09-29-2017, 11:05 PM
„-because what denialists of evolutionary biology don’t want to acknowledge is the fact that human behaviour and potential can be easily brought into direct causation with genes,“ I spoke to the assorted crowd of biologists and other folk before me. If there was one thing that the University of Cambridge got right, I was quite sure that I would say it was the podiums they employed for speakers in their auditoriums. Being slightly elevated while standing on a raised dais with the light directed at me had a certain feeling to it that just couldn’t be matched in Rheinland or Liberty. “Superior genes, if you will.”
With a click on a small handheld device, I switched the static image shown on the holoscreen behind her to one depicting a diagram. It showed a pie chart divided into four sections, each in a different colour. I went on to explain how certain traits within humanity’s gene code promoted certain features that were advantageous within certain regions. My favourite example of this was the darker skin tones that were more prevalent in the Hispanic folk than inside the houses, and that permitted for a higher resistance against afflictions like skin cancer. Up until this point, everyone was always on my side. Still, the controversial part about my views was still ahead.
“Not only are certain genetic makeups advantageous when dealing with environmental hazards, but it is very well possible that, from a Darwinist perspective, it is very likely that certain social structures are also actively promoted with a people being placed in a harsh environment.” As expected, several eyebrows went up. “What do I mean by that?” Another push of the handheld device and another image was shown, this time depicting tentative statistics alluding to the rate of certain crimes committed per capita in Corsair society as opposed to the Bretonian one. “Well, first I’ll tell you what I don’t mean. It has been said about me that I assume the existence of a ‘crime’ or ‘predator’ gene that is favoured Darwinistically in societies that exist within a perpetual state of distress. There is nothing to suggest something as to that extend would be true.”
With a laserpointer, I highlighted the discrepancies within the statistics. “As you can see, when it comes to per capita cases of what we would define as aggravated battery, Corsair males have a twenty times higher rate of being a suspect of the crime than a Bretonian.” There were single whispers within the crowd. I was quite sure they were wondering about my statistics. It was true that they were not publically known, or at least, not yet. I had spent quite a lot of time gathering that data, going so far as to return to Crete for a while. “People are quick to attribute things such as aggressiveness to things such as culture or upbringing. People are not comfortable with the idea that something as fundamental as one’s potential for violence could be hard wired, and indeed, Corsair culture is by far more patriarchal than that of most Bretonian colonies.”
I made a pause to take the glass in hand that stood on the podium before me to take a sip. My hand was steady. In my years, I had given many talks like that to scientific peers, and it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to their scrutiny. “A correlation between patriarchal ideas in society and the acceptance of violence has long since proven, thus the, albeit false, conclusion that this is the only factor when it comes to potential violence, is all too understandable. Men are even today still taught that any contact with another human is either violent or sexual.” Another click of the device, and this time, two DNA sequences were shown on the holoscreen. “The left sequence is taken from a Bretonian and the right one from a Corsair.” Several nucleotides on the Corsair strand were highlighted in one colour while the other DNA sequence had similar parts highlighted in a different one. I went on to explain how the highlighted parts of the Corsair DNA were responsible for the formation of certain brain regions and the creation of hormones at a later date, noting discrepancies between the two…
“I don’t rightly think they appreciated what I did,” I groused into a big cup of ice cream, staring at Adrian in front of me. We were sitting in a sweet little café roughly two blocks away from the university, watching taxis and other vehicles flit through the skies at irregular intervals.
“You were the one wanting to take a controversial topic for your paper,” he meant, taking a sip from his sundae. It had molten in the time we had been here, given that he was not a fast eater. He gave the sundae a sour look as if the dessert was responsible for him getting toothaches each time he ate something cold.
“You know it’d be easy for me to correct the nerves, right?” I asked, knowing what he would answer. It was always the same.
“I’m quite fine with my nerves as they are.”
I suppressed a snort. Looking to the window, I could see part of my reflection. My skin was darker than his, so it made making out details a bit more tricky.
“Hey, cheer up, you’re still one of the most valuable contributors they have,” he said after a few moments during which I hadn’t said anything. I blinked, noticing that I had been staring at my reflection for a while.
“For about twenty years now,” I replied, not really knowing what else to say. “I invented methods of genetic splicing, radiation therapy and decontamination technology that is used widely across Sirius, but I can’t convince a few cultural Marxists that they’re idiots.” I groaned. “It’d be way easier if I wouldn’t have to run to a lawyer each time I want to test a hypothesis. There are enough morbidly ill people in Bretonia, especially with the war with Gallia. So what if I didn’t test anything before? I can’t test anything if I don’t get the chance to test anything.”
