by Greig Beck
Once off the ledge, he tore off his shirt to create a sack and transferred his booty into it. He threw the heavy weight over his shoulder, grunting, and glanced back. He was satisfied not to see anyone reappearing from inside the strange sphere, and even happier that nothing was crawling up out of the dark chasm toward him.
He knew there was another HAWC stationed with his own men in the Psychro Cave, but the three of them together should be able to subdue him. And if Petro or Andronus was lost in the skirmish, all the more gold for him.
He sucked in a deep breath, the sweat streaming down his body. He’d need all his energy for the climb back up the stone steps – hundreds of them. But he’d rather die than leave the gold behind. He stifled a giggle. He’d come back here with a private army – there wouldn’t be a single coin or antiquity left when he was finished. He puffed and reached up an arm to wipe his streaming brow. In that split second, something struck the side of his head.
Tony went down hard, his makeshift sack spilling coins all around him. He looked up groggily. A man like a spider, all in black and with one glowing red eye, stood over him. Beside him, a one-eyed giant loomed.
The giant grinned through a bushy black beard, and pressed an enormous boot down on Tony’s neck. ‘How many inside circle door?’
*
The HAWCs spread out around the hangar-like space, while Matt and Rebecca explored the wonders surrounding them.
‘There’s a control panel here,’ Rebecca called out.
She was already leaning over it when Alex turned toward her. ‘For Chrissakes,’ he muttered under his breath, feeling a small knot of frustration tighten inside him. He forced himself to exhale, recognizing that she was a scientist and being curious was her job. No matter it might get them all killed.
The control panel was set into a desk that seemed to grow up out of the floor. Rebecca touched one of the screens and it flared to life, showing lists of strange symbols.
‘Wow; one side is Minoan, and the other...’ He snorted. ‘… probably their language.’ He turned; his eyes alight. ‘You know what this is? It’s a goddamn Rosetta Stone.’
‘They were teaching themselves Minoan so they could communicate.’ Rebecca said softly.
‘Exactly.’ Matt nodded. ‘And the writing in the crypt below the Basilica Cisterns, was maybe the Gorgon attempting to communicate, assuming we’d understand it.’ He turned to Alex. ‘I told you we should try to…’
‘Forget it.’ Alex cut in.
Rebecca touched the screen again and the outline of a human being, arms and legs outstretched, appeared. She touched the figure and more lists of symbols scrolled up beside it.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Alex said, pulling her arm away. ‘Don’t touch –’
‘Wait; look!’ she said, jerking her arm out of his hand. ‘It’s us. Or rather, information about us.’ She touched the screen again, and it changed to show the human skeletal structure overlaid with the circulatory system. ‘Like in a medical school.’ She kept touching the screen and the magnification dived down lower, showing individual cells and then strands of DNA, with more lists of data. ‘Very detailed information about our physiology.’
‘They wanted to understand us,’ Matt said. He tapped another screen, and a small circle opened on the desk beside them. A cylinder rose up out of the desktop; inside, suspended in clear fluid, floated a small brown hand and forearm.
Matt grimaced. ‘Ah, shit.’
‘That’s one way to understand us,’ Sam said, ‘a piece at a time.’
‘I’m guessing it’s a tissue sample,’ Rebecca said, peering at the foot-high tube.
‘Like you said, it’s exactly like what you’d find in a medical school,’ Matt said. ‘This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s quite logical when you think about it.’
‘Know your enemy?’ Franks said.
Matt shook his head. ‘Rubbish. You don’t need to cut them up to know them.’
Alex backed up. ‘You might if they were a different species.’ An image of himself strapped down to a metal cot, and Captain Graham leaning over him with a scalpel jumped into his mind. To understand a different species, Alex thought darkly. He shook the images away, grabbed both scientists and pulled them away from the desk. Immediately, the screens went dark. He looked to Sam. ‘We’re done here, let’s keep moving.’
