Galaxy Dog Read online

  “I have found an ancient symbol,” Brax said, “Another of the basic root symbols.”

  "That's wonderful," Altia couldn't keep excitement from her voice, "Could be another breakthrough."

  "We can only hope."

  They reached the point in the corridor where the new symbol had been discovered. Altia bent to examine it.

  “It's in a dark corner,” she said.

  Brax projected a large hologram of the area of the wall they were standing beside, from a projector on his chest. The robot turned the projection and zoomed in on the symbol they were interested in. Altia reached out to touch the hologram version of the symbol, though, of course, there was nothing physical beneath her fingertips, just the immaterial surface of the hologram. She traced the edges of the symbol thinking about why that symbol had been chosen to sit on this innocuous looking patch of wall.

  “Interesting,” she said, “The closer to the root they are, the less abstract they are.”

  The symbol looked like waves, and she had the idea of flow, though she was aware this was just a subjective notion that had occurred to her human mind and might not have anything remotely in common with the life of the Drifters.

  "Fascinating, isn't it?" the robot mumbled.

  Altia went over to the patch of wall, bending at the waist to examine the actual physical symbol in its context. The robot didn't take its eyes off the hologram in front of it.

  "I wonder what these conduits in here were for," Altia said, pointing at some structure in the wall of the tunnel, "We know so little about their technology. They could be for power, life support, or... or... delicious snacks, for all I know."

  There were three heavy conduits, right next to the symbol.

  "Flow," she mumbled to herself.

  Altia stared at the conduits, and at the symbol. The conduits were dead, serving no purpose. Most of the planet's systems were inert, with only maintenance online. But whether they were in operation at the moment or not, there would be a certain direction to their flow. She stood back and tried to trace the flow with her mind.

  Then she saw it, after years of her life spent studying this long-dead language, she saw it. She understood.

  She turned to Brax, who was still examining the holographic enlargement of the symbol.

  "Brax, please project architectural schematic oblique four, for sector gold nine" she asked him.

  A spiderweb of blue lines representing walls, floors and ceilings sprang into life, projected from the robot's chest, slowly turning.

  "And overlay that with character set G60," she said.

  Spidery green lines appeared, outlines of a subset of the alien hieroglyphs, superimposed on the floor plan. Altia's face lit up. There was the correlation she had been looking for. The hieroglyphs with longer bars were in longer corridors. The variations in size of elements of the characters weren't to do with available space, or with graphic design, they held meaning. A whole new level of meaning that nobody had guessed was present was mapped onto the dimensions of the writing.

  “Have you found a connection?” Brax asked.

  “I think I have,” Altia said.

  “If we could decipher these hieroglyphics,” Brax said, “It would help us immeasurably in working out the secrets of Drifter technology.”

  “Yes it would,” Altia said, with a smile, “Yes it would.”

  ***

  Over the next few weeks Altia found much more meaning modulated within the dimensions of the characters. She saw a numbering systems, indications of position, status and relationships. The language rapidly unfolded itself to her. But she still couldn't assign a meaning to any of the characters that would be like a word. Except perhaps the word “flow”, the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became.

  The history of the language was there in front of her. She could see early root forms develop into more and more complex forms. The Drifter scribes would write in any direction, depending on the space available, and wrote left to right, right to left, up to down and down to up, and combinations of these. The only way to determine which way to read a text was to look at the asymmetrical characters. She more and more began to suspect that these asymmetrical characters represented lifeforms. One in particular recurred over and over. She wondered if this one character might be a representation of a Drifter.

  There was already a huge amount of data on the patterns and interrelationships of the language, but the only item of vocabulary she had discovered was the word flow, which she was becoming increasingly convinced was her first Drifter word. But with just one word, a whole language could be decrypted.

  For an entire week, she focused on similar characters and discovered another, its opposite, blockage. With these first cornerstones she went on to build outwards, gradually unlocking the meaning of the language. She was so happy with her progress, so confident that she was right, that she had to share it, to get news of her discovery out. First of all though she wanted to tell her superior, Shivia.

  Altia was sitting in her office, in a temporary building bonded to the floor of a large chamber deep below the planet's surface, when she decided to make the call. Shivia's holographic avatar appeared in mid air in the center of the room. It was a simple departmental logo crest with her name and rank written below. When Shivia accepted the call, this logo went fuzzy at the edges and was replaced by a hologram of Shivia herself, standing life-size on the floor a few paces away.

  "Altia?" Shivia said.

  "Hello," Altia replied.

  "What's this about?"

  "Something huge. I think I have taken the first steps towards a decipherment."

  Shivia didn't reply. Shock could clearly be seen on her face, despite the poor resolution of the field-grade military hologram communicator.

  "Have you gone mad? Nobody has made progress in a hundred years."

  "I hesitate to make this call, but I am convinced."

  "I will come to you," Shivia said.

  The line went dead, Shivia's hologram replaced by the departmental crest, slowly turning in the air. Altia shut off the communicator. If her boss was coming to see her work, she'd better have something impressive to show her.

