by Rick Jones
Anu’s eyes, a startling liquid blue which could be seen from across the room, remained fixed on the team.
“We need to move,” Demir finally said. “We need to find the support system that’s keeping these things alive. And the only way out is through there.” He pointed to the furthest region of the room, to a bullet-shaped archway. As far as he was concerned it was unchartered territory. But it was the only way out. So they moved forward.
As they did the eyes of Anu continued to follow them.
How eerie it was, Alyssa considered, that a holographic image could bear so much life.
How eerie, indeed.
CHAPTER FIFTY
As they passed beneath the archway and began to ascend a corkscrewing incline, they could hear a waspy hum similar to that when they first entered the chamber.
Savage held up a hand in warning, the team stopping in their tracks. “You hear that?”
Demir stepped forward. “Yeah . . . I do.”
“It’s exactly like the sounds we heard down below. It’s the sound of generators,” said Savage.
Demir concurred with a simple nod of his chin.
As they took the spiraling incline, the hum grew louder but remained a steady drone that did not vacillate in pitch or tone, peaks or valleys—just a flat-line measure.
At the top of the incline they could feel a cool breeze sweep through the air, a cooling system.
They immediately adjusted their shoulder lamps and moved into a vast chamber cast in darkness that was complete and absolute. The lamps could only penetrate as far as forty feet now that their numbers were vastly reduced.
As they moved forward, silhouetted images began to take shape. They were perfectly round and appeared elevated above the floor without any support to keep them aloft, the shapes appearing to float. But as they neared the vessels, beams of light lit upon orbs that were tethered by what appeared to be feeding tubes coming down from a stone ceiling that was the color of desert sand. The tubes pulsated like the beat of a heart as a green viscous fluid passed through the tubing like the flow of blood into the sphere.
As they neared the orbs they could see the fluid coursing through them in random patterns like amniotic fluid in constant motion, the liquid always moving.
The first thought that struck Savage and Alyssa was the energy source discovered in the ship beneath the Yucatan Peninsula on the previous mission: the sphere acted as the energy source that granted life to the creatures within.
These orbs were no different, they concluded. But there were thousands of them, the rows stretching deep until they finally disappeared into distant shadows. There was one for each life force, each sphere an umbilical tie to the inhabitants within the stasis bins on the level below.
“This is it,” said Demir.
“But there’re thousands,” stated Hillary.
Demir held up the point of his knife and took a tentative steps toward the first orb. When he was about ten feet away the humming stopped. And so did he, the man becoming still.
They all waited in silence, listening.
Nothing.
So Demir took another step.
Still nothing.
When Demir was an arm’s length away he reached out and touched the sphere. It was body-warm to the touch, soft and gelatinous; the membrane appearing as fragile as the skin of a balloon.
Suddenly Demir’s arm came across in a horizontal arc, the blade of the knife slicing neatly across the bladder, tearing it, the green viscous fluid splashing down against the floor and splattering the Turk’s uniform, the green gel clinging to his pants and boots.
He looked at the bladder which was no longer spherical, but a loose hanging mass that hung like a wet blanket hanging from a hook.
Demir stepped back and looked down the rows until the spheres disappeared into darkness. “One down,” he said, allowing the knife to roll over in his hand. And thousands more to go. But to do it this way, he realized, was time consuming. There had to be a central unit governing the source somewhere.
Savage took up beside Demir as well as Alyssa, both wondering what the consequences were by slicing the bladder.
While it claimed the life of one, no one realized that they had also awakened sleeping giants.
#
The moment the sphere was destroyed, a male within the first stasis bin on the level below became animated, his arms flailing about like a man drowning, his hands seeking the purchase of something not there with the exception of the life-sustaining hose that no longer provided the nutrition or energy to maintain his welfare. He grabbed at the hose, the umbilical tube, and pulled it free from his mouth and throat, the male now thrashing about in wild panic and self-preservation, his eyes wide in terror, realizing that he was about to drown in the amniotic fluid.
In time his movements began to slow, his lungs quickly filling and becoming weighted, his body then descending slowly to the bottom of the bin with his arms drifting in mock crucifixion.
On another tier, however, it was a completely different matter as something else came to life.
#
There were four of them—Sentinels who were the guardians of the temple Alnitak.
The first had snapped its eyes wide open at the moment of death of the first life force.
Someone had breached the chamber below.
It was tall—much taller than its siblings below and far more muscular. By appearances it looked definably male but it was sexless. It had no hair or eyebrows. Yet it was remarkably human in every aspect physically with ten fingers, ten toes, two eyes, a nose, a flat brow, legs and arms that were cut to showcase every fiber of muscle, a tapered waist, and a well-defined chest. Its eyes were a startling Jamaican-sea blue, bright and dazzling with embedded flexes of soft gray. And when it stretched its limbs, it revealed a body to its fullest glory with every cord of muscle becoming electric with movement.
