Alien Arcana (Starship's Mage Book 4) (6 page)

“Not yet,” Damien told him. “Inspector Dragic will continue her investigation here. I need to take a look at the runes Kurosawa found. Can you show me to the alien base?”

“I can have…”

“Doctor, please,” the Hand said quietly, “you know the Strangers’ base better than anyone here.” If he didn’t, Kael wasn’t doing his job, and that wasn’t
quite
Damien’s impression of the man. “I can read the papers everyone has written, but that doesn’t tell me much. I need your take on this.”

The Andala Expedition’s leader sighed. That was apparently the right tack to take, though, as the man nodded his agreement.

“All right, my lord Hand. Follow me.”

As he led the way through the plain metal corridors of the research site, Kael waved a hand around genteelly, taking in his entire facility.

“Our quarters and research labs were built in modules on Terra herself,” he told Damien. “The best equipment from across the Protectorate was loaded into them, and they were delivered here by a chartered ex-military transport.

“There’s only one site worth investigating on the planet,” he continued as they reached a different airlock from the one they’d entered through, “so we set up right next to it. We have a covered tunnel that connects our site to the stranger base, but we concluded that pumping breathable air into the old base could cause irreparable damage to some of the artifacts.”

“Could you?” Damien asked, curious. “It’s still airtight?”

“Not entirely anymore,” Kael admitted, “but it definitely was initially. Whoever the Strangers were, they were no more able to breathe Andala Four’s air than we are. We’ve found several air intakes with filters that, well, look blocky and obsolete to us
now
, but they were
abandoned
over two hundred years ago.” He gestured to a locker by the door out.

“Grab a breather, my lord…if you want, I suppose?” he considered aloud, clearly remembering Damien’s arrival.

Damien chuckled at the administrator’s discomfiture but grabbed a breather. He checked over its telltales and made sure it linked to his wrist comp, then put it on.

A few adjusted straps later, and he was breathing carefully filtered air. Glancing back, he confirmed that his three trailers had
also
put on the breathers. They were here to protect him, but he figured that responsibility was reciprocal.

“After you, Dr. Kael,” he instructed the other man.

The older scientist led the way into the airlock and cycled it with the push of a button. Since the only real concern with the planet’s air was the toxin concentrations, the outer door opened immediately and Kael led the way into a tunnel of flexible plastic.

“The Strangers built their facility with local materials,” he told Damien. “The domes are local rock, pulverized and cast in a chemical matrix. High-tech concrete, basically. There are six of them,” he said, pointing through the translucent plastic. “Each is roughly six hundred meters across and a hundred high—this was not a small facility.”

“But according to your papers, it wasn’t a colony?” the Hand asked, studying the shapes as they approached the closest dome. The tunnel had several forks, other covered paths heading out to the three further domes.

“It was a colony in the sense that they clearly aren’t
from
here,” Kael replied, more energized now that he was talking about what was clearly his favorite topic. “The degree to which the facility is sealed from the local atmosphere tells us that, as does the lack of any
other
ruins on the planet.

“There are also utterly massive fuel tanks underground here,” he continued. “There’s no evidence of cloud-scoop infrastructure on the gas giant, but it had to be there. This was some kind of refueling station with some groundside recreation and shopping opportunities. There are a dozen facilities like it in human space.”

“That’s why we’re sure they had interstellar travel?” Damien asked.

“There would be no other reason to have a facility like this,” Kael told him. “This is the only place we’ve ever seen which was clearly settled by aliens from a different system—we’ve never found ruins that weren’t clearly from aliens evolved around that star.”

And ruins were most of what humanity had found of other alien races, Damien knew. A tiny handful of races had been discovered with tech ranging from Stone Age up to one mid–Steam Revolution species, but anyone beyond that had died out. The intact races were carefully watched by quiet Navy pickets to make sure nothing avoidable happened to them.

The evidence humanity had was that a single system species was
terrifyingly
vulnerable to natural disasters on an astronomical scale—but the Andala IV base was the only place they’d ever found evidence of a multi-system species.

Reaching the end of the tunnel, they reached what clearly had once been an airlock. Without power, it had simply been forced open and wedged in place. The presence of the flexible plastic tunnel meant no more of the planet’s air made it inside than had already been there, but from Kael’s comments, the interior had been the same as the outside, anyway.

“The upper layers in the domes are built much as you would expect,” the scientist told him, leading the way into the alien structure. Tiny but powerful lights had been strung down the main corridors, providing the light the ancient facility’s systems no longer could.

“There’s a few open spaces, but mostly they’re buildings. Built of concrete made of local rock, same as the domes themselves. Dimensions suggest a species not much taller than us but noticeably
wider.
” He gestured at a door as they passed, and Damien saw what he meant.

