Perry Rhodan Lemuria 1: Ark of the Stars (19 page)

Solina nearly burst out laughing. "Of course they have! They consider themselves smarter, and think that sooner or later they can kick us out—but we'll see who kicks out whom!" Without realizing it, Solina had stood up from her seat and cried out the last few words.

Jere von Baloy's gaze locked on her. "You would pay any price to go aboard that Lemurian ship, wouldn't you?"

"Yes."

"Then we don't want to disappoint you." The maphan gave the syntron a sign again and said to Sharita Coho: "That is a very wise and sensible suggestion. We accept."

Solina collapsed in her chair. Her knees trembled. She would board the Lemurian ship!

What a day.

If it just wasn't so blasted cramped!

Pearl Laneaux was convinced she would cease being able to breathe at any moment. The air in the crawler was hot. It stank horribly. Of the sweat of her companions, of course, from their excitement and anticipation, but there was also a smell that Pearl had trouble placing at first, then identified as mold. That was the legacy of the crawler's regular crew, who had cleared out of their beloved vehicle for this mission only under protest.

There you are!
she thought.
You've always wondered what being in a crawler felt like. Now you know.

The crawlers were purely utility vehicles, equipped to take readings in life-hostile environments, collect samples and analyze both. Pearl had the impression that it had only occurred to the builders of the crawlers at the last minute, just before delivering the first model, that they had to accommodate three people somewhere.
Nothing could be easier,
they must have thought.
We'll just bolt a cabin on underneath!

A cabin large enough for three people who must be prepared to live for weeks or months in a kind of symbiosis that would transform them into a conjoined entity, not a collective being but no longer individuals.

Three people. For months. Pearl had been on board for less than half an hour.

She only had to shift her weight to the left and pull her head back slightly in order to find her nose between Perry Rhodan's shoulder blades. She wondered how the Immortal would react to that. Rhodan would probably make a polite remark, or a joke. That might not be so bad, and who could claim to have ever been so close to an Immortal? Pearl cautiously shifted her weight, and her nose came within a couple of centimeters of Rhodan's back. No, better not.

She stretched out her right leg, folded it again and felt it rest against something solid. She quickly shifted back, but too late. Hayden Norwell gave her a sharp glance.
Sharita, what were you thinking?
she mentally demanded of her commander, who had assembled the team.
Did you want to punish Rhodan for being smarter than you? Or me because I was on his side?

Hayden was one of the prospectors. Crawler Twelve was his normal assignment—she had no idea how the other two on board with him could stand it—and so most of the time he was out of sight and out of mind. Pearl had once tried to find out what tasks Norwell actually performed on the crawler, but his comrades had nothing to say. The first officer, whose curiosity had now been properly spurred, turned instead to Alemaheyu Kossa. The comm officer knew everything about everybody on board the
Palenque.
But even Alemaheyu had passed on her question. Norwell had no identifiable qualifications that explained his presence: not professionally, and not personally.

And on top of all that he was ugly. Incredibly ugly. Pearl considered herself a sensitive person. Even though she loved to vent her anger now and then with French curses that no one on board understood, she appreciated a minimum standard in the matter of conduct and grooming. Norwell was a failure in both categories. His dark eyes were always outlined by faint shadows, as though he'd had too little sleep. His eyebrows were bushy, seeming to cry out for scissors to trim back their rank growth. Then there was the scar over the right eye, which seemed to have slipped. That part of his face, including his eyebrow, must have been torn off and then crudely sewn back on again. The injury probably had the same cause as his nose with its impossible bump. When and how he had been injured, no one could say. Here, too, Alemaheyu had had to pass.

Why is he in our team, for God's sake? Is he supposed to keep the inhabitants of that Lemurian crate—if there are any—at a distance by the sheer sight of him?

That Norwell was in so-so physical shape hardly mattered. They weren't going on board the Lemurian ship to do gymnastics. And besides, Pearl, Perry Rhodan, and the prospector wore protective suits equipped with antigrav propulsion systems.

