And All The Stars A Grave. Read online

  AND ALL THE STARS A GRAVE.

  GREG CURTIS.

  Copyright 2011 by Greg Curtis.

  Kindle Edition.

  Dedication.

  This book is dedicated to my mother Ruth Curtis and my sister Lucille Curtis, my biggest supporters, harshest critics and all round cheer team, and without whom this book would not have been written. It’s also dedicated to my father Allen Curtis, gone too soon but not forgotten.

  Chapter One.

  “Have I done something wrong?” It seemed a reasonable enough question from Daryl’s perspective, though he belatedly realised the Force could easily use it against him. Ignorance wasn’t after all just ‘no excuse’ for the interstellar community’s police; it could just as easily be a confession. Especially when it was a mere human on the receiving end of their questioning. But he still thought it a reasonable question given what they were telling him.

  To be inspected by the Interstellar Community’s Police Force was normal enough for any off world researcher, and he’d already been through the procedure half a dozen times or more. It was a relatively painless procedure that involved a small Force shuttle craft landing on whatever planet he was currently excavating and then sending out a detachment of officers to check through his cargo, records and permits. Then, after a few hours of being sneered at, personally, professionally and of course racially they generally left to annoy some other unfortunates.

  But in this instance the “shuttle” he was informed that was about to land was an entire Force cruiser with a compliment of surely many hundreds of officers all ostensibly just to carry out a complete audit. Notwithstanding that he was then ordered, as if he was a true citizen of the interstellar community directly under their jurisdiction instead of a member of a back wood’s non member species reviled across the galaxy, to present himself for inspection in mere minutes. No this was not normal. It was way over the top.

  Of course there was still nothing he could do except comply. Even if he’d had the power to flout their rules, his own people would expect it of him. Actually they’d demand it. Full cooperation with the Force, regardless. That was their policy. It was the only one possible given the Community’s advanced technology and pre-eminent status throughout all the space humanity might one day ever dream of travelling. It didn’t help that the Community apparently detested all human kind. Even a small token resistance on his part could have serious consequences for mankind.

  One day his people could only hope that the Interstellar Community might change their view or at least relent in their disapproval, allowing mankind the same basic rights and freedoms as the rest of the sector. Until then they simply had to keep their heads down, obey every edict given them, and ride the bad weather out. But it was a storm that had already been raging for nearly a hundred years, for no known reason and with no end in sight.

  “Time will tell.” The communication was cut off somewhat curtly before he had any chance to ask any more questions, as no doubt the Myran officer had intended. His people weren’t exactly known for their polite chitchat. They might look like friendly, orange, leathery pug dogs that had evolved to walk on two legs but their personalities were more like those of short-tempered crocodiles with toothaches. Extremely lacking in tolerance, and likely to snap at the slightest provocation.

  “You know, maybe you lot were the lucky ones!” It was probably a stupid thing to say, especially to several dozen desiccated alien corpses all still lying perfectly preserved in the cots where they’d died, but nearly a year on his own had left Daryl with some bad habits. Talking to the dead was only the beginning of them. It was when he sometimes imagined them talking back, or worse wandering around in the darkness beyond the reach of his lights, that he knew he’d been away too long. And when the smell of thousand year old dust and dried up lichen, and the gloom of an underground cavern began to seem welcoming, it was probably worse than he knew. But such were the hazards of his profession.

  Knowing he had absolutely no choice - not if he wanted to keep his ticket as a practising interstellar archaeologist, even for the few dozen dried up and long since dead systems humans were allowed to explore - Daryl quickly gathered up Scratch who was sleeping as usual on the warm top of the scanner bed, together with a few expensive tools as well just in case, and got back in the bug. It was already pointed at the tunnel he’d bored to reach this chamber, and the surface beyond. He didn’t even stop to load more than the few artefacts he’d already collected on to the bug. They had value, but being late to greet the Force would be taken as a black mark against him before they’d even begun their investigation. Besides, he could always come back for them, he hoped. Unless he actually had broken one of their never ending and utterly obscure rules. In that case he might not come back at all.

  That would be sad. Already in this underground bunker and many others he’d excavated over the previous ten months, he’d managed to learn more about the ancient Navidians than had ever been known before, and captured quite a lot of their ancient technology as well. The Sparrow’s hold was filled with artefacts, her databases crammed to the limit with information. It was a good dig, and he didn’t want it to be over before his time was up.

  Clicking the bug into gear he let its powerful electric turbines and unbreakable treads rip the rock floor apart underneath him, as he took off like a bat out of hell. Something he was normally careful to avoid as he tried to preserve his dig sites. But this was an emergency. The bug might only have a top speed of fifty or so klicks, but with its massive power it could reach it incredibly quickly, even if the stone path underneath it didn’t survive so well. He knew he needed to use every one of its eight thousand kilowatts to get back before the cruiser landed.

