Resurgence

CHAPTER ELEVEN On Deadworld

The Savior was an all-purpose vehicle. Although its designers must have anticipated that its primary uses would be in space-based operations, the ship was well equipped to support surface work. Hans Rebka had a choice of two different types of wheeled vehicle. One was an open form, little more than a bare platform with seats, wheels, and a big cargo area. The other was a fully enclosed car complete with its own atmosphere, in which the riders did not need to wear suits and could eat, drink, or sleep in comfort.

Hans Rebka chose the more primitive form. Even wearing a suit, he felt more in touch with the frozen world when its air was only a fraction of a centimeter away from his skin. Had it not been for the digging equipment—a mystery in its own right—he would have preferred to walk.

If the others questioned his decision on choice of car, they did so in silence. No one spoke as they watched the digger, a hump-backed machine with the blue-black carapace of a gigantic spider, extrude multiple jointed legs and climb effortlessly onto the cargo rack at the back of the car. Rather less easily, Hans led the way to the front of the vehicle and they took their places on hard bucket seats. He engaged the engine and the car began to crawl across the frozen plain.

Above, unfamiliar star patterns twinkled slightly. There was still enough heat in the lower atmosphere to permit small-scale turbulence. Hans glanced at the air temperature sensor. It hovered at a balmy hundred and fifty degrees above absolute zero, far warmer than open space. With no heat arriving from the central star, the planet’s metallic core must contain a good deal of slowly decaying radioactive materials. Some warmth continued to seep out from the interior. The air sniffers confirmed the temperature reading. All traces of radon, xenon, and chlorine had precipitated out onto the frozen surface. Oxygen and nitrogen remained, along with a greater-than-expected abundance of argon and traces of krypton. Hans assumed that was a characteristic of the Sag Arm, rather than of this particular planet.

The car, its blue-white beams providing a narrow wedge of light on the surface ahead, trundled along at a sedate five kilometers an hour. The ship had landed close to the planetary equator, and the calm heavens wheeled steadily overhead. The pattern would repeat every twenty-nine hours, with no promise ever of returning day. Although the air felt perfectly still, at some time after the cold began there had been strong winds. The carbon dioxide snow had here and there blown into banks and deep drifts. Hans avoided them and kept his eyes fixed on the edge of the zone of visibility provided by the car’s lights. He could detect objects only to a distance of perhaps two hundred meters. After the three-kilometer mark he found himself impatiently trying to see beyond the narrow illuminated cone. He was filled with a combination of excitement and uneasiness. It was one thing to believe that you were right, and quite another to have proof to show to others.

At last, he saw far ahead a change in the landscape. The frozen drifts rose higher and beyond them stood a regular, sawtoothed barrier. He had been waiting for this, but the others must have been keeping their own close watch. Before Hans was sure of what he saw, Lara Quistner said “What is that?” At the same moment Darya Lang put a hand on Rebka’s arm. “Hans, we should stop until we know what’s ahead.”

“I know what it is.” Rebka kept the vehicle moving forward at the same slow pace. “I saw hundreds of these on the high-resolution orbital images. They were all partly covered by blown snow, but they are too regular in shape to be natural.”

“Regular how?”

“Nature often makes circles, but it seldom makes right angles. What we are seeing is a wall. I’d say it’s close to ten meters high, and it forms almost a perfect square.”

“A walled town?” Ben Blesh had been perched on an uncomfortable rear seat. He pressed forward between Hans Rebka and Darya Lang, too interested to be either critical or argumentative. “Back in the Orion arm a fortification like this would mean at least a Level Two civilization.”

Darya added, “But no higher than a Level Three. Walled cities go away as soon as the means to destroy them are developed. So these people didn’t have explosives and artillery.”

