“A holo display,” Sedge said. “Except everything looks so solid. And everyone.” He pointed at a worker walking past them in a protective suit. The figure did not glance over. None of the holo-workers showed any awareness toward the outsiders in their midst—or the rock pile in the middle of the craft they were working on.
Even though finding a ship had been Kalish’s quest, she found herself staring at the people—at the aliens.
They had hair that ranged from white to silver, though some had much more vibrant colors such as pinks and greens, making her wonder if these people had experimented with dyes, the same as humans. Their skin ranged from bronze to black, with the pores more evident than on a normal person. On those workers with sleeveless shirts, a thin layer of fur was visible, running up the backs of their arms. There were men and women, with figures not unlike humans’, though the aliens were taller and leaner on average, with ropy muscles and barrel chests. Some of them were more ambiguous with androgynous features. A third gender? Or simply a blurring of the lines?
A squawk of distress came from the other side of the hangar, from behind the rock pile and the ship.
“You all right, Tick?” Sedge called. Had that been Tick? It had almost sounded like a feminine cry.
“He’s fine,” Striker said. “Just swallowed his gum. Such a shame. He’d barely popped that in.”
“You can touch them,” Tick said.
Since Kalish could not see him through the rocks and ship, she was not certain what he meant. “The people?” she guessed.
“Them. The ship. Everything. Your hand doesn’t go through like with a holodisplay.”
“Are we sure they’re not really here?” Striker asked.
“If they were, that one would have slapped you for leering at her breasts,” Tick said, recovering some of his equanimity.
“I wasn’t looking at her breasts. I was looking at her fur. And wondering where all it goes.”
Kalish barely heard them. She walked past two workers who were soldering a seam on the ship and stretched out her hand toward the underbelly of the hull. Cool, smooth metal met her fingers.
“Amazing,” she breathed.
Even though she knew it was a holodisplay and they could not take it with them, giddiness filled her at the realization that she was touching something that aliens had built thousands of years earlier. She did not think anyone had seen pictures of the ancient race before either, so just seeing the people working was an amazing find.
“I wonder if you can climb on it, look inside,” she said.
“That’s an affirmative.” Tick’s voice came from somewhere above her.
Kalish backed up until she could see him. He had found a spot to climb atop the hull and now stood more than forty feet above her head. It was another thirty or forty feet to the top of the hangar, most of which lay peeled open, thanks to the rock fall, and in spots the ship rose nearly that high. She wondered how the aliens got their craft out once they finished building them. Some large parts and machinery could fit through the large doors at the front, but a ship this size certainly could not roll out. She did not see wheels on it anyway. Just landing struts.
“Can you look inside?” she asked curiously, tempted to climb up herself.
“I can check.”
“What happens if Sedge turns off the holo while you’re up there?” Striker asked.
“Uhm, I guess I fall,” Tick said.
“And land on some of those rocks down there. You could get your balls smashed into a thousand pieces.”
“A risk I accept every time I go on a mission with you.”
Kalish jogged past a couple of workers carrying another panel over and joined Sedge again. She wanted to climb up onto the ship, too, especially if it might be possible to look around inside, but she had to know: “Is there any chance of getting the computer that’s projecting that—” she glanced around, having no idea where the projector might be or how the solid display was being made, “—out of the wall and onto my ship? If everything it’s showing us is accurate, this could be all we need to build a duplicate of one of their ships.”
She bounced on her toes. As much as she had been in love with the idea of flying out with a ship in tow, obtaining the schematics would be more efficient. They wouldn’t need the tractor beam or to try and figure out how to slip such a cargo past the orbiting Fleet ships. A computer that she could tuck into one of the hidden storage compartments on the Divining Rod would do just as well. They might even be able to figure out how to copy the schematics, so she could give Cometrunner what he wanted and keep a version for herself.
“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” Sedge said. “There are only two more runes I can press though, and I’ve translated them.” He waved his tablet, then pointed. “This one says security and that one says roof. I don’t think we want to risk calling security.”
