She let out a skittish, nervous little laugh.
He put an arm around her. “It’s not every day you get to travel from one planet to another.”
Mia nodded. “That’s what I’m worried about.”
Minutes later, they entered the decontamination chamber. Then one by one they stepped through the portal. Jack and Mia were the last to go and just before they went through he said, “Just stay close and whatever you do, don’t wander off.”
•••
The buzzing in Mia’s ears was so intense she wondered if she was about to go deaf. Pinpoints of light assaulted her eyes even after she snapped her lids shut. She willed herself to put one foot in front of the other, if for no other reason than to escape the tortured feeling of straddling two vastly different worlds. Jack caught her as she came out the other side, her breathing heavy and ragged.
The spectacular sight that greeted her was like nothing she could have imagined. Of course, she had seen the images and videos Jack and Anna had brought back, but no digital rendering could compare to the real thing. She felt like Dorothy leaving the black and white world of Kansas and entering the land of Oz.
“It’s a lot to take in the first time,” Jack said, watching her with a smile.
Dag was beside her and must have said the words ‘far out’ a dozen times.
Stokes and the other Delta operators formed a loose perimeter around them.
“Whatever planet this is,” Mia said, her voice sounding distant even to her own ears, “we found one with a blue sky just like our own.”
Jack glanced up through a small opening in the thick, multicolored canopy overhead and noticed for the first time that she was right. The sun had been directly overhead the first time he’d been here, washing out the sky with blinding light.
“The incoming blue light waves interact with the air molecules in the atmosphere,” Anna explained. “As a result, they tend to scatter more than red light waves. This is why blue is more visible than red. Technically speaking, it is what is called the Rayleigh effect.”
Nearby, Yuri was running a quick diagnostic on Ivan.
“Would you like some help?” Anna offered.
“Buzz off,” he barked, his fingers scrolling down a tablet with lines of code.
Anna looked around, confused by Yuri’s reaction, before moving away. A case on her back contained three drones. Jack and Dag came over and removed them one by one, tossing the objects into the air. The tiny propeller engines started at once, revving up to a high-pitched whine as the drones momentarily dipped and then lifted into the air.
“Let’s start by mapping the immediate area,” Jack suggested. “That way we’ll have an idea of what’s around us.”
“I still don’t get why a supposedly intelligent alien race would lay a doorway down in the middle of a jungle,” Dag said, the pessimism practically oozing off his every word. “You ask me, whoever lived here is long gone, man. I mean we dig down deep enough and we’re sure to find the foundations of ancient skyscrapers or something.” He kicked at the loose soil before him as if to drive home the point. “The world’s about to end and here we are on a wild goose―”
“Hey, what is that?” Mia asked, staring at the dirt Dag had just kicked up. She bent down and grabbed hold of a rounded white lever. She moved it back and forth until the lever broke free. As she held the object in the air, it immediately became clear she was holding an arm bone. But who did it belong to? The bone’s dark color and porous quality made it clear it had been there a while.
Mia snapped a shot with her glasses and then ran it against everything they had on file. Soon enough, they found a match. She forwarded the findings to the others.
“It’s from the Mesonyx people,” Dag said, amazed.
Yuri glanced up from his work. “The who?”
“The long-lost civilization that built the city under the Greenland ice sheet,” Jack told him. “The one you travelled through on your way to Base Camp Zulu. Or maybe you were on your phone.”
Yuri scoffed.
“Anyway, this proves that at some stage, they travelled through the portal. But why?”
Dag shifted uncomfortably. “For all we know the guy was a sacrifice, sent here to appease the alien gods who were busy destroying their world.”
“Yuri,” Stokes said, still eyeing the perimeter. “You nearly done over there? We need to make our way off the LZ ASAP. No telling how much daylight we got left and I don’t intend to be caught here after dark.”
Some topographical data had already started coming back via the drones. “A hill with a clearing at the top lies a hundred meters in that direction,” Anna said, pointing. “The gap in the canopy should enable us to send the drones even higher.”
The group headed in that direction with Ivan in the lead, cutting a path through the vibrant undergrowth with his powerful tank-like treads.
Mia pulled up the atmospheric readings. “I suggest everyone fight the urge to remove your helmets. The air here is barely over ten percent oxygen.”
“That bad?” Kerr asked. He was a short but handsome Southerner with a compact frame and a distinct Tennessee twang.
“Only if you enjoy breathing,” Jack told him, not bothering to sugarcoat the reality of the situation. The terrain inclined and Jack began breathing more heavily.
Kerr must have seen him sucking wind and said, “Lucky for me, I used to run along the Blue Ridge Mountains as a kid, hunting rabbits and squirrels. Felt like my own backyard.”
“This remind you of home?” Jack said, aware that all the exertion was elevating the temperature inside his biosuit.
“A wee bit,” Kerr admitted. “Except for the funky psychedelic colors. I’ve already snapped a bunch of pics with these glasses. Otherwise, the folks back home would never believe me.”
“Let’s hope when all is said and done you have folks to go back to,” Jack said, not aiming to sound like a downer, but eager to keep it clear that this wasn’t a simulation. This was the real deal and the game clock was ticking down.
