Melchior's Fire tk-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  “And no mag lev bikes on the Stanley, either,” An Li reminded him. “This is Normie’s money.”

  “You ever ridden one?” Sark asked Nagel.

  “Me? Yeah, a few times, years ago. They had some in the labs where I did my training. You?”

  “Never. Ladies?”

  None of the three woman had ever used them.

  Nagel nodded. “I see what you mean. Well, they’re not hard to learn if you don’t get overconfident,” he told them. “We’ll do a little practice before we go anywhere anyway.” He turned back to the view screen. “Take it towards the ocean, Cap. Let’s see if we can see some real live aliens close up. Keep unobtrusive, though. If we can get around them without them noticing us, all the better.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” the captain responded. “However, this is much the same sort of position as you were discussing with treasure hunting. I have no idea who or what I am looking for, might not when I find it, and certainly I do not know how they even perceive things, let alone how close is too close, how high is too high, and so on.”

  “Understood. The watch phrase here is ‘Do your best.’ That goes for all of us.”

  The probe rose up, then headed for the ocean near the largest volcano on the island it had been examining.

  The vegetation looked to be very junglelike, although it was difficult to tell the shape or relative sizes of the plants, let alone their composition and other qualities, from the top. One thing was certain, though: the jungle was thick enough in areas not refractured or overrun by lava flows that it formed a multicolored but effective canopy over the forest floor.

  “That’s where you go during the twenty hours of the sun side season when that sun’s out and beating down during the day,” Randi pointed out. “That’s shade down there. Probably makes things habitable and keeps them wet. Note, too, that the oldest growth is established on high, rolling hills. Evolution in action. The lowlands get flood surges from the storms that hit up against the mountains, and they run quickly down the lowest and sharpest slopes to the sea, taking a lot with them. Some growth survives, of course, but it’s a rough area. The old stuff that grows big and strong watches the floods go by.”

  “Yesss,” Nagel muttered. “I was thinking of evolution myself. Lots of life, even if it isn’t any of the smart stuff, in a situation as dynamic as this is probably running at one hell of a pace. Say! Look at those!”

  The probe was showing a grouping of what seemed to be flying creatures coming up from the ocean and diving into the jungle and back again. They were very fast, and it was tough to get a really good view that could be resolved to a decent level. They weren’t all that big, half a meter tops, most much smaller, but they did have a number of obvious curiosities about themselves. They didn’t seem to have any wings at all, for example, appearing like pear-shaped artillery shells. How they maneuvered so well, and how they flew at all, wasn’t clear.

  “Well, we have flying critters here that seem natural,” Cross pointed out. “I hope they don’t drill easy into our hulls, though.”

  “I hope they’re vegetarians,” Randi Queson said uneasily.

  “Uh—yeah. Hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I got us energy body armor,” An Li said confidently. “Those belts have enough power in their power packs to generate a protective energy barrier for over thirty standard days.”

  “If they work against the creatures here, and if we don’t need them longer than thirty days,” Randi responded.

  “You worry too much, Doc.”

  Then you don’t worry enough.

  “Funny,” Nagel commented, still half in his deep thought mode.

  “Yes? What?”

  “I mean funny odd, not funny ha ha. I was just thinking of all these damned aliens we seem to be running into. Not the worm—if they’d run into that in the old days they wouldn’t have told anybody because of the possible paranoia it would cause. Here. Alien races on Balshazzar, alien races up to the armpits here, probably alien races somewhere on or under Kaspar, and what is our past? The old Earth System Combine sent out hundreds of cybernetic scouts, hundreds more robotic ones, found and settled a ton of worlds so we could all breed like cockroaches, and not once, not once, did it run into another thinking race. Not even remnants of that race. Oh, alien animals, alien plants, all that, but not a thinking race. Not a creator, a builder race. All that time, all that effort, and never once did we meet anybody. The Holy Joes took that as proof that God of the gods created us as unique. Now here we are and we’re up to our fuckin’ armpits in other races. Not that we’ve actually seen one yet in the flesh, but, still…”

  “Well, you can see one now,” the captain told him.

  She had taken the probe out over the ocean and made a slow turn up the coast, and now there was sure and certain sign that humanity not only wasn’t alone in the universe, it never had been.

  The very design of the town was alien. No human being would ever have carved out of rock the twisted cones and bizarre geometrical forms that now filled their view. These creatures were certainly air-breathers, though, and had emerged under a biochemistry not alien at all, and so there were certain things that they had in common with people in this kind of environment.

  They made and sailed boats, for example.

  The boats themselves were exotic looking, and the complex setting of a lot of small sails would never be done by humans the way they were done below, but the hull was still practically shaped for reasons of pure physics; masts and sails were still the best way to work under these conditions, and it didn’t take Nagel more than a couple of minutes to realize that, with a few modifications, he could probably sail those boats providing he had a crew who could carry out commands.

