by Doug Goodman
He nodded. As the group turned to leave, they heard a giant crunching sound behind them.
C.C. had smashed the old box in.
“Oops.”
“C.C.!” Emily was getting frustrated with his penchant for not following orders.
He pushed aside the broken shards of rock and wood. Inside lay a manuscript, 25 centimeters long and 33 centimeters wide. Each page was a two-centimeter-thick stone slab. C.C. lifted the heavy tome and slowly handed it to Cole. “I think this is for you. Can you read it?”
Cole leaned back to absorb the weight of the book. He traced the hieroglyphs on the cover. “Mrititrickiliki Nafem Nafem Mrititrickiliki. Literally, this means The Book of the Giver of Life to the World, but said backwards. The Doomsday Book.”
“That sounds ominous,” Mathieu said.
“Maybe, or I could be saying it wrong. I’m kind of interpreting on the fly here.”
With all lights on him, he opened the dusty cover and read silently. His eyebrows furrowed. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just gibberish words. The first page says ‘Tok, Tok, Tok.’ The second page says ‘Doom, Doom, Doom.’ I’m sorry, but I’m going to need more time with this.”
“Time you have, but back at the Hab. We really need to get going.” Emily plodded ahead.
From there, they passed by several more rooms full of scrolls, books, and ancient scientific tools. Even Emily had to stop and drool over the ancient tools and wonder what they were used for and why they were made. From there, they walked up a stone staircase to a large, open chamber.
The whole room was built around a large sphere in the middle of the room. Large oval plates stretched outward from the sphere in the center of the room. The walls were built similarly but with large stone plates dappled with small holes.
“JEVS, I hope you’re getting this for Mission Data Collection,” Emily said. “We are going to make a lot of astronomers happy.”
The planetarium depicted the stars and moons and planets of the solar system of 51 Golgotha.
C.C. went to a plate on the wall surrounded by hieroglyphs.
“Wait, maybe we should have Cole read it first,” Anna said.
C.C. pushed down on the small plate. The sound of something popping in the walls emanated through the room.
“Too late.”
“You’ve really got to stop being so cowboy with everything,” Mathieu said. Emily scowled. Cole still had his nose in the book. He only looked up when the plates in the room started to move.
“It’s like a giant astronomical clock,” Anna said.
“Puts Stonehenge into a whole new perspective, doesn’t it?” C.C. said.
From the planetarium, they climbed more staircases that led them to the top of the wind tunnels. Before the wind tunnels, Anna stopped and turned to her right.
“What is it? Another lock box?” C.C. asked.
Anna pushed against an out-of-place stone. The wall cracked and split open. Beyond was a small room.
“This wasn’t on any of the recon,” Emily said. “Be careful. Everybody check your breathing equipment. I want to verify that nobody has faulty breathing apparatus before we enter a room that’s been sealed for four thousand years.”
After they checked their equipment and everything was working fine, Emily logged the entry for NASA, and they entered the room.
The room was thickly humid. Four bodies lay next to each other, hand-in-hand. Two of the dead were clearly children. Stone pots sat at the far side of the room. Anna opened them.
“Some of these still have food in them, or at least what I think was food,” she said. She glanced around, saw a stick, and dipped it into one of the jars. A tarry substance dripped from the stick.
“What happened to them?” Mathieu said.
“And who where they hiding from, and why?” C.C. added.
“Look at the walls,” Emily said.
Notches had been scratched into the far wall. She quickly counted them up. “93 notches. Were they here for 93 days?”
They took several holographic photos of the strange new find and continued to the wind tunnel.
From here, they could look out on the city. Of course, they had seen many satellite photos of Resurrection City, but never from this angle. The devastation was obvious. All the bodies, all the broken buildings, even some of the strange aqueducts that were toppled. Part of the wall had been razed during the destruction of the city.