All of the sudden, Ivan hit a steep jungle berm. The robot’s treads rolled on, churning up the ground and flinging it behind him.
“Ivan, stop,” Yuri snapped.
“Understood,” Ivan replied and stopped moving.
“At least he’s obedient,” Mia said with a wry smile.
“Ivan’s terrain-mapping program is rather primitive,” Anna said, innocently. “I believe the undergrowth and certain shades of foliage are not being recognized by his laser sensors.”
Mia caught the scowl on Yuri’s face as he noted down Anna’s observations in his tablet. She understood some of the annoyance the Russian was surely experiencing. Anna could be infuriatingly frank and frustratingly thorough at times.
Mia turned her attention back to the ledge Ivan had driven into and noticed two things. The first was the way the blueish vines snaked up the uniform surface. The second was how unnatural it looked. From here, the outcropping of earth appeared to rise up at a perfect right angle at least fifteen feet into the air.
“You caught that too,” Jack said, standing next to her and eyeing the slightly camouflaged obstruction.
“Could it be a structure of some kind?” she wondered.
“Anna,” Jack called out. “Have the drones do a quick pass over this location and trace the extent of this outcropping.”
“Of course, Dr. Greer.”
Seconds later came the whiz of the three drones as they flew overhead, moving in a widening array of circles.
They watched the feed as the scan took place in real time.
“Right there,” Jack said with excitement as he projected a 3D rendition before him and used his outstretched hands to rotate it. “See the shadow on the other side?”
“It does sorta look like a doorway,” Dag admitted, tilting his head and growing more convinced.
The opening Jack had found meant a fifty-meter detour from their current location. If it provided any clues abou
t who might have once inhabited this place, then it would be well worth the time to investigate. Cutting through the jungle, the group clambered over uneven terrain to reach the possible entryway. Now practiced with climbing ladders and stairs, Anna made short work of the obstacles. Ivan on the other hand was struggling, in spite of his impressive treads.
“I suggest you go around,” Anna said, waving her hand around in a half circle. “The ground is not as steep over there.”
“He can make it,” Yuri insisted, ordering Ivan on.
By the time Jack and the others arrived they could still hear Ivan working himself through the dense brush.
“If that damn robot gets any louder,” Stokes said, banging the light on his helmet until it turned on, “he’s gonna announce our presence to every damn thing within a five-mile radius.” Stokes ordered his men to fan out while Jack, Mia and the others tried to make sense of what they were seeing.
They stood for a moment, eyeing the clean vertical and horizontal lines of a doorway. “It clearly used to be a structure,” Jack said, in the process of brushing away some of the thin overhanging vines when something flew out at him from inside. Jack reeled back and lost his balance and began to fall, only to be caught by one of Ivan’s outstretched arms. The other arm followed whatever had flown past Jack’s head and downed it with a single shot from one of its imbedded weapons.
The bird or whatever it was tumbled out of the air, landing directly at Stokes’ feet. Dag ran over to enclose it in a sample bag.
The Delta team was on edge, scanning the perimeter from the ground to the treetops.
Diaz, a Latino with dark skin and a pencil-thin mustache, jerked his rifle around. “I got a red dot, flying around my position.”
“They’re harmless,” Jack shouted, still rattled.
“Are you all right, Dr. Greer?” the stout robot asked in his metallic twang, setting Jack back on his feet.
“That was some impressive shooting,” Jack admitted, noticing the wisp of smoke rising from Ivan’s barrel. “If only your wall-detecting skills were as strong.”
Yuri fought off a grin. “Let’s just say we wanted to get the important things right first.”
Jack spun to find Mia ducking past the low-hanging vines and through the opening. He drew his pistol and followed after her. Thick tree roots snaked along the floor. Branches and thick fronds lined every inch of the walls and ceiling. Jack turned on his helmet light as the two of them descended what had once been a long set of stairs.
“Hold the vines as you go,” he told her, holstering his pistol so he could do the same.
An arched opening sat at the base of the staircase.
Jack studied it as he went by, estimating the archway’s height at nine feet. “We’re not in munchkin land, I can tell you that much.”
The chamber beyond the archway was enormous and filled with its own forest. The amount of ancient-looking undergrowth was staggering. Massive orange tree trunks hugged the walls, as wide as the support struts on the Golden Gate Bridge. As they rose, Mia noticed how their branches coursed across the high ceiling toward the entrance as though searching for a way out.
Already they had spotted several new species of plant life that had taken up residence in this sunless environment. A row of long magenta tubes emerged from a nearby ledge, puffing out spore rings like patrons in a cigar lounge.
Mia followed as a dot of red light danced through the air before settling on the petal of a yellow flower.
“That’s a wisp,” Jack said, moving closer. “Anna and I spotted them on our first visit. She named it after a will-o’-the-wisp.”
They drew closer and saw the insect was no longer glowing. Then, in a blur of motion, a long fibrous tongue lashed out from the flower’s center, wrapped around the wisp and pulled it in.
Mia recoiled. “Oh, goodness.”
“Consider that a reminder not to go touching anything.”
Anna and Stokes appeared, looking around in awe.
