Hidden City by M S Lawson - HTML preview

HIDDEN CITY

 

By M S Lawson

 

ISBN 978-0-6455245-2-9 (e-book)

 

Copyright© 2025 by Mark Steven Lawson writing as M S Lawson

markslawson@optusnet.com.au

 

Published by Clearvadersname Pty Ltd

 

Website: www.clearvadersname.com

 

All rights reserved. The book contains material protected under international and national copyright laws and treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without express permission from the publisher.

 

Other books by this author

 

No Wolves in Los Angeles (ebook, 2023)

 

Obsidian’s War – the winter city (ebook, 2022)

 

Obsidian’s War (ebook, 2021)

 

The Musketeers of Haven – a science fiction story (ebook, 2020)

 

Claire Takes on The Galaxy (ebook, published on the website Dreame, 2019)

 

Darth Vader – The good guy who lost (non-fiction ebook, 2018)

 

A Planet for Emily (ebook, 2017)

 

Disgraced in all of Koala Bay (ebook, 2016)

 

The Zen of Being Grumpy (non-fiction published by Connor Court, 2013)

 

Cover image: devised using the website NightCafe Studio

 

Spelling and grammar note: the spelling in this book is mainly English standard. That is civilization not civilization; colour not color, and so on, except that the spelling and grammar correction system I used often had different ideas. Readers will simply have to put up with the horror of the occasional slip. Read on.

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

Absorbed in testing circuits on a hover car lift-crystal unit, Alf did not realise anyone else was in the workshop until a shadow fell across his workbench. He turned to see an attractive woman in perhaps her late 20s, dark hair cut short in the fashion of the time. She wore a white shirt with a gold chain at the throat and black pants that clung to her figure in a way that Alfonso, or just Alf, admired. A brown, knee-length jacket plus a few touches of makeup underscored the general air of street chic, but with a grim underlying message of a shoulder holster containing a police issue Glock nine millimetre with a laser sight, barely concealed by the jacket. Despite all the technological advances, this classic weapon remained a reliable way to blow holes in people should the user decide to do so, as Alf knew well. Another problem was that the newcomer's otherwise bright eyes regarded Alf with a potent mixture of official disdain and feminine contempt.

"This is an honour, sergeant," said Alf. turning around and getting up. Police sergeant Ellen Pullen was model-tall, but Alf still towered above her. "I didn't hear you come in. You're looking good; figure's trim. You've been working out."

"Shut up, scum," she snapped.

"Ooookay," said Alf. He nodded at the second, auburn-haired female police officer just behind the Sergeant and said, "Senior constable." That police official, Samantha Pye, was not blessed with the same cheekbones or figure as her superior but was somewhat friendlier as she nodded back and almost smiled. "If this is about stolen spare parts again, I told you the last couple of times it's really Julian who buys and sells, and I'm pretty sure he's not into anything."

"It's not about parts," snapped the Sergeant. "I have questions for the hired slime. Julian's not in? We'll use his office."

"The boss's out on a job at the spaceport," said Alf. "Even us slimy mechanics get called in to help with the orbital shuttles from time to time." He eyed the police officer's figure again as they walked to the office. "Looking good, Sergeant. You've been putting that rowing machine in the gym to good use."

Ellen rounded on Alf.

"How do you know I've been using a rowing machine? You been stalking me, you creep?"

"Not at all, sergeant," said Alf, mildly. "We use the same gym, but I mostly stay on the boxing side, so you haven't seen me. I only saw you because some of the other gentlemen in the boxing gym made – um – admiring comments about a woman using the rowing machine, and I looked for myself.

"Ha!" she said. They went into the office, where she took the padded, swivel chair, leaving Alf and the senior constable to take two chipped, plastic stacker chairs used by guests. The office's large glass window looked out onto the cavernous workshop filled with ground and hover vehicles of all types. Both sides of the office were fitted with shelves crammed with equipment, including discarded, faulty parts and a couple of testing units Alf sometimes used. The only decorations were drawings done by the boss's very young children tacked up on the back wall. He also kept a framed picture of his family on the battered desk next to the computer. The Sergeant's eyes softened when it looked at those family items before switching back to Alf at full glare.

"Would I appreciate these 'admiring comments'?" she asked.

"They were raw compliments," said Alf judiciously, "that would have to be translated from male-speak to be suitable for mixed company."

The senior constable just managed to transform an emerging giggle into a snort, earning a glare from her superior.

(In fact, the cleanest of the comments made to Alf was that the girl on the rowing machine was a "prime piece.")

"Getting back from the gym," said the Sergeant, "I've been told you've been doing work on the star freighters in orbit; you got ferried up there for two days."

"Maybe I have, and maybe I haven't," said Alf carefully. "Is it a crime to do repair work? This business is called in for jobs at the port, as Julian will tell you."

The spaceport was, in fact, close enough for the occasional rumble of departing orbital shuttles to be heard and felt in the office. The suburb of Marshland where the workshop was located mainly existed to supply services to the port, ranging from machinery repairs to the less savory entertainments for visiting crews and the port's small garrison of Imperial auxiliaries, as well as housing many of its workers. However, those who could afford to do so lived on the other side of the port, in Creaghville proper, and pretended that Marshland and the adjacent marshes that gave the area its name did not exist.

"No crime in itself," said the Sergeant, "but when I heard about it, I took another look at the criminal record of one Alfonso Grego Martinez, a petty thief from the Sulu system."

"I'm flattered that you should take an interest in me, Sergeant," said Alf, inwardly cursing that someone had talked, although he'd asked for his involvement in the repair mission to be kept quiet.

"You don't want this sort of attention, scum," said the Sergeant. "The record of the petty thief that goes with the tracker embedded in your arm by Imperial law shows that he just scraped through school before being arrested for a series of crude smash and grabs. But I'm told you need at least a master's in space drive engineering to work on the engines of those big ships."

"What can I say, Sergeant? A man learns a lot knocking about the galaxy."

"The record also shows that you're supposed to be shorter than me, but I would barely come up to your shoulder, even in high heels."

The senior constable raised one eyebrow over that remark but remained silent.

"I guess being out on the rim made me grow in many ways, Sergeant, and you'd look really great in high heels."

"Do you seriously want to spend the night in a jail cell?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then stick to answering my questions. The listed weight is way off."

"I've been eating well," said Alf. "Those records can be inaccurate."

"The physical description doesn't match, nor does the picture." She leaned forward. "Who are you, Alfonso?"

"Just a mechanic trying to get by in this grand universe of ours."

"Right!" she snorted. "Here's the thing, Scum, I was all for dragging your arse down to the station and sweating some real answers out of you instead of the crap you've been handing me. Whoever you are, if you've taken this petty criminal's identity, your actual identity must be way worse. There's also the question of what happened to the real Alfonso. But my inspector says to just ask for now."

"Nice of him."

"He also says to say you can earn some points for yourself by keeping an ear out about this crashed ship."

"Crashed ship?"

"Sure, a big ship meant to have gone down somewhere on the other side of the marshes."

"First I've heard of it," said Alf. "They were trying to get to the port. Wouldn't port control just track the transponder?"

"It's not like that," said the Sergeant." Whoever was on the ship must be lowlifes like you. They didn't want to check in at the actual port, but they need facilities and mechanics to fix the ship."

"This is why you started asking questions around the port and checking records?"

"Why I started asking questions about your past isn't relevant, Scum," she said. "What you want to think about is your future. Help out the police on this, and we may just decide that you're not worth our time and the taxpayer's expense of a jail cell."

"I can certainly keep an ear out as you say, Sergeant," said Alf, "but it sounds wild to me. There's no place to hide a ship out there. Even a small escape pod would be picked up in any scan. Sounds almost as wild as that city that's supposed to be in the desert."

"Never mind the hidden city crap," said the Sergent.

"We've chased a few rumours on that one," said the senior constable, speaking up for the first time, "And come up with nothing. No trace on scans either."

"Let's concentrate on the crashed ship," said the Sergeant. "Here is my card with the station's number. Someone there will listen to your report and replay it to me, any time of the day or night."

"You're giving me your number, Sergeant?"

"Work number," said the Sergeant, standing up. "Use it for anything other than business, and the city has a dark, cold jail cell with your name on it."

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

 

Out on the street of downtown Marshland, Sergeant Pullen asked Senior Constable Pye if she had planted the bugs.

"Sure, one in the workshop, away from the electrical equipment, and another in the office under the desk. He was so busy looking at you he didn't notice what I did…" She giggled, "Admiring comments… Maybe we'll get something from the bugs, but otherwise, apart from learning that you're drawing attention at the gym, we didn't get much from that stop."

"Um, well." Ellen stopped to open her jacket and appraise her figure in the reflection of a glass shopfront. We learned that he noticed I'd been working out."

"Divorce finalised?" said Samatha who was a friend as well as colleague of Ellen.

"Yep."

"Going to do the dating scene?"

"Guess so, eventually," said Ellen.

"You know the talk around the girl's lockers in the station was that we should arrest Alf on the grounds that he's way more interesting a guy to question than the drunks we get from the strip clubs."

"The other girls know Alf?"

"Mostly by sight. I told them he's got personality and presence as well as looks. If you're going back on the dating scene, you could do way worse than ask Alf out, especially as he seems interested. But if you're going to date a guy, maybe calling him Scum, slime and creep is not the best way to start out."

"I call him that because I may yet have to arrest him," said Ellen, "and I don't know who he is. What's our next stop?"

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

After the police left, Julian called Alf from the spaceport to ask if anything had happened. Alfonso told him that an e-bike used for commuting, which wasn't recharging properly, had been brought in, and a gigantic diesel farm unit requiring servicing had been dropped off, but he did not mention the police visit. Julian told him to close up at the end of the business day, which he did. Then Alf walked several blocks through the narrow streets of grey sandstone buildings to the gym, also frequented by Sergeant Ellen Pullen, where he earned a few extra credits as a sparring partner to aspiring kickboxers. Alf preferred boxing with its greater emphasis on footwork and evasion and thought that in a real fight, kicking at anything higher than the groin was asking for trouble, but kickboxing was the preferred sport in the outpost, and he had shown enough talent at it for one of the trainers to offer to coach him. Alf politely declined on the grounds that he was too old to start a career in competition.

"Too old to maybe go all the way," the trainer said. "But you don't need much training to step into a ring, and you could easily win bouts now. I even get the impression that you're holding back at times."

"Look, thanks for the offer, but I've seen too much fighting already. I can handle being a target for the fighting wannabes, but that's it." He did not mention another compelling reason – that winning a few fights might draw unwanted attention from people who would take a closer look at his identity

"Suit yourself," the trainer said. "Just keep my offer in mind."

"I'll do that."

Alf had changed into shorts and a sleeveless tee shirt and was waiting by one of the rings to be called, talking to one of the wannabes, when he was tapped on the shoulder. He turned to see a man almost as tall and a little wider than himself dressed in an ill-fitting suit with a black shirt but no tie. His head was shaven, and his face reminded Alf of a concrete wall.

"Office," said this mean-looking apparition, then he turned and left.

Alf remained where he was, talking to the wannabe, but adjusted his position so that he could see the thug return and try to grab his arm. Alf batted the man's arm away.

"Do I know you?" he said, facing the intruder squarely. The wannabe faded away. The other gym inmates stopped to watch this piece of workplace theatre.

"Office," said the man, sneeringly.

"I heard you the first time."

Alf and the thug eyed one another for a time.

"Come to the office now."

"Okay, so you want me to come to an office. Which office and why?"

The thug gestured at the boxing gym manager's office in the corner. "Mr Charles wants to see you."

Alf was being summoned to see the local crime lord.

"Really! Mr Charles wants to see me. Did he say why?"

"Come, now," said the thug angrily.

Alf thought the newcomer riled up nicely, but there was no point in riling him any further. If Mr Charles wanted to see him, he would go.

"Lead the way," he said.

The thug led the way to the office, opened the door, and stepped to one side, grinning most unpleasantly. Alf, who had dealt with thugs before, knew the man meant to push him in. Watching the thug out of the corner of his eye, he waited for the man to surge forward, then sidestepped and hauled on his assailant's arm with all his might, sticking out one leg to trip him. The thug flew through the door to land face down on the carpet, his head narrowly missing the corner of the boxing gym manager's desk. The man leaped to his feet – he was agile - and whirled, fists clenched.

"Thumper, that's enough!" barked a man sitting at the manager's desk.

"Mr Charles, I presume?" said Alf. "Sorry about that but your associate is no diplomat."

"His specialty is dispute resolution," said Mr Charles, with a slight smile. "And he's very good at it. You're lucky I've called him off."

Mr Charles had the face and demeanour of a suburban accountant, dressing in a light, grey suit and pastel tie as might be expected of such a comparatively humble but respectable post, all of which belied his reputation for ruthlessness backed by violence. Another thug stamped out of the same mould as Alf's opponent and dressed in the same way, sat to one side. The final occupant of the office, sitting in one corner, was a balding, squat, fresh-faced man dressed in a floral shirt and off-white pants and openly wearing a holster containing a police-issue handgun identical to the one carried by Sergeant Pullen.

"Alf, is it?" said the man wearing the police-issue holster as the second thug touched a button to turn the windows looking out onto the boxing area opaque. Thumper retreated to another corner to glare at Alf.

"Inspector," said Alf. He knew who the man was, although it was the first time he had spoken to him. "I had your Sergeant Pullen pay me a visit today."

"We discussed your responses to her questions and offer," said the inspector. "And now you've met Mr Charles."

"You are a man of consequence in what thriller writers would call the underworld, Mr Charles," said Alf. "I would have thought I'd be beneath your notice."

"Just a businessman, Alf," said Mr Charles, pleasantly. "Please sit." He indicated a swivel chair by the door with cracked green upholstery. "As it happens, I have a need for various people with different skills, and you may be able to make yourself some money."

"I had Sergeant Pullen ask around the spaceport," the inspector said, "looking for people who could fix starship engines and reactors who would also be discreet, and your name came up."

"Discreet?" said Alf. "The Sergeant said something about a crashed spaceship out beyond the marshes somewhere. Doesn't seem likely to me."

"Let's just say for the moment that I need your skills for a few days," said Mr Charles, "although I am curious on one point. You don't have any formal qualifications, yet I'm told you've been working on big-time technology."

"There's a loophole in the regulations," said Alf. "I can work for a qualified spaceship engineer as an assistant. There's nothing in the regs about the assistant having qualifications. The engineer is the one who signs off on the job and takes the fall if anything goes wrong."

"I see," said Mr Charles. "The word is the engineers think you know just as much as they do."

"Maybe, Mr Charles," said Alf. (In fact, the senior engineer had offered him a job and a chance to work towards his qualifications. Alf had said he would think about it.) "What concerns me now is what you'd expect me to do, how long you would want my services, and what you'd be willing to pay for those services. Is there a crashed ship?"

"If you take the job, you'll be taken to the site and shown what we want done."

"Then it's a matter of going out somewhere remote, beyond the marshes? I'm to be driven out to the site?"

"Yes, taken there."

"But what equipment is there on the site, Mr Charles? I can't just show up with a toolbox and hope to fix advanced engineering. If the system, or whatever this thing is, is down entirely, then I'll need to jack in a decent generator to reboot the software and use the diagnostics. Then it's usually a matter of ordering spare parts, and that should be interesting considering that the people who do that stuff only deal with known engineering firms."

"Hmmm, I see you know something about what you're doing," said Mr Charles. "Let's call it a preliminary scoping out then. A few days camping out in the wild so you can get an idea of what has to be done. I'm told you're unattached, so there's no one to ask where you're going."

"That makes more sense. Yes, I'm unattached, but I still have a job and a boss who depends on my being at work. How many days are we talking about, and how much?"

"How many do you think you might need?"

