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| "The Outlanders" image prompt from Iron Age Media |
The item at auction was floundering. Bidding had been contentious up to one hundred thousand, but now it had slowed and the auctioneer was surveying the crowd. No one seemed willing to go over two hundred thousand. The auctioneer slammed the gavel once, twice, but then a voice rang out, clear and confident over the rest of the grumbling crowd.
“Ten million.” The tangled thrum of voices vanished in an instant. The auctioneer blinked, failing to hide his shock for a second before he acknowledged the bid.
“I have ten million,” he murmured, a twinge of disbelief clear in his voice. “Do I have eleven?”
There were no further bids. The sound of the gavel rang out with finality.
* * *
Jenkins stepped off the ramp leading down from the airship and looked around at the landscape. It was mostly barren, a few wilted plants with gnarled woody stalks around. There was a river nearby, and the noisily rushing water was clear but disturbingly lifeless. There was practically no green. A small animal darted from one hole to another, and the glimpse Jenkins got was off-putting--the creature was rodent-like, hairless, and tumorous pink flesh jutted out in grotesque protrusions all over its body.
Jenkins took his handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his forehead. The air was hot and muggy, and he had already started to sweat. A little ways off, his friend Marley stood at the peak of a little hill, looking around with a satisfied expression on his face. Jenkins walked up the hill to meet him.
“I still think you paid too much,” Jenkins said, now wiping the back of his neck.
Marley seemed unaffected by the heat or the humidity. He smiled broadly. “That's where you're wrong, my friend.” He spread his arms wide. “What this planet lacks in natural resources, it makes up for in history.” He turned and waved his arm out at the wasteland around them. “This is Earth, Jenkins, the cradle of mankind!”
Jenkins had never understood Marley's eccentric passion for the archaic, but he tolerated it more than most. He was probably Marley's only close friend. Marley, who had a reputation in polite society as an antisocial, backward lover of the past, even though that reputation belied his incisive vision of the future. His tireless work and shrewd investments had borne fruit enough that he could afford this unusual purchase. Now they both stood on the ground that had long ago harbored men who had chosen stasis over advancement.
The planet itself had been rediscovered and claimed fifty cycles ago by another explorer, the famous Richard Dagrón, but Dagrón had failed, against his expectations, to find any hidden caches of useful resources. The people who had stayed behind had destroyed themselves through a combination of poor management and armed conflict nearly ten thousand years ago. Those who had bet on the frontier had already left by then, and there had been very little reason to return while power-mad tyrants obsessed with control still held sway there. The people of Earth eventually banned any attempt to leave. For a long time, any who had tried to go back vanished and were never heard from again. Eventually the urge to return dried up and the planet's location and significance was relegated to rarely-read historical treatises.
By refusing to accept the future, Earth became ancient history. The rest of mankind had continued its sweep outward, exploring the galaxy further and further from its origins, and eventually very few cared to remember Earth when the vast frontier of the galaxy and its practically unlimited promise stood before them, waiting with open arms.
Dagrón had given up on the planet. The surface had been marred by a long period of high radioactivity. The animals and plants were deformed and useless except as sideshow exhibits. And so it had sat in Dagrón's considerable portfolio until his unexpected death last cycle. The planet went to auction, along with many other pieces of property that his son had no desire to manage.
Marley had snapped it up at auction with his unexpected and, frankly, shocking bid.
“Now what?” asked Jenkins, wiping behind his ears. “How do you expect to make a return on this investment? Even Dagrón couldn't figure out what to do with it.”
Marley nodded with a calm smile on his face. “Dagrón was a brilliant explorer, really a visionary. But he was interested in the frontier, not the past. In my mind, I've already seen a return on this investment.” Jenkins gave him a dubious look, so he continued. “More practically, I have ten other airships surveying the planet, and they aren't looking for resources. They're looking for the remains of Earth civilization.”
* * *
Two cycles passed. It had been nearly an Earth year, and Jenkins was shocked by how much additional funding Marley had dumped into this bizarre venture. It must have counted up into the millions! Marley, however, seemed completely unfazed and spent much of his time--too much, Jenkins hazarded--reading reports from the excavation teams and examining the trinkets they had found. They had first been guided by looking for large quantities of metal deep underground. Where they found hints of ancient cities, they had dug through the top layer of soil and found a second layer some ways down that was rich in the final, inert results of radioactive decay: lead, nickel, and a few other materials. Now they were finally digging into the remains of those long-dead cities.
