Balshazzar's Serpent tk-1 Page 3

  Everybody on the bridge froze. When the Doctor was in one of his moods, which was more often than not, he couldn’t be pacified, was on a hair trigger, and often would just replace anybody who pissed him off. Everyone on the bridge was there by the grace of the Doctor; even the captain could wind up supervising latrines if the Doctor so chose. A combination admiral and pope, the Doctor was not very democratic. And even those who’d been around him his whole life could never be sure what was real and what was act, but they had known, seen, and sometimes felt the consequences of guessing wrong.

  “How many unmanned probes we got left?” the big, bearded man asked, settling back into his chair.

  “Nine, sir. And three of those are mostly being used as spare parts and models for spare parts. That last go-round with the Joy of Islam left us spent. Give me a few days with a competent shipyard or munitions factory and I can replace them all, but not with less.”

  The Doctor tugged a bit on his bearded chin, thinking. “All right, we’ll try one. Protect it as best you can and try and recover if at all possible.”

  “Cover it, sir? You mean defend it if it’s shot at?” This was quite unusual practice for an unmanned probe, even if they were in such short supply.

  The Doctor got up and stretched, then nodded. “That’s right, Captain. Notify me when it’s within data collection range. Notify me even faster if someone or something takes a shot at it. And, if anything does, try and neutralize it.”

  “Neutralize…?” The captain knew what the instructions were but he wanted it spelled out for the record.

  “Blow it to Hell, damn it!” the Doctor snapped, then exited the com. He paused a moment, then added, “And let’s leave one Q and A channel open, the most likely one to be used, but let’s broadcast on the entire rest of the spectrum. Take a vote, then assemble and transmit at near overload on those channels the worst sounding hymns of all time. If nothing else, that might get some action!”

  The captain sighed. “Well, you heard him. Deborah, Rachel, I’ll let you be the music committee. Everybody else on the probe and defensive station. Let’s see who’s down there!”

  * * *

  It took a couple of hours of diagnostics and programming before the probe was ready to go, and then they knew it would take days to reach the inner planets. The engines on the probes were among the fastest small engines ever devised, but distances were still vast and none of the wormgates was ever placed close enough in to be warped or disrupted by major planetary gravitational fields or in likely areas of cosmic debris.

  The first trick was to launch the probe in such a way as to make it clear to any defender that it was indeed a probe and not a weapon. That was easier said than done, and relied on some experience and tried-and-true methods, but that didn’t stop the entire ship from being put on alert when it was launched, weapons at the ready.

  The same defensive system that scanned them when they arrived also locked onto the probe, but, as with them, appeared to make no aggressive moves as a result. As the probe closed in on the largest gas giant and used its great gravitational force to supplement its jump engines, more scans snapped on, but, as before, nothing fired at the spherical probe. Either the system wasn’t armed for defense, was incapable of it, or was willing to allow the potential aggressor a look at things. There would have been nothing The Mountain’s crew could have done to protect the probe had it been shot at; with every passing minute the time delay for a reaction increased. The probe’s own computer was pretty much on its own.

  A bit more than three days in, and just a hair more than halfway to the inner planet, the defensive system acted. It wasn’t a serious defensive blow, more a shot across the bow of the probe, clearly missing deliberately but with the intent of slowing or halting the thing. It came from an undetected free-floating platform that was too small and too well shielded to show up on instruments until it revealed itself, but when it did, it showed, too, that there were no lifeforms aboard. This was automatic.

  The probe showed some defensive prowess, whirling and twisting while using some energy for its own shields, but instead of slowing it used every ounce of available power to get the hell out of there while taking a more evasive, zigzag style inward course.

  The gun platform suddenly flared into life and began a rapid pursuit. Clearly it would not just be a bow shot if it could close, although it remained to be seen if it was capable of doing that.

  “Very weak energy signature,” the gunnery officer noted back on The Mountain. “It’s showing its age and its lack of service. I’d say these folks no longer have space travel in any useful sense. Look—you can see how it’s losing the race. I’d expect—Ah!”

  There was a major energy surge from the gun platform, as if it had suddenly shot everything it had at the fleeing probe, but it was certainly not enough. The probe easily swerved even as the beam fired, and didn’t look back.

  “Reading only trace energy on the platform,” one of the artillery crew noted. “That platform’s spent.”

  “Notify the Doctor and send this to whatever console he’s closest to,” the gunnery officer ordered.

  “Done!”

  The Doctor was on the intercom within two minutes. “It missed?”

  “Yes, sir. No problem. But, of course, if one of them does that this far out, it’s sure as shooting that there’ll be more and meaner ones closer in.”

  “Doctor to bridge. Close to the position of the platform. See if you can snag it. I doubt if it’ll be in any shape to resist and our shielding should take whatever it might give. Let’s see who made it, and when.”

  “This could be a trap to lure us into just that,” the First Officer commanding the bridge at the time warned him. “Do you really want to risk the ship at this juncture?”

