Relic Worlds - Lancaster James & the Salient Seed of the Galaxy, Part 2

by Jeff McArthur

  A few moments later, Jude answered the door wearing only her towel. She brightened at the sight of Mika. “Hey Mika! You worried I didn’t come back yet?”

  “Is that Mika?” came the voice of Lancaster further inside.

  Mika was stumbling over her words, apologizing and excusing herself.

  Jude shook a hand. “Don’t worry about it. We’re just relaxing now. But hey, I’m staying here tonight, so the other room is yours. Stretch out!”

  “Yeah,” Mika managed to say as she formed a smile across her face. “That sounds great.”

  Lancaster came to the door dressed only in the hotel’s robe. Mika made her escape just before he got there. “You two have a great night. I’m going to go get some room service.” She didn’t know what she meant by the last line, it was just the first thing that came to mind as she hurried toward the elevator.

  Lancaster chased after, trying to hold his robe closed. “Mika, I…” he said. She didn’t interrupt, but she stopped, and Lancaster didn’t know what to say after that.

  Mika turned to him, the counterfeit, formal smile still plastered across her face. All Lancaster could think to say was, “I’m sorry.”

  She shook her hand. “Don’t be. No need, no need. I… I saw downstairs that they sell some hats. You could replace the one you lost.”

  Lancaster’s face dropped. Her pretending to be happy and covering for her sadness made it all the more heartbreaking. She, in turn, knew that he had seen past her façade, but there was nothing she could do. She had left him. He had every right to move on. She had no right to feel the way she did.

  She waved goodbye before her will fell apart, and she hurried away. Lancaster called after her, “Mika…” but he cut off at the end, having a sudden thought. His eyes turned away, his mind contemplating. “Mika,” he said again, this time to himself, with realization and hope filling his eyes.

  Mika bypassed her room and headed for the casino. She was holding together her veneer to the public just well enough, but she could not hold it together in front of Lancaster. He would see through any mask she wore, and he did not need to see what was underneath. He had every right to move on, but if he saw how she felt, he would beat himself up over it. That wouldn’t be fair. So the best thing she could do for him would be to get out of his sight. She needed to get away and stay away. He didn’t deserve her pain, and he would take it on no matter how hard she tried to hide it from him.

  She stood at the edge of the balcony, her hands on the railing, looking out into the darkness of the ruins. Dots of light of various sizes wandered about, sometimes illuminating the crags or the fog or the ancient buildings. It was clear which ones were drones as they glided in perfect lines across the landscape, forming a perfect grid. One of these looked at first to be slightly askew, then Mika realized it was a hover skiff full of corporate guards they had brought in to join the others who were already out there trying to locate signs of fugitives.

  A voice rang muttered behind Mika, saying, “Poor sods. They were probably on what little break the corporation gives them only to be called in again.”

  Mika turned, startled by the voice. She found Little Jack a few meters away, craning his neck to look down at the show. “You don’t really feel sorry for them.”

  Little Jack shrugged. “Not really. Maybe.”

  A laugh broke through Mika’s lips.

  “I mean, if they were in charge, they’d be as awful as the corporate execs.”

  “What about you?” Mika asked. “Would you be the benevolent leader that brings justice to the galaxy?”

  “Hades no. I’d be the worst. I’d give humanity what’s coming to it.”

  “You really don’t like people, do you?”

  “Have you met people? They’re terrible.”

  Mika laughed even harder, and scrutinizing Little Jack, she could see a hint of inner laughter written on his face. She wondered how many other times she had misinterpreted his dry… What was it? Sense of humor? Or was it simply insight.

  Little Jack stepped closer to her. “What about you?”

  “What about me?” Mika asked, taken aback.

  “What would you do if you were in charge of everything?”

  “Everything? I credited I was just getting a corporation.”

  “Congratulations, you’re being promoted to God now. Most CEOs think they are anyway, so why not?”