Alex led the way down the long tunnel to the bulkhead, Matt and Rebecca following him, then Sam, followed by Franks and Thompson like a pair of guard dogs. They had their guns up, moving them back and forth, turning to spot on the far entrance they came through to cover their only exit. In another few minutes, they were standing before a huge smooth wall. Alex tried placing his bare hand against the surface. Just as before, his hand glowed momentarily before a circle formed around it. The glowing ring widened, then dissolved into an opening. Muted lighting flicked on inside.
Alex nodded to Sam to go through first.
‘I don’t believe this,’ Sam said, his voice echoing as he stepped inside. ‘This thing is bigger than an aircraft carrier.’
The others followed him through. Soft lights continued to come on in a peristaltic wave out and away from where they stood on a small walkway. There were a dozen levels above them, and at least that many below, in a circular design. Alex calculated it would take an hour or so to jog around the ship’s circumference. Every ten feet or so along the wall was a small porthole window.
‘Cargo hold?’ Alex said. He walked to a window, needing to get up on his toes to peer in. ‘What the hell?’
He dropped down and looked left and right, then placed his hand on the surface. The door dissolved away. Matt and Rebecca tried to crowd in at his sides, but he pushed them back. The cubicle looked like a storage room, and was filled with long silver tubes stacked one on top of the other. The top side of each had a clear panel, with another smaller panel showing a collection of blinking lights.
Alex wiped the surface of one tube and peered inside. ‘Ah, Christ.’
He examined some of the other tubes, and found that each held a body. His mind jumped back to the vision he’d experienced when he’d confronted Magera in the Turkish desert. Fleeting impressions of darkness, water, a landscape dripping with moss and lichens, a city with tall silver spires that touched the sky. He’d seen beings like the one in the cryo tank, heads writhing with monstrous outgrowths, escorting thousands of smaller creatures toward the city. Their latest harvest, no doubt – transported there in a craft just like this one.
‘What is it, boss?’ Sam leaned in close, towering over Matt and Rebecca.
Alex grimaced as he straightened. ‘I was right; it is a cargo hold.’
Matt wiped at the panel of another tube, clearing away the condensation. ‘My god! I think they’re alive.’ He turned to the others, exhaling slowly. ‘We’ve never known why the Minoan race, the most advanced culture of its time, disappeared. We guessed that successive wars, disease, or even earthquakes caused them to abandon their cities and scatter to the mountains. Looks like most of them ended up here instead.’
Alex pointed around the room. ‘There are ten tubes in here. Judging by the number of rooms, there’s got to be tens of thousands of them in this ship.’
‘Stacked up like firewood.’ Sam shook his head.
Alex looked at Matt. ‘Still feel like to talking to these sons of bitches?’
Matt didn’t reply – he seemed to be in a trance.
Rebecca peered in through the clear panel. ‘Maybe the ship crashed here, and its owners couldn’t complete their mission. Maybe we humans weren’t evolved enough back then to help them repair their ship.’ She shrugged. ‘The thing is, thousands of years ago we woke them up, and they just continued going about their task. For all we know, they thought they were saving us. Keeping us safe in this … ark.’
‘Ark?’ Sam snorted and waved a huge arm toward the tanks. ‘You don’t collect this many of the same specimen. This isn’t an ark, it’s a fucking
harvester.’
Alex nodded. ‘A factory ship.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘Like a modern whaling ship – hunt, capture, and process the prey aboard the vessel.’ He nodded toward the cylinders. ‘Are they alive or dead? We need to check.’
Sam grabbed one end of the cylinder and dragged it out of its harness. The movement pulled Matt out of his trance-like state. He kneeled next to the tube and put his hand on the casing. Nothing happened. He bent over the panel of lights and pressed one of the small buttons, then another. The tube seamlessly unzipped, releasing some kind of gas.
Matt held a hand over his face. ‘Jesus, what the hell was that?’
‘Not oxygen,’ Rebecca said, and sneezed. ‘But we’re still alive so it’s not toxic. Maybe some sort of preservative?’
The tube collapsed to reveal a young man, no more than twenty, with olive skin and smooth features. His hair was long and oiled, with the long side-locks the Minoans wore. He didn’t look any more than five feet tall. He groaned, and then coughed.
Matt leaned forward. ‘Holy shit, he is alive.’
