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Chapter 23

Zanzibar

Danzig-5012 Solar System

Equatorial Region, 300 km north of Freeport


Cecil Blackwood lifted his respirator and took a long drink from his flask. The tunnel he found himself in was well-lit with high-intensity work lights. The voices of Aristotle Lang’s workers were barely audible over the roar of the earthmoving machinery, even with Cecil’s electronic hearing protection.

Nearby, Zak Mesa and Anna Kay watched in silence. Their faces were obscured by respirators and goggles, but Cecil noted that they were holding hands. Good, he thought to himself. Happiness was hard to come by on Zanzibar; you had to take it where you found it.

This tunnel wasn’t like other hastily dug subterranean storage sites. It was wide enough to have a two-lane road, paved with ceramicrete running its length. The originally installed lighting and ventilation no longer worked, but the tunnel itself was structurally sound. The only blockages were deliberate cave-ins, intended to keep intruders out.

Intruders like Cecil Blackwood and Aristotle Lang. Cecil took another swig of booze. It had taken weeks of research, false starts, and dead ends, but Zak and Anna had finally located Lang’s precious vault. Given how remote and how deeply dug the site was, Cecil was sure there was something of immense value in there. What, exactly, he couldn’t say—all records of what had been placed in that vault had been deliberately scrubbed before the Maggot invasion.

Lang seemed confident that it had all been worth it, though. The pompous warlord stood off to the side, not bothering with a respirator, his mouth in a wide grin as machines worked at the heavy blast doors. The tunnel had been deliberately collapsed at three separate points along its long, straight path beneath a barren mountain north of Freeport. Getting through the cave-ins had been slow going, damaging several pieces of equipment and killing four of Lang’s workers. The effort had continued though, and now they were at the end: the blast doors to the vault.

Cecil found himself secretly hoping that there was nothing in there. Lang would likely kill Zak out of frustration, but the look on his face would be priceless. Still, he was as curious as anyone else as to what this vault contained. Every storage site they had uncovered so far had contained at least a few items of value: artifacts from the vanished Zanzibari civilization, mostly, but also precious metals, useful machinery, even records of the human colony on Zanzibar before its destruction. It was a historical treasure trove, enough to make even Zak Mesa crack a smile.

Lang’s greed was insatiable, though, and he was focused like a laser on finding the vault. Now he waited, believing this to be his moment of triumph. Perhaps it was, and perhaps Cecil’s ordeal was almost over. His sister, Catherine, was on her way, and should be arriving on Zanzibar soon. She was coming to take him home. Cecil dared to hope that he would be able to leave this rock behind and never return. He didn’t speculate about what he’d do after this, but whatever it was, it’d be somewhere with plenty of sunshine, fresh, breathable air, and every luxury he could afford.

For Zak and Anna, it was also a moment of triumph, if a bittersweet one. The secrets they’d uncovered would go down in the history books. They had learned more about Zanzibar than any researchers had since before the war, and their hard work had paid off. Even Cecil considered it a tragedy that such dedication to research and learning should serve to benefit a maniac like Aristotle Lang, but nonetheless, Zak and Anna had much to be proud of. He doubted they really believed him, but Cecil had promised them both that he’d ensure they were taken care of, once their ordeal was over. They had earned it, after all.

It had taken days of constant drilling to breach the armored, reinforced ceramicrete blast doors, but Lang had kept the pressure on his foremen, and his dig crews had been relentless. Now, as the warlord watched eagerly, a drilling machine was about to punch through the last layer of the meter-and-a-half thick blast doors. The technicians monitoring the drilling robot were intensely studying the displays, sweat trickling down their faces. The machines and lighting had caused it to grow uncomfortably warm in the tunnel, and everyone was nervous as well. One of them, a dark-haired man whose face was covered with a breathing apparatus, cocked his head suddenly. He tapped the controls and the machine ground to a halt. As the heavy, tracked drilling machine backed out, a loud, beeping alarm marking its time, the clouds of dust drifted through the hole it had just dug. A slight breeze wafted through the entire tunnel as the air pressure equalized. When the machine was far enough away, its operators shut it down, and it was suddenly eerily quiet.

