Invardii Series Boxset Page 7

  Then it was time for the freighter to settle into orbit round the planet. When that was done they could begin their first surveys.

  “I want a standard pattern of geostationary satellites, Andre. You know the drill. Bounce commslink off every part of the surface. I want to know if this weather gives us any dead spots for comms, got it?”

  Andre nodded.

  “Jeneen, now’s your chance to do that planet-wide survey. Take your time about it, I don’t want you to miss anything. None of us are going down there until we know all there is to know about life on the surface.

  “Geelong, use the scanners to pick up any concentration of refined metals that might suggest technology, and anything bigger than a hut. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes, Ma’am!” snapped the pilot, “Look for signs of civilisation.”

  Celia nodded.

  “That’s it, people. Go to it, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  The report from Geelong, just before the sleep cycle at the end of the first ship’s day above Orouth, was disappointing. There was nothing that suggested a civilisation. There were some cleared areas in the denser parts of the rain forest that might be settlements, but no concentrations of refined metals, and nothing else of interest.

  Most of the team slept lightly that night, re-running the day’s events in broken dreams, or too anxious about the next day to relax.

  On the second day, Geelong got a sizable hit.

  “Look at this!” he said to Celia, as he put the view from a long-range scanner up on the main screen. They were looking at a mountain range that made an enormous bend around the north pole. At least it was in an area clear of the weather bands.

  The scanner showed a good-sized building of some sort, hidden in a high valley impossible to see from anywhere below. There were two outbuildings, and a low, rounded something that led back into a cliff face.

  It had been made by a sophisticated race, there was no doubt of that. Celia contacted Sallyanne, who was sieving through the data they had already collected in one of the work rooms, and called her to the bridge.

  “Rothii,” said Sallyanne, without a moment’s hesitation. “There’s nothing distinguishing about the buildings, but look at the location, and the layout. What sort of height are we talking about here?”

  “High,” said Andre, doing some quick calculations. “Around three clicks, less than half the atmospheric pressure at the surface.”

  “See?” said Sallyanne. “The natives of this planet weren’t meant to ever find it. The buildings are hidden from view, and the site is in the middle of a freezing cold mountain range, and climbing to that height is almost impossible with such a reduced level of oxygen.

  “So, an outpost to keep an eye on the peoples of the planet, probably abandoned when the Rothii disappeared 200 thousand years ago.”

  “We’re going to take a look at it, though. Right?” said Andre.

  Celia nodded. She wanted all the information they could get about the planet. Maybe the outpost had a data base they could learn from. It would also give the Hud pilots some time with the shuttles.

  The shuttle crew would be going in suited up, and carrying their air supply with them. Preliminaries on the atmosphere showed it was fine for breathing, and close to Earth standard. Celia expected that, since the Rothii had shifted Humans from Orouth to Earth, but she was always careful.

  Roberto accompanied a squad of Hud pilots on the descent to the hidden valley later in the day.

  “Is this some sort of macho thing?” said Jeneen as the shuttle drew away from the freighter, disappointed she was not going.

  “No, it’s just your white hair might scare the inhabitants away,” said Andre with a grin. He was cuffed around the back of his head for his trouble.

  “We want the best people we’ve got for each job we do,” said Celia sharply. “The people in the shuttle are trained for trouble, you’re not.”

  It was rare for Celia to show her teeth, but she wasn’t going to have her leadership questioned, even by those she was close to. Jeneen was quiet for a long time after that.

  “Trip down was a breeze!” said Roberto over the commslink, just as the ship’s scanners showed the shuttle landing at the site. “The touchdown was a little tricky, with some cross-currents off the mountains, but we managed okay.”

  Shortly after that Roberto and Habid cycled through the airlock and stepped out into the valley. The suits they wore were only there to screen out contamination, and they were light and flexible. They found it little more than wearing a heavy overcoat.

  The ground was covered in alpine scrub. The peaks around them were mostly rocky faces or loose scree, but the valley must have had its own little climate. It wasn’t hard to step over the mossy clumps. Whatever the Rothii had used to keep the land around the buildings clear of plants had stopped working aeons ago.

  The two men, admittedly of different species, were an odd combination. Roberto’s height, and the Hud pilot’s extreme breadth, made them look like an exclamation mark and full stop that had got separated from their page.

  Roberto switched on a recorder on his suit, and the view came up on a screen in the freighter. The people on the bridge would see everything he saw.

  The shuttle had landed next to the main building, and the two figures were approaching the side of it. Roberto looked up and saw that the roof had fallen in. He said something to Habid over a private commslink, and they managed to boost themselves up so they could scramble through one of the holes.

  Once they were inside it was clear the site had been badly damaged by weather, and the great length of time that had passed. A brief search confirmed the data bases were no longer functional, but at least there were no bodily remains to disturb them. The Rothii seemed to have effected an orderly withdrawal from the site.

  “This place is better preserved than anything we found on the surface at Ba’H’Roth,” said Andre, looking at the feed to the freighter’s screen. “They seemed to have built it to last longer.”

  “I’m not sure why,” said Sallyanne, “because they built everything else to two different standards. They expected their cities to fall apart over time, but the space stations, and the archive we found, were as good as new after 200 thousand years.”

