The Lazarus War: Artefact (23 page)

Deacon clambered back into the passenger cabin. He must have heard us talking, because he pointed to a hideous scar on his chest. I winced even as he showed me; the result of a Krell boomer, I guessed.

“I made sergeant in the Alliance Army,” he said, with something approaching self-satisfaction in his voice. “Did two tours on Ultris. Eleven confirmed Korean kills. Three years, objective, of military service. And I never got a scratch on me, not a single one. Then I was stationed on Helios – four weeks in, I got
this
. There was a really bad storm, and a leader-form got into the station. Took out sixteen of my men, before we could bring it down.”

“You were lucky to get away with only the scar,” I said. “I’ve seen what that stuff can do. Strip a man of muscle in under an hour.”

“You’ve seen what it can do to a sim,” Deacon scoffed. He had no way of knowing of my background in the Alliance Special Forces, and I wasn’t about to correct him. “You can’t imagine the pain when it happens to your own body. The bastard wasn’t particularly big, just a mean son of a bitch. Carried one of those cannons. Fired at me as it was dying. Churned right through my H-suit.”

Deacon’s smile became fixed, his eyes glassy as he recalled the memory.

“If there is one thing that I hate more than the Directorate, it’s the damned Krell,” he said.

We reached the site somewhere approaching late morning, local time.

“Stop over there,” Kellerman directed. “By the crater. Not too close to the edge.”

Ray obeyed and manoeuvred the crawler. Then the vehicle stopped, and Kellerman’s people began to unpack a gun-bot. It was a small quadruped model – multi-legged to traverse broken terrain. About as intelligent as a dog, armoured with metal-plating and equipped with a heavy-calibre solid-shot assault cannon. The main body was taken up by a variety of sensory apparatus, used to scan for viable targets. Simple security issue, although similar units were deployed by the Army. Someone had scrawled SCRAPPY on the bot’s body.

“Mr Deacon – get outside and scout the immediate vicinity,” Kellerman barked. “I don’t want to take any risks.”

Deacon cracked the hatch to the crawler. Immediately, a wall of hot, still air hit me. He jumped down from the cabin and disappeared for a few moments. The crew continued prepping the gun-bot.

“Best to be safe,” Kellerman said to me, without explaining himself.

“Of course.”

Deacon reappeared at the hatch, his carbine cocked on his hip.

“Safe,” he announced.

Kellerman nodded sagely. “Your efforts are appreciated, Mr Deacon. Everyone can disembark now.”

His people deployed the bot – carrying it outside, then placing it on the ground. The bot activated and began to ponderously patrol the sand-crawler. Its metal legs whined and pumped as it went, multi-coloured eye lenses scanning the desert.

The rest of us cautiously dismounted the crawler. Before I had even got out of the vehicle, I felt the prickle of sweat breaking on my brow. The H-suit didn’t have an atmosphere control unit, and moving about was hard work.

“As I explained, personal communication outside of the crawler is permissible,” Kellerman said. “But try to stay together so far as possible. The Artefact is approximately twenty kilometres west of here. And so, as you can see, the Krell leave this region well alone.”

“Let’s hope,” I said.

I took in the detail of the location. A crater, maybe a kilometre across, set between two enormous mountains. The area was pocked with rock structures, twisted into bizarre shapes by the elements. The two suns threw out long shadows, providing precious shade. Here and there, bloated insect-things flitted in the cool. Stunted and warped coral-like formations – barely recognisable as some sort of plant-life – ringed the basin but did not invade it. The horizon was heat-blurred, and the whole place – protected from the worst of the wind by the mountain range – was blisteringly hot.

The away team spread out from the crawler. I paced – stretching my legs and testing the capabilities of my H-suit. It was equipped with a basic respirator mask. The churning of my individual oxygen-processing tank was a constant companion. I remembered my last sim op – clutching the cold hide of the
Oregon
in orbit around Helios. Then I had been in a sim, able to withstand the extremes of war. Not now.

Kaminski and Blake stood with me, scanning the horizon.

“So why exactly are we out here?” Blake muttered, his voice hazed by the hum of his own oxygen supply. “All I see is sand.”

Kaminski nodded. “I hear that.”