Rebecca placed a hand on the youth’s shoulder. ‘Take it easy,’ she said softly. ‘It’s okay.’
The youth coughed again, his face wrinkling as if in pain. He crushed his eyes shut, and his lips moved.
Matt bent forward, listening, translating. ‘He’s asking if they’ve arrived in the Elysian Fields yet. That’s the Minoan version of heaven.’ The youth’s lips moved again, and Matt’s brow furrowed as he concentrated. ‘He says: we are the gift to the gods.’ He looked up at the others, grinning. ‘This is the first time Minoan, real Minoan, has been spoken in 5000 years.’
‘Great,’ Alex said, and nodded to the youth. ‘Now ask him how they speak to their gods. How do they calm them, sing to them? Hurry it up, Professor.’
Matt spoke in a soft but guttural tongue. The young man’s eyes flicked open – they were the darkest brown and filled with confusion. He grimaced, his teeth clenching together.
Matt spoke the same words again, but a little louder.
Rebecca laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘He’s sick; we need to ease up. He’s been asleep for –’
‘I don’t care,’ Alex said. ‘Matt, hurry.’
Matt’s words became more urgent. The Minoan coughed wetly, then groaned. His eyes flicked open, wide and rolling, and his mouth opened unnaturally wide, releasing a piercing scream.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Casey Franks grabbed Matt’s collar and hauled him back. Thompson did the same to Rebecca.
As they watched, the young man’s body seem to inflate, his facial features became distorted, and his eyes turned milky. His cry of pain was abruptly shut off as first his face and then his body collapsed in on itself. In another few seconds, he was nothing but a foul-smelling mound of sludge.
Rebecca gagged, and Matt’s mouth was hanging open in horror. ‘What the fuck just happened?’
‘Fuck me.’ Thompson grimaced. ‘Some sort of infection?’
Alex shook his head. ‘That smell when we opened the tube – atmospheric gases. His body was saturated in them. Maybe he was being conditioned for another environment. The abrupt change destroyed him.’
‘What?’ Rebecca waved at the other tubes. ‘So they can’t live on Earth any more? All of them?’
Alex nodded. ‘I think so. I saw it in the Magera’s mind when we connected in the desert, but I didn’t understand it then. The Gorgons were herding some other race of beings toward this big city, as though they were cattle. Looks like we were to be the next herd. Sam’s right – it’s a harvest; this entire ship is a livestock transport. These Minoans thought they were gifts to the gods, but they were basically meals on wheels, being transported home.’
Sam growled deep in his throat. ‘Someone woke up Magera and it started to go about its business again. For all we know, this might be a scout ship – the first of many. If they like the samples, Earth might turn into their giant stockyard.’
‘Fuck ’em.’ Franks shook her head, her teeth grinding together. ‘Blow the shit out of it.’
‘Wait, what about the Minoans?’ Matt said. ‘There’s thousands of them.’
‘They’re already dead,’ Alex said. He turned to the SAS soldier. ‘Plant the C-4, all of it. We’ll use the grenades too for a bit of extra kick. Let’s turn this abomination into atoms, and then bury what’s left.’
*
On the surface, the mist moved toward the cave entrance, stopping at the Land Rover and the truck left by the Greeks. It hovered by them for a moment, and the nucleus at its center coalesced, darkening. The weeping was drowned out by another noise – a deep roar of fury as it sensed the intrusion below.
The mist swept toward the cave’s opening, and the metal guardrail buckled, as though squeezed by monstrous hands.
Once it had entered the darkness, the mist vanished, and the creature within took on physical form and descended into the cave’s stygian depths.
CHAPTER 36
Sam and Reece Thompson stacked the C-4 in two piles on each side of the door, along with the HAWCs’ M33 fragmentation grenades. Sam had wired in the small silver tubes, each one amplified with HMX – a powerful nitramine chemical. Because of its high molecular weight, HMX was one of the most potent explosives around, with a lethal shockwave many times that of standard compact military impact devices. Simply put, they were a small package with a huge blast.
Sam turned. ‘Boss, time?’
‘Sixty minutes.‘ Alex set his watch. ‘Mark.’
Sam coordinated the timer and stood. ‘We’re outta here.’
