Event Horizon (Hellgate) (63 page)

Marin had heard this theory from Mark before. “So the Resalq and the Zunshu have been in a territory dispute. Humans blundered in, and – what? The Zunshu never even bothered to give us fair warning to
git
.”

“Perhaps,” Dario said tersely, “they’re so alien, so different, they can’t tell humans and Resalq apart. Look at us: oxygen breathing, endothermic, two meters give or take a little, bipedal, binocular, mammalian. Sure, very different body temperatures, organ and brain structures, hormones, chromosomes … for a start, you humans even have two
genders
, which most of us still think of as insanely bizarre. But none of these details would be apparent at a glance.”

“The similarities between us really are barely skin deep,” Jazinsky protested, “and any species that can master the gravity express obviously has access to sophisticated biological scan gear. They point a hunk of hardware at me, and then at Richard, and then at Mark, and they read
three
recognizable genders, male, female and
you
; plus two distinct DNA blueprints. They’d know inside ten seconds, one bunch of us is double-gendered with half a chromosome set apiece, and you guys are not even from the same
planet
, not with that weird-ass DNA of yours.”

“So why,” Vaurien reasoned, “did the Zunshu just pick up the hammer and start in on us humans when we showed our odd-looking faces in this neck of the woods? Why didn’t they at least park a comm beacon out here, broadcasting a nasty ‘Keep out, this means you’ message along with a cipher key to crack the language? Any intelligent, territorial species would have done that.” His head was shaking in a slow negative. “Sorry, Mark, I’m not buying this one. You’re hypothesizing a species so bloody territorial, they’ll commit outright xenocide to protect a region of space they don’t even want to make use of over the span of more than a thousand years … but they won’t go to the trouble of marking it with a beacon?”

“That kind of territoriality goes back to the days when all our ancestors, human and Resalq, were so primitive, they had fangs as long as your thumb,” Vidal added. “They used to scent-mark their patch of the forest or savannah, and they’d fight to the death to defend it. I’ll certainly agree, a species could master the gravity express and still harbor the kind of territoriality of wolves in the timberland – and sure, they’d be freakin’ paranoid about their borders. But that’s the whole point. As soon as the Resalq started to reach out, you’d have run face-first into the beacons. You’d have been chased right back to your own home system, first time you sent out an interstellar probe.”

In fact, Mark could only agree. “This is the bottom line I reach every time I run the theory. It’s actually good to have the argument confirmed by consensus. Which,” he said darkly, “leaves us not one whit closer to understanding the Zunshu! We know a few more things, for what they’re worth: they never seem to send a manned ship. Every deployment is about drones, either drone vessels, or ‘smart’ weapons like the one intended for Borushek, or semi-aware automata which were designed to look like – well, like you, Midani.”

The ancient Resalq had been standing well back, listening with a fierce concentration. Tonio Teniko was lurking behind him, dark eyed and inexpressive, monitoring, digesting, adding nothing; but Midani was struggling with the language, with every bit of resolve he could muster.

He was busy with a handy, every moment, running unfamiliar words. Marin could only admire him for the determination. The Resalq was in loose slacks, a blue-gold tunic baggy enough about him to disguise his different body morphology, and the bare, elongated Resalq skull was wrapped in a dark emerald bandanna. He was trying to blend in, and part of Marin had begun to wish he would not. Midani was not merely Resalq, he was ancestral – he should celebrate his heritage, not try to hide it.

He stepped closer now, between Mark and Dario, with whom he most often worked. “What I can be telling to you, you not already knowing? I seen plenty Zunshu
machine
. Too much Zunshu machine. Never
Zunshu
… not living, alive, thing, real, uh …” His double thumbs flew over keypad. “Creature,” he finished. “Never Zunshu live creature, like Resalq, like human, be living.”

“Oh, we know what you mean, Mid,” Dario assured him. “And – think back to history class, in school. Do you remember any mention, anywhere, anytime, of the early Resalq space explorers finding a marker, a buoy, a beacon …
jin
,
debai
roresclal
,
sem
?”

“
Semsem
.” Midani began to nod and then changed the gesture to a shake of his head. The ancestrals nodded ‘no’ and shook their heads ‘yes.’ All else was learned from humans and practiced deliberately in the interests of communication. “Never found, no. No beacon, no marker.
Obusem
– nothing.”

“There – Midani just made my point exactly.” Vidal’s slim shoulders lifted in a shrug. “A territorial instinct strong enough to inspire a race of people to commit xenocide would send the bastards out pissing on trees – well, posting marker buoys, anyway.”

“Research,” Rusch said flatly. “Mark, Richard, we’re not going to know more till we get through to the Orion Gate and take another look at the ruins.” She frowned at Mark. “Lai’a, do you have the research returned by the Resalq expedition to Orion 359?”

“Of course, Colonel Rusch.” Lai’a paused. “To which workstation would you like the data streamed?”

She spread her hands. “Richard, any preferences?”

“Joss, bring Comm 4 online.” Vaurien thrust both hands into the pockets of black denims. “Leon, you want to go through it?”

“I’ve seen it twenty times,” Leon protested.

“Not with me, you haven’t.” Rusch had her teeth into the job. “A new perspective. A fresh pair of eyeballs. But I’ll need Resalq input. It’s an ocean of data, and I’ve never seen any of it.”

“All right.” Leon groaned expressively.

“Take your time,” Richard warned. “Twelve thousand tracking marks. One
Ebrezjim
. It’s going to take a while to find the needle in this particular haystack … Lai’a!”

