Shrike Nanowrimo 2009 Day 1
Prologue
Even at local noon, the light was poor. Had it been brighter it would have made an acceptable stand-in for emergency lighting. As it was it merely threw sharp-edged shadows across the ice ridges that cross-crossed the icy surface, highlighting cracks and crevasses. The real lighting was accomplished by the floodlamps the spacers had brought with them, banks of high-intensity lights that provided more light than the isolated worldlet had received in a billion years.
In the shotgun seat of the rumble buggy, Mompati Khama observed the icy features rolling by as the six-wheeled machine picked its way from where the Iris had set down. The lights fitted to its roll bar turned the red-flooded ice into a spectrum of pastels; without significant ultraviolet from the local star the various ices hadn’t been altered to some chemical gunk like tholins or the like that would make an utter mess of the machinery when they thawed. For that he was grateful.
As the buggy drove over a particularly hard bump that the suspension didn’t fully mute, one of the spacesuited figures in the back complained over the open radio channel.
“Hey boss, why’d we have to land so far from the site?”
The reply was pained, from one of the other spacesuits.
“Because at a fifty Kelvin these ice ridges are gonna be as hard as rock and we’re not dropping a couple seismic charges to make an LZ next to a bunch of postie pyramids and maybe piss off what’s inside. If you wanna fight off attack drones, be my guest, but let me blast off first!”
There was some laughter at the rookie who was undoubtedly burning red behind his face mask.
“Kid’s right though,” Mompati said. “If there’s anything bulky we’ll need to chop a better path or else melt some ridges so the Iris doesn’t rip her belly out setting down beside the site.”
“Aw hell cap, if we gotta blast another ice road like last time I’m asking for double shares!”
“Me too!”
For the next half-hour the main channel was full of the chatter of old stories being retold and dreams of untold riches being aired as the buggy got ever-closer. For the final ten minutes or so the tips of the posthuman pyramids that were the goal were intermittently visible over the ice ridges. There were muted cheers as the buggy skidded to a halt at end of the ice gulley they’d been following. Beyond them stretched a flat plain of blue-tinged water ice. Out of that plain rose a trio of pyramids of some frosted glassy substance. Scattered around them were smaller structures, some clearly complete-looking, others irregular and unfinished.
Mompati knew from experience that the outsides of posthuman structures was made from a tough diamondoid substance, rugged enough to withstand all but the most determined or powerful attempts to pierce it. That was a last resort though, and postie structures generally had some sort of internal access. Some of them even fell apart if you managed to get into their computer network and deliver the appropriate commands. Stepping out of the rumble buggy, Mompati bounce-walked over to where the pure water ice faded away into the mixed materiel that made up the rest of the worldlet’s surface. Chips sprayed by the rumble buggy’s wheels had bounced across it in the low gravity. His instincts didn’t say anything to him, and the various sensors available were reporting all green.
He turned back to face the gaggle of spacesuited figures that had jumped out of the open vehicle, each of them distinctively painted and all laden down with various pieces of equipment and armament. He waved.
“Hemppi, you’re with me. Rest of you, fan out. Let’s get this done before we need to charge our tanks.”
They efficiently bounced across the ice, some using portable sensors to peer more closely at the various structures and identify the live ones against the dead ones, while others set about erecting portable floodlights and refining the geosurvey values made from orbit. The first news didn’t take long to trickle out; almost everything he was quiescent or outright dead, with just a few structures still showing signs of internal power. That was pretty much as expected, but it was reassuring nonetheless. The posties – or their machines, anyhow – could be enigmatic or obtuse, but they were almost never cruel or bothered to guard inactive sites.
Buoyed by the unlikelyhood of encountering a hostile machine that would proceed to wipe them out or drive them off, the combat archaeology team put down their weapons and started to work faster. Soon a detailed sensor-fusion map of the site took shape in the buggy’s computer.
One of the smaller pillars in particular drew attention. While posthuman sites tended to be unique in the details, they shared commonalities. The pillar, ten times the height of a man and a third that in diameter was a typical example of a posthuman network server and remained one of the active structures. Underneath the exterior diamondoind cladding lights twinkled mysteriously, the sign of some form of work going on. Carefully one of the crew crew a red circle around the pillar, the thick vaccum-rated paint including reflective microparticles to make it even more obvious. It wouldn’t do to wander around and inadvertently trip something. There might still be some less than friendly machinery ready to be awakened.
