The Auriga Project (Translocator Trilogy Book 1)

by M. G. Herron

  “We’re going home,” he said.

  Eliana nodded and turned to Rakulo and Ixchel, who had remained behind. A moment later, Citlali crossed the courtyard and approached them.

  “It’s done,” she told Rakulo, who nodded.

  “So what happens next?” Eliana asked.

  Rakulo frowned. “I don’t know. Xucha may still punish us for my father’s actions.”

  “Why? He got a sacrifice like he wanted.”

  “Who can understand the whims of the gods?”

  “Maybe he will allow your people to live in peace. Maybe the sacrifices can end now,” Eliana said, though even as the words came out she didn’t believe that it would be that easy.

  Rakulo shook his head. “What if we don’t feed the gods before the next full moons, and my people fall sick again?”

  “Spoken like a true chief. Your people would do well to have such a caring leader.”

  “I know what happens to chiefs.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “I’ll go to him. Xucha will come for his demon and show me a way through the wall.”

  Eliana frowned. He had mentioned a wall before, but she didn’t fully understand the reference.

  “Eliana,” Amon said, pointing at a bright pinprick of light that had appeared in the air. It slowly grew more vibrant. Light beams poked out in several directions at variegated levels of brightness and reach until a rough sphere about six feet in diameter illuminated Uchben Na.

  Eliana hugged Rakulo. “You would have been a good guide,” she said. “I’m sorry we never got to take that journey together.”

  She hugged Citlali next. “Thank you for teaching me and letting me into your home.”

  With a shy smile, she responded simply, “You’re welcome. Goodbye.”

  Finally, Eliana turned to Ixchel. “I’m so sorry for your loss. I wish we had met under different circumstances.”

  “Me too,” Ixchel said.

  “What will you do next?”

  “I will mourn my husband like I mourned my son.”

  “Thank you for being kind to me when I needed it.”

  “You’re most welcome.”

  Eliana turned away from the three of them and took Amon’s hand. As they approached the sphere of light, something glinted on the ground and caught Eliana’s attention. It was her ring, lying forgotten among the paving stones where Dambu had tossed it.

  Amon realized what it was as well. “You can’t take that with you,” he said. “We have no way to isolate the carbonado. It will interfere with the translocation.”

  Leaving Amon’s side, she picked it up and walked over to Rakulo.

  “This helped me. Perhaps it will be of some use to you.”

  Rakulo took hold of the ring carefully.

  “Here,” Ixchel said. “A gift for you in return.” She removed her beautiful necklace of turquoise stones and seashells and draped it around Eliana’s neck.

  “Thank you,” Eliana said.

  With one last glance at the faces of her friends, Eliana took Amon’s hand, and together they stepped into the light.

  19

  Breaking News

  Amon felt like a rookie pilot stumbling out of his first high-G training session in the centrifuge: legs of rubber, stomach in knots. He and Eliana sank to the floor, leaning against each other.

  They were inside of the shell of alloy rings surrounding the translocation platform. He peered into the lab, looking for Lucas, Fowler, Montoya, and the rifle-wielding tactical team of mercenaries who had attended his departure. He saw none of them, though a furor of voices resounded through the rough circular hole in the blast door.

  Eliana massaged her temples and let her head loll back. She groaned with pleasure. “Air conditioning,” she said. “Holy crap that feels good.”

  “Aren’t you nauseated?”

  “Yeah. But the air conditioning!”

  As Amon was thinking about how he would have to talk to Reuben about finding a way to temper the physical side-effects of the translocation, the man himself shuffled up the ramp into view. A sling held his left arm close to his side.

  “Is that your lovely wife?” Reuben said.

  “Reuben,” Eliana said, sitting up. “What happened to your arm?”

  “Got shot.”

  “He took a bullet for me,” Amon said, standing. Reuben drew air through his teeth when Amon embraced him. “You old putz.”

