Readyworld
fiction by michael werneburg
The girl looked good, if you could get past the look of terminal boredom and frustration. Given my own treatment here I could only imagine what she went through on a regular basis. Boy I wanted to give her a wink.
The young woman followed me into the hatch when it opened, and we stood there as the tube withdrew into the lock above. We had a view up the inside of the tube of the inner hatch approaching, then the obligatory blast of plasma, and the inner hatch opened. Waiting inside was another expressionless figure in a suit. This time, it was a man.
He led me down the corridor that led out of the lock's inner chamber and I followed. Soon he presented me with yet another hatch, this time open. I stepped forward. It opened, and I was treated to a view of a dark room filled with more people in uniforms. To my surprise, there were a number of civilians present as well.
The civilians that I recognized—and there were three or four—were all scientists from around the site, of course. Those I knew were all tied up with the military staff at the moment, looking at various displays around the room. To see them working together was odd, but what the hell—anything goes on a frontier.
I looked at the displays. Some showed scenes from around the planet. Others showed charts, or stills of odd-looking animals. One showed a flying animal that had evidently just caught a fish. This last was a nice shot, actually; nicely framed.
No one seemed to be paying me much attention, so I walked over to the image of the flying creature. It looked like a cross between a bird and a scaly green bat. Leathery wings, a long beak, a head covered in thick skin or scales, lots of dark green fuzz or feathers. Awful looking, really. In all my time on Readyworld, I hadn't seen anything flying, and was shocked to learn they existed. I turned back to look at the gathered people, and wondered what I was doing here.
To answer that question, the hatchway opened again and several people marched in together in a tight bundle. All conversation in the room died. The new group—four men and a woman, all in senior military insignia—were led by a figure that I knew. From his photo and the hints I'd had to his physical presence when we spoke, I could see that this must be Major Weaver. He strode to a horizontal work surface in the middle of the room, and said, "Gather around, please."
One of the others from the new group, a man wearing white gloves, set an irregular chunk of glass on the work surface in front of the Major. A light source from somewhere fell on the irregular chunk before him, and he said, "We have a new development. Earlier this morning, a flying reconnaissance drone found this in the third peninsula on the second continent. A position—can we have it on a display, Captain?"
"Yes, a position marked there," he said, with a gesture. I turned and saw a map comprised of irregular blue and beige patches. There was a red dot marking a spot halfway 'round the world. I glanced back at the glass chunk and then at the map. Had they found a new alien site?
The Major started talking about perimeters and quadrants and monitoring details, and I tuned him out. The 'second continent', it seemed, was the name for the long, semi-circular stretch of mountainous highlands and kilometer-high waterfalls that formed the western perimeter of The Great Eastern Ocean.
The third peninsula was a huge finger of land about the size of Scandinavia that pointed away from the ocean in the general direction of the continent I was standing on. I turned back to the table, and saw the glass sitting in its pool of light, and realized that this was my 'artifact'. I pulled off my backpack, and plucked out my field unit and a big pair of goggles. The goggles had all kinds of optical equipment and a field generator. It would help me look into the 'glass', and inspect its internal structure at various wavelengths. The sensor would tell me everything else.
I squeezed between two of the figures in suits, and crouched down next to the work surface. I heard the Major pause in his lecture, and looked up.
"You're the materials hotshot," he stated.
"You don't mind if I get to this?" I asked.
With a slight narrowing of the eyes that suggested he was re-appraising me, he shook his head. I set the sensor unit down next to the irregular bulk of glass, which I could now see had some bits of rock attached to it. It looked as if it had been plucked right out of bedrock. Interesting! An alien communications port, perhaps? Or a traffic signal? As I set the sensor to work, I put on the goggles and began the usual routine. For the next few minutes, I'd be watching a bizarre light show as the goggles blasted the sample with all kinds of radiation, and fed back the results as visible light.