  “That’s a positive for us,” said Celia. “If there is another archive down there somewhere, or anything like one of these ‘battle gods’ of yours, Sallyanne, the Rothii have probably buried it, and made it to last.”

  Sallyanne nodded. Then the screen showed Roberto and Habid trying to find a way into the lower building that disappeared into the cliff face.

  “Blow it open,” said Celia, when all their attempts to find an entry mechanism failed.

  Roberto and Habid walked through the hole they’d made after a brief wait some distance away. Their suit lights weren’t meant for illuminating large spaces, but they showed up the walls around them clearly enough, and the long tunnel that rolled back into the mountain.

  “Heading in now,” said Roberto. “I’ve set our tracking beacons to audio. If the link between us and the ship is broken by too much rock overhead we’ll hear it, and head back.

  “Acknowledged,” said Celia. It was standard procedure.

  “We’re at the end of the tunnel,” said Roberto, a little later. “It ends in a shaft that goes straight down, and our lights are barely picking up the other side of the shaft. No sign of a ladder down, or an elevator. It’s quite warm in here though, if that means anything.”

  His words were clear enough over the commslink with the freighter, if a little fainter than before.

  “Mining shaft?” said Andre, but Sallyanne shook her head.

  “The Rothii would have restrictions on mining if a sentient race was present on the planet, something like their non-interference policy. I think it’s a heat exchanger.”

  Celia was surprised at her understanding of hard science. Sallyanne was probably right, too. The Rothii liked a warmer cl
imate than Humans were used to, so they would use the heat to condition their outpost. On top of that, where there was a difference in temperatures it was always possible to generate electricity.

  The shaft was an interesting discovery, but there was little more Roberto and Habid could do down at the Rothii site. She called them back to the freighter, and then settled back in her chair to decide what the expedition should do next.

  In the end it was an easy decision. The atmospheric analysis had cleared the air on Orouth for Human use, so the team would be able to stand out in the open. And there were the intriguing clearances in the middle of the rain forest. She decided the research team should go calling, but would anybody be home?

  CHAPTER 11

  ________________

  A day later, the first shuttle to the rain forest was cleared to go. The destination would be one of the clearings the ship’s scanners had picked up when Geelong was trying to find traces of civilisation.

  Unfortunately, the cloud cover was piled twice as high as cloud cover on Earth, and backed into a very active ozone layer, and that had limited the detail Geelong had been able to pull up on the target area. But that was okay. They wouldn’t decide to land in the clearing until they got a look at the place.

  The Orouth Freighter was now synchronised to Orouth time, and Celia had ordered a very early start for the shuttle team. They ate a hasty meal and congregated in the huge cargo bay on the ship.

  “Remember that we’re going in blind,” she said crisply, “and we don’t have a lot of information about the landing site. If anything doesn’t look right, the pilots will abort the mission and return to base. At least by then we’ll have a whole lot of fresh data to look at.

  “So far there’s no sign of civilised life in the middle deserts, or the northern wastes, but we’ll look at them more closely when we have time.

  “One good thing about the rain forests is that the weather on the ground might not be as bad as we first thought. The atmospheric conditions along the cloud bands are so violent that the bulk of the planet’s moisture spends its life inside the thunderclouds, going up and down.

  “Ice crystals turn to rain on the way down, then hit the thermo-incline at the bottom of the system and become warm, supersaturated water vapour again. The heat causes them to rise back up in the walls of the weather cells we’ve been seeing, turning to ice crystals again when they get high enough.

  “Ice blizzards are released off the top of the cells into some sort of jet stream, until they reach an area where they can sink, and the cycle starts all over again.”

  She was reinforcing what Geelong had told them in last night’s briefing. It had taken a while to realise that the majority of the weather happened well above the surface, and rarely made it to the ground.

  “The worst you’ll get is ground fogs, and small localised shower systems as the day heats up. Got it?”

  There was a lot of nodding. The Hud pilots in particular were trying to keep their nervousness in check. The storm conditions on the way down would be a lot worse than they had ever experienced. Their piloting skills would have to be enough for the job.

  “What about lightning strikes?” asked Cantoselli, who was going to be on board the shuttle with one of her Mersa technicians. The Mersa of all the people on board the freighter had the least experience of stormy conditions, since the weather on Alamos was generally settled.

  “The shuttle is sealed against electrical activity,” responded Geelong reassuringly. “The skin carries a field which will repel any electrical discharges nearby.

  “The hull itself is an insulator, with no entry point for electricity that might accumulate on the hull. I’m not expecting problems with electrical interference, but the turbulence will be extreme.

  “Despite all the stabiliser systems the shuttle has, it wasn’t built for conditions like this. You’ll basically be in g-webbing, and in free-fall, until you’re through the cloud cover.”

  His words were greeted by an uncomfortable silence.

  Habid stood stoically, along with three of his Hud pilots who’d been chosen for bodyguard duties. The thought of the descent to the surface was particularly uncomfortable for them.

  They were completely at home with the idea of hurling themselves between star systems inside thin metal shells, but this was different – this was weather. They’d learned to respect the weather on Hud since the planet warmed up. This, apparently, was going to be worse.

