Only sporadic flashes of lightning relieved the darkness as he sat precariously on the crumbling cliff with his lean legs dangling above the barren beach thirty meters below him; the rain rushed down, and Andrew Howe, senior surveyboat pilot in the Confederation Exploratory Service, clasped the dead skin of his leather flight coat closely to his chest to avoid the chill of the raging wind and of his own despair. The double brass bars of his Lieutenant Commander's rank glinted at the collar of the jacket with every surge of electricity across the turmoil torn sky.
Like the work of a colorblind watercolorist, the yellow-gray sea washed into the yellow-gray sky far off along the western horizon, black clouds fading into the yellow-gray haze of rain fading into the sulphurous depths. The vitriolic seawater of this mostly Class-M world had long since eaten through the outer hull of the Ursine Ensign, and he knew that the remnant of broached bulkhead beached below him could not survive another immersion in the frothing foam; but some hope remained in his heart as he scanned the blackened sky for signs of redemption. The fury of the west wind had slackened since he had first run out into the storm, but the rain unrelentingly pounded upon his upraised face. He blinked the moisture from his widened pupils; if it ended soon, he would be able to salvage more precious hardware from his vessel. But there were no signs of abatement.
Behind him crouched the violent growth of the labyrinthine jungle. Two hundred meters northeast along the trail he had beaten with his strength was his shelter, what had been a near-collapsed concrete bunker; its formerly vermin- and reptile-infested blackness had become his dry, lighted home. He longed to return to its warm and wind-shielded sanctuary. But Andrew was determined to remain exposed to the wretched weather until the sea ceased advancing toward the corroded, skeletal carcass of his transport. Not that he was able to slow the onrushing ocean by staring at the destructive waves; he merely wanted to witness the 'boat's destruction or salvation, and reassure himself that there was nothing that he could do to prevent or hinder whatever end befell his once uncompromised vessel.
When Andrew had first fallen precipitously toward this world his ‘boat had been nearly intact; the explosion that had destroyed the power core of his Warp and inertial drives had not breached the space-proof adamantine hull of his vessel. But the electromagnetic pulse accompanying that explosion had annihilated most data in his navigational computer; he had only vague ideas about where he was.
In addition, his hyperwave radio was useless without an out-system beacon; unlike conventionally modulated waves, hyperwave transmissions must be initiated away from gravitational interference. And even if he had a relay satellite, he didn’t know where to send his transmission. Hyperwaves do not go on and on until they encounter a listener or their energy is dissipated by distance. Hyperwave radios simply relay an existing realwave to another place. They are aimed at a specific location in space, and are heard only at those coordinates. If he did have a beacon, it would be possible to set a hyperwave transmitter to randomly relay, and thus saturate space with a distress call, but with the billions of stars in the sky, Andrew’s chances of hitting the right spot, and receiving a response, before he died of old age, were still tens of thousands to one. And Andrew was the first human to push this far into the frontier; even if he were to successfully contact a Confederation vessel, his now hopelessly incomplete star charts were the only maps that humanity had of anything this far out. He could not tell any would-be rescuers where he was; and unless another ship wandered within the range of his real-space radio -- set on a distress channel -- he would be stranded.
His base ship, the Star Surveyor California, was somewhere near his surveyboat’s original location; but without an accurate star chart he would not know where to begin narrowcasting a hyperwave message -- even if he had a relay.
And after seven weeks on this overgrown planet Andrew knew that she would have long since suspended a search for him.
Immediately after the abortive Jump Andrew spent the first moments on damage control. The inertia of his ‘boat had been maintained during Jump -- in fact, the explosion had increased his speed -- so he had to maintain his command of the vessel while simultaneously plugging the leaks and extinguishing the fires. After he had assessed the level of destruction and quieted all of the alarms he scanned nearby space for an emergency port. His luck was incredible. Less than four days away, and within a few degrees of his current trajectory, was a star system with a full range of planets. The fact that he didn’t know where he was or where he was going did not deter him. Without the main drive, the Ursine Ensign would, within a week, be adrift in the void with no power to operate the atmospheric conditioner, let alone his food recycler.
His frozen corpse would, ultimately, be vaporized by a dispassionate sun.
From his vantage point outside the system, Andrew could get some rough ideas about the planets orbiting the mid-sized, middle-aged star. Of the seven worlds he could survey, the second seemed almost impossibly likely as a destination. The world was a sibling, though not a twin, of Earth, with a mean orbit about 150 million kilometers from its star, a clone of Sol; its orbital velocity was approximately 30 kilometers per second. It had a year of about 370 days; its day was about twenty-five hours. With an average density of 5.6 grams per cubic centimeter, its 12,800 kilometer diameter provided an approximately earth-normal gravity, enabling it to maintain an atmosphere dominated by nitrogen, oxygen and sulphur. And it sported a large satellite.