Kellerman clumsily came down the slope, the crawler behind him. Walking through sand was even more difficult for him; his exo-suit leg motors protested noisily.

“Beautiful site, isn’t it?” he said, indicating to the desert basin.

“What’s to see?” I asked.

Kellerman pointed with a gloved hand towards the bottom of the basin. “There.”

From a distance, it looked like just another rock-structure – a series of serrated spires, erupting from the crater floor. Caked in sand and stained the same colour as the surrounding desert, they looked innocuous enough. But Kellerman thrust a pair of battered electronic binoculars into my hands. In reconstructed monochrome I realised that this was an artificial edifice – reaching thirty or forty metres out of the ground.

I started off down the basin slope and the rest of the group followed. I broke into a jog, despite my leg. Kellerman fell back behind me, doing his best on his new legs. Deacon ran ahead, two rifles strapped across his back. As I got nearer, I saw that a small tent had been set up alongside the structure. The entrance door flapped lazily in the wind, slapping against the sagging fabric walls.

A half-buried construction rose out of the sand. Like the ribcage of some titanic alien creature, the skeletal structure had been pierced in places. The spars were of some metallic substance, unmistakably. Most of the thing appeared to be submerged.

“What is it?” I managed. I even felt a spark of excitement at the discovery.

Kellerman wandered towards the entrance to the tent. It covered the largest opening. The interior was dark, shadowy; leading directly into the alien derelict.

“We believe that it is a starship,” he proclaimed.

The spires were covered in intricate, swirling hieroglyphics. I stood back, to better take in the big structure. Every exposed surface was covered in the markings. I couldn’t focus on the language; it made my head spin. But the architecture was inimitable: this was surely made by the same engineers as the Artefact.

“So they didn’t just leave the Artefact behind …” I muttered.

“Fucking A,” Kaminski replied. “This is some serious shit.”

“They left so much more,” Kellerman said. “But the trajectory of the ship suggests that it was heading for the Artefact. Perhaps as a result of enemy fire, it crashed here. Please, do come inside. Mr Farrell, Mr Ray – you will stand guard duty. I want you to watch for intruders and monitor security of the sand-crawler.”

Ray and Farrell peeled off from the group. The rest of the team carefully picked their way into the craft.

Inside, the ship was labyrinthine. The corridors were wide and empty; the walls cast of some iridescent black material – cold to the touch, even through gloves.

“We still don’t know what the structure is made of,” Kellerman said. “Certainly not an alloy known to the Alliance.”

The going was slow and sporadic, with Deacon leading the way and Kellerman giving directions. The tunnels were ovular, making them difficult to walk through, and mostly indistinguishable from one another. Some ended abruptly in walls of sand or stone. There were very few chambers or control rooms, but we passed through several spaces full of long-dead computer banks. Cuneiform patterns had been etched onto every possible surface – walls, floors, ceilings. Intricate, tight script: pressed as though it had been stamped by a machine, like ancient circuitry. Occasionally, when I touched a wall with my hand, the scripture seemed to illuminate – but I dismissed that as a trick of the light.

There was no crew to be found at all, not even dead bodies. Nor any space for a crew; no seating, no stations. The layout of the craft didn’t seem to favour a manual crew at all. Maybe, I considered, the ship had been automated: a huge artificial intelligence, manned by a robotic crew.

The place was insulated from the wind outside and in the lower levels it was intensely silent. When an echo did sound through the empty halls, it sounded to me like a reproduction of the Artefact’s signal. No one else seemed to notice that, and I thought better of mentioning it. Probably just my imagination; the squealing in my head had died, and I was sure that this sound would too.

I followed Kellerman deeper into the hulk. We used flashlights and glow-globes embedded in the walls for guidance. Kellerman regularly consulted a hand-held data-slate that he manipulated clumsily in his protective gloves. Sometimes, when the terrain became especially rough, one of his people helped him – even though they were well-meaning, Kellerman would invariably bark his disapproval.

“How long has it been here?” I asked him, as we went.

“Likely many thousands of years. We’ve attempted carbon-dating techniques, but the materials used in the construction of the ship are highly advanced. If our premise is correct, just think about that for a moment. This vessel, as sophisticated as it is, was the product of a starfaring civilisation.” He shook his head. “It probably crashed when we were still monkeys in the trees.”

