Resurgence (8 page)

She said, "If the Builders were active all over the galaxy, that explains a lot of things." She added, "Kallik and Atvar H'sial can tell you—" Then she paused.

She had been going to say that the Hymenopt and the Cecropian probably knew as much about the Builders as she did. Unfortunately, Kallik and Atvar H'sial were aboard the
Have-It-All
, along with Nenda, J'merlia, and the hulking Zardalu, Archimedes.

She glanced up to the display. The flashing beacon of the other ship was pulsing at a higher rate.

"E.C., that's a Bose entry signal. They're about to make another transition."

"That is correct. Another, and the final one."

"So soon?"

"As I said, this last stage of the journey is short and simple. Unless they return a warning drone after Bose node entry, our own transition is only a few minutes away. However, as to my earlier question, and our discussion of it—"

"Not now, Tally. If you don't mind, I'd rather not talk."

Unlike E.C., Darya definitely did have circuits for emotion. At the moment they were close to shorting out with overload. So many elements were converging. Louis Nenda was about to take a leap into unknown dangers—she found it hard to forgive herself for refusing his simple request for a meal together; mixed with worry for Louis came the excitement of encountering a new stellar system that sounded like nothing anyone had ever seen; and finally, most powerful of all, there was the promise of renewed Builder interaction. That hit her like strong wine after a two-year drought.

Darya watched and waited until the beacon of the
Have-It-All
vanished, then watched and waited again through the long minutes preceding their own Bose transition.

The moment came at last. The universe blinked. Darya sighed, leaned forward, and opened her eyes wide.

And saw nothing. She felt bewildered. The records left by the Chism Polypheme and the dead Marglotta should have brought the
Pride of Orion
to a system where the central primary was a greenish-yellow star alive with hydrogen prominences. Before her eyes lay nothing but darkness, lit by the wan gleam of far-off stars and galaxies.

At her side, E.C. Tally was not limited to wavelengths visible to humans. The embodied computer was in direct contact with all the sensors of the
Pride of Orion
, which had completed a first full-sky survey within milliseconds of transition. Darya heard Tally's exclamation of surprise.

"What is it, E.C.?"

"One star, but many planets—more than forty of them."

"Where? I can't see a single one."

"Nor can I, even with the superior eyes of my body. But the
Pride of Orion
reports the presence of a central star less than two hundred million kilometers away from us, orbited by a large train of planets."

"Then why don't we see them?"

"Because they are all, even the central star, at low temperatures. The
Pride of Orion
employs bolometers, able to detect and measure the radiation from objects only a few degrees above absolute zero. This is ridiculous!"

"What is?" Darya had heard—or imagined—excitement in Tally's voice.

"Why, the readings. The star and most of the planets are cold, no more than a couple of hundred degrees absolute. But one of those planets—a big one, in a close-in orbit—is at only 1.2 kelvins. That is
lower
than the temperature of the universe's microwave background radiation."

"Isn't that physically impossible?"

"According to the accepted theories of human and Cecropian scientists, it is. But perhaps the scientists of the Sag Arm employ different theories."

Darya hardly heard E.C. Tally's reply. A more disturbing thought had come into her head. Where was the beacon? Where was the flashing sign assuring them of the safe arrival of the others? Where was Louis Nenda?

Darya called for a new full-sky survey, centered on the frequencies of the signal beacon. She concentrated totally on the monitors as the results came in, ignoring E.C. Tally who was still babbling on at her side.

Nothing, nothing, nothing. The
Have-It-All
, along with all its crew, had vanished without a trace.

Louis Nenda wished to travel separately from the
Pride of Orion
for a very specific reason. Julian Graves, as you might expect of a numb-nuts Ethical Council member, was a hopeless pacifist who did not believe in the use of weapons. Maybe it hadn't been Graves's idea to add a "survival team" to the party, but it was unlikely that he had fought against it. Arabella Lund—whoever she might be—had trained them, and she was one of Graves's buddies. So he trusted her and them. Nenda, on the other hand, trusted nobody but himself, and he had made too many blind and desperate leaps through Bose nodes to leave to chance whatever might lie on the other side.

