Jack McDevitt - POLARIS

The only noteworthy event during our visit to Terranova occurred when a piece of rock got too close and had to be taken out by the Hazard Control System. The HCS consists of a black box mounted on the hull that detects and identifies incoming objects and coordinates the response, which is delivered by one or more of four particle-beam projectors.

The rock at Terranova was strictly a one-beam operation. It was only the second time in my career that we actually used the device.

Serendipity was the fourth world in the Gaspar system, and our last candidate. It was effectively a collage of desert broken by occasional patches of jungle near the poles.

A few small seas were scattered across the surface, isolated from each other. The equatorial belt was boiling hot and bone-dry, its vegetation consisting mostly of purple scrub. Even the local wildlife avoided the area.

Gaspar was a yellow-white class-F star. According to the data banks, the three inner worlds were all pretty thoroughly cooked. The sun was in an expansion cycle, getting hotter every year, and would soon burn off whatever life still clung to Gaspar IV. Serendipity. Soon seemed to be one of those cosmic terms, which really meant several hundred thousand years.

The life-forms were big, primitive, hungry. Not dinosaurs, exactly. Not lizards at all. They were mostly oversized, warm-blooded, slow-moving behemoths. Their considerable bulk was favored by the low gravity, which was about three-quarters of a gee.

The world was called Serendipity because everything had gone wrong on the discovery flight. The ship had been the Kismet, a private vessel operated by fortune hunters functioning several decades before the Confederacy established guidelines for exploration. Like requiring a license before external life-forms could be introduced into a biosystem.

A field team member was killed by one of the behemoths. Walked on, according to the most popular version of the story. Another had stepped in a hole and broken his leg. A marriage had disintegrated into a near-violent squabble. And the captain suffered a fatal heart attack the day after they arrived. In the midst of all that, the Kismet ’s Armstrong engines died, so they had to be rescued.

From orbit, we looked down at a surface that was dust brown and wrinkled, dried out, cracked, broken. Lots of places were emitting steam. Serendipity had the usual big moon that seems to be a requirement for large, land-based animals, and its skies were almost cloudless. It had a breathable atmosphere, and there were no pathogens known to be dangerous to humans. If you wanted to hide someone for a few weeks or months, this would be the perfect place. Except where would a hotel key fit in? “I was hoping we’d get lucky,” said Alex.

“Doesn’t look like it. This place is primitive. Does anybody live here at all?”

He grinned. “Would you?”

“Not really.”

“We’re here,” he said. “Might as well do the search. I’d guess we’re looking for a cluster of modules. Some sort of temporary shelter. Anything artificial.” He was visibly discouraged.

I told Belle to run a planetwide scan.

We passed over a miniscule sea and back over desert. The place was so desolate and forlorn that it had a kind of eerie beauty. When we crossed the terminator and slipped into the night, the ground occasionally glowed with ethereal fire.

But there was nothing, no place, certainly no hotel, where anyone could have stashed visitors.

After two days, Belle reported the scan complete. “Negative results,” she said. “I do not see anything artificial on the surface.”

Alex grunted and closed his eyes. “No surprise.”

“Time to go home,” I said.

He took the key out of his pocket and stared at it. Up. Down. Lock. Unlock.

Transfer funds. “Barber was willing to kill to keep its existence secret,” he said.

Why?

I looked down at the surface and thought how nothing would ever happen there.

The oversized critters would continue to chase one another down while the climate kept getting hotter. By the time survival became impossible even for these hardy lifeforms, the human race would probably be gone, evolved into something else. It got me thinking about time, how it seems to move faster as you get older, how it runs at different rates in gravity fields or under acceleration. How we assume that the kind of world we live in is the status quo, the end point of history. There’ll always be a Rimway.

“You know,” I said, “we may have made an assumption about the key.”

An eyebrow went up. “Which is what?”

“That it came from around 1365.”

“Of course it did,” he said. “It was lying in the back of the shuttle.”

“That doesn’t mean it belongs to that era.” I took the key from him and stared at it. “People have been barging around in the Veiled Lady for thousands of years.”

“We’ve ruled out planetary surfaces and outstations,” Alex said. “And we’ve ruled out a rendezvous with another ship. What’s left?”

Not much. “Somebody else’s outstation?” I suggested.

He considered it. “Maybe. Maybe we’re looking for an artifact. Something left over that’s not in the record.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But it can’t be too old. If you’re going to use it to shelter people, even for a just a few days, it has to be capable of functioning.”

“By which you mean it has to be able to hold a charge.”

“Yes. That’s part of it.”

“How old?” he asked.

When did I become the professional on outstations? “I’m not an engineer, Alex.

But I’d guess maybe two thousand years at the outside. Maybe not that long. Maybe not nearly that long.”

We were moving back into daylight again, watching the sun climb above the arc of the planet. “Two thousand years,” he said. “That sounds like the Kang.”

“It could be.” They’d been active in this region for a period of about twelve hundred years, beginning during the ninth millennium. After that they’d gone dormant. Only in the last century had the Kang begun showing some of their old vitality. “Belle,” I said, “has anyone other than ourselves and the Kang Republic been prominent in the exploration of the region that includes Delta Karpis? Out, say, to seventy light-years?”

“The Alterians maintained a substantial presence, as did the Ioni.”

“I’m talking about recent times. Within the last three millennia.” I realized what I’d said and must have grinned.

“That’s good,” Alex said. “We’re thinking big.”

“It appears,” Belle said, “that no one else has invested in the subject area. Other than the Commonwealth, of course.” The forerunner of the Confederacy.

Alex poked a finger at the AI. “Belle,” he said, “what kind of character did the Kang use to represent their currency? During their period of ascendancy?”

“There were many. Which currency, and during what era?”

“Show us all of them.”

The screen filled with symbols. Letters from various alphabets, ideographs, geometric figures. He looked at them, shook his head, and asked whether there were more. There were.

It was in the second batch. The fifth symbol from the key. The rectangle. The press pad. “That looks like it,” he said.

It was impossible to be certain, but it did seem to be the same character. And I thought, Finally! “Belle, please provide the position for any remnant outstation from the Kang era located within the subject area.”

“Scanning, Chase.”

Alex closed his eyes.

“We lack data,” said Belle. “The locations of the Kang outstations were lost during the Pandemic revolutions. The stations themselves were long abandoned by the time the polity collapsed, and apparently no one cared enough to save the details.