Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

Yet, in a sense, beyond the ship’s crew and maintenance, she was the most important person aboard the Henry Morton Stanley. You could hire a captain and a crew, and much of the salvage work was automated, but only she was knowledgeable enough to know what was valuable and what was junk. She, and the chief engineer, Jerry Nagel, who could say if some particular gadget or gizmo could be put back into service or whether its parts were potentially golden or simply fried goo. That was why both had to be down on the surface with the exploration team, and why the rest of the team’s main job was protecting the two of them.

Queson was in fact the only one aboard who knew the irony of being a member of a ship’s complement named after Henry M. Stanley. Stanley, a British-born American newspaperman who set out to find David Livingstone, a famous explorer and missionary, found him, wrote a book about it, and became a legend. What was not as well-known was that he then went with his exploration experience, his maps and charts, to European powers, most notably the King of Belgium, and created one of the nastiest and most immoral colonies since the days of slavery, the Belgian Congo. Stanley’d gotten famous for Livingstone, but he’d gotten rich by exploitation.

Livingstone, a godly man with a love of Africa, died, nearly a saint, bringing medicine and Christianity to the natives he loved, and who loved him, while sending back the maps that the Stanleys of that time would use to rape the continent.

The ship was not named for David Livingstone.

Nagel signaled to the rest of the team and they approached the first of the vast series of structures that had once been a great farm supporting a town that was clearly intended to become a city. The cold wind continued to swirl and howl all around them, like some sort of ghostly presence, or perhaps the pain that dreams feel when they die.

The buildings seemed to go on and on; long, boxy affairs with high-pitched roofs facing the maximum sun. A mass of greenhouses, perhaps, although they did not, had never, depended on that sun for very much.

Still, much of the structures had been designed to be, if not transparent, then nearly so. Now, they were nearly opaque, sandblasted over decades without any attempt at maintenance to clear them. Here and there there were jagged holes in the surface, like the remains of great rocks thrown through plate glass.

Only this wasn’t glass, it was a synthetic material designed to withstand far worse than this miserable planet could normally dish out. Rocks, even huge ones catapulted by who knows what, would have been very noisy and created a lot of vibration, but they wouldn’t have penetrated that stuff.

You needed to shoot these holes in those panes. Nothing less would have done.

“What do you think, Doc?” Nagel asked her, standing in front of one of the holes now. “Civil war? Riot? Revolution? Or maybe early raiders?”

She examined the wound in the building pane. “Hard to say. Not raiders, though, I wouldn’t think. Hard to tell with all this dust and sand piled up, but the curvature on the edging here indicates that it was blown out , not in. I’d bet you’ll find some missing shards if you dig enough in this pile. Bring up one of the big searchlights. We’re going inside.”

Two of the crew floated in an obelisk-shaped remote light. About a meter and a half high and slightly thicker at the base, it was not heavy, and very, very useful.

A tap on one symbol at the base brought the entire thing to light, giving a bright but diffuse lighting to a large area. Other settings allowed different kinds of light as required, at different intensities and, if needed, it could be brought to bear on any point with the greatest accuracy and illumination that any spotlight ever made could manage. They moved it inside, and the two leaders followed.

Inside wasn’t as bad or as beaten up as they’d assumed. In fact, it looked relatively intact, although any remains of plants once grown there appeared to be either missing or turned to dust.

Nagel examined the hydroponic rows one by one. “Pretty worn, showing their age and heavy use, but still more than serviceable,” he proclaimed. “With the exception of the broken panes, we could probably dismantle this down to the flooring and do pretty well. It ain’t sexy but it sure looks profitable.”

Queson took her personal light and took a close look at the holding membranes for the plants. It was a familiar design, pretty standard about two centuries earlier, and still very much in use back in civilization. She went close, opened her kit, and took scrapings from the whole area, including the holes.

“What’s the matter, Doc? See something you don’t like?”

“Probably nothing,” she responded, continuing to take samples at random points in the complex. “But either this went before the silence or there should be some remains of something here. We know there’s nothing intrinsically caustic in the atmosphere, so if one of us were to drop dead here and be left in place, we’d find a skeleton, certainly, or at least identifiable parts of one depending on the exposure to the elements, and probably clothing or parts of clothing and personal stuff.”

“Yeah, so? I’d be surprised to find any bodies around here. Whoever wanted out sure seems to have gotten out, and this don’t look like anyplace other folks would be living. Most of the complex is automated—you can see the mag tracks and signs of robotic tending. We’ll probably find the robots themselves, power depleted. I hope so. Those would be the most valuable finds yet.”

“Yes, well, that’s what I mean. In conditions far more primitive than this, and less protected, there’s always the remains of plant matter of some kind. Dried remnants of vines, that sort of thing. I don’t know of anything we grow in this kind of setting that would leave not a single trace behind.”

“Maybe it was raiders,” he suggested. “I mean, they’d strip the food out of here just like we would if it had any. Or, this is one of—what? Seventy, seventy-five buildings, each around a kilometer long, just in this valley? And the last one out at that. Maybe it never got put online. Maybe it was down for maintenance. Unless we find some kind of record we’ll never know.”

“You’re right, of course,” she sighed, wondering why she just felt that something was very, very wrong here. She couldn’t shake it, and in this business you lived longer if you trusted that kind of instinct. “Still, I’ll feel better if we find more normal things in the others. I really wish we knew what went on here.”

“If you ask me,” came the deep, gravel voice of Sark, one of the ground detail, “anybody who’d come and live on a hole like this place in an armpit like this had to be nuts from the start.”

“I’ve seen worse and I’ve seen it work,” Queson told him. “Back in those days they even had means of controlling weather and climate on a planetary basis. They didn’t do that here, but I think that was the ultimate goal. Take a place with all the elements but in the wrong places and forms, prove it and mold it, then eventually create out of an armpit, as you call it, a garden of beauty and plenty. Some of the best worlds we still have were created that way by these kind of people. This one just failed, for some reason.”

Now she badly wanted to know what that reason was, too. Not just because she had to weigh any threats against the salvagers from all this, but also because it was another chapter in the story of humanity. She hadn’t gotten her degrees to go into the salvage business; she’d gone into the salvage business to provide a means to satisfy her curiosity.