Enigma (34 page)

For a time, no one said anything. Jankowski made a halfhearted game out of kicking a pebble-sized chunk of masonry ahead of him as they walked on.

“Kevin, you have a good feel for these people—,” Koi began.

“I think so.”

“Since you’ve arrived, have you seen any sign that they considered returning to space to avoid what happened? Any evidence that they had kept that capability or could have stretched themselves to reacquire it?”

Jankowski stared intently at the ground before him as he thought. “No. They were tip-top farmers. They were pretty good chemists. They were fair breeders—they created varieties of
Canis
for everything from food to draft animals to pets. But the kinds of technology required for space travel, the metallurgy, the electronics—no. They just hadn’t taken things in that direction very far at all. I don’t guess that’s what you wanted to hear,” Jankowski added apologetically.

“No, we want honesty above all,” Thackery said.

“I know. I just wish I could be more helpful to you.” Despite his helmet’s faceplate, Jankowski’s frown and furrowed brow were evident to both Koi and Thackery. “If it’s oddities you’re looking for, about the best I could do is take you out to see the delta-wing at Site 241.”

Thackery perked up noticeably at that. “Wing as in aircraft?”

“Sort of. It’s just a name, really, for about 300 kilos of metal—” Koi was frowning. “I’ve been over the archaeological reports pretty thoroughly—”

“You won’t find it there. Frankly, it’s a bit of an embarrassment, not being able to explain it. Every dig has its little mysteries, as Dr. Essinger says. But don’t let me lead you on—it’s not a real aircraft, just shaped like one—”

Thackery would not hear Jankowski’s qualifications. “I want to see it. Is it back at the warehouses?”

“No, it was left
in situ
.”

“Where?”

“North of Wynea. We’d have to take one of the skiffs—”

“What’s the problem, do we need a pilot?”

“Oh, no, I can fly it—”

“Then take us there.”

The primary sun had set by the time they reached Site 241, but the dwarf provided a bright twilight in the great pit. Thackery was out the door almost the moment the skiff landed on the barren volcanic plain, and Koi was not far behind.

“They found it about eight years ago, during an aerial scan,” Jankowski said as he joined them on the rim of the pit. “But you see what I was trying to tell you. It’s not really a plane. It’s just a skeleton of something that looked kind of like one.”

Thackery had already come to that unhappy conclusion. The artifact consisted of three S-shaped ribs of bluish-tinged metal, each a few centimetres across and perhaps thirty metres in length. All three ribs came together to form the “nose” of the plane. Two of the ribs, one reversed from the other, lay flat on the floor of the pit and formed the outline of the “wings.”

The third rib, partially supported now by a truss added by the excavators, swept up and back along the centerline of the “fuselage” to form the leading edge of the “tail.” A conical piece of the same bluish metal reinforced both the triple joint and the suggestion of an aircraft nose.

“This is all that was found?” Thackery asked, his disappointment evident.

“Oh, no. But all the small artifacts were removed and stored. I think there were over a hundred of them, all found within the area marked out by the boundaries of the wings.”

“What kind of artifacts?” Thackery asked, more from reflex than real curiosity. “Metal. Little things, the size of your palm or smaller. Pieces from some kind of machinery.”

Koi asked, “Can we go down in the pit?”

“Sure. There’s some footholds cut in the wall at the far end.”

“I’ll pass,” Thackery said, and sat down where he had been standing.

When the others reached the bottom, Koi went first to the nose and examined the joint there, then stood and walked toward the back, running her gloved fingers along the spine-like center rib until it was too high for her to reach. “Why did they stop digging?” she wanted to know when she straightened up.

Jankowski frowned. “They went all the way down to the A level. You can see by the ash layers in the wall of the pit all the episodes of volcanism. Ash, pyroclastic flow, tuff breccia, ash again, basaltic lava—we’re standing on what was the valley floor when the Wynea lived here.”

“So we’re looking at the whole thing? There’s nothing buried?”

“No.”

“And no other structures in the area?”

“No.”

“Anything else like this on the whole planet?”

“Not that we’ve found.”

“So what do your bosses think it is?”

“A range shelter.”

Koi regarded him dubiously. “Really?”