  “Well if I had the powers of a god, I would change the basic laws of nature and time. Time especially.”

  “Well that settles it. I won’t be living in your universe.”

  “Why not?”

  “Time is my only escape. I don’t want to go back to where I was.”

  “But if all of time is opened up, you’ve got more options.”

  Little Jack hesitated a moment, calculating what Mika was saying. “Your universe has become a bit more interesting now.”

  “You could go back to this time and see when that city down there was not yet a ruin, but a thriving metropolis.”

  “You’ve ruined it again.”

  “How so?”

  “You brought people back into it.”

  “Someone really hurt you,” Mika said.

  Little Jack didn’t answer. He remained rigid, still looking at the ruins. It was silent for a moment until he said, “So god is too much responsibility. How about a corporate baroness?”

  “Hmm. Well claro I’d pull all the artifacts from ancient sites on my property planets…”

  Little Jack rolled his head as with his eyes, “Of course…”

  “Oh shush. This is my fantasy.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Okay, so after that I would probably liquidate my businesses, take all the money and retire.”

  “What about all the power? Entire worlds of subjects,” Little Jack asked.

  “Have you met people?” Mika asked. The response was so sudden and unexpected, Little Jack could not stop a chuckle.

  Then, before he could respond, he spotted Lancaster passing by out of the corner of his eye; haphazardly dressed in an unbuttoned shirt and unzipped pants.

  He was walking quickly, steadily, his head leaned forward in concentration as though he was on an important mission. He didn’t see the pair, or most likely anything around him. He was razor focused on his destination.

  Mika turned as well, and she and Little Jack soon saw Jude following, dressed in one of Lancaster’s other shirts, tied at the waist to make the bottom look like a skirt, and slippers. She noticed Mika and Little Jack, and she shrugged at them before they could ask what was going on.

  They all followed him into the lobby of the hotel. He was hunting for something by memory; moving like a search dog tracking by smell. Then he found what he was looking for, jolting when he saw them; the statues in the lobby. Still, no one understood. They were life-sized depictions of what the reptilian Milak Shivar might have looked like. Of course, they were more like the common thought of their appearance, and Mika made a point of pointing out the less sophisticated stereotypes. She was confused as to why Lancaster would care about these.

  “What? No! Not the statues, the platforms!” Lancaster said, pointing at the three foot tall, Formica bases beneath the feet of the statues.

  Everyone’s eyes dropped, and some kept going. “That’s it, Lancaster’s lost it,” Little Jack said, as though ready to pack it all in.

  Lancaster pulled Mika’s voice recorder out of his pocket, telling them to wait a moment.

  “Hey, why do you have that?” Mika asked.

  “Got it from your room. Listen.” He played the first few words, then stopped the recorder. “We thought he was saying For Mika. But I always thought it sounded a little weird the way he said your name. Now I sav why.” Lancaster laid his hands on one of the Formica plinths. Everyone watched silently. No one had a word of protest.

  A sound from the front desk distracted everyone, and they turned to see three desk workers, one customer, and one bell hop in the r
oom going about their business. “Something tells me you don’t want them watching,” Little Jack said.

  “That would be a bad idea,” Lancaster agreed.

  “We’ll distract them. You figure out how to move that thing,” Mika said.

  Everyone agreed, and they went toward the staff while Lancaster looked over the statues. At first glance they looked impossibly heavy; something he would need machinery to move. But after a few seconds’ appraisal, Lancaster realized that the material was as cheap as an imitation. The Formica base would be the heaviest part. He had his plan; he just needed the others to do their part first.

  Mika and Little Jack went to the front desk. They purposely walked to the far end, further from Lancaster than the attendant so she would be looking their way instead of toward Lancaster. Little Jack said nothing, just glaring at the attendant with his unsettling eyes. Mika told her that they might have friends joining, and she wanted to know what rooms were available for them to rent. Each room the attendant brought up Mika asked a series of questions about, then rejected it. In this way she ate up a lot of time.

