“Hear me out.” He told Orl everything that had transpired during their meeting.
Orl didn’t say anything for several seconds after Kals finished.
“She’s from Earth, Kals,” he said with a scowl. “I don’t trust her.” Orl and Kals were both second generation Citizens.
“I have to find out what she was driving at.”
“You’re not,” Orl warned.
“I am.”
“When your wife finds out you’re going to not only lose your marriage you’re going to lose your position as provincial manager.”
“No one is going to find out,” Kals assured him.
“There’s something not quite right about this.”
“It’s worth a try to discover what she’s really up to,” he said gamely, falling into a trap he had no idea was even there.
Chapter 16
Naylon flipped the blanket back from over his head. Low morning sunlight was breaking through wispy cirrus clouds. A thin shaft of light was creeping into the cavern entrance. He had spent a restless night in a chilly cave, tossing and turning for hours before he had finally fallen sleep. Now it was morning and, in his estimation, just above freezing outside. The cavern seemed to have maintained a semblance of a few degrees above that. Even though he had plenty of experience in the way of short field expeditions, even weeklong ones, Naylon still hated sleeping in his clothing. The last time he had done so was when he was studying for his Ph.D. Oddly enough, these rough conditions were exactly what they were expecting, although not after having been shot out of the sky.
Darreth had stayed up for hours after everyone else had gone to sleep, scanning the comm frequencies and the clear night sky for any sign of a craft.
Shortly after Naylon stirred, the rest of the group awoke, too. Tann opened one of the ration cylinders and pulled out a container of water. An hour later, after everyone, including Merek, who was feeling much better now, had shaved and used a makeshift latrine several dozen meters from the cavern’s entrance, all were focused on making breakfast.
“Nothing at all last night on the comm,” Darreth told them.
“I can’t believe they haven’t sent a rescue craft after us yet. We’re hours overdue,” Merek said. He gingerly touched his scalp where the gash was still tender. In this cold he wasn’t able to properly wash his hair and it looked a mess.
“They’ll come,” Darreth told him confidently. “We have plenty of food and enough water to last at least two weeks. Maybe more if we stretch it out. How’s this for a laugh. There’s no nearby ice here on icy Rylerra to make water.”
“Yeah, real funny, Dare,” Tann said acidly. He wasn’t looking too happy about their situation at all now. It wasn’t like his well-oiled world where everything went just about exactly as he expected. Plus, the idea of staying in this cavern for up to two weeks didn’t sit well with him at all. He had hoped for adventure, but a far more comfortable one.
“Don’t get all angry about it just yet, Tann. At least you didn’t lose any blood like our friend Merek.”
Tann looked first to Merek, then to his brother but quieted down.
Naylon realized it was time to divert Tann’s attention. “Hey, after we’re done with breakfast let’s find out what’s at the end of that passageway.” He pointed to the right. Naylon was getting antsy to do something other than sit still.
Tann went toward the dark passageway and stopped in front of the dark maw. He held both arms up. “I feel a draft. If there’s an opening further on maybe we can get to the other side of this mountain.”
Naylon looked at him quizzically. “Why would we want to do that?”
“You might have something there, Tann,” Darreth told him.
Naylon looked at Darreth. “He does?”
“If our pursuers come back and they happen to find the shuttle, and also happen to find the cave, then we might have an exit route, if it’s big enough to get through, of course.”
“Oh, that makes sense,” Naylon said sheepishly. He turned to Tann after they downed their breakfast. “Let’s pack some stuff and head out.”
Naylon and Tann unzipped their packs, tossed in their canteens and added a few food bars. Naylon added to his a pack of forty marble-sized glow globes and other miscellaneous items they’d need for a couple of hours of exploration.
“No rope climbing, no slogging through water and no falling down dark shafts,” Darreth told them. “If it looks at all dangerous come back.”
“We have no intention of getting into trouble,” Naylon assured him.
