by Aer-ki Jyr
Davis backpedaled cautiously, touching his ear and contacting his staff who were spread out across the pyramid, escorting the Archons around. He hoped some of them were close.
Oni crossed to the center of the chamber in the blink of an eye and jump-kicked into the man’s right side as Rafa wisely turned his attention away from her, setting up the heavy strike.
The bulky giant, a good head taller than Rafa, went down hard, stunned by the unexpected attack as the two Archons orbited around him. “Who are you?” Rafa demanded.
Not seeming to care to talk, the man got back up and spun around in a twirling run headed towards Oni. When he got within range he didn’t stop his rotation, but rather extended arms and legs in a flurry of odd blows that he executed artfully. They caught her off guard, forcing her to step back and back and back until she took a chance and darted in with a fist-locked shove aimed at his torso…but his arm whipped around too fast and knocked her blow off target.
The man caught and locked Oni’s arms against his chest, pulling her off balance as his spinning momentum threw her much lighter body back towards Rafa as he tried a nearly simultaneous attack. Oni’s head hit him in the gut and knocked them both down, then Rafa saw a massive foot coming down over his head.
He twisted aside just in time, then kicked up at the man’s crotch in response, catching him in the side of the leg instead as the man danced aside and out of range…only to step forward towards Rafa again as he tried to get up, launching into a forward, midair summersault that ended with an outstretched leg that came down hard on Rafa’s left side, hitting him in the pelvis and knocking him back down.
In the moment of awkward positioning the attack left the man in Oni tackled him, wrapping an arm around his thick neck and working her way around and onto his back, then latching on with her legs and immobilizing him as much as possible. As Rafa struggled to his feet the man lifted Oni up off the ground as he rolled over onto his hands and knees, then jumped up and to the side, landing on his back and crushing Oni into the padded floor.
She yelled on impact, but her grip didn’t break. As the man tried to roll aside again to get his arms and feet underneath him she yanked him back, putting her right leg out as leverage to keep him on top of her in a giant bear hug as Rafa suddenly appeared in mid air over top of them both. He fell elbow first down into the man’s exposed gut, just below Oni’s locked arms, and impaled the man with as much force as he could bring to bear…knowing that Oni was going to suffer for it too.
He felt his elbow hit the man’s taught muscles and dig in several inches as the two Humans were crunched down into the floor…then suddenly the pressure beneath his elbow vanished, along with the man.
Rafa’s elbow fell down onto Oni, as did the rest of his body, delivering an unintentional hit to her crotch.
“Ooowww!” she moaned as air was suddenly available to her lungs. “Son of a…”
“Sorry,” Rafa offered, looking around. “What just happened?”
“I don’t…know,” she said, coughing and feeling her chest. “Ah, think I’ve got a broken rib…or three.”
“My bad,” Rafa said, rolling off her and pulling his fellow adept up to her feet. As he did he saw a hologram had appeared over the console. “Check that out.”
“Sure,” she said, walking over to it while he stood guard, looking for another attacker to pop out of nowhere.
Oni recognized about half the script, the rest were independent symbols that she wasn’t familiar with. The V’kit’no’sat language had a basic alphabet, but it also had thousands of unique symbols, such as the one used to represent Humans, which marked various rooms and files meant for their access. Each of the V’kit’no’sat races had their own identification symbol, but these she was seeing were something else entirely.
The part she could read was mostly numbers. It took her head a while to wrap around the glowing figures and descriptions, but when she worked her way down to ‘grad’ac tas,’ which translated as ‘elapsed time,’ and she saw the figure attached to it she swore in vexation.
“Damn.”
“What?” Rafa asked, still alert and scanning the room.
“You can relax. I think it’s a training program that was left running when the pyramid was attacked. It probably went into powersave mode until Davis touched the console.”
“Holographic?” Rafa said, still not taking his attention off the room as he walked over to the console.
“These read like statistics. The timer also says it’s been on for 100,000 years.”
“Damn,” Rafa echoed her previous statement. “I thought he felt a little weird.”
“And heavy…heavier than one of the Knights.”
“I wonder what difficulty that was on…and how much damage had been inflicted before we got to it?”
Oni reached down and held a hand against her crotch, bending over in anguish. “You just had to jump on me, didn’t you?”
“You set up the opening. Isn’t that what you wanted me to do?”
“Yeah, it was,” she admitted. “Didn’t expect him to disappear and have you bone me,” she said, squinting as she tried to massage away some of the discomfort. “That’s gonna leave a mark.”
Rafa smiled at her playful exaggeration as Ross and Tyr came running into view, with Davis coming back down the hall behind them.
“It’s over,” Rafa said as Oni straightened back up and the other two Archons slid to a halt inside the chamber.
“Where is he?” Tyr demanded.
“It was a hologram…we think,” Oni explained, gesturing to the floating statistics. “A training program left in sleep mode until we woke it up.”
“Seriously?” Ross asked.
“Yeah,” she said, feeling her ribcage again.
“Are you alright?” Davis asked, finally catching up to the much faster Archons.
“Little banged up,” she said, waving aside his concerns.
“Where is he?”
