Echelon’s End
Book 4:
Sidereal Quest
By
E. Robert Dunn
PROLOGUE:
Hopelessly lost from her home berth, the Pioneer Pod Four had become a wanderer in the interstellar frontier, a hobo on a runabout with no foreseeable end. The crew of the Pioneer Pod Four had come to terms with a way of life where the unexpected had become the norm, where no experience, however bizarre, could be ruled out. They were stranded where the writ of Aidennian-based logic no longer ran. When the alien world they had crash landed on began to turn from a barren, hostile badland to a virtual wilderness beyond the grasp of imagination, Capel Perezsire, commander of exploration and research, reckoned soberly it was an answer to an unspoken prayer. But, he clamped down on optimism. His crew could think he was the cold-hearted bastard of all time, but he wanted emotion out of the equation as much as possible. The newly born jungle and one of its inhabitants had claimed the life of a crewmember … his son, Lunon.
The great, saucer-shaped ship, with its complement of over three hundred pieces of sophisticated hardware, was nearing a launch point. After months of repair and preparation, the Pioneer Pod Four was once again ready to join the glowing jewels on the black velvet pad of space. Once again, the refugees from the sundered planet of Aidennia would venture out into the cold reaches of the void and try and find a place to call...Home.
“Paradise Lost”
CHAPTER ONE:
Gliding through the blackness of deep space, the Tauron Imperial Strikecruiser Rue Saxer kept its mighty snub-nosed shape toward the remoteness of the Outer Rim. It’s one cycle mission in this sector, which was relatively lifeless and of little interest to anyone except xenogeologists, was almost complete. Other than the unusual composition of many of the planets' atmospheres, there was little to note about the Outer Rim sectors -- except that some areas of the war had flushed several System worlds' refugees into fleeing to the Rim's border planets. Its bridge was alive with activity, punctuated by a voice that called from the starboard-side crew pit through the din of background conversation and ship noise. "Ba’al Sirdar Eyer-le?" the voice said. "Message from the launching bay: the probe droidships are ready."
Eyer-le, leaning over the shoulder of the Tauron at the Rue Saxer's bridge engineering holomonitor, ignored the shout. "Trace this plasma line for me," he ordered, tapping a light pen at the schematic on the display.
The engineer threw a questioning glance up at him. "Ba’al --?"
"I heard him, Ensign," Eyer-le said. "You have an order. Make sure you tie stellar cartography files in with your quantum distribution scan."
"Aye, Ba’al," the other said carefully, and keyed for the trace.
"Ba’al Sirdar Eyer-le?" the voice repeated, closer this time.
Keeping his snake-like eyes on the engineering display, Eyer-le waited until he could hear approaching footsteps. Then, with all the regal weight that thirty cycles spent in the Strikeforce Fleet gave to a Tauron, he straightened up and turned. Eyer-le’s gharial tail twitched with controlled rage as his cordovan V-shaped pair of cranial crests trembled enough to make the young duty officer's brisk walk faltered. He came to an abrupt halt. "Uh, Ba’al --" He looked into Eyer-le's eyes and his voice faded away.
Eyer-le let the silence hang in the air for a handful of heartbeats, long enough for those nearest to notice. He took into consideration the age of the junior officer; his body scales just as green as his manner, his mandible tusks just nubs behind his prominent jowl pinchers. "This is a bridge of a Tauron Imperial Strikeforce warship. Routine information is not -- repeat, NOT -- simply shouted in the general direction of its intended recipient. Is that clear?"
The ensign swallowed. "Yes, my Ba’al."
Eyer-le held his ophidian eyes a few micronodes longer, and then lowered his crested head in a slight nod. "Now. Report."
"Yes, Ba’al," the ensign swallowed again, the hue of his emerald scales returning some. "We've just received word from the launch bay, Ba’al, the probe droidships are ready for their scans within the Outer Rim's frontier space for any refugees from the encounter with The System."
"Very good," Eyer-le nodded. "Tell the deck officer to launch and track each droidship's progress. Report anything interesting immediately."
