by Donald Swan
Nick fell on his ass as the craft bolted out of the hangar. “Damn, someone’s in a hurry!”
He didn’t know the thing could accelerate like that. He had never seen Arya in this much of a hurry before, either. Not that he minded. He was anxious to get to the vault, as well. The data from the probe could shed some light on the mystery he’d been mulling over. How did that probe end up two thousand years in the past? And the patch? What did a burnt patch mean? His heart beat faster just thinking about it.
“Karg, I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh-oh, Nick’s been thinking again,” Karg joked.
“No really. Don’t you wonder about the possible paradoxes? I mean, what if I destroy my patch right now? That would mean that it couldn’t make it into the past. And if it wasn’t in the past, there wouldn’t be any record of it in the archives. And what if I just took a torch and made a hole in it? Would the picture suddenly show a patch with a hole in it? What if I replace the patch with one that said Nick? Would it then be the Prophecy of Nick? How would we even know if things were originally different and we’ve already changed it, changing the past to the way it is now?”
Arya looked over her shoulder at Karg. “Have you been letting him have too much gorban juice again?”
“Hey, this kind of thing bothers me. Doesn’t it bother you?” Nick questioned.
“Don’t make me come back there!” Arya announced sternly, without so much as a glance. She sounded like a mother scolding her unruly children.
“Are we there yet?” Nick asked grinning. The whole conversation, and Arya’s demeanor, was reminiscent of a particular summer vacation he’d had with his parents and sister. He hated long, boring drives. Just the thought of that day on the road made his rear sore. He could almost feel the sting from the whipping he had received when his father had had enough of their sibling bickering and pulled the car over at the rest stop. He swore he could feel welts starting to form on his butt.
“Not a good thought right now,” he mused to himself.
“What was that?” Arya said from the pilot’s seat.
“Nothing,” Nick answered.
Nick wished they could have set out from orbit. It would have made their trip shorter. But it made more sense to keep the Ashok some distance away to avoid alerting anyone to their presence. The last thing they needed was unwelcome company following them down to the planet.
He looked out of the cockpit window at the clouds rushing by, trying to get his mind off his painful youth. This planet had one heck of a thick cloud layer. He wondered if they would ever break through it. Time passed as he stared at the water vapor sporadically blowing by as they sped downward.
A collision warning chattered from the console, rousing the crew from their lethargic state. Arya watched as the ground appeared on the holo-display, though they still couldn’t see anything through the cockpit window in the planet’s soupy atmosphere. Darker colors eventually began to emerge through pockets in the clouds, revealing small glimpses of a lush landscape on the world below. As the transport cleared the thick cloud layer, Arya pulled the craft out of its dive and flew toward the location of the secret vault. Hopefully, the Admiral’s data was correct and no one had beaten them to it.
An ever shortening cycle of beeps emanated from the holo-display, indicating that they were closing in on their target. Arya scanned the area. It would be good to know what sort of local inhabitants were around. “I’m not picking up any signs of technology. Just a wide array of lower life-forms. Although, the minerals present in the rock formations seem to be blocking the scans. Hard to say what could be under ground.”
From the view outside Nick’s window, the planet looked like a dense jungle. Surprisingly similar to the small pockets of protected rainforest still left in the Amazon on Earth. Mountain ranges whizzed by, their peaks shrouded in clouds. Even the lower elevations appeared to be enveloped in thick fog. Pretty, from what he could see of it, but no doubt treacherous and difficult to traverse.
A marker showing their destination popped up on the holo-display, visually identifying their landing zone ahead. Arya guided the ship along its course until they were almost directly over the top of the landing area. The quick deceleration was felt in every inch of Nick’s body as the transport came to a screeching halt. Then the ship descended into the thick fog, Arya deftly avoiding the sloping terrain and tall tree line. Nick pressed his face up against the window to peer down at the landing zone, ever watchful for anything of concern.
