Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) Read Free Page B

space.
    “Okay, Penny,” Kris said with a sigh, “what did you see that is so important you’ve dragged me and Jack off that lovely beach?”
    Penny held up a finger. “First, we found a planet that was sanitized right down to bedrock. Best we could tell, it had been hit with atomics and rocks so hard about a hundred thousand years ago that we couldn’t find any sign of life. Maybe there are some. Maybe a virus or two survived, but we couldn’t spot them in the time we dared take or the probes we sent down.
    “Oh, and we left the probes down there. We couldn’t risk being contaminated by stuff we couldn’t spot. What they found was no water. No nothing. No life at all as best we could tell.”
    “Are you sure it ever had life?” Jack asked.
    “Under all the hammering, it sure looked like there had once been riverbeds,” Masao put in. “We clearly made out ocean beds. We found the remains of coral reefs, and we think we found fossil remains of fish and other aquatic life, but to prove it we would have needed better sensors on our probes than we had. That is why we really think there needs to be a second expedition to look that place over, fully equipped and soon.”
    Beside him, Penny nodded agreement before continuing her own debriefing.
    “But it was the planet in the next system, just one jump away, that I really think you want to see,” she said.
    “Why?” Kris asked.
    “Because it has the aliens on it.”
    “You got to see them?” Jack asked, incredulously.
    “You weren’t supposed to risk getting that close,” Kris said.
    “We didn’t risk anything. The big bad aliens weren’t home, but their kinds of aliens were on that planet,” Penny said.
    “You’re not making sense,” Kris said.
    “She is,” Masao put in, defending Penny, “she just needs to explain it more slowly.”
    Penny threw her friend a look that told Kris a lot more than she needed to know about how the relationship between them was going. Penny appreciated the protection but did not want any help. Kris’s old friend was still trying to come to terms with the fact that the men she loved always seemed to die. For Penny, giving her heart to any man would be a long, hard journey.
    Apparently, Masao was still willing to wait.
    Penny blew out a long breath. “There were no alien ships in orbit around the next planet. There were no space stations, no satellites, no reactors or radio communications. It looked like an empty planet. But as we got close, it started to come alive.
    “There was an atmosphere and oceans. Vegetation covered the land, at least in most places. Radar mapping showed several places where it had been hammered by asteroid strikes. Small ones, not extinction events. Also, there was one huge plain of glass. Radioactive, too. Something had been hit hard by atomics.”
    “You think it was attacked from space?” Jack put in.
    “From our place in orbit, it was impossible to say, but it sure looked like it had been hit hard some hundred and ten thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia,” Penny said.
    “It was what was
on
the glass plain that caught our attention even before we sent probes down. There is a pyramid of granite rock right in the middle of the plain.”
    “A pyramid?” Kris and Jack said together.
    “No question but that it is artificial,” Lieutenant Iizuka said.
    “What’s in it?” Kris asked.
    “We have no idea,” Penny said. “There seems to be a door, but it was locked down tight.”
    “Couldn’t your nanos get in?” Kris asked.
    “Kris, whatever we sent down there we were leaving there, and we didn’t want to leave any high-tech stuff. That meant no Smart Metal. That meant what went was pretty big by nano standards. Yes, there was a door, but we didn’t dare drop anything that could get through the door seal. Oh, we tried with what we had, but that is one tightly sealed door. Nothing we dropped could get a look in.”
    Penny paused. “But that was only one of the