"Mr Charles, how would I know," said Alf, spreading his hands. "Is this a ship? Did it crash? Is it a problem with the reactor or the drive? Is the operating system still in one piece?"

"There's no crash. The problem is that nothing seems to work. You touch a button, and nothing happens. Generators will be available."

"Hmmm, well, I'd ask for more details, but nothing beats going and looking for myself. Call it two days. It's Tuesday today, so take me out Thursday morning, and with any luck, by Friday afternoon, I'll have a plan of attack. If not, there's still the weekend."

"That's a plan," said Mr Charles. "My associates will give you pick-up details."

"As for my fee, ten thousand credits sounds good."

Mr Charles smiled slightly. "If you can fix the thing, sure."

Alf had made that offer expecting Mr Charles to bargain, but he had not.

"Half in my account tomorrow," he said. Mr Charles' expression hardened. "And if I can't do anything for you, I won't expect the other half."

"Why don't we see what you can do before throwing money at you?" said the crime lord.

"We live in a hard, cold universe, Mr Charles, where even respected businessmen can neglect agreed payments, especially as there is no way I can take you to court."

Mr Charles snorted. "Still seems rash to throw money at you. Why don't you go out to the site, and then we can agree on terms?"

"Where I'm at the mercy of your thugs, Mr Charles? With all due respect, I must insist that it's no pay, no show."

"You'll do as Mr Charles says," said Thumper.

"Oh, he's fun," said Alf, mildly, without looking at the thug.

"Not now, Thumper," said Mr Charles, waving one hand at the thug, who subsided but continued to glare at Alf. "Tell you what, I'll drop one thousand in your account tomorrow."

"Make it two."

"Fifteen hundred."

"And we'll call that my appearance money for this jaunt," said Alf after a moment's thought. "Make it three credit sticks each of five hundred left for me at the desk here by lunchtime, and I'll go. Leave instructions for the pickup with the sticks. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll get back to what I was doing."

After Alf had left, Mr Charles said to the inspector: "Your sergeant, can she be squared, Evan?"

The inspector shook his head. "She's divorced and out here because she made a ruckus when she found her husband was involved in scams."

"Shame, she could have been useful. She was certainly right about one thing."

"What's that, Mr Charles?"

"Whoever that guy is, he's no petty thief from Sulu."

 

CHAPTER THREE

 

Detective Sergeant Ellen Pullen returned home to her tiny, rented unit in one of the almost-presentable sections of Marshland at the end of a day of chasing down rumours about the phantom crashed ship, changed into pee jays, and a dressing gown only to find herself, yet again, thinking of the mysterious Alf.

"Stop this," she told herself angrily. "I might yet have to arrest him I can't date him."

To distract herself, she switched the home entertainment system to a popular drama and settled down in front of the screen when the front doorbell chimed on her personal assistant. Earlier generations would have thought of the PA as a mobile phone, but it was much more than that. Ellen's PA had even advised her when it was time to divorce her now ex-husband, and she had not regretted taking that advice. She had not asked the device what it thought of Alf on the chance that it might tell her to ask him out. Not expecting anyone, she looked at the surveillance cam on her front porch to see, to her surprise, Alfonso, the man she had been trying to keep out of her mind. He was holding a piece of cardboard on his chest with a message hand-written in large letters.

"Asked to go to ship crash site," she read. "Need to talk directly to you."

After taking a moment to grab her police Glock and take the safety off, Ellen opened the door and stood there, pistol in hand, glaring at Alf.

"You were told to ring the station, Slime," she snapped, keeping her voice down. Her neighbours had been known to inquire about male visitors. "And how did you know where I live?"

"I can explain everything," said Alf, also keeping his voice down for the same reason. "Just let me in – it's kinda exposed out here – and you'll hear it all."

She thought about this for a moment, then moved well back. "Sit at the table and put your hands on it so I can see them. Do not move from the table."

"Sure," said Alf. The table in question was a small, round affair set to one side of the living room, next to a kitchen nook. A couch and chair with an entertainment unit were on the other side. A door led to bedrooms and the bathroom. It was hardly luxurious living, Alf thought, but it was clean, neat, and comfortable enough and a major step up from his single room with en-suite in a run-down apartment building.

Ellen sat on the outer side of the table, slapping her pistol, the safety still off, on the table, and then slapping her police handcuffs beside the pistol to underline her point.

Alf caught his cue.

"I only found out where you lived today when I realised I had to talk to you directly," he said quickly. "We go to the same gym, remember, and I thought your address must be on the membership files."

"You hacked the gym's system?"

"I didn't even have to do that. I went to the front desk, thinking I might slip the guy who usually sits there a few credits to take a peek while he looked the other way, making up a story about someone owing me money. But he wasn't at the desk when I went there, and the desk unit was on. Didn't take long."

"Humph! I still don't see why you couldn't have rung the station and asked to be put through to me." Ellen said.

"When I went to the gym, I was pulled into a meeting with Mr Charles and a couple of his thugs, and your inspector, Evan Bara… something. I knew him by sight, but it was the first time I'd met him."

Ellen's face fell.

"Barastoc," she said. "Shit! I thought he was clean." She banged her pistol on the table again, causing Alf concern. The safety was still off. "This crap is endless."

"As I was going out, I overheard Mr Charles ask your inspector if his sergeant could be squared, and he said you'd ended up here because you wouldn't be in some scam."

Ellen nodded. "Close enough. Alright, you came here instead of the station, even if you had to commit a minor felony to do it. I'm still listening. What did Charles say?"

"He wanted me to go out to whatever this thing is – seems it's not a crash – and look at it. I tried to get details like what was actually wrong with this piece of hardware, or even what it was, so maybe I could take along the right equipment to fix it, but no go. All he would say was that nothing worked. In the end we agreed on fifteen hundred credits up front for me to go there and see what needed to be done."

"You're an expensive petty thief," exclaimed Ellen.

"Risk must be priced accordingly, Sergeant, and I'm at real risk in this. Initially, I asked for ten thousand without specifying that it would be upfront, and Charles smiled and agreed."

"He has no intention of paying," said Ellen after a moment's thought.

"I'll be kept out there with a series of excuses until I'm judged to no longer be of any use, then killed. Charles only balked when I asked for money upfront as he'd have trouble getting it back."

"Then why go at all?"

"Too late to back out," said Alf. "I am about the only person on this rock that might be able to fix whatever it is without screaming for the cops – even if they are in his pocket - and If I refuse to go, then Mr Charles will send his thugs to kidnap me or, worse, grab someone I care about and threaten them. At the moment, that's my boss and his young family. We're not that close, but I've had dinner there a couple of times, and I couldn't let anything happen to them. If I go, well, I've been in harm's way before and lived to tell the tale."

"Why are you telling me, then?" said Ellen. "You can go out, overcome Mr Charles' goons, and claim the ship, or whatever it is, for your own."

"I doubt I'll be able to do anything with … the item, let's call it, but I was hoping that if I helped a certain rising police sergeant who would look good on news conference cameras…"

"Ha!" said Ellen.

"… locate whatever is out there, then maybe that same rising police sergeant, who in all other respects is far above me, will help me go legit so that I can take a job with one of the major engineering firms."

"Really?" said Ellen, interested in spite of herself. "You got an offer."

"Yep. An engineering firm wants to sponsor me to get qualified in spaceship engineering, and I'd like to take it."

"Humph!" she sat back and folded her arms. "Here's the thing; you see this little finger?" She showed Alf the little finger of her left hand. "I won't stir even this to help you until you tell me who you are, and no bullshit."

"I suppose that's fair enough," said Alf. "You recording this?"

She shook her head. "Wouldn't be of any use without a warrant unless I got your permission."

"Okay, well, record away if you want. My real name is Jake – Jake Christian Langston, and I was a Captain in the Forgotten Legion in the Rebellion on Martus Prime."

Ellen's mouth fell open. "What? How did you end up here?"

She had heard of the rebellion and even of the military unit, as one of the rebel units able to match the Imperial Legions but only as echoes of distant troubles. Martus Prime was a good chunk of the galaxy away from Creaghville.

"To start from the beginning, I come from one of the agricultural settlements way out on Martus itself, but I managed to win a slot at the Imperial Academy in the capital. I'd finished the basic physics degree and got into the masters of spaceship engineering course when the rebellion started."

"Then you already knew something about the advanced stuff?" said Ellen.

"Oh, sure. I knew enough to assist with repairing and adapting almost anything they could put into space in a cram course in engineering on the fly. It was a lot of fun. The Martus navy even won the first couple of battles. But then – and if I'd been older, I might have realised it was inevitable – the Imperials got organised and blew our navy to pieces. Then I was volunteered for the infantry and got altered."

Ellen's mouth fell open for the second time.

"What? But you look normal."

"I am normal for the most part – I look the same as I did before I started. But about half who underwent the treatment didn't make it at all, and half of the rest went psycho. Those of us who survived had advantages – increased mitochondrial activity and all that shit making us stronger and move faster – although just one-quarter of those who started the program got the benefits without dying or going insane."

"You agreed to try this?" exclaimed Ellen.

"No, I didn't. We were told we'd be given a few injections to protect against some Imperial bioweapon. We were all kept separate, so we didn't realise what had happened until after it was all over, and an Imperial official handed the survivors copies of the files kept on the program. We'd been given special training, diet supplements, and so on, and we thought the physical improvements were due to that. In reality, the interests behind the rebellion were desperate to find some way to counter the Imperial Legions in the land battle they knew was coming. They figured that if they could make it too costly to take the urban centres, the Imperium would come to some sort of compromise. We made a real fight of it, but in the end, the strategy didn't work."

"Quite a story," said Ellen. "What happened to you?"

"For most of those who surrendered, the proconsul took the American Civil War approach. If you handed in your weapons and swore allegiance to the Empire, you could go home, but not those who were altered. We were held on an Imperial Detention Order and subjected to all sorts of tests. I guess the Imperium was hoping to make super-soldiers of its own but without the high wastage rate.

"After a few months, I was told that if I wanted to be released, I could join the auxiliaries and fight for a time. I wound up as a sergeant in charge of a platoon stationed at a mining hell hole fighting semi-sentient worms that got their jollies from feeding on warm blooded creatures. Not fun. Don't recommend it."

"You were a sergeant in the auxiliaries as well?" said Ellen. The auxiliaries were either specialised support troops or glorified police and protection units, as distinct from the assault troops of the Imperial Legions. The Roman Empire had a similar system.

"Yep, for a time. Then the whole unit was abandoned."

"Abandoned?"

"The mining operations were shut down and I was told the unit was disbanded, all personnel discharged, but everyone was to remain on the planet until further notice."

"Okayyy… but you got out?"

"We still had our weapons, and some of the guys and girls were talking about rebelling, going rogue, all that sort of crap. I'd had enough of rebellions and, by chance, I met a freighter captain who was short an engineer. She was the sole crew on the ship when I met her – and she, well, took a fancy to me as a companion on long trips."

"Ha!" said Ellen. "You gigoloed your way out?"

"Kinda, I guess, although it's different for a guy, and I do know my way around engines."

"Where did the false identity come from?"

"I couldn't move around as Jake Langston, at least not in that quadrant. I didn't have any travel authorisation and, if intercepted, would be sent straight back. Somehow, my new friend knew a place where identity capsules could be implanted. Once one of those is in your arm, you can pass the basic checkpoints at most spaceports. No need for any travel documents."

"What happened to the real Alf from Sulu?"

"No idea. I'm told it's possible to duplicate the capsules, or maybe he just wanted it removed so he may still be around, but I never met the man and didn't ask questions."

"You ended up here?" said Ellen.

"When we got to orbit here, we found that my captain friend's husband was in town."

"Oops!" said Ellen, amused.

"There was some quick cleaning up, and I was dropped outside of town with a few credits using an escape chute straight into the marsh, which was also not fun – icky, corrosive, and dangerous. I walked into town and started looking for work. My identity capsule was enough to get me tax status, and nobody seemed to care about anything else. I can't move off the planet, but at least here, no one wants to kill me or get me to rebel. However, I would like my old identity back, along with evidence of my basic degree and the course work I had done for my masters."

Ellen got up from the table, taking her pistol with her, grabbed a writing pad from the sideboard, and slapped it in front of Alf.

"Type out your name, rank, and unit designation both for the rebellion and in the auxiliaries; also, provide your friend's name, that of her ship, and where the identity was implanted. I'll try not to get your ex-friend in trouble," she added, seeing Alf open his mouth. "But I need to check everything. Petty thieves are skilled liars, and so is my ex-husband."

"Sure," he said.

"Assuming any of that long story checks out in the Imperial archives here, what did you want from me?"

"Part of the reason for my visit is just to tell someone I'm going and what's really happening. If I don't make it back, then you know it's because I've been killed out there, and you may be in a position to do something about it. Then there are the transcripts. If you're going to check the archives, which I can't access, it's not much extra effort to take copies of my academic and military records."

"I'll think about it," said Ellen after a pause.

"There's also the question of tracking me. I thought you could track me and get a location on this place. What's the range on my capsule?"

"We can track it for ten klicks out of town," said Ellen. "I can also send a drone to scan for it, but that involves telling my inspector what I want the drone for."

"I think I'm going way beyond ten klicks. You got any tracking devices down the station I might be able to hide in my socks, anything like that? They'll search me, but they'll be looking for weapons.

"Nothing I can check out without a good explanation. Why not try that shop two blocks beyond the gym? They've got all sorts of stuff like combat knives and security equipment."

"I know that place. Those bugs your offsider must have planted while you distracted me with your feminine wiles…."

"I did nothing of the kind, Mr Langston!" retorted Ellen, looking at the writing pad Alf had slid back to her. “That cold, dark cell is still available for those who make remarks like that."

"… while you were distracting me with your forthright questioning, I plan on leaving them in place because they won't show anything."

"How did you know we'd put them there?"

"A device in the workshop scans every two hours or so. It's an old habit of mine. Even Julian doesn't know about it. I don't suppose the devices can be repurposed for tracking?"

"They're short range," said Ellen after a moment's thought. "So, no."

"I'll be back at about this time tomorrow night, sergeant," said Alf, getting up.

"And why will you be coming back, Mr Langston?" asked Ellen sharply.

"I have to show you what arrangements I've made for tracking me, and for the moment, you should continue to call me Scum or Slime, maybe Alf, if you can't be bothered putting me down."

"Okay, Slime," said Ellen.

"Your inspector will also probably want you now to get off my case – don't agree too easily; he'll get suspicious."

"I'll just tell him you're total scum and not worth another moment of my day."

"The sad thing is he might believe you," said Alf.

He left with a wave and a half smile. Ellen put her back to the door, closed her eyes, and let her breathe out slowly. Samantha was right; the man had a presence. Later, as she was going to bed, it occurred to Ellen that if Alf/Jake's story checked out, then he might be almost datable. She pushed the thought to one side. She might yet have to arrest him.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

 

When Alf knocked lightly on Ellen's door the next day, she let him in immediately, gesturing at the table. She was fully dressed this time but without a jacket to semi-conceal the shoulder holster and pistol she wore. Alf noted that the safety was on.

"Sit only at the table," she said, stepping back. "Hands where I can see them."

"I thought we were past the 'let me see your hands' stage," said Alf.

"You're scum until I say otherwise," Ellen said. She took a folder off the sideboard and slapped it on the table. Despite all the advances in technology, paper still had advantages.

"Amazingly, your story checks out. Jake Christian Langston rose through the ranks to become a captain and commanding officer of the tenth independent combat group in the Forgotten Legion. This time, the picture and physical description on file match you. How many people are in those combat commands?"

"Nominal strength was about three hundred, but it was usually closer to two hundred and fifty," said Alf. "As well as grunts with guns, we had medical, comms, heavy support weapons, and makeshift transport so that we could, in theory at least, fight on our own for long periods and even run away convincingly in the transport – hence the independent bit of the title."