“You should probably take a break,” Adrian murmured under his breath, pushing the sundae away.
“Maybe next time I replace anything related to serotonin production in you wi-“ I took a deep breath. I was way too easily annoyed. “Yes, you’re right.”
“So you’re going to cancel the trip to Pygar?” he asked hopefully, and I gave him a flat look.
“Look, it’s not like I’m going to suffer huge amounts of stress there, alright? I’ll just go there, listen to some old people ramble about xenobiology and bugger off again.” I sounded almost apologetic, I noticed, though I didn’t mind.
“Teresa, you-“
“No, really, it’s fine,” I said, trying to sound as reassuring as I could. It wasn’t like I’d actually collapse from stress or anything. “It is just a dead planet. Freeport 9 is directly next to the planet, almost.” I pulled out my purse to leave two credit chips on the table, signalling for him to stand up.
“Alright,” he said, pronouncing the word while breathing out.
I waved to the waiter so he’d know we were going. “Really, Adrian, for a man of science, you really are worrying too much about improbabilities.” He started protesting, but I didn’t listen. He was a sweet man. If I were younger, I might have considered dating him, but as it stood, there was a twenty-five year age difference between us. He was working towards his own PhD in Bio-Engineering right now. If I might say so myself, there was nobody else better than me he could learn from, but that was beside the point. We left the café and I called a cab, telling the driver to bring us back to the university.
Two weeks later.
If Pygar was one thing, then I would prefer using the words arid or dusty. The atmosphere was tenuously thin. Some had theorized that the remainder of the oxygen in the air had once come from vegetation that had grown on the pole parts of the planet, as archaeologists had found small amounts of oil there that could allude to fossilized wood and plant matter. In any case, this wasn’t really what I had come here for.
Pygar had a slightly tainted reputation since the year 800 A.S., given that it had been identified as the source of the Nomad infection that had swept into Rheinland and very nearly set into motion a chain of events that could have very well ended the existence of humanity within the Sirius Sector. Thankfully, there had been people braver than I had been. Really, thinking back those years, I actually appreciated the fact that the events of the Nomad War had barely touched the Corsair Empire at all. I had lived on Crete at the time, given that I had been born there. Maybe not the most comfortable place to grow up, but I was not one to dwell on such things.
Stepping down the ramp and into the hangar, I looked around. The indoor hangar pretty much reminded me of those she had seen on Sprague. The only difference here was that Pygar’s surface was prone to be ravaged by sandstorms that made any sort of unassisted human survival on the surface unfeasible. Adrian left after me, looking almost seasick. I chortled and he shot me a dirty look.
“Miss Martinez?” a man in lab coat asked me after we had distanced ourselves a few paces from the shuttle.
“That would be me,” I answered, waiting for the man to check his files and give us our identifications for our stay here. Given Pygar’s history, everyone was required to carry a valid identification with them at all times. Sporadic checks and checkpoints were set up at the fringes of where the research compounds connected, requiring people wanting to traverse the place to identify themselves every five hundred meters.
“And you must be Mr. Wight, then,” the man asked, and Adrian nodded. He handed us two electronic chip cards that were fastened on a chord that could be hung around ones neck. I looked at it, and found a picture of myself on it, together with name and pretty much everything else a regular ID card would have. I dimly wondered why we couldn’t just use our Bretonian passports, but my question was answered as soon as I touched the card with one hand.
A small green light lit up at the corner. “Fingerprints,” I stated, unimpressed. “Do we need to do retina scans as well? Do you want my pee, maybe?” I was only semi-serious in my complaints.
“Ma’am, I’m trying to do my work,” he replied, looking somewhere else as if wanting to leave.
I sighed. “I guess. Where can I find Dr. Julius?”
“Dr. Julius is currently at the excavation site C, together with his assistants,” the man answered, glad that I had stopped haranguing him. “Talk to the security personnel and they will lead you around the compounds.”
I nodded, and that was that. Looking around, I was definitely reminded of Sprague. Or at least, when Sprague hadn’t been terraformed to the point it was now. The hangar was relatively big, with at least four shuttles being able to comfortably be parked here. People were milling about, most wearing lab coats, others wearing blue uniforms that reminded me of police. Naturally, some security was required, given the immense value of the work done here.
And, well, the people working here also worth a lot. It’s not like I think people are not equal under the law, but I did believe that society could do without certain kinds of people. Losing even one of the minds at work here, for example, would be a bigger tragedy than some bum on the streets overdosing on the latest drug.