  The thousands of kilowatts of grunt soon had the bug racing through the darkened tunnel he’d drilled into the solid rock above to reach his dig and in short order he could see daylight ahead as he approached the tunnel opening. Once on the surface though he still had five klicks to go across some of the bleakest landscape on any world he’d ever seen. Even those with no air. Yet this one actually had an earth-like atmosphere, slightly low in oxygen and somewhat too high in radioactive and heavy metal dusts, but quite breathable for a while, with filters.

  It had once had life as well. Highly advanced life. Highly demented, space addled life but still technologically advanced. No longer though. Nothing lived here any more, at least not on the surface of Navid Two. Even deep down in some of the sites he’d excavated over the previous year, nothing bigger than small rodents survived, living on pasty coloured mushrooms, and each other. A chilling testimony to the shear destructiveness of whatever unearthly weapons the natives had launched against themselves so many thousands of years ago. They had practically sterilized their entire world in their madness. And as far as he could tell the weapons they’d used were neither nuclear nor plasma based. There was simply no radioactive trace of such weapons. Besides, the extensive crust fracturing suggested strongly some sort of gravetic weapon, as they’d literally torn their world apart under their feet.

  It must have been a horrible way to commit suicide. Within days of landing on the world he’d put together a complete topographical map of the entire globe, and with some careful guesswork he’d had the computer work backwards from the wreckage and geologic anomalies and plotted out what he thought the last days of the Navidian’s must have been like. It hadn’t in the end, been very pleasant. Every single city on the planet had had the core underneath it suddenly fracture, with the result of titanic earthquakes and unprecedented volcanic activity all under the local’s very feet.

  Not many would have survived the initial collapse of the cities, given that the magnitude of the quakes wouldn’t have left
a single building standing in any of the cities and nothing more than a single story high structure anywhere on the rest of the planet. Of those who did, they would then have had to escape numerous other threats. Lava flows, many of which were a hundred or more klicks long, and which must have flowed at nearly the speed of sound. Poisonous gas clouds from the volcanoes that would have settled in the valleys and lowlands suffocating one and all. Fireballs without number, thrown in all directions for hundreds of klicks. Dust and ash clouds that had surely covered the entire world for centuries. It had been a spectacularly violent end. In fact such was the force of some of the eruptions that some smaller rocks had actually made low orbit and might never come down.

  The few survivors of that initial destruction he had uncovered had headed for the remote areas, much as he’d expected. The towns and farming communities furthest from the volcanoes. And then of course, they’d found their way into caves and underground shelters, to try and survive the apocalypse. But he suspected there would have been very few survivors to begin with, and they had been unprepared for the true destructive power of their weapons. Even in the most remote shelters, they would have been no safer.

  Literally over a thousand volcanoes simultaneously erupting, sending untold billions of tons of ash and sulphur into the air had created their own form of nuclear winter. One that had lasted more than a century. And to make things worse, the ash when it settled was toxic. Filled with heavy metals and radioactive elements from the planet’s molten core, it had poisoned the land and the sea, causing the extinction of nearly every single life form on the planet. Those that didn’t die of the poisons themselves, starved as their food sources died out. Oxygen supplies too had suffered, as the sea life, which as on Earth generated most of it, died off. Over the millennia some of it had recovered, either adapting to the poisons or forming more primitive ecosystems in the less polluted regions, and the air once more had enough oxygen for a human to survive on. But even now, it was not what it had been, and never would be again.

  Here and there he’d found the equivalents of bomb shelters, all hidden deep beneath the larger towns, but most had also been devastated by the quakes, which knew no boundaries, and which had likely continued for many years. And even the shelters hadn’t been safe. From the looks of them, many had been built hastily and provisions stored in them had been less than adequate for the times ahead.

  Those few shelters that had remained relatively unscathed through the geological upheaval, all told the same depressing tale, as their occupants died one by one. Usually when their air, water or food ran out. Children too. A few, a very few had prepared their shelters well. Well enough to take them through many years underground and to leave lengthy records of their demise. But still not enough to let them survive the many centuries they would need. Sooner or later they’d also had to surface, and that was the last record he’d ever found of them. None had survived.

  It was depressing coming across so many bodies, all usually well preserved by the dryness of the air, and to know that these were surely, for the most part the innocents. The ones who had never pressed the buttons, had probably not even lived in the cities, but still had paid the ultimate price. It was made worse by the fact that so many were children, their mummified remains often lying in their parents arms as if they were merely sleeping. But they would never wake up, and he couldn’t even bury them. Even if it hadn’t been against basic archaeological principals, he didn’t know their customs regarding death. To bury their corpses might be sacrilege to them. He could only hope their remains served as a message to other races. A warning of what such madness could bring.

  The only positive things to come out of his ten months here were his finds. The Navidian’s had had some interesting technology for all their insanity, and in his nearly ten months on the world, he’d unearthed a brand new design of gravetic power plant with some significant advantages over his people’s current models, updated engine designs, and several new ore mining techniques. They might have been criminally insane but that didn’t mean they were dumb.

