Melchior's Fire

XII: FINDING WHAT YE SEEK

“They’re really not that tough, and they have one big advantage,” Jerry Nagel said as they stood around the maglev scooters dropped off with the packs, before Lucky Cross took the shuttle back up to a low orbit to sit and be ready just in case a quick extraction was needed.

All four below were in excellent physical shape, and all looked like they were ready to pass out even as it was, although Nagel and Sark were trying to keep up a brave front.

First, it was hot. Hotter than the worm planet had been cold, if not quite as windy, at least at the moment. The handhelds made the surface temperature where they stood at an almost exact thirty-seven degrees centigrade; not enough to cause physical problems for the healthy, only to make them feel like it would, particularly with a humidity level hovering in the eighty percent range. The light was also a bit strange and caused some disorientation. It was reflected light from the gigantic gas ball in the sky rather than direct sunlight, and, while it was bright enough, it was still less than optimum for eyes designed to see best in full daylight.

When the additional fifteen percent in weight was added, they all felt tired from the moment they hit the ground, and found it hard to move and difficult to do even routine things quickly. This world would take some getting used to.

Eyegor hovered a bit above the ground and griped, as usual. “I should not be exposed to this dust and these potentially harmful radiations,” it complained. “I am not designed for this sort of thing.”

“We don’t know what you are designed for,” An Li snapped, “but if it isn’t for this, then what good are you? Keep quiet and keep up or you can just stay here!”

In front of them sat the four maglevs. They didn’t look like much; nice, padded seats behind rather standard-looking handlebars with grip controls, and a readout panel with touchscreen centered between them. There were clips for packs to be attached, but Jerry wanted them to get the feel of the things first without complications.

“The trick is balance,” he told them. “The units will power up if you press these two control symbols at the same time,” he went on, pointing to the touchscreen. “As you can see, you can’t really push the two accidentally; you have to contort a little to do it, which is the idea. Power down the same way. The power cells inside are good for several years at standard gravity and shouldn’t be a problem, and they can be recharged with a power source, so you’re not likely to run out of juice.”

The body of the scooter was, under the saddle, basically a long and smooth rectangular block with no particular features; stirrups came down from under the saddle to provide foot and leg support. There were no wheels or runners, and the four units sat there quite simply resting balanced on their flat undersides.

The four of them had all chosen light face masks to filter out the dust and ash that blew around, but otherwise each was very individually dressed. Jerry was wearing an off-white pullover robe tied with a belt at the waist, with a hood hanging back off the neck, and a pair of calf-length boots. He was also wearing not much else, judging from what was revealed when he got on the scooter nearest him, although that didn’t bother any of them. They’d all been together too long to be titillated by the sight of anybody’s skin.

Sark wore a light khaki-colored tunic and shorts, also bound with a belt at the waist, a broad-brimmed hat tied under the chin with a strap, and ship’s utility boots, which were light and comfortable but might not be as insulating as Jerry’s.

An Li wore basically bikini style briefs and a halter, revealing a better figure than she usually showed, but also a more problematic one on a heavier gravity world. She did, however, wear a head scarf, mostly to control her hair, and high leather boots that might or might not be good for a hike but would certainly do if she could master the scooter. Randi kept her ship’s uniform, basically a light pullover shirt, jeans, and ship’s boots, and a baseball cap.

Jerry sat on the saddle, turned on the power, and then gripped the handlebars as the scooter rose about fifteen centimeters above the rocky ground and hovered there. If it made a sound, it was masked by the sound of the wind and far-off volcanic noises.