Long before the
Have-It-All
made the final Bose transition, the ship had every weapons port open and every weapon primed. All warning sensors were on full alert. The ship was ready to fire on command, to make another Bose jump, or to run a high-speed route for whatever cover might exist. Nenda had also silenced any device that might signal their presence to an unfriendly listener. If anyone's signal beacon served as a homing signal for enemy fire, it would not be Louis Nenda's. What those morons on the
Pride of Orion
chose to do was up to them.

The
Have-It-All
emerged from the node and floated free in space, its drives turned off. Nenda took one look at the warning displays and released a long-held breath.

"Nothing. Not one blessed thing."

He meant that he saw no signs of anything dangerous, but Atvar H'sial, at his side, was receiving the input of other sensors tuned to her own echolocation vision. Her pheromonal output murmured, "Less than nothing." When Nenda turned to stare, she became more specific. "We are supposed to find here the home world of the Marglotta, are we not? It is the presumed source of much strangeness and who-knows-what wonders of alien technology, priceless when returned to the Orion Arm. Tell me, then. Where are these treasures?"

Nenda turned on the raft of displays not dedicated to warnings. The
Have-It-All
should have emerged close to the Marglotta home star, somewhere within a complex stellar system. All that showed on his screen was a central disk of darkness against a faint background of distant stars.

He scanned the other monitors. "Nothing at any wavelength. What gives? Has the Marglotta star been turned into a black hole? And where are the planets?"

The pheromonal reply from Atvar H'sial was tinged with uneasiness. "There are planets, in abundance. But all are cold. Too cold for liquid water, too cold for a breathable atmosphere."

"No air, no water. So there's no life. Unless the Marglotta don't need any of that?"

"But they do, Louis. Remember, they were air breathers just as we are air breathers. They could not survive on any of the worlds we see."

"Master Nenda, if I may with respect add to this discussion." Kallik, crouched at Nenda's side, had access to the same displays and was following Nenda's spoken version of the conversation with Atvar H'sial. "The main body that you see on the screen cannot be a black hole. Our mass detectors indicate that it contains as much matter as a large star, and this is confirmed by the periods of revolution of the planets. However, a black hole of such a mass would have a diameter of only a few kilometers. What we observe is a dense object several tens of thousands of kilometers in diameter, at just a couple of hundred degrees above absolute zero."

"The size of a large planet, but as heavy as a star. A white dwarf?"

"Except that it gives off no energy. I wonder." The Hymenopt hesitated.

"Spit it out, Kallik. No time to get coy with me."

"The body that we see does not lie at the end of any natural stellar evolutionary sequence known in our own spiral arm. It appears to be solid matter in a cold, crystallized form. Could it be that the laws of physics are different in the Sag Arm?"

"That is at best a remote possibility." Atvar H'sial had been receiving pheromonal translation through Nenda, and her response revealed her chemical scorn at such an idea. "The laws of physics are the same throughout the universe."

"Maybe. But either way we got us a mystery."

"I think not. Louis, there is one other possible answer. Ask Kallik if she believes that the star arrived in its present state through natural processes."

As soon as she received the question, Kallik shook her round head. "I can see no way for natural processes to achieve such a result."

"Very good." Atvar H'sial nodded as Nenda gave her that reply, and went on, "Tell Kallik, then it must have reached its present state through
unnatural
processes. The star has been
drained
of its energy, by some external agent."

"I concur. And the same is true for the big planet." Kallik gestured to the bank of monitors. "Observe. It is supernaturally cold. Nothing in this whole system is warm enough to radiate significant amounts of energy."

"Not quite nothing. Not any more." Nenda pointed to one of the monitors, where the signal beacon of another ship suddenly flashed bright against the dark span of the Gulf. "Look at those dummies. They're certainly radiating energy. They come through the Bose node into possible danger, an' they're all lit up for the holidays. I'll bet you Hans Rebka is foaming at the mouth, but he don't have final say on the
Pride of Orion
. Lucky for them there's nothing sittin' here waitin' to wipe 'em out."

