Swallow the Sky: A Space Opera (19 page)

As soon as they got under
way Carson and Aiyana headed to bed – it had been a very long day.

“How amazing” said Aiyana
as they snuggled in the darkened cabin “we are the only people in the galaxy
who really know about the Yongding’s treasure.”

“Well I did share some
information with Officer Asima.”

“Was that wise? I mean
Juro has corrupted so many people on Mita.”

“I felt someone else had
to know, and Asima is as straight as laser light. Besides, she promised to tell
no-one except Commissioner Zhou.”

“That’s all right then”

“Sweet dreams darling”

The silent ship plunged on through the interstellar night.

“There! I swear I saw a fin!”

Carson scrambled up the
beach away from the water’s edge.

“Are you sure?” Aiyana
shouted from the top of the bluffs. “I thought there was nothing bigger than an
amoeba.”

He scrunched up the shale
to where she was standing and surveyed the view. The sluggish sea mirrored the
light of the grey clouds, making it hard to distinguish where the ocean stopped
and the sky began. The land behind them offered little more – rust-colored
hills and shallow valleys rolled away to the horizon.

“This is the most boring
place I have ever visited.”

Aiyana opened a channel
to Tallis.

“Anything interesting,
nest mate?”

“Nothing, we question why [untranslatable]
was ever chosen”

“You’ve never visited a
bacteria world before have you Carson?” Aiyana asked.

“Oh God no! Why should
anyone? They’re nothing but a broth of microorganisms.”

“The ship was telling me that there are ten billion of them in the galaxy. Can you imagine? All
those planets floundering in the first stage of genesis.”

But Mirama was showing
promise. It started with a catastrophe fifty million years ago when a new
life-form began generating a poisonous gas that killed virtually the entire
biomass. The gas was oxygen and the life-form plankton. Now the air was
breathable and the surviving organisms were creating the high-energy metabolic
pathways that would one day culminate in multicellular life.

“In the meantime” Carson said “the landmass is barren. God help anyone trying to start a colony here. I’m
guessing it was chlorophyll signature that lured the Yongding.”

“See this” Aiyana said as
she squatted down and crumbled flakes of red earth in her fingers. “You know
what this reminds me of? That picture of Old Mars in the Book, the one taken
before the first settlers arrived.”

She pulled out a portable
analyzer and held it to the surface.

“Iron oxide – it must
have been created during the oxygenation event.”

“This place could be Mars
two billion ago.”

Aiyana stood up and
dusted her hands.

“Sakyamuni said they left
supplies?”

“That he did. They had no
idea how many planets supported life so perhaps they weren’t expecting anything
better. There’s no other reason to try colonizing this dump.”

“None of which explains a
fin” Aiyana said. “Are you sure you saw something?”

“Pretty certain. Hey
buggy, do you know anything about Mirama c being terraformed?”

“Nothing – I’ll check
with the ship.”

“There was a lot of wild
stuff going on when the human race first broke out from the Eridani system”
Carson said “I’m guessing the planet was seeded then.”

“If they brought their
own life-forms there might be anything in the sea.”

“Yeah, isn’t that a
lovely thought?”

Aiyana shivered. “It’s
getting late, let’s get back to camp. Hey Tallis, smell you at the nest!”

“My antennae twitch with pleasure”

“You two are getting far
too friendly” Carson said as they climbed aboard the scooter.

They had set up base on
the western edge of the planet’s largest continent, a thousand kilometers south
of the equator. Their orbital radar survey had shown numerous anomalies in the
immediate area but so far nothing had panned out.

Three days earlier they
had arrived to discover the world enveloped in cloud.

“Just like home with none
of the fun” Aiyana observed, “well at least it isn’t raining.”

The hidden surface
wrecked their plans for performing the hunt from orbit. But all was not lost –
their constellation of satellites could still perform radar scans. As a bonus
the clouds parted occasionally to reveal glimpses of the surface, and Tallis’s
fleet of tiny vessels kept busy reconnoitering at low-level.

