Progeny (The Progenitor Trilogy, Book Three) (14 page)

              ‘Looks like we found some of the locals, poor bastards,’ said Rekkid. ‘Perhaps they crept down here to die together?’

              Katherine stepped carefully across the bone strewn floor so as not to disturb any of the remains.  She crouched down in front of one of the more intact skulls and played her torch over it.  The skull lacked a bottom jaw and the upper one contained a number of broken teeth towards the front of the mouth.  Looking carefully Katherine could see that these people had endlessly replacing teeth, similar to terrestrial sharks.  A number of other partially formed teeth could be seen growing from the jaw, but the front teeth had not had time to re-grow and looking closer she could see that there were fragments of broken tooth still within the upper jaw.  There was also the small matter of the massive wound across the creature’s left eye.  A sharp edge had chopped down diagonally, embedding itself in the eye socket, biting into the creature’s cheekbone and cracking the frontal bone.  The cranium had been broken open.  Looking inside it, Katherine could see the telltale scrape marks made by a metal implement of some kind.  She looked about at the bones around her from legs, arms and ribs.  There were cut marks on them.  Somebody had used a blade to strip them of meat.

              ‘My god, Rekkid,’ said Katherine in horror.  ‘These people didn’t come here to die: they were forced down here and butchered like animals.  Look at the marks on the bones!’

              Rekkid peered closer at a nearby bone resembling a femur and also saw the cut marks clearly visible in the light from his torch.  This largest bone had been smashed open, presumably to get at the marrow inside.

              ‘They must have been desperate,’ he muttered.  ‘Imagine what must have happened when the food ran out.  Civilisation is just a thin veneer.  People will do anything to survive when it comes down to it.  The owners of this shop could have been hoarding food down here.  They would have been easy prey for any roaming, desperate gangs, and they would have been well fed compared to everyone else, plenty of meat on their bones...’

              ‘Stop it!’ snapped Katherine.  ‘Christ, Rekkid.  How can you be so callous?’

              ‘Sorry,’ Rekkid replied sheepishly. ‘I guess I use black humour as a coping mechanism.’

              ‘I’d noticed, thanks.’

              ‘You’re absolutely correct, this is a pretty grim scene,’ said Rekkid, his brow furrowing.  ‘Maybe they were killed and butchered down here and the meat taken elsewhere along with whatever food they had hoarded.’

              ‘We should log this site, it needs proper investigation and maybe we can reconstruct some of these skeletons to get a proper impression of what these people looked like,’ said Katherine.

              ‘Agreed,’ said Rekkid. ‘But first I intend to get a date on the age of these remains.’

              He removed his sample analyser from his pack and after selecting a small bone fragment from the floor of the cellar, placed it within the device.  After a few seconds, the analyser displayed a result.

              ‘The analyser doesn’t recognise the genetic structure of the sample.  But it can estimate that it’s about ten thousand years old, give or take a century or two,’ said Rekkid, scrutinising the device’s display.  ‘Someone killed this planet whilst the human race was still using stone tools and it’s lain undisturbed ever since.  The question is, why?’

‘We need to keep looking,’ said Katherine.  ‘Come on, let’s push further on into the city.’

              Further in, the buildings became larger and more closely packed.  Some had obviously been many stories in height and had come crashing down when they had been hit by the blast wave.  Others had survived the attack, but had simply crumbled with the ravages of time.  Increasingly the road became choked with drifts of rubble, making the going more difficult.  There was far more dust here, and it swirled in choking clouds at the slightest breeze.  Katherine and Rekkid removed Arkari made re-breather units from their packs and fixed the slick, flexible devices to their faces, allowing them to breathe and see easily in the filthy atmosphere.

              Their comms. crackled into life: it was Steelscale.

              ‘I’ve found something you might want to see,’ said the flat tones of the translation software.  ‘A place of worship of some kind, I think.  I’ve marked it for you on your maps and I’ll wait here until you arrive.  Plenty of the internal decoration has survived.  I’ll think you will find it interesting.’

