Seeker

ONE

… But what provided the truest sense of the antiquity of (the Egyptian tomb) was to see graffiti scrawled on its walls by Athenian visitors, circa 200 C.E. And to know the place was as old for them, as their markings are for me.

- Wolfgang Corbin,

The Vandal and the Slavegirl, 6612 C.E.

The station was exactly where Alex said it would be, on the thirteenth moon of Gideon V, a gas giant with no special characteristics to recommend it other than that it circled a dead star rather than a sun. It was in a deteriorating orbit, and, in another hundred thousand years, according to the experts, it would slip into the clouds and vanish. In the meantime it was ours.

The station consisted of a cluster of four domes and an array of radio telescopes and sensors. Nothing fancy. Everything, the domes and the electronic gear and the surrounding rock, was a dark, patchy orange, illuminated only by the mud brown gas giant and its equally mud brown ring system. It was easy enough to see why nobody had noticed the station during several routine Survey visits. Gideon V had just become only the third known outstation left by the Celians.

“Magnificent,” Alex said, standing by the viewport with his arms folded.

“The site?” I said. “Or you?”

He smiled modestly. We both knew he wasn’t good at being humble.

“Benedict strikes again,” I said. “How did you figure it out?”

I hesitate to say Alex ever looked smug. But that day he was close. “I am pretty good, aren’t I?”

“How’d you do it?” I’d doubted him all the way, and he was enjoying his moment.

“Simple enough, Kolpath. Let me explain.”

He had done it, of course, the way he always did things. By imagination, hard work, and methodical attention to detail. He’d gone through shipping records and histories and personal memoirs and everything else he could lay hands on. He’d narrowed it down, and concluded that Gideon V was an ideal central location for the exploratory operations then being conducted by the Celians. The planet, by the way, was given the Roman numeral not because it was the fifth world in the system. It was, in fact, the only one, the others having either been swallowed whole or torn from their orbits by a passing star. It had happened a quarter million years ago, so there’d been no witnesses.

But it was possible to compute from the elliptical orbit of the remaining world that there had been others. The question up for debate was their number. While most astrophysicists thought there’d been four additional worlds, some put the probable total closer to ten.

Nobody really knew. But the station, several hundred light-years from the nearest occupied world, would be a treasure trove for Rainbow Enterprises. The Celians, during their golden age, had been a romantic nation, given over to philosophy, drama, music, and exploration. They were believed to have penetrated deeper into the Aurelian Cluster than any other branch of the human family. Gideon V had been central to that effort. Alex was convinced they’d pushed well beyond, into the Basin.

If so, there was considerably more to be found.

Several centuries ago, the Celians had gone abruptly downhill. Civil war erupted, governments across the home world collapsed in chaos, and in the end they had to be bailed out by the other members of what was then known as the Pact. When it was over, their great days were also over. They’d lost their fire, become conservative, more interested in creature comforts than in exploration. Today, they are possibly the most regressive planetary society in the Confederacy. They are proud of their former greatness and try to wear it as a kind of aura. This is who we are. But in truth it’s who they were.

We were in the Belle-Marie, maybe twenty thousand kilometers out from the gas giant when the domes rotated into view. Alex makes his living trading and selling artifacts, and occasionally finding lost sites himself. He’s good at it, seems almost to have a telepathic sense for ruin. Mention that to him, as people occasionally do, and he smiles modestly and ascribes everything to good luck. Whatever it is, it’s made Rainbow Enterprises a highly profitable operation and left me with more money to throw around than I would ever have thought possible.

The thirteenth moon was big, the third biggest among twenty-six, the biggest without an accompanying atmosphere. Consequently it had been the first place we’d looked, for those two reasons. Large moons are better for bases because they provide a reasonable level of gravity without having to generate it artificially. But you don’t want one so large that it has an atmosphere. An atmosphere is always a complicating factor.

As far as we were concerned, vacuum had another advantage: It acts as a preservative.

Anything left by the Celians when they closed up shop six centuries earlier was likely to be in pristine condition.