While everyone else stared at the destruction, Cole looked back on the mountains. Over the mountains was the Habitation Module, but more importantly, the Ascent Vehicle. Things had changed drastically for him while journeying to Jedik-ikik. As much as he enjoyed this adventure, he really wanted to get home. There was no speeding up time, though. Home was seven years away.
Was something moving on the mountain?
Cole squinted, trying to get a better look. Maybe it was a trick of the mind, or maybe it was just weariness and gravity catching up to him, but he swore he saw something.
He was about to open his mouth when Anna said, “Mira. Down there. The Squatter.”
The ground was swirling, like some invisible dust devil was grwoing out from the surface under the Squatter’s statue. As the astronauts watched, little waves rippled through the dust. The waves radiated toward the walls in every direction.
Emily barked, “Everyone, we’re heading out NOW!”
They rushed back downstairs, but from the floor level, they could no longer observe the ripples.
“Were they just viewable from up high?” Cole wondered.
“I don’t know.” Emily crossed to the epicenter. She stood over the dust and waited, but nothing happened. She reached down and pressed her fingers against the stone ripples.
“Whatever it was, it’s over now,” Anna said. Emily wasn’t so sure.
“Where are we going next?” Mathieu asked. As he spoke, he yawned, so the words came out as one big yawn.
Emily checked on the rest of the crew. Her husband leaned against the wall of the pyramid, his head in the Doomsday Book. He was like a bulldog with a chew toy when it came to things like this. He wasn’t going to let go. Anna was just as focused, but trying to figure out the riddle of the rippling dust. Her face belied her weariness. C.C. was stretching.
“We are all running on adrenaline,” Emily said. “And I don’t like what we just experienced, even if it’s just signs of gravity-induced fatigue. So I’m adjusting the schedule. Rather than eat lunch and nap here, we’re going straight to the Hab. We can eat on the way back.”
C.C. rolled his eyes. Nobody else looked directly at her. Cole raised his hand.
“Um, hon, the Sunken Robot’s on the way.”
“C’mon,” C.C. said, “we can’t pass that up today.” The others nodded agreement.
Emily considered it for a moment. “Okay, but a short visit. Five minutes, tops.”
Nobody argued with her.
“Sweet,” C.C. said.
Everyone and their DSMUs except Cole started crossing the plaza to the next nearest pyramid.
“Cole,” Emily said.
“Right. Sorry.” Except for raising his hand, Cole had been deep in his book the entire time.
“You okay? You look a little weird.”
“I was just reading something disconcerting. This book is full of curses and warnings, straight out of a horror novel. ‘Anyone who enters the City of Rebirth Without Sincerity and Peace Will Find Misery and Eternal Suffering.’”
“Ominous,” C.C. said. He and the rest of the crew had stopped when Cole began reading from the Doomsday Book. “That sounds just like the warnings on the walls.”
“That’s here, too,” Cole said. “‘If you need, you will be provided. If you take, then home will be as unknown to you as the mind of the Rentok.’”
“What is a Rentok?”
“I don’t know. There is more, though. Descriptions of invasion from the s
tars. And look.” Cole held up the book. A large glyph showed a man with two arms and two legs wearing a space suit and helmet, not unlike theirs.
“Wait. Is that book predicting us?” Mathieu asked. “That’s impossible. It’s gotta be luck or something.”
“Convergent evolution,” Anna said. “It makes sense that a similar space-faring species would look like us and, thus, wear clothing like us.”
“Still. That’s pretty creepy,” Mathieu said.
They crossed many dead bodies of the Jedik-ikik on their way to the next site. The DSMUs, in particular, struggled with walking here. The bodies were well preserved. The astronauts didn’t want to damage any of them.
Cole looked up from his heavy book long enough to study the many other large buildings in Ximortikrim. They were all tall, with many second-, third-, and even fifth-floor patios. Briefly, he thought of the French Quarter in New Orleans, with all its ironwork balconies. The balconies here were stone and dust, but just as powerful a visual.
A Jedik-ikik watched him from one of the balconies. Cole jumped.
