Wayfarer: AV494

by Matthew S. Cox

  After bringing in the rest of the cases, Ellen and Lars occupied themselves by collecting the silt from the floor and lugging it outside. All the while, they chatted with Don about his plans to excavate deeper into the mountainside based on sensor readings from the air. Blurs and distortions in the output suggested at least nine total chambers existed here, with the innermost space easily six times the size of this one.

  Gina and Private Foster helped with the silt clearing after Don assured them brushing the walls wouldn’t damage anything.

  For a while, Kerys managed to forget Will had ever existed. Chatter crisscrossed the comm as people discussed everything from Marco missing a real steak dinner to Ellen talking about her sister’s four sons. Paula and Don discussed the pattern on the walls, both agreeing it syntactically meaningless, and intended for decoration.

  “Hey, you think the aliens have corporations?” asked Lars.

  Don laughed. “For their sake, I hope not.”

  “We don’t know enough about them.” Paula paused to study the wall. “We’re not even sure what they look like.”

  “Or looked like,” said Marco. “They could be extinct.”

  “True.” Kerys swept her brush down in broad strokes, knocking inches-deep caked-on silt to the ground. The pattern of ferrules continued, squared off lines forming spirals in an endless repetition. “I think I’ve seen something like this before. We found some engravings on Copernicus, and I also remember the same sort of thing in the archives back at Cal. We started calling them Atlanteans on Cope.”

  “What like the mythological continent?” asked Marco before chuckling. “You’re saying aliens were on Earth now?”

  She shrugged. “There’s not enough evidence to support that, but some of the designs have striking similarities to what the Cornell group discovered.”

  “Oh, I heard about that.” Paula twisted away from the wall to nod at her. “Some kind of ruins along the floor of the Mediterranean Sea.”

  Marco shook his head. “They didn’t find any UFO parts down there.”

  “There are some thematic similarities in the patterns. I’m not saying aliens were at Atlantis, or that Atlantis even existed. It’s just what my old team started calling the aliens because we wanted a quick name for them.” Kerys stepped right, standing on tiptoe to swing her broom as high as possible.

  “Hey, one thing that’s been bugging me,” said Marco. “What’s Avasar bankrolling us for anyway? Not that I’m gonna turn down the paycheck, but why’s a biopharma company interested in this stuff?”

  “Tax breaks,” said Ellen. “Donating to the sciences or some shit like that. Lets them get more money out of the military. Whatever it cost them to bring you guys out here, they get like six times that back. Lars here is the one who found the site.”

  “Aye.” Lars nodded. “Captain Chen wanted us to check this ridge, see if we can get to the peaks to scout out a new location for some kind of long-range terrain scanner.”

  “You’re the one who broke the door in?” asked Kerys.

  Lars faced her, smiled, and shrugged his massive suit’s arms. “I knocked.”

  “Avasar came to AV494 after a USIC deep space probe detected biological activity here. The life turned out to be plant matter, so the military contracted with Avasar Biotech. They’ve been here a couple years now studying the plants for possible medical or scientific applications.” Gina tapped her brush against her boot to clear silt. “How did all this dust build up in a sealed chamber?”

  “Perhaps it sat open for some time before being sealed,” said Don. “Of course, that would imply that some other sentient life discovered this place first and decided to close it off.”

  Paula pointed at the north wall. “We’re only seeing the tip of the proverbial iceberg here. This site extends over a mile into the rock. There could’ve been some kind of explosive event from deeper in that kicked up all this dust.”

  “They find anything good yet?” asked Marco.

  “Well, they’ve managed to purify water.” Gina laughed. “I heard them talking about it in the cafeteria last month. Without purification, the water here would kill us to drink, but the native plants use it. We can remove the toxic elements, but about a third of the plants they’ve found can’t survive on ‘human water.’”

  “Interesting,” said Don. “Makes me wonder if they’ll be able to find any useful medical applications for them.”

  “That’s over my pay grade.” Gina shook her head.

  Paula let off a startled gasp. “There’s a door here!”

