Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows)

by Nuttall, Christopher

  The shuttle rocked again as it dived lower, coming in over the ocean. There had been a long debate about their flight path, before Captain Thor had ruled that they would enter the atmosphere over the ocean and then fly to the selected landing zone near Warlock’s Bane. If the shuttle lost power completely and crashed, there would be no evidence of their presence for the locals to find, at least until they got over the land. But as far as they could tell, technology didn’t glitch over the oceans. The flight would be completely safe until they actually reached land.

  A brilliant flash of lightning danced outside, illuminating the interior of the shuttle, before fading away into darkness. The shuttle slowed, steadying itself, before angling down towards the ocean. Elyria used her neural link to peer through the shuttle’s senses and saw a pair of sailing ships heading out into the ocean, presumably looking for somewhere else to trade. A set of snoops had already attached themselves to the boats, monitoring the crew. They didn’t seem to be anything more than sailors.

  “There’s bad weather over the land,” the shuttle pilot said, seriously. It would normally not have been a problem for a Confederation shuttle, but Darius was unpredictable and technology had a habit of glitching. A thunderstorm might bring the shuttle down. “I’m altering course to take us around the worst of the storm.”

  “Mind you stay out of the Dead Zones,” the XO warned. She’d told Elyria that the pilot had taken part in landings on hostile territory before, but no one had ever experienced anything like Darius. “We really don’t want to fall out of the sky.”

  Elyria nodded, watching through the neural link as the shuttle swept over a loch and skimmed around Warlock’s Bane. The loch held a dozen big ships, sheltering from the worst of the storms out on the open sea, and hundreds of smaller fishing vessels, each one capable of bringing in hundreds of fish a day. It was possible that the locals would eventually deplete the fish stocks around Warlock’s Bane, the researchers had warned; running out of resources was not an uncommon problem in scarcity societies. They might not think to limit the number of fish that could be caught until it was too late. At least they weren’t tapping their oil reserves yet... given their very limited knowledge base, Elyria was mildly surprised that they’d learned to burn coal. But they were very definitely mining it from sites near the city.

  The shuttle altered course slightly, giving Warlock’s Bane a wide berth. Unlike cities on advanced worlds, Warlock’s Bane was almost completely shrouded in darkness, with only a handful of glowing lights to mark its presence. The snoops had no difficulty seeing in the dark; they’d reported that most of the population went to bed when darkness fell. Even the ruler of the city, who seemed to be capable of generating a ball of light at will, seemed unwilling to do much after dark. They just didn’t have the technology to carry on working.

  A dull tremor ran through the shuttle. “I’m not sure what that was,” the pilot said. He sounded rather disturbed. “The sensors didn’t pick up any turbulence before we hit it.”

  Elyria looked over at Dacron. The embodied AI looked nervous; no, he looked terrified. It wasn’t easy to remember that, in a very real sense, Dacron was only two months old. The whole experience would be terrifying for him – she winced as the shuttle shook again – and there was nothing they could do until they touched down. She wanted to reach over and take his hand, but he was out of reach. Instead, she shot him what she hoped was a reassuring smile and returned to monitoring the live feed from the snoops. They reported that the area they’d designated as a landing zone was clear of human life.

  “The closest human settlement is two kilometres away,” Adana confirmed. She’d been looking for signs that the landing zone wasn’t deserted too. “It’s just a small farm, with seven people and a handful of animals. They shouldn’t be able to see us.”

  They wouldn’t, not on any normal world. Elyria had used stealthed shuttles before and knew how they worked. They were completely invisible to the naked eye and any sensors that could be devised by a Fourth Age society. Darius should not have been able to detect them at all, but Darius was a very strange world. It was better to keep their distance than to risk disaster, at least until they knew what was going on.

