Blue Planet Rising (Pebbles in the Sky Book 2)

by Jeffery Bagley

  “No,” said Brianna.

  “How did you know?” Brianna asked as she looked up.

  Beatrice burst out laughing. “Honey, every woman who’s been with a man can recognize that freshly sexed look. I knew it as soon as you two drove up. Kristy suspects also, but would rather pretend it didn’t happen than cause a confrontation. If Sarah wasn’t up on communications watch, she would have known too.”

  “I, we, uh, I didn’t mean for it to happen,” said Brianna. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what Brianna? You’re a young woman on a planet with some virile young men. I don’t remember swearing abstinence for the duration of the entire expedition. Did you swear such an oath?”

  Brianna shook her head. “It could cause problems.”

  Beatrice chuckled. “Yes, if you get pregnant it’ll definitely cause problems. Kristy will go nuts and the administrative mucky mucks back on at NASA will have a heart attack. You are aware, aren’t you, that the birth control shots that we brought with us were lost in the explosion and fire on the two supply ships?”

  Brianna looked up in alarm.

  “That’s right,” said Beatrice. “The only reliable birth control we have is abstinence. If you intend on continuing your relationship with Jason then you need to monitor your cycles very closely when you start having them again. Other than abstinence, the rhythm method is the only means of birth control we have available.”

  Brianna bent back down to the slides. The two didn’t mention the topic again. When Donald went up to relieve Sarah on the communications watch, Sarah came down and sat down on the bunk beside Brianna. The females were sleeping on one side of the dome and the males on the other. For some semblance of modesty, they had hung one of the parachutes from a frame in the top of the dome effectively dividing the interior space in half. Kristy had gone up to the communication station so the three women were talking amongst themselves. Sarah kept wrinkling up her nose. Suddenly the young black woman bent over and sniffed Brianna’s lap. She sat up and squinted her eyes at Brianna.

  “Girl, have you been doing the thing?”

  Brianna looked at Sarah in shock.

  “Girl, I ain’t stupid. I smell man stuff on you. There’s no smell in the world like the smell of semen,” accused Sarah.

  “Quiet Sarah,” whispered Beatrice. “You don’t have to tell the whole crew. It’s none of their business, nor is it any of ours I might say.”

  “Jason?” whispered Sarah.

  Brianna nodded.

  “Damn girl, you would go and get the best of the lot of them. For God’s sake, go take a bath. I don’t want to smell that all night,” Sarah said as she shook her head.

  Brianna grabbed a towel, soap, a water bladder, and went outside. When she got back the other three females were all laying on their cots asleep. She lay down and closed her eyes. Her body tingled as she re-played the scene of her lovemaking with Jason in her head. She fell asleep quickly with a content smile on her face.

  Chapter 35

  May 5th, 2047

  Elpis

  “Happy Cinco de Mayo,” Jason told Briana as he walked up to her and rubbed her hip with his hand.

  She brushed his hand away. “Jason, don’t do that while people are around.”

  He bent over to refasten a tab on his boot and kissed her leg on the way back up. She smacked his head. He smiled and walked over to get his next load of soil. David had used the heavy transport and scooped up a mound of dirt near the greenhouses. They were raking it down and removing the stones and then carrying it into the greenhouses. There, Beatrice and Sarah were working bacteria spores and human fertilizer into the soil and spreading it in the soil trays. They had been at this task for three days now and they were almost done.

  Brianna picked up a bag of dirt and threw it over her back. The physical labor had all of them sweating in the humidity. It had been raining off and on all morning in between periods of sunshine. When the sun came out and started evaporating the moisture from the recent rain, the humidity became almost unbearable. The women were down to shorts and shirts tied up off of their waist and the men were all working shirtless and in trousers. As Brianna carried her load into the green house she watched Jason’s muscular back straining with his sack of soil. She felt that longing sensation again and had to shake her head to make it go away.

  Last evening, Jason had been on radio watch when Brianna had gone to the stream to bathe. The ground team had relaxed their security measures and as long as they had their PA with them, Kristy no longer made people travel in pairs. Brianna had taken some warm food up to Jason on her way to the stream. She had quickly given in to his advances and they had hurriedly made love again at the top of the hill. She had then gone and bathed and returned to the dome. Both Sarah and Beatrice had kidded her about taking so long at the stream. Brianna couldn’t figure how the hell they knew that she had been with Jason.

  By lunch time, all the soil trays were full. The entire team gathered for lunch in front of the dome they were using for a shelter. They had started eating the self-heating rations and everyone agreed that they were a step up from the emergency rations they had lived off of during the first few days on the planet. They were excited about the possibility of fresh vegetables in the not too distant future.

  “Everybody, listen up,” Kristy said as she stood up in front of the group. “Now that the greenhouses are set up, we need to wait a few days for the bacteria to start multiplying. We have mixed the soil with our uh…fertilizer and it shouldn’t take long to see if the bacteria live. Alpha control relayed the message that the NASA people want us to start earning our keep.” She held up her hands displaying the blisters there. As if we haven’t been doing so,” she laughed. “Anyway, they want us to start doing some science.”