If you could have thrown sunlight on Gideon’s dark rings, they would have been spectacular. They were twisted and divided into three or four distinct sections. I couldn’t be sure. It depended on your angle of vision. The thirteenth moon lay just beyond the outermost ring. It moved in an orbit a few degrees above and below their plane, and the result would have been a compelling not-quite-edge-on view had there been any light to speak of. The gas giant itself, as seen from the station, never moved from its position halfway up the sky over a series of low hills. It was a dull, dark presence, not much more than simply a place where there were no stars.

I put the Belle-Marie in orbit and we went down in the lander.

The moon was heavily cratered in the north and along the equator, with plains in the south streaked with ridges and canyons. There were several mountain ranges, tall, skeletal peaks of pure granite. The domes were located midway between the equator and the north pole, on relatively flat ground. The antenna field was to the west.

Mountains rose to the east. A tracked ground vehicle had been left in the middle of the complex.

The domes appeared to be in good condition. Alex watched them with growing satisfaction as we descended through the black sky. A half dozen moons were visible.

They were pale, ghostly, barely discernible in the feeble light from the central star.

Had you not known they were there, you might not have seen them.

I eased us in carefully. When we touched down I shut the engines off and brought the gravity back slowly. Alex waited impatiently while I exercised what he routinely called a surplus of feminine caution. He’s always anxious to get moving-let’s go, we don’t have forever. He enjoys playing that role. But he doesn’t like unpleasant surprises either. And that’s supposed to be my job, heading them off. I broke through the bottom of a crater years ago into a sinkhole, and he still hasn’t let me forget it.

Everything held. Alex gave me a big smile, well-done and all that. The talk about let’s move it along got put aside while he sat looking out the viewport, savoring the moment. You go into one of these places, a site that’s been empty for centuries or maybe millennia, and you never know what you might find. Some have been rigged with death traps. Floors have been known to collapse and walls to give way. In one way station, air pressure built up when something malfunctioned and it all but exploded when a Survey team tried to enter.

What you always hope for, of course, is an open hatch and a map of the premises.

Like they found at Lyautey.

I unbuckled and waited for Alex. Finally, he took a deep breath, released his harness, swung the chair around, climbed out of it, and pulled on his air tanks. We ran a radio check and inspected each other’s suits. When he was ready I decompressed and opened the hatch.

We climbed down the ladder onto the surface. The ground was crumbly. Sand and iron chips. We saw myriad footprints and tracks from vehicles. Untouched down the centuries.

“Last ones out, you think?” Alex asked.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. I was more interested in the view. A slice of the rings and two moons were visible just above the mountains.

“Something wrong,” Alex said.

“What?” The domes were dark and quiet. Nothing moved on the plain, which stretched to the southern horizon. Nothing unusual in the sky.

In the dark I couldn’t see Alex’s face, encased in his helmet. But he seemed to be looking at the nearest dome. No, past it at one of the other units, the northernmost, which was also the largest of the four.

There was an open door.

Well, not open in the sense that the hatch was ajar. Someone had cut into it. Had cut a large hole that we should have seen coming down if we’d been paying attention.

Alex grumbled something over the circuit about vandals and started angrily toward it.

I fell in behind. “Watch the gravity,” I said, as he stumbled but caught himself.

“Damned thieves.” Alex delivered a series of imprecations. “How’s this possible?”

It was hard to believe that someone had beaten us here because artifacts from Gideon V had never appeared on the market. And there was no historical record that the base had been found.

“Has to be recent,” I said.

“You mean yesterday?” he asked.

“Maybe they didn’t know what they had. Just broke in, looked around, and left.”

“It’s possible, Chase,” he said. “Maybe it happened centuries ago. When people still remembered where this place was.”

I hoped he was right.

It was usually the case that when archeologists found a ransacked site, the ransacking had been done within a few hundred years of the era during which the site had operated. After a reasonable length of time, people forget where things are. And they get permanently lost. I sometimes wonder how many ships are floating around out in the dark, having blown an engine and eventually faded from the record.

