So far, though, there didn’t seem to be anything Brazilian in the neighborhood. Actually, there didn’t seem to be much of anything. It was a large, well-filled-out system, but so far, I’d found no metal ore. Seriously, nothing. This star’s spectral lines showed about two-thirds Sol’s metallicity. Generally, the composition of the system would follow the composition of the parent star.
Hands behind my back, I walked around the balcony of my tree house, enjoying the view and the thousand-meter drop to the forest floor. This forest had never existed except in literature, and even there, it was an amalgam of a lot of different books. Mostly it was from Foster’s Midworld, but I’d thinned things out so there were good lines-of-sight. I’d added lots of earth-birds and deleted any large, hungry, dragony things.
I raised an eyebrow at Guppy. “Got an opinion?”
[Above my pay grade]
I chuckled. The version-2 Heavens had more core and memory space than Bob-1 had started out with. Guppy had a lot of room to expand in the standard design, and I’d given him even more. He was becoming a person in his own right. He was acerbic and flip, just this side of insolent. I loved it. And, of course, he wasn’t a Bob clone.
“Okay, wise guy. Got an analysis?”
[Those I have. Analysis: there’s no metal]
“Thank you, Captain Obvious. Any idea why?”
[No, but I note that all of the other elements are within expected ratios. Only metals are missing. And completely so]
And that was just not possible, not by any known theory of stellar or planetary formation. Guppy blinked once and turned to face me. I knew what was coming.
[Someone else was here first]
“Dammit. Medeiros. But shouldn’t there still be an autofactory around?”
I cut off what I was about to say and thought for a few seconds. Something was fishy with that theory, beside the originator.
“Hold on. How much ore are we talking about? Based on how much we think this system should have, how long would it take Medeiros to turn it all into cute little Medeiri?”
Guppy thought for a moment. Or calculated. Whatever.
[1,732 years. Give or take]
“So we can rule that out. We’ve only come twenty-odd light years. And he would have had to travel for the same amount of time.” I was belaboring the obvious, and I knew it, but I’d always found that talking something out helped to work through it in my mind.
[That does represent a flaw in the theory]
“Ya think?” I pointed to the inner planets on the system schematic. “We may end up having to do some planetary mining. Let’s go take a look at some of the rocky planets and see what’s available.”
[Your wish is my command]
We took a few days to get to the fourth planet—I still didn’t want to show all my cards in case someone was watching. GL19-4 was a brown ball of mud with gray oceans and a thick, murky atmosphere. It looked like the result of a lot of volcanic activity, but I didn’t see any immediate candidates in the way of rings or chains of volcanoes.
I inserted myself into a polar orbit and began deep scans for, well, anything, really. Metal deposits, of course, but also volcanic activity, and anything else interesting.
It was one of those good news, bad news situations. Good news, I found lots that was interesting. Bad news, no metals. None. Not within reach of anything in my arsenal, anyway. The planet had a magnetic field, so it obviously had a metallic core. But next to nothing in the crust. Oh, a patch here and a patch there, but not worth grubbing for.
[Anomaly detected]
“And this isn’t anomalous enough already?”
[Double-plus anomaly detected. Better?]
Not loving it quite so much. For a fleeting moment, I thought of reinitializing Guppy. Only for a moment.
Not that I needed to worry. One of our redesign items was to not allow GUPPI to read our thoughts. That was just too creepy. He now required voice commands, however you define voice in a computer system that talks to itself.
“Okay, Guppy, what is it?”
[Accumulation of refined metal detected. An artifact]
“Holy crap.” I thought for a moment. “Deploy three of our exploration drones. Send them down to the location of the anomaly. Have them carry a couple of roamers too. Set one of the drones to spiral outward from the site, while the other two and the roamers investigate the site in detail.”
[Aye]
Guppy was all business now. This was serious. Had Medeiros crashed? Was it a probe from one of the other nations?
The drones got there in record time—I think Guppy might have driven them a little aggressively—and settled around the anomaly. One started to circle, gradually getting farther from the center, while the other two landed and spit out twenty-centimeter roamers. The drones lifted off and started on close-up visual scans.
One thing was obvious right away: this wasn’t one of the probes. In fact, this wasn’t from Earth at all. I couldn’t describe exactly what about it screamed alien, but no human mind designed that. The best metaphor I could come up with was the alien ship in Prometheus. It just didn’t make sense.
I took a moment to savor the thought. I had just found the first intelligent life outside of Earth. Well, okay, looking at the wreck, I might have just found the corpses of the first intelligent life. But still…
It was obvious that this had been some kind of cargo carrier. The thing had crashed and split open. It had spilled out part of its contents, which seemed to consist of stacks and stacks of large metal ingots of various types. Each ingot was pure, all one element. Iron, titanium, copper, nickel, tons of the stuff. The carrier looked like it had only been a quarter full, though, unless some had been taken.
It appeared we had found our metal thieves. Well, one of them. And thief was probably too strong a word. But still…
[Anomaly]
“Oh, for—what now?”
[See for yourself]
I picked up the video that Guppy offered to me. And my jaw dropped. This planet wasn’t lifeless. Well, it was now, but it hadn’t been at some point in the past.
I was looking at a dead ecosystem, what you’d get if everything in the Amazon basin died all at once. It was dry, it was weathered, it was corroded. But it was trees, and bushes, and the occasional animal. And it went on forever.
***
I sent down some biological analysis drones to do some necropsies and try to figure out what had happened here. That wasn’t quite what they were designed for, but I had all the accumulated biological and medical knowledge from Earth, and a very advanced piece of technology designed by, uh, me.
They poked and prodded and cut, and they got some suitable specimens. They had their orders, and the AMIs were entirely competent within the parameters they’d been assigned. I just had to stay out of the way and not joggle their mechanical elbows.
The drones and roamers continued to examine the wreckage. Without being able to say why, I sent a couple of busters down to hover menacingly. Things looked deader than dead, but I just had a spooky feeling.
The report from the biological drones arrived on my desktop with a ding. I hurried over and opened the file.