Jacques chuckled. “There is nothing worse than the political machinations when it comes to funding science,” he said.
“How much Smart Metal do you need?” Sandy asked.
“Three kilograms,” Marie answered. “However, to build a drone that can travel fast from one of our normal drop zones we would need five kilos.”
Sandy tapped her commlink. “Penny, I have a job for you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We need five, no make that eight kilos of Smart Metal for a tiny dig that I’m quite interested in. Could you arrange to have that on the next shuttle drop? Jacques’ Marie can work with your Mimzy to see that it is dropped off as close to the dig as possible.”
“Mimzy says she has the coordinates. We can arrange for a slightly different landing path to tomorrow morning’s dawn drop. They should have the material in six hours.”
“Should I ask what you’re taking the Smart Metal out of?” Sandy asked cautiously.
“Better you don’t, ma’am. That way you can deny it if the matter comes up, which I doubt it will.”
“Thank you, Penny.”
“You’re welcome, Admiral.”
“Jacques, I am very interested in anything that might give us some samples of what life was like on this planet before the first bombardment. If you see any place that might give me something to gnaw on, let me know and I’ll see that you get your hands on resources immediately. Understand?”
“I believe the answer is aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Now you’re sassing me, civilian.”
“Not at all. I am being very, very grateful and respectful.”
The rest of the evening was more listening to scientists talk on matter she hardly understood. She wondered what it would take to have them slow down and translate it as well as Jacques had just done. From the way they talked, Sandy doubted that was possible. They spoke in their own language. No doubt if she tried explaining battle tactics and ship maintenance, she would get back the same blank stares or vacant smiles as she was giving them.
Which left her wondering. How much information was going right over her head, and how much of that information might be something she really needed to know?
27
Sandy spent the next two weeks with her head on a swivel. Her time was divided. Half her day was for her war fighters, eying the reports from the pickets. They had defeated one onslaught by the aliens. They were in general agreement that it was from one wolf pack. Most also agreed that it was very unlikely that another wolf pack would be in this vicinity.
No one, however, agreed with that enough to bet money on it.
The other half of Sandy’s time was focused dirt side. The full team of scientists, equipped this time for a carefully planned assault on the mysteries of this planet, was turning up some very interesting discoveries.
The language continued to puzzle the linguists. As they gathered more and more examples of the language spoken by more of the wandering groups, they were left with an impossible challenge.
“Language changes,” one scientist said over supper with Sandy. Sandy was spending a lot of time on the Galileo. “Just as DNA drift allows us to track the evolution of our bodies as we become isolated and mutations occur, so it is with languages. Take Standard. It’s a mishmash of several Earth languages. If you were dropped on a street in a slum of say, Beijing, New York or Paris, you might understand every tenth word. And it would be a different tenth word depending on which of those cities, separated by ten thousand kilometers, that you stood in.”
The scientist waved his hand as if to avoid an argument. “Yes, I know. You could talk to any of the scientific or federated government officials and you could understand each other. But only because they had taught Standard in school. That’s not something many of those slum dwellers get a chance to learn. Okay, you get what I mean. Language changes over distances and over time. It takes a lot of effort to keep Standard the same Standard everywhere.”
He shook his head. “Now we come to this damn place. We’ve got people tens of thousands of kilometers apart. Separated by huge oceans that they lack the technology to cross. Similarly, they have no media technology to create a unified audience. My archeological associates tell me it has been this way for a hundred thousand years or more. But what I see is a collection of tribes where the most deviation we can find across continents is something that hardly shows more than a few hundred years of mutation.
“It’s just not natural,” he said. “It goes against everything we’ve found in the last five hundred years of human study. It can’t be!”
“I’m told you’re also studying the small groups around the pyramid that seem to have been recently exiled from ships. What about their language drift?” Sandy asked.
“It’s the same thing. The very same thing. If they talk slower, every one of them could understand anyone around them or on the other side of the planet. It’s impossible.”
