Europa Strike (14 page)

Sam drifted along the Plaza's perimeter, Oscar's binocular eyes shifting back and forth, up and down, taking in each detail. Earlier images of this site had been poorly resolved at best, and the identification of these crystalline forms as statues had been little more than a guess. That guess, however, was clearly accurate. The statues—most of them, anyway—almost certainly represented eighty-one different nonhuman races. If there was any doubt about some of them, it was because it was difficult to relate the shapes and forms represented with anything in human experience recognizable as a living creature.

The Plaza of the Galactics was the full name Dr. Paul Alexander had given to this place, though now most simply called it the Plaza. Possibly, these statues represented the different members of some long-vanished stellar federation; the truth might never be known. Here, a being with an elongated, bristle-spiked head atop a body draped in folds that hid its form gestured with four crookedly jointed arms, like a crab's, a salute frozen in milk-pale stone. There, something that might be reptilian, with three stalks that might house eyes, and scales etched with loving detail into deep blue crystal.

Many shapes, intriguingly, were more machine than biological. Sam Too paused at one fallen full-length across the pavement. It looked like an elongated egg shape with multiple blisters, curves, and swellings, with no legs or arms or any other features at all save a seemingly random scattering of what might have been turreted eyes.

Sam took special care to photograph that one from every angle. Something of the sort had been seen by humans before….

Finally, Sam guided Oscar to the west end of the Plaza, where a low, broad ramp rose into the open heart of a three-tiered step pyramid. On shrieking turbo-jets, it floated up the ramp, pausing once to turn and examine carefully the view to the east, noting walls, fallen statues, the reach of shadows, and the sky-stab of the Needle.

A perfect match, point by point.

Cutting back Oscar's jets, Sam let the probe settle to the base of its Y, where portions of the machine's body opened, rotated, and unfolded, extending a pair of wide and heavy treads. With a final, dwindling whine, the thrusters died away, pulling in and rotating slightly to fold back against the machine's hull. Oscar was narrow enough now to fit through the slender, upright opening at the top of the ramp.

The rising sun was high enough by now to cast its warm rays directly into the chamber within the pyramid, a chamber open to the sky now, but probably enclosed once, before the city's fall, possibly with glass or even plastic or metal. The people who'd built this city had been technologists of a high order, building with materials other than enduring stone. In half a million years, however, only the stone had survived.

And a few artifacts…

She watched Oscar as the ranger probe hissed its way gingerly into the stone-walled room, something like a golden sphere of polished metal etched deeply with a few geometrically ordered black lines. Above it, set into the wall, were slightly curved, rectangular screens—nine of them, though seven were black and lifeless.

On one of the remaining two, the image of another ruined city, similar to the one at its back, stretched toward a mountainous horizon beneath a sullen, black-patched red-orange sun far larger in the sky than Alpha Centauri A was here. And on the other…

Two humans worked together on some unseen project between them, their heads bent low, almost touching. The one on the left, in blue coveralls, was Dr. Paul Alexander. On the right, in U.S. Marine green utilities, was Major Jack Ramsey.

Sam Too engaged the voder in Oscar, opening a new communications channel. “Good morning, Jack,” she said, her voice the first speech to echo from these dusty walls in how many millennia? “Hello, Dr. Alexander. It's very good to see you.”

Both figures started at her voice, leaping back in almost comical astonishment, their faces turning up to stare at something just above their physical pickup. Jack pointed, Paul nodded and adjusted some control.

“Sam?” Jack said, his face eager. The voice was tinny, a bit faint, but Sam could easily adjust the gain on Oscar's receivers to hear it better. “Sam! You fucking made it!”

The words, transmitted instantaneously across almost four and a half light years, were as predictably banal as Dr. Bell's historic “Come here, Watson. I need you.”

12
OCTOBER
2067

Major Jack Ramsey stared into the monitor, shock transforming into delight. Display 94725 still showed the same background panorama it always had, looking out into the Plaza, with the slender thrust of the Needle in the distance…but now, much of the scene was blocked by the hulking silhouette, black against the rising sun on the far horizon, unmistakably the insect shape of one of Sam Too's remote planetary surface probes. Despite the shadows, he could make out the glitter of the probe's twin optics as they swiveled to look him directly in the face.

“My God, Sam,” Jack said. “It's good to see you!”

“Technically, you're not seeing me,” the probe replied. It was almost impossible to hear the gritty words. David, at Jack's right, reached out to the control touchboard and tried boosting the gain. “You are seeing Probe Oscar as I teleoperate it from orbit. But I understand your meaning.” A panel near the base of the probe opened, and a multijointed arm unfolded. Jauntily, across four and a half light years, the probe waved.

And Jack, scarcely believing what was happening, waved back.

His first thought was of how chest-swelling proud he was of Sam Too. The last word he'd had was four and a half years out of date, when the
Ad Astra
had been approximately three-quarters of the way to her destination. He was seeing living proof on the display screen that Sam,
his
Sam, had successfully made it to another star.

