The Devil's Nebula (16 page)

Gorley nodded. “Look for a suitable landing place within the city itself.”

The
Hawk
approached slowly, sand-coloured domes and towers passing beneath them. Carew searched for the slightest sign of movement, but all that stirred between the buildings was the wind-driven sand.

Choudri said, “There’s no sign of vegetation anywhere. It’s totally lifeless.”

They moved gradually over the wreck of a downed starship, conjoined with the wreckage of the building it had destroyed.

Lania brought the ship down beyond it, in a plaza surrounded by low, round buildings, ochre brick domes, and the occasional towering minaret. Carew imagined a time when the city square had heaved with alien life, when citizens had gone about their lives, oblivious of the apocalypse to come.

The
Hawk
landed in a sandstorm of its own making, impacted gently and bobbed on its stanchions.

“Atmosphere content?” Carew asked.

“Oxygen-nitrogen-argon mix,” Lania said, reading from her screen, “but rarefied. We’ll have to go out there with breathing apparatus. And it’s damned hot out there – over forty Celsius.”

Gorley said, “I’ll send out a team of militia first and then whoever would care to disembark may do so. I’d advise we venture out in teams of three, until we’ve ascertained that it’s safe out there.”

Much as Ed wanted to find something to object to in Gorley’s orders, the Commander was following sensible landfall protocol.

He returned to the screen and stared out at the dead city. Ten minutes later, three militia moved out from under the nose of the
Hawk
, suited up and masked, looking like insects. As he watched, one of their number looked up at the viewscreen and waved. Beside him, Lania smiled and returned the salute. Carew looked at her, but Lania’s expression told him nothing.

“A friend of yours?”

She nipped her top lip between her teeth, as if to stop herself from smiling. “Something like that,” she said.

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER
they received word that all was AOK on the surface of the alien world and Carew prepared to disembark with Lania and Choudri. Jed said he might take a look later, and satisfied himself in the interim with a cold beer.

With Lania at his side, Carew took the dropchute to the exit hatch and stepped out onto the hot sand. They moved from the shadow of the
Hawk
into the glare of the alien sun: it was a vast orange hemisphere low on the horizon, setting over the desiccated city and casting long shadows across the square.

“Where to begin?” Choudri said.

A trail of scuff-marks in the sand, left by the militia, crossed the square and approached a stone-built dome topped by a tower. Carew indicated the building. “Why not over here?” Beyond it was the wreck of the starship they’d seen earlier.

They crossed the square to the domed building.

Carew had visited perhaps a hundred different worlds in his lifetime, and while many of them had sported alien landscape, flora and fauna, they had all been settled by humans and therefore shared a basic similarity, or familiarity, of architecture. He had never really felt totally alienated on an alien world.

But here it was different. The strange architecture told him he was on a world where humans had never trod before.

The stone domes that surrounded the square were windowless, their entrances thin slits, and Carew could only assume that they had been places of cool refuge from the daytime heat of the supergiant. It was twilight now, but even so, he judged the temperature to be in the high thirties.

They came to the curving wall of the dome and examined the entrance, tall and narrow, as if made for creatures half again as tall as humans and extremely thin. Carew turned sideways and edged through the gap; he had expected it to be dark within, but light flooded the great circular chamber.

Lania and Choudri followed him in.

He looked around and saw how the dome was illuminated. Light was channelled down the spire that sat at the apex of the dome, where angled mirrors reflected the dying light of the sun.

Lania moved around the perimeter of the dome, staring at something on the wall. He joined her.

“Carvings,” she said, her voice muffled by her breathing apparatus. “They look ancient.” She reached out, gently touched a bas relief design depicting a tall, insect-like creature holding what might have been an agricultural tool. Or, then again, it might have been a weapon.

They moved around the dome, staring at the frescoes showing aliens in all manner of activities, none of which were readily comprehensible.

Choudri said quietly, “I wonder what happened to them?”

