“So am I, Miss Moon,” Prael said, gritting his teeth. “But to get back on point. This does not appear to be a threat to the ship?”
“No, sir,” Bill said. “Not to us. But they’re a threat to somebody.”
“How’s that, XO?” the CO asked.
“Gotta make a Star Trek reference, sir,” Bill said, grinning faintly.
“I’ll survive,” the CO replied.
“If they got the right food, they’re worse than tribbles. Tribbles didn’t have claws that catch.”
“Nada, CO,” Bill said. They’d been at the process for a week, checking out all of the rocky planets and the bigger moons, even if they were outside the standard life-zone. “The only one thing that seems to be in this system was that installation the Hexosehr trashed.”
“So we keep looking,” the CO said. “Suggestions? Astro?”
“HD 243170 is a G0 type star, very similar to Sol in other words, about four light-years away. That would be my next suggestion.”
“XO?” the CO asked.
“Concur,” Bill said. “Main sequence stars have longer life-zone periods than any other type of star. Theoretically, they’re the most likely to have developed life. My only query is about that point. We’re looking for a star-spanning species; they could be anywhere.”
“In which case HD 243170 is also the closest star,” Lieutenant Fey pointed out.
“Which was why I concurred,” Bill said, shrugging. “We’re just going to have to start from here and expand out. It’s going to be sloooow…”
“Oh God,” Berg moaned. “I can’t believe I’m longing for some nice exciting paperwork.”
The guys in the platoons had been told to send anything that might be an anomaly on to their chain-of-command. Then they’d been told to send stuff that only really looked like an anomaly. Which meant that Berg was only getting a file every minute or so. He was currently looking at a suspicious hill, if by “suspicious” you meant looking remarkably like Little Round-Top, tree-cover included.
The nice thing about this shot, admittedly, was that the Blade had finally found an apparently uninhabited planet that looked remarkably like Earth must have prior to the advent of civilization. The closest possible magnification even showed trees that looked like… well, trees. Broad-leafed, coniferous… If there was ever an Earth Two, it was the planet they were currently surveying.
“I know what you mean, man,” Lieutenant Morris said. “I wish just one of…”
“One of what?” Eric asked, pulling up the next shot. This one, he had to admit, was interesting. It looked sort of like…
“Eric,” Morris said in a strangled voice.
“I think I’ve got…”
“I don’t think,” Lieutenant Morris said. “I know.”
“Calling that thing a ruin is a bit of an understatement,” Captain Prael said, whistling faintly. “That’s a… A…”
“That would be a city, sir,” Weaver said, looking at the zoomed back shot of the area. “A big one. A big one. And it’s not the first one we’ve spotted, just the largest to date.”
It was hard to tell that the collection of odd-shaped mounds was a city unless you looked at the penetrating radar. When those shots had been pieced together, it was apparent that buried under about forty feet of silt and loess was a massive urban region approximately thirty miles across. The larger mounds were piles of rubble from immense buildings over a kilometer across at the base. Foundations for lesser buildings could be seen stretching out from those megastructures.
The ocean was now well away from the structures but the city might have once rested at a seaside. One side certainly had that terminal look. That meant that the planet had, probably, been warmer given that in twenty million years a sun tended to cool, slightly. The planet currently had extensive icecaps which might have been liquid in that earlier time.
“Do you think it’s their home planet?” the CO asked.
“Sir, I wouldn’t begin to venture a clue,” Bill replied. “We don’t know what these guys looked like, how they lived, what they ate or what happened to them. But the point is, we’re looking at a ruined planet. One that has more territory than we can effectively survey just in this one shot. And one, by the way, that’s perfect for humans as far as I can tell. Gravity’s slightly lower, oxygen’s a tad higher. It’s actually paradisical.”
“You just said a big word, XO.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Gravity’s lower?” the CO said. “The Blade’s gravity is…”
“Even lower than that, sir,” Bill replied. “If we assume that they would design a drive that gave the same gravity as their home planet, sir, it actually mitigates against this being it.”
“I wonder what their home planet looks like, then,” the CO said.
“If we ever find it, it will be interesting.”
“The majority of the ruins are under forty feet of soil,” Captain Zanella said. “Which means we are not going to be digging; that’s way too much to move. What we are going to do is look for any surface remnants we might find. Platoons will cover their designated search boxes and we’ll keep it up until we find something or Captain Prael calls off the search.”
“Remember that scene in Star Wars where they’re chasing each other on those bike things?” Dupras said, weaving his board around a massive broad-leafed tree.
The area where the city had once been was covered in trees. They looked somewhat like hemlocks but rose nearly ninety feet off the loam-covered forest-floor. Over the external sensors could be heard the sound of birdlike creatures fighting for territory, calling for mates. A deep, rumbling croak like from a frog the size of a mastadon occasionally echoed through the woods. Nobody had spotted the source, but there were various bets on what it was going to look like.
“Yeah,” Staff Sergeant Carr said as they came to a large stream and started to parallel it. “And I remember them crashing a lot. So be careful.”
“I’m being careful, Staff Sergeant,” Dupras said, sliding around another tree. “I’m being so careful I’m the model of carefulness. But I gotta say, I wish this was as far as we were going. This place is great. Gotta get rid of some of the trees, though.”
“Yeah, I don’t get all the trees,” Lance Corporal Rucker interjected. “Where are the fields? It’s just, like, trees for miles and miles and miles. I was looking at the shots and I didn’t see one open area in this whole part of the continent.”
“The whole eastern seaboard used to be covered in trees,” Sergeant Bae, the Bravo Team leader, answered. “It’s been clear cut at least five times since you Westerners arrived. Ecologically destructive bastards.”
“And the Chinese aren’t?” Carr replied, grinning.
“Oh, hell, so was China until we clear cut it,” the sergeant replied. “But that was thousands of years ago, not hundreds, so it’s all shiny.”
“Staff Sergeant?” Dupras said, suddenly. “I’m sorry to interrupt your wrangling like an old married couple, but I think you need to see this.”
“It’s some sort of support member for one of the buildings,” Eric said, looking at the shots from the portable ground penetrator. The meter-square box didn’t have the power of the radar on the Blade so it only revealed structures down twenty feet or so. The member faded into the depths well below that.
The part that extended above ground, jutting out of the stream like a transluscent rock, looked like a log made of glass. It was apparently untouched by the elements, about a foot across and the portion that could be sounded for was at least forty feet long. It was a jutting enigma, a relic of a race gone for so long that their most massive works were buried under the dirt and silt of millennia, with only this glassine remnant whispering: We were here.