  The world was also quite safe for him to work on. If there was one advantage to working on a dead world, it was that he didn’t have to worry about being attacked by the local animal life, or diseases. Nor did he have to avoid any tough patches of vegetation, or try and plot a way through forests. There were none. The whole place was just rock and dirt. And most of the dirt had long since settled by the effects of gravity, water and time until it had become almost concrete. Much of the world was simply an endless plain of flat dead muddy concrete, with a few rocks sticking out here and there for contrast. Perfect for driving to a meeting with the Force.

  Once he’d escaped the tunnel, Daryl planted boot and quickly had the bug at top speed as he headed directly for his ship. The Mud Bug as he’d christened it, was a strange vehicle; in reality it was two vehicles connected at their tails by an articulated power coupling, so the bug actually had two fronts and no back. Like the ‘Push me pull you’ he’d been told stories of as a child except that this was no fairy creature. It was a hard working tank. Powerful, flexible and utilitarian. Articulated in the middle the huge advantage of its design was that it could snake through tunnels and never need to turn around. Reach a tight dead end and all he had to do was go to the other cockpit, put the bug in reverse - though in reality it had no true reverse - and drive.

  Each end was a self contained little land crab, capable of keeping him alive even on an airless world for months. Though not in comfort. The bug might be three metres wide and fifteen long, but it was less than two metres high, and inside he couldn’t stand up without brushing his head on the ceiling. But it was an invaluable research tool, capable of going damn near anywhere, drilling through solid rock, scanning for everything from stray energy emissions to rock structures, and with built in shields that could have saved him from a cave in or animal attack. Over the years it had become probably his most valuable asset as it got him into and out of any number of hairy situations.

  Soon he was coming up fast on the Sparrow, sitting alone on the planet’s surface, and as always the sight of his ship brought a smile to his face.

  She was a small, modified space yacht Earth Fleet had lent him years before. In design she was laid out like any other ship of her class. Three reasonably sized cabins, two bathrooms and a small kitchen lay behind the cockpit and flight control centre, making up the top level. The larger middle level housed the two small labs, a galley cum lounge big enough for six to be seated comfortably for dinner or entertainment, and the access way to the engine bays at the ship’s rear. The bottom level was the only level with a four metre stud height. It had the simple weapons control at the front and two good sized holds behind it with the front one having a hydraulic ramp especially for the bug to be lowered and raised into the ship. Finally, the back part of the ship housed the main engine bay.

  Unlike many other ships, the Sparrow had some major design differences from most true space vessels. The most obvious was her shape, as she had a true aerodynamic profile complete with stubby, retractable wings. The Sparrow did not simply land and take off in atmosphere; she could fly and manoeuvre, almost like a plane, allowing her the luxury of scouting and finding a suitable landing spot on worlds without space ports. She might not be a graceful flyer, but what she had was a major advantage over any larger Earth Fleet vessel.

  She also possessed the very latest in Earth information technology with each cabin having a direct link up to the two main computers, while the labs themselves possessed the very latest super computers designed. With the advent of flexible process flow coupling, the ships other computer, the flight nav com unit, could also act as a back up to research computers when idle, while in an emergency, the research computers could double for it in turn.

  Only seventy-eight metres long, the Sparrow wasn’t a big ship by any stretch of the imagination, and over time she tended to become somewhat claustrophobic even for one person. But she was home, his security on an
alien world, and his ticket off it. Besides, to add to his comfort, he had set up a small house next to it when he’d first arrived on Navid Two, as he always did on a new world; a good sized collapsible prefab unit in which he could spread out and live comfortably. After nearly a year on the world, it had become more truly a home than even his ship, as it had many times before.

  From the outside it looked like nothing more than a giant tin shack in the middle of a dusty wasteland, but that belied its essence. Inside it had only one bedroom, but it was large enough that he never needed to feel claustrophobic. It had a large lounge, massive hydroponics section and even larger lab, which he’d slowly moved his equipment into. Most important of all to him all it had a feeling of space, imparted by its open plan design. It too was a haven from the alien nature of the world, and should he ever need it, an emergency life support station.

  Rebuilding his house was the first thing he did whenever he arrived on a new world, and dismantling it, the last act before he left. He might soon be dismantling it again though he realised, two months early, and before he’d completed his study. What the hell could the Force want with him? Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

  As he approached the Sparrow, Daryl could see the ship landing and almost slowed down in shock as he recognised the vessel’s shape. There was something about that brick like ship that any human would know if only in their nightmares. It was a full Force battle ship. The same type of space going monster that enforced the embargo upon Earth, regulating traffic flow, making sure nothing was smuggled through, and checked, double checked and then triple checked every movement. The same sort that could, if circumstances required it, destroy the Earth’s entire navy in a heartbeat. The only difference was that this one was landing on a planet, something he hadn’t until that moment realised that they could do. He doubted the Earth Fleet admirals had either.