by F P Adriani
Suddenly, I had another thought, “Well maybe it can protect itself…” because when I looked to my left, I spotted something, or more correctly, someone. Someone dead.
A body lay crushed beneath rubble. Even here there had been damage to the corridor, but not, seemingly, to the diamond sphere itself.
“Well, someone else has definitely been here before,” I said now, moving over to the body.
The others rushed up to me.
“How long ago, you think?” asked Tan toward no one in particular.
And no one responded; none of us seemed to have an answer for him.
To my nose, the body didn’t stink badly of death, yet some flesh still clung to the bones. The body probably wasn’t too old. It looked like it had been a man, but it was hard to say….
“Well, I wonder how this happened,” said Hu, frowning now.
But I was back to eyeing the wall images again. “I’m wondering about lots of things. Where did the Starminers go? Do they ever come back—have they been back since humans have been here? Does anyone agree with me that it’s…it’s almost like a garden here? A terrarium? Diamond. A terrarium that the Starminers created long ago.”
“Yeah, and we’re the weeds,” Tan said.
Another silence fell. My lips were trembling, at Tan.
Then Chuck said: “It could be art too—they create beauty with planets.”
“Created,” Hu said. “As Pia indicated, we don’t know what’s happened to them…. And we also don’t know what will happen to us.” Her mouth was a grim slash across her face. “Like everyone else, I’m awed by the beauty here, but we didn’t come here for only that. We’ve got to figure out what to do about this. I now see I can’t have my people camped out here for forever. We may have to let The Council take care of this place.”
“What!” I heard Jeremy say.
Hu sighed at him. “Do you have any better ideas? Don’t forget that Amy said there’s a danger of the planet cracking if this is disturbed. People are greedy. I’m sure someone would love to possess this giant diamond. But it seems that very possession would destroy the planet Diamond. We can’t let that happen.”
“Maybe we could just squelch the knowledge…” Tan said in an eager voice at first, but then his voice faded into the odd air as he seemed to realize his mistake. No one had to say “too late”; we all knew that was the case.
“Well, for now,” said Hu, “I’m filming as much as I can. If I decide to let the people of Diamond know about this and The Council won’t, we’ll need evidence.”
*
While Hu filmed, I read the walls—as much as I could “read” them when they were in another language. I could not believe that all these years of life on Diamond had been engineered—by someone else. All the structures and lifestyles and institutions humans had since engineered here—all of that meant nothing compared to the ability of Diamond’s creators to engineer planets.
In the notebooks Amy had said nothing about all this, understandably. But she must have known of it. In one of the books she did make a cryptic statement: “A diamond is the secret to Diamond.” When I’d read that, I’d thought it sounded, well, a little loony. But I should have known better: if nothing else, Amy Castano sounded very methodical and very objective in her actual science work. No wonder she’d discovered so much that others hadn’t.
I had no idea what her personal convictions had been; I still couldn’t figure out how allied she’d been with TNI and at which points she’d been allied with them during her research discoveries. Maybe I’d never know the answers to that.
But she’d ultimately found something extremely important. Ironically, that very finding was now a danger to Diamond; at the same time, had she never discovered this, at some future point humans might have agitated the three areas Amy had located, and that probably would have led to Diamond’s destruction….
No matter how many times I thought or said that idea, I still couldn’t figure out how Amy knew the three locations were so significant. In her research she’d never mentioned how she’d specifically determined this. So I assumed her opinion about the dangers was based on her calculations, the math of which I couldn’t understand. In her writings there had been something about “the missing force on Diamond is comparable to the missing mass in the Universe”—whatever that meant.
But if she’d never seen any damage to Diamond actually happen, and as far as I knew, none so far had happened, how could she know disturbing these areas would prove dangerous? For that matter, had our simply entering here endangered Diamond’s structure? And if it had, would we ever know it?
I had so many questions; I’d assumed that once we reached here, we would get so many answers. But it seemed we’d only found even more questions.