“The right control is your accelerator,” he told them. “Go easy on it, build to speed and then hold it comfortably. You can lock it in if you need to scratch or reach for something, but it’s not a good idea to use that much. The left is your levitator. Pull the two calipers together and you’ll rise from the default fifteen centimeters up to about five meters. Leave it in default for now; five meters is pretty high up to fall off a moving scooter onto hard rocks. You can switch them in function by simply flipping this lever on each to give the hands a rest or to reach for something with the right while still going. Pulling the levitator all the way in will cause it to lock and leave the scooter in a stationary position at whatever height you happen to be at; just remember that it’ll also override your accelerator. Whatever height you set, the scooter’s sensors will keep you at that height relative to the ground until told to do otherwise. You steer with your body. It’ll go where you lean or want it to go. Turning radius isn’t all that great, so practice a little with that. That said, a little steer goes a long way.”

“How come no safety harness?” An Li asked him.

“If you lose control, you’ll find that, on these, you’re better off jumping off, even at five meters and thirty kilometers an hour, than sticking with one. Remember that. Now, I’m going to take this one for a little demo around the area here. Watch me and see what I do. Then we’ll have each of you try it in turn, with me monitoring nearby, and then it’s everybody for themselves. Deal?”

He rose about five meters into the air and started forward. The fact was, it looked easy and fun, and by that point they were all grimy, dripping with sweat, and feeling all their muscles ache. Any way to let a machine do the heavy stuff was all right with them.

An Li volunteered to be next. She found the saddle hot against her choice of mostly bare skin, but she said she’d get used to it. Smaller than the others, she needed Jerry to adjust the handlebars and the stirrups, and now he showed them, with An Li aboard hers, the other functions of the panel—intercom, various sensors, things that were useful but not essential to the basic task.

An Li proved something of a natural once she got going, although she did have some problems adjusting to the speed control, and she almost fell off when she reached for her canteen with her right hand, thereby releasing the calipers and bringing her to a more abrupt stop two meters up than she expected.

Sark’s big body had some trouble with the subtleties of steering, and it took him a good half hour or more to get even the basics to where Jerry felt confident Sark wasn’t going to kill himself or, more importantly, them.

Randi Queson was somewhere in between, riding comfortably and well from the start but occasionally forgetting to do something critical and causing potentially dangerous problems. Still, Jerry was satisfied she could keep up if she didn’t do anything fancy.

Now it was time to attach the packs and instrumentation, practice going a little with those unbalanced loads, practice a little more going together at a consistent speed and altitude, and then decide they could do it.

Randi found that the worst problem was judging distances at any kind of speed at all. The light was just so strange and soft that it was disorienting.

The last thing to do before heading out was to hand out the guns. These were settable energy pistols for the two women, and precision needling guns, riflelike devices with long ranges held by holders on the saddles themselves, for the men. Neither needed a lot of skill; if you could see what you wanted to shoot, the logic in the guns would pick it up and you would hit it.

Salvagers with guns and maglev scooters, Randi Queson thought to herself with discomfort and amazement. My god! Where have we taken ourselves? She felt uncomfortable with the pistol in its holster on her belt, but she also couldn’t help but think that she’d have given her right arm for one of these back on the worm’s world.

Jerry put them in a kind of diamond formation, with himself bringing up the rear. “This way I can see all three of you and know if there’s any trouble,” he explained. “And you three can keep eyes on each other. Just remember that if you hear a beep from the pad then turn around, because it’s me that’s in trouble!”

Eyegor did not prove to have a lot of speed in this environment. Even though the scooters went at a maximum speed of under forty kilometers per hour, it seemed much faster when you were on one, and it also was considerably faster than the tiny levitator in the robot was designed to do, no matter how close in principle was the design of Eyegor’s propulsion unit and the maglevs. Jerry did find that if the thing was partly fastened to the saddlebags, it didn’t add much if any weight, and so he put it on An Li’s scooter to her right. If anybody could keep the little sniveler of a robot in its place, she could.

Jerry put Queson in the lead. He was more than confident that not only was she the smartest one in the group but also that she had real guts. That stuff with the worm and the absorbed colony had proven that. He punched the intercom. “Where to, Doc? You’re the lead.”