“No, let’s skip that one.”
Even if they had not seen any of those killer robots during their search of the hangars, that did not mean they were not hidden away somewhere. They hadn’t seen them on the refinery platform either, not until they had come striding out of the darkness with weapons blazing.
“That one says roof,” Kalish said. “Maybe they were able to retract the roofs on the hangars, so the ships could fly out when completed. I was just thinking that the doors weren’t big enough.”
Sedge nodded. “Maybe so.”
He rapped a knuckle against the wall. The material clanked, sounding thin, much like the door.
“If there’s a computer in here, it’s a small one.” Sedge turned, eyeing the chamber. “More likely it’s somewhere else and this is simply an access panel.”
“All right. Where else? We’ve looked at everything in this hangar. All of the hangars.”
“Kalish, come look at this.” Her mother waved from back near the entrance.
Kalish jogged down the long hangar toward her, aware of Tick and now Striker as well clambering around atop the ship. Apparently, Striker had gotten over the worry of falling and ball-smashing.
“The rocks are messing with the holo,” Tick called down. “It looks like there’s a big hatch or maybe cargo bay doors up here, but the rock is just... there, where the rest of it should be.”
“Can you move the rocks?” Kalish asked.
“Uh, they look like they weigh a few tons each.”
“What’s that?” Striker ambled over and patted a boulder. “A job for the Chief of Boom?”
“An explosion in here may cause another rock fall.” Tick pointed at the cavern ceiling high above. Though it disappeared into darkness, Kalish had no trouble imagining the mountain on top of them.
“Maybe there’s another hatch on the bottom,” she said. It would make sense that there be a way to access the ship from the ground. “I’ll look in a second.”
Her mother had not moved. She was standing and pointing along the wall, toward a corner that had been hidden from Kalish’s view before. A trapdoor that she was certain had not been there before stood open, with a worker sticking halfway out of it, gesticulating to another worker standing on the ground next to him.
“Sedge.” Kalish spun around so quickly, her braids of hair batted at her face. “It looks like there’s a basement. Maybe the computer is down there.”
Her mother’s lip thinned, but she did not say anything about Kalish calling him over. When she found some time, she would have to explain Sedge’s story, enough to make her mother understand that he was a good man. But not now. She couldn’t wait for Sedge to reach her. She ran to the trapdoor, afraid the workers would finish, and it would disappear back into the floor. The man who had been standing on a ladder or whatever had held him up had already disappeared, and the second worker was heading back toward the ship.
When Kalish reached the edge, she could see into what appeared to be a tool shop. It probably was not a true basement that spanned the length of the hangar, but it might be what they needed. She pushed the toe
of her boot toward the opening, not sure whether it would lower down or hit the floor. It thumped against solid ground. She slumped with disappointment.
“What is it?” Sedge asked as he approached. His tablet was still out, a display open over his palm. He was recording the scene, she realized.
“That’s a good idea.” Maybe she should be trying harder to find a way into the ship, so she could record the engine room, in case they were not able to find the computer or a schematic to take with them.
Sedge tapped the “opening” as she had done, his boot not going through either. “It must be here somewhere. Everything we’re seeing seems to be a part of events that actually happened. Maybe this is even an instructional video, the equivalent of a Fleet field manual that’s supposed to teach a new recruit how to do his job.”
Kalish goggled at that notion. “Look around. Maybe there are some runes on the floor that—”
A loud groan came from above the hangar, from within the rocks high overhead. Kalish stumbled back, pressing her back to the wall. Was another rockfall coming?
The workers shouted to each other, and people hopped off the craft, ran out from underneath it, and pushed tools and machines to the walls. Clanks and screeches came from above, this time from the roof of the hangar rather than the rocks. The warped ceiling, with its gaping holes and dangling metal pieces, split open down the center.
“Is that a holo or is that really happening?” Kalish asked.
