by Josi Russell
But before he could speak, Traore’s arms arched up in a terrible windmill and Ethan saw him slip, falling into the rushing water.
Ndaiye cried out and Maggie clung to him as he tried to get nearer the water. His cousin was gone, down the nearly vertical chute.
“No!” Ethan leaned forward, peering into the gorge. He saw nothing but water and darkness.
And then he heard Traore’s voice, small amid the thundering falls.
“Come on!” Traore shouted. “It’s safe!”
They all heard him.
“We have to go,” Ndaiye said, immediately stripping off his coveralls and outer clothes and stuffing them into his pack, then pulling the waterproof cover over it and securing it. “There’s no way to get him back up here, and I’m not leaving him alone down here.” The others watched, undecided, while Ndaiye yelled, “Here’s my pack!” and tossed it into the torrent.
A second later, Traore called, “Got it!”
Ndaiye sat carefully on the slippery side of the river and launched himself into the swirling water. He slid upright for a moment before disappearing down the hole, calling, “Whoooo!” as if he were at an amusement park.
Ethan saw that there wasn’t another choice, unless they wanted to split up. Maggie went next, then Brynn. Ethan’s own trip down the chute was surprisingly pleasant, except for the freezing water. Soon they were all on the bank several meters downstream from the chute, trying to dry as quickly as possible and pulling on their clothes with badly shivering hands.
Traore had a new look about him. “That was some ride!” he said, catching Ethan’s eye. “I’m glad to be alive!”
“S-some ride.” Ethan stuttered, his jaw convulsing as he tried to speak.
“Huddle up!” Maggie commanded. Brynn stepped close to the older woman, but Maggie hobbled away from her, gathering the rest of them closer and ending up on the other side of the circle from Brynn. Ethan thought Maggie could at least show the girl a little affection. They’d been down here together long enough, been through enough together, that they owed each other something. He threw an arm around Brynn and, on his other side, Ndaiye. The group stood, trying to minimize contact with the cold ground, and talked about the ride down the chute.
Ten minutes later they were no warmer. Ethan knew the dangers of hypothermia. He’d read a lot about it on Ship 12-22, when he was surrounded by the vast, cold vacuum of space. “We have to light a heat brick,” he said.
“Not here,” Maggie challenged, her teeth chattering so much that Ethan had a hard time understanding her. “We need to see if there’s somewhere with a higher ceiling. We’ll suffocate if we light it here.”
“I can’t go much farther,” Brynn said pleadingly.
“You’ll go as far as you have to,” Maggie snapped.
Ethan pulled away from the group, striding down the nearest passageway. It was wide and dark and he sensed it might open up.
When it did, it took his breath away. A cavern covered in sparkling white flowstone arched before him. It was beautiful, a stone cathedral. There was a calm feeling there, a safe and holy feeling.
He shone the light up, but couldn’t see the ceiling. He shouted, and though his voice was weak and thready from the cold, he could tell by the reverberation that the room was enormous. Working quickly, he pulled two heat bricks out of his pack with stiff fingers and lit them before going to retrieve the others.
When they all returned, the bricks were glowing cheerfully. Ethan felt the heat reach him as he left the passage. Brynn rushed to the glowing bricks, leaning over them, seemingly oblivious to the smoke billowing up. He was afraid she might climb on top of them. Traore took her shoulders gently and pulled her back, guiding her to sit on the ground near the bricks and stretch her hands toward the heat.
The others came close and huddled around the heat bricks. The ceiling was high and Ethan fanned the smoke up and away from them into the unseen heights of the cavern. Ethan gradually felt the worst of the chill leave him and looked to see the others trembling less as well. He had not reckoned on how the icy water would draw the heat from their bodies, and how difficult it would be to replace. Sitting around the bricks, willing warmth back into his body, the dehydration of the last few days seemed a small price to pay for the radiant heat of the Sauna Room.
“We should also keep moving,” Ethan said, standing and swinging his arms back and forth. “That will help keep the blood circulating.” He walked in a wide circle, trying not to think about the fact that these heat bricks were their last. Ndaiye stood and walked, too.
“Hey Ethan, look over here! Isn’t this an alien language?”
Ethan gazed at the undulating white wall where his friend was pointing. There, dancing across the curves, were more Ikastn symbols. Not just a few more, either. As they walked around the white chamber, they found the symbols etched into nearly every surface. Soon, the whole team was inspecting the cavern.
The symbols were large and small, some simply scratched into the bare rock, some scratched and then painted over with color. Huge epitrochoids arched above them, and smaller ones nestled inside the curves of the larger ones. Around the room, in dizzying variety, were the words of an alien race.
“What do they say, Ethan?” Ndaiye asked with awe in his voice.
Ethan was struggling to decipher them. It was one thing to translate when he had a computer, or even texts to assist him. It was another to try to guess at meaning with unfamiliar syntax and little context.
But one symbol he knew. One symbol seemed to repeat itself over and over.
Monster.
Ethan tried desperately to determine the context, reaching into his memory for anything he could remember about Ikastn syntax and pronouns. There were words he recognized: children, sleep, danger, but it was like trying to put together the shards of a broken jar. Just when he thought he had two pieces working together, then next slipped out of his hand and broke into two more.