  The boats were not, however, designed for your average weekend sail on quiet waters near your university.

  “Good God! Are they ugly!” Lucky Cross exclaimed.

  Randi had an instinctive and instant fearful dislike of them because they looked somewhat like worms or at least snakes, with long, slender black legless bodies, but they were more than that. They had slender forearms with long, spidery fingers and they appeared to be able to slither and stick to just about anything anywhere, and even a small area would suffice. But the most repulsive thing about them as they oozed and swarmed over the boats and rigging was that they all looked like they’d had their heads chopped off.

  Where the head would be expected to start there was a flat area, and a series of concentric, oscillating rings of pulpy flesh surrounding a central hole that appeared to be ringed with more sharp pointed teeth than could be counted. When idle, they appeared to put this flat top section face into a bulkhead or even the side of the ship itself and stick there.

  “Good lord! How do they see?” Jerry Nagel exclaimed, open mouthed.

  “How do they do much of anything, let alone build ships and towns like that?” Randi Queson added.

  “I’ll bet they’re the universe’s greatest kissers, though,” An Li put in.

  They ignored her. “I’m not sure I want to try contact with them, at least by anything other than radio,” Lucky Cross said, echoing their sentiments. She sighed. “Well, now that I’ve seen these guys, I think maybe I was happier the other way.”

  “Take the probe out and down the coast a ways,” Nagel instructed. “I think we want to find out if these characters are typical or if there’s a better group somewhere further on.”

  “I agree, at least at this point,” the captain told him. “I certainly would classify them as probable carnivores.”

  Nagel nodded. “Still, the ship was kind of outfitted like a trawler of some sort. I didn’t see any catch on the deck, but it’s probably below being butchered and processed or already stored for unloading. There’s something in the seas, maybe not anything we’d like or could use, maybe or maybe not anything even remotely fish or reptilelike, but something in their ecological niche that those characters have discovered can feed them. I’ve got to ad
mit, though, I never would have thought of creatures like that as town builders or sailors, let alone intelligences capable of interstellar flight.”

  “None of us would,” Randi Queson agreed. “And that’s the problem, I suspect. I always used to wonder if it wasn’t that we never discovered other civilizations but maybe that other civilizations discovered us and decided not to let us know. You saw those things! We’d have been in some kind of war with them almost instantly, just because of their looks.”

  “Could be,” Nagel responded. “First time I saw those things, I’d figure some race got overrun and eaten by those carnivorous worms and started blasting away. Still, they had hands, fingers, arms. They’re builders, all right. I wonder what they’d think if they met us?”

  “Let’s not find out,” Randi suggested. “Let’s let the next group here do that. On the other hand, I’d pay money to see old Normie show up down there and demand they all sign contracts or be evicted.”

  “Well, I’d love to see the deal-making handshake,” An Li agreed.

  “Here’s the next settlement. Definitely not the same family,” the captain told them.

  “On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to walk in and say ‘Hello’ just yet there, either,” Nagel responded.

  The best word you could use to describe this group was that they were bugs. Not insects—they seemed to have only four limbs, like humans—but they also had chitinous exoskeletons that gleamed with a sort of reddish-brown metallic reflection in the light, and their oversize heads were a mess of proboscises, eyelike pads, mandibles, and cilia put together in the same, but not to the onlookers any rational order. Three fingers and a sort of oversized opposing thumb appeared tipped with large yellow suckers, and the exoskeletal armor on their arms and legs looked as sharp as sword edges. The feet were oversized versions of the hands, with the even larger suckers being far more prominent.

  While the average one was probably a meter or more tall, they certainly had no problem getting around, walking straight up cliffs and having no apparent stairs or climbing aids on their gumdrop-shaped houses, all of which appeared to be made out of some kind of secretion and then hardened, possibly by heat.

  “Well, they’re not dumb,” Randi noted. “They’re distilling salt from seawater in a big way in that squared-off area over there, with a kind of roof of tree fronds or something of the sort that’s retractable. When you get the sun bearing down on that, I bet it dries up nicely. They’ve got fire, and they’ve got it contained. Those poles look to be permanent torches, and there are several smoldering fire pits around with good protective drainage and covers on the pits that can be used if they get a downpour.”

  The captain saw something else, being able to see all ranges at once. “Back up on that hilly area about a kilometer back and raised a bit over the village appears to be the remnants of an interplanetary ship,” she pointed out. “There is sufficient power from a single engine source for it, and the signature is surprisingly close to what ours gives off.”

  “Interesting,” Jerry Nagel said. “So they could take off from here if they wanted to?”

  “Maybe. You are assuming that the ship is actually spaceworthy without maintenance, without seals checks, and for who knows how long? Even if it could, though, where would it go? It’s clearly interplanetary. There’s nothing there that could attain the speed, power, and stability to keep from being crushed in a wormhole, and if they have another way of traveling, then why are they still here living a basic life? And if it did work in-system, where here? Kaspar? I wonder what their temperature range for survival is? And if they go to Balshazzar, they get trapped on the surface there. No, I think they have kept it primarily as a resource and perhaps as a way to contact home if somebody from home ever shows up, just like Woodward’s ship on Balshazzar.”

