Melchior's Fire

IX: FOLLOWING YONDER STAR…

“I found something interesting in the database,” Randi Queson told them as the Stanley approached the ghostly and frozen moon of Kaspar. “An old Christian melody. I wonder if that monk was tweaking our future collective noses a bit?”

Nagel’s bushy eyebrows rose. “A melody? You mean a religious song?”

“One of many about them, although hardly a religious song in the usual sense. There wasn’t any real agreement ever on whether or not they really were kings or more likely astrologers or some sort of magicians high up in royal courts. I looked through the bunch—there are even some operas—but this one is kind of interesting. I half suspect that if anything was running through that cybernetic brain when those reports were sent, it was this one.”

“Not my background, but let’s hear it.”

Nagel shrugged. “Sounds pretty innocuous to me, the parts that make sense.”

“Christian tradition, mostly, The Christian Bible really says little about them except that they were so naive they inadvertently made the local king so paranoid he tried to kill all the babies. But the traditions would be in the mind of this monastic scout, that’s for sure. He would have been raised with them. It might just be a kind of perverse sense of humor—monk humor, maybe. In this case our kings don’t follow a star but a failed star, but it’s sure a star of wonder and beauty as these things go. But in the song all the kings bear gifts to give to the Christ child. They come, they do it, but in the process cause infanticide. A warning, perhaps, to those who know the story?”

Nagel wasn’t impressed. “Maybe, maybe not. I remember an old legend once about the oracle that always gave infallible predictions, but in riddles. Trouble was, you could never figure out what the oracle meant until the thing came true, so it was useless. If that old boy had any kind of message in mind, other than being creative in his names, I doubt if we could figure it out until after it’s too late, so what’s the point? Maybe we should have brought along a priest, huh?”

“Not with the percentage Vaticanus would demand. And I don’t think Normie was the religious type, and definitely not that kind of religious. Interesting, though, if even that was a part of the old monk’s description. They’re a strange lot, those people. I mean, which star is he talking about if he’s referring to here? The conventional one, or the almost-star that traps the Kings? That planet gives me the creeps anyway. For all its awesome beauty, the fact that it’s active enough to send out light and heat on its own, and that kind of throbbing luminescence on what should be the dark side… I don’t know.”

The captain’s voice interrupted them. “I am placing us in a medium orbit above Kaspar as we speak. On the way out, I will launch a mapping satellite that should be able to produce an excellent and detailed surface study over time. Do you want to just look over the place with the screens now, or send down a surface probe?”

“We just want an overview for now,” Nagel told her. “We’ll launch a probe if we see anything we really want to look at.”

At 180 kilometers above the planet-sized moon, the instrumentation and cameras could do an excellent job. If somebody had stopped off there and left graffiti on a rock, they could read it. The trick was noticing the rock in the first place.

It was a forbidding-looking place. The residual heat from the big and still officially unnamed mother planet, plus pressure deep under its oceans, freezing around the coasts but still liquid for most of their expanse, allowed it to maintain a barely habitable temperature during its long semi-night, but just gave an even more eerie look to the place.

“Not any signs of glaciation,” Nagel noted. “It must melt pretty good on the sunward leg. Lots of erosion in the regions against the mountains, but the main land masses have been so chewed up they’re just cold, powdery desert. Those dunes and that wind would make it even nastier. And we thought that overrun colony’s choice of worlds was bad!”

“Could you breathe down there? Without aid?” An Li asked him.

He checked the figures. “Yes, looks like it. Pretty damned cold at the moment and dry as a bone, but the oxygen and nitrogen mix is within our limits. I wouldn’t like to do it without some sort of facemask to keep the grit from choking you, but the air would be okay. I don’t know what you’d eat, though, and any fresh water in those big lakes would take a fission reactor to properly melt for use. It’s probably as ugly but very different on the solar traverse. No way to tell until we can see it, and that’s still almost fifteen standard days, I think.”

A subsurface scan showed even more similarities to the old world they’d grown to hate.

“We’ve found a good second home for that worm, though,” Randi noted. Lots of caverns, vast openings beneath the surface. You could get lost in there fast.”

“Yeah, but not much water in them, interestingly enough,” Nagel pointed out. “Most of the interior caverns, some of which seem to go way down, appear to be relatively dry, and those figures there just might indicate some running water even at this point. That’s how you survive the cold cycle. Ten to one the caves maintain an above-freezing temperature that’s either constant or nearly so. The surface is only comfortable half the year. Odd, though.”

