Horizon Storms (32 page)

On the fifth evening, another loud Attention tone rang through the camp, as it did several times a day. Hopeful and eager people popped their heads out of tents and stopped cooking and conversations to listen. “This one’ll be us, Orli,” Jan said. “I’m sure of it.” He’d said the same thing at every announcement for the past three days.

“Colonists from Group B, please report to the gathering ramp. Prepare for disembarkation through the transportal within two hours.”

The announcement repeated several times, though the colonists had hung on every word the first time. Her father slapped Orli playfully on the shoulder. “See, I told you, girl. If you guess enough times, you’re sure to be right eventually.”

The nearby colonists began moving about frantically, as if they’d been called to an emergency evacuation. Two hours was plenty of time to gather the few belongings she and Jan had carried from Dremen. Orli wrapped her synthesizer strips carefully in her clothes and put them in her pack, and her father scrounged together his clothes, files, sketchpads with ideas for fruitless inventions, and a few tools he’d brought.

They would all leave the temporary tents behind for the next wave of travelers. After their group departed, compies would clean and refurbish the standard living quarters; within a day, more people would arrive to fill them. Prefab buildings had already been shipped to each destination point.

Orli and her father hurried with the moving current of people toward the ramps up into the cliff city. There was no particular reason to hurry.

They still had an hour and a half, but her father wanted to be among the 192

first to go through the transportal, as if a few minutes would make a difference in staking the best claim for a homestead. Maybe he was right.

A few other pale-skinned hopefuls from Dremen joined those from various struggling Hansa colonies. They all stood around talking until finally the settlers were allowed forward into the labyrinth of Klikiss structures.

The stone halls were worn and scuffed. Many of the alien hieroglyphics and artifacts had been damaged or rubbed away by the sheer volume of people passing through.

Orli paused to look at the letters written by a clawed Klikiss hand in an incomprehensible language, but her father nudged her forward. “We’ll have plenty of time to study old ruins when we get to our new colony, girl.

Every place has them, otherwise we wouldn’t have a transportal on the other end.”

A grizzled man with shaggy hair and several days’ stubble turned to them. “Oh, the place we’re going has ruins, all right. And a big valley, tall granite walls, running water. We’ll be able to settle there nicely.”

“How do you know?” Orli asked.

“Because I’ve been there.” The old man stuck out his hand to the girl first, then to her father. “I’m Hud Steinman, one of the transportal explorers. I found Corribus only a month or so ago, and right away I decided I wanted to retire there. It’s perfect, the best of all the worlds I’ve been to.”

Her father beamed. “See, Orli, I told you so.”

Orli wrinkled her nose as the shaggy explorer stepped closer. He smelled sour and dusty, but he seemed friendly enough. Ahead she could see the colonists shuffling forward group by group toward a shimmering image displayed on what had been a flat stone wall. Loud voices echoed in the rock-walled chamber. Hansa managers told people to keep moving as each group marched forward through the instantaneous transportation system.

Orli recalled a day once, when she’d been a little girl, when her father had taken her to a crowded amusement park full of rides, holographic simulations, and old-fashioned roller-coasters. The wait had seemed interminable as they inched forward. It had felt as if they’d had to stand forever just to get to the roller-coaster . . . and the ride had been over in only a few minutes. But the thrill had made every moment of anticipation worthwhile.

Orli hoped the payoff on this distant Klikiss world—Corribus?—would be just as gratifying.

As they came closer, listening to the hum of alien machinery, the quick discussions of technicians, and the nervous excitement of the colonists, Orli could see the wall up ahead. People marched forward and then vanished, as if they had stepped off the edge of a cliff. Finally, the crackling stone trapezoid loomed in front of her, ringed by well over a hundred tiles, each one containing a strange symbol.

Hud Steinman turned to them with a grin, showing off bad teeth.

“Here we go. You’ll see what I mean.”

