The Auriga Project (Translocator Trilogy Book 1)

by M. G. Herron

  So he needed someone to activate the Hopper to bring him and Eliana back through once he gave the signal using the transponder. But more importantly, he needed Reuben to protect the Hopper while he was gone and make sure the way back to Earth stayed open for them.

  He wrote to Reuben again:

  > OK. YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. MESSAGE WHEN CLEAR.

  Then Fowler rang in on the internal teleconference line.

  “Ah, Ms. Fowler,” Amon said. “How was your flight?”

  “Cut the crap, Amon. You broke into NASA. You stole from a federal facility.” Fowler’s self-righteousness rang out in her voice, but to Amon it sounded thin and harried.

  “I didn’t break into anything,” Amon said. “Honest.”

  “I’ve had enough of this.”

  “Who tipped you off?” Amon said, switching subjects.

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  “You knew I was down there,” he badgered her. “Who told you?”

  She answered indirectly. “You’re a fugitive now. As soon as the judge calls me with the warrant—”

  “Bullshit! We both know you’re not really FBI agents, so give up the charade.”

  Her voice turned icy. “Either way, we’re blowing this door off its hinges and putting an end to this foolishness once and for all.”

  “Just so you know, blast doors have no hinges. But more importantly, if you try to blow through a ten-ton blast door with brute force, you’ll kill us all. Except me. I’ll be fine. That’s what the blast door is for.”

  “Smartass,” Fowler said before she slammed down the receiver.

  Amon’s grin faded as he sagged over the desk. Fighting a war on two fronts was starting to take its toll. Messing with Fowler’s head wouldn’t work for much longer. Part of Amon was surprised he’d lasted this long without someone trying to force their way into the lab. He supposed one crazed scientist wasn’t worth the effort.

  A new notification blinked across the computer screen.

  > READY.

  Amon turned the brightness of the walls up to max and clutched the fire extinguisher to his body. Then he keyed up the Hopper, homed in on Reuben’s transponder, and translocated Reuben into the lab.

  “Oy gevalt,” Reuben said when he appeared, clutching his head. “Do you mind, with the lights?”

  The fire extinguisher slipped from Amon’s fingers and hit the floor with a metallic rattle. He ran forward, crunching glass underfoot without concern, and embraced Reuben in a bear hug.

  Reuben squirmed under Amon’s grip. “Easy there, kid.”

  Amon laughed. “It’s so good to see you.”

  “You’re hurting me,” he complained.

  “Sorry! Sorry. I’m just so glad to see you.”

  Reuben smiled and shook his head. “I’m sorry I bailed on you.”

  “It’s not your fault. Forget it.”

  Reuben walked Amon through the troubles he’d had over the past several weeks. He told Amon about his chats with Audrey. He shared what it was like to be tailed by a private detective, who appeared shortly after he was rejected by NASA’s security system. Finally, he relayed the experience of the assault. “One day, I come home, and a man in a black ski mask is waiting for me. I knew they’d been trailing me, but I thought they were just keeping tabs. I hadn’t actually done anything illegal yet, you understand. But he beat the tar out of me. Threatened me. I’ve never been more scared in my life.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  Amon inspected Reuben’s face, the three stitches on his forehead, and yellowish-brown swollen flesh around his eye.

  “You’re sure it was a private detective following you?” Amon said. “Not an FBI agent?”

  “I can’t be sure of anything.”

  “And the guy who attacked you?”

  “If he was FBI, we’re all doomed. I don’t know. Hard to tell when a fella is covered in black from head to foot, but I guess he could have been military. Had the build and the posture for it, not to mention the anger. You know the type?”

  The image of Montoya pointing a pistol at him remained fresh in his mind. “I do,” Amon said.

  Reuben explained how he flew Charlie out west and got him a room at Miriam Ben-Gurion, a Jewish assisted-living facility in Beverly Hills. He also put a will in place so that Charlie would be well-taken care of if anything happened that might prevent Reuben from paying the bills.