“They modeled the prevailing wind patterns in the valley prior to the volcanism and found that the small end faces upwind. If you span the area between the center rib—think of it as a ridge pole—and the ground ribs with fabric, like they do with the arches inside their buildings, you’d have a good-sized protected volume inside.”

Thackery called down into the pit, “You almost finished, Amy?”

“Almost,” Koi answered. “Why aren’t you sure?” she asked Jankowski.

“Mostly the fact that we haven’t found any more of them yet—though Dr. Essinger expects to, eventually. ‘Find one, it’s an oddity—find two, it’s a commodity’ is how he says it.”

“And that’s why it hasn’t been included in the Annex’s reports?”

“You have to understand that everything we find spends some time on the Interim list before any report is filed. This one’s just been there a little longer than usual.”

“Because you can’t find another?”

“I guess. And because of the way this one was found. It was solid pyroclastics and lava right down to the spine—and then nothing, right down to the original valley floor. The other artifacts were just lying on the A level, on the floor of the shelter, as it were.”

“There was a cavity in the deposits?”

Jankowski nodded. “The center rib was part of the roof of the cavity. Whatever the fabric was, it was apparently strong enough to hold out the lava until it cooled—which the other fabrics we’ve found indoors wouldn’t have. Dr. Essinger would like to find a sample of it before he closes the books.”

Koi looked up to where Thackery sat on the lip of the pit. “What do you think?”

His face devoid of interest, Thackery clambered to his feet. “If you folks can get out the way you got in, I think it’s time we headed back.”

“You
are
disappointed, no matter what you told Kevin,” Koi whispered to Thackery when they were alone that night, squeezed together onto a one-person foldaway in a test of both agility and companionability.

“I’m just afraid you’re right—that the colony failed without any help from the D’shanna.”

“Did you ever really expect anything different?”

“All the way over to Site 241,1 was thinking that Sputnik followed Kitty Hawk by only about fifty years. If the Wenlock had achieved flight, then the D’shanna would have had reason to come here.”

“Kevin tried to tell us it wasn’t a plane.”

“And I wouldn’t listen, I know. Well—there’s two new colonies waiting for us. Essinger says we could probably beat the followup mission to 16 Herculis. Or we could go all the way across to the Perseus octant and drop in on the Shinn.”

“Or we could always just get into
Munin
and go out to the rim of the Galaxy, and come back a few thousand years from now when somebody else has sorted it all out.”

“Don’t think the thought hasn’t crossed my mind.”

“I was joking,” Koi said, pulling away from him. “Besides 16 Herculis, there’s still Ross 128 and 2 Triangulum Australis. And I’m not ready to write off this planet yet.”

“Oh, we’ll stay a while yet. But I can’t see much reason to hope for anything.”

“Do me a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t be with us like Neale was with you at Sennifi. Let me tell you when I’m finished, and not the other way around.” His smile was rueful. “Sorry.”

“You haven’t done it yet,” she said, and kissed him. “I just want to make sure you don’t.”

A night’s sleep seemed to restore Thackery to his former state of enthusiasm and optimism. He was the first up of the
Munin
team, and had cleaned and inspected all four E-suits by the time the others dragged themselves down to breakfast. “I’ve asked Kevin to take us out to the Werno dig,” Thackery told Koi when they settled at a table.

Her face wrinkled unhappily. “Why don’t you take Derrel, or Barbrice?”

“Why, what are you going to do?”

“I want to look a little more into this business of the 241 artifact. Besides, we don’t want the others to think that the only way to get to go on a field trip is to sleep with the boss.”

“You think they might think that, eh? Then I guess I’ll take Barbrice.” Koi glowered threateningly, then relaxed into a smile. “That’s all right. She’s gay.”

“Figures. Listen—there’s no need to get hung up on the 241 artifact just because I was for a while.”

“No danger,” she said cheerfully. “We’ll see you in a few hours.”

Now that she knew it was there, Koi had no trouble extracting the data on the 241 artifact from the Annex’s Interim files. The abstract contained a variety of information which Jankowski had not provided, including one intriguing fact: an assay showing that the ribs were made of tantalum-niobium alloy.