  She looked down and smiled. Most of the worlds humanity had settled, in thousands of years of expansion, had been allowed to return to nature now that the human population was housed in giant rings surrounding the planets. One day, their biospheres might even produce intelligent life, perhaps derived from the Earth-native plants and animals introduced into their ecologies. Darius, on the other hand, was slowly being tamed by its human population, something that puzzled the researchers. If Darius had been settled for longer than a thousand years, as seemed probable, they should have tamed the world by now. But Jorlem had pointed out that even reaching Darius would have taken years, perhaps centuries. Darius might not have been settled for as long as they thought.

  Or perhaps something else weird is going on, she thought. Was the whole planet an Elder experiment to see what happened if you allowed a race the power to manipulate the quantum foam, or was it their version of a massive game set in a virtual world? The Confederation had created Disneyworld, inhabited by semi-sentient creatures that acted as playmates for human visitors, and Pleasure, which fully lived up to its name, but neither of them operated on such a scale. Disneyworld, in particular, was reshaped constantly by nanotech, yet Darius didn’t seem to have anything so advanced in its atmosphere. Indeed, nanotech wouldn’t work for very long on Darius.

  “Prepare for landing,” the pilot said. They’d plotted out the landing zone carefully, but the pilot had warned them to beware of unpleasant surprises. “Going down... now.”

  Elyria braced herself as the shuttle descended in the clearing and gently touched down. A final thump ran through the craft as its landing struts met the ground, and then the faint background humming died away as the drive powered down. She glanced around through the shuttle’s sensors and saw nothing, apart from a handful of rabbits that looked at the shuttle and then hopped away. The rabbits definitely implied a colony ship from the First Expansion Era. After that, there had been strict laws on keeping them under control; rabbits had helped to devastate a number of weaker planetary ecologies.

  “There were some minor glitches in advanced technology,” Jorlem said, as the team unstrapped themselves and stood up. “If we hadn’t built so much redundancy into the system we would have fallen out of the sky.”

  Elyria blanched. She was glad she hadn’t known that while they were flying. “We can probably make some projections now,” Jorlem added. “The glitches seem to be targeted, at least to some extent. They may have been focused on the shuttle from the moment we entered the atmosphere. That suggests the possibility of intelligent control.”

  “A simple fission beam would have blown us out of the sky,” Adam grumbled. He was familiar with technological glitches from Ancient worlds. “Why would they fart around with something so uncertain instead of deploying something that would definitely kill us?”

  “Maybe it’s the only weapon they have,” Jorlem suggested. “Or maybe they want to discourage the Confederation from further missions to Darius, rather than using something that would be detectable two systems away.”

  Dacron had a more thoughtful question. “Were there any other effects?”

  “There was a faint power drain in some of our shielded power cells, but the effect was minimal,” the pilot said. “It wasn’t enough to pose a threat.”

  “Unless they were just testing the equipment,” Adam offered. “They could drain the rest of our power at any moment.”

  “And you’re just trying to scare us,” Elyria said, with more anger than she intended. The landing had been stressful and the discussion wasn’t helping. “There is no evidence to suggest that they can do that...”

  “The Confederation could,” Dacron pointed out. “If Darius was designed by an advanced alien race, we have to assume that they are at least as advanced as ou
rselves.”

  Elyria nodded. “Start deploying the diggers,” she ordered, leaving the rest of the discussion for the moment. They could debate it once they were safe. “I want to be able to hide the shuttle before daylight.”

  “Certainly,” the pilot said. He keyed a switch and the digger robots started to deploy from the shuttle’s cargo hold. “Assuming the snoops were correct, it shouldn’t take more than a few hours to produce the base. And then we can start some real expansion.”

  Elyria sat back in her chair and watched as the diggers went to work. The Confederation had had centuries of experience in constructing hidden bases quickly; the diggers, with their combination of earth-moving technology and nanotech, could hollow out the ground very quickly. Once they had made a hole, they’d move the shuttle into the hole and then arrange the ground so that there would be no sign that the shuttle had been there at all. Normally, they’d use teleporters to get in and out of the base, but they’d had to add an entry shaft to the design for Darius. It created a security risk that would simply have to be tolerated.

