53 CHIEF SCIENTIST HOWARD PALAWU

The Klikiss ruins on Rheindic Co bustled with a clamor of crowds. All the chaos made it damned hard to get any work done. Sent here on direct orders from Chairman Wenceslas himself, Chief Scientist Palawu had all the data files and equipment he needed, even authorization to supersede the technologists who had studied the first known operating Klikiss transportal since its discovery.

Despite Palawu’s supposed clout, however, the activities of the colonization initiative dominated so much of the time and space in the transportal chamber that he managed to study the system for only an hour or two in the dead of night. Figuring out how the transportals worked didn’t seem to be a priority for anyone but him.

Every few hours, Hansa staff rounded up colonists, then opened the transportal that corresponded to one of the numerous approved coordinate tiles. The pioneers filed forward, carrying their possessions on their backs. Cases of supplies and overloaded hoverpallets, barely able to fit within the trapezoidal frame, drifted through the stone wall and vanished. Presumably they arrived at the other end, though it wasn’t immediately obvious. As he watched person after person step through the shimmering wall, Palawu wondered if Margaret Colicos had escaped this room in the same manner . . . and been unable to find her way back.

Some colonists passed through with excitement-bright eyes and smiling faces. Others wore doubtful or uneasy expressions, but momentum carried them along. After coming this far, very few changed their minds and backed away. Anyone who declined the offer at the last moment was required to pay an exorbitant fee to go back home.

If Palawu had been younger, if his wife had still been alive, if he’d still had something to prove, he might have considered taking the chance himself. Instead, the Chief Scientist sat in the control room and listened to loud conversations, excitement building to a pitch of hysteria.

Hansa managers noisily directed the exodus, while transportal technicians monitored the machinery, keeping careful notes, because even they didn’t understand the process. Oh, how Palawu wished he could have had the luxury of time and peace and concentration just to figure out the alien technology. Given a week to pore over the Klikiss artifacts, Palawu was sure he could decipher many of the basic principles.

But Chairman Wenceslas had been eager to unleash his new interstellar land rush, leaving the Chief Scientist with little choice but to do his work by gathering up crumbs of time and information. He found a chair and tried to remain unobtrusive as he called up files on his old datascreen. For now he was just scanning textual notes, and he preferred using the slow and obsolete unit he’d had since his first job as a lab assistant and secondary engineer. His wife had given it to him.

He jabbed a key and called up Louis Colicos’s scattered log entries. It amazed him that one old man had managed to get the first transportal working again, rigging up powerpacks and restarting the mothballed Klikiss machinery. After nearly ten thousand years, the alien equipment was in extraordinarily good condition. So far, only a few of the numerous coordinate tiles were marked black to indicate places from which explorers had not returned. Many of the coordinate tiles around the trapezoidal window remained untried—potential paradises. Or traps.

He switched to another file that displayed a detailed starmap, indicating sites of known Klikiss ruins and functional transportals. If Palawu could decipher the core technology, then the Hansa could establish transportals anywhere they chose, and the economic boom would increase by orders of magnitude. . . .

He also had access to high-resolution astronomical maps that displayed the sweep of standard Hansa colonies, Ildiran worlds, and Klikiss ruins, along with summaries of star types and planetary positions. Glowing dots marked where former stars had been violently snuffed out in recent months, their fires squelched by hydrogues in their incomprehensible conflict against the faeros. Though the blips on the starmap looked innocuous, Palawu shuddered at the implications—whole suns were being extinguished by the titanic beings!

On the starmap, he noted another marker in the Ptoro system, where a Klikiss Torch had recently turned the gas giant into a fresh burning star. The Klikiss had developed that weapon long ago—to fight the hydrogues, presumably? The planet Corribus, one of the new colonization worlds, still showed the battle scars of that final conflict.

Following a hunch, Palawu collated the spectral readings of newly ignited Ptoro and added them to the records from the first test planet, Oncier. Knowing that his old datascreen did not have the processing power he required, he commandeered one of the larger Hansa computers not being used for transporting new colonists. He set the machine working on a fast and intense comparison.

If the Klikiss had developed the Torch, surely they must have used it at least once. Those artificially created stars would be short-lived on a cosmic time scale—a gas giant did not have enough fuel to burn for more than a few thousand years—but even after ten millennia they wouldn’t all be extinguished.

With a thrill of satisfaction, he looked at the results. The computer found twenty-one stars with small burning companions that could well have been gas giants ignited by the Klikiss Torch, long ago. Twenty-one.

Were they ancient battlefields of the Klikiss against the hydrogues? So far, Oncier, Ptoro, and three other hydrogue gas giants had been obliterated in the current war, their funeral pyres still burning.

Though his discovery was amazing, Palawu soon came to the somber realization that even after using their Torch weapon twenty-one times, the Klikiss race had still been exterminated. What possible chance did humanity have?