time.
Between one eyeblink and the next, the aliens weren't there anymore: they'd disappeared in a flash of liberated steam energy along with a good part of the wall behind them, and he could still see the shimmering in the air and hear the echoes of the thunderclap from where the laserpulses had burned evacuated tunnels through the atmosphere. Pete jerked around and saw the chin cannon of one of the surviving landers still glowing, still pointed where the aliens had been while the shuttle hovered on columns of fire.
Slowly and gently the shuttle touched down and its boarding ramp lowered, disgorging another squad of mercenaries...and Robert Chang. The man had a sidearm, but it wasn't drawn, and he didn't seem to be wearing any armor, unless he had a byomer suit under his normal shipwear. He glanced around with a blasé nonchalance, then stepped up past the perimeter, ignoring the charred remnants of what had once been his soldiers.
One of the aliens emerged through the gap in the wall, visibly different from the others. It wore nothing that might be called armor, carried no weapons and seemed to Pete somehow, indefinably older. It wore strips of multicolored clothing that seemed to decorate more than they covered and it bore markings on its skin that could have been dye or perhaps tattooing. Pete couldn't tell whether it was afraid or not, but it stepped out boldly, raising its arms in some gesture he didn't understand, then speaking in a language that seemed at once sibilant and yet harsh.
Pete watched Cutter, sure that the man was going to draw his gun and put a round through the thing's head. Instead, the former street surgeon stepped closer, stopping about two meters from the alien and raising his arms in a gesture similar to the one it had given.
"Is he trying to communicate with that thing?" Pete wondered out loud.
"That will take forever," Rachel said, shaking her head, "even with the best AI translation programs working on it, you have to have some common frames of reference and..."
She fell silent as Robert Chang began speaking to the alien in its own language, with not a single hesitation or stumble, pronouncing sounds that couldn't be made by human vocal cords.
Pete threw back his helmet's visor and shot a look at Rachel, seeing the same realization in her eyes. To do that, to talk to the aliens, Chang would have needed both an upload of a translation program customized to the language and an augment to his vocal cords to allow him to make the correct sounds. Pete knew what the ramifications of that were, but was trying not to think about them.
The alien replied, then slowly backed away back through the gap in the wall before turning and running.
"What did you say to him?" Rachel asked the question Pete didn't feel like voicing.
Chang grinned at her, looking as if none of what was happening could truly affect him.
"It's our first contact with an alien civilization," he said. "I asked him to take me to his leader, of course."
Chapter Nineteen
Rachel:
The alien palace---that's what Rachel was calling it in her head, anyway---was different than she'd thought it would be. The ceilings were low, compared to the height of the aliens anyway, supported by columns carved in the shape of things she couldn't identify but had a sense were significant. Other carvings were in the ceiling itself, some jutting downward nearly to the floor, and the whole structure seemed somehow indeterminate: walking through it, she couldn't seem to figure out where one room ended and another began. There was furniture here and there, but its shape confused her...until she considered that it was built for a race whose knees bent the wrong way. Not as much of it as she would have imagined, and in places that made no sense to her.
What really bent her brain was what she didn't see. There were no plants; it had taken her a while to notice, but there wasn't as much as a single flower displayed anywhere. Even stranger, there were no paintings, no sculptures, no frescoes that showed realistic portrayals of people---well, aliens, whatever---or animals or vehicles or anything that looked real to her. She looked again at the aliens escorting their party and wondered if somehow they saw things differently, like in another spectrum or with different senses that humans didn't possess. Humans or Tahni, she corrected herself, since she knew the Tahni had representational art.
What she also hadn't seen were any sort of powered vehicles. No groundcars, no trains, no aircraft. It was night, but there were no electric lights either; lighting came from some sort of oil-burning lamps instead, although they were shaped more like a glass pyramid than any lamp she'd ever seen. She had seen what could have been some sort of pedi-cab resting along an exterior wall; it had sported two wheels anyway, and protrusions that could have been for lifting and pulling.
More confusing than their art or their transportation or even their lack of electric lighting, however, were the weapons the escort was carrying. Only one of the eight aliens guarding their party had one of the intimidating Predecessor-tech handguns that had destroyed one of the landers. The others carried a strangely shaped longarm that she thought she'd finally identified as a crossbow of some kind. The pouches that the guards wore on their hips definitely held some sort of metal bolt, anyway.
