The Voyage of the Joyous Venture

Part 30

What happened to Charmian, Robert's Brain II, the Watcher in the Darkness, the Berghofs, Ahluic and the Eye in the Pyramid

 

Wednesday 30th March

Bishop's Folly creatures do not have DNA as we know it: different sugars. It takes Robert a long while to work it out. It isn't a double molecule but might be triple. The natural wildlife on Gaia does not display these characteristics. This has not been reported anywhere; probably weren't around when Felix was there. Robert does not get any further in the time available; it is probably a major research project to unravel this.

The crew decide to not to submit their original (faked) report to Trilon but instead to submit one sticking to the "Systems failure" story and claim they were never on board the Karelia. Robert thinks his discovery is easily important enough to be worth major kudos within Trilon or, failing that, Forethought. Robert offers to put everyone's name on the paper. Antonio points out that, since we are all at the same institution, putting everyone's name on the paper would still only count once for the RAE. Antonio suggests naming the big thing with teeth in the hole after him in lieu of his name on the paper. Robert says it would be tricky since they would need to catch one and give it to a museum. Antonio says anything big with teeth will do.

More files on the inquiry are uncovered. The New Worlds was looking for (according to Charmian) an object with very low mass in the asteroid belt that they had detected at long range... made of ice? If Galcarb got an ice asteroid they would get the edge on Trilon which already had a colony on Paradise.

All Charmian remembers from the collision is the asteroid suddenly appearing in front of them. After the cockpit camera goes blank, Charmian got a liferaft and the hull is supposed to have been breached. The ship was destroyed but a couple of weeks later they picked up the life-raft after Trilon ships detected the distress beacon and searched for debris. Why did this take so long? They should have detected its beacon earlier. When they found the life-raft its course suggested it had not come from the wreckage. Did something grab it, switch off the beacon and then let it go? Various other small anomalies occurred. The Board of Inquiry concluded that the impact affected the power systems on the life-raft. Life-rafts only have minor propulsion units sufficient to take them clear of danger. Privately other members of the board thought Trilon was involved. Trilon has had a reputation for a long time for trying to keep systems under monopoly. Bengtsson and Charmian had an alternative (unrecorded) theory. Even after they started a sexual relationship she never changed her story. Galcarb did try and search for the 'ice' object but not in depth to avoid alerting Trilon; made some heuristic guesstimates about orbits but didn't find anything. Was the big low mass thing a big hollow ancient object with mind-control?

Berthier has seven planets and an asteroid belt. People now live on the asteroid belt. Robert is in favour of having a quick look for the asteroid. The Trilon colony is called New Bali and there is an OTS above it called New Bali High. We dock early in the morning on the 30th March and send in our report. All agree that DNA stuff from Gaia should go through Komiko.

Paradise is a Midgarten I world with reptiles; Robert thinks they should go down and explore. Andi refuses. Robert claims trauma and need for R&R. He suggests all sorts of psychological side-effects for himself and Andi. Antonio agrees that Robert and Andi should have a medical. This is put on Komiko's credit card.

The doctor thinks Robert is physically very healthy but the metabolic anomalies have increased. He suggests Robert take a proper holiday for a fortnight on a beach without a shrimping net. He agrees to mention this to Andi. The doctor says that R&R on Berthier would be stressful - there are lots of things that can eat you. Physically Andi is a bit undersize - not been exercising enough recently. Andi also has metabolic anomalies; the doctor thinks there might be some virus involved. Her leg is almost healed and the doctor thinks she's lucky considering the lack of physiotherapy. Antonio and Miho also get checked up. Antonio has some recent scars but is otherwise in superb physical health. He has a slight raise in metabolic stuff, the doctor reckons whatever Robert and Andi have, Antonio's had a minor dose but this is entirely off the record because the doctor thinks it is more than his reputation is worth. Miho also has metabolic anomalies although not as serious as Robert and Andi. The doctor thinks the entire crew could use some relaxation and some sex. Robert suggests that the shagging problem could be fixed with Komiko's credit card. Andi refuses.

