Return to Krell

After a few steps the structure came into view, emerging from the gloom as its white surface reflected the light. It looked like it was built from giant, white cubes with rounded edges. There were no visible windows or doors on its surface. There wasn't much of anything in fact, the nearest face of the building was featureless besides the gunk that was clinging to it.

There were water weeds growing all over it, lichens and what looked like clusters of barnacles, it had clearly been left in disrepair for a very long period of time. Colonies of crustaceans seemed to have made their homes around its base, where the silt and mud deposited over the eons was slowly burying it. It almost looked like it was sinking into the ground, but she knew that all of this had built up over centuries.

She reached the first building and began to circle it, searching for an opening that would let her inside, referencing her sonar scan as she went. The wireframe model showed six such buildings, all in irregular sizes and linked by tubes. If the tubes were made from glass, might Sleethe be able to break into them?

One such tube came into view as she rounded the first of the featureless blocks, appearing from the wall and vanishing into the adjacent building. The silt had built up here too, the glass tube was half buried in muck, tiny crabs milling about in the forest of weeds that had sprung up around it. Unfortunately the glass wasn't so much as cracked, it was likely made from supermaterials that humans hadn't even discovered yet.

Lena checked her timer. Two and a half minutes had elapsed.

Sleethe disturbed the weeds as he swam nearby, hovering over the installation and turning his long snout this way and that, searching. He must know what she was trying to accomplish, scouting for an entrance from above.

Her feet were starting to get painfully cold. Walking in this mud was like wading through snow, and so she paddled a little higher. The exercise warmed her, but too much exertion would expend her oxygen supply very quickly. She couldn't see any way inside, would all of this effort be for nothing?

Sleethe abruptly shot out of view, vanishing into the murky water as the powerful strokes of his tail disturbed a shoal of nearby fish. When he reemerged again, he was heading straight for her, and he swooped down to pluck her off the ground. He held her in his arms as he swam her up and over the installation, Lena gazing down at it as he carried her along. The third block of the structure was in the shadow of the underwater cliff that had shown up on her scan. The rock face extended up thirty or forty feet towards the surface. As Sleethe swam her lower, she noticed a pile of rubble, and her eyes lit up.

It was a rockslide! At some point part of the cliff had collapsed, raining large boulders down on the Broker base. Even at this distance she could make out where the building had buckled under the stress, but if it had torn an opening in the material, then it was buried under the subsequent buildup of mud and silt.

Apparently their advanced materials weren't so advanced that they were immune to the slow advance of nature. It might have taken a lot longer to decay than a human structure would have, but the planet was slowly reclaiming it.

Sleethe deposited her beside the pile of rocks, and they both began to inspect it, trying to find a break in the white material where Lena might slip through. It almost looked like the building was made of putty or soft plastic, it had dented inward and sagged where the rocks had crushed it. It wasn't made of anything that Lena could recognize. Maybe it would be worth taking some samples back with her, perhaps the UAS could study its composition and find a way to reproduce it.

Finally she located a space between two rocks where she could see inside the structure, pulling away handfuls of silt and small stones as she peered in. It looked the same inside as out, matte white walls with no discernible details. The tear looked large enough for her to get inside, but the boulders that were blocking her way must have been five or six hundred pounds apiece, there was no way for her to move them. She waved Sleethe over and he swam up beside her, immediately realizing what she was trying to accomplish. Lena took a few steps back and floated nearby as he braced his feet against the lakebed, his massive biceps bulging beneath his leathery skin as he hooked his hands under the nearest rock and strained to lift it.

Even underwater these boulders were incredibly heavy, but Sleethe was as strong as ten men, succeeding in lifting it off the pile. A stream of bubbles trailed from his nostrils as he cast it aside, its impact shaking the ground beneath Lena's feet. It landed in the mud and sank a few inches, its considerable weight easily apparent. She watched in awe as he moved on to the next one, even larger than the first. They were stacked on top of the building's sagging wall almost like a pyramid, the joints between them filled in with mud and silt that had accumulated there over time. They had been here long enough that some of them had barnacles and weeds clinging to their irregular surfaces.