"Understood, Ba’al," the ensign breathed, turned on his booted heels, and hurried off to his abandoned station to relay the order. His tail almost tucked between his scurrying legs.
From the Strikecruiser's enormous underside hull hangar bay, came tiny pinpoints of metal that instantaneously ignited their compact, ion-plasma engines as soon as they cleared the mammoth ship's gravity field. With a fierce determination, each probe shot out across the heavens toward a pre-determined destination in pseudo-motion, then was gone from sight within micronodes as hyperspace took them.
* * *
Pioneer Pod Four Log. Mission Status Report. Five hundred and fifty-five rotates since launch. Commander Capel Perezsire reporting. Because of the uncertainty of this planet's primary sun, and to prepare for any critical change that may affect the safety of the Pioneer Pod Four's crew, we have been assembling data on atmospheric levels and beyond. To collect the necessary data, observation satellites have been set up at a distance several kiloretems above this planet's surface. There, swinging in endless orbits around this planet, are twelve drone probes. For six consecutive rotates since their launch they have reported by all means of communication without incident. Each providing primary information needed to prepare a detailed information bank on this planet's companion suns and worlds. This information will hopefully prove vital on the rotate that the Pioneer Pod Four becomes spaceborne once again. The effects of gravitational loss, showers of meteoritic dust, and the fierce and undiluted radiation of this solar group's ternary stars -- are all being studied. However, as of 09:00 nodes, four rotates ago, all twelve satellites have gone silent following a massive solar flare eruption on the surface of this planet's primary star. This is only one of a long list of cosmic bombardments that have been plaguing this tiny rock with which we, the crew of the Pioneer Pod Four, have been clinging to life on. At present, all crew are on Yellow Alert status and all emergency systems are on standby with all major and secondary systems at top priority for diagnostic review and repair.
***
It was a hot world, a dry world, a brick-dust world, where the sky was always red. A supercontinent belted the baked orb and stretched from its south to its north poles and separated a paleo-inland sea to its east, from a panthalassic abyssal ocean to its west. The broad volcanic central pangean mountain range formed an equatorial highland that was the equatorial locus for a rainy belt. The volcanic mountain range moved northward into drier climates and the interior that became desert-like as the continued uplift of the mountain range blocked moisture-laden equatorial winds. A range of hills divided this area into northern and southern desert basins, where strong dry winds created huge sand dunes able to migrate unopposed across great distances. Wind-blown sediments usually well sorted, which also gave them a very good reservoir potential. The strong winds and high temperatures made the area very hostile. In some areas, the land subsided and was flooded by the shallow seas. The dry and extremely hot climate caused constant evaporation of the seawater, with the salt left as a seabed deposit. In this bleak landscape, the planetary inhabitants’ biggest battle was with the elements. A massive surge in volcanic activity was beginning to superheat the planet’s atmosphere, creating the highest temperatures yet known for this radically changing orb. Life on this planet was about to change…
It did not help that the planet held an elliptical orbit around a star held in its own revolution around two other stars, one of which was a bloated red supergiant. At any given time, one to three suns could be present in the primordial sky. The planet's primary star was a yellow blowtorch searing down on its landscape, too bright to look at even through tinted visors. It was enough intensity nearly to suffocate the planet under the oppressive heat. Shadows cast by the two early morning suns highlighted the fresh tracks of a side-winding adder in the sand. Following the marks, Lieutenant Retho Capelsire climbed a golden dune slope to where they ended beside a large clump of grass. Retho cautiously circled the grass, searching for signs of the viper's presence, but found none. Frustrated, Retho removed a field biocoder from his short-sleeved fatigue’s cargo-styled pants utility belt and scanned the clump. Still nothing.
"Where did it go, and how did it vanish so quickly? It must have buried itself deep into the root zone," he muttered to himself, rechecking his hand-held biocoder. "Damned heat levels," he cursed, clearing the sensors and then resetting them. The thermal readings that came back were still inconclusive. "I don't know which is worse on the sensors; the ambient air or the solar ultra-violet interference."
