Ancestor's World (27 page)

Gordon bowed to the Temple of Records female. "Elder Talteen, I'm pleased to announce that thanks to the efforts of Etsane Mwarka, our team Iconographer, and with the help of Professor Greyshine and Interrelator Burroughs, we

195

have established the presence in First Dynasty Na-Dina of ideoglyphs drawn from Mizari Four. A language spoken by the oldest members of the CLS."

That did it. The assembled Elders broke protocol in a riot of hissing, salt tossing forgotten. He didn't blame them. The discovery of Mizari relics in the Tomb had suggested the presence of off-worlders on the planet long ago, at the start of their own history. Now, the Mizari Four ideoglyphs proved that offworlder influence was greater than a brief stopover. It takes time to influence a language. And the Elders were clearly upset by the apparent influence on the start of their civilization.

Gordon tossed salt into the sand. Then water. When he tossed the water bowl into the pit, where it broke loudly, people finally shut up.

"Elder Talteen, we are still in the earliest stages of linguistic analysis of this new discovery. We are far from even a partial translation of the Tomb inscriptions. But we have made a breakthrough, thanks to the help of the new researchers from the CLS."

Mahree glanced at him, her expression pleased and thankful. Then she turned around and tossed salt. She stood. "Elders of the Council, be assured that I, Doctor Mitchell, and all his team are exerting our best efforts to honor your Ancestors by rescuing their remains, and their knowledge, from destruction by the new lake. We will keep you informed as new progress is made."

The Temple of Records Elder stared at Mahree. "You have made an old woman's final years her best years." The stare stretched longer than any Gordon recalled seeing among the Na-Dina. "I am pleased we sent two Philosopher-Historians to you, to participate in this great wonder." The female bowed low to Mahree, to Gordon, and then squatted down.

Elder Salween stood up. "I see no other questions." She looked to Mahree, dipping her head politely. "You and Philosopher Gordon are excused. Thank you for a... most interesting report."

196

Mahree nodded back. "It has been an honor, Elder." But in Gordon's ears, her words rang hollowly in the stillness.

Mahree sat in the pilot cabin of the shuttle she'd borrowed from Emerald Scales, watching through the thick quartz nose-windows as the camp's jumpjet lifted off the mesa top. Under autopilot control, the jet rose vertically, rotated, and flew off to the southwest, aiming for Base Camp and the landing field beacon. Gordon sat to her left, in the pilot's seat. Touching the control panel deftly, he brought online the shuttle's a-grav hover-and-lift engines, taking them up to a thousand meters elevation.

"Watch this," he said, grinning boyishly at her. He slapped On the main fusion drive. A string of lights flashed amber-red on the panel as the MHD

units pumped fuel through the sun-hot center of the craft's plasma bottle. The shuttle spat out a flaming tail of stripped hydrogen and oxygen ions.

As they surged forward, Mahree felt the sudden weight of their racing start for just a moment, until the inertial damping field came on. She tugged at the straps holding her against the copilot's seat, then glanced his way. "Gordon, did you put some bourbon in our fuel tanks?"

He laughed, a warm easy laugh that had come more often of late. "Nope, just reliving my youth. When I was in grad school in Tennessee, I used to fly cargo SSTO's down to Brazil during winter vacation." He guided the craft, tipping the nose up and letting the shuttle climb rapidly.

"Flying those crates paid for my tuition, and taught me how to compute a suborbital parabolic in my head. One hour to anywhere on Earth. That was the motto of those rigs. Two hundred fifty years old, some of 'em were, but they were tough babies."

Mahree noticed how the night sky, full of stars and the white disk of Mother's Daughter rising over the southern horizon, had now darkened. She pointed it out. "Gordon, we're already in the mesosphere. Why the high altitude? In straight-line flight we'd be at the camp in ten minutes. Or less."

197

He nodded casually, even as the slant of the shuttle steepened. "Yeah, I know. I thought you might enjoy taking the long way home, and seeing the stars up close."

She saw his hopeful smile, and smiled back. What the heck. They'd both been working such long hours, it was fun to have a break. "Sounds perfect."

Gordon grinned mischievously. "Want to get a close look at the equatorial volcanoes?"

Mahree was tempted, but such joyriding was a violation, in spirit at least, of the CLS promise to the Council to keep off-worlder flights through Mother Sky to the minimum needed for their work. "No, thanks, Gordon. The stars are clear enough from here."