The splat of an object against the window made Nick jolt backwards so hard he almost fell into Karg’s lap. A six legged, frog-like creature clung to the outside of the window, right where Nick’s face had been. It was an odd sort of creature with reddish colored splotches and a prehensile tail.
“Shit. That scared the hell out of me.” Nick wiped at his face as if he could feel the creature’s paws on his cheeks. Back in the Rain Forest of Earth, bright colors usually meant a frog was poisonous. He wondered if this planet would yield similar dangers.
Nick swallowed hard. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of giant, alien snakes. He hadn’t even thought of that possibility until now. Snakes were okay; he even kind of liked them, as long as they weren’t giant, poisonous monsters waiting to squeeze the life out of him.
“Lord knows what deadly creatures could be lurking in that alien jungle,” he muttered.
Arya set the ship down on a small, fairly flat, rocky patch on the forest floor. She powered down and then sat for a moment staring out of the forward cockpit window at the thick, misty jungle ahead. She didn’t appear to be in a hurry to go anywhere now. The foreboding task of getting through the thick underbrush was no doubt the reason.
“Okay.” She sighed. “I calculate our destination is a short distance in that direction, but we better be prepared in case we run into more than we bargained for. I want you two fully outfitted.”
Nick grinned as he watched her. Battle weary as she was, she would carry out this task with dignity and bravery. She was starting to sound more like Argos every day. Maybe it came with the job. Maybe it was the need to always be prepared to protect your crew. In any case, she was a natural born leader. Just like Argos had said.
Karg stuck a heavy backpack in Nick’s face. Nick peeked over the bag at Karg as he grabbed the straps. “Thanks, man.”
Karg let go of the pack. The weight of it caught Nick off guard and pulled him off balance. He regained his footing with difficulty and eventually managed to get the bag flung over his shoulders. As he fastened the clip, he couldn’t help feeling like he was chaining himself to a lead weight.
“Shouldn’t you guys have super futuristic lightweight gear? What the hell is in this thing? The backpacking gear on my planet is a third the weight of this.”
Karg stood loading the biggest rifle Nick had ever seen. “Forty clips of ammo, three days of rations, a sleeping bag, water purifier, extra clothing, medical kit, um…a spare pulse pistol, rescue beacon, five plasma grenades. I never go anywhere without plasma grenades. Let’s see…what am I missing?” Karg shrugged. “A variety of other survival gear.”
“Ropes, pulleys and other climbing gear, too,” Arya added.
“Don’t you think we’ve over packed?” Nick asked, looking at Arya. “Maybe we should include the kitchen sink.”
She just gave him that momma-knows-best look.
Nick followed her to the door. “Yeah, right. Better to be prepared, I always say.” The words grunted out under the weight of the pack.
The transport’s door swung down into the mist, landing with a loud clank against the rocky outcropping on which the ship was perched. Nearby in the misty brush, more than one creature stirred from the sound of the door hitting rock. Arya paused and glanced into the woods toward the rustling bushes. When nothing came rushing out at them, she pulled out her PDU and fearlessly walked down the ramp, swinging the device left and right to pinpoint the location of the vault.
“This way.�
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Nick strained to hear over the background roar of the abundant forest creatures. Birds? Frogs? Whatever they were, it wasn’t unlike the constant noise of the Amazon. Nick looked up as they passed an immense tree. More of a tree fern than a tree, really. The thing towered over them, its trunk disappearing into the misty fog above. He glanced back down just in time to see Karg vanish in a waft of fog. Crap. He trotted forward through the soup and almost ran his nose into Karg’s backpack. A horrid smell quickly permeated his nostrils. It smelled like….
“What the hell is that? Karg, you’re not having stomach issues again, are you?” A look at the ground revealed the source. Karg’s foot was square in the middle of a large pile of dark, messy dung. “Oh, crap. Literally. Karg, you’re standing in sh—”
Karg swung one arm back and poked Nick in the chest with his massive finger, almost knocking the wind out of him. Nick opened his mouth again to say something when he realized the two were listening to something.