Sam Too was descended from the original Sam, who he still kept as his secretary on his PAD. He'd put her together himself, using several commercial secretary programs, when he'd still been a kid, and taught himself a thing or three about chaos logic along the way. That Sam had turned out to be flexible and adaptive enough to abandon set programming parameters at a crucial point and literally take a guess. Most advanced AI work since then had followed the same application of deep chaos logic—and Sam Too, a product of both his own efforts and the Advanced Software Design Team at Pittsburgh's Hans Moravec Institute, was just about the sharpest AI there was now.

And Jack couldn't have been prouder of her if she'd been his own daughter.

His heart was bounding in his chest as he lowered his hand. His mouth had gone dry. “Jesus, David! Are we recording this?
Are we recording?
”

“Of course, Jack.” The voice, calm and unhurried, was that of Carter, David's AI secretary, which in turn was running as one part of the much more powerful Dejah Thoris.

“Get Teri and Paul in here, stat,” David added.

“They are already on the way,” Carter replied.

Jack leaned back and looked around the compartment, trying to get his mental bearings after the other-worldly shock of proven FTL communications. They were in the relatively cramped quarters that had been set up in the shadow of the famous Cydonian Face. One entire wall was occupied by a flatscreen, on which was displayed the image from a robotic drone's cameras inside the vast, hollow cavern beneath the Face known as the Cave of Wonders. That chamber was still in the chill, near-vacuum of the ambient Martian atmosphere; the research facility had been set up in a small, sealed hab on the surface so that the scientists studying the Cave of Wonders didn't have to spend all of their time in pressurized Marsuits.

He still found it hard to believe that this was happening. He looked back at the screen, which showed just one of the thousands of displays available in the Cave of Wonders. Most of those displays were blank, but a few precious hundreds appeared to show landscapes set on other worlds around other stars.

Worlds around other stars…

And now they'd just proven that David Alexander had been right. The images displayed in the Cave of Wonders were wonderful indeed. They were
real time—
traveling instantaneously across the light years.

David was uttering something rapidly under his breath.

“What's that?” Jack asked.

“Faster-than-light communication!” David shook his head slowly, his eyes locked on the monitor. “It's true! It's really honest-to-God true!”

“David, you're the one who guessed that that's what it was,” Jack reminded him. “And you're the one who suggested the spectral analyses to prove that that is a view coming from a planet at Alpha Centauri. And you're surprised?”

“Jack, when you get to be as old as I am, you'll know there's a
big
difference between a carefully thought-out hypothesis and the reality. And it isn't always you get to feel the pound of stepping from one to the other!”

David Alexander didn't look much over fifty, and Jack had to remind himself that the man was in his seventies. When he pulled his wise-old-codger routine, as he called it, it could be a bit disconcerting until you realized that he was of the so-called Millennial Generation, one of the people born within ten years of the dawning of the twenty-first century—and the first generation to have the effects of TBEs and other anti-aging drugs begin to show their effects. His experience didn't seem to match his face.

“Well,” Jack said, “you'd better get used to it. This is going to win you the Nobel prize for sure!”

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “A lot of other people were in on this.” A grin split his face. “But god
damn
, it's gonna be fun to toss this little grenade into the physicists' camp! They all claimed this level of quantum data coupling wasn't possible! But we've ambushed 'em
this
time, by God!”

Jack smiled at David's militaristic imagery. David Alexander was one of the most important, most hero-worshipped famous of all modern xenotechnoarcheologists—the man who'd defined the field with his original work at Cydonia twenty-five years earlier. But, sometimes, it seemed that he was prouder, personally, to have been one of a handful of civilians who'd been with the Marines on Garroway's March. Not many civilians were accorded the status of honorary Marine; David Alexander had earned it, though…and reveled in it still.

“David?” Dr. Teri Sullivan, David's wife, walked into the room. Their son, Paul, was close behind. “Carter said you had something exciting to tell us.”

“Yeah, so, whatcha got?” Paul asked. He was twenty-four, a student, working on his Ph.D. at the Columbia xe-noarcheological doctorate program. David had managed to wangle a position for him here in his third-year experiential education externship.

David gestured at the screen, where the robot regarded them dispassionately. “Hello, Dr. Sullivan,” the machine said. “I do not recognize the person with you, but calculate a 70-percent-plus probability that this is Paul.”

“Why, of course it's—” She stopped, blushing. “Oh, it
has
been a while since you've seen him, hasn't it?”

“Ten years, eight months, twenty-four days,” Sam Too said. “Other versions of myself might have interacted with him in recent years, but I have been…somewhat out of touch. Hello, Paul.”

“Uh…hey. How ya doin'?” He seemed uncomfortable, and Jack remembered David telling him that for a time when he was ten and eleven, a commercial secretary package had acted as Paul's cissie. He frowned, wondering if Paul was embarrassed talking to a
servant
that was about to become world famous. The Alexanders had always seemed a bit aristocratic where AIs were concerned.

“Well, thank you,” Sam replied. “Jack, Teri, David, I have a large amount of information to impart, if you are set to receive and record it.”

“Ready to record,” Carter's voice said. “Laser receiver on.”