One day, Marley called Jenkins to join him as he visited one of the digs, the one with the largest underground metal signature they had found so far. The men working there had uncovered a vast walled compound, with signs of many collapsed buildings, but some still partly intact under the layers of sediment. In addition, they had detected a significant network of tunnels and open areas below the buildings. One building, near the center of the compound, was a monstrous ziggurat of reinforced concrete, which one might still consider standing despite being buried by eons of accumulated dirt.
The workers had carefully excavated the earth around the compound until this central building stood at the bottom of a vast, rectangular strip mine cutting over a hundred meters into the earth. The thick walls stood, cracked and filthy. Huge steel doors, now rotted through with rust, had been pulled open and hung loosely off of long-decayed hinges.
Marley and Jenkins walked in. A handful of workmen glanced up at them, both men dressed with more attention to form than function, and went back to their work, shrugging. The foreman approached them with a nod, which both Marley and Jenkins returned.
“Marley, Jenkins, good to see you. I heard you were going to visit us today.”
Marley smiled. “Nice to see you, too, Harold. You had something you thought I'd like to see? I saw your report from yesterday.”
“Oh, yes,” Harold hummed with delight, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “We're just about ready to crack open the central room of this... fortress, I guess you would call it.”
“It's intact?” Jenkins asked incredulously.
“Surprisingly so, yes. The outer portion of the building took a beating but continued to stand, and this central room is even more fortified. It stands in the center of the fortress, behind several layers of structure. Each layer shouldered part of the load, providing ample protection to the innermost room. Those doors haven't been opened in over ten thousand Earth years.”
Marley whistled in awe, but Jenkins couldn't resist a sardonic upward flick of his eyebrows. Marley had been extremely lucky to find a kindred spirit for the foreman of this project. Harold was another antiquarian outcast, hardly accepted by fashionable people, but he was exactly the right person to lead this sort of effort, both intelligent and meticulous, a true craftsman with a love for history practically unknown in modern man.
“Lead the way,” said Marley, his voice dripping with delight, and Harold led them deeper into the complex.
They soon passed into a great hallway with doors arranged regularly on either side. In the center of the room was a pedestal with a marble face. On top of the pedestal was a single, disembodied bronze leg. The rest of the body had been torn off by some great force, as evidenced by the grotesquely stretched and sheared metal at the top of the thigh.
Harold pointed at a few piles of deeply warped and pitted pieces of bronze laying around the room. “The other parts of the statue, we think,” he said quietly. “They're barely recognizable as such, if indeed that is what they were.” The three men each went to examine a different piece. Jenkins found that one still held a little resemblance to the human form, what looked like a left arm halfway across the room. The other pieces were warped and showed evidence of being battered by great force, and some of their surfaces even looked as if they had been partially melted.
“This was the outer room,” Harold explained. “As best we can tell, members of the public were allowed here to look at the statue, and, I assume, a great deal of other things related to the subject of the statue.” Everything but the metal and stone had long since decayed into dust.
“What does that faceplate say?” asked Marley.
“It was written in what we call Late Earth Imperial,” said Harold. “When our ancestors left Earth, the languages spoke by the two groups began to diverge. Then, after thousands of years of isolation, the people on Earth had largely settled into this single language.
“The plate says, 'Behold Arva Morello, the First Emperor of Mankind, King of Kings! First of the great line which has ruled for millennia! Those who bow need feel no fear.'”
Jenkins shifted uncomfortably, frowning. “Quite a message,” mused Marley, whose smile had faded. The primal tendency of mankind to rule others with naked force had faded significantly once they had taken to the infinite sea of stars. There, it was nearly impossible for such a person to hold sway over many for long, when dissidents could simply escape into the endless void and thrive instead.
Harold went on. “Our understanding of Earth's history is piecemeal, and aside from what we have learned from our recent work here, ends shortly after the establishment of the Earth Empire.” He coughed. They had disturbed some of the dust by walking around, and a dirty haze clung to the ground like a predatory beast crouching, waiting for prey. “It was not long after the Earth Empire was established that the last people who were able to escape, left for the stars. From what we've learned in our digs, the Earth Empire lasted for about six thousand years before it collapsed.”
“And took all of the people on Earth with it,” Jenkins finished.
Harold nodded solemnly. “In the end, yes. As you can see from the condition of this fortress, or more accurately, from the condition of the city around this fortress, there was a great conflict. Fission and fusion-based weapons hit every major population center, some multiple times. The radioactive fallout and environmental changes made life impossible for the few isolated survivors. As far as we have found, the most recent human remains date to only a decade or so after the start of the conflict.”
“Ten years of torture,” Jenkins muttered, shaking his head.
Marley's face had twisted into a confused grimace. He looked around for a moment, deep in thought. “How is this place still standing?” he asked.