Ahead, Arya panned the scanner. “This dense vegetation is making it difficult to scan very far. For a moment I thought I saw—”
She abruptly spun around and brought her pistol to bear at Karg’s head. “Down!” she screamed, firing a burst of plasma rounds as Karg ducked. A large shadowy shape flew over Nick and through the mist toward Arya, meeting the stream of plasma from her pistol. An ear-piercing scream erupted from the beast, forcing Nick to cover his ears as he fell to the ground. Peering around Karg, he watched as Arya dove to the side to avoid the huge creature’s trajectory. It crashed to the ground and floundered in the wet leaves of the forest floor. Karg was on it in a second, firing several bursts into its head until he was certain the large beast was dead.
Karg let out a low, rumbling laugh. “That was fun.”
Between Karg poking him and that thing scaring the daylights out of him, Nick was struggling to breathe. “Don’t turn your back on it, Karg,” Nick huffed. “They always do that in the movies and it’s never a good thing.”
He shook his head as Karg ignored him and walked off. “Why do they always turn their back on the monster when they think it’s dead?” he muttered to himself.
He forced himself upright again and stared cautiously at the creature. Scaly skin, large claws, and big teeth. It looked surprisingly like a Velociraptor, only much, much bigger. It appeared to be very dead, but he wasn’t going to take any chances.
Karg washed his dung encrusted boot in a nearby shallow stream of water. Even he was having a problem dealing with the stink. “What is that thing, anyway?” he asked, as he peered over his shoulder at the huge animal sprawled on the ground.
Arya shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It’s a dinosaur. Or a cousin of one, by the looks of it,” Nick replied.
Arya gave him a puzzled look. “You have these things on your planet? It’s a wonder your species survived.”
“Well, no we….” He scrunched his eyes at her. “What’s that supposed to mean, a wonder we survived?” Nick paused, waiting for an apology that never came. “Never mind. These lived on my planet millions of years ago. We only know about them from fossil records. They kinda sorta predated us.”
“Oh, well, that explains it then,” Arya quipped back with a grin. “Come on, we need to get moving. There may be more of them nearby.”
Nick carefully stepped around the huge corpse, keeping his pistol aimed at its head as he went. The monster’s body faded into the fog as they made their way through the jungle. Nick couldn’t help but look back every few seconds to make sure it wasn’t following. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was playing dead. He’d watched too many creepy movies growing up. The monster always came back to life. Right when you least expected it.
“Hey, guys, why do I have the rear, anyway?”
The forest floor gave way to a bog of sorts. Nick’s boots squished and slid in the smelly mud as he pushed to keep up. Soaked and covered with mud, solid ground slowly emerged under his feet again as they trudged forward. They had finally come to another rocky outcropping where he could get a firm footing. A short distance ahead the blank stone face of a mountainside stared back at them.
The team approached the rocky vertical face and stopped. Nick looked left, then right, then up. Nothing but rock as far as he could see in the fog. “Now what?”
Arya adjusted the setting on her scanner, but it was no use. The rock resisted her scans. “The properties of this rock make it impossible to scan. But the coordinates are five hundred feet that way.” Arya motioned in the direction of the solid rock wall. “Inside this mountain.”
“Sounds like the perfect place to hide something. I bet we aren’t equipped to dig five hundred feet through solid rock,” Nick said to Karg, out of the side of his mouth. “Told you we should have brought more stuff.”
Arya turned and gave him a stiff glare and went back to fiddling with her PDU. Holding the scanner out in front of her, she stepped closer to the rock wall and brushed some of the vegetation aside with her free hand. She rubbed her fingers along the rock then stopped on an indentation. Using one finger, she outlined the small impression while examining it with the scanner.
“What do you make of this?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the screen of her PDU.
