Chap. 270 The Mystery in the Strait
“K’ndar here! Who calls?”
One of these days, he hoped, the voice would be that of the caller, rather than the strange sounding, electronically produced one. Was that how AIVAS had sounded?
“K’ndar, it’s me! Jansen!! Can you come to Engineering? I’m there with just about every engineer in Landing. D’nis is opening a symposium in response to what we’ve learned about that thing at the bottom of Western’s Strait!
He ran, despite not knowing quite sure where Engineering was.
He found it. Panting from his run, he took a spot at the back of the crowd. A quick glance told him these were all strangers to him. Obviously, not a biologist in the bunch!
Nor, he realized, was there the curious staff, uninvolved in the research but showing up anyway. Apparently engineering and surveying weren’t as interesting as a new animal.
On a projected screen, above the heads of the audience a strange, multicolored picture showed the Strait’s chute. He could easily discern the color coding. The darker the color, the deeper the chute.
He saw that every one of the engineers had the same picture on his or her datalink. He’d not thought to bring his.
D’nis, at the front of the group, beckoned him to join him.
Again? I have no desire to be the center of attention, he thought.
“Should I be here, sir? I’m no engineer.”
D’nis grinned. “No, but should there be a question in a biological vein, you’re the answer man.”
“Gee, thanks,” K’ndar said. He hoped none of the crowd would ask him anything.
“Good morning, Engineers,” D’nis called out in a dragon rider’s voice.
The voices dropped, save for one man who insisted on chatting to someone on his datalink.
D’nis waited for several moments. Then Jansen called out, “Geoff! We’re all waiting on you.”
The man rolled his eyes but didn’t look up. D’nis waited. After a moment, he called out, “Geoff?” The man finally met his eyes.
D’nis began.
“My colleagues. Several months ago, I led a team composed of four scientist dragonriders to locate a site on the Western Continent for Observatory 2, now in the process of being built. During the survey, we found a large man made caisson that had been built sometime in the past, right on the very edge of the canyon that is the Strait. That strait cuts Western Continent completely in half.
While we were at Observatory 1, we talked to a dolphineer. Her dolphins, when asked about the Strait, mentioned that there was ‘something made by humans” on the seabed.
Greta, my geologist, took readings from the caisson with a field lidar. It indicated something big and uniformly shaped was deep in the water, but it didn’t have the range or depth of field to give any more information. So, some of you, and Jansen in particular, have been accessing the Yokohama’s bathymetric lidar to examine that indication.”
Geoff interrupted.
“Start at the beginning! How did they know it was there? I’m looking at the screen, I see a blip, but what makes you think it’s anything more than just a big rock?”
D’nis frowned. He couldn’t decide if he were more pissed at the man’s casual inattention or his intentional insolence.
“Weren’t you listening? I just said the dolphins reported something there,” he snapped.
“Actually, no, I was looking at the lidar graph on my datalink,” he said, giggling.
Dead silence. Someone elbowed him.
K’ndar glared at him.
“Sir,” he said, forcing the civil term, “not only did her lidar indicate something unnatural was there, the dolphins insist there’s something on the seabed that is man made, and metallic. They don’t know precisely what it is, because dolphins are forbidden to transit the strait. It’s too dangerous, even for a dolphin. The current runs from west to east without a break at about 100 kilometers per hour,” he said.
“One hundred? As in one zero zero?”
“Correct.” What part of hundred did this jerk not understand?
“Has anyone actually measured the speed? Gone down the strait in a ship?”
K’ndar snickered.
“If they have, it was only once,” he said.
“Once as in one try, or…” Geoff pressed.
“Once, as in, they don’t survive the trip. The southern end of the strait is littered with wrecks,” K’ndar said.
“Gotcha!” Geoff crowed. “If there are no data, and dolphins don’t go down the strait, what makes you think it’s manmade?”
“ ‘Gotcha?’ ” he repeated, rolling the word in his mouth as if it were nasty.
“Dolphins don’t need to be right atop it to know it’s there. They navigate by sonar. They can ping it from a long ways away. In addition, they have a form of communication that can travel vast distances via underwater sound waves. I can tell you from experience, they can transmit information from one end of Pern to the other within minutes. I would not be surprised if the information about whatever it is in the strait was first reported by a dolphin who saw it before it was dropped into the sea.”
“What? That’s impossible! They don’t read or write!”
“I’ve spoken with dolphins, even Tillek, their leader and the most revered dolphin on Pern. She comes from two and half millennia of matriarchs, all who proudly take the name Tillek in honor of Captain James Tillek, of the transport Bahrain. That starship brought the first dolphins to Pern.
Their history is oral and cultural. Everything dolphins know, everything they learn, everything they experience, is shared with every other dolphin. They have a complete history of their existence that goes right back to colonization. If they say it’s manmade, I believe them.”
