Until they finished, Kris sat with her safety belt tight as she eyed her screens. Her inner ear screamed as “down” did a jig around her.
Another screen showed the pickets posted around the system. There were three jumps into the system, one to the planet they’d already looked over and two more to different systems. Those three had a total of seven jumps out from them. The Endeavor and the Intrepid were out, deploying low-tech warning buoys on both sides of those systems’ jumps.
The buoys inside this system reported all was well. That data could be obsolete for as much as a day before Kris knew it.
With a shrug, Kris put that bit of data away in a pigeonhole marked WORRY ABOUT NEVER. Until someone came up with a way to move or communicate faster than light, it was just a fact of life.
Kris turned back to her boards; they were coming up on the most remarkable thing about this planet. Slowly, it revolved into Kris’s view.
Below her was a plain of glass. Huge, it spread for hundreds of kilometers in all directions. It wasn’t a circle or a square but a blob, splashing out more here, less there onto the great plain that had been scorched and left to glaze over.
There might once have been a great river flowing down one side of it, but the watercourse had been directed back to the south and now flowed into a series of great lakes.
Circular lakes.
Kris wondered what was at the bottom of those hollows.
She wondered more about the pyramid rising in what could pass for the exact center of the glass plain.
Also sharing the table with Kris was Commander Penny Pasley, Kris’s intelligence officer. Beside her was her erstwhile boyfriend, Lieutenant Iizuka Masao, an intelligence officer of the Musashi Navy. The Wasp had fitted out under unusual conditions for a U.S. warship and still had quite a few officers drawn from the Musashi Navy.
On occasions Kris dreamed of having a plain old, standard Navy command. But then, she hadn’t bothered to have a plain old Navy career or come from a plain old anything family.
She’d have to make do with what she could get.
“That pyramid is made of solid granite,” Penny said. “That’s about all we could determine for sure.”
Kris turned to Professor Labao. “How long before your boffins can determine if it’s safe to go down there?”
“You can go down there now. I’m just not sure it would ever be safe for you to come back up,” he said. His nose was still out of joint after Nelly had pulled off what his scientists had failed to do.
“I would prefer to not homestead the aliens’ home world,” Kris said. “Please check it out most thoroughly. Report back to me in two days as to what the biological risks are down there.”
“We should be able to do that by then,” he admitted, and seemed to lose himself in communication with his computer. It was one of Nelly’s kids. If Kris wanted to know what was going on with her science lead, she could just ask Nelly.
She didn’t.
The Wasp’s orbit now carried it over the coast of the great continent and out over the narrower of the two great seas. Here and there were islands, but Kris wasn’t looking at them. Her thoughts were back on the glass plain.
“Nelly, put the area around the pyramid on screen four.”
Her computer did.
“Identify likely impact craters around the glass plain.”
Circles began to appear on the vast expanse of land. The screen zoomed out to show the entire continent covered with circles. Some overlapped. Some, in the lowlands, were filled with water. Others, in the mountainous areas, were ragged and imperfect. Even in the land covered with forest or jungle, the map identified impacts.
“Someone really pounded this place,” Jack said.
“And went in for overkill around that plain. Nelly, go back to it. Are there any impact craters?”
“No, Kris. As best I can tell, there are craters from atomic explosions, but that’s not enough to cover this entire plain with glass.”
“What did, then?” Penny asked.
“As best I can tell, the areas between the atomic hits were lased to the melting point.”
“Someone really wanted whatever was down there to go away,” Jack said.
“It’s all overkill,” Jacques put in. “A waste.”
“With these aliens, all I’m seeing is a lot of that overkill thing,” Kris said.
A thought was nagging at the edge of her mind. Kris let her eyes rest on the overhead for a long moment. Around her, her team seemed also lost in thought.
Then it came to Kris.
“Two planets slammed by someone or something that goes in not just for winning but for making sure that there is nothing left. Or, in the case of this planet, anyone left alive knows they’ve been defeated, and defeated totally.”
Around her, her team nodded agreement.
“Penny, you were sent to examine six systems that might have had the night sky we think we found imprinted on a ceiling in each alien ship.”
“Yes, boss,” Penny said.
“You came home after you found this one, the fifth you looked at.”
“Right, boss.”
“Is there any chance that the sixth system holds the civilization that hit both of these planets?”
“No boss,” Penny said, grinning.
“And why not?” Kris said. She might be wrong, but she wanted something better than a bald “No” to her line of thought.
“The Endeavor just finished picketing the next system out. It’s the sixth system, the one I didn’t get a chance to search. There is no planet in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone. All its planets are too close or too far out for there to be any liquid water on them. Sorry, Kris, there’s no easy answer for our puzzle. There are two planets in the right orbits to have life and that night sky. One’s been blasted clean of life and the other one is the one below us.”
“Darn,” Jack said with a grin. “Don’t you hate it when the easy answer isn’t?”
“Yes,” Kris admitted.
Below them, the Wasp was coming up on the large landmass in the northern hemisphere. Dark was approaching, but you could still see the west coast.
Now, in real time, impact circles appeared.
“Nelly, transfer the view of that coast to the fifth screen. Jacques, what do you make of the impact craters? Do there seem to be fewer on this continent, or is that just me?”
“It is not you, Kris,” Nelly said. “While the craters cover twenty-two percent of the other landmass, this continent has only twelve-percent coverage.”
“And they’re more strategic,” Jacques said. “Look. There’s a river flowing into the ocean.” His own computer generated a red dot on Kris’s screen.
“I’d bet money that a city grew up there. It must have been a big one, it looks like three overlapping craters there. Here you can see another likely port city.” Another dot appeared. “Only one crater for that one. I wonder if we might find evidence of outlying suburbs there. Though, if this did happen a hundred thousand years ago, there wouldn’t be much left.”
Jacques made more red dots appear on the screen. “Look, two rivers flowing into this circular lake. Only one flowing out. A river confluence is always a good city site. In early-civilization development, you’d have water trade flowing through it. Later, a city grows where the village and town was.”
“But why the hits on the mountains?” Kris said, spotting a range of mountains that looked to have been hammered.
“I can think of several reasons,” the anthropologist said. “A buried command and control center in a modern age. A mountain retreat, either for royalty or the wealthy of an earlier era. You make the call. What level of civilization do you think was here when they got hammered from space?”
Kris thought over what she’d heard. When she spoke, she did so slowly, letting each word come out carefully polished. “So. Did this planet attack the other one? Or did the other one attack this planet? And if this planet was the last one standing, why are we looking at a primitive world? What level of technology did you spot among the people here, Penny?”