Starship Summer (Starship Seasons, #1)(21)

EIGHT



Early next morning I was sitting with Hawk and Matt on the veranda of the Fighting Jackeral, enjoying coffee and croissants as the sun climbed high above the interior mountains.

Maddie had said little after her pronouncement about the Yall last night, and a short while later Hawk had driven her home. She had agreed to meet us for breakfast in the morning.

Hawk demolished half a croissant in one bite and said around the mouthful, “You do realise what this means, David?”

I nodded. “I’ve been thinking about nothing else all night.”

“Specifically about the ship,” he said.

I shrugged. “It’s unique. The only surviving ship of the Yall.”

“And as such,” Hawk went on, “it’s priceless. Just think what the religious organisations would give for a ship that belonged to the race which constructed the Golden Column.”

Matt said, “That fact’s yet to be verified, Hawk.”

“Are you saying Maddie isn’t to be trusted?”

“Not at all. I’m saying that the various religious cults that worship the Column might need some convincing that the Yall had a hand in it. I mean, many of them think it the work of their own god.”

Hawk said, “So we hire a team of accredited telepaths from Earth to read Maddie. They’ll verify what she experienced.”

“Might be expensive,” I said.

Hawk laughed. “Listen to you! David, you don’t seem to realise what we’re sitting on here. This could be the biggest thing since humankind made first contact with the Qlax. That ship… Christ, it could be worth millions.”

“I’ll cut you all in on whatever I get,” I said.

“And to think it was sitting in my yard for years. Hell, I even thought of cutting it up for scrap last year.”

Matt said, injecting a note of realism, “There are other things to consider, beyond the mere value of the discovery.”

Hawk smiled. “You’re talking to a penniless businessman, here, Matt.”

I said to Matt, “Other things…?”

He nursed his coffee cup in both hands, regarding the liquid the same shade as his skin. “The first thing that strikes me is whether we should make the discovery public, or keep it to ourselves. If we do the former, then things will change around here. Magenta will be inundated with the media, scads of scientists, government suits from Earth…”

I said, “Do we have a duty to science to make it public?”

Matt shrugged. “Eventually, maybe. I think, before that, we should investigate it ourselves.”

Hawk looked at him. “And how do we do that?”

“First, we set up some recording equipment in the lounge, and maybe in other places around the ship. We go through it from top to bottom, try to find the Yall equivalent of a computer core. It’d help if we knew just why the apparition was occurring.”

“Maybe,” Hawk said with a shrug, “we might be able to communicate with it?”

I said, “My guess is that the apparition is some holographic image or icon, not sentient in itself. If we can access some kind of ship’s data base, however…”

Matt said, “We’re dealing with something alien here, remember. All our assumptions about what things might be are based on comparisons to what we know—which might not hold in this case.”

“So we set up some cameras and scour the ship for a com system,” I said. “Then what?”

“Then maybe we take a trip out to the Golden Column,” Matt said.

“That’d make sense,” I said. “I must admit that I haven’t seen it yet.”

Hawk grinned. “Know something? The closest I’ve come to the Column was when I salvaged the ship. I was about a hundred kays away then, and the Column dominated the horizon even at that distance.”

“I visited the column soon after I got here,” Matt said. “I was struck by two things. First, how amazing it was as an artefact—its size, its power and energy. It took my breath away and made my hair stand on end.” He smiled. “All the usual clichés.”

I said, “And the second?”

“How tacky the surrounding show of religious fervour was, the stalls selling souvenirs to the gullible, the quacks and charlatans who’d set up business in the area. It stank. I haven’t been back.”

I smiled. “They’ll be gutted when they find that it wasn’t their god who created the Column.”

Matt grunted. “And how long will it be before some cult starts worshipping the Yall?” he said, “and selling models of the aliens, and authentic Yall cures?”

I ordered another coffee and five minutes later Hawk pointed along the beach. “Here’s Maddie now.”

She was walking, as if in a daze, along the low tide-line, her home-made sandals leaving imprints in the wet sand. She was staring at the ground, miles away.

Hawk stood and waved. “Maddie, over here.”

She looked up, sketched a wave and wandered over to us, climbing the steps and casting an eye over the debris of our breakfast. “Ah, coffee and croissants. What better?”

I signalled the waiter and ordered for Maddie.

As she seated herself, first draping a hand-woven shawl over the seat, Hawk said, “You okay?”