He looked at the printouts. "Ahhhh yes! And my Academy transcript. That saves me a lot of trouble. Thank you for that."

"You're still scum," said Ellen. "Even if you took two wounds and earned two bravery commendations plus another note of approval in your file from your time in the auxiliaries."

"I did?" said Alf. He flicked through to his auxiliary record. "So, I did; that miserable Imperial Legion captain said I ran my unit well. I always thought he disapproved of me as rebel scum. This also says I've been discharged."

"The archives say your unit was disbanded and all members discharged. No outstanding warrants on your name or that of Alfonso. But I can still get you on entering the colony illegally, using a false identity, and messing with the gym's membership system."

In fact, Ellen had been impressed by Jake/Alf's academic and military record and was interested that no criminal matter of any consequence hung over him. Even the identity chop shop that Alf/Jake had used seemed to have been shut down in a police action. The offenses of illegal entry and using a fake identity could be glossed over by a colony that wanted to attract skilled people, not throw them in jail. But she was not about to acknowledge any of that.

"Don't sound so disappointed," said Alf. "Can I keep this folder?"

"I included a digital dot, but sure. As for getting your identity back if we can shed some more light on the activities of Mr Charles, then I may lift my other little finger to help on that count."

"Here's where I'm supposed to meet the transport." Alf handed over a note. "It's early morning."

"Not far from here," said Ellen, looking at it. "On the edge of town. You'll be in their hands."

"They won't kill me yet. They need me to look at whatever is out there, and I'll give you this." He put a small device about the same size as a business card, albeit somewhat thicker and heavier, on the table and slid it across to Ellen.

"What this?"

"I don't dare ask for your number, so here is the twin of a tracking device I bought at that shop." Alf also had bought a small knife he could conceal in his boot, but he was not about to admit to that. "I'll get the other past the inevitable searches. The tracking data will show on your device, as well as text messages and images, and you can send the material to your other devices. You'll see I'm listed as scum in the contacts."

Ellen smiled slightly despite herself.

"You're beginning to understand your importance in this colony," she said. "That's good."

"As for the rest, we'll have to wing it, and I'd best go before your neighbours start wondering why that strange man they saw come in is staying so long. Keep an eye on the device."

"I will, although you're still scum."

"Now I know all the right people despise me," said Alf, standing up.

He was at the door before she could say anything – she had previously debated whether to offer coffee but eventually decided it would be a bad idea – and had closed the door before she could say "take care" softly.

 

Early the next morning, Alf arrived at the pickup point – a dusty intersection on the edge of Marshland - to find two others, a man and a woman of about undergraduate age, dressed as if they had just come from lectures. They also carried packs with clothes and night gear as they had all been instructed.

"Who are you?" asked the male, a slight, bespectacled youth.

"Alf, an engineer – waiting for Mr Charles' men." Alf may have revealed his true identity to Ellen, but he would call himself Alfonso for now as that was the name Mr Charles' thugs knew him by.

"Oh, okay," said the youth. "Brian, computer science. Also waiting for them."

They shook hands.

"Elsbeth," said the girl, an intense looking person with lank, blonde hair framing a narrow face. "Linguistics."

"Linguistics?" asked Alf. "How come we need a linguist?"

Elbereth shrugged. "They're paying me good money to come, and a PhD in linguistics is not a money spinner in this colony."

"Guess not," said Alf.

Before they could talk further, the pickup vehicle arrived – a semi-automated furniture van with all signage and emblems on the worn-looking canopy painted over. The van pulled up in front of them without ceremony and disgorged three of Mr Charles' thugs, including Alf's old friend Thumper, grinning evilly. Alf allowed himself to be grabbed by this thug and thrown into the back of the van, where benches had been installed. Brian and Elbereth were flung in beside him, protesting. Alf had time to note that the front half of the van was filled with boxes and assorted equipment, including what seemed to be a large diesel generator, before Thumper turned him around and pushed him face first against the wall.

"Hands against the wall, scum," he said.

Alf thought it was much nicer when Ellen called him scum. Thumper searched him briefly, taking his phone assistant but missing the tracking device Alf had taped to his chest, then cuffed the engineer's hands behind his back with electronic restraints, slammed him down on the bench, and dropped a hood over his head. Alf could hear the other two protesting as they got the same treatment.

Some distance off, concealed in some stunted trees, Ellen was watching this byplay through her standard-issue police electronic binoculars with concern. All three persons had been waiting calmly, so why treat them like that? She looked at the tracking device Alf had given her. There had been a signal just before. Now, there was none. The van canopy might be metallic. Would that block the signal? Ellen did not know. She could at least run the van's number plates and try to identify the thugs from the video recordings made automatically by her binoculars. Even in the far reaches of the galaxy, police work followed certain procedures.

 

In the back of the van, Thumper was gloating.

"Now we'll see who's the tough guy," he said as the van drove off.

Alf supposed the remark was directed at him.

"You two go and sit in the driver's cabin," Thumper snarled.

"Mr Charles said not to leave you alone with our consultants," said one of the thugs. "Especially after what happened with the last one."

"Last one?" thought Alf.

"He's not here; I am," said Thumper. "Don't worry, I won't damage 'em. Maybe warm up Alf a bit."

"The big 'un?" said the other thug.

"Yeah, he outsmarted Thumper in front of Mr Charles a couple of days back," said the first thug. "Now he wants pay back."

"No one outsmarted anyone else," said Thumper, "but Alf here wants some learning." He lashed out, thumping Alf on the side of the head, knocking him into Brian.

"We didn't sign up for this," squawked Brian from inside his hood. "Why do this?"

"Why handcuff us?" Elsbeth said indignantly, her voice also muffled by a hood. "We're not going to do anything."

"Shuddup!" snarled Thumper. "No noise, and I might forget you exist. Get lost, you two."

The last command was apparently addressed to the two thugs, who, as far as Alf could judge from the noise, moved off to the driver's cabin through a sliding door. The vehicle was self-driving, but even with all the advances in AI, it was still a good idea to have a human upfront.

"Now we can have a few words," said Thumper in a nasty voice after a few moments.

"Is this the part where we bond?" asked Alf. His reward was another smashing blow, knocking him into Brian, who, in turn, fell into Elsbeth. Both youths fell to the floor, squawking.

Alf thought that this had to stop before someone got hurt.

"You know what I hate," Thumper said, grabbing the front of Alf's tee-shirt in his left hand. "It's smart arses."

Alf pulled away from him, forcing Thumper to pull harder while at the same time crouching down, half off the bench with his legs coiled underneath him. He could not see Thumper but as the thug was trying to pull him up, he thought he knew about where his face would be. Alf lowered his head and sprang forward with all the strength of his legs, his body a battering ram. His covered head connected with Thumper's face, driving it hard and smashing the back of the thug's skull into the side of the van. He head-butted Thumper twice more, using his legs and body as a powerful hammer. Alf stood back and shook his hood off as his opponent slid to the floor, unconscious, face covered in blood.

The two youths were whimpering.

"What's going on?" squeaked Elsbeth.

The sliding door from the driver's cabin jerked twice, then the thug inside banged on it.

"Thumper, open up!" yelled the thug. "What are you doing to the consultants?"

Thumper had locked the sliding door and there was no window.

"They're all fine," said Alf in what he hoped was a passable imitation of Thumper's snarl. "Tell us when we're close."

Alf's snarl was sufficiently convincing to make the thug in the driver's cabin stop rattling the door. The soldier searched the unconscious Thumper's pockets for the electronic key and then, after some fiddling, managed to insert the card in his cuff. He knew about electronic handcuffs from his time in an Imperial prison. Once freed, he grabbed Thumper and flung him so that his face connected with the edge of a container in the heap of goods on the far side of the van. After some thought, Alf used his hood to wipe the blood off Thumper's face – not because he cared about the thug at all but to disguise the fact that his hood had blood on it - then freed the other two.

"What happened to that guy?" said Elsbeth, going up to Thumper. "There's blood!"

"Think he tripped while belting me, with you two as collateral damage. He went quiet for a while, so I shook off my hood and found him like that. Then I got the key." Alf knew his story would not hold up for a moment under careful examination, but he didn't think anyone would care enough to ask questions.

"You know how those cuffs work?" asked Brian.

"Just to get off and on. I've had a varied career."

"Shouldn't we do something for him?" said Elsbeth.

"Why?" asked Alf. "To remind you of very recent events, that guy cuffed you, stuck your head in a sack, and was thumping you – albeit indirectly. I was getting it directly, which was no fun. He's still alive, which is a shame, and seems to be breathing strongly enough, so leave him."

Elsbeth shrugged and sat down again.

"Now we can talk about how we came here," said Alf.

The two youths were students at the local university who had answered an online ad about work that paid well but had to be kept confidential. Brian had a knack for hacking, or so he said. Elsbeth's inclinations had led her to study language structures and, eventually, to big-picture ideas about the nature of languages. She had been told her skills might be put to good use.

"Do you speak any other languages?" asked Alf.

"Some French."

"Were either of you told anything about a crashed spaceship?"

They both shook their heads, obviously surprised.

"Is that what you were told?" said Brian.

"I know something about phase drive systems and ship reactors, but I can't see what a crashed ship would be doing beyond the marshlands or why it wouldn't be a total wreck they could claim as salvage."

"Guess we'll know soon enough," said Elsbeth.

They talked about how much they were being paid. Both had been promised thousands of credits, but neither had thought to ask for any of the money upfront. Alf was tempted to tell his new colleagues that he suspected they had stuck their heads in a noose. But then thought that they might panic, and that might cause problems. Privately, he vowed to keep them alive if he possibly could.

Eventually, the van turned off the sealed road onto a desert track. The marsh just behind the suburb of Marshland was watered by streams from distant mountains, but otherwise, the area got little rain, meaning that it was hot, waterless, and unattractive scrub. After a few minutes, the road started rising, and they climbed to a plateau, so that at least it was cooler than on the Creaghville plain, but the country remained barren and largely featureless.

After another half an hour of bouncing around on the dirt track, the truck stopped. Alf pushed the back doors open and stepped out into a large area covered by some form of plastic sheeting supported by metal poles. There were several tents in this area – self-erecting affairs bought from sports stores, or so Alf suspected – two cars and more equipment in piles. At one end was a gate with at least one guard that Alf could see. At the other was an excavation set into the side of a hill, protected by a wire security fence.

One of the thugs from the van appeared, relieved to find the "consultants" had been released and were unharmed.

"Where did Thumper go?" he asked.

"Still in the back," said Alf, jerking his thumb at the van. "Whatever's behind that fence might be what we were called here to investigate," he said to the others. "Let's take a look."

They threw their packs beside one of the tents – Alf taking a moment to palm the tracking device from the sheath strapped to his chest and slip it into one of the pockets – and walked towards the fence. The thug came back.

"What the fuck happened to Thumper?" he asked.

"Seems to have tripped or something," said Alf over his shoulder. "He was thumping me and knocking me into the others; then he was quiet for a while. I shook off my hood, and he was like that."

"Yeah?" said the thug. "He's taken a hell of a knock."

"Look closely," said Alf, turning to face the thug. "Do we care? You guys cuffed us, put hoods on us, and he started belting me. We didn't sign on for any of that."

"Yeah, we didn't," said Elsbeth. "That guy terrified me."

"I checked he was still breathing and left him," said Alf. "I was going to open the back door and kick him out but then thought that someone might miss him."

"He won't be too happy when he wakes up," said the thug.

"Uh huh!" said Alf, turning away. "Maybe you can get Mr Charles to open a hospital wing for him."

The fence had a gate that was not locked and a sign that said, 'Authorised Personnel Only', which they ignored.

"Who's Mr Charles," asked Brian as they opened the gate.

"The gangster boss running this whole thing," said Alf. "Those guys work for him. Thumper's one of his chief enforcers. You didn't meet him before coming here?"

"No, I just had an interview with a woman at a recruitment agency," said Brian. "No one said anything about gangsters to me."

"Nor me," said Elsbeth.

Beyond was a metallic ramp that led down to the bottom of a pit. On the far side of that pit, hidden underneath an overhang, was a metal hatch. Much shorter and somewhat narrower than the hatches Alf was used to, the hatch was inset into a white, concrete-like wall. It had a security lock with a keypad set in the concrete on one side, but the symbols on the keypad writing on the door were entirely unfamiliar.

 

 

 

"Looks like a cross between cuneiform and Anglo-Saxon runes," said Elsbeth.

Several more words in the same script were stamped on the hatch, with another single symbol set above it to the right.

"This no ship," said Alf. "And it's alien."

 

CHAPTER FIVE

 

On his way out to lunch, Inspector Evan Barastoc stopped at Detective Sergeant Ellen Pullen's desk.

"Sent you a couple of items," he said. "How's the domestic assault going?"

"Interviewed everyone," said Ellen. After some debate with herself, she had decided not to say anything to Barastoc about his being in league with the local gangster for now. The last time she kicked up a fuss about corruption, she ended up divorced in the Marshlands stations, albeit with a promotion to sergeant. She would bide her time. "Got the hospital reports. Just compiling the evidence brief now."

"All good, but the brief won't be wanted for a few days. You can check out that other stuff."

Ellen had been pulled off her inquiries at the spaceport the day after Alf appeared at her door and given a string of investigations, the juiciest of which had been the domestic assault against a sex worker by the girl's partner. The girl had been left for dead, and the man, a total pig, had been amazed that the police cared enough to investigate, and so enraged that a female detective was leading the investigation that he had blurted out admissions in the interrogation. This sort of investigation made a difference, but Ellen also knew that it had been thrown at her to keep her busy so that she would not check again on Alf.

"Beaten up guy in hospital," she said, reading the first item on her screen. "Could be anything."

"Hospital thought enough of it to pass on an alert. It's not a gunshot wound, so we're not obliged to do anything but go and talk to the man. See if he has anything to say for himself."

"Okay!" Ellen looked at the next item. "Dognapping?"

Barastoc shrugged. "The perpetrators of this crime are asking for two thousand credits for the return of… what was the animal's name?"

"Poppy. A cocker spaniel cross."

"There you are, a much-loved member of the family has gone missing," said Barastoc, "and two thousand credits is enough for us to pay attention."

The inspector wandered off, and Ellen checked the tracking device Alf had given her. The signal had vanished for a couple of hours after Alf had been thrown in the van but had reappeared and had been static for some time. She had been able to access routine satellite pictures of the area with a surprisingly good resolution without anyone asking questions. There was nothing immediately obvious at the location, but on looking closely, Ellen realized that a rough vehicle track led up to the spot and then vanished. Under magnification, she could see a hint here and there of the edges of a carefully camouflaged roof – enough to mark out its area. Wherever Alf had ended up, someone was taking great pains to conceal what was happening. How interesting!

Being a conscientious police officer Ellen had opened an investigation file but had kept it out of the police database. Thanks to the satellite photographs, initial notes, and tracing the ownership of the van, the file was starting to look respectable – albeit without any evidence of a major felony.

Senior Constable Samanta Pye stopped at Ellen's desk to report.

"Finished the statements on the assault boss," she said. "Anything else?"

"I'm going off to talk to a beat-up guy in the hospital, and you get the dognapping case."

"Dognapping?" said Samantha.

"Sure," said Ellen. "Poppy is missing."

 

At the desert site, Alf's new colleagues were discussing his verdict on the hatchway.

"How do you know it's alien?" Brian asked. "It could be a door with funny writing on it."

"These markings look like standard messages you might find stamped on a hatch anywhere, but I've never seen letters like this. I mean, apart from Roman letters on Earth they have what? Latin letters, then Cyrillic and Greek. The Chinese have pictograms; the Koreans have a phonetic system. Hindi has a different alphabet, but nothing I've seen looks anything like this."

"I haven't either," said Ellen. "If humans did this, why wouldn't they use one of the major languages?"

"But an alien installation or whatever out this way?" said Brian. "We're just a place everyone passes through to go somewhere else."

