“Not just yet.” Hans felt an irrational irritation. Ben Blesh and Lara Quistner were fast, efficient, cautious, cooperative, and doing everything right. Wasn’t that just what you hoped for from a survival team?
It was. Unfortunately, their high-quality performance had another implication: Hans and Darya were not going to be particularly useful.
But then, before that thought was complete, Hans understood why he had come to this world. His instincts were right after all. He hadn’t seen anything, but he knew what they were going to find.
It was all psychological, of course, but suddenly his bones didn’t ache and he felt twenty percent lighter.
“We take a vehicle,” he said. “Get one ready, Ben—and make sure that it comes equipped with a power digger.”
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.”