  “Fah!” Reuben said. “You should talk. You don’t look so good, yourself actually. But I’m not sure how much longer you-know-who will stay back now that you’re here.”

  “Where’s Lucas? What happened?”

  “Plenty of time to talk about that later. I’m sorry, I know you hate the cameras. But here comes Carter now.”

  “Mr. Fisk!” Carter shouted, pushing through the aperture in the blast door and stomping across the room. Laden with crisscrossing camera straps, cradling a digital recorder, a notebook and several other knickknacks in one hand, he snapped photos with a camera.

  Ch-chic, ch-chic.

  Amon smiled shyly. For once, he was only mildly uncomfortable in front of the lenses. After all, he had brought this on himself.

  A cameraman filming video hurried after Carter, followed by dozens of other reporters and photographers. A new media liaison Amon had never seen before wrangled them together and gained control over the initial clamor.

  Amon stepped up to answer questions, but most of the questions were directed at his wife.

  Eliana smiled gracefully and answered the questions. No, she was unharmed. Yes, the Translocator is perfectly safe—wouldn’t she know?

  Amon stepped back and let her take the spotlight. She was as elegant and stunning as ever, wearing a coarsely woven cloth, hemp sandals, and a turquoise-and-shell necklace.

  #

  “I still can’t believe you got shot,” said Eliana.

  Reuben laughed. “I got lucky; the bullet went straight through. It’ll make a good conversation starter though.”

  “Okay,” Amon said. “Tell us from the beginning so Dr. Badeux can hear the story, starting with what happened after I translocated out of the lab.”

  It had been two days since they returned home. Amon called in a doctor on the first night to care for Eliana’s injuries. They had slept fourteen hours straight and spent the following day and night locked in their bedroom together, only cracking the door to order food.

  Now, cleaned up and well rested, the group gathered in the living room of Amon’s home. He and Eliana sat on the love seat across from Reuben and Audrey on the bigger couch. Dr. Badeux, who had arrived from France an hour ago, sat in the recliner.

  “After we sent the message to Carter and Amon went through the Hopper after Eliana,” Reuben said, “I dialed Audrey’s phone and left the line open. When she heard the gunshots, she called the local cops and the real FBI. By the time I had stumbled out of the lab, delirious and bleeding, the authorities had arrived in droves. There was a showdown between the real SWAT team and the private military contractors Lucas hired—Hawkwood, they’re called—which Lucas used as a distraction to slip away. But Hawkwood doesn’t want to get on the bad side of the authorities or they risk losing their license to operate, so that fizzled out real quick.

  “The cops put out an APB for Lucas, but he made it into Mexico through the Laredo border crossing under an assumed identity. The FBI told us yesterday that they have footage of him crossing the border in his car, but that they lost track of him after that. If you ask me, Lucas must have been planning his escape for a while. The whole thing with Hawkwood impersonating FBI agents was just a ruse for him to sidetrack us while he gutted the company’s bank accounts.”

  “Hawkwood lost their security contract with NASA, too,” said Audrey. “They’re under investigation now.”

  “Lucas wasn’t lying about cash flow problems though,” Amon said, pursing his lips. ”Fisk Industries was in trouble. But instead of doing something to help, h
e shut down the Beijing plant, sold off the equipment, and funneled millions of dollars straight into his pocket.”

  “I never did trust him,” Eliana said.

  Reuben nodded. “Wes is fervently denying any involvement, of course. He senses which way the wind is blowing, now that Eliana and Amon’s faces are all over the news again, and fears about the Translocator’s safety have been assuaged.”

  “Why did Hawkwood agree to go along with Lucas’s crazy idea in the first place?” Audrey asked.

  “They wanted the Translocator for themselves,” Amon said without hesitation. “Can you imagine how dangerous a machine like that would be in the hands of the wrong people?”

  “It’s our duty to make sure that never happens,” Reuben said.