I motioned for Adrian to follow me as we approached one of the people in blue who seemed to have nothing to do besides standing around. I told him where we wanted to go and we were off. I couldn’t help but notice that he was limping while he walked ahead of us. Involuntarily, my mind wondered about the cause and came up with multiple ways of correcting it. I took a deep breath and continued walking.
“OCD again?” Adrian asked quietly by my side so the man before us wouldn’t hear, and I reluctantly nodded. “Just distract yourself. I’m sure there’ll be enough to keep you occupied when we’re there.”
I just nodded. I hated this. I hated the fact that this twenty five years younger man had to tell me to distract myself from my neurotic fits. My hands shook slightly as I put them into the pockets on my lab coat and started fiddling around with the keys I had in them.
Down an elevator we went, past at least twenty stories of this complex. I couldn’t even fathom how many people could realistically be housed here, but publically available information stated that it was at least a couple thousand. I tended to think that this was bull, simply because the sheer mass of this complex. One or two times, I glimpsed something that looked like a collapsed corridor or something and I turned to our guard.
“Do these cave ins happen often?” I asked, glad for the opportunity to distract myself further.
He turned to me slightly while we passed another story. “We’re already multiple hundreds of meters underground. The pressure is immense, and the older parts of the compound tend to destabilize when there’s an earthquake. We’ve requested more sturdy equipment to build everything, but passing Bretonia’s bureaucracy these days is impossible, especially with the Gallic War taking up all the capacities when it comes to steel production, et cetera.”
I looked at Adrian with a raised eyebrow. This was new to me. “I didn’t know the expedition had such chronic deficiencies in the means provided to them.”
“Well, up until now, there have been no deaths, but it is only a matter of time until someone will get hurt so badly that they won’t make it. We had an entire section cave in at some point. Luckily, nobody had been there at the time.”
The lift stopped and we moved out. The air was considerably colder down here. Occasional piles of stuff littered the corridor as we walked and I identified them as various ingredients used to repair. “What happened to that section?” I asked after we rounded a corner.
“Inaccessible now. Was supposed to be a medbay, since the one we have on level two is rather small. The expedition was never supposed to become this big, apparently, so the medbay there is only really equipped to handle a handful of people at one time.” I nodded again. From my perspective, it seemed like a real shame that Bretonia didn’t seem to be able to provide medics to help. After all, the only injuries I could see happen here were lacerations, broken bones, the occasional puncture wound. Lost limbs, maybe? Even a medicine student in the fourth semester could handle those.
“A real shame,” I answered, for lack of anything better to say, and that ended our conversation. I didn’t actually know how long we walked, but the talk had given me enough to mull over to not mind it terribly. Eventually, the corridor just, well, stopped. Instead, it gave way to something that looked like a natural cave inside the earth. Catwalks had been built in places to allow people to cross distances without fearing to impale themselves on some of the pointy rocks that jutted out from the ground like spears. All in all, this place seemed like a real death trap. It was dark, too, with the only light sources being glaring lights affixed to the catwalk. I’d say this cave could hold around the volume of a cruiser-sized vessel.
“The Doctor is down there. If there is anything else, I’ll be waiting in the corridor outside,” our guard told us, and Adrian nodded. I looked into the distance, where the catwalk seemed to slope down and eventually disappear deeper into the earth, forming stairs.
“Spooky,” Adrian whispered into my ear and I rolled my eyes, starting to walk ahead. On the way, I buttoned up my lab coat, trying to preserve some of the warmth of my body. They really could’ve made some effort to warn me about this. Eventually, I could hear the echoes of voices down below, and leaning over the railing slightly, I could make out people standing downstairs. Most of whom I did not recognize. Maybe half a dozen. Dr. Julius was distinct in the way I could see his brown hair bob up and down as he gestured with his hands. The man should’ve become a politician, I mused beside myself.
The embarrassment of needing to interrupt him in order to announce myself and Adrian was spared to me, because he raised a hand in my direction as he saw me. “Ah, Dr. Martinez!” he exclaimed, almost ecstatic. I cringed inwardly. Definitely a politician.
“It is nice to meet you again, too,” I replied, taking his offered hand. The assorted people around me eyed me weirdly, as if they couldn’t believe a Hispanic woman could know the capacity on the area of Xeno-Biology.