  She noticed that her diary was being remote accessed. The diary opened up, displaying all its little boxes, with each little box representing a time slot and they were all color coded and full. Altia saw all her appointments being canceled, all her time slots going white. Then one slot in ten days time colored red. The words, Meeting with Shivia, appeared.

  "It looks like I have ten days to get my ideas together."

  Shivia must have been off world. It was the only explanation of the length of time she had allowed before the meeting. Altia was grateful for all the extra time she could get. She spent the entire ten days decrypting texts collected from around the artificial planet. There was so much information, her vocabulary was filling so fast. With each new translation, correlations could be made that allowed further translations. By the time Shivia arrived, she had pages of deciphered text to show her. The text had gaps. It was often difficult to interpret, but there was no doubt it was real.

  Shivia arrived unannounced via the largest of the corridors leading off from Altia's camp site. She was brought by grav sled from wherever her spaceship had landed. She was accompanied by a team of scientists and a pair of armed guards. They didn't have heavy weapons and they weren't wearing combat armor, but it was odd to see armed personnel down on the planet, although they were common enough up in orbit.

  "Well hello Altia," Shivia said, emerging from the grav sled, "I've been hardly able to sleep for wondering at the marvels you would have to show me."

  "I hope you aren't disappointed."

  "I hope for the same thing," Shivia said, a slight menace to her voice.

  The sled door closed behind her, leaving the other scientists and the guards inside.

  "This way," Altia said.

  She led the way through the encampment, a handful of temporary build
ings and crates of supplies, until she reached the building she used as an office.

  Altia plugged a memory stick into a screen and gave it to Shivia.

  "It's raw text, not formatted, with gap length indicated by dashes," Altia said, "And there are still a lot of gaps."

  "Very well," Shivia said.

  She looked around Altia's office space and selected a comfortable chair. She shrugged off her cloak and sat with her legs crossed, the screen balanced on a knee. She swiped her finger from the bottom of the screen upwards, the motion to turn the page, then again and again. She sat for two hours, swiping backward and forward without saying a word, comparing original symbols with Altia's translations. Altia stood in front of her, forgotten.

  "This is incredible," Shivia said at last.

  "Yes," Altia said.

  Shivia pointed at a section of the text, and Altia looked over her shoulder at the screen.

  "We are remnants-The power has been taken away—-The cold sleep—They abide——-,"the tablet said.

  "You think this is important?" Altia asked.

  "I do," Shivia said, "That gap at the end. I'm sure you will find that those symbols are coordinates. Decoding that is your new priority."

  Shivia abruptly stood up. As she was walking to the door, leaving without a word, Altia asked.

  "Can I share my findings?"

  "Oh no. This must remain a secret."

  Chapter 3

  ––––––––

  The worst thing was not knowing. Knave was "buttoned up" in his power armor and only information he needed for his mission was being relayed to him. This did not include an overview of the super-atmospheric battle, even though the assault ship he was on was caught up in it. He could feel concussions transmitted through the hull, but had no idea if they would be able to clear a window to insert his unit or not. Just then he felt acceleration tugging at him, the slamming concussions being transmitted by the hull increased in frequency and intensity. The mission status icon inside his helmet display grew to three times its usual size, the other icons shrinking to make room, switched over to ongoing, written in red, and shrank back into its usual place again.

  "Here we go," Henrik muttered.

  "How long now before that door opens?" Knave asked.

  "An eternity," Henrik answered, "But you're never ready. However long it takes, however much you brace yourself, you're never ready."

  "I guess," Knave said.

  "Just remember two things," Henrik said, "You go left."

  "And?"

  "And what?"

  "The second thing," Knave prompted.

  "Shoot anything your targeter paints as the enemy."

  "That's it?"

  "That's our job."

  "How good is the targeter at spotting the enemy," Knave asked.

  He'd asked about this before, but never gotten a really satisfactory answer.

  "About fifty, fifty," Henrik said, "Use your best judgment."

  Knave felt the Galaxy Dog lurch downwards, like an elevator with the cables cut.

  "Here we go," Henrik said.

  "You already said that."

  The metal head of Henrik's power armor turned to look at Knave. There was a visor strip across the front at Henrik's eye line, the transparent armor of the strip was dark. There was no way to see the look in his eyes, but Knave could guess.

  "Which way are you going?" Henrik asked.

  "Left."

  "Which way is left?"

  Knave took an armored hand off the front handle of the mass driver, offended a little that Henrik obviously assumed he didn't know his left from his right, and pointed to the port bulkhead.

  "Well okay," Henrik said, the irritation in his voice carrying clearly over the communications channel.

  They both turned their heads to stare at the door.

  "Now is about time for our change of objective," Henrik said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Control usually changes our objective just before the door opens. They're cutting it a little fine this time."

  "I've never had my orders updated so close-"

  Knave was interrupted by his heads up display. It showed his assigned position moving from the periphery of the mountain to a position on its flanks. The projected landing position of Galaxy Dog moved too, away from the mountain.

  "What?" Knave said.