Everyone looked to Aristotle Lang. The warlord, for his part, was focused only on the entrance to the tunnel. He approached slowly, cautiously even, as if he were afraid it was all a dream. His mouth agape, he shook his head slowly before looking over at his trio of captives. “Mr. Mesa, come here, my boy.”

Zak and Cecil looked at one another anxiously, but the historian approached Lang quietly, saying nothing. Cecil and Anna followed tepidly.

“You’ve done it,” Lang said softly, almost choked up. “You have done this thing for me. I never doubted you.”

“Well, yes, but I can’t confirm that there’s anything of value—”

“Nonsense, boy. No one would go through this much trouble without good reason. Listen to me now. Take your compatriots and go in with me. Together, we will see what you have worked so hard to find. You’ve all earned it.”

It took the trio of off-worlders only a few moments to get ready. Protective hard hats, flashlights, and recorders were all readied. As they prepared to enter, Lang’s men clustered around the breach in the blast door in a large semicircle, but kept their distance. They had been afraid that some alien horror was buried in there. Cecil didn’t think so, but he certainly couldn’t rule it out. He was a little nervous himself, if he cared to admit it.

Lang went in first, his flashlight leading the way as he ducked through the hole in the blast door. Zak followed, then Anna. Cecil was last. Taking a deep breath of filtered, condensed air, the Avalonian aristocrat ducked down, stepped through the breach, and joined the others on the far side. When he cleared the borehole he stood up and shined his light around the massive room he found himself in. “My God.”

The vault was not empty. The middle of the huge room was open, allowing even large trucks to enter. A turntable built into the floor would rotate them around so they could drive back out of the tunnel without having to back out. A dust-covered, eight-wheeled, seven-ton truck sat on the turntable, where it had been left more than a century before. Beyond it were stacks of shipping containers, neatly organized and arranged. The room was ten meters high, and the containers were stacked almost to the ceiling.

The four vault hunters, in awe, slowly moved deeper into the vast storage room, each wandering in a different direction. As before, the containers were marked and labeled with hard copy manifests of their contents. Cecil brushed the dust off of the clear plastic envelope and read the packing list. The artifact was given a serial number, and had been cataloged by when and where it had been found. The description itself was vague; Cecil didn’t know what was meant by “anomalous materials,” exactly. The thing that caught his attention was the last line, “ORIGIN”: instead of “Native Zanzibari” like all of the stored artifacts they’d found before, this one was listed as “Unknown Extraterrestrial Antecedent Species.”

It took Cecil a moment to process what he’d just read. Antecedent species. His heart dropped into his stomach. “Zak!” he shouted. “Zak, get over here!”

The historian, with Anna Kay and Aristotle Lang in tow, jogged over to Cecil, wondering what he was so upset about. Instead of explaining, Cecil merely shined his light on the container and pointed. Zak leaned forward and read the manifest, his mouth unconsciously moving as he did so. “Unknown extraterrestrial Antecedent . . . species . . .” he said, trailing off. He stood up slowly, eyes wide. “Cecil,” he said, looking as if he’d seen a ghost. “This is it. This is the secret they were hiding. It wasn’t just the Zanzibari artifacts. There . . . there was another species on this planet. Look at the date codes! It was from the same era as the Zanzibari civilization! Cecil, the natives, they were being visited by advanced aliens! My God, they found Antecessor artifacts . . . they . . . I don’t . . .” Zak trailed off again, looking a little woozy. He steadied himself on the massive storage shelf and breathed deeply through his mask for a moment. “Cecil, do you know what this means? Right here, in this room, are materials, artifacts left over from a species so advanced they were traveling the stars four million years ago. This is a priceless find . . . priceless.”

In the depths of space, there had been found evidence of species older and more advanced than humankind. While humanity had encountered only one other spacefaring race, the aliens derisively known as the Maggots, the galaxy was nonetheless full of life. Most worlds that supported life had nothing akin to a sentient species; the few sentient races that had been encountered were all very primitive compared to humanity. Only the Maggots surpassed the human race in their technological capabilities, for they were far older. It was widely believed that the forces the Concordiat fought and defeated were the last remnants, the dying gasp of a once mighty, galaxy-spanning empire. The Maggots, it was believed, had been a spacefaring race for thousands of years before humanity ever left the Earth, but even they were young in a universe that was incredibly ancient. There had been scattered evidence of advanced, intelligent, spacefaring races far, far older than even the Maggots. Human scientists had no names for them, and knew nothing about them aside from what could be gleaned from the occasional bit of leftover material or fossilized biological matter. These multiple races were known collectively as Antecessors, and what little remained of them, after millions or even billions of years, was indeed priceless.