“So you believe a fish rather than a scientist.”
“Dolphins are mammals, not fish.”
“If it swims, it’s a fish.”
He was about to retort when Raventh touched him.
Corvuth says, ‘D’nis says you’re being purposefully baited. He says, let me handle this yob
He met D’nis’s eye and nodded.
“Stop picking nits, Geoff, and let’s get on with this,” said a woman in the group.
“It’s not nits I’m picking. I am pursuing their line of inquiry, one that sounds specious at best. Looking at the lidar map of the strait there, it’s about 950 meters from the top of the cliff? to the surface of the water. Add in the water’s depth of about 300 meters, I can’t believe you can see anything on the bottom, light doesn’t penetrate that far. And neither can a handheld lidar, that’s a fact.”
“That’s why we used the starship’s lidar, it has a much better range and depth,” Jansen, trying to head off what she saw coming. Idiot. Everyone’s patience is being tested by you.
What IS it about these people? Always someone pawing his turf, even when he has nothing to gain by it, K’ndar thought, keeping his eye on Geoff. You’re the fourth…or fifth? pompous, conceited arsehole I’ve met here at Landing.
“If you’re finished quibbling, I would like to continue my briefing. I have only a short amount of time to present this information as I have other things to manage,” D’nis said, coldly.
K’ndar recognized the warning in his tone.
The group smirked. Geoff subsided, but it was plain he wasn’t done.
“Now then. Despite her expertise, Jansen was unable to extract any information about the object from the field lidar. What drew our attention in the first place was a large bulwark, found on the northern edge of the strait. Jansen?”
Jansen cued her datalink and a picture of the bulwark appeared. Everyone laughed. K’ndar was crouched atop it, gingerly looking over the side. Siskin was hanging onto his shoulder for dear life, his wings behind him.
“I didn’t remember that picture being taken,” he said to D’nis. D’nis grinned.
“I think you were just trying to keep being blown off the bulwark.”
“It DOES look a bit breezy,” someone said.
K’ndar laughed. “Ma’am, you have no idea!”
D’nis continued. “The bulwark is composed of the same material that our buildings here at Landing are made of. A mixture of ‘plastic’ and ‘concrete’, material we no longer have available. It is a size consistent with that of one of the cargo shuttles from the starship, a surviving, if inoperable one of which is in Honshu Weyr. So at first, we believed it to be a shuttle pad.
Then we wondered if perhaps it was meant to be the caisson for a bridge. But, as you may imagine, the winds are too strong, I don’t believe a bridge could be erected safely, nor could one be designed that could tolerate those wind speeds, at least not with the materials we have now. In addition, Western Continent is almost completely uninhabitable, and there was no sign that we could see of any construction of roads, or buildings. There is no reason for building a bridge to nowhere.
We crossed the strait to see if there was a corresponding caisson on the other side. There was nothing.”
“Right,” Geoff said, “you crossed to the other side? Didn’t you say ships can’t go down there? What did you do, swim?” he snarked.
“Hey!” someone said.
D’nis stopped for the count of three. Then, in a tone of ice, said, “Sir, you are dismissed.”
There was a shocked silence. K’ndar was so proud of D’nis he could hardly keep from laughing.
“What, why? All I’m doing is asking questions,” Geoff said, all innocence.
“No, you are heckling. I am Councilman D’nis, Geoff, a Councilman of PERN. I am, also, former Weyrleader of Kahrain Steppe Weyr. I have yet to hear even the slightest bit of respect for my position from you.
Your tone of voice is condescending, your questions nothing but vainglorious posturing. You are taking up time that all of us here have very little of. Before you leave, I will remind you that I am a dragonrider, as was everyone on my team. Dragons can FLY. We FLEW across the strait. Now, sir, you will go and tender your resignation to Administration. You are permanently barred from Landing. Gather your personal belongings and depart. Should you keep any of Landing’s equipment, books, information or tools, even so much as a blunt pencil, I will have you punished, possibly incarcerated, and officially banished.”
Someone breathed, ‘Finally…”
Geoff gawped. “But..”
“Didn’t you understand what I said? Are you deaf as well as stupid? Go. Resign. Leave. Now.”
For several long moments, Geoff stood, his mouth working without a sound. His eyes went from corner to corner, looking for support. None was coming.
He fled the room.
Several of the crowd sighed. It sounded like relief, to K’ndar.
D’nis allowed his heat to dissipate. No one seemed upset. Good.
“Now then. Let’s cut to the chase. When we reached the southern side of the strait, I photographed pictures of the opposite cliff face. Jansen?”
“On it, sir! Jansen said, still smirking at Geoff’s denouement. The picture changed to one of the northern cliff wall. Zooming in, K’ndar saw it almost solid white from the guano of uncounted numbers of nesting birds and wherries. He could even see small caves, with young birds peering out.