During the cycle and six months he and his family had been marooned in this desert region on this alien planet, Retho had spent many free moments walking in the shrinking dunes nearby. The desertscape was disappearing due to the rapid growth of the surrounding jungle that had metamorphosed as long-buried seedlings sprung to life after a plasma firestorm some eleven months past. Retho had originally been out scouting around for meteorite impact craters. Recently, small pieces of debris pelted the planet without any known origin other than outer space. His attention suddenly diverted from one such gout in the desertscape by the appearance of an object streaking across the sky, leaving behind a lingering trail of smoke as it dipped toward the hazy horizon. After retrieving his electron binoculars from his utility belt, Retho had followed its fiery course and watched intently as it had crashed on the butter-yellow dunes and consumed in its own explosive brilliance. That explosion had been somewhere near where he now stood; but, then came the diversion of the viper. Now Retho found himself engrossed in this planet's indigenous version amongst the sand and stone.
Retho occasionally encountered vipers side winding across the sand, but never did he find one lurking in the shrubs where he expected it to be. Succumbing to the facts that his biocoder presented, Retho closed the device and returned it to his utility belt. Seating himself at the base of a dune, Retho's careful eye focused suddenly in on a sand lizard endemic to the dune fields surrounding the Pioneer Pod Four's crash site. Slowly the lizard foraged along the bottom of the dune's steepest face, where food often collected. Stopping periodically, it pushed aside the sand with its broad, shovel-like snout, searching for seeds from grasses and succulents, as well as for insects and other small arthropods. Unsuccessful, it continued.
Suddenly the sand above it exploded, blurring Retho's vision. As his eyes refocused, he saw the lizard violently thrashing in the distorted maw of the adder he had been tracking. Soon the lizard was still. The snake unhinged its lower jaw and shifted the lizard from side to side, aligning it for its headfirst passage into its stomach.
Retho had seen many System species of captive venomous snakes and Aidennian vipers strike prey, and each time their speed amazed him, but nothing had prepared him for the stealth of this attack. While Retho's research focused on the ecology of the sand lizard, he had learned a great deal about the various strategies organisms on this planet had evolved to cope with the peculiar climate and topography. The remaining desert's shifting sand dunes supported very little plant life, which would have supplied shade and food and be the base upon which all other organisms depend. It also was doubly important, for plants not only provide energy, but were also the main source of water for most of the desert animals.
Because of the desert topography, the amount of time an animal could forage during the day for food and water was about half what it might be in a flatter, more vegetated desert. That was why Retho had to make the best of the short time allotted to make his observations. He had only approximately two nodes.
Retho moved his attention away from the dining viper to a cluster of cameloids situated across the desert expanse. They appeared to be unaffected by the rising heat. He knew this one-humped dromedary of this desert thrived in this the hottest and driest climate on this planet. In the cool of the night and early morning, the cameloids core temperature could drop to about ninety-two noches Heit, rising with air temperatures during the day to one hundred noches. As a result, the difference between a cameloid's body temperature and that of its environment was never as large as it was for other mammals, and so the flow of heat from the air to its body reduced.
The alien cameloids were not alone in coping to climate. The Aidennians shared a physiological adaptation to heat -- that being, a network of blood vessels, called a carotid rete, just below the brain. The rete insured that when core body temperature was high, venous blood draining the nasal cavity cooled arterial blood destined for the brain. That was not the only upper hand the Aidennian survivors had over the endemic species. Retho and his comrades, being bipedal hominids having very little body hair had the advantage of exposed skin having direct contact to the flow of air, promoting the shedding of excess heat by convection, and when necessary, enhancing the effectiveness of sweating. Yet, with all the superior adaptations to extreme climate that Aidennians had, in order to continue to observe, Retho knew that he could not stay as he was now. He could feel something odd in the air. The suns overhead were different -- not just unseasonably sweltering, but different. Intense enough to make Retho need shelter and try to ignore the scratch of thirst in his throat. Even though he had had plenty of water to drink, Retho was suffering from the accumulating heat, and began sweating profusely. He did not have fair skin and was not obsessive about avoiding sunlight for fear of skin cancer, but these suns were...deviant.
