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Jack McDevitt

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Ace Books by Jack McDevitt

THE ENGINES OF GOD

ANCIENT SHORES

ETERNITY ROAD

MOONFALL

INFINITY BEACH

DEEPSIX

CHINDI

OMEGA

POLARIS

SEEKER

For T.E.D. Klein and Terry Carr with my appreciation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m indebted to Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History, to David DeGraff of Alfred

University, and to Walter Cuirle, for advice and technical assistance. To Jerry Oltion, for reading and

commenting on an early version of the manuscript. To Ginjer Buchanan, for editorial assistance. To Ralph

Vicinanza, for his continuing support. And, as always, to my wife and inhouse editor, Maureen McDevitt.

PROLOGUE

“We advise that our patrons not attempt the slopes today, other than the Blue Run. A distinct danger

from avalanches is still present throughout the skiing area. It would be prudent to remain in the chalet, or

perhaps to consider spending the day in town.”

1398, RIMWAY CALENDAR

Wescott knew he was dead. There seemed little chance for Margaret, either. Or for his daughter. He had

followed the instruction and stayed inside and now he lay beneath tons of ice and rock. He could hear

weeping and screams, lost in the dark around him.

He was trembling in the cold, his right arm crushed and pinned beneath a fallen timber. He could no

longer feel the pain. Or the arm.

He thought of Delia. Just beginning her life and almost certainly swept away. Tears ran down his cheeks.

She’d been so anxious to come.

He closed his eyes and tried to resign himself. Tried to place himself again aboard the Falcon, where he

and Margaret had met. Those had been priceless years. He’d known the day would come when he

would wish he could go back and do it all again.

The Falcon.

My God. It occurred to him that, if Margaret had not escaped the building, their discovery would die

with them. Delia knew about it, but she was too young to understand.

They had told nobody! Except Mattie. Mattie knew.

He tore at the timber, tried to drag himself free. Tried to change his angle and get his feet against it. He

had to survive long enough to tell them. Just in case . . .

But Margaret was not dead. Could not be dead.

Please, God.

The cries and screams around him dwindled, became occasional moanings. How long had it been? It

seemed like hours since the chalet had crashed down on him. Where were the rescue workers?

He listened to his own labored breathing. The floor had shaken, had stopped, had shaken again. Then,

after the shocks, when everybody in the dining room had thought maybe it was over, he’d heard the

sudden roar. They’d looked at one another, some people had gotten up to run, others had sat terrified,

the lights went out, and the walls had imploded. He was pretty sure the floor had collapsed and that he

was trapped in a cellar. But he couldn’t be certain. Not that it mattered.

He heard distant sirens. Finally.

He pushed at the timber that held his arm. He didn’t feel entirely connected to his body anymore. He’d

retreated into his head and looked out, not unlike a spectator hiding in a cave. Beneath him, the ground

trembled again.

He wanted to believe Margaret had survived. Bubbly, immortal, farseeing Margaret, who was never,

ever, taken by surprise. It didn’t seem possible she could be caught in all this, swept aside in that single

terrible moment. She’d gone back to their room to get a sweater. Had left just moments before it had all

happened. Had gone up the staircase and vanished forever from his life.

And Delia. In the apartment. Eight years old. Sulking because he’d refused permission for her to go out

on her own, I don’t care if they’re saying the Blue Run is safe, we’ll wait until we hear everything’s okay.

The apartment was on the third floor, toward the front of the building. Maybe it had been spared. He

prayed they were both standing out there somewhere now, in the snow, worrying about him.

When they’d issued the warning, they’d said the chalet was safe. Safe and solid. Stay indoors and

everything will be okay. Avalanche-free zone.

In the dark, he smiled.

They’d been sitting in the dining room with their newest acquaintance, Breia Somebody-or-Other, who

was from his hometown, when Margaret had gotten up, said something about now don’t you two eat all

the eggs I’ll only be a minute, and walked off. A group of skiers stood near the front doors, ready to go

out, angrily complaining about the level of caution at the chalet and how Blue Run was for beginners.

Two couples sat amid potted plants enjoying a round of drinks. A heavyset man who looked like a judge

was descending the staircase. A young woman in a gray-green jacket had just sat down at the piano and

begun to play.

Margaret would just have had time to reach their room before the first shock came. The diners had

looked around at each other, their eyes wide with surprise. Then the second jolt, and the fear in the room

became palpable. There’d been no screams, as best he could remember, but people were throwing back

their chairs and starting for the exits.

