He snapped his thoughts back to the safe subject of Hela’s topography, wondering if he might make some sense of the bridge from its context. The bridge was aligned more or less east-to-west, as defined by Hela’s rotation. It was situated very near the equator, spanning the gash that was the world’s most immediately obvious geographic feature. The gash began near the northern pole, cutting diagonally from north to south across the equator. It was at its widest and deepest near the equator, but it was still fearfully impressive many hundreds of kilometres north or south of that point.
Ginnungagap Rift, he had named it.
The rift sloped from north-east to south-west. To its west in the northern hemisphere was an upraised geologically complex region that he had named the Western Hyrrokkin Uplands. The Eastern Hyrrokkin Uplands curled around the pole to flank the rift on its other side. South of the western range, but still above the equator, was the zone that Quaiche had elected to call Glistenheath Ridge. South of the equator was another upraised area named the Gullveig Range. To the west, straddling the tropics, Quaiche identified Mount Gudbrand, the Kelda Flats, the Vigrid badlands, Mount Jord… to Quaiche, these names conveyed a dizzying sense of antiquity, a feeling that this world already had a richly textured past, a frontier history of epic expeditions and harrowing crossings, a history populated by the brave and the bold.
Inevitably, however, his attention returned to Ginnungagap Rift and the bridge that spanned it. The details were still unclear, but the bridge was obviously too complicated, too artful and delicate, to be just a tongue of land left behind by some erosive process. It had been built there, and it did not appear as if humans had had much to do with it.
It was not that it was beyond human ingenuity. Humans had achieved many things in the last thousand years, and throwing a bridge across a forty-kilometre-wide abyss—even a bridge as cleanly elegant as the one that spanned Ginnungagap Rift—would not be amongst the most audacious of those achievements. But just because humans could have done it did not mean that they had.
This was Hela. This was as far out in the sticks as it was possible to be. No human had any business building bridges here.
But aliens? Now that was a different matter.
It was true that in six hundred years of space travel, nothing remotely resembling an intelligent, tool-using technological culture had ever been encountered by humankind. But they had been out there once. Their ruins dotted dozens of worlds. Not just one culture either, but eight or nine of them—and that was only the tally in the little huddle of systems within a few dozen light-years of the First System. There was no guessing how many hundreds or thousands of dead cultures had left their mark across the wider galaxy. What kind of culture might have lived on Hela? Had they evolved on this icy moon, or had it just been a stopover point in some ancient, forgotten diaspora?
What were they like? Were they one of the known cultures?
He was getting ahead of himself. These were questions for later, when he had surveyed the bridge and determined its composition and age. Closer in, he might well find other things that the sensors were missing at this range. There might be artefacts that unequivocally linked the Hela culture to one that had already been studied elsewhere. Or the artefacts might cinch the case the other way: an utterly new culture, never encountered before.
It didn’t matter. Either way, the find was of incalculable value. Jasmina could control access to it for decades to come. It would give her back the prestige she had lost over the last few decades. For all that he had disappointed her, Quaiche was certain she would find a way to reward him for that.
Something chimed on the console of the Scavenger’s Daughter. For the first time, the probing radar had picked up an echo. There was something metallic down there. It was small, tucked away in the depths of the rift, very near the bridge.
Quaiche adjusted the radar, making sure that the echo was genuine. It did not vanish. He had not seen it before, but it would have been at the limit of his sensor range until now. The Dominatrix would have missed it entirely.
He didn’t like it. He had convinced himself that there had never been a human presence out here and now he was getting exactly the sort of signature he would have expected from discarded junk.
“Be careful,” he said to himself.
On an earlier mission, he had been approaching a moon a little smaller than Hela. There had been something on it that enticed him, and he had advanced incautiously. Near the surface he had picked up a radar echo similar to this one, a glint of something down there. He had pushed on, ignoring his better instincts.
The thing had turned out to be a booby trap. A particle cannon had popped out of the ice and locked on to his ship. Its beam had chewed holes in the ship’s armour, nearly frying Quaiche in the process. He had made it back to safety, but not before sustaining nearly fatal damage to both the ship and himself. He had recovered and the ship had been repaired, but for years afterwards he had been wary of similar traps. Things got left behind: automated sentries, plonked down on worlds centuries earlier to defend property claims or mining rights. Sometimes they kept on working long after their original owners were dust.
Quaiche had been lucky: the sentry, or whatever it was, had been damaged, its beam less powerful than it had once been. He had got off with a warning, a reminder not to assume anything. And now he was in serious danger of making the same mistake again.
He reviewed his options. The presence of a metallic echo was dispiriting, making him doubtful that the bridge was as ancient and alien as he had hoped. But he would not know until he was closer, and that would mean approaching the source of the echo. If it was indeed a waiting sentry, he would be placing himself in harm’s way. But, he reminded himself, the Scavenger’s Daughter was a good ship, nimble, smart and well armoured. She was crammed with intelligence and guile. Reflexes were not much use against a relativistic weapon like a particle beam, but the Daughter would be monitoring the source of the echo all the while, just in case there was some movement before firing. The instant the ship saw anything she found alarming, she would execute a high-gee random evasion pattern designed to prevent the beam-weapon from predicting its position. The ship knew the precise physiological tolerances of Quaiche’s body, and was prepared nearly to kill him in the interests of his ultimate survival. If she got really annoyed, she would deploy microde-fences of her own.
“I’m all right,” Quaiche said aloud. “I can go deeper and still come out of this laughing. I’m sorted.”
But he had to consider Morwenna as well. The Dominatrix was further away, granted, but it was slower and less responsive. It would be a stretch for a beam-weapon to take out the Dominatrix, but it was not impossible. And there were other weapons that a sentry might deploy, such as hunter-seeker missiles. There might even be a distributed network of the things, talking to each other.
Hell, he thought. It might not even be a sentry. It might just be a metal-rich boulder or a discarded fuel tank. But he had to assume the very worst. He needed to keep Morwenna alive. Equally, he needed the Dominatrix to be able to get back to Jasmina. He could not risk losing either his lover or the ship that was now her extended prison. Somehow, he had either to protect both of them or give up now. He was not in the mood to give up. But how was he going to safeguard his ticket out of there and his lover without waiting hours for them to get a safe distance away from Hela?