  Everyone swarmed to her as she knocked silt from the wall around the center of the eastern wall, revealing a doorway in line with the passage to the outside. A featureless slab of silicon grey blocked it, set in a seam so perfect a sheet of paper wouldn’t fit past it. The team spent a while examining the area, but could find no mechanism or means of opening the apparent door.

  “That’s gotta weigh thousands of pounds,” said Marco. “Why would they use something so heavy for a door?”

  Kerys traced her fingers down the glass-smooth surface. “Maybe it’s a vault?”

  “As exciting as this is,” said Don, “we’ve got at least six months to study this site. There’s no need to rush or do anything carelessly. Why don’t we finish clearing the walls? Maybe there’s something useful still hidden.”

  “Oh, like a security desk, something to uhh, ‘buzz us in’?” Marco laughed.

  The team got back to work, finishing off the remainder of the wall clearing in about twenty minutes. Their efforts exposed a band of carved pattern two feet tall around the entire room, but no sign of anything that might operate the door.

  Don headed for the largest case, opening the lid to reveal a six-foot metal pole studded with boxy equipment. “This room’s more or less clear. I’ll get started on setting up the 3D scanner.”

  Everyone else migrated to the opening in the middle of the north wall, a short hallway leading to the secondary room, which also had a coating of silt, but not quite as thick. It took up about half the space of the first room, and had a square profile. A partial cave-in at the northwest corner looked like a mole the size of a compact car had gotten lost and crashed into the wall from the outside. Slabs of stone lay upon a mound of jet-black dirt that sparkled in the glare of shoulder-mounted spotlights. The video and still images had made the collapse look worse than reality. Up close, it didn’t seem anywhere near a threat to structural integrity.

  While Marco examined the debris, Kerys headed straight to the north wall. Paula set to brushing nearest the hallway they’d entered from.

  The last room had a door in line with the entrance. I wonder if the Atlanteans keep their patterns.

  She got to brushing again, and within a few strokes, her efforts exposed a bit of flat metal embedded in the wall. “Ooh! Found something!” She attacked the area with fervor, unearthing a metal panel six feet tall. Three rows of one-inch squares carved into the surface at her head level each contained a different symbol.

  “That looks like writing.” She peered back over her shoulder. “Paula? Come take a look at this.”

  The older woman hurried over, as did Marco.

  “You’re right, but… I don’t think it’s a phrase.” Paula held up an e-pad and captured still photos of the object. “It almost looks like―”

  “A keyboard,” said Kerys. “I’ve seen symbols like this before on Copernicus.” Images of pottery and slabs of stone laying half buried in craters came back to her. The surface of that planet had reminded her a lot of Earth’s moon, only with snowstorms. “That squiggle like a one-winged falcon was always at the top left.”

  “Hmm.” Paula kept taking pictures. “Only one or two of these look familiar, but I’ve studied every known sample of alien language we’ve ever come across.”

  “Evidently not,” muttered Marco. When she glared at him, he grinned. “Perhaps her Atlanteans are a different species?”

  Paula sighed. “Must you cal
l them Atlanteans? It makes them sound like mythology. Stories didn’t”―she gestured emphatically at the wall―“build this.”

  “Sorry for mentioning it.” Kerys slipped her e-pad from her belt and searched the file system for her old notes. “We needed a word. It was faster than constantly saying ‘the aliens who may or may not have built this stuff.’”

  “She’s got a point.” Marco chuckled. “Oh, the wall appears to be okay. The part that broke isn’t load-bearing.”

  Paula glanced at the damage. “If it’s not holding weight, what made it buckle?”

  “Umm.” Marco scratched at his helmet. “I’d have to dig inside to confirm, but it kinda looks like something explosive behind the wall. Could’ve been a pocket of trapped gas or something.”

  Aha! Kerys tapped a folder containing pictures of the artifacts her team had uncovered on Copernicus. She held the e-pad with one hand, thumbing from image to image while absentmindedly brushing silt from the wall.

  “What’s that?” asked Paula, leaning closer.

  “Stuff from the Copernicus site.”

  Again, Paula gasped. “How do you have that? I’ve been requesting to see those files for over a year, but Doctor Furroughs keeps refusing to share.”

