by Johan Kalsi
“Anything?” said the Captain. “We’re sealing everything from engine back. Report!”
The engine room chief replied, “Nothing, Captain. They cracked the door wide open, but nothing came in.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. It’s a good thing we weren’t running a pressurization test for human travel like we were yesterday. We’d be exploring the deep without you right now.”
“Have you closed the door?”
“Negative. Holding watch.”
BASC said, “Captain, TRA-C and I made it down here before the seal closed. We can work on the door.”
“Go,” said the captain. “We’re monitoring you. Something got that ship out there. We’ve put nearly 10,000 ultralooks between us and it already, but it is clear we were close enough to trade something. Whatever opened that door was no ghost.”
TRA-C held the rail on her way to the door, and then stopped midway. BASC approached the door and gripped its handle. Gripping the footrail with both feet, he tensed and said, “Switch it to manual.”
“Switched to manual,” said a technical unit from the Captain’s deck.
The door didn’t budge.
“TRA-C come here. I can’t get it to shut.”
“Maybe it is jammed.”
“There’s no damage whatsoever. I just think it is really heavy. Come here, please.”
“I think it’s jammed.”
BASC turned to face her. She stood motionless at the rail. Her body was pressed against the wall.
“You aren’t going to fall out. There’s no pressure anywhere in the ship. Please. Come.”
She didn’t move.
Silent blasts erupted in a flash of gunfire from TEN-2, standing in the square of engine room units. His black and orange mask flared as he fired. He fell backwards while holding his footgrips steady. He contorted wildly and let his gun go as he clutched at nothing with his hands. Tubing in his neck must have ruptured, because a cluster of dark round balls of fluid burst out from there and floated upward.
BASC extended his weapons: a 2112 in one hand and launchable multibayonet on the opposite wrist. TRA-C began to shake and twist. BASC went to her, feet first. Something invisible surrounded her and kept him from touching her. He kicked it, hard. He was surprised and unbalanced by how much gravity the thing had. BASC pulled himself toward TRA-C. She seized and shook and did not respond to him calling her name.
The dormant TEN-2 reactivated. His head hung at an awkward angle, and he didn’t seem to have control of his limbs. He fired his gun without bracing, and his body began to spin out of control. The line of fire cut across the room. BASC trained on him but couldn’t shoot his own unit.
Fortunately, the engine chief could. With a hard launch his cannon shot a heavy wad of sludge into TEN-2’s ribs. TEN-2 sailed across the room, screaming into BASC’s head. He cracked into the corner of the room and crumpled there, immobilized. His moans had a strange, animal sound to them, and he began babbling incoherently in a foreign language.
The engine chief hunched over and powered down, leaking beads of ruddy orange from greaves in his legs, arms, and neck. His cannon fired, at point blank, into the two remaining engine mates. The cannon wrenched, disembodied, from the grip of the fallen chief. BASC shoved himself away from the twitching TRA-C, toward the engine-room door. The cannon turned, mid-air, toward the seal.
The ghost was going to breach it. BASC felt the wall shudder as he fled, pulling himself outside the ship.
“Captain, release the engine room. The seal’s breaching.”
“I see that. You need to open the manual locks, otherwise I’ll nuke the entire ship.”
BASC crawled his way over the surface of the engine room hull.
“I’m already on it.”
The first lever yanked up and open easily. He crawled to the next one. The walls vibrated again. The ghost cannon was blasting through. He opened the next lever down the line, and then the next. It occurred to him that the cannon might have been out of shots. He kept working the levers, wondering if he’d have a chance to survive this by going back inside. A sound broke up from below him, which was particularly unusual: it wasn’t coming from inside his head. A whine, like a saw or drill echoed up from within the shell of the engine room. Impossible. It is space.
He hurried to the last lever and released it.
“Go Captain.”
“BASC, crawl to the forward hatch.”
The sawing whined from below. BASC started pulling himself away from the engine bay.
“No, sir. Go!”