“What’s this one?” Ndaiye asked, tracing the delicate lines of the most repeated word.
Ethan bit back the word. Words had power, he knew, and saying monster in a place like this, as the light faded and the days grew more desperate, would only introduce an unnecessary fear. He redirected them to the more neutral symbol near his elbow:
“This one is sleep. I’m not sure what the rest mean. It’s a language that came from Xardn, so I can translate some of it, but other words and other rules have been incorporated into it, and I don’t know all of them.”
He dug in his pack for his missive, hoping it still had enough juice to turn on. He’d been saving its batteries so he could use it as a last-resort light source if necessary, but he needed to capture these symbols. If he did get out of here, he could work to decipher them.
The missive glowed when he switched it on, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Working quickly, he snapped photos of all the symbols that he could adequately illuminate.
“Brynn, stand there so I can see the scale of these,” he asked as he pointed the missive at a particularly massive wall of glyphs. “Ndaiye, stand by that one.”
The missive’s critical low battery warning was blinking as he snapped the last few shots. Its screen went dark. Ethan tried not to debate in his mind whether capturing the symbols had been worth wasting the last of the missive’s light as he slid it back into the protected pocket in his pack. At least he’d have somewhere to start when he got home. The ever-present echo teased his mind: If he got home.
“Who made these?” Maggie asked directly. “Some life form from here on Minea?”
Ethan shrugged. “It’s unlikely that they came from here originally. It’s too far from the Circinus Galaxy. And when humans first came to Minea, there were no life forms sufficiently developed to have this kind of language complexity, so I suspect that whoever it is, they’ve come recently.”
Ndaiye was quiet. “I’ve seen ‘em,” he said softly.
“What?” Maggie barked.
“I’ve see
n them,” he enunciated. “The ghosts at the lake in the mornings.”
Ethan remembered standing at the edge of the lake with Ndaiye, a lifetime ago, remembered the man’s stories about the ghosts that came just before dawn. Could they be the same beings that made these engravings?
Ethan started to speak up as well, started to say that he’d seen someone at Shark’s Mouth and Crystal Springs and that he suspected someone was leading the Xyxos, but the way the figures had simply disappeared and the way that the dark played tricks on them down here made him quiet. He wasn’t sure he’d seen anything, and there was no need to add to the growing disquiet he was feeling among them. He had the photos. If he got out, he would decipher what they had to say, and perhaps that would tell him more about who they were and what they were doing on Minea.
***
As the ship descended Galo began to glimpse the planet below. There were huge mountains to the Northeast and broad, flat plains to the west.
The settlement below him lay on the plain, curled in a circle where the tall grasses had been cleared and the land terraformed. Galo cruised slowly over the settlement, then turned the big ship and glided past the settlement again. The scanner’s constant low hum grated on him.
He found himself pleasantly intrigued by the settlement. This appeared to be some sort of mining city. He could tell by the extensive infrastructure and the great efforts that were being undertaken that they were obviously producing something of value. To Galo, there were two kinds of beings: customers and potential customers. It occurred to him that perhaps these humans might need a shipper for whatever they were mining. He had the sudden worry that his ship, squat and dark, with its exhaust burning red behind it, might seem ominous and threatening to them. In port cities, where ships came and went all the time, his barges didn’t concern anyone, but here it seemed that there were no other beings besides these humans. They wouldn’t be accustomed to seeing other crafts and might be more easily frightened than others.
If they had stolen his Vala, then keeping them as customers was unimportant. But if he was misunderstanding what had happened, and this race had nothing to do with the Vala’s disappearance, then Galo didn’t want to lose their business. He would need to open communications with them and further assess the situation. He engaged his translator.
The Asgre dealt on a constant basis with beings from other worlds and he prided himself on their translator, which gave him the ability to speak to nearly anyone. Though the equipment took up an entire room in each ship, he was thrilled with how the translator worked and how well it worked. When it was engaged, it scanned the area around the target race, which was sometimes just a single ship but in this case was the whole planet, for all communication, written and verbal. Even real-time conversations were scanned and processed, resulting in the translator’s nearly perfect knowledge of the language. It took some time, but when the screen lit up showing that the translator was done scanning and processing and was online and operational, he could speak to almost anyone he encountered.
The translator began scanning the communications of the planet and he felt a chill of anticipation as he waited for it to be operational. It began a countdown on the upper edge of the screen. The translator would not be ready for hours. That was longer than Galo wanted to wait. But there was no rushing the technology. To distract himself, he focused on the scanner, still humming, and checked the communications lines. He was surprised to find one switched off.
Switching it back on, he remembered why he’d disabled it. The ship filled with an irritating buzz. It was more frequent now, more urgent. They must be closer to the magnetic field that Uumbor had mentioned. Galo switched it off again, basking in the cessation of the maddening sound.
The city, from above, looked as crosshatched as the moon that orbited Ondyne II, the Asgre home world. Only these striations didn’t come from fault lines, they came from the humans’ planned streets and buildings. The humans he saw far below were bipedal and bimanual. Galo shook his head. How did creatures function with only two hands?