As Howe approached a detailed scanning range, he was able to map the surface of his destination planet; tectonically active, it included three major landmasses and a substantial temperate zone. About two thirds of the globe was covered by mostly shallow seas. One continent was in the northern hemisphere; there were several high, volcanic mountain ranges on this alternately glaciated or erupting polar continent. Vast plains of basalt and deserts of sulphur were punctuated by icily glistening mountain peaks. The other two continents shared the southern hemisphere, with some small overlap into the northern half of the globe. The land area on the southern continents was predominately covered by forest, swamp and jungle.
Although he could not get a completely accurate picture of the lifeforms populating the new world, Howe’s scans gave every indication that the native fauna and flora were diverse, as the evolutionary models predicted.
He named his destination Abandon.
After his ‘boat had burrowed herself into the dense atmosphere of this planet Andrew had done his best to preserve control. But the Ursine Ensign had not been designed for atmospheric re-entry without main drive, especially in adverse conditions; maintaining control of his craft during the descent into the gravity well had been nearly impossible. Spiraling at the mercy of high winds in the upper atmosphere, the Ursine Ensign had bounced like a skipping stone over water. Semi-operative thrusters coupled with inadequate instrumentation had prevented Andrew from maintaining course almost immediately after atmospheric entry. He found himself struggling to simply control his rate of descent rather than adjusting to a correct heading.
His ‘boat, flipping end over end and rolling uncontrollably, required his constant attention. Howe found himself grappling with his controls to simply avoid pitching into the sea; but no amount of stamina would help him avoid a crash at the end of his descent.
When he had been abruptly brought to a stop on the face of the sedimentary stone cliff he now sat atop, the landing on firm ground had been more because of insane luck than because of his skill as a pilot; he wasn’t sure, however, that it wouldn’t have been better to land in the open sea. His fragile body was spared the worst of the crash, but the gravitic control mechanisms aboard the ‘boat failed on impact, and the Ursine Ensign had rapidly begun to slip down the cliff-face and into the dark water below.
With a co-ordination Andrew had not known he possessed, he had held the ‘boat together with control jets and muscle in its second descent. And when it had finally come to rest, belly up on the rocky beach, he had scrambled to save what equipment he could. An emergency survival kit was included in the boat’s locker, and Andrew had quickly removed it and all other portable equipment from the derelict vessel. He had been rather battered, but was alive; and he had loaded himself with all that he could carry and struggled up the sheer face of the crumbling, rain-soaked cliff.
At the top the yellow-stained tangle of an alien forest had greeted him with the whisper of death.
Now the wail of the storm was greatly diminished, and Andrew peered into the gloom for a glimpse of clear, green sky. Far off on the western horizon he made out a thin line of brightness. The waves grew more infrequent and the noise of the surf fell. The worst of the storm was past as Andrew clambered wearily to his bruised feet.
He stood, raising a calloused hand to wipe the worst of the wet from his weathered lips; Andrew thrust himself into the damp, darkened jungle.
The two hundred meters of yellow jungle between the cliff and his bunker had always lacked any sounds of life during the coastline’s frequent rainstorms. The native fauna of this planet well knew the ravages of the western storms, and hid accordingly. Andrew twisted his way among the fronds and vines of the near-virgin jungle toward the shelter he had found with luck, not technology.
The reason for its very presence remained a mystery to him. It was old, certainly, but remarkably well-preserved after remaining partially buried beneath the native soil in rotting roots and decayed trailers for at least six hundred Earth years. But six hundred years past the Europeans had hardly started to conquer the New World of America, let alone the fifty newly-terraformed worlds far out in the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy. So it obviously couldn’t be human construction. And no other intelligent alien life had been discovered during those six hundred years. Not to say that there wasn’t other sapient life; but it had never been encountered by the human race.
Andrew had literally tripped over the bunker, and the discovery of thirty generations, in the dark.
The bunker was made of a substance similar to terrestrial concrete, but the materials were native to this planet; the iron-rich carcasses of the local equivalent of anciently decayed Cambrian creatures in the lime stained it the color of dried human blood. The walls had been scabbed clots of pebbles when Andrew first arrived; but the spray-on insulating sealant he had carried with his emergency gear had adequately bandaged the decaying interior. The ceiling in the middle of the central chamber still sagged like an old man’s belly, but the worst collapses had been shored up with carbonsteel beams salvaged from the wreckage of the ‘boat and the leaks had been patched with more of the spray-on sealant.
