Eldest Among the Stars
an excerpt

Potential chapter titles...

Star Flower (complete)
Cairn (complete)
Sky Flame (complete)
Deep Revelation (complete)
Hazardous Legacy (complete)
The Chase (complete)
Escape! (complete)
Blind Rift (complete)
Crash (complete)
Elder World (complete)
Home Trap (complete)
Deepening Sky (complete)
Discovered (complete)
Perilous Wisdom (complete)
Deadly Legacy (complete)
Fatal Approach (complete)
Terminus (complete)
Exodus (complete)
Capture (in use)
Finis

...Elder World:

0923 hrs - 1 Midha 6897
Niphredil – Command Center

Chad watched as the ship approached a blue-green orb. Were it not for Maeve’s last-minute course change, they would have missed the planet and something they needed—deuterium. The month of Thandda had ended with a harrowing ride through an unknown branch of the Rift System, and somewhere during his sleeping, Maeve had taken Niphredil out of hyperdrive to track down a deuterium source.
They had arrived here, the third world from its parent star, passing a gray moon that looked pristine and clean.
Arriving here had been a “grand spiral,” according to Maeve, a highly elliptical repeated hyperspatial flight that took them past each orbital. There were myriads of objects on the farthest-flung orbitals, but Maeve had cut the count down to nine.
Chad read the report: two orbited each other farthest out. They were each composed of a mixture of rock and ice. The next one in was a bluish gas giant, followed by a ringed gas giant of greenish hue whose axial tilt pointed one pole directly toward its parent star. It was seventh in line. The sixth body was a tan object, surrounded by broad rings of tan. Fifth was the largest and most massive object aside from the star. It was a stormy gas giant. A single storm stood out among the banks of turbulent cloud formations. It was an oval and it was far larger than Edhandar.
A band of smaller objects orbited between the fifth and fourth objects, followed by the fourth object, a reddish brown rocky planet with two irregularly shaped moons.
The second object was covered with clouds, but sensors gave the indication that it was inhospitable, an atmosphere hot enough to melt lead. The closest object to the parent star was a scorched and barren rock.
Maeve had taken several passes in hyperspace on her grand spiral until the ship had passed close enough to each object to record its general characteristics. She settled on the third object and had cut power to the engines.
Paul shifted the Niphredil in orbit and applied braking thrust. The Niphredil, running on its last fuel, de-orbited and set itself on course for landing.
Chad felt a sense of dread and awe come over him. The one uncertainty about the report was the fact that the deuterium source was down on the planet and it was highly concentrated.
Niphredil plunged into the atmosphere of the world, which to Chad somehow seemed older than Cairn, Edhandar, or Kinardh. He wondered if it could even be older than Achaida.
He was about to find out.

1013 hrs
Niphredil – Command Center

The flight through the atmosphere had ended as Paul pulled the ship out of her dive on the sunlit side of the planet. They cruised over blue ocean for several minutes before coming over land.
“Heading East-northeast,” Paul reported.
Philippa remained busy at her work station until the ship crossed a large lake.
“That’s odd,” she said.
“What?” Chad asked.
“I could’ve sworn I got a reading of slabs of plasteel.”
“Can we turn back?” Paul asked.
“Deuterium reserves are almost exhausted,” Kenneth said, “but if we’re forced to land, we could still use the shuttles to get to the source.”
“Keep flying,” Chad said.
So the ship flew on, over swamp lands, over trees, and over patches of land which Philippa reported showed signs of irregularity in the soil.
“What are the irregularities like?” Chad asked.
“A pattern, almost like a grid, deep down. High carbon concentrations in rectangular or linear patterns. The soil density varies. Wait,” Philippa worked at her station and brought up a recording of the terrain below.
Chad watched her project the terrain through different sensors from the array, and watched the terrain and trees change color. The land was brown below, but Chad was sure the forked projections were branches of trees whose leaves were gone. They had already passed over evergreens on their approach.
“There,” Philippa said. A blocky stone stood out. “We overflew it two minutes ago.”
“What is it?”
“I’m comparing the recording of its molecular structure to a prior recording.” Chad watched Philippa bring up a recording of the landing lights as they flew in over Cairn.
Two bar graphs appeared and Philippa overlaid them. They were duplicates.
“That block back there was made of the same stuff as the starmac we landed on.”
She looked Chad dead in the eye.
“There’s more ahead, and we’re almost to the deuterium source.”
“How long?” Kenneth asked her.
“Four minutes.”
Chad looked forward through the view port. The time seemed to crawl as Paul brought the ship ever closer to top of what might bloom into a green canopy over this alien world. Then he saw it.
“There!” he said, pointing to a knobby outcropping that slipped past below the ship.
“Readings of starmac materials and plasteel,” Philippa said.
“What does it mean?” Chad asked.
“Perhaps that the Ancients were once here,” she said.
“Did sensors pick up any probes or other objects?”
“Nothing we know of,” Paul said. “We could’ve missed things on Maeve’s approach.”
Chad nodded.
They passed over the edge of a change in the terrain. It looked like a mass of upthrust rock from which all soil had been eroded. But Philippa remarked that some of the pieces below had somewhat straight edges. She also confirmed readings of plasteel in the scattered brownish splotches that ran in rivulets down the shattered edges of the outcrops.
“Land somewhere,” Philippa said, “we’re here.”
Paul brought the ship to circle the outcrop.
“Can we put her off to one side?” he asked.
“If you can find a spot safer,” Philippa answered.
They took another scan and Paul brought Niphredil down over one region that was flatter, though still littered with fragments and rubble. Chad could tell that Paul was taking his time with the approach, positioning the ship so that she would be as level as possible on touchdown. Again the ship kicked up a cloud of dust, and some of the smaller detritus blew away.
A couple of patches of color showed, a faint red line and a faint white line. If this was starmac, it was the most pitted, most pockmarked, most ancient stuff Chad had ever seen.
They touched down and Paul remarked about how level the ship was. She was level enough to be safe.