“The obsidian cliff,” she told him. “Let’s take a look at that transport, whatever it was, and the area at the base of the cliff. Whoever they were or are, they thought there was something worthwhile over there, too!”

“Besides, I really would like to get a look at that contraption,” Jerry Nagel added.

Queson was still not all that confident on the scooter and tended to keep it just two meters above the ground and at a leisurely clip. The ones behind weren’t thrilled, but they matched pace, and in about fifteen minutes they sighted the strange alien vehicle and pulled up to it and stopped. One by one, they lowered their scooters to the ground, throwing up some ash when the vehicles settled.

Nagel pulled a small pistol out of his pack and just stuck it in his belt. He didn’t think he was going to need it, but it was a precaution. The memory of running across those roofs being paced by detached units of the worm had never really left him.

Close up, the alien vehicle didn’t look as shiny and nice as it had in the probe pictures. In fact, it looked heavily pitted, although nothing seemed to have penetrated it, and one wheel was slightly off its axle due to a rockslide they hadn’t noticed.

“There’s why it’s stuck here,” Nagel pointed to the bum wheel. “They were heading along, either caused the slide themselves or got caught in a mild afterquake from the eruption, and they couldn’t go any farther. Anybody got any ideas about how long this thing’s sat here? I mean, are we looking at days, weeks, years, or centuries here?”

“Months, certainly, from the lack of any tracks and the buildup of dust on the leeward side,” An Li said, looking. “Maybe longer when you look at that pitting.”

“I agree,” Randi Queson added. “Months, maybe a few years, although not a horrendously long time. The pitting shows it’s been stationary a fairly long time, since the particles blowing against it now bounce off, but this slide’s not that old, and the eruption on the opposite side of the mountain is very recent. No renewed growth was visible, although it’s all over elsewhere, and there were no buildups to naturally channel the rain runoff. I’d say a year or two.”

The usually taciturn Sark looked over the tankerlike vehicle. “Where’d they get in and out, and where were they going?” he asked nobody in particular. “No door or window at all that I can see.”

Nagel looked under the tank, between the wheels. In spite of low clearance, he was pretty sure that there was some sort of exit there. “See? In the center. Rounded shape with a beveled edge. Most likely some kind of hatch. Either they were small or low to the ground, but that’s the way in and out for sure. As to how they see, well, maybe they don’t need a window. Maybe viewers are built into the hull of the thing, or it’s transparent when you’re inside and maybe flip a switch or something. Eyegor’s head’s a globe, but he sees.”

“Be funny if this thing wasn’t a transport but a water wagon or something,” An Li commented. “I mean, it looks like a tanker, and in here there are pools of standing fresh water.”

Nagel shook his head. “No, if they built this or had it to carry things, it wasn’t water. No need on this world. No, I think it was their version of our scooters and it just had some real bad luck right here.”

“You want to try and get inside it?” An Li asked.

“I’d love to, but with the dust buildup underneath narrowing the clearance even worse, and with that hatch looking shut, I’m not at all sure it wouldn’t be a long and heavy lifting kind of job. Maybe if we bring the whole C&C down and set up a base camp here, yeah, it’ll be worth doing with the equipment we have. Sark?”

“Dunno what the material is, but if it can be dented by rocks I can pull it apart,” the big man assured him. “Most of our equipment’s still salvage stuff, after all.”

“Then we’ll let it wait. I’m less curious about it and its owners than I am what it was doing here. Doc, any clues on that?”

“Not really, but assuming from the angle here that it was heading towards that notch in the obsidian wall about a half a kilometer on, we might as well see.”

An Li frowned. “Wouldn’t the rockfall have turned it around? Or maybe it was going that way instead of this way.”

The Doc shrugged. “Doesn’t make much difference if it was coming or going from there, that’s the interesting place. The other direction’s going into an older lava plain and then through towards the sea. And if it had been turned much it would have become unbalanced and tipped over on this uneven ground. No, I’m pretty certain that if it was a treasure hunt then the treasure, if it exists, is over there.”