              ‘That’s wonderful, Steelscale,’ replied Katherine and checked her comm.’s mapping function where a new icon had appeared.  ‘We’re on our way, though the going’s a little rough around here, so we could be a while.  See you when we get there.’

              ‘Interesting,’ said Rekkid. ‘I wonder what he’s found?’

              As Katherine predicted, the journey to Steelscale’s position proved difficult.  They scrambled over piles of rubble, through buckled and shattered streets, through the remains of collapsed buildings and across what had once been broad public spaces but were now littered with massive chunks of debris and shallow dunes of accumulated grit and dust.  More than once, Katherine and Rekkid were forced to assist one another in clambering over huge lumps of fallen masonry, pulling one another up and over cyclopean blocks where entire sides of what had once been skyscrapers had come tumbling down.  Eventually they arrived at a solidly built structure with high, narrow windows and the smashed remains of what had once been spires at each corner.  The masonry was heavily weathered, but the remains of ornamental carvings depicting various figures accompanied by the faint remains of an alien script could be seen on the exterior.  Aside from the damage to the towers, the main building, shaped somewhat like an upturned boat, seemed largely intact.  An ornate entrance, the doors having long since disintegrated, was set into the nearest side.  Breathless from their exertions, Katherine and Rekkid headed inside and gratefully removed their rebreathers.

              The appearance of the temple was deceptive.  Inside the entrance, broad stone steps led downwards into the earth until they opened up into the nave, the increased roof height created by sinking the floor giving the illusion that the temple was bigger on the inside than from without.  Heavy stone columns supported equally massive arches that held up the roof.  The floor was a mosaic of tiny tiles set into complex geometric patterns and was strewn with the remains of what must have once been chairs or pews.

              Steelscale was waiting for them.  He sat curled, catlike, at the end of the nave where the altar lay, lit by the glow of the torch he had set upon the ornamented stone wall that separated the altar from the rest of the nave, the torch’s beam angled so that it illuminated the end wall.

              ‘Katherine, Rekkid.  So glad you could make it at last.’ Steelscale’s translator was difficult to hear over his natural rumbling, guttural voice that echoed in the vaulted space.  ‘I thought you would never make it.’ The last sentence was followed by a short bark, the K’Soth equivalent of a laugh.

              ‘You should see some of the terrain out there in the city, Steelscale,’ said Rekkid breathlessly, still sweating profusely despite the cool of the temple’s interior.  ‘Those ruins aren’t exactly easy to scramble over.’

              Steelscale laughed again. ‘Four legs and talons have their uses.  Personally, I enjoyed the exercise.  Gave me a chance to ‘stretch my legs’ as I believe the humans say.’

              ‘Yeah well, remind me to grow an extra pair,’ Rekkid replied.  ‘Now, what is it that you’ve found here that you just had to show us?’

              Steescale gestured at the wall above the altar, where the faint remains of frescos could still be seen, remarkably preserved.

              ‘As you can see, this building appears to be a place of worship.  Many of my kind would simply dismiss this as pagan imagery and burn the place to the ground in the name of the Light, but I think we can learn much here.’

              ‘Yes we can,’ breathed Katherine. ‘Such as: what the people who built this place looked like.  Look, in the lower left corner, there are figures, can you see?’

              Rekkid followed Katherine’s pointing finger.  Sure enough, there were humanoid figures depicted in the fading paint.  Whether the figures were stylised was unclear as they had no point of reference, but the stocky forms were clearly visible. Brown, near black, skin tones contrasted with brightly coloured clothing, the painted textures of the cloth just visible in places.  Their arms seemed to be held up in worship of something towards the upper middle of the fresco.  Just what they were worshipping was, however, unclear, that portion of the fresco having fallen away, but traces of what appeared to be divine rays could be seen reaching out to the figures.