Hu had finally finished her filming and put her camera back into her pack. And now we all remained in the same general corridor area near the big diamond, when, really, we probably should have left by now. But it seemed that to everyone this was a once-in-a-lifetime event—at least it seemed that way to me, and seemingly to Tan too, who was speechless now.
He solemnly walked around the corridor looking at the panels; he stared up at the sphere, first on one side of the front of it, then on the other side, and then back again. But he never spoke.
Sighing now as she too stared up at the sphere, Hu finally said, “I think we should rest for a bit before we figure out what to do. We’re all burnt out. This trek has been hard on us.”
“And it’s about to get harder than hard,” a strange voice suddenly replied.
And when my head spun around toward the voice’s direction, I saw that the voice belonged to John.
*
He’d moved in behind us and he was now blocking our exit. Gray military fatigues covered his tall body. In one arm, the arm I hadn’t shot him in, he held a large laser-powered handgun. And he wasn’t alone; four more armed men stood around and behind him—including Cal. And they were all pointing their rifles, at us.
Fucking crap. My head spun to Tan, who stood about ten feet away from me. His eyes shot to mine then, and it seemed like he tried to frown. But then he looked too afraid to move much. That worried me—his fear. It seemed I had always been making him frightened, my actions, my safety. Poor Tan….
“So you found us,” Hu said. “And collected another of us.” Her eyes narrowed hard at Cal.
“Cal’s a smart guy. Outside, he couldn’t resist my offer of riches,” John said in a smooth voice, a smooth slither of a voice. It contained no inflections, no emotions, no nothings. It was the voice of a human snake.
His good arm motioned for us to back away from the sphere and move toward the walls more as he took steps down the corridor’s center toward the sphere.
“I actually wasn’t looking for you the whole way,” he turned and said to Hu now. “I was looking for this.” He waved his gun around the corridor. “But finding you here would have been ridiculously easy anyway. Everyone knows you can’t resist being a do-gooder.”
Hu appeared to be grinding her teeth behind her closed lips. John suddenly nodded at his men, and then they came around to each of us, feeling us up and removing our weapons.
Cal went up to Hu to frisk her, and I thought I saw a look pass between them…. At first I felt hopeful. Then I thought, No, please don’t risk our lives by trying anything yet.
Sweat covered the back of my neck…but Cal only walked away.
“I’d really like to know how you found this,” Hu practically spat at John, who then glanced back at where the sphere hovered.
He shrugged both his shoulders, including the bad one above his white arm sling. “I guess I can tell you more. What will it matter soon? You see, Princess, I have the map piece for here, and that Castano woman was foolish and didn’t cover her traveling tracks. Then when Ronin ran into you near The Grasslands, I knew we were on the right track following the woman’s past tracks. We’ve been waiting around these mountains today. And you led me right to this spot. Ma
ybe I should thank you.”
“You fool,” Hu said to him through shaking lips, looking as if she didn’t know what else to say. Apparently, she was talking based purely on emotion now.
“Dear Princess, I go where the most money is,” John said. “And you ain’t that place.”
“So, all along, you were a plant among me. A spy.”
“Something like that,” said John, his voice finally showing the first bit of emotion: smugness.
“You’re an embarrassment,” I now heard Chuck baritone-growl from behind me. I wanted to look at him, but I was afraid to take my eyes off the guns pointed at us; maybe I’d see an opening there….
“And you always were an idiot,” John said to his cousin. “That’s why you lost a body part.”
Hu spat now, “Easy to be a big mouth when you’ve got a gun pointed at someone.”
“Why so unfriendly, Princess? I don’t really have a complaint with you and my cousin.” He and his gun turned to me. “Now you—that’s a different story.”
My heart shot into my ears. My eyes were on the gun and my mind was on my imminent demise.
Then in my peripheral vision, I saw Tan take a step forward.
