The Circle and Star

by John Foster

  “As you can see there are numerous energy circles like the one the Paradig is sitting on. They are surrounded by these amber towers that I think, in part, store energy, but for our purposes and most important for us, maintain the space ships that the ancient culture here used,” said Madison as she ticked off different circles on the hologram of the planet Jo-Tene with her digital pen.

  “So, you’re thinking that each of these circles is a spaceport or a space ship?” asked Theo bending farther over the scan in front of him.

  “I hadn’t considered that they were AtVacs but at the very least spaceports. If they represent a single AtVac, then those ships are on a scale with nothing we’ve ever seen or even suspected,” said Madison looking up at West and Theo.

  “Well, they’re obviously not a AtVac because there’s no ship in sight unless as Lester thinks we’re sitting on it right now,” said West smiling.

  “Really? Lester said that? Well, that baker guy has got some smarts in addition to being a good cook,” said Madison. She zoomed in on the spot they were looking at on the view screen and both West and Theo bent over the screen again. The image resolved itself and they found they were looking at the square where the Paradig was sitting.

  “Here is the current ground level view that we’ve seen for the last week.” She pressed another button and then another and the view went into a series of crisscrossed tunnels, storage chambers and unidentified areas where there was no resolution and seemingly no pattern. Here’s the gross image of what’s underneath us including the museum and a large number of other chambers and tunnels. It’s a veritable honeycomb of passages and chambers below. Now look at this.” She pressed another button and half the view fell away.

  “This is the top half of the view below us to two hundred feet with everything below dropped away. You can start to see patterns of tunnels but no central point or obvious control centers.”

  Both West and Theo nodded.

  “Now look at the top hundred feet right below us. This matches the depth of another tunnel system that Volkum noticed after the attack in museum.” There was a shift, and a radial pattern of spokes shooting out from a central hub were left in view on the screen.

  “Damn, that’s the tunnel complex at the Gobi site,” said West, shaking his head.

  Theo shook his head, then frowned, then realization dawned on him and his eyes agreed.

  “You’re right West, that’s the complex in the Gobi,” said Theo.

  “Is it?” asked Madison looking intently at the view screen.

  They all stared at each other for a moment.

  “That would explain why we couldn’t see through the tunnel walls with our radar units, they were too dense. I thought that they were within some kind of geological formation that blocked our signal but it was actually the tunnels themselves we couldn’t see through,” said West slowly nodding his head as the idea started to take on certainty.

  “Yep, that’s what I thought too when I ran the mapping of the tunnels through the computer systems, and they came out so damn perfect, it’s because they weren’t tunnels but the passageways of a AtVac,” said Madison whipping her hair about in frustration at the memory. “I’m so mad at myself for ignoring the obvious,” said Madison.

  “Well, the premise was good but just didn’t cover all the facts,” said West.

  “So, we’re sitting on the alien ship right now?” asked Theo.

  “Yes, and from what I can tell, it’s the only one that has a chance of still working,” said Madison. Both West and Theo looked towards her.

  Smiling, she punched a couple of buttons on the view screen and the world view reappeared. “These spaceport locations or AtVacs all have these amber towers around them but they all differ from the ones around us here. Ours are still energized and the rest are not. Those energy systems were built to last millennia but one by one they failed, but the power distribution systems still fed power to this location and to this location only. This is the only place where all the energy feeders are directed. This location was meant to last and I think that was to maintain this AtVac below us. It needs power to run and maintain itself for all those ages and I think that’s what it’s doing right now. Waiting for us,” said Madison, her face bright and energized. They heard a noise outside in the passageway and Theo walked to the door and looked out but didn’t see anyone but there did seem to be a shadow from the nearest perpendicular passage but it was only monetary and Theo came back in the room. “Nothing, must be the Paradig settling,” said Theo.

  “Tomorrow, we get into the tunnels through the red building and find this space ship,” said West and then turning to Theo, said “then you get it to run.” Theo smiled.

  Dickens walked hurriedly along the ship’s corridor certain that the information he had just gotten would prove to be useful to his other employer.

  The next day, the sun was dull red and a sand storm was brewing far out in the plains south of the spaceport. Theo was at the ramp with 10 of the crew getting gear and equipment to start running tests on the AtVac should they find it.

  “First time, I ever worked on a AtVac underground,” said Theo.

  “If anybody can do it, you’re the man,” said Volkum, and then teasingly said, “Just wait till we get you in that hoist and the lizard people come up the shaft.”

  “Damn, it was starting out as a nice day, and you have to pretty it up for me,” said Theo smiling but not as pleasantly as he hoped.

  The team was better armed this time, all were equipped with rifle and pistol weapons as well as hand grenades. They were also dropping alarm sensors that attached to the ceiling or walls that blended into the surroundings as a small disk that would not be too obvious.

  A small hover quad machine with trailer hitched behind carried the hoist and other equipment that Theo would use to run diagnostics on the ship’s equipment. West remained behind supervising the repairs on the Paradig trying to speed up the fabrication process.

