It had happened a quarter million years ago, so there’d been no witnesses. But it was possible to compute from the elliptical orbit of the remaining world that there had been others. The question up for debate was their number. While most astrophysicists thought there’d been four additional worlds, some put the probable total closer to ten.
Nobody really knew. But the station, several hundred light-years from the nearest occupied world, would be a treasure trove for Rainbow Enterprises. The Celians, during their golden age, had been a romantic nation, given over to philosophy, drama, music, and exploration. They were believed to have penetrated deeper into the Aurelian Cluster than any other branch of the human family. Gideon V had been central to that effort. Alex was convinced they’d pushed well beyond, into the Basin. If so, there was considerably more to be found.
Several centuries ago, the Celians had gone abruptly downhill. Civil war erupted, governments across the home world collapsed in chaos, and in the end they had to be bailed out by the other members of what was then known as the Pact. When it was over, their great days were also over. They’d lost their fire, become conservative, more interested in creature comforts than in exploration. Today, they are possibly the most regressive planetary society in the Confederacy. They are proud of their former greatness and try to wear it as a kind of aura. This is who we are. But in truth it’s who they were.
We were in the Belle-Marie, maybe twenty thousand kilometers out from the gas giant when the domes rotated into view. Alex makes his living trading and selling artifacts, and occasionally finding lost sites himself. He’s good at it, seems almost to have a telepathic sense for ruin. Mention that to him, as people occasionally do, and he smiles modestly and ascribes everything to good luck. Whatever it is, it’s made Rainbow Enterprises a highly profitable operation and left me with more money to throw around than I would ever have thought possible.
The thirteenth moon was big, the third biggest among twenty-six, the biggest without an accompanying atmosphere. Consequently it had been the first place we’d looked, for those two reasons. Large moons are better for bases because they provide a reasonable level of gravity without having to generate it artificially. But you don’t want one so large that it has an atmosphere. An atmosphere is always a complicating factor.
As far as we were concerned, vacuum had another advantage: It acts as a preservative. Anything left by the Celians when they closed up shop six centuries earlier was likely to be in pristine condition.
If you could have thrown sunlight on Gideon’s dark rings, they would have been spectacular. They were twisted and divided into three or four distinct sections. I couldn’t be sure. It depended on your angle of vision. The thirteenth moon lay just beyond the outermost ring. It moved in an orbit a few degrees above and below their plane, and the result would have been a compelling not-quite-edge-on view had there been any light to speak of. The gas giant itself, as seen from the station, never moved from its position halfway up the sky over a series of low hills. It was a dull, dark presence, not much more than simply a place where there were no stars.
I put the Belle-Marie in orbit and we went down in the lander.
The moon was heavily cratered in the north and along the equator, with plains in the south streaked with ridges and canyons. There were several mountain ranges, tall, skeletal peaks of pure granite. The domes were located midway between the equator and the north pole, on relatively flat ground. The antenna field was to the west. Mountains rose to the east. A tracked ground vehicle had been left in the middle of the complex.
The domes appeared to be in good condition. Alex watched them with growing satisfaction as we descended through the black sky. A half dozen moons were visible. They were pale, ghostly, barely discernible in the feeble light from the central star. Had you not known they were there, you might not have seen them.
I eased us in carefully. When we touched down I shut the engines off and brought the gravity back slowly. Alex waited impatiently while I exercised what he routinely called a surplus of feminine caution. He’s always anxious to get moving—let’s go, we don’t have forever. He enjoys playing that role. But he doesn’t