Now John said, his gun barrel traveling to Tan, “Ah-ah. Don’t move.” The big tip of his gun moved back toward me….
Hu spoke again. “You really think you should use a laser weapon in here? Have you any idea what might happen then? Look around you, on your right on the ground.”
He hesitated at first, then, sighing coldly, he finally did what she’d said; he walked over to the decaying corpse and kicked at it a bit with his gray boot. Then his good shoulder shrugged. “So? That doesn’t mean anything. But, just in case….” He stashed his weapon in his belt. He turned back to me, his green eyes assessing me. “Anyway, now that I’m thinking about it, your pal Ronin might want to finish this. Oh, didn’t you know? He’s out there guarding the cave’s entrance. I’m sure he’d like to take a final shot at you. So I’ll deal with you later. No rush. Right now, I’ve got better things to do.” He turned to the sphere.
But Hu wasn’t finished with him yet. “There’s something I’d like to know. Are you working for TNI? Did they hire you to do all this?”
He stopped moving and turned again. Slowly, he nodded at her; then he did one of his no-emotion shrugs. “Sure thing. They’re loaded. And I’m not. They knew the woman was up to something, found something big. They didn’t know where or what though. And now they don’t need to know about my discovery of her discovery. And if they ever do know, by the time that happens, I’ll be far away in another layer, enjoying the money I’ve made off the fruits of this cave.”
His eyes were on the dazzling sphere again. “Incredible, isn’t it? I had no idea this was here. But you did. I’m sure you have the notebooks because I never did get hold of them. They would have been nice. But they turned out unnecessary.”
“So what do you think you’ve found—you think you’re going to make off with that?” Hu’s head jerked up at the sphere. “How?”
John deliberately shook his blond head, as if at a child. “You silly woman.”
I watched Hu grit her teeth at the sexist jab. Now a person could probably call Hu a bunch of negative things, but silly wasn’t one of them. Silly made no sense there.
But never mind Hu: at the “silly” word, I thought the red-hot anger on Chuck’s face would pop his eyes from his head….
“Someone must have put that thing up there,” John continued, “so I’m sure it can be taken down.”
He shook his head over at one of his people, who moved to right behind him.
I could see what John was going to do, I could sense it. I had also thought of touching that seductive beautiful diamond sphere. I was sure we’d all thought of doing that, but we, at least, had known better.
I despised John, didn’t give a shit what might happen to him, but my alarm bells went off for the rest of us.
So now I shouted to John, “No! Don’t touch it—don’t do it!”
But he just ignored me and pushed forward to raise his arm and slide his palm very briefly against the sphere.
The sphere’s response was instantaneous: the many-colored facets each began to boil along the surface; round and round their insides swirled, in an angry-looking kaleidoscope too fast for the human eye to follow, until the colors burst from the sphere’s boundary, covering John and the other guy and knocking them back against the cave wall like paper dolls.
BAM their bodies went, as if they were the most insignificant bits of fluff in the Universe….
I had no time to philosophically ponder that further because two things happened almost simultaneously.
The first thing: a fight broke out when Cal suddenly slammed a big fist into the face of one of John’s guys while Chuck and Jeremy went after the other one. The two guys had been so stunned by John’s quick demise, they had been standing there mouth-agape staring.
It didn’t take long for Cal, Jeremy and Chuck to subdue the two, especially when Tan had picked up one of the weapons the two had dropped, which he now pointed at them.
Unfortunately, there was that second thing that happened: I felt a sudden huge jolt beneath our feet. The walls responded; they slowly began to tremble, the trembling apparently originating from the area right around the sphere.
A layer of powder fell from the ceiling; the floor seemed to tilt like liquid in a glass….
“Everyone get the fuck out of here!” I screamed now.
In a flurry of spastic arms and legs, we fled, only we couldn’t get out of the corridor so easily because the dust created by the shaking began filling the air. One of John’s guys quickly got crushed by a giant ceiling part. Cal, Jeremy and Hu took off. And Chuck and Tan kept running with the other guy in tow, but the corridor only rained more ceiling pieces.