They both stood at the opening while Naylon played his lantern straight ahead. About twenty meters along Naylon noticed that the walls, ceiling and floor of the tunnel had become perfectly planar as far as the light beam could reach. It seemed equally odd that the corridor’s corners were perfect right angles and the ceiling was slightly taller than a man. Naylon placed a gloved hand against the wall and picked off some loose rock. It crumbled at his touch.
“This is certainly strange,” Naylon commented after they had proceeded forty meters down the corridor, inspecting the walls and ceiling ever so often. He had already switched on and dropped a glow globe every three meters or so. Their intense white light simply acted as a breadcrumb for their return journey in case the passageway turned out to twist and turn in all directions. So far, that had not been the case.
“What is?” Tann asked.
“I could swear this tunnel is manmade.”
“I doubt that. We’re easily the only people to have ever come here.”
“But we’ve gone quite a ways and we’ve not seen the usual features of a natural cavern.”
“Like what?”
“How about an uneven floor. Or rough walls and ceiling. This corridor has been square since just about the time we started out.”
Tann played his flashlight along the wall nearest him. He stopped to inspect the loose material, too.
Naylon spoke up again. “We’ve not seen a corridor branching left or right or any other way at all.” He stopped and pulled off his pack.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m pulling out a terahertz scanner. It might give us an idea of how much further this tunnel goes.”
“Oh.” Tann was quite familiar with the scanner. It was routinely used to see through solid objects.
Naylon pressed a few icons on the display pad. He pointed it ahead of them and they both observed the graphic. “It just keeps going,” Naylon said. He switched off the sensor.
They continued to walk in silence, with only the crunching of their feet echoing all around them. Every three meters or so Naylon dropped another glow globe. After nearly fifty meters, the corridor abruptly shifted forty-five degrees to the left. They stopped and played their lanterns all around them.
“All right, this is a mining shaft. A natural cavern wouldn’t switch at a sharp angle like this,” Naylon said. The hair on the back of his neck was beginning to prickle. There were mines all over Rylerra. Naylon already knew that. But they were all near habitations and thus, people. If not, there was equipment near or in them or other signs of humans being there or having been there. This shaft was far from the nearest inhabited region and it looked well over three generations old. The oldest city on the planet was barely that age. Plus, they saw not the vaguest sign of equipment anywhere. The implication was simply not possible.
“I see what you mean,” Tann replied as he played his light beam all around. Despite never having explored a cavern before, he had seen plenty of pictures of them. The odd part was that the cavern they had all entered yesterday was clearly natural. This passageway was the anomaly.
They continued for another thirty meters. Bare walls, exactly the same height the entire way continued to span out in front of them. Abruptly the long monotonous corridor opened to a huge open cavern much larger than the one they had taken shelter in.
“I’m positive what we just went through was built as a tunnel.” Naylon told Tann. �
��It connects the entrance cavern to this inner chamber.”
“Is that sunlight?” Tann asked. Across the dark expanse, slightly higher than where they were standing, was a narrow vertical opening. A shaft of sunlight was beaming across the darkness.
“Looks like a crack in the wall,” Naylon replied. “That explains the airflow. Let’s see if it’s big enough to fit through.” He aimed his lantern ahead of him, observing normal uneven ground, which was completely unlike the nearly flat surface they had just traveled down. “Be careful. The floor here isn’t like what we were just walking on,” he told Tann.
He led the way, aiming his light ahead of him, upward, then to the sides. Tann did the same. The ceiling was at least a dozen meters above them, proving that this chamber was quite large and spacious. From Naylon’s estimation, this chamber was at least six times larger in volume than the entrance area they were camped in. All around were the proper elements of a natural cavern system: some evidence of flowstone, a few stalactites, a couple of stalagmites, and lots of large and small boulders strewn about.
