Relics and fragments continued to fall into our hands. Sometimes the ships that intruded into the Infrastructure were damaged, as if the passage into our territory had been a violent one. Often, the subsequent encounter with one of our ships was enough to shake them to pieces, or at the very least dislodge major components. The majority of these shards vanished without a trace into the implacable machinery of the Infrastructure. Even if the khorkoiapparatus was beginning to fail, it was still more than capable of attending to the garbage left behind by its users. But occasionally, pieces lingered in the system (as if the walls had indigestion?), waiting to be swept up by Qilian’s ships, and eventually brought home to this moon.
As often as not, though, it was a trivial matter to classify the consignments, requiring only a glance at their contents. The work became so routine, in fact—and the quantity of consignments so high—that eventually I had no choice but to take a step back from hands-on analysis. I assembled six teams and let them get on with it, requiring that they report back to me only when they had something of note: a new empire, or something odd from one of those we already knew about.
That was when the golden egg fell into our hands. It was in the seventh month of my service under Qilian, and I immediately knew that it originated from a culture not yet known to us. Perhaps it was a ship, or part of one. The outer hull was almost entirely covered in a quilt of golden platelets, overlapping in the manner of fish scales. The only parts not covered by the platelets were the dark apertures of sensors and thruster ports, and a small, eye-shaped area on one side of the teardrop that we quickly identified as a door.
Fearing that it might damage the other relics if it exploded under our examinations, I ordered that the analysis of the egg take place in a different part of the mining structure. Soon, though, my concern shifted to the welfare of the egg’s occupants. We knew that there were beings inside it, even if we could not be sure if they were human. Scans had illuminated ghostly structures inside the hulclass="underline" the intestinal complexity of propulsion subsystems, fuel lines, and tanks packed ingeniously tight, the fatty tissue of insulating layers, the bony divisions of armored partitions, the cartilaginous detailing of furniture and life-support equipment. There were even ranks of couches, with eight crew still reclining in them. Dead or in suspended animation, it was impossible to tell. All we could see was their bones, a suggestion of humanoid skeletons, and there was no movement of those bones to suggest respiration.
We got the door open easily enough. It was somewhat like breaking into a safe, but once we had worked out the underlying mechanism—and the curiously alien logic that underpinned its design—it presented no insurmountable difficulties. Gratifyingly, there was only a mild gust of equalizing pressure when the door hinged wide, and none of the sensors arrayed around the egg detected any harmful gases.
As far as we could tell, it was filled with an oxygen-nitrogen mix only slightly different from that aboard our own ships.
“What now?” Qilian asked, fingering the patch of hair beneath his lip.
“We’ll send machines aboard now,” I replied. “Just to be safe, in case there are any booby traps inside.”
He placed a heavy, thick-fingered hand on my shoulder. “What say we skip the machines and just take a look inside ourselves?” His tone was playful. “Not afraid, are we, Yellow Dog?”
“Of course not,” I answered.
“There’s no need to be. I’ll go in first, just in case there aresurprises.”
We walked across the floor, through the cordon of sensors, to the base of the attenuated metal staircase that led to the open door. The robots scuttled out of the way. My staff exchanged concerned glances, aware that we were deviating from a protocol we had spent weeks thrashing out to the last detail. I waved down their qualms.
Inside, as we already knew from the scans, the egg was compartmented into several small chambers, with the crew in the middle section. The rear part contained most of the propulsion and life-support equipment. Up front, in the sharp end, was what appeared to be a kind of pressurized cargo space. The egg still had power, judging by the presence of interior lighting, although the air aboard it was very cold and still. It was exceedingly cramped, requiring me to duck and Qilian to stoop almost double. To pass from one compartment to the next, we had to crawl on our hands and knees through doors that were barely large enough for children. The external door was larger than the others, presumably because it had to admit a crew member wearing a spacesuit or some other encumbrance.
Qilian was the first to see the occupants. I was only a few seconds behind him, but those seconds stretched to years as I heard his words.
“They are aliens after all, Yellow Dog. Strapped in their seats like little pale monkeys. I can see why we thought they might be human… but they’re not, not at all. So much for the theory that every empire must represent a human enclave, no matter how incomprehensible the artifacts or script.”
“That was never my theory, sir. But it’s good to have it dismissed.”
“They have masks on. I can see their faces, but I’d like a better look.”
Still on my knees, I said, “Be careful, sir.”
“They’re dead, Yellow Dog. Stiff and cold as mummies.”
By the time I reached Qilian, he had removed one of the intricate masks from the face of his chosen alien.
In his hands, it was tiny, like a delicate accessory belonging to a doll. He put it down carefully, placing it on the creature’s lap. The alien was dressed in a quilted gold uniform, cross-buckled into the couch. It was the size of an eight-year-old child, but greatly skinnier in build, its torso and limbs elongated to the point where it resembled a smaller creature that had been stretched. Though its hands were gloved, the layout of the long, dainty-looking digits corresponded exactly to my own: four fingers and an opposed thumb, though each of the digits was uncommonly slender, such that I feared they might snap if we attempted to remove the gloves. Its head—the only part of it not covered by the suit—was delicate and rather beautiful, with huge, dark eyes set in patches of black fur. Its nose and mouth formed one snoutlike feature, suggestive of a dog or cat. It had sleek, intricate ears, running back along the sides of its head.
Save for the eye patches, and a black nose at the tip of the snout, its skin varied between a pale buff or off-white.
The alien’s hands rested on a pair of small control consoles hinged to the sides of the couch; the consoles were flat surfaces embossed with golden ridges and studs, devoid of markings. A second console angled down from the ceiling to form a blank screen at the creature’s eye level. The other seven occupants all had similar amenities. There were no windows, and no controls or readouts in the orthodox sense. The aliens were all alike, with nothing on their uniforms to indicate rank or function. From what little I could see of their faces, the other seven were identical to the one we had unmasked.
I suppose I should have felt awed: here I was, privileged to be one of the first two people in history to set eyes on true aliens. Instead, all I felt was a kind of creeping sadness, and a tawdry, unsettling feeling that I had no business in this place of death.
“I’ve seen these things before,” Qilian said, a note of disbelief in his words.
“These aliens, sir? But this is the first time we’ve seen them.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean, isn’t there something about them that reminds you of something?”
“Something of what, sir?”
He ignored my question. “I also want this vehicle stripped down to the last bolt, or whatever it is that holds it together. If we can hack into its navigation system, find an Infrastructure map, we may be able to work out where they came from, and how the hell we’ve missed them until now.”