“This planet was supposed
to be the easy one” Carson moaned. “No surface vegetation, no tectonics,
uneventful climate. Now we’re scrabbling round the surface checking out radar
blips.”

The camp glowed in the
rock-strewn landscape as they approached in the fading light. It consisted of
three woven-monofilament transparent cubes held rigid by inertial fields; they appeared
flimsy but once pinioned to the ground they were as strong as stone-built
houses. The largest contained memory shape furniture and served as their living
quarters. In one corner was an anonymous cube – Tallis’s portable nest. The
second, smaller module housed recycling and bathroom facilities, and the third
contained supplies. The buggy was parked a few meters away.

“This whole setup cost me
a fortune but God knows how long we’re going to be stuck here.”

Once they were away from
New Earth they had spent countless hours planning. In faking the second tape Carson had used the premise that all good lies start with a large chunk of the truth: Sakyamuni
had indeed named three worlds where supply dumps were located – one on the
ground and one in cometary orbit for each system.

“I wanted to make sure we
returned to New Earth before Shin, so I substituted planets that would make his
search as hard as possible. Sharez a is covered with forest and Lum e has a
gigantic land mass. He’s obviously determined not to return home empty-handed
and I reckon he’ll keep searching for years.”

“Why didn’t you name ten
worlds? That could tie them up for decades.”

“Yeah, I was tempted. But
one thing I’ve learned about Juro is that he always knows more than you think. We’ve
never heard the third tape – Sakyamuni might have dropped far more clues than
we realize.”

Aiyana scanned through Carson’s list of bogus targets.

“It seems like Dante b
would be pretty easy to survey.”

“You’re right, but it’s
ninety-six light years away. My idea was to lure them straight into a long trip
but Juro didn’t take the bait. Even so, we have a hell of a time advantage.”

“I almost feel sorry for
Shin.”

“Me too, but at least
when he returns he won’t have to worry about his boss – Juro will have long
since been sentenced to total personality reconstruction.

“And we, my dear” he
added gathering up Aiyana in his arms “will be heroes.”

But the euphoria had
vanished when they stared down at Mirama’s cloud-covered surface. Now they
faced a slog that could last months.

Aiyana, far more at home in
interplanetary space, wanted to start by searching for the supply dump in
cometary orbit but Carson had vetoed the idea.

“Shin had a team of
experts and unlimited funds to develop the right deep search tools. Even so I
doubt he’ll find anything. We’d be using much more primitive equipment to find
what? Something ten meters in diameter? In a solar system-sized volume! Sorry,
honey, we’ll start on the ground.”

Carson slapped his hand
on the green circle on the side of the habitation module and waited for the
entrance to peel open.

“What’s for dinner” he
asked the portable stove as he pushed through the inertial field.

“Synthesized chicken
stew” the machine replied.

“Welcome to the Aether,
honored patron” Aiyana muttered as she followed Carson inside.

After their meal they relaxed
with glasses of real wine, which Aiyana had insisted on bringing, and discussed
strategy. As they talked a cluster of tiny green lights appeared through the
transparent walls. Tallis’s fleet was returning to recharge its batteries.

“We will start again as soon as there is
sufficient ambient electromagnetic radiation.”

“Dawn is ten hours away. It
makes me wonder about using artificial light – what do you think buggy?”

“My searchlights are
nowhere near powerful enough. Perhaps we could fabricate something. Let me ask
the ship.”

Carson sighed. Their
vessel was stationed at the edge of the system, four light hours out. It would
be the next day before they would get a response.

“I can equip my sensors to operate in very
low levels of radiation”
Tallis offered.

“Yeah, but that’s going
to play havoc with the pattern recognition algorithms.”

He had seen the raw data streaming
from the little craft – the planet’s surface was a rubble-strewn wasteland. Finding
the cargo was going to be difficult enough without degrading the image quality,
especially when they were not even sure what they were searching for.