  The journey to the red building was uneventful and not a lizard man or sand creature was to be seen. Several airborne drones were launched from the Paradig and they would fly over the ship and target building as long as the crew was away from the ship. Any movement would divert them from their pre-programed routes and they would scan and image anything seen or detected. Satisfied that they had aerial eyes, West returned to the fabrication area that had been set up in the cargo bay and started his work there.

  As Theo had the motion detectors set up in the shaft, both above and below the tunnels they would be in, he reflected on the task ahead. He and Madison had spent some time discussing the probability of where the command center would be for the ship. While they had no idea that such a center even existed or that it would be recognizable as such, Theo was certain he would find it. Find the power node, you find the engines, and once that was done, all you had to do was find the on switch. Theo and Madison had laughed over that but Theo was hoping there was more to it than he had any right to believe. Madison had programmed most of crew’s HDA’s with the translation program she had developed after decoding a good deal of script that they had found in the lobby of the red building and in other locations around the square. It was during this process that they discovered that the people who had lived here were either called the Kaa or were associated with an alien race called the Kaa. It was unclear which was the case since most references were in the third person and Madison hadn’t been able to fine tune their translations sufficiently to find out who had lived here and exactly who the Kaa were.

  They started the search for the alien ship entry in the lobby of the red building and the tunnel they were looking for was 50 feet above the passageway they had used to reach the museum. They had missed it last time as it was pitch dark in the vertical shaft. Volkum had noticed it when his hand light had strayed over the area on the descent and taken a depth measurement but had forgotten it until they had returned to the Paradig after the attack in the museum.

  Theo was perplexe
d by the entrance to the ship or supposed ship as there didn’t seem to be any door or mechanism that would open or close it. The walls and ceiling were seamless to the shaft to the red building. He had not studied the entrance to the tunnels in the Gobi as those seemed to be the product of an older but human culture. He realized now that the real entrance had been covered by the product of years, or hundreds of years, of human activity and he had accepted it at face value. He could kick himself for not pursuing that while he had the chance. Now he was a hundred feet below the surface in a dark shaft with crazy monsters wanting to eat his brains out. He shook his head to free himself of these unproductive thoughts and set the hoist to descend. He had a couple of boxes slung below him in the same cable and would ease them into the tunnel when he arrived. Volkum, Cesar, and Kal were waiting for him while Curt was in charge of the above ground team. Theo nodded and Curt toggled the button and Theo descended into the dark.

  Volkum and Cesar pulled the equipment bundles in as the hoist lowered them out of sight. With a change in weight, Theo was able to swing into the tunnel entrance. “We all set?” asked Theo looking at his crew and letting the hoist return to the main floor of the red building. The passageway smelled musty and from the look of the dust on the floor there hadn’t been any visitors for eons.

  “This is our game plan, we set loose our pyramid rovers and they will map the tunnels, and create a database for us to use. We’ll set up lighting in increments and maintain security. Each of us will have two security team members. Is that understood?”

  Volkum and Cesar nodded their assent.

  “How many of the rovers do we let go?” asked Cesar opening a box.

  “We’ll do three for now and see how many perpendicular passages the rovers find,” said Theo.

  Cesar pulled out three packages about the size of a loaf of bread, opened them, and pulled out the little tracked vehicles, flipped a switch on each, and placed them, one by one, on the floor. Taking a small bag out, he opened it and removed a remote-control panel which immediately illumined and checked each rover to see if it were transmitting correctly and that its mapping software was correct. Satisfied, he looked to Theo who nodded and then pushed a button and watched the rovers move off in a straight line into the darkness of the corridor. He watched them a moment and then called up to the above team to send the security teams down. He could hear Curt giving instructions from the shaft edge without benefit of his HDA. In a few minutes, the whir of the hoist and the rest of the crew could be heard coming down the shaft. In the meantime, Theo set up a portable table to use as his work station until they could find a suitable alternative. Volkum started to attach light globes with simple suction cups to the sides of the corridor to give them more light. Cesar continued to monitor the progress of the rovers as they mapped the tunnel complex. The rovers had been developed more than 300 years ago, for investigating the Egyptian Pyramids in areas that full sized people couldn’t go and had been instrumental in finding out how the pyramids had been built.

  One of the key problems that Theo had to resolve was to find the doors that they assumed were present within the ship. Certainly, in the Gobi they had never seen any doors much less detected them and Theo was tasked with finding out where they were and how they operated.

  Walking up to Cesar who was bent over looking at the rover display, Theo asked, “Any sign of doors or anything else of interest?”

  Cesar bent over the table and looked over the display, “Yep, tons of them,” said Cesar.

  “What do you mean?” asked Theo who bent down over Cesar’s shoulder and looked at his display.

  “Take a look for yourself, the rovers have spotted and opened about a dozen already and just in this main corridor,” said Cesar.

  “Opened them?” asked Theo as he bent over the console. “Yeah, take a look,” said Cesar pointing to the parallel lines being created on the screen in front of them, “Here’s a new door, right here,” said Cesar pointing to an “X” that appeared on the screen. The second rover entered the room spun around seeking other passageways and not finding any returned to the main corridor and followed Rover 1. Rover 3 waiting patiently in the hall for it to return and the dutifully followed No. 2.

