“I gotcha,” Ellie said. “Let’s go play some free-jazz.”
Ravi looked at his brother with concern. “Be careful out there. Please,” Ravi said.
“No worries,” Theo said.
“None,” Ellie added.
“Seriously, be careful. And come back quickly,” Ravi said.
“You got it, mutant,” Theo added.
“With dozens of silverflies,” Ravi added.
“You want fries and a chocolate shake with that?” Theo added.
“Make it a silver one,” Ravi answered.
Theo and Ellie left the Escape Pod. Golden dust fell from the sky. The wind was swirling. They went to the storage area of the Pod and rolled the ATV out onto the flats of the campground area.
Theo and Ellie jumped on the ATV, fired up the engine and sped away in a cloud of GidX7 dust.
At full speed, off solar power, they made a speedy five minute trip trek over hill after small hill of the golden brown dust. When they got to the edge of the Not So Grand Canyon, they were within a hundred yards of the last known coordinates of the swarm of silverflies.
They had the coordinates from the geothermal and sedimentary soil analysis and zeroed in on a triangular opening in the folds of limestone rock.
Once they jumped off the ATV, Theo and Ellie hiked toward the highest plateau in the area where they had a three-hundred sixty-degree view of all the canyon cliffs around. There were folds of sandstone that rose and fell.
“We’re looking for an opening,” Theo said. “A hole. Anything unusual, especially something like a mighty rupture in the soil. Ms. Esparanza has been right about this place.”
“She knows it better than anyone,” Ellie said.
Once they reached the edge of the canyon cliff, they spotted a dark open hole carved into the canyon about twenty feet straight down. To reach it, they would need to rappel down.
“There it is,” Ellie said. “At least that’s what it looks like.”
“Within a stone’s throw of where you calculated,” Theo said.
“Isn’t it strange to think there’s an underground labyrinth right where our feet are now? Right where we stand there’s a tectonic rupture of epic proportions,” Ellie said.
They got their climbing gear ready. This was the location where they suspected the silverflies had flown into the previous night. They had speculated that it was an entrance to a subterranean set of caverns, just a theory, though one that was slightly more than an educated hunch.
The opening was a slice of darkness cutting a scar into the jagged canyon of limestone rock only about twenty feet from the top of the plateau they were standing on. The canyon floor was nearly a thousand feet down.
Theo pounded a climbing stake into the soil of the plateau. They could still see the reflection of the sun beaming from the Escape Pod’s solar panels nearly two miles away.
As Theo attached the climbing rope to the stake and slipped it through the clamp, he didn’t look down. He wasn’t afraid of heights. In fact, this was one of the endeavors he had been practicing since he could walk.
Facing the canyon wall, Theo rappelled down the twenty feet and paused his climb. He was dangling from the rope in front of the triangular opening that angled into the canyon wall. From Theo’s up close, personal and dangerous point of view, the hole did look like an entrance to the underground earth. How far and how deep it went was still a mystery. The hole was an uneven arch with a somewhat flat bottom.
Theo’s hand braced against the start of the arch. With the other he flicked on his helmet light. He could see into the hole and he could tell it was an opening, almost like a cave that widened out to a width that was nearly twice Theo’s size.
“Looks like it angles down into oblivion,” Theo said to Ellie through her Communication Device.
“It can’t go on forever,” Ellie replied on the voice-to voice setting.
Theo climbed into the small hole. He was on his knees. He shone the helmet light deep into the opening. It went straight down at a decline of about thirty degrees. It was dark and long and Theo could not see a bottom. It offered a natural shelter from the swirling dust. When it was safe he unclasped from the rappelling rope.
Theo heard Ellie on her communication device. It was set to local, voice-to-voice transmission.
“What did you find?” Ellie asked.
Theo spoke into his communication device. “It’s a cave. Just like you calculated. Appears solid and stable. Come on down!”
Ellie soon climbed down the role, facing the canyon wall. Her legs were firmly rooted into the smooth canyon wall and she quickly joined Theo in the narrow crawlspace. They left the climbing rope dangling against the sheer face of the canyon wall.
“A long time ago,” Ellie said, “when I was kind of intelligent and safe back on the Ark or even Odyssey, I would’ve said that venturing into a dark cave on a crazy alien planet is the stupidest thing to do.”
“And now?”
“Let’s go hunting,” Ellie said.
Theo kind of smiled, looking at Ellie with a touch of admiration.
“What’s wrong?” Ellie asked.
“Nothing.”
“Then stop looking at me like that,” Ellie said.
“You’re okay, you know that?”
“I know. Women are almost always tougher than men,” Ellie said.
“Oh really,” Theo said.
“Yeah, we were born to give birth to big headed babies. Do you know how much pain a mother has to endure to give birth?”
“Hadn’t given it much thought,” Theo answered.
“Well, maybe you should,” Ellie said as she dropped to her knees and followed Theo’s crawl. It was a slow moving dance. The crevice opening was too thin to travel otherwise.
After just a few crawls the passageway widened and rose in height. It was nearly twice as wide and twice as tall as what was behind them.