  Kerys flashed a saccharin smile. “Well, I was on that team. I took these pics myself. And”―she wobbled her head side to side―“maybe I was obligated to delete them afterward, but they screwed me out of any credit or recognition. So maybe it slipped my mind to clear the data.”

  “You know they could come after you for that,” said Paula

  “I doubt it. The only way I could have this is if I was there too, and they don’t want to risk the fallout in case I make a big deal about being brushed aside. One of the major findings from that site was my work. This one mechanism, a machine that took up a room a little bigger than this one… I’m the one who figured out they used it to draw geothermal energy up from the ground for heat.” She scowled. “When Doctor Furroughs couldn’t disprove my theories, he decided to ‘test think’ about them being right, and then he realized it checked out, so they became his discovery. I mean, they couldn’t have the kid only three years out of college making a find like that before the doctors.”

  Paula clapped her on the shoulder. “Sorry.”

  Blue laser light flickered in the corridor. Seconds later, Don, Ellen, and Lars hurried in, ‘hurried’ being a matter of relative for the two in exo suits. The heavy tromping knocked dust off the ceiling and sent two large hunks of rock in the partial cave-in sliding to the floor.

  “Careful!” shouted Paula.

  Marco chuckled. “Hey, instead of all this brushing, maybe we could just have those two jump up and down.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” said Don. “Too much risk of damage. I’ll need to ask everyone to stay in here for at least fifteen minutes while the outer room is being scanned.”

  Kerys sat with her back to the wall, staring at the e-pad. This has got to be some kind of keyboard. Her fingers danced over the tiny eight-by-eight-inch screen, zooming and rotating pictures of the Copernicus ruins. The ‘heat generator’ room had similar markings, maybe one of the chambers in this place would hold a geothermal plant as well? The sixth image had what she searched for: a view of the side of a large, metal tank engraved with six symbols.

  A one-winged hawk, a dot with a ring around it, a squiggle that resembled a cursive ‘z,’ a glyph composed of a square U with two vertical bars descending from the bottom, a mark with three lines spiraling clockwise together, and a complicated sigil that somewhat resembled a Japanese Kanji.

  She found the same string of characters in another photo, etched into a slab of rock that had once been a wall. Minutes later, the string reappeared on the surface of a pottery vase. I guess it isn’t like a department name – ‘facilities’ or some such. She chuckled. Why would they put that on vases? What if it’s their god or something? She blinked. Maybe they do have corporations. Did I just learn ‘ACME’ in alien?

  “Hey check this out,” said Marco. He pointed at a dark grey squiggle on the floor. “Looks like there could have been moisture in here at some point. This is dried mud that looks like the same silt that’s on the walls.”

  “Interesting,” said Don. “But what did that dribble from?”

  Marco looked up. “Water vapor rises? Maybe it fell from the ceiling?”

  Once the laser light show in the main chamber stopped, Don ambled off to check on the scanner. Paula followed, as did Lars, Ellen, and Private Foster. Gina hovered close by, leaning against the wall with one boot up.

  When Kerys glanced up at her, she smiled. It didn’t seem necessary to have armed soldiers around on a planet that had been deserted for millennia. The chances that some other company would send a crew to steal their work, or that some indigenous threat would present itself seemed equally remote. Still, the woman exuded friendliness. Her earlier comment about running away from a bad home at sixteen to join the USIC made Kerys wonder if the girl suffered from simple loneliness.

  “What’cha doin?” asked Gina.

  “Those marks on the wall. I’ve seen something like them before. I’m trying to make sense of them. I keep finding the same series of characters.” Kerys twisted to peer up at the slab, and though they did not form the sequence, all six of those symbols existed in the array.

  Marco approached the metal panel and folded his arms. “Don’s probably going to want to deep-scan that big door and find a way to open it. Looks like the main entrance. You know, now that I think about it, that space out there looks like a lobby.”

  “I think this is the way to open it.” Kerys stood, gesturing at the fifteen buttons arranged in three rows of five. “It’s like an access code panel. But… how long has it been dead? Might not work at all.”

  She traced her finger around the small square holding the one-winged hawk symbol at the center of the bottom row. “This is the first letter.”

