Seeker

Synopsis:

Thousands of years after an entire colony mysteriously disappears, antiquities dealer Alex Benedict comes into possession of a cup that seems to be from the Seeker, one of the colony’s ships. Investigating the provenance of the cup, Alex and his assistant Chase follow a deadly trail to the Seeker — strangely adrift in a system barren of habitable worlds. But their discovery raises more questions than it answers, drawing Alex and Chase into the very heart of danger.

For T.E.D. Klein and Terry Carr with my appreciation

“We advise that our patrons not attempt the slopes today, other than the Blue Run. A distinct danger from avalanches is still present throughout the skiing area. It would be prudent to remain in the chalet, or perhaps to consider spending the day in town.”

1398, RIMWAY CALENDAR

Wescott knew he was dead. There seemed little chance for Margaret, either. Or for his daughter. He had followed the instruction and stayed inside and now he lay beneath tons of ice and rock. He could hear weeping and screams, lost in the dark around him.

He was trembling in the cold, his right arm crushed and pinned beneath a fallen timber. He could no longer feel the pain. Or the arm.

He thought of Delia. Just beginning her life and almost certainly swept away. Tears ran down his cheeks. She’d been so anxious to come.

He closed his eyes and tried to resign himself. Tried to place himself again aboard the
Falcon
, where he and Margaret had met. Those had been priceless years. He’d known the day would come when he would wish he could go back and do it all again.

The
Falcon
.

My God. It occurred to him that, if Margaret had not escaped the building, their discovery would die with them. Delia knew about it, but she was too young to understand.

They had told nobody! Except Mattie. Mattie knew.

He tore at the timber, tried to drag himself free. Tried to change his angle and get his feet against it. He had to survive long enough to tell them. Just in case . . .

But Margaret was not dead. Could not be dead.

Please, God.

The cries and screams around him dwindled, became occasional moanings. How long had it been? It seemed like hours since the chalet had crashed down on him. Where were the rescue workers?

He listened to his own labored breathing. The floor had shaken, had stopped, had shaken again. Then, after the shocks, when everybody in the dining room had thought maybe it was over, he’d heard the sudden roar. They’d looked at one another, some people had gotten up to run, others had sat terrified, the lights went out, and the walls had imploded. He was pretty sure the floor had collapsed and that he was trapped in a cellar. But he couldn’t be certain. Not that it mattered.

He heard distant sirens. Finally.

He pushed at the timber that held his arm. He didn’t feel entirely connected to his body anymore. He’d retreated into his head and looked out, not unlike a spectator hiding in a cave. Beneath him, the ground trembled again.

He wanted to believe Margaret had survived. Bubbly, immortal, farseeing Margaret, who was never, ever, taken by surprise. It didn’t seem possible she could be caught in all this, swept aside in that single terrible moment. She’d gone back to their room to get a sweater. Had left just moments before it had all happened. Had gone up the staircase and vanished forever from his life.

And Delia. In the apartment. Eight years old. Sulking because he’d refused permission for her to go out on her own, I don’t care if they’re saying the Blue Run is safe, we’ll wait until we hear everything’s okay. The apartment was on the third floor, toward the front of the building. Maybe it had been spared. He prayed they were both standing out there somewhere now, in the snow, worrying about
him
.

When they’d issued the warning, they’d said the chalet was safe. Safe and solid. Stay indoors and everything will be okay. Avalanche-free zone.

In the dark, he smiled.

They’d been sitting in the dining room with their newest acquaintance, Breia Somebody-or-Other, who was from his hometown, when Margaret had gotten up, said something about now don’t you two eat all the eggs I’ll only be a minute, and walked off. A group of skiers stood near the front doors, ready to go out, angrily complaining about the level of caution at the chalet and how Blue Run was for beginners. Two couples sat amid potted plants enjoying a round of drinks. A heavyset man who looked like a judge was descending the staircase. A young woman in a gray-green jacket had just sat down at the piano and begun to play.

Margaret would just have had time to reach their room before the first shock came. The diners had looked around at each other, their eyes wide with surprise. Then the second jolt, and the fear in the room became palpable. There’d been no screams, as best he could remember, but people were throwing back their chairs and starting for the exits.

Breia, middle-aged, dark-haired, a teacher on vacation, had looked out the window, trying to see what was happening. His angle was bad so he couldn’t see much, but his hair stood straight up when she gasped and whispered
Run
in a terrified voice. Without another sound she threw back her chair and fled.

Outside, a wall of snow appeared and bore down on them. It had been smooth, rhythmic, almost choreographed, a crystal tide flowing down the side of the mountain, engulfing trees and boulders and, finally, the heavy stone wall that marked the perimeter of the chalet’s grounds. As he watched, it swept over someone. Man or woman, it happened too quick to be sure. Somebody trying to run.

Wescott had sat quietly, knowing there was no place to hide. He took a sip of his coffee. It was as if time had stopped. The desk clerk, a simulation, blinked off. So did the host and one of the doormen. The skiers near the front door scattered.

Wescott held his breath. The rear and sidewalls blew into the dining room and there was a sharp pain and the sensation of falling.

Somewhere, doors slammed.

Something wet was running down his ribs. Tickling him, but he couldn’t reach it.

Breia hadn’t gotten out of the dining room. She was probably within a few meters. It was hard to speak. He didn’t seem to have much air in his lungs. But he whispered her name.

He heard a voice, far away. “
Over here
.” But it was a male voice.

And then there were boots chunking through snow.