While the gap in the concrete was only a bit over two meters high, not even out of the range for human doors, it was almost as wide as it was high, a very different set of dimensions than for a “normal” door.

“What do we know about the Strangers?” he asked as he followed the other man deeper into the dome.

“Mostly? They didn’t like to paint pictures of themselves,” Kael said, his tone irritated. “We’ve gone through the entirety of four domes and were working our way down toward the points in the tunnels where we were blocked off. There’s a surprising amount of art—probably more than we would have—but most of it is abstract. What isn’t abstract is landscapes. Not Andala Four’s landscapes, but no creatures, and certainly no aliens.”

“Inconsiderate of them,” Damien agreed. They were underground now, and the lights were getting sparser. He appreciated the scale on which the Strangers had built their base quite a bit!

Kael pulled out a pair of flashlights and passed Damien one. He seemed to have forgotten the Secret Service men, but they all produced small but powerful lights from inside their suit jackets. It was rare, in the Hand’s experience, for his bodyguards
not
to produce whatever minor tool was needed from inside their jackets.

Since his own jacket was of a very similar style and design, he wasn’t entirely sure how they did it.

“We’re passing the area where we’ve completed our sweep and set up lights,” he said. “This section is…safe, but it’s also where the collapses occurred. Keep your eyes and ears open.”

“This doesn’t look quite the same as above,” Damien noted, pointing his light at the walls. The stone was smoother now, with even the minor casting-mold lines the dome corridors had.

“Laser-cut,” Kael replied. “Or, at least, laser-smoothed. We could build something similar, of course—not sure we could have when this place was built, though.”

“The Olympus Mons Complex was built around then,” Damien pointed out. “Much the same way: blasted out with explosives and then smoothed with lasers.”

“I didn’t know that,” the older man admitted. “Not many people go inside the Mountain, though, my lord Hand.”

“All relative, I suppose,” Damien said quietly. The Complex itself had a population of over a hundred thousand, and the city that sprawled across the slopes of the immense mountain was home to over twelve
million
souls.

“But we’re also not sure when this place was built,” Kael continued. “Easier to date when it was abandoned. We have a range of over a hundred and fifty years for when it was built—and at the high end…well, let’s just say it
probably
wasn’t built before nineteen fifty.”

The Hand whistled silently. That was
five hundred years
earlier. Before humanity had even launched rockets to orbit.

“What happened to them?” he asked. Andala IV was only twenty-two light-years from Sol. An alien facility had been occupied for between a hundred and
two hundred and fifty
years, basically in humanity’s backyard, but humanity hadn’t seen any other sign of the Strangers.

“We don’t know. They just…packed up and left. We have some evidence that it happened in stages,” Kael noted. “When they finally left, only one dome was in operation.”

He shook his head and gestured forward to where a bright light marked a collapsed tunnel and two guards carrying stun-guns.

“We’ve reached the collapse,” he told Damien. “Once we’re through here, we’re walking in spaces only a handful of beings have seen in centuries.”

Waiting for his Secret Service agents to check the other side of the admittedly intimidating and dark tunnel that Kurosawa had made through the cave-in, Damien spent the time studying the tunnel itself. It was impressive: the Mage had lifted everything into place, moving hundreds of kilos of stone, then flash-transmuted it to solidify it there.

Damien would freely admit that transmutation was one of his weakest points, something he generally overcame by the sheer brute force that the Runes inlaid into his flesh allowed him. Kurosawa’s arched tunnel was anything
but
a brute-force approach—but had still required an immense amount of power.

“I’m impressed,” he told Dr. Kael. “Kurosawa was powerful.”

“Martian and Mage by Blood,” the chief scientist replied, as if that answered the question. “My understanding is that he was very powerful, as these things are measured. Not sure how he could have been killed by magic!”

“He wasn’t combat-trained,” Damien said softly, considering the archway. “But his power would have allowed him a decent chance against any Mage that
wasn’t
.”

“What does that even
mean
?” Kael demanded.

“That you have a combat-trained Mage hiding among your staff,” the Hand told him. “Which suggests that this was hardly personal. Kurosawa’s killer was a professional.”

The Expedition head didn’t get a chance to reply before one of the two Secret Service agents who’d gone forward returned.

“The gallery we were told about is clear,” he told Damien. “We haven’t checked further, but we’ve got sensors on the entrances. Should be safe.”

“Come on, Johannes,” Damien told the doctor. “Let’s go take a look at the Strangers’ magic, shall we?”

#

The gallery was impressive from what Damien could see, which wasn’t much with the limited light of the flashlights. They picked out the railing of the galleries glittering off the silver band he presumed to be the runes Kurosawa had found.

“Give me a moment,” he ordered the other men. Even Kael paused, unsure whether or not to argue, long enough for Damien to channel energy through his Runes and conjure a cool-but-bright ball of light and pitch it into the air.