Miho decides to paint some trains. Antonio goes to look for indoor soccer which he plays "aggressively but badly". Robert finds an exotic fauna appreciation society and takes Clarence to show them. Andi and Miho decide to hack Trilon for details about mysterious asteroids.

Andi easily downloads the public records on the New Worlds incident. The incident took place in the asteroid belt. An electronic signal was picked up when the ship was hit. Two ships were dispatched and the Trilon Starburst, crewed by Klaus and Ekaterina Berghof, picked up some bits and two weeks later picked up the life-raft. Trilon also went looking for the Asteroid and found nothing. All corporations in the asteroid belt have been obsessed for decades with finding this mystery asteroid, every so often survey teams or other ships detect something, but in different orbits. Wishful thinking might be contributing this. Every couple of years, especially after some sort of reshuffle, management send people after the ice asteroid and ships get lost - although more often they just get bored. Remote probes also get lost. Colloquially the asteroid is called the "Watcher in the Darkness" which even has its own symbol - a circle inside a triangle.

No silicon carbide has been found locally, nothing to suggest any local Ancients sites.

The Berghofs are still around, currently gathering ice from the outer system. Antonio suggests an in-system jump to Persephone (the outermost planet). This has a ring system and one large moon. While the crew consider whether to go and talk to them they establish that Andi has the key to the gun cabinet and there is insufficient room in the hold to store a space plane. They decide on taking the fast route to Persephone. Robert is taken out to dinner by the Exotic Fauna people. It's established that Clarence might be female and that he wasn't successfully mated on Beekhu. There is some graffiti on the station. Robert notices that the Watcher symbol appears in several places, often paired with the phrase "It's watching" or "The Watcher is watching you". The Exotic Fauna people, when asked, say its nutters from the asteroid belt; nutters who think there is a malevolent thing watching and interfering with them. They email the Berghofs to say they are coming and then wait seven hours for the email to arrive. After some discussion they decide to take some alcohol as a gift.

Friday 1st April

As the ship gets into orbit they get a challenge from a vessel asking what they are about. After some confusion this is resolved. It takes a couple of hours for the ship to get into the right orbit and for the Berghofs to come off shift. The local manager gets slightly freaked because he classifies the ship as light military and observes that it is not on his books. They dock with the ship.

The Berghofs are early middle-age. Robert and Antonio listen in on comms. Miho explains that they are chasing Ancients' stuff and are interested in the salvage work they previously undertook. Andi senses that the woman is frightened, the man is resigned. They have been asked about it before.

The Watcher is now well known on Ahluic (no rumours about the Watcher before the accident). The symbol is something some exec thought up. Never been any rumours relating the Ancients to the Watcher. Ask if they know why its called the Watcher. Five time he and his wife have been sent out to see this thing. He thinks there is a malevolent ghost out there that wants to destroy people. He and his wife have been lucky.

After a bit more probing, Andi and Miho invite the others down and break out the Jack Daniels. Most of Galcarb folk just joined up with Trilon during the collapse; some of the managers got killed. Galcarb management had a reputation for being mean.

Robert mentions, apropos of nothing, some bad news might follow us from Asterion and that it wasn't our fault. This does not help put the Berghofs at their ease. Ekaterina remains tight-lipped, alcohol begins to relax Klaus.

Antonio expresses his scepticism to Klaus while Andi and Miho occupy Ekaterina. Antonio's thesis is that the Watcher is a name for "things that go bad in space". Klaus disagrees; 1 in 20 people do not come back from looking for the Watcher. Antonio agrees this is unlikely. There have been no sightings for over a decade. Klaus saw it once (his wife glares at him), it nearly caught them but they got away. They recorded the co-ordinates, spread it around and now everyone who knows avoids it. If they don't bother it, it won't change its orbit again. It's haunted, if you go looking for it, it will kill you. It tried to get them, they turned the engines on and it got away. They felt it working on them.

The crew let them go and send a strong commendation to their boss. After some discussion they decide to go to the asteroid belt and try and hack some systems to get the mystery object's co-ordinates.

