Saving proxima, p.30
Saving Proxima, page 30
“What are you thinking about this, Alma?” Rain Gilster asked. “A lost civilization or something?”
“Well, Rain, honestly, I just don’t know. But what I do know is that from all, not some, but every single one of the history records given to us by the Fintidierians, there is absolutely no reference, zero, zilch, nada, to an ancient culture on this continent.”
“Maybe they’ve yet to discover them?” Dr. Raheem Ramashandra suggested. “There is still debate about the age of various cultures on Earth.”
“Yes, this could just be a new discovery that our technology has enabled,” Dr. Jones offered. “But it might not be. All I can say is, perhaps there are clues there as to where these people came from. If we know where they’ve been . . . ”
“We might figure out where they are going?” Charles asked.
“Right,” Jones agreed. “But there’s more to this story.”
“More?” Charles asked.
“Yes, there is. Dr. Jenda actually had the idea,” Dr. Jones replied. “Tanya, would you mind?”
Charles looked as the screen changed to a tall, slender, black woman with very silky-smooth skin. Her eyes were a piercing ice blue. He didn’t have to look at his AI for her name because she was the kind of woman that when a man met her, he remembered. She had all the features of a runway model or a movie star. To top that off, she’d been nominated not once, but twice, for the Nobel Prize—once for economics and once for mathematics. Dr. Tanya Jenda from Tobago. Her expertise was economics and statistics and the history of macroscopic economies.
“Yes, thank you,” Dr. Jenda said in a very mild voice. “After hearing Dr. Jones’s discovery of this lost culture, I started thinking about our own history. Such locations always drive and fuel manifest destinies. Treasure hunters, thrill seekers, explorers, and the like always fuel the next economy. Just look how much economy we created with our insane adventure.”
“Hahaha!” Charles chuckled to himself quietly. “You ain’t kidding there.”
“Where are the ancient artifact hunters, the gold rush seekers, the explorers looking for treasure? If they were attempting to fly there, we would see runways nearby. So, they must be using naval vessels to go there if there are exploration activities in this area, right?”
“That makes sense, doesn’t it?” Alma Jones added.
“Yes, it would make sense,” Dr. Jenda agreed. “So, we looked for increases in naval-based economies in the southern hemisphere going on trade routes, exploration routes, or anything in this direction. There is nothing. Next, I took all of the satellite imagery data we have taken since arrival and had the AIs mark all naval traffic, as well as all aerial traffic. Granted, their technology is slow and it will really take several months more to map with certainty, so I needed more data. Therefore, I also had a library search done on all forms of traffic lanes noted in their history, literature, and even mythologies—of which they have few. I have here a map compiled from all their traffic. The blue dotted lines are current paths and expected trajectories. The red dotted lines are from current maritime law data. The green dotted lines are from historical documents. The purple dotted lines from literature. And the yellow dotted lines are from mythology.”
“That’s an impressive bit of work,” Victor Tarasenko said, a bit too loudly.
“What on earth?” Rain agreed.
“What are the odds of that?” Dr. Renaud asked.
“Very good question, Dr. Renaud,” Dr. Jenda replied and continued. “Clearly, you have all noticed that according to this data there is no traffic to this region out to at least one thousand kilometers’ radius from these ruins. This is what appears to be a quarantined zone or an off-limits zone for whatever reason.”
“What the hell?” Crosby’s face appeared on the screen briefly.
“Exactly.” Dr. Jones stood again as Dr. Jenda sat back down. “Thanks, Tanya. I’d have never thought about that approach. Brilliant investigation. But there’s more.”
“More?” Charles was so intrigued. He was on the edge of his seat at this point. “Please go on.”
“Once we figured this part out. The fact that there is an off-limits zone in the southern hemisphere of this planet that is almost two thousand kilometers in diameter is absolutely fascinating and clearly deliberate. For comparison, this area is a little larger than three million square kilometers. Texas is about six hundred and ninety-one thousand square kilometers. This spot is about four and a half times larger than Texas! Alaska is one point seven million square kilometers or so. The spot is almost twice the size of Alaska! Why? What happened here?”
