Skylar Mars and the Crystal Claw

by Drew Seren

  11

  The Past Is A Frozen

  Hole In The Ground

  “FROZON PLANETS like Pantheria present archeologists with extra problems,” Felonia explained as she drove the family hover car toward the dig site. “Luckily, we’ve dealt with ice for a couple thousand years and know how to handle it.”

  Skylar shivered even though he had on his thermal suit. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to deal with living on a frozen world. He might’ve complained about the heat on Hummassa every summer, but at least he hadn’t had to bundle up every time he wanted to go outside.

  “Yeah,” Solaria said from the seat next to her mother. “We’ve had tons of time to evolve to the point where the cold doesn’t bother us anymore. Well, unless it gets really, really cold.”

  “I don’t want to deal with really, really cold,” Skylar said. “Springtime is enough for me.”

  “We were talking about archeology,” Felonia said. “Not the cold. Skylar, the biggest thing you’ll need to learn about the cold is to not dwell on it. If you dwell on it, it gets worse.”

  “Yes ma’am.” He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to not dwell on it, when it was ever-present and just waiting for something to go wrong before it froze him and Filzbalm solid.

  “But in the dig site, we’ve been having some amazing discoveries.” She angled the hover car toward a low building. “There are runes we never expected to find, proof of a civilization that was here thousands of years or more before we were. I don’t know what’s more exciting, the evidence of a previous society, or going back to the start of our own time on the planet.”

  “You’ve always told me that the universe is old enough, and none of us are the original inhabitants of our worlds.” Solaria sounded a lot more like Del than herself, and Skylar wondered if she was trying to show off for him or her mother.

  As they neared the building, a debris field came into view. It seemed to originate somewhere behind the place, and extend over the horizon.

  “Right.” Felonia pulled up in front of the building and cut the engine. “There’s a fair amount of evidence in the dig site that the Pantherians were planted here. The problem is, even with evidence—hard, frozen evidence—most species aren’t going to believe they didn’t evolve on their world. There are too many similarities in most of the upright bipeds in the universe to think we might’ve generated from separate species. A five-fingered hand is not exactly the best way things should work.”

  “I guess so,” Skylar mumbled. On Hummasssa the natives had three fingers, but he’d never stopped to think that the rest of them, beyond their hands, had looked a lot like him. And Solaria and her people did too: even if they were furry, they were about the same size and build as humans, and had five digits on their hands—he’d never seen Solaria’s bare feet, so he couldn’t say there. He hadn’t expected to come on a break from school and end up thinking about scientific things.

  Felonia got out of the hover car. “Okay. Let’s go see if they found out anything since we left last night.”

  Skylar followed toward the closed door. The amount of damage was worse than he’d seen on the drive over. It reinforced the idea that the attack was more than just a single feeler. There had to be someone with mover abilities involved. Considering the debris trail outside, the inside of the building was in good order.

  A tall, slender Pantherian with gold fur, who looked a bit like Felonia and Phil, was working at a computer terminal. She looked up as they came in. “Oh, Felonia. I think we may have found something interesting, I just can’t make it out.”

  “What is it, Chillarni?” Felonia went over and stared over her shoulder. “It’s definitely a language of some kind. I just don’t recognize it. Have you run it through a translator?”

  Chillarni nodded. “Right before you came in. There are a few repeated symbols, but nothing that really stands out. I don’t think there’s enough of it for the translator to work properly.”

  Skylar peered over her shoulder. It was a group of hieroglyphics. They were strange symbol-letters that didn’t make any sense to him. “I wonder if Del could sort this out.”

  “Who’s Del?” Felonia asked as she straightened to look at Skylar.

  “He’s a Tursiops we go to school with,” Solaria said before Skylar could. “He’s our best friend. He’s really good with languages and riddles.”

  Again, Skylar was taken a bit aback. He’d never heard Solaria refer to Del as one of her best friends. He was, but she wasn’t big into telling folks about that back at school.

  Chillarni frowned. “We’re still uncovering the wall where the writing is. Once we get it done, we might have enough to get the translator to work.”

  “Or we might not,” Felonia said as she crossed her arms. “We need to try and get this sorted out as quickly as possible. You saw the damage that thing did last night. We need to know what it is and how to stop it as soon as possible. If Del can help, then let’s send him pictures of the glyphs and see if he has any idea what they are.”

  “Okay.” Skylar held his communicator over the small markings on the screen and snapped a couple of pictures. “Let me send them, and I’ll inform you of what he has to say.” As he sent the pictures, he hoped Del was awake and could help. Time flowed differently on each planet and he couldn’t figure out if it was currently day or night on Stars’ End, or if Del was even still on the station or had already gone on to the museum where he so wanted to be.

  “I doubt he’ll be able to do anything with it if the translator can’t.” Chillarni went back to her computer screen. “If we can get more of the permafrost chipped off the wall down there, we can have more of it exposed. Of course, we have a lot more exposed now than we did this time yesterday.”

  “Have we been able to determine what came out of the site?” Felonia asked.

  “Not yet. It was big, that much we know.” Chillarni pulled up a series of static-filled video feeds. “Whatever it was, it impacted electronics that were in close proximity. It was like it used a telekinetic burst as well as a telepathic blast. We’re all lucky to be alive.”

