by Aer-ki Jyr
“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.
“You said that’s for the planet?” Morgan repeated.
“Yeah, the planetary tag is right here,” Sam said, pointing to the top of the chart.
“That’s helpful, but not necessarily representative of the overall V’kit’no’sat social structure.”
“She’s right,” Jason agreed, “but it gives us a start. So who was tops down here?”
“I don’t recognize that symbol,” Sam said, pointing to the top left, “but that’s Oso’lon.”
“So the T-Rex isn’t tops,” Jason sniped. “Spielberg would be crushed.”
“Ari’tat?” Paul asked, referring to the singular race on the second tier of the chart. The tiny dinosaurs were smaller than Humans, and as far as pure size went, one wouldn’t think they would have had such high standing.
“That is surprising,” Jason agreed, moving his eyes down to the third tier. “Rit’ko’sor, and two others I don’t recognize. Can you pull up a profile?”
“Good idea,” Sam said, looking around the system for how to do that. “This may take a while.”
“Look at this,” Ryan said, pulling their attention back to his console. “The Humans have some type of clan markers in their files, if I’m reading this right. Those that appear to be soldiers are different from the techs, so it’s either a ranking system or biological.”
“Maybe both, if they’re split up into castes,” Paul pointed out.
“I bet that has something to do with the security measures,” Morgan added. “If all of them have access to the pyramid they’d need to restrict database access to those they wanted, hence the access key in the ambrosia.”
“So the others don’t take it, or don’t take as much?” Ryan asked.
“Davis was able to see the ring around the door,” Paul pointed out, “but not the symbol. If everyone took it, but didn’t do the training necessary to increase their dosage, then they’d conceivably be able to see which areas were marked as ‘restricted access’ without being able to enter.”
“The door controls might be set to register a higher amount of ambrosia by touch than is required for the vision augmentation,” Jason added, thinking along the same lines. “And if their Human society is divided into castes or something like it, then information might be withheld that a certain caste wouldn’t need to know about. This is the first access we’ve had to a planetary map, which suggests there is some sort of compartmentalization going on.”
“And we’ve just found out that we’ve had the access key all along,” Morgan commented.
“Access key to 100,000 year old data,” Paul amended. “As valuable as all of this is, who knows what they’ve come up with since then.”
“Or they could have had a technological backslide,” the Acolyte countered. “They’ve never tried to resettle this colony, so something must have happened.”
“I agree with the second part, but not the first. I don’t think we’re going to be that lucky.”
“Neither do I, but they obviously restricted access for a reason, and by some quirky luck we ended up with that access. That’s a masterstroke if there ever was one.”
“More like a massive mistake on their part,” Jason said. “Masterstroke implies that we created the situation, not got lucky.”
“We didn’t luck into our training,” Ryan pointed out.
Jason wavered. “Ok, you have a point there.”
“Access,” Paul repeated. “Do you suppose we’re able to fire the weapons?”
Ryan cringed. “Buried underground with a factory on top of us?”
“I meant…”
“I know what you meant,” Ryan interrupted him. “If we can see the data on the systems then there’s a good chance we can access them…though it’s possible it’s code-locked.”
“I meant could Humans fire the weapons, or was that reserved for the other races.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say we could, based on the way this system is laid out,” Ryan said, searching around a bit.
“Well don’t try,” Morgan scolded him.
Ryan turned around and glared at her. “I’ll be careful,” he scoffed.
“Guys, I think I found something,” Sam said, having brought up the appropriate files on the top ranked race icon that they couldn’t identify. In addition to a myriad of floating text, the hologram resolved itself into the 3D picture of another dinosaur…this one with fins rather than legs.
“Garas’tox,” Paul read aloud. He recognized it as some type of plesiosaur, but couldn’t exactly place it. Obviously a swimmer by the fins, the Garas’tox had a long neck and equally long tail that, when stretched out, resembled a sea snake with a bulbous central body. The only exception was the four limb-like fins and shark-fin stretching out down the center of its back. The head was arrow-like, with rows of tiny teeth that made the creature look as fearsome as a dragon…except this one was real and not a figment of Hollywood’s imagination.
“I thought Davis said there were no water dinosaurs?” Morgan reminded them.
“I guess they don’t interact with the common folk,” Jason said sarcastically, referring to the compartmentalization of information again.
“I’m betting those other two are swimmers,” Paul said, referring to the other unidentified symbols on the third tier, which Sam was now quickly able to confirm, bringing up an image of a hammerhead-like, thick bodied ‘tank,’ followed by a much more streamlined ‘super shark.’
“Earth is a waterworld,” Jason offered. “It would make sense why they’d have a higher priority for colonization.”
“Except there’s no competition between the land and water,” Morgan pointed out. “There’s got to be more to that priority chart than we’re aware of.”
“Just a question,” Paul added, not liking where he was going with this. “But if the Raptors rebelled, how would they kill the swimmers?”
Jason’s mind flashed back to the reports of the large ocean creatures that Star Force had been continually encountering the deeper they expanded their seafloor habitats. “No…”
“I think we need to dig deeper into the battle records,” Paul suggested. “We need to know exactly what happened here.”
Ryan and Sam exchanged glances, then both pushed aside what they were working on and began sifting through the databanks, looking for any data on underwater habitats.
6
July 14, 2112
Paul woke up at the sound of his wristwatch alarm, blinking off the haze of the past eight hours of sleep and sitting up in bed, suddenly remembering where he was as his brain caught up to reality. He climbed out of bed and hopped into the bathroom in the small quarters he’d been assigned in what the pyramid research staff referred to as the ‘hotel.’
Sitting a couple of tiers below the command deck, the hotel was the housing facility that Star Force had built inside the pyramid so the staff could live inside without having to commute back and forth, thus increasing the security of the site. It sat in the northwest corner of
what had formerly been the Brat’mar ‘embassy.’ Each of the various races within the V’kit’no’sat appeared to have been given specific sections of the pyramid for their own uses, with the Human levels residing at the apex.
The Brat’mar, or Triceratops, had several larger rooms within their domain at what Star Force had previously believed to have been at about center level within the pyramid. What the ridged, wide open areas were used for hadn’t yet been determined, but it made sense for the hotel to be placed in a central location to facilitate the local commute to their workstations, given that some of them had miles to travel inside the twisting confines to get from one portion of the structure to another.
Shaving then taking a quick shower, Paul readied himself for another long day of exploration and headed over to the cafeteria for a bit of breakfast before meeting up with Jason and several other Archons for a morning run around the command deck. It had been a long flight in that first day, and with all the excitement of new discoveries being unlocked they’d worked right through their normal sleep period and into the next day. As much as Paul wanted to be back out there digging through records and exploring the various chambers he and the others knew that they needed sleep, so he’d resigned himself to getting a good 8 hours in last night.
Normally a light sleeper, Paul hadn’t woke once during the night, underscoring how much he’d needed the rest to defrag his brain. The morning run would help salve their missing training time, as well as let them explore the huge room as they crisscrossed the distances between cushioned pedestals while keeping up sub 6:00 pace. By the time they’d made their first lap Paul and Jason had picked up 22 other Archons following in their wake in a long, single file line. Two other groups were also running the deck at various points, either far behind or far ahead of them, but none of them were ambitious enough to hit the access ramps, given their steep incline and irregular footing.