Breia, middle-aged, dark-haired, a teacher on vacation, had looked out the window, trying to see what

was happening. His angle was bad so he couldn’t see much, but his hair stood straight up when she

gasped and whispered Run in a terrified voice. Without another sound she threw back her chair and fled.

Outside, a wall of snow appeared and bore down on them. It had been smooth, rhythmic, almost

choreographed, a crystal tide flowing down the side of the mountain, engulfing trees and boulders and,

finally, the heavy stone wall that marked the perimeter of the chalet’s grounds. As he watched, it swept

over someone. Man or woman, it happened too quick to be sure. Somebody trying to run.

Wescott had sat quietly, knowing there was no place to hide. He took a sip of his coffee. It was as if time

had stopped. The desk clerk, a simulation, blinked off. So did the host and one of the doormen. The

skiers near the front door scattered.

Wescott held his breath. The rear and sidewalls blew into the dining room and there was a sharp pain

and the sensation of falling.

Somewhere, doors slammed.

Something wet was running down his ribs. Tickling him, but he couldn’t reach it.

Breia hadn’t gotten out of the dining room. She was probably within a few meters. It was hard to speak.

He didn’t seem to have much air in his lungs. But he whispered her name.

He heard a voice, far away. “Over here.” But it was a male voice.

And then there were boots chunking through snow.

“See if you can get him out, Harry.”

Somebody was digging.

“Hurry.”

No answer though from Breia.

He tried to cry out, let them know where he was, but he was too weak. No need anyhow. Margaret

knew he was in trouble, and she was surely out there somewhere, with the rescue workers, trying to find

him.

But a deeper darkness was coming. The rubble on which he lay was fading, and he stopped caring about

the secret that he and Margaret shared, stopped caring about the timber that pinned him down. Margaret

was okay. Had to be.

And he slid away from his prison.

ONE

. . . But what provided the truest sense of the antiquity of (the Egyptian tomb) was to see graffiti scrawled

on its walls by Athenian visitors, circa 200 C.E. And to know the place was as old for them, as their

markings are for me.

—Wolfgang Corbin,

The Vandal and the Slavegirl, 6612 C.E.

1429, THIRTY-ONE YEARS LATER

The station was exactly where Alex said it would be, on the thirteenth moon of Gideon V, a gas giant

with no special characteristics to recommend it other than that it circled a dead star rather than a sun. It

was in a deteriorating orbit, and, in another hundred thousand years, according to the experts, it would

slip into the clouds and vanish. In the meantime it was ours.

The station consisted of a cluster of four domes and an array of radio telescopes and sensors. Nothing

fancy. Everything, the domes and the electronic gear and the surrounding rock, was a dark, patchy

orange, illuminated only by the mud brown gas giant and its equally mud brown ring system. It was easy

enough to see why nobody had noticed the station during several routine Survey visits. Gideon V had just

become only the third known outstation left by the Celians.

“Magnificent,” Alex said, standing by the viewport with his arms folded.

“The site?” I said. “Or you?”

He smiled modestly. We both knew he wasn’t good at being humble.

“Benedict strikes again,” I said. “How did you figure it out?”

I hesitate to say Alex ever looked smug. But that day he was close. “I am pretty good, aren’t I?”

“How’d you do it?” I’d doubted him all the way, and he was enjoying his moment.

“Simple enough, Kolpath. Let me explain.”

He had done it, of course, the way he always did things. By imagination, hard work, and methodical

attention to detail. He’d gone through shipping records and histories and personal memoirs and

everything else he could lay hands on. He’d narrowed it down, and concluded that Gideon V was an

ideal central location for the exploratory operations then being conducted by the Celians. The planet, by

the way, was given the Roman numeral not because it was the fifth world in the system. It was, in fact,

the only one, the others having either been swallowed whole or torn from their orbits by a passing star. It

had happened a quarter million years ago, so there’d been no witnesses. But it was possible to compute

from the elliptical orbit of the remaining world that there had been others. The question up for debate was

their number. While most astrophysicists thought there’d been four additional worlds, some put the

probable total closer to ten.

Nobody really knew. But the station, several hundred light-years from the nearest occupied world, would

be a treasure trove for Rainbow Enterprises. The Celians, during their golden age, had been a romantic

nation, given over to philosophy, drama, music, and exploration. They were believed to have penetrated

deeper into the Aurelian Cluster than any other branch of the human family. Gideon V had been central to

that effort. Alex was convinced they’d pushed well beyond, into the Basin. If so, there was considerably

more to be found.