As they headed across the open cavern, they both noted something obscuring their view of the opening where the shaft of light was streaming in. They discovered a rectangular section of rock in the exact center of the chamber. Naylon stopped and played his light over it. Its surface was perfectly smooth, looked like highly polished reddish-black granite and had a two-meter diameter cylindrical hole drilled completely through it. Naylon was immediately intrigued.
Tann was instantly curious about the tunnel, too. He approached it from the other end and felt the interior as he played his light inside it. Naylon was at the other end, still inspecting the shiny outer surface. Tann continued on through the tunnel and reached the middle. His light beam reflected and scattered off some sort of barrier that seemed to be draped across the entire diameter of the tunnel. Tann reached his hand out but felt nothing. He decided it was merely an optical illusion caused by the highly polished interior surface. He continued on and reached Naylon seconds later.
Naylon seemed startled. “How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“I didn’t see you coming through there.”
“The middle of the tunnel is weird,” Tann told him, shaking his head.
“What do you mean weird?” Naylon shone his lantern into it. The beam seemed to scatter and reflect from the dead center. “That is odd,” he murmured. “This is certainly not natural. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make this thing.”
Tann heard him but had his light aimed several meters away. He had seen something glinting a few meters away and went to investigate. Moments later he emitted an ear piercing shriek.
Naylon whirled around. Tann’s light beam was moving all around and he was rolling over on the dirt floor. It appeared he had tripped and fallen over something. He stood back up and dusted himself off as quickly as he could. His breath was ragged and he sounded terrified as he kept saying ‘Uh! Uh!’. He continued to dust his pant legs off as if he were covered with stinging burynits, which were common on Andakar’s southern beaches.
“What happened?” Naylon asked in alarm as he made his way toward the boy.
“Th-there! That-that thing!” Tann replied. He aimed his lantern onto the eye sockets of a skull staring at him.
Startled, Naylon played his light beam on the body, too. His first reaction was one of complete and utter denial. The skull staring out into the blackness of the cavern was slumped against a rock. It was attached to a body, a body that didn’t look at all human. It was clearly clothed, albeit the clothing was terribly faded and obviously very old. But what was worse was the implication of what he was looking at. It was completely impossible. Nothing like this had ever been discovered in the entire history of humanity. His mind and his eyes continued to war with an undeniable truth. He was looking at what was clearly a dead alien creature.
Tann’s initial fright had given way to intense curiosity as he calmed down. He got closer to the alien body and widened the light beam.
Naylon had already dropped his pack and was pulling out another light source. He wanted a lot more light now that he realized what they were observing. “Th-this is incredible!” was all he could say. He activated his neural implant in an attempt to contact Darreth. He tried three times before giving up. There was just too much solid rock between them. All over Andakar there were transmission towers and repeaters everywhere for just that reason. The internal power source was simply too weak to penetrate solid rock. All he had to rely on here was the energy generated by the nanowires implanted into his right arm. Here, the weak impulse simply wasn’t capable of generating enough power to penetrate a hundred meters of solid rock.
“Aliens? On Rylerra?” Tann said in disbelief. “But we’ve never seen any of their cities.”
“I wouldn’t believe it myself unless I was standing right here,” Naylon told him.
Both of them took detailed mental notes of the dead being. Tann’s fright had been because of the tightened skin sunken inside its eye sockets. It made the oversized orbits look ghastly. One was completely closed. The other was slightly opened, which seemed due to the thick eyelid having shrunk more than the other one. The alien appeared to be taller than most humans. It was clearly clothed. A one-piece uniform covered most of the body. Here and there, parts of it had torn to reveal clear white bone and taut grayish skin or hide underneath. It was difficult to tell much of the being’s features since so much of it was covered. But one thing was evident. It had two sets of legs. One set was clearly the ones it used the most. That was because it had boots covering the long thin feet. The other set was higher on the hips and shorter. They were terribly shriveled but it was easy to tell they were appendages. It didn’t look to Naylon like the being could have easily used them if it stood upright. He wondered if it had crawled instead. But then he wasn’t sure since the being’s clothing and its position, slumped backward against the cavern wall, indicated that it walked upright. It clearly had hands at the ends of arms, which were as long as a man’s, complete with six fingers in a radial pattern. There was no obvious thumb. The head was the most interesting since it was uncovered. There was no hair. It had a high protruding brow line, which ran in a circle around its entire head. The alien looked reptilian, but not. It looked human in a way too, but perhaps only because it was clothed. The long thin feet made it seem as though it couldn’t possibly stand erect too easily.
