Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky [Tchaikovsky, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781529051919
Google: pBsMEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0316705853
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2021-05-26T23:00:00+00:00

18.

Idris

In an eerie echo of the nearby human settlement, the Originators had certainly liked their concentric circles when it came to architecture. Or maybe it was something to do with their technology – or something else entirely. Whatever their purpose, those circles were the last remnants of what might have been a city. Maybe. They were visible as striations in the grey, ashy soil of Jericho where the plantlife had been cut back. Or they could be spotted beneath odd swathes of off-colour vegetation. Each circle enclosed a weird mazework of buried foundations. It was as though the whole site was composed of a series of nested labyrinths – each only large enough for a five-year-old to comfortably navigate. Idris could see where the archaeology team had been working, because a whole slice of the ruins had been exposed. The excavation currently extended down two metres, and Idris considered how much further down it might go. The thought of a half-mile of cramped, subterranean labyrinth lurking beneath them made his insides twist. And yet somehow he felt it was there.

The ruins seemed to be formed of eroded stone. Perhaps the chewing of the elements over countless centuries had given those structures their toothy, irregular texture. Yet the stonework of the exposed lower levels was no smoother. Maybe it’s just what the stuff is supposed to look like? By this time the ground car was winding around the outer circle, careful not to crush any priceless archaeological rubbish. Idris spotted some large dome tents nearby – big ones, with individual chambers podding out from the centre on spokes. They were lit up from within, now the sun was on its way down. The sunken basin, surrounded by tall forest, must mean night came suddenly to the dig site.

‘What,’ Kris asked Robellin, ‘keeps the damn gropplers and the rest from just . . . chowing down on you all?’

‘Half our generator power goes into creating big-ass EM static,’ the biologist told them. ‘Fucks with our comms all right, but it’s like shouting into the ears of any bastard that wants to come at us.’ His grin slipped. ‘Still, it’s like your mate was saying. Nothing much big does come down there. They don’t like it.’

‘Do the ruins put out their own EM frequencies?’

‘That’d be a tidy bloody piece of explanation, wouldn’t it? No such luck. We’ve tested everything, and they’re dead. They’ve been dead for hundreds of thousands of years – conservative estimate. You wouldn’t expect them to have left the fucking oven on or something.’

Idris stopped listening because he was looking at the ruins – no, feeling the ruins. He could sense them in the same way that he could sense the Throughways and the nodes of unspace. Something was active there. It was a tugging at the edge of his mind, like someone plucking at his sleeve. There was a metaphysical weight to the whole area. It was baked in to the structure, the shape, the weird maze-like arrangements and the materials that nobody had ever been able to satisfactorily analyse or duplicate.

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