Swallow the Sky: A Space Opera (30 page)

“Oh God, the bastards
have beaten us to it.”

It was seven hours later.
They were floating in the main cabin examining an image sent by a member of Tallis’s
fleet. The tiny vessel had come to a halt two hundred kilometers from its
target, recorded the scene, then scuttled back beyond detection range before
transmitting its finding. The array picked up the faint signal – they were two
light hours away – and relayed it to the ship.

There was no doubt – it
was the storage modules left in orbit by the Yongding eight thousand years ago
– but beside them floated another spacecraft.

“That’s an interplanetary
shuttle, so where’s Tabarak’s starship?”

Carson had a bright idea.

“Hey, array, you must be
able to spot an interstellar vessel from a hell of a distance. Do you see
anything?”

The huge machine was over
a billion kilometers away and it took an infuriatingly long time for the reply to
come through.

“Right, a starship’s
shell will show up clear across the solar system. I’ll know more later but so
far I can tell you there’s nothing within a light hour.”

Tabarak appeared to be acting
as cautiously as they were. Carson told the ship to move closer.

“The array makes a great
lookout. At least we’ll see them coming.”

Tallis’s vessel went in
for a second time. Nothing appeared to have changed.

“I don’t like this. Why
aren’t they loading the modules? Is it a trap?”

There was nothing to do
but get closer still. Eventually they rendezvoused with the array twenty
million kilometers away from the orbiting storage modules. The ship kept its
shell of charged black holes just below maximum spin level, ready for a getaway
at a moment’s notice.

Tallis directed one of
her tiny spacecraft to get really close. As it approached the mystery deepened.

“That doesn’t look like
any clan Aniko ship that I’ve ever seen” Aiyana said.

Their spy was now within
a kilometer of the modules but there was still no sign of it having been
spotted. Carson leaned forward and stared at the image.

“Oh God” he whispered,
“It’s a wreck.”

As Tallis’s craft moved
in they could see that the mystery vessel had been breached, its interior
gaping open to the vacuum of space.

“
The destruction is not a new event
”
Tallis said. “
The
temperature of the vessel is just four degrees Kelvin; it has achieved thermal equilibrium
with surrounding space.
”

Carson could wait no
longer. “Let’s suit-up and check it out for ourselves.”

They climbed into the
buggy and slipped cautiously along the ship’s axis. With the shell’s space-time
maelstrom close to critical and any deviation in their trajectory would be
catastrophic.

The little vessel emerged
into the open vacuum. Seen from a distance of five billion kilometers Orpheus’s
sun was no more than a splinter of blue-white light floating among the stars. The
modules and the wrecked spacecraft lay directly ahead. At two hundred meters
they clambered out of the cabin and floated forward, Tallis’s fleet surrounding
them like a cloud of hornets.

Only the sound of their
breathing broke the silence of the desolate scene. Carson counted thirty-two
linked storage modules silhouetted against the glow of the Milky Way. He
amped-up his vision. Most of the modules appeared to be in perfect condition, although
the last unit in the string, the one nearest the mysterious spacecraft, had
been caught in the cataclysm.

The doomed vessel was a
stubby ovoid about fifteen meters long. Attached to its sides was an assortment
of drilling tools, grapplers, and sampling equipment – all the paraphernalia of
a prospector. As they drew closer they could make out a comet-shaped logo on
the side; beneath it were the words
Lopez Cometary Resources.

They entered the craft
through the meter-wide split in its hull. Aiyana turned on her suit lights and
promptly let out a scream – she was facing the mummified body of a woman, her
dead eyes staring blankly at the stars. The miner was still clutching a coffee
mug; death must have been instantaneous.

Carson peered at the
corpse. It was riddled with small puncture wounds.

“Had to be some kind of
meteor strike” he said. “It burst the hull open and sprayed the crew with
fragments.”

He turned to Aiyana and took
her arm with his gloved hand.

“She died straight away. Probably
never knew what happened.”

“But every ship protects
itself against strikes. They would have been an inertial field, close-range
radar, rapid-fire defenses – how could a meteor have gotten through?”

“Tallis’s tug managed to
destroy the observation platform. I guess it’s just a matter of speed. Come on,
we’d better look around.”

They found two more crew,
both men, neither wearing an environment suit. One appeared to have been asleep
in his bunk, the other slumped over a consol. Carson overcame his misgivings
and cut a sample of hair from one of the bodies.

“We’ll carbon-date it
when we get to the ship; that will give us an accurate timeline” he said; judging
from the state of the bodies the wreck was not a recent event.

They slipped outside the
stricken spacecraft and examined the storage modules. None had been forced
open, reinforcing Carson’s hunch that the meteor struck soon after the miners
arrived on the scene. Only the unit closest to the ship had been caught in the
blast. Half of the casing had been blown away spewing the contents – assuming
there had been any – across the heavens.

Tallis recorded the scene
with her high-definition cameras and then they set about checking the modules’
contents. As before, gamma rays were used to image each unit’s interior without
the necessity of forcing it open. All but two resolved to be crammed with supplies
– an overwhelming amount of treasure. They should have been elated but the stricken
vessel cast a pall over the discovery.

The buggy started ferrying
the containers to the ship, but to Aiyana’s surprise Carson left eight full modules
tethered to the miners’ spacecraft.