“Huh? What?” Queson responded.

“Well, caverns of that signature tend to be sedimentary rock, easily eroded away over time by the underground rivers and streams, and certainly all the makings are there for a classic setup. Note, though, that there are no such caverns within a hundred or more kilometers of the coastlines. They’re away from the oceans and in the highlands no matter where you look. There doesn’t seem to be a major change in bedrock composition in most of those cases that would explain it. The planet’s got a heavy but mostly solid core that’s maintained the gravity and kept the atmosphere, but a lot of the underground water doesn’t seem to obey the laws all that well. It’s probably scrambled data from all this interference, but on the face of it it seems like as many of those deep rivers are flowing upward as down slope.”

“Water does not run uphill. Even I know that,” An Li commented.

“Precisely my point. Either these readings are wrong, or the signals are being distorted before sending back, or we have here a good example of the repeal of the law of gravity.”

“Water in pipes or under pressure can flow up, down, or anywhere at all,” An Li pointed out.

“Plumbing for a race driven from the surface? Interesting idea, but we’re getting heavy organics but nothing that would suggest a civilization or even a big colony that would justify building works like that. If your aliens are down there, then they’re probably long dead or reduced to a primitive existence. This is a planet you can survive on, it’s not one you ever want to try and live and work on if you don’t have to.”

An Li settled back in her chair and looked at the passing parade of the dismal, cold world below. Suddenly she sat bolt upright. “What the hell was that?” she almost shouted. “Go back! Go back!”

“What? What did you see?” Nagel and Queson both prompted her.

“A structure! I’d swear it wasn’t natural! Cap, can you back up the video ten seconds at a time?”

“Will do,” the captain’s voice responded, and the visual segment began the backing up. An Li was almost ready to admit that she’d been hallucinating when, suddenly, it showed up again, and this time they all saw it.

“There! Freeze that!”

It did look very much like an artificial structure, but not for humans. It also gave off virtually no power signatures, meaning either that it used a power system unknown to them and therefore unmeasurable or, more likely, that it was a derelict from times long past, covered and then uncovered by the shifting sands.

It was a huge ball shape, perhaps 300 meters across, sticking out of the sand. It was light gray in color, and all over its surface it had short probelike protrusions. A closeup didn’t reveal much more about it, but it did reveal at least one clear breach of the hull or exterior or whatever it was. A jagged hole, half in the sand and possibly anchoring it there.

“It’s nothing natural, that’s for sure,” Nagel agreed. “And I doubt that it’s much of anything from any kind of ancient Kasparian civilization. That leaves the obvious, boys and girls. We’ve just discovered our first-in-history, honest-to-goodness alien spacecraft.”

“Yeah. Too bad we ain’t in the salvage business any more,” Sark growled, tongue a bit in cheek.

“He’s right,” Queson noted, not echoing the humor. “There’s a lot of potential down there, but it’s not what we’re here for. If you look at the size of that thing, even the Stanley isn’t big enough to handle it whole, and we don’t have aboard all the equipment to break it up even if we knew how to do it properly and save what’s valuable. If, that is, we could figure out what was valuable. No, we have to plot it, mark it, and go on, I think. When we can stabilize that wild hole and turn it into a genhole, if that’s possible, then it’s possibly the most valuable thing here. Until then, it’s more valuable if others come to it.”

“Man! Goes against all my instincts, though!” Nagel sighed. “Damn! Even I would love to go down there and look through that ship.”

Queson wasn’t so enthusiastic. “Yeah, that’s right. None of you have ever talked to an alien close up, have you? Still, you got to wonder.”

“Huh? What?” Nagel asked.

“That’s been down there a while, You can smell it as a long-term derelict, an ancient shipwreck. Sure, you wonder if any of ’em survived, and, if so, did they manage to set up something permanent down there, but it’s a long shot. More telling is that it’s there at all, and that there’s good evidence it’s been buried by the sands and winds several times, and maybe baked and thawed as well on the sunward side. How many more might be down there, I wonder?”

“What? You think they were a colony or a military squadron or something?” Lucky Cross asked. “Don’t see that. Not out here.”

“No, no, I don’t mean that. I suspect they were scouts, explorers, maybe even some commercial vessel or a lone military one. I don’t mean how many other ships like that one might be down there someplace, hidden for now. Just the idea that we’ve seen the wreck of even one on the surface of the first world we looked at makes me wonder just how many ships from how many different races have come through here and not left. Remember how Li kept thinking of this region as some kind of trap? Maybe it is, either planned or just naturally one. Either way, it’s not a trap set for us, I don’t think. If the former, it’s set long ago for somebody or something very different than us; if the latter, it’s effective against just about anyone that comes here regardless of shape, size, or racial origins.”

