Arriving at a T intersection, Lancaster stalled, consulting his Geograph. The rock face was larger than he had expected, and he didn’t want his detour to take him too far out of his way. He scanned through the holographic map, searching for another option that might be more along the way.
But Mika looked closer at the stone, scanning more of its surface. “This is a wall,” she said. She reached out and brushed some of it off. Dust scattered into the air, a thick plume roiling in her light. She found an indentation where her fingers disappeared into darkness.
Lancaster looked it over as well, switching his Illuminator through several spectrums of light. Within the neighborhood of X-ray he found artifices that had been grown over with calcified dust.
Mika pulled out of her pack one of her only tools, a Thermal Pick, which she turned on and heated up while examining a portion of the wall. When it was ready, she smashed into the indented section. Much of the rock face crumbled. She swung again, and more came loose.
“Can I help?” Lancaster asked.
“More light,” she said, and he illuminated it with the HID setting of his Illuminator, which bathed their part of the gully in near sunlight. Mika swung again, and this time nabbed a section of rock within the clutches of the pike. She pulled and it came loose, dropping to the ground, and revealing a hole. One side was perfectly round; too well carved to be natural. A window. Mika chipped further into the hole, the wall crumbling under the heated metal as she went.
At last there was a clear crawl-way inside. Lancaster brought the light and shone it in the window. They both marveled at what they saw; an encased marketplace; well preserved, but still encroached upon by millions of years of geology. It was the best of both worlds. Useless, yet beautiful relics, such as jewelry and ornaments, sat in easy to access cubbies, and glittering minerals clung to the intruding cave walls.
“I should have known when I saw the realatholagic formations a couple dozen meters back,” Mika said.
“The Steuric Postmal district?” Lancaster asked.
Mika nodded, “Mm-hmm.”
“That would make sense,” Lancaster said. “The forum is just past this…”
“Are you two shining a light from the star?” Little Jack asked.
Lancaster jumped. His light was very bright, casting a glow into the fog that was no doubt visible from above. He turned it off, and they were suddenly cast in complete darkness.
Little Jack had spotted the glow from the point of view of the drone he had hacked into, so its camera had picked it up. However, it had just launched along with a second one, and they were flying on autopilot, so the operators might not have been paying enough attention yet to have seen it. Like guards at a security desk, they probably only glanced up at the monitors every now and then.
However, the drones were heading in the direction of Lancaster and Mika, and they had infrared and other visual capabilities that would locate them through the fog and even light cover if they knew where to search, so Little Jack decided not to take a chance that the operators hadn’t seen the light, and instead decided to take a different sort of chance.
Taking control of the rear drone, he increased its speed slightly, then turned off its light and sensor. He informed the pair on the ground what was going on, and added, “You have somewhere to hide if this doesn’t work?” Little Jack asked.
Lancaster answered with a few grunts as he squeezed through the window. “Yes. We’re blicking out an underground district.”
“Don’t get comfortable,” Little Jack warned. “You’re going to need to hurry to your desto in a moment.”
“We need to grab a few shiny items for a certain payment,” Lancaster explained.
Jude piped up suddenly on the line, her voice low and through gritted teeth, “Yep. It’s a necessary detour.”
Little Jack knew Jude’s ‘don’t mess with me,’ voice, and this was it, despite the fact that it sounded like it was coming out of a bad ventriloquist. He didn’t ask, he just watched through the drone monitors as the rear one smashed into the front one, and they both tumbled fifty feet to the ground. He then switched to the others in the hangar, waiting for them to launch.
Jude was stalling for time along the Graphslot Supereight row, pretending that she forgot which machine had been causing problems. The floor boss was losing patience with her. He looked ready to leave. “They all appraise fine to me,” he said.
“This one!” she exclaimed, pointing at a machine that had a customer wearing headphones and focused on the task of winning.
They approached the machine. “It looks fine,” the floor boss said.
“I wonder if the woman has had any problems.”
“She doesn’t scry like she wants to be disturbed.”
“I’ll bet my plastic she’s had problems just like I had!” Jude said, her voice threatening to get more unpleasant. “You won’t sav unless you ask.”
The floor boss was visibly annoyed, and clearly torn, as his eyes kept darting to the balcony. Jude knew why. She could hear the chaos from the managers in the control room scrambling to understand what was happening with their drones. They wanted the floor boss to report from the balcony.
Jude decided to switch her tone from vinegar to honey. She put on her best damsel in distress appearance, complete with timid smile, and said, “Please ask her. For me.”
The man looked at her, his eyes stealing a look at her sultry form – the dress paying for itself – then over at the machine. He tapped the seated woman on the shoulder. It took him a few tries to get her attention.
Jude leaned over him as he did, her hand on his shoulder like a flirty friend. He didn’t object. She stroked his ear lightly with a finger. Perhaps a little over the line, but he merely twitched. A moment later, when it was clear he wasn’t going to shrug her off, her fingernail popped up. She shot a tiny laser into the wire that plugged into his earpiece. She continued to hear the chaos of the control room, but he did not.