Nick walked over and peered closely at the small oval depression in the stone. He brushed some dirt out of the crevice with his fingers. It wasn’t exactly an oval. There were some indentations on either side of the top and a faint pattern carved into the main depression. Nick struggled to make out what he was looking at. It seemed familiar somehow, but why he wasn’t sure. Maybe if he could clean up the rock face a bit he could get a better look.
Arya held the scanner in front of the dent, flipping through different visual wavelengths. As she flipped to ultraviolet, a clearly defined image of what lay beneath the dirt encrusted surface emerged. Her eyes widened as she turned and stared at Nick.
One look at the image and Nick quickly holstered his pistol. He knew exactly what she was thinking. He reached up and pulled the amulet from under his shirt and held it out. The shape and design on the amulet matched perfectly. Pulling the necklace over his head, Nick held the amulet in front of the carved relief. With a nod from Arya, he pushed it into the indentation.
Vibrations rumbled at their feet as dirt fell from vertical grooves in the wall, just left of where they stood. A ten foot high, eight foot wide section of the rock face moved back several feet and then slowly slid into a pocket within the solid stone mountainside, revealing a dark passageway. The three leaned into the doorway to take a peek down the long and mysterious tunnel into the unknown.
“That’s so takei!” Arya voiced, her eyes glowing with wonder.
Nick looked over at her with his usual confused expression. “What the hell is takei?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s slang for…well, it kind of means….”
Karg interrupted, reading from the screen of his PDU. “Here it is. The forty-seventh edition of the Interstellar Dictionary defines takei as ‘practically perfect in every way.’ But you’d probably just say cool.”
“Cool,” Nick replied, nodding in agreement as he peered back into the depths of the black cavern. “I’ll take the rear,” he quickly spit out.
Arya raised her brow. “Now you want to be at the rear?” She continued scanning, but still couldn’t get any definitive readings. It was a most unusual rock formation. The crystalline matrix combined with its high metal content scattered the scanning beam, making it hard to determine where the passageway led.
She reached down, pulled out her pistol, and switched on its built-in light. “Lights,” she commanded.
The boys drew their weapons and flipped on their lights, glancing at each other nervously as they prepared to enter. Arya led the way, followed by Karg, with Nick bringing up the rear. Several yards into the black corridor, the stone door shut behind them considerably faster than it had opened.
“I knew it. I’m telling you, I knew that damn door was going to shut behind us,” Nick grumbled. “Hey, wait up.” Nick stumbled forward, trying to catch up to the silhouettes of his teammates as they slipped into the darkness in front of him.
Arya’s light fell onto a metal door ahead of them. Tri-tanium by the look of it, and damn solid. As they approached, much to their surprise, the door opened automatically. Beyond the door, a larger chamber loomed in the inky blackness. Oddly, the floor on the other side of the doorway was no longer stone, it was metal. Arya cautiously stepped inside. Recessed lighting in the ceiling gradually illuminated what lay in front of them. A rectangular metal room emerged from the darkness. The entire thing was built from solid tri-tanium, even the ceiling. They were in one big metal box. No markings, fixtures or furniture, except for a door at the far end and a control panel on the wall next to it. The team turned in circles looking for any sign of danger as they crept toward the door at the far end.
The door behind them sprang closed, the slamming sound echoing off the walls of the chamber like the loud roar of a stick of dynamite.
Nick spun around and stared at the door. “Damn! How stupid are we? Do we even have a plan for getting out of here?”
Arya ignored him as she examined the panel near the door. “Nick, bring the amulet here.”
Nick jogged over and handed the necklace to her. An indentation in the panel similar to the one outside caught his eye.
Arya pressed the amulet into the depression.
Nothing happened.
“Sket!” she hissed.
Hoping something had simply glitched, she removed the amulet and pushed it back into the indention again. Clanking sounds, like heavy gears grinding away in giant machinery echoed through the room.