"That's true," said Alf, "but we won't settle the argument by looking at the hatch. Any chance you can do something with the keypad."

"No power," said Brian. "Even if I figured out what to bypass, it wouldn't do anything."

"That's also true," said Alf. But if it's anything like the hatches on major ships, there's usually some manual override close by that only works if the power's gone entirely. Let's look."

Two short-handled camper spades and a steel rod that had evidently been used for probing were nearby. Within a meter of the hatch, they found a metal box showing signs of corrosion, kept locked by a simple metal pin. This contained a small control pad with two buttons, which also proved to be dead.

"Might have had an independent power supply, but the battery or whatever is totally flat," said Alf.

"We could jack in power for this, at least," said Brian. "I think I can get the cover off, but power tools would help."

"Lots of equipment up top," said Alf, let's check that stuff out. "In the meantime, Elsbeth what are you like at sketching and drafting?"

"Totally crap at sketching."

"See if you can find a notebook and measuring tape and put together some sort of plan of the area. You see, we're standing on a concrete platform."

"We are?"

Alf kicked some of the dirt to reveal a patch of concrete underneath. "This must've been the front porch. See if you can find out anything about its size and shape. Take pics of the door, the control panel, and so on with this device." He handed her the tracking device he had bought, which also took pictures and sent text. Alf had not thought how important those features would be when he got it but was now very glad that the device had that capability. "Just don't let our friends see you use it, or they'll want to take it off you like they took our digital assistants."

"Gotit," said Elsbeth.

The thug who had questioned them before came down the ramp, saw the box they had discovered, and was told what they were doing.

"Do you guys know what happened to the electronic key?"

"You mean the key to the cuffs? I threw it away," said Alf. In fact, it was buried in the dirt beneath the recently discovered emergency hatch opening box.

"What did you do that for?" said the thug.

"Do I have to go through the 'we don't care' speech again? We need some tools for this thing." Alf pointed at the newly discovered box.

The thug thought that there was nothing to be gained from arguing with Alf. "Boxes to the right at the top of the ramp," he said eventually, turning away. He would deal with Alf later. Among other pressing jobs to hand he had to take Thumper to hospital.

 

When Ellen arrived at the hospital bedside of the ‘accident victim’ she found the man's face swathed in bandages, but the bits she could see had that same evil look as the man she had recorded throwing Alf and two others into a van early that morning.

"You've had quite a fall, Mr Bianchi," said Ellen after introducing herself and looking at the patient's medical chart. "Fractured eye socket and cheekbone and broken nose, but no injuries to the chest or body indicating a fall, and major bruising on the back of the head. You told the hospital staff you fell off a ladder."

"Yeah."

"What were you doing up the ladder?"

"Setting up decorations."

"Really, what were you celebrating?"

Bianchi thought about that for a moment, his one good eye, pending work on the socket on the other eye, glinting. He had been interviewed by police before. "My good health."

"Which has taken quite a turn. Where did this decorating effort take place?"

"Don't remember."

"Don't remember or just don't wish to say, Mr Bianchi?"

"Whatever."

"Did this fall happen to take place in the back of a moving van, Mr Bianchi?'

The thug's good eye stared at Ellen in astonishment, and the policewoman knew that he was the same man.

"What van? Why are you talking about vans?"

"I was just guessing, Mr Bianchi." It occurred to Ellen that she might have said too much. "Is there anything you want to tell the police about this incident?"

"Nah!" he said.

Ellen gave Bianchi her card with the station number, which was procedure, and left thinking that now she had more to put into her investigation file, but without realising the trouble she had caused for herself by mentioning the van.

 

Back at the desert site, after almost two hours of fiddling with the emergency control panel, the two would-be door jackers finally hit the right combination of connections and jacked-in voltage from an instrument testing device they had found amongst the stacks of equipment at the site, to be rewarded by a distinct 'click'. The hatch reluctantly gave way, but the only thing revealed was a narrow stairway leading down to a second hatch with another security panel and more of the mysterious writing. But this time, there were no override controls that they could see; even after bringing down lights connected to a generator, they had come with them in the furniture truck.

Just as Alf and Brian were discussing the necessity of levering off the second control panel and shooting some power into that from the generator, the thug reappeared, crowding into the small space in front of the second door.

"Mr Charles wants updates. I see you got the first hatch open; when do you think you can get past this hatch?"

"Listen… what was your name?" said Alf.

"Hutch."

"Listen, Hutch, we're dealing with alien tech in a confined space, you tell me how long it might take."

"Alien tech?"

"Look at the writing. Sure, some human sect or group or whatever might have had their own funny writing system and got out this far, but none of that seems likely. Other than that, we don't know anything apart from the fact that it'll be lunch soon."

"Yeah, lunch," said Brian.

"Mr James wants you to keep working."

"Tell Mr James we'll work better when we've eaten," said Alf. "It's been a long day."

Hutch left, muttering, but the consultants got their lunch – sandwiches brought from a vending machine in Creaghville on a trestle table set up among the tents - with Alf taking advantage of the break to slip into his tent and send details of the site and his new colleagues to Ellen on the tracking device's twin. He included pictures of the inner and outer doors taken by Elsbeth. As it happened, Elle was at her desk and could shoot back a text response. The device's services did not extend to phone conversations.

"Saw badly beat up guy, an offsider of Mr Charles, in hospital," she wrote. "Do you know anything about that?"

"Must be a workplace safety incident," typed Alf, sitting on the bunk in his allocated tent. The device included a small stylus for him to pick out letters on a keyboard displayed on a touch-sensitive screen. "The workplace can be hazardous, as you know."

"Workplace hazards my rear end," wrote Ellen. "This guy tried to tell me he fell off a ladder, but I don't believe that either."

"And a charming rear end it is, too," wrote Alf. "And before you can call me scum or threaten me with jail time for that remark, I'm outa here. I've got alien tech to deal with."

"Scum!" said Ellen to the device, but she found herself smiling as she dropped the device into the top drawer of her desk. She had been concerned over the safety of Alf's two consultants, but the sight of Thumper in hospital had reassured her that Alf should be able to handle the situation. In any case, Ellen still had no legal cause to do anything at all.

 

Back at the desert campsite, while Elsbeth sat outside and studied copies of the writing examples they had found to date – sketches rather than images so that the thugs would not catch sight of the recording device – Alf and Brian finally levered off the control panel cover on the second hatch to be confronted by a series of metal plates and printed circuits connected to a cable.

"Looks like fibre optic," said Alf of the cable.

"Fibre optic for a door security panel?" asked Brian.

Alf shrugged. "Quality installation, I guess. At least we know our alien friends didn't do things by halves."

That still left the problem of getting the door open, and they went back to connecting various metal surfaces with alligator clips and shooting voltages through them, mainly using the instrument testing device. At one point, they made the panel at the top of the device glow, although nothing appeared on the display. Another time, they got one of the buttons to glow. They took to writing notes on slips of paper taped to sections of the metal surfaces. Then Brian accidentally tapped the end of one clip to a piece of metal he was not aiming for. The door clicked, swung slightly, and the air pressure equalised with a sigh.

They were in, or so they thought.

Alf pulled the lever on the hatch and pushed the assembly inwards. The lever was stiff, and the hatch creaked a little, but otherwise, it moved surprisingly easily for a piece of engineering that had not been used in a long time.

"Whoa!" breathed Brian. He called for Elsbeth as Alf pushed the door further open to reveal a dark corridor. The light they had been using was on the end of a pole mounted on a tripod. Alf took the pole off the tripod and pushed it through the hatch. On closer inspection, the corridor proved to be an undecorated anteroom, floor covered in dust. On one side was a series of pegs, one of which still held what could have been a hazmat suit too small for most adult humans; on the other were two doors. After they advanced cautiously into the room, sniffing the air, they discovered that the doors led to a dusty shower room with another security lock hatch at one end.

"Maybe a decontamination shower," said Alf. "That hatch must lead to the place where they put their day wear back on."

"No male, female, separation," said Elsbeth, eagerly sketching the various labels they encountered and sneaking the occasional pic with Alf's small device. She was putting together an alphabet, for what that was worth, but had no idea what any of the words in the writing they could see meant.

"Another lock to get through," said Brian.

After an hour of messing with clips and voltages, with Elsbeth busy sketching whatever she could see, the door clicked, then smashed open. Elsbeth would have been swept off her feet, but Alf grabbed her arm. Brian braced himself against a wall. The hatch smashed shut, then opened several times, eventually to stay open, the wild blasts of air settling down into a steady breeze.

"Now it looks like we're in," said Alf.

 

CHAPTER SIX

 

Mr Charles was not one to scare easily. In fact, he did the scaring. But he was wary of the supreme crime boss of Creaghville, a Mr Acheron. Very few people knew of Mr Acheron's role as ultimate crime boss in the settlement, and a few of those who did were still alive because Mr Acheron did not realise that they knew. He was also the main power behind the alien dig. Now Mr Acheron was on the phone with Mr Charles, one of several underlings through which he conducted business, and he wanted to know things.

"Passed the first hatch, you say?" said Mr Acheron.

"Last I heard, they were still trying to open the second hatch, Mr Acheron," said Mr Charles. "But they're working blind with strange circuits."

"I'm impressed they got the first hatch open so quickly," said Mr Acheron. Mr Charles let out a quiet sigh of relief. "Progress cannot be forecast in these things, and we knew the facility was abandoned a long time ago. When they do get full access, you know our priorities?"

"Yes, Mr Acheron, I'll make sure of it."

"In the meantime, I'm concerned that someone has been looking at files of the rebellion at Martus Prime in the Imperial archives here."

"Is that a matter of concern, Mr Acheron? Martus Prime is a long way from here, and the rebellion is over."

"Yes, the empire crushed it," said Mr Acheron. "But there are matters connected with it that would best be left undisturbed, even here. It may be someone just doing a history project or looking at some unimportant matter, but I would still like to know who. The tip I had pointed to the police station in Marshlands. You have a contact there?"

"I do, Mr Acheron. What do you want me to do when I find out who it is?"

"Who and why, Tobias. Who and why. Tell me that, and I'll decide what action, if any, is required."

 

Beyond the final metal hatch, the trio of explorers found a small room with a bench for sitting, also covered in dust, a place where clothes might have been hung, and a door with a lever where a human would have expected to find a handle but without a security lock.

On one wall, Elsbeth found a framed poster showing a hominid creature with distinctly reptilian features, including a jaw that looked as if it could bite a human face off, very pale skin, and lank, grey hair. But the creature was dressed in colorful clothes and might have been smiling, as far as they could tell. In the background was what looked to be a cave with glittering columns of stalagmites and hanging curtains of stalactites. There was a single word in large type on top of the poster and several in smaller type underneath.

"It's a travel poster!" shrieked Elsbeth. "This is what the creatures who built this place look like. This is a huge, huge find. There's been nothing like this anywhere. This is an entirely new civilisation. It has to be broadcast to the Empire. We have to tell those guys."

"Elsbeth, don't tell them!" snapped Alf. "Don't say anything when Hutch comes around, especially about broadcasting the find."

"But it's true," she protested.

"Of course it's true," retorted Alf. "The trouble is our hosts are not good sharers. The gangsters behind this have spent a lot of time and money getting this far, and they'll want to see a really good return on their investment, or they'll be around asking why not in an unpleasant, if not downright nasty fashion. That's why it's important they don't see you with that device of mine."

"How nasty?" asked Brian.

"A hole out in the desert that is forever yours, that's how nasty."

The two college types were shocked into silence.

"They wouldn't dare!" said Elsbeth, eventually.

"Watch them. But I'll do my best to keep you guys from harm. They won't do anything for a few days, and we have a whole alien facility, whatever this place is, to get lost in. Keep an eye open for ways to slip out unnoticed."

"Into the desert?" said Brian.

"Still working on that part," said Alf. He had decided not to tell them that a member of the police should already have a location on the site.

Hutch came in at that moment, obviously delighted at the progress. He even spared a glance for the travel poster.

"When can we access the complex itself?" he asked.

As an answer, Alf pulled out the lever on the door and pushed it open. "Knock yourself out, but we're calling it for tonight. Note that there is still a breeze, so there's a pressure difference somewhere. That means we shouldn't be this far in without proper equipment like breathing masks and maybe those helmets with a light that the miners have, and it's really late. Tomorrow guys. We'll get kitted out properly and start exploring the whole complex."

Another reason for stopping for the night was that the engineer wanted to report what had happened to Detective Sergeant Ellen Pullen – he did not dare think of her in any other terms, even if she was cute – and ensure the find was safely recorded in off-site databases.

"I see what you mean, a real breeze," said Hutch, holding up his hand to feel the airflow. "We need to go on now."

"Turn off the generator when you leave," said Alf. He led the consultants out to a dinner of frozen packaged meals heated up in a microwave.

"Why do we need masks?" asked Elsbeth.

"Cave explorers, spelunkers, who go into cave systems that have been sealed carry them," said Alf. "The air quality on the surface here is below Earth normal as it is. Judging by how the pressure equalised when we got that last door open, I think the atmosphere in the bunker-facility-whatever it is, was different somehow. I guess it's been sealed for a long time. Maybe much of the oxygen got absorbed into the alien concrete or something. I seem to recall that happening when they were experimenting with people living in closed systems back on Earth. Nitrogen is inert, so it wouldn't get absorbed.

"I saw some basic masks in the equipment stacks – from the same sporting goods store as the tents, I suppose. They have air quality monitors of sorts and small oxygen bottles. I'll show you how to use them tomorrow."

"Have we any idea how long it's been closed up?" asked Brian.

"Apart from a lot of dust, it doesn't look all that old," said Alf, "but it's been locked up in darkness, and the air is dry. This colony was first settled, what, eighty years ago, and the planet was surveyed at least a couple of decades before that without anyone finding traces of an advanced civilisation. Call it a century, at least, but anything beyond that is a guess. We need archaeologists here sifting the ground."

When they went to their tents, Alf repeated much of this in a text message to Ellen, who examined the pictures laboriously transmitted to her – the device uploaded only slowly - with considerable interest. She was still up and sitting at a small desk in her bedroom.

"Am I still scum?" he asked at the end of the uploads.

"Slime," she retorted, "but slime that is proving marginally useful. Keep it up."

"Are you in that cute dressing gown of yours right now?"

"Now you're back to being scum about to go up on charges of making disrespectful comments to police. Go to bed and report tomorrow."

Ellen deleted the text exchange on her device because she did not want it to go into the case file, but when she dropped the device into her bag for the next day, she caught herself smiling.

 

Alf went to bed and was well into a dreamland that featured Detective Sergeant Ellen Pullen in her blue dressing gown behaving in ways inconsistent with her role as a police officer when he found himself pressing the small knife he had brought with him against the belly of Hutch. The thug had come into the tent to shake him awake, and Alf had acted on instinct.

"What the…," said Hutch. He knew the feeling of a knife against his belly. "Where did that come from?" Alf's other hand gripped the thug's right arm. Hatch tried to shake it off but could not move his arm at all.

"First, you tell me why the fuck you're sneaking into my tent," said Alf, head still on his pillow. "I'm not the sort of guy you sneak up on."

"I guess not," said Hutch. "I came 'cause three of my guys are missing in that Alien place."

"Missing?" said Alf, pushing the thug away and getting up. "What do you mean missing?"

"I mean, they went in on the boss's orders and haven't come out."

"How long have they been gone?"

"Three hours. One should have come back by now at least to say what's happening."

"These were the three guys I saw around before, right? They didn't strike me as scientist types. What were they hoping to do that us consultants couldn't, apart from some sightseeing?"

"Boss's orders," said Hutch. "Straight from him."

"Do you know where in the underground base or whatever it is they might have gone?"

Hutch paused before answering and seemed to undergo some internal struggle.

"Third level," he said eventually.