The floor boss was too busy dealing with a now irate customer at the Supereight machine. He had interrupted her chi music! That would break the flow of her positive energy and would bring her bad luck. It was going to be a miserable night for him.
At an ancient table, Mika lifted a circular, flat piece of jewelry that looked like an arm band. It would fit perfectly around Jude’s forearm. Blowing off the dust, it appeared to be made of purple cobalt. This would match her hair… at least this week. It would also go well with the small statue that she could tell Jude was an ancient idol; even though it was a mass produced doll.
Lancaster, meanwhile, finished picking out a third chunk of quartz from the encroaching walls. “What do you credit of this?” Mika asked him.
Lancaster looked at what she had grabbed, and compared it to what he had pulled out. “This should be enough to pay her,” he said.
“What about your partner?” Mika asked.
“He gets the pleasure of my company,” he answered, and he unmated himself. “How are the skies?”
“Claro for the moment,” Little Jack said; a hint of emphasis on the word “moment.”
“Let’s go,” Lancaster said, and he climbed out the window. He helped Mika through, though her smaller frame meant she needed much less help than he could have used.
She led now. They were close enough that her knowledge of the Milak Shivar and her missing husband were the best guides. Thinking as he would have, she based her decisions for directions on what he would have taken as clues.
Lancaster took the opportunity to muse at what sights he could see. The area had opened up a bit into what were wider courtyards, and there were platforms, half toppled statues, and pieces of smaller buildings. Peering in one direction with his Illuminator he spotted the beginning of a business distract that disappeared into the cliff which led up to the hotel.
Mika reached a point where she genuinely did not know which direction to go. A row of columns once stood here, but now they lay in pieces on their sides. Teo wou
ld have likely made his decision by what was on these pillars; but with them gone, his decision would have been almost random. Then she had a thought. Mika had come to the painful conclusion that Teo was more like Lancaster than she would like to admit. So she called her ex-husband over and said, “Which way would you go if you were here?”
Lancaster thought a moment, glancing around. His expression seemed stumped, but Mika knew better. He hopped up on the remains of one of the columns. ‘Of course,’ Mika thought. She could see Teo doing the same thing. Lancaster glanced around with the aid of the Illuminator. He then cheated and looked at his Geograph. “Well, the Astrology Center is strass over there. We wanted to check that out anyway.”
Mika agreed. Teo knew that the Milak Shivar mixed religion and space travel, so there were probably going to be clues within those domed walls as to where he went. She hurried toward it, and Lancaster followed, calling to the others with an update.
Jude responded with laughter. The voices of other rowdy customers were audible as well. She said that a couple more party crashers had just arrived to replace the first one. They were busy being buzz kills to the tables, but would soon probably break up the party.
Jude’s code went with the spirit of where she was, rousing up a crowd around a dice table to a pitch fever that distracted the pit and floor bosses of the casino. She had bought a couple rounds of the strongest drinks for everyone and had leveraged their inebriation to get them all into a loud frenzy of fun that verged on a riot. Her efforts had been aided by a pair of party girls wearing oversized cat-eye sunglasses who whipped up the crowd of a nearby table. The two crowds were forming together, beginning to morph into a mob.
Through her earpiece she could hear the managers in the control room trying to keep order, but the confusion over the drones and the fear of crowds getting out of hand in the casino were testing their limits. A few of them were discussing placing a call to the syndicate administrators.
Jude managed to focus in on the piloting team and found that they were preparing to launch several more drones to locate the missing ones, and to investigate what was causing all of the problems. She warned Little Jack that “more friends were leaving” and he should keep a lookout for them.
Little Jack changed the point of view to one of the drones in the hangar. He saw several others lifting off, so he switched into one of their views. He didn’t know yet how he was going to handle the situation, so he was relieved to find that the squadron of drones were heading out further than Lancaster and Mika’s current location, so he had a little bit of time. He said into his mic, “Bogies are in formation, two o’clock high reading five by five, flying recovery sortie at extraction.”
“Come again?” Lancaster asked.
“Get done with your geffar!” Little Jack answered sternly. “You’ve got five minutes.”
Lancaster and Mika were inside the Astrology Center now and digging feverishly through every piece of information. There was a discouragingly small amount of it.
The domed ceiling was much like planetariums of other species who splayed out star maps and important astronomical information. The Milak Shivar would have placed more emphasis on star clusters they combined as their constellations. These, of course, differed from planet to planet, and the religious leaders read meanings in the new combinations found on each added colony. Oftentimes these meanings had something to do with where to settle next, where to find fertile or mineral-rich planets, some meaning in how to live their lives, or, more often than not, where to conquer next. That was why this was a likely location for Teo to have gone to learn where the Idol of Haniz had been taken.
But little remained that could help them. The dome was primarily empty save for a round chimney at the top, and most of the rest of the structure had crumbled over time. There were several cement slabs on the periphery of the concave floor with sharp, broken pieces jutting upward like sharp, judgmental fingers. Mika looked a couple of these over and recognized them as the bottoms of statues. Studying them closer, she realized they had been effigies of several Milak Shivar gods.