His shelter had five rooms laid out in the shape of a squared pinwheel; the central room was the largest, about six meters square. Four doors, each approximately one hundred fifty centimeters square, pierced the center of the four walls of the central chamber, opening onto four rooms, each three meters square. The original entrance to the bunker had been a tunnel leading from the ceiling of the central chamber to the root system of a large banyan-like tree three meters above; but the centuries, though leaving the tree to stand, giant-like, above the entrance, had since eroded the soil away from around the concrete-lined shaft, exposing the now-weathered cement and contributing to its deterioration.
It had taken Andrew seven days to repair the damage to the bunker and re-bury the concrete tunnel. And draining the yellow-tinted slime-water from the bunker had taken another two days of strenuous hand-assisted pumping. But the tomblike structure was home for him now; and Andrew had prepared to stay.
The new entrance portal to his domicile had formerly been the outer airlock hatch of the Ursine Ensign, and it bore the name and serial number of the stripped surveyboat. The chipped paint was quite readable despite the crash -- CSB 103-A Ursine Ensign.
Survey Pilot Andrew Howe undogged the hatch manually, spinning the lockwheel with the dexterity of long practice. Heaving upward on the thirty kilo hatch that was designed to open horizontally, not vertically, Andrew opened the steeply sloped tunnel that led to his home. The banyan-like jungle giant that stretched overhead sheltered the hatch from the worst of the weather, but a puddle had formed around the entrance to the bunker and Andrew slopped some of its mud onto the first rung of the downward-leading ladder.
forty-nine days of regular practice had bestowed Lt. Commander Howe with sure-footedness, and he rapidly descended into the artificially oxygen-enriched atmosphere of his domicile. The soft, sticky, wet squish of Andrew’s fleet-issue boots against the makeshift ladder echoed against the round wall of the steep tunnel. The hatch slamming down on the entrance to the bunker reverberated like Lucifer’s hammer crashing against the armor of a Saint; the hatch’s sealing hissed like twenty asps. The unfiltered odor of stale rations and the unmasked musk of six weeks of sweat met Andrew’s nostrils like a welcome breeze.
It was the only place on this planet that smelled even remotely like Earth. Even if nothing else went right, at least Andrew Howe could call this hole home.
At the bottom of the ladder, Andrew Howe looked up and peered into the gloom over his head; no light penetrated the hatchcover.
Andrew had spent the first five days after the crash simply moving pieces of the destroyed ‘boat to his camp at the top of the cliff. It had been physically debilitating for him to move all of the survival gear and loose, useful hardware up the precipice with only primitive pulleys and synthetic rope. No anti-grav hardware had survived intact; of all the generating equipment aboard, only a few kilowatt power supply was operable. And for the first two days, Lt. Commander Howe could not locate the water extractor.
Extractors are commonly stowed in the head, along with the rest of the emergency kit, but when he had looked for it there, all he had found was empty tubing and a smashed zero-gee urinal. After an hour of searching Andrew had determined he would have to build a still from spare parts; he had already half-finished that project when he came upon the perfectly functioning extractor. At the bottom of his pile of salvage, at the top of the cliff, where he had put it...as the first thing to be salvaged. After that incident, Andrew began inventorying every item he wanted in a database on his pocket desk before he removed it from its original location.
The first thing Andrew did whenever he returned from the outside to his decayed domicile was remove and clean his boots. If he left them to sit, they would invariably molder into slime. After the native bacteria destroyed two of the only three pairs of boots within light years, Lt. Commander Howe kept the remaining pair scrupulously clean.
After he removed his boots in preparation for the ritual cleansing, Howe began stowing what few items they had been able to salvage from the ‘boat this trip: The four working chips from the navigational computer; three meters of cable; sixteen bolts with matching brackets; five inertial drive components. Despite the apparent futility, Andrew had continued to collect every bit of material he could from his vessel. In this environment he couldn’t predict what would be useful and what would be wasteful.
These articles quickly joined the other artifacts recovered from the wreck of the Ursine Ensign in various cavities around the central chamber. Loose ends of cable and carbonsteel fragments dangled from hooks and sat on shelves about the room. Among the flotsam were many things, Andrew was sure, that would save his life on this globe.
