could possibly be artificial. After over a millennium of interstellar expansion to a catalog of better than sixteen thousand explored planets, more than two thousand of them permanently inhabited, the human race had yet to settle the question of whether other sophont life now populated, or ever had populated, this end of the galaxy.
Ask recognized the inherent importance of the question. He didn’t expect to run into aliens beneath the planetary crust, though. Beneath any planetary crust, in truth. So far he had not been disappointed.
And these tunnels… Many were smooth like lava tubes. Most of those interconnected. Some were not, jagged openings that tended to dead-end. All were lined with a threaded metallic mesh that glinted in his handlight with the effervescence of a distant fairyland glimpsed only in dreams. Seen through his thermal vision, they glowed just slightly warmer than the ambient stone, a network like a neural map.
That resemblance was not lost on Ask. Nor was the patently obvious fact that whatever natural or artificial process had deposited this coating inside these tunnels was more recent than the formation of the tunnels themselves. His current working theory was that the smooth passages were the result of some long-vanished petrophage, while the rough passages were formed by the more usual geological processes. The coating, now, there was a mystery.
Ask sat in an intersection of three of the smooth passages, enjoying his quick-heated fish stew. Redghost boasted a generous hydrosphere that the colonists here had husbanded magnificently with Terran stock. And the smell of it was magnificent, too—the rich meat of the salmon, spicy notes from tarragon and false-sage, the slight edginess of the kale.
If he closed his eyes, held very still, and concentrated, Ask could hear the faint echoes of air moving in the tunnels. Atmospheric pressure variations and subtle pressures in the lithosphere made a great, slow, rumbling organ of this place.
A series of jarring thumps more felt than heard woke him from his reverie. Dust fell from the arch of the ceiling—the first time he’d observed that kind of decay while down here.
He consulted his telemeter. One advantage of being a Howard was all the hardware you could carry in your head. Literally as well as figuratively. Data flowed into his optic processing centers in configurable cognitive displays that he could chunk to whatever degree he liked. Like fireworks in the mind, though fractal in nature. Elephants all the way down, one of his early tutors had said, before being forced to explain the joke. Elephants, made of tinier elephants, made of tinier elephants, almost ad infinitum.
In this case, Ask’s fractal elephants informed him that the subsurface sensors were jittering with tiny temblors, confirming in finely-grained technical detail what he’d already felt. The surface sensors were offline.
He also noted a series of neutrino bursts. Solar flares from Redghost’s host star? That hadn’t been in any of the forecasts.
The still-operating sensor cluster closest to the cave mouth started to register a slow increase in ambient radiation as well. Everything above that was dead, as was his surface equipment. It would be a long walk home if the rockhopper and his base camp equipment just outside were knocked out of commission just like the upper sensors.
Had someone let off a
Tactically it was even stranger. Redghost didn’t have much that anyone wanted except living space and arable land. Who would bother?
Uneasy, he rested out the remainder of his body-clocked night. The radiation levels near the surface quickly peaked, though they did not subside all the way back to their earlier baseline norms. Hotter than he might like, but at least he wouldn’t be strolling into a fallout hell.
When he reached the first inoperative sensor cluster, Ask peeled the nubbly gray strip off the wall and studied it. Ten centimeters of adhesive polymer with several hundred microdots of instrumentation. The only reason for it to be even this large was the convenience of human hands. With no camera in his standard subsurface packages, focal length was never an issue.
The failure mode band at the end was starkly purple from radiation exposure. The neutrino bursts must have been part of some very fast cloud of high-energy particles that fried the equipment, he realized. Instrumentation deeper down had been protected by a sufficient layer of planetary crust. Not to mention the curiously semiconducting tunnel walls.
A cold thought stole through Ask’s mind. What would that burst have done to the enhancements crowding for skullspace inside his head?
Well,
He doubled back and dropped his camping gear, instruments, tools and handlights down the tunnels with the last working sensor. It seemed sensible enough, given that he had no way of knowing whether the events of last night would re-occur.
Once that was done, he approached the entrance with caution. Though the official reports he occasionally saw were far more complex and nuanced, the chief causes of death among his fellow Howards could be boiled down to either murder or stupidity. Or too often, both.
Whatever was happening on the surface seemed ripe for either option.
His outside equipment remained obstinately dead. Ask drifted to the point where reflected light from the surface began to make deep gray shadows of the otherwise permanent darkness. He should have been able to pick up comm chatter now, at least as garbled scatter.
Nothing.
There had been no more quakes. No more neutrino bursts. Whatever had taken place last night was a single event, or contained series of events, not an ongoing situation. Which rather argued against solar flares—those lasted for days at a time.
Stupidity? Or murder? Could those happen on a planetary scale?
Why, he wondered, had
It was the silence on the comm spectra that had put the wind up him, Ask realized. Even the long-wave stuff used for planetary science was down.
Quiet as nature had ever intended this planet to be.
He walked into the light, wondering what he would find.
The base camp equipment looked normal enough. No one had shot it up. Fried electronically, Ask realized. The rockhopper on the other hand, was… strange.
When you’d lived the better part of a thousand years, much of it exploring, your definitions of
Really, the rockhopper was just an air car, not radically different from the twenty-fourth century’s first efforts at gravimetric technology. A mass-rated lifting spine with a boron-lattice power pack around which a multitude of bodies or hulls could be constructed. Useless away from a decent mass with a magnetosphere, but otherwise damned handy things, air cars. The rockhopper was a variant suited to landings in unimproved terrain, combining all-weather survivability with a complex arrangement of storage compartments, utility feeds and a cab intended for long-term inhabitation. Eight meters long, roughly three meters wide and slightly less tall, it looked like any other piece of high-endurance industrial equipment, right down to the white and orange “see me” paint job.
Someone had definitely shot it up. Ask was fairly certain that if he’d managed to arrive somewhat earlier, he would have seen wisps of smoke curling up. As it was, sprung access panels and a starred windshield testified to significant brute force—that front screen was space-rated plaz, and should have remained intact even if the cab around it had delaminated.
Something had hit the vehicle very, very hard.
After a bit of careful climbing about, Ask identified seven entry points, all from a fairly high angle. He couldn’t help glancing repeatedly up at the sky. Redghost’s faintly mauve heavens, wispy with altocirrus, appeared as benign