That one discovery made the range shelter idea fallacious on its face. Tantalum and niobium were both refractory metals, relatively rare in the crust of 7 Herculis-5—in fact, the orbital assays suggested that the source minerals, tantalite and samarskite, were even less common on 7 Herculis-5 than they were on Earth. Abundance aside, together tantalum and niobium made an alloy with outstanding corrosion resistance, high-temperature stability, and tensile strength—hardly the alloy of choice for something as mundane as a shelter.

This wasn’t part of their working technology
, she thought triumphantly.
And Essinger must realize it too. That’s why they haven’t said anything. He’s in no hurry to look stupid
.

After a few minutes of further checking, Koi confirmed that except for Site 241, no tantalum-niobium artifacts had been uncovered anywhere on the planet. That might have been of minor significance, except for the level of skill the Wenlock had evinced as chemists.

For tantalum was resistant not only to ordinary atmospheric corrosion, but to acids and alkalis as well, even to highly reactive fluorine. Had tantalum been available in quantity from some local deposit or ore, now hidden from the surveyors by layers of ash and lava, the Wenlock would surely have found a variety of uses for it. But even in those applications where its properties would have been valuable—surgical instruments and implants, cutting tools, chemical equipment—the Wenlock had employed more conventional alloys, such as iron-chromium steels.

This isn’t proof
, she told herself sternly, trying to constrain her deductive leaps. But there was no resisting the central conclusion:
Whatever the 241 artifact is, it wasn’t made on this planet
.

Koi turned next to the photographic records of the artifact.

“Model,” she instructed the netlink, and a three-dimensional solid graphic replaced the actual image. “Hold foreground and abstract,” she instructed, and the pit vanished from the display.

“Rotate left and down. Stop. Draw,” she said, and touched a stylus to the screen to trace a line closing the double-S base and another vertically from the back end of the center rib.
That looks good—

“Fill, using Class A aerodynamic parameters,” she said, and the skeleton acquired flesh.

“Rotate right and up.”

The modeling program obediently complied, and Koi sat back in her chair and steepled her fingers against her lips. On the display before her was a persuasive side view of a hightailed, delta-winged aircraft.

Aircraft? High tensile strength—high melting point—high corrosion resistance—just like you’d need for—“Evaluate: atmospheric entry, multiple-skip aerodynamic braking, unpowered descent to flight-normal altitude.”

NOT POSSIBLE UNDER CURRENT PARAMETERS.

“Modify.”

As she watched, the trailing edge of the wing lengthened,. the fuselage tapered to a point at the base of the tail, and the vertical stabilizer grew larger. The changes affected only the portion of the shape which the modeling routine had created; the three tantalum-niobium ribs remained unchanged.

MODIFICATION COMPLETE.

No, not an aircraft—a goddamn spacecraft. A winged reentry vehicle. These people found the skeleton of a goddamn transonic spaceplane sitting under eighteen metres of pyroclastics in the middle of nowhere on a colony planet and didn’t even know what they’d found.

“Save model,” she said grimly, and folded the netlink’s display flat against the controls.
There’s one big problem, Amy dear. The Wenlock couldn’t have built it. The D’shanna, at least Merritt’s D’shanna, wouldn’t have needed it
.

As far as Koi knew, that left only one possibility. And that one was so fantastic that she could scarcely bear to entertain it.

Guerrieri did not share her enthusiasm, and was loathe to share her conclusion.

“That’s not a spacecraft—it’s a shell,” he complained when Koi showed him the model.

“That’s what I want your help with—filling it.”

He shook his head. “You’re as bad as the paleontologists who reconstruct an entire skeleton from half a jawbone.”

“This ‘jawbone’ has a melting point of over 1600 degrees Celsius, a perfect airframe profile, and an extremely suspect genealogy.”

“But it’s still just a jawbone. Don’t you realize how complex even a dead-stick glider is? Where’s the load-bearing stringers and truss spars? Where’re the control surfaces? Where’re the avionics and navigation packages?”

“Some of those may be in the Annex warehouses. That’s why I want you to go out there with me and look at the rest of the Site 241 artifacts.”

Guerrieri sighed expressively. “You won’t let me rest until I say yes, will you?”

“Nope. Best you surrender now.”