  “Donald, after lunch I want you and Frederick to take the heavy transport and pick a good location for the weather station and start setting it up,” she said. They nodded and got up to start gathering their gear.”

  “Sarah, will you please go relieve David on the communications watch.”

  “Albert, if you think you can operate the jeep; I want you to take Brianna and go start collecting your geological samples. NASA is dying to know what types of resources may be in the area. They’re especially interested in any rare elements that may be present. They would also like you to check some of the large washes in the area to see if you can determine if there is any geological evidence of this planet being warmer at one time.”

  “Master Chief, you have permission to play with the alien excavator. Take David and see if you two can figure out how to make it work. If you can get it going, it’ll make our task of preparing a landing strip much easier since its’s four times the size of the heavy transport we brought with us. Jason, Beatrice, and I are going to take a look in the other small dome. Anyone have questions?”

  Everyone stood, ready to get to work, and Kristy took that as an affirmative. She was very pleased at the way the entire group was working together. They made a good team and everyone pitched in to help. She was still very concerned however about the relationship that was obviously developing between Jason and Brianna. A lovers spat or jealousy among the team members could ruin everything that they had going for them.

  Kristy, Jason and Beatrice walked over to the other small dome and stood in front of it. The other team members had all left on their other assigned tasks. She could hear the Master Chief yelling down at David as they crawled over the alien excavator.

  “Does anyone think we should do anything different or just try to open the door?” asked Kristy.

  “Just do it,” said Jason. “We haven’t found anything that indicates any malevolent intent by the aliens that built this place.”

  Kristy nodded. She walked up to the recessed control for the door, reached in and turned it. The door opened just like its twin in the other building. Although the dome was exactly the same size and shape as the one they had taken shelter in, it was obvious it had be
en used for a totally different purpose. While the first dome had contained only a few boxes and containers, this one was far from empty.

  Kristy placed an empty box in the doorway and they entered slowly and circled the large piece of equipment in the center of the dome. It was huge. The entire machine was over ten meters wide. There was a control panel on one side with some thick stubby switches and a whole panel of oddly shaped buttons. There was a hexagonal display above the buttons that was similar to the one in the excavator. As they looked around the dome, they saw that the exterior wall contained storage racks and boxes of materials. Jason went over to one box and picked up a flat round oval of metal.

  “If I did not know better this is an ingot of plain old iron,” he said.

  Kristy held up a similar sized oval of a cloudy silver colored metal and judged its weight in her hand. “I think this one is aluminum,” she announced.

  They found about twenty containers of the flat oval ingots made of various metals, several large tanks of some thick unknown liquid, large spools of fibers, and other materials they didn’t recognize.

  “This is obviously a warehouse,” said Beatrice.

  “Then, what is that then?” asked Jason as he walked back over to the large machine in the center of the dome.

  “I think it may be the alien equivalent of our 3-D manufacturing machines,” guessed Kristy. “These are the raw materials. You feed them into the machine and tell it what you want based upon a computer pattern and it makes it for you. We have some machines that are very similar in factories on Earth. They have several on the moon at Farside Base also. None of the them that I have seen are anywhere near as big as this though. They were all for making small parts.”

  “Let’s not mess with it right now,” said Kristy in caution as Jason bent over to look closely at the control panel.

  Suddenly, there was a loud grinding sound and a crash followed by cursing from down by the other small dome. The three of them ran out and saw the Master Chief up in the control pod of the alien excavator. It was backing away from the largest alien dome as David was yelling up at him. As the machine backed up, the four rear treads were rotating, but the front two were being dragged. Then the machine moved forward and the front treads started moving but not the rear. David kept calling up observations to the Master Chief who was cursing up a storm. Finally, the machine stopped moving.

  Master Chief motioned David to the stand in front of the machine. In a moment the two large arms there extended. With some more experimentation and feedback from David standing on the ground, Master Chief moved the arms up and down, side to side, and folded them back up. He then extended them and experimented until he could close the three fingered claws and twist the claws all the way in any direction. Master Chief yelled down for David to come up. David climbed into the back of the machine. Kristy walked up and was going to ask a question when David’s head popped up behind the Master Chief’s. He was pointing out something to David and explaining. Suddenly, the large machine started backing up and turning. Master Chief and David discussed something and the machine lurched forward, turned to the left and started up the hill.

  Kristy was trying to get their attention to stop when Jason caught up with her. “Let them go,” he told her. “The fastest way to get the hang of it is just playing with it.”

  They walked up the hill where Sarah was sitting under a tent monitoring the communication equipment. Below them, the two chiefs were driving the alien machine all around the landing zone. They switched places and David was in front and he drove it around for a while. Beatrice was recording the whole event with a video imager. After about a half hour of driving around, backing, turning, and starting and stopping, they drove the machine back over to the alien site and parked it right beside the charging plug in the first building. Master Chief closed the bubble over the control pod and they both climbed out of the machine very pleased with themselves.

  Kristy was standing there waiting on them with her hands on her hips. “Did you boys have fun tearing up the ground at the LZ?”