  “His Alzheimer’s is getting worse,” Reuben said while Amon made them instant coffee in the kitchenette. “We used to be so close. Now when we talk on the phone or if I go to visit him, most of the time he doesn’t even remember my name. What kind of quality of life does a person have at that point? But you and Eliana, you’re both young. And if she really is alive out there somewhere, I owe it to you both to help find her. Besides, I feel responsible for her disappearance. I helped build the Hopper. I keep thinking, what if it was Charlie, you know? I couldn’t live knowing I had a chance to help and didn’t.”

  “I’m glad to have you back,” Amon said. “There’s a lot of work to do. We don’t have the resources between us to spend any more time trying to figure out what went wrong. If the meteorite sample works, and I suspect it will, we have to focus on recreating Eliana’s translocation exactly, so that I can follow the same vector she took wherever it leads. I’ll bring the transponder. As soon as I activate it on that end and you receive the signal, you can bring us home.”

  “Is that safe? You don’t know what’s on the other side.”

  “We’ll take precautions,” Amon said.

  Reuben nodded, stroking his chin. “It’s going to take time. But it’s doable.”

  “I don’t think we have much time.”

  While they were looking for something heavy with which to break the meteorite sample into pieces, a thin vibrating noise rose into the air.

  “Is that the Hopper?” Reuben asked.

  Amon, finely attuned to every sound in his personal bunker, turned to face the steel blast door that blocked the only entrance and exit.

  “No,” he said. “Fowler and Montoya are drilling into the blast door.”

  15

  Survival Kit

  Calloused fingers brushed Eliana’s neck. She screamed and rolled to the side. The soft sand of the dune in which she hid shifted beneath her. She staggered to her feet, supporting herself with her hands and knees. A vine hidden in the dune tangled her foot when she tried to run. She plowed face-first into the sand.

  “Eliana?”

  She scrabbled back, kicking up dust.

  “It’s me! Eliana, it’s me.”

  She looked up into the face of Rakulo. She coughed on a mouthful of sand. Fine grains clung to her clammy skin.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “You scared me!”

  “Are you okay? What were you doing in there?”

  Without thinking, Eliana opened her mouth to tell Rakulo everything, but closed her mouth before the words escaped. She shook her head and walked toward the water.

  She stopped next to the remnants of Amon’s name where it had been carved into the beach, trying with an effort of willpower to gather a sense of calm into herself, to rediscover her ability to reason.

  Rakulo stood nearby, unconsciously fingering the dark-stained wrapping on his forearm while Eliana got control of herself again.

  In the end, she decided that despite the honesty she sensed in her earlier conversation with Rakulo, his family ties were too complicated to trust him with what she had just witnessed.

  “I left a rock there in the dune. To draw this,” she said, gesturing to Amon’s name.

  “Where is the rock?”

  “Couldn’t find it.”

  A moment passed. Rakulo asked, “What does the drawing mean?”

  “It’s my husband’s name,” she said. “Amon.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Eliana walked back toward the bonfire. Rakulo journeyed with her in silenc
e.

  When they reached the crowd, Eliana saw that the storytelling had ended. However, the party was just getting underway. A crowd of adults danced near the dying fire, took long swigs from water skins filled with liquor, and sang into the night.

  Rakulo stumbled into Eliana’s side. “Whoa!” she cried. “Easy.”

  He nodded. His skin looked pale in the firelight.

  “I’m pretty tired, too,” Eliana said. “How about we make our way back up to the village?”

  She found a cup of water for Rakulo. He drained it, and then they walked back up to the village together, matching pace with the older folks who led their children home to put them to bed.

  Instead of going to sleep when she and Rakulo parted, Eliana gathered her few belongings in the darkness of her hut and stayed awake while she waited for the late-night revelers to drink the last of the alcohol and finally turn in. She jumped at every snapping twig, every rustle of leaves outside of her door. When everyone seemed to be asleep and the party was over, Eliana set out to raid the outbuildings of the people of Kakul.