"Crawler Twelve, are you ready?" Alemaheyu's voice asked from an acoustic field.

"Couldn't be better," Pearl answered bravely. She gasped for air, being careful to breathe through her mouth so she didn't have to tolerate even more smells. "How much longer ... Mama?"

Pearl could just about hear Alemaheyu's satisfied grin through the acoustic field. He loved being called "Mama" even though he indignantly denied it when anyone suggested that might be true.

"I see you've made yourself at home," the comm officer said.

"It's not bad," Pearl coughed. "How much longer, Mama?"

The crawler was under the control of the mother ship's syntron, which guided its course. Pearl and the others were only passengers. She hated having no control, but it was the most reasonable solution. If the Akonians or the presumed Lemurian ship decided to open fire in a surprise attack, any human reaction would come too late. The
Palenque
's syntron gave them the best advantage here. It also had an overview of everything that was happening and so could coordinate the actions of the prospector ship and all the crawlers.

"Eleven minutes, forty-three seconds," Alemaheyu replied.

"Good," Pearl said succinctly. "How are things with the Akonians?"

"They're holding to the deal. Their fighters have withdrawn to the specified distance and they've launched two objects that we think are Shifts. One will dock with the
Palenque,
and the other is on course for the rendezvous point."

"What about us?"

"Of course we're keeping our word," Alemaheyu laughed. "Did you expect anything else?"

"Certainly not," Pearl replied, knowing that the commander could tap into the
Palenque
's entire communications traffic at any time. Sharita was considered capable of anything, even an attempt to dupe the Akonians at the cost of the special team.

"The hostage is—" The impulse engines came to life in order to brake the crawler and drowned out the comm officer. The builders of the vehicle had skipped the acoustic shielding. At that moment, Pearl wished she could get her hands on one of them and lock him into one of his vehicles for a three-week test flight at full thrust. She would have gladly listened to what he had to say afterwards—if he could manage to string together a coherent sentence.

She deactivated the acoustic field, hoped that the vibration of the crawler didn't make her lose her balance, and shut her eyes.

She tried to imagine what awaited her on board the Lemurian ship. A paradise, perhaps? If her calculations were correct and the ship had been under way for tens of thousands of years—and for centuries for those currently on board—it must amount to its own little world inside. A utopia in which there was no crime and no violence, no cares, only simple people who contentedly went about their work, and the stars that surrounded them, stars that ... .

A holo appeared above the heads of the crawler's crew. It showed space and in its center a massive shadow that rapidly grew larger. The shadow's outlines took shape, revealing it to be the widely-used all-purpose transport vehicle called a Shift.

The Akonians' Shift.

The Akonians. Pearl wondered what to expect from them. "Don't trust any Akonian!" Sharita had advised her, but Pearl had dismissed the idea almost immediately. The Akonians were human beings like them, weren't they?

She would soon find out.

* * *

Solina Tormas wondered what the Terrans would be like. She had never met one in the flesh. Not that she hadn't dealt with them. As a historian, she regularly took part in conferences that included Terrans, but for reasons of cost, or perhaps because her superiors were afraid of what direct contact with Terrans and other aliens might stir up in her, such meetings had been strictly virtual—up to now. Admittedly, in the thirteenth century of the New Galactic Era, a virtual conference was recognizable as such only on the third look and then by careful observers. An academic institution's syntron projected simulations of the participants in the lecture hall and placed them in the seats. When a participant spoke, his digital avatar stood up and talked and gestured exactly like a being of flesh and blood.

And yet ... something was lacking. Was it some last gap in the behavioral model the syntron used to animate the avatars? Or the uniformity of the model that could never imitate the diversity of actual living beings? What Solina missed was somewhat more concrete: odors. Avatars were bodiless, didn't smell, and even when the entire lecture hall was fully packed with them, Solina's nose perceived only the sharp odor of the cleaning fluid that the robots used on the floor every night.

What did a Terran smell like?

She would soon know the answer, and much more as well.