Dr. Julius was old. Older than me, in fact, which meant something. Being above seventy, but still possessing an ego large enough to fill this room, Julius spent nearly all of his actual earnings from his scientific work on beauty products. He dyed his hair, underwent regular therapy to counter the visible parts of the aging process about his body. Really, he looked like he was in his late twenties. Adrian had once confided in me, saying he found Dr. Julius exceedingly creepy, and fair enough, I could understand why he, given that he was a father, would find the thought of some old creep potentially dating his daughter creepy. My thoughts? I admired the work quite a lot. I never cared about money too much, as long as I could sustain myself. I could appreciate the work of biological manipulation Dr. Julius underwent. Now if only he was actually immortal…
“You’ve just come in the right moment to hear about our finds from last week. Drilling efforts have opened a new cave that we believe might have been a nest in which the Nomads hibernated for all those hundreds of years.”
I nodded. This did sound interesting. It might give us some important clues about their physiology, their needs. If we knew what they need to sustain themselves, we could start working on ways to either deprive them of their sources of sustenance, or we could try and devise a biological weapon that inhibits their bodies in space from metabolizing that particular source of sustenance, starving them.
“Mr. Wight, I imagine,” Dr. Julius said to Adrian and extended his hand to him, finally. Adrian shook it.
“Wouldn’t want to miss a chance to see this.”
And too see if I don’t fall into neurotic fits, I thought wryly, not voicing that, though. Nobody needed to know about that. It wasn’t like it inhibited my ability to work.
“Commendable, boy,” Julius’ voice boomed way too loud for my taste, echoing ever so slightly. “Alright, if we’re all here, then I guess there’s no reason why we should dally here any further.”
He lead the way, the entourage of archaeologists and biologists following him like ducks would their momma duck, or at least, that was the impression it made while we walked along another catwalk. Trailing my hand along the railing, I could tell that this one had been put up more recently than the others. Less grime, less use. I had no desire to walk directly after Julius, so I let the other people go first. For me, this wasn’t a competition, but I could guess that half of these people hoped to impress Julius so they could have him as their mentor while they promoted. I could understand that desire. I’d also sucked up to people like that. Not literally, though.
The walk was, thankfully, rather short. We came to a halt on a rounded platform that had been constructed in another cave that looked distinctly artificial. It had probably once been completely oval, though time and water had whetted away at the walls, creating crevices and nooks where parts of the stone had been knocked askew. That was not the most noticeable part, however. Looking around, the walls had holes that I could best liken to that of a honeycomb. There were alcoves created inside the wall, with the space inside being empty and dark. I looked down from the platform we stood on and noticed even more of these depressions in the ground. All in all, I would guess this room’s diameter to be about a hundred meters, maybe more.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Julius was the first to speak, addressing the assorted people. “This has been discovered in the aftermath of a recent earthquake that collapsed part of the cave that we just crossed to get here.” He gestured for the catwalk, that was leading through a collapsed part of the wall, judging by the rubble that was still strewn about. I dimly wondered how high the possibility was of all them getting caught up in a sudden cave in and dying.
“Initial examinations of the structure lead us to suspect that this room was artificially created, and no, we don’t just infer that from what we see with our eyes.” He withdrew a PDA from his lab coat and I rolled my eyes as everyone and their mother craned their necks to see what he wanted to show them.
“The walls of this cave have been whetted away so the angle of the curvature would sustain the maximum amount of pressure without compromising on the possible alcoves in the wall. We took samples of the stone and initial guesses are that the stone in this room was last heated to the point that it would be able to be formed around three hundred thousand years ago.”
I raised an eyebrow. That was interesting and all, but it didn’t really answer what I wanted to know. I raised a hand and Julius looked at me, apparently a bit distracted before he nodded and I spoke. “Why did the wall collapse? If this cave is that old, why did it not collapse earlier? It stands to reason that Pygar has been seismically active for at least half a million years now.”
He pointed at me. “Good question.” He turned to his PDA and showed another 3D display of this room, though this time, small Nomad ships were nestled — there really wasn’t a better word — inside the wall’s alcoves. “We believe that the room was actually stable only for as long as a significant weight rested on the grounds of these alcoves, because if we take them away in this simulation…” He trailed off, and pressed a button, prompting the Nomad ships to disappear. An overlay displayed the shifts in the center of gravity in the different parts of the wall, and I understood. Clever construction. The Nomads had used their ships as building blocks to keep this room stable while they hibernated. I mean, why not. It wasn’t like they could use them in this state.
“How did they get out, though?” I asked, feeling like I was stating the obvious.
“Well, that…” Julius began, picking up a flashlight from a small table nearby and walking over to the edge of the platform, putting one hand on the railing the other on the flashlight, and shone its cone of light below them.