  Before dawn, she slipped through several of the breezy pole-and-thatch dwellings used as pantries, never making a sound. She scooped up a handful of dried mangos, lifted some tree nuts, and stacked up pieces of salted fish. An astute cook might notice the food was missing, but possibly not for days, and none would suffer for what she took.

  As she returned to her hut burdened with her bounty, the village lay quiet save for the constant buzz of insects. It was funny, Eliana reflected, how one managed to tune out the regular noises of any place after a certain amount of time spent there. The calls of songbirds from the trees and the low-hanging cloud of tiny insects had become part of the background noise of life—neither noticed nor noticeable. Unless, as now, she directed her senses toward those sounds.

  The whole time she’d been in Kakul, a constant feeling of unease had plagued her. At first, she had chalked it up to two close encounters with death. Anyone would feel uneasy after that. The mysteries of the native religion also puzzled her. She knew that many cultures practiced ritual sacrifice—the Vikings, the ancient Hindus, the Aztecs, and the brilliant Mayans. As an archaeologist, perhaps she had been more accepting than others might have been after seeing it firsthand. But sacrifice wasn’t the whole story either.

  As she filled her rucksack with food and her only change of clothes, she finally realized what it was: a distinct lack of wildlife. Sure, there were the insects, the perpetual swarms of them; and the bird calls she heard in the forest, though she rarely glimpsed more than flits of color through the canopy. And there were the wild turkey-like birds, which the men hunted and which served as a staple of the Kakuli diet.

  But she had seen no lizards or snakes, no monkeys, no wild boars, no ferrets, no foxes. She had not caught sight of a single cow, sheep, or horse. And though it was not unusual for an established human civilization to forego domesticating their animals, it was unsettling that she had not seen a single dog or cat, indeed no pets of any kind. And apart from Xucha when he morphed into a jaguar—which Eliana was still not certain was not just the culminating vision in a nightmarish hallucinogenic experience—no predators.

  She shivered. It was so…unreal. What kind of human population existed without a single competing predator nearby? No wonder the village women ventured into the jungle alone, unafraid and unconcerned. The lack of wildlife seemed like the shadow of some greater mystery, made even more unsettling by the presence of such totems in their mythology.

  The foul play she had seen between Dambu and the mysterious Xucha this evening existed on yet a higher plain of horror. The ease with which Xucha brought Dambu to his knees without laying a hand on him made her quake with fear. Not a hallucination, Eliana was certain, but high technology. She thought of Earth equivalents—long-distance and close-range electroshock weapons, remote controls of various sorts. Practically magic compared to the technology available to the natives of Kakul.

  Terrifying, all-powerful, blood-thirsty devil magic.

  She slung her rucksack over her shoulders. Awkward to carry, but it was the best she could do on short notice. She surveyed the hut one last time.

  She barely made it to the edge of the village before Rakulo caught up to her. He looked fresher, more intent than the night before. The wrapping on his forearm had been replaced by a new cloth.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  In a heightened, nearly animal state of awareness, Eliana’s hackles shot up. “Nowhere.”

  “Don’t go,” he said. “The jungle is a dangerous place.”

  “I can protect myself from a few birds,” she said and felt foolish saying it. She had no survival training. She didn’t even know how to fish. She chided herself for not learning more basic skills while she was here, but kept walking.

  “It’s not the wild animals you have to worry about,” Rakulo said. His voice dropped to a whisper. “You’ll never make it through the wall alone.”

  She froze. “What wall?”

  He put his fingers to his lips, glanced around. “Let me guide you. Please.”

  Eliana hesitated. “How did you know I was leaving?” she asked.

  “I heard you gathering food.”

  She felt her face flush. “You heard me?”

  “You make a lot of noise.”

  She sighed. It didn’t take a big leap of imagination to see why she might need a guide. “Okay,” she said. “You can come. But I’m leaving now.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not safe. We’ll leave at night so they can’t track us.”