  "Always happens with planetary assault," Henrik mumbled, "Never goes according to plan."

  "But we'll have to run for hours to cover that distance."

  "This is nothing," Henrik said, "I've been dropped in the wrong hemisphere before."

  There was a jolting series of shocks that would have thrown them around like so much loose cargo if they weren't anchored to the decking by their armor boots.

  "Hard landing," Henrik muttered.

  The door was dotted with a sprinkling of green and blue indicator lights, which all suddenly went red at the same time. Then the door hinged down, more slowly than in the simulations, accompanied by a grinding noise.

  "Very hard landing," Henrik said.

  As soon as the door was open wide enough, Henrik clambered out, jumping to the ice before the door had fully deployed. Knave did the same a moment later and they were both followed by a pack of wolves, their drones, forty strong, half of them under Knave's control. Knave was immediately running left. He had expected to be taking incoming fire already, but everything was eerily quiet. Then he heard it, the first corrupting sounds of Buzzer interference within the communications. Swelling and receding noises, sometimes taking the form of human voices.

  "Go back," his communicator whispered in an unhealthy version of a human voice.

  There was precipitation too, he hadn't been expecting that, ice crystals ejected by an ice volcano, off to his right. He took a good long look at the volcano, drinking in its beauty, and some of his Wolves glanced at it, to see what he was looking at, then went back to scanning for targets. The volcano was so tall he could see it as a thorn sticking out of the horizon, and he could see the plume of ice it was ejecting like a dragon breathing straight up in triumph at the sight of fresh victims. The snow, for want of a better word, was coming down hard, reducing visibility, but it wasn't the graceful crystals of water ice. The nitrogen snow was more like closely packed salt, like rice thrown at a wedding. Along with the snow, there were banks of fog. Although the moon's atmosphere was tenuous, it was very cold and therefore very thick. The thick fog came and went, it appeared very gradually, obscured visibility almost entirely at its thickest and then gradually subsided. Combined with the gritty snow rattling on his face plate, it was like being in a sandstorm of dirty snow.

  Even through the snow, Knave could see that fighting was intense at the base of the mountain, with clouds of ice being kicked up, and the flashes of explosions visible within.

  Knave kept running until he reached a shallow ravine. He gave the bottom a quick scan with his sensors to make sure it would support him and then hopped in. Two of his wolves followed him down and the others started fanning out. It wasn't good to bunch up too much, because of the risk of having the whole wolf pack taken out by a single missile, or maybe a mine.

  Knave glanced back at the dropship and sucked a breath in sharply between his teeth at what he saw. He knew a thing or two about spaceship maintenance, but he'd never seen damage like it. It was battle damage, deep scars in the hull, trenches where armor had been chiseled out. The landing gear on the port side had collapsed and that side of the spaceship was resting on its underside like a beached whale. The impact of the landing had obviously been hard and had cratered and cracked the ice around the spaceship. The landing had gouged the spaceship into the ice crust of the moon. Units were still disembarking and fanning out, the majority heading for Mount Sabre Tooth, or Fang Hill as Henrik had taken to calling it, enormously high and smooth, the objective.

  Remembering the objective, Knave forced the dropship from his mind and turned towards the target. He pop
ped his head round from cover. Then, seeing as it didn't get blown off, he continued his headlong charge for the foothills of the mountain. As he ran, he got more of an idea of the surrounding conditions and terrain. Apart from the volcano, there was only one other obvious geographic feature poking out of the cratered and ravened expanse of ice. It was Mount Sabre Tooth itself. It was located right at the center of the massive impact crater where the dropship had made its hard landing. It had an escarpment along part of its perimeter which rose kilometers above the surrounding terrain, and the crater floor lay several kilometers below the rest of the surface of the planet. This basin consisted of undulating terrain and a central mound, almost 200 kilometers in diameter, which rose 22 kilometers to the base of the mountain.

  The crater was staggeringly huge, and the impact responsible for creating it had excavated about one percent of the planet's volume, leaving some nearby asteroids as products of the collision. What little atmosphere the moon had was concentrated in the crater, swirling around the central mountain.

  Knave's wolf pack had spread out so far now that he could only see the drone to his right and the drone to his left. Then contact. Ice dust started kicking up around him and a burst of incoming fire came close enough to slap his suit with fist size chunks of ice. He was sent staggering backwards as he felt the bruising impact of them, but his armor kept its integrity. His targeting unit, as if just waking up, suddenly painted a handful of targets against the white terrain ahead.

  "Better late than never," Knave grumbled.

  The hostiles fired again, and one of his wolf pack of drones detonated. The explosion was shocking, strong enough for Knave to feel it through his armor. The first loss of one of his units, and it could just as easily have been him.

  He felt an almost overwhelming urge to tighten his finger on the trigger of his mass driver, to send a return volley of rods at relativistic speeds to chew up his enemies, the creatures trying to kill him, but he didn't.

  "Save you ammo Knave," he said to himself.

  If his wolves were taken out, the last thing he wanted was to be running around on the surface of an ice moon with an empty mag.