  The clearing they’d used as a landing zone was also used by the locals as a stopover place for wagon trains, according to orbital observation. Darius didn’t seem to have much night traffic at all, which wasn’t too surprising when wooden torches were the only light available to most of the population. Having a defensible position to rest while they were outside the cities was obviously a priority; the clearing was big enough to hold over thirty wagons in reasonable comfort, a bigger number than any convoy they’d yet tracked. Thousands of additional snoops flitted through the surrounding area, taking up position to watch for any local intruders. Elyria couldn’t help noticing that the snoops heading away from the city were more likely to fail than those heading towards it.

  She stood up, suddenly impatient, and headed for the airlock. Plax and Fred, the bodyguards, followed her a moment later, even though they both knew that there was nothing even remotely hostile outside. She opened the hatch, entered the airlock and allowed them to close it before the outer hatch hissed open, revealing a darkened forest. Elyria stepped forward and breathed in the air of a new world. Darius smelt sweet, without the hydrocarbon by-products that were the signature of a Second or Third Age society. There should be nothing capable of harming her in the air, she knew, but she couldn’t help feeling worried as she stepped out of the shuttle. How did they know that the tests they’d run on the planet’s atmosphere were reliable?

  This planet causes us to doubt everything, she thought, as she walked away from the shuttle. Her enhanced eyes had little difficulty seeing in the dark, but when she looked back it was difficult, almost impossible, to see the shuttle. Only a faint hint of a ghostly image betrayed its presence. The locals would simply ignore it. Beyond the shuttle, the diggers were burrowing into the ground, widening out a cave that was already large enough for it. It wouldn’t be long before they were ready to move the shuttle into its hiding place...

  She blinked in shock as a warning message flashed up in front of her eyes. Her implants, including the neural link, had suffered a brief glitch. That hadn’t been too surprising, but it still bothered her. She felt naked without Confederation technology to protect her... she ordered the system to run a full diagnostic, but it found nothing. The primitive radio they’d implanted seemed to be fine, thankfully. They’d just have to remember that they could no longer rely on their neural links.

  “The QCC links suffered glitches at the same time,” Fred reported. The bodyguard looked worried, glancing around as if he expected armed warriors to come bursting out of the forest at any moment. “It’s possible that the glitches were precisely targeted on us.”

  Elyria shrugged. There was no way to know. They’d just have to hope that the more primitive technology would work perfectly. She shook her head and started to walk back to the shuttle. The diggers were signalling that they were ready to move the shuttle and she needed to be inside it when that happened. There would be nowhere for her on the surface until they were ready to deploy their wagons. She climbed back into the shuttle and briefly updated Jorlem on what had happened. Unsurprisingly, there had been a number of recorded glitches in the shuttle’s computers.

  “We’re ready,” she said, as the airlock closed. The shuttle’s sensors had scanned all three of them thoroughly, reporting nothing apart from some pollen. Nanotech swarms removed it anyway, just in case. “You can start burying us now.”

  The shuttle lurched as the diggers went back to work, dragging the shuttle towards the hole they’d made in the ground. Elyria felt a faint sense of unease as the antigravity field came on, allowing them to start lowering the shuttle into its hiding place, a moment before the technology suffered another glitch. The shuttle dropped like a stone, slamming into the ground with terrifying force. Red emergency lights flared through the passenger compartment, followed rapidly by shouts and cries of pain. Half of the team hadn’t even been sitting down while the shuttle had been moving. None of them had realised that the antigravity field might also fail.

  Jorlem leaned forward. “Damage report,” he barked. “How badly were we damaged?”

  “Main drives and systems appear intact,” the pilot said. “The shuttle was designed to be tough. Some minor dents in the hull, but nothing to stop us flying out of here.”