I looked at where he pointed the light. A hole. “Like a drain,” he finished his thought. “We haven’t yet explored where this ‘drain’ leads, but we assume that it will probably lead outside at some point.” I could see that. The complex was closed off, so there was no way to test this without going down. The test where people identified whether cave paths led to the surface or not only worked if there were two points a draft of air could go. “That is secondary for now, though. What we are here to see is this cave in particular and its implications on Nomad physiology.”
With a click on a small handheld device, I switched the static image shown on the holoscreen behind her to one depicting a diagram. It showed a pie chart divided into four sections, each in a different colour. I went on to explain how certain traits within humanity’s gene code promoted certain features that were advantageous within certain regions. My favourite example of this was the darker skin tones that were more prevalent in the Hispanic folk than inside the houses, and that permitted for a higher resistance against afflictions like skin cancer. Up until this point, everyone was always on my side. Still, the controversial part about my views was still ahead.
“Not only are certain genetic makeups advantageous when dealing with environmental hazards, but it is very well possible that, from a Darwinist perspective, it is very likely that certain social structures are also actively promoted with a people being placed in a harsh environment.” As expected, several eyebrows went up. “What do I mean by that?” Another push of the handheld device and another image was shown, this time depicting tentative statistics alluding to the rate of certain crimes committed per capita in Corsair society as opposed to the Bretonian one. “Well, first I’ll tell you what I don’t mean. It has been said about me that I assume the existence of a ‘crime’ or ‘predator’ gene that is favoured Darwinistically in societies that exist within a perpetual state of distress. There is nothing to suggest something as to that extend would be true.”
With a laserpointer, I highlighted the discrepancies within the statistics. “As you can see, when it comes to per capita cases of what we would define as aggravated battery, Corsair males have a twenty times higher rate of being a suspect of the crime than a Bretonian.” There were single whispers within the crowd. I was quite sure they were wondering about my statistics. It was true that they were not publically known, or at least, not yet. I had spent quite a lot of time gathering that data, going so far as to return to Crete for a while. “People are quick to attribute things such as aggressiveness to things such as culture or upbringing. People are not comfortable with the idea that something as fundamental as one’s potential for violence could be hard wired, and indeed, Corsair culture is by far more patriarchal than that of most Bretonian colonies.”
I made a pause to take the glass in hand that stood on the podium before me to take a sip. My hand was steady. In my years, I had given many talks like that to scientific peers, and it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to their scrutiny. “A correlation between patriarchal ideas in society and the acceptance of violence has long since proven, thus the, albeit false, conclusion that this is the only factor when it comes to potential violence, is all too understandable. Men are even today still taught that any contact with another human is either violent or sexual.” Another click of the device, and this time, two DNA sequences were shown on the holoscreen. “The left sequence is taken from a Bretonian and the right one from a Corsair.” Several nucleotides on the Corsair strand were highlighted in one colour while the other DNA sequence had similar parts highlighted in a different one. I went on to explain how the highlighted parts of the Corsair DNA were responsible for the formation of certain brain regions and the creation of hormones at a later date, noting discrepancies between the two…
“I don’t rightly think they appreciated what I did,” I groused into a big cup of ice cream, staring at Adrian in front of me. We were sitting in a sweet little café roughly two blocks away from the university, watching taxis and other vehicles flit through the skies at irregular intervals.
“You were the one wanting to take a controversial topic for your paper,” he meant, taking a sip from his sundae. It had molten in the time we had been here, given that he was not a fast eater. He gave the sundae a sour look as if the dessert was responsible for him getting toothaches each time he ate something cold.
“You know it’d be easy for me to correct the nerves, right?” I asked, knowing what he would answer. It was always the same.
“I’m quite fine with my nerves as they are.”
I suppressed a snort. Looking to the window, I could see part of my reflection. My skin was darker than his, so it made making out details a bit more tricky.
“Hey, cheer up, you’re still one of the most valuable contributors they have,” he said after a few moments during which I hadn’t said anything. I blinked, noticing that I had been staring at my reflection for a while.
“For about twenty years now,” I replied, not really knowing what else to say. “I invented methods of genetic splicing, radiation therapy and decontamination technology that is used widely across Sirius, but I can’t convince a few cultural Marxists that they’re idiots.” I groaned. “It’d be way easier if I wouldn’t have to run to a lawyer each time I want to test a hypothesis. There are enough morbidly ill people in Bretonia, especially with the war with Gallia. So what if I didn’t test anything before? I can’t test anything if I don’t get the chance to test anything.”
“You should probably take a break,” Adrian murmured under his breath, pushing the sundae away.
“Maybe next time I replace anything related to serotonin production in you wi-“ I took a deep breath. I was way too easily annoyed. “Yes, you’re right.”