She leaned back, seeing the glory of those stellar pinpoints as the sky turned almost black overhead. They were in the purple-black ionosphere, where the auroras played and temperatures dropped precipitously.

"Hey!" Gordon jerked forward. A yellow light had begun blinking on the control panel. "Mahree, that sensor is picking up Type Three neutrino emissions. From a fusion ship drive. Does Emerald Scales have a second shuttle?" She shivered, as if cold water had been poured down her neck.

Leaning forward, she scanned the strip of over-the- horizon sensor readouts.

"No, it doesn't. Does Nordlund have a shuttle?"

"Nope." Gordon's right hand moved the manual yoke forward. The shuttle's nose lowered and they began to curve around the planet in a suborbital arc.

"Mahree, who the hell is running a transport-sized ship drive? And on the far side of Ancestor's World at that!"

She looked at him, feeling her heart race. "The smugglers?"

"Damn it!" Gordon's jaw muscles tightened visibly. "Why didn't Emerald Scales pick this up earlier?" Mahree wondered about that, then remembered the relative positions of the Mizari freighter, their shuttle, and this alien intruder. "Solar masking, Gordon! Mother's Eye puts out one hell of a lot of neutrinos, like all stars. Even though neutrinos penetrate solid matter easily, we wouldn't pick

198

up a drive plant emission from the day side. Think of an ancient fighter plane hiding in the glare of the sun." She paused, thinking it through. "Unless the transport was flying off to one side of a line connecting Ancestor's World and Mother's Eye. At a right angle to that line. Then it would flare against empty space, making it stand out to our sensors."

Gordon nodded slowly. "Got it. Makes sense. And the only reason we picked it up is because we're at high altitude, gallivanting about on the nightside of Ancestor's World." He touched on a sensor screen. "The emission source is moving, going in for a landing on dayside. I'm going to follow them, see where they land. Maybe we can stop them, or at least get Krillen to alert local authorities."

"But what if they spot us?"

"We can avoid that, if we fly low enough. I'm going to full manual, so I can bypass the fail-safes."

Gordon pushed the yoke forward even more. Attitude jets flared at their nose, and under their belly. The view in the nose-windows changed radically.

Suddenly, Mahree was staring straight down at the wrinkled brown surface of Ancestor's World. She clutched her seat with both hands and swallowed.

As Gordon steepened their dive even more, Mahree's stomach lurched as the inertial damping field again lagged behind Gordon's abrupt flight changes.

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" she gasped, as the ground rushed up at them dizzyingly.

He grinned at her, his eyes--They're blue-gray, she noted with part of her mind--twinkling. "Sure. Trust me."

They fell...

199

Gordon watched the hull temperature readouts, gauging how far he could stress the titanium-beryllium hull of the shuttle. It was a damned fine craft, Mizari-built, and he had no doubt it would hold up. But if he wanted secrecy, he couldn't afford to look like a streaking meteor to someone on the ground.

He called to Mahree. "Would you handle the emission tracking? I've got to pay attention to my hypersonic flight envelope."

"Right," Mahree said, reaching out to the sensor strip. She tapped in a series of commands.

He concentrated on their plummeting dive down into dense atmosphere.

"Passing through the mesopause, coming up on the stratosphere."

"Tracking. Neutrino sensor is now showing all three types of neutrinos--

muonic, electronic, and tauic. The target is dumping large amounts of muonic neutrinos." Gordon tried to remember his college nucleosynthesis classes, couldn't, and chose not to worry about it. "What does that mean?"

His partner moved to touch another part of the panel, a data bank of ship types. "It means they're showing the drive emission signature typical of a C-Class transport."

200

The ship was about the size of Emerald Scales, then. With long-range metaspace reach, as well as the ability to make planetfall. Mahree frowned thoughtfully. "The neutrino mix in the drive emissions says transport, and the weakness of the electronic neutrinos suggests to me this is an old ship."

Gordon moved the flight yoke carefully, adding a slight curve to their dive.

"That big? I'd have expected a smaller ship. Hell, the most valuable artifacts don't really mass that much."

"A good point." Mahree tapped the data bank again. "Why the hell are the smugglers running something this big and this slow? It doesn't make sense."