This fact was not lost on Aristotle Lang. He slowly ran a hand over the container, smudging the thick layer of dust with his gloved hand. The look on his face was one of awe, even lust. “Mr. Mesa,” he said quietly. “You will be rewarded handsomely, you and your partner both. You cannot imagine how wealthy you just made me. You cannot imagine . . .”

Zak frowned. “All I want is to go home,” he said ruefully.

Lang ignored his tone, still almost in shock. “Then go home you shall. You have earned it. I need . . . I need to get my men in here. I need to appraise these artifacts, find buyers . . . so much to do . . .”

Cecil, treading carefully, tried to caution the old warlord. “These anomalous materials could be toxic, radioactive, or dangerous in some other way. You must be careful. If the Zanzibaran colonists found prehistoric alien technology—”

“Then they have made me a very, very rich man, Mr. Blackwood,” Lang interrupted. He turned to Cecil. “Zanzibar is my home. I was born here, in squalor. Every day is a struggle for survival on this Godforsaken planet. There is nothing here but chaos, violence, and suffering. This, this is the key, don’t you see? By leveraging these natural resources, I can remake this miserable world into something fit to live on! Money, investment, research, all of these things will flow to Zanzibar now. The man who controls these resources controls the future of this world. I control these resources now, Mr. Blackwood. I’m going to make Zanzibar a better world.”

And kill everyone who gets in your way, Cecil thought numbly. Dear God, what have I done?

* * *

A steady wind howled through Lang’s Burg, blasting the east side of the settlement with dust and sand. Zak Mesa, huddled over his console, three separate displays up, paid the wind no mind. He was utterly lost in his work, and had been so for hours. It was only in the last hour or so, when he had gotten up to empty his bladder, that he realized that night had fallen. Cecil had staggered by sometime before that, guided by Bianca to his bed. He had gotten so drunk he could barely stand, and his Zanzibaran . . . girlfriend? Concubine? Zak had never really figured out their relationship. In any case, Bianca had been promising Cecil all sorts of intimate delights if he’d just stop drinking and come to bed.

The historian hadn’t thought about it long enough to figure out what Cecil was on about. The Avalonian rich boy went through depressive mood swings like this from time to time, and the easiest thing to do was to just let him sort himself out. Bianca seemed to genuinely care about him, though, which puzzled Zak, but he had never been able to figure women out anyway.

Rubbing his eyes, Zak took another sip from an awful, probably unsafe, locally produced energy drink and focused on his reading. There had been so much information in the vault, saved on drives for long-term storage, that it had been utterly overwhelming. Lang had secured all of the found artifacts for himself, and had them under heavy guard. He was even now trying to find ships to take them off-world, buyers for the goods, and places to buy weapons from. Within a local year or two, Zak figured, his armies would overrun Freeport and he’d be the de facto dictator of the entire planet. The alien treasures, instead of being studied, cataloged, and put on display, would be hoarded away by greedy collectors, smuggled into private collections, or destructively exploited.

It sickened Zak. It sickened him that he’d uncovered one of the greatest xenoarchaeological finds in history, one that had been carefully and deliberately hidden before the Second Interstellar War, and it was all to the benefit of a violent megalomaniac like Aristotle Lang. He might end up in the history books, but he wondered what those books would say about him in the end. How many people were going to die because of Lang? What would become of the artifacts?

It was depressing to think about, so Zak tried not to think. At times, he thought he understood why Cecil drank so much. In any case, his ordeal was, hopefully, almost over. Cecil’s sister was on her way; with luck, Zak and Anna would be off Zanzibar. He didn’t know what would happen after that. He’d been too depressed, too overwhelmed, and too wrapped up in his work to broach the subject with her. That talk would have to come, sooner or later, and Zak found himself dreading it. She was a woman of wealth, education, and note. He had been barely making a living as an archivist, a minimum-wage historian, when Cecil had initially approached him. He had very little to go home to back on Columbia. Anna had everything she could possibly want on New Constantinople.

