As the scan image of the writing on the cylinder unfolded in the feed, Hummingbird stirred to life, attention sharpening. One hand, gnarled and scarred, brushed across the display, keying a series of preset searches. The panel chirped pleasantly, then began processing. Immediately, the video feeds flickered to a stop and the entire device dimmed noticeably.
In the small, crowded office beside his private cabin, Hadeishi cursed as his display slowed to a crawl, then snapped back to its normal responsiveness. A stiff finger jabbed a comm channel open. "Sho-sa Kosho, are we under attack?"
"No, Captain," came a quiet, level reply. "By ship's clock Hummingbird-tzin was using twenty percent main comp capacity for six seconds."
Hadeishi suppressed a curse, then curiosity washed away his anger. "What is he doing with that level of capacity?"
"I do not know, Hadeishi-san, and would not venture to guess." Kosho's voice was very demure.
"Understood." Hadeishi cut the channel, forcing speculation from his mind. There were logistics and supply usage reports to review and sign. Twenty percent? Is he modeling planetary weather or something?
Hummingbird scowled, lean old face twisting into a tight mask. Bits and pieces of the glyphs incised into the cylinder were coming back a match with examples from his archive. He thought briefly of using the blue pyramid, but discarded the notion. I urge caution on others, he thought with a trace of humor, so should I practice it myself.
What did match was troubling. Some of the more complicated signs were very like a series of temple carvings observed by a deep-range probe in a dead system beyond New Malta. Others suggested the contents of tablets secured by a Mirror agent from the marketplaces of Ik-hu-huillane. Both sets of documents were restricted to the highest levels of the Mirror — Hummingbird did not even possess translations of them, only symbol-match heuristics — and a series of winking red-and-white banded glyphs appeared alongside the comparison results.
"You say they're dangerous," he muttered at the panel. "But how?"
He began to feel uneasy, watching the Anderssen woman work with her probes and sensors, slowly revealing more and more layers hidden inside the cylinder. The arrangements of the membranes inside the structure did seem to contain more data — a vast amount, far more than even the writing etched on the outer surface.
"Are they access instructions?" he wondered aloud, wishing the upper levels of the Mirror had seen fit to provide him with more information about dead Gulatith and whichever race had chipped the Ik-hu-huillane tablets from interstellar ice. "Could she decipher them, given time? Or is the device too old — broken by the wear of so many millennia… She has the inclination, I see." Hummingbird was glad Anderssen had such limited software.
On his v-pane, the woman was cursing at her slow panel and tapping commands at a furious rate. Hummingbird shook his head slowly — curiosity was a powerful drug — one whose effects he had felt himself and he wondered if the soldier was right. We could throw the cylinders into the sun. There they might be destroyed, or at least lost for another million years.
"But then," he said to the dark room, "we would not know, would we? And we are curious monkeys…even I am pricked by curiosity."
The densely packed strip of symbols taunted him from the display. He could sense — even through the filters running in his panel, even with well-ordered detachment — a tantalizing meaning in the angular, alien shapes. Hummingbird felt an urge to turn the power of his display — of the Cornuelle's main comp — to their decipherment. The pyramid might contain a linguistic key. My tools might —
"I think not," he said aloud, and tapped off the v-feed from the Palenque.
"Delores…take a look at this." Parker dialed up the magnification on his work lenses, head cocked as he stared down the throat of shuttle number two's air intake. The heavy machinery had been — at last — removed from shuttle number one's cargo hold, the mold cleaned away and the entire assembly mounted on a diagnostic rack in the Palenque's engineering ring. The morning had been spent laboriously attaching power feeds and exhaust vents so the engine could be tested. The exploration ship did not have a proper maintenance bay, causing Parker and Isoroku to waste a great deal of time trying to get reliable diagnostic relays established between the Sunda Aerospace Yards Komodo-class shuttle and the Novoya Rossiya–built mechanicals on the Palenque.
Eventually, the pilot had given up trying to make the Javan and Swedish equipment play nicely and had settled for a visual inspection. A multispectrum lamp was clipped to the lip of the intake.
"What?" Delores, surly again for some reason — though she'd greeted both Parker and Isoroku with a big smile this morning when she came swinging out of the accessway — climbed up on the rack and worked her head and shoulders inside.
"Switch to UV-band on your lenses," Parker said, gently placing his fingertip on a curving section of the intake wall. The highly polished ceramic alloy gleamed like a mirror, reflecting his face as an enormous, distorted monster. "And hi-mag, about six hundred."
"Now I can't see anything but the surface of the composite." Delores didn't bother to keep mounting irritation out of her voice.
"Follow my arm, then just ahead of my finger."
Delores grunted, making a face. "You need to take a bath sometime. Your nails…" Then she whistled softly in alarm. "By the Sister — what is that?"
"Something alive," Parker said, watching a faint discoloration shimmer like a rainbow in the hi-mag view of his work lenses. He could see regular, symmetric structures in the discoloration — not the stolid honeycomb of the ceramic, but something delicate and far, far more complicated. "Something eating the hi-temp ceramic lining and making more…more metallic lichen."
"Oh, Sister!" Delores scrambled backward out of the intake. "It's the eaters!"
"No," Parker said, watching the tiny gleaming lights with a bemused expression on his narrow face. "No, it's not them…we'd be dissolved or turned inside out. This is different — this must have come from the planet. Is there any life down there?"
"No," Delores called from across the engineering bay. "Just rocks, sand and barren mountains. Nothing green, no trees, no water. Nothing."
The pilot wanted to scratch his nose, but couldn't, not in the close confines of the intake. On a hunch, he breathed on the discoloration, trying to focus the flow of moist gas with his lips. In the restricted universe of hi-mag, he saw the delicate tendrils wave in the wind, and the textures and colors brightened. He blinked, then squinted in disbelief. "I think they got bigger," he called excitedly to Delores.
The crewwoman was still on the other side of the bay. She had found a welding torch and was hefting the slender wand like a bat. "Well, don't do that again, whatever it was! Come on, let's tell the engineer or Anderssen-tzin about this."
"Hmmm…ok." Parker backed out of the intake and swung the UV lamp to mark the discoloration. Even from the vast remove of a meter, he could no longer make out the lichen. Sitting on the steps of a work ladder, he tapped open a channel.
"Doctor Anderssen? Parker. Can you join me and Delores down in Engineering bay four? Bring your hi-mag lenses, if you've got 'em handy."