Harold raised a finger. “Ah. That's the interesting part,” he replied. “This fortress was never actually hit by any of those weapons directly. The city around it was, yes, but even this building wouldn't have survived a direct hit.” There was a sudden glint in his eye, and a little smile crossed his face. “Come with me.”
Harold led them down the center of the great hall and through a series of doors. Human bones littered the floor, along with the rusted husks of small arms. The lights brought in by the excavation team glowed a haunting blue-white, casting distasteful shadows. Before long, the hallway reached a large intersection, with two hallways leading off to the sides and another small hallway leading further in.
“These two side paths lead to a series of silos that held, or perhaps I could even say hold, missiles tipped with warheads using fissile materials,” Harold reported.
Jenkins gaped in incredulity. “Ho--hold?” he stammered.
“Oh, yes. The electronics, rockets, and explosives are long past being operable, but the uranium and plutonium have long half-lives. They're still there. We have a team coming to inspect them soon. If they can, they'll dismantle them and recycle any usable material.”
“Why weren't they used?” asked Jenkins, squinting skeptically. “I mean, if this great war happened, wouldn't these weapons have been used?”
“Oh, one would think so, yes,” Harold said. “I'm afraid we don't yet have a complete answer for that. Something prevented them from being used. We're wondering whether the answer lies beyond the innermost door, which is where we're headed, by the way.”
Marley grinned. “I'm intrigued. Lead on.”
They continued deeper inside along the smaller central hallway and reached a large, sealed double door. Marley walked up and ran a hand down the smooth, dark metal. Surprisingly, the metal had a patina from age but hadn't rusted through anywhere significantly. There was a large plastic crate at the side of the door, obviously left there by the excavation team.
“This door is made of some very resilient materials,” Harold noted, an air of admiration in his voice. “Heavy metal alloys with some synthetic materials mixed in. It's quite comparable to our modern metallurgy. However,” he grinned, “it's nothing we can't handle. He walked over to the box and opened it. “Jenkins, could you give me a hand?”
Jenkins walked over and the two of them pulled a large industrial laser from the box. The output of the laser was a hefty optical fiber with a flexible metal sheath. Harold passed out safety glasses and the three men put them on. The glasses would protect them from any small stray reflections of the invisible laser light, but not from a direct strike by the laser, Jenkins noted with slight trepidation.
Then Harold went to work on each hinge of the great door, slowly and carefully. The laser cut through the material without too much difficulty. After a few minutes, all six hinges had been cut in half. Then, Harold repeated the process with the center of the double doors. He quickly cut through whatever mechanisms held the doors together, then turned off the laser and set it aside.
“Could you two help me out?” Harold asked. “The door is heavy, but I think the three of us can move it.”
The three men grabbed onto the right half of the double doors and carefully slid it out of the frame and laid it onto the ground. Dust and dirt fell from the ceiling in dark, billowing clouds as they disturbed the ancient structure. The room was dark as pitch.
Harold handed flashlights to Marley and Jenkins and they went in. The room was littered with human remains, but most of them were near the doors or off to the sides of the room, as if they had been trying to escape something. Far at the back, there was a large, golden throne, miraculously intact.
Marley inspected the area around the throne, and suddenly his light passed over something. More bones, he thought, and was about to move on, but there was something peculiar about them. He walked up for a closer look.
Marley's voice was quiet with awe, but in the dread silence of the long-dead room, Jenkins and Harold heard him clearly. “Come here, look at this,” he said. The other two walked over to where his flashlight was pointed at the ground.
What first appeared to be a single skeleton was actually two sets of human remains. One laid practically on top of the other. The one on the bottom had several rings or bracelets of gold and other precious metals around its arms and legs. At first glance, the one on top had nothing, but as they inspected more closely they found a piece of black polymer clenched in its right hand.
The piece of black polymer led to a long, pitted and oxidized blade that rested between the ribs of the corpse on the bottom. The three men stared at the mess of bones.
Crouching, Jenkins blurted something similar to what the other two were thinking: “An empire, spanning an entire world, feared and obeyed by billions. Protected by the most advanced and destructive weapons in existence. Ended--by a single dagger.”
# # #
I hope you enjoyed this little bit of speculative fiction! If you like far-future spacefaring sci-fi, check out Missed Contact, a novella about a team of salvagers tasked with finding a missing group of scientists. What did they find that stopped them from reporting in, and will the Misevelin Salvage team fall prey to the same fate?
You might also like some of my free short stories--how about Jade Cargo, about a salvage hunter on patrol finding a weird, dead ship, or Cracks in the Walls at the Bottom, an actiony story about finding a little bonus at the bottom of a city built from a gigantic borehole in the ground.
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