  Jude’s plan was less sophisticated. She grabbed a portable coat rack out of the hands of a porter and rode out the front door with it screaming, “Weeeeee!” This distracted everyone, including those working the front desk. And the resulting commotion was so loud that no one heard Lancaster sliding one of the statues out of place, revealing a hole underneath.

  He tried to slide the statue as directly forward as possible so as to mask the fact that it had moved at all. Then he waited, hidden behind the façade.

  Little Jack turned to Mika and said, “I credit you should call your sister and find out what she would like.”

  “That’s nove,” she said. “I think I can figure…”

  Little Jack kicked her discreetly and insisted, “I really think you need to contact her to make sure.”

  “Don’t you think you should talk to her, too?” Mika said after a short pause.

  “I want to learn about their schedule of events,” he said.

  “Oh, that won’t take long,” the desk worker said. “There are only a few…”

  “For the whole year,” Little Jack finished.

  The desk worker looked at him with wider eyes; then brought up a long list on her holopad.

  Little Jack turned to Mika. “I’ll be fine, Mom. Go talk to Sis.”

  Mika nodded, then slipped away. The employee turned her head to watch her, but Little Jack grabbed the woman’s attention. “Hey,” he said, pointing two fingers first to the woman, then to the center of his frosted-over glasses. “My eyes are down here. So let’s talk event planning.”

  With bell hops chasing a coat rack surfing Jude, and the front desk tied up explaining local events to Little Jack, Mika was able to make her way unnoticed to the back of the statue. There, she and Lancaster climbed down into the hole.

  They found themselves in a thin cavity that sloped downward toward the cliff where the rest of the ruins were. It quite suddenly opened up into a wide chamber carved out by intelligent hands – or other appendages the Milak Shivar might have used – with passages leading in other directions, and openings into buildings whose roofs formed into the cave ceiling. The doors were often not touching the ground, but were holes carved partway up the walls. This was once a an area fully immersed underwater from floor to ceiling.

  Lancaster and Mika’s spots of light revealed only pieces at a time, and neither of them could remain long on any single element as they needed to keep a lookout for any dangers. Some of the most horrifying creatures lived underground on these alien worlds.

  Lancaster adjusted his Illuminator and said, “Watch your eyes.” He then flicked a switch and the entire area was flooded with light. It appeared that they were in a sort of town square with several corridor roads leading out on all sides. Many of the walls of buildings were sculpted into shapes that seemed to describe what was once inside them. The floor and ceiling were decorated the same as either could be the bottom or the top. Several holes within both of these were passages one could take when water filled the underground city.

  Most windows and doorways were circular, with a few of them still retaining small pieces of the doors and shutters that had somehow never dissolved into dust. There was a distant smell of trash or septic; the result of the hotel no doubt, and a lingering chill hung in the air.

  But what was conspicuously lacking was any clue as to Teo’s location. “Give me the recorder,” Mika said, her voice echoing through the caverns. Lancaster handed it to her, and she played it.

  “To meet her… from the heart…” Mika pressed stop.

  “Who is ‘her’?” she asked, looking over the walls. She focused on the ones with designs.

  “Is one of them a brothel?” Lancaster asked. Mika turned her light on his eyes with annoyance. He laughed and squinted. “All right, all right,” he said.

  They strolled around the open area, not wandering too far from their cavity entrance, studying the carvings. Mika looked over one of them more studiously than the others. It seemed like a cave wall, which caused it to stand out among the rest of the formed architecture. But then she recognized the anatomy. This was an organ. Judging by its shape, it would be the right shape to fit in the Milak Shivar anatomy as a heart.

  “From the heart,” Mika said softly. “Meet her from the heart.” She walked up to the wall and put her back to it. “Meet her. Meet who?”

  “There is a lot of static,” Lancaster said. “Meter? Maybe we’re hearing an H because of the hissing in the recording?”