“Godspeed, BASC-2”
“Godsp--”
The explosion ripped his arms off, and what was left of BASC’s body spun wildly into the black, and the Morale Officer thought nothing.
His visor retracted and he saw sunlight on the surface of the asteroid. BASC-2 was outside the Atorox, but the Atorox was not in deep space. It was not torn in half. It wasn’t flying at all. BASC had slid across the fuselage, and now was hanging outside the engine room door. The rush of sound overwhelmed him. The saw was still roaring inside.
His homeworld filled the air with bright greens, reds and blues. BASC pulled himself into the engine room. A masked man in regular black battlewear and chest armor lay crumpled in the door. His neck was broken, and BASC had the sinking suspicion that the man had been kicked very hard. As he pulled himself over the body, gripping the rails, he noticed something he had not seen in a long time. Hydraulic suspensors sprouted from his shoulders. They lifted and lowered him robotically, simulating zero gravity.
TRA-C was held fast to the ceiling, her hands still clutching the rails, but hydraulics suspending the weight of her body above his head.
At the seal, a man in the same foreign combat gear as the dead man at the door was sawing. BASC fired his gun, but it was a dummy. His bayonet was not. Hurling himself along the rail, the hydraulic buoying him in the familiar weightless way, he drove the blades into the intruder’s back. The saw – still running – fumbled into the man’s masked face, and finally stopped. The engine crew lay contorted in the ruins of their defensive square, all held, slowly floating, like a child’s mobile, suspended by hydraulics. On the floor was a familiar man, wearing a bloody Atorox Project uniform. He had been ripped from TEN-2 robotic simulator suit forcibly. His throat was slashed.
Down in the far corner, hanging in it, was TEN-2’s simulator, with many pieces shattered and piled below its occupant. Because of the tears in the simulator suit, BASC could see the flesh of another foreign attacker. It was bruised but in no way cannon shot. He was hanging limp and almost certainly dead. BASC guessed it was from the trauma of hitting the wall.
The engine room was secure, although BASC worried at each shadow. The sunlight streaming in through the engine door left the room in an eerie glow, and he couldn’t shake the sense that there might still be invisible demons crawling through the ship. He floated himself to TRA-C. His robotic hands were not equipped to remove her mask or safely descend her hydraulics to the floor.
“TRA-C, can you hear me?” He shook her shoulder. He pried open one hand, removing it from the bar, then the next. He was struggling to get her foot clamp off a lower rail when movement poured in from the engine door.
BASC turned his gun on them, forgetting it was useless.
They were Atorox Project paramedics. He put the gun down, and as he did, he felt himself slowly descending to their level. He pushed up off a rail, but it did nothing to stop his descent. Against his will, he touched ground and his suit immobilized him.
The medics took down TRA-C and laid her flat, while two others worked quickly to unfasten BASC’s bolts.
As BASC’s face pulled away from the mask, the light blinded him. His muscles twitched and he felt as if his bones had turned to stone. The medics had him on a hoverstretcher. The bright light gave way to a steel face filling his view.
The robodoc was familiar to him, but it took him a second to recognize it, after all thi
s time so many light years away from home. Servo. Doctor Servo.
Servo’s medical arms extended from his torso and ran vitals on BASC.
“Take it easy, sir,” said Servo. “Can you say your name?”
“How’d they get in?”
“We had a breach in security, sir. They injected a virus into the security system that identified them as custodial staff. We’ve got it fixed. Don’t worry. Can you say your name?”
BASC turned his head to see them pulling a pale woman out of the husk of her TRA-C simulator. She was limp, and the medics slashed her uniform from her chest. They immediately plunged heartstarters in. Her pale body didn’t even jolt. Her head hung at a very wrong angle.
“You saved the mission, sir. The ship’s going to make it there. Nine crew members survived and remain intact. Can you say your name?”
The light got brighter, and fluttering thunder of an evac unit filled the air.
“No,” he said. There was nothing but a hole, an dark and empty space where his name should be. “No, I don’t know.”