There you go again, damn it. Just focus. There was nothing to be gained from this speculation and brooding. He had in front of him a treasure trove of information, and Zak had long since learned that the best distraction from his troubles was to get lost in his reading. There had been more to this find than even the long-dead Dr. Loren had known. The Zanzibaran Colonial Government had kept the discovery of the Antecessor artifacts top secret. There was always the potential that alien discoveries could be dangerous, like a tribe of hunter-gatherers discovering a box of hand grenades. They kept everything as secret as they could, compartmentalized the project as much as possible.

Very little was known about the Antecessor species that had once walked on Zanzibar. It did seem that like the human scientists four million years later, they knew their end was coming. Everything that had been found of them had been located underground, discovered by a mining operation. Whereas some fossilized skeletons of the bipedal, three-eyed native species had been recovered, there was no leftover biological remnant of the Antecessors. All that was known of their makeup and appearance came from the artwork of the Zanzibari.

This Antecessor species looked nothing like a human, and the Zanzibari depictions of them were nebulous at best. So unfamiliar was their form that one didn’t immediately recognize what one was seeing when studying a picture of them, though it reminded Zak of a mix of Earth sea creatures.

The trunks of their bodies were stalklike and resembled a sea cucumber standing on end, at least two meters tall, with different Zanzibari illustrations showing individuals with surface bumps and projecting spikes. At the bottom of the stalk there seemed to be an elastic pad, similar to a slug’s, that was used for mobility. Halfway up the stalk, four tendril-like appendages emerged from their bodies, and the depictions by the natives indicated that these appendages could be extended or retracted as needed. Their bodies curved slightly forward and were crowned with what resembled a grotesque sea anemone. The tendrils and tissues on this structure were theorized to be sensory units, but that, too, was little more than speculation.

The xenobiologists who had studied this species theorized that this Antecessor species had aquatic origins. They called them Pseudocaelus aquagrandis. Like many of their theories, this was also speculation, as no biological remains of them had ever been found.

The ancient native Zanzibari hadn’t known anything about the Antecessors, either. Everything the human scientists had learned of their arrival and presence on Zanzibar had come from a series of remarkably well-preserved etchings and sculptures, created by native artists millions of years before. The Antecessors were depicted coming down from the stars in great vessels. The Zanzibari believed that the Antecessors had found them as hunter-gatherers and had lifted them up, teaching them writing, farming, mining, and city-building. The native civilization flourished under the guidance of the aliens, and in turn, the Zanzibari seemed to have worshiped the Antecessors as gods. Great temples were built in their honor, orders and societies were dedicated to their devotion.

For thousands of local years, the Antecessors ruled over Zanzibar. They seemed to have been few in number, but their influence was great. They were depicted observing, or perhaps directing, the construction of great pentagonal pyramids that dwarfed the ones constructed by the Ancient Egyptians on Earth. They oversaw the digging of great canals to get fresh water from great northern glaciers to the equatorial cities. The Antecessors taught the Zanzibari to build ships and navigate the planet’s shallow, salty seas. They were shown teaching astronomy and apparently medicine as well. They gave the natives alloys stronger and longer-lasting than anything they could have forged for themselves, which, Zak realized, probably explained the short sword Anna had been studying.

The advanced aliens’ generosity came at a price, however. One of the murals, which Zak was presently studying, depicted a group of Zanzibari rebelling against the Antecessors, even slaying one with swords and spears. In turn, the aliens punished the natives cruelly. They obliterated one of the great cities they had helped the Zanzibari build, wiping it from the surface of the planet like Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament. The wayward natives were slaughtered by the thousands, sacrificed as a penance for their uprising.

The Antecessors may have wielded godlike power and influence over the Zanzibari, but they were not gods. The scientists studying the artifacts had not ascertained what had happened to the planet four million years before, but it seemed the Antecessor beings knew the end was coming. Great murals, preserved for millions of years in the incredibly dry darkness of subterranean caves, depicted the Antecessors digging great underground structures, holdfasts against the coming doom. Others were shown fleeing back to the stars, leading to speculation that they might still be out there somewhere.

