The superintendent tilted his head, eying him askance. “You’re not serious…”
The advocate’s smile tightened. “How long until your ships arrive, Mr. Cantrell?”
Cantrell shrugged. “I don’t know. Ninety-six hours, give or take…”
“There, you see,” Lassiter said, turning back to Liz. “Four days. That should be more than enough time for you and Dr. Tobias to gather any samples you need.”
“That, or get yourselves killed,” Cantrell grumbled.
“Four days…” Liz murmured. She allowed herself to drop slowly back into her chair. Her gaze again moved out to the wreckage in the distance. When she’d been selected for this mission, she’d been unable to believe her good fortune. The discovery of the Anunnaki ship had been the talk of the Fleet—the beacon of light they’d been searching for all these generations. She’d never thought to ask herself why the Council had selected a newly commissioned officer like herself for the mission. Why someone with no experience would be chosen to investigate the first real find in decades. But now the truth settled like a numbing cold into her bones. Despite what she’d been taught, despite what everyone wanted to believe, the fact was, no one really cared anymore. All their talk about finding the Anunnaki, about reuniting themselves with the race that had spawned human civilization—it was nothing but empty words.
“Hard to believe anything’s alive down there, isn’t it?” Dr. Tobias mused. Hunched beside Liz at the shuttle’s command console, he strained forward, his rheumy gray eyes squinting down through the windscreen at the expanse of dark ice rushing past beneath them.
The shuttle’s autopilot had brought them low enough now that Liz could see into the jagged fissures where Slag’s crust had split and the ice sheet had melted away to reveal the moon’s molten core. Steam rose from the fissures in long winding curtains that caught the light from the magma and surrounded them in a glowing orange mist. As they descended, the mist beaded on the windscreen, forming tiny droplets that bounced erratically before the whistling wind carried them away.
“I don’t know why the Council sent us out here in the first place,” she said above the whine of the engines. “They couldn’t care less about the Anunnaki.” She gripped the arms of her chair as the autopilot banked around the plume of ash rising from one of the volcanoes that had thrust its dark cone up through the ice.
“They didn’t have a choice,” Tobias said. He settled back into his chair, the lines around his eyes and mouth deepening in the shadows cast by the blue and green lights on the console. “Once word of the wreckage leaked out, they had to act like they were launching a full-scale investigation. That’s what the Fleet expected, so that’s what the Council gave them.”
“But if the Anunnaki really did try to modify Slag’s ecology, think of what we could learn,” she said. “I mean, if you could prove they manipulated the worms’ DNA, maybe it would help us figure out whether they manipulated ours.”
Tobias gave her a skeptical glance, arching one of his bushy gray eyebrows. “I’m not positive anyone has manipulated anyone’s DNA,” he said. “At this point, all we can say for sure is that you wouldn’t expect a multicellular organism like the worms to have evolved an oxygen-based metabolism in an environment like this one.”
Liz forced back a grimace. She knew Tobias thought her beliefs regarding the Anunnaki were nothing but myth, that the mysterious beings had played no role in human history. His lack of faith had, in fact, cost him a promising career. Still, he was a first-rate geneticist. If there was something to learn from the worms’ DNA, she felt sure he would learn it.
“As for the Council,” he continued, “there was probably a time when they wanted to learn all they could about these Anunnaki of yours. They may even have believed we’d catch up with them someday. But now, all they care about is learning as much as they can about the technology of whoever it is we’ve been tracking. Their FTL drive, their communications, their long-rang sensors—anything that might improve our own capabilities. All of which means that once the initial survey team determined the wreckage held nothing of value, the Council lost interest. They figured anything on the surface would have been swallowed up ages ago, so they were perfectly happy to give Slag to the Consortium. From their point of view, Superintendent Cantrell and his men can cut it up into as many pieces as they want.”
The Consortium was the Fleet’s commercial arm, the merchant class that had emerged over the generations to keep the ships supplied during their centuries-long journey out from human-occupied space. Like Fleet Command, which had evolved to maintain order and organization, the Consortium operated under the auspices of the Council—the spiritual descendents of those early visionaries who’d first recognized the correlations between the Nazca drawings from old Earth and the Anunnaki glyphs they’d uncovered on more than a dozen worlds as human civilization expanded out through the galactic arm. It was the courage of these early truth-seekers that had first drawn Liz to her study of Anunnakian archaeology—their determination to reestablish humankind’s relationship with Earth’s ancient visitors. This, in spite of the ridicule they’d received at the hands of the governments and secular scientists who’d tried to discredit their findings and block the formation of the Fleet in the first place.
“But you think we’ll find something, don’t you?” she asked Tobias. “I mean, if the Anunnaki really were here, they must have left something behind.”
“Oh, I think we’ll find something,” he said. “Whether it’s evidence that the Anunnaki were ever here remains to be seen. But the fact is, Slag’s ecology is unlike anything we’ve ever encountered. My guess is someone tinkered with it.”
The shuttle’s autopilot set them down at the abandoned ground station the initial survey crew had set up midway between the face of the melting ice sheet and a wide fissure several hundred yards to the south. The station consisted of a molded duroplast igloo approximately thirty feet in diameter and a flat landing surface that had been leveled out of the rock with a high-energy laser.
“Looks like the anteroom to hell…” Tobias mused as they stepped out onto the surface. He switched off the shoulder lights on his survival suit and turned his gaze toward the fissure. With no nearby star, the only light was the dull orange glow cast up from the depths. It barely illuminated his features through his transparent faceplate, but there was no mistaking the grim set of his brow.
Liz followed the direction of his gaze, then turned her eyes toward the sky, trying to make out Slag’s gas-giant parent against the background of stars. The giant—which had escaped its star system with Slag and its two more distant moons millions of years before—provided the tidal forces that kept Slag’s interior molten. The general consensus was that the other two moons, which were mostly rock and ice, had probably formed from the same disk of gas and debris as the giant; while Slag, with its heavy iron core, appeared to have once been a small planet, possibly captured by the giant when it was pulled from its original system by a passing star.
“You’d think we could at least see the lightning storms in the giant’s cloud tops,” Liz shouted. Even with their helmet mikes, she had to raise her voice to be heard over a sudden gust of wind that rushed down from the ice sheet behind them. “But from down here, it just looks like a big hole in the sky. Like something ate all the stars.”
“You’re right,” Tobias shouted back. He stared up at the sky for a moment, then turned back, offering her a wry grin. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t eat us.”