“I can’t tell,” Sedge said, then punctuated the sentence with a sneeze.
“What’s going on?” Tick called down.
“You better get off of there.” Sedge waved at the workers. “They’re all running for the door.”
The people weren’t running exactly. Though Kalish could not understand their words or decipher their hand signals and gestures, she had the feeling they felt happy. Accomplished. A day’s work well done?
The hangar ceiling finished opening, the panels disappearing, or perhaps folding down on the outsides of the walls. More groans came from the rocks. Kalish turned her flashlight in that direction, but her beam barely reached the cavern ceiling. The hangar lights disappeared, leaving them in darkness again, aside from lamps blinking on the front and rear of the ship. A hum reverberated through the floor of the hangar.
“Is that part of the holodisplay?” Sedge wondered, staring down at his feet. “It’s all so real.”
A slash of light came from the ceiling of the cavern. Sunlight.
Kalish stared up at it, half-blinded but unable to look away. “That’s brilliant. I was wondering how they could get ships out through that tunnel, but it looks like they didn’t. How close are we to the surface? I wouldn’t have even guessed, but that must be a door, a way out.”
She could tell the light was coming down through a large tunnel, but not how far up it extended. Was that a hint of the sky up there?
“Kalish, what are you doing in there?” came Tia’s voice over the comm.
“You can see that too?” Kalish asked. “From out there?”
“Well, obviously. It’s pretty hard to miss.”
Sedge frowned down at his tablet. “I’m not entirely positive that’s part of the program.”
“What do you mean?”
“My sensor thinks there’s actually an opening there.”
The workers had left the building, or at least seemed to do so. Since Tia had not mentioned a squad of aliens trotting down the beach, Kalish guessed that the holodisplay ended at the door. But what of the cavern ceiling?
The landing struts on the spaceship were sucked into the hull. For a moment, it hovered above the floor, but then it rose up, as if it were a fully constructed craft, ready to shoot up into orbit.
Striker and Tick had found their way down, and they ran over to join Kalish and Sedge.
“I can get sensor readings from the planet’s surface now,” Tia said.
Sedge nodded grimly. “There’s actually a door there, and it’s actually open.” He said it as if he had been condemned to death.
Kalish didn’t understand the reason for his tone. Seeing all of this was amazing, though she lamented that she had not found a way into the ship to record the engine room and everything else inside. The ship was lifting higher now, rising above the open roof of the hangar.
“I just got a couple of old messages from the captain,” Sedge said. “From yesterday. From after we lost contact with him.”
“Is the ship all right?”
“More importantly,” Striker asked, “is the Fleet and everybody else up on the planet going to know we’re here now that the giant door to the outside is open?”
His words hit Kalish like a mallet to the gut. Oh. That was why Sedge looked worried.
“I’m hoping that closes again soon,” Sedge said, “but even if it does, we’re not far from the mining compound. Someone’s probably going to have noticed that.”
A shadow fell across the hangar again as the alien ship moved under the tunnel, blocking the shaft of sunlight. It rose upward, but as soon as it crossed into the passage, it faded from existence. The ship disappeared, and so did all of the machinery and tools. The trapdoor and the tool room under Kalish’s foot winked out as well, leaving her team alone in the empty rock-filled hangar. Everything was as it had been when they had first walked in, except for the sunlight still streaming down through that door.
“Is that going to close soon?” Tick asked. “I like some sun on my face as much as the next feller, but that’s making me feel a mite vulnerable.”
“Kalish?” Tia said. “I’m able to pick up comm chatter. At first, I thought it was coming from orbit, and there may be some of that too, but it sounds like there are Fleet ships nearby, maybe at that mining complex. We’re only a few miles from it now, aren’t we?”
Kalish swallowed. “Yes.”
“Their transmissions are encrypted, but the people talking seem real excited about something.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Kalish clenched her fist. She was not ready to go—damn it, all she had was a couple of nuts and bolts in her pocket so far—but they might not have any choice.
