Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

“The remnants of older villages,” chief anthropologist Morgan noted. “Not abandoned or overworked. They look to be definitely destroyed, probably by fire.”

“There’s an exceptionally fertile area right in along the lakeshore, too, very near those ruins,” a geographer named Salkind put in. “And yet it’s not worked. Nobody is living within ten kilometers of these ruins. Interesting. And just as fascinating, there’s an exceptional amount of commercial-grade ore and some abnormal radiation readings in that area of the lake as well. I think we ought to send over a small expert away team and see what that’s about.”

“I agree,” Morgan responded. “Why not you and me, and some military and forensic types?”

“Oh, I’d like nothing better,” Salkind assured her. “I’ve been anxious to walk upon a real planet again after so long. I missed the last one, you know. Not much for me to do when all they’re trying to do is capture or shoot us. At least, over there, there won’t be any of the locals to even object.”

The Doctor okayed the expedition on the condition that they take some experienced armed security with them. He was very uneasy about the secrets of these people and he didn’t want any more ugly scenes just in case they misread things—as they had done more than once before.

The small team came down with full gear including waterproof probes that were smart enough to just let loose. Although none aboard the Mountain had ever seen a real fish, that’s what the devices were called. Trained and obedient fish at that.

While others went to take forensic samples and to carefully examine the burnt-out ruins nearby, others set up the land-based part of the fish remotes. They used a flat panel rather than a hologram for most of this, as it was better in filtering out distortion in the water; if need be, they could plug into the board and connect directly with the fish and “fly” it for more detailed and true three-dimensional studies.

The lake was deep, dropping off from a narrow shelf to almost six meters in just a few steps and quickly plunging down to a dark and irregular bottom that at its deepest point was at least one hundred and twenty meters. The irregularity of the bottom seemed to be natural; either this was a system of huge caverns that had collapsed after being too weakened by erosion to support the upper rock floor or there were ancient volcanic flows down there. Evidence suggested the former, although at more than a hundred and thirty-four kilometers across at this point it must have been one hell of a collapse if that truly were its origin.

It was much too dark in the lake to use ordinary lights; the fish switched to sonar as their main guides and kept a wide spectrum sweep on all available frequencies for the rest. If you could see something visibly, they’d transmit it to the land-based screen; if not, they would interpolate it as a visual scene.

At about seven hundred meters out, they came upon The Object. It was about twenty meters down, although the depth around it at that point showed over a hundred meters, suggesting it was massive.

Little visible could be seen, but the outline translated from the sonar suggested a broad, smooth, metallic surface with no obvious opening. Laser probes showed it to be smooth, with no lake growths or sediment attaching itself to the thing. Whatever it was, it was pretty much the same as when it went in.

“A hundred meters tall, half a kilometer long. No wonder it’s all collapsed around there,” the technician commented.

Thomas Cromwell studied the shape and orientation on the screen, chin in palm, then said, “Well, there’s their ship. A ragtag Noah’s ark, I’d suspect. It’s an old model, one of a half dozen or so that come to mind. It’s relatively small, too, but definitely interstellar. I’d say a converted corvette. Surplus military, probably cobbled together from junkyards or rebuilt from an abandoned Navy vessel. There’s no sign of an energy leakage anywhere?”

“No, sir. Nothing.”

“Then she’s almost certainly cold. Even with all that armor there’d be something . I don’t think it’s hidden there or placed there deliberately. You don’t come in and plunk yourself that deep in water, known or unknown, by choice. I think they crashed there.” He sighed. “Well, at least now I think I can deduce some of the mystery here. If we had more people, more equipment, and more time we could go in, locate and pull the record modules and see what the log says about her, but I don’t think it’s practical at this point. It’s possible they were removed anyway. Certainly they got the guns out, and who knows what else?”

“These people have acted like they’re hiding some great secret,” John Robey noted. “They’ve acted that way from the start. You think maybe they or their ancestors came in that thing, and that after they set things up they either discovered that the ship was too damaged to ever fly again or they just wanted it hidden where you’d have to be really curious to look for it?”

“No, I doubt that,” Cromwell replied. “That’s not the ship that brought most of these people here, along with the seed, initial two-year food supplies, prefab headquarters center, even crindin. You might stuff it all in, but it would be tight. No, this ship’s more recent. From what we’ve found, probably a gunrunner to some of the independent worlds out there all paranoid about one another. I think it got chased here.”

“You mean—?”

“That, Brother John, is a raider. Sleek, fast, probably modified with all the latest getaway gear and armed with enough weaponry to take on a small fleet, although not a Navy cruiser or its equivalent. I think if we cover the whole surface of the thing we’ll find signs of a scrap, and a nasty one at that. They came up against something that was bigger and meaner than they were, or somebody just got in a lucky shot, something like that. Ambushed, most likely, when they were preparing to enter a genhole. They got in, managed some kind of maneuvers—I suspect that their captain was very good indeed—and somehow popped up here, off the charts. They were probably as surprised as we were to find an agricultural colony here. And, most likely, pretty pissed off at that, too. Can you imagine pirates suddenly having to become farmers?”

Robey thought about Gregnar, Krag, and Alon and compared them to the others. “I’m not sure they did—that is, until we showed up. Then they had to play farmer, at least long enough to lull us into a sense of, well, an odd cultural direction but nothing bizarre. But I didn’t get the sense of the people in general being scared, and you have to figure these guys would become petty tyrants pretty easy.”

“There’s a fine line between fear and resignation at a situation you can do nothing about but cope,” Cromwell noted. “They’re pretty good at it, though. They had only a week or so to get everything ready, and they couldn’t have planted all this and built all this in that time. I suspect we’re seeing how the original settlers here lived, and mostly still do live. The question is where the raider crew survivors really live, and where the intermediary things we know must be here, from some kind of educational system to records, from books to computer learning systems, must be.”

“This whole continent is underlain with caverns,” Robey pointed out. “It’s an interesting analogy for our own business, if you think of it. The power and the evil are below; the good but meek are above. The thing is, if you’re right, what now?”

“What indeed?” Cromwell echoed. While it would be morally impossible not to intercede if, say, they found masses of people being tortured and killed, that kind of thing, this was much more insidious. To act in this circumstance would bring on a lot more death and destruction of the innocents than not acting, and nobody looked beaten or starved. In fact, they didn’t even look all that unhappy, although looks could be as deceiving as these marooned pirates.