“Sweet Jesus, this place is bigger than I thought,” Stokes said, panning his light into the ceiling’s dark crevasses.
Mia called out, waving them over. “Come take a look at this.”
Along the back wall were a series of broken transparent enclosures. It reminded Jack of the pod farm they’d found on the ship in the Gulf, only each of them was much smaller. Could this have been where the beings who inhabited this planet created the specimens for their ships?
“There are more of ’em over here,” Stokes said, nudging a broken shard with the barrel of his rifle.
The longer they looked, the more obvious it became. The chamber was filled with hundreds if not thousands of small glass canisters. Weirder still, each and every one of them appeared to be broken. It was hard not to wonder what they had once contained. Or whether whoever had broken them was still here.
Chapter 18
Kay’s instructions were simple. McPherson Square Station at the end of the westbound platform. That was where she had agreed to meet the Aussie who claimed to have information on her parents’ whereabouts. Could it be a trick? In the past, she had allowed her thirst for the truth to blind her to possible danger. Now, her desire to locate her parents was a much stronger motivation.
She was reassured knowing that if the people she had come here to meet didn’t look right she had two cards up her sleeve. The first was the silver revolver sitting in her purse. The second was the subway tracks by the platform, which might offer an escape route through the tunnels. Neither of those were ideal, but Kay’s desperation for answers was quickly pushing her from cautious and calculated to reckless.
She was about to enter the main metro terminal when her phone pinged.
It was a text message from Ron Lewis. “Looks like our little gamble failed,” he wrote cryptically.
Kay stopped, leaned up against a wall out of sight and dialed him. Whether she was chasing down a story or not, Kay knew a reporter lived on their phone. It was one of the things Derek had always scolded her for. “Put that thing away, will you?” he would chant whenever he’d had enough. The memory seared a painful line down the center of her heart. But it was an occupational hazard. Or better yet, a double-edged sword.
“Kay,” Ron answered, his voice hoarse, like a man intent on abusing it with a few cartons of Marlboros.
“I got your message. What’s going on?”
“I take it you haven’t looked at the paper today.”
Kay minimized the call and opened the Post’s website.
Page Not Found.
“Huh?”
Ron let out a sick little laugh. “Nope, you are not hallucinating.” His words ran together as though smoking wasn’t the only thing he’d got up to.
“Have you been drinking?”
“The paper’s been shut down, Kay. Wouldn’t you be?”
“Shut down? By who?”
“Who else? The president signed an executive order citing national security, blah, blah, blah.”
Warm beads of sweat trickled down Kay’s brow. “But they can’t do that, Ron. Not to a paper this big.”
“They’ve done it, Kay. It was a risk we were willing to take, remember? We called their bluff and they had a full house. Turns out we had nothing but a lousy pair of threes.”
“There’s no federal judge worth his salt who won’t overturn the order.”
“Kay, wake up. We’ve been muzzled. By the time a judge sits his ass on the bench to render a decision, it’ll be too late. And we’re not the only ones either. I’ve been told that anyone who continues to run your story will suffer the same fate. Looks like you cleared out your desk just in time.”
“I didn’t know this was coming, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
She heard the clink of ice as Ron downed another drink. “I’m sure you didn’t. Either way, what does it matter? The press is only a pillar of democracy.”
It seemed that democracy was becoming an old-fashioned concept, but she kept that to hersel
f. Engaging in a philosophical conversation with a drunken news editor wasn’t going to end well.
“I’d wish you good luck,” he said, his words trailing off only to suddenly come back at full strength. “But I don’t think luck’s got anything to do with it.” Ron hung up after that and Kay stood staring down at her phone, wondering how things could get any worse.
•••
After her conversation with Ron, Kay made her way onto the westbound platform. She took a seat at the very end and waited. Opened in 1977, McPherson Square’s vaulted ceiling and futuristic look made it one of Washington’s most iconic metro stations. But iconic or not, trains were only coming once every thirty minutes or so nowadays. She scanned the small handful of faces as each one pulled in. The idea that the subway would soon be closed for good was another sign the natural order of things was being irreparably worn away. Total anarchy hadn’t taken hold just yet, but it was not far off.
At the other end of the station, two men descended the staircase, making their way along the platform. One of them was unusually large and muscular, the other confident and ruggedly handsome in a Chef Ramsay sort of way.
The men approached and sat down on either side of her. Kay felt her pulse quicken.
Kay’s hands were folded over the gun in her purse. The larger man covered her hands with one of his own, the way a father might do to a young child.
“No need to worry,” he said in a deep, resonating voice. “We won’t hurt you.”
She let out a skittish laugh. “If I had a nickel…” she started to say before the other man cut in.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as rather we dispense with the small talk. I love pleasantries just as much as the next man, but I think you’ll believe me when I say we ain’t got time to dilly-dally. I’m Ollie and the lug next to you is Sven.”
Sven winked.
She turned back to Ollie. “You’re the Australian I spoke to on the phone,” she said, keeping her hands where they were. “I normally don’t meet contacts in person. It’s safer that way.”
“Contacts?” Ollie asked, his face twisting in confusion.
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