Saturday 2nd April

Unwilling to take the risk of jumping straight in to the asteroid belt, it will take 200 hours to get into Ahluic. Robert works on his Nobel prize. Miho trawls the Ancients databases and anything they have on space-faring legends for relevant stuff. The eye in triangle crops up at nearly all the Ancients sites except Asterion (but not seen any symbology at Asterion) and Neubayern. It turns up on Eberhaven, Beekhu and Earth. The symbol first appeared shortly after Charmian turned up. The manager in charge of the search, Georgia Fox, is no longer here. There is one other asteroidal body with a similar anomalously low density - Prometheus.

Karelia has a double insert, Ekaterina has a single insert, Klaus has a triple insert with mutation on it.

Robert is in favour of Andi rigging herself up with a "brain zap" or at least steering on sensors which go into alarm mode in a difficult to ignore fashion.

Saturday 9th April

They enter the belt on manual and dock at an OTS type thing. Andi finds an almost perfectly circular orbit about 20 degrees to the ecliptic. This information has been updated a couple of times. It has been at 15 degrees and 5 degrees to the ecliptic. It hasn't an official ephemeris but is given a similar code, BCX-10-154, and flagged with the triangle/circle symbol. Andi tries to take a peek at it on passive sensors.

The crew agree to set off a failsafe auto-pilot that will steer the ship away from a potential collision that will take a few minutes to over-ride: a set of manual switches which any one person can over-ride. We log in the black box what we are doing and why. Should we also log all our results? Should we be logging these already? Are we logging stuff already? We probably have everything backed up on the ship. The crew sends Karelia a bank account number and we email all the rest of our stuff to Antonio's mum and Andi's parents with instructions to forward to Komiko if anything happens.

We head off to find the asteroid, about 0.3 of an AU. Takes about 18 hours.

Sunday 10th April

Everyone is in space-suits: Andi is in a purple suit, Antonio in red, Miho in blue and Robert in green. Andi and Antonio have their helmets off but handy in order to operate computers. Andi continues checking sensors. Andi detects something using optical sensors. Antonio sets a fly-by trajectory, not an interception. Andi checks again, can't find it. Antonio turns round and reverses our course. Andi checks behind and can see the thing. A potato shaped object, several miles across with a black albedo.

With a good view, Antonio tries a new course to fly-past about half a million miles astern of it. Andi works on try to see it but then loses it. Tries active sensors and sends in some drones. Send one at best guess of a collision course and one at second about 20,000 Ks, so they don't both hit it. We agree that if they've still not spotted it in half an hour then we turn round again. Andi is getting disheartened but Antonio is fine.

Miho gets the sense that the geography has changed. We suddenly see it dead ahead. We head down but the proximity system steers us towards it, we are accelerating towards the asteroid with 2 minutes to impact. Antonio cuts the engines and starts the override.

The drag must be alien tech, eg Gravitics or some kind of electro-magnetics. The ship's velocity stabilises to a point where it will miss by about 200 metres. We record the whole thing and stream data to Ahluic. The ship veers to the side off its course parallel to the side of the asteroid, tilts up so scanners pan across surface and the velocity drops. We still feel no gravity. All now have helmets on.

We see 'teeth' in a crater move sideways to reveal a cavern beneath. Robert is really excited. Miho looks in the omnivue. We feel about ⅓ gravity. Air bags of some sort extrude from walls to hold the ship in place. Robert films something dropping. Robert then films something of different masses. Something forms a hollow tube to the airlock.

Every one except Robert decides its time to leave the ship and he wants to go anyway. Miho takes the Omnivue. Antonio has a plasma rifle (light anti-tank device) and a handgun. Robert has a first aid kit and sampling gear. Andi has a pistol. The airlock cycles: pressure 1/3 bar, near enough pure oxygen. We see a long squidgy corridor with a texture like a mattress.

We close the spaceship behind us, walk about 100 yards and the corridor opens into a room. At the last bit is a diving board extending out over an incredibly deep swimming pool full of 'treacle'. Robert and Miho get onto the diving board and try to sample it. The stuff folds away, forming a hemisphere beneath them. Robert thinks it might be an elevator. Antonio and Robert go back to get something to drop down the hole, but the tube has closed up.

