The Devil's Nebula (5 page)

Jed said, “Were aliens ever traced?”

Ed shook his head. “No, which makes it all the more mysterious. And now we find that the Vetch are curious about it, too. So that’s why I wanted to come here, quite apart from the fact that we could make a little money by retrieving the statuette.”

Lania said, “Presumably the crash-site has been well and truly scoured by now?”

“I still wanted to see for myself,” Ed said. “Also, the politician said that items from the ship were stored in the vaults of the Valderido museum.”

Lania tapped his knee. “That’s before our ugly friends took them away, Ed.”

He moved his leg from her reach and nodded, conceding the point.

She said, “I still wish you’d told us about it, Ed.”

He stood quickly and regarded the shot-glass doors of the museum. “You forget yourself, Lania. I’m the Captain of the
Poet,
I need tell you nothing.”

He strode off, pushed open the swing door and disappeared inside.

Open-mouthed, Jed watched him go. “What’s eating him, Lania?”

“Oh, he’s just being his usual old, cold self,” she said.

They stood and hurried after their captain.

L
ANIA HAD ALWAYS
found museums rather sad places, the termini of relics from cultures long dead and almost forgotten. As a child on the old colony world of Xaria, she’d spent hours in the cultural history museum of the capital city, staring solemnly at the artefacts of races, both alien and human, who had had their day and died.

It was a poignant reminder that the spread of her own people through this sector of the galaxy was but a passing show across the vast face of the universe.

Now, as they walked reverently through dusty halls with half-emptied cases to their left and right, she knew that even sadder than the museums of her childhood were museums like this one: museums whose exhibits stood in mute testimony, not only to long dead civilisations, but to a present and future bereft of citizens to gaze upon the wonders of ages past.

A terrible melancholy seemed to fill the echoing halls, an atmosphere which demanded silence from the trio as if they were treading the sacred precincts of a cathedral.

Lania found herself whispering, “Do you know where the statuette was kept?”

If Ed was still upset with her, he didn’t show it. “The dealer said it was in a hall given over to the remains of the Hhar civilisation, the race which became extinct here a million years ago.”

Ed gestured along the length of the vast central hall, indicating an opening to his right. They came to the archway and paused on the threshold.

“It’s almost untouched,” Ed said. “I don’t know whether to be sad about that, or glad.”

Jed looked at him. “Because the statue’ll be easier to find?”

Ed smiled. “Something like that, Jed.”

Lania watched Ed as he stepped into the chamber containing rows of cases of Hhar artefacts. There were times, she thought, when he exhibited more compassion towards things and ideas than towards real, living people.

A row of glass cabinets lined the walls and ran down the centre of the room. Ed said, “A small statue of an alien figure, about as long as my hand, carved from grey stone.”

He moved to the left-most series of cases, while Jed checked the central aisle and Lania began peering into the cabinets to the right.

She wondered why none of the Hhar artefacts had been salvaged, either by staff or the looters who came afterwards. Were these pieces worth nothing, these exquisitely carved representations of wild Hesperidian animals, admittedly primitive but nevertheless carved with care and a knowledge of the subject? Like their creators, they were destined to be lost in the mists of time.

In the third case was a small carving of what looked like a scaled lion. She worked out how to open the case, reached inside and picked up the cold, heavy object.

She turned the carving, admiring the intricacy of the detail, the fidelity the ancient artisan had brought to the leaping musculature and the ferocious head.

“Lania?” Ed called. “Found it?”

“No – just this.” She held it up. “To remember Hesperides by, Ed.”

She slipped the carving into her pouch and moved to the next case. Five minutes later she came to the last one and admitted defeat. Ed was still peering into a cabinet across the chamber, a gangly, professorial figure absorbed in antiquities, when Jed called out, “Here, boss. I think I’ve found it!”

Lania moved to his side and Ed joined them. The statuette occupied a cabinet of its own, standing on a black velvet plinth. It was as Ed had described it, perhaps ten centimetres tall and iron-grey, an attenuated alien figure with long legs and short arms and a long, thin head.