  “The weather’s at its best, if you can call it that,” said Celia, “just before dawn, so let’s get busy. We don’t want to waste the opportunity.”

  It was a busy scene as Celia and her team loaded the last of the supplies onto the shuttle. The technical equipment had been set up the day before, and Andre and Jeneen went through last-minute preparations. Sallyanne would be going with them to help with local customs, and their best chance of knowing whether the natives, if there were any, were hostile or merely curious.

  At last they were ready. Geelong received the ‘okay to go’ signal and opened the cargo bay doors. The shuttle floated gently out into the first rays of Orouth’s sun as it rose above the horizon. It was still dark on the planet’s surface below them.

  Celia looked down at the top of the planet’s atmosphere, and couldn’t believe they were going to hurl themselves into the boiling mass of cloud below. Andre lowered the shuttle’s nose, and sent it into a steep descent.

  Roberto and Jeneen fastened themselves into the g-webbing around the back of the cabin, alongside the Mersa technicians and Andre, who was next to the Hud security detail. Finally, Celia and Sallyanne joined them.

  Habid tried to keep in mind the giant shock absorbers that cushioned his pilot’s chair, and the inertial dampeners that acted on the metallic fibres woven into his pilot’s suit, but it didn’t remove his sense of dread.

  Celia turned her head to see out of the clear section of hull ahead of Habid. There were no windows in the shuttle, just thickened diamond polymer sections of the hull that allowed the pilot visual references when they were needed.

  The lumpy tops of thunderclouds hurtled toward the shuttle. The boiling grey and white shapes were illuminated briefly by an eerie purple light. It was the sparkle of ozone being born in the stratosphere as intense solar radiation interacted with the electricity building up in the clouds.

  One of the towering cells ahead of the shuttle blossomed upward, reaching above its fellows and trying to grasp at the emptiness of space. It was shaken apart a moment later by a series of startling purple flashes. The top disintegrated into a spreading mass of ice crystals, quickly torn away by a jet stream.

  “Goddamn,” breathed Andre, from his position in the g-webbing, “that plume covers the area of a large city.”

  Then it was too late to have second thoughts,. They hurtled into the howling maelstrom of the thunderclouds. The shuttle darkened, and the internal lights came on. The tattered clouds whipped past them, and brightened to an intense violet glow, then went out like a switch turning off.

  “Turning over to autopilot,” said Habid, “and going into free fall.”

  The shuttle juddered, and twisted onto its side, before levelling out with its nose sharply down. The sensation of falling out of the sky was deliciously exhilarating, until there was a peal of thunder that made their ears ring, and the shuttle was shaken violently.

  “Good thing I didn’t have any breakfast,” said Sallyanne with a weak smile. There was another violent bout of shaking, like a dog worrying a bone, and then a few moments of uninterrupted free fall. A faint white glow surrounded the shuttle, tinged with gold, then shot with violet streaks.

  “St Elmo’s fire,” said Roberto in delight, who had some experience of sailing windjammers back on Earth, as a hobby.

  “Not quite,” said Andre, looking nervously through the clear section of hull for the next intense purple glow, anticipating the thunder that would follow. “This stuff would peel the skin right off you. But if you can hol
d on for a few more minutes we should pass into a smoother section of the atmosphere.”

  They hung on in silence, and bit by bit the fury of the thunderclouds abated. Then they were falling through a steady rain, which thickened gradually to a driving downpour, and then abruptly cut off.

  “We’re at the bottom of the thermo-incline now,” said Andre, and the cloud cover became a dense white-out, leaving them feeling suspended in the clouds, though the readout showing their height above the ground continued to whirr downwards.

  “Taking back control of the shuttle . . . now,” said Habid, and the shuttle trembled as he brought it around to take advantage of a better glide path.

  “Damn thing flies like a brick while we don’t have the burners on,” he added to no one in particular. The Hud pilots smiled – they knew how frustrating it was to be a pilot in an aerodynamically unstable craft.

  The cloud cover began to thin, and Habid started the countdown routine for the atmospheric engines. The shuttle burst out into a grey day above a tropical rainforest that ran to the horizon in all directions, and Habid started the burners.

  The big coils deployed from the aft of the shuttle, and began to superheat the air passing through them using the shuttle’s microfusion plant. It provided a simple but effective propulsion system. Stubby wings extended on either side of the shuttle, and Habid ramped up the burners until the shuttle lifted its nose into a cruise descent.

  There were little exclamations as they dropped lower. This was a new world, the first time anyone like themselves had come this way, and they were curious.

  “Air slightly higher in oxygen and carbon dioxide than on Earth, and nearly three times the amount of inert gases, but we haven’t picked up anything harmful,” reported Roberto. “Overall the atmosphere is very similar to Earth, as expected.”

  “Look at those trees!” said Celia, pointing to a little enclave of thick trunks that rose above the forest canopy, unfolding into dense mats of branches.

  “Why do the leaves have a blue tinge?” asked Cantoselli. Roberto explained that some types of light penetrated the cloud cover better than others, and the blue was a way of taking advantage of that.