1332 hrs
Niphredil – Command Center

The reports came in swiftly after dispatching a crew to investigate the deuterium reading. A group had found shallow ditch in the starmac and followed it as it grew deeper. It was full of rubble and shattered debris, but a strong plasteel reading stood out. When they reached this, they were in a tunnel leading out to the edge of the outcropping.
“There’s a lot of plasteel down here,” Ian reported, “and a lot of deuterium.”
Chad watched the data coming back from the team of archaeologists he had dispatched.
“We’re several stories above the deuterium,” Paige reported, “but there’s a vertical hole that we almost fell into. What’s this?”
Chad watched as the camera Paige carried recorded a series of horizontal rods spaced evenly down the hole.
“You could almost climb these,” she said.
“Maybe it is a ladder,” Kenneth said.
The crew descended to a door and scanned the area for structural soundness.
“This is remarkable,” Paige said. “Below the surface, the plasteel has held up well.” Chad compared her observation to the fact that Philippa had identified the brownish splotchings—they were iron rust, a byproduct of the breakdown of plasteel.
Somebody passed a camera over a placard on the wall. The scribblings looked vaguely Cairnese, done in red with a red border.
“There’s also a diagram of some sort,” Kenneth said.
“What are those large round things on the diagram?” Paige asked. Kenneth moved his camera nearer to the diagram and Chad could see what they were talking about.
“Philippa to Kenneth,” Philippa said.
“Kenneth here,” he replied.
“Sensors here on the ship say that those round things on the diagram are the source of the deuterium.”
The crew tried the door but it did not budge easily. Kenneth used his augment suit to increase his strength and forced the door open. Inside, they panned their cameras over a ledge view with a set of four white cylinders, each almost as wide as the tunnel under Cairn. Each cylinder was several stories tall.
“Each one is full of water,” Ian said.
“Heavy water,” Kenneth said. “We can pump it up and get the deuterium.”
“This must have been a storage facility of some kind,” Ian said.
Each of the cylinders was marked with yellow and black signs, some with red borders.
“Look at these figures here,” Paige pointed her camera at a sign that showed figures, not the vaguely Cairnese scribblings.
“They appear to be pictures,” Ian said. “A hand here? Maybe grasping the red knob there?”
There was a hand shape outlined, with the red knob nearby and a curved arrow.
“Then a rectangle with a set of wavy lines inside it. And then a rectangle with less wavy lines inside it,” Ian said. “And an arrow pointing to toward the bottom of the rectangle. What does it mean?”
They paused for several minutes.
“Sometimes a wavy line like this is a symbol for water,” Paige said.
“It’s a set of instructions for how to get the water out of the cylinder,” Ian said.
“What is this diagram?” Paige asked.
Ian moved his camera. Chad saw his hand point to the rectangles.
“One is this cylinder,” he said, “see the downward arrow there?”
“This rectangle without a top line has wavy lines in it and an arrow pointing upward,” Kenneth said.
“It’s how to empty the tanks!” Ian said. “You turn the knobs.”
“See the double lines connecting both rectangles? There’s no drainage in the bottom of the second rectangle,” Paige said. “Is there?”
“Why would there be?” Kenneth said. “Deuterium was a commodity in Ancient times. If we drain this tank, it has to go somewhere safe, or it would be wasted.”
“A universal fuel pit, maybe?” Ian asked. “Maybe they recover the water in buckets and take it up?”
“Or maybe somebody could let a tube down and pump it out,” Paige said.
“Chad to Kenneth,” Chad spoke through the comm at Philippa’s work station.
“Kenneth here.”
“Try to find the pit where that water goes,” Chad said.
They returned to the first diagram and looked it over again. Then Kenneth pointed to a rectangle.
“There is a passage through to here,” he said. He pointed to it. “See this rectangle around the four circles? That’s the room we were just inside. The rectangle is connected to a square over here, and it has a square inside it.”
It took several more minutes to get the knob to turn and Kenneth took Paige with him to the second room with the square in it. He scanned down below and saw the water level rise and rise. A quick scan showed no sign of a drainage point for the pool.
“We could use a crew down here,” Kenneth said. “We’ll need a long hose.”

1527 hrs
Niphredil – Command Center

Chad watched as the fuel indicators at Kenneth’s board rose to full height. There had been enough deuterium in three of the tanks to fully replenish Niphredil’s fuel reserves.
Several people petitioned Chad to explore the planet, and Chad allowed parties to form. One was scheduled to take Mithrandir on an orbital survey of the planet and return in two days. Three other parties were finally resolved: One would search the coastline where Philippa thought she saw plasteel remnants, the second would explore the area nearby and examine the plants and wildlife, and the third party would dig where Philippa had located the variances in soil density.
Though they now had proof that the Ancients had been here, and reason to explore here, Chad had his misgivings. There was something foreboding about this world, something different from Cairn and something that felt sinister.