NEVER, NELLY.
THAT’S NICE TO HEAR, had more sarcasm in it than a computer should be allowed. However, Nelly had been upgraded way too many times to keep count since she had been given to Kris before the first grade. One of those upgrades had included a fragment of a storage device left by the three alien races that had built the highway between the stars 2 million years ago.
Now, Nelly was just plain Nelly. Obstinate, outspoken, an atrocious joke teller, and the one item that could possibly rival Jack as the most important thing in her life. SHALL WE GO SEE WHAT PENNY HAS FOUND?
I ALREADY KNOW, KRIS. MIMZY TOLD ME. I’VE JUST BEEN WAITING FOR YOU TO FIND TIME TO LOOK INTO PANDORA’S BOX.
Which was Nelly’s none too gentle way of reminding Kris that she and her kids could handle a lot more data a whole lot faster than mere meat mortals.
Kris settled Nelly in her usual place below her collarbone, eyed Jack, who gave a slight shrug, and together they returned to the veranda. Iizuka Masao had rustled up two more chairs from somewhere, and the four took their own corner of the table, Kris sat with Jack on her right. Masao settled on her left, leaving Penny the position directly across from Kris.
That was a bit of a surprise. Kris had expected Penny to take the place at her left hand. Clearly, Penny wanted to confront Kris head-on. Mentally, Kris notched up the category of this meeting from Best Friends’ Get-together to Official Staff Meeting; maybe even Staffer has a Major Bone to Pick with Boss.
Kris raised an inquisitive eyebrow and waited for Penny to start. It was, after all, her dime.
“You sent me to search five or six systems and see if one of them might have the night sky that we’ve found on the overhead of all the alien ships we’ve examined. See if it might be the home of the alien raiders we’ve been fighting,” Penny said without preamble.
“I know I got back just in time to see you win a hell of a fight with one more of those alien raiding clans. I know you’re busy. But I also heard that there were three alien warships watching your latest fight, and they’re likely observers from three more of those huge clans. You know and I know that there’s another fight coming. We don’t know how long it will take them to get their act together. Okay, fine, you have a lot on your plate. I can understand it. You’re one of those damn Longknifes, but you’re just a Longknife. Not God.”
Penny paused for a moment. “But, Kris, I’ve seen shit that I really think you need to see for yourself. You need to see this stuff and dig deeper than I was able to with just one ship and me looking over my shoulders and ready to run if anyone or anything said ‘boo.’”
Penny again paused in her pleading, and Kris considered what she’d heard. Yes, she’d sent Penny off in a knocked-together warship with half its lasers aimed aft so she could shoot while she ran. And yes, Kris had more questions about the aliens than she could catalog.
The damn things would not say a word when hailed. Heaven knows, Kris had tried and tried again to open communications with them. Their response was to try to kill her every time, and when they failed, they made sure that every last one of them died.
These aliens were frustrating Kris’s long-held belief that any problem could be talked out if you just tried hard enough. She knew that was Father, the Prime Minister, speaking in her head. As a politician, he firmly believed what he had taught his daughter at his knee.
But the great politician Billy Longknife had never met these bug-eyed monsters who, very disappointingly, looked more like humans than any race we’d come across so far in space.
“Okay, Penny,” Kris said with a sigh, “what did you see that is so important you’ve dragged me and Jack off that lovely beach?”
Penny held up a finger. “First, we found a planet that was sanitized right down to bedrock. Best we could tell, it had been hit with atomics and rocks so hard about a hundred thousand years ago that we couldn’t find any sign of life. Maybe there are some. Maybe a virus or two survived, but we couldn’t spot them in the time we dared take or the probes we sent down.
“Oh, and we left the probes down there. We couldn’t risk being contaminated by stuff we couldn’t spot. What they found was no water. No nothing. No life at all as best we could tell.”
“Are you sure it ever had life?” Jack asked.
“Under all the hammering, it sure looked like there had once been riverbeds,” Masao put in. “We clearly made out ocean beds. We found the remains of coral reefs, and we think we found fossil remains of fish and other aquatic life, but to prove it we would have needed better sensors on our probes than we had. That is why we really think there needs to be a second expedition to look that place over, fully equipped and soon.”
Beside him, Penny nodded agreement before continuing her own debriefing.
“But it was the planet in the next system, just one jump away, that I really think you want to see,” she said.
“Why?” Kris asked.
“Because it has the aliens on it.”
“You got to see them?” Jack asked, incredulously.
“You weren’t supposed to risk getting that close,” Kris said.
“We didn’t risk anything. The big bad aliens weren’t home, but their kinds of aliens were on that planet,” Penny said.
“You’re not making sense,” Kris said.
“She is,” Masao put in, defending Penny, “she just needs to explain it more slowly.”
Penny threw her friend a look that told Kris a lot more than she needed to know about how the relationship between them was going. Penny appreciated the protection but did not want any help. Kris’s old friend was still trying to come to terms with the fact that the men she loved always seemed to die. For Penny, giving her heart to any man would be a long, hard journey.
Apparently, Masao was still willing to wait.
Penny blew out a long breath. “There were no alien ships in orbit around the next planet. There were no space stations, no satellites, no reactors or radio communications. It looked like an empty planet. But as we got close, it started to come alive.
“There was an atmosphere and oceans. Vegetation covered the land, at least in most places. Radar mapping showed several places where it had been hammered by asteroid strikes. Small ones, not extinction events. Also, there was one huge plain of glass. Radioactive, too. Something had been hit hard by atomics.”
“You think it was attacked from space?” Jack put in.
“From our place in orbit, it was impossible to say, but it sure looked like it had been hit hard some hundred and ten thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia,” Penny said.
“It was what was on the glass plain that caught our attention even before we sent probes down. There is a pyramid of granite rock right in the middle of the plain.”
“A pyramid?” Kris and Jack said together.
“No question but that it is artificial,” Lieutenant Iizuka said.
“What’s in it?” Kris asked.
“We have no idea,” Penny said. “There seems to be a door, but it was locked down tight.”
“Couldn’t your nanos get in?” Kris asked.
“Kris, whatever we sent down there we were leaving there, and we didn’t want to leave any high-tech stuff. That meant no Smart Metal. That meant what went was pretty big by nano standards. Yes, there was a door, but we didn’t dare drop anything that could get through the door seal. Oh, we tried with what we had, but that is one tightly sealed door. Nothing we dropped could get a look in.”
Penny paused. “But that was only one of the things that left us wanting to get a better look. There were aliens. At least I think they were aliens.”
“Did you get a DNA test?” Jack said.
“A very basic one. Again, we didn’t dare drop anything too sophisticated,” Masao said. “But it was the different tribes down there. Once you got well away from the plain of glass, there were some pretty sophisticated hunter-gatherers. I think there was even some farming. They had stone-edged weapons and were hunting some real big stuff.”