"Third level? The place has been sealed and forgotten for at least a century and probably much longer, and they know to go to the third level? What else do you guys know about this place that you haven't told us poor, hard-working consultants? Like how you knew that the entrance to the facility was there in the first place."

"There were plans for the place in some archive somewhere," said Hutch. "I dunno what archive, I dunno where the boss got them from, and I haven't seen the plans myself, but there's something on the third level they wanted."

"Were there any warnings along with the plans about what might be in this place?" asked Alf.

"I know just what I told you. We weren't told of any warnings."

"Did your guys take masks?"

"Masks? Were they supposed to?"

"Didn't you hear me say to the others that we shouldn't be this far in without masks?"

Hatch strained his brain with thought for a moment. "Oh yeah. But the place has oxygen."

"Doesn't mean all the air is good. This isn't my problem, but I guess we can't leave your guys down there without trying something." He thought but did not add, that Detective Sergeant Ellen Pullen would not approve at all of people being left to die, even thugs. "Go grab five masks from the crates by the pit, I'll change. Oh yeah, and there's a big first aid kit there. Grab that."

A few minutes later, they were at the entrance to the facility, and Alf was explaining about the air quality warnings. "It's an audio warning thing. If it's just ticking, there's no problem. If the ticking starts increasing, look at the needle on the gage. Check how far it is from the red area. When the air gets really bad, it starts shrieking 'warning' 'warning'; that's when you want to put the masks on quickly. There is a smart air filter and an oxygen bottle with fifteen minutes or so air. There's also a speaker so we can talk to one another without taking the mask off."

"Have you used these things before?"

"Something similar. I looked at the manuals for these briefly yesterday."

"When did you have to go underground?"

"Like I told the others yesterday, I've had a varied career. You want to find your colleagues or not? Let's go."

Besides the masks which they carried strapped around their necks, ready to put on at a moment's notice, and the air monitoring devices clipped to their belts, they had mining hard hats with powerful lights at the front, good for about two hours, plus heavy-duty flashlights. They stepped through the final hatch into a corridor beyond.

The first impression Alf had of the Alien installation was of absolute silence; the second was of darkness. The lights on their mining helmets made little impression on the inky blackness. The corridor stretched off to the left and right, and there were doors.

"Any idea which way to this third level?" asked Alf.

"I didn't think to ask. They said they knew."

"Wait!" Alf saw something on the floor. “Look at this. The dust has been disturbed to the right. There are footprints in the dust. We can track your guys."

"All right, lead the way," said Hutch.

They followed the obvious tracks to another door with a security lock, but this one was lying on its side, and there were scorch marks around the lock.

"You guys blew it open?" asked Alf in astonishment.

"Way faster," said Hutch, unabashed, "and it's not a heavy-duty hatch like the others. Just an internal security door."

"Whatever," said Alf and stepped through. Beyond that door was an ordinary one with a lever, which opened onto a gallery at the top of a vast, open space. The walls on either side of Alf melted away. In front of him was a waist high wall of blue material with nothing beyond that.

He looked down. Far below, he thought he could see a tiled floor and long seats fitting with what might have been green cushions. Above him was a roof of pale, ribbed arches filled in with the same blue concrete/plaster material used in the wall. The arches were, in turn, supported by Greek-style fluted pillars set into the galleries, with an additional vast column that they could just see in the middle of the space. Alf could not see any end to the galleries to his left, but to his right, the structure curved around and flattened out. In the lights from the mining hats, he could just see the other side. The space had both elegance and grandeur.

"Impressive," said Alf, then added, "your friends went around to the right."

They followed the tracks. Sightseeing could wait, although Alf glanced in the occasional window. Some of these windows had lettering on them; others did not. Occasionally, he glimpsed what might have been bits of furniture. Overall, Alf got the impression of a giant, emptied out, very dusty, underground shopping mall.

At the end of the galleries the tracks merged into each other in front of two sliding doors.

"Looks as if they were hoping to get the lift," said Hutch.

"They would have been waiting a long time," said Alf. "No power at all."

The tracks moved on to what was unmistakably a set of stairs, although small for humans. Two levels down, the tracks veered off to the right again.

"This must be the third level," said Alf. They followed the tracks down a broad corridor, and then Alf stopped abruptly.

"Wait, what's this," he said, stepping to the edge of the corridor.

In the dust was another, completely different set of tracks. They were of two small feet, perhaps the size of a chimpanzee on Earth, but with a flatter sole and three toes, including a massive, big toe. There was no dust at all in the second set of tracks and no indication that the men who had passed that way had paused to inspect them.

"These were made after your colleagues passed through," said Alf. "Whatever creature made these tracks, I think it's following your guys."

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

 

Senior constable Samantha Pye was pleased with herself.

"I cracked my dognapping case," she told her superior, Sergeant Pullen, when she came in.

"Poppy is saved?" said Ellen.

"Turns out that it was an inside job, and that Poppy was never in any real danger."

"Do tell."

"One of the husband's sons by his first marriage grabbed the dog and used a disposable assistant unit to text the threats. He had the sense to use a credit stick to pay for the phone but forgot about the security cameras in the store. His dad identified him and got Poppy back. The family has declined to make any formal complaint, which suits me fine."

"And me," said Ellen. "If we present a brief on dognapping to legal, we'd never live it down. The family is happy; the crime has been cleared from our records; we can go back to trying to trace stolen parts."

Then Inspector Barastoc appeared and summoned Ellen to his office.

"I was just looking at the inquiries made by this station and saw you were making record requests for the war on Martus Prime," he said after he had closed the door.

"Yes, sir," said Ellen, thinking fast. She had not thought to cover her tracks on those inquiries. Now, she was confronted by one of her major failings as a police officer: her inability to do undercover work. Brilliant at interrogations and playing one suspect off against another, she was no good at acting and subterfuge. She decided she could tell part of the truth.

"I, um, was just following up a lead, sir, about that mechanic you were interested in."

"The petty thief from Sulu?"

"Yes, sir. He let slip to one of the people at the airport that he was in the rebellion on Martus Prime."

"Was he in the legions?"

"If he was Imperial, what's he doing all the way over here under what is clearly an assumed identity? Maybe he was a rebel."

"Ah! That makes sense. But the rebellion's been quashed, and the rebel soldiers allowed to go home."

"Yes, sir. I was trying to work that out, but I couldn't find any trace of an Alfonso on the rebel side, and those bugs we have on his workplace indicate that he's called in sick. Do you want me to pick him up from his home?"

"Ah, hmmm!" Barastoc pretended to consider that action, although he knew full well that Alf was at the Alien site. "May as well leave it until he reappears. Did you hear anything more about the ship crash thing?"

Ellen shook her head while being careful to continue to look directly at Barastoc.

"No, sir, nothing."

"Okay, well, there are perps lifting engine parts left and right – maybe see if we can find out more about that gang."

Ellen 'yes sired' and left. After she had gone, Barastoc reached for his phone.

 

Alf switched on his big flashlight to take a closer look at the tracks in the dust.

"What could be down here?" said Hutch. "You said the place had been sealed."

"For a century, maybe, at least, but we're just guessing," said Alf. "Look at tracks; you can see regular marks here and here, outside the footprints on the right and a long trail here on the left."

"What could be causing that?"

Alf thought for a moment. "Maybe it's also using its hands to walk, like a guerilla or chimp on Earth? The travel poster showed a creature that was lizard-like but with longer arms like that of a chimpanzee. The feet are small, which also suggests a chimp."

Alf had never seen a chimpanzee, even in a zoo, but he knew about them from films.

"An alien lizard-chimp?" said Hutch

"Maybe. I dunno," said Alf. "Now that I think about it, your guys must have made a hell of a racket when they blew that door open. Must've been able to hear the boom all over this place. There are no other tracks. This creature must not come up here unless it has a reason."

"How many would there be?"

"Hutch, I have no idea. I can see one set of tracks, and it's going in the same direction as your friends. Let's follow them. This place gives me the creeps."

"I hear you," said Hutch.

They walked on, keeping an eye on both the human and the other set of tracks, which did not vary until they came to a corridor, turning to the left this time. The creature's tracks also turned to the left. As they entered the corridor, the air quality monitors suddenly started ticking harder, and the voice warnings kicked in.

"Alert! Alert! Put on masks now!"

As they put on their masks, Alf thought he heard a stealthy shuffle, a whisper, or was it a whimper? He switched on the flashlight again to see, through the mask, a hint of a grey form and a glimpse of two brief points of red in the distance. Then, nothing but ticking from the monitors.

"There they are!" said Hutch. All three men were on the floor in front of a door. Two had simply fallen. The other had been flung across the corridor to the wall on the opposite side and had slid down to the floor, the front of his tee shirt glistening with blood. Alf had only time for a glance at the scene but saw that one of the shoulder bags the men brought with them had been flipped open, and the contents, including a small stick of explosives and a plastic lunch box, had been emptied out. The top of the lunch box had been ripped off, and the items – a packet of sandwiches, a drink box, and a fruit bar – spread in the dust.

"This guy's been shot but still breathing," said Hutch. "What's wrong with them?"

As an answer, Alf grabbed one of the spare face masks, pulled it over one of the thug's heads, and turned on the air bottle. After a moment, the man stirred and then sat up.

"Do that guy," said Alf pointing at the wounded man. "I'll do this other one."

Two of the thugs were soon sitting up, glad to be breathing properly, but the wounded man was in a bad way. Now that he was conscious, he was in pain.

"You two," said Alf to the thugs, "where was this guy when he got shot?"

"In front of the door," said one, still breathing heavily. "Touched the handle."

A closer inspection of the door, with Alf careful not to touch the handle or step in front of it, showed a small round hole that might have been one end of a gun barrel.

"Booby trap, I guess," said Alf. He looked at the wounded man. The bullet, if that was what had come out of the barrel, had gone under his ribs and might have gone into his intestines. There was no exit wound.

"Your guy needs to go to a hospital now," said Alf. "No messing around. We'll have to carry him out." He rummaged in the medical kit. "Some morphine here, you allergic?" The wounded man shook his head. Alf dosed him with an injectable ampule, slapped an auto-bandage on the wound, and picked him up. "Grab the feet," he said to Hutch. "We'll carry him out that way. Have your guys grab their stuff, and let's move."

"What about the creature?" said Hutch, who had also glimpsed a grey form.

"Don't think it's going to bother us. It seemed more curious about the weird creatures in its domain than hostile."

Alf and Hutch carried the wounded man up two flights of stairs before the other two men felt recovered enough to carry their comrade. The three men in the original party had started to feel the effects of the air as they went into the corridor and foolishly tried to carry on. They later realised that the further they got from the only open door, the more dangerous it was to be without masks.

The camp was still in darkness when they got to the surface.

"What am I going to tell them when we get to the hospital?" Hutch asked Alf as Junot, the wounded man, was loaded into a large passenger car that was also at the site. The obvious gunshot wound would be reported to the police.

"Hutch, I don't care," said Alf, standing by the thug as he typed in the password for the car's AI. "But in the interests of avoiding police involvement here for a while longer, keep it as simple as possible. Just say you found him somewhere, and he's a friend of yours. Remember that they'll ask questions about where you found him and why you found him, the dust on his clothes, and so on. Start thinking of a story and make sure Junot knows it."

Before he went back to bed to grab another couple of hours' sleep if he was lucky, Alf sent a text to Ellen saying that another of the men at the site had been taken to hospital and, no, it had nothing to do with him. The man had set off a booby trap at the site. There were also indications of a creature on the site.

The news that the alien installation was inhabited also caused Alf's colleagues considerable surprise the next morning at breakfast. They sat at the camp table they had claimed as their own, with the two thugs from last night's expedition keeping an eye on the consultants from a separate table.

"How can anything biological still be alive down there?" asked Elsbeth.

"Is it just one?" asked Brian.

"No idea on both counts," said Alf. "But the tracks were recent and unmistakable, and both Hutch and I glimpsed the creature itself. Maybe there's another way in, but you remember how the hatch blew when we jacked the lock. The place had been sealed for a long time before we came along. Also, there were no other tracks in the galleries, and I didn't see anything like animal droppings."

"Automaton?" asked Brian.

Alf shrugged. "It's a thought. My guess is that it's only one and doesn't bother much with the area we were in. But it heard the noise when our friends blew the door and came to take a look. I don't think it's hostile – it didn't hurt the guys on the ground – just curious. It looked at a lunch box that was in their packs and threw the stuff around."

"Poor thing," said Elsbeth. "It's been down there at least a century alone."

"If you do see this creature down there, poor or not, don't approach it," said Alf. "If you're between it and an open door, get out of the way so it can escape. If it gets used to us being around, maybe we can work out some way to make contact."

"Gotit," she said.

"What were our friends looking for, working off this plan they didn't share with us?" said Brian.

"A good question," said Alf. "Whatever was behind that door, it was protected by a booby trap that's managed to remain in working order for a century or so. There was a single word on the door, which didn't mean anything to me. Maybe it's a piece of Alien tech they somehow knew about, maybe it's weapons, maybe it's advanced ship tech. Whatever it is, I'm not about to ask our friends."

"This is such a huge find," said Elsbeth. "The Alien races we know about are the Poolers and the Fronde, who we've been fighting. But all the physical contact we've had has been crashed ships and a couple of markers set up by the Poolers – all of it coreward, in the opposite direction from Earth to us. Then there are the Spacers, who seem to have just vanished. We know their main language thanks to the Poolers but not much else, and now we're sitting on top of a whole fucking installation built by a race using an alphabet that bears no relation to anything we've seen so far. This is not just huge; it's humongous. Scholars will be coming from all over the Imperium."

"When it's announced," said Alf. "Like I said before, the interests of our hosts are not scholastic, and they'll be worried about you blabbing when you get back to Creaghville."

The other two were silent for a moment.

"They're going to kill us, anyway," said Elsbeth softly.

"When we stop being useful," said Alf.

"We're not getting any money from this?" said Brian.

"You guys didn't ask for any money upfront, did you?"

They both shook their heads.

"Or even tell anybody where you were going or with whom?"

They both shook their heads.

"Shit!" said Brian quietly. "I thought it was such a sweet deal."

"It still can be," said Alf. "When this gets out, the Empire will throw money at the research for this place, and you two will be in prime slots for jobs."

"We're still back to this point about when it gets out," said Elsbeth. "How do we get the word out? How do we get out?"

"Okay, it's time I came clean," said Alf, "now keep your voice down when I tell you this … I've been sending all details of this place out to a police sergeant who's been compiling an investigation file."

"With that device of yours?" said Brian.

"Uh-huh."

"Who's the sergeant?" asked Elsbeth.

"Detective Sergeant Ellen Pullen, she works out of the Marshlands station."

"Why her?"

"She was hassling me about other stuff at the time, and I overheard a snippet of conversation between her boss, Inspector Barastoc, and Mr Charles that indicated she isn't corrupt. Barastoc's in Charles's pocket but not her."

"Good to know," said Elsbeth.

"If you talk to any police, only her. Come to think of it, I'll see if she can release her file to a lot of people and the media all at the same time. If all this," Alf waved his hands, "becomes generally known, there won't be any point in killing us."

"Release it now," said Brian.

"Let's just take more of a look inside," said Alf. "I couldn't take pics last night, and maybe we can see how far that gallery extends. Hutch may not be back for a while, and our friends over there won't care."

Alf told the thugs where they were going and went through the air-quality breathing mask drill with his colleagues. They strapped on miner's helmets, grabbed large flashlights, and walked into the Alien structure, this time trying the handles of any doors they came to in the first corridor. The trio carefully examined each door first and then stood to one side when they pushed on the lever. A few opened, mostly to reveal dusty chairs and tables, all small for humans, but the occasional artifact. In one, they found a small box with a keypad.