Mompati was examining the latest data when his timer beeped. Six hours already?
“Alright, everyone back to the buggy. Looks like we’re good for phase one, so we’ll move on to phase two tomorrow.”
The following day the original rumble buggy was joined by two additional and more equipment was being rapidly put up next to the lights that had been left there during the local night, seventeen hours long. Seismic sensors began to draw a map of the subsurface, identifying where the various posthuman structures were anchored in the ice. Cables of various sorts were unreeled, connecting high-density batteries to an increasing number of light poles.
A few of the spacesuited men and women opted to climb a couple of the incomplete structures, their multicoloured spacesuits vibrant against cloudy white of the posthuman construction material. In the low gravity it was a work of moments to scale the ten meter mass. Once at the top they shone their lights downward into the mass; a simple test. The yells were all that Mompati needed to know they were in luck.
“Reverse rainbow! We’ve got dust!”
In a society that had annihilated the value of Gold and other precious materials by unlocking the vast treasure chest of the galaxy, the nanoprocessors known colloquially as ‘dust’ due to their size was the new Gold, the new petroleum, the new Uranium, all rolled in to one. Some were relics of the ancient Precursors, mysterious aliens that had gardened the galaxy a hundred million years ago. Others, like these, were the product of Posthuman machinery, deliberately aping the ancients’ technology and advancing their technical abilities an unfathomable number of years. It was what made interstellar travel possible, along with a whole host of other technologies that that were practically taken for granted in the 22nd century.
To people like Mompati on board hundreds of private survey ships across the Human-explored galaxy, it was as good as money in the bank.
Cheers went up all across the shared radio channel as the crew exulted. To find dust this early was a good sign, even if it turned out to be relatively corrupted. The men and women of the survey teams worked with an energized sense of purpose, bustling around as they sought the keys to unlock the Posthuman structures and extract what they were looking for.
By the end of the second day’s shift, several entrances into the main pyramidal structures had been positively identified. Sometimes the entrances were used for the movement of machinery, other times automated drones, still others for seemingly no purpose at all. Until an actual probe was sent in however it was difficult to know just what to expect inside.
Twelve hours after they’d arrived, two of the three rumble buggies turned and set back for the Iris, making better time now that the route had been properly mapped and driven over. The third remained as a tracked robot was dismounted from the now-depleted bundle of machinery in its bed. Trailing a long cable tail it trundled across the ice towards the nearest pyramid. As it made its way the remaining survey team inflated a temporary pressure tent and moved various electronics inside. Psyched by the easy discoveries, they were all on stims and would easy stay awake and fully alert for an Earth day if not more.
The tent was hardly luxurious, but being able to pop your helmet and gloves was relaxing after twelve hours. Meals were hurriedly wolfed down as the final OK’s were given by Mompati, halfway back to the Iris.
“Ok, this is it. We’ve starting the approach!” At the controls of the remote probe was Noreen Mahola, a graduate student from Alzahra University of Tehran who’d abandoned her academic path for the excitement of doing ‘real work’ in the Expanse. Surrounding her and gazing raptly at the camera screens were a half-dozen others ranging from their mid-twenties to their fifties. All were veterans of at least one previous ‘dig’, with the oldest, Seamus O’Kell of Cúchulain colony having done this for the past twenty years. As the probe entered the first tunnel some of them began to speak softly into data recorders. There was little to actually observe though, and much of it was banal observations, done simply for the log.
“The walls are still normal diamondoid. No reaction, can’t see any internal structure. Nothing on IR or UV.”
“It’s opening up ahead. Tunnel’s still got the same geometry.”
“Activate the main lamps. Let’s see what we got.”
A trio of floodlights activated on the probe, swivelling around and panning across the inside of the pyramid. The circles of white light swept around, synchronized with the cameras under control of the humans back outside. Monolithic objects of various shape and apparent composition were scattered throughout, and several large shapes extruding out of the pyramid’s inside walls suggested large machinery buried inside.
“Hold on, pan back to that block in the middle. No, the other one, to the left. Douse the lights, I thought I saw something.”
The lights went out and all the visual-spectrum monitors returned to near-blackness save one, in the middle of which twinkled pastel lights that slowly faded.
“Definately some sort of reaction. Still not picking up any noticeable activity though, must be a photic reaction. We might have a better idea if we can feed it power.”