Jack McDevitt - Ancient Shores

She had assumed that the hunt on Lasker’s farm had been for another boat. But now, without explanation, her team had been sent to the top of Johnson’s Ridge. What in hell were they looking for?

It was a question that had begun to keep her awake nights. Moore suspected there was something illegal going on. Nothing else explained the compulsive secrecy. Yet Max (who reminded her of her first husband) seemed too tentative to be a criminal, and the Laskers were clearly up-front types. She was not sure about April Cannon, with whom she’d spent little time. Cannon possessed a streak of ruthlessness and was probably not above bending the law, given the right reason. But that still did not answer the basic question. What were they looking for? Hidden treasure? Buried drugs? A lost cache of nerve gas?

She watched Sara track the input from Charlie’s radar. The weather had moderated somewhat, warmed up after the last few days, and Charlie was cutting his pattern across the top of the ridge. The scans were fed into the system and translated into images of rock and earth.

They’d had a couple of days of unseasonable warmth, and the snow cover had melted. The ground was consequently wet and dangerous, so Moore had drawn the survey course carefully, keeping Charlie safely away from the edge of the precipice. She kept a close eye on his progress and occasionally warned him back in, sacrificing coverage to safety.

The ground-search unit was giving them reasonable imagery to about a hundred feet. For archeological purposes—assuming that was the real reason they were here—that would be more than adequate.

The western section of Johnson’s Ridge, the summit of the rear wall, was grassy and flat, a long plateau about two thousand yards north to south and a hundred fifty yards across the spine. On the south, a ravine split it off from the rising hills on its flank. The north side ended in a wall of trees.

“Concentrate along the rim,” Max had said.

“Slower,” she told Charlie, who was still uncomfortably close to the edge.

“Roger,” said Charlie. He was wearing an outsized lumberjack coat and a woolen hat with its earflaps pulled down.

Moore wanted to find something . Not only because she wanted to know what was going on, but because she was a professional and intended to deliver a product to the customer even when he made the project unnecessarily difficult. Still, it was irritating that Max and his associates wouldn’t trust her. Nobody was going to steal their beads and arrowheads, or whatever. And that was another aspect of this that pointed toward a geological motif: These did not seem like people who would be interested in digging up old cookpots. But she had explained that if they wanted to find, say, gold, they had to tell her about it if they expected to get results.

She was seated with her feet on one of the work-benches, sipping coffee, when a very peculiar picture worked its way onto the bank of screens. “Son of a bitch,” she said, freezing the image on her personal display.

Max was in Tucson to bid on a Halifax bomber when the call came in.

“I think we got it right out of the box.” April’s voice, hushed. “Something’s buried on the lip of the ridge.”

“What? Another boat?” Max was standing near a window in the lone terminal of a small private airport. The Halifax was out on the runway, surrounded by the competition.

“No. This is a lot bigger. About a hundred fifty feet across. And it’s right where you thought it might be. On the brink of the summit.”

“Damn.”

“Max,” she said, “it’s round .”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

The word brought a long, pregnant silence at both ends.

On the radar printouts, it looked like a roundhouse with a bubble dome. “I’m damned if I’ve ever seen anything like it,” Moore said. “It’s not a ranger station and it’s not a silo. And it sure isn’t a farmhouse.” She looked suspiciously at Max. “I assume you know what it is.”

Max knew what he was hoping for. But the trace image didn’t look aerodynamic. He contented himself with shaking his head.

“What else can you make out?” April asked.

“Nothing. Nada . It’s just a big, round building. About five hundred feet in circumference.”

“How high is it?”

“Twenty feet at the perimeter. Thirty feet or so at the top of the bubble.” They were in the GeoTech van, which was parked uncomfortably close to the cliff edge, directly over the object. The wind pushed against the side of the vehicle. “Now here’s something else that’s strange,” Moore said. “The top of the summit is mostly rock, with a few feet of dirt thrown on top. Okay? But this thing is built inside a cut in the rock. Look, see these shadows? That’s all granite.”

April asked her to enlarge the image.

“The cut is also round,” Moore said. “Uh, I would have to say it was made specifically to accommodate the roundhouse.”

Max and April exchanged glances.

“Here’s something else,” said Moore. She pointed at dark shadings below and in front of the object. (If, that is, one could assume that the front was at the lip of the cliff.) “This is a channel cut through the rock.” It passed from a point directly under the structure out to the edge of the precipice.

“What’s the roundhouse made of?” April asked.

“Don’t know. I can tell you it isn’t rock, though.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Quality of the return. It almost reads like glass.” Moore tapped her fingers against the top of her work table. “I just can’t imagine what anything like this is doing up here. If we were down on the plain, I’d say it was an abandoned storage facility. It’s big enough. But why would anyone put a storage building up here? It almost looks like a place where people came to sit on the front porch and look out over the valley. Right?” She looked hard at Max. “But this thing doesn’t have a front porch.” Max squirmed under her irritation and was tempted to blurt everything out. But what was he going to tell her? That he thought she’d just found a flying saucer?

They climbed out of the van and stood looking down into the ground as if, by sheer will, they could see what lay beneath. It had snowed during the night, but the wind had been blowing hard all day and had swept the summit clear. It was just after sunset, and the temperature was dropping fast.

The radar tractor crisscrossed the ground at a distance, looking for other objects. The periodic roars of its engine knifed through the still air. Far below, a pair of headlights moved south along Route 32, and a couple of farmhouses lit up the gathering gloom. The landscape was fading, becoming intangible.

April surprised him. She put her arm through his and walked him along the brink, away from Moore. “The channel,” she said. “Are you thinking what I am?”

He nodded. “It was for the boat.”

She shivered with excitement. “I think we’ve hit the jackpot.”

“I think so,” said Max.

Neither spoke for a time. Max was savoring his feelings.

“Do you think,” she said, “the Sioux will agree to our digging up the area?”

“Sure. They stand to profit from this, too.”

They turned their backs to the wind and looked out over the void. “I don’t like the idea,” she said, “of putting this on a profit-and-loss footing. I wish we could just sneak in here and do this without saying anything to anybody. But we’re talking about a major project now.”