[Note from Steve: I haven’t written a Dr. Carlos story for a while. You’ll find plenty in Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape and Fantastic Encores!, but here’s another one. It tidies up some things in my sci-fi novels too.]

Old Planet

Copyright 2018, Steven M. Moore

“What’s your take on this, Obregon?”

Carlos Obregon, Chief Medical Officer in the crew of the survey ship Brendan, looked up from his tablet where he’d been watching a demo of a new surgical technique for the ETs called Rangers. It didn’t matter to him that the starship didn’t currently have any of the little fellows among its crewmembers. The doctor liked to keep up with techniques to prepare for all eventualities, and he had saved ET lives as well as Human lives because of this preparation.

Captain Lester Wilson wasn’t smiling on the ship-to-planet widescreen that filled most of one wall in the tent that served as temporary galley and meeting place for the planetary survey team.

“Too early to tell, but Zoltan’s probably right.” He winked at the new Chief Science Officer Zoltan Karnoy. “Team’s going to have to do some precise dating, but the ruins are thousands of years old at least. But why ask me?”

“You’re the senior person down there,” said Lester. “Zoltan’s new at this.”

Obregon saw Zoltan’s frown. New as Chief Science Officer, but the fellow has experience. What’s with Lester? “He’s expressed the general consensus of the scientific team.”

“There’s no residual radiation,” said Zoltan. “There would be, even if a nuclear exchange occurred a million years ago. Self-destruction is out. And it looks to be a good climate for an ITUIP colony.”

ITUIP was the International Trade Union of Independent Planets, a loose confederation. Being a history buff, Obregon considered it modeled after the old European Union on Earth, the Humans’ home planet. But I also know how that ended!

“If it’s such a good E-type planet, why did the previous owners abandon it?” said the captain.

“Maybe they joined the Swarm?” said Zoltan, smiling at the huge screen.

Obregon blasted his own frown toward the scientist. And they say I’m too much the historian! He hadn’t heard that collective intelligence mentioned for a long time. It had played an important role in early near-Earth history.

Lester didn’t ignore the comment, though. “That’s a possibility. Keep checking the planet out for future colinization, but also have some people figure out what happened to the previous inhabitants. We need to be thorough.”

***

“Meeting in the main tent,” Zoltan said, sticking his head into the tent that Obregon used as a temporary sick bay.

Obregon had just finished up a minor surgical procedure on Tialok, their Tali shuttle pilot who also flew one of the three small tricopters used for optical and SAR mapping, among other things.  He smiled at the pilot who was now recuperating in the portadoc. “Lucky you. You’re missing what surely will be another boring meeting.” He patted the big, furry head and tweaked the Teddy Bear ears, but the Tali was still under anesthesia. “Not that I would want to take that kind of fall to get out of a meeting.”

Obregon walked there with Zoltan. George Edgerton, their xenosociologist, was at the head of the table, shuffling some handwritten notes and glancing at his tablet. He had served on Brendan almost as long as Obregon.

The doctor was prepared for a boring session where the science team presented data and tenative analyses of the same. Normally he would stay on board Brendan and send his intern down to a planet’s surface, but Julie Chen, who had been with him for years, had just left to become Chief Medical Officer on another survey ship. They still didn’t have a replacement. Lester’s answer was always, “I’m working on it,” but Obregon hadn’t even seen a list of candidates. He expected it to be a slow process, though. The starships were the fastest mode of communication in near-Earth space, and Obregon compared that to the Pony Express, something else he’d studied about Earth’s history.

George began with his analysis of the ruins, reporting on results from his subteam that included xenoarchaeologists and other social scientists with whom Obregon chewed the fat because of his interest in history, which often related to archaeology.

“We’ve located the ruins of some large buildings that might have been temples,” George said. He described the site in detail and their plans to excavate there for a while. When he finished, Zoltan passed the baton to the survey team leader, a Tali named Wotang.

That was when Obregon took out his tablet and started reading some medical articles. He only looked up when Zoltan directly asked him a question.

“How is Tialock?”

Obregon put the tablet in sleep mode and looked around the table. “He’ll be able to fly us back up to Brendan, but don’t look for him to help with the survey piloting a tricopter. We’ll have to ground one.”

Zoltan nodded. “No problem. There’s more ocean area than land. We’ll cover all of it before George and his minions finish their dig.”

“I can speed that up,” said Riley, the Security Chief. “I can pilot a tricopter.”

“You’ll have to put someone else in charge of the security detail here,” said Obregon. “I don’t want to walk around armed to the teeth.”

Zoltan smiled. “Not much on this planet that’s dangerous, except the terrain at times. By the way, the whole survey team should take Tialock’s fall to be a lesson. Loose shale and stones can be tricky in a 1.2 gravity field.” He looked around the group. “Let’s get back to work. The quicker we finish, the quicker we’ll be back aboard Brendan.”

***

While Obregon did his duty by checking Tialock from time to time, he went out with Edgerton and his group too. He sat on one of the massive marble stones and watched others dig.

“You could help, you know,” said Edgerton, sitting beside him after a few hours work.

Obregon held up his hands. “These do fine work, my friend. None of the crew would want me to hazard any damage to them, not while I’m the only medic in a many parsecs diameter sphere around this planet.”

“Most of the time, only the portadoc’s all that’s needed.”

“And Tialok is an example of when we need more. I need an intern. You should put some pressure on Lester.”

“The captain doesn’t listen to me much. He’s chomping at the bit to get on to the next planet.”

“Now there’s an interesting expression. I don’t suppose you know what it means.”

“As a matter of fact, I do. You’re not the only history buff around here. I’m comparing Lester to an ancient Earth animal called a horse. With the bit and reins, Humans would steer them. I guess the primitives tortured animals back then.”