Reluctantly, Retho stood from his crouched position and moved back to where he had parked the convertible-styled, Roadster-class hovercar. Placing the shouldered, portable gear he had been toting in the back squab, Retho hauled himself up and into the driver's seat in one quick, graceful move. It was time to join up with his sister, pick her up from her observation outpost near the coastline, and then return to base camp with a full report.
Activating the small craft's hyperatomic motor, Retho eased the directional controls forward and the Getabout surged forward in a sudden rush of air. Although the region was only two hundred and twenty-seven square mets in size, it was really a mini-continent within the main continent, with a wide variety of habitats. Along the east coast were the remnants and the beginnings of rich tropical rain forests. In the south where the Pioneer Pod 4 crashed was a spiny desert, a dry land studded with prickly cactus-like plants and bulbous baobab trees. To the west were dry forests, and in the middle was a central plateau.
Movement from off-center to the Getabout’s course caught Retho’s eye, and he tracked the disturbance with the ‘car’s sensor pallet. It was a migrating synapsid theraspoid herd. Each was of a massive beige body with a spiked head, and bony armor developed to an extreme. These proto-mammalian creatures were sniffing out waterholes. It was possible they smelled water from several mets away; making any discovery the first drink the herd may have had in six months. To survive, the synapsids had adapted to squeeze out every ounce of nutrients from the dietary poor desert plants they grazed on in their treks across the sandy expanse in search of their next water ration.
Honks and snorts of the advancing herd reverberated across the desert basin, seemingly announcing the rabble’s arrival. However, it was more than mere posturing for the sake of bevy members, but also for those that shadowed the herd’s progress.
The herd was not alone. Carnivores, too wise to attack a group so large who knew how to defend itself, trailed at a safe distance. These were theriodonts, therapsid hunters -- lightly built saber-toothed carnivores, with long running legs that fed on the abundant dicynodont herbivores that shared the environment. It was a migratory standoff.
Within a few rotates after the therapsid herd uncovered a water source, the members would drink it dry and then move on. The ever-vigilant predators would euthanize any weak or sick individuals trailing behind. It was an age-old symbiotic dance. One that played out more and more, for suddenly more and more the water everywhere was turning up missing. Life quickly threatened by what was becoming a global draught.
According to Retho Capelsire’s calculations, the current planetary water crisis was obliterating millions of cycles of evolution. Life was on the brink. There had been a reprieve shortly after the demise of the planet’s ecosphere control network and subsequent firestorm the infused the world with renewed life. That all had begun to change in the last few months; it was yet still unexplainable – the planet’s atmosphere charged with volcanic pollutants snuffing out entire ecosystems. Mass extinctions were inevitable.
Disenchanted, Retho left the roaming armored synapsids and their stalking saber-tooth shadows to their own ends. The hovercar jetted on a cushion of air across some grasslands of the plateau as Retho navigated a steady and familiar course toward the beach. Along the way, he past rivers running red with soil stripped from the barren hills after recent heavy rains. The swelling waterways had managed to cut a devastating swath through the quadrant's unique wildlife and plants. According to recent research, the scientists onboard the Pioneer Pod Four discovered that the native vegetation covered only ten percent of the quadrant. The majority of the central plateau was still a barren landscape; erosion in the quadrant was as serious as anywhere. Every time it rained, the waterways ran red with soil.
Banking the 'Rover's Getabout away from the engorged riverways of the plateau, Retho guided the convertible aerofoil alongside a deep ravine carved into the western slope of one of the many mountains of the eastern sector. He cast longing glances at the approaching shadows. The prehistoric inhabitants who lived there also paid attention to solar orientation. The ship's environmental expert, a Bio-Type Syntheform affectionately known as BeeTee, uncovered evidence that the long dead occupants of this alien planet had taken advantage of subtle alignments of the landscape for protection from the three suns that bombarded the surface at critical times of the planetary cycle. Realizing that a narrow ledge in the canyon wall faced north, they had dedicated the entire site to the construction of storage units, digging small pits in the dirt and debris fallen from the overhanging roof of the rock-shelter. They lined the pits with sandstone slabs bonded by mud mortar and roofed them with beehive constructions of sticks and mud. This enabled the aliens to store food (corn, beans, pine nuts, squash) for a long time in a cool, dry environment in the middle of a sandstone hotbox. The crew of the Pioneer 4 had considered this process as an alternate for foodstuff storage if the ship's food preservation system ever failed.
