“You must have seen her. Where did she go?” Aldrich called out.
“I didn’t see her. She must have come by during the shift change. I didn’t see anyone,” the guard lied.
Cara gained another foot, but it was still too dark to see where the floor below began. If she let go she might suffer bruised feet, or worse broken bones.
Just keep climbing.
“What is this?” Aldrich’s voice sounded victorious.
Cara looked up, certain that he’d climbed the tower and was looking down at her. Her hold slipped and she slid down the wall, her nails scraping against the rock, and tearing away. She caught herself with her right hand, her arm jerking hard.
Biting her lip, she stifled a cry of pain as her feet searched out holds and grooves in between the stones.
“This is hers.” Aldrich accused. His voice sounded like it came from the tower. He must have climbed up while she was sliding down the wall. If he looked down, he might see her. It was still dark but the sun was continuing to rise.
“It’s the same shawl that all the girls wear. It’s the standard you yourself issue out to the women.”
“Are you saying it’s not hers? That this couldn’t be Cara’s?”
A muffled sound drew her eyes upward. Aldrich was smashing the shawl against the guard’s face. Cara watched in horror. She didn’t know what to do.
The guard fought his way free of Aldrich, he gasped for air as he leaned over the wall. His eyes were searching the darkness. He was looking for Cara, but he couldn’t see her even though she was only a dozen or so feet down the wall.
He mouthed the word, “Run.”
Aldrich slipped the shawl around his neck and shoved him over the wall. His pointed face leaned over the wall after he’d tied off the shawl to the tower. “You lied to me. You saw her. My Cara.”
The guard’s feet kicked, his heels scraping on the wall but they weren’t catching. He was choking. Aldrich wasn’t going to release him.
Cara reached up, climbing upward as fast as she could. The light caught her hand as she took hold of his shoe and pushed, trying to help him.
“No,” the guard gurgled out kicking her hand away.
I can’t let you die.
She reached up again as Aldrich pressed his face into the dying man’s neck. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to fuck her? To break her?”
He kicked her hand away again, only this time she lost her grasp on the wall. Cara pushed off from the wall with her feet, hoping to land on the other side of the mote around the outer wall.
Aldrich straightened away from the dead guard, blood dripped down his chin as he cut the shawl and turned away.
Water enveloped her into freezing cold darkness. The dim light from above cast a silhouette of the guard who saved her life and gave his own. He was floating on the surface.
Cara choked on water as she tried to crawl up from the depths of the murky liquid. She didn’t know how to swim, but her frantic movements seemed to be working though too slow to do her much good.
She kicked her feet harder, climbing faster. When she reached him, Cara pulled until her head broke through the surface. A deep breath of air filled her lungs. She coughed.
It was so loud, her coughing in the silence. Aldrich would hear her. Someone would hear her. The quaking of her body was so violent she knew her thrashing around in the water would draw notice.
Sharp rocks stabbed into her back expressing what little air she’d managed to get. The force pushed her back under the surface but she didn’t let go of her hero. She reached up again. This time her hand caught hold of a boulder.
Cara pulled herself above the surface again. She tried to climb, out but she couldn’t do it holding onto the dead guard’s shirt. With a silent sob, she let go and climbed out of the still water. Its slimy texture increased the difficulty of climbing out.
Cara’s body was still shaking too hard. Her teeth chattering like drums. The boots she’d kicked off were long gone, probably at the bottom of the mote.
She should go, run even, but Cara couldn’t leave him like he was. This man who saved her was floating face down in the filthy, still water. It was foul smelling, and with the sun continuing to rise Cara could see human waste floating along the surface.
Cara bent down and took hold of his jacket. She braced herself with her feet flat on the huge boulder and pulled. It was slow going pulling him up the rocky, muddy slope. When she stopped to rest, he started sliding back in.
No. No. Please, no.
Her arms shook with the strain to hold his head above the water. Using all the muscle in her legs she pushed against the boulder gaining another two feet of his body onto the slope. Cara climbed a step higher. She began pulling the dead weight from the water. It didn’t matter how many times she had to do it. Cara wasn’t leaving him to rot in filth. He deserved a hero’s burial.
I don’t even know his name.
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Preview of Awakening
Awakening
Phoenix Rising
By:
Amelia Wilson
J. A. Cummings
Prologue
The jungle was hot and oppressively humid, but Theyn could not stop to rest. He had encouraged the local native population of this green planet to help him construct his isolation chamber, allowing them to also build a tomb they felt was appropriate for a god. He did not have the heart to tell them that he was not in need of a tomb and was not a god, but he doubted that they would be very impressed to know that their mysterious guest from the stars was only a botanist.
He hesitated at the mouth of the stone construct they had built for him, taking one last look up at the sky. The stars were brilliant and beautiful, but the constellations were not the ones he had come to know. He was filled with the ache of homesickness and stabbing grief. Somewhere out there, far beyond this solar system, his world was in flames, and he would never see his home again.