  They laughed. “It took a while to figure out the controls,” Master Chief said. “The four foot pedals are used to apply power to the treads. Then you use the two large levers to go forward or backwards or turn. It’s quite versatile in what it can do. The only problem is that we only have two feet. To use the thing, we will have to have two operators working the foot pedals or rig up something that can press both the foot pads on one side when a human operator is using it. I have an idea in my head for a rig that might work. If we can use that machine for excavation we can save the hydrogen from the hydrolysis units that we would have had to use as fuel for our large transport. We have an unlimited amount of electricity from the dome to charge the alien excavator.”

  David went and got a bottle of water while Jason climbed into the excavator to look at the controls.

  “What was in the other building?” asked the Master Chief.

  “We think it’s some type of three dimensional fabricating machine. Come take a look,” said Kristy.

  They all walked back over to the second small dome. Jason, David, and the Master Chief looked over the raw materials and then walked up to the control panel. Master Chief reached out and flipped a switch that had a series of small dots below it. The machine emitted a hum and the control panel lit up. The hexagonal panel lit up and several lines of dots ran down the panel and stopped. They stood looking at it.

  “Don’t screw with it, Master Chief,” warned Kristy.

  “The power switch is marked just like the one in the excavator, he explained. The dots are a written language of some sort. I have no idea how to read it. Unfortunately, I don’t read or write alien, only English.”

  “Maybe Albert can make some sort of sense out of the patterns,” said Beatrice. He’s an archeologist after all.”

  Kristy nodded. “Take pictures of everything then turn it off. We’ll send everything to the specialists back on Earth and let Albert look at the writing. Maybe someone can start to decipher it.”

  They went back outside and stood in the sunshine.

  “There’s just one building left,” said Jason.

  “I’m dying to know what’s in there,” said Beatrice.

  “We all are,” said Kristy, “but not today. Let’s transmit what we’ve found to Earth and see what they make of it all. Then, we’ll talk about entering the big dome.”

  That night they stayed up late talking about the day’s activities. The weather station was set up, and Albert had taken some interesting soil and rock samples that he was going to analyze in the morning. He and Brianna had also found a deep gully that had been cut into the ground by erosion from rain water. There, they had discovered an area of sedimentary layers that indicated that this plateau had at one time been under water. The planet evidently had not always been frozen solid in its distant past. They collated and transmitted all the information that they had collected to Earth. They hoped that they would have some instructions in the morning on what they should do next. The entire group was itching to enter the big dome.

  When they were getting ready to turn in, Kristy was washing her face when Brianna said she was going to the latrine and went outside. Kristy noted that Jason snuck out the door several minutes later. Kristy lay awake and waited, feigning sleep. They both returned in about half an hour and went to their individual cots. Kristy sighed to herself. She knew that she would have to speak to Jason in the morning regarding his relationship with Brianna. She didn’t look forward to the confrontation. She finally went to sleep, but she dreamed of her dead husband all night and didn’t rest well.

  Chapter 36

  May 9th, 2047

  New Washington, Georgia

  President Walden, the First Lady, Peter Rockwell, and his wife Susan were sitting enjoying coffee after dinner. Peter and Susan had enjoyed a private dinner with the President and his wife. Now, they were watching the evening newscast. The latest information regarding the findings on Elp
is was being released to the news organizations and the general public tonight. The President was very anxious over how people would react.

  “I’m still expecting some sort of mild panic,” he said to Peter.

  Peter thought for a moment and then shook his head. “I’m not sure I agree, Mr. President. How could anyone expect that the aliens that built those artifacts to have evolved to look like us? They’re a product of their home planet’s environment just like we are. I believe people will understand that, and not go nuts fearing that we’ve uncovered some species that’s hell bent on devouring us all.”

  “Doctor Rockwell, I’m not as scientifically literate as my husband, so would you mind explaining to me exactly what we do know about them so far?” asked the First Lady.

  “Certainly,” said Peter. “From the space suit that was found at the site, we know that they stand about six feet tall and they have four legs that they walk on. The feet of the suit indicated that their feet are rounded and we believe that their legs may actually end in a hoof like foot. The suit showed no design features that indicated that their feet were very flexible. The suit had two arms that were slightly longer than a human arm. The gloves on the end of the arms indicate that they appear to have three digits and have one opposing digit like our thumb. The biologists think opposable digits are a pretty common trait of any tool user. We believe they’re probably warm-blooded, or at least have a metabolism that requires a human like temperature. The excavation machine that’s at the site has heaters on it that would keep the temperature in a range that’s comfortable for a human. Unfortunately, at this point, we can only speculate on what their head would look like.”

  “So you think that they look like a horse with arms and that they eat plants?” asked Mrs. Walden.

  “As I said, we’re only speculating when we try and say more about them,” said Peter. “All the animals on our planet with hooves are herbivores. If we assume a similar type evolution for this race, then they would probably have evolved eyes on the sides of their heads where they could watch for predators. They would have large flat teeth for grinding plant fibers. Such teeth would require a long mouth like we see in cows, horses, and other grazers. Any further speculation at this time is just wild guesses.”