“Also, they didn’t expect attacks from the air.” Rebka halted the vehicle thirty meters short of the wall. “We’re talking pre-industrial here. No aircraft, so no spacecraft. An intelligent species—we’ll want to confirm that by looking inside the wall—but without the technology needed to escape. These people were in the worst possible situation. They knew what was happening to them, and they had plenty of time to worry about it. But without spaceflight, and pretty advanced spaceflight at that, there was no chance at all of their survival.”

The others were silent for a while. At last Ben Blesh said, “Captain Rebka, how long do you think it took?”

“I’ve been trying to answer that question. So far I’ve been unsuccessful. The Pride of Orion sent me a range of times, but without more information they couldn’t offer anything definite. When the fusion process was turned off in these people’s sun, the cooling began. I’d like to know if that cooling took place all at once, or over a period of thousands of years.” Rebka started the car moving again, but this time directed its course tangentially to the wall.

Lara Quistner said softly, “Left to die slowly, in the cold and dark. It’s an awful tragedy. If only some spacefaring species in the Sag Arm had known about it, these people could have been helped.”

“Some spacefaring species did know. Stars can explode and stars can kill you off with a solar flare big enough to wipe out all planetary life. We’ve all heard of cases where that happened. But stars do not simply go out. Something or somebody killed these people. Whatever it was acted by design, with a total indifference to the fate of other intelligent beings. That’s why we needed to come here. Julian Graves has to know about this world, and what happened to it. We don’t know how these people lived, and an hour ago we were not sure of their existence. But this is a pure case of genocide, and the Ethical Council needs to know—even though there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.”

Hans Rebka had been studying the wall on their left as the car drove along parallel to it. He stopped where the drifted snow was less deep and formed a shallow V-shaped cut like a valley leading right up to the wall.

“A fortified town must have a way for people and goods to get in and out. It’s time to use our digging equipment. I suspect that we have reached one of the entry gates.”

He was starting to climb down, but Darya again put a hand on his suited arm. “Hans, do we really need to go through with this?”

“I’m afraid we do. What we find inside will probably be unpleasant, but Julian Graves will ask for every scrap of detail that we can give him. Come on. This world is one giant cemetery, and maybe we are desecrating graves. But I think whoever is buried in there would agree that what we’re doing is in a good cause.”

“Good, perhaps, but too late to be useful.” Darya Lang did not argue anymore. They watched in silence as Ben Blesh ordered the digger to dismount from the car, and gave it the instructions needed so that it could perform its task.

Hans Rebka had visited a hundred worlds and experienced most things that the Orion Arm had to offer. Even so, the digger was like nothing that he had ever seen. Before it started into action he imagined it tunneling its way forward, perhaps extruding a variety of shovels and picks to hold in its multiple jointed limbs, then carving a way through the hard-packed frozen drift.

The machine was smarter than that—smarter it seemed than Hans, at least when it came to its own specialized skills. The digger crept forward, crouched low, and poked thin antennalike sensors deep into the drift. After what seemed like a moment of meditation, it said in a clear female voice, “The material to be cleared is ninety-nine point seven percent solid carbon dioxide, with a little water-ice and trace elements. Beyond it lies stone, baked clay, and a combination of iron and a softer fibrous material. A large working area will be needed. Organic beings, please retreat until you are no closer than sixty meters.”

When Hans hesitated, Ben Blesh said, “We’d better get a move on. The digger knows what it’s talking about, and it won’t start until we’re at a safe distance.”

A large working area sounded like a bad idea to Hans. “Is it proposing to use explosives? That could destroy exactly the things we are hoping to find.”

“It has orders to operate in a non-destructive mode.” For once, Ben apparently didn’t have all the answers. The four of them climbed back onto the car and it retreated on a path at right angles to the saw-tooth line of the wall. Then it was watch and wait for a long while. To Hans Rebka’s eyes nothing at all was happening. But at last Lara Quistner said, “It’s really moving. I didn’t realize it could go so fast.”