The Zanzibari, too, prepared for their end. They dug catacombs and tombs for themselves, but unlike the Antecessors, they seemed to hold out no hope for their survival. Interpreting the artwork of a long dead, nonhuman species involved a lot of guesswork and speculation, but in observing the murals, etchings, and sculptures, Zak came to the same conclusion as his predecessors: they had known that they were doomed. There was a fatalistic sadness to their art that transcended the gulf between human and inhuman intellects.

When the end came, it happened rapidly. The geological record of the incident could be found all over the planet. The world was scorched, burned, cleansed in fire. The seas, indeed almost all water on Zanzibar, boiled away and were blown into space as the planet’s magnetosphere dissipated. Solar winds did the rest, slowly thinning out the planet’s atmosphere over the course of eons. Colossal upheavals shook the surface of the world, causing great quakes unlike anything ever seen on Earth. Mountains crumbled and fell, rifts kilometers wide opened up, and still scarred the surface of the barren world.

Everything the Zanzibari had built, all of their achievements, were rendered unto dust and carried away by the winds of time. Only fragments of their once mighty civilization remained, broken remnants buried between layers of silicate. Zanzibar, now a cold and dead world, wheeled quietly around Danzig-5012 for four million years before another living being set foot on it.

Conflicting theories as to the cause of Zanzibar’s apocalypse abounded. Many believed it had been an unusually powerful solar flare, or even a discharge from Danzig-5012 striking and altering the planet’s atmosphere. Some postulated the culprit might have been a nearby gamma ray burster. Others insisted that neither of these scenarios would have ended the planet’s seismic and volcanic activity, but the counter for that argument was that it wasn’t known when such activity stopped. It could have been millions of years earlier, as the geological evidence was inconclusive.

The most chilling theory, to Zak’s mind, was the one that most of the scientists had dismissed. This theory held that Zanzibar was deliberately destroyed by other alien intelligences, greater than even the Antecessors. By what means they did this could only be guessed at. The thought of something capable of wielding such titanic power frightened Zak to his core. He looked up from the warm glow of his screens, listened to the howling wind buffeting the building, and felt very small in a dark and hostile universe.

Zak startled when a hand was lightly placed on his shoulder. He turned around to see Anna, looking concerned. “You should get some rest,” she said softly. “Do you know what time it is?”

Zak blinked hard and looked at the chrono on one of his displays. “Oh man. It’s late.”

“You’ve been at this for more than a day straight,” Anna said.

“I know. I’m just frustrated. Look at what we found, what we learned, and it’s all going to Lang!”

“There’s nothing we can do right now,” she replied. She was right, of course. “Once we get off this planet and back to civilization, we’ll have more options. Your message was sent out. You’ve done everything you can do, and risked your life in the process. Stop beating yourself up.”

Zak closed his eyes as Anna rubbed his shoulders. “I know. Once I get back to Columbia I can get a hearing with Concordiat officials.”

“I’ll be there with you. I may be able to use my family connections to open some doors.”

Zak opened his eyes again. “You’re going back to Columbia? Why not go home to New Constantinople?” He immediately felt stupid for asking. Are you trying to convince her to be on a different planet than you, idiot?

Anna smiled, looking down at the historian. Her hair hung down in his face as he looked up into her eyes. “Because I don’t want to go back to New Constantinople yet, Zachary. When I do go back, I’m taking my paramour home with me.”

“Paramour?” Zak asked. “Is that what they—” Before he could finish, Anna leaned down and kissed him passionately.

She stood up after a long moment, gently stroking the top of his bald head. “Paramour, Zak. It’s aristocratic-speak for boyfriend. Lover, if you will. Now come to bed. Those files will still be there tomorrow, and being the paramour of a woman in my position is a serious matter. I’m tired of going to bed alone. You’ve been derelict in your duties.”

Zak blinked rapidly, and tried to think of something clever or charming to say, but he stammered out “I, uh, okay, sorry,” instead. Anna just smiled at him one last time and turned for her room. Zak watched her leave, glanced back at his screens, then looked at the partially open door to her room. She was right: the long and tragic history of Zanzibar would wait a few more hours. Perhaps it was time to focus on something positive. The rather-less-dour historian stood up, kicked off his shoes, and followed Anna into her room. Carpe diem, right?




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