Even so, there were several dark, vertical lines, straight and uniform, unmarked by guano.
“If you look closely, the photos show what appear to be channels precisely and obviously mechanically cut, running from seabed to the top of the cliff, ending at the base of the bulwark.”
Jansen moved a cursor up and down the channels. Yes. Only now can I see them, K’ndar thought. He remembered that flight in the strait. No way could I have seen them then, he thought. Not as fast as we were going, not as frightening it had been…yet incredibly exciting.
The memory of Raventh’s amazing dive sent chills up his spine.
It was fun. I might try that again, someday Raventh said, proudly.
You will over my dead body, lizard. We were lucky.
Jansen shifted the view. Yes. The channels were deep, appeared to be uniform top to bottom, and extended from the bulwark to the bottom of the channel.
“They’re deep. Look at that precision!”
“Anchor lines, sir?” someone asked. K’ndar noticed their tone was much happier. Geoff had it coming, he thought, and everyone else seems to be happy about it. Fool, to cross D’nis! He knew from being a weyrling that the bronze rider was patient but didn’t suffer fools or bullies lightly. You tested his fences at your peril. Let’s never mind that a Councilman of Pern had more than enough power to send Geoff and his whole family to the Bitran mines, had he a mind to. What in the world is it with people like that?
“I’m thinking, transmission lines. Because…Jansen?”
Jansen was quick as light, grinning from ear to ear. Oh, this was going to be the best part. She remembered her victory dance when she finally coaxed the data out of hiding. I must have looked ridiculous, jumping for joy. But things like this..it’s why I love my work.
“This is a view of what the lidar can ‘see’ on the seabed. The dark blue background indicates great depth. Annnnnnnnd, here is the artifact, “she said.
The lidar map expanded to show, against a dark blue background, a long barrel shaped tube, open at both ends. The downstream end of the tube was much smaller than the intake end.
Just a few meters away from it, the remnants of what had once been a gantry, or a scaffold, lay crumpled on the seabed, as if it had fallen from a great height.
The room erupted into questions.
“What in the name of Pern is that?”
“Whoa, how big is that thing?”
“Oh…that structure, it…did it fall off the bulwark?”
“What’s that framework, look, has anyone measured it? Looks sturdy.”
“Maybe it was a crane, to lower the tube down from the cliff?”
“But that would imply that the tube was on the bulwark to begin with? But, sir, you said there’s no indication of any sort of load bearing paths?”
Enjoying the chaos not normally seen from engineers, D’nis said, “None that we could see, and our ground truthing, as well as the lidars, shows nothing but vegetation, with no soil compaction..am I right, K’ndar?”
Fascinated, K’ndar had forgotten he might be pinged!
“What..um, ma’am, I’m sorry, would you repeat the question?”
“I’ll rephrase it. Did you take soil samples, and if so, did they show any sort of compaction consistent with heavy traffic from oxen, or from machinery used to create the bulwark?” the woman said.
“Yes, ma’am, I took soil samples, as well as vegetative ones. There was no compaction of soils that would, um, indicate heavy traffic, like that from oxen or humans. All the soil samples were of the same density, on either side of the strait.”
Somehow I dragged that out of my arse, he thought. I have to wake up!!
“Would you say, then, that there was no sign of human, or animal movement around or to the bulwark?”
“I would say there was no sign whatsoever.”
“So, whatever that tube is, it probably wasn’t lowered from the bulwark, correct, Councilman? Or was it built on site? But no, that would mean materials, tools…”
The questions swarmed like so many insects. Thankfully, they were no longer directed at him.
“I don’t know that, but I would hazard a guess that it was used for SOME sort of support,” D’nis said.
“Something had to bring it in, then. If not a ship, not by land, then by a dragon? Could a dragon have brought it in?”
“Or a shuttle? The Ancients had aircraft that wasn’t used for people, they were for bringing in big, heavy cargo, like those gigantic metal doors at Fort Hold. I’ve seen it, there’s one at Honshu,” someone interjected.
“Ma’am, I doubt dragons were used to lift it. Our dragons, TODAY, perhaps, but dragons were far smaller 2500 years ago. I’m guessing that it was created before things went sideways on Pern, before Thread became the primary business of dragons,” D’nis said.
“Maybe a cargo shuttle did land on the caisson, or maybe they staged the tube on the bulwark? It looks solid enough.”
“Maybe it was floated in, with a crew standing atop the bulwark?”
D’nis was enjoying this flurry of questions. It was how research was started, with dozens of sharp minds trying to fit the answer into the question.
“Could the framework have been a cradle for the tube? Perhaps the tube was lowered into the water by a shuttle?”
“That’s a real possibility. I don’t know the first thing about flying a shuttle, sir. I don’t know if they could handle the winds.”