  “Looks like a bowling pin with a splinter stickin’ out of it,” said Gina.

  Kerys grinned. “I think it looks like a hawk.”

  “Yeah, I suppose if you’ve taken enough LSD.” Marco chuckled.

  She smirked. “Hmm.” On a whim, she pressed at it like a button.

  The symbol glowed soft blue.

  “Whoa,” whispered Marco, taking a step back.

  Gina pushed off the wall and got a ready grip on her rifle. “What did you do?”

  Kerys shivered with delight. “It still works.” The top-right button had a dot with a ring around it. She pushed it, and it lit up. All the way left in the middle row had the ‘cursive z.’ She pushed that one, and it glowed.

  “Wait, stop.” Marco grabbed her forearm. “We don’t know what this is going to do.”

  “I’ve seen this… word written all over the place on the Atlantean artifacts we found on Copernicus. It’s got to be either their name―like ‘human’ is to us―or maybe a deity they worship, or a company. They plaster it over everything like a label.”

  He let go, but looked worried. “What if it’s a self-destruct or something?”

  “Uhh,” said Gina, “if it is, it would be kinda stupid to put the password to nuke-it-all on everything, right?”

  Kerys pushed the second button from the left on the top row, the mark that resembled a chalice. It too, glowed blue. “Yeah. If this was supposed to be some kind of secret, they wouldn’t write it everywhere.” The spiral mark button, second from the right in the middle row, lit up at a touch.

  “At least it’s pretty.” Marco yanked his e-pad off his belt and held it up. “I should probably be recording this.”

  “Good idea.” She faced him. “This is Kerys Loring with the Avasar Biotech expedition on AV494. We’ve discovered alien ruins near the Wayfarer Outpost. While exploring them, we encountered what appears to be a control pad on the wall with a… form of keyboard. These glyphs are identical to others I observed on a previous site. I believe the same non-human species respons
ible for that site created this one. A pattern of these symbols recurred frequently on their artifacts, so I am attempting to enter that same sequence here to see if it might open the door. I’m joined by Marco Trem, and Corporal Gina Mitchell of the USIC.”

  “Why are you saying our names?” asked Gina.

  Marco peered around the side of the e-pad. “In case we all die when she hits that last button.”

  “Uhh.” Gina stared at her.

  Kerys shook her head. “This isn’t going to kill anyone.” She pressed her finger into the last button, the not-quite-Kanji. Rather than the button lighting up, the rest of them went dark.

  “Huh, well that was anticlimactic,” said Marco.

  She scowled at her e-pad. “Damn. I thought that would do som―”

  The seam around the entire panel glowed blue. Kerys took a step back. The wall emitted a loud click and the six-foot metal plane opened inward, revealing a narrow corridor. Wisps of dust and silt whorled in air flooded with azure light from deep inside.

  “It’s not a panel… it’s a door.” Kerys switched her e-pad to record video, and crept in, holding the device high.

  “Wait.” Gina put a hand on her shoulder. “Let me go first in case there’s something in there.”

  “Yo, Doc,” said Marco. “Kerys found a door. Got it open.”

  “What? Where?” yelled Don, sounding alarmed.

  As Marco explained the buttons, Kerys advanced down a narrow tunnel despite Gina’s tugging hand. The walls appeared made of individual bricks. Kerys pivoted the e-pad to the side.

  “New section of the AV494 site shows evidence of brick construction, unlike the outer chambers which looked carved from solid rock. This could be a false wall to conceal hidden spaces or mechanisms. Either that, or the mountain isn’t solid.”

  “Maybe the mountains are artificial?” asked Marco. “Camouflage?”

  The younger woman scooted in close behind her, as if trying to see over her shoulder.

  Kerys walked deeper into the passage, taking slow, cautious steps. She emerged in a square chamber with a vaulted pyramid ceiling three stories tall. At the center of the room, an object hovered a few inches over a pedestal with no apparent means of support. Its shape conjured images of a bizarre internal organ, perhaps a heart. Thin portions of membrane or tubes gleamed with a dark maroon luster, but the majority of the object appeared black.