“I’m sending the location
to the King’s private address” he told her. “Prices for high-end antiques are
notoriously difficult to estimate, but I’ll guarantee that the contents of
those eight will pay off Orpheus’s debts with enough left over to finance the
reclamation of the planet.”

She gave him a clumsy hug
in her environment suit. “Darling, that’s so kind!”

Eventually all the transported
modules were stowed on the outside of the ship’s hull. They had been in a
vacuum at close to absolute zero for eight thousand years Carson explained; the
last thing he wanted to do was warm them up in an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

When they returned to the
ship Tallis asked to examine the miner’s hair sample. Carson took it to the
conservatory and sat down on the grass. Two workers crawled onto his hand and
played their feelers over the strands.

“This tastes old. We would estimate five
hundred standard years. The man had not bathed for several days and he ate a
meal of synthetic lamb a few hours before dying.”

“Good God! You can work
out all that from hair that’s spent centuries in a vacuum?” Carson shook his
head in amazement and thought about Tallis’s blind world where every object
told its story through taste and smell. No wonder it had taken the human race so
long to learn how to communicate with the tiny creatures.

He went into the main
cabin and ran the sample through carbon dating.

“Tallis was spot on: the
miners died five hundred and twenty years ago. Tabarak had nothing to do with
this.”

Carson composed a message
to the King telling him of the storage modules and their discovery of the
ancient tragedy. He suggested that instead of privately selling the treasure
trove Orpheus should offer the Huan Federation a swap: the modules and their
contents in exchange for debt forgiveness, the return of the royal collection,
and a substantial cash payment.

“I my opinion sir, this
is a better option than the open market: the Federation will house the
artifacts in its new museum for the enjoyment of all its citizens. They have
been itching to get their hands on an Old Earth collection and you will garner
the goodwill of one of the most powerful alliances in the galaxy.”

“Won’t the New Earth Archivists
be mad?” Aiyana asked.

“Oh please, the poor
things. Now they’re only getting thirty-three modules stuffed with priceless treasure.”

He completed his message
and sent it over to the array.

“Can you shoot this down
to Orpheus?”

“So now I’m a mailman? Yeah,
sure. Also, I got one for you.”

Carson winced. It was the
invoice from Kamal Prospecting, but instead of a demand for payment there
statement showed a zero balance. It was accompanied by a message bearing the
seal of the Keeper of the Imperial Privy Purse.

“I am commanded by his
majesty to inform you that in recognition of your services in cataloging the
Palace’s household your expenses will be met out of royal funds. His highness wishes
to offer you his gracious goodwill for your ongoing journey.”

“That guy Gustav is one
class act.”

It was time to send the
array on its way. Aiyana formally signed off on the contact and they watched
the huge system reassemble itself into a single entity.

“Here’s my card” it said.
“Give me a call if you do any more prospecting.”

And with that the machine
shot sunward, down the gravity well.

“So when are you guys
going to read it?” the ship asked.

“The letter from the
King? We just did.”

“No, I mean this.”

A ghostly shape appeared
in the cabin: the gamma ray image of the first empty module. Affixed to the
inside surface was a faint rectangle. It was another message from Samuelson.

The leader of the Techs
began as before.

The fact that you are
reading this message proves that the people of New Earth have succeeded in
building another starship…

Further on, it began to
differ from the earlier messages:

We have taken little
from this supply dump, having replenished ourselves at Mirama and Falk. I doubt
you are interested in what remains, except perhaps as curios.

However, the contents of
the last unit are totally different. The module contains a complete copy of the
Bi Sheng Repository that is in orbit around Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. It was
created to ensure that a permanent record of the human race’s greatest
intellectual achievements would survive even when Earth itself ceased to exist.
In retrospect it was a far-sighted decision.

The Repository was
designed to last more than a billion years and I pray that it has survived the
Melt, but the fate of the original need not concern you for it is represented
here in its entirety. It contains Earth’s greatest storehouses of knowledge and
art: the National Libraries of Greater China and India, the Library of the New
Congress; the British Museum; the Bibliotheque Universel of the United States
of Europe, and many others.

We have taken our own
copy of the unit’s contents and have left the module for you, our brothers and
sisters.

The message ended like
the other two:

Perhaps in the far
future our descendants will meet again. Until that day, I wish you well.

November 30, 2148

After he finished reading
the ancient message Carson drifted around the cabin for a long time, staring at
nothing in particular. Finally he caught Aiyana’s gaze and managed a weak
smile.

“Good God, the whole
insane venture finally makes sense. No wonder Juro was willing to do anything
to get at the Yongding’s treasure.”

He retrieved the sole
existent image of the ancient starship, so familiar and so strange.
How
little we knew
he thought.

“It’s something totally
unique, isn’t it? I mean, there’s almost nothing left of Old Earth’s culture.”

“Just the Book and the
stuff Teng captured in his recordings. And now this – it’s like discovering a
gold nugget the size of a star.”

It was obvious how the
old man would cash in, Carson said. Unlike the antiques which would have to be
dribbled onto the market for decades to maintain their sky-high prices, the
Repository could instantaneously be turned into a stupendous amount of money.

“Can you imagine? Every
school, every museum, every library in the galaxy would pay a fortune for a
copy. Media companies could slice and dice the contents and sell it to the
public. How much would you be willing to pay for the story of Old Earth – ten
Ecus, a hundred, a thousand? Now multiply that by a trillion.”

“And then,” Carson added
“he would use all that money to finance his crazy rebellion.”