“I don’t think they were spying, so much as studying,” Gruber said.
“What do you mean?”
“This feels more like a duck blind or a tree stand. Whoever built this was observing these people ‘in the wild,’ as it were. That might be why they were brought here in the first place, as a kind of control group for studying human behavior.”
Allison smiled. “Excellent, Marcel. That’s the consensus we’ve reached down here as well.”
Maximus studied the different views of the village. “Where are all the men?”
“What do you mean? The Pirikura males?”
“Yes, they seem to be almost all women or children. It’s like a prehistoric meat market down there.”
“Their annual celebrations have a somewhat … deleterious effect on the male population. Women outnumber the adult men almost three to one.”
“There must be a lot of lonely single ladies floating around, then,” Maximus observed while managing not to lick his lips.
“Not really. Their marriage customs are polygamous, to account for the dearth of males,” Allison said.
“Hmm. Never held with polygamy.”
“Really?” Allison could barely conceal her surprise. “I thought building a harem was the alpha male ideal.”
“Well, it would certainly have benefits, but strategically, I just can’t see wanting to be outnumbered in every fight. Nope, I’m a one-woman man.”
“One at a time, you mean.”
“Well, yeah. Why, what did I say?”
Gruber pushed in to try to avert the looming personality clash. “Captain Ridgeway, am I alone in thinking that the tech in that room strongly resembles the interior of the buoy?”
“Not at all, Marcel. I thought so, too, and it was the first thing Mr. Fletcher said when he walked through the door.”
“So the same consortium that fenced in Earth has been out here running their own little human research colonies, studying us like packs of gorillas. That’s going to play well back home.”
“Careful with the primate references, Commander,” Maximus said. “If Buttercup hears that, he might tear your legs off. Or, worse yet, write an unflattering article about you.”
Gruber filed that last sentence away as an important insight into Maximus’s mind. “I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t thinking about Mr. Buttercup.”
“Not at all. Please continue, Captain.”
Allison nodded and restarted the recording. “Now, this is where it gets really strange. Beyond the surveillance room, we found another chamber.”
The camera view floated through an archway, and two parallel rows of tiny beds came into view. They were impeccably tidy. The beds were ominous, but not nearly so bad as what they saw next. Set into the far wall, a pair of figures stood ramrod straight. They appeared human, but their flawless posture hinted at something artificial. As the camera focused on their features, it became apparent their designers had tried to cross the Uncanny Valley, but slipped off the footbridge and were subsequently devoured by crocodiles.
“What the hell are those?” Maximus exclaimed.
“Androids,” Allison answered. “Our best guess is they serve as automated nannies.”
“It’s a nursery,” Maximus said. “They’re raising children in there like baby cranes, and those things are like the creepy hand-puppet mama-bird heads they feed them with.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that, but the comparison probably isn’t far off.”
“What do they need them for? The Pirikura raise their own kids.”
Gruber drummed his fingers on the table. “Maybe they’re for starting new tribes. There are dozens of them on the planet, but they’re all geographically isolated from each other. Maybe the aliens cook up a new batch of children and raise them here when they want to start a fresh experiment.”
Allison was impressed. “That’s a sound hypothesis, Marcel.”
“Yes, indeed. Good work, everyone. Captain Ridgeway, pack up your team and get headed back to Magellan. Lieutenant Harris and his squad will remain long enough to cover your departure; then we’re moving on to the next system.”
Allison cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Captain Tiberius. As I understood our mission charter, I hold discretion over the scientific and exploratory aspects of the expedition, and I say we have a lot more work to do here.”
“That’s true, but this isn’t my idea. We received a QER burst from the president’s office a few minutes before this briefing started. Remember, we’re out here to make contact with the buoy races. Since they aren’t here, he wants us to move on to the Twinkling Star.”