Lena could see Sleethe's muscles ripple beneath his armored scales as he lifted the next boulder, bracing his legs like a strongman lifting a barbell. It must have been half a ton of rock at least, but but it was soon rolling across the muddy lakebottom beside him. He dislodged three more of the rocks, and then Lena watched his head vanish into the opening, checking out the interior. If his head could fit inside, then so could she.

She began to swim over to him, but then the orange glow of her holographic counter caught her eye. Seven minutes had passed. She patted Sleethe on his scaly rump when he came into range, and gestured to her wrist. He didn't waste a second, curling his arm around her and shooting up towards the surface of the lake like a green torpedo. Perhaps the minor incident during the first test of the rebreather had scared him.

In less than a minute her head was above the water, and she took a few moments to let her rebreather recharge and to recover from the cold. She swore that she could feel the cool blood moving from her extremities back into her core. That didn't seem very safe. She lay flat on the calm surface of the water, ensuring that she was completely reheated before braving the frigid depths again. When she was ready to resume her expedition, she reset her timer and had Sleethe swim her back down.

Before long she was floating in front of the Broker structure again, and now there was a vaguely Lena-sized hole in the rocks where she should be able to slip through. She rested her hands on the pile of mud and stones as she gauged the size of the hole. It looked like she would fit. She poked her arms through first, then her head, using the leverage to pull the rest of her body through the opening. There was a flare of pain a she scraped her thigh on one of the boulders, the jagged rock tearing into her skin. Lena yelped into her mask as a small cloud of blood billowed from the injury, floating into the Broker facility and turning to examine the wound.

It stung, but it was superficial, no reason to abort the dive. She would have to give it a thorough clean with antiseptic and dress it when she returned to the shore, there was nothing to be done about it right now.

Sleethe must have smelled the blood in the water, because his long snout pushed between the boulders and he stared at her with a concerned expression. She gave him two thumbs up, and he withdrew again, satisfied that she wasn't bleeding to death. Lena took a moment to work through the stinging pain, and then proceeded.

Finally, she was inside the Broker base, and there were none of the egotistical aliens around to hamper her investigations. She floated through the water, turning her head to examine the interior. It reminded her of being on the Broker spacecraft when she had flown down to the planet's surface. Everything was matte white and silver, made from clean, geometric shapes with rounded edges. It was so synthetic, it lacked any artistic flair or decoration that would have characterized the dwellings and buildings of the other Coalition races. The first structure was perhaps thirty feet squared, a perfect cube with an equally high ceiling. The proportions were odd, how could the inhabitants make use of that space?

Unlike the spaceship however, there was furniture here. Where humans would have used chairs, the Brokers seemed to have mesh nets that hung from the ceiling on cables, like small hammocks. The Krell scholar had suggested that they were an aquatic race, was this how they took a load off? Did they swim up to these nets and sit in them? There were tables here and there too. Large, flat surfaces that were lifted off the floor with a single leg that propped them up from the center, and which looked too fragile to hold their weight.

Lena swam closer and examined them. They were as flat and as featureless as the walls, no clues there. What had been the purpose of this structure when it was in use? Habitation? Research? Espionage? The room was so bare that it was very hard to imagine what its function might have been.

She moved on to the next structure, swimming along a glass tunnel that was half buried in the mud, her torch lighting her way. She could see the weeds that were clinging to it from below, taking a photo of how their roots wound across the transparent material. She could see the undersides of the barnacle-like creatures too, their fleshy 'foot' clinging to the glass like that of a snail.