/> What the hell was going on? Why were these things able to attack them with reactionless-drive spaceships when they couldn't even make electric lights? Why would they bother with crossbows when they had hand weapons that could destroy a shuttle?
Many possibilities spun through her mind, but she couldn't concentrate on any one of them long enough to decide which was her favorite. She was too busy watching for trouble, particularly watching that one with the Predecessor hand weapon, and trying to keep an eye on Pete as well. She just hoped she could trust Cutter to find Cal.
She glanced at Chang, surrounded by his mercenary guards. They hadn't had more than a few moments before the aliens had arrived to escort them into the palace, but he'd told them that he'd learned their language from recordings on the Naga lighter. He'd said that Gregorian must have acquired the recordings from the Predecessor cache, and that their language must still be understandable to their descendants.
It was a plausible enough explanation, though she wondered why he'd kept the information from them until now. Was it just part of his innate paranoia? He had been a criminal for decades, and a spy before that. That would make anyone a bit strange, and the whole business of dying and coming back three times surely couldn't help. She wished Cal were here...and even Captain McIntire. It was easier to deal with Cutter when Kara McIntire was around to keep his strangeness in check.
It seemed like the walk took hours to her, but a check of the time projected in her helmet's HUD showed it had only been twenty minutes when they finally arrived in what she immediately dubbed the throne room. It was taller than the rest of the palace, though the change in height had been so gradual she almost hadn't noticed it, and it shared the strange lack of delineation that the other sections of the palace had demonstrated.
There were three pieces of what passed for furniture among the aliens arranged in a loose triangle near the center of the throne room and on each rested one of the creatures, all three naked but for a natural covering of downy feathers. One was quite obviously female, but what she assumed were the two males showed no obvious signs of it and she wondered if they kept the family jewels in some sort of protective pouch inside their abdomen.
The leader of the escort paused before the triad of thrones and did what Rachel could only describe as some sort of elaborate and stylized dance that spun around all three of the seats before coming to rest in a position with his arms spread wide in front of the female. She made a motion with her right hand, the two thumbs forming a complicated shape with two of her fingers, and the male returned to a normal standing position and began speaking. The female and one of the males responded and soon the air was full of the incomprehensible tongue.
Their language teased at her hind brain like the grunt of a bear or the snarl of a big cat might have done to one of her ancestors. It was punctuated with nasal hoots and echoing clicks that couldn't have come from the mouth of an unmodified human and involved quite a bit of body language as well. She wondered if there were other forms of communication at work: smells, pheromones, subsonic vibrations? Who could tell?
Hopefully Cutter could, because he began speaking to the rulers, launching into a monologue that went on for nearly a minute. At one point, he made a gesture that pointed back at her and Pete, and the eyes of all three of the aliens she was calling the rulers turned to lock onto them. She felt a prickling at the nape of her neck under the gaze of those huge, liquid eyes, their irises slitted vertically like a cat's. Nictitating membranes blinked in one of them and she started, stifling a curse.
"What are you telling them?" Pete asked, echoing her thoughts.
"That we're searching for your brother and his friends," Cutter said smoothly, not taking his eyes off the aliens. "Now don't interrupt."
The conversation went on for long minutes more, with Cutter twice going into an intricate dance for which his body wasn't well designed. The female responded with a sinuous motion of her long neck and that seemed to decide the rulers...on whatever it was they were trying to decide. All three rose from the half-crouch that was as close as they came to sitting, and began moving towards a large, irregular-shaped doorway in the far wall.
Cutter turned to the rest of the mercenary guard with him. "Stay here," he instructed them. "From here on, it's just going to be the three of us and the Triumvirate." Rachel could almost hear the capitalization and knew he had to be referring to the alien rulers.
"Where are we going?" Rachel asked him as they followed the things into a narrow passageway, one of the few clearly delineated corridors she'd seen since they'd entered the palace.
"Their...well, temple is about as close as I can come, though it also involves respect to their history and their ancestors," Cutter told her, walking briskly to keep up with the long strides of the three aliens. "So it's sort of a mash-up of a museum, a shrine and their holiest-of-holies all in one."