Andrew had made his initial camp at the top of the cliff face, using the deckplates of the Ursine Ensign as a rigid tent until he could contrive more permanent quarters. The nearly daily storms had made life there extremely uncomfortable; and during clearer weather Andrew heard too many large animals carousing in the nearby jungle for his comfort.
During his fifth night on Abandon he learned truly first hand how diverse the fauna of Abandon were. Andrew had been fitfully sleeping for an hour, flash lamp shining into the darkness to ward off the nocturnal carnivores, when his tent crashed heavily upon him. He was instantly awake, scrambling noisily for his sidearm, the deep, muffled grunts of something large and dark rooting through the wreckage, the sulphurous smell of the native equivalent of stale sweat overcoming his nostrils, the glare of the flash lamp shining in his eyes making his surroundings invisible.
He panicked.
Almost before he was sure he wasn’t asleep, Andrew Howe burst from his bedroll, tossing the metal plates of his collapsed shelter aside, and jumped to his feet. Running painfully barefoot across the rocky soil, inland through the jungle, his breath ripping through his nostrils like a misting tempest in the yellow phosphorescence before him, nausea clutching menacingly at his stomach, sweating hands gripping the slick pommel of his blaster, he swept blindly into the forest. The undergrowth, sticky with sap and dew, groped at his flailing limbs; roots reached up from the muddy soil to entangle his clumsy feet. From behind him he heard the cries of the monstrous carnivore and the clangor of clashing metal.
The pale verdigris light of Abandon’s waning moon distilled through the fog, throwing Howe’s surroundings into surreal relief; the threatening jungle shadows crowding around him like an army of moldering soldiers. Andrew peered behind him, thinking he dimly perceived the creature close at his back.
And then he fell.
The abrupt impact stunned him; he lay very still, half immersed in a brackish pool. Then, the acidic bite of stale water leaking into his semi-open mouth and draining up his nose electrified him into renewed action. Dragging himself painfully into a sitting position, Howe spat furiously into the darkness, finally vomiting noisily into the pool. His nose trickled a warm, salty flow of blood. Slowly returning to lucidity and choking for a single breath, Andrew looked around between coughs.
He was sprawled at the edge of a roughly circular clearing, about ten meters in diameter; above him loomed the immense root structure of an enormous tree. Two meters north -- he thought, his flight had disoriented him -- hulked a large, oblong block of reddish stone, its oddly regular silhouette rising against the darkened jungle in the green moonlight like a pillar of heaven.
Howe was surprised; the stone did not look like the product of nature. The geologist’s training and four years in the Exploratory Service snapped him back to lucidity. Wiping his bloody nose with the back of his foul-smelling hand, he lurched erect, forgetting about his compulsion to run; slogging carefully toward the block through the ankle-deep pond, Andrew moved to examine it more carefully.
As he passed his blistered, abraded fingers along its surface, the weathered texture of the block instantly struck him with its oddness. The strangely regular edges, the slightly off-vertical tilt, the generally constructed look of the stone brought his curiosity abruptly into focus. Pacing through the mud, Howe circled the monument. For monument it must be; as he looked at it more closely, even in the shadowy light of the moon, he could see the faint outlines of toolmarks on the stone.
But no, they weren’t toolmarks; they were the impressions of forms. This stone had not been carved by tools; it was poured.
Andrew Howe was looking at an artifact constructed by intelligent beings. An artifact made of cement.
By the light of morning, Howe had begun moving the trashed remains of his camp to the bunker. The huge carnivore that had surprised him the previous night had scattered his carefully organized salvage all over the campsite, in the process damaging further his valuable equipment and wrecking his carefully assembled supplies. Packing all the loose items he could carry at once into a harness, he trudged eastward into the jungle, swinging his forceblade to clear a path wide enough for him and his burdens to pass without smearing the alien sap all over his clothes and load.
He hoped that his generator would still work after being thrown or dragged -- he couldn’t tell because of the claws that had churned through the mud -- over twenty meters. If it didn’t, tools like the forceblade he was using to cut through the growth would be useless within one or two days.
In his first load back, Andrew had brought a small pump, and he left that to work on emptying the interior of the bunker while he went for a second load.
It took seven trips, but the distance was short, and Andrew had moved his precious salvage from the clifftop to the bunker by midafternoon.
That episode taught Andrew the necessity of solid protection from the fauna of Abandon. He suspected he wouldn’t be so lucky next time he encountered nocturnal wildlife. From then on, Howe wore his blaster on his hip at all times, even when bathing in the hypersonic shower inside the bunker; and he was sure that the hatch of the Ursine Ensign was secure against all intrusions.