Emily, who’d been walking next to him, followed his gaze. “That’s just an old dead one.”
“I saw something move.”
“I’ll zoom in and scan it.” She adjusted her scopes and stared at the balcony for a few moments. “My scopes aren’t picking up anything. You sure?”
“I swear I saw something move.”
Anna said, “There’s no life here, and the only life on this planet is the jungle forests. We have the scans and years of satellite photography to prove it.”
Emily touched Cole’s arm. “Want us to skip this and return to the Hab now? Just say the word.”
Cole continued to search the balconies and the columns for movement while he worked through his wife’s words. “Nah. Let’s keep going.”
A few minutes later, they arrived at the second pyramid. Like the first pyramid, it, too was conical and tall, with wind tunnels to cool the inside. But unlike the first pyramid, this one stood at the end of several massive stone buildings. Drone study revealed this pyramid’s function as the entrance to the military building of the Jedik-ikik.
“Iktit,” Cole said. “Home of Ximortikrim’s soldiers.”
But the reason they wanted to stop here before heading back to the Hab had nothing to do with Iktit, but rather what lay outside its pyramid.
Fallen against a wall was a robot, sunk in the dust. He was a purely mechanical device full of an intricate latticework of copper and brass gears covered in stone housing. Earth’s robots started the automaton once. The next five minutes of discussion before the automaton lost its power was the basis for all concept on what the language of the Jedik-ikik sounded like. Not wanting to risk damage with the robots handling the automaton, NASA elected to wait until humans could restart the machine.
Mathieu pulled out a kit designed to prepare the robot for removal from the city. He only wanted some of the brushes to clean off the dust and shine the brass and copper.
“Do you think it’ll turn back on?” Anna asked.
“There’s only one way to find out, but no way are we risking it by crossing our fingers and hitting the reboot button.” (The reboot button, in this case, was a winding lever on the robot’s chest.)
“I just want to clean him off a bit for photo work,” he added. But as he brushed off the gears, he found a tiny sliver of metal jammed into the gears. The techy in him couldn’t resist prying the sliver loose.
As soon as the sliver popped out, the gears began turning and whirring, kicking up a dust cloud around the robot. A fast-tempo clicking, like a metronome on high speed, was clacking back and forth in the robot’s chest. The robot’s head rolled up at the astronauts. Its mandibles clicked mechanically.
Cole didn’t realize at first that the clicks were the robot speaking to them in the language of the Jedik-ikik.
“Wait.” He addressed the robot with sudden realization. “Slow down. I can’t understand you.”
The robot buzzed faster.
“Um, hang on. Treek. Tiknicriki…tlikit.”
The robot’s head rolled to face Cole. Its mandibles slowed, almost painfully.
“Triknik. Iktit. Tiknik. Itkik. Rentok. Tok. Tok.”
Cole thought a second, then said, “Quirt dridt?”
The automaton leaned forward in the dust and looked around. “Kiktikn’kikikikitl. Klint dree?”
“Nee drikliktik. Trizlipt itl tikniklitpit.”
“Nee? Driktik.”
Cole nodded. There were tears in his eyes.
“What’s going on?” Emily asked, a little stunned. “I only picked up a few words.”
Cole blinked away the tears. “He wanted to know where his family was. I told him that the Jedik-ikik died thousands of years ago. He said he is alone and cold. Nee drik. Slik klint-itl. We will be your family now.”
The robot stared at Cole for a moment, then said, “Triknik iktit. Tiknik itkik. Kilil te Rentok. Rentok! Tok. Tok. Rentok!”
“What is Rentok?” C.C. asked Cole.
“I’m still not sure. He’s saying something about something dark coming from the stars. Is that Rentok? Nik kil te Rentok?”
The robot looked at all the astronaut. Then it pointed back toward the mountains and said, “Rentok. Tok. Tok.” The words slurred out of the robot’s mouth. Its gears were winding down. The clicking in its chest had slowed.
“I wish he’d stop saying that,” Anna said.