“But it is what the evidence shows you,” Sandy pointed out.
“It is. I can’t argue with that. It is, but it can’t be.”
“Clearly, there is something going on here that we’ve either missed or don’t have a handle on yet.”
The boffin nodded. “Exactly. Trust me, Admiral. We are hunting for it. Oh, are we hunting for it!”
Another boffin cleared his throat. “We know the aliens, both those on the ground and those from space that we’ve studied, have a very complex DNA. We also know that complex DNA is reserved for just the sentient species and only for them. None of the prey or predator animals on this planet have it. Some of us are thinking it is artificial.”
“I saw a report somewhere,” Sandy said slowly, “that showed that the alien heads piled before that central family in the crypt of horrors also seemed to have a very complex DNA.”
“Yes,” said the boffin who had just entered the conversation. “They have eight acids in their DNA code. Two more than the bug-eyed monsters and four more than we have or the animals on this planet have. We can decode that DNA and break it down into its components. We can match some of the DNA against local animals and see the evolution. What we can’t do is tell what the DNA with the extra two acids do.”
“Is it possible that it has something to do with the unique characteristics that we’re seeing?” Sandy asked. “A language that doesn’t mutate much. A killing rage that hasn’t cooled in a hundred thousand years. Neither of those are humanly possible, but then, our limited DNA doesn’t allow for a lot more than the basics of recreating our bodies, does it?”
“There are protein that pass along some echoes of what happened to the last few generations. If you grandmother suffered major trauma, she may pass echoes of that along to her children. Of course, after two or three generations, those proteins slough off,” the biologist said.
“And if you had two or three times the storage capacity in your DNA?” Sandy asked, raising an eyebrow.
The boffin rubbed his face with both hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know how you would get that data into the DNA. Did the aliens start out with fewer nucleonic acids, like the other animals on this planet? How the hell do you replace the DNA in an entire species?” Again he shook his head. “This is so far beyond us, it boggles the mind even to think of it. Yes, we can do minor surgery on our DNA to get rid of this or that problem, but replacing it with an entirely new system and including in that revision a whole lot of other stuff? Language? Hatred? No, I can’t believe that.”
“Maybe we need to,” Sandy said. “When all the possible answers have proven insufficient, isn’t it wise to consider the impossible?”
“Of course, you’re right, Admiral. Of course. Maybe I should have supper with you more often. Maybe I should risk my comfort more often by talking things over with someone who knows nothing about what I’m talking about.”
“I think I’ve just been insulted,” Sandy said, grinning.
“No, say you have shown a light into a dark place, and now, a whol
e lot of people are likely to lose a lot of sleep chasing that light, expanding it in the darkness.”
“Are there any similarities in the DNA of our aliens and those of the family under the pyramid?” Sandy asked, getting back to something that had been nibbling at the back of her mind.
“Trying to match up eight acid DNA with six acid DNA is not an easy task. We’ve been trying to match up the six with the four, both from the animals and our own. It’s enough to drive you crazy.”
“I imagine it’s quite a jigsaw puzzle,” Sandy said, agreeably. “Still, it looks to me that it could be a big help. Does our database have all the DNA we’ve taken off of the different aliens we’ve had access to?”
“Pretty much,” the biologist said.
Sandy didn’t much like the sound of that. “Pretty much?”
“The samples from the first shoot out Kris Longknife had with the aliens kind of has gotten lost. Someone on Alwa screwed up and left the data back home. Also, Alwa didn’t have a lot of resources back then, so they only tested a few of the aliens on the first ship Kris brought back and the partial mother ship that she shot up at the Cat system. We’ve got the DNA from the aliens she brought back from here as well as everybody on the latest ship we captured.”
Sandy sighed. “It seems to me we need to study all the DNA, don’t you think?”