Several centuries ago, the Celians had gone abruptly downhill. Civil war erupted, governments across the

home world collapsed in chaos, and in the end they had to be bailed out by the other members of what

was then known as the Pact. When it was over, their great days were also over. They’d lost their fire,

become conservative, more interested in creature comforts than in exploration. Today, they are possibly

the most regressive planetary society in the Confederacy. They are proud of their former greatness and

try to wear it as a kind of aura. This is who we are. But in truth it’s who they were.

We were in the Belle-Marie, maybe twenty thousand kilometers out from the gas giant when the domes

rotated into view. Alex makes his living trading and selling artifacts, and occasionally finding lost sites

himself. He’s good at it, seems almost to have a telepathic sense for ruin. Mention that to him, as people

occasionally do, and he smiles modestly and ascribes everything to good luck. Whatever it is, it’s made

Rainbow Enterprises a highly profitable operation and left me with more money to throw around than I

would ever have thought possible.

The thirteenth moon was big, the third biggest among twenty-six, the biggest without an accompanying

atmosphere. Consequently it had been the first place we’d looked, for those two reasons. Large moons

are better for bases because they provide a reasonable level of gravity without having to generate it

artificially. But you don’t want one so large that it has an atmosphere. An atmosphere is always a

complicating factor.

As far as we were concerned, vacuum had another advantage: It acts as a preservative. Anything left by

the Celians when they closed up shop six centuries earlier was likely to be in pristine condition.

If you could have thrown sunlight on Gideon’s dark rings, they would have been spectacular. They were

twisted and divided into three or four distinct sections. I couldn’t be sure. It depended on your angle of

vision. The thirteenth moon lay just beyond the outermost ring. It moved in an orbit a few degrees above

and below their plane, and the result would have been a compelling not-quite-edge-on view had there

been any light to speak of. The gas giant itself, as seen from the station, never moved from its position

halfway up the sky over a series of low hills. It was a dull, dark presence, not much more than simply a

place where there were no stars.

I put the Belle-Marie in orbit and we went down in the lander.

The moon was heavily cratered in the north and along the equator, with plains in the south streaked with

ridges and canyons. There were several mountain ranges, tall, skeletal peaks of pure granite. The domes

were located midway between the equator and the north pole, on relatively flat ground. The antenna field

was to the west. Mountains rose to the east. A tracked ground vehicle had been left in the middle of the

complex.

The domes appeared to be in good condition. Alex watched them with growing satisfaction as we

descended through the black sky. A half dozen moons were visible. They were pale, ghostly, barely

discernible in the feeble light from the central star. Had you not known they were there, you might not

have seen them.

I eased us in carefully. When we touched down I shut the engines off and brought the gravity back

slowly. Alex waited impatiently while I exercised what he routinely called a surplus of feminine caution.

He’s always anxious to get moving—let’s go, we don’t have forever. He enjoys playing that role. But he

doesn’t like unpleasant surprises either. And that’s supposed to be my job, heading them off. I broke

through the bottom of a crater years ago into a sinkhole, and he still hasn’t let me forget it.

Everything held. Alex gave me a big smile, well-done and all that. The talk about let’s move it along got

put aside while he sat looking out the viewport, savoring the moment. You go into one of these places, a

site that’s been empty for centuries or maybe millennia, and you never know what you might find. Some

have been rigged with death traps. Floors have been known to collapse and walls to give way. In one

way station, air pressure built up when something malfunctioned and it all but exploded when a Survey

team tried to enter.

What you always hope for, of course, is an open hatch and a map of the premises. Like they found at

Lyautey.

I unbuckled and waited for Alex. Finally, he took a deep breath, released his harness, swung the chair

around, climbed out of it, and pulled on his air tanks. We ran a radio check and inspected each other’s

suits. When he was ready I decompressed and opened the hatch.

We climbed down the ladder onto the surface. The ground was crumbly. Sand and iron chips. We saw

myriad footprints and tracks from vehicles. Untouched down the centuries.

“Last ones out, you think?” Alex asked.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. I was more interested in the view. A slice of the rings and two moons

were visible just above the mountains.

“Something wrong,” Alex said.

“What?” The domes were dark and quiet. Nothing moved on the plain, which stretched to the southern

horizon. Nothing unusual in the sky.

In the dark I couldn’t see Alex’s face, encased in his helmet. But he seemed to be looking at the nearest

dome. No, past it at one of the other units, the northernmost, which was also the largest of the four.

There was an open door.