  “Tell that to all the people in Glacier City,” Felonia grumbled. “Come on kids, let’s go take a look at things down in the site. It was a disaster last night by floodlight. It probably doesn’t look any better now.” She turned and walked out the door behind the desk, then down a long flight of wooden stairs.

  “Wow, so we’re going deep underground,” Skylar said as the stairs led to a tunnel that continued down. Here and there, along the steeper parts of the tunnel, stairs had been carved, apparently to make the going easier. He started wondering why Felonia thought things would be different in the daylight than they had been under floodlight.

  In the hood of his coat, Filzbalm stirred for the first time since they had taken off from Solaria’s house. “It feels strange down here.”

  “Yeah it does.” Skylar had thought it was just the act of going underground, but there was a strange prickling along his mental senses. The farther they went down, the more antsy he became. He wanted to run back up into the small building.

  “What does?” Solaria asked from a few feet in front of him.

  “Filzbalm was just saying that it feels strange down here,” Skylar relayed, wishing the Solar Drake had included Solaria in his thoughts.

  “Everyone says that,” Felonia said. “I’ve been to a lot of archeological dig sites over the years and they all have an odd presence: old. I’ve never really been able to put my finger on it, but this one—this is different. Even the people like Chillarni who aren’t very psychic can feel something unusual. So far, we haven’t discovered anything to account for the sensation. It might be years before we do. At least it doesn’t appear to be harmful.”

  That news didn’t make it any easier for Skylar to keep walking down the stairs.

  Before they reached the end of the stairs, natural light filled the tunnel, overriding the bright LEDs strung along the ceiling.

  �
�What’s causing this?” Solaria asked as they stepped into a huge chamber at the base of the stairs.

  Her mother gestured up toward the ceiling, which had a huge hole in it. The ice along the edge of the hole was rough and jagged. “Until last night, the light was just from the ice here being unusually pure, crystal clear. I’ve never seen ice like it, particularly at the temperatures things get around here. Last night, whatever it was that attacked us and Glacier City blasted out of here. The hole made the light that much brighter. Any worse and we’d need protective eyewear.”

  “I hate snow blindness,” Solaria said, moving away from the stairs.

  “Luckily we’re far enough down, we don’t have to worry about it,” Felonia said as she walked across the chamber. On the far side was the wall with the hieroglyphics. One man with thick black stripes on his orange fur was working with a chisel, knocking chunks of ice off the wall into a growing pile at his feet.

  He turned and looked at them. “Felonia, did Chillarni show you the pictures? This is incredible. We’ve never had hard proof of a pre-settlement civilization before. This writing is primitive, nothing a spacefaring race would use. But we’ve been told for hundreds of years that if a planet was inhabited it wouldn’t be intruded upon. This proves otherwise.”

  Felonia walked up next to him and put her hand on the wall. “It is amazing. And this wall literally hums with power.”

  “Even more than before.” The man knocked another chunk off. “I think Romalda is down in the chamber we found last night when everything went crazy.” He pointed with his hammer toward a new-looking rope ladder that went over the edge of the crater. It was such a large hole that Skylar wondered where all the ice that should’ve come out of it had gone. The area looked way too clean for the broken ice to be new, but the edges weren’t worn in anyway.

  “We couldn’t get down there last night.” Felonia looked down the ladder. “Thanks for bringing this.”

  “Thank Romalda—she was the one who showed up with it.” He struck the chisel with his hammer again and more ice cascaded to the floor. “I figured we were going to need to go hire a couple of movers to float us down.”

  “If there are any strong movers in any shape to do anything today.” Felonia walked to the edge of the hole and started down the ladder. “If you three want to come down you can—otherwise stay out of Clytin’s way.”

  Solaria looked at Skylar. “I’m going. It’s up to you.”

  Although Skylar didn’t like the idea of climbing down a rope ladder into an icy pit, he nodded. “Sure. Let’s go.”

  “I’ll protect you,” Filzbalm said.

  Skylar resisted laughing. He really doubted the little Solar Drake could lift him up if he started to fall. The odd feeling grew stronger still as he knelt down to put his hands on the ice and lowered himself down to the first rung of the ladder. Everything swayed a little bit as either Solaria or Felonia did something below him to make his passage down less stable. He glanced at the heavy metal spikes in the ice where the ladder was anchored. They looked strong enough to support them all. He just hoped the cold wouldn’t cause the rope to fray or anything before they got down, then back up.

  The further down he went, the more he wished he was a mover like Solaria, since he’d have felt better if he could at least slow his fall if he slipped.

  “You’re almost there,” Solaria called out as the ladder stopped moving with other people’s motions.

  “She’s right below us,” Filzbalm announced.

  Skylar didn’t want to look down. He stayed focused on the wall of ice a few inches from his nose. If he kept his gaze there, he wouldn’t have a problem. He remembered why he hated climbing trees back on Hummassa. He’d always been afraid he was going to slip and fall, particularly after he’d done exactly that and broken his arm. His mother had fussed over him for days.