Jed was fumbling in an attempt to open the case. Lania eased him aside and showed him how.

Ed reached into the case and took custody of the figure.

He examined the alien carving, then passed it to Jed who hefted it in his right hand. “A hundred thousand units,” he said in wonder.

Lania took the figure and examined it, wondering what made this example of Hhar culture so valuable.

As if reading her thoughts, Ed said, “The dealer wants it for his private collection. He collects carvings of alien races, ancient and modern.”

She looked at him. “Is it worth what we went through, Ed?”

He smiled. “He’ll certainly think so, Lania.”

She wondered if it had been worth the fear and tension she’d experienced during the past few hours and decided that, on balance, it was. She would put the thirty thousand in her savings, towards the villa on Xaria by the ocean where her father had lost his life.

“Lania,” Ed said, interrupting her thoughts, “summon the
Poet
and have it land in the square immediately.”

“We’re leaving?” Jed asked.

“We’re heading north to the crash-site,” Ed told him, “just as soon as I’ve checked if the Vetch left anything of the wreckage.”

They followed him from the Hhar chamber and turned right along the atrium, following the scuffed trail in the dust left by the Vetch. It led down a flight of stairs to the basement and along a dim corridor. An open door gave onto a long room full of metal racks, most of which were empty. Only half a dozen plastic containers remained, and these had been emptied.

Ed found a scrawled ticket, which might once have been attached to an artefact. He passed it to Lania. “Miramar,” she read.

“The place where the wreckage of the starship was discovered,” Ed explained.

“Well, the Vetch have been pretty thorough here,” she said.

“Let us hope that they have been less conscientious at the site itself.”

Some hope, Lania said to herself as she followed him from the basement room, but thought it best not to voice the opinion.

T
HE
P
ARADOXICAL
P
OET
squatted on its ramjet haunches, in the full glare of the sun, as they emerged from the museum. For a fifty year-old ex-navy survey vessel, superannuated when Ed purchased it twenty years ago, it looked pretty good, and performed even better. Even though Lania was just its pilot, she always felt a surge of pride at the sight of the old junkpile. Its bodywork was excoriated by the void, its armour plating blasted by a million micro-meteorite hits – and dented by a hundred larger impacts – but it retained its dignity despite its manifest hard living, like a veteran soldier who had survived numerous campaigns, bloody but unbowed.

Lania climbed to the flight-deck – the ship was so old that it still had ladders in place of elevators – slipped into the pilot’s sling and commanded her suit to meld with the ship’s smartcore nexus. Jed took the sling beside her and powered up the auxiliary drive.

Ed took his seat to the rear of the flight-deck, lounging on a couch he’d bought at a mansion-clearance on Deneb IV. It was farcically old-fashioned and matched nothing on the flight-deck, even though he’d personalised the space with Lyran wall-hangings and artwork from across the Expansion.

Ed gave her the co-ordinates of the crash-site and she relayed them to her smartsuit. She closed her eyes and became one with the
Poet
, no longer aware of herself as a separate entity with human cares and worries. Flying the ship was a soul-soothing drug that allowed her release from the more disturbing recollections of her past. Flying, she was truly happy.

She opened her eyes as the ship lifted slowly, the surrounding jungle-covered buildings obscured by churning smoke and blasted debris. She turned the
Poet
north and eased it forward, and they moved slowly from the city.

Soon, all evidence below them that humanity had once inhabited this planet was lost beneath the brilliant green cover of the jungle. Here and there, towering stalks erupted from the canopy, ending in heliotropic blooms like inverted marquees which gave the scene a touch of the bizarre. Straight ahead, two moons sat above the horizon, lacy and insubstantial.

Ed pointed to a distant scar in the jungle on the slopes of a rearing mountain. She brought the
Poet
down with the delicacy of a balloon kissing the ground, and gave Jed the command to power down the drive. Through the screen she had a perfect view along the length of the furrow as it rose in a die-straight line towards the distant mountain-top.