“Yes, ma’am. The first captured ship is still orbiting Alwa. We’ll get on it when we get back. In the meantime, we’ll see what we can find out from what we have. It’s kind of hard to figure out what DNA does when you only have a few live samples.”
“Yes,” Sandy said, tired of this conversation. She glanced around. Jacques caught her glance and moved in.
“Admiral. We’ve got some very interesting pictures I’d love to show you.”
“Then I think I’d love to see them,” Sandy answered.
“Do you mind dropping down to my room? I just got the pictures and Amanda wants to see them, too.”
28
Jacques’s lovely wife was not that far away. Sandy joined them for the short walk down a deck to their stateroom. Apparently, the Galileo was now in Love Boat configuration. She was one of the Smart MetalTM transports that had been constructed expressly for the Alwa run. She was supposed to have gone back immediately, but she and her sister ship, the Tycho, had been appropriated, or rather retasked, for this voyage to a strange world. For the moment, the two ships swung around each other and both had expanded to make the boffins more comfortable.
Jacques and Amanda’s quarters were quite comfortable with a cozy sitting room. A large office was accessible through an open arch to the right and a bedroom was to the left behind a door. Jacques offered Sandy a comfortable chair, then settled on the couch with his wife.
“Marie, show us the entrance to the cave and tunnel complex,” he said.
Immediately, a hologram appeared in front of them.
“I’m adjusting the view to make it level with someone walking up to the entrance,” Marie said.
“Good. Now, Admiral, you will note that there doesn’t appear to be anything like a cave here. That rock,” and the view swept to the right and left, then up, “is big. It sheared off of the cliff above and hardly looks like there’s anything more to see,” Jacques said.
“However, if you mosey around to the left, you get a different view.”
Sandy studied the scene as it moved quickly to the left. It would be a rough walk. The hill was steep and there were rocks of various sizes littering the ground. It would be easy to turn an ankle.
Then the view from behind the rock appeared.
“You’ve got a rough overhang,” Jacques pointed out. “It’s about a meter wide, so you could walk up to the cave with no risk of being viewed from orbit. There’s about another meter, so if you needed to haul in something bigger, you could.”
“Where are the rocks? The path is almost smooth,” Sandy observed.
“No rocks here,” Jacques said, with a sparkle in his eyes. “You’d almost think someone had cleared a path. If they did, the overhang has kept the rock falls off. There are a few rocks to the right.”
“In a hundred and ten thousand years, you do get rocks.”
“You do,” Amanda said, her shoes off, her feet under herself and an arm around her husband.
“Now we have the cave. It has been occupied. There’s a fire pit that has recently burned wood. Say one, maybe two years old. This entire cave, the part that has daylight reflected into it, is pretty much all windblown dirt, ash or bone. We think a hundred and ten thousand years ago it was much closer to the bedrock.”
The picture adjusted itself to show a cave with a much larger opening.
“We’ve had nano diggers slip through gaps in the soil all the way down to the bedrock. There are layers after layers of dirt and ash with a few bones tossed in,” Jacques said. “None of the bones are alien. Just their prey. There are a few stone tools, sharp stone chips, arrow and spearheads. It’s pretty much what you’d expect at the normal human prehistory dig back on Earth. Some of our archeologists are dying to get a trowel into that dirt, but the nanos have given us a good picture.
“It’s just dirt all the way down?” Sandy asked.
“Yes, but there’s a clear change at the bottom. The sand down there looks like it’s taken from deep in the mountain. It’s consistent with that rock. Above that layer begins the ash, fine dirt and bones.”
“First occupancy was by something other than a hunter gatherer,” Amanda observed.
“It sure looks like it,” Jacques agreed.
Sandy said nothing. For now she was content to just take it all in and taste the questions.
The view moved further back. It came to a small opening, about two meters across and much less than half a meter high at it’s largest.
“That is all that is left of entrance to the tunnel system. Just a small, dark maw. Nothing there to encourage anyone to slip inside.”