It then pulled the tube from its throat, disengaged the leads from its body, and stepped down from the bin and onto the stone floor of Alnitak, testing the strength of its legs. It was human and it was not. It was Second Generation and it was not. The Sentinel, having the attributes of both First- and Second-Generation humankind, was a hybrid carrying a particular gene from the First Generation—the gene that made it capable of great violence.
They were all imbedded with it, as well as an overwhelming need to protect those who could not protect themselves, those of the Second Generation.
The other three began to stir in their stasis bins, flexing and reaching with every cable of muscle writhing.
No words had to be spoken since they were genetically encoded to perform a specific task: to hunt and kill.
Against the far wall were halberds, long pikes or spears that were tipped with battle axes. Each Sentinel hefted the instrument, the weapons feeling good in their grasps. There were arcs and thrusts, the axe blades moving deftly through the air with the skill and design of trained assassins. Their poise was remarkable. Their skill sets in combat even more so.
With the halberds firmly within their grips, the Sentinels, driven by the encoded gene they shared with the First Generation but deliberately omitted from the Second, went to meet the challenge they were bred for: to wage war.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
“There has to be a faster way,” said Demir. “There has to be a main engineering facility that maintains these spheres.” He looked at the blade of his knife—at the viscous gel that clung to the steel a moment before whipping the blade outward so that the substance would fly clear. After wiping the last clinging remnants free against the side of his pants, he said, “We need to find the source of the hum. If we find it, then we find the lifeline. And we need to put these things down with one shot.”
Savage moved closer to Demir, but stayed at the edge of the gel that pooled on the floor beneath the voided sack that hung limply in the air. “This is the way,” he said, pointing to a deeper darkness at the room’s outer edge. “The drone seems to be em
anating from a point coming from the far end. But I don’t see a passageway.”
“It’s there,” Demir said with confidence. Over the years he had come to realize that just because something could not be seen didn’t mean that it didn’t exist. It only meant that it was well hidden and by design used the darkness as its ally.
But it was there.
Demir said something to his team in Turkish, an order that spurred them to check their weaponry such as their knives and accessories, a very minimal armament.
Savage looked at the knife in his hand. It was keenly wicked at its tip, the length of the blade razor sharp, a good weapon. But he also understood the cons of such a weapon. As skilled as he was, he knew that it was also a weapon specifically tooled for close combat.
And close combat in Alnitak, with whatever it was that resided here, and no matter the skill level possessed by a single man in double-edged weaponry, may not be enough. He held the knife tight until he became white-knuckled—could feel the comfort by wielding its hilt that seemed to fit perfectly within the design of his grip.
They were but four soldiers with four blades and nothing else but their fortitude as warriors to press on.
Savage looked at Alyssa and she looked at him, both realizing that such weaponry would be like using a slingshot against a charging rhino whose approaching horn was growing intensely closer. It was a lesson learned when they were inside the temple of Eden a year before, fighting and scraping for every inch of survival against the Megalania Priscas.
He winked at her, the action bringing a false smile to her lips. She was bright, he knew. He also knew that she understood that the shadows hid many secrets and many dangers.
We’ll be fine, he thought.
But in Alnitak it was becoming a hollow mantra.
We’ll be fine.
#
They were below.
And the Sentinels took a warriors’ umbrage to the breaching of Alnitak by outsiders.
One Second Generation had already died by the hands of a hostile who summarily laid the groundwork of a threat to the entire future generation that was now in jeopardy by its throwback generation.
The slaughter was beginning.
The Sentinels moved quickly through the warrens. Their eyes programmed to see well in the darkness as they made their way to the level below to confront the rising threat.
They held the points of their halberds forward, the blades of their axes facing the floor as they moved swiftly and silently toward their quarry. They were wired to protect and defend. And they would kill without remorse or contrition simply for the fact that they were genetically encoded to respond in such fashion. It was a general flaw in their DNA. But it was also a necessity.
They began to descend the decline to the lower level, closing the gap between them and their targets.
And like animals they began to pick up a scent.
It was alien and familiar at the same time. The scent was their own and not their own. It was the scent of something they shared a bond with—the scent of war and violence and blood lust, the scent of the First Generation.
And with every step taken the scent became stronger and more pronounced.
The two factions were coming together.
#
The lamps remained strong and powerful, illuminating as far as fifty feet in front of them.
At the far end of the chamber they noticed another archway, a doorway that led upward in another spiraling effort of construction and engineering.
As they took the rise the humming became louder, the drone remaining steady.
Demir was sure that his answers and prayers to Allah had been answered, that this was the way and salvation of saving mankind. As soon as they shut down the heart of Alnitak, then the temple would die as well as the threat it offered.
They pressed on with Hillary and the Cultural Minister lagging behind, their aged bodies finding the incline too steep, their legs too soft and too weak to maintain a steady pace as the rest of the team often found themselves waiting at the next bend for them to catch up.
