‘In this armpit place? Not bloody likely.’
Then the groppler shook itself like a man remembering a prior appointment, lurched sideways, to general alarm, and stamped off into the jungle.
‘Idris, what was that?’ Kris demanded, sounding furious with him, though Solace could tell it was mostly adrenaline.
The Intermediary held his head in his hands, as though to physically hold it together. ‘Yon said the life here adapted.’
‘All the bloody time,’ Robellin confirmed. ‘Listen, mate, like the lady says, what was that?’
‘Originators,’ Idris said weakly. ‘The ruins here. I bet the local wildlife keeps clear of the sites, right?’
‘The big fuckers, sure.’ The biologist nodded warily.
‘They don’t like them.’ Idris was abruptly running with sweat, despite the cool air. He looked absolutely wrung-out with fatigue and nerves. ‘Don’t know why. But they know how to detect them sure enough. They’re . . . on the same channel.’
‘As what?’ Robellin asked, but Idris had clammed up and wouldn’t say more. Solace knew what he’d left unsaid. The ‘Originator channel’ carried some indefinable signal – one that telegraphed the location of anything from that ancient civilization, even a handful of leftover junk. It broadcast so that even a moon-sized planet destroyer, up in high orbit, could detect its presence and would rather flee than risk a confrontation. It was the same channel that Ints like Idris could access, that had let them touch the inhuman sentience of the Architects and send them away. This planet hosted the most extensive set of Originator ruins any human had ever seen. And here, the entire ecosphere was plugged right into that same channel and was listening.
Two of Jericho’s brief day-and-nights later, the trail finally led their grinding, complaining car to the dig site. They lurched abruptly over a rise and into a bowl-like crater, at least a kilometre across. As they did so, the dense foliage thinned out a little. The group was silent as they descended the incline. Laid out below, like the bones of time itself, was all that the Originators had left behind.
18.
Idris
In an eerie echo of the nearby human settlement, the Originators had certainly liked their concentric circles when it came to architecture. Or maybe it was something to do with their technology – or something else entirely. Whatever their purpose, those circles were the last remnants of what might have been a city. Maybe. They were visible as striations in the grey, ashy soil of Jericho where the plantlife had been cut back. Or they could be spotted beneath odd swathes of off-colour vegetation. Each circle enclosed a weird mazework of buried foundations. It was as though the whole site was composed of a series of nested labyrinths – each only large enough for a five-year-old to comfortably navigate. Idris could see where the archaeology team had been working, because a whole slice of the ruins had been exposed. The excavation currently extended down two metres, and Idris considered how much further down it might go. The thought of a half-mile of cramped, subterranean labyrinth lurking beneath them made his insides twist. And yet somehow he felt it was there.
The ruins seemed to be formed of eroded stone. Perhaps the chewing of the elements over countless centuries had given those structures their toothy, irregular texture. Yet the stonework of the exposed lower levels was no smoother. Maybe it’s just what the stuff is supposed to look like? By this time the ground car was winding around the outer circle, careful not to crush any priceless archaeological rubbish. Idris spotted some large dome tents nearby – big ones, with individual chambers podding out from the centre on spokes. They were lit up from within, now the sun was on its way down. The sunken basin, surrounded by tall forest, must mean night came suddenly to the dig site.
‘What,’ Kris asked Robellin, ‘keeps the damn gropplers and the rest from just . . . chowing down on you all?’
‘Half our generator power goes into creating big-ass EM static,’ the biologist told them. ‘Fucks with our comms all right, but it’s like shouting into the ears of any bastard that wants to come at us.’ His grin slipped. ‘Still, it’s like your mate was saying. Nothing much big does come down there. They don’t like it.’
‘Do the ruins put out their own EM frequencies?’
‘That’d be a tidy bloody piece of explanation, wouldn’t it? No such luck. We’ve tested everything, and they’re dead. They’ve been dead for hundreds of thousands of years – conservative estimate. You wouldn’t expect them to have left the fucking oven on or something.’