Event Horizon (Hellgate) (99 page)

A pause, and Lai’a said, “Yes. It registers the first active scanning we have seen since entering this system.”

“Somebody’s awake on the platform,” Travers growled.

“Or an AI.” Marin came closer to the tank, the better to follow the flood of incoming data. “Lai’a – watch yourself.”

“I will know at once,” it assured him, “if any attempt is made to interfere with my processes. Standby for manual override.”

Vidal was already moving. “Relay navigation and engine data to Tech 3. Jo, you out of the Infirmary yet?”

And Queneau, over the loop: “Just cycled the locks. I’m coming to you. You want me to take navigation?”

“Yeah. Just in case.” Vidal’s armor was braced before the workstation. His living human eyes digested flight data just as Travers had moved to tactical and Marin was dividing his attention between comm and environment.

“Probe 107 is on approach to the platform,” Lai’a said calmly. “It is being deep scanned, but it has detected no overtly hostile activity.”

“It’s not being shot at,” Shapiro muttered.

“No target acquisition, General,” Lai’a affirmed. “It has been scanned deeply enough for its components to be
modeled
, but the individuals, or the AI, responsible for the deep scan are not about to destroy it.”

“Not
yet
,” Jazinsky said with profound cynicism. “Give the bastards a chance. Do you have a vid feed from 107?”

“Not until it is within 200 meters,” Lai’a told her. “The medium in which the platform is suspended has a specific gravity similar to salt water, and a high concentration of contamination in suspension. The result is –”

“It’s murky down there,” Marin finished. “Not a lot of visibility. We’ll take what you can get, Lai’a. How long?”

“One minute before useful visual information can be returned,” Lai’a said in guarded tones. “Doctor Grant reports Major Hubler resting comfortably. Doctor Sereccio’s cryogen unit has been moved to OR 2. He is scheduled for surgical procedure at 04:00.”

Dario’s breath rasped over the pickup. “So soon?”

“Why wait? Tor wouldn’t thank you for leaving him on ice while history’s being made.” Jazinsky was intent on the indistinct images which had just appeared in the tank. Lai’a was right, nothing useful could be inferred at this distance. “And don’t forget, Richard’s argument against tanking Teniko was that if the ship were damaged, only folks mobile enough to get up and bug out would survive.” She skipped a beat. “Richard turned out to be dead right … he usually is. But it was himself who was trapped, and Tonio…” She seemed to shake herself.

“Don’t try to put sense to it,” Marin warned. “It’s enough to drive you right out of your mind … Barb, Mark, look at this.”

As he spoke Lai’a announced, “A low-power, short-range signal is transmitting from a point on the platform.” It paused to monitor, record. “Message is 17.3 seconds in duration, and loops. The signal was almost certainly triggered by the appearance of our probe.”

“Let’s see it.” Travers came around for a better view at the flatscreen where Marin was working.

Since Curtis was monitoring comm, he had the data at his fingertips in realtime. The meaningless audio was playing while he watched the waveform slowly rotating in threedee. “It looks … similar to the wave pattern we recorded at both the defense zones,” he said slowly.

“It is certainly the same language,” Lai’a said without hesitation, “however, the message content is very different. I am comparing the three samples. The aggregate of all remains insufficient to enable translation.”

“But someone,” Mark said grimly, “is talking to us. The same someone who was talking out by the weapons fields. Lai’a, confirm that this is
nothing
like any Zunshu language we’re ever sampled from any of their hardware.”

“Confirmed. Which could be precisely the point, Doctor Sherratt,” Lai’a speculated. “All languages we have seen previously were the code systems of drones, probes and automata.
This
language could be the spoken tongue of the living Zunshu.”

“Spoken?” Marin echoed.

The word was surely a misnomer. The audio signal was a wailing, howling tone, oscillating back and forth around several dissonant notes with a seemingly random scattering of higher and lower tones overlaid like harmonic resonance. It might have been the wind shrieking through a crevice, or the voice of a night bird crying over the forest, punctuated by bats.

“Are they trying to contact us?” Rusch asked shrewdly.

“It’s likely,” Jazinsky whispered. “Damnit, Mark –
are
they trying to talk to us? We smashed our way through the best defenses they could throw at us, we’re still here, and instead of launching a swarm against their platform, or running a bunch of Weimann jumps from low orbit, as Tonio suggested – sheer bloody xenocide – we’ve sent one inoffensive little drone to take readings and image them. They could be trying to open a dialog. Negotiate.”

It was Mark’s turn to groan. “If they are, we have no idea what they’re saying. For all we know, it could be ‘We surrender, don’t shoot!’, or it could be ‘This is your last warning before we launch the doomsday bomb.’”

“Oh, sweet,” Travers breathed. “Lai’a, we might as well say something intelligent to them … ‘Greetings from the Deep Sky, we come on a mission of peace to ensure the survival and prosperity of all.’”

Shapiro’s helmet turned toward him. “For a soldier, you’re quite the diplomat. All right, Lai’a. Go ahead and transmit exactly what Colonel Travers suggested. Transmit in as many human languages and Resalq dialects as you can.”

“We tried this in the outer system,” Dario warned. “Result:
nada
.”