Theo and Ellie were finally able to stand up and walk normally. They were partially underground. A cliff overhang curved and welcomed them into the crevice.
Each step further into the space, they found that the air was cooling and getting damper. The cavern wall was moist, almost electric to the touch. It was like walking through a shrinking closet of limestone rock.
Twenty paces in there was still sunlight from above that was cascading in.
By forty paces in darkness started to engulf them and they were forced to switch on the portable light atop their goggles.
Sixty paces in and the rush of the outside wind softened.
The brief flicker from the strobe light weakened for a moment. The darkness of this underground maze was shrouded in an increasing dark gray. The climb through the crevice narrowed once again and they wedged their bodies sideways and again they were forced to shuffle sideways.
This terrain brought Theo and Ellie back to a more primitive mindset when man believed in the monstrous creatures hidden in the shadows of such places, back when man was a savage explorer. Now, Theo and Ellie were just hoping to find the silverflies hidden in the underground of this Mount New Acadia.
They continued on the path downward.
Gradually, the crevice widened and Theo and Ellie were able to walk side by side. The angle of decline also flattened out and soon they were marching on a fairly flat surface of hardened soil and rock.
There was little sound except the repetition of their own breathing and the faint trickle of liquid. It seemed to be running through the walls of this rupture in the land. Every few seconds the wind gurgled from above and occasionally swept in a dusting of soil.
They were tense and alert and cloaked in the shadows of this tectonic rupture in the canyon divide and soon the jagged opening joined as one above their head, forming a ceiling of the limestone rock.
The cool air perspired a damp tingle on the base of their necks. Little hairs sprung to attention as the passageway widened out.
They were in an oval cavern with stalactites dripping from the
ceiling about twenty feet above them. Drops of cool sweat fell. The howl of a light wind was quietly singing. Darts of air pricked their skin and a current of the whisper rose through the hair on their head.
Theo and Ellie were surrounded by this unnatural wind. It still sounded like an infant cry, a shriek of intense pain. A cyclone of haunts and spooks surrounded them. It was not a very inviting gesture, as if the mountain were saying in its jagged and natural form: don’t come inside me; there is no refuge from the storm outside.
The main part of this cavern, however, was wide and inviting. The ceiling was high, at least twenty feet in most directions.
“I guess we can’t judge a hole in this earth by its initial size,” Ellie said.
“Exactly.”
Theo kept walking then paused when he noticed that Ellie was no longer two steps behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw that Ellie was focused on an atmospheric reading on her atmospheric sensor.
“You okay there?”
“Sure. Sure. Loving this. Totally loving this. You know we’re just canaries in a coal mine, don’t you?”
“It’s methane, right?” Theo said.
“Yeah, pretty deadly and explosive mixture,” Ellie said. “One spark will do it, so no shooting your taser or lighting a match. Or we’ll both be blown to kingdom come.”
Before they said another word, a familiar shrieking overwhelmed the cave. They were getting close to the silverflies, but given the cavernous echo it was hard to pinpoint their location.
“Now that’s the sound I wanted to hear,” Theo said.
“How are we going to do this?”
“The parachute,” Theo answered.
“Right,” Ellie said, “That’s the strongest inorganic material we brought with us. Smart.”
“It’s going to be okay,” Theo said, noticing Ellie’s apprehension.
“Sure. Sure. Everything is karmically falling into place. Life down here is just a walk in the park, right?”’
“Right.”
Ellie and Theo scanned left and right. Each of their lights stopped on separate offshoot passageways, almost like inviting tunnels beckoning them to explore.
From this small oval cavern, there were three passageways, shooting off at sharp angles into narrow crevices. There was a regularity to the size of each of the passageways. Each was around teen feet high and perfectly cylindrical, almost like subway drainpipes. It was as if the walls had been worn down by another surface, perhaps running water.
“These tunnels are almost identical,” Ellie observed. “Very strange.”
“Stop spooking yourself,” Theo said.
Ellie snapped back. “I’ve studied too many caves to know they are never exactly alike. What’s your theory?”
“Unusually perfect erosion caused by an unidentified source,” Theo answered.
“I don’t like unidentified sources,” Ellie said.
“Neither do I.”
They walked into the passageway on the left.
On the ground, they spotted a collection of silver and black goo from the silverflies. It was splattered around in a couple of small clusters.
“Time to taste your medicine,” Theo said.
“Is it safe?”
“Harry Wolf sucked the thing down in two gulps and he’s doing better than ever.”
“True,” Ellie said reluctantly, “but I’m not a dog.”
“Come on, what are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know. It just looks like…well…it looks like…
“Silverfly medicine,” Theo said.
“Goo-poo,” Ellie said with a nervous laugh.
“Close your eyes and pretend you’re eating a virtual steak. Okay? Or the best virtual pizza you’ve ever had.”
Ellie dabbed her finger into the silver goo and then placed it on her tongue. She sucked it down. Theo took a small sample and swallowed it down too.
“Yuck,” Ellie said.
“I know. Nasty and acidic, but at least it’s better than cough syrup. You should take more,” Theo suggested.
Ellie cupped her hand and scooped up a large pile of the silver goo on the ground. She closed her eyes and sucked it into her mouth and swallowed.
