Nightfall_at_Algemron

violet and blue over things—lichens and the simplest of the plants waking up. In a month this place will be ablaze with color as everything awakens and makes use of the water and the air while they are available." She glanced at him. "How is our direction?"
"We're all right," said Gabriel. "North still."
They went on northward in formation with Longshot and Lalique. Only twice did they pass any settlements. This came as no surprise, for Ohmel was still very sparsely settled—maybe forty thousand people on the whole planet, and fifteen thousand of those were in Charlotte. The rest were divided among thirty or forty hamlets, villages, or towns, little domed communities all of them, for there was no use building a place to live that was unliveable for half the year. In fall and winter when the atmosphere froze and became snow, and water was just another kind of stone, all human and other life retreated into the domes and tended the underground hydroponics farms and greenhouses that kept everyone alive.
The secured site was at a place called Boxcar, which was about thirty degrees south of Ohmel's arctic circle. It was cold enough that they would all probably add a layer or two under their coats, and one of those layers would be armor. While Boxcar had long since been scoured by the archaeologists and declared empty of the dangers associated with the Glassmakers or any of the other Precursor races, Gabriel preferred to be cautious.
If things went well, shortly after that they would come to the unsecured site, and that would be another matter entirely. The Ohmel government, insofar as it paid attention to such matters, did not encourage citizens or visitors to explore unsecured sites. It made sure that such access was expensive and difficult for anyone who didn't own a long range ship or other transport that would make access possible. Otherwise, it was assumed that you might do as you pleased, and that the reputation of the sites would help them to police themselves.
There were numerous cases every year, both on Ohmel and on High Mojave, the other best-known home of Glassmaker sites, of explorers going out and not coming back again. Some of these, admittedly, were half-witted tourists who insisted on making their way out to the sites, and their failure to return was variously considered by the locals as merely the universe "culling the herd." There were plenty of ways to come to grief on Ohmel that did not involve anything unusuaclass="underline" the terrain, the fierce weather—during the cold season, the most volatile gases had a tendency to freeze and condense out of the air, a particularly emphatic kind of snow—and what was left of Ohmel's biosphere could also be deadly enough for the unprepared or incautious. At the same time, there were explorers who went out well-equipped, well-prepared, people expert in their fields, steady, sensible old hands, who also did not come back. About those deaths, the rumors were rampant.
Some of the rumors were plainly ghost stories, products of an information vacuum. Others were possible enough, if unsubstantiated. The Glassmakers had dabbled in the creation of sentient and semisentient life with varying levels of success. Some of their creations, like the werewisp, had been possibly too successful. They had no natural enemies and roamed the empty places in the long nights, looking for energy to drain. Explorers, typically (and necessarily) well supplied with powered equipment to hold off the terrible cold and do their other work, might as well have stood out in the frigid darkness and banged dinner gongs. Then there were other lifeforms, like the arachnons, less scattershot in their tactics but far more deadly and much more specifically associated with the old Glassmaker sites. They were guardians, some said. Others said they were simply engineered creatures that had lost their programming. In either case, they could be deadly. Numerous people had gone out to study them and had sent no data back nor come back themselves.
Gabriel had no desire to become one of these. Even though Boxcar was supposed to be safe, he would be wearing his armor, and everyone else would too.
"How close are we?" he asked Helm over comms.
"About fifty kilometers," Helm said. "Ten minutes at this speed."
Gabriel sat with the stone in his hands and felt the "buzzing" in it increase. It was in a tiny way like the experience of hearing all those fraal minds had been in the dream, but somehow this was more like hearing a recording of the minds. A sense of immediacy was missing, though the other content and "meaning" was still there. Now if only I could figure out exactly what the content meant.
"Coming up on it now," Helm said after a few minutes.
Enda, piloting, swooped down lower and dropped much of her speed. The others came in on either side, matching Enda's reduced acceleration. They all looked down.
There was very little there. Gabriel had read some time back, while investigating Glassmaker matters, that the ruins on Ohmel had suffered badly and were not nearly as spectacular as those on High Mojave. "Ruins" was a poor word for the buildings left on High Mojave. Delicate spires and domes of a glasslike material, they were so tough that nothing could break them. Even a subsidence of land under one of the more spectacular sites had done nothing but spill the glittering minarets on the ground below the cliff where they had stood, and now they lay there undamaged but drastically relocated.
Here, though, little or none of the original glasswork remained above ground. There was apparently some of it under the surface still, but the archaeologists, having found nothing remarkable enough to get their patron organizations to fund them any further, had left it all mostly buried. As their ships circled the site in the advancing morning, Gabriel could just make out the occasional buried glint of "glass," low shapes of opaque white or pale translucent green in the sun.
Enda shook her head, looking down on the site as she brought the ship around. "Think of how old that is," she said. "How many millions of years."
"Lots," Gabriel said and concentrated on the stone. He was rather shocked to find that the buzzing was dying off slightly.
"Where do you want us to land, Gabe?" Helm said. Gabriel thought about that for a moment. "I don't." "What?"
"This isn't it," Gabriel said, clenching the stone in one fist and trying to maximize the contact. "The stone's calming down. Swing north again and see what we get."
They turned north and headed slowly away from the Boxcar ruins. Gabriel closed his eyes.
Stronger, yes. The buzz was increasing. A little more to the left.
"A little farther to the west," Gabriel said.
Enda angled Sunshine a little that way. The "signal" got stronger.
"Whatever it is that the stone's been homing on," Gabriel said, "it's not that. That site's dead." "So we're going unsecured right away?" Helm said. "Joy."
"Oh, come on, Helm," Gabriel said. "You know you love it. Think of all the weapons we can bring along
with us."
"Think how little use they're going to be," Helm muttered, "against arachnons, for example."
"I thought you said you were ready for anything, Helm," said Enda, chuckling softly. "What a bastion of caution and conservatism you become at times like this."
"Mmf," Helm said.
They made their way northward. Gabriel stopped looking at the scenery, which at this point was pretty much red-brown rocks, outcroppings, and canyons. Instead he concentrated on the output he was getting from the stone.
"We're pretty close," he said, with some surprise. "In fact, we're very close." "Query: how very 'very'?" Delde Sota asked. "I almost understood that," said Angela from Lalique.
"Me, too," Gabriel answered. "Delde Sota, I'd say no more than two or three kilometers. Helm, don't overshoot it. Slow down!"
Enda slowed Sunshine still more. "Straight on?" she asked.