He noticed two ships rising into the air from what appeared to be a defensive base at the edge of the city. Galo readied basic defenses, just in case. He checked the translator, though he knew it would not be online yet, and he could not yet announce his reason for coming to their city.
Glowing on his screen was the map of the eight human settlements. Galo traced a route up and over the large mountains as he planned the order in which he would scan the cities, ending at the last, an outlying city near the other mountains to the northeast. He would not rush, though. Each city must be thoroughly scanned for Vala life signs and the Vala trail. He could not afford to miss any clue as to their whereabouts.
Chapter 22
Ethan saw a new weariness in the little group when they left the Flowstone Room. They had staved off hypothermia, but never really warmed up to the point they’d been before the chute. They had eaten their last nutrition bar, split five ways, and the knowledge that the food was gone made Ethan feel more desperate than he had before.
Aided by Kaia’s cells, the Instasplint, and the Sprayshield, Maggie was walking better, keeping her balance better, and still barking orders at every turn, but Ethan could see by the weariness in her eyes that even she was almost out of determination.
The arched opening that they chose out of the Flowstone Room led them to a small, narrow passage. Going in first, Ethan found a tangled passageway that curved and looped and ran back and forth in jagged lines for an exhausting distance through the cave. As his shoulder scraped the side, he noticed that the walls in this section didn’t catch his coveralls with the same rough scraping as the walls in the rest of the cave. When he shone his one shoulder light onto the walls, he was amazed to see that like opaque orange glass, the smooth walls reflected his light and his image back at him. The passageway was pure Yynium. The crew made their way, single file, through the long winding tunnel, glowing in the reflected light.
When the tunnel opened out, Ethan stopped short. He found himself standing at the brink of a precipice. A narrow ledge led off to his right, up into the dark.
He turned to the others. “Should we go back?” he asked.
They came out of the tangles one by one and lined up on the edge of the yawning chasm. The two remaining shoulder lights penetrated only far enough to see how the rock fell away beneath their feet and left a vast nothingness stretching in front of them.
“Hello!” Ndaiye called. There was, for the first time in weeks, no echo. The emptiness and dark contrasted with the closeness and light of the tangles made Ethan’s head spin. He sat down on the ledge and leaned back against the orange Yynium deposit. It felt solid and cool and firm at his back, comforting somehow.
Brynn sat down next to him, gazing fearfully up the little ledge that led up and away.
Traore and Ndaiye started up the path. “I don’t want to go back,” Ndaiye said. “I want to see where this takes us.”
Ethan admired their adventurous spirit. Part of him wanted to go back to the sparkling Flowstone Room and stay in its sanctuary forever. But Maggie was already shuffling after the cousins, and Ethan jumped up to steady her. One wrong step and this could be the last of Maggie.
Brynn followed, if somewhat reluctantly. Ethan watched every step he took. When his foot struck a rock and sent it falling silently into the abyss, he started humming to keep himself occupied.
Suddenly, the cousins’ voices filled the air. They were furiously excited about something, and when Ethan reached the top of the sloping ledge, he saw what it was: stars. Reaching in front of them, on the other side of the wide chasm, was an arched opening filled with the night sky.
***
Aria didn’t see Daniel again for days, even though she made the trek to G building several times. Most often, she found no one home. Once the two little girls answered her knock by calling through the door, but they were home alone and not supposed to open it. She left the fruits outside the door, hoping
that they got them.
Finally, when she’d given up on seeing him again, Aria was standing in line to buy the last few pathetic apples and zilen, the squash of Minea. She looked up and saw, through the window, Daniel approaching the market. Before he reached the main front door, though, the young man turned. Aria paid for her purchases quickly and rushed to peer down the alley beside the market. Daniel was emerging into the alley from a back door to the market, a chain heavy with scrip dangling from his hand. He saw Aria on the sidewalk. Daniel ducked his head and looked away before he turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction. When Aria reached the alleyway, Gaynes was standing there, holding a small silver box and smiling smugly. He glanced up, saw her there, and glared, turning and entering a back door into his market.
***
Aria wanted to know what Gaynes had been up to. Somehow, he’d gotten to Daniel, and with Marise gone, someone had to watch out for the boy. She thought of an excuse as she strode to the registers.
“I want to see Gaynes,” Aria demanded. “You can’t sell this produce. It’s obviously contaminated.” She raised her voice on the last word, just loud enough to make the shoppers near her shift uncomfortably. One woman glanced their direction, then set her basket down and left the store.
The clerk noticed the woman’s departure and looked nervously at Aria. She gazed into his eyes, challenging him to deny her request. Though she’d told herself she wouldn’t use it again, she flashed the Colony Offices badge out of her pocket just a little.
“Okay,” the clerk said, his fear of the Colony Offices warring with his fear of Gaynes. “Come on back.” He unbolted the door next to his register and re-barred it after she was through. He led her to Gaynes’s empty office, where a broad desk was topped only with a decanter of brown liquid and a glass half full of the same stuff.