The landscape unfolded around the hovercar as it skimmed further away from Base Camp. The meager tree cover to be found, consisting of low-lying junipers, pinon pines, and ponderosas, afforded little refuge from the black, jagged basaltic blanket. Not far below ground, however, were natural cavities that were oases of coolness. Lava tubes that had hardened around molten rivers of rock provided makeshift thoroughfares to those sanctums, into which the dense, cold air during the winter season settled and remained. While exploring these catacombs, Retho, Moela, and BeeTee had discovered ice that had formed, and depending on the cave size and shape and the location of its entrance hole, it could be preserved throughout a cycle.
The Getabout glided onward into a topographical depression that was quite familiar to the young scientist. He had known this place, he thought, before the wild orchards had grown; when it had been part pseudo-jungle, part volcanic barrens around acrid mudflats. He remembered it when the only sign of life had been their little group at the crash site's base camp clustered up against the rising hillocks of land at the end of the narrow valley, truly little more than a fingernail gouge in the marble wastelands of eternal desert.
Along the valley rim above a tributary of a local creek, Retho could see the results of his fossil prospecting. One of many sites he and the others had discovered was beginning to unlock this planet's history. In cuts and slopes, erosion had laid bare a bed of silvery gray volcanic ash -- the fossil-bearing formation -- sandwiched between layers of sandstone. It had been there he had discovered it, first of many gems.
He had been doing a routine scanning of the quadrant, dropping down to the streambed to explore one more gullied escarpment when suddenly high above his head he saw the skull, gleaming white against the weathered ash of the ravine wall. Finding the bank too steep to climb, he backtracked to the rim and dropped to a narrow ledge for a closer look. It was a baby rhinoceros’s skull about a retem long, perfectly preserved, its big teeth glossily marbled with the dark chemicals of fossilization. Retho suddenly remembered how his hands had trembled with excitement as he lasered the soft ash away from the skull. To his joy he found it joined to a string of neck vertebrae running back under the hill. He had stumbled back to Base Camp with, for once, a good excuse for being late to supper. "I've never seen anything like it," he told the others. "The whole animal could be there."
The next rotate's digging had uncovered a bonanza: Not only was the baby rhinoceros intact, but the articulated skeletons of three more rhinos, including a full-grown adult, also extended back in to the hill. There was a bone hunter's dream come true. In river-deposited layers, such as the sandstone above and below the ash, whole skulls are a rarity and full skeletons almost unheard of. Further testing of the ash bed yielded twelve more skeletons from an area no larger than average living quarters.
Although the fossil mammals, which consisted of rhinos, equines, cameloids, and others, all apparently belonged to previously named species, the new skeletons were by far the most complete remains of those creatures ever unearthed. Rarely found parts such as tongue bones, cartilages, tendons, and tiny bones in the middle ear all survived in exquisite detail and in their correct positions. Such small and fragile parts, as the tendons of a turkey leg, only partly calcified in life, and survived primarily because no action of water, wind, or earth movement ever shifted them after burial. Fragments of fossil birds were rare in rocks of this age, so it was likely that the skeletons represented totally new forms from the ash bed.
Retho mused to himself as he drove through the small valley at the cardinal joy of paleontology being the thrill of discovery -- being the first to see a new fossil. He found it funny because of the irony -- being the first to tell whom? Still, he remembered how Moela, Capel, Dara, and he had savored that special moment. Relished the time finding fossil feather impressions, finding a bird skeleton complete with small polished pebbles in its gizzard, porous bones of an unborn calf inside an adult rhino skeleton, extracting fossil grass seeds from a rhino's throat cavity, and unearthing the giant tusk of an elephant-like Gomphotherium.