  Suddenly there wasn’t a rung under Skylar’s foot. His heart pounded as he tried to find it.

  “Skylar, you can drop from there,” Solaria said in a familiar, somewhat haughty tone. “It’s just a couple more feet.”

  He suddenly felt really stupid. It was all he could do to let go of the ladder and fall the couple of extra feet to the ground.

  Solaria smiled broadly, then shook her head. “Sometimes you humans are so cautious. If you’d just embrace your predator side, things would come a lot easier.” She turned and stalked across the open area to where her mother was talking with a woman covered in dark black fur. Or at least it looked dark black in the weaker light of the deep pit.

  The strange pricking feeling was stronger than ever. Skylar wanted to scurry up the ladder and run up the stairs. Something deep in his brain wanted him to flee. He didn’t feel like he was safe.

  “It was huge,” the dark female said. “I’ve never heard of anything on this planet so large.”

  “Do you think it might’ve been alien of some sort?” Felonia asked as she knelt down, running her hands along a shallow impression in the ice.

  The dark female shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. What I do know is when the laser drill hit the ice, something happened. It was like something was draining the light from the drill. Everything glowed bright, then exploded upward.” She gestured through the hole they’d just climbed down. “I wish we had vid. But there was something—I don’t know if it was telekinetic, an EMP, or what. It knocked everything out.”

  “Yeah, Chillarni showed us the static feeds.” Felonia rose and walked around to the other side of the depression. “Glacier City is destroyed. Whatever got free from here is on a rampage.”

  “Glacier City?” The dark female frowned. “But the force wave didn’t extend that far.”

  “Right, but whatever we let out traveled that far and is destroying everything in its path,” Felonia said as she stood. “At this point, I think the two priorities are getting a translation of the wall upstairs, and cataloging this area. It doesn’t look like there’s anything down here other than this depression, which is too smooth to be natural ice. Someone left something buried down here, and we woke it up. Now we have to figure out what it is and stop it before it destroys Pantheria.”

  Skylar wanted to go find Phil and ask for a ride back to Stars’ End. He’d been expecting a nice quiet break with Solaria showing him how to hunt and what her world was like. He didn’t know what he was going to be able to do to help save the world, even if Aunt Blizza called him the Light—whatever that meant.

  12

  Lost Signal

  WHEN THEY reached the office area again, Skylar’s communicator beeped. He tapped it quickly, hoping for a message from Del saying he’d managed to decipher the glyphs. But it was just a system indicator saying his transmission couldn’t reach the interplanetary net.

  “Hey, does this mean everything’s down?” He glanced at Solaria. “Try your com.”

  She did, then frowned when it beeped at her. “Mine’s down too. I wonder if that strange pulse took it out.”

  “Local coms are working.” Chillarni looked up from her computer terminal. “I’ve been uploading things to the main storage bank at your folk’s house all day. But I can’t reach off planet. And the closest interplanetary relay is in Glacier City.”

  Skylar sat on the edge of a desk. “Which has been destroyed.”

  “Right.” Chillarni tapped something on her terminal and a 3D projection popped up next to Skylar, making him jump off the desk. “At this point, we’re not getting any signals from Glacier City. Until we hear back from Aniu and Philaneo, we’re not going to know how bad things are there. We could try bouncing a signal off the space port, but that might or might not work the way we need it to.” The projection showed what looked like the communications grid for Pantheria. There was a dark spot near where Skylar thought they were. Lines from all the surrounding area turned black. The other lines appeared to be intact.

  “Then we should at least try.” Solaria made an adjustment to her com. When she tapped it, it gave her a normal beep. �
��If we force the signal to the spaceport we should be okay. Mom said something earlier about coms being spotty. I’m not Del, but I think the only thing that could really mess with the coms would be an EM pulse of some kind.”

  Skylar had had a brief class on how the coms worked when he got to Stars’ End, but he didn’t remember much of it. He tapped his com to bring up the projected display, then did what he thought should work. He got a high-pitched whine in his ear. Frowning, he put it back the way it had been, then made a different adjustment. It was a louder screeching noise.

  Solaria shook her head. “Here.” She took his hand and made small adjustments on the display. “Coms aren’t that hard.” When she was done, she tapped it and the display registered sending the images to Del. “That should work fine.”

  “Thanks,” Skylar said.

  “I paid close attention to what she did,” Filzbalm announced. “I’ll be able to help you replicate the fix should the need arise.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t,” Skylar said. He didn’t know how often communications networks went down, but as they were the heartbeat of the universe, he didn’t think it would be broken for long. “I wonder if that interstellar com I have would be affected.” Skylar suddenly wished he hadn’t left it in his room back at school.

  “Probably not,” Solaria said. “That thing worked from Armstrong’s Ring—it’ll work anywhere.”

  Chillarni straightened and turned from her terminal. “You two have been on Armstrong’s Ring? Your folks didn’t say anything about that. It’s one of the most secure systems in the galaxy.”

  “I think we’re supposed to keep all that quiet,” Solaria said. “Mom and Dad know, and Uncle Phil came to rescue us after our ship got blown up by Boarisk raiders. But beyond that, we aren’t supposed to talk about what happened there.”