  “What do I do until then?”

  “Act normal. I’ll come find you after dark.”

  Rakulo walked away, peering carefully around corners and into shadowed alcoves, on the lookout like a man under watch.

  #

  Eliana thought, Normal…Right. What now?

  She returned to her hut and settled in to wait. The lack of sleep was catching up to her. Without meaning to, she dozed off for a while.

  As evening approached, she woke thirsty and drained the remainder of one of the water skins she had prepared for her journey. She got up with the intention of heading to the stream nearby to refill it. But before she made it out the door, she realized that filling the water skin would look suspicious. The skins were meant for outings, and she was supposed to be acting like she wasn’t going anywhere.

  It would be more natural to fill one of the water jugs Ixchel had given her for use in her hut. She picked up the smallest narrow-necked vessel.

  The trip down the quiet, shaded path to the cool stream soothed Eliana. She passed a few women carrying wet laundry back to the village. They were laughing. She smiled at them, and they smiled back. She encountered no one else on the way, and at the stream she found herself alone.

  Eliana set the pot down and splashed water on her face from a clear, calm eddy. She raised her face and closed her eyes. She breathed in the earthen smells of moss and mud and let the water drip down her warm skin. She heard no warning sounds until he was upon her.

  Hands gripped her hair and shoved her face into the shallow stream. Her front teeth banged into rocks in the stream bed. She inhaled to scream, but water and mud washed into her mouth. She choked. River muck coated her tongue and palate as she struggled for air.

  She swung her hands behind her, trying vainly to reach her attacker. One hand found a thick, hairy ankle near her head. She dug her nails in, but that had no effect. She turned her head. Sharp pain lanced into her scalp as hair was torn from its roots. Her lips found ankle bone—or maybe an Achilles tendon. She bit down with all her might.

  Her attacker let go as Eliana’s teeth drew blood. She scrambled back onto dry land, coughing and gasping for air.

  Her attacker snarled and came at her again. She caught her first full glimpse of the man. He wore a mask depicting the gaping maw of a serpent, the mask of Snake from the storytelling. His massive frame and heavily tattooed upper torso gave
him away.

  Chief Dambu advanced on her with startling speed, drawing an obsidian knife from his belt. Eliana kicked out as the knife came down. A stroke of luck connected her foot squarely with his wrist and sent the knife spinning into the bushes. He fell on her again, pummeling her with his fists and overpowering her with his greater size and strength. She raised her arms to protect herself, but they were battered down relentlessly. She curled up into the fetal position to protect her head and body from the rain of fists.

  When Eliana had stopped fighting back, Dambu reached down, seized her ankles with both hands, and dragged her toward the water again. She loosed a full-throated scream and kicked her legs. His fingers slipped on her wet skin, and he lost hold of one ankle. Eliana bucked and rolled over. He snatched for her legs and yanked on her, but in that moment of freedom she managed to reach out and grasp hold of the clay jug. Dambu dragged her through the sand back to the water. Eliana had learned in a self-defense class once that a woman’s thighs are her strongest muscle group. As Dambu repositioned himself over her so that he might resume her drowning, she pulled her knees in and thrust outward, landing a solid kick with both feet to the broad target of his chest. Thrown off balance, he staggered backward. Eliana jumped to her feet and swung the jug in both hands, using the fullest arc possible, to strike his head with the vessel.

  The clay pot crashed into Dambu’s head and shattered. He fell back into the stream.

  Shards of pottery floated in the water beside his head, but he remained still.

  16

  Leap of Faith

  “That’s as close as we’re going to get,” Reuben said as he flicked the energy output graph onto a wall with a gesture. He expanded its edges until the jagged line, like a heart-rate monitor, was superimposed atop the cumulative output of Eliana’s translocation.

  Amon compared the two.

  “You can’t shave off that energy spike in the warm-up phase?” he asked, stepping into the leg of a spacesuit.