The fossil quarry had been abominably dusty. Whenever a slight breeze lifted the powdery volcanic ash, they had to put on dust masks. Ash permeated everything. It was prickly and irritating to the skin and it ruined scanning equipment and surveying instruments. Most of the rhino skeletons were crouched with legs either tucked under their bodies or lying on their sides. A few had the ribs scattered where the gases of decomposition had caused bloating and explosion. Yet the overall impression was of a large herd of animals peacefully at rest.
So, what had caused this massive death? It had to have been something quite sudden and without notice. That was what frightened the Aidennians. This planet was known to excel in producing such phenomenon that ultimately led to being life-threatening. The first encounter with this bizarre, alien planet had been immediately after Retho's life had been shattered forever.
In the System Star Cycle of 6752 A.T., on planetary rotate .0719, the probeship Aidennian-System Transporter Saarien had been launched from Orbiter Spacedock Aidennia One bound for the Outer-System world of Mira-IV with orders to proceed with colonization. The Saarien ambushed less than ten rotates out by a Tauron Death Squad.
Retho and his family had been in stasis when the attack on the probeship had commenced. Awakened amid the Saarien's demise by the mission pilot Major Nicraan Matasire. Retho's eyes opened from suspended animation onto a surrealistic vision of hell. Even now, as he sped across the receding boundaries of the alien desert in the hovercar, Retho could still imagine seeing the Hibernation Center's air filled with smoke and hearing the cacophony of despair: the wails of klaxons, the crash of imploding sections, muffled weeping from his awakened family.
All that Retho recalled in those desperate moments of fleeing from the burning probeship's bowels in the Pioneer Pod Four were two thoughts that played across his sanity: Do not think, do not feel...
As Retho reviewed the memory, those two connected thoughts surfaced again; and, with some sadness, he found that he still could not think nor feel in reflection to his emotional status on the incident. To Retho it was meaningless. Irrelevant. All destroyed. Feelings were the most irrelevant of all; Retho was beyond emotion. In his mind, he lay dead beside all of his comrades, especially the Elders. He missed them the most -- for, they raised the offspring, nurtured the offspring, trained the offspring, and passed on to the offspring the wisdom of their kind. It was in trying times like this that Retho thought about them. They would know what to do, and he wished that he could go to them for council now.
The Elders were to have guided the Pioneer Pod colonists in their first cycles of their isolation away from The System. They had been familiar and loved figures, but now they were dead, killed in the Saarien explosion, and could offer their advice no more. The Elders and fellow Aidennians that had been massacred in the Tauron ambush, their bodies consumed by flame, still echoed hauntingly in Retho’s mind.
The bitter clarity of the Saarien's end filled his mind just then. The mammoth supership had exploded module by module like a small sun. Retho remembered allowing himself to be blinded by the light.
That kind of blinding light filled Retho's vision again as the flatlands gave way to the buckled, cracked surface of a lava field. Sulfurous smoke and fumes boiled into the air as the lieutenant snapped back from his reverie. Bubbling pools simmered around him. Retho let the hot breezes blow his au-burn hair into a ragged mane around his aquiline face. His eyes stung reddened and smoke and grit stained his cheeks.
The ground shook as a distant geyser of scarlet lava shot up and looped back down like the mating plumage of a flamebird; to burble beneath the planet’s crust. As an air displacement shock wave bubbled out across the plain, a plume of smoke rose like a towering anvil into the sky. The volcanic soot powdered the speeder’s windshield and dulled the reflective alloy of the fuselage, reducing the energy-absorbing abilities; yet Retho pressed forward, stinging eyes intent, gritty brow furrowed. The ash and smoke would color the suns-sets with flaring oranges and reds.
From his slightly elevated position in the hovering Getabout, he studied the mottled terrain with its black rocks freshly formed by cooling lava, orange-and-brown smears that indicated oozing sulfur compounds. He circled the raw blast crater and was amazed to note the extent of the destruction. The titanic explosion had knocked down countless monolithic rock formations, flattening them like crushed pebbles for a kiloretem around.
