“You’ll be assigned bunks in the quarters section…
“No one is to travel alone. Several of you are not part of a team. We’ve worked out arrangements for you, and we’ll tell you individually right after we finish this briefing…”
All of what the lieutenant said was common sense. Some of it I wouldn’t have thought about. Some, I didn’t see how anyone could not have figured out.
She came over to me first, after the briefing. “Ser Barna? Tech Nuovyl has been assigned to be your escort. You’re cleared to go anywhere you wish, but it’s recommended that you take frequent rests or stops…”
After listening to another round of cautions and instructions, I escaped.
Nuovyl was waiting outside the briefing room. Like many of the techs, he had shaved his head. His smile matched the cheerful voice. “Ser Barna!”
“You’re cheerful.”
“Yes, sir. I get to look at everything when I’m escorting you, and I don’t have to carry much. Do you want me to carry your gear?”
“No. Let’s dump my personals on a bunk first. I’m only carrying an imager.”
The quarters for the groundside team were very spartan. Rows of bunks in two bays. Everything recycled. Already, it bore the odors of an orbit station. I was glad to get back into my helmet and follow Nuovyl out through the lock and toward the cluster of towers closest to the flat area on which the shuttle had landed. -The suit light wasn’t that bright, but it was adequate.
I glanced back toward the shuttle. Figures in armor were carrying containers and loading them into the shuttle’s cargo bay. Under the lights, they were metallic shadows.
“Nuovyl… I need to circle back.”
“Yes, sir.”
I took several shots, all from different angles, trying to get in the figures in armor, the shuttle, and the more distant towers. With the lack of light, the towers would be shadowy at best, if they appeared on the image at all, but I could re-create them from other images I took later. It might be a composite, but the composite would be more truthful than a technically accurate image. What I was after was a fundamental contrast—the alienness of the armor and the shuttle opposed to the alienness of the towers. Once I was done, a viewer would see representations of two different civilizations, never quite sure which was alien and which was not.
Nuovyl didn’t say anything.
Before long we were headed back toward the first set of towers.
Even with vision enhancers built into the armor, and the suit lights, I could only see the lower part of the tower closest to me—even when we were less than ten meters away. The images that I’d studied on the ship had been silvery blue, but before me, they appeared almost totally silver, with the barest hint of blue. The tower was far bigger than I had realized. It had to be a good two hundred meters across. It wasn’t exactly circular, either, more oval I would have judged, but I really couldn’t tell. My lights didn’t show enough. I was going to need some higher-powered illumination to get any large-scale outside images.
“Sir… we have to go down the ramp through the ice there.”
“In a minute.” I walked off the plastrene-sprayed path and over to the side of the tower. I looked up. The tower curved outward from the base—not much, but noticeably from beneath. I took several images, not that they would show much, but the imager was more sensitive than my eyes, even with enhancers. There would be something of the tower in the final image.
Even when I put my faceplate almost against the wall, the surface appeared shimmeringly smooth, without a hint of damage. Up close, there was no hint of blueness at all, just silver. The silver showed no reflection, smooth and shiny as it looked.
I stepped back and took several more images.
“This way, sir,” Nuovyl pointed down a ramp, cut through the ice at a gentle angle.
We had to walk away from the tower to take the ramp downward.
“How did they figure out where the entrances were?”
“Where they were wasn’t too hard to see once they cleared away the ice and frozen air,” the tech answered. “There were places that looked to be entrances. More like nowhere else they could have been. Getting them open was harder. It took more than a week. They finally figured out how and where they could cut the latches, or whatever. Had to boost one of the cutting lasers almost to burnout.”
“The doors were that tightly locked?”
“No, sir. Something about the material flowing into itself, because the latches were different from the casings. One of the physicists—that was Dr. Lazar—he was amazed at the whole setup.”
“Can they open the others now that they’ve found out how they work?”
“No, sir. Only from inside. Unless they cut through.”
That seemed odd, but maybe the means for opening them from outside no longer existed.
At the base of the ramp was an opening to the tower. It was a circle with the base flattened. The high point of the center arc was only ten or fifteen centimeters above my head. I studied the door itself, which consisted of two sections. Each had been slid about three-quarters open. There was something about the door. I looked again. The door melded with the tower wall. It was neither farther in nor farther out than the wall itself. How had they done that?
“Sir?”
“The door. It shouldn’t open. It’s part of the wall.” I wasn’t expressing myself that well, but Nuovyl would understand.
“Yes, sir. They’re like that. The material, whatever it is, deforms to do that.”
“When it’s this cold?”
“It’s slower. It took almost half a stan to open this one just a few centimeters. That was until Dr. Lazar suggested using the laser on low power to heat it some. Then it opened real quick. Well… quick by comparison.”
I looked at the door again. Metal doors that changed their shape to open? After a moment, I took a series of images of the door from the outside, then from the inside. The material was seamless on both sides, with no signs of joins or joints.
Inside the door was a circular room about fifteen meters across. It would have been a foyer in a human building. The silver walls were smooth, and slightly curved inward. Floors, walls, and ceilings seemed to be made of the same material as the outside of the tower. There were no protrusions, no roughness—and no furniture. There was also no dirt, except smudges created by the boots of others in space armor. The surfaces held and reflected the suit lights. That created a faint illumination from everywhere. I didn’t see a single reflection of our images.
I captured more images. “Were there any furnishings, any equipment? Anything?”
“No, sir. Dr. Lazar doesn’t think they had anything like that. They wouldn’t need it.”
Wouldn’t need it? Why not? Because the walls or ceilings or floors could form anything? I moved to the nearest wall and pressed my armor-stiffened fingers against the wall. I could feel some give. It wasn’t from the gauntlets I wore. I could tell that. “Are all the buildings like this?”
“So far as I know, but I’ve only been inside a few, sir.”
Two corridors opened from the foyer, one to the right and one to the left. They looked like they paralleled the outer wall. I took the one on the left. The corridor was the same shape as the outer door, if larger in diameter and almost seven meters wide. The ceiling was low for the size of the tower, since I could reach up and touch it without stretching. There were no sharp edges. Even the corners where the walls melded into the floors or ceilings were curved arcs. Every surface was a curve or an arc.