  “Money is no object,” Dr. Badeux said. “Just tell me what the Auriga Project needs and you’ll have it.”

  “I appreciate that,” Amon said. “The engineers and scientists at the lunar colony will, too.”

  “Your funding will be reinstated immediately, of course. I’ve already filed the paperwork,” Dr. Badeux said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “I truly am sorry. Lucas painted a very convincing picture. He said you’d cracked, Amon, after Eliana went missing, and that the best thing for everyone would be to shut the project down. I couldn’t argue that logic. With everything else in the media, you can imagine how painful this whole ordeal was for us—not that it holds a candle to what you both went through, of course.”

  “It’s in the past now,” Amon said. “I’m just glad we get to pick up where we left off.”

  “Eliana, what happened to you while you were gone?” Audrey asked. “Reuben tells me that you lived in a primitive village with other people. But how did humans get to another planet in the first place?”

  “I don’t know how to answer that question, to be perfectly honest. It was like they had been there for several hundred years already, maybe longer. I was so busy trying to survive and learn the language that I didn’t really give it much thought.”

  “So what are you going to do now?”

  “Spend some time writing down what happened while it’s still fresh in my mind. In a weird way, this might turn out to be the jump-start my archaeology career needed. I’ve received three job offers since I’ve been back.”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Amon said, pushing himself up from the couch. “I have to go now, or I’ll be late for my ‘exclusive interview’ with Carter.” He used air quotes for the phrase.

  Eliana stood and grabbed Amon’s hand as he turned to leave. She planted a kiss firmly on his mouth and pulled his hips to hers.

  “Wish me luck?” he asked.

  “Luck,” she said.

  “You’ll be here when I get back?”

  “Are you kidding me? I have a comfortable bed and air conditioning. I’m not leaving this house for a week.”

  They all laughed.

  20

  Beyond the Wall

  On the last stretch of his three-day hike, Rakulo tightened the straps of his pack, drove his legs into soft earth, and powered up the steep hill to the base of Xucha’s wall.

  At the top of the hill, he shook the dirt and leaves out of his sandals and stared up at the vast, seamless slab of wall. It stretched far above the tallest, most ancient trees, seemingly into the clouds themselves, and as far as his eyes could see to either side. As the wall extended in both directions from where he stood, it bent back in a concave arc, enfolding the jungle and land it contained.

  Rakulo first learned about the existence of Xucha’s wall on a turkey-hunting trip when he was six years old. His father had brought him to where Xucha’s wall met the cliffs in the dead-end canyon at the edge of the southern reach. Dambu explained to his stunned protégé how the wall encompassed their people’s entire area for three days’ hike in every direction.

  “It surrounds us?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long has it been here?”

  “Forever.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “Is it?”

  “But why?”

  His father stared at him until Rakulo snapped his mouth shut. Instead of chiding him for asking too many questions, Dambu had answered in a whisper, “God knows.”

  He had meant that literally. As far as Rakulo knew, no man or woman in his village had ever been on the other side of the wall.

  Being an inquisitive child, Rakulo soon came up with a more important question. Since the wall did not extend into the ocean (that he had seen), why, he wondered, had no one attempted to swim around it?

  “I knew a man once who tried that. He never returned. We lost two good men during that cycle.”

  Rakulo opened his hands and laid them on the wall, running his fingers along every reachable inch of the smooth slab for several yards in either direction. The stone of the wall was so different from the great pyramids in Uchben Na. It was smooth instead of rough. It seemed to be one continuous piece. There were no bricks, and therefore no gaps between them—nothing for a man to grasp onto. Rain water slid off Xucha’s wall but carved no path through the material. An obsidian knife directed against the wall would dull before the wall itself would chip or break. Xucha’s wall seemed to defy the passage of time, to defy nature itself.

  Rakulo had long ago given up trying to penetrate the wall, though he had dreamed of finding a way to the other side of it since he knew it existed.

