needed.
At the end of the first hour, Carson checked in with Jake. Everything was quiet at the shuttle. 'Here too,' he said.
'Glad to hear it. You haven't gone very far.' Jake seemed intrigued. 'What's out there?'
'Treasure,' said Carson.
Jake signed off. He had never before been first down on an unknown world. It was a little scary. But he was glad he'd come.
Jake had been piloting Kosmik shuttles for the better part of his life. It was a prestigious job, and it paid well. It hadn't turned out to be as exciting as he'd thought, but all jobs become dull in time. He flew from skydock to ground station to starship. And back. He did it over and over, and he transported people whose interests were limited to their jobs, who never looked out through the shuttle ports. This bunch was different.
He liked them. He'd enjoyed following their trek through the space station, although he'd been careful to keep his interest to himself. It was more his nature to play the hard-headed cynic. And this: he knew about the Monument-Makers, knew they too had roamed the stars. Now he was in one of their cities.
The heavy green foliage at the edge of the clearing gleamed in the bright midday sun. He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. And saw something. A glimmer of light in the trees.
It looked like a reflection.
He poked his head through the hatch and leaned forward and watched it for several minutes. Something white. A piece of marble, maybe. The warm harbor air washed over him.
They stopped by a crystal stream and gazed at the fish. The filtered sunlight lent an air of unreality and innocence to the forest. There were paths, animal trails, but they were narrow and not always passable. Occasionally, they had to back away from a dead end, or a steep descent, or a bristling thicket. Carson wore out his pulser and borrowed Maggie's.
The stream ran beneath a tapered blue-gray arch. The arch was old, and the elements had had their way with it. Symbols had been carved into the stone, but they were long past deciphering. Maggie tried to read with her fingertips what lay beyond the capability of her eyes.
She was preoccupied, and did not hear a sudden burst of clicking, like the sound of castanets. The others didn't miss it, however, and looked toward a patch of thick briar in time to see a small crablike creature pull swiftly back out of sight.
Beyond the arch, they found a statue of one of the natives. It was tipped over, and half-buried, but they took time to dig it up. Erect, it would have been twice George's height. They tried to clean it with water from a nearby stream, and were impressed with the abilities of the sculptor: they thought they could read character in the stone features. Nobility. And intelligence.
They measured and mapped and paced. George seemed more interested in what they couldn't see. In what lay hidden in the forest floor. He wondered aloud how long it would take to mount a full-scale mission.
There was no easy answer to that question. If it were up to the commissioner, they would be here in a few months. But it would not be that simple. This world, after all, could be settled immediately. And there would be the possibility of technological advantage. Hutch thought it would be years before anyone would be allowed near the place, other than the NAU military.
Jake climbed out onto the shuttle's wing, dropped to the ground, and peered into the trees. He could still see it. The clearing was lined with flowering bushes, whose lush milky blooms swung rhythmically in a crisp wind off the harbor. They were bright and moist in the sunlight. Jake's experience with forests was limited to the belt of trees in his suburban Kansas City neighborhood, where he had played as a kid. You could never get in so deep that you couldn't see out onto Rolway Road on one side, or the Pike on the other.
He understood that despite its peaceful appearance, the woodland was potentially dangerous. But he wore a pulser, and he knew the weapon could bum a hole in anything that tried to get close.
The day was marked by a sky so blue and lovely that it hurt his eyes. White clouds floated over the harbor. And sea birds wheeled overhead, screaming.
He touched the stock of his weapon to reassure himself, and walked toward the edge of the clearing.
They were fairy-tale trees, of the sort often portrayed in children's books with grimaces and smiles. They looked very old. Some grew out of the mounds, enveloped the mounds in their root systems, as if clutching whatever secrets might be left. The city had been dead a long time.
'Hundreds of years,' said Maggie.
The underbrush now was sparse, and the trees were far apart. It was a forest cast in summer sunlight, a vista that seemed to lose itself far away among the living columns.
They came over the crest of a hill and caught their collective breath.
The land dropped gradually away into a wooded gully, and then rose toward another ridge. Ahead, a wall emerged from the downslope, from thick, tangled brush, and soared out over the ravine. It was wide and heavy, like a dam. Like a rampart. It extended somewhat more than halfway across the valley. And then it stopped. Five stories high, it simply came to an end. Hutch could see metal ribs and cables. A skeletal stairway rose above the wall, ending in midair. There had been crosswalls, but only the connections remained. The top was rocky and covered with vegetation.
'Let's take a break,' said Carson. 'This is a good place to eat lunch.' They broke out sandwiches and fruit juice and got comfortable.
Everyone talked. They talked about what the valley had looked like when the city was here, and what might have happened, and how everything they had gone through had been worth it to get to this hillside.
Carson opened a channel to the shuttle. 'Jake?'
'I'm here.'
'Everything's quiet.'
'Here, too.'
'Good.' Pause. 'Jake, this place is spectacular.'
'Yeah. I thought you'd think that. It looked pretty good from the air. Are you still coming back at sundown?'
Carson would have liked to stay out overnight, but that would be taking advantage of Truscott. And maybe foolish, as well. Now, with the Ashley Tee within range, he was sure she could be persuaded to wait for the rendezvous. Which meant they had plenty of time to poke around. No need to push. 'Yes,' he said. 'We'll be there.'
'I read.'
Carson signed off, and turned to Hutch. 'How long will the Ashley Tee be able to stay in the neighborhood?'
'Hard to say. They'll have a two-man crew. They stay out for roughly a year at a time. So it depends on how much food and water they have left.'
'I'm sure we can scrounge some from Melanie,' Carson said. (Hutch did not miss the new familiarity.) 'I tell you what I'd like,' he continued. 'I'd like to be here when the Academy mission arrives, say hello, and shake their hands as they come in. By God, that's the stuff legends are made of. Maybe we can find a way.'
Jake could see a white surface, buried in the foliage.
He stopped at the edge of the trees, slid the pulser out of his pocket, and thumbed the safety release. The shuttle waited silently in the middle of the field, its prow pointed toward him. Its green and white colors blended with the forest. He should make it a point to get some pictures of the occasion. Jake's shuttle.
The Perth name and device, an old Athena rocket within a ring of stars, was stenciled on the hull. The ship was named for the early space-age heroine who had elected to stay aboard a shattered vessel rather than doom her comrades by depleting their already-thin air supply. Stuff like that doesn't happen anymore, Jake thought. Life has become mundane.
He poked his head into the foliage. It was marble. He could see that now. It was clean and cold in the daylight. But the shrubbery around it was thick and he could find no path. He used the pulser to make one.
He was careful to keep the weapon away from the structure. But he got tangled among the bushes and almost caught himself with the beam. That threw a scare into him.
It looked like a table.
An altar, maybe.
