SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (28 page)

"As much as we can, yes, it's not like we can go
for a fifty kilometer bike ride, or an open water swim. Why are you asking
this, Colonel?"

"Because," I explained, "if our special
forces ever need to go into action on Newark, they will need a real doctor with
them. They have two medics, guys who went through a crash course before we left
Earth, that's no substitute for a real doctor. That means a doctor who is
capable of going into action with them, not participating in the fighting, I
mean traveling with them wherever they go. While I don't expect our SpecOps
soldiers will see combat here on Newark, I do believe in being prepared.
Sergeant Adams, you know Sergeant Adams?" She nodded. "She and I have
been training with SpecOps teams in the mornings. You would not need any of the
hand to hand combat, or weapons training, you would need to run, march with a
pack, learn to climb, and also to lift weights. Would you be willing to do
that? I'm not talking anything crazy, like getting bounced out of bed at 0300 for
a ten mile run, you only need to participate in simple endurance training. If a
SpecOps team has to go somewhere, they're likely to be going on foot, and
they'll need a qualified doctor with them. The bonus to you," I added,
"is getting out of these caverns every day. It's not the most pleasant
weather out there, it is a change of scenery from this," I pointed at the
gray rock ceiling.

"What about Doctor Rouse?" She asked.
"Or Tanaka?"

She didn't ask about Suarez, who was an experienced
doctor and molecular biologist, and was also 58 years old and not someone I
could picture going on a twenty-mile hike with special forces.

"Tanaka said yes when I asked him this morning.
Rouse is a swimmer, not a runner, and he got a mild ankle sprain yesterday,
twisted it walking in the stream bed."

"Me and Tanaka?"

"And me, and Sergeant Adams. For training with a
SpecOps team. Doctor, I know this planet is a tremendous opportunity for a
biologist, maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity, there's an entire biosphere
out there to be explored. This training will only take a couple hours each
morning, six days a week. I promise that when we're out running, or on a hike,
and you see something you want to get a sample of, we will stop."

"Can I think about it, Colonel?"

"Sure. If you're in, we're going out for a run at
0800 tomorrow."

"Oh," she said, surprised, "I thought
you'd be starting earlier."

"No, I don't want people running in unfamiliar
terrain when it's dark, the last thing we need is sprained knees and broken
legs down here. SpecOps teams will be able to conduct night training once a
week, to maintain proficiency, you won’t have to go with them. Again, I do not
expect any military action while we are on Newark, I want to avoid that except
under extreme circumstances. Think about it, please, and let me know in the
morning."

Because of the austere conditions on Newark, we made
an extra effort to gather as many people as we could in the main cavern for the
evening meal. The mood was tense and glum, everyone, including myself, was
afraid Skippy would be ultimately unable to repair the
Dutchman
, and
we'd be stuck on an ice planet until our food ran out. To lighten the mood, I
tapped a fork on my coffee mug to get people's attention. Knowing Skippy was of
course listening, I cleared my throat and said "I have an announcement.
Skippy, hey, when we were in the fire fight, surrounded by that Thuranin
destroyer squadron, you told me something that surprised me. You've grown
fond
of us monkeys?" No way could I let an opportunity like this slip by. 
"How did that happen?"

"Oh, man, I should have known you wouldn't let
that slide," Skippy responded. "I lowered my expectations, is all.
Lowered them until they hit the ground, I dug a hole, and when I hit bedrock I
got a big drill and punched down as far as I could, and when the drill ran out
I jumped up and down on my expectations to squish them some more, and finally I
took a big steaming dump on my expectations, and filled in the hole."

"Uh huh. So, long story short, you totally love
us," I said. People chuckled.

"Ugh, I hate my life," Skippy grumbled.

"Ski-pp-y loves us, Sk-ipp-y loves us, Ski-"

"Shut up. Damn it, why didn't I jump us into that
star?"

"Because then we wouldn't have this quality time
together, Skippy."

"Exactly. Plenty of stars out there to jump
into."