They left the dome and walked around its perimeter, following a cobbled channel that led to a long, straight road, arrowing off into the city between domes. Carew made out what might have been vehicles; small, rusted wrecks mired in drifts of sand.

They moved to the first of the wrecks and peered within. At first glance, the vehicle appeared empty, but Lania placed a hand on his arm and pointed to what seemed to be a driver’s seat mounted before a control column.

Piled on the seat was a jackstraw collection of bones, bleached white by the sun. Carew made out the skull, long and thin, which corresponded to the carved heads of the aliens portrayed in the dome.

Choudri touched his earpiece, listened attentively, then said, “Understood. We’ll be right with you.”

He turned to Carew. “That was Alleghri, leading the militia. They’ve found something. This way.”

His curiosity piqued, Carew followed the Indian along the main road, threading their way between even more wrecked vehicles, until they came to a turning beside a dome whose walls were cracked and stove-in like an eggshell.

They passed between buildings and came to another wide open area. Carew made out three armoured figures – the sight of them human and comforting in the alien landscape – standing on the edge of a great pit. They were staring down, their bowed heads granting them an air of reverence.

One of the figures turned and lifted its arm in a wave. Carew recognised the crew-cut woman who’d signalled up to the ship earlier: Lania’s new friend.

They joined the trio at the edge of the pit and stared down.

At first, Carew failed to take in the enormity of what lay before him. His mind registered the hundreds of stick-like objects at his feet, and then he realised suddenly that they were bones and that they went on and on and on, a macabre landscape of tangled skeletons of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of aliens extending for at least a kilometre.

Two of the guards were running tests on the nearby bones, scanning the remains with sensors connected to smartcores within their armour.

The woman, Alleghri, said, “We’ve found skeletal remains all over the city, practically everywhere we’ve looked. There must be millions of them.”

“Any idea what might have happened to them?” Lania asked.

The woman shook her head. “Judging by the wrecked fortifications and the ships we saw in orbit, there seems to have been some kind of war. But here” – she swept out an armoured arm to indicate the city – “there’s no sign of war damage. It’s as if the populace suffered a plague.”

One of the militia stood and read something scrolling across a screen embedded in the forearm of his armour. “The remains are approximately a hundred and twenty years old, give or take a few years.”

“Any idea of cause of death?” Choudri asked.

“Impossible to say, at the moment. I’ll run tests back at the ship, but I’m not hopeful we’ll find out soon.”

“But no signs of violence?”

“None that we can discern.”

Lania looked out across the sea of bones. “A mass burial site? Is this where the survivors came to lay their dead?”

Alleghri looked at her. “What survivors?”

Lania shrugged. “Survivors who themselves succumbed to whatever killed their fellows?” She shook her head. “It’s unimaginable.”

Alleghri said, “And this is representative of what we saw on the way in. City after city, dead and deserted. The entire planet, dead for over a hundred years.”

Choudri said, “On the scale of things, that’s not long at all.”

A thought occurred to Carew. “When did the colony ship from Vercors set off?”

Choudri thought about it. “About a hundred years ago, Ed. It was a slow-ship, the colonists in suspended animation. They wouldn’t have arrived at this system for twenty, thirty years.”

“So it can’t have been humans bringing some form of disease.”

Lania shook her head. “No. And it wouldn’t account for the orbital destruction,” she pointed out.

“I wonder if this was the result of bacteriological warfare?” Carew said. “They fought an orbital battle with invaders, but lost when their enemy resorted to germ warfare?”

“We might know more in a few hours,” Choudri said.

Carew looked around at the skyline of the dead city and found what he’d been looking for. The broken back of the downed starship emerged from the rubble of buildings, perhaps half a kilometre away.

He pointed. “I’m going to take a look at that.”

Lania came with him, along with Choudri. Alleghri gave orders to the two militia-men to conduct further tests, then fell into step with Lania. The pair exchanged smalltalk as Carew led the way through the city, their words too quiet and muffled for him to pick up.