“What did happen there?” Charles heard but didn’t bother taking his eyes off Dr. Jones to see who it was. This was absolutely fascinating and riveting.
“At this point I asked Victor to do a very detailed intelligence data sweep of the region,” Dr. Jones continued and then held out a hand pointing to the intel specialist. “Vic?”
“Yes, uh, thank you, Dr. Jones.” Tarasenko stood and started talking. “Following her direction, I started at the center of this circle and began a push-broom sweep with all sensors of the area. We now have data of this region down to centimeter accuracy across the spectrum. First, sensors show no signs of radioactivity or any such major catastrophe. What it does show us is this, right here. You can see scattered in large areas—larger than soccer fields, many of them—where the earth has been disturbed and then filled back over as mounds that are now grown over by vegetation. There are no spoils piles.”
“Pyramids?” from the audience.
“Ha! That is what I thought I was finding.” Tarasenko’s Russian accent rolled the words together. “But nyet. They are graves. Massive, massive, mass-grave sites. And there are many tens, maybe hundreds of them.”
“Grave sites! That many?” Dr. Faruq, theoretical physicist, asked.
“Dah, yes, and maybe there is more of them.” Tarasenko nodded his head in the affirmative. “I am still looking at the data. As of right now, the number of grave sites, and the size of them, I can’t be certain of the depth, but each of them are roughly rectangular pyramid shapes about one hundred meters on a side and at least fifty meters tall. Ground-penetrating radar suggests they are equally deep with a twenty percent error, perhaps. The volume of a rectangular pyramid this size is about three hundred thirty-three thousand cubic meters. If it is equally deep then the volume is six hundred sixty-six thousand cubic meters. A human body is about zero point zero seven five cubic meters. Allowing for dirt falling in, and sloppiness, we can say a body would take zero point one cubic meters of volume. This would mean that in each of these grave sites there are approximately six point six million bodies. Counting all the known sites suggests hundreds of millions of bodies and maybe as much as a billion or more!”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Allah be praised.”
“Holy shit.”
“So now you see.” Dr. Jones stood up, motioning a thank-you to Victor Tarasenko. “Now you see. Something, horrible, cataclysmic, dangerous, I don’t know what, happened there. We must go there and see what happened. It might be a clue as to why these people are dying off. Maybe it happened before.”
“Maybe there was a disease like the Black Plague in the Middle Ages?”
“Well, we will not know the answer until we go there and investigate. There is nothing about this in the Fintidierans’ literature, history, politics, culture. Nothing. They have either forgotten it or covered it up. Since there are actually no travel zones, it smells of cover up,” Dr. Jones finished. “Ambassador, it’s a clear imperative that we go and investigate this location.”
“I’d like to take a team there and investigate with you.”
“I’ll volunteer to go!”
Charles listened as most of the team discussed going and what might be the cause of such mass death and then what reasons there could be to cover it up. He listened for a few moments and then stood.
“Alright, let’s hold it down a bit,” he said. “First of all, the contents of this meeting are to be kept completely confidential to Earthlings only. I cannot emphasize this enough. Until we have more information, we had better not let on that we are investigating something that could be at the very heart of this culture’s deepest, darkest history. We could start an interstellar incident. Hell, they might just come kill us for our troubles.”
“We have to go. You realize this, right, Charles?” Jones pleaded with him.
“Calm down.” He waved a hand at her. “Of course we have to go. We have to find out what happened on this world and make sure it doesn’t happen to us.”
“So, we’re going, then?” Jones asked again for affirmation.
“Commander Rogers.” Charles turned his attention to the SEAL.
“Yes, Ambassador?”
“Can you get a team, handpicked by you and Dr. Jones, geared up so that they would be protected from alien bears and snakes and the like?” Charles asked. “And ready for God-knows-what-else in the event something happened?”