              ‘Fascinating isn’t it?  We seem to have an image of this planet’s former inhabitants. What is also interesting, however,’ continued Steelscale, ‘is that there appear to be two images on this altar, one painted over the other,  the most recent, the one with the figures, having replaced something quite different.  Here.’  He picked up the torch and moved the beam so that the right hand portion of the wall was better illuminated.  Here, the uppermost layer had flaked away revealing a series of large symbols and columns of smaller, unreadable alien text.  There were no depictions of any kind.  ‘It is clear that at some point this temple was heavily redecorated,’ said Steelscale.  ‘I have examined the rest of the building and found other areas where a layer of frescos displaying symbols and texts had been covered over with an additional layer, in many cases with another set of artwork.  Sadly I have not been able to uncover precisely what these figures in the later frescos appear to be worshipping.  Some sort of divine being perhaps?’

              ‘Seems that way,’ said Rekkid. ‘Those rays of holy light, if that’s what they are, would seem to indicate as much.  What do you think this over-painting points to?  Some sort of religious change or schism or just a change in fashion?’

              ‘It does bear a resemblance to some of the medieval cathedrals in Europe,’ said Katherine.  ‘The colourful decorations of formerly Catholic churches were whitewashed or plastered over to conceal them to create a simpler more ascetic look.  So yes, it could point to some sort of drastic religious episode, or as you say, a simple change in fashion in how they liked to decorate their temples.  We’ll need more evidence before we could draw any sort of concrete conclusions and so far we know very little about these people.’

              ‘It would help if we could decipher their language,’ said Rekkid.  ‘Some sort of key or primer.  But after such a long time I don’t hold out much hope of finding anything useful.  Any books would have long since disintegrated.’

              ‘Some of their machines must have survived,’ said Steelscale.  ‘Or else what is generating that signal that the
Shining Glory
picked up from orbit?  Maybe we can find electronic records there.  Whatever is beaming out that signal could be in some sort of hardened facility if it still works after the bombardment and after all this time.  We should head to the source. We’re bound to find out more once we investigate it, I’m certain.’

              ‘Agreed,’ said Rekkid.  ‘We should record images of this place and move on.  We can always return with scanning equipment and see if we can reveal some more of the images on these walls.  We need to press on with what Mentith sent us here to do in the first place: find the source of those signals.’

              They spent a while taking pictures of the interior of the temple, then after a brief rest and a spartan meal from their ration packs, the three archaeologists continued into the city.  They’d been heading roughly northwards into the city centre, however the source of the signals lay within the area that orbital imaging had revealed as being totally flattened by whatever weapon had struck the city ten millennia previously, at the centre of which was a crater around half a kilometre in diameter.

              Steelscale led the way, his lithe, muscular body powering him over the rubble with surprising speed as he scouted out easier routes for his two humanoid companions to take.  He seemed unbothered by the dusty atmosphere - membranes in his eyes and nose allowing him to cope with the particles in the air.

              As they pushed deeper into the city, the state of the buildings began to deteriorate.  Here they had obviously been tall, many storied structures,- judging from the sheer volume of debris - but increasingly these former monoliths had been reduced to little more shattered stumps.  Occasionally, they came across a lone building that had survived nearly intact.  Something about their orientation or construction had saved them.  Some leaned at unsettling angles, looking as though they were ready to topple.  In other places, the central cores of the buildings were all that had survived, massive pillars of a concrete like substance from which had presumably hung metal and glass floors and walls.  They stood over the devastation like stele in an ancient necropolis.

              Eventually, they arrived at the edge of the area where the destruction was near total and stood for a moment, looking inwards towards the vast crater at its heart.  A sea of rubble stretched for several kilometres to the horizon.  The central crater was just visible amid the shifting dust storms. 

A single structure remained standing amid the ruins.  It was a squat ziggurat several hundred feet in height and about a kilometre distant.  Presumably, the solid construction of its sloping walls had saved it from destruction.  It appeared to be the source of the transmissions.

              Katherine looked at the undulating expanse of smashed buildings between them and their destination and felt doubt creeping into her mind.

              ‘I’m not sure how we’re going to cross all that,’ she said.  ‘Maybe we should contact the
Glory
and get them to send a shuttle down to take us across all of this.’