He and his Companion had escaped the destruction of their world in a borrowed research probe that was never meant to carry lifeforms this far from home. It had been a desperate act, but both Theyn and Beno had a strong will to live. They were the last survivors of Ylia, and they meant to carry her legacy into the future somehow.
Near the fourth planet in this system, an inhospitable red-colored rock, their probe had encountered an asteroid field. There was no propulsion capability on the probe and no way to avoid a collision, so they were knocked off course and forced to jettison in separate escape pods when they reached the outer atmosphere of this world.
Theyn counted his blessings. Neither of them were navigators, and they had done a blind launch. If it hadn’t been for the asteroids, they most likely would have ended up flying straight into Sol, the yellow sun at the center of this system. They were fortunate to have landed on a world with life, a compatible atmosphere, and gravity slightly lighter than their own. If they had to find a new world, this one was acceptable.
Theyn’s escape pod had landed here on an isthmus covered in jungle and populated by bipedal intelligent life. They had taken him to be a god, which is how he found himself here today, about to be sealed into a hibernation cell in the bottom of a stone pyramid.
He hoped that Beno, wherever he had landed, was having better luck. He hoped that Beno’s escape pod had also included the specifications for the construction of the hibernation cell. Otherwise, he would be very, very lonely when the cell finally released him, nine hundred standard orbital time units from now.
He took a deep breath, possibly his last breath of fresh air for a very long time. He would have been lying if he’d said he wasn’t a little afraid.
The natives were watching him, the young woman that they insisted on bringing with them leaning on the shoulder of one of the warriors. She was inebriated and unable to stand on her own. The warrior shook her gently, and her eyes rolled back into her head, a thin line of greenish drool escaping from her lax m
outh. Theyn shuddered. He did not understand these primitive ways.
The escape pod had been designed to be converted into a hibernation cell so that anyone in need could afford to wait for help to arrive in safety. There was never any way to know what sort of infectious diseases or parasitic life forms might exist in a new biosphere, so it was better to be safe than sorry. Once he was sealed into his cell, he would be put into decontamination and a deep sleep. His cell would be linked to Beno’s, assuming that Beno’s cell survived his landing. When one of them awoke, so would the other, and then they would find each other again. Ylians were social creatures; they could not exist in isolation.
The natives helped him climb into his hibernation cell, obeying his direction on how to encase it once he had sealed it from the inside. Once it was activated, his cell would require very little power, but what it needed it could obtain through the soil beneath the stone floor of the chamber. He had placed the array himself. He would be all right, he was certain of it. He hoped that somewhere out there, Beno could say the same.
He closed his eyes and took one last breath as he lay down. The native chieftain spoke to him, but Theyn could not understand the words he said. He only smiled as gently as he could as he closed the lid.
Chapter One
Dr. Sera Cooper adjusted the lamp on her helmet and crouched next to a stone panel in a subterranean passageway. The corridor she was in had been hacked out of bedrock by hand tools over five hundred years ago, and the chisel marks still stood out in places on the low ceiling above her head. Above her, a stone pyramid reached a thousand meters into the sky, only recently rescued from its green jungle cocoon by weeks of back-breaking work.
In the dim light from her headlamp, Mayan glyphs danced across the stone, eroded by the slow trickle of water that flowed through the cavern. Several of the stone glyphs were covered with thick, clinging moss that obscured the characters. She gently scraped some of the moss away with the edge of her trowel and peered closer.
She squinted her blue eyes and blew a stray blonde curl out of the way as she read the ancient writing. As an archaeologist specializing in the Mayan culture, she was able to read glyphs as well as she could read an e-mail from her best friend, but this inscription was defying all of her efforts.
“This makes no sense,” she muttered. “‘The god came from the jaguar star and...green jade...mushrooms?’ What the hell?” She scraped the stone again, trying to clean it more thoroughly.
One of the glyphs moved. It pressed in like a button on a machine, and a low grinding noise filled the corridor. The stone panel she had been examining shuddered and slid backward into the cave wall, moving with a soft hum. It receded, moving to the right until it was completely swallowed by the stone around it, almost like a pocket door in a modern house. An opening gaped in front of her now, and the darkness beyond it was absolute. Air rushed back at her, stale and smelling of earth and dank, wet stone.
Sera swallowed hard and adjusted her head lamp again. Her heart thudded in her chest in wild excitement. A hidden chamber! She wanted to run inside, but her sense of self-preservation overrode her eagerness to explore. She picked up her walkie talkie and contacted her assistant, who was on the surface in the artifact tent.
“Joely,” she said. “I need you. Bring your brightest flashlight.”
Her voice came back immediately, responding to the quivering excitement in Sera’s tone. “Are you all right?”
“Perfect. Just… bring some light and get down here.”
She put the radio away and shone her light into the darkness. From what she could see, the chamber she had just opened was fairly large. She could see more glyphs carved into the walls. There was a large object in the center of the room, and from where she crouched, it looked like a sarcophagus. Beside it, a human-shaped bundle of textiles, wrapped with rope vines and lying on its side, rested on a low stone platform. A thrill shot through her, and she shivered. She had just made the greatest discovery of her career.