Hans realized that a broad tunnel was appearing in the body of the drift. The digger was creeping forward into the cleared space. Hans saw what was perhaps a slight fog in the air above the digger’s broad back, but otherwise there was no sign of cleared materials. After a few more seconds he exclaimed, “It’s applying heat to the solid carbon oxide. Of course. Sublimation, straight to gas with no liquid phase. Does the digger have a fusion engine inside it?”

“A substantial one.” Ben Blesh was measuring the rate of progress. “Don’t worry, the digger will turn the heat off as soon as it is near a wall or a door or anything else that it recognizes. After that it will be up to us. If we want the door to remain intact, we can’t rely on the digger. It knows fabricated objects when it sees them, but it doesn’t know what to do with them.”

The tunnel was deepening, at the same time as the drift above it was vanishing. After twenty more minutes, the digger halted. It extruded its limbs and retreated. The female voice said, “We have reached a boundary. Beyond this we cannot proceed without material damage.”

Hans and the others approached the end of the newly created valley. They scraped at the white surface, gently at first and then more vigorously as their lamps revealed a brown facing. Ben scraped a path in several directions, to determine the outline of the flat surface. “It’s some type of door all right. But it’s tiny. They must have been very small. Do you think we will be able to squeeze through?”

“I hope so.” Hans came close and directed his light onto the right-hand edge. “No kind of hinges. It would waste a lot of time if we tried to go over the wall. I don’t think anyone will object if we do a little breaking-in.”

The entry went easier than expected. If this had once indeed been a fortified gate, age and extreme temperature had rendered the construction materials weak and brittle. The facing caved in at one blow from Hans Rebka’s gloved fist. Within half a minute, the whole door was gone and the way inside clear. Ben Blesh pushed forward eagerly, and Rebka allowed the other man to go first. He could not imagine finding anything pleasant, and at this point he did not expect danger.

The reality was more pathetic than threatening. The tunnel through the thick wall led not back into the open air, but to a large closed chamber. Within it, huddled in some kind of sacking intended to keep in warmth, they found five small bodies. The aliens resembled no species known to Rebka, and he had seen many on many worlds. But all had been in the Orion Arm. It should be no surprise that Sag Arm inhabitants had developed along different physical patterns.

Darya Lang cut open one of the sleeping bags. She worked carefully, afraid that the tiny frozen body would crumble to dust at her touch. The creature resembled a cross between insectoid and reptilian forms. Large compound eyes, clouded in death, stared up from a narrow muzzled face. Thin lips had shrunk back to show teeth like triangular knives. Four limbs, protected at their ends by a shiny chitinous covering, wrapped across the segmented body as though making a final effort to hold in warmth and life.

“How long do think they had?” Lara Quistner asked. “Many generations, or just one or two?”

“Unless someone returns for a thorough investigation, we don’t know and we never will.” Hans Rebka turned away. “You have to wish that it could have been quicker. I’ll take the flash of a supernova any time over long, drawn-out cold.”

Darya Lang stood up. She had been making a visual recording of the corpses and their surroundings. “I think it was fairly quick. I examined the images taken from orbit, too. I didn’t notice these walled towns, but everything went too quickly for glaciation to creep down from the poles.”

“Quick, but not quick enough. Does anyone want to see more?”

“What about the other sites, Captain Rebka?” Ben Blesh was commanding the digger to return to its position on the cargo rack. Having objected to visiting this world, he now seemed reluctant to leave. “Might we learn something there?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t see much variation in the towns. It will be the same sad story, repeated a thousand or ten thousand times. Starvation, cold, death.” As Hans Rebka led the way back to the car, he added to Darya Lang, “Even if it lasted only one lifetime, that was much too long. I’m inclined to agree with you, Darya, this isn’t the handiwork of the Builders. Something more inhuman, something more indifferent to organic suffering, has been at work in this system. Let’s get back to the Savior, file our report with Julian Graves—and take a look at Iceworld. It may prove more dangerous, but I can’t imagine anything more depressing than what we found here.”