"Nothing
now
." The chill in Atvar H'sial's words was that of the frozen stellar system to which they had come. "But at some time, Louis, the fusion processes of that star were halted and it was depleted of its energy. Something has been at work here on a scale that I find hard to imagine."

"The Builders?"

"They are certainly capable of it. Yet this does not fit with my perceptions of Builder activities."

"Kallik? Do you think the Builders might have done this? Atvar H'sial says no."

"With respect, Master Nenda, I must agree with Atvar H'sial. This does not have the feel of a Builder artifact."

"So where do we go from here? At, do you think we're safe in this system?"

"I believe that we are safe
for the moment
. The continued existence of the
Pride of Orion
supports that idea. Its crew must be as puzzled as we are, since this is clearly not the system of the Marglotta."

"We should have known that all along. We told 'em that no Polypheme ever tells the truth unless it has to."

"Congratulations to us on our own perspicacity. However, self-praise does us little good. This is not the place where we thought to arrive. I repeat, it is not the system of the Marglotta."

"Damn right. It's colder than a witch's cul-de-sac."

"And I am at a loss to suggest what we should do next."

"Ten heads might be better than five. Let's go an' see if Graves and his bunch have any bright ideas."

"In order to do that, Louis, we must either travel or send signals to them."

"Then that's what I guess we gotta do."

"Either signals or motion will reveal our existence and our position."

"But according to you, At, for the moment we don't need to worry too much about that." Nenda turned on the
Have-It-All
's signal beacon. "There. Now everybody knows we're here." He activated the intercom to the pilot's cabin. "Hit them buttons, J'merlia, an' take us to rendezvous. It's time to compare notes. Let's give the others a chance to show off how smart they are."

The
Have-It-All
was Louis Nenda's pride and joy and his most treasured possession. Allowing J'merlia to serve as its pilot represented a triumph of reason over emotion.

Nenda's homeworld, Karelia, wasn't the sort of place that went in for formal education. Survival was the limit of most people's ambition. Maybe because of that, Louis despised anything that might be labeled as philosophical thought. But he had learned a thing or two in the school of hard knocks, and one of them was that if somebody or something did a job better than you ever would or could, it made sense to let them. J'merlia had instincts and eyesight and reflexes that Nenda could not match. So, J'merlia would fly the ship.

In the same way, Kallik had superior analytical ability, while Atvar H'sial possessed a great knowledge of Builder history. Nenda suspected that Darya Lang knew even more, but he wasn't about to head into that territory. Atvar H'sial's satisfaction when Darya was left behind on the other ship had sent a pheromonal message you could read at a hundred meters.

And amid all this talent, what did Louis Nenda himself do? He knew the answer to that. He did anything left over that had to be done, and he examined anything that made his guts rumble uneasily for no defined reason. While the
Have-It-All
and the
Pride of Orion
closed in on each other, he took a closer look at the planets orbiting their frozen primary.

Ignoring the usual space rubble of minor planetoids and comets, the count was unusually high. The tracking equipment on the
Have-It-All
reported forty-seven sizeable bodies, eighteen of them massive enough to maintain some kind of atmosphere. Few of them did—most were simply too cold—but one oddity would have caught the eye of a space traveller far less seasoned than Louis Nenda. Of the five worlds orbiting within the life-zone region of a normal star of equivalent mass, one planet was a monster larger than all the others combined. It was also the coldest one, almost as big as the star around which it orbited. Based on diameter alone that should make it a gas-giant with a gravitational field strong enough to sweep clear a broad swath of space. That had not happened. The deep ranging system on the
Have-It-All
revealed the existence of celestial debris, including objects no bigger than orbiting mountains, crisscrossing the orbit of the monster world.

You could not expect to see much from eighty million kilometers, but Nenda focused the
Have-It-All
's best scope on the planet.