Lancaster scanned the ceiling with his Illuminator and found with the range detector that there were small etchings that hinted at the constellations the Milak Shivar had decided upon invading. He highlighted them, and tried to decipher what the stars were supposed to be.
Mika was meanwhile studying the bases of the statues to determine what gods they represented. She managed to figure out three of them: Quolar, Utobsx, and Buolua. At least, those were the closest approximations humans were able to translate from what they had gathered of the Milak Shivar religions. But ultimately, it didn’t mean anything.
Lancaster, too, was coming up empty. Everything they were looking at was meant to be combined with an air bubble presentation. Because, like the classroom, this building was originally under water, and visual presentations were created through the formation of air bubbles into patterns, and the swirling of the waves. It would take the resources of an entire corporate empire to get this place running again, and it wouldn’t get them any closer to Teo, for he had the same resources Mika and Lancaster now had.
Then Mika had a thought. She pulled the recorder from her pocket and played it. Teo’s voice filled the room. “This… for Mika… to meet her… from the heart… below… you are… always with me.”
“Play that again,” Lancaster said, jogging over the ruins of walls and large stones. When he stopped, she played it again.
When it was done, Lancaster looked up and scanned the room once more. He searched for any clue that would connect to what Teo was saying. Mika turned the other direction, and together they covered the entire area. They found only more etchings, some individual words in the Milak Shivar language, but nothing that was relevant.
“To meet her,” Lancaster said. “A constellation of someone meeting a female. Or two people meeting…”
“Right!” Mika said. She was shining her own Spectro-beam over an area, trying to find the lines that made up their constellations. Trying to find any connection at all. She played it again.
“This… for Mika… to meet her… from the heart… below…”
“Below!” she shouted, looking down. She dug under rocks, under wall pieces, under debris, under anything.
“Don’t move too much!” Lancaster said. “No one likely jondered in here after him, so he would have left everything as it was.”
“Right,” she answered, seeing the logic in what he was saying. She played it again, and again, and again.
They tried to combine each line with something in the room, but nothing seemed relevant. Mika grabbed her head in frustration. Why didn’t he just leave a note? Something to say where he was going?
Looking over at Lancaster she could see him searching frantically like he was trying to rescue an old friend. But he had never met Teo. He had only to lose from finding him.
Lancaster’s head lifted suddenly. “There might be a place with keys to the local constellations.”
Mika brightened with renewed hope. “Milak Shivar did keep them. And they were usually in preservable form.”
“Where?” Lancaster asked.
“Um… Government districts. Do you sav…”
“This way!” Lancaster said excitedly, and he led Mika out the door.
“Bogies on the way,” Little Jack said.
“What?” Mika and Lancaster asked.
“Get your shafts out of there. They register something’s going on and they’re searching for you.”
“We just need a couple more minutes…” Lancaster started to say.
But Little Jack interrupted, “Then a couple more, and a couple more…”
“No, this is it. If we don’t find anything, we’re out. Just give us two minutes.”
Little Jack was about to relent, then Mika interrupted, “Four minutes!”
Little Jack took in a deep, frustrated breath. “Shaz,” he said.
He was not only reacting to his impossible colleagu
es, he was looking through the eyes of one of the drones taking off from the hangar. All remaining drones were launching. They were spreading out across the badlands
Little Jack switched drones until he got into the one assigned to the sector Lancaster and Mika were in. He scanned around to see the other nearby drones. There was one that had just launched, and another that had been part of the recent wave that was heading toward the Astrology Center. Little Jack took a moment to consider whether there was a better option, but he knew there wasn’t. He was already beginning to detect heat signatures from his partner and that partner’s ex-wife.
So Little Jack took control of the drone and flew it into the nearby one. He managed to damage the rammed drone badly enough that it staggered away, but his own was still up and running. So Little Jack had it dive bomb into the other drone from the earlier wave. The last thing he saw from its visual sensor was it ramming into the metal body of its comrade.
“We have a saboteur!” Jude heard someone in the control center shout. They alerted security all over the hotel, who began to arm themselves, as well as the syndicate bosses. Jude knew that they would soon be going room to room while Little Jack was still visually lost in his glasses.
She thought quickly quickly. Two men were rubbing up against her; one in front and one behind. She knew the one behind was stealing glances down her dress at her cleavage. The one sitting in front of her took several opportunities to drop his hand down to rub against her exposed leg. Despite all this, she could tell that he still fancied himself a chivalrous man, so Jude took advantage of it.
“Ahh!” she screamed, looking angrily at the man behind her. “Don’t you know better than to pinch a lady?”
“I didn’t…” he tried to protest, but the man in front of Jude was already standing.
Jude said he did, and she punched him. He punched back and she ducked just in time for his fist to punch the man who had stood. The situation escalated from there.
Relic Worlds - Lancaster James & the Salient Seed of the Galaxy, Part 2 Page 3