“We’ve only got a few hours until dark,” Nagel pointed out, “and without the C&C and all our equipment and a ground defense perimeter I’m not sure I want to spend twenty hours in the dark here. Let’s follow the Doc’s nose and see if anything smells at the other end.”

“Oh, Jerry, you’re so romantic,” An Li responded sourly, but they all got back on the scooters and headed off in the direction the Doc was sure was the right one.

It was just beyond that notch, in a small rift, that they came upon a glittering fall of shattered but sparkling stones spread in a kind of rock field. They all assumed that they were simply shattered remnants of a dislodged obsidian boulder, but Queson decided to stop anyway and get down and take a look.

An Li sniffed. “Maybe you were right after all, Jerry,” she said. “Through the smell of rotten eggs that’s all over this place I swear I’m getting a strong directional scent of, well, it smells like lemon, or maybe lemon and orange. That’s crazy.”

It might have been crazy, but they all smelled it as they walked up to the field of shattered and glittering stones that lay, fan-shaped, in front of them.

“Whoa!” An Li said suddenly, and seemed to stagger a bit.

“Heat and gravity getting to you?” Nagel asked.

“No, it was, well, something very odd. I’m getting a whole series of sensations. Disorienting, creepy, I don’t know what. It’s getting worse as we come to the stones.”

“I’m feeling it, too, Jerry,” Randi told him. “Not as bad, but it’s there.”

In truth, Nagel had been dismissing some dizziness and occasional blurred vision as just heat and exhaustion and now he knew differently. “Li, stay here. Sit down, or lie down, and just breathe regularly in and out and try and get things back. Everybody else, let’s see what we got here.”

Randi Queson felt increasing effort just to get to the rock field, but she made it, then bent down and picked up several smaller pieces of whatever it was in her hand and examined them. “These pieces are definitely standard ordinary obsidian glass, common to all volcanoes,” she told them. “But these— I don’t know what these are. They seem to be embedded in shards of obsidian, or in one or two cases here entirely encased in it.” She took one, pulled down her mask, and sniffed, then replaced the mask over her nose and nodded. “Uh huh. Very much like lemon.”

“This one’s more orange, and there were a couple here that seemed more like flower scents,” Nagel told her. “What the hell is giving the scents off? Trapped gas that’s now being released?”

“I doubt it. If that were so, it would dissipate as the wind picks up like now, and it’s not dissipating. No, I think something in there, some compound, is actually giving off the odors. Be careful, both of you, about close smells. I got a real weird set of sensations when I sniffed that one.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Nagel agreed. “Li! You feeling better?”

“A little, since the wind shifted a bit away from me,” she told him. “Bring me one of those things. I want to take a look at it. Only one! I seem to have a worse reaction than the rest of you!”

Nagel gestured to Sark, who went back and handed An Li a fairly large one. She examined it, frowned, then said, “I think I know what these are! That swirl pattern around the single large facet in the center gives it away. It’s an unpolished, unfinished Magi Stone. I don’t remember any smells coming from the one Sanders had, but otherwise I can see the finished, set product in this one!”

“Maybe it loses its scent over a period of time,” Randi suggested, “or maybe it’s sealed when they cut and shape the gems. I hadn’t realized they were cut and shaped at all. Hell, maybe these smell and the others found before don’t. Most of them were found on derelicts anyway. Who knows what they went through or where they came from? Melchior, it looks like, but not here, not this place. This one’s too new.”

“That implies that this kind of stuff is fairly common here,” Nagel pointed out. “It means you’re gonna have to be very careful in the number of these introduced into the interplanetary economy. Too common and their value’s gonna drop like a stone. Still, if we can get a few bags of these, of various sizes, back with odors intact, we’re looking at more than enough to amortize the trip right here and now! And if Normie’s dumb enough to flood the market later, ours will already have been sold.”