Naylon touched the material of the alien’s clothing, wondering what it was made of. That’s when he found the hole. He discovered the hide had been penetrated, too.
“Look at this, Tann. He was shot.”
Tann looked closely. “Wow! Do you think he was in a battle? Maybe there are others!” He stood up and shone his flashlight all around as he walked the expanse of the cavern. His effort was rewarded a moment later. “Over here!” came Tann’s excited voice.
Five meters away, slumped on its side, was another of the alien creatures. He was dressed the same way. The cavern had also preserved this one, too. Naylon looked for signs of a bullet hole. He quickly found one. From the look of the neat circular hole in the alien’s clothing, Naylon concluded it had also been shot with some sort of projectile weapon.
“Definitely some sort of shootout took place in here. But what’s more important is who they were. There have never been any reports of a civilization on any planet in all of explored space. It’s been assumed that we’re totally alone. And now this,” Naylon said in both a perplexed yet thrilled tone.
“Hey, here’s another one!” Tann found the third body laying some distance from the other two. The alien was clutching a bag. Tann carefully tried to lift it from the alien’s hand. It disintegrated as he did so. A metallic clinking sound greeted his ears. Out spilled a fist-sized disc-shaped object. He picked it up and inspected it. The object looked as if it had been fashioned yesterday. It had the oddest red and orange iridescence to it that made it seem to glow. “Wow, look at this,�
� Tann told Naylon as he approached.
Naylon took the object, inspecting it closely.
“Think it’s money?” Tann asked.
“Maybe. I could have been worth dying for. Who knows?”
“If they died for money,” Tann mused, “I don’t see why he still has it. You’d think their pursuers would have taken off with the loot. There might be more bags of this stuff around. Let’s look.”
“Good idea.” Naylon placed the disc in his thigh pocket and snapped it shut.
They scanned the rest of the area, finding no more sacks of the objects. Finally though, Tann found another one lying under the mummified hand of one of the other aliens. He carefully pulled it from the dusty cavern floor, taking care not to touch the body. They both examined it, looking for possible clues. It too looked like it had just recently been fashioned.
“Looks like these were important enough to die for. Maybe they were money after all. Put it in your pack,” Naylon told Tann.
Tann retrieved his pack, placed it into one of the zipper compartments, then swung the pack over his shoulder.
They went to the hollowed out cylinder in the center of the chamber again and inspected it in more detail. It was as if a laser had bored a perfect cylinder out of the stone and polished the inside surface. Maybe the aliens made this, Naylon thought. What was most mysterious about it was that no matter what angle they aimed their lanterns the light beams seemed to hit a wall of what Naylon could only describe as static in the dead center of the cylinder.
He decided to walk through the tunnel this time. Tann followed closely behind him. As soon as they reached the center, they both felt as if they had just been spun in an extremely fast loop-de-loop. The length of the cylinder was two and a half meters long. They swiftly made their way to the other side in less than a second.
Tann almost stepped on Naylon’s heels as he tried to get past him. He went to the ground onto his knees, breathing heavily. He felt he might vomit again. Naylon was having a hell of a time keeping upright as well. In the same moment that Tann went to his knees, Naylon shot his hand out to the side of the smooth rock surface to hold himself up. Within seconds though, they were both past the sensation, looking at each other with their lanterns pointed at each other’s faces.
The Rylerran Gateway Page 14