“I have been examining objects since my deep scan completed,” Lai’a said unconcernedly. “Only two thousand mapped traces are large enough to be the remains of the
Ebrezjim
. I am matching scan profiles with the specifications of the Resalq vessel. Given that Captain Rabelais and the ship’s service drones undocked the engine deck, the
Ebrezjim
will be easily identified by this profile. However, it is not currently within scan range. Transspace drive is operational; I have already commenced routine search procedures.”

As it spoke, the deck began to thrum with the now familiar vibration of the hyper-Weimann drive. The ship was moving – fast, if Marin was any judge, though the navigation tank remained utterly black.

A perplexed look settled on Vaurien’s face and he tilted his head at Shapiro. “Are you sure you wanted a captain along on this jaunt?”

“Absolutely sure,” Shapiro told him, though he chuckled. “Lai’a is more than capable of handling itself and any technical aspect of the expedition. The human element is something else. Lai’a, can you estimate how long it’ll take to locate the
Ebrezjim
?”

“Not to any degree of accuracy, General. I have no information regarding the point at which the
Ebrezjim
transited the temporal horizon, so I cannot estimate its drift vector.”

“Suppose you had to grid-search the whole lagoon,” Shapiro coaxed, “at good speed, with scan platforms configured for maximum range.”

“Four hours, at current speed,” Lai’a said promptly. “It is equally possible for me to locate the
Ebrezjim
in one minute, or 240 minutes.”

“Best guess, a couple of hours, give or take,” Shapiro decided. “I’m going to get a shower, a meal and some rest. Richard, give me a buzz when Lai’a finds the wreck. I’d like to watch this.”

“Decontamination will be complete in 28 minutes,” Lai’a added. “In armor, humans and Resalq will be able to safely tolerate residual radiation levels in 22 minutes, with a decontamination penalty upon return.”

“How long a penalty?” Dario growled.

“No less than five minutes,” Lai’a warned.

“I can live with that.” Tor was moving. “Gives us plenty of time to check out the hardsuits, get the gear together. Mark?”

“An expedition of ten, fully equipped, redundant safety protocols, equipment and backups, heading back in 70 minutes, or 80 at maximum.” Mark looked from Jazinsky to Vaurien, who both nodded. “Get busy,” he said to Dario and Tor, Marin and Travers. “Neil, call Medic Inosanto and choose one other hand from Bravo. Lai’a … keep me informed.”

“Of course, Doctor,” Lai’a said with just a trace of reproach.

Chapter Twelve

Travers had lost track of how many hundreds of hours he had spent in Marines armor, in vacuum and on the surface of blasted worlds like Ulkur, but he recalled nothing as eerie, as disturbing as the lagoon. In normal space there was always orientation, some feature of landscape or sky to tell a man which way was nominally up or down. Here, there was nothing, and he felt his sense of orientation lock up like jammed gyros.

The Arago sled was a hundred meters from Lai’a, and he turned deliberately to look back at the ship to fix a navigation point. The naked drive core crackled in blues, greens, golds, casting a strange light and macabre shadows over the dorsal hull. The hangar from which they had launched was closed now, but red running lights marked its position. A meter from the furthest reach of any light generated by Lai’a, all was blackness, and Travers saw why Vidal had come to call it the pit of hell.

He turned back as the sled’s floodlights kicked on, and listened to the muttered profanities from Fargo, Inosanto and Tor Sereccio. Marin’s gloves had the sled’s guard rail in a
vise
-grip, while Kulich and both the Sherratts were busy with instruments. Rabelais and Queneau were silent, grim, fixated on the shape that wallowed up beneath the sled like a ghost.

The Resalq science ship was one of the strangest vessels Travers had ever seen. The nose was scooped, hollow, filled with the spines and rods of sensor probes; the dorsal surface was pockmarked, cratered, with scores of dishes set into the hull rather than being mounted on it, and Mark had described the ventral surface as being one cavern after another, holds and hangars and escape pods, all sealed and shielded by plate armor of the same tenacity as the Zunshu armor. The damage to the hull was restricted to a single tear, a hundred-meter rip which had peeled her open down the port side, from a point just behind the sensor probes to another not forty meters forward of the place where the engine deck should have begun.

“Nose shell is gone missing,” Midani Kulich said quietly. “See sensory gearings inside nose? Oughtta be covered up, all protect with armor, like shell. Is gone, but.”

The nose armor would have given the
Ebrezjim
a more normal appearance, but even so she was far wider in the beam, by ratio to her length, than any human ship or modern Resalq vessel, would have been. The impression was strengthened when Travers saw how she just
ended
, stopped, on the line where the engine deck should have locked into place.

The whole section containing the generators and transspace engines had been undocked – the Arago clamps released so it could be floated off and redocked to the
Odyssey
. That segment of the
Ebrezjim
still existed, parked at Alshie’nya and still attached to the
Orpheus-Odyssey
, where it was being studied by Resalq engineers.

“There she is,” Ernst Rabelais said to no one in particular. “I was close to the end when I found her. I came drifting in like this, but from below and behind. The engines were cold, dead, but she was
almost
whole. I’d never seen a hull that was still just about in one piece – everything I’d run into before was smashed. This one, well, look at her. Just the one tear in her. Throw an Arago field across the gash, and you could hold an atmosphere … I thought, Christ, there could be people on this one.”

“You might hold an atmosphere at useful pressure,” Mark mused, “but you’d bleed away heat so fast, you couldn’t keep the hull habitable for long. Have you looked at the ambient temperature here?”