The Night's Dawn Trilogy (412 page)

A cache of human machinery was spread out before the door at the end of the ramp: a couple of microfusion generators, mobile
cherry-picker platforms, industrial thermal inducer plates, hydraulic rams, and electromechanical actuators; all hooked together
with loosely bundled cables and flexible hoses. The archaeology expedition had used them to reactivate the massive airlock.
It was a quarter open, allowing them access to ring five. Four small jeeps were parked just inside, standard airless-planet
mobility vehicles, with large low-pressure tyres and a composite latticework chassis. Ridiculously dainty in comparison to
the engineering on display around them.

Samuel went over and inspected them, flicking switches on the dashboard. “I’m getting a response from the control processor,”
he datavised. “There’s some power left in the standby circuits, but that’s about all. The main energy cells are dead.”

“Irrelevant,” Monica datavised. She ordered her suit lamps to emit a high-wattage pulse, and readied the sensors. Her neural
nanonics memory froze the image when the lights flared. Buffer programs isolated the image for her to examine.

Not even the suit’s lights could penetrate the gloom right across the ring. As a result, the curvature effect was completely
lost. She was standing in a metal cave, walls, floor, and ceiling made up from millions of aluminium alloy panels, heat sealed
to the naked rock underneath and welded together. Plants had been grown up the walls while the arkship was occupied, vigorous
creepers clawing their way along metal trellises. Their leaves were black and wizened now, dead from lack of water and light
long before the heat seeped away into space. But the cold had arrived before they’d fallen in their final autumn, sprinkling
them with frost then freezing them into place against the dull metal tiling.

The ring’s ceiling had an analogue in human warehouse roofs; criss crossed with thick pipes and sturdy gantry crane rails,
giving the vast chamber an overtly industrial feel. Its illumination had been provided by thousands of large circular disks
of smoked glass, which peered out of the gaps.

“A winter wonderland palace,” Monica datavised. “Even if it was built by the devil’s own elves.”

“How could they live in this, for Christ’s sake?” Renato asked. “It’s just a machine. There’s no attempt to make it pleasing
or hospitable. You couldn’t stay inside all of your life, it would drive you insane.”

“Us,” Oski datavised. “Not them. They don’t have our psychological profile.”

“I expect they would find one of our habitats to be equally disenchanting,” Samuel said.

“The Tyrathca have arrived,” one of the serjeants datavised.

Everyone saw it through the sensor disk Monica had left up in level one. A flash of light from the airlock which led up to
the spaceport support column. Large jagged sections of the square titanium hatch flew into the corridor, rebounding from the
walls amid cascades of ice chips to twirl away in both directions. The Tyrathca emerged, and began moving in a slow canter
towards the entrance to the spiral ramp. They were in spacesuits, which made it hard to tell between breeders and soldiers.
Although the SII had tried many times to sell them programmable silicon suits modified to their physiology, they’d resolutely
stuck to their own original design.

The body of Tyrathca spacesuits was made from a tough flexible plastic, a silvery blue in colour, like metallic silk. They
formed overalls that were loose and baggy enough for the big creatures to slip into easily, with concertina-like tubes for
legs and arms. After that, instead of inflating them with oxygen, they were pumped full with a thick gel, expelling all the
air. Given how many limbs (and therefore joints) a Tyrathca body had, such a concept neatly did away with the problem of providing
multiple pressurized joints on every suit. In order to breathe, they wore simple tight-fitting masks inside the suits. Oxygen
tanks, a regulator mechanism, and a heat exchanger were worn in a pack along their backs, with two black radiator fins running
along their spine. Additional equipment was carried on a harness around their necks.

“Looks like subtlety is another trait we don’t share,” Monica datavised. “They must have blown out every airlock along that
first corridor to get inside. The sensor disk is registering a lot of gas motion in that corridor. They just don’t care that
Tanjuntic-RI is going to vent its remaining atmosphere.”

“If they don’t, we shouldn’t,” Renato datavised. “It won’t affect our mission.”

“They’re all armed,” Samuel datavised. “Even the breeders.”