“In the outer system,” Mark said musingly, “we were probably talking to a beacon issuing a recorded message. Here?” He turned back to the tank, where the image had resolved with proximity to target. “We’re certainly talking to an intelligent species, though I think it’s incredibly different from ourselves. Those sounds … if this is a spoken language, it’s not issuing from any larynx, mouth, tongue, lips, remotely like ours. You also notice, it never pauses for breath. Which suggests something like cyclical breathing. Perhaps gill breathing.”

Travers felt a prickle as the hair stood up on his nape. “I guess we were just lucky humans and Resalq are so similar.”

“Superficially, at least.” Jazinsky leaned down to watch as the shape of the platform became discernible through the haze and murk of cloudy liquid. “I’ve often wondered how the future would have shaped up if the Resalq had been arachnoids, three meters across the legs … Mark, are you seeing this?”

“Oh, I’m seeing it.” Mark’s voice was husky with reaction.

In the tank, Travers could make out a hull surface which seemed to be metal, off-white or gull-gray; no markings were apparent, but at irregular intervals dark shapes were recessed into the surface, and in any structure he had ever seen, he would have identified viewports. The platform was immense. The probe raced down its side for minutes before it reached the short end of the rectangular body, and there it dove under to image the bottom.

Great hemispherical domes bulged from the ventral surface, and every few kilometers along the length were the cylindrical openings of chutes which could have been exhaust stacks or garbage disposal. The Ops room was silent as the vid feed displayed, though the surface details simply repeated over and over until the drone reached the opposite end. Now it looped up over the top of the platform, and the superficial features changed. Anyone would have recognized the porcupine spines of comm arrays; but these were smashed.

“No wonder they’re almost totally off the air,” Vidal said softly. “Those are highband arrays, if ever I’ve seen ’em. Disabled.”

“Or damaged in an accident,” Rusch added. “Mark?”

“It looks like there’s been a … a collision,” he agreed. “Something hit these arrays, and hit them hard.”

“A comet fragment?” Jazinsky wondered. “Lai’a, can you enhance any of this footage enough to tell if there’s been a large scale impact of a body from orbit?”

“Enhancement shows no such evidence,” the AI responded at once. “Observable damage is consistent with the lateral impact of a body such as a ship or industrial drone, which destroyed the arrays either by accident or by intent.”

“An old fashioned crash,” Dario said slowly. “Maybe they got hit by some of their own junk – the system’s lousy with it. Damnit, how ironic would that be!”

“The question is,” Jazinsky added, “why the hell these arrays weren’t fixed inside of a day or two. We lose our highband, and we go ballistic.” She zoomed the image to maximum. “See this? The broken spars are crusted over with so much muck and algae, up close, you can’t even tell they
are
broken antennae.”

“Bloody hell,” Rabelais muttered passionately, “I’d forgotten how much I detest a mystery.”

Over the loop, Bill Grant’s light voice said, “Not to intrude on your explorations, people, but Barb and Neil might want to know. Richard’s in surgery right now. OR 1 is sealed. If anybody wants to follow the procedure, I’ll stream it to one of your workstations.”

“Just keep me informed, Bill,” Jazinsky said in an odd voice, high and taut. “We’re a little busy just now.”

“I’ve been listening,” Grant told her. “We just said hello.”

“Not,” Mark added, “that the people who speak this local language will know what we said. To a species without larynx or tongue or lips, the sounds we make will sound like gravel rattling around on a shovel. Lai’a, is there any response to our message?”

“None,” it said with the machine’s imperturbable calm. “I am repeating the message. The transmission received from the platform remains the same, repeating on an endless loop without variation.”

Travers’s steel gloved fingers drummed on the side of the threedee which had been coopted as the navigation tank. “Another recording.”

“Possibly. Probably.” Mark took a long breath as the probe completed the circuit of the platform and waited for instructions.

“Do you wish the probe to return?” Lai’a asked.

For a moment Mark hesitated. “No. Have it remain on station there and observe the platform.”

“Looking for what, Doctor Sherratt?”

“Machines or life forms moving outside the structure, waste dumping from the chutes in the bottom, drones working on the surface, lights inside, heat blooms of machinery, weapons coming online, somebody waving from a window! … anything at all to tell us the life forms inside are reacting to our presence.” Mark was still engrossed in the data racing through the side of the display. “This is definitely another recorded message. It’d certainly have been triggered by sensors when our probe appeared; but you can’t fail to notice, this time they’re not shooting.”

“Perhaps the probe’s too small to present a hostile target?” Marin wondered, and then, “no, that makes no sense. Not when the Zunshu’s own probes are a quarter the size.” He turned toward Mark. “They ought to be shooting. Everything we know from your own history and ours says they should have opened fire as soon as our probe came into range.”

“Exactly,” Mark agreed. “Yet they’re as passive as the big platforms out there by the Drift, which we called gatekeepers. One could speculate that they’ve had a salutary shock: they were comprehensively defeated in orbit. Lai’a, give me a report on the comm sky.”

“Silent, Doctor.”

“Can you estimate, from current data, how many life forms are aboard the platform?” Rusch asked.

“No less than twenty thousand,” Lai’a judged, “no more than ninety thousand. The lower figure is the more reliable, since many of the thermal traces I am tracking might easily be machinery. Biomechanical systems are difficult to differentiate from life forms, at distance. Be aware that domestic animals could easily account for a high percentage of the remainder.”

“Food animals?” Dario sounded doubtful.