“When they weren’t torturing their fellow Humans. What’s Xena found?”

A tall woman with short brown hair was waving wildly at Edgerton and yelling something.

“Too far away. If you can get off your butt, let’s go and see what they found.”

***

“I’ll be damned,” said Obregon, admiring the mural on a wall in the temple room the scientists had broken into. “You say you’re a historian, George. Do you recognize these people? Zoltan was right.”

“I don’t, so how do you know he was right?”

“These little fellows called themselves the shipbuilders—in their language, of course. Brent Mueller’s wife Jenny Wong was kidnapped by one of their ships, and they were instrumental in saving ITUIP from that criminal mastermind Dimitri Negrini. After that, they just disappeared. Looks like they made a habit of that. This must be their home planet.”

“That’s quite a bit of extrapolation from very little data,” said George. “And you’re suggesting they joined Swarm?”

“They disappeared somewhere. What’s interesting is that they played important roles in Human history, from the nuclear exchange between Colombia and Venezuela in 2078, old calendar, to stopping Negrini in 3073.”

“They caused that nuclear exchange?”

“Not them. Some idiot playing with one of their toys.”

“OK, you’ll have to fill in the details over ales on Brendan sometime. What caused them to abandon this planet?”

“Still the unanswered question,” said Obregon. “There’s no information in this mural. The shipbuilders look happy, in fact.”

***

The survey team, with Riley’s help, finished before George’s. The captain gave the latter three more standard days, after which they would have to leave the excavation to future scientists. Obregon was bored, so he convinced Riley to take him on a leisurely flight over a nearby city that was just as much in ruins as the one where George’s group was working.

“You can see things from up here that aren’t obvious down there,” said Obregon.

Riley nodded but said nothing, concentrating on piloting the vehicle because they weren’t actually that high.

“That’s not a temple,” Obregon observed at one point. “It’s a defense installation.  Missile silos, to be precise. I’m surprised the survey fellows missed them.”

“They probably had no idea what they were,” said Riley. “I sure didn’t.”

They studied the five rows of equally spaced indentations at the city’s outskirts, twenty-five silos in total.

“Wouldn’t they protect each city that way?”

“Maybe the other silos filled in with rubble. Or this is just for space defense. The question is: who did the shipbuilders need protection from? Can you land this contraption?”

“Of course. There’s a flat space right down there. Hold on.”

Before they got out of the tricopter, Riley reported in to both Brendan and Zoltan back in the camp. They then headed for the closest silo. There wasn’t much to see until Obregon spotted the entrance to a bunker.

“We shouldn’t go down there,” said Riley. “Remember Tialock.  I need to get the OK from Zoltan.”

Zoltan didn’t give them the OK. He told them to wait for backup. Obregon’s interest was flagging by the time they arrived.

***

The bunker provided new information in the form of data cubes. Humans knew how to manage those ever since they’d been found in the shipbuilder’s crashed ship on Saturn’s moon Helene that had contained the remains of three different ET species. In fact, Humans had co-opted some of that technology to improve their own data storage. They all gathered around Obregon’s tablet after a techie figured out how to read the ET data cubes.

Most of the content was data, in fact. Just numbers. But a few contained interesting videos of another world showing ETs who were unknown to ITUIP, not the shipbuilders.

“Who are these guys?” said Zoltan.

“Maybe the enemy,” said Obregon. “Lester, can you have someone search the archives for an astrosociological thesis by a Human named Asako Koboyashi.”

“A relative of the Takahashi?”

“I don’t think so. Ashi is a common surname ending.”

The planetary group waited for about ten minutes. Lester then came online.

“Found it. ‘A Sociological Analysis of Fistian Culture and History,’ by Asako Kobayashi. Erudite stuff about some new ETs who later joined ITUIP. It’s about one hundred standard years old. How’d you know about this? And why is it relevant?”

“Fistians are like Earth horses George Edgerton and I were discussing not long ago, except they have two arms besides their four legs. Some crewmembers might have met them from time to time. I was figuring out what special surgical techiques I’d need to tend to those fellows. The relevance is at the end.”

“You mean in the conclusions? Seems like a lot of a ET specie’s superstitions gone wild.”

“Yes, that was my initial interpretation. Dr. Kobayashi translated the Fistian name to Marauders. Can you transmit her sketch of a Marauder?”

Lester did so, and Obregon heard the sharp intakes of breath. They were all looking at a whole city of Marauders on the data cube’s video file.

“Now we know why the shipbuilders fled their home planet. They probably figured their defenses weren’t enough to stop these bellicose ETs.”

“You can determine all that from that video of city dwellers going about their business?”

“No. The correlation of the sketch with the denizens of that city tells me that the Fistians’ superstition gone wild is reality. We might be close to the Marauders right now, assuming those ETs are still around.”

“What do we do about that?” said Riley.

“Maybe make some preparations,” said Obregon.

Zoltan could only nod.

***

Comments are always welcome.

A. B. Carolan’s The Secret of the Urns tells the story of how Asako Koboyashi came to write her thesis about the Fistians. The story of the shipbuilders starts as far back as the novels in the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy.” The ruins on Helene are featured in Survivors of the Chaos, the first novel in the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy,” while the battle with Dimitri Negrini is described in Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!, the third novel in that trilogy. All I’ve done here is to give some closure to readers who have read all those novels…and might want to meet Dr. Carlos Obregon, as much a sleuth as a medical officer.

For other Dr. Carlos stories, see Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape and Fantastic Encores!

In libris libertas!

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2018 at 3:30 am and is filed under Steve's Shorts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.