Hillary was clearly out of breath. “No need to wait up,” he told them. “We’ll be along.”
But everyone waited, knowing that they were relying on safety in numbers, especially when their numbers were becoming slim.
The humming grew louder as the incline began to level off.
When the landing evened off it revealed a rotunda with a perfectly-shaped dome ceiling. In the room’s center was a sphere that glowed with pearlescent colors. The orb was approximately fifty feet in circumference, a perfect globe that glowed and dimmed with the pulsating measure of a beating heart.
John Savage and Alyssa Moore immediately recognized the sphere as the same one they found in the ship buried beneath the Yucatan Peninsula. It had served as the life-giving force that nurtured everything within the ship. No doubt it sustained everything within Alnitak, as well.
They circled the sphere which appeared to hover without any supports or suspensions, defying gravity.
“This is it,” said Demir. He didn’t know how he knew, he just did. Perhaps it was a genetic encoding in which the human genome automatically understood that destroying the sphere would effectively destroy everything else like dominoes tumbling one after the other until there was nothing left. “This is it,” he reaffirmed. The humming remained loud and constant as he removed his knife from its sheath without taking his eyes off the globe. “If we destroy this, then there’s nothing more to worry about, yes?”
“We don’t know that,” Savage responded curtly. “Hacking away at things doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the solution to the current matter at hand.”
Demir faced Savage. “So what do you suggest?”
Savage didn’t have an answer.
So he turned to Alyssa. “What about you?” he asked her. “You must have an opinion.”
She thought of the baby—thought the way a mother would think to save her child at all costs. “Destroy it.”
Savage was taken aback, his eyes detonating with mild shock. Alyssa was always about preserving things, not destroying them. “Honey . . .”
“We need to assure the future,” she told him.
“You might also be opening a Pandora’s Box.”
“This isn’t about us, John. This is about saving mankind, in general.”
“Do you remember what happened on that ship beneath the Yucatan when the sphere basically imploded? Have you forgotten the horrors that followed?”
She turned away, looking sheepish.
Then from Demir. “What are you talking about?”
Savage confronted him, though congenially. “Several months ago a remnant of a ship was discovered beneath the Yucatan Peninsula—an intergalactic ark which we now believed served as the bolide that ended the age of the dinosaurs. It was just a small piece that remained, but on board was something like this.” He pointed to the orb. “The writings on the remnant were similar to what we found in Eden, Göbekli Tepe, and civilizations throughout Mesoamerica, Egypt, and Babylon, tying the ship’s comparisons of sixty-four million years ago to the civilizations I just mentioned. On board there was a sphere very similar to this one but much smaller. It was housed in a central area and sustained life forms you could never dream of in your wildest nightmares. The moment the sphere imploded it became the moment of living hell. And if you destroy this . . . who knows what will happen.”
“So we just stand here and do what exactly?”
Savage hesitated. “I’m just saying that we look at this from all angles before commencing.”
“And how do we do that?”
Savage didn’t have an answer. It was, after all, a sphere that had no connective strands or mechanical engagements. It was simply a suspended ball of energy that hummed with a life of its own.
“So what do you suggest, John,” Demir asked once again. “Is this your answer? To stand idly by as time passes when time is not a luxury?”
Savage k
new that they needed to get out of Alnitak and quickly. In the end, however, there was no other alternative. It appeared that Demir was right. Nevertheless, Savage refused to commit himself. He did, however, allow Demir to act accordingly to what he believed to be the best solution for the group without further opposition.
Demir, stepping closer to the orb, its lights reflecting off his face in pearlescent shades, brought the point of the knife to the sphere and held it inches away, the man hesitating, which brought a questioning look to Savage. Obviously Demir had some considerations, he thought.
And just as Demir was about to puncture the womb of the sphere, something emerged from the darkness.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
The halberd flew across the chamber spinning in horizontal revolutions that cut through the air in a series of whooshes.
. . . Whoosh . . .
. . . Whoosh . . .
. . . Whoosh . . .
It was a perfect strike as the curve of the axe’s blade caught the Cultural Minister at mid torso, the blade slicing neatly and cleanly through flesh and bone as if they had the same consistency as a hot cake of butter. The minister’s eyes flared with shocking disbelief as the weapon passed through his body and kept going, his mind unable to register that his body had been severed at the pelvic girdle as the halberd continued its flight to the far wall. Looking downward and seeing the toes of his shoes, his body began to part and slip away, the toes disappearing as his torso slid off the pedestal of his legs and to the floor, the legs subsequently falling and landing close to the halved body.
The minister was still alive, his mouth moving in mute protest as he raised his hands for help. But there was no help to be had. Everyone was on alert.
There was something in the dark—something in the shadows.
And it was drawing down on them.
The minister allowed his hands to fall as he succumbed to his fate, his eyes finally growing detached and distant, his life gone.