Robert lowers himself off the edge of the diving board, stuff folds round him like a bubble, so Robert lets go. He goes down 20 feet and then sideways and then stops. Then Andi moves next to him with membrane between them, then Miho. They wait for Antonio who, after some deliberation concerning plasma rifles, gets in too.

They all drop down. Robert thinks he's inside a gigantic organism, possibly inside some sort of reticulum. Gravity feels towards feet for all us but we're all oriented differently. We get footage of gravity working in different directions. Antonio tries to walk towards another bubble and can get within about 3 feet. Suit lights reflect off the inside surface.

After a while, we arrive at a nexus where red, yellow and white strands meet to form a pyramidal structure (a bit larger than the one outside the Louvre). All end up oriented the same way at one of the bases to the pyramid, which is dark and forbidding. It looks organic. Suddenly it lights up like phosphorescent bacteria to reveal an enormous eye surrounded by tentacles. Robert thinks there is fluid pumping into it and it's being woken up. The eye is not a pupil in the regular sense, the iris/pupil is a collection of multi-faceted eyelets.

"Greetings! I have been waiting for you!" The voice conveys a sense of great age. Robert, Miho and Andi say hello, Antonio decides to restrict himself to name, rank and serial number. "I have been waiting for your kind to contact me for some time. I am the Sentinel for this sector." Antonio hears it in Italian. "I am the last of the governors for this sector and my time is passing. Already most of my brethren have advanced to become pure energy beings."

The Sentinel is looking for people to replace him. It thinks it is what we would call an 'Ancient' and has been waiting many thousands of Paradise years (there are about 2 Paradise years to 1 Earth year). It watches over roughly 100 light years worth of stars and six sentient races. The Ancients ensured no one race disturbed the balance; they call themselves 'managers'.

The Ancients effected the development of races to ensure adequate governors to succeed them. He will give us 'the tools'. The Sentinel will grant them to us; it involves a certain amount of training and will take a short while.

Robert asks about Bishop: apparently he failed to survive the transit; he was quite badly injured. Antonio wants to know if he has a choice: Antonio can choose to leave. Komiko was not conscious and had to be repaired.

When the Ancients transmuted into ultimate energy beings, their ability to interact directly with the sentient races would have been limited so it came to their attention that it might be an idea to create new governors. Since they didn't want to put all their eggs in one basket, they decided to use several 'experiments', of which we were one. The meddling enhanced the development of six potentially sentient races with separate experimental protocols for each.

On the world we now know as Earth, the chief supervisor disagreed with the experimental protocols and made unauthorised changes to the human genome. When his actions were discovered, the transgressor was made to help undo his damage but he was not really contrite and many individuals bearing the amended genome survived, spread over the planet.

When his further treachery was uncovered it was too late to undo what he'd done. Instead, a specialist team was sent in to take over management of human development. Despite being captured and incarcerated at least once, the Transgressor waged a guerrilla war against this team.

The Transgressor was not the only one to dispute policy among the Ancients. There were some who championed the Eber as future successors, seeing as they were more advanced. Eventually, civil war broke out among the stars between the 'establishment' Ancients and the Eber and their Ancient allies.

The Sentinel lost contact with the Eber systems but evidently the Eber were bombed back to the Stone Age. The War also had a disastrous effect on Ancients society, causing many to release their physical forms in the Final Transformation. The Ancients galactic civilisation collapsed.

With this, the 'salvage team' on Earth became fatally isolated. Divisions also appeared within their ranks, both over many old issues but also policy toward the humans. The Transgressor apparently exploited these divisions and, with the help of misguided individuals, set about slaying his opponents.

The last message the Sentinel had from Earth was nearly 2500 years ago, when the last handful of the salvage team were planning a further offensive against the Transgressor. The Sentinel does not know who eventually triumphed or whether all the Ancients are now dead. But he fears from our information that the Transgressor himself may still be active among the Human Race.

He would look like us. The Ancients made them like that.

The Sentinel suggests we explore the galaxy slowly.