“Do your diggers show evidence of the entrance being widened, raised?” Sandy asked.
“After all this time, it is more likely than not that it was worked, however.” Here Jacques shrugged.
“Yes. A hundred, maybe a hundred and ten thousand years is a long time,” Sandy said, and found herself musing what the things she possessed would look like in a hundred and ten millenniums.
The view moved into the tunnel. It quickly passed into pitch darkness. That only lasted for a second, then the view lit up almost as bright as day.
“Our nanos have now adjusted to the low light,” Marie said.
Sandy studied the walls, floor and overhead. They had clearly been constructed, and well constructed at that. Yes, there were cracks and some places where the sides or overhead had fallen away, but they were not that many.
The nano paused to look down. There was a thick layer of fine dirt on the deck.
“The dust in here is an interesting mixture of concrete from the walls, some wood and metals. There may also be some bones, but they’ve vanished into just dust. There’s nothing for us to analyze but the dust left behind.”
To the right and left, side tunnels led to large rooms.
“The dirt or dust in these rooms closest to the mouth are rich in iron with some copper. Whatever was here, it’s rusted or eroded away to nothing. Some of us think there may have been electric generators here, but we’re just guessing.”
“It seems logical,” Sandy said. “If this is a high-class thieves hole-in-the-wall, or a secret rebel base, you’d put your generators up here so the exhaust could be vented outside.”
“The next batch of rooms are also high in metals, though there are quite a bit of heavy metals mixed in,” Jacques said. “I’ve talked our results over with the head of our Marine detachment. He thinks we might have rusted out guns here with heavy metals in the ammunition. However, again, there’s nothing but dust. The mushrooms, however, are laced with poisonous levels of heavy metals.”
Sandy watched as the view
dipped down. The floor was indeed covered with fungi.
“Are there anything like bats or rats in here? If there’s food, there has to be someone eating it.”
Jacques shook his head. “The heavy metal content inside these two rooms and the next two make those fungi deadly. In a hundred thousand years, even the animals have learned this is not a good place to hang out. It may have helped keep this place from going to the dogs, or bears, or bats, or whatever.”
Sandy nodded.
The view continued down the central passageway with other openings into rooms or more passageways leading off into the dark. One large chamber showed ramps heading to an upper and lower level. This place really was huge. When it was occupied, it must have been quite a beehive of activity.
“Where did they get rid of all the rock they chewed up?” Sandy asked.
“I was wondering when you’d ask that. Marie lets pick up the pace.”
Now, instead of walking through the labyrinth, it was as if they rode a cycle. Openings whizzed by until an end began to loom in front of them. They braked to a sudden stop on a ledge above a precipice.
“Wow,” came from both Sandy and Amanda at the same time.
Before them was a vast cavern. The walls had a phosphorescent glow about them, lighting the huge expanse before them in dim shadows. This was clearly a gift of nature: rough, uneven, and almost limitless. Almost, but not quite. Sandy saw the bottom, far below and the ceiling way above her. The walls stretched out on either side before vanishing into antechambers.
Several shuttle construction hangars could get lost in here. Far below, shimmered a lake of water that glowed with its own phosphorous light.
“There’s no evidence of human construction here, with one exception.”
Their view tiptoed to the edge of the ledge they seemed to be standing on, then looked over. Below them stretched a massive sand pile.
“We’ve checked the sand. It’s from the same rock we’ve been walking through. They must have had something that could chew up rock and spit out sand. Our guess is that they knew this huge cavern was back here. Say, some spelunker had wiggled his way back here along a natural hole in the rock. They used that cave as a guide to dig the main passageway, then dumped the rest of their residue off this cliff. Off to the left you’ll see another ledge, less natural. There was likely some elevators there to go below, but they’ve rusted away. Hold on to your stomachs,” Jacques warned, and the view shot down.
Kris Longknife's Relief: Grand Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station Page 16