13
Sedge was already jogging back to the panel on the wall when Kalish pointed at the cavern ceiling and said, “We need that closed, please.” Even though she was polite, her voice sounded strained.
He understood. That exit might be useful when they were ready to go, but they hadn’t yet found anything that they could take with them.
“I know,” he said. “I’ll try to close it.”
As soon as he reached the wall, he pressed the roof symbol he had touched earlier. A resounding ker-thud came from high above. He could not see the cavern opening from his spot in the corner, but he watched the still-open ceiling of the hangar, waiting for the slash of sunlight to narrow. The noise came a couple more times, followed by a distressed grinding.
“Oh, sure. Their killer robots work perfectly after ten thousand years, but the door sticks?”
He pressed the rune a few more times, but the tunnel remained open, sunlight streaming down into the chamber.
“Striker, Tick,” came Kalish’s voice from across the hangar, oddly muffled, as if she had her head in a box. “I need your muscles.”
Sedge returned to that side of the building, hoping she had found something and that it could be removed quickly. Striker was climbing into a hole—the entrance the trapdoor in the holodisplay had shown. They had found the actual one, exactly where the recording had shown it.
Curious, Sedge ran to join them, but a beep came from his comm-patch, and he slowed down to answer it.
“Thomlin here.”
“Sedge, this is Val. Are you down in that hole?”
“Yes. Uh, who all knows about the hole? Are you all right? Is Thatcher?”
“Who doesn’t know about it? It just opened up on a mountainside right above the desert floor where two Fleet heavy cruisers are landed.”
Sedge groaned and peered
into the hole. “If we want to have any hope of escaping, we need to go now,” he told Kalish, Striker, and Tick, who were trying to lever a sleek gray cylinder out of a storage cubicle in the wall. It reminded Sedge of a torpedo, but thicker.
“Tell my mom to get the hand tractor,” Kalish ordered. “I don’t know if this is the engine, but it definitely looks like something important. That rune that means energy is written on the side.”
“Hand tractor?” Val asked. “Sedge, you need to get out of there now. There’s no time to pack the luggage. And be careful coming out. There are ships heading over to look inside. Thatcher is harrying them, but they’ve figured out he isn’t striking to kill, and they’re mostly ignoring us. Sedge, we can’t get in a firefight with Fleet over your girlfriend.”
“I know that. We’re hurrying.” Sedge relayed Kalish’s request, then climbed down the ladder, so he could help the others. “Can’t the Albatross come down and try to distract them again? Maybe that bio-agent could be used in the open air.” Not that he wanted the Divining Rod to fly out through a corrosive miasma, but if it would bother the Fleet ships, it would be worth it.
“We don’t know where the Albatross is,” Val said. “We still can’t raise them on the comm, and the only thing we see in orbit is three more Fleet ships. This is way more than we signed on to handle.”
“I know, I know. What happened out in the cavern? Have we... committed any crimes against the military that would be indefensible?”
“I hope not. I don’t know. Gregor led those fighters on a high-speed chase through the caverns, and most of them crashed of their own accord. I blew a new exit in the side of the mountain, thinking we might slip out unnoticed. Hah. Fleet’s all over out here.”
“Understood,” Sedge said. A small green box affixed to a corner next to a wall of tools caught his eye.
Striker, Tick, and Kalish were shoving their cylinder over to the trapdoor. It must have been too heavy even for the three of them to lift. When Kalish’s mother appeared and tossed down a hand tractor, Sedge trusted they could handle the burden themselves. He slid his hands over the box, searching for a way to detach it. Aside from the tools, there wasn’t much else in the room, besides another of those cylinders, also in a cubicle that had been designed to fit it. Maybe the box held the computer. If, like he suspected, the program inside was a training aid, something meant to teach those people how to construct a spaceship from scratch, then it could be more valuable than any other artifact they might find.
Mandrake Company- The Complete Series Page 103