“You want to go down there and have a look around?” Lucky Cross asked them.

“Not me,” Nagel replied, and, one by one, Sark, An Li, and most emphatically Doctor Queson also shook their heads “No.” With that weather and those caverns, their experience with the unexpected worm kept coming up as well.

“We could send Eyegor down,” An Li suggested. “That would solve a lot of problems at once.”

“Not a bad idea,” Nagel replied, only to see the hovering robot in the back area of the command and control center.

“I am not programmed to become an explorer,” it said, sounding no more enthused about going down there than the humans had.

“Ah, but what about your primary mission?” An Li pressed. “Look at the pictures down there! The first close-ups of the exterior and perhaps the interior of a truly advanced alien spacecraft. And who knows what else might be valuable?”

“Sand is not good for my workings, and I do not know if my mobility might be impaired. I believe the ship’s cameras will suffice for this one for now.”

“Then why are you really here?” Nagel put in. “If it’s not your job to get those kind of pictures, then the only conceivable mission you could really be on is to spy on us. That is what you’re really doing, isn’t it? Spying on us?”

“I am documenting you, not spying on you,” the robot responded. “If you go down there, I go down there. But without you, the potential for fulfilling my mission is greatly diminished.”

“Sounds fishy to me,” Sark growled. “I say we take it apart now, file it under spare parts, and forget about it. It can do us no good.”

The robot said nothing, but even the others weren’t sure whether or not Sark was joking and, worse, none of them cared if he wasn’t.

“We could send down a probe,” Cross suggested.

“Too limited,” Nagel responded. “It wouldn’t be able to do much if it could get inside the thing, and we’ve got a finite number. Best to use them when we have questions that have to be answered. This is just something we’d like to know, not something we can easily turn into money.”

After a long silence, An Li asked, matter of factly, “So, what do we do about poor little Kaspar here? Go down or go on?”

“We need stuff that can be picked up and hauled back and turned into money,” Lucky Cross pointed out. “I can’t see it down there with what we got. As you said, we couldn’t haul that thing back on a bet.”

“Any of the life that might exist down there, native or survivors and survivor descendants, will be underground at this point, or maybe underwater,” Queson pointed out. “This isn’t the right time to go looking for them, nor is there a lot of profit in it. I say we note this as potentially valuable but go on. I’ve had enough freezing cold and blowing sand.”

An Li nodded. “Anybody else? Then we’re agreed. Captain, launch your probe and survey satellite and let’s move on. We can always come back if nothing more promising turns up.”

“Very well,” the captain’s voice responded. “Let the log show we are in unanimous agreement. I think personally we should examine all three before doing much in the way of landing anyway. That goes even if the next one has streets paved with gold and the Fountain of Youth in the center.”

“I might stop on that,” Nagel commented. “Still, we all agree with the general sentiment.”

“Setting course for Balshazzar,” the captain told them. “At least it’s very pretty as worlds go. Were I still human, that would be the one that I think I’d go down and look over first anyway.”

“How long?” Nagel asked her.

“Two and a half days. We have to go slow and careful in this miniature solar system without charts and nav beacons. Planets this size don’t just accumulate moons and rings, they pick up a ton of junk.”

And now, from the bleakness of Limbo, they turned towards the spectre of Eden.

Even going the slow and careful route, though, they were well within instrument and sensitive optical range of the second livable moon long before they reached it.

“There’s altogether too much life on that moon,” Randi Queson grumbled. “Can’t pick anything valuable out of it. In fact, the only interesting parts are these energy signatures against some very small but measurably dead points. At least two could be the remains of routine solar-system lander power supplies, and a third could even be the remnants of an interstellar worm drive. There are several more such signatures elsewhere on the planet, but they don’t give off anything familiar or recognizable to the database. If we assume that at least one is ours, from some prior expedition, and maybe two, and we make the reasonable assumption that even a very alien civilization would probably wind up doing it for sheer practical reasons pretty much like we do, then we’re looking at the signatures of at least a dozen shipwrecks down there, at least a few of which are not ancient history. I keep thinking about Dr. Woodward and his evangelical space colony. We’re following in his footsteps and we got here with the same data, so why should we assume that he didn’t?”