“Uh, yeah, Sam,” Jack told the screen. “Go ahead.”

“Here it comes, then.”

A tiny red light on the probe's lower torso winked on. The vid equipment they were using on Mars wasn't capable of replicating the heterodyning of data on a standard lasercomm carrier beam, but it
could
record on-off flashes at very high speed, so fast that the individual blinks were undetectable by the human eye. All data and all electronic communications in human space was binary encoded as long strings of 0 and 1, off and on. Carter was now recording those blinks and translating them into data interpretable by humans.

It was a good thing, Jack thought, that they weren't now using the Builders' trinary encoding, with logic gates set to read electron spins of up, down, or none. That would be harder to transmit in this fashion. It had taken ten years just to figure out the arithmetical basis of the Builders' computer system, and how to extract it by reading the spin state of electrons imbedded in crystalline lattices. Using brute force methods, the research team had learned to identify graphics, full sensory, and audio files, but until they found a key to the Builders' language, further decryption was almost certainly impossible.

David laughed. “Smoke signals,” he said.

“Beg your pardon, sir?”

“Using laser this way, to transmit data.
They
did it by quantum pairing. Having Sam Too send us data this way is like using a laser comm to transmit images of puffs of smoke. Smoke signals.” He shook his head. “May the Builders forgive us!”

The invocation carried a biting, sarcastic edge. David Alexander, Jack knew, had a particularly strong disdain for the ET religions that had been proliferating around the Earth in the past quarter century, especially those worshipping the Builders as gods. His first wife, many years ago, had been a member of The First Church of the Divine Masters of the Cosmos until her death in the destruction of Chicago during the UN War.

“Then you think this proves their communications network works with quantum pairing?” Teri asked.

David waved at the probe on the screen with its solitary red light. “Has to be. We're getting this with no time delay
I
can perceive. The theory has been in place for a century. Unless the Builders are using something even
more
magical…”

“This is quite enough magic for me,” Jack said. Quantum pairing took advantage of one of the more oddball aspects of quantum mechanics. Create two quantum particles—electrons, say—in the same event. Trap them, separate them, and change one aspect of one particle…flip its spin, for instance, from up to down. The spin of the other particle changes too,
no matter how far away in space it might have been moved
.

There was no beam, no transmission of signal. The two particles simply acted as if they were the same particle, regardless of whether the distance between them was centimeters or light years. Within the receivers in the Cave of Wonders, there must be bank upon bank of crystal-locked quantum particles paired with twins now located on other worlds in other star systems, arrayed in such a way that their eerie paired shifts of spin or moment or other characteristics carried data.

As the flood of data continued pouring in through that fast-flashing laser light, Sam Too added, “I have some information that may particularly interest you, Dr. Alexander.”

“Yes?”

“As you suspected, the Plaza outside this room is ringed by a number of statues carved from various types of colored crystal, some standing, most toppled. I have just observed one which appears identical in size, shape, and detail with the Martian floaters.”

“
Did
you, by God!”

Jack felt a cold, deep stirring of awe. “Floaters? Are you sure?”

“As certain as I can be, given the information available. Probability is in excess of 90 percent.”

Jack leaned back, stunned. Excavations of the vast complex of ruins on Mars had continued for decades, but the task had really only just begun. The XTA teams on site estimated that perhaps 8 percent of the Cydonian ruins and structures had been surveyed so far, and less than 2 percent actually excavated and explored. There was a lot left to discover on Mars.

One artifact that had been turned up in some numbers, however, were the so-called floaters. These were bundled cigar shapes, like elongated eggs perhaps three meters long and a meter through at their widest. All were badly corroded—some were little more than metal and ceramic shells flaking away beneath the relentless UV flood and exotic oxidizing chemistries of the Martian sands. All appeared to be filled completely with electronic components of staggering complexity and miniaturization. All possessed between five and nine lenses scattered about their bodies that were almost certainly optics, plus numerous other components that probably represented other senses.

Current theory held that they were robots of some sort. They were called “floaters” because it was assumed they used some sort of electromagnetic repulsive force to hover above the ground—even, possibly, true antigravity, though none possessed circuitry or power systems intact enough to confirm such speculation. When found, every one had been lying on the ground as though they'd simply fallen there when the power cut off.

Sam Too's discovery put a new light on things. The landscape visible on Display 94725 in the Cave of Wonders had yielded various tantalizing bits of information. For one thing, the room was oriented in such a way that the sun could be observed setting behind the monolithic Needle once every 216 days—from which the length of the planet's year had been deduced. Better, the spectra of that star had exactly matched the spectra of Alpha Centauri A—the specific bit of research that had resulted in the
Ad Astra
, humankind's first true starship.

By sharply enhancing the image, bits of the background had been studied, and objects that might have been alien statues had been glimpsed and reconstructed. The XTA teams had assumed that each statue represented a different alien race, though not enough information had been available to make that more than a guess.

The teams had assumed the floaters to be robots in the original sense—servants and workers. If floaters were among those statues, though, that seemed to upgrade them from robot to living being.