Carson and Aiyana were
dividing their time between examining potential hits from the fleet’s survey
and checking out anomalies thrown up by the radar. They were discovering that
rocks could look awfully like storage modules.

“How much did you cover
today Tallis?” Aiyana asked.

“Nearly one million
square kilometers”

“Wow! That’s terrific!”

Except that it wasn’t. At
the current rate it would take them over a hundred days just to scan the
planet’s landmass. Carson groaned and slumped in his chair.

Aiyana tried to cheer him
up.

“You poor thing. A whole
hundred days to make the greatest archeological discovery in history!”

“I know, but suppose everything
has been buried by a landslide? Or perhaps they used a cave – it would have
made sense.”

“Oh shut up! Perhaps
we’ll have more luck tomorrow.”

Carson frowned but as
usual Aiyana was right.

The next morning they
climbed aboard the scooter to check out another anomaly from the radar scan. Tallis’s
fleet was already in the air hurrying to the start point of the day’s search.

“The ship got back to me about artificial lighting” the buggy said as they took off. “It reckons the
best plan would be to fabricate titanium-sapphire pulse lasers.”

“How long would that
take?”

“Sorry, it says the fab
robotics aren’t up to it – you’d have to go to the ship and build them yourself.”

Carson sighed. Constructing
the lights would probably take days, and then there would be the problem of how
to fly them – Tallis’s craft were far too small.

“Three minutes to target”
Aiyana said.

They were cruising at an
altitude of two hundred meters. Beneath them, the surface was becoming
increasing pockmarked with rocks, many as large as their living module.

“Seems like glacial
activity” Carson said. “Oh God, I hope the ice age occurred before the
Yongding’s visit.”

“Well here we are”

They peered down at a
huge piece of basalt.

“Great, another dud”

“Oh come on” Aiyana said
“at least let’s land and look around, the radar positioning isn’t that
accurate.”

Before Carson could argue
she dropped the scooter to the surface.

“I guess the rock would
make a good landmark” he said as he climbed off his saddle “let’s try the top
of that hill – you wouldn’t leave supplies where they could be caught in a
flash flood.”

They puffed up the slope.

“We should have used the
scooter”

“No way – you need the
exercise old man.”

Five minutes later they
were on the crest. Carson stared around then kicked a pebble in disgust.

“Onto the next location” Aiyana said

He nodded. “Okay, but
I’ve had today’s workout. Hey scooter! Come and get us.”

“I’ve sorry Carson” the machine replied “but I can’t do that”

“What?”

“Something just bit me.”

They ran across the brow
of the hill to where they could see the little machine.

“There goes the bacteria
world” Aiyana shouted.

A green lizard-like
creature, about five meters long, was gripping the scooter in its jaws.

“Can it cause any
damage?” she asked.

“Don’t know and don’t
want to find out.”

“Hey, I bet it’s after
the chicken stew leftovers I packed for lunch.”

At the sound of their
voices the creature let go of the scooter and whipped round to face them, its
open mouth displaying a nightmarish tangle of teeth.

“It’s simple” Aiyana said
“all I have to do is provoke into chasing me while you get on the scooter. Then
you come and pick me up.”

“Oh no!” Carson said but she was already waiving her arms and running down the hill.

“Hey ugly” Aiyana yelled
“want something better to eat?”

Moments later she changed
direction. The animal took a step, hesitated, then waddled off in pursuit.

“Can’t catch me” she
shouted, but Carson was not so sure. The creature was clearly amphibious – its
stubby legs ended in splayed web feet – but it was showing a surprising turn of
speed. There was nothing to do but charge full tilt to where they had parked.

The scooter had a line of
deep scratches scoured into one of its storage pods but otherwise appeared
sound. He straddled the machine and shot into the air, but both Aiyana and her
pursuer had vanished.

He opened their private
channel.