“I don’t give a flying frog what that shrunken-headed idiot—”
Gruber made a show of clearing his throat. “Excuse me. I’ve been fighting a cold. I think what Captain Ridgeway is trying to say is that we’ve been waiting for the opportunity to survey this planet for more than sixty years. It would be an awful shame if we had to withdraw before we’re finished.”
“I sympathize with you,” Maximus said, “but we have our marching orders. Besides, it’s not like Solonis B is going anywhere. We can always come back.”
Allison wasn’t finished. “We’ve only investigated one tribe out of dozens, and we haven’t even had a full day in the cave complex yet. Who knows what else we can learn from the tech in those rooms. That’s part of our mission, too.”
“So strip the rooms and stuff everything you can into the shuttles. We’ll sort it out in transit. Right now, we’ve gotta boogie.”
“What about the people on the surface?” Gruber asked. “We can’t just leave them down there in a planet-sized lab. We need to rescue them.”
Allison shook her head. “I don’t think it’s that simple, Marcel. Even if their ancestors were kidnapped from Earth, the Pirikura have lived on Solonis B for generations. They’re humans, all right, but they aren’t earthlings anymore. ‘Rescuing’ them now would be like a second abduction.”
Gruber bowed his head a fraction. “I hadn’t thought of it like that, ma’am.”
“No worries. Your heart is in the right place.” Allison’s translucent head turned to address Maximus. “Captain, it will take time to secure all of our equipment. Some of it is here in the cave, but some is still in the village. I’ll need at least a full shift before we’re ready to depart.”
“That’s fine. We’ll need almost that long to retrieve and secure the Gargoyle platforms. We’ll see you in orbit.”
* * *
Vel Noric watched through bloodred, artificial eyes as the two human vessels disappeared through their high-space portal.
His attention then turned to the world they’d just departed. The earthlings almost certainly had another designation for the planet, but the civilized galaxy knew it as Culpus-Alam, set aside many generations ago to observe humans in a controlled setting.
The experiment had run unattended for many cycles as the tribes of humans developed distinct cultures. The next step was to facilitate contact between the tribes and observe their interactions. The hope was to learn enough to better predict humanity’s eventual integration into the galactic community.
In Noric’s opinion, Culpus-Alam was typical of the way the Assembly of Sentient Species operated. A time-consuming, complicated, and expensive reaction to what should be a straightforward problem.
It was a problem that Noric had been tasked with solving by the Kumer-Vel himself.
“Has their high-space portal sealed?”
“Yes, Vel.”
“Very well.” Noric straightened his spine and stood at his full height. “Hedfer-Vel, you may begin the operation.”
CHAPTER 30
D’armic sat cross-legged on the floor of his small quarters, sipping yelic root tea to try to excite his nerves. Some in the drug-free movement considered the bitter root cheating, but he did not. While the tea was undoubtedly a stimulant, it worked indiscriminately across the Lividite nervous system, boosting perception and concentration f
or a time. It did not mimic any of the neurochemicals specific to emotions or try to boost receptor site sensitivity. So D’armic felt no guilt in drinking it from time to time. Of course, without a dose of Regretinide, he didn’t feel guilty about anything.
Yet I remain moral, he thought. How do I know to do that without guilt or compassion? Is morality deeper even than emotion?
The implications didn’t make sense. In fact, the thought served to reinforce his belief that his natural emotions were there, still influencing his decisions and actions, but too deep to make themselves known consciously.
If he felt anything, it was a powerful and growing sense of melancholy. His survey of the Human Wildlife Preserve buoy network had been, with the exception of the still-unexplained fate of Buoy #4258743-E, dull and repetitive enough to bore a dead Teskin. Yet he’d soldiered on through the assignment without complaint. The Teskin are one of the most specialized carnivores in the known galaxy. They evolved over the millennia to infiltrate cocktail parties, wedding receptions, and class reunions. Once inside, they corner their unsuspecting prey and regale them with hours of banal anecdotes about office politics, family vacations, and medical issues. A successful hunt ends when the target kills itself out of desperation. If you’re ever invited to attend a Teskin business conference, decline and immediately change your telephone number, email address, mailing address, and name.