One finally hit Chuck, on the head, and he fell down flat. Then the guy with Tan tripped over something and started getting buried in debris. Tan didn’t waste any time trying to save him; instead, he grabbed at Chuck repeatedly, but his big body looked heavy, immovable.
Now Tan began running toward me, but I yelled, “Just get out yourself!”
Then I heard a shout behind me: Hu. Apparently, at some point, she’d gotten left behind in the dust.
Now I shot back into it and found her half-lying on the floor with her leg wedged in the crack between two boulder-sized ceiling chunks. I gave a quick push at one but it wouldn’t budge.
“Tan!” I screamed now. “Come help me!”
Then Hu said, “No! Get out—please save Chuck! I’m jammed in here good—I can’t keep up with all this anymore. It’s finally over for me.”
“No it’s not!”
“But my bad leg’s stuck. I can’t pull my foot without agonizing pain….”
“Try to shift the rest of you back—I need more space.” I slid beside her, pushing at the boulder. I was strong and it seemed like the sphere’s proximity had given me even more strength. But I still could only barely move the damn boulder.
“Move some more—I can’t get enough leverage!” I said to her.
“But I can’t move anymore.”
Now I heard Tan coming near. “Move your ass, Arlene!” He ran right beside her and shoved his hands against the rock as I braced myself against the shaking wall and used one of my legs as a lever, wedging it between the boulder and the wall.
Hu finally really started struggling against the boulder. …And then I finally felt the thing slipping away.
“Take her out!” I shouted at Tan.
I ran for Chuck, and now I half-dragged half-carried his body through the shadowy corridor while ahead of me Tan pulled a badly limping Hu through. At one point, Chuck’s face began stirring, and I actually felt a moment of thankfulness for that. But he still couldn’t move the rest of his body, so I still had to pull him.
As we got closer to the entrance, I realized that part of the top had collapsed and the entrancewa
y had narrowed. If we didn’t move our asses….
We did move our asses and we all finally burst outside into the light.
Tan’s head turned back to the corridor, and he yelled at me fast now, “Get farther away from the opening!” as he ran away from it himself.
“What—” I started to say as I kept moving and pulling Chuck along.
And then I both saw and felt it: a giant rumbling shifting in the air—coming from the cave.
My head instinctively spun around, and now I saw a sharply growing light coming from inside. There was a fast increase in tone and along the spectrum, first red, then yellow, then green, then blue, and then finally the light turned white, and began shooting out the cave in a giant rush, as if a liquefied star had just been pumped from deep within Diamond.
“Holy shit!” I said, yanking Chuck along faster now till we’d both slipped farther down the slope. My eyes never left the intense beam. I watched as it spun off into the distance, angry and swirling, far away it shot, till it had disappeared somewhere within Diamond’s atmosphere.
“What the fuck was that!” I shouted.
“I don’t know!” Tan shouted back.
The rumbling of the ground subsided until I could no longer detect it.
“Are you all right!” I said to Tan now.
“Yes! Are you—” he began to say from somewhere across the slope. But then he’d sounded startled.
And now I saw why: Ronin. In all the cave excitement, we’d totally forgotten about him.
But here he was, not far from us, limping along unarmed, blood sliding down his pants as he tried to run away into the forest. Only Tan was on his heels, Tan with a gun was on his heels, and that gun was pointed at Ronin.
I’d never seen such a fast- and furious-looking Tan, but on others I had seen that agitated posture too many times: there was murder in it.
“No!” I shouted now, spit flying out my mouth. “Don’t kill him, Tan!” But Tan only kept moving.
Chuck’s big body slipped away from me and I ran for Tan just as he tackled Ronin. Tan must have heard me because he’d dropped the gun and was using his fists on Ronin now, who bad leg and all, was fighting back.