“Yeah, but the old records say he had a humongous ship, a real artificial world moving through the universe,” An Linoted. “If that’s so, where is it?”

“It wasn’t cybernetic,” Queson pointed out. “And, as you say, it was huge. Put both of those in our wild hole and you might not be in any condition to get back once you get through, if you do. So let’s assume they did. Lucky, you’ve looked at the old records with the layouts of Woodward’s interstellar holy land. Am I off base here?”

“Nope, right on. In fact, Woodward was a physicist. He had to know, as did his pilots and crew, that it was gonna be damned near impossible to bring something that huge through, and, even if they did, to stabilize it in this environment when it emerged.”

“Faith,” the doctor responded. “Faith moves mountains. He would have no choice but to act on his faith, particularly if he thought God was directing them here.”

“Yeah, faith moves mountains. Faith Explosives, Queenspark, Marchellus,” Nagel said with a chuckle.

They ignored him. “So be speculative based on what you know. What might happen if Woodward got this far but with a banged-up ship?”

“He’d never fully control it if it were really banged up,” Cross noted. “And that thing was a fuckin’ nightmare. All patchwork, the drives of different shapes and sizes and manufacture… Wouldn’t take much to really screw ’em up, and this system’s got everything you need. If he had no real control, then he’s gone, either into the void, into the big gasbag there, or into the sun, and so are all his followers. But if he could get it stabilized to any degree, long enough to cram his people into his planetary lander, then he’d be able to do something if he and they got away from the big mother fast enough. That far out, you’d spend most of your fuel fighting gravity for control, and even then you’d be pulled right into Mama’s orbit here. That many people, that big a craft, that antique equipment and long struggle to get in-system… He’d have to make a quick decision. Pick one and head for there. And which one would you pick under those circumstances, assuming he could see and get some details of all three?”

There was an easy answer to that. “So you’d say the big part probably went into the planet or the sun, but my largest residual power supply is probably his lander?”

“That’d be my guess. Unless they were really creamed, there’s no reason they shouldn’t have gotten down all right, but they would stay there.”

“You think the moon would prevent a takeoff?”

“Nope. But takeoff to where? You ain’t got power to get back to the hole, let alone get through it. And you’d be in a ship with no instrumentation or drives capable of wormhole travel. That’s certain death even if they did the impossible and made it that far back, and I’m damned sure they couldn’t. The best they could do would be to risk that topheavy, probably damaged and overlarge antique to go to one of the other moons. So where do you go? Volcano City or Sandstorm Hell? Even if you could even make it that far.”

“Point taken. But that was only… what? Under a century, certainly. There could very well be survivors of Woodward’s original crew still living down there, assuming it’s not a blind and that some of this life we’re reading is edible. And they’d have a pretty solid colony there by now.”

An Li looked at the optical view of Balshazzar in the C&C main board view window. “Yeah, and I bet there’s edible stuff there. The thing is, those other signatures. Put that together with our alien ship from Kaspar and we got a more interesting question on this one.”

“Yeah? What?”

“If those are alien survivors and groups down there—the other signatures, I mean— then did they wipe out the humans as they prayed, or are they commingling, or is there war in Paradise?”

Randi Queson shrugged. “I think we’ll know in under a day, assuming we can keep off the damned surface of the place.”

It was a pretty world, whether a moon or a planet. The explorers and scouts would classify it as a Class One Terran, not only a world capable of sustaining human life unaided but one that might even evolve such life. If An Li’s aliens existed and were in any sense of the word life as they knew and understood it, then this was the world they would have come from.

“Sixty-three percent ocean, another three percent internal lakes, and thirty-three percent land masses,” Jerry Nagel noted. “Axial tilt’s under eight degrees, so there’s probably little in the way of seasons from that source. Rotation on axis twenty-two point six standard hours, pretty close to nominal. Two northern continents with several huge islands, and a matching two southern continents, different in shape and size, plus more islands big and small. The majority of land is in the mid-latitudes, which is all to the good, since the periods when this sucker is getting hit from the sun have got to fry almost anything within those eight-degree tropics. Otherwise, we’re talking a high when facing the mother planet of roughly thirty-one degrees centigrade, a low about eighteen, those at sea level, of course. Ocean water is saline, temperatures from the tropic lines to the continental borders roughly twenty-seven to thirty degrees, polar side temps about twenty-one degrees down to maybe thirteen at the surface. Within the tropics the temps are bearable now, but even if they cool down at the current rate while on this side they’ll be within tropical norms for this type of planet. Sunward, I’d put those tropical regions at crisp, extra crisp, well done, and deep fried.”

