Kuan shifted in his seat and glanced across the shuttle hold. The EVA suits made everyone look the same, but he easily spotted his own Marines. They held themselves with stoic poise, sitting erect in their straps with blasters positioned across their laps. Just as he’d trained them. Kuan felt a familiar swell of quiet pride. These men were his family in a way, his children, sons without a mother…
An old pain stirred in his chest, and he averted his eyes, closing them to push away the face that intruded on his memories. It wasn’t time for the past. Not time for her. Not now.
He opened his eyes and looked at the other group. Unlike the Marines, the researchers clung to their straps like drowning men. One seemed about to throw up in his helmet. Tal himself trembled like a leaf in the wind. Kuan had a brief feeling of Schadenfreude that he pushed aside. The mission was all that mattered.
“Final descent in 3…2…1… Mark.”
Kuan closed his eyes again as a low, rumbling vibration spread through the craft. They were penetrating atmosphere, passing through fire. The first spacers had done this in fragile proto-ships with neither shielding nor starsteel.
Their craft had both—it landed completely intact.
The ramp extended. Kuan rose, joined by the other Marines as they poured out in a silent, invisible stream, weapons ready. A violet sky glowed above them. The shuttle was atop a flat, circular pad several dozen meters in diameter. There was ground far below. A single bridge stretched out into an unending sea of domes and spires, all of them swathed in twilight. No life-forms on the scanners—at least none with recognizable bio-rhythms. It took less than a minute to secure a perimeter. He gave the order to de-cloak. A low whine of energy and thirteen armed men materialized back into the visible spectrum. They kept their backs to the shuttle as the researchers exited with their equipment.
“Really, Lieutenant, is this all quite necessary?”
Tal.
Kuan spoke without turning around. “I have my orders, sir.”
“I’m sure you do. Just tell your men to keep their trigger fingers steady and try not to scare any of the locals. I’m not throwing away a potential first-contact event.”
“With all due respect, sir, we’ve seen those turn dangerous before. Remember Proxima 9.”
There was an extended silence. Then Tal finally spoke again. “See to it this one doesn’t, Lieutenant.”
Kuan heard the man’s departing footsteps. They took some of his own tension with them.
They finished unloading twenty minutes later. Several of the Marines set up shield-net relays around their position, enveloping the shuttle and its off-loaded infrastructure in a force-field with constantly shifting frequencies.
“Sergeant. You have the camp.”
“Aye, Sir.”
They split the group evenly in half. Forty others left with Kuan, 25 Marines, 15 researchers including Dr. Tal himself. The man was now mercifully silent. They took the bridge on foot, crossing over a chasm filled with what might have been a river. Kuan looked down. The liquid was silent, still as a sheet of glass.
The domes grew larger. They hardly seemed ruins at all. They were pristine, glimmering with untainted marble. Pathways became visible among them, all identically sized and too small for vehicles. Kuan wondered if the builders of this place had either walked everywhere or flown.
They reached the end of the bridge. The city appeared less real than at a distance. Kuan knelt and drew his fingers over the walkway beneath him, looking in vain for where it separated from the surrounding structures. There were no angles anywhere, all corners rounded in whorls, waves and undulating circles. Everything flowed into one another as if grown from the same material. The effect was organic, almost aquatic in a way. Plant-growths towered among them like underwater weeds, blue-leaved, luminous, and stationary, yet seemingly swaying in a non-existent wind.
Kuan heard Tal murmuring behind him. He caught only snatches of what the doctor said. The phrases included “art and function,” “reconciled,” and “geometrical proportions,” likely meant for no one but his helm recorder. Kuan rose and walked out of range. He ran a second scan for life-signs. Nothing. The result was harder to accept this time. This place had no visible decay anywhere, as if only recently abandoned—or newly built and never inhabited at all. Every surface was the same flawless, reflective marble, glimmering violent, pink, cerulean blue.
“Eyes out. I don’t like this.”
“Aye, Sir.”
He closed the channel. None of the scientists heard them. Tal had gotten closer, muttering something about comparative aesthetics. Kuan thought of repeating the warning then promptly decided not to waste his breath. He gave the area another visual sweep. The domes were windowless but clearly buildings. Entrances were visible at the base, round ovular passageways without doors. A design of some sort flowed around the border of each. It looked merely decorative at first, then he realized it was script—curving lines, looping circles, interconnecting sweeps that recalled Old Arabic calligraphy. He ran a brief comparison search that came back matchless. Not unexpected.
They entered what might have been a thoroughfare. This area was wider than the rest, and held the first trace of plant life he’d seen since they landed. Smaller versions of the blue-leaved plants lined either side of the walkway on helix-curled stems, interspersed with mounted basins of liquid. Fountains lined the center.
The fountains were flowing.
They all stopped and stared in uniform disbelief. Clear, transparent liquid flowed down each structure in sparkling, jet-driven streams. Kuan re-activated his scanner. No life signs at all.