A moment’s concentration put the small artificial sun in the middle of the room, hanging a dozen meters above the dry ancient fountain. Murals in odd purplish colors covered the outer walls, and the half-rusted poles of long-ago vendors’ stalls and tents still stuck up from the ground.

With the room lit up, it was easy for Damien, at least, to pick out the signs of a Mage fight. Scorch marks covered the wall behind him and parts of the railing. It was also sadly easy to pick up where Professor Yoshi Kurosawa’s life had ended: a chunk of the edge of the old fountain was the reddish-brown stain of recently dried blood.

“His body, of course, is in storage at the base,” Kael said quietly. “We…well, we didn’t have the gear for forensics, so I ordered the lower levels guarded and kept for your people.”

“Inspector Dragic will go over both the body and the crime scene,” Damien told him. “Is anyone in the Expedition qualified to do an autopsy?”

“We have a couple of medical doctors, but…I don’t think so.”

“Then the Inspector will walk them through it,” the Hand replied with a confidence he wasn’t sure he felt.
He
certainly couldn’t run an autopsy.

Leaving the others behind, Damien walked up to the edge of the railing. The sensors on his breather, linked to his PC, told him the main function of the runes as he glanced at their results. The toxic levels of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide had been scrubbed from the air. The oxygen content was increased above levels humans would find comfortable.

While it had been made decorative and part of the life of the base, this gallery had been a magically secured emergency shelter, its air purified by a heavily secured and charged spell that had survived
centuries
without maintenance.

Damien was impressed.

Kneeling next to the stone railing with its strip of silver inlay, he looked at the runes and Saw. Where anyone else would only see the silver itself, he saw the flow of power itself through the silver. He also saw that while it
had
worked unmaintained for centuries, it wouldn’t do so much longer.

There hadn’t been much power left in the runes, and they’d taken damage in the fight where Kurosawa had died. What power was left was sputtering out, supercharging an effect that wouldn’t have been powerful enough to fully purify the air, but also reducing its lifespan to a matter of days.

He blinked, shaking his head. The pattern looked
very
familiar. Too familiar. He’d been a Jump Mage before he’d been a Hand—the two runes required for that job were still inlaid into his palm—and he
knew
what an emergency air-purification spell looked like.

It was strange. It looked the same but different, and he couldn’t put his finger on it. Like he was reading a sentence he knew in a foreign language but was still able to puzzle it out because they were both Latin languages using the same alphabet…

“That’s impossible,” he whispered, but he brought his PC up to take a photo and run it through his software regardless.

The piece of code he used had been custom-written by the current Mage-King before he’d taken his throne. Both Desmond the Third and Damien had worked on it since then, and it was able to recognize any arrangement of the seventy-six characters and fourteen connectors in the Martian Runic script and reduce them to a circuit diagram.

Normally, the Rune Wrights didn’t need it. The program had been made for Hands
other
than Damien, none of whom were Rune Wrights. But right now…he needed the confirmation.

A confirmation by the software happily popped up, unaware of how deeply its simple conclusion shook the foundations of human knowledge of the universe.

“Dr. Kael,” Damien said levelly. “You are certain no human was in here before Kurosawa?”

“Absolutely,” the Expedition leader replied. “We dated the rubble back when we were mapping the facility. The cave-in was just over two hundred years ago. The Protectorate barely existed then. No one had been to this star system.” He paused. “Why?”

“Because if we hadn’t found this behind a cave-in, sealed away for hundreds of years, I would say someone was playing a prank on you, Doctor,” the Hand told him. “But since we did, I’m afraid I know what Kurosawa died for.

“These aren’t alien runes, Dr. Kael. These are ours. Martian Runic.”

“That’s
impossible
,” the xenoarchaeologist replied. “I’m no student of runes, my lord, but even I know Martian Runic was only developed in the twenty-third century by the Eugenicists!”

“Earlier than that,” Damien said quietly. The Olympus Mons amplifier had, after all, enabled the Olympus Project to identify children with scraps of the Gift for their forced breeding program that had started in the twenty-one-fifties. “But much of the details of the origin of human magic was lost when the Mages overthrew the Eugenicists,” he admitted.

“But that is details,” Damien continued, staring at the runes. “Because you’re right. This facility uses the same runes we do and
predates human magic
.”

From the stunned expression on the scientist’s face—and his bodyguards’ faces, for that matter—told him everyone else had caught up.

Unlike anyone else here, Damien
knew
that Martian Runic was not an entirely efficient way of organizing magic. He’d discussed revamping the language with the Mage-King, but the current conclusion was that it was just too huge a project.

Aliens would have—
must
have—developed their own not-entirely-efficient language.

There was only one way these runes could be the same as humanity’s: if humanity had learned rune magic
from
the Strangers.