Chapter 14: An Honest Inquisition
Universal 382
Avatar Travel: A method of nanomolecular intergalactic travel whereby human beings operating in model environments remotely control full-body robots, known as avatars, as if the human body is physically housed within the avatar shell. With the corruption and failure of the ancient Black Box interstellar travel system, the Canon Archive was instrumental in developing the noegenetic technology that permitted the transmission of materials through interstellar wormholes by molecular transfer…
—Infogalactic Entry: Grand Category: Interstellar Transfer
The full, bleak and soundless day of the hot but rarely fatal autumn equinox on the equatorial desert of Movexa felt, on the skin, downright supernatural. It was as if the sun had never risen that morning in the west, nor that it would ever reach its noonday peak, nor set in the east hours later. Inquisitor and Archaeologist, Awoi Enjo, a scholar of the order furthest away from the stale confines of the Canon Archive bureaucracy, did something he had not done in weeks:
He savored his meal.
It was a modest thing: a working-man’s lunch of breaded meat, pulped wild spanch, and three thin bars of infused cracklings. Miraculously, it didn’t have a spec of sand in it, and the odd lazy timelessness of the day cast a drowsy, seductive hue across the entire dig.
Both disgruntled factions of guards, sent by dueling warlords a few weeks ago, appeared only in the form of lounging exoskeletons, facemasks blank. Enjo’s team was downright cheery as they gently dusted the tender surfaces of the so called “hatch-wall” of the great and ancient Movexa Necropolis.
From the shadows of a small architectural perch, the long black naked legs of the Ambassadorial Overseer dangled, as they had all morning. If the denizens didn’t know any better, he could have been mistaken for a chandelier.
Enjo chased the last morsel with a satisfying quaff of still-cold spanch and stole a final, food-cooled breath of the otherwise sweet desert air. He had misplaced his methane-filter mask that morning, as he did nearly every day, as—although he was not even native to the planet—his lungs had long-since adapted to breathing the mixed air. This was one of those days when he pitied those who—like the crew’s horses in the corral—couldn’t bear to breathe a whiff without the oxygen infuser. One last deep breath, one last golden view—
As if it had been timed to complete his lunch, one of Enjo’s students cried out. A new sensation, even more pleasurable than nature’s quiet glow, surged in him.
The hatch was one-hundred percent effaced.
Now everyone, down to the last acolytes, was very well aware that the chamber beyond the hatch was packed full after millennia of burial. Not only was this to be expected, but it had been proven by the initial robotic monitor scans of the once-secret monument. Nowadays scans were imprecise things, still based on rudimentary Noegenetic principles and downright analog recording devices, but radio-wave detection of sand and debris-filled chambers was child’s play. You’d have to deceive the ‘bots with mirrors, on purpose, to fool them.
Still, the exposed door was an important moment in the Inquisition, if only symbolically. Of course, daily photograms, measurements, and reconstructions had been sent to the analysts on the distant Canon Archive. Today, however, would produce the first “clean” shot of the hatch. It would no doubt be featured on the dig’s Infogalactic entry, and was destined to become a symbol for its own archaeological museum. Admittance into the Canon Archive Museum System was exclusive and secret, but there was no doubt that the currently named Incidental Movexan Exploratory Co-prosperity Cultural Eduvocational Exchange Probe Site Inquiry 00-86 cat. 63.00.10.9 would, upon extensive documentation and site visits, be granted its own foundational museum. The first joint archaeological expedition between the human race and Another already had such a cyclone of popular hyperbole swirling about on the civilized Inner Planets Awoi Enjo would undoubtedly be honored with some sort of permanent proctorship, scholarship or possibly even admittance on the custodial committee.
Inner Planets: An astropolitical description of the union of civilized planets throughout the galaxy closely interconnected by way of the deteriorating Black Box system. The vast majority of connections had to route through the Black Box between Holocrone and its moon, which is managed directly by the Canon Archive Space-Time-Flight Authority.
