The Rossem Project

The Assembly - Part 3

     Saturn beckoned to a wizard in the front row, who stood up and handed him a large, clear crystal before sitting again. "This memory crystal contains the images that we have been able to obtain so far. "

     He spoke a few words and an image sprang into life in the centre of the room. An image of the vast ship, similar to an ocean going vessel but differing in strange ways. The image was ten feet long, but even so the portholes in its sides and the human figures strolling around on its open deck were tiny, giving a stunning idea of the size of the alien vessel. Its hull was smooth and ivory white, bearing symbols in an unknown language, and the structures and fittings adorning the decks were painted in gleaming gold and silver giving it a regal, imperious look as if it had been meant to carry royalty. It was a ship clearly designed for one purpose and one purpose only; to impress upon all those who saw it the power and importance of those carried aboard her. Its creators had gone to an enormous effort to impress someone, but if it had been the people of the planet Tharia they'd been guilty of a serious case of overkill.

     There was one incongruous aspect to the ship, though. Masts bearing sails filled with wind reached out sideways from the hull like the spread wings of a bird and sailors in smart uniforms scrambled in the rigging like monkeys in a tree. It was the unmistakable characteristic of a flying ship, a ship designed to fly through the sky, but such ships on Tharia could not fly above the breathable layers of the planet's atmosphere.

     Lirenna leaned across to whisper in Thomas’s ear. “There's no air in space. Right?”

     “Right,” replied her husband in a whisper.

     “So how could a ship like that fly between worlds?”

     “Maybe it only used the sails when it was close to the ground,” Thomas replied. “Maybe they had another means of propelling the ship when it was in space.”

     “The throne?” said Lirenna, but Saturn was glaring at them and she fell silent.

     "We have been using translation spells to try to make sense of the symbols on the hull," said Saturn, "but without success, indicating that they are either purely decorative, with no meaning at all, or that their language is too alien for the spell to cope with. Work is going on with more powerful versions of the spell, but we ought to face up to the possibility that we may never know what meaning, if any, they have. Major Valeron Hort will now tell you what we have been able to deduce about this ship."

     The wizard stepped back and allowed the Beltharan soldier to replace him. He wasted no time with preliminaries but got straight to the point.

     "The first thing we notice," he barked, gesturing at the image with a long white stick, "is the complete absence of anything we can immediately identify as a weapon. That does not necessarily mean anything, of course, as their weapons may be completely alien to us and therefore impossible for us to identify, and it is also possible that they deliberately hid their weapons in order to deceive us. They may have wanted to fool anyone they met into thinking that they came with good intentions. If that interpretation is correct then it is encouraging, as it implies that they did not know who they were going to meet. In other words, they may know no more about us than we know about them." He paused to clear his throat. "It has been suggested that they truly did not have any weapons, that the absence of visible weaponry is not a deception but actuality. I do not believe it. Nobody goes into the unknown without the means to defend themselves. They had weapons, you can depend upon that."

     He looked up at the circles of seated wizards, searching the expressions on their faces to see that they agreed with him on this point. Satisfied, he continued. "Second, the sheer size of this vessel gives us an idea of the size and power of the civilisation that produced it. If we compare it with the largest flying ship ever manufactured by humanity on our world..."