D’armic reached for his cup to take another sip when the cutter’s proximity alarm chimed. Reflexes honed during many cycles propelled D’armic to the command cave. He was halfway there when the strangeness of the situation hit him.
The cutter was decelerating through high-space, on course for Culpus-Alam. His three-dimensional ship couldn’t actually collide with any of the four-dimensional matter native to high-space. On the rare occasions that his three-dimensional cutter did intersect high-space material, it sort of floated around it due to incompatible topologies, or something. He didn’t fathom how it worked exactly, but then, few could. Those that did were either institutionalized for their own safety, or became performance artists.
D’armic knew he couldn’t collide with anything of this dimension, which meant the alarm was warning of an impending impact with something from his dimension. The odds against that were … well, the usual superlatives weren’t going to cut it.
The cutter wasn’t in immediate peril. The ship’s sensor suite was sensitive enough to afford D’armic plenty of time to analyze the situation and take appropriate action, even at maximum velocity. As soon as he reached the command cave, he bonded with the ship’s computer, feeding a steady flow of data into his consciousness.
What he saw didn’t merely defy understanding. It snuck out of its bedroom window at 1:00 A.M., stole understanding’s prized collector car from the garage, and crashed it into a tree.
Ahead of his cutter, a titanic worm of fire twisted and danced in the vacuum. Its skin boiled, spitting chunks larger than his cutter into high-space. It was a nightmare monster of the deep caverns, straight from his race’s oldest, forgotten superstitions. It slithered toward his ship, intent on devouring him in its hellish, glowing lava maw.
At least that’s what his lower brain believed. His higher brain was having trouble forming an opinion. In the absence of a rational counterbalance, his lower brain acted on its own initiative and opened a portal back to the universe below. The cutter dove through the portal, emerging safely back in his native dimension.
He searched in all directions for evidence of the monster, but there was none. The single star of the Culpus-Alam system shone ahead of his bow like a milky jewel. An involuntary tremor ran through D’armic’s body, and his skin danced with electricity. He felt suddenly fatigued.
Was that fear? he asked himself. No, fear was the wrong word. There had been no time to be afraid. It certainly resembled the drug-induced feelings he’d experienced as a larva, but it was more raw and immediate. Panic, perhaps? He’d been in danger before, even mortal danger. Why was this time different? The question deserved contemplation, but not now.
The worm was a mystery to solve, but first he had to review the progress of the experiment on the surface of Culpus-Alam. The little cutter’s trajectory carried it deeper into the system while its counter-grav engines worked overtime to shed momentum. The planet slowly moved out of the eclipse of the sun.
Something was wrong. D’armic had never been to this system before, but his assignment files described it as a garden world of lush forests and deep oceans. The planet revealed by his cutter’s telescope was a tortured waste. The atmosphere was filled with carbon oxides, sulfates, and particulate indicative of massive volcanic activity. Vast webs of glowing cracks lined the surface, making the whole planet look like a shattered egg. Tracing the scars backward led to a massive hole in the world’s crust, from which a fountain of lava erupted, sending molten rock into orbit. An asteroid crater?
D’armic’s mind raced, seeking an explanation that would solve the disparity between the world described in his briefing and the shattered husk before his eyes. The orbital location and inclination was right, but everything else was wrong. He dug through the stream of data, correlating atmospheric sampling, crust composition, rotational speed, mass …
Mass. There wasn’t enough of it. He quickly worked up an estimate of the ejecta thrown clear of the planet, but the total was still short by nearly a percent. An asteroid impact would have added mass to the planet, so that hypothesis was tossed down the stream.
Something occurred to him then that sent an icy jolt through his spine. He thought of the worm, thought of its color and size. Hoping he was wrong, but almost certain he wasn’t, he dug into the sensor records from the encounter. The fire worm’s estimated mass matched what was missing from Culpus-Alam to six decimal places.