  “Well, let’s go before somebody notices,” An Li prompted nervously. “We’ve seen our creepy-crawly aliens, now we have to decide where we are going to set down and, when we do, determine that we can get back up.”

  “Head towards more recent volcanic activity,” Queson told her. “I think that anything that’s valuable and near the surface is going to be in new areas not yet flooded clean. Head for that gigantic island to the northwest. It’s pretty well out of the clouds but it has a lot of recent volcanoes from the looks of it.”

  The probe left the heavily populated area and headed towards the one their part-time geologist suggested. It didn’t seem inhabited, probably due to the more recent activity and the amount of dust all over half the island, but it looked pretty mean.

  “You don’t think we can turn up anything in a place like that, do you, Doc?” Lucky Cross asked skeptically.

  At almost that moment the probe came over a rise and looked at a huge volcano with a massive and impressive caldera smoking and grumbling away. Flows came from all points on its sides, but were a combination of old and new.

  Randi almost jumped from her chair. “There! Look at that!”

  An area of the volcano had apparently broken away in a recent eruption, and part of the side had collapsed down into rubble, revealing a great expanse of reflective wall, very light brown in color and translucent but glassy smooth. It was the largest obsidian wall she ever remembered seeing, even in pictures.

  “If we’re going to find anything unusual and valuable created by these, it’ll be near or around a formation like that,” she told them.

  Precious metals weren’t exactly in great demand; there was a lot of almost everything on otherwise dark and useless rocks within range of most ships back home, but jewel-quality gems of unique types were something else, depending as much on the very different combinations possible on other worlds and unique conditions for getting them out onto the surface.

  “How hard can it be to find Magi’s Stones?” An Li mused. “I mean, almost every ship that got back, no matter how wrecked, had a couple at least, and even if they’re extremely rare back home they have to be kinda obvious to pick up here, right? I don’t see things like that forming easily on Kaspar, they couldn’t’a gotten ’em off Balshazzar, so they’ve got to be here.”

  “They’re here,” Randi assured her. “They just might need to be examined close up by hand. This is a tremendously dynamic place, changing constantly, and it’s not likely to keep things obvious and on the surface for any length of time. Look at the volcanic dust alone here.”

  “Well, all the same—hey! What’s that?”

  An Li’s cry drew all their attention to a small but obviously artificial structure, vehicle, or whatever it was, sitting there atop the rubble near that vast obsidian cliff.

  It looked to be about twelve meters long by six meters around, a cylindrical body pierced on the bottom by big, oversized wheels on a covered but obvious axle assembly that allowed the wheels near-total independence. The wheels themselves were grooved, almost like tank treads, but these were no tires or treads but single integrated structures, each rising almost to the top of the central cylinder.

  “It’s an exploration vehicle of some sort,” Nagel commented, staring at the image. “I’ll be damned. How old do you think it is, Doc? Cap?”

  “Impossible to say,” Randi told him. “It’s clearly not one of ours, so who or what made it is unknown, and so’s its composition. There’s ash piled up on the top and on the top of the wheels, so it’s been there awhile, but it definitely is newer than the rockfall that began exposing the obsidian. Captain, any signs of life or energy?”

  “Negative, but that just may be because what I have can’t penetrate the cylinder. Still, educated guess would say that it’s abandoned in place.”

  “That’s where we start, then,” Randi Queson told them. “If this area attracts me, and it attracted others, then I can’t see how we can find a better place to start. Any objections?”

  “Let’s see if we can get the probe back, first,” An Li suggested.

  That was easy to find out, and within a half an hour the captain reported that the probe
was safely back and in containment and analysis aboard ship. This area was strictly automated; no probe could be permitted to bring back any nasty little things that might not be anticipated and loose them aboard ship. The whole lab, in fact, could be ejected into space and destroyed by remote command should something show up in the probe that they could not otherwise contain or analyze.

  “Analysis looks okay from this end,” the captain told them. “You are right—take a simple breath mask to keep out the big volcanic dust particulates and you should be okay. How much equipment do you want to break out for this?”

  “Four sets,” Randi Queson told her. “I think we need as much cover as we can for each other on our first trip down. Lucky can cover from the shuttle. And bring up Eyegor. This time the little bastard is going documenting with us, like it or not!”

  XII: FINDING WHAT YE SEEK

  “They’re really not that tough, and they have one big advantage,” Jerry Nagel said as they stood around the maglev scooters dropped off with the packs, before Lucky Cross took the shuttle back up to a low orbit to sit and be ready just in case a quick extraction was needed.

  All four below were in excellent physical shape, and all looked like they were ready to pass out even as it was, although Nagel and Sark were trying to keep up a brave front.