“Back in the computer,” Rafa told him. “We think this is some sort of hand to hand training chamber. The attacker was holographic.”
“We think,” Oni emphasized.
“Whoops,” Davis said sheepishly. “Sorry about that. Didn’t know what I was turning on.”
“It wasn’t you,” Rafa assured him. “It was in sleep mode. I’d guess any key would have turned it back on.”
“Sleep mode? Since…” Davis said, his face clearing with sudden understanding. “All this time?”
“Timestamp,” Oni said, pointing to the appropriate line on the hologram.
Davis frowned. “Let me guess, another hologram?”
“You can’t see it?”
“Apparently not. Do you want to stay and work on this or leave it till later?”
“I’ll stay…I don’t feel like walking around just yet,” she said, throwing Rafa a mock glare as Cora came running into the room.
“Situation handled,” Rafa told her as Davis got on his radio to call off the others.
“What happened?” she asked, looking around.
“Stick around and I’ll fill you in,” Oni told her. “The rest of you can check out the other rooms, and stay on your toes.”
“Right,” Rafa agreed, pointing back to the doorway, “no way of knowing how much other stuff they left on. How’s your head?”
“No concussion,” Davis said as the foursome walked out, “but I imagine I’ll have a nasty bruise by tomorrow.”
“Ross,” Rafa prompted as they walked around a piece of the ring-like hallway and into one of the spurs, letting the other Archon go first while he stayed back to watch over Davis.
Without hesitation Ross walked up to the closest of the closed doors and touched the dent in the center, with the door opening as soon as his fingers brushed the surface. He walked inside and disappeared from view.
Tyr stepped up behind him and looked inside, then motioned the others forward. Davis followed Rafa in and saw the first two Archons standing in the mid
dle of a giant hologram…apparently not a solid one this time, for Tyr’s head was sticking up above the galactic plane as a swarm of tiny dots representing star positions within the galaxy filled the room with an abundance of ambient light.
Rafa glanced at Davis. “Can you see that?”
“Yes I can,” he said, looking out across the map of the Milky Way. “Find the controls.”
“Pedestal over here,” Ross said from the opposite side.
“See if you can pull up data on specific systems,” Davis asked. All other maps regarding galactic data had been extremely limited. He hoped that this one, in a secure area, might be more forthcoming…but then again he could see it, so he wasn’t sure how hopeful he should get.
“Give me a second,” Ross said, messing with the controls. Suddenly the galaxy map zoomed in on their current star system.
“Whoops,” he said, backtracking. Finding the button he wanted he pulled up a sector by sector highlighter and picked one in closer to the core, in the middle of the deepest outlined V’kit’no’sat territory. Their current position was indeed on the periphery of their territory, barely shaded, marking it as frontier and low priority/low traffic according to the data streams floating above the map that acted as a key.
“Capitol,” he said, pulling up a particular star system. It was a trinary star system with two large, white stars in the center and a red giant orbiting the pair further out. Sitting between them were four planets, with another three solely in orbit around the red giant. None of the planets had any moons, but they were all large and inhabited, based off of population statistics.
“Are you sure?” Davis asked, looking at the stars and planets.
Tyr pointed above the map at empty space. “Neotras.”
Davis recognized the word for ‘capitol’ but he didn’t see what he was pointing at. “Are there icons attached to this map?”
Rafa glanced over at him as if that were a stupid question, for the entire space above the map was filled with text and figures. “Guess you can’t see everything.”
“That allays my concerns,” Davis said, surprising Rafa.
“How so?”
“This map should have additional data that we haven’t been able to access previously. If it was general access I would be able to see it.”
“Well, there’s a wealth of data here,” Ross told him, “with a lot of subcategories that I can pull up.”
Davis glanced between the three Archons. “Don’t suppose I could convince some of you to stick around to transcribe all this?”
Rafa smiled at him. “You kidding? Now that you let us in, we’re never leaving.”
“Ditto,” Tyr agreed.
Davis smiled sheepishly. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to set up a sanctum down here so some of you can stay on station for prolonged periods of time.”
Rafa nodded. “If nothing else, we’re going to want to use the V’kit’no’sat training programs to see how we match up with their troops. They’re bound to have statistics for other users saved somewhere.”
“I thought you might,” Davis said, looking around the room. “Looks like the research team is going to have to rely on you guys to feed them data. I know that’s not your normal duties…”
“We’ll make it work,” Rafa promised.
“Good,” Davis said, nodding. “Now, let’s have a look at the other rooms.”
5
“There,” Jason said, pointing to a specific place in the pyramid’s orbital sensor logs. “Ship arrival, just before all hell breaks loose.”
“ID?” Morgan asked.
“Hold on,” Ryan said, tagging the tiny icon emblazoned on the orbital map. When he did so it enlarged into a schematic with a stream of data attached. “What do you know, Raptors.”
“So they did have help,” Paul said, crossing his arms over his chest as he thought this out. So far all the records they’d reviewed showed a massive Rit’ko’sor ground attack against the temple, coming from where they didn’t know. Earlier records that Star Force had access to showed that the Rit’ko’sor did have a presence on the planet along with the other races, but this was the first evidence that there’d been an external assistance in the brief war that had consumed the V’kit’no’sat colony.