“Good point,” Doc responded. “Still, while most of these will be put in vacuum storage, I’d like to keep a couple out just for tests and examination. I’d love to know what the hell causes these weird effects when you get close to these stones. The odor? Or is their makeup such that they’re receiving something, something weird, from someplace else? Who knows? With this many, I’d sure like to find out.”

“Interesting those aliens thought these were important, too,” Sark noted. “I mean, it can’t have the same effect on them, can it? And them ant things wasn’t wearin’ no jewels.”

“I think it’s a good point,” An Li noted, studying the small one in her hand. “Still, this is almost definitely what they were either going to or coming from, and they sure looked like they was gonna load up. Not much to eat around here, but it seems stable enough to bring in our equipment and pick up a fair load. As you say, we can control the output until, at least, ours are sold.”

Jerry looked around at the high walls of volcanic rock and dust and the big planet above. “Night’s falling, and pretty fast,” he said. “Everybody put a handful of these things in their packs and let’s get back to where Lucky can pick us up. We got twenty hours to shit, shave, eat, sleep, and analyze. After that, I think we bring the C&C module down.”

There was no argument on that.

The captain’s own labs isolated the compounds that gave off the odor in the stones, but neither those labs nor the Doc’s could do much more. The Magi’s Stones lived up to their reputation and shattered when you tried any sort of analysis on them. What jewelers could do was to shape the stones to a very small degree, mostly by shaving away the obsidian. Only in a few cases could the lightest of robotic hands split them along a single outer crystal boundary. Anything more, and you had dust that the analytical labs found little different in general composition from the obsidian plus a few odd and by no means consistent trace minerals.

Every crystal, though, appeared filled with microscopic bubbles of the gas that gave the sense of flavor. Not, it seemed, because it really did smell like lemon, or orange, or lilacs, or whatever, but because it was a mild hallucinogen that stimulated that sensation in the brain.

The hallucinogen might have explained An Li’s paranoia about the alien lurker, stimulated by Norman Sanders’s theatrical setup, and the sense of looking into the past, but it wasn’t all that clear if that was all there was to it.

An Li, using a sealed lab unit in which she was not physically sharing any space with the stone, nor breathing any air nor touching it except in a virtual manner by manipulating robotic probes through a head unit, nonetheless received visions staring at the stone Sark had given her, visions that also now came with odd physical sensations that ran from dizziness to tingling in all extremities and even to mild orgasm. And, after a half dozen minutes or so, she felt the sensation once more of Him and backed out fast.

Randi Queson tried the same tack, and got results that in some cases were similar, some different. Her visions were of darkness and something like spirits moving across the face of a frozen sea, suddenly bursting into a riot of colors and shapes that were beyond figuring out but nonetheless were beautiful and fascinating and, most of all, mathematical to a large degree.

Eventually she, too, felt the sensation of others becoming aware of her, of being able in some way to interact with her, but, unlike An Li, the presences were plural and carried with them no sense of menace, no voyeuristic violation. She had the distinct impression that they were trying to tell her something, or at least convey some sort of message or warning to her, but they were too unfamiliar, too alien, and if in fact they were sending and she was receiving she had no way to decode and thereby comprehend whatever it was they were saying.

Jerry Nagel had something in between, with a sensation of going through space, of light and dark, fire and ice, joy and sadness, but on a level he more sensed than could comprehend from the wash of visions. His overall sensation, though, was clear.

There was a war, he thought. Or, possibly, is a war. He couldn’t be sure. At times he had the sensation of time covering eons and distances beyond any human ability to comprehend, yet just as quickly he had a sense of seeing things now, or perhaps no older than yesterday. At no time did he sense anyone aware of him, but eventually the lightning-fast visions and sounds and smells and shapes overwhelmed him and translated into running a gamut of physical and psychological sensations in rapid-fire succession until he couldn’t take it anymore. When he bailed out, he found that he was soaked in perspiration, his muscles tensed into knots, and yet he was as turned on as he’d ever been in his life.