"We love you too, Skippy." People laughed
out loud.

"Damn it, I long for the good old days when I was
buried on Paradise, taking a nice, long, peaceful dirt nap," he grumbled.
"Why did those stupid lizards have to dig me out of the ground?"

Four weeks into our idyllic tropical vacation on
Newark. I got a call. "Colonel," came the voice of Sergeant Adams in
my zPhone earpiece, "there's something you need to see over here."

"Trouble?" I brushed off my hands, as I'd
been helping dig to enlarge one of the back caverns of the lower cave. The rock
here was crumbly, that scared me about the cavern's integrity, but a couple
feet down we hit a solid rock like granite. If we could clear out all the
crumbly rock, we'd have a lot more space. Simms had offered to move some of our
stack of supplies out of the main cavern, if we could find a safe, dry place.

"Not exactly,” she replied. “Not at the
moment."

"Where are you?" I was intrigued.

"The cathedral complex, sir." She meant a
large cavern that, to some people, looked like a cathedral, with a large
entrance flanked by tall, column-like stones. The entrance had once been much
smaller, until the roof collapsed under the crushing weight of snow and ice
eons ago, or so our science team speculated. We had looked into the cathedral
complex as a possible habitat, but the entrance chamber afforded us little
cover, and large solid stones blocked the way into caves further under the
hills. I'd given permission for people to recon the place, in case we could
make something of it, the cathedral was conveniently located less than two kilometers
up the canyon.

Still, it was a long walk, in heavy gravity, and low
oxygen, and it would be getting dark soon. ""You can't give me a
hint, Adams?"

"You'd really best see this for yourself sir.
It's important."

Adams knew that because of our history, she could push
me further than other people could. As a colonel, I could have ordered her to
tell me what was going on. I didn't, I trusted her judgment instead.

Going to the cathedral, with darkness approaching,
meant walking up the canyon floor, sometimes splashing knee-deep through the ice
melt stream that meandered from one side of the canyon to another. That afternoon,
for the first time in three days, it wasn’t raining. It was cloudy, bleak,
chilly, with a stiff wind blowing straight into my face down the canyon.
Looking in front, then behind me, there wasn’t another human in sight, everyone
was safely tucked into our caverns except for the team excavating the cathedral
complex.

I paused to zip up my jacket against the wind, and
stared down into the stream. There were tiny animals in the water, I’d seen
them in the science team’s microscopes. They were hardy creatures, and I felt
sorry for them. If the science team was right, and I’d seen their evidence with
my own eyes, Newark had once had abundant life. There had at least been flying
insects or something similar, whatever had spread pollen from flower to flower.
Then the planet had somehow become locked in an ice age. It was now a frozen,
chilly, icy, rainy, thoroughly miserable place, but once it had been a decent
place for life, at least around the equator. Likely, I would never see Newark
again after we left, and I couldn’t imagine another species was choosing the
planet for a colony.

A gust of wind shook me out of my daydream. I tried to
step on rocks to cross the stream, but the rocks were slippery, and I skidded
off into the cold water up to my knees. Crap. Whatever reason Adams wanted me
at the cathedral, it had better be damned good.

Adams was waiting for me at the entrance with a big
flashlight. Even with Skippy controlling the satellite images, we didn't like
to use artificial light in the open, it was too risky. Whatever she wanted me
to see, it didn't have her scared. The expression on her face was, I thought,
excited. And sad. A deep sadness. "What's the big secret, Adams?"

She turned and walked toward the back of the
cathedral, toward the large, flat stone we called the altar. "You'll see,
sir."

We had to clamber over stones, and squeeze around a
large boulder that had once been part of the ceiling, I had never been this far
back into the cavern before. The science team, with a lot of help from soldiers
who were bored and had nothing else to do, had excavated a huge pile of stones
that had blocked the way into what we thought might be a much larger chamber. There
was not yet any large cavern, there was a path has been made to get by the big
boulder. Then we had to walk steeply up through a long, low-ceilinged passage, and
into a tall, narrow chamber. As I crouched down in the passage, nearly scraping
my head on the ceiling, I grumbled “Adams, if this is surprise party for my
birthday or something, there had better be a big goddamn cake.”