  Mika walked forward. Her practiced legs knew how to walk two meters exactly. Teo knew this. Her final step brought her to a narrow alley… carved out of the ground. “Below,” Mika said, quoting the next line from the recording.

  “Two meters, from the heart, below,” Lancaster repeated as he stepped up to her nodding.

  Mika was shaking her head annoyed, angry. The wine in her system bubbled up her emotions again, and her face wrinkled as she held them in like holding in vomit. They settled down into an expression of bitterness.

  Lancaster recognized this series of looks on her face and said, “At least he wasn’t going to meet some other woman.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and both shook and nodded her head as if it was loose on her neck. “So typical,” she said. Then her voice began to crack as she continued, “I credited the message was for me. An endearment. It wasn’t. It was fucking clues on another treasure hunt. For Mika, Formica. How could I be so stupid?”

  “You weren’t stupid,” Lancaster said.

  “I keep falling for this. You, him, the Stellar Arcanum I kept trying to join; everyone’s so concerned with unraveling the past that they can’t even try to patch up the present. I’m either stupid or a glutton for punishment.”

  “You’re a teacher. You’re obviously a glutton for punishment,” Lancaster said.

  Mika laughed despite herself. The sound reverberated across the walls even after she had reined it in and was wiping her eyes.

  Lancaster pulled out his grappling gun as he said, “I’m not going to pretend to be anyone else anymore. But I am going to try to make this as intriguing for you as possible.” He then shot the grappling hook into the rock, made sure it was secure, and gave the handle to Mika.

  She took a breath, nodded; then attached the grappling gun to her belt. She stepped toward the hole while Lancaster shined a light down it. It seemed to go straight a few meters, then curve off to the side. Lancaster was letting her go before him because he figured she would want to know the answer to Teo’s riddle first. But before she left, he said, “And who knows? You might screw up and have a little bit of fun.” They shared a smile, then she began to climb down the hole, her feet against the wall.

  Mika held her Spectro-beam with her free hand, scanning the walls around her as she went. They were more or less blank at first, adorned only with hardened dust and adjusting stone. But after a few meters her beam
of light turned to a contorted face. Writhing bodies floated all around it. Twisting to see the other walls, she found that this chilling presentation surrounded the entire corridor.

  Lancaster had heard Mika gasp, even though she hadn’t been very loud. “Everything okay?” he asked urgently.

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “You sure? I can pull you up if…”

  “I’m fine!” she insisted. Her light beam fixed on one specific point. A design was carved into the wall under one of the tortured faces. She had studied this before, but she had to think for a moment what it meant. Then she remembered, “Disease.” This was usually reason enough for her to turn away from any site and study its chemical make-up from afar before proceeding. But Teo had gone through here, and this was their only lead. Who knew if they’d be able to come back? Suddenly, Lancaster’s seat of the pants ways began to make more sense.

  Mika continued down, dropping past the bottleneck and onto the slanted ground where the chamber opened up a bit. The ceiling was about five meters above her, and also slanted at about a 45 degree angle. There were a couple decorations in the room, but before she checked them out, she detached the grappling hook gun from her belt and called for Lancaster to come down.

  As he did, Mika approached the largest object in the room, which was a statue of one of their gods, Buolua, standing on a platform. Curiously enough, the god was not in a pose of bravery, leadership, and war, as Milak Shivar (and many statues of people) typically had been. He was cradling a round object with rings around it; keeping it safe in his lower torso with his cupped hand.

  She was still looking over the details of the statue when Lancaster lowered in and stepped up behind her. “Find the graphimage of Buolua’s constellation from the Astrology Center,” she said.

  Lancaster ran back through the images he had captured and found an image that included the constellation. It was dim, and far away on the image, but he was able to isolate the specific dots and lines and increase the contrast enough for it to be seen.

  He projected the image over the statue, though it didn’t match at first. He twisted the projector until the lines lined up with the god like it was its skeleton, and the dots highlighted over some of his joints.