Jack Chalker: Melchior's Fire

The maps held up; like everything else they saw, they looked so new it was as if they’d been put up yesterday. Sheltered from the outside violent weather, they hadn’t faded or lost any luster. It was a tomb, but it was an eerily new tomb, one so fresh it didn’t even seem to have any remains around.

Still, in the protective suits and with no interior lighting, it was one hell of a long walk.

“Nagel? Doc? You okay?” a high, reedy feminine voice asked.

It was An Li, the operations controller when people were on the ground, the first officer of the Stanley when in flight. She was one of only three people who never left the ship while it was in search or salvage modes. No matter what they might find on the ground, it could not get to the ship, now in geostationary orbit well above them, nor to the ship’s controls. An Li could dispatch anything from heavy weapons to food and drink, assume control of any of the machinery below, including the salvage tug and its heavy robotic equipment, and do whatever was necessary to protect the crew on the ground if possible and the ship above in all cases.

Queson wasn’t the only one who thought that An Li’s choice of positions stemmed more from the fact that she was fifty-eight centimeters tall—and then only when she wore thick work boots—and weighed at best thirty-six kilos. But at that control panel high above, she was the height of a constellation and the weight of a neutron star. In orbit and on station, she had all the power.

“We’re fine, Li,” Queson responded. “But if we have to go much farther I’m not so sure.” Maybe I’m getting too old and out of shape for this, she thought, feeling the distance in her back and legs. She was never one to work out hard and regularly on the long space hauls.

“We’ll pick a real low-gravity planet next time,” the officer promised with a chuckle.

“You want to rest?” Nagel asked her, suddenly aware that she was breathing hard.

“No, I’m all right. I’ll rest when we find some sign in this spook house that something was ever alive in here.”

“Like those, maybe?” Nagel responded, shining his light on the floor and stopping to look.

She came over and stared. Clothes. Standard work uniforms like you’d find even now on hundreds of worlds—synthetic, automatically form-fitting, utilitarian, along with synthetic-rubber-soled work boots. There were several sets on the floor, spaced out in an unnerving fashion, as if each had once had an occupant who had simply, well, dissolved. As if they’d been balloons, pumped up with air, and suddenly punctured.

Randi Queson studied them, and particularly the areas around where the head would have been. One figure clearly had earrings, kind of crudely placed on either side of an imaginary head, as if they’d fallen a small bit to the floor as the head had ceased to exist.

Nagel picked up a work glove and shook it. A ring fell out and clattered as it landed on the smooth floor. He stepped on it, stopping its roll, and then leaned down and picked it up.

It was clearly a wedding ring.

One of the other phantoms also had a ring in a glove, this one a school ring from some far-off university or other. The cuneiform around the institutional crest was the same as on the signs in the greenhouses, and so far still unfamiliar to any of them.

He looked at the anthropologist and frowned. “There aren’t two explanations for this coming to mind,” he noted, sounding a bit nervous.

She nodded. “They were in these clothes, and then they weren’t. It happened fast and it was complete. Organic matter, animal and plant, was completely consumed. Nothing else was touched.”

“You ever hear of anything that could do that?” he asked her. “I mean, come on! I’ve used a particle-beam disintegrator and there’s always some residue, no matter how slight. Nothing is converted so efficiently that it leaves nothing behind!”

“There may be something there, but if so, it’s so minor it’ll take a full lab analysis to find it. Queson to Control.”

“Yes, Randi? What did you find?”

“The question is, what didn’t we find. Anything back on that sample I sent?”

“Um, yeah. Ground lab says nothing. Brand new. No vegetable matter of any kind, nothing carbon. They don’t have full facilities there, but they’re pretty good.”

“They’re good enough,” the Doc responded. “Whatever got this station consumes everything organic, and I mean everything . Run that through the computers and see if you can find anything that efficient and that selective all at the same time in the records. Any luck on the writing yet?”

“Oh, yes. Turns out to be one of the Sanskrit family of languages in its original alphabet. This was either an ethnic or national extension, that’s for sure, not just a commercial one. Most of them used one of the widespread alphabets for centuries, but a few kept the old stuff for cultural cohesion. This was a really nationalist group, since the signs have no translations. The computers say it’s probably Laotian, possibly Thai—Siamese, but it may be an east Indian regional one. Impossible to get any closer than that unless you find the history records, though. It doesn’t quite match anything we have.”

“But can you read it?”

“Oh, sure. If you find anything more than directional signs and shit like that, we can make it out. You sure you want to go farther in without some kind of backup, though?”

“I think it’s pretty unlikely that anything that got them made it through the years after it did,” Queson told her, hoping her logic held. “First, it was probably some sort of thing they either brought with them or that mutated, since anything that efficient with our kind of plants and animals had to know us. It eats, therefore it has starved for generations because of its own efficiency. Any such organism would have turned on its own species to survive. Unless the ultimate survivor learned to eat sand or metal—and it clearly didn’t from the looks of this—it would finally croak. Still, this means high-level sterilization of any salvage and a Class A containment situation for everybody and everything down here until that’s confirmed.”

“That’s affirmative. You hear that, everybody? Class A containment. Any violators get left down there and outside. And as for you, Doc, and you, Nagel, I want your helmet cameras on and audio key permanently open. I’m recording from this point if you’re going to go any farther in.”

“Acknowledged, switching to permanently on,” Nagel responded. “This might cut power by a third, though.”

“Well, then, keep an eye on it. Remember, the more in you go, the more distance you have to cover back.”

Queson gave a low moan. “Don’t remind me!”

Jerry Nagel stood up, shined the light around the ghostly greenhouse, and sighed. “God, I hate this part of the job!”

“Well, as you pointed out, our shares of something this big are going to be enormous,” Queson said resignedly. “And even with all this, in this day and age, it’s a hell of a lot safer than robbing banks. Still, I wish we had an archaeologist on the team. Going blind into ancient graves is what they get off on, and they’re never happier than when they’re digging up and carting off some old graveyard. Come on, let’s see what’s what.”

Finally, they made the cliff. At this point the complex ceased being a greenhouse or processing area and instead became a small self-contained city built inside the protective rock.

As they expected, the amount of clothing absent owners increased with every step now, and often was so dense you couldn’t help but walk on them even though both salvagers felt, somehow, that they were stepping on bodies.