The next building was longer than it was wide, and it was full of alien machinery. This must be the engine room, so to speak, the structure that housed all of the systems that did...whatever this outpost was designed to do. Lena swam about the room, carefully documenting everything with her computer's camera. There were large glass tubes that might have been for containing live specimens, or perhaps for filtering water. There were surfaces littered with all manner of what looked to her like science or engineering equipment, tools that would fit no hand that Lena could conceive of. It was all impossible to quantify. There were weeds and mosses her and there, some creatures had managed to find their way into the breach and had made this structure their home, almost like a shipwreck.

She came across something that looked near enough to a touch panel or a computer screen, and leaned in to examine it more closely. Information was what she wanted, but if there was a computer system in this base, would it still be active after all these years? Would the data be corrupted? Could she even turn on a Broker computer?

She reached out with her hand and brushed the flat surface, and to her surprise it flared to life. The whole room lit up with a dull, blue light, bubbles rising in the large transparent tanks and miscellaneous machinery activating itself. Just like inside the Broker spaceship, the light had no visible source, as if it was radiating from the walls themselves. She panicked for a moment as she was assailed by the odd sounds, but then calmed as the screen began to display alien characters. Krell had been a hard enough language to decipher, this would be impossible. It was the most complex language that she had ever seen. Before her very eyes the blocky characters were shifting and moving, what she assumed to be letters flying across the screen as they interlocked to form new words, a mad exchange of data as the vertical lines of text merged into one another and scrambled.

Each letter was contained within a square, the contents of which seemed infinitely variable, further diversifying as they came into contact with other squares. Was it a language, numbers, computer code? A mixture of all three? No way to know. She had a feeling that her portable work station would not have the processing power to make any kind of sense of this.

She tapped at the screen with her fingers, experimenting, and it seemed to react to her touch. After a few random presses, the display changed. Now there was a horizontal row of icons that resembled larger squares, a vertical line of pictograms in the upper left corner of each. They were overlaid on top of each other, almost like...files.

Brokers and humans might not share a common language, but they were both technological civilizations that used computers extensively. Would there be innate similarities between those systems? Were certain features necessary for computing, rather than being an aesthetic or technical choice?

She pressed one of the boxes, and something behind her cast a blue glow on the wall. She turned towards a large table in the center of the room, surrounded by a dozen of the hammocks that she had seen in the previous building, and saw that there was a blue image shimmering in the air above it.

It was a hologram, a three dimensional image being projected by some kind of hidden system, far more advanced than anything used by the UNN. It was so lifelike, so solid. It depicted what looked like an embryo in an egg, curled up in a fetal position with large, black eyes. Clearly still early in development. Could it be a Krell? It was hard to be sure.

She took a picture of it, and then turned back to the screen. She swiped at the squares with her finger, and they scrolled past with a fluid animation, overlapping one another. Yep, these were folders alright. Broker GUI design followed the same logic as that of humans, slick and intuitive. They must be very visual creatures, much like humans were.

It was an unexpected stroke of luck. She had read reports about the recent studies on Betelgeusians that detailed how they communicated entirely through pheromones, using organic computer systems that worked through scent in lieu of keyboards or touch commands for input. If the Broker system had been anything like that, then she would have been completely stumped.

She scrolled to the next folder icon, and the hologram that was hovering above the table changed. The embryo fizzled out, and was replaced by an equally impressive image of an adult Krell. It rotated slowly, three dimensional characters in the form of cubes displaying undecipherable information. As she watched, a double helix appeared, it was a strand of DNA. The animation was describing a gene editing process no doubt. Was this some kind of conference room? Was she accessing the equivalent of a Broker presentation?

Lena was careful to document everything, recording a video of the animation as she let it run its course. She might not be able to retrieve data from the computer, but as long as that data was holographic, she could take pictures and recordings. She had started off her career as a linguist, then she had been tasked with doing the field work of a dozen different disciplines, and now she was playing at espionage like some kind of UNNI agent.