Alex looked up at the enormous rockwall above the massive orb. ‘This blows right, it’ll take out the entire wall and bring down about a mile of rock.’
Sam nodded, hands on his hips. ‘It’ll work. And even if the blast doesn’t kill these things, they’ll be sealed in about a billion tons of stone. Better than Constantine’s urn.’
‘How much time have we got?’ Matt asked.
‘Plenty.’ Alex looked at his watch. ‘Fifty-eight minutes. But I wouldn’t recommend any more sightseeing, so let’s move it.’
Rebecca had her arms folded tightly across her chest. ‘I wish there was a way to save the Minoans. We’ll be killing them as well.’
Franks spat onto the cave floor. ‘You must’ve skipped the part where the poor sap turned to mud right before our eyes. Like the boss said, they’re already dead, lady.’
Rebecca fumed. ‘There must be a way to save them. We should at least bring a medical team in to –’
‘To what? To get turned to stone by that monster?’ Franks leveled her steely gaze at the scientist. ‘Boss knows what he’s doing.’
Sam looked around the cave. ‘Anyone seen that little Greek asshole?’
Matt snorted. ‘He’s probably halfway home by now, dragging a Santa sack full of gold.’
‘He better not try something stupid when we’re buggin’ out.’ Franks held a scope to her eye, scanning the stone steps in the far distance.
Matt shook his head. ‘I think the gold was a priority. Doubt he’d hang around to take a few pot shots at us.’
Franks snorted. ‘If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s greed’ll win out every time.’
Alex nodded to the HAWCs to form up around Matt and Rebecca. ‘If the Greek gets in our way, he’ll be staying down here with the Minoans.’ He glanced down at the chasm. ‘Those dog things are watching us – I can feel them. Like most pack animals, they’ll be waiting for a straggler to become separated. So we all stick together.’ He looked at Matt. ‘Try not to look wounded.’
Matt gazed into the chasm’s dark depths. ‘I don’t know if I can run … if we need to.’ He gave Alex a weak smile. ‘And my head’s killing me.’
‘Dehydration,’ Alex said. He turned Matt’s head and looked at his neck. ‘Glands are up – might have been something in their saliva. Good news is, you’re alive. Just take it easy. We don’t want that wound to start bleeding again.’
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Matt raised his eyebrows. ‘Worried about me, or leaving a blood trail?’
Alex could see the fear in his eyes. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. We’re not going back into the chasm.’ He gave Matt what he hoped was a reassuring smile and then turned away.
He could feel the huge animals in the darkness watching while remaining out of sight. But now he began to sense something else – the creeping feeling of desolation and fury he had felt in the Turkish desert. Magera was approaching, returning to her lair, and it would be a hundred times worse than what was watching them hungrily from below. Their time was fast running out.
‘Just stay close to me. Home soon, Prof,’ Alex said and stepped onto the narrow ledge that would take them back to the village.
*
Sam’s eyes moved from Alex to the paved street. He’d noticed the HAWC leader’s eyes shining silver in the darkness, and he seemed to be on high alert. They were moving quickly now – Alex had picked up their pace. No one spoke, and the silence seemed to swallow even the sound of their footsteps.
Alex held his fist up, and froze. ‘Halt.’
Sam brought his rifle up and followed Alex’s gaze, but didn’t see or hear anything. He returned his eyes to the street. ‘What you got, boss?’
‘Ambush.’ Alex exploded into activity, pushing Matt and Rebecca to the ground, his movements so quick that it was hard to follow him. ‘Stay down.’
Two soft gunshots spat from the line of buildings ahead. One struck the ground where Matt had just been standing; the other kicked Alex’s head back.
More shots rang out, and the group scrambled for cover. Thompson returned fire, while Casey Franks herded Matt and Rebecca into a space between two buildings.
Sam dragged Alex from the street as bullets whacked into his armored back, and tore Alex’s helmet from his head. ‘Shit.’ The wound was a deep gouge across his temple, and looked like it had depressed some of the skull.
‘How is he?’ Franks crawled forward, but Sam waved her back. ‘Cover our asses, soldier.’