“Next!” the technician called. “Step up. Don’t delay the rest of the line. We have a lot of people to get through on this transmission.”

Orli clasped her father’s hand. He squeezed hers for reassurance, and they looked at each other, eyes bright. Then together they stepped through the transportal—and emerged under the sunny skies of Corribus and into a whole new landscape.

535CHIEF SCIENTIST

H O WA R D PA L AW u

The Klikiss ruins on Rheindic Co bustled with a clamor of crowds. All the chaos made it damned hard to get any work done.

Sent here on direct orders from Chairman Wenceslas himself, Chief Scientist Palawu had all the data files and equipment he needed, even authorization to supersede the technologists who had studied the first known operating Klikiss transportal since its discovery.

Despite Palawu’s supposed clout, however, the activities of the colo-

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nization initiative dominated so much of the time and space in the transportal chamber that he managed to study the system for only an hour or two in the dead of night. Figuring out how the transportals worked didn’t seem to be a priority for anyone but him.

Every few hours, Hansa staff rounded up colonists, then opened the transportal that corresponded to one of the numerous approved coordinate tiles. The pioneers filed forward, carrying their possessions on their backs.

Cases of supplies and overloaded hoverpallets, barely able to fit within the trapezoidal frame, drifted through the stone wall and vanished. Presumably they arrived at the other end, though it wasn’t immediately obvious. As he watched person after person step through the shimmering wall, Palawu wondered if Margaret Colicos had escaped this room in the same manner . . . and been unable to find her way back.

Some colonists passed through with excitement-bright eyes and smiling faces. Others wore doubtful or uneasy expressions, but momentum carried them along. After coming this far, very few changed their minds and backed away. Anyone who declined the offer at the last moment was required to pay an exorbitant fee to go back home.

If Palawu had been younger, if his wife had still been alive, if he’d still had something to prove, he might have considered taking the chance himself. Instead, the Chief Scientist sat in the control room and listened to loud conversations, excitement building to a pitch of hysteria.

Hansa managers noisily directed the exodus, while transportal technicians monitored the machinery, keeping careful notes, because even they didn’t understand the process. Oh, how Palawu wished he could have had the luxury of time and peace and concentration just to figure out the alien technology. Given a week to pore over the Klikiss artifacts, Palawu was sure he could decipher many of the basic principles.

But Chairman Wenceslas had been eager to unleash his new interstellar land rush, leaving the Chief Scientist with little choice but to do his work by gathering up crumbs of time and information. He found a chair and tried to remain unobtrusive as he called up files on his old datascreen.

For now he was just scanning textual notes, and he preferred using the slow and obsolete unit he’d had since his first job as a lab assistant and secondary engineer. His wife had given it to him.

He jabbed a key and called up Louis Colicos’s scattered log entries. It

amazed him that one old man had managed to get the first transportal working again, rigging up powerpacks and restarting the mothballed Klikiss machinery. After nearly ten thousand years, the alien equipment was in extraordinarily good condition. So far, only a few of the numerous coordinate tiles were marked black to indicate places from which explorers had not returned. Many of the coordinate tiles around the trapezoidal window remained untried—potential paradises. Or traps.

He switched to another file that displayed a detailed starmap, indicating sites of known Klikiss ruins and functional transportals. If Palawu could decipher the core technology, then the Hansa could establish transportals anywhere they chose, and the economic boom would increase by orders of magnitude. . . .

He also had access to high-resolution astronomical maps that displayed the sweep of standard Hansa colonies, Ildiran worlds, and Klikiss ruins, along with summaries of star types and planetary positions. Glowing dots marked where former stars had been violently snuffed out in recent months, their fires squelched by hydrogues in their incomprehensible conflict against the faeros. Though the blips on the starmap looked innocuous, Palawu shuddered at the implications—whole suns were being extinguished by the titanic beings!