“So you’re going to cancel the trip to Pygar?” he asked hopefully, and I gave him a flat look.
“Look, it’s not like I’m going to suffer huge amounts of stress there, alright? I’ll just go there, listen to some old people ramble about xenobiology and bugger off again.” I sounded almost apologetic, I noticed, though I didn’t mind.
“Teresa, you-“
“No, really, it’s fine,” I said, trying to sound as reassuring as I could. It wasn’t like I’d actually collapse from stress or anything. “It is just a dead planet. Freeport 9 is directly next to the planet, almost.” I pulled out my purse to leave two credit chips on the table, signalling for him to stand up.
“Alright,” he said, pronouncing the word while breathing out.
I waved to the waiter so he’d know we were going. “Really, Adrian, for a man of science, you really are worrying too much about improbabilities.” He started protesting, but I didn’t listen. He was a sweet man. If I were younger, I might have considered dating him, but as it stood, there was a twenty-five year age difference between us. He was working towards his own PhD in Bio-Engineering right now. If I might say so myself, there was nobody else better than me he could learn from, but that was beside the point. We left the café and I called a cab, telling the driver to bring us back to the university.
Two weeks later.
If Pygar was one thing, then I would prefer using the words arid or dusty. The atmosphere was tenuously thin. Some had theorized that the remainder of the oxygen in the air had once come from vegetation that had grown on the pole parts of the planet, as archaeologists had found small amounts of oil there that could allude to fossilized wood and plant matter. In any case, this wasn’t really what I had come here for.
Pygar had a slightly tainted reputation since the year 800 A.S., given that it had been identified as the source of the Nomad infection that had swept into Rheinland and very nearly set into motion a chain of events that could have very well ended the existence of humanity within the Sirius Sector. Thankfully, there had been people braver than I had been. Really, thinking back those years, I actually appreciated the fact that the events of the Nomad War had barely touched the Corsair Empire at all. I had lived on Crete at the time, given that I had been born there. Maybe not the most comfortable place to grow up, but I was not one to dwell on such things.
Stepping down the ramp and into the hangar, I looked around. The indoor hangar pretty much reminded me of those she had seen on Sprague. The only difference here was that Pygar’s surface was prone to be ravaged by sandstorms that made any sort of unassisted human survival on the surface unfeasible. Adrian left after me, looking almost seasick. I chortled and he shot me a dirty look.
“Miss Martinez?” a man in lab coat asked me after we had distanced ourselves a few paces from the shuttle.
“That would be me,” I answered, waiting for the man to check his files and give us our identifications for our stay here. Given Pygar’s history, everyone was required to carry a valid identification with them at all times. Sporadic checks and checkpoints were set up at the fringes of where the research compounds connected, requiring people wanting to traverse the place to identify themselves every five hundred meters.
“And you must be Mr. Wight, then,” the man asked, and Adrian nodded. He handed us two electronic chip cards that were fastened on a chord that could be hung around ones neck. I looked at it, and found a picture of myself on it, together with name and pretty much everything else a regular ID card would have. I dimly wondered why we couldn’t just use our Bretonian passports, but my question was answered as soon as I touched the card with one hand.
A small green light lit up at the corner. “Fingerprints,” I stated, unimpressed. “Do we need to do retina scans as well? Do you want my pee, maybe?” I was only semi-serious in my complaints.
“Ma’am, I’m trying to do my work,” he replied, looking somewhere else as if wanting to leave.
I sighed. “I guess. Where can I find Dr. Julius?”
“Dr. Julius is currently at the excavation site C, together with his assistants,” the man answered, glad that I had stopped haranguing him. “Talk to the security personnel and they will lead you around the compounds.”
I nodded, and that was that. Looking around, I was definitely reminded of Sprague. Or at least, when Sprague hadn’t been terraformed to the point it was now. The hangar was relatively big, with at least four shuttles being able to comfortably be parked here. People were milling about, most wearing lab coats, others wearing blue uniforms that reminded me of police. Naturally, some security was required, given the immense value of the work done here.
And, well, the people working here also worth a lot. It’s not like I think people are not equal under the law, but I did believe that society could do without certain kinds of people. Losing even one of the minds at work here, for example, would be a bigger tragedy than some bum on the streets overdosing on the latest drug.
I motioned for Adrian to follow me as we approached one of the people in blue who seemed to have nothing to do besides standing around. I told him where we wanted to go and we were off. I couldn’t help but notice that he was limping while he walked ahead of us. Involuntarily, my mind wondered about the cause and came up with multiple ways of correcting it. I took a deep breath and continued walking.
