by Terry Mixon
“I suppose not,” Angela admitted. “Then again, they did relocate dinosaurs from Terra to this new planet and change its ecosystem to match our birth world. What’s to say that they didn’t decide that Talbot would make a good study sample to set up another world?”
Kelsey considered that for a moment, and her gut churned. She didn’t want to leave her husband in the lurch, but she honestly didn’t think he was in too great a danger, and if she delayed, word of her condition might get out, and then she’d be screwed.
She had to act now.
“They’d need women for that, so I’m going to keep that worry on the back burner,” Kelsey said. “Honestly, I’m concerned, and if I had any choice in the matter, I’d stay. The problem is that I don’t have a choice. None of us do. Trust your husband to make the magic happen.”
A man at one of the consoles lifted his head from his screens. “Colonel, Major, we’ve got a cutter inbound from Invincible. The admiral is aboard. He’s indicated that he’s going to accompany us while the fleet follows.”
That hadn’t been part of the plan. The fleet was supposed to trail them almost to Twilight River, but he should’ve stayed on Invincible. What had changed?
Kelsey opened her mouth to object, but what was she going to say? Jared was in command of the fleet. If he’d decided to go on the probing mission, she couldn’t stop him.
“The Raiders are almost all back,” Angela said. “We should be ready to leave orbit shortly.”
“I’ll go wait for Jared in the wardroom,” Kelsey said. “I could use some coffee.”
She made her way to the wardroom and poured herself a cup. She wondered if it was really healthy to be drinking coffee when she was pregnant but decided it was a little late to worry about caffeine. No doubt Lily would chew her ass off for it and any number of other things she was doing. Or about to do.
Luckily for her, Lily wasn’t there.
Twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the hatch, and Jared stepped in. Kelsey started to say something snarky but then saw Lily standing right behind her brother, her eyes narrowed as she stared at Kelsey.
Oh, crap.
Elise stepped out of the cutter and stared up at the obelisk. It was tremendous, intimidating, and gorgeous.
She’d probably be in a lot of trouble if Sean knew that she’d come down to the surface, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. Kelsey wasn’t going to be able to be there for Talbot, so she felt it was her duty to stand in for her.
Besides, she had Olivia with her, so she wasn’t alone.
“Wow,” Olivia said, craning her neck up to see the top of the obelisk. “That thing is huge.”
“Ladies,” she heard someone shout.
Elise looked in the direction of the voice and saw Carl waving his arm from where he stood beside the obelisk. It looked like they were assembling something to scan the giant structure.
The two women walked over and stood nearby as Carl explained something about frequencies to a few other scientists standing nearby. He was laying out the rules about how something needed to be done. She was impressed by how much more decisive he’d become since she’d first met him.
He’d been a retiring, introspective sort in the beginning. Now he was an assertive leader, a man who didn’t hesitate to give orders that he expected would be obeyed.
She remembered the story that his wife had told about how he’d stood between her and the men trying to kill them with only the hammer that he’d built for Kelsey. How he’d saved her and killed every single last one of them with it.
As Talbot would say, he’d seen the elephant.
He might never be a warrior in the strictest of senses, but he was made of the same stuff. He’d find his friend no matter how long it took or how much pain and effort it required.
As soon as he’d finished speaking to the other scientists, he turned to face Elise and Olivia. “What can I do for you? I’m a little bit busy.”
“You’re going back inside, aren’t you?” Elise asked. “We’re going with you.”
He scowled and shook his head. “That’s not the best idea. We don’t know where Talbot went or what took him.”
“Nevertheless, that’s what we’re going to do,” she said resolutely, putting on her crown princess face.
He sighed and shrugged. “If Commodore Meyer gets angry about this, I was overruled. If you’d step over to the oval, we’ll take a trip up and then down.”
Olivia frowned. “What does that mean?”
“The oval sends out a short-range signal that I match with my equipment, and that activates some kind of antigravity field that lifts us up and brings us through a temporary opening at the top of the obelisk. Then we go down through a shaft to a chamber somewhere far below.
“There’s got to be more underneath that, since I saw nothing that would have caused a power spike like the one that happened when Talbot disappeared. Considering that I also never saw any holoprojectors to display the map we found, I’m not sure that I’d even recognize what I was looking at if I did. These aliens were so far in advance of us that it might as well be magic.”
“Then you’re our wizard,” Elise assured him. “Let’s wave your wand, say abracadabra, and get moving.”
Carl chuckled, and then they walked over to the area that was colored just like the obelisk. The women followed him closely. He brought up an instrument and did something with it, and suddenly they were rising into the air with nothing holding them.
Elise resisted the urge to scream. If she forced herself to think of this as a lift that was taking them somewhere inside a ship, then she wouldn’t panic. In a way, it was just like a lift. Only one that was invisible and insubstantial.
Olivia cursed under her breath but managed to avoid freaking out as well. “You could’ve warned us about that.”