“So the life’s on the continents, mostly, and the islands?” An Li asked, looking at the pictorials.

“Well, that’s the thing. It’s everywhere. The oceans are teeming with it, the continents have their sparse spots but dense concentrations in the best overall geographic areas. Still, I would suspect as much from the wide variations produced by this system. Since there’s no evidence of roads or major structures to accompany the areas of dense population, I’d say that unless some of them have wings, they walk everywhere, and that probably means they stick fairly close to home. Territorial. When your ‘year’ is only fifteen or sixteen standard days, your ‘seasons’ basically last for maybe three or four days each. Not much time for real variation, but it sure keeps the weather systems stirred up. Most storms are produced by cold air meeting warm air. I bet the transition from sun to planet source only is pretty violent in the weather department, and you can see a lot of nasty-looking local stuff swirling around in the tropics right now. Give them solar heat and they’ll become monsters.”

“You’re making it sound a lot less appealing all of a sudden,” Randi Queson commented. “Stuck in your local garden, killer storms and tropical rains, and no machines worth a damn. That’s a recipe for taking humanity back hundreds of thousands of years or more.”

Nagel shrugged. “Maybe. They probably don’t have to do much hunting, though, or wander too far to eat. That looks damned rich down there, and if there are human heat signatures then a lot of it is edible for folks like us. And, of course, it’s a life of essentially leisure, fresh air, all natural foods and drink, and no natural enemies. If the nonhuman elements either don’t mix or are friendly, then everybody’s in the same boat, as it were. It’s probably pretty damned dull.”

Queson sighed. “Poor Dr. Woodward.”

“Huh? Why do you say that?”

“A man of his great intellect and great faith, down on an alien world, meeting up with aliens as smart or smarter than we are who also are probably the survivors or descendants of survivors of expeditions past. Imagine the meeting. Imagine how it might shake him when he discovers they haven’t discovered Jesus, or perhaps have a totally different concept of God and the universe, perhaps even no religious beliefs or concepts at all.”

“Wouldn’t bother guys like him a bit,” Nagel assured her. “I seem to remember that those types went looking for civilizations that hadn’t heard the Word as they themselves saw it and then converted them, by force, hook, or crook if necessary. Vaticanus still has an Office for the Propagation of the Faith, or whatever they called it, better known as the Inquisition. Torture them until they either convert or die. Either way, God’s will is done. Bring Bibles to the heathen, but make sure you also bring booze to trade for the slaves. Or God tells the faithful to join an army and conquer the world for Him. So they do, and destroy the other religions as heathen, desecrate or destroy the old churches, temples, and monuments, and if you can’t convert ’em, well, their children will convert, or be slaves. Naw… He wouldn’t see it as a break in his faith. He’d see it as being handed by God the opportunity to be the first one to convert nonhumans.”

“My, you are cynical,” she responded.

“You’re the social scientist. My world is hard science. Numbers, experiments, repeatable data searches. We hard science types never were great at grasping how human behavior works on the grand scale, but I think I have my history pretty much right, don’t I?”

“More or less, I guess. But not everybody is like that, even within a religious faith.”

“Well, much of human history’s misery has been caused by religion. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all bunk.”

“Well, we’ll all go our own way on that. Coming up on Balshazzar now. Cap, you have an energy signature that might in any way match a downed shuttle of the type Woodward’s group used?”

“I’ve got a possibility,” the captain responded. “I am trying to hail it on all standard frequencies in use at that time. Nothing so far.”

“Yeah, well, I think if I were down there and spent eighty years calling with nobody picking up the other end I’d probably stop hanging out near the phone myself,” Nagel said. “Still, there’s enough power for them to keep things going assuming the ship’s intact?”

“Oh yes, although one would expect it to be half buried and overgrown in that area by now. There has definitely been flooding in the area, although the floodplain may not have been in that area when they landed. These do shift.”

“What’s the population in that floodplain area right now?” Queson asked her. “Roughly speaking, of course.”

“Difficult to say. Rough estimate would be between one thousand and one thousand five hundred. They are camped just off the plain, in a very large area of groves and springs, but it may well be that we have had some luck if we want to contact them. I am not at all certain you are correct that they remain in one place. This looks like a migration of sorts, or perhaps a pilgrimage. They are just now gathering. It is impossible to know how many there will ultimately be, but it could be a lot.”

“All human?”

“Mostly human. There are readings that indicate some lateral traffic from some sort of life giving off nonhuman signatures.”

