Stephen Baxter - Xeelee by The Ghost Pit

Author:The Ghost Pit
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-01-04T11:24:35+00:00

We had to sleep in our suits, of course. I dug a shallow trench in the dust. I couldn’t shut out the crimson light. I slept in patches.

I woke up in my own stink.

The recycled gloop from my hood nipples already tasted stale, my skinsuit was chafing in a dozen places, and I felt bruises from that landing that hadn’t registered at the time. If the sun had moved across the sky at all, I couldn’t see it.

It’s a strange thing, but it wasn’t until that second ‘morning’ that I took seriously the possibility that I might die here. I guess I had been distracted by the hunt, my conflict with L’Eesh. Or maybe I just lack imagination. Anyhow my adrenaline rush was long gone; I was numb, flat, feeling beaten.

Through that endless day, we walked on.

We came to what might have been a township. There was little left but a gridwork of foundations, a few pits like cellars, bits of low wall. I thought I could see a sequence, of older buildings constructed of massive marble-like blocks, later structures made of what looked like the local sandstone or else bits of broken-up marble ruins.

All of it trashed, burned out, knocked flat.

L’Eesh, his suit scuffed and filthy, began poking around a large battleship-shaped mound of rubble.

I squatted, chewing on a glucose tab.

L’Eesh called, ‘You know, there’s something odd here. I thought this was a fort, or perhaps some equivalent of a cathedral. But it looks for all the world as if it crashed here.’

‘You don’t make aircraft from brick.’

‘Well, whatever made such a vast, ungainly structure fly through the air is gone now. Nevertheless there was clearly once a pretty advanced civilisation here. On the way in I glimpsed extensive ruins. And some of those impact craters looked deliberately placed. This whole world is an arena of war. But it seems to have been a war that was fought with interplanetary weapons, and then flying brick fortresses, and at last fire and clubs …’

He laughed, fiddling with his hood. ‘Of course it’s likely both moons were inhabited. Life could have been sparked on either moon, in some tidal puddle stirred by the Jovian parent. And then panspermia would work, spores wafting on meteorite winds, two worlds developing in parallel, cross-fertilising …’

On he talked. I wasn’t interested. I was here for Ghosts, not archaeology.

I waited until he took the lead, and we walked on, leaving the ruined township behind.

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