"A control wand, maybe?" said Brian, wiping the dust from it and looking at the keypad. In another, they found, high up on a shelf, what looked suspiciously like a laptop with a fold-out screen, albeit smaller than the ones they used. "Oh man, think we can jack it?"

"We can try," said Alf. "Let's stop the room to room stuff and see how far we can get on that gallery floor."

They stepped through into the vast main gallery.

"Whoa," said Elsbeth reverently.

"It's so quiet," said Brian. "Like a tomb." He clapped his hands. It echoed. They walked around to the stairwells.

"You said there was a lift or elevator around here?" said Elsbeth.

The soldier led them around to where last night's group had paused. "I think those are the equivalent of lift doors," said Alf.

Elsbeth studied the doors intently for a moment and then the doors of the same lift on the next floor.

"There," she said, pointing at a symbol on the right above the sliding doors. "That might be a floor number."

"Counting up or counting down?" asked Brian.

She shrugged. "We'll have to see, but it's a place to start."

On level three, they walked around to the side gallery so that Alf could show the other two the tracks he had spotted the other night. Elsbeth gave a small shriek when she saw them.

"Oh, my stars, it's real," she breathed.

"Still can't see how anything bio could survive down here for so long," said Brian.

They got to the bottom and examined the seats that had once been upholstered in some form of glossy fabric, which still looked good but cracked the moment Alf touched it. They took pictures and moved on, keeping to the side rather than out into the vast central space.

"Look," said Alf, shining his light on the dust on the gallery floor, "our friend has been here."

"Recent?" said Elsbeth, bending over to peer closely.

"Difficult to tell, but seems so," said Alf. "There are no other tracks. It doesn't seem to have bothered with this area at all until we started messing around."

"There's a big passage off to the right up here," said Brian.

Just then, the air quality monitors started shrieking, "Warning! Warning! Masks on now!" The trio obliged.

"Let's take a peek through that passage and then come straight back," said Alf through the speaker on his mask. "These air bottles don't last long."

The passage was short, and at its end, the trio was confronted with another waist-high blue wall beyond which was a vast, black space. After a few moments of staring into the darkness, Alf thought he could see a lump in the near distance. He aimed his light at the lump and played it back and forth until he realised that it might be the head of a statue looking like the head of the creature they had seen on the travel poster. On a whim, he got one of the commercial light sticks he had found in the equipment bins, cracked the tube so that it glowed, and threw it. As it arched over the void, the stick shed tendrils of light on the grey mass, which was indeed a gigantic statue of one of the creatures that built the city, dressed in a cloak and holding a spear, the tip of which almost touched the ceiling of the vast chamber it was in. Beyond and to both sides of that statue, the explorers caught a glimpse of more galleries and statues before the stick hit the smooth, patterned floor far below.

"Oh my," said Elsbeth.

"Behold the Kingdom of the Dwarves," muttered Brian.

"This isn't just an installation; it's a whole city," said Alf.

After another minute or so of the trio using their flashlights to get some idea of the colossal size of the place, Alf noticed two tiny red dots just visible in the gloom about where he thought the base of the statue would be on the floor of the chamber.

"Elsbeth," muttered Alf. "No shrieking but look directly in front at about floor level. Do you see two red dots?"

"Oh yes," she said.

"I think that's the creature checking us out."

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

 

When Ellen and Samantha got into work, Inspector Barastoc had a job for them.

"Some guy 's come into the Marshlands hospital with a gunshot wound," he said. "They're operating on him now. Be there when he wakes up and see if you can get a statement."

Thanks to Alf's text, Ellen knew that the wounded man was from the Alien site in the desert and that they were unlikely to get any usable statement out of him, but they had to go through the motions. When they got to the hospital, the investigating duo's first act was to take charge of the slug extracted from the thug's intestines and place it in an evidence bag where Ellen pronounced it "unusual." The standard police evidence scanners both officers carried with them didn't offer any further details, but then Ellen had not expected it to.

A scan of the fingerprints of the thug Junot Romero before he woke up indicated that his career had been of considerable previous interest to the police. As a result, when the anesthetic wore off, Juno found himself confronted by two notably unsympathetic female police officers.

"That's an unusual slug the doctors dug out of you, Mr Romero," said Ellen after she had gone through the preliminaries of introductions. "With your history of bad behaviour, we're kinda interested to know who shot you and where you got shot."

"I didn't see who shot me. I was walking, and the next thing I know, I was in hospital."

"Where were you walking?"

"By the marshes."

"Where exactly?"

"Somewhere close to route three."

"What time was this?"

A pause. "'Bout one in the morning."

"What were you doing out there at one in the morning?"

"I couldn't sleep. I wanted to walk."

"Our records show that you live on the other side of the spaceport. That's quite a drive to walk off a bout of insomnia. Why out there? Why not walk in Founder Park?"

"I like the marshlands."

"You're one of the few who do. What do you like about them?"

"I just like 'em."

This went on for some time before Ellen decided to wind up.

"Here's the thing, Mr Romero," she said. "Under Imperial law, if a gunshot wound victim is proving uncooperative, I can ask for warrants to search their place and anyone else involved, including the person who dropped you off. The hospital security cameras and facial recognition software show this to be a Joffrey Hutchins, another person who has proved of some interest to the police over the years."

"I was answering your questions."

"Most unconvincingly," said Ellen. "When the men in our relationships lie to us, we can't do much about it. But when the men we interview for work lie to us, we can apply for warrants. Under that same law, we can ensure you cannot get to a phone for a few hours to warn people. Is there anyone you'd like us to notify?"

Junot thought about that for a moment. "My mum," he said eventually.

"Give us the details, and we'll be on our way. A police officer will be stationed outside for the rest of the day. After that, you'll be free to go – depending on what we find, of course."

The ladies left.

"You going to check with the inspector about the warrants?" asked Samantha as they left the hospital.

"It's just standard procedure," said Ellen, who suspected that the Inspector would try to divert her back to chasing stolen spare parts. "We can take a couple of extra steps before reporting. It's better than investigating petty theft at any rate."

"It is," said Sam.

 

By the time the consultants had emerged from the Alien city, as they now believed it was, with Elsbeth taking sketches of whatever writing she could find, Hutch had returned from his mercy dash, full of information.

"You were in the rebellion on Martus Prime," he said to Alf as the consultant climbed out of the pit.

Thanks to a text from Ellen, which had been almost apologetic, saying she had revealed that information, Alf had a reply ready.

"Uh-huh."

"You were in the Imperial Guard?" said Elsbeth.

"Other side."

"A rebel?"

"Yep."

"Front line?" asked Hutch.

"Wounded twice."

"And you ended up all the way over here?"

"I took a tour for my health."

"Long way to come for your health," said Hutch.

"I had a lot of health issues. Now, if you'll excuse us, we've got some processing to do."

"Are those IT devices?" said Hutch, seeing the control wand and the unit they thought might be a tablet.

"Yep. We searched the rooms close to the opening. Then, walked through that gallery to the end and took a quick look at the city beyond."

"City?"

"As in underground structures several times the size of what we saw last night - a very large gallery with big statues, and we think several galleries of the same size leading off it. Didn't your plans show you that stuff?"

"Just the part we saw and a passage on the bottom level leading off."

"That's the passage that leads to the rest of the city," said Alf. "Go back to your boss and ask him if there's more to the plans and tell him that if he wants us to look at alien tech – that's what all this is about right?"

Hutch nodded reluctantly.

"Then you need to get more advanced masks to go into that city - ones that recycle the air we breathe as well as use bottled air. They last for hours. And how about you show us these plans?"

"I'll ask the boss," said Hutch, "but for now, he wants us to look in that room."

"What's in that room that's so important?"

"He's not sure himself. Once we get in and look, he'll tell us what to do."

"My only suggestion then is to blow the door, like you did with that locked door to the gallery," said Alf. "I had a quick look at it last night. There's no security pad or anything else to work on. I suspect it's unlocked from a computer console somewhere else, and that could take us weeks or months to find. If you're that keen on getting in, blow it. Just don't be around when you do. Use a timer."

"Gotit," said Hutch, relieved to have a straight forward, easily understandable solution to the problem in front of him. "Say, what about that creature we saw? Did you see it again?"

"More tracks, but we think it was out there watching us."

"Boss was really weirded out at the thought of whatever it is. Was wondering if we should shoot it."

"No way," said Elsbeth looking up.

"Tell Mr Charles it seems curious about us, not hostile, and even if it's hostile, he'd never be forgiven for ordering it shot."

"You bet," said Elsbeth.

Hutch shrugged. "I'll tell him. I don't think he cares, but I'll tell him."

By the time Alf sat down to the consultant's sandwich lunch, Elsbeth was stressing out about the information she had collected.

"I can tell the difference between letters, numbers, and symbols," she said, "but I dunno which way the number sequence goes. Is it counting up or counting down? Do these guys read left to right or right to left?" Then she caught sight of the suspected control wand by the alien tablet computer, squealed, and pounced on it.

"Numbers on the keys. She looked some more at the keypad. Okay, I think that's a symbol instead of a letter or number," she pointed at a button at the top, "and that may be zero." She pointed at a button at the bottom. "This is the reverse of the elevator door sequence, and there are twelve buttons. The gallery we were in had five floors, and the door in that lift space had that symbol on it – five from the top button. Maybe it's a five at the top in that elevator shaft we saw and one at the bottom, with these guys counting by twelves rather than by tens like us, and now I'm pretty sure they read left to right." She sat back.

"That's pretty good, Elsbeth," said Alf, genuinely impressed. She beamed. "But it is still just one small step."

She nodded reluctantly. "Mind you, there's a number three on the first hatch you guys unlocked."

"As in entrance number three?"

She nodded again.

"It makes sense that there'd be more than one entrance to a place that size, but why haven't the entrances been detected well before this? I mean, maybe this place has been abandoned for centuries, but not thousands of years – not enough time for erosion and soil deposition to cover large entrances."

"Maybe it's like that weird archaeological site on Earth they still haven't figured out," said Elsbeth. "It's a huge site ten thousand years old, and they initially said it might have been deliberately buried."

"Göbekli Tepe you mean?" said Alf. "But they later decided it hadn't been buried. Hmmm! If these guys deliberately buried everything, it's one explanation for why we haven't found any traces of them before now. Where are the farms, the mines, the connecting roads, and the holiday resorts?"

"Maybe the resorts are also underground," said Elsbeth. "You saw the travel poster. They like to visit caves. Maybe everything's underground."

"Maybe," said Alf. "Another difference, now that I think of it, is that religion plays a big part in Göbekli Tepe, but I don't think our alien friends are into religious rituals. We didn't see any carvings showing anything that might be religious scenes or anything much in the way of decorations apart from the statues on the gallery floor, and we didn't get a close look at them.

Brian, who had taken no part in the conversation in favour of tinkering with the computer notepad they had picked up, suddenly ripped off the bottom half of it.

"That was it, the keypad lifts out. Look! Circuits are densely packed but all sealed, so it might still work."

"Got any points we can put leads onto?" asked Alf.

"Think so," muttered Brian. "No external power jacks, but this might be the main power system. Low voltage to start?"

"Let's try."

While they ate the sandwiches, Brian brought over the battery system they had used on the locks and tried a low voltage to be rewarded with a gleam of light inside the device. They increased the voltage again and got a block of what appeared to be a soft mist hanging above the top of the device. It took Alf a moment to understand what they were looking at.

"It's a holographic screen display," he exclaimed.

They could not put the keypad back in with the jacking wires in place, but Brian pressed some of the contacts. The mist cleared, and a series of symbols appeared. After looking at the keypad, he pressed the contact he suspected corresponded with enter on a human keyboard and was presented with a series of words in the alien language.

"Until we can read this stuff, I can't do much else," said Brian.

"At least we know how to power it," said Alf, "and we know they used holographic images."

Hutch came to the table to exclaim, "What the fuck! You got one of their devices to work!"

"We got a response from it," said Alf, "but it doesn't mean anything until we can work out the language."

"Boss wants us to try blowing the door after lunch," said Hatch. "You guys going to come?"

"I think we will. Tell us when you're ready."

Elsbeth waited until Hutch left and then whispered fiercely. "Are we really going to help out in this alien tech scavenger hunt of theirs?"

"They won't get to keep any of it, remember," whispered Alf back, "and I think it might help us take a closer look at the creature."

An hour later Alf was hiding around the corner in the passage off the gallery where he had seen the tracks on the previous night. Brian was beside him with a flashlight, and Elsbeth was a little further away, crouching behind one of the pillars in the walls.

Behind them, Hutch and company abruptly blew in the door to the room they were interested in with an ear shattering boom that seemed to echo throughout the enormous, empty, underground city. No wonder the creature had come to check it out. They waited. Eventually, Hutch called on the cheap two-way radios they had found in the equipment stacks. The devices had proved effective enough at very short ranges inside the city.

"Alf, can you come?"

"Soon. Wait there."

Then Elsbeth, who also had a radio, whispered excitedly. "I see something."

A little later, Alf also saw the creature as a dim outline in the distance shuffling along, moving chimp-like on hands and feet but with its left arm limp and apparently useless, trailing in the dust. So that was the reason for the odd track he had seen the night before. He was aware that Hutch had walked in behind him.

"Don't do anything," he said softly.

"Boss wants to know," said Hutch, having the sense to keep his voice down.

Alf waited until the creature was within about twenty paces, then swung himself out into the side passage, raising both arms, hands palm outwards as if surrendering.

"Want to talk," he said. At the same moment Brian switched on the large flashlight so that Alf was lit up, clearly visible to the creature.

Better able to see the creature, despite the darkness and being lit up himself, Alf realised that it was wearing clothes. Its coat might have once been a smart blue with shiny buttons but was now so old that the color was mostly grey; all but two buttons had disappeared, and the sleeves looked as if they might fall off. A pair of grey trousers with a black belt were so torn and tattered that they revealed more than they hid.

The creature's face was of the same basic plan as that of the individual in the travel poster, with a snake-like jaw and nostrils up front and a skull and ears that bore a passing resemblance to that of a human. Part of the creature's face had cracked – not scared, but cracked as if it was a type of plastic rather than flesh. That meant it was an artificial being, although the creature’s eyes seemed to glow with intelligence. Otherwise, the greenish skin was smooth, without either fur or scales, including a completely bald head.

All this Alf saw in the brief moment the creature stopped, exclaimed, "Aaaagh!" then turned and raced off down the gallery. Then, as it reached the doorway it had come in by, the creature turned and stopped to look at Alf. He saw that the human had not moved and that no one else was chasing it. The creature then raised one arm, hand out in the same gesture Alf had used, with the left arm still hanging limp and useless. It remained that way for a few seconds, then bolted through the doorway.

"Oh, my stars," shrieked Elsbeth over the radio, "I think it's sentient.”

 

CHAPTER NINE

 

Ellen and Samantha found enough items of interest at the homes of both Hutch and Junot to get the wounded Junot handcuffed to his hospital bed while they questioned him again.

"An impressive collection of firearms at your place, Mr Romero," said Ellen, "and you took some trouble to hide them. But detective senior constable Pye here has more experience than she wants in men hiding things from her."

"Hard won experience," said Samantha.

"Self-defence," muttered Junot.

"You need both an assault rifle and a high-powered rifle with top-of-the-range optical sights for self-defence?" asked Ellen. "Our tech guys nearly wet themselves when we handed those over. Now they're happily firing them and comparing the fired slugs with bullets recovered in past cases."

"Boys and their toys, Sergeant Pullen," interjected Samantha.

"And the boys liked that machine gun of yours, Mr Romero," said Ellen. "They told me all sorts of stuff about it, like it uses standard 7.62-millimetre cartridges and has an impressive rate of fire. You might have gotten away with possessing the other weapons if you had a license for them, but you don't. The machine gun, however, and I don't need any guy to tell me this, is flat out illegal. For the record, I have to ask, who or what were you planning on defending yourself against?"