“And the tube? What’s the size of it? Is it solid? I’m thinking it’s a real tube, hollow.”
“It is enormous. It appears to be about 50 meters long. Of course we can’t see inside. I agree with you, I believe it to be hollow. Or at least, open at both ends.”
“Look at the placement of it. Assuming it’s not been moved by the current, it’s precisely aligned with what is probably the maximum water flow. The narrower end is downstream. Water flowing into the tube and then…I think what we’re seeing is a tube demonstrating the Bernoulli principle, the water’s speed is increased by the narrowing.”
“Was it on the floor, placed on the sea bottom purposefully? Or could it have been suspended in mid-current?”
K’ndar grinned at seeing all their engineering brains starting to whirl. This was what science was, he realized..good minds, all over a puzzle, dissecting it through group think.
“Why wasn’t it, uh, if this was an installation, what happened? Why was it never completed? Or maybe it fell off an air craft?”
“I have no idea, sir.”
“Did the database have any historical data on it?”
“Jansen? This is your part,” D’nis said.
Jansen nodded. “Yes sir. I was unable to get any data out of the field lidar. It was useless, waterlogged and corroded by sea water. The database could only speak to what the Yoke’s lidar gave it. It had no context. I had given up trying to find anything about the tube.
But we recently restored a large scanner in one of the buildings recently opened. It had a great deal of data stored in its brain, stuff that, for some unknown reason, had never been uploaded to the database. The last data entered into the scanner was just around fifteen years after Landing. That, we all know, is when Mt. Garben erupted, and even though we now know it was Garben’s last eruption, Landing was abandoned.
It took some coaxing of the scanner, but when the database got through to it, we got reams of data. We’ll be processing that for months to come. When it awoke, the scanner was almost in tears, thankful that finally SOMEONE was emptying its memory.”
She loves her computers, K’ndar thought, they’re like pets to her, creatures with feelings.
“The database has been chewing through the scanner’s data for weeks. It indicated that it had data from the scanner about lidar readings on the strait. This morning, I asked it what it thinks the tube is.”
Every ear pricked up.
“And?”
“The database’s ‘best guess’ is that the tube is a ‘turbine’. “A power generating turbine, using water flowing through it at high speed to produce electricity.””
For one strained moment, there was complete silence. Then,“Yessssssssssss!!!” a man shouted, jumping to his feet. His arms pumped the air. “Bernoulli! I was right!!”
The crowd erupted in applause and yells. They all began talking at once. D’nis smiled.
After the cacophony settled, somewhat, D’nis called for their attention. “Engineers, I will leave this with you, now. I would love to sit with you all and talk this thing out-there’s nothing I love better than a good engineer brain thrashing. But duty calls, so, if there are no more questions, I need to return to my work as Councilman.”
“I have one, sir,” said one of the women, “You said something about the geologist? Greta? You have her lidar, is there a reason she’s not here?”
The celebrants froze at D’nis’s expression. K’ndar felt his heart break.
D’nis turned to K’ndar.
“K’ndar?”
Shards, he thought. Me again?
He cleared his throat.
“Ma’am, the reason we know ANYTHING about this ‘turbine’ is that Greta went back to the site after we’d completed our survey. She went alone, without telling a soul. She still had her field lidar. I think she attempted to fly down the strait to get a better reading.”
“Wasn’t she aware of how strong the winds were? Too strong for a dragon?”
“Yes ma’am, she was very aware. But Greta was two things above all-absolutely fearless, and, without a doubt, the best dragon rider I’ve ever met. If she thought it was possible to fly in those winds, she would have have done it.”
“So, she turned the lidar in? But no, you said she still had the lidar. Now you have it. Was she fired?”
K’ndar sighed.
“She wasn’t fired, ma’am, she just left the weyr after the survey was done. She’d never formally signed in, she was there as a guest. We had no idea where she’d gone, but Greta was like that. A free agent, like a flutter on the wind.”
“Now I am thoroughly confused, K’ndar. How is it you have the lidar?”
“How..okay. I was sent back to Western for a few days. While there, I flew to the bulwark to gather more samples. I had no intentions of flying the strait, but I was lucky. While I was there, the winds suddenly dropped to a virtual standstill. My fire lizard was able to fly down to the water. He showed me a backpack at the base of the cliff. I dismissed the idea of recovering it, but against my better judgment, my dragon insisted we try. We did, and I promise you I’ll never try that again, even with light winds. My dragon timed it perfectly, the winds picked up right after we regained the top of the cliff.”
He paused. “The backpack was…it was Greta’s. The lidar was one of the few things that survived.”
“And Greta…didn’t?”
He felt his throat tighten. The mix of shattered human and dragon bones amidst the boulders would be forever in his mind. Greta. Earth. Probably their first ever taste of terror was their last.
“No.”
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