Ring Around the Sky - Allyn Gibson [6]
Gomez smiled. “The Kharzh’ullans didn’t build the elevators and the Ring. They found it.”
“Found it?” said Bart Faulwell, the ship’s linguist. “Useful artifacts like that aren’t usually left around for anyone to find.” He looked to Tev. “Where did the Ring come from?”
Tev placed both hands on the table and leaned forward slightly. “Two and a half centuries ago a Tellarite ship surveyed the Kharzh’ulla star system and located several planets, with the fourth planet apparently inhabited, as the Ring was detectable by telescopic observation even from far outside the system. As the survey ship drew closer to the fourth planet, however, they detected no life save for some lower animals and vegetation. When they made planetfall they found the Ring and elevators intact, but no intelligent life, and as the planet seemed in all respects to be capable of supporting a civilization, a colony ship was dispatched from Tellar. Several years after the colony’s founding the mechanism for working the elevators was discovered, and a few years after that archeological expeditions placed the age of the elevators and Ring at nearly fifty thousand years.”
“Who built it?” Faulwell asked.
“For a long time they were called the Tomeq.”
“The Tellarite word for ‘unknown,’ ” said Faulwell.
“Correct, Bartholomew,” Tev said. He touched the computer terminal, and the viewscreen image changed from the schematic view to the image of an old Constitution-class starship. Gomez read the sensor tag at the bottom of the image—NCC-1701, U.S.S. Enterprise—and concluded it was at least a century old. “Analysis of the wreckage of this starship, the Rath, led xenoarcheologists to conclude that the original inhabitants of Kharzh’ulla IV and the builders of the elevators and the Ring were”—he turned to the screen, toggled the image it displayed, and waited for the crew’s reaction—“the Furies.”
On the viewscreen a pale yellow humanoid appeared. He had red eyes with slits for irises, and instead of eyebrows red horns protruded outward and upward from his skull. This was one of the races known collectively as the Furies, inhabitants of the Alpha Quadrant some five millennia before, then cast across space and banished to the Delta Quadrant. They had attempted to invade the Alpha Quadrant and take their homeworlds by force at least three times in the past century, each time stopped by only the slimmest of margins.
“You mean, Kharzh’ulla IV is the Fury homeworld?” said Abramowitz.
Tev flared his nostrils slightly. “Analysis of the native lifeforms on Kharzh’ulla IV show few genetic links between them and the Fury corpses retrieved by the Enterprise-D at Brundage Point eight years ago. The evidence is inconclusive that the Furies evolved on Kharzh’ulla IV. It may have been one of their colony worlds.”
“Why build the Ring, though?” asked Faulwell. “The cost in resources would have been immense. Plus, there are easier and quicker ways to get into space. It seems like too much effort for too little benefit.”
“We know from Captain Kirk’s encounter with the Furies a hundred years ago that they didn’t have transporter technology,” said Gomez. She pulled up a galactic map on the viewscreen. Kharzh’ulla IV was indicated by an over-sized red dot. “This is Kharzh’ulla IV’s present location. Run its location backward through time”—the location of Kharzh’ulla IV moved, as did the positions of many other stars—“and fifty thousand years ago Kharzh’ulla IV was here.” She zoomed the image to focus on a single sector of space. “The heart of the Culostan Expanse. A region of space twenty thousand light-years wide in which spatial density is such that transporters do not function and warp travel is limited. If the Furies had the knowledge of transporter technology, even the theory, within the Culostan Expanse that knowledge would have been useless. It could be that they built the Ring because they needed it to expand outward into space.”
“Another possibility to consider is this,” said Tev. “The docking facilities