“Does it appear like a hostile movement?”

“Who can say? Logic tells me that if you are thinking of being hostile to a group of one to two thousand you’d best bring more than a few dozen of your own.”

“Good point. Okay, so either they don’t go into the old ship anymore because they can’t, they think it’s holy ground, or they already have everything they can get from it, or they just haven’t gotten enough of a crowd yet. In any event, we’re in no position to wait for them to do it, and we have no idea whether they can or will pick up the communications. It’s pretty clear we need some way to talk to them, after first letting them know we’re here at all. Any suggestions? Anybody?”

“I could just take the shuttle down and say hello,” Lucky Cross suggested. “That seems the simplest and easiest.”

“On the surface, yes,” An Li responded. “But if that’s Woodward’s ship and people and it’s got power, they might be expected to have checked the rest of the system out. They didn’t. Neither did the aliens, if that’s what they are, and we have signatures from their ships as well. How many ship-to-ground shuttles have we got on this run, Lucky?”

“You know damn well we only got the same one. Otherwise it’s just the escape pods.”

“I say we need a unanimous vote, then, to take that shuttle down anywhere, since we have no evidence it can get back up again from down there and some evidence maybe it can’t. Without that shuttle, we may as well go home.”

Jerry Nagel looked over at Eyegor. “There’s always the robot. Hell, this is a much better place to send the thing than the other one. At least it won’t be alone down there.”

“You seem bent on getting rid of me,” the robot responded. “In response this time I ask a variation of the same question just asked on the shuttle. Is it plausible that at least one, perhaps most of those stuck down there brought with them AI devices of some sort? If so, where are they? They should also show up on our scans.”

“The thing’s got a point,” Nagel said, nodding. “Not much in the way of mechanized anything down there, unless it’s levers and ropes and pulleys. There are several known combinations of radiation and energy fields known to damage or destroy AI synapses while being harmless to humans. There are more the other way around, I admit, but the former’s not that unusual.”

“So what does that leave?” Queson asked nobody in particular.

“A probe,” the captain responded. “It is simple and has minimal AI circuitry and maximum shielding. It is used for low-level measurements.”

“Yeah, but that’s just a remote-controlled camera ball like old Eyegor’s head there,” Sark pointed out. “What good does that do us?”

“It can be rigged to carry a few things,” the captain reminded them. “Its cargo is limited, but we could put a couple of ferrets in there, or perhaps simply use it not as a recorder but as a playback device. If they can call us, it’ll tell them to do so. If they can’t, we’ll work out a way to send something down that can.”

“Too much AI in the ferrets to take a chance until we know for sure they’ll work,” An Li said firmly. “But the idea of using a probe as basically a speaker works well, and since a probe is designed to be disposable we don’t have to worry if it can’t get back. Stick a handheld ship-to-ship intercom in the storage compartment just in case. I’m not thrilled about losing one, but we have to talk to them.”

Once decided, it was easier to rig up and execute than it was to discuss it.

The probes were very small devices shielded for entry and designed to send up close-in data across any spectrum, do soil and atmospheric analysis, and give the basics they or anyone else would need before planning a manned landing on an alien world. In essence they were simply small, remote-controlled data collectors made cheaply and designed for simple tasks. Analysis was always aboard ship; they only sent a data stream of what they were told to examine.

It was something of a microphone, and all a speaker is is a microphone in reverse, creating the opposite pattern on a surface capable of receiving it. These were strictly single use, send or receive—but they included the ground-to-air handheld transceiver in case they didn’t have a better way.

“Last chance,” the captain warned. “Everyone still all right with this?”

“Send it,” Nagel told her. The probe was quickly away.

To keep it intact and from burning up as it entered the atmosphere, they took about an hour and a quarter to get the thing into the atmosphere. After that, it was a simple matter to fly it towards the supposed human colony while the Stanley took up geosynchronous orbit.

“Jeez! I just thought of something,” Randi Queson said worriedly.

“Yeah? What?” Nagel was just hoping to hear about all those weird jewels for the taking, or maybe alien technology, and other stuff like that.

“I was just thinking—if they’ve gone this long without anything mechanical, and if life is hard enough down there so the elders are basically dead, then what kind of reaction are we gonna get when this—this voice suddenly comes out of this little ball? They might think God is talking to them!”

“All the better,” Nagel replied cynically. “Then God can just command them to go gather all their valuables. Much easier than telling them, ‘This is a stickup.’ ”