  Elyria exchanged glances with Jorlem. “The timing couldn’t have been a coincidence,” Jorlem muttered. “That might have been intended to kill us.”

  “They must have known it wouldn’t kill us all,” Elyria pointed out. The shuttle might have been damaged and there would be injured, but it seemed like an unnecessarily complex plan for very little return. “Some of us would have survived; hell, we all survived.”

  They checked the wounded quickly. Apart from Gigot, who had banged her arm hard enough to break it, no one was seriously injured. Their enhanced bodies were already starting to repair the damage, removing the pain as a matter of course. Gigot would take longer to heal, so Elyria slapped a packet of medical nanites against her arm. They’d heal the wound in minutes. The locals, ironically, would probably have regarded them as magic.

  “Things may just have become a little more dangerous than we thought,” she said, outlining their conclusions. The timing of the glitch was very suspicious, even if it didn’t seem like an outright attempt to kill them. Why not glitch the shuttle when they’d been over the ocean? They’d have fallen out of the sky and died, without hope of recovery.

  Elyria snorted. “And I’m afraid it’s too late to return to the Hamilton,” she added. “If any of you want to stay in the shuttle, however...”

  “No, thank you,” Adana said, quickly. The sociologist smiled, brightly. “There’s too much of interest here.”

  The next two hours passed quickly as the diggers completed the task of burying the shuttle, hiding all traces of their landing and then starting to expand out under the ground. Given time, they would hollow out enough room to allow more equipment to be shipped down from the orbiting starship, including a small fabricator. If it would work here... the Captain had already insisted that anything that might glitch had to be checked with him first. Most glitches wouldn’t do serious damage, but some would be very dangerous. They’d be living in primitive conditions for quite some time.

  “We will all get some sleep,” Elyria said. She would have to write a full report for Captain Thor, which would be passed on to the CSC. At least they weren’t trying to micromanage from thousands of light years away. “Tomorrow, we’ll start moving the wagons to the surface and then start heading to the city.”

  She smiled. Adana was right; despite the danger, this was a fascinating world. There were genuinely original discoveries to be made here, in all sorts of fields. She just couldn’t wait.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  Joshua had always liked the dark.

  It wasn’t something he had shared with anyone, apart from Master Faye, who had laughed and told him that it was an early si
gn of magic. The darkness held threats that could only be driven back by light; people went to bed as soon as darkness fell and attempted to sleep through the terrors, even the people living in cities. Joshua, on the other hand, had found the darkness fascinating. There were no true threats lurking within the shadows, he’d discovered, even before he’d learned to produce light for himself. The common folk were scared of nothing more than illusions.

  “Something is happening,” Master Faye said, as they stood together on the roof of his house. “One of my detection spells activated for a few brief seconds.”

  Joshua winced. They’d spent two weeks preparing themselves as best they could for a challenge, for when a Scion walked into the city and tried to claim it as his own, but nothing had happened. Eventually, he’d started to wonder if all of their preparations had discouraged the Scion from challenging Master Faye, although that was unlikely. A Scion with a full grasp of his powers might well have more recent experience skirmishing with other magicians than Master Faye. And few magicians were actually cowards.

  “Someone was flying,” Master Faye added. “They flew near my wards and then banked away.”

  “Oh,” Joshua said. “Why?”

  “Good question,” Master Faye said, more than a little crossly. “I’ll let you know when I figure out the answer.”

  Joshua swallowed. Flying – on a carpet, or a broom, or even alone – was a very complex spell, almost as complex as teleportation. It was easy for a magician to fly halfway around the world to attend a banquet – Master Faye had done it on occasion – but it was also easy for that magician’s enemies to disrupt his spells and send him tumbling out of the sky. Any magician flying so close to another bailiwick had to be utterly confident in their powers. All the great magicians of legend had castles built in the clouds or perched on a needle-thin rock – but no one ever built them in the real world, because they were just too easy to destroy.