  Before Dambu’s death, though he may not have been aware of it at the time, his father had given Rakulo a unique opportunity.

  He turned and headed back down the soft dirt hill, leaving a clear trail of heavy footprints to a small grass-filled clearing within sight of the wall. On the ground in the clearing, he swung his pack down, opened the flap, and withdrew Xucha’s demon—a battered sphere made of the same material as his wall.

  It seemed obvious that the two were connected. Today, he was going to find out just how closely related they were.

  Rakulo left the demon in the clearing then walked back in the direction of the village. He moved quickly. He did not know how long it would take, but he suspected he did not have much time.

  After the demon was out of sight, Rakulo doubled back, walking carefully backward and using a leafy branch as a brush to cover his trail. When he reached a large tree with low branches, he scampered up it, the now-empty pack on his back swinging from side to side as he climbed.

  In a bushy intersection of branches, with Xucha’s wall and the demon both in view, he concealed himself and waited.

  It didn’t take long. What he saw made his skin crawl and his breath quicken. The truth was so much wilder than he had ever dreamed possible.

  First, he heard the low humming sound, and then a shiny circular demon came straight through the seamless face of Xucha’s wall. It spun around, its dim, red eyes searching for signs of something in the daylight. Finding nothing, it zoomed down the wall, along the ground, and into the clearing where it circled around its fallen brethren.

  Rakulo had to fight to control his breathing and remain still for what he saw next.

  At the place where the demon came through the wall, a hole tall enough to stand in suddenly appeared. One minute it wasn’t there, and the next it was. The hole was located above and slightly to the right of where Rakulo’s footprints marched up the hill to the base of the wall, but closer to the ground than where he perched in the tree now.

  Beyond the wall, there were no trees. He saw scorched dirt, reddish brown fading to black, cracked with deep gashes, dry and flaky. Jutting out of the ground in the widest of the cracks, a black needle, mostly obscured from view, stabbed into the purple sky.

  Xucha stepped up into the hole and jumped to the ground thirty feet below without breaking his stride. His spherical head reflected the leaves and trees above him as he marched over to the demon.

  He stood over it for a moment and cocked his head to the side like a particularly clever turkey staring at a berry used
as a lure, as if wondering whether the treat was a trap. Though he had no visible eyes like a man, Rakulo imagined him gazing down at the trail of footprints leading back to Kakul.

  Please don’t follow them, please don’t, Rakulo thought.

  Xucha bent down, lifted the demon in his arms, and walked back toward the wall. Rakulo let out a sigh of relief. When Xucha reached the wall, instead of jumping to the hole he put a foot on the wall and then walked up it, his body extended horizontally. Rakulo began to quake.

  When Xucha and his live demon had moved through the hole, Rakulo’s view through the hole faded, and the wall was once again a seamless, smooth face, slightly curved.

  Rakulo waited in his perch until the sun set and darkness descended on the jungle. He didn’t count himself fully safe until he had walked for half the night back toward Kakul, where he bedded down in a rocky, covered hollow to sleep until the sun rose.

  He didn’t get much sleep. His fingers caressed the dark stone on the ring around his neck, the one Eliana had given him before she left as mysteriously as she had arrived. While he lay awake, his mind raced with the new knowledge he had gained that day. He wanted desperately to talk to Citlali about it. His entire being cried out that his people had to know the truth.

  He was glad for the two days’ journey home. It gave him time to quell his excitement and think rationally. Not everyone would believe him. Not yet, anyway. He must talk to those he trusted first, to Citlali and his mother in particular.

  When he made it through the wall and returned to tell the tale, then he could tell everyone. Then they would believe him. Then they would know the truth.

  A Guide to the Pronunciation of Names

  Though ample evidence suggests there existed a wide variety of languages and dialects among the ancient people of Central America, the author based the language of the Kakuli people on Yucatec Maya, the most commonly spoken—and well documented—Mayan language today.