There was no cake. There was a well-lit chamber,
square, roughly ten meters on a wide, and it was tall, perhaps six meters. It
was square.
Square
. Like, almost precisely. In some areas, there were
indentations in the walls, that had once been filled with some sort of brick
and plaster, the plaster had weakened over time, and some bricks had tumbled
onto the floor. On the floor, there was a stacked pile of bricks, and another
stack of carved stones. Carved. Artificial. None of what I saw could have been
natural. I gasped, and looked up at Adams. She nodded. "I know, sir. Dr. Graziano
found it this morning."

"And you waited until now to tell me?"

Graziano explained. "We wanted to be certain,
that these stones don't simply give the appearance of having been carved. These
stones are old, Colonel.
Old
. They would have flaked off and looked like
much of nothing, if this chamber hadn't kept them dry all this time."

"All what time? How long ago?" If there were
other sentient beings on Newark, I wanted to know immediately.

He shrugged. "I don't know. Not yet. I'll need
Mr. Skippy to assist with the analysis. Very old. Hundreds of thousands of
years, at the very least. Probably more." He ran a hand lightly along one
carved edge. "Whoever made this, they are long gone from here.”

“Huh,” I said, glancing around the rock chamber. The
years had eroded it somewhat, still I could see the stone walls had been
shaped, smoothed, by someone’s hand long ago. “So, what, you think some aliens
took shelter here? They got stuck on Newark, and created this place to take
shelter, while they waited for rescue?” Enlarging a chamber is something that I
could see a stranded starship crew doing, especially if they didn’t have
powercells for heat like we did. Why they would carve stones into blocks made
little sense. Why would they need to build a wall? “Were they Kristang?”

Graziano glanced at Adams, and she gave a little
shrug. “He doesn’t know,” she said to the scientist. “I thought he should see
for himself.”

“We found it only a few hours ago.” Graziano explained
to me. “Come this way, please, Colonel Bishop.” He pointed to an opening in the
far wall that was so low, he needed to get on hands and knees and crawl. The
opening had at one time been blocked up by stones, which Graziano and his team
had carefully removed. I followed on hands and knees, with Adams behind me. Graziano
and Adams had lights, I should have brought one along. That was stupid of me,
it was growing dark outside anyway. The passageway we had to crawl through was
only twenty feet long, it soon opened up into another chamber, this one far
larger. It had also worked by sentient beings, the walls were smooth and
straight.

That wasn’t all. There were bones. Bones, and tools.
Bronze tools. Axes, shovels, spears, swords, arrowheads. The tools were mostly
upright in ceramic containers, with a few scattered on the floor, where their
ceramic containers had broken.

None of the bones were scattered, they were all
carefully laid on carved stone slabs. The bodies may have been dressed in fine
clothing, or wrapped in ceremonial cloth, now they were only bones. Some had
bronze shields laid atop them, some without. I knelt down to examine one set of
bones. Bipedal, like us. Two arms, two legs, a head with holes for two eyes,
and an opening for a nose that was more horizontal than humans. The leg bones
were heavy. And they were short, shorter than the average human. Shorter than
humans used to be, in ages past? I didn’t know.

The carvings on the slabs were eroded, their edges
rounded. I reached out to touch a carving, when Graziano coughed. “Sorry,” I
said guiltily, looking at the gloves he was wearing. “I wanted to see if these
carvings show what they looked like.”

“They do,” he pointed at one slab, where Doctors
Venkman and Friedlander were painstakingly clearing off accumulated dust with
soft brushes. Graziano led me over to a shield which had been removed from the
body it covered. The shield had been partly cleared of corrosion, exposing an
area which depicted a figure, in highly realistic detail. The figure stood on
two legs, it carried a sword in one hand, and some type of plant or branches in
the other. It was overall more squat and bulky than a modern human, and what I
thought at first was a helmet was, after close inspection, a bony ridge on top
of its head. I glanced between the bones on the stone slab to the depiction on
the shield, the bones also had a bony ridge. “They were shorter than us,” I
remarked without thinking.