“I did,” Carl said. “I suppose I could’ve gone into more detail, but that wouldn’t be nearly as fun. Hold on, here we go.”
As he’d indicated, a portion of the top section of the obelisk seemed to just disappear. Inside was a dark shaft that led downward. Moments after they entered it, the light from above extinguished, and they dropped like stones.
“Can we get some light?” Elise asked.
“That’s a bad idea. Right now, you can’t see how fast we’re moving, and if your eyes tried to make that assessment, it would freak you out even more. Just wait until we get down below.”
That sounded far from reassuring.
The trip didn’t take very long, and they came out into a large open area with enough light for her to see. They were off to the side of a large oval chamber. There were probably thirty people scouring the room, looking at the walls, floor, and even high up at the ceiling with bright lights.
Her innate fear of falling made her panic for a few seconds, but they touched down as lightly as feathers. She took a couple of steps, and nothing seemed to be inhibiting her from walking away from the jade-colored area that they’d landed on, so she did just that.
“Are all the walls the same?” she asked, her voice just a bit shaky. “Smooth and featureless like the rest?”
“Yes,” Carl said. “We’re scanning them now, but we’re not detecting anything beyond the surface. The stealth field obscures everything beyond this chamber. We’ve resorted to making loud noises and trying to hear if any of the segments of the wall sound different than the others. That might allow us to detect a hidden passage.”
“Could we see the map?” Olivia asked.
“I’ll activate it, and it’ll start running in sequence,” Carl agreed. “Experience has shown that it starts with what existed roughly seventy million years ago. That is impressive enough. I can move it to the present if you’d like.”
Elise had to admit that she was intimidated by the scale of what these aliens had created and mystified by their obscure reasons for doing so.
Carl led them to the center of the room, where there was a smaller jade oval, and she stepped be
hind him to watch as he brought up a program on his tablet and instructed it to send a signal. She looked up, expecting to see stars all around them, but that was not what happened.
That was not what happened at all.
Close around her body, a swirling vortex of bright gold curves and strange sigils appeared and began rotating slowly around her. She jumped back, but the effect moved with her.
“What the hell is this?” she almost screamed. “Get it off me!”
Carl frowned at her. “Get what off you? What’s happening?”
“Can’t you see this?” she demanded. “These swirls of light and weird symbols all around me?”
He shook his head as he walked around her. “I don’t see anything like that.”
She initiated an implant call with both him and Olivia before sending a vid of what she was seeing.
Carl’s eyes widened. “Holy crap! Does it hurt?”
“I don’t want to find out! Undo it!”
“I’m trying,” he said as he stepped back into the oval and manipulated his equipment. “I’m sending out the same signal, but it’s not responding. I’m not even getting the original signal now. Are you okay?”
“It doesn’t seem to be hurting me,” Elise grudgingly admitted, taking a few forced breaths to calm herself. “Are these letters?”
“They look like some kind of alien script, but I have absolutely no idea what they mean or why you can see them but we can’t.”
Elise sighed. This was her fault. She’d been the one who’d wanted to come down here and see what all the excitement was about. Now she was going to have her fill of it, whether she liked it or not.
Hesitantly, she raised her hand in front of her and tried to touch one of the golden curves. Her fingers passed right through it, but the display rotated in the direction of the movement.
“It’s insubstantial,” she said.
“Be careful,” Carl warned. “We don’t know what any of this does.”
She shifted her hand to the side and reached for one of the runes. It glowed blue as her finger touched the area it occupied, even though it was just as insubstantial as the curves of light, and suddenly the air around her exploded with light.
Elise blinked, and when she adjusted to what she was seeing, she realized that the starfield that Carl had been talking about earlier was now above their heads. It wasn’t showing any flashing lights or flip lines, though.
“It seems like I’m controlling the display like you did,” she said.
Her friend frowned as he looked up. “There’s nothing up there. Whatever you’re seeing is only visible to you. It has to be something the holoprojectors are doing, though how they can focus only on you seems impossible.”
“Why was it different for me?” she asked. “Could it be the fact that I’m a woman?”
He shook his head. “We’ve had a number of people activate it, several of them women. There has to be a different explanation. Try touching a different rune.”
“Is that safe?”
“It seems to be a control for the display. Unless we find something that says differently, I hope not.”
“That’s not at all reassuring.”
She reached out and tapped another rune. The field of stars above her began expanding. It was like she was zooming in on a portion of it. The map just became a very localized segment of what had previously been displayed.
When it finished zooming in, she was looking at a single star system. She could see the planets and the star itself. She tried pulling one of the worlds closer, and it enlarged to the size of a basketball and hovered half a meter in front of her face.
It was like being in orbit around the world. She could see the clouds and land masses, the oceans and mountains. It really was just like being there.
“That’s amazing,” Olivia said.