Bad neighbourhood," said Junot after a pause.

"Didn't seem that bad," said Ellen. "Did you think it was bad, Detective Senior Constable Pye?"

"I'd buy there," said Samantha. "Although it wouldn't be my first choice. We spoke to the residents of your building, Mr Romero, and they seemed to think that they were the ones who needed protection from you and friends of yours that come around."

"Trouble with neighbours," said Junot defiantly.

"Really?" said Ellen. "Which ones? The grandmother, the single mum with two kids, the husband and wife real estate agents, or the student share apartment? Did any of the residents seem threatening to you, senior constable Pye?"

"Couldn't see any threat at all except to my sanity, Sergeant Pullen," said Samantha.

"Mr Romero," said Ellen, "your digital assistant is with our tech guys now, who are busily going through emails, texts, and the occasional digital file you have been entrusted with, and I expect to find many interesting lines of inquiry. In the meantime, I'll do the paperwork on the arms charges. I'd wish you a speedy recovery, but I doubt you'd welcome moving from a hospital bed to a cell."

"I have friends," said Junot.

"You'll need them, Mr Romero," said Ellen.

"What did he mean when he said he had friends?" asked Samantha when they were back out on the streets.

"He's one of Charles' thugs," said Ellen. "He's hoping the boss can pull a few strings. I also know where he got shot."

"You do? Where did he get shot?" asked Samantha, "and how do you know where?"

"Time for lunch and for me to tell you what's going on," said Ellen.

 

Hutch finally managed to persuade the consultants to leave off discussing their encounter with the creature to look in the room they could now access. The group stepped over the pieces of a ruined security door, paying briefly to inspect the booby trap mechanism – a pistol mechanism with what seemed to be three cartridges, all ruined by the explosion – and then shone their flashlights on several rows of what they took to be security droids sealed in tubes filled with some form of greenish liquid. The droids were built along the same lines as the race that inhabited the city in that they were half-human-chimp, half-reptilian, although somewhat larger than they thought the city inhabitants had been. The bodies of these droids were encased in a dull-grey armour but without tac helmets, which they found in cases fixed to a table. Racks of arms were mounted in transparent cases filled with more of the green liquid recessed into the walls of the room. The arms were further secured by metal bars inside the case with no apparent lock or fastening.

"Sorry to disappoint your Mr Charles," said Alf, examining the weapons through the case, "but these seem similar to special forces assault rifles with a built-in grenade launcher. See the tube grip at the front? Better than holding it by the barrel. The optical sights seem advanced, but I can't tell much else until I can handle the weapon. Good luck on getting them out of that rack."

"What about these things?" said Hutch, pointing to another rack filled with stubby weapons resembling old-fashioned submachine guns with a circular magazine, except that the magazine was very thick and the barrel very wide.

"Looks like it fires explosive rounds – grenades. Lethal, particularly in confined spaces, but it's not very innovative technology. Looks like they were fully equipped to crush any dissenting groups in the city or any groups outside of it."

"Such as who?" asked Hutch.

"How would I know? Until we can work out their language and gain access to their information systems, we're flying blind here."

Rifle-like weapons in a third rack puzzled Alf. "Looks like these do something electrical. See the prongs there? I dunno what they do, but these may interest your boss. You'd have to take one out of the rack, point it at something, and try to fire it, then dismantle a couple to see how they work. This rack," Alf pointed at another row of weapons inset in the wall, "seems to be batons that you use to hit people with. The basic technology has been around a while."

Their tour took them to the back wall, which was full of what looked to be lockers.

"What about these?" asked Hatch.

"Same basic problem as the door and the weapon racks," said Alf. "There's nothing for us to hack. There's no security keypad or any sort of central control for us to jack that I can see. The whole thing must be unlocked from elsewhere."

"And you can't find that place?"

"If we had some means of talking to the creature, assuming it can talk, and it didn't run away the moment we spoke to it, then maybe we could ask it, but I wouldn't hold your breath. In the meantime, we'll look around the city to see if there's anything that helps us get a handle on the language or point to where the city's AI might be holed up. While you're waiting around, why not just try cutting through the weapon cases and the lockers? They look tough, but you've got some mean cutting equipment in the camp. Just remember to check for booby traps."

After that, the consultants were left alone to explore the city, reaching the floor of the main arcade they had seen on the previous day, thanks to improved mining breathing masks brought in by Hatch. These filtered the air and had much larger air bottles. Mr Charles, they were told, had grumbled about the expense. The explorers had assumed the gallery with the big statue was the main part of the city, but when they got to its floor via staircases, they found that it was simply the end point of two larger galleries that stretched off into the darkness.

They looked at the statue of the creature wearing a cloak and holding a spear and at an inscription on the base of the statue, which meant nothing to them. Then they walked to another statue, just as large, of a creature in a cloak and hood looking dramatically off into the distance, clutching a book. Elsbeth also studied the inscription at the base of that statue, although she could make little of it.

"All their words seem short, with distinct letters – they don't join up at all – and I think the end of a sentence is marked by this line here," said Elsbeth, pointing to a bar. "There are languages on earth that use something similar."

"Okay, another piece of the puzzle," said Alf. "Good work. You may also be interested to know that our friend is looking at us from the corner of the intersecting gallery. Don't turn around! Elsbeth stopped turning. We'll do everything slowly. Brian, can you shine that light on me?"

Alf turned around and raised his arms, palm outward as before, while illuminated. Then Elsbeth and Brian did the same thing, all to show the creature that they knew it was there and would not do anything. After that, they studiously ignored it in favour of looking at a third statue. That sculpture was a figure in a hood and a cloak with one hand on a sword worn on its right hip. The inscription in the statue's base meant as much to them as the first two had.

"Is he still following us?" asked Brian.

"Yes, but a little closer," said Alf.

"Why couldn't it be a 'she'?" asked Elsbeth.

"Ships are 'she' creatures found in long abandoned cities are 'he,'" said Alf, "until we have further information." They walked on and realised that the galleries they had been in were simply the outlier for a vast central area, a forest of stone columns interspersed with awe-inspiring, domed spaces.

"These guys really knew how to engineer," said Alf. "There's masses of rock and dirt above us, but there's not a crack or a seam anywhere in these chambers. Maybe we should call the creatures that built this place The Engineers until we know more."

They came to what they thought might be the city's centre with a massive statue of another of the lizard-chimp-humanoids that built the place. That one was dressed in what might well have been an archaic costume, albeit a few centuries after the first statues, consisting of a coat with buttons and braid and holding what looked very much like a ship's spyglass. In front of this statue was a large stone bowl with a spike, which they realized must be a fountain without the water. In front of the fountain were a host of small benches made of stone.

"One of the city's meeting places. Let's see if our friend will sit with us?" said Alf.

They sat down on one bench in a row, facing outwards, one of the large flashlights on a stone bench in front of them, the beam parallel to them. Alf stood up, facing toward where he knew the creature was, and pointed at another bench a few meters from them. For a minute or so, the profound silence of an empty city settled over them, and then the creature came closer, walking slowly, its feet hardly seeming to make any sound. Eventually, it shuffled up to the bench and sat on the edge, still just as ragged, grimy, and forlorn as it had appeared in the upper chambers, left arm dangling.

Alf stood up slowly, placed a hand on his chest, and said solemnly, "Alf." Elsbeth stood up and declared herself "Elsbeth," followed by "Brian."

Then the creature stood up, placed a hand on its chest, and after apparent difficulty in getting its mouth to work, said, "Sill."

"Oh my! Oh my! Oh my!" breathed Elsbeth.

Alf got up again and said, "I am Alf," then pointed at the creature, "You are Sill." Elsbeth did the same, then Brian. Sill then obligingly went through the same process in what they took to be its language. All the two men could say about the words used was that it involved a lot of hissing. Elsbeth, however, busily took notes and cursed Alf's tracking device. It recorded sound but was hardly fit for purpose and did not do video, which was important for such work.

Alf asked by sign language if they could sit on the bench closer to Sill, and the creature nodded.

"Nodding means yes," breathed Elsbeth.

Sill did not look any better close up, although his eyes gleamed with intelligence as he looked at each of the intruders in his domain in turn. Once they were seated, however, the conversation stalled as the humans could not think of anything obvious to ask. Then Alf pointed at Sill's useless left arm and said, "Bad? What happened?"

Sill looked at Alf for a moment, then stood up and stepped back.

"You've scared him," said Elsbeth.

But Sill did not back away. Instead, he said something that sounded like "Shade" and waved his good arm towards himself as if wanting them to move. He repeated the word and the gesture.

"I think he wants us to follow him," said Alf, and that proved to be the case. Sill led them down what might be a processional way that led off the meeting place – in the light of their mining lamps the avenue looked very much like an extended cathedral nave on Earth but without the stained-glass windows and with statues every few meters.

"We've got maybe another two hours on our masks," said Brian.

"One hour, then, if we want to allow plenty of time to get back," said Alf.

Sill led them to a door off the processional way and then down six flights, all the time looking back to make sure his new friends were following.

"How far down does this city go?" grumbled Elsbeth.

Sill finally turned off onto a corridor, and they marched on, passing any number of doors (the consultants soon lost count) until he stopped in front of one and pointed. Words were printed on the door, but like every other piece of writing in the city, they meant nothing to the humans. When Alf walked forward to get a better look, he stepped on something. He picked up the object and turned it over.

"It's a hammer," he said after a moment.

The tool was simply a lump of metal inset on a handle of indeterminate material. One end was flat, and the other was shaped like an axe.

"Look at this," said Brian. "There are marks on the door around the lock."

Alf pointed at the hammer at Sill and at the marks on the door. "Did you do this?"

Sill nodded, somewhat reluctantly, Alf thought.

"What's the lock like?" he asked Brian.

"I think it's biometric," said Brian, "but still has the same basic architecture as the other locks we've cracked."

"Sill here has been desperate enough to get in to attack the door with a hammer,” said Alf. “We can earn some goodwill by jacking the lock and seeing what he wants."

 

CHAPTER TEN

 

Inspector Barastoc was in the uncomfortable position of having to explain to Mr Charles that, despite the money the crime lord was paying hard-working police officials, he had been unable to sabotage the activities of an eager subordinate, namely Detective Sergeant Ellen Pullen.

"If I'd known it was one of your guys, Mr Charles," said Barastoc, "I would have gone down myself and interviewed him. No one told me about a shooting at this place. I was trying to keep the sergeant busy and away from inquiring about this crash site." Barastoc had now begun to suspect that there was more to the story than a missing space transport, but Mr Charles was not paying him to ask questions.

Instead, he had to explain to the crime boss that the search warrants were standard procedure in such cases and that Sergeant Pullen should have informed him what she was doing but had not required his permission or authorization to do so. The sergeant apologised for that oversight, saying that she had gotten caught up in the moment. Barastoc did not suspect that this was a lie, but in any case, the action had occurred, and the searches by the two female police officers had proved surprisingly efficient. A handgun recovered at the residence of Joffrey Hutchins was not covered by a permit but otherwise had proved of little interest to police. The arsenal recovered from Junot's abode, however, was proving to be a treasure trove of forensic material and raised a host of questions.

The discovery of a full machine gun in a quiet Imperial backwater, in particular, had excited the interest of various senior officials. Where had Junot got such a weapon and ammunition? Unfortunately, from the point of view of Mr Charles, this information had been automatically forwarded to various police squads in Creaghville police HQ, and the matter was out of the inspector's hands. Already, the thug had been transferred to HQ for further questioning.

Mr Charles sighed. Somehow, Junot had to be silenced, and the evidence lost, and that would take money. The episode was disrupting business, potentially threatening him personally, and costing a great deal – funds that Mr Acheron might not repay.

 

Back in the abandoned city, now having some experience in jacking alien security locks, Alf and Brian used tools they had brought to rip off the lock's outer casing. After inspecting the metal array underneath, they ripped that out as well and started putting leads from the high-voltage battery they had brought with them on various likely surfaces of the exposed circuitry. After a few minutes, they were rewarded with a distinct 'click', and the door swung inwards slightly. But before they could move, Sill barged through the door into the room beyond. The three humans followed to find themselves in a workshop.

There was a bench with tools placed neatly in a rack in front of it. Unlike the weapon racks they had seen earlier, the tools had not been sealed in any way but still looked almost new, if dusty. On another wall was a succession of diagrams showing mechanical arms, legs, and torsos, which they had only a moment to examine before Elsbeth called.

"Guys, look at this."

Sill had opened one of a line of lockers and pointed at an item on a shelf, which the linguist pulled out. It proved to be an arm identical to Sill's arm but wrapped in a form of plastic. One end was shaped like a shoulder joint and had various clips, connections, and a power cable.

"Look at that; it's a left arm like the one not working," said Alf. "This must be some sort of android workshop where they'd fix guys like him. He knew where it was but couldn't get in."

"Must have really wanted to fix his arm for so long," said Elsbeth.

Sill pointed at the replacement arm, then at his useless left arm, and looked at Alf. The human thought there was a hint of pleading in the android's eyes.

"Can we replace his arm?" asked Brian, a note of disbelief in his voice.

"Well, um," said Alf, then he remembered the diagrams on the wall and walked back to the workshop area. "Look at that." He pointed to one. "It's the steps for an arm replacement like the diagrams you follow in assembling something from a box."

"And I usually get wrong," said Elsbeth, "even when I know the language of the instructions."

"Sill here has been designed so that his limbs can be easily replaced, and these diagrams show step by step. We can't read the words, but we can follow the diagrams. These straps here must function like tendons, and the electrical cable is the power and nerves. At least we can have a look."

Alf knelt before Sill and gestured for the robot to take his coat off. Sill undid the two remaining buttons of his blue jacket which not so much fell off but seemed to disintegrate, the scraps falling around the feet of the android. The skin underneath was flesh-like with shallow muscle divisions that were more for show than any function. Above and to the left of where a belly button would be on a human were two tubes that looked as if they could be plugged into something, which Alf thought that he must ask about if they were ever able to talk to Sill.

After feeling the arm, Alf realised that he could pull up a flap of this flesh, but not very far. He then leaned on Sill's shoulder while pushing the creature's arm in the opposite direction and found that he could take the arm out of its elbow socket, much as a human arm can be dislocated. Sill did not say anything while Alf explored. He just stood there, looking straight ahead.

"Brian, there's a tool in that diagram for reaching under the flesh and unclipping those straps we can see – the tendons. See if you can find one in that rack?" Alf was aware that Elsbeth was off elsewhere in the workshop, looking in lockers.

Brian found what looked to be the right tool. It was undoubtedly slim enough to fit under the flesh, although they had to pull the flesh back a little further to operate the device. Sill stood there, not even looking at his arm. After a few stops and starts, they managed to release the three straps and then pop the elbow joint out of its socket, only to find that something was still connecting the arm to the body. After some messing around, Brian pointed out that they had forgotten about the electrical cable. That was unclipped, and the arm came out freely.

"How about that - android amputation," said Alf.

Attaching the spare arm proved harder. For one thing, the diagrams indicated that the shoulder joint had to be greased with a lubricant. A search uncovered a sealed, shallow round tin strongly reminiscent of the type of container earlier generations on earth used for shoe polish in a set of drawers below the bench. The diagrams also indicated that it had to be applied with a heavy glove, which was too small for the men but not for Elsbeth. She greased the joint and reached into the empty shoulder cavity to grease the elbow socket.

"Ergh!" she said, but she did it.

Then, it was a matter of attaching the cable and the straps, which required some dexterity. They stood back. Sill looked at them for a moment, his arm still hanging limply, then he moved his fingers and lifted it, eventually clasping both hands together on his chest in what might have been a gesture of appreciation.

"No problem," said Alf, "but what engineering? This stuff still works even after a century or so. The guys who built this place and Sill here knew what they were doing."

"Can we add alien android repair to our CVs?" asked Brian.