  “Faith, Number One! We’re founded on faith! This is God’s chariot! I gave you an order and I expect it to be carried out, not questioned!” he thundered, then paused a moment before adding, in a much more conversational tone, “Besides, if we’re so damned paranoid we’ll run from these antiques then we should get out of this business!”

  The First Officer nodded, more to himself than to any other authority, thought a quiet and personal prayer, and then said, “Half ahead. Maintain full alert defensive mode, slowly increase speed to two-thirds pulse if clear.”

  The ship was basically computer controlled, and was used to interpreting the orders of its long-time bridge officers. In fact, the whole of The Mountain actually required few human crewmembers to run efficiently, although it was hardly a luxury liner type of ship. Much of the routine maintenance, such as collecting soiled clothes, cleaning the vast areas of the ship, changing linen, and so on were done by humans because there were no robots or robotic services of that sort to do them, and, in fact, probably would never be allowed so long as the Doctor was running things. The key systems were automated, even gunnery, although at all such positions, from the bridge to gunnery to engineering, there were humans present to confirm, block, or manually override as might be needed, and these were also experts at checking out and testing their equipment.

  Many of the less crucial functions aboard might have been automated but deliberately weren’t. The Doctor wanted everyone to have a job that meant something to the whole.

  By the time The Mountain was in approach range of the one hostile gun platform the probe itself was almost to the warm, blue and white world that was their objective. There had been several attacks, but always tepid ones, and never with great power or with anything other than automated systems behind them, indicating that this whole defense grid was sadly undermaintained and out of whack.

  This was doubly reinforced when The Mountain reached the platform, placed an energy plasma shield around it, and hauled it in. The poor platform was almost an object of pity aboard ship; it kept trying to defend itself and shoot up the works, but it just didn’t have any juice left. Gunnery experts in repair spacesuits actually approached and boarded it, tracing and dismantling its self-destruct mechanism even though instruments said that there was nothing left there to explode.

  “Standard Mark XXIX,” the chief gunnery officer reported. “It’s so pitted that it’s clear nobody or nothing’s been here to service it for maybe a century or more, and whatever made the big dent shorted out a lot of its power. Logic circuits are still okay, though. Readout says it was placed by Eleventh Mars Corps, UC Navy, one hundred and sixty-one years ago.” He whistled. “This is an old trooper, then, if it’s never been rebuilt or serviced.”

  “At least it dates the colony, since it’s probable that this and the other defensive units were placed here when the colony was established as part of the network,” the Doctor commented.

  “So they got set up and it wasn’t long before the Silence. That could explain why it’s so undeveloped down there. I bet they never even got a lot of their initial shipments. Hell, they probably didn’t have anything more than the stuff they initially brought with them, and that would have been really the basics. By this point that could be a very primitive agricultural colony down there.”

  “So you think everything here is automatic, and in as poor shape as that thing?” the Doctor asked.

  “Probably, but I wouldn’t underestimate one or two of these units or better escaping the ravages and actually functioning. You never can tell.”

  “Oh, I believe we can tell,” the Doctor told him. “And in a matter of hours we’ll have a look at just what they’ve managed to maintain down there. Cheer up! If it’s like you say, then we may be able to help them out and lift them up. God brought us here for a reason. Consider what would have happened if one of the pirates had found this place first.”

  He never understood why they didn’t think of themselves as the good guys, and it worr
ied him. He was a better teacher than that.

  The probe’s data confirmed their suspicions of a fairly low level technology even though the colony here had been saved to a large extent by the climate, isolation, and the fact that they’d been set up so close to the Silence that nobody’d heard of them or blundered into them before.

  The initial centralized city was stock prefab architecture and was composed of large administrative-type buildings and warehouses. There was no indication that it was ever used as a real settlement or capital, only that it was the place where everything was landed. Some cultivated fields surrounding the complex showed that there was continuing activity there, but on a subsistence level.

  A technological culture would have had few if any roads; hovercraft and air mags would have made them superfluous. Here there were not only roads, but dirt roads, many deeply rutted, as well as heavily trod paths and trails. The farther from the central core they looked, the less signs of automation or any kind of prefabrication existed.

  Development had been more or less radial due to the vast interior plains, the abundant rivers and lakes, and the apparently year-round mild climate. The fields looked quite snappy close in to the landing site, but became more ragged although not less abundant as the distance from the site increased. Houses tended to be the marshmallowlike prefab of the old Combine close in, as did the big buildings at the center, but you didn’t have to look far to see little evidence of that sort of technology. By the third “ring” of settlement, most of the houses appeared built of some sort of adobe, quite natural and matching the available materials. There was evidence of some building in wood and stone, but it appeared that they hadn’t quite gotten the full hang of that as yet.

  What was most eerie was the total lack of any energy pulses or sites or transmissions along the surface. Not only were there no aircraft, there weren’t any powered conveyances of any sort to be seen or detected.

  “They’re either extremely resourceful or they are members of an old order recidivist cult,” the chief anthropologist, Ruth Morgan, noted when looking at the finely detailed three-dimensional pictures coming in from the probe.

