To the north, there is a fence.
A sign upon it reads:
“When the star crosses, the sky will burn.
And there will be great sorrow.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The bottom third of the pale yellow sun had already slipped below the horizon when they crossed the high ridgeline and gazed down on a flat, smooth, steep-sided plateau. The plateau was nearly perfectly square, roughly two kilometers to a side; it had the appearance of an island that had once risen from the foaming waves of an ancient sea that had long ago dried up. The side that faced the setting sun sparkled reddish brown, while the far side cast a long shadow across the basin beyond. A flat, semitranslucent structure sat near the center of the plateau, its appearance suggesting that it had been built by stacking enormous calcite crystals.
The three flew across the basin, descending onto a rocky shelf within sight of the building. The sun had now set halfway, and deep indigo crept across the sky from the opposite direction. It was extremely cold—so cold that the three feared their hearts would freeze. All was silent; the dim sun glittered in the chill.
“Do you think this is the Planetary Development Committee’s headquarters?” Siddhārtha asked.
If it is, then why is it so quiet?
Even from a distance, they could look through the semitranslucent material of the structure to see many rooms dividing it into compartments of indeterminate use. A row of six columns stood in a large hall toward the middle of the structure, and another hall that held a large flat table appeared to be some kind of conference room. There was also a wide staircase, its edges tracing complicated lines as it rose through the structure.
“Doesn’t look like anyone’s inside.”
The weak rays of the setting sun passed directly through the vast, empty building’s interior. Nothing moved.
One of the large doors at the main entrance had been pulled off its hinges; it lay just inside the wide, slanting entry hall. Cold air ripped through the opening, scattering thick brown dust in a fan pattern beyond the doorway.
The three entered in single file, stepping over the fallen door. Their feet sent up plumes of fine dust with every step.
“It’s been a terribly long time since anyone used this place,” Siddhārtha said.
Several thousand years, he judged from the appearance of everything on the ground floor. Hallways extended from either side of the entry hall. These connected in turn to the many smaller rooms the companions had seen from the outside. In each of the small rooms, they discovered powerful gravitational barrier generators, now inactive and quietly decaying.
“Sandstorms must have damaged the place,” Asura said, her eyes taking in the signs of severe abrasion on the exterior wall. The whole structure had probably once been perfectly transparent. “What’s that?” she added, pointing toward a large metal bowl-shaped object lying at an angle just outside the far end of the building. Metallic panels and tangled wires were scattered over the ground beside it. “Looks like a parabolic antenna.”
The antenna had been attached to a rotating platform that had, over the course of thousands of years, decayed to the point where it could no longer support the weight of the dish.
Orionae placed his forehead against a wall, staring through it at the fallen dish. “I have seen something like this before. Twice.” He wore a vague, clouded expression as he turned to face the others.
“A parabolic antenna?” Siddhārtha asked. “Where?”
Orionae craned his neck to look up at the thin yellow sky. “The first time was by that village in the desert, Elcasia. The second was on the roof of the royal palace in Atlantis.”
“Interesting,” Siddhārtha said. “Could it mean that the Planetary Development Committee here on Astarta 50, and the village of Elcasia, and Atlantis, were all connected?” He imagined an invasion coordinated along a single line of communication. Could the fall of Atlantis have been dictated remotely from across the galaxy?
“Yes,” Orionae nodded. “That might explain the window of the suzerain. And the mystery of the orichalcum. Now that I think about it, I wonder why I didn’t look into things more closely back when I was there. It is most vexing.”
“Orichalcum, you say?”
“Yes—a strange material that was used everywhere in the construction of Atlantis . . . yet there were no records at all concerning its composition or means of fabrication.”
The last pale rays of the setting sun painted the large hall on the upper floor. The walls sparkled as the light passed through the dancing dust that marked their progress through the lesser rooms. Other than the dust, there was nothing at all in any of the small rooms that added to their information.
The upper hall had an arched ceiling over fifty meters in height. It had clearly lain abandoned for a very long time. The only sound there was the sough and echo of the wind as it swept down the corridors. Toward one edge of the building was a section that looked as if it had been struck by some kind of meteor; a large hole had been opened in the exterior wall, facing out toward the basin beyond.
In the center of the upper hall stood a large spherical object constructed of thin translucent pipes interconnected in a complicated weave. The sphere was about ten meters across.
“I wonder what that could be?” Asura asked.
It looked out of place, a memory stripped of its context—perhaps the last remaining vestige of whatever civilization had once thrived here. A thick layer of dust had settled on the thin pipes and the short metal bars that supported the sphere at its base.
Twilight had fallen outside, casting the world into depths of indigo. As one, the three travelers were stricken with homesickness for their own planet, and in that mood they contemplated the staggering length of time in which this place had sat as a ruin.
Asura had seen tragic devastation many times in her long life, but she had never seen anything quite so barren as this. The sort of devastation from which there can never be a recovery comes quietly and over many years.
“Well,” Siddhārtha said simply. “Even if this were once the Planetary Development Committee’s headquarters, that was long ago.”
“So our hunt ends here,” Asura said, perching on a fragment of fallen wall.
“But this cannot possibly be the end of the trail. This must be Astarta 50. We will find something. Let’s look again.”
“I am not so sure,” Orionae said, his voice solemn. “Those words we all know mentioning the Planetary Development Committee on Astarta 50 are from five or six thousand years ago. It is rather unlikely, in fact, that anything remains here at all.”
“I suppose they could have moved someplace else,” Siddhārtha admitted. “But since we’re here anyway, let’s take a better look around. The enemy we seek is not human. Just because this place is a ruin does not mean they aren’t using it. It would be dangerous to assume anything.”
“True,” Asura said. “And if there is no way to influence one’s destination on that spaceway we traveled, then we can say with some certainty that Jesus of Nazareth did come here before us.” Abruptly, her eyes focused on the darkness overhead. “Look!”
The ceiling above them had begun to emit a pale aquamarine light. The light grew steadily brighter until the hall was suffused in a beautiful brilliance. Quickly the three retreated to a corner hallway from which they could see through the walls back into the main hall—see, and also be seen.
The sphere in the hall began to emit light in many colors. Bright crimson orbs appeared, traveling along the pipes, and from these emerged minute particles of illumination that scattered like dust. Soon, the entire hall was scintillating with projected color. The light breathed, growing in intensity and then fading in pulses. It must have seemed fantastically and eerily beautiful from outside the translucent building.
Siddhārtha and Asura could feel their spines growing cold. Whatever was happening, it seemed likely that this was the trap they had long expected.
“Someone’s there!”
The light wavered like a mirage as it passed through the translucent wall, suddenly revealing a figure on the other side. Siddhārtha engaged the polarized filters on his light-condensing contact lenses, while Asura extended infrared night vision sensors from a bracelet on her wrist to scan the hall.
The figure—a human man, apparently—was walking around inside the hall, wearing something like a monk’s robe that fell halfway down his legs and was sewn beneath his arms on both sides. On his feet he wore leather sandals. His eyes sparkled and darted with an eerie quickness that left a glowing trail across the imaging readout on Asura’s screen, making it easy to see where he was looking. His eyes seemed to shift regularly toward the sphere, then back to the walls of the hall.
“I wonder what he’s doing?”