“See if you can get him out, Harry.”

Somebody was digging.

“Hurry.”

No answer though from Breia.

He tried to cry out, let them know where he was, but he was too weak. No need anyhow. Margaret knew he was in trouble, and she was surely out there somewhere, with the rescue workers, trying to find him.

But a deeper darkness was coming. The rubble on which he lay was fading, and he stopped caring about the secret that he and Margaret shared, stopped caring about the timber that pinned him down. Margaret was okay. Had to be.

And he slid away from his prison.

. . . But what provided the truest sense of the antiquity of (the Egyptian tomb) was to see graffiti scrawled on its walls by Athenian visitors, circa 200 C.E. And to know the place was as old for them, as their markings are for me.
— Wolfgang Corbin,
The Vandal and the Slavegirl,
6612 C.E.

1429, THIRTY-ONE YEARS LATER

The station was exactly where Alex said it would be, on the thirteenth moon of Gideon V, a gas giant with no special characteristics to recommend it other than that it circled a dead star rather than a sun. It was in a deteriorating orbit, and, in another hundred thousand years, according to the experts, it would slip into the clouds and vanish. In the meantime it was ours.

The station consisted of a cluster of four domes and an array of radio telescopes and sensors. Nothing fancy. Everything, the domes and the electronic gear and the surrounding rock, was a dark, patchy orange, illuminated only by the mud brown gas giant and its equally mud brown ring system. It was easy enough to see why nobody had noticed the station during several routine Survey visits. Gideon V had just become only the third known outstation left by the Celians.

“Magnificent,” Alex said, standing by the viewport with his arms folded.

“The site?” I said. “Or you?”

He smiled modestly. We both knew he wasn’t good at being humble.

“Benedict strikes again,” I said. “How did you figure it out?”

I hesitate to say Alex ever looked smug. But that day he was close. “I am pretty good, aren’t I?”

“How’d you do it?” I’d doubted him all the way, and he was enjoying his moment.

“Simple enough, Kolpath. Let me explain.”

He had done it, of course, the way he always did things. By imagination, hard work, and methodical attention to detail. He’d gone through shipping records and histories and personal memoirs and everything else he could lay hands on. He’d narrowed it down, and concluded that Gideon V was an ideal central location for the exploratory operations then being conducted by the Celians. The planet, by the way, was given the Roman numeral not because it was the fifth world in the system. It was, in fact, the only one, the others having either been swallowed whole or torn from their orbits by a passing star. It had happened a quarter million years ago, so there’d been no witnesses. But it was possible to compute from the elliptical orbit of the remaining world that there had been others. The question up for debate was their number. While most astrophysicists thought there’d been four additional worlds, some put the probable total closer to ten.

Nobody really knew. But the station, several hundred light-years from the nearest occupied world, would be a treasure trove for Rainbow Enterprises. The Celians, during their golden age, had been a romantic nation, given over to philosophy, drama, music, and exploration. They were believed to have penetrated deeper into the Aurelian Cluster than any other branch of the human family. Gideon V had been central to that effort. Alex was convinced they’d pushed well beyond, into the Basin. If so, there was considerably more to be found.

Several centuries ago, the Celians had gone abruptly downhill. Civil war erupted, governments across the home world collapsed in chaos, and in the end they had to be bailed out by the other members of what was then known as the Pact. When it was over, their great days were also over. They’d lost their fire, become conservative, more interested in creature comforts than in exploration. Today, they are possibly the most regressive planetary society in the Confederacy. They are proud of their former greatness and try to wear it as a kind of aura.
This is who we are
. But in truth it’s who they
were
.

We were in the
Belle-Marie
, maybe twenty thousand kilometers out from the gas giant when the domes rotated into view. Alex makes his living trading and selling artifacts, and occasionally finding lost sites himself. He’s good at it, seems almost to have a telepathic sense for ruin. Mention that to him, as people occasionally do, and he smiles modestly and ascribes everything to good luck. Whatever it is, it’s made Rainbow Enterprises a highly profitable operation and left me with more money to throw around than I would ever have thought possible.

The thirteenth moon was big, the third biggest among twenty-six, the biggest without an accompanying atmosphere. Consequently it had been the first place we’d looked, for those two reasons. Large moons are better for bases because they provide a reasonable level of gravity without having to generate it artificially. But you don’t want one so large that it has an atmosphere. An atmosphere is always a complicating factor.

As far as we were concerned, vacuum had another advantage: It acts as a preservative. Anything left by the Celians when they closed up shop six centuries earlier was likely to be in pristine condition.

If you could have thrown sunlight on Gideon’s dark rings, they would have been spectacular. They were twisted and divided into three or four distinct sections. I couldn’t be sure. It depended on your angle of vision. The thirteenth moon lay just beyond the outermost ring. It moved in an orbit a few degrees above and below their plane, and the result would have been a compelling not-quite-edge-on view had there been any light to speak of. The gas giant itself, as seen from the station, never moved from its position halfway up the sky over a series of low hills. It was a dull, dark presence, not much more than simply a place where there were no stars.

I put the
Belle-Marie
in orbit and we went down in the lander.

The moon was heavily cratered in the north and along the equator, with plains in the south streaked with ridges and canyons. There were several mountain ranges, tall, skeletal peaks of pure granite. The domes were located midway between the equator and the north pole, on relatively flat ground. The antenna field was to the west. Mountains rose to the east. A tracked ground vehicle had been left in the middle of the complex.