“Incredible…” Tal stepped toward the edifice before Kuan could stop him. He dipped his hand into the fountain. The glove came back wet. “After all this time…centuries? Millennia?”
“Step back, Doctor.”
Tal ignored him. He put his hand back in, drew it through the pool, watching ripples on the surface. “The design, the engineering it would have taken…”
“I said, step back.”
Kuan kept his eyes locked on the fountain, eased a finger over his blaster trigger as he tried to squint beneath its contents. The liquid could have been just water, but that meant nothing. There could still be things inside, quick things, dangerous things...
“I hear you, Sergeant.” The hand withdrew. Tal still didn’t look at him. He was staring in the distance, gaze fixed on one of the towering spires. “How perfect a culture would they have to be for their works to last so long…?”
“If they were that perfect, where are they now?”
“Dr. Tal!” They both turned. One of the other scientists was pointing at something. Kuan followed the line of his finger and stopped.
The figure was of a transparent, glass-like material. That was why he missed it. Had to be. Then he suddenly saw more of them, placed at regular intervals among the larger structures. His skin crawled beneath his armor. How had he missed them all?
Tal stepped around him. “We seem to have found them.”
Something was wrong. Kuan scanned the distance, keying the magnifier in his helm as he compared several of the statutes at a time. They looked almost human. But small details didn’t match. They had vaguely feline noses, flared fin-like ears spreading from the jaw like wings. And they were all female—assuming such descriptions applied. The bodies were svelte and supple, the faces disturbingly child-like. He thought of pixies, elves, little people, though these figures were hardly diminutive. Each figure was at least 2 meters tall, affixed to a base that raised it by another half. The sculptures towered over them, casting shadows in shy, yet provocative postures. The male in him could have appreciated it. But those faces… He turned away.
“This calligraphy… have you seen anything like it?” Tal and his colleague were chattering rapidly between themselves. Kuan glanced back. Both men were fixated on the base block supporting the sculpture, a plaque with flowing lines of script. Tal rose to his feet and stared up at the likeness itself. Too long, Kuan thought. Then Tal reached out his hand, touched the neck, ran it lower…
Kuan turned away. He kept his back to them, letting the Science Officer finish whatever prurient examination he had in mind. He forced his eyes to wander, consciously avoiding the sculptures he now saw nearly everywhere as if they’d suddenly blinked into existence. There were reasonable explanations. Color-shifting, cloaking tech…
But there was something else about this place. Something…strange. He couldn’t identify it at first. Then he understood. Sameness. It was everywhere. The streets. The architecture. Even the plants. Identical features repeated themselves with mathematical regularity. Only a few predetermined variations gave the illusion of diversity. There were no other markers or quirks of any kind to distinguish one area from another. He would have been lost without the shuttle transponder. That unsettled him more than anything.
“Seem to be ideograms…glyphs, perhaps?”
“Directly on the body like that…my guess would be some religious significance…”
“In a culture this sophisticated? I wonder…”
One of the domes was nearby. Kuan moved toward it and let the scientists’ chatter fade away behind him. The doorless entrance stood before him, a window into blackness. As good an excuse as any. He stepped towards it slowly, rifle held out before him. Two of his squad mates followed.
Kuan reached the dome and put his back to the wall just short of the opening. His comrades took up position behind him. He held the rifle aloft in one hand and plastered the other against the building surface. The action automatically engaged the fingertip sensors in his suit. They should have picked up any sound vibrations inside, but there was nothing. He would have to make his own.
He sent a probe tremor through the servos in his fingertips. No feedback. He frowned. A material that absorbent would have to be military grade at the very least. He raised the power controls and sent the tremor again.
This time it worked. A partial reading appeared at the corner of his helm display. There was something inside. Something massive.
He reached down and detached the scope from his blaster. No need to escalate things just yet. He eased the device around the edge and activated it. A linked image appeared in his helm.
Three long seconds passed before he processed what he saw. He blinked several times, hesitated, and withdrew his arm. Then gave the signal to advance.
They entered a chamber open to the sky, twilight rays streaming down through a ceiling oculus to light the interior.
At the center was a giant.
The statue was at least 11 meters tall. It stood directly beneath the oculus. The same ubiquitous elfin figure they had seen before. This time fully naked, a globe in each hand, encircled by towering plants whose blue-violet light rendered it ethereal.
No one spoke. No one moved. Then Kuan keyed his radio.
“Doctor? You may want to see this.”
Tal’s voice came back over the link. “Lieutenant? Where are you?”
“The dome.”
The link ended and Tal emerged through the doorway. He stopped. Froze. Several of his team entered behind and halted in identical reactions. Kuan almost smiled.
“Think they had religion after all?”
This time, they said nothing. They only stared, silent captives to the goddess in her Parthenon. Kuan turned and stared back out the entrance, toward the cityscape beyond with its identical lifeless buildings, streets, and statuary among ghostly trees.
The thought had struck him more than once. How could anyone have lived here? Then another thought came. You needed people for a city–but not a mausoleum.
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