I should mention that we’re not archeologists. We’re strictly business types, matching collectors with merchandise, and sometimes, as now, hunting down original sources.

This had looked like a gold mine moments ago. But now-Alex was holding his breath as we approached the opening.

The hatch had been cut away by a torch. It lay off to one side. And there was only the lightest coating of dust on it. “This just happened,” he said. I’ll confess that Alex is not exactly even-tempered. At home, in social circumstances, he’s a model of courtesy and restraint. But in places like that lunar surface, where society is a long way off, I occasionally get to see his real feelings. He stared at the fallen door, picked up a rock, said something under his breath, and threw the rock halfway into orbit.

I stood there, a kid in the principal’s office. “Probably my fault,” I said.

The inner hatch was also down. Beyond it, the interior was dark.

He looked at me. The visor was too opaque to allow me to see his expression, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. “How do you mean?” he asked.

“I told Windy.” Windy was Survey’s public relations director, and a longtime friend.

Alex wasn’t appreciably taller than I am, but he seemed to be towering over me.

“Windy wouldn’t say anything.”

“I know.”

“You told her over an open circuit.”

“Yeah.”

He sighed. “Chase, how could you do that?”

“I don’t know.” I was trying not to whine. “I didn’t think there’d be a problem. We were talking about something else and it just came up.”

“Couldn’t resist?”

“I guess not.”

He planted one boot on the hatch and shoved. It didn’t budge. “Well,” he said, “no help for it now.”

I straightened my shoulders. Shoot me if it’ll make you feel better. “Won’t happen again.”

“It’s okay.” He was using his spilled-milk voice. “Let’s go see how much damage they did.”

He led the way in.

The domes were connected by tunnels. Staircases led to underground spaces. These places are always ghostly, illuminated only by wrist lamps. Shadows chase themselves around the bulkheads, and there seems always to be something moving just outside the field of vision. I remember reading how Casmir Kolchevsky was attacked in a place like this by a security bot that he had inadvertently activated.

The vandals had been relentless.

We wandered through the operational sections, through a gym, through private living quarters. Through a kitchen and dining room. Everywhere we went, drawers were pulled out and their contents dumped. Cabinets were cut open, storage lockers broken apart. The place had been ransacked. There wasn’t much remaining that could have been put up for sale or would have been of interest to a museum. We found ourselves treading carefully past broken glass and data disks and overturned tables. Some clothing will survive for a surprisingly long time in a vacuum. But we found only a handful of pieces, most of them victims of whatever chemicals had been in the original material. Or sufficiently mundane that nobody would have cared. It doesn’t much matter where a pullover shirt has come from. Unless it’s been worn by a legendary general or an immortal playwright, nobody cares. But the jumpsuits, which usually carry a shoulder patch, or a stenciled identity over a pocket, GIDEON BASE or some such thing, are worth their weight. We found only one, badly frayed. The inscription was of course in Celian characters, framing a tall, narrow peak. “The station’s emblem,” said Alex.

They’d also stripped the operations center. Electronic gear had been taken. They’d torn the panels apart to get access. Again, the objective had been to find parts marked as belonging to the base. It looked as if anything not meeting that standard had been yanked out and dropped on the deck.

Alex was in a rage by the time we were finished. All four domes, and the underground network, had been treated the same way. There’d been one exception to the general chaos. We found a common room, littered with debris. The deck was covered with projectors and readers, and data crystals that would have gone dry long before six centuries had passed. A broken pitcher and some ice lay in one corner, and a partially torn-up carpet had been dragged into another. But a small table stood in the center of the room, and a book lay open on it, arranged for the convenience of anyone seated in the lone chair.

“Well,” I said, looking down at it, “at least it won’t be a complete blowout. That thing will bring some money.”

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

It was last year’s edition of The Antiquarian Guide.

“Look as if the vandal knew we’d be here,” Alex said. “He’s saying hello.”