“No, you can’t,” the Doctor agreed. “Still, there’s something phoney here. I sometimes think it’s too bad we aren’t old order Roman Catholics. They know obedience to authority as well as anybody and, more importantly, once we had a few of these folks in confessionals we’d get the story.” He sat back and sighed. “Well, unless you have anything else, we’ll just have to keep thinking about this and hope we get another break. Anybody come back for more weapons?”
“No, sir,” Cromwell told him. “And that has us a little worried. If they have that much firepower and they don’t keep coming back to get more, it suggests they now have all that they require for whatever it is they’re planning.”
“Any idea how much they took out?” the bearded man asked. “Can we deduce it?”
“No, sir. Not from the way it’s stacked and distributed, and the cave floor is much too scuffed up. Worse, I’m worried that with our mag scooters and small transports we’ve managed to give them the means they didn’t have to distribute those weapons far and wide. Suppose they suddenly just decide to kill all the Arms of Gideon in their areas?”
“It would be ugly,” Doc Woodward agreed. “Still, I don’t think that’s the problem. What would it get them? We still have this ship with potential unknown to them sitting here, and we have a more imposing presence above with a population and weaponry we’ve not allowed them to know the size of.”
“Unless they think that, being people of God, we wouldn’t retaliate,” Cromwell suggested.
“Hmmm… Maybe I should preach a little tomorrow night on who Gideon was and what the three hundred did, eh?”
“It couldn’t hurt,” Cromwell replied. “Still, it would make the additional point if, say, we began wearing conspicuous sidearms.”
“No! Never! Not in an environment where we’re only guessing at a threat and have people listening and interested! How can I teach them to practice faith when such a move would clearly show us doing the opposite? No, not unless we are actually under threat will a single weapon be shown or produced. But I want a solid aerial grid survey of this entire continent using our best equipment, understand?”
“What are we looking for?” Cromwell asked him.
“Anything that shows up that just doesn’t fit. And let’s get it started as soon as possible! In the meantime, we proceed as if everything is normal.”
The survey began methodically, meter by square meter, from cameras in orbit guided by computers. The one problem even with the smartest computers, though, was that they were at their worst when told to look for “anything unusual.” Even though this planet was inhabited by people whose ancestry was definitely Earth, it was another world, and not enough was known about it to give anyone, human or machine, enough information to really know when something was “normal” or “abnormal.”
Still, as things went on as usual down below, and people went out in the fields to manage crops while others processed the harvest and still others cooked or looked after the kids, a few things did turn up, not close to the original landing site or the close-in villages but farther away, along the shores of some of the great internal lakes to the south and west of Mount Olivet’s landing site. The computers dutifully flagged the anthropologists, geologists, and other experts aboard the orbiting Mount Sinai.
“The remnants of older villages,” chief anthropologist Morgan noted. “Not abandoned or overworked. They look to be definitely destroyed, probably by fire.”
“There’s an exceptionally fertile area right in along the lakeshore, too, very near those ruins,” a geographer named Salkind put in. “And yet it’s not worked. Nobody is living within ten kilometers of these ruins. Interesting. And just as fascinating, there’s an exceptional amount of commercial-grade ore and some abnormal radiation readings in that area of the lake as well. I think we ought to send over a small expert away team and see what that’s about.”
“I agree,” Morgan responded. “Why not you and me, and some military and forensic types?”
“Oh, I’d like nothing better,” Salkind assured her. “I’ve been anxious to walk upon a real planet again after so long. I missed the last one, you know. Not much for me to do when all they’re trying to do is capture or shoot us. At least, over there, there won’t be any of the locals to even object.”
The Doctor okayed the expedition on the condition that they take some experienced armed security with them. He was very uneasy about the secrets of these people and he didn’t want any more ugly scenes just in case they misread things—as they had done more than once before.
The small team came down with full gear including waterproof probes that were smart enough to just let loose. Although none aboard the Mountain had ever seen a real fish, that’s what the devices were called. Trained and obedient fish at that.
While others went to take forensic samples and to carefully examine the burnt-out ruins nearby, others set up the land-based part of the fish remotes. They used a flat panel rather than a hologram for most of this, as it was better in filtering out distortion in the water; if need be, they could plug into the board and connect directly with the fish and “fly” it for more detailed and true three-dimensional studies.
The lake was deep, dropping off from a narrow shelf to almost six meters in just a few steps and quickly plunging down to a dark and irregular bottom that at its deepest point was at least one hundred and twenty meters. The irregularity of the bottom seemed to be natural; either this was a system of huge caverns that had collapsed after being too weakened by erosion to support the upper rock floor or there were ancient volcanic flows down there. Evidence suggested the former, although at more than a hundred and thirty-four kilometers across at this point it must have been one hell of a collapse if that truly were its origin.
It was much too dark in the lake to use ordinary lights; the fish switched to sonar as their main guides and kept a wide spectrum sweep on all available frequencies for the rest. If you could see something visibly, they’d transmit it to the land-based screen; if not, they would interpolate it as a visual scene.
At about seven hundred meters out, they came upon The Object. It was about twenty meters down, although the depth around it at that point showed over a hundred meters, suggesting it was massive.
Little visible could be seen, but the outline translated from the sonar suggested a broad, smooth, metallic surface with no obvious opening. Laser probes showed it to be smooth, with no lake growths or sediment attaching itself to the thing. Whatever it was, it was pretty much the same as when it went in.
“A hundred meters tall, half a kilometer long. No wonder it’s all collapsed around there,” the technician commented.
Thomas Cromwell studied the shape and orientation on the screen, chin in palm, then said, “Well, there’s their ship. A ragtag Noah’s ark, I’d suspect. It’s an old model, one of a half dozen or so that come to mind. It’s relatively small, too, but definitely interstellar. I’d say a converted corvette. Surplus military, probably cobbled together from junkyards or rebuilt from an abandoned Navy vessel. There’s no sign of an energy leakage anywhere?”
“No, sir. Nothing.”
“Then she’s almost certainly cold. Even with all that armor there’d be something. I don’t think it’s hidden there or placed there deliberately. You don’t come in and plunk yourself that deep in water, known or unknown, by choice. I think they crashed there.” He sighed. “Well, at least now I think I can deduce some of the mystery here. If we had more people, more equipment, and more time we could go in, locate and pull the record modules and see what the log says about her, but I don’t think it’s practical at this point. It’s possible they were removed anyway. Certainly they got the guns out, and who knows what else?”