Well, not open in the sense that the hatch was ajar. Someone had cut into it. Had cut a large hole that we

should have seen coming down if we’d been paying attention.

Alex grumbled something over the circuit about vandals and started angrily toward it. I fell in behind.

“Watch the gravity,” I said, as he stumbled but caught himself.

“Damned thieves.” Alex delivered a series of imprecations. “How’s this possible?”

It was hard to believe that someone had beaten us here because artifacts from Gideon V had never

appeared on the market. And there was no historical record that the base had been found.

“Has to be recent,” I said.

“You mean yesterday?” he asked.

“Maybe they didn’t know what they had. Just broke in, looked around, and left.”

“It’s possible, Chase,” he said. “Maybe it happened centuries ago. When people still remembered

where this place was.”

I hoped he was right.

It was usually the case that when archeologists found a ransacked site, the ransacking had been done

within a few hundred years of the era during which the site had operated. After a reasonable length of

time, people forget where things are. And they get permanently lost. I sometimes wonder how many

ships are floating around out in the dark, having blown an engine and eventually faded from the record.

I should mention that we’re not archeologists. We’re strictly business types, matching collectors with

merchandise, and sometimes, as now, hunting down original sources. This had looked like a gold mine

moments ago. But now—Alex was holding his breath as we approached the opening.

The hatch had been cut away by a torch. It lay off to one side. And there was only the lightest coating of

dust on it. “This just happened,” he said. I’ll confess that Alex is not exactly even-tempered. At home,

in social circumstances, he’s a model of courtesy and restraint. But in places like that lunar surface, where

society is a long way off, I occasionally get to see his real feelings. He stared at the fallen door, picked up

a rock, said something under his breath, and threw the rock halfway into orbit.

I stood there, a kid in the principal’s office. “Probably my fault,” I said.

The inner hatch was also down. Beyond it, the interior was dark.

He looked at me. The visor was too opaque to allow me to see his expression, but it wasn’t hard to

imagine. “How do you mean?” he asked.

“I told Windy.” Windy was Survey’s public relations director, and a longtime friend.

Alex wasn’t appreciably taller than I am, but he seemed to be towering over me. “Windy wouldn’t say

anything.”

“I know.”

“You told her over an open circuit.”

“Yeah.”

He sighed. “Chase, how could you do that?”

“I don’t know.” I was trying not to whine. “I didn’t think there’d be a problem. We were talking about

something else and it just came up.”

“Couldn’t resist?”

“I guess not.”

He planted one boot on the hatch and shoved. It didn’t budge. “Well,” he said, “no help for it now.”

I straightened my shoulders. Shoot me if it’ll make you feel better. “Won’t happen again.”

“It’s okay.” He was using his spilled-milk voice. “Let’s go see how much damage they did.”

He led the way in.

The domes were connected by tunnels. Staircases led to underground spaces. These places are always

ghostly, illuminated only by wrist lamps. Shadows chase themselves around the bulkheads, and there

seems always to be something moving just outside the field of vision. I remember reading how Casmir

Kolchevsky was attacked in a place like this by a security bot that he had inadvertently activated.

The vandals had been relentless.

We wandered through the operational sections, through a gym, through private living quarters. Through a

kitchen and dining room. Everywhere we went, drawers were pulled out and their contents dumped.

Cabinets were cut open, storage lockers broken apart. The place had been ransacked. There wasn’t

much remaining that could have been put up for sale or would have been of interest to a museum. We

found ourselves treading carefully past broken glass and data disks and overturned tables. Some clothing

will survive for a surprisingly long time in a vacuum. But we found only a handful of pieces, most of them

victims of whatever chemicals had been in the original material. Or sufficiently mundane that nobody

would have cared. It doesn’t much matter where a pullover shirt has come from. Unless it’s been worn

by a legendary general or an immortal playwright, nobody cares. But the jumpsuits, which usually carry a

shoulder patch, or a stenciled identity over a pocket, GIDEON BASE or some such thing, are worth

their weight. We found only one, badly frayed. The inscription was of course in Celian characters,

framing a tall, narrow peak. “The station’s emblem,” said Alex.

They’d also stripped the operations center. Electronic gear had been taken. They’d torn the panels apart

to get access. Again, the objective had been to find parts marked as belonging to the base. It looked as if

anything not meeting that standard had been yanked out and dropped on the deck.