"Everything all right, Robol?" She turned in her seat in the direction of the logistics officer, who had taken over guidance of the Shift.

The man, unusually brawny for an Akonian, gestured in the affirmative. "The Terrans are right in front of us. Strange looking crate."

He pointed to the hyperdetector holo showing the Terran ship. No, not a ship.
Vehicle.
Solina had the impression that someone had pounded on a Terran spacesphere with a colossal sledgehammer until it was as flat as one of the predatory fish that pressed themselves into the seafloor along the shallow coastlines of Shaghomin, except that the giant hadn't stopped until he had beaten a hollow into the center. And the Terrans didn't seem to care much about their engineering; it was surrounded by a simple High-energy Overload (HO) shield, scant protection that the Shift's on-board gun could have blown away at any time.

"What do you expect, Robol?" replied Hevror ta Gosz. "They're Terrans!" The two men laughed. Solina hesitated, then joined in. It felt good to relieve the tension a bit, and she didn't have to worry on Hevror's account. He wasn't a Terran-hater, but simply carried on Akon's sacred tradition of making fun of the Terrans. It felt good to always have someone to blame or to sneer at. Solina often thought that if the Terrans didn't already exist, her people would have had to invent them.

Hevror adjusted the quiver-like bag he carried slung over his back. More than two meters in height, he was tall even for an Akonian. His skin was weather-beaten and wrinkled, and occasional bright spots of pigment stood out from the otherwise velvety brown of his skin, a souvenir of the uncounted suns Hevror had walked under without protection.

Most of the crew members of the
Las-Toór
considered Hevror ta Gosz a little crazy. For Solina, he was the closest thing she had to a friend. Hevror had called her as soon as the expedition was a go.

"Solina, I've got to come along!" was all he had said.

"You?" she had asked.

"I'm a specialist in planetary ecologies."

"True."

"That thing on the screens may be a metal cylinder, but I swear that you can use somebody like me there. Care to bet that thing has its own ecosystem?"

"That could be," Solina had said simply, but in her heart she had already decided to bring Hevror. It would be good to have a friend along, even if he was a bit crazy. To her surprise, Jere von Baloy supported her choice.

When Hevror had arrived at the Shift, the long, leather bag was dangling on his back.

Solina had frowned. "What do you want with that?"

"The same as always?"

"In the Lemurian ship?"

"We'll see," Hevror had answered and disappeared into the Shift.

Solina had let it go. What did she care if Hevror dragged along his bag? The thing was light. It wouldn't get in his way. And hadn't she railed against conformity all her life?

In front of the Terran vehicle, a huge dark shape emerged from the blackness.

The Lemurian ship.

They approached it near the bow. The gigantic ship—now that they had the thing right in front of their noses, the hyperdetector was finally delivering consistent data—had a length of some five kilometers. The diameter of the hull was nearly five hundred meters. At that size, it was bigger than any of the ships ever built in Akonian shipyards. Now, size meant little by itself. Solina was certain that viewed through the eyes of a technician, this ship represented an anachronistic scrapheap. But that wasn't the point. What was critically important was understanding the effort behind building the ship. Building such a massive artificial structure would have required considerable financial means, persistence and an iron will. Solina could hardly believe that the construction and launch of such a ship had been forgotten, but that exact possibility was the fascination of her profession: the past held mysteries and wonders without end, and every answer one found led to a dozen new questions.

And they still knew so little about the Lemurians!

The onslaught of the Beasts had destroyed the Great Tamanium of the Lemurians, nearly wiping out the human race. Only by escaping to Andromeda was humanity's survival ensured. Those who remained behind eked out a miserable existence in the ruins of their once-glorious civilization. The Akonians had been the one major exception. Once, they had comprised the Eighty-seventh Tamanium of the Lemurian Imperium, in which separatist tendencies had been evident even before the Beasts attacked. The later Akonians managed to seal themselves off so far from the outer universe that they had been left untouched by the great cataclysm that struck the Lemurians.