“OCD again?” Adrian asked quietly by my side so the man before us wouldn’t hear, and I reluctantly nodded. “Just distract yourself. I’m sure there’ll be enough to keep you occupied when we’re there.”
I just nodded. I hated this. I hated the fact that this twenty five years younger man had to tell me to distract myself from my neurotic fits. My hands shook slightly as I put them into the pockets on my lab coat and started fiddling around with the keys I had in them.
Down an elevator we went, past at least twenty stories of this complex. I couldn’t even fathom how many people could realistically be housed here, but publically available information stated that it was at least a couple thousand. I tended to think that this was bull, simply because the sheer mass of this complex. One or two times, I glimpsed something that looked like a collapsed corridor or something and I turned to our guard.
“Do these cave ins happen often?” I asked, glad for the opportunity to distract myself further.
He turned to me slightly while we passed another story. “We’re already multiple hundreds of meters underground. The pressure is immense, and the older parts of the compound tend to destabilize when there’s an earthquake. We’ve requested more sturdy equipment to build everything, but passing Bretonia’s bureaucracy these days is impossible, especially with the Gallic War taking up all the capacities when it comes to steel production, et cetera.”
I looked at Adrian with a raised eyebrow. This was new to me. “I didn’t know the expedition had such chronic deficiencies in the means provided to them.”
“Well, up until now, there have been no deaths, but it is only a matter of time until someone will get hurt so badly that they won’t make it. We had an entire section cave in at some point. Luckily, nobody had been there at the time.”
The lift stopped and we moved out. The air was considerably colder down here. Occasional piles of stuff littered the corridor as we walked and I identified them as various ingredients used to repair. “What happened to that section?” I asked after we rounded a corner.
“Inaccessible now. Was supposed to be a medbay, since the one we have on level two is rather small. The expedition was never supposed to become this big, apparently, so the medbay there is only really equipped to handle a handful of people at one time.” I nodded again. From my perspective, it seemed like a real shame that Bretonia didn’t seem to be able to provide medics to help. After all, the only injuries I could see happen here were lacerations, broken bones, the occasional puncture wound. Lost limbs, maybe? Even a medicine student in the fourth semester could handle those.
“A real shame,” I answered, for lack of anything better to say, and that ended our conversation. I didn’t actually know how long we walked, but the talk had given me enough to mull over to not mind it terribly. Eventually, the corridor just, well, stopped. Instead, it gave way to something that looked like a natural cave inside the earth. Catwalks had been built in places to allow people to cross distances without fearing to impale themselves on some of the pointy rocks that jutted out from the ground like spears. All in all, this place seemed like a real death trap. It was dark, too, with the only light sources being glaring lights affixed to the catwalk. I’d say this cave could hold around the volume of a cruiser-sized vessel.
“The Doctor is down there. If there is anything else, I’ll be waiting in the corridor outside,” our guard told us, and Adrian nodded. I looked into the distance, where the catwalk seemed to slope down and eventually disappear deeper into the earth, forming stairs.
“Spooky,” Adrian whispered into my ear and I rolled my eyes, starting to walk ahead. On the way, I buttoned up my lab coat, trying to preserve some of the warmth of my body. They really could’ve made some effort to warn me about this. Eventually, I could hear the echoes of voices down below, and leaning over the railing slightly, I could make out people standing downstairs. Most of whom I did not recognize. Maybe half a dozen. Dr. Julius was distinct in the way I could see his brown hair bob up and down as he gestured with his hands. The man should’ve become a politician, I mused beside myself.
The embarrassment of needing to interrupt him in order to announce myself and Adrian was spared to me, because he raised a hand in my direction as he saw me. “Ah, Dr. Martinez!” he exclaimed, almost ecstatic. I cringed inwardly. Definitely a politician.
“It is nice to meet you again, too,” I replied, taking his offered hand. The assorted people around me eyed me weirdly, as if they couldn’t believe a Hispanic woman could know the capacity on the area of Xeno-Biology.
Dr. Julius was old. Older than me, in fact, which meant something. Being above seventy, but still possessing an ego large enough to fill this room, Julius spent nearly all of his actual earnings from his scientific work on beauty products. He dyed his hair, underwent regular therapy to counter the visible parts of the aging process about his body. Really, he looked like he was in his late twenties. Adrian had once confided in me, saying he found Dr. Julius exceedingly creepy, and fair enough, I could understand why he, given that he was a father, would find the thought of some old creep potentially dating his daughter creepy. My thoughts? I admired the work quite a lot. I never cared about money too much, as long as I could sustain myself. I could appreciate the work of biological manipulation Dr. Julius underwent. Now if only he was actually immortal…
“You’ve just come in the right moment to hear about our finds from last week. Drilling efforts have opened a new cave that we believe might have been a nest in which the Nomads hibernated for all those hundreds of years.”