The overall ecological impact was incalculable.
Retho reduced the hovercraft’s speed and landed on a small patch of level ground outside the active lava area. Magma continued to percolate from beneath the scabs on the terrain, flowing out like hot pudding. Steam plumes rocketed into the sky whenever the viscous ooze encountered surrounded pools of standing water.
In one swift movement, Retho climbed out of the convertible speeder and gathered his pack containing needed equipment. The chaos around him seemed to exhilarate the scientist within.
The air was oven-hot on his face; each breath dried his mouth and seemed to sear his lungs. Drawing in pursed-lipped breaths, he trudged across the sharp rocks that were still hot; testing the resiliency of his boot soles. The sound envelope was a background roar around him. To one side, a bright splash of fresh lava flowed like spilled blood across the blackened earth.
Undeterred, he reached the edge of the molten river. Staring directly into the fury for a long moment, mesmerized by the awesomeness before him before he got to work. Unshouldering his pack, Retho opened it and removed a piece of stowed equipment. The device was a probe that resembled a small toy rocket with miniaturized fins at its base that mimicked bent legs, sharpened to points; balanced atop its slender shaft was an elongated gold ellipsoid filled with technology.
He switched on the probe’s remote scanner and recording hardware. After activating its force-field generator, which projected a shimmering protective sheath around the mechanical device, he gently tossed the probe into the air. It arced up and then plunged into the hot, scarlet current; then it dove downward.
From his pack, Retho removed a contact screen and activated it. Picking up the signal from the probe-device, he monitored its progress through magma as it proceeded deeper into molten chemical constituents. The probe’s integrated analyzers allowed it to follow the intense thermal currents even deeper.
While he continued to track the probe’s progress, Retho could feel the ground beneath trembling. All around him, the barren environment seemed to be shivering. On the hand-held contact screen, alarming indications of rising pressures in the planet’s core flickered in graphic glyphs. Each display reading revealed an inexplicable radioactive shift was occurring far beneath the crust. Elements were converting, creating strange mineral instabilities.
But, how? He had to know…
Another convulsive upheaval churned the lava river. Magma levels dropped, then bubbled up again in a fresh burst. Retho was astonished when the molten rock abruptly changed color, as if a vat of dye had spilled into it. Instead of an intense orange and scarlet, a gush of some new mineral compound appeared – a bright neon blue seeping into the flow like a spreading stain of pus. Retho was a novice geologist, but he knew he had never seen or learned of anything like it. Then the thermal currents swallowed up the blue, and the lava ran red again.
The dutiful probe swam deeper and deeper, into hotter and hotter territory. On the contact screen, the readings became even more damning. The situation in the mantle was worse than he had feared.
With determined touches, Retho gave the probe further instructions to extend its analyzers to their limits. Just as he had input the commands, the contact screen flashed with static as the signal vanished. The probe programmed to continue until the extreme temperatures terminated it.
Retho had known he had sent it on a suicide mission.
There was a moment of remorse for the device’s sacrifice, but it had served well. The vital, yet baffling information it had gathered showed that something unimaginably powerful but inexplicable was shifting deep beneath his feet. The larger question was to determine whether this was a fascinating curiosity or an impending planetary disaster.
Just from the preliminary glimpse of the probe’s transmitted data, Retho guessed that this problem was too large to ignore. He knew he more than likely would have to pull his sister, sire, and even the podship’s environmental specialist cybernaut into the effort of discovery beyond himself if the scale was as great as he imagined. Even though Retho was more of an environmental scientist than a geologist, more theoretician than engineer, his insights would be vital to the investigation.
Fumaroles and geysers continued to hiss around him, blurring his vision. All served to remind him of the changing face of the area; all more reason for him to get on with the rotate’s itinerary and get back to Pioneer 4.
Storing the probe’s data into the contact screen’s memory core, Retho closed the tablet and returned it to his pack. Shouldering the bag, he turned quickly and retraced his steps back to the parked hovercraft.