“The higher gravity,” Graziano noted, “thicker bones,
also.”

“This was not a starship crew,” I said almost to
myself, considering the bronze tools. Surely any species advanced enough to
make starships would have tools of steel rather than bronze. Or they would have
tools constructed of composites or exotic materials. Not bronze. “These creat-”
almost I said ‘creatures’. These were not mere creatures. They created tools be
working metal. These were
people
. “These people, were natives here. How
is this possible? On this frozen planet?”

“Yes” Venkman said, standing up to brush the dust off
her pants. “These were natives. Remember what I showed you about the plants
that used to have flowers? Newark used to be warmer, significantly warmer.
These people, as you say, are more evidence to support that conclusion.”

“And then, what?” I asked, peering intently at the
figure on the bronze shield. “The planet went into an ice age, and they all
died? Everything? Not only them, all planets and animals on land went extinct?”

“We don’t understand how,” Friedlander joined the
conversation, he was a rocket scientist on loan to UNEF from NASA. “We may
never know the mechanism, not unless we stay here and study this planet much
longer than we plan to.”

“They all died?” I couldn’t process that. An entire
species, and entire civilization, gone. Completely wiped out. “Because of an
ice age?”

“Yes,” Venkman replied. “This is not unprecedented.
There is genetic evidence that the total human population shrank to as few as
five or ten thousand people, around seventy thousand years ago.”

“The Toba catastrophy,” Graziano started to say.

“That is only one theory,” Friedlander interjected, “and
there is contradictory evidence.”

“Toba?” I asked, wondering if T-O-B-A was an acronym
for something.

“Toba was a supervolcano in Indonesia, it erupted
around seventy thousand years ago,” Venkman explained, “and left a thick layer
of ash around the planet. There is a theory that the Toba event caused a global
winter. And that event roughly coincides with a bottleneck in human genetic
diversity. The point, Colonel, is that we came close to humanity going extinct
perhaps several times. With the severe changes to temperatures on Newark, it is
not surprising that a relatively advanced civilization would not have been able
to adapt quickly enough to survive. Imagine if ice had advanced down from the
poles to the equator on Earth, during the time of ancient Egypt or Sumeria.
Would those peoples have been able to survive?” She shook her head.

“They all died,” I said quietly, and no one responded,
they all knew I wasn’t asking a question. “We are near the equator here, they
came here as the temperature dropped? To, what, try to survive in caves? Why
wouldn’t they have chosen the caverns we are living in now? The cathedral is
too open,” I pointed out. That’s why we weren’t living in it.

Graziano spoke first. “We think, Colonel, that what we
call the cathedral used to extend forward much further, we believe the canyon
outside did not exist back then. It was probably an ordinary stream on the
surface in that time. Over the years, glaciers advanced, retreated, advanced,
retreated again, over and over, and the ice and seasonal melt flooding carved
the canyon. The roof of the cathedral was underground back then, and with hot
springs around, these caverns would have been one of the last places the
natives,” he pointed to the dry bones, “could have survived the deep freeze.
They held out here, the last of their kind, until the food ran out, or diseases
took them. With the population clustered tightly together here, pathogens could
have spread widely, especially with these people stressed from severe cold and
poor nutrition.”

“The weight of the glacier collapsed the roof of the
cavern?” I didn’t like hearing that. If one roof could collapse, then the roofs
of our two caverns could be unstable, weakened by past glaciers.

“That is possible, yes, it is more likely that
seasonal flooding of the stream slowly wore away material above the cavern,
exposing the stones that formed the roof. It would have been weakened, water
gets in, freezes, causes cracks. The cracks widen, more water seeps in. It is a
slow process. Over the course of a hundred thousand years, perhaps a million
years, water is unstoppable.”