Europa Strike(43)

Oscar floated a few meters above the ground. Once it had discarded its reentry shell, its three-meter body had unfolded into a Y-shaped framework with massive, cylindrical turbine-drive housings on pivot mounts on each upraised arm. Those drives sucked air down through the anterior vents, compressed it, heated it in tiny, gas-core fission micropiles, and blasted it out as exhaust, keeping the robotic craft hovering above the ground. Slight cantings of the drive housings together or independently sent the craft skittering across the landscape; at need, it could reach 400 kph, but at the moment it was employing just enough thrust to hover and drift slowly forward. Hatches had opened on the lower hull so that it could extend a variety of sensors and manipulators. A pair of lenses, like blackshrouded binoculars unfolding from the cusp of the Y, twisted back and forth on the end of a jointed arm, providing 3-D vision from a platform at least as agile and maneuverable as a human neck and head.

As far as Sam’s remote eyes could see, the ground was covered with the shattered relics of a civilization of high order. Sam possessed downloaded memories of the Cydonian dig on Mars; this was similar, but far larger. Those structures still standing had been wind-blasted for hundreds of thousands of years, leaving them scarcely recognizable as artificial. Chipped and broken and sand-worn blocks of something like blue-white marble lay everywhere, too thickly strewn for walking to be at all easy. For millennia, the desert had been encroaching on the site, and sand dunes had claimed much of this city; eastward, toward the rising sun, a large sea had retreated, leaving a salt plain that gleamed like ice in the sunlight. Vegetation still endured within the ruins, however; something that looked like roses covered some of the rubble—Sam did know what a rose was—though these sprouted in masses from uncurling vines, with no leaves, and appeared to have been molded from some ruby-hued, gelatinous, extruded material, rather than grown as a cluster of petals. The red and orange blossoms here appeared to serve as photosynthesizing leaves rather than as organs of reproduction.

But the biology of Chiron could wait for another time, perhaps even for another expedition. It was the ruins that drew Sam on, and one artifact in particular.

She’d identified it from orbit, based on sharply enhanced imagery from Farstar. Her human colleagues had named it the Needle, and indeed, it looked like one—slim and silver and erect, nearly a hundred meters tall, with an opening at the slender, rounded base like a needle’s eye. It rose from a kind of dais at the east edge of a broad, wide stone-tiled area called the Plaza.

This landmark, too, had been seen through Farstar’s long-range vision, though not in useful detail. As big as the Square of St. Peter’s in Rome, the Plaza was circular, with openings in its walls facing east, toward the Needle, and west, toward a structure known simply as the Pyramid. Once, Sam thought, this might have been a park or tame forest of a sort; the Plaza’s center was open ground, rather than pavement, and there were still “roses” and a profusion of other gold-hued vegetation growing there.

Around the perimeter of the Plaza, however, were the statues that had captured human interest in the first place. There were eighty-one of them in all, with perhaps a third still standing. The others had fallen long ago, some more or less intact, others smashed into gleaming, broken-crystal shards.

Sam drifted along the Plaza’s perimeter, Oscar’s binocular eyes shifting back and forth, up and down, taking in each detail. Earlier images of this site had been poorly resolved at best, and the identification of these crystalline forms as statues had been little more than a guess. That guess, however, was clearly accurate. The statues—most of them, anyway—almost certainly represented eighty-one different nonhuman races. If there was any doubt about some of them, it was because it was difficult to relate the shapes and forms represented with anything in human experience recognizable as a living creature.

The Plaza of the Galactics was the full name Dr. Paul Alexander had given to this place, though now most simply called it the Plaza. Possibly, these statues represented the different members of some long-vanished stellar federation; the truth might never be known. Here, a being with an elongated, bristle-spiked head atop a body draped in folds that hid its form gestured with four crookedly jointed arms, like a crab’s, a salute frozen in milk-pale stone. There, something that might be reptilian, with three stalks that might house eyes, and scales etched with loving detail into deep blue crystal.

Many shapes, intriguingly, were more machine than biological. Sam Too paused at one fallen full-length across the pavement. It looked like an elongated egg shape with multiple blisters, curves, and swellings, with no legs or arms or any other features at all save a seemingly random scattering of what might have been turreted eyes.