“So disgusting! Am I going to pass out like you?”
“I don’t know,” Theo shrugged. “Maybe you need to be stung for that happen.”
Theo shone the portable light down to the ground a few steps ahead of his current position. He and Ellie both bent down to the ground, each on one knee.
By the left most tunnel passageway, there was a very regular, consistent and repetitive pattern in the soil pathway just a few steps ahead of their current position. The imprints were several feet wide. However mysterious the source, they had seen the imprints before, out by the half eaten hills the night the camelback herd appeared.
“I’ve seen these before,” Theo observed.
“Where?”
“That night we fought the herd,” Theo said.
“But it is highly doubtful the silverflies made these, right? And they’re too consistent and too large a pattern to be the wind,” Ellie added.
“Agreed.”
“Then if it’s not the wind and it’s not the silverflies and it’s not caused by natural erosion, then what is it?” Theo did not answer her. She continued, “Then dare I say it? They look like creature tracks of some kind,” Ellie said.
“Perhaps.”
“This is crazy,” Ellie added. “You know this is crazy.”
“Then let’s find these silverflies, get a bunch and get out quickly.”
“Agreed.”
Inside the underground cavern, Theo and Ellie kept walking into the narrow passageway. The imprints repeated deep into the underground cavern.
There was the constant hum of four discernible sounds swirling near them: their own breathing, the trickle of liquid flowing in the cavern walls, wind rustling through the crevices and the last sound was the familiar low hum from the silverflies.
“Do you hear that?”
“Yes,” Theo whispered.
“It’s an echo-echo-echo of the silverflies. Which one is it coming from?”
“Don’t know,” Theo said.
“They might all be connected, but all I know is that they’re close. Very close.”
“We have to go on. We need those silverflies.”
“And of course the silverflies that we need to hunt live in a cavern in the depths of this underground labyrinth.”
Drips of liquid fell on their heads, as if rain was falling. Halfway through this right most passageway, they both paused and dimmed their helmet lights.
Theo pointed to the end of the passageway where a silver fluorescence was glowing from the secondary cavern. It was shaped like a gigantic mushroom.
As they looked up, scanning with the portable light, there were hundreds of silverflies pulsing and glowing on the roof of the secondary cave.
For a few moments, Theo and Ellie observed silently.
It was hard to tell if the silverflies were asleep or just resting. They were all attached to a different portion of the cavern wall. Intermittently, they pulsed on and off with their silver glow.
At the edge of this secondary offshoot cavern with all of the silverflies, there was a large pool of liquid. It was oval, deep, almost like an underground miniature lake. It had both a silver and dark coffee brown tinge to the liquid.
Before proceeding any further, Theo and Ellie unfolded the parachute and formed a sack. Since the parachute could withstand six G’s of force on the way down to the planet’s surface, they were fairly confident it could withstand the fluttering of the silverfly wings. Whether it was strong enough to withstand the attempted punctures of the tendrils of the silverfly remained to be seen.
CHAPTER 24
THE SILVER LAKE
On the ceiling of the mountain cave, there was a glow of silver throbbing every other second or so.
Ellie tilted the handheld light up
toward the source. There were hundreds of the small silver globs with the odd four flap wings. They were like tiny jellyfish, pulsing and clinging to the cave.
Calmly, Theo and Ellie held the canvas white parachute with both and hands and then they stretched it out from end to end. It was like an empty sack just swaying in the breeze. In a quick burst of movements, they snapped the parachute open and twirled it up to the ceiling in one big, fluid half circle.
Several silverflies fell to the ground, while several others fell into the parachute sack and some others went flying chaotically away. From this behavior, it was hard to call them an intelligent life form. They had reactions, perhaps only instincts that were connected to some kind of sensory system.
As Theo and Ellie joined the two edges of the parachute and tied it together with some rope, some of the silverflies chaotically escaped the makeshift sack created by the parachute. It was still filled with an abundance of the silverflies and was now officially filled with their medical salvation, at least that’s what they hoped.
Theo slung the parachute shoulder straps over his arms.
Ellie grimaced. There was a silverfly resting on her shoulder and a second on her hand and a third actually rested on her nose. Ellie wanted to sneeze. She wanted to swat them away. She fought every instinct in her body, not to move a muscle. She stood still like some marble statue in an art museum.
“Let it do its thing,” Theo said. “Come on thing. Sting her.”
These silverflies thing were his only chance of salvation from the internal madness rushing through his body, just a silver mystery medicine that liked to shriek.
The shriek went silent and the silverfly on Ellie’s shoulder shimmered up and down until the silver stinger pierced her skin and stayed in there.
“You’re going to be okay,” Theo said.
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
As the silverlfy stung Ellie, there was a disturbing sound rising from the pool. It was the sound of rock scraping against rock, loud and abrasive.
Both their eyes turned instinctively in the direction of the sound.
Ellie’s face was frozen, mouth open, eyes as wide as a full moon, because there was a creature. Not just any kind of creature. Large. Getting larger with each breath. Cylindrical. Liquid from the pool dispersed on to the cavern floor.
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