The Tyrathca were each carrying a pair of long matt-black rifles, with coiled leads plugged into power packs on their harnesses.
Monica put an armaments library file into primary mode, and let it run through the catalogue for a match. “Masers,” she datavised.
“Fairly basic medium-output projectors. Our armour should withstand an energy strike from them. But if we get caught in a
saturation situation we’ll be in trouble. And they’re carrying other ordnance as well. I think I can make out some guided
rockets, and EE grenades on those harnesses. Human-built.”

“I wonder who sold those to them,” Oski datavised. “I thought the Confederation didn’t permit armaments sales to the Tyrathca.”

“Not relevant,” Samuel datavised. “Come on, let’s locate that control office the archaeology expedition found.”

Monica bled in her suit sensor’s infrared visualization as they moved off. The Tyrathca buildings materialized around her,
tapering towers of a pale blue luminescence, like flame frozen against the empty blackness which stretched out along the ring.
It was a cold necropolis, with every street and building identical, as if each section had been stamped from the same die
and laid out end to end. Gardens of tangled plants besieged each of the towers, their entwined stalks caught in the act of
sagging. Unrelenting cold had turned the vegetation as hard and black as cast iron. Fanciful leaves, strangely shaped flowers
and bloated seed pods had all been reduced to the same sombre shade of charcoal.

“Damn, those Tyrathca can move fast in low-gee,” Samuel datavised. They hadn’t been walking ten minutes, and already the Tyrathca
had reached the bottom of the first spiral ramp. A sensor disk showed one of them sweeping a portable electronic scanner over
the floor while the others waited behind. The group split into three, following the various thermal trails.

“I make that eighteen coming our way,” Monica datavised. “I think we’ve got four breeders. They’re slightly larger.”

“I will return to the entrance,” one of the serjeants datavised. “I will have time to lay several false heat trails before
they reach this ring. That should split them again. And I may manage to close the airlock door. Either way, it will reduce
the force that will ultimately pursue you.”

“Thank you,” Monica datavised.

The serjeant turned round, and walked back down the road.

“And then there were five,” Renato muttered uneasily round his respirator tube.

______

Ione wanted to know as soon as possible what the Tyrathca intended. The knowledge would certainly help her plan the kind of
tactics needed to keep them away from the team. The two diversion serjeants had busily laid their heat trails, meandering
between several of the big machinery chambers on the second level. That was when she found that the map made by the archaeologists
was not perfect. Several times, she’d had to use her inertial guidance to work out where she was when corridors didn’t correspond
to the indicated layout. It was a factor to consider when she sketched in her possible escape routes. The Tyrathca wouldn’t
suffer from such misinformation. Tanjuntic-RI’s exact topology would be known to them; passed down from generation to generation
via their chemical program glands.

One of the diversion serjeants was now hanging back from the archway that opened into a hemispherical chamber. It was a big
space, occupied by what appeared to be a refinery constructed entirely out of glass. Colonnades, spheres, bulbs, and minarets
formed their own miniature city, bound together with a tangled lattice of tubes. Individual containers were full of coloured
liquids that had turned to ice. Cracks were visible everywhere. If heat ever did return to this chamber, the whole edifice
would probably collapse.

There were three other entrances to the glass refinery, the one opposite the serjeant was where the heat trail from the ramp
led. Sensor disks on the corridor wall showed Ione the Tyrathca advancing steadily along it. Ione waited. She knew her suit’s
heat signature would be visible to the Tyrathca as soon as they entered the refinery chamber, shining with the tenacity of
a red dwarf star against the arctic corridor.

The first Tyrathca came in. Stopped. Raised the scanner it was holding, pointing it directly at her. Her suit communication
block picked up a burst of encrypted data. The whole column of Tyrathca came to a halt. Then two of them moved up to support
the first. They immediately fanned out on either side of the chamber, reducing her target opportunity.

Damn,
she said.
I think we can kiss the entrapment goodbye. The rest are waiting to see what happens.