D’armic put a hand to his mouth, reluctant to believe what he’d discovered, but the conclusion was inescapable. The worm really was a monster from his people’s past, but it hadn’t risen from the depths of their imaginations.
Millennia ago, in the closing days of the Lividite war against, well, everybody, it became apparent their military had bitten off just enough to choke on. The Lividite war machine had overreached.
The Pu’Lan were closest to the front lines. They’d handed the Lividies a string of defeats, the first in the history of their campaigns among the stars. Desperate to regain the initiative, the Lividite military hatched a plan to make an example of the Pu’Lan.
As it turns out, destroying an entire world was a simple affair, provided the culprits were without remorse. Simply fly a ship straight at the world, open a high-space portal, and allow the hole in the universe to bore a tunnel straight through to the other side. The resulting collapse of the magma tunnel set off mayhem on a scale that would ruin the surface, triggering two massive volcanoes at the entry and exit wounds, shattering tectonic plates, disrupting the planet’s core and magnetic field. It was an apocalypse.
The Pu’Lan were all but obliterated. While it was nearly impossible to truly eradicate a space-faring race, without their home world as a keystone, their culture and heritage crumbled. The ancestors of the scattered survivors grew into nomads, echoes of a once-proud race, and a constant reminder of the Lividites’ bloodthirstiness, to their everlasting shame.
It was called geocide, and there was no higher crime in Assembly space.
D’armic scanned the surface of Culpus-Alam for survivors. It was proper procedure, but he knew it was futile. Between the volcanic outgassing, massive ground shakes, the rain of molten debris falling from orbit, and the firestorms tearing through the forests, there was little chance any complex life would survive.
The chill in his bones was turning to heat. The population had been completely defenseless. They possessed nothing more advanced than flint spears and stone axes. The destruction of the Pu’Lan had been a galaxy-shaping tragedy, but that conflict had been between near peers technologically. The humans on Culpus-Alam were not equipped to underst
and what had happened to them, much less defend against it.
Even if there were no survivors, perhaps he could still find the killers. As was Lividite custom, all the planet’s research and observation stations were built into underground caves. There was one for each colony, twenty-seven in total. That gave D’armic twenty-seven chances to recover whatever data the planet’s sensor network had recorded before the attack. But there was too much interference at this altitude. Establishing a direct link meant dropping into the shooting gallery that had become low orbit.
He sent out a hail, hoping one of the facilities had survived. In fact, two had. They pinged back, requesting authentication codes while the little cutter dodged pieces of red-hot debris moving at orbital speeds. The uploads dragged on for what seemed like an epoch. Attempting to speed things up, he limited the data request to the last three days.
Even still, time ran out for one of the sites. Lava from a nearby flow broke through a natural dam and flooded the cave with liquefied rock. Not even Lividite technology could stand up to that sort of abuse.
The last site was more fortunate. It survived just long enough to broadcast what it had seen. Data retrieved, the cutter hastily climbed out of Culpus-Alam’s gravity well while pebbles ricocheted off the hull. In time, an accretion disk would form, perhaps even a small moon.
For the next several hundred cycles, the planet’s surface would be mercilessly bombarded by meteorites as parts of its own mantle returned. Whatever simple life survived would have a daunting climb ahead of it before it would return to multicellular complexity.
D’armic settled the cutter into a lazy orbit above the swarm of rocks and began scrounging through the data. Starting from the end and working backward, he learned the attack had come less than a day earlier. The quality of the tactical information was poor, owing to the sensors being optimized for ground-level viewing. The residents had not been expected to develop powered flight anytime soon.
Still, there was enough data to confirm the appearance of the high-space portal right before contact. However, the ship that opened it was obscured behind the portal itself. Moving further back through the time line, D’armic caught a break. A second high-space portal had been opened a few moments before the one that had delivered the deathblow, and two ships had escaped through it.
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