“The politician told me,” Ed said, “that for some reason nothing would grow at the site of the crash-landing. He said it wasn’t radiation, or anything else that their scientists could detect.”

Jed exchanged a fearful glance with Lania, who smiled to reassure him. “Some alien bacteria,” she said. “It won’t be harmful now, Jed.”

He peered through the screen. “There’s still nothing growing down there.”

Lania looked at Ed. “Perhaps we should wear breathing masks?” she suggested.

He nodded, then pointed up the kilometre-long furrow. “Magnify the screen. Zoom in on the very end of the trench.”

She did as commanded and the shell of a starship, very alien and rococo, sprang into view. It appeared burned out, with its upper half sheared off and its length broken in about three places.

“Okay, let’s take a closer look,” Ed said.

Jed powered up the drive and Lania took the
Poet
on a short kilometre hop up the furrow. She settled the ship beside the wreck and ordered her suit to break the link with the smartcore.

They equipped themselves with face-masks and boarded the dropchute. Even in the shadow of the
Poet
, the heat was staggering. Lania kicked at the ground, wondering if this was the first time she had seen bare soil since landing on the planet. Nothing grew. She turned and stared down the length of the furrow, a stark black exclamation mark cut through the verdant jungle. The starship must have come in at some speed, which no doubt accounted for its broken-backed state now.

She left the shadow of the
Poet
, wincing as the sunlight smote her unprotected head, and approached the alien vessel.

It was, she saw now, a leviathan. Perhaps three hundred metres long and thirty high – though its height was hard to assess, since its upper superstructure was missing – it dominated the landscape, dwarfing the trees that rose on either side. She stepped into the welcome shade and stared up at its underside. A complex pattern of scrolls and curlicues flowed across the bodywork, and a dozen fins and balancers, curved like scimitars, told her that this ship was nothing that any human had designed.

Keeping in the lee of the ship, she walked its length until she came to a great vertical rent in the flank. She hesitated, then stepped inside. Now she saw why the ship appeared to have lost its upper sections: they had collapsed on impact and fallen into the belly of the ship, and from the evidence of the blackened interior, fire appeared to have consumed the wreck.

She told her suit to scan for radiation; a few seconds later, its soft feminine contralto spoke in her earpiece. “No radiation detected beyond background levels.”

Ed was beside her. They climbed onto the fallen superstructure and strolled up the length of the ship, for all the world like holiday-makers taking the air on the pier on a pleasure planet.

“It’s... magnificent,” she said.

“It’s quite something, certainly,” Ed said, his voice muffled by the mask. “I was told it came down during the night, and it wasn’t until hours later that the first colonists were on the scene. They found no sign of whoever had crewed the ship.”

She looked at him.

“That’s what intrigues me, Lania. What happened to the beings who flew the ship? Where did they go? Why did they come here – and from where?” He paused, then went on, “And why are the Vetch so interested?”

Jed joined them. “You know something, boss? This is familiar.”

Lania stared at the engineer. “It is?”

Jed frowned, recalling something. “I was on a planet called... Tamalkin, that’s it. About twenty years ago. And I saw a crash-landed ship just like this one, same fins, same patterns.”

Ed said, “Exactly the same?”

The engineer nodded. “Identical, I’d say. It was a tourist attraction.” He shook his head. “I can’t recall much more about it.”

Ed nodded and moved off towards the front of the ship. Lania followed, curious to examine the flight-deck; perhaps the accoutrements there – the slings, couches or harnesses – might give some clue as to the physical makeup of the ship’s elusive crew.

They stopped when they came to a break in the deck, where the nose cone had sheared off from the rest of the ship. Lania glanced to her left, through a fracture in the flank. She froze at what she saw there and dropped to her knees.

She opened a comm channel to Ed and Jed. “Stop what you’re doing and come here.”

She saw Ed turn and stare at her, then hurry back. She pulled him into the cover of the curving wall and pointed through the sheared metalwork at the Vetch ship squatting on the far side of the alien vessel.

Jed joined them. “I thought the bastards had gone,” he hissed.