It was to be expected,
Samuel replied.
They are soldier-caste, after all. Bred for conflict. The breeders don’t need to impart chemical programs of tactics among
them; such knowledge is instinctive.

The serjeant moved out of the shallow alcove which had been masking it. Ione was ordering the communication block to open
a channel on the frequency the Tyrathca were using when both the soldiers fired their maser rifles. The beams struck the serjeant’s
armour, almost overloading its energy dissipation web. She jumped, a movement enhanced considerably by low gravity and the
suit’s augmentation. At the same time she triggered the EE charges she’d placed above each of the chamber’s entrances. Tonnes
of rock descended in four separate avalanches, sealing the three Tyrathca in.

Ione climbed to her feet, and focused the suit sensors back. The jump had sent her soaring fifty metres down the corridor,
barely avoiding hitting the roof. Small lumps of rock were spinning and bouncing towards her in lazy motions. The sensor disks
in the refinery chamber showed nothing but a swirling cloud of dust, while the others showed the remaining Tyrathca retreating
swiftly. They started to split up, vanishing down side corridors where there were no sensors to follow them.

The bad news is they’re operating a shoot-to-kill policy,
she said.
I guess they’re not curious why we’re here.

That’s to be expected,
Samuel said.
You don’t evolve an entire caste devoted to aggression unless you have a great need for them. The Tyrathca social structure
is based around a clan hierarchy, they are extremely territorial. And we’re violating their oldest piece of territory in defiance
of their explicit instructions.

Yes. Well at least you know what to expect when they reach ring five. Now I’d better get out of here before they pop up from
some secret passage and shoot me.

______

The control offices were a series of rooms bored into the wall of ring five, fourteen hundred metres from the spiral ramp.
Simple open rectangles, plated in aluminium alloy, with the floor covered in composite. Each room was lined by bulky computer
terminals, with twin rosette keyboards for Tyrathca fingers. The walls above them were covered by long display screens to
project the arkship’s engineering schematics and navigational plot. To all intents and purposes, this was Tanjuntic-RI’s bridge.

According to the archaeology expedition there was less frost and ice inside, which had permitted them to reactivate several
of the electronic systems without much trouble. The control offices were on an independent environmental circuit with a much
reduced humidity level; and the airlocks were shut prior to the arkship’s final evacuation so there was no contamination from
ring five’s damper atmosphere.

The archaeology expedition had known the sealed rooms were important; they’d traced the arkship’s internal communication network,
and discovered the principal node was inside. With due respect, they’d installed their own hatches in the Tyrathca airlocks,
as they had up in level one. There was no worry about atmospheric contamination any more, not with all the water frozen out.
But they wanted to maintain the environmental integrity. This was the first human exploration through an artefact belonging
to a sentient xenoc species; ethics was a paramount concern—even though the Tyrathca were indifferent to such matters.

So, Monica and the others discovered, was someone else.

The large titanium rectangles leading to the control offices had been reactivated and opened, swinging back against the chamber
wall. Not only that, the safety interlocks had somehow been circumvented, allowing all three to be opened at once. The five
suited figures stood in front of the opening, scanning round with their sensors.

“This has got to be it,” Monica datavised. “The human hatches are still here. The archaeologists didn’t install them anywhere
else.”

“Has there been another expedition since the first?” Renato asked.

“If there was, then neither Earth, Jupiter, nor Kulu knew anything about it,” Samuel datavised. “I have to say that’s extremely
unlikely.”

“In any case, why not just use the archaeology team’s hatches?” Renato asked. “We know they work. It must have taken a lot
of effort to get these brutes open again.”

Oski stepped forward gingerly, using a hand-held sensor pad to scan around the airlock rim. “I can’t pick up any electrical
impulses. But this was opened very recently. There’s still some very faint thermal traces in the surrounding structure. They
probably had to warm the airlocks back up to their operating temperature to get them to function again.”

Monica resisted the instinct to whirl round and check the streets of the necropolis behind. Her suit’s micro radar was scanning
constantly for any sign of local movement. But the arkship’s chill had somehow managed to stroke her skin through the armour.
“How recent?” she asked.