"And why are we going to their temple?" Pete asked, with a tone of stretched patience in his voice.
"Because that's where they told me they needed to go to find your brother and his friends," Cutter explained casually. "They didn't explain how, but I'm betting there's some more leftover Predecessor technology in there."
"How the hell did they wind up with crossbows and pedi-cabs," Rachel wondered, "when they have Predecessor tech laying around?"
"Because they don't know how to make it anymore," Cutter told her as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "They don't know how to repair them, they don't know how to recharge them. Once something is out of energy or broken, it's dead, and it's been that way for thousands of years at a minimum."
"I thought these things were the Predecessors," Pete said, shaking his head---she could see it because they'd both removed their helmets on the walk to the palace. "I mean, they look just like the ones the Corporate Council showed us..."
"And they have those ships," Rachel reminded him. "The ones that attacked us when we entered the system..."
"We can debate the finer points of this later," Cutter told her. "Right now, we have more pressing matters, no?"
Rachel let it go, seeing they were coming to the end of the corridor. A curtain of what looked like feathers hung across a wide doorway there, and the Triumvirate paused before it, performing a dance that made the one in the throne room seem like a nod of the head by comparison. They gesticulated and pirouetted for a good ten minutes by Rachel's estimate, and she was beginning to shift from one foot to the other impatiently. She didn't interrupt, though, because one of the three was armed with a Predecessor weapon and besides, it seemed impolite.
Finally, with a flourish of motion and a cacophony of hissing and clicking, they were finished and the female of the group brushed aside the curtain with a dramatic swipe of her hand. As she followed them through, Rachel could see that the curtain separated the more recent parts of the palace from something much older...and more advanced.
The walls went from what seemed like stuccoed blocks to something she couldn't identify except it seemed about the same consistency as plastalloy. There were no oil lanterns to illuminate their way, nor could she see any discrete light source, yet somehow a diffuse glow that came from somewhere or perhaps everywhere made it nearly as bright as day. The walls of the long corridor were unadorned, and she thought that might have been because the natives couldn't figure out a way to attach anything to them.
The lack of decoration made the hallway seem even longer, and she was wondering exactly how far they were going to walk when abruptly the walkway slanted downwards and she had to fight to keep her balance. She noted as she put out a hand to steady herself against the nearest wall, that the steep slope didn't seem to bother the aliens. Probably because of their anatomy, she decided. The walls seemed to narrow the farther down they went, though that might have been her imagination because it was also getting darker the farther they descended.
It had to have been nearly a kilometer before the passage leveled off again; they were at least two hundred meters underground
, Rachel estimated. She thought about putting her helmet back on to use the infrared illuminator, but instead switched on the red tactical light on her utility vest. One of the aliens glanced back at her, but it said nothing and she couldn't read its body language.
"I don't especially like tunnels," Pete declared softly, his voice sounding hollow in the near darkness.
"It can't be much longer," Cutter assured him. Rachel glanced at the man in annoyance.
"What?" she asked sharply. "That wasn't in the files that let you speak their language and know all about their religion?"
"Perhaps it was," Cutter allowed, seemingly unfazed by her barbs. "But I only had time to review a certain number of files, and I thought being able to communicate with the locals was of maximum importance." He shot her an ingratiating smile. "I would have offered you the chance to upload the language files, but I know neither of you has a neurolink or a headcomp." He tsk'ed. "Which is a shame, in so many ways..."
"I've survived just fine without one, thanks," Pete muttered.
"Times change."
Neither Pete nor Rachel had the time to reply to that, because they both saw the passage begin to widen out ahead, and with it the return of the diffuse illumination. Rachel switched off her own light and followed the aliens---she was beginning to think of them as the Remnants, since they were clearly what was left of the Predecessors---into a huge underground chamber that stretched upward nearly fifty meters and before them for at least three times that.
And in the center of it all was one of the ships.
Not one of the little interceptors which had attacked them when they'd arrived insystem. No, this was a hundred meters long and stretched almost to the ceiling of the chamber in height, an emerald green cylinder that seemed to her to be the source of the chamber's inherent glow. At first she thought it was resting on the bare floor---which seemed to be of the same material as the walls---but as they approached closer, she could see that it was floating a meter off the ground, riding on a cushion of God knew what.