“I will gear them up, as you say, sir, with a security team,” Rogers replied. “We can protect them. And we can get in and out without being seen.”
“Okay then. Do it. But don’t tell me about it until afterward.” Charles held a finger to his lips with a grin. “Understood?”
“Plausible deniability, sir. Understood.”
“Okay then, on to the next front. Let’s please shelve the discussion of this bizarre and fascinating discovery until we complete our business of the day here.” Charles moved an icon in front of him. “Dr. Burbank and Dr. Gilster, you two are up.”
“Go ahead, Rain,” Roy said. The camera jumped to him briefly and then back to Rain. Charles was glad to see Dr. Burbank integrating into the team. While there was still a quietly routed suicide watch notice about Roy, there was nothing official other than everyone was worried about him.
“Right. Okay, Roy.” Dr. Gilster stood so the drone could find her easily. “Roy and I have been reworking the long-range communications capability and we’ve succeeded. This morning, our radio astronomy assay was brought online, tested against known radio stars, and then pointed at the Sol system. We, after some fine-tuning, detected the communications beacon being transmitted from there. We decoded it. As you can imagine it was a repeating loop wanting to know if we could read them and instructions on what frequencies to find looped letters-from-home data dumps. There are also news feeds and so on in the loop. We’ve started full downloads and have routed them to all the appropriate public folders on our network.”
Rain paused to let that sink in. There were sighs of relief, various cheers and applauding, and a few shouts of “Amen!” She nodded in agreement and could see a noticeably big expression of satisfaction and happiness from Roy. He was already updating his three-dimensional model of his daughter.
“The secretary general was right. From the top line of the news feed, it is clear that the Emissary left Earth about four and a half years ago, just after we went into cryo after our midflight physicals.” Rain let that sink in too. “I’ve been looking through the data for the ship’s roster along with other information. My AI has put together several days’ worth of video feeds and tomes of information that we’ve missed. It will take some time to get through all of it and that hasn’t been my main focus anyway.”
“What has been?” Crosby’s face appeared briefly on the screen.
“This.” Rain tapped at more icons before her and the screen changed to a spectrum analyzer waterfall page. “Roy and I found this.”
The waterfall chart represented an area from one to ten gigahertz. Just to the left of the middle of the chart was a peak sticking straight up far above the background noise. There were two smaller peaks on either side of the central one. Rain zoomed in on it just a bit and placed a window box over the main peak. It then zoomed in and spread the peak into what now appeared as a bell-shaped, or Gaussian-shaped, curve that modulated up and down and had ripples changing on the bell-shaped line. The curve looked like a faster rippling sinusoidal function bent upward into the bell shape. The faster smaller ripples changed in frequency and amplitude.
“This is coming from the general direction of Earth, but it is much, much closer,” Rain explained. “And I’m sure any of you space jockeys online can recognize it. If I apply the blue-shift filter to it and then add a narrow waveform frequency modulation filter, we get this . . . ”
“ . . . Samaritan, this is the starship Emissary from Earth. This is Captain Alan Jacobs of the United States Space Force on adjunct assignment to the United Nations. We are currently inbound to Proxima. Please respond. ETA at current rate of closure is ninety-three days . . . ”
The room cheered again.
CHAPTER 51
January 16, 2100 (Earth/Proxima timeline)
Proxima b, aka Fintidier
The scientists of the exploration team had been on-site for more than three days. Before that, Commander Rogers had made the first trip with security forces only and did a forward recon of the region. At first, they completed several flyovers and then landed at the central point of the region. In the very center area, according to ground-penetrating radar, infrared and visible lidar, and acoustic vibrometry was what appeared to be a large pyramid-shaped stone temple that was as large or larger than the great pyramids on Earth. There were several smaller adjunct pyramidal structures adjacent in particular geometric patterns. The scientists were running AI pattern recognition algorithms against other known patterns such as star maps and so on. The temple was completely covered with eons of vegetation and unless you’d already looked at the location with foliage-penetrating radar and lidar there would be no way to discern it from a geological feature.