  “Let’s take a look and see what’s in these rooms,” Theo said and then signaled his security team to follow while Cesar stayed at the little station they had set up.

  Theo and his team walked down the hallway, passing Volkum and his two team members who stopped to watch what they were doing. Theo using his HDA walked about 20 yards down the corridor and then turned to his right and stopped facing a blank wall. “There’s nothing here....,” said Theo and then suddenly stopped in mid-sentence as part of the wall slid back into itself revealing a small room. His security team immediately leveled their weapons but a light switched on in the room and it was filled with what looked like a cafeteria without chairs, just six-foot-long tables with dried brown material sitting on one end of each table and a monitor on one wall and an odd-looking thing that looked like a misshapen chair in front of the view screen. There were view screens above each table at one end but none showed any image, just inky blackness. “Why did it open?” asked Theo more to himself than to anyone in particular.

  He walked into the room and could see that shelves were all about but had nothing on them, nor did they seem to have any function that he could discern.

  He walked out of the room and down the corridor looking for the next room while his detail followed behind. The door slid shut to the room Theo had just quit but Volkum noted that there was a faint green sheen around the door way and when he approached it, it opened for him as well.

  Well, this isn’t going to be so difficult, he thought to himself, as he returned to his duties putting up globe lights. Volkum looked up the corridor and saw Theo pause in front of another door, and sure enough an edge appeared and a door slid open noiselessly. Theo waited a second and light appeared from within the room and Theo peered in and looked around. His security detail looking a little more relaxed than at the first doorway they had encountered.

  “Hey West, you read me?” asked Theo as he paused at the second doorway.

  “I read you Pilot, what’ve you got?”

  “Well, our little rovers are discovering rooms by the dozen with maybe more than 20 in just this segment of the corridor,” said Theo.

  “What’s in them?”

  “They look like work stations with odd chairs in them, some kind of view station and empty shelves.”

  “Nothing else?” asked West.

  “Nope, at least not yet.”

  Madison cut in the conversation, “Theo this is Madison how did you find the doors?”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t know. We set the tunnel rats free and the console started to light up with doors all over the place,” said Theo.

  “The tunnel rats found them?” mused Madison.

  “Yeah, it’s like the rats knew they were there and the doors just opened for them,” said Theo. “Another thing is that the lights in the rooms turned on within a few seconds of the door opening. It’s like the room knew we were there,” said Theo. At that moment, the hallway Theo was standing in flickered a moment and the entire corridor was lit up as if a switch was thrown. “Lights in the corridor just turned on,” said Theo looking around. Volkum who had been putting up lights stopped and walked over to Theo with Zerg and Martin following.

  “No obvious source for the lighting either,” said Volkum to Theo.

  “It seems like the ship is waking up now that you’ve entered it,” said Madison. As she spoke Theo and Volkum could see down the corridor that it was lighting up section by section as if welcoming them.

  “We’ll report back when we find out more,” said Theo

  “Right, good hunting and don’t forget to find the engine room,” said West.

  Turning to Cesar, Theo said, “Cesar? Do me a favor and go to the landing platform and get some more of the rovers, it looks like we’ll need them.�
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  Cesar walked to the shaft entrance and grabbed some of the equipment that had been lowered to the shaft platform. He looked through the boxes and found another 10 packages of tunnel rats and lifted the box up and walked off the platform and tripped as he left the landing. He fell face forward and his rifle that had been slung over his shoulder had swung forward and got trapped under his right arm and the sight on the weapon dug into his underarm. He cried out in pain and could feel the warm flow of blood under his shirt.

  “Hey big boy, what’s happening,” said Kal swinging onto the platform from the shaft hoist. Her face smiling until Cesar sat up and she could see the dark stain of blood under his arm. Her face went anxious and she ran over to him.

  “Hold on, let me take a look at that.”

  “Hey, I don’t need the help, I’m okay.”

  “Seriously? You’re just fine and bleeding like a stuck pig?”

  Johnson then appeared on the platform, having come down the hoist. “Yo Cesar, what’s going down?” Johnson peered at Kal and Cesar crouched on the floor and sensing something amiss his hands went to his rifle and pulled it around to the front of him.

  “He’s fine Johnson, help me get him to one of the rooms down the corridor, the one with the tables in it without chairs.”

  “Right, Sarge.”

  “I’m not a Sarge,” said Kal as she stood up.

  “You act like a Sarge,” protested Johnson.

  “Uh, you gonna help me or should I just sit here and bleed,” said Cesar looking up at the two of them.

  Kal and Johnson looked down at Cesar and simultaneously bent down and helped him up. Kal pulled a bandage out of her med kit hanging on her belt. Lifting Cesar’s arm up she checked out his wound.

  “Hmmm... looks like it will need some stitches.”

  Cesar just shook his head while Johnson took him by the other arm and started to walk him down the corridor following after Kal.

  Kal swept the room as they entered it and pointed to one of the horizontal platforms, and said over her shoulder to Johnson, “put him down on that table but get rid of that stuff on the end,” pointing to a pile of dark brown mud like material lying on the end of each table.