"Sure can," said Alf. "But what was wrong with the old arm? Doesn't seem to be anything amiss with the connections or the bits we can see."

"Maybe something in the internal circuitry," said Brian. "The arm probably has its own chip, and maybe it stopped synching with the main motor system for some reason. Good to see if we could re-condition it somehow."

"Leave it here for now," said Alf. "It's too hard to conceal up top, and we can come back for it."

Sill pointed at the still open tin of lubricant and then at his other shoulder joint and two leg joints.

"He wants a grease job on the other joints, but we're seriously out of time," said Brian.

"Shit, you're right," said Alf, looking at the gauge on his air bottle. "We've gotta roll people."

"Here," said Elsbeth, handing Sill two bundles wrapped in the same material as the replacement arm. They were replacements for the uniform coat and pants Sill had been wearing. "I found them further back. There is only one size, so it must be right." Sill grabbed the bundles and nodded vigorously. "Are we going to take him with us?"

"Not a good idea, Elsbeth, not this time," said Alf. "If you recall, our friends up top were talking about shooting him, and there's the problem that he hasn't been in the open air for at least a century, as far as we know."

"I suppose," said Elsbeth. "Will he be all right by himself down here?"

"Elsbeth, he's been down here at least since before your grandparents were born. Another day or so won't matter. We'll leave him by the city centre fountain and try to get him to understand we'll be back."

By pointing at their tanks and miming choking, they seemed to make Sill understand that they had to go, and he led them back to the fountain, where they tried to get him to understand, by pantomime, that they would be back and that he was not to try to contact the other humans. Those other humans were bad (much pointing at the upper gallery and shaking of heads). They left Sill at the fountain and hurried on, anxious eyes on their air gauges. Finally, they emerged in the open air, relieved to be out of the dark, airless, tomb-silence of the city. It was after dark, with the pit illuminated by a single lamp near the hatch entrance.

"There you are," said Hutch from the darkness at the top of the ramp to the pit. "Thought I might have to go and get the bodies."

"No need to wait up or go out late," said Alf, "our bodies would have waited until morning."

"What took you so long?"

"Got turned around down there," said Alf quickly before the others could respond. "You know how I said there was a big gallery beyond – there's even more beyond that, including what we think is the city centre. There are also levels below. That's where we got turned around."

"Shit!" said Hatch. "Mr Charles wants us to find the power system for the city."

"Must be in those levels. We'll try again tomorrow, but good luck getting any of the machinery to work after all this time."

Hatch shrugged. "Whatever – just find that stuff to start."

"Give us spare air bottles, and we can stay out longer."

"Sure… Say, did you see that creature?"

"He was there. We all saw him." The others nodded. "But he kept his distance. He's not hostile; he's just curious but shy."

"Humph!" said Hutch meaningfully and walked off, leaving the consultants to discuss their day over a packaged dinner, speaking mainly in whispers.

"You were talking about sneaking away," said Elsbeth. "What do we do with Sill then?"

"When we go, I guess we'll have to take him with us," said Alf. "Hutch and friends might start hunting him. But there's still the difficulty that he hasn't been outside for a long time. Direct sunlight and heat could be a real problem. Also, we don't know how he works. Where does he get his energy from? If we take him, we need to take at least a chunk of that android workshop along with replacement limbs, which should be interesting. You're at the Imperial Academy, right?"

Elsbeth nodded.

"Who is your doctoral supervisor?"

"I only have an AI supervisor. The plan is to send my thesis to academics at Mid-guard for assessment when it's ready." (Mid-guard was a major population centre further out along the galactic arm.)

"You have a senior academic who keeps an eye on you?"

"Dr Kalapsy – we call him Dr Creepy, but he's not such a bad guy."

"What I don't get," said Brian, "is that the city still seems viable, or at least we can't see what's wrong with the place that made everyone leave."

"Don't think it was any calamity," said Alf. "There's no sign of any disorder in any of the spaces we've seen. Everything is incredibly dusty and likely to crack if touched, but there's nothing left lying around. Do you remember the workshop? The last technicians there put all the tools back in their place and even locked the door, unfortunately for Sill.

"If you look at Earth, the Maya abandoned a host of cities before the Spanish turned up. Scholars aren't sure why – they say a lot of interrelated reasons – but anyway, the cities were completely forgotten and swallowed up by the jungle until explorers started stumbling across them."

"Angor Wat – a huge temple-city complex in Asia was also abandoned," said Elsbeth. "I did an essay on it as part of my degree. In that case, they know the elites shifted towards the growing trading centres along the Mekong Delta, but there were also problems with the water system and the varying climate. An invasion or two probably didn't help. But I don't think The Engineers would be worried by changes in climate and there's no one around here to invade them."

"Except us," said Alf.

"Huh?" said Brian and Elsbeth together.

"We'd never threaten them," said Elsbeth.

"Oh, I agree," said Alf. "We'd have wanted to talk to them. But maybe they didn't realise that. The Empire hasn't been violence-free, as I know only too well, and it fought a war with the Frondes. We were attacked, but, again, maybe these guys – The Engineers – were not to know that. After all, the city's only been abandoned maybe a few centuries at most – I'm just guessing, but if it's thousands, then Sill would have worn down long ago, and a few hundred years is just a blink of an eye in astronomical terms. The only thing that changed around here at that time was us. Maybe this place was in decline anyway, and rather than defend a declining outpost against assault by evil humans, they elected to abandon it and cover all traces of its existence. Then they could deal with us on their terms when ready."

"Wow, we're evil," said Elsbeth.

"My mum thinks I'm strange, not evil," said Brian.

"Just a thought," said Alf. "When we announce, scholars will swarm all over this place, and there'll be more than enough theories to go around."

"You bet," said Elsbeth.

"You'll have to tell Dr Creepy your thesis is changing to this place," said Alf.

"Sure is," said Elsbeth. "I just have to have a focus."

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

The next day, the three consultants got spare air bottles and batteries for the lamps. Hatch had adopted Alf's suggestion that they run an air line connected to an air pump in the pit as far into the gallery as possible. That meant the thugs had less need for masks and, as they found walking in the city, "spooky," were happy to keep at the task of wrecking the armoury they had found.

Alf thought the thugs had managed to get into some of the lockers, but he had not been told what they had found and was careful not to ask. He also did not care. Of more immediate concern was that when Elsbeth used his tracking device to send a reassuring text to her mother, she happened to read some of the exchanges between himself and Sergeant Pullen.

"Why does the police sergeant who we are depending on to help get us out of this and publicise the city call you 'scum'?" she asked as they walked across the floor of the upper gallery.

"She calls me that whenever I compliment her," said Alf, "as well as slime and a creep."

"Have you given any reason for thinking of you as scum, apart from the compliments, and how come you've seen her in a dressing gown?"

That required some explanation, which Elsbeth listened to in silence. "Your assumed identity is this petty thief from Sulu, but this sergeant knew that was wrong?"

"There are, unfortunately, marked differences between me and the file description of the person who goes with the identity capsule. I had to tell her my real identity as a soldier in the rebellion before she would help me."

"Are you wanted because of the rebellion thing?" asked Brian, who had been listening.

"I'm not wanted – at least not for anything major – and I've got no real reason to hide, but I didn't realise that until after I got here, and that's all I'll say. Stick to calling me Alf. I'll tell you the rest after we get out of this."

"Well, okay," said Elsbeth, "but I want to know, is there anything between yourself and this sergeant you compliment?"

"I only wish," said Alf, "but as you can see, I am but scum to her."

Elsbeth thought that the texts mostly did not show any marked disgust by the sergeant and that Alf would be a good proposition for any woman but decided she had taken the issue far enough.

 

Back in the Marshlands police station Sergeant Pullen had been handed a missing persons case.

"At least it's not another dog," said Samantha.

In fact, the only person missing Jubilee Egret, Jubee to his friends, was the man's parole officer. Jubee had not turned up for his regular appointment, and his sister had not seen him for a few days, although that was a good thing as far as she was concerned.

"Had to let him stay here after he got out," said Honey Egret after the two policewomen had tracked her down, "but it really cramps my style, you know." A low-rent blonde – to be kind – who was nearly bursting out of her top, Honey mixed club stripping with sex work, or so the policewomen suspected, sticking to trusted regular customers to avoid the need for a pimp and keep under police radar. But she still needed somewhere to take her clients, and the brother had been getting in the way.

"Jubee got himself mixed up in some serious stuff, I see," said Ellen, "getting past security locks for a gang to clean stores out of high-end merchandise. Did he say anything about where he was going?"

"Just said something about how he'd got a high-paying gig out in the desert. It's no big deal that he's not around. He'll come back – worse luck."

The two police officers exchanged glances.

"Did he say who offered him this desert job?" asked Ellen.

"Just people he knew through the gang," said Honey, "he also thought that it was on the up."

A few more questions later, they were on the street outside Honey's small unit.

"Worth asking around the gang members – they'll be on record – about who was recruiting?" asked Samatha. She had been given a copy of Ellen's growing investigation file.

"Why not? There're also the people who recruited Alf's friends in the site. We can ask who wanted the recruiting done."

 

In the city, the consultants found Sill waiting by the fountain.

Alf pointed at the arm, "All, okay?"

Sill nodded and lifted the arm to show that it was working, then said "shade" with a distinct hiss at the "s" and gestured for them to come as he had the previous day, but this time he did not lead them to the android repair room. Instead, he led them much further down the grand processional way to a square fronting what looked to be a civic building with grand Greek-style columns out front and a huge arched doorway in which the doors had been left open. Beyond that was an anteroom with two grand staircases leading to an upper story, with a grand, arched doorway between them. Sill led the way through the grand opening to a corridor with desks on either side and then to another grand door. That door opened to a large chamber with rows of seats on two sides and a box at one end where a single person sat when the chamber was in use.

"It's a council chamber," said Elsbeth, in awe. "The king, or speaker, or president sat there. She pointed at the box.

But the council chamber was simply a side trip on the way to the place Sill really wanted to show them. He took them back out to the antechamber and then to a side door that had been left open, down two of the narrow sets of stairs used by the city inhabitants, and into another large room.

For a moment, the consultants did not realise where they were. All they could see was a series of what looked to be panels. Then Alf pushed the light between two of the panels, and it dawned on them that they were looking at bookcases, running as far as their eyes could see. They were all filled with books.

"A library!" gasped Elsbeth. She shone her light on a panel displaying large characters on the end of one of the panels. "Those are numbers. There must be a central index."

"Didn't these guys go digital?" asked Brian.

"Books can still be convenient," said Alf, "and you don't need a computer to read them or the power to be on."

Sill wanted to lead them further, and they followed. He pointed at a table with several books on it.

"He's been reading," said Elsbeth.

"But it's pitch black in here," said Brian.

"I'm pretty certain he can see in the dark," said Alf. "His eyes glow red like that of an animal."

They moved on with Sill, looking at signs at the top of the bookcase ends that the humans had not previously noticed.

"Subject categories?" guessed Elsbeth.

Finally, Sill turned into one row and walked along, looking at the volumes until, perhaps a hundred human paces along, he stopped and waved at the books on one side, looking at Elsbeth. She looked at the titles of the books, wiping away dust gently with a handkerchief. The books varied considerably in width and height but had been bound in the same grey material with the title on the spine in silver letters with what might have been the library reference number on the bottom. Unlike the seat covers in the city, the material did not crack at a touch.

"No, no," she said. "Nothing here I can understand … wait! This one is in the Spacers language. It'll be possible to read it." Elsbeth pulled on the spine only for it to crack badly. "Shit!"

"I was going to say be gentle," said Alf. "These books have been there a long while."

Elsbeth pulled the tome out with more care, rocking it back and forth until it slid out, then put it on the floor and opened it without causing more damage. The pages were not paper but some form of thin plastic. The pages cracked ominously when turned over but did not break.

"We should be wearing gloves when we handle this stuff," said Alf. "But we haven't got any."

After flipping over a few pages, Elsbeth squealed again. "Look an illustration!"

Alf and Brian looked to see a line drawing of a thin creature with a domed head dressed in a robe walking along what looked to be a castle battlement, deep in thought.

"A spacer in archaic costume?" guessed Alf. "Is it some sort of storybook?"

"There's an app for this language. It's in the open-source section of the Imperial archives here. I looked at it when I was hunting around for thesis topics. I can put it on that tracking device and Brian might be able to rig up an image recognition interface.

"Can do," said Brian.

"Be able to read word by word," said Alf. "Better if you know the grammar, but at least you'll be able to get an idea of what the book's about. Progress, but doesn't get us far with the Sill language."

"No, it doesn't," said Elsbeth, chewing her lip. "But these guys obviously had contact with the Spacers. Maybe…" She scanned the bookcases around the Spacers' book, without finding what she wanted, then climbed up to look at the top-most shelves. Alf intervened by putting his shoulder under her bottom and hoisting her up as if she were a child. She giggled. "Thanks. Um, go along to the left. Some more." This time, she shrieked, grabbing at a book. Sill looked on in alarm. Was something wrong?

Elsbeth carefully maneuvered the book out of its slot, then put it on the floor, carefully flipped open the cover, and squealed again. "I don't believe it; I don't believe it. This is a Spacer-Engineers, Engineers-Spacer dictionary. My parents had an English Latin dictionary that fascinated me as a child. See, the first half has words in the Engineer's language, and the definition is in Spacer. The second half," she flipped over a lot of pages at once, "has the words in Spacer and the definition in Engineer. This is the Rosetta Stone for this place, not to mention my PhD thesis, my professorship, and my ticket to an Imperial Research Institute dedicated to scanning and reading all these books. I mean, just look at this place?" She spread her arms, face shining. "Even with AI assistance and image recognition, there's years of work here."

The linguist turned to Sill, who was still looking on in alarm, put the book on the floor, and clasped her hands in front of her chest - the same gesture the creature had made when his arm had been replaced. She waved her arms at the book and repeated the thank you gesture. Sill's eyes seemed to widen, then he straightened up and bowed, staying in the bow for several seconds, eyes down, before straightening up.

"Okay, another example of Sill etiquette," said Alf. "We'll look around a little more. Check the shelves on the other side. We'll mark this place and the row and come back. We've still got to give Sill his grease and oil change and make an effort to check out the lower levels for the power generators and city AI to keep Hutch off our backs.

"And have lunch," said Brian. "What's a Rosetta Stone?"

"When scholars first started taking a serious interest in Earth's ancient Egyptian civilisation," said Elsbeth, "they couldn't read the Hieroglyphs carved on all those stone monuments. They knew it must be a language, but anyone who could read it had been dead for a thousand years. Then they discovered, by chance, a stone at a place called Rosetta that set out a royal decree in both ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek, and scholars could read the Greek. That proved the key to deciphering the whole thing. This is way better than any Rosetta Stone as it's in a form we can readily understand. I might be able to communicate basic words to Sill tomorrow by pointing to them in the book. Brian, I need that app downloaded and hooked up to image recognition as soon as you can."

"Alf's little device has got a camera, so sure," said Brian. "I can hook something up."

Sill looked from one human to another, apparently wondering what they were talking about.

CHAPTER TWELVE

 

Mr Charles thought that Hutch, now his senior guy at the excavation camp, was at least an improvement on the homicidal Thumper in that he did not execute those recruited to help, as had happened with the security lock expert his people had found. He had also done a reasonable job opening up the city – albeit with the help of consultants. But he was still a thug dealing with alien technology.

"We've been hacking away at this armoury, Mr Charles," Thumper said in his daily call to the boss. He had stepped away from the other thugs to a corner of the above ground camp under the camouflage awning. "But the alien metal and plastic material is the hardest shit the guys have ever come across. We've opened some of the lockers, but I dunno what I'm looking at."

"What about getting the base power online? I was told it was possible to start it."

"With all due respect, Mr Charles, it's not a base we think it's a city."

"What?"