On the starmap, he noted another marker in the Ptoro system, where a Klikiss Torch had recently turned the gas giant into a fresh burning star.

The Klikiss had developed that weapon long ago—to fight the hydrogues, presumably? The planet Corribus, one of the new colonization worlds, still showed the battle scars of that final conflict.

Following a hunch, Palawu collated the spectral readings of newly ignited Ptoro and added them to the records from the first test planet, Oncier. Knowing that his old datascreen did not have the processing power he required, he commandeered one of the larger Hansa computers not being used for transporting new colonists. He set the machine working on a fast and intense comparison.

If the Klikiss had developed the Torch, surely they must have used it at least once. Those artificially created stars would be short-lived on a cosmic time scale—a gas giant did not have enough fuel to burn for more than a few thousand years—but even after ten millennia they wouldn’t all be extinguished.

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With a thrill of satisfaction, he looked at the results. The computer found twenty-one stars with small burning companions that could well have been gas giants ignited by the Klikiss Torch, long ago. Twenty-one.

Were they ancient battlefields of the Klikiss against the hydrogues? So far, Oncier, Ptoro, and three other hydrogue gas giants had been obliterated in the current war, their funeral pyres still burning.

Though his discovery was amazing, Palawu soon came to the somber realization that even after using their Torch weapon twenty-one times, the Klikiss race had still been exterminated. What possible chance did humanity have?

545ANTON COLICOS

Inside the bright domes of Maratha Prime, Anton stared past the glare into the months-long darkness, feeling very alone.

With the return of Designate Avi’h to the mothballed vacation mecca, the skeleton crew had become energized, though they often ignored the unnecessary orders given by the chief bureaucrat Bhali’v. The two additional Ildirans among them helped strengthen the bonds of thism.

But Anton was separate from all that. The self-centered Designate had blithely announced the death of Anton’s father and the disappearance of his mother, as if delivering nothing more serious than a weather prediction.

Though he had feared the worst after so many years without news, Anton still felt as if the floor had dropped away beneath his feet. Now it was time for grieving, and for regrets.

He had never been particularly close to his parents after he’d grown up and gone off to pursue his own interests. They were proud of him, he knew. Margaret and Louis had read all of his scholarly papers, offered encouragement, attended his graduation and tenure ceremonies—an amaz-

ing thing, now that he thought of it, since they were so often at one archaeological dig or another—but Anton had always taken them for granted. The Colicoses had raised their son to be self-sufficient, just as they themselves were.

Now, against the dark stain of Maratha’s night, Anton saw his ghostly reflection in the curved glass: narrow chin, flat brown hair, squinting eyes.

When he’d come here, excited to be studying with Rememberer Vao’sh, he hadn’t even thought to bring along photographs of his mother and father.

Back in his university office, however, Anton kept quite a collection of their images, journals, and documents for the purpose of writing a definitive bi-ography of his illustrious parents.

Now, sadly, he had an end to the story. The piece he had always been missing . . .

“I have discovered another difference between humans and Ildirans, Rememberer Anton.” The rich voice of Vao’sh spoke from behind him.

“When Ildirans are troubled, we seek the companionship of others. But you clearly choose to be alone.”

Anton turned to see the other historian standing in the doorway, enfolded by the light. He forced a wan smile. “Oh, I’m just trying to deal with how things have changed. I’m swimming in memories and drowning in realizations I should have had years ago.”

He’d been eight years old the first time he accompanied his parents on one of their archaeological expeditions. The planet was Pym, a world with termite-mound ruins built by the lost insectoid race. Pym’s air was dry and the sky was clear every night, revealing a myriad of stars. The support workers and university associates spent the evenings discussing esoteric historical questions, comparing notes, and occasionally telling bawdy stories.

Besides himself, there were no children in the camp. The other archaeologists were much older, their sons and daughters already grown up and gone off to school or careers, so Anton was left to himself, a fifth wheel, glad to be with his parents but not quite belonging.