Once secured in the car’s driver seat, he powered up the levitation engines. It lifted into the lava field’s buffeting thermal currents. As the craft hovered away from the stark and dangerous plain, he saw another bright flash of blue; the new form of mineral magma burbling up from the planet’s depths.
It only took a few rote turns before he could see the dunes of the beach. Rounding over the beachhead’s crest, the sea spread to the farther horizon, cool and blue, with long gentle swells that steepened into surf as they ran up toward the land. Beyond the beach, the land was green here; shrubs and mossy-looking plants patchily sprinkled around. The primary yellow star and its twin rose high in the sky, flooding the ocean with reflective brightness. The red supergiant, companion star was low on the horizon behind Retho as it continued its course toward the ‘night’-side of the planet; the three suns gave the ebony-sanded beach a pinkish tint.
The hills cliffing the beach descended only slightly into a rolling plateau that went on until they reached the bluffs that overlooked the sea. A few hundred retems down was a narrow strip of beach, with the breakers surging in, it was there that Retho immediately spotted Moela's makeshift camp.
With a wince, Lieutenant Commander Moela Darasiress squinted her dark brown eyes, held her nose with a free hand, and gasped for air. While the planet lost it oceans, it still maintained a sea. Stumbling over the kelp-strewn beach, she quickly undid her field kit; preparing to take biocoder readings for a liver and stomach scan. Eight whales lay dead or stranded up ahead of her on the blackened sands.
Glancing at the biocoder's miniature screen as the small hand-held device's warble changed, Moela said, "One is still alive." It was almost a sigh of relief than mere observation.
Having no fear, the scientist moved to the face of water mammal. Its eyes were cloudy, milky blue, enormous. According to Moela's biocoder readings, the mammal had all of a few nodes left. Sympathetically, she stroked the flesh, divining some meaning. The animal breathed with a forced respiratory inflection, mucilaginous air grating through its blowhole. It was struggling against the gravity that was causing its asphyxiation. The creature's tens of thousands of kilograms not meant to languish on a rocky beach, crushing its internal organs. Moela stood before the mute and winsome eye -- the size of her own hand -- trembling for lack of any remedies.
"Why...What happened to all of you?" Moela mumbled, straining for contact, touching the whale beneath its eye. She was trembling, in a frenzy of instant pain. She emptied out her field kit, got to the tide pools, filled the case with water and rushed back to the only whale still breathing. She poured the remaining two quarts-worth of ocean over the skyward-side of its face. The eye responded, closing, and then reopening.
"I'm so sorry...I don't understand..." she said, sitting down before the creature, openly in tears. With genuine remorse, Moela stroke her melon-shaped abdomen that carried within its womb the seed of her race. It just seemed wickedly unfair the way life worked. Before her lay a dying creature, while within her grew new life.
Suddenly, the whale's breathing became faint. Its ribcage pressed against its flesh. Moela rose to stare at the forty-five-retem-long masterpiece. Checking her biocoder once again, she worked the controls by rote. As the tiny monitor lit up, automatically compensating for the coral-hue lighting of the suns-set and suns-rise, she played the device along much of its body. Symbols and numbers flashed on the screen, which to a nonprofessional would have meant nothing. Nevertheless, to her they meant a great deal.
It confirmed her initial fears. The mammal was dying, quickly and painfully, and it was beyond her power to save it. All she could do was watch; agonize with the creature through its suffering.
"You're starving!" Moela voiced softly. Wiping away tears that streaked her face, the Aidennian got hold of herself and studied the biocoder's screen as readings changed and new data presented itself. "Brevetoxin..."
The mammal went silent, jarring Moela's attention away from the instrument in her palm. The whale had died; its eyes remained open like its companions. Moela's free hand went into a fist as she reluctantly turned away from the huge corpse. A faint whine in the distance down the beach tickled her ears, and she looked up to see a familiar funnel cloud racing toward her small science camp. With anticipation, Moela swallowed her sorrow, packed up her gear, and jogged toward the reflective light fronting the sandy plume.