Ryan accelerated the timelapse forward and saw the ship go to ground…then skirt along the surface to another point, hold position for a while, then scoot across to another and another. After a long series of maneuvers it eventually came near the pyramid, and after a long wait took off and departed the system.
“Looks like it was a torch and burn op,” Sam said as the five Archons continued to piece together the circumstances of the planet’s accidental independence.
“Can you find a map of those other locations?” Paul suggested.
“Think there are other facilities buried somewhere on the planet?” Jason asked.
Paul shrugged. “We have generic population figures, and there’s no way they could all fit in here. I’d like to see if their other structures are as robust as this…I’m guessing not.”
“What if the ship came to pick the Raptors up?” Jason differed. “Those could be rendezvous coordinates.”
“Got something,” Sam said, working a different console beside Ryan. “The last automated maintenance log indicated that the interstellar communications system had gone offline, but only the outgoing feed.”
“Saboteurs inside the pyramid,” Morgan guessed.
Sam nodded.
A new planetary map materialized itself in front of Ryan. “I think I’m starting to get a handle on this interface. If I’m right, this is a deployment map for the armed forces.”
Paul stepped closer, noticing tiny pinpricks across the seven continents…though their shapes were a bit different than present day due to seafloor spreading and contraction. “Try there.”
Ryan zoomed in on the larger icon in the southern half of Africa. “Wow.”
“So that’s what one of their cities look like,” Morgan mewed, looking at the cluster of three distinct types of buildings all arrayed around a central open area that the display tagged as ‘ta’stor irot,’ or ‘landing zone.’
The buildings in the northeast quadrant were the smallest of the three designs, with angled, sharp curves that resembled claws and were thousands in number, spread out in a chaotic arrangement that looked like they’d just built them wherever they liked without any specific layout in mind. Walkways, the size of highways on present day Earth, connected the buildings with crisscrossing lines through the jungle environment that seemed to encompass most of the planet. Those walkways ended at the central landing zone, which covered dozens of square miles, conceivably to accommodate the V’kit’no’sat’s insanely large ships.
On the full southern half of the city an opposite motif was dominant. Neat, grid-like ‘roads’ were laid out in a triangular pattern, each the width of several football fields. There were less of them than their tiny cousins to the northeast, but the sheer acreage covered was much more massive, pressing the southern boundary of the city out in a much larger radius than the other two sectors.
In addition, the buildings in the southern sector were beyond massive. Round, smashed domes, the smallest of them had to be at least half a mile in diameter…with the largest dwarfing the size of the pyramid in which they now stood. One obvious difference, however, was the coloration. The green/black stone that the pyramid was constructed with was not present in the city’s architecture, as Paul had guessed.
The northwestern sector of the city was the most compact of the three, with the towering buildings all interconnected with each other via short tunnels. Their height surpassed the domes of the southern sector by a factor of 5, reminding Paul of the skyscrapers in Chicago and New York, but the V’kit’no’sat version put those cities to shame. Not only were they taller, but they were much wider and conical shaped, giving that sector of the city the look of a bed of needles all pointing up into the sky to impale any ship that dared
to land off the assigned grid.
“Rit’ko’sor,” Ryan identified, pointing at the northeast sector, “Oso’lon, and Kret’net.”
“So they do stay segregated,” Paul noted.
“Not so much that they build separate cities,” Jason amended. “Are there any military structures?”
“One,” Ryan said, further zooming in to a small building on the perimeter of the landing zone. It was a squarish building, three tiers high, looking like a brown-colored miniature version of the main pyramid.
“Garrison?” Morgan asked, based on the size.
Ryan tagged the holographic icon above the visual representation of the building and a list of weaponry appeared. “Looks like an anti-air/communications/turret/garrison/command center.”
“Multi-tasking military complex,” Jason summed up. “I have a feeling any square structure is going to be communal, while each race builds their own unique habitats.”
“Does it have a troop manifest?” Morgan wondered.
Ryan tagged a few subservient icons on the list and sorted through various menus. “Now that’s interesting. They have a group of six Era’tran listed along with icons for Rit’ko’sor and Ter’nat.”
Paul frowned. ‘Era’tran’ was the name for Tyrannosaurus Rex, Rit’ko’sor were the Raptors, and Ter’nat was the V’kit’no’sat name for Humans…which meant two of the three didn’t have settlements in the city to live in, unless they shared. “Think they live on base?”
“That’d be my guess,” Ryan said, pulling up files on each of the individuals assigned to the base/outpost.
“Guys, look at this,” Sam interrupted. “I think I have a structural breakdown.”
“Of what?” Jason asked.
“Their social structure.”
“Finally,” Paul said, stepping around Ryan.
“What exactly have you found?” Morgan asked, less confident.
“Priority list for the planet regarding colonization rights,” he said, pointing to a chart with the symbols for each race arrayed in rows. At the top were two symbols side by side, below them was another one followed by three more. Below that came several more rows, each with no less than 10 equivalent groupings, sprouting dozens of racial symbols in total.