The next hologram was a Betelgeusian, the variety with fins on their limbs and gills on their chests, the same that the scholar had described in his story. She swiped past it, and then came across something that looked very sensitive indeed.

Lena might not be a soldier, but she lived on a military space station. She had seen this kind of thing before, only in passing, but it was immediately recognizable. The hologram now showed a field of small spheres, with smaller spheres orbiting them. These were obviously solar systems. It was a tactical map, the stars and planets color coded. Some were blue, but a handful were flashing orange, and there were icons that looked like triangles which were green in color. The triangles numbered two dozen or more and were spread out around the starfield, many of them clustering around the orange planets. Might those be fleets or spaceships? There was data everywhere, but nothing that Lena could read.

She was no astronomer, and so she couldn't tell at a glance where these systems were, but her portable work station would have that information in its database for sure.

Something odd stood out to her, and she swam closer to get a better look at the hologram. One of the flashing orange systems was different from the others. It had more information cubes floating around it for one, but while all of the other orange planets and systems were surrounded by green triangles, this one was not. There were green triangles here, but they seemed to be keeping their distance. If these were battle plans or fleet movements, then that might mean anything. They were perhaps waiting for the right time to attack, holding off until more support arrived maybe.

But there was another icon here, a small, yellow blip. It was the only icon of its kind, there were no others on the map. There was a trail of small dots behind it that curved away and out of view, as if they had been plotting the object's course. Something was different about this solar system.

Lena remembered how the scholar had talked about the war abruptly ending, how one day the Brokers had halted their advance for reasons that were beyond the understanding of the Krell. Could this be it? Was this the last field report, the last set of orders that the inhabitants of this base had received before packing up and leaving the planet?

She checked the counter on her wrist, eighty seconds left, she had better make for the exit.

***

The portable workstation's cooling fans whirred loudly as it read the data from Lena's wrist computer, transferring all of the video files and photos that she had recorded during her dive. She had spent the better part of the day exploring the Broker base, but besides the hologram files she hadn't found much else of use. Sure it was all interesting, but with no frame of reference there wasn't much that she could do besides gawk at the alien tech.

The holograms had been interesting however, especially the one that had resembled a tactical map. The first thing that she wanted to do was use the workstation to get a match on those solar systems. Even if the map was three hundred years old, the constellations would not have significantly changed, it should be trivial for the computer to match them against the database.

She had been asking a lot of the little workstation, it was down to fifteen percent battery. She had replacements fortunately, but she hadn't expected to burn through the first charge in only a few days. Without it, she would not have been able to churn through the data at such a prodigious rate. She didn't want to imagine how long it would have taken to parse the Krell alphabet by hand.

She sat cross legged on the damp wood of the temple as she waited for a match, Sleethe lazing about in the nearest sleeping pit, his scaly chin resting on the rim as he watched the animated icon spin.

After a few more moments it flashed a message indicating that it was finished, the star systems had been matched. She tapped at the screen excitedly, and the computer displayed a video recording of the Broker hologram with a UNN starmap superimposed on top of it. The little spheres now each had their own label. It seemed to be a representation of the Orion constellation. She could see Rigel, Bellatrix, Saiph, Sigma Orionis and other stars.

Most of the systems were blue, and those that had an orange planet were encircled by triangles. She was sure now that they must represent Broker fleets. Blue meant that the system had been cleared of Bugs, orange must mean that they were still infested, as that was where the fleets were concentrated. One star stood out as different however.

Lena felt a cold chill wash over her as she realized that the system was Betelgeuse. She knew all about the system, as did everyone in UNN space. It was at Betelgeuse that first contact with the Bugs had resulted in the destruction of a human colony ship, along with forty thousand colonists. It was humanity's first interaction with an alien species, and the most disastrous. The expedition had expected to find a fertile colony planet ready to be claimed, but instead they had found a Bug hive. When they had attempted peaceful communication, the Betelgeusians had attacked them. They hadn't stood a chance.