—Infogalactic Entry: Grand Category: Inner Planets (STF Authority)
What the hatch really meant to him was that time wasted on fundraising trips and arcane grant requests would be significantly reduced. The hatch sold itself. The hatch also meant that he might now finally be able to relax. He might finally be able to spend the rest of his life digging. Certainly the sand removal alone could take up much of his time before he retired to the confines of guidance and memory within the vivid walls of a new museum—his new museum—in the heart of the Canon Archive.
Enjo pulled new gloves onto his hands. For all the history he had uncovered, he had never been the lead for the ceremonial “pull” photo.
Technically, the honor should have gone to Foucha Fiyinn, the Onhi ambassador and occasional light fixture, but the Onhi People had no use for human dramatics. In fact, it was unlikely that even with all Foucha’s education and experience in the still-new art of xenophilic, Human-Another relations, that he would even be able to detect the significance of a door containing slightly less dirt on it than the day before.
Nevertheless, all portals—windows, hatches, latches, holes, doors or even suspected openings—were subject to the time-honored tradition of the “pull.” Enjo clapped his hands together in anticipation, smiled broadly, and very nearly forgot to wait for others from the other sections of the excavation site to jog in.
The hatch couldn’t have been more perfect. It had an extended handle, one of exquisite quality, and probably wide enough for four human hands. It was clearly ceremonial. Enjo had long suspected that this had at one point been the grand portal to the Necropolis, and that the monument upon which they had spent so many painstaking years, had at one point been the entry of priests and morticians whose culture, even after years of research, remained cloaked in mystery.
The hatch was nearly a man high, for reasons not yet known. That meant that Enjo had to stand with his hands upstretched slightly for the traditional “poised” photogram. He smiled broadly, with the core of his team surrounding him—squatting, sitting, crouching or standing. Others tried to crowd in, but the photogrammer couldn’t include them all for the close-up. He took a few courtesy “broadshots.”
Enjo felt his hands shake as he now neared them to the handle. He had touched, inadvertently or with purpose, the surface of the hatch countless times. But this photogram was for the ages. He prayed that his light, mock-grasp of the handle would not be the final whisper that disintegrated the beautiful object into desert memory. His fingers encircled the handle.
Nothing but the Noegenetic click
! of the photogrammator happened. Enjo released the handle and everyone applauded.
Then the hatch door, unmolested for countless centuries, swung open on its own.
No ancient sand gushed from the opening. Not a single grain. The crowd gasped. It was in fact clear of any fill whatsoever.
All eyes turned to Enjo, and he tried his best not to greet them with a gaping mouth.
“Uh. Platform. The hydraulic. Bring it over.” He hoped that what was simple nervous paralysis of nearly all his faculties would be mistaken for calm command. Several older students and a few acolytes rolled an elevator platform from the storage supply. He indicated for them to position it directly below the hatch.
A burst of locusts filled his stomach. His hand went numb at the platform switch. The people watched as he ascended to the opening, chain-ladder in his hand, body-lights at the ready. He wondered fleetingly if he should have taken the time to don an exoskeleton. He raised the platform high enough for him to kneel but look comfortably through the high portal. His lights flared.
It was a simple empty chamber.
It may as well been filled with gold and sprinkled with yttrium.
Although a layer of dust coated every squared-off surface in the room several things were instantly apparent. First, this chamber, and possibly others, had been nearly perfectly sealed to the outside ravages of weather and time. It had quite likely been that way since the origins of the structure. Second, as ancient as the temple was known to be, there was nothing primitive about the carvings within the chamber. In fact, they outdid the artisan quality of the current Native Aliens. The images were not just carved in three dimensions, but were done with natural perspective and realism. The first one Enjo could make out in the darkness was that of a realistic-looking dragon. The stalled sun’s light pierced the hatch opening and landed on the creature’s mouth like fire. Its asymmetrical teeth were not only individually carved, but appeared to be individually designed, like in a fossil cast.