“I can’t imagine this is in real time,” Carl said. “No way these aliens are monitoring some random planet like that. It does tell us that they’ve been there, though. Or at least sent probes at some point in the distant past. Try pulling back out, and let’s look at something we know about. View the Nova system.”
“I’m no navigator, and I don’t really understand how to control this,” she complained, making a shooing gesture that the planet in her face ignored. “I’m pushing random buttons here.”
He nodded. “Right. Sorry.”
Elise pushed at the planet like she was shoving it away, and the map expanded back out until her view was full of stars again. Well, she’d learned something, she supposed.
“Why did it pick me?” she demanded, her voice almost a wail. “And how do I turn it off?”
“Let’s get you back outside,” Carl said soothingly. “That should terminate whatever program is running. You’ve obviously been granted some kind of control interface that the rest of us weren’t. It’s bizarre. What makes you any different than the rest of us?”
That was when it hit her. She almost certainly knew the only difference between her and the other women. She was pregnant. Somehow, the alien machine had known that, and it was significant in some way that she couldn’t fathom.
While she was thinking about that, Carl led her and Olivia over to the exit. The control interface moved with her. Once they were on the oval of jade, he tapped his tablet, and she waited for the unseen forces to lift them into the air.
Nothing happened.
11
Talbot tried to find a way to get back into the strange alcove for over an hour with no success. Whatever was concealing it from him looked exactly like the stone all around it. Hell, it might be the same stone.
He couldn’t find any hidden triggers that allowed him back in, and no amount of pounding on the wall caused the rock to even chip. He had his flechette pistol, but he wasn’t desperate enough to try shooting his way in just yet.
With a sigh, he took stock of his surroundings. The small outcropping of stone that he’d arrived on had a path that led down to the strange city below. There were no visible lights, so he had the impression that it wasn’t occupied. Perhaps it had been abandoned long before humanity had evolved.
He took a few minutes to sit out of the wind and eat one of his ration bars. Thankfully, he’d outfitted himself like he was going on a mission, so he had bars stashed in various pockets all around his person. He even had enough water for a few days. If he hadn’t had those two things, he’d have been in immediate trouble.
With him being on an alien planet and having no support structure, he would still run out of food and had no way to test any of the local plants or animals to see if they could support him. When that happened, he would have to roll the dice, and the odds were very much stacked against him.
He found some small stones and arranged an arrow pointing to the path that led down to the city. If Carl figured out how to follow him, his friend would need to know where he’d gone.
Part of him wanted to just sit right where he was and wait for rescue, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do that. He wanted to at least look around the edges of the city below and see what he could discover.
The sheer number of stars overhead and their brightness told him that he was significantly closer to the galactic core than he’d been before. He hoped he wasn’t so close that the radiation was dangerous, even on the planet’s surface.
If it was, there was nothing he could do about it. Still, would the aliens have built a city in a place that was that hostile?
Maybe they ate radiation. Probably not. The planet’s magnetic field likely protected it enough to live here. Or maybe there were alien artifacts in orbit that shielded the planet from the radiation with strong protective fields.
With aliens, one could never know.
There were plants all around him, and he could hear what certainly sounded like small critters moving in the brush. That implied that the radiation wasn’t an issue for the local wildlife.
The little shrubs didn’t look like anything he’d seen before, and bec
ause it was night, he didn’t trust his judgment about what their actual color was. They looked kind of dark red, but that could just be an artifact of being viewed under starlight rather than sunlight.
With his enhanced vision options, he had no trouble seeing everything around him in exquisite detail, so he decided not to call any unwanted attention to himself by using a hand light. He made certain to record everything. If he ever got out of here, it would be useful to know what this planet had to offer.
As he carefully made his way down a path that looked like it had been made by wildlife, he thought about how much distance he’d traveled to get here. He’d come farther than any human being had ever traveled, bar none, and he hadn’t even had a spaceship.
Somehow, the aliens had come up with a way to move people from planet to planet without using the natural flip point system. He had no idea how that was even possible, but one couldn’t argue with the evidence in front of one’s eyes.
Once he reached the flat ground below the hill, he saw that he was about half a kilometer from the edge of the city. The buildings started out low to the ground and were very wide. As they progressed further in, they rose until they dominated the sky. Based on the facility they’d found, the structures likely went deep below the ground as well, which was also a good shield against radiation.
Nowhere did he see any evidence of artificial light. The starlight reflected off the jade buildings, but that was it. The streets were dark and the buildings silent. There was no sign of any movement whatsoever. The city was definitely abandoned.
That was a testament to how ridiculously long-lived the building materials the aliens had used were. Talbot doubted very seriously that he’d find much other than the buildings themselves, because what could last seventy million years?
Part of him was concerned about being attacked by animals, so he kept his hand close to the butt of his pistol. It might not be much in the grand scheme of things, but the flechettes would deter any local critters that decided he was a midnight snack.