Joely clambered into the chamber, crawling forward through the claustrophobic tunnel where Sera had been working. She had two battery-powered lamps in her hands, and when she reached Sera, her mouth dropped open.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What is that?”
Sera took one of the lamps. “We’re about to find out.”
She turned on the lamp on its highest setting and pointed it into the chamber. The room sprang into view, illuminated at last, and she crept inside. Once she made it through the doorway, she was able to stand again. Joely followed behind her, her dark eyes wide.
“Oh my God,” Joely said again.
Sera went to the object in the center of the room. It was a sarcophagus, and it was covered with the same garbled glyphs that had graced the door to this chamber. She leaned closer to examine the carvings, and she could hear a low hum emanating from inside the stone coffin.
“Get the team,” she said. “This is now priority one.”
***
It took them weeks to properly record the glyphs from the doorway and the sliding panel. After a good deal of inspection, they realized that the door was attached to an ingenious hydraulic system utilizing rainwater and an intricate system of stone counterbalances to shift the panel. The chamber contained a sarcophagus, firmly sealed, and lying beside it was the wrapped body of an adolescent female, likely some sort of sacrifice. The poor girl had probably been entombed alive to accompany the tomb’s occupant, who was obviously a very important person. There were no grave goods to speak of, but the sarcophagus was extremely long. Sera was willing to bet that there was a cache of burial objects inside.
The interior walls of the chamber were covered in an elaborate creation myth she had never encountered before, something about gods from the sky. She had read it twice to make sure she understood what it was saying, and she still couldn’t quite believe her eyes.
Joely was setting up the laser scanner to record a 3-D image of the chamber for closer examination back in the lab. “I don’t know, Sera,” she said, shaking her head. “If those Ancient Aliens people get hold of this, we’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Tell me about it,” she groaned. “Do you think we can publish without including a translation?”
Her assistant laughed. “Not on your life.”
They started the scanner and let a laser light grid pass over the entire interior space of the tomb, careful to stay out of the way of the beams as the machine slowly rotated, taking readings and downloading the details of the space. Sera stood with her hands on her hips, watching the readout as the data was recorded.
“This is so much better than having to draw all of this by hand,” she said. “Can you imagine what the first archaeologists went through? They must have all had art classes.”
“I took art classes,” Joely said.
Sera was surprised. “Really? You didn’t tell me that.”
“Yep. Art was actually my minor. I specialized in charcoal illustration.” She grinned. “It was great when the frat boys came in to do nude figure modeling to earn beer money.”
She snorted a laugh. “That was probably the only reason you took the class - a little free peek.”
“Nothing wrong with being young and alive,” Joely quipped.
Asa Brunner, one of her graduate students, ambled into the chamber, ducking to avoid the laser. He was a former rodeo cowboy who had turned to archaeology after a career-ending injury. The damage to his leg gave him a strange, looping stride. In his thick Texas accent, he said, “Dr. Cooper, there’s a man from the Mexican government here to talk to you.”
Sera and Joely exchanged a knowing look, and she sighed. “Okay. Thanks, Asa.”
The young Texan tipped his hat to them and left, and Joely said, “That didn’t take long.”
“Predictable. Government agents at important digs are like flies to shit.”
She left the chamber and clambered out into the open air. The pyramid they were excavating was a tiny one, and it had
been utterly swallowed by the jungle before Sera and her team had started their work. Now they had cleared one entire face of the structure and a good part of the paved courtyard in front of it, revealing the precise joinery of the stones and the excellent masonry for which the Maya were rightly known. Tents had been pitched in the square, and the artifacts were examined and conserved there before being shipped back to the University of Austin, which was where Sera had tenure. Predictably, now that they had found something more interesting and potentially more valuable than a bunch of inscriptions and broken pots, the Mexican government was trying to get in on the action.
It was hard to blame them, really. The Maya were their ancestors, and Mexico City had already paid for the armed guards that stood over their work, protecting them from drug cartels and thieves. She should have been more grateful, but this was her dig. She had fought for six years to convince the authorities and the university that the pyramid was valuable enough to be the focus of their efforts. It stood in the direct center of a complex of larger pyramids, three of which had already been excavated. She thought that its positioning in the center of the other construction indicated that this one was special. She’d worked on this for years. It was the subject of her doctoral dissertation and would be the basis of her entire career. She would be damned if she let some elected official take the glory away from her.
She followed Asa, who led her to man in a white linen suit and a flat Panama hat. He had a handkerchief that he was continually using to wipe away his sweat. She walked up to him and offered a handshake.
“I’m Dr. Sera Cooper, the lead archaeologist on this dig.” They shook hands, and she could tell that the man was startled by her appearance. She had been told before that she looked like a Barbie doll, and it had caused many people to dismiss her as flimsy or unintelligent. She made sure that was a mistake nobody made twice.
Aeon War: Alien Menage Romance (Sensual Abduction Series Book 3) Page 10