"I don't know either," Gordon said. "We're passing over the Great Desert, heading for dayside. Now in the troposphere." He jiggled the yoke more firmly, and with his other hand tapped in a drive command. "Slowing to supersonic. I'm extruding my flight control surfaces." From the rear of the shuttle came a grinding rumble as stubby delta wings and a bobbed tail pushed out from the basic wedge-shape of the craft.

Mahree lifted a hand as sunrise glared suddenly through their nose-windows. "Ouch." She lowered her hand when the automatic polarization darkened the window. Then she looked his way. "Gordon, they're slowing to land. About nine hundred klicks ahead. Is there anything in that region?"

He thought a moment, recalling the basic geography of Ancestor's World.

"That's on the opposite side of the planet from Base Camp. It's a highland plateau area, inhabited mostly by remote farming villages. They get enough rain from the Mountains of Faith to farm, even without irrigation or river diversion. But it's really isolated."

Gordon leveled the shuttle's flight track into a straight- line one. The craft rattled badly as they curved out of their precipitous fall; then the vibration bled off. "In the troposphere now, moving at Mach Three. ETA about ten minutes."

201

He glanced down at their travel bags. "Open up my bag, Mahree. I packed the pulse-guns, just in case we ran into trouble from your admirer. I have a feeling we might need them."

She nodded, though he could tell she wasn't happy. "And now, hold on to your seat, Mahree. We're about to practice some close-terrain following. That ship must have radar and, though the ashfalls we're now flying through will screen us some, I prefer to drop into the radar clutter of the local mountains."

"Drop?" Mahree winced. "Ohhhh, Gordon. Not again!"

Mahree gulped as Gordon shed more altitude, sending them into a corkscrew flight line that needled through a narrow canyon. He jinked to the right around a red-glowing volcano, then flew them down the middle of a long rift valley bordered on both sides by snow-capped peaks. The transport had set down, her sensors said, about two hundred klicks ahead and to the southwest of their current flight track. She touched on a new screen.

According to the orbital map made by Scales, Gordon's plateau resembled a fissured tongue that struck north from the equatorial mountains. The ancient flood-basalt flow had long since been carved up by earthquakes, shear zones, strike-slip faults, and the watery erosion of time.

Krillen had told her that the reach of the Forty-Sixth Dynasty extended even this far, but the visits of Guard Marshals and their units did not make up for the fact there was no river barge access to this place, unlike the opposite hemisphere. Although the Royal Roads did connect this part of the planet to Spirit, and ships crossed the Northern Sea. Radio might make a difference, but the thunderstorms still played havoc with their own long-distance connection to Scales, let alone the Na-Dina's more primitive, low- powered version of radio.

Shaking her head, Mahree focused on the sunlit landscape of a new part of Ancestor's World. It was a rugged, weather-slashed place, where the green of a forest or a

202

meadow field flashed briefly, then was lost to black lava flows, red erosion channels, and sandy pockets that lay in wind-shadow.

Gordon pointed at a high-walled mountain pass. "That's our gateway to the plateau. Hang on."

"Hanging on," she gulped. The shuttle tilted over onto its side, flashed out of the rift valley and into the pass, then leveled out as Gordon pushed them down, down to within a hundred meters of the flashing red, green, and black landscape.

She gulped and nearly choked. "Gordon. I think I'm going to be sick."

He looked at her with concern. "Sorry. I'll take it easier."

Mahree swallowed, then breathed deeply as Gordon slowed the headlong rush of the shuttle. She checked the sensor strip. "They're just ahead, behind that ridgeline on the horizon. There's a"--she looked over and checked the orbital map again--"a bowl-valley beyond it, grassy it looks like, but without any local habitation. The valley is cut off from the rest of the plateau by steep erosion-cut canyons."

Gordon looked at her, his expression somber. "Sounds like a perfect smuggler base to me." He turned back to his piloting. "I'm taking us on a-grav up to that ridgeline, then I'm going to set down just below its crest.

There are scanner eyeshades in my bag. We can check this out from a distance, without walking up to their front door. Okay?"

"That's a plan," Mahree said, thankful for anything that took her mind off her stomach. She twisted in her seat, reached back, and pulled over Gordon's bag. She pulled out the two pulse-guns and their holster-belts, next the scanner shades, and finally a water bottle for each of them. She'd learned early in her stay here to never go anywhere on Ancestor's World without water and salt pills.