  “You mean like the Old Order Amish or the like?” the Doctor responded. “We’ve already seen and traced all the known ones from them and similar groups. That doesn’t mean they weren’t out for a simpler life, but we’ve seen too many dead worlds where colonists thought they knew how to do things by hand.”

  “Still, this group is basically growing grains, fruits, and vegetables the old way,” she noted. “Those fields are tilled by animal power. There’s no electric grid at all. And yet, I’m not at all sure it was intended that way. You see those herds there? They’re crindin, a big, lumbering creature our records indicate is from an old Silenced colony called Mandolan. They were picked to be brought here and probably used in that way, since they’re not known to be edible by humans. They make great oxen if you know how to use a yoke and plow, though. Hard to believe many people did.”

  The Doctor frowned and looked at the closeup of the big beasts, that in many ways resembled six-legged two-trunked monstrous purple elephants. “Interesting. I’m beginning to grow more and more curious at this colony’s past. I think we ought to keep getting data as long as possible but go on in.” He punched the intercom. “Captain, high orbit. I don’t want us seen from the ground, but I want to be close enough to do our setup work. I don’t feel danger here, but I do feel mystery.”

  The Doctor turned back to the anthropologist. “Any sign of churches or other types of houses of worship?”

  She shrugged. “I’m sorry, Doc, but I can’t tell. The buildings are so crude we wouldn’t expect them to risk a steeple, and there’s nothing in the shape of any of the buildings to suggest a cross or similar outfit. No minarets, either, and certainly nothing in the towns to indicate Buddhism or one of its offshoots. My feeling is that it’s either pretty secular, possibly Hindu or an offshoot of it, or another faith with little liking for the trappings of organized religion. They may just worship as they please. Until we’re down there, we can’t know.”

  “People?”

  “You can see some of them there in those freezes from the survey. Reddish brown skin predominates, but that doesn’t mean much in that climate. Hair seems to be either coal black or pretty white, mostly bearded. The dress looks functional, probably handmade, and fairly standard. Women are wearing either a pullover patterned dress or some sort of pants and loose shirt pretty much like the men. Long hair, which indicates few pests, but I don’t see much sign of beards from the admittedly limited sample. The interesting shots are these, taken in one of the warmer regions near a shallow lake. The lake appears thick with rice, and the lands around look to be some variation of cotton plants. Look there—see the movement? Men, women, boys, girls, all out there clearly picking cotton by hand. I bet that in the rice harvest season they do the same thing in the lake. The trail network connects them to basically a quarter of the other farms, suggesting a trading system. Rice and cotton take certain conditions you don’t need for wheat and maize, for example, and I don’t see a lot of indications that these cotton pickers process their crop in bulk. I’d say they trade.”

  “Well, it looks promising,” the Doctor noted. “I think we ought to send some folks down there and get a practical lay of the land. Anybody in the mood to go Biblical and take a long, hot walk?”

  “We are always ready,” Morgan assured him without a second thought, and, while pleased, he accepted that at face value.

  II: ORPHANS OF THE SILENCE

  There were an infinite number of ways to approach a new world of which you knew nothing, including the full frontal assault, as it were, where you just landed as yourself and had faith that the locals would be more curious than hostile. In this case, with so little known but such a primitive layout below, it was decided that they’d send down two young but experienced Arms of Gideon looking as innocent and fresh-faced and nonthreatening as possible, one male, one female.

  John Robey was twenty-four standard years old, about a hundred and eighty centimeters tall, with a strong but ruggedly handsome face, short-cropped sandy brown hair and brown eyes. His companion was Eve Toloway, twenty-two, about a hundred and sixty centimeters, with a near angelic face, olive complexion, and big green eyes. She and John had worked together now and then, but this would be their first away team experience together, and her first at any time in her life. They were selected by computer and approved by the Doctor as appropriate for this mission.

  Both of them had been born and raised within The Mountain and knew no other life or ways. Both were sincere, dedicated, and well trained. They both wore white robes with hoods made out of a material that was far more than it seemed, and would help protect them from the potentially harsh and possibly unknown dangers of a planetary climate. Consistent with the Doctor’s beliefs in his interstellar religious commune, John would be in charge down there, but that didn’t imply inferiority on the part of Eve but rather a chain of command of sorts. In fact, their leader often joked that he thought women were superior to men, which is why the Bible set up things with the weaker sex in charge. Otherwise, he said, only half joking, men would soon be obsolete.

  The small scout cars were precious to a ship like The Mountain; although incapable of interstellar flight, they could land just about anywhere, take off straight up faster than most people could see, and were silent and secure. Once they’d contained complex self-aware computers as backups; they were designed for such things. Now it was strictly a basic system, though, not because of any paranoia or fear on the part of The Mountain or the Doctor, but basically because those things had required first-class specialized maintenance and by the time The Mountain had acquired its current scouts the old computers had either become too unreliable to use or had been removed. It didn’t really matter because of the way they were now used anyway; The Mountain actually flew them remotely from an area between the bridge and gunnery control, and in a pinch the passengers could take over and fly them manually.

  They would both be on a leash, but everyone on the big ship and the scout understood that, once down, they were pretty much on their own.