The security recon team had spread out and covered several of the burial mounds, which were overgrown so thickly that walking over them and around them was nearly impossible. Using exfoliants, fire, and several of the ATVs with ad hoc scoops added to the front of them, pathways and gathering areas were created. No permanent structures were set up and Rogers was pretty certain that in less than a couple months the area would be completely grown over, covering nearly all traces that they had been there. The jungle was that thick, alive, and encroaching in every direction. Screams of all manners of insects, reptiles, and mammals filled the twilight daytime that practically never ended, at least not for twenty-some-odd days.
For the first two Earth daytime periods the security team set up perimeter markers, makeshift barricades, and temporary shelters. A tent was set up to act as a latrine station and a thousand-gallon plastic water tank was set in place for drinking and bathing. On day three, the scientists were brought in, and they went straight to work.
“We found an entrance to the main temple,” Terrence Henry from the security force, a retired British Special Forces colonel, told Dr. Jones with excitement. “You should come see it, Doctor.”
They had used the ATVs to cut a driving path around the base of the large temple and had continued to excavate upward and inward until they had hit stone. From there they had cleared away dirt and vegetation based on ground-penetrating radar data until there were clear markings and evidence of construction methods, and that led them toward an entrance. About a hundred square meters of area up the side of the pyramid that had been covered in alien oranges, yellows, and burgundies were cleared away, revealing a large monolithic stone entrance.
“Looks like the front door to me,” Dr. Jones exclaimed. “Look how big!”
“I bet that thing weighs tens of thousands of tons. How on Earth did they get it in place amidst all of this?” Terrence asked her.
“I don’t think it was a jungle, or at least it was more manicured when they lived here,” she replied. “We need to move that rock.”
“No way the ATVs will do it,” Terrence said. “I don’t even think the OSAM would move it.”
“No, I suspect it wouldn’t.” Dr. Jones studied the entrance and looked about the stone steps and sidewalls for marking or writings that might reveal how to get in. There were markings, but the application that Dr. Oliveira-Santos had given them couldn’t translate it. “We need Maggie down here to look at this. Maybe she can figure out a way to translate some of these glyphs. They’re not similar at all to any on Earth or the AI would pick up on it.”
“Want me to get the OSAM sent back for her?”
“I don’t know. Let me think,” Jones said.
“We could get Dr. Ash over here. She’s an expert on explosives and war-machine engineering. She might have an idea,” Terrence told her. “Not sure what that stone is made of, but surely we have some ordnance that would take care of it.”
“Well, I was thinking about asking the CHENG about an idea,” she said. “Get Maggie and Dr. Ash down here. I’m going to keep looking around. And maybe call the CHENG. Can we get some more lights here also?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Terrence turned back toward the ATV, calling out to Commander Rogers on the ’net as he left her. Then he turned to one of the other security team members. “Zeke, stay with her. I’m going to talk to the boss.”
“Right.” The SEAL responded.
* * *
“No, Alma.” Dr. Maggie Oliveira-Santos shook her head in disappointment. “I don’t have a reference for these glyphs. They are a language, but not from any of the Fintidierian libraries and not of Earth. This is a different lost language. Maybe inside or somewhere else out here there might be a primer stone.”
“Okay, then, take a break, or keep at it. It’s up to you.” Dr. Jones sighed with frustration. “I’ve got a meeting with Dr. Ash. We can talk in a little while.”
* * *
“So, Carol? Do we have anything that will blow the stone up? Move it? Cut it? I dunno?” Dr. Jones was growing more and more frustrated with the lack of progress of getting inside the temple while the rest of the team had excavated one of the burial sites and discovered remains. They were bringing down a Carbon-14 dating machine on the next OSAM flight.