He had been obsessed with starships of all kinds since his youth on Temeredes. He’d lived near the starport there and spent all his free time in the observation lounge, watching the ships come and go. His imagination had been fired by the bigger ships, the colossal cargo liners and supply ships, and the farther they had travelled through space to get to Temeredes, the greater his interest. He wondered what the boy he had been would have thought of his future self, thousands of light years from home, and approaching the wreck of a vast alien starship.

They climbed over sand-blasted rubble and came at last to the great curving flank of the vessel.

Lania turned and stared at him, her brown eyes intense above her breathing mask. “Remind you of anything, Ed?” she murmured.

He reached out, his finger-tips tracing the familiar scrolls and whorls etched onto the metal. He stepped back and looked up, following the swirling design across the arching superstructure.

He said to Lania, “It’s almost identical, wouldn’t you say?”

She nodded. “Right.”

Choudri was watching them. “To what?”

Lania said, “On Hesperides, we found the crash-landed wreck of a starship. It was obviously alien.” She reached out and touched the swirls engraved on the metal. “The design was identical to this.”

Carew took in the lines of the ship, the sweep of its scimitar fins. “The ship, too, resembled this one.”

“The same provenance, then?”

“It would seem so.”

He left the group and moved to where a panel in the side of the ship had parted company with its neighbour and hung open like an inviting doorway. He pulled it further back and eased his way through, the soles of his boots grating across a fine drift of sand.

The others joined them and he led the way along corridors – broken and angled, which made navigation difficult – towards the front end of the ship. Along the way they came across alien skeletons clothed in the shredded remains of uniforms, attenuated creatures with long, narrow skulls.

They arrived at the flight-deck, a circular amphitheatre surrounded by banked consoles and screens. Carew counted twenty dead aliens littered around the chamber.

“I wondered if the ship belonged to an invading race,” he said. “But I think not.”

Choudri agreed. “The frescoes showed creatures that appeared very much like these. They were an advanced, star-faring race.”

“Which sent a vessel all the way across Vetch space, only for it to crash-land on Hesperides.”

Lania said, “They sent more than one vessel, Ed. Remember what Jed said about seeing that crashed ship on Tamalkin, way back?”

Carew looked at her. “I wonder if it had anything to do with this, the death of their civilisation? Perhaps they were fleeing something?”

“Fleeing the war, whoever was attacking them?” Lania suggested.

Carew thought about it. “That’s all very well. But if you recall, there was no sign on the ship on Hesperides of any survivors, or the bodies of those killed on impact. If there had been survivors, then we’d surely have heard about it. And on Tamalkin, too.”

Choudri was watching him. Carew frowned at the Expansion man. “What is it?”

“There were other crash-landed wrecks like this one, all across the Expansion. They arrived in our space more than a hundred years ago, over a five year period.”

“I never heard about it,” Carew said.

“The Expansion authorities kept it under wraps, didn’t let word get out.”

Lania asked, “And why was that?”

The Director paused, then went on. “We investigated the wrecks, but the odd thing was that they appeared to be empty, unmanned. And... and they hadn’t been running on auto-pilot, either. To be honest, we didn’t know what the hell was happening, so we threw up security cordons around the ships and maintained a complete news black-out.”

“Any theories?” Carew asked.

Choudri shook his head. “We were completely mystified and still are.”

Lania said, “Perhaps we’ll find out more clues here?”

Something occurred to Carew. “The cultists from Vercors, Procyon... Jed said something about a cult on Tamalkin, worshipping some kind of crashed starship.”

Choudri nodded. “As did the cultists on Vercors,” he said.

“So they set off aboard the colony vessel, heading for this very star system. It can’t be just coincidence.”

“It would appear not,” Choudri said and in an aside to Carew, “I wonder how much Gorley knows, and isn’t telling me?”

“Perhaps,” Carew said, “we should return to the
Hawk
and go through what we’ve found. Then the Commander might be more forthcoming.”

Choudri laughed at that. “You are an optimist, Captain Carew.”

They left the ship and made their slow way back through the desiccated city.