I nodded. This did sound interesting. It might give us some important clues about their physiology, their needs. If we knew what they need to sustain themselves, we could start working on ways to either deprive them of their sources of sustenance, or we could try and devise a biological weapon that inhibits their bodies in space from metabolizing that particular source of sustenance, starving them.
“Mr. Wight, I imagine,” Dr. Julius said to Adrian and extended his hand to him, finally. Adrian shook it.
“Wouldn’t want to miss a chance to see this.”
And too see if I don’t fall into neurotic fits, I thought wryly, not voicing that, though. Nobody needed to know about that. It wasn’t like it inhibited my ability to work.
“Commendable, boy,” Julius’ voice boomed way too loud for my taste, echoing ever so slightly. “Alright, if we’re all here, then I guess there’s no reason why we should dally here any further.”
He lead the way, the entourage of archaeologists and biologists following him like ducks would their momma duck, or at least, that was the impression it made while we walked along another catwalk. Trailing my hand along the railing, I could tell that this one had been put up more recently than the others. Less grime, less use. I had no desire to walk directly after Julius, so I let the other people go first. For me, this wasn’t a competition, but I could guess that half of these people hoped to impress Julius so they could have him as their mentor while they promoted. I could understand that desire. I’d also sucked up to people like that. Not literally, though.
The walk was, thankfully, rather short. We came to a halt on a rounded platform that had been constructed in another cave that looked distinctly artificial. It had probably once been completely oval, though time and water had whetted away at the walls, creating crevices and nooks where parts of the stone had been knocked askew. That was not the most noticeable part, however. Looking around, the walls had holes that I could best liken to that of a honeycomb. There were alcoves created inside the wall, with the space inside being empty and dark. I looked down from the platform we stood on and noticed even more of these depressions in the ground. All in all, I would guess this room’s diameter to be about a hundred meters, maybe more.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Julius was the first to speak, addressing the assorted people. “This has been discovered in the aftermath of a recent earthquake that collapsed part of the cave that we just crossed to get here.” He gestured for the catwalk, that was leading through a collapsed part of the wall, judging by the rubble that was still strewn about. I dimly wondered how high the possibility was of all them getting caught up in a sudden cave in and dying.
“Initial examinations of the structure lead us to suspect that this room was artificially created, and no, we don’t just infer that from what we see with our eyes.” He withdrew a PDA from his lab coat and I rolled my eyes as everyone and their mother craned their necks to see what he wanted to show them.
“The walls of this cave have been whetted away so the angle of the curvature would sustain the maximum amount of pressure without compromising on the possible alcoves in the wall. We took samples of the stone and initial guesses are that the stone in this room was last heated to the point that it would be able to be formed around three hundred thousand years ago.”
I raised an eyebrow. That was interesting and all, but it didn’t really answer what I wanted to know. I raised a hand and Julius looked at me, apparently a bit distracted before he nodded and I spoke. “Why did the wall collapse? If this cave is that old, why did it not collapse earlier? It stands to reason that Pygar has been seismically active for at least half a million years now.”
He pointed at me. “Good question.” He turned to his PDA and showed another 3D display of this room, though this time, small Nomad ships were nestled — there really wasn’t a better word — inside the wall’s alcoves. “We believe that the room was actually stable only for as long as a significant weight rested on the grounds of these alcoves, because if we take them away in this simulation…” He trailed off, and pressed a button, prompting the Nomad ships to disappear. An overlay displayed the shifts in the center of gravity in the different parts of the wall, and I understood. Clever construction. The Nomads had used their ships as building blocks to keep this room stable while they hibernated. I mean, why not. It wasn’t like they could use them in this state.
“How did they get out, though?” I asked, feeling like I was stating the obvious.
“Well, that…” Julius began, picking up a flashlight from a small table nearby and walking over to the edge of the platform, putting one hand on the railing the other on the flashlight, and shone its cone of light below them.
I looked at where he pointed the light. A hole. “Like a drain,” he finished his thought. “We haven’t yet explored where this ‘drain’ leads, but we assume that it will probably lead outside at some point.” I could see that. The complex was closed off, so there was no way to test this without going down. The test where people identified whether cave paths led to the surface or not only worked if there were two points a draft of air could go. “That is secondary for now, though. What we are here to see is this cave in particular and its implications on Nomad physiology.”