“Not too much further,” Deacon cautioned. “We should be getting back to the crawler soon.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Some of the lower corridors are crushed,” Kellerman answered. “The original starship must have been vast. I believe that it crashed in some tremendous catastrophe, and many parts of it were shorn off. During the long sleep, those elements have been claimed by the desert. Only a tiny proportion of the ship has been mapped.”

“Does the engine still work?” Kaminski asked. “We could use it to jump this planet.”

Kellerman scowled. “No, it does not. While we have met with some limited success in activating the control systems, repairing the main engine is beyond our capabilities.”

“Unsurprising, really,” Deacon pitched in, “when you consider what this thing must have gone through.”

“It did better than the
Oregon
when it came down,” Blake added.

“That it did,” Kellerman said. “But even so, I was concerned that the structural integrity of the lower decks had been compromised. That is where the engine is located. As a result, I have prohibited excavations past a certain depth. Some of the rooms have been cleared of debris and atmospherically sealed, to enable proper cataloguing of finds, but most have fallen into a state of complete disrepair.”

“We need to get moving again,” Deacon reminded Kellerman.

“I want to show the captain some of our discoveries before we leave,” Kellerman said. “It seems an awfully long way to come without showing the military expedition what we’ve found.”

Deacon just grunted.

We eventually emerged into a huge chamber, with a vaulted ceiling far above us. It was perhaps twenty metres tall and fifty or so across; easily the largest chamber I had seen inside the alien ship. It was also more ornate than most of the others. Huge, obsidian-black consoles rose out of the walls. The ground was pitted by larger hieroglyphs and scripted markings. Although everything was coated in dust, this room had clearly seen some recent attention from Kellerman’s people. Tracks and footprints marked the floor, criss-crossing at times. Kellerman followed one footprint path across the room, illuminating glow-globes in the ceiling. There was a jury-rigged lighting system above us: lamps trailed from cables, connected to a battered power generator.

Kellerman stopped. “Mr Peters, Miss Dolan – come here.”

The two researchers obediently obeyed – beaming, so pleased to be on an away-day from the station. In the middle of the room, assembled on a tattered plastic sheet, was a series of mechanical and electronic components, and Kellerman’s group assembled around it. The items had been reverently cleaned and labelled.

“Mr Peters,” Kellerman said with a wave of his hand, “you have the honour of showing the captain what we discovered in this room.”

“Of course, Doctor,” Peters enthused.

Peters placed a metal case down on the floor – something that he had brought with him from the crawler. He slowly opened the catches on the box, grinning as he peered inside. He lifted the contents in both hands, standing slowly, careful not to drop the item. He delicately tilted it. It was a bladed metal instrument, as long as my forearm. Cast from the same matt-black material as the rest of the starship – obviously conscientiously cleaned. It was covered in tiny, barely visible alien scripture.

Just an old relic
, I told myself. But the thing radiated a malevolence beyond its physical presence: something that I couldn’t explain to myself, something that wasn’t logical. In contradiction, Peters just grinned and grinned; ignorant of my inexplicable reaction.

“We believe that this was part of the ship’s control unit.”

Peters was a young man but with a tired and wrinkled face. His hair was grown out, framing his dark eyes. He wandered over to one of the consoles and inserted the device. The lights overhead dipped, throwing the room into darkness. Kaminski and Blake started immediately but Kellerman held up a hand for calm.

“Please, don’t be startled,” he insisted.

A low keening sounded in the background. Then the chamber suddenly became illuminated again. The overhead glow-globes activated, but also the glyphs set into the walls and floor. The alien consoles around the perimeter of the chamber initiated. Soon the entire chamber was full of humming, operational machines and glowing iconography. The place was
alive
: I could almost sense the data-streams around me, as the machines communicated. That image of a ship navigated by a huge AI came to mind again.

I inspected the nearest console, watching as the machines powered up. Kellerman and his crew were in wonder at the living chamber, but I was less pleased. This felt wrong: as though we were messing with something that we didn’t understand, awakening something ancient and unknown. Blake and Kaminski seemed to share my sense of unease.