Sark seemed particularly troubled by the effect of the stones and would not take them on one on one, even though there was never any question of his courage.

Still, when they compared notes, little really made sense.

“Clearly the gems are broadcasting something, and that means it’s coming from somewhere,” Randi Queson insisted. “The question is, what is the source of it and why does it have this series of similar if unique effects on us?”

“Well, we’ve all wound up really turned on,” Nagel pointed out, “but we also have other things in common here. Fleeting but deep senses of hunger, thirst, fear, laughter, all the range of emotions and urges, right down to the bowels. That says to me that something’s messing with our minds. And if it’s random, as it seems to be, that something isn’t necessarily directing them. I’ve seen similar stuff in drug reactions.”

“But we factored out the gas,” An Li pointed out.

“Sure, we factored out the gas, but we didn’t factor out other things. This is something we’ve not seen before, and have experienced only in a few of these that survived and got back home,” the Doc said thoughtfully. “Now we know the brain is an electrical device, so to speak. It works by being able to store, filter, and then bring together in one central command area what’s needed for thoughts and ideas or to compel actions. Even the least of us is smarter than our ancestors because they were genetically bred or enhanced, so our brains are pretty damned fast, although never as fast as the fastest quasi-organic computers. Still, it’s fetch data and assemble, then act if A but not B is true. All that’s done by electrical signals. Drugs often interfere with those signals to get their effects, or drop blockers or substitutes into receptors to get others. I think something inside these Magi’s Stones is some kind of natural electrical transmitter, very small power but somehow on a wavelength our brains can receive. We get that effect, and inside our heads our brains try to make sense of the random signals coming in. There’s stimulation while it rumbles around in there trying to find a place to put it, and there’s hallucination as it tries to make sense of things. That sound logical?”

“You mean it really is all in our heads?” An Li asked, sounding skeptical.

“I think so. It’s this very effect, though, that makes many drugs so attractive to some people, and it’s what makes these things unique and valuable to others. I think after we sleep but before we go down again and start setting up we ought to swap stones and see what happens. If we get the exact same sensations from different stones, then it’s proof that the signals are random and our brains are doing it from the Magi’s Stone’s stimulation. If it’s wildly different, or if we get each other’s sensations, then there might be something external that they’re picking up. An Li’s seeing much the same thing in her stone as she saw in Sanders’s gem, though, makes me suspect it’s us.”

“Regardless, how the hell are we going to mask the effect so we can harvest the pile?” Nagel wanted to know. “And how far away can we stow them here so they won’t have any effect on us, or maybe even the captain?”

“I get nothing from the samples you brought up,” the captain assured them.

“Yeah, maybe, but we’re not talking about a kilo or so. We’re talking a ton of the stuff that went right through and along the labs’ neural nets,” Nagel pointed out. “I keep wondering if some of those derelicts from the Kings weren’t because of the shielding or wormholes at all, but maybe were because people went nuts.”

“Well, we’ll just have to try and be smarter than they were,” An Li put in. “I don’t like the damned things one bit, but if we pick up a ton of them and get out of here and back home, I do know we’ll have one hell of a nest egg for all our futures. We sure haven’t found anything else we can carry.”

“Maybe we did,” Jerry replied thoughtfully. “Hell, our primary job is salvage, and we’ve got a ship designed for it. If we can pick up that alien whatever, bring it up, and stick it in the hold, then we’ve got an extra-value cargo that might really make us all rich, particularly if there’s some remains of dead aliens left inside it.”

“Great,” Randi sighed. “Going back, which nobody’s ever done before in any case, with a ship stuffed with hallucinogenic gemstones and rotting alien corpses. What fun!”

“Nevertheless, at sun—er, at planetrise, Lucky and we take the C&C down to the surface and we get to work,” An Li declared. “Let’s get this over and out of here before one of those multiple ugly mountains down there decides it doesn’t like us, either!”