Alex was in a rage by the time we were finished. All four domes, and the underground network, had

been treated the same way. There’d been one exception to the general chaos. We found a common

room, littered with debris. The deck was covered with projectors and readers, and data crystals that

would have gone dry long before six centuries had passed. A broken pitcher and some ice lay in one

corner, and a partially torn-up carpet had been dragged into another. But a small table stood in the center

of the room, and a book lay open on it, arranged for the convenience of anyone seated in the lone chair.

“Well,” I said, looking down at it, “at least it won’t be a complete blowout. That thing will bring some

money.”

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

It was last year’s edition of The Antiquarian Guide.

“Look as if the vandal knew we’d be here,” Alex said. “He’s saying hello.”

TWO

I told him he was an idiot. I explained that he was auctioning off our history, converting it to baubles and

handing it over to people who had no concept who Mike Esther was. And that when he was finished,

when the last crystal had been taken from the museum and sold to the jewelers, there would be nothing

left of the men and women who had built our world. He smiled and shook his head and I thought for a

moment that his voice caught. “Old friend,” he said, “they are already long gone.”

—Haras Kora,

Binacqua Chronicles, 4417 C.E.

Winetta Yashevik was the archeological liaison at Survey, and she doubled as their public relations chief.

Windy was the only person to whom I’d revealed our destination, but I knew she would never have

given information away to any of Alex’s rivals. She was a true believer. In her view, we turned antiquities

into commodities and sold them to private buyers. It was an offense against decency, and she always

contrived, without saying anything directly, to make me feel that I was ethically unfit. I was, if you like, the

lost sheep. The one that had been corrupted by the mendacity of the world and didn’t seem able to find

its way home.

It was easy enough for her to sit in judgment. She’d been born into wealth and never known what it was

to go without anything. But that’s another matter.

When I stopped by her office at the Survey complex, on the second floor of the Kolman building, she

brightened, waved me inside, and closed the door. “You’re back more quickly than I expected. Did you

not find the place? I hope.”

“It was there,” I said. “Right where Alex said it would be. But somebody got there first and broke in.”

She sighed. “Thieves everywhere. Well, anyhow, congratulations. Now you know how the rest of us feel

when you and Alex have taken over a site.” She paused, smiled as if she wanted me to think she didn’t

want to hurt my feelings, just kidding, you know how it is. But she was enjoying herself. “Were you able

to make off with anything at all?”

I ignored the phraseology. “The place was cleaned out,” I said.

Her eyes slid shut. I saw her lips tighten, but she said nothing. Windy was tall, dark, passionate about the

things she believed in. No halfway measures. Me she tolerated because she wasn’t going to throw a

friendship overboard that went all the way back to when we were both playing with dolls. “No idea who

they were?”

“No. It happened recently, though. Within the last year. Maybe within the last few days.”

Her office was big. There were pictures from various missions on the paneled walls, as well as a

scattering of awards. Winetta Yashevik, Employee of the Year; Harbison Award for Outstanding

Service; Appreciation from the United Defenders for contributions to their Toys for Kids program. And

there were pictures from excavations.

“Well,” she said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Windy, we were trying to figure out how it happened.” I took a deep breath. “Don’t take this the wrong

way, but as far as we can figure, you’re the only one who knew in advance where we were going.”

“Chase,” she said, in a level tone, “you told me to keep it quiet, and I did. You also know I would never

help one of these vandals.”

“We know that. But we were wondering if the information got passed on in any way? If anybody else in

the organization knew?”

“No,” she said, “I’m sure I didn’t tell anybody.” She thought about it. “Except Louie.” That was a

reference to Louis Ponzio, the director.

“Okay. That probably means somebody’s listening in on us.”

“Could be.” She looked uncomfortable. “Chase, we both know the director doesn’t run the tightest ship

on the planet.”

Actually I didn’t know.

“That may or may not have been the problem. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It’s okay. It was probably the comm system.”

“Whatever. Listen, Chase—”

“Yes?”

“I wouldn’t want you to feel you can’t tell me things.”

“I know. It’s not a problem.”

“Next time—”

“I know.”

Fenn Redfield, Alex’s old police buddy, was at the country house when I got back. Alex had told him

what happened. Not an official complaint, of course. There was none to be made. “But there’s a

possibility somebody’s doing some eavesdropping.”

“Wish I could help,” he said. “You guys just have to be more careful what you say over an open circuit.”

Fenn was short, stocky, a walking barrel with green eyes and a deep bass voice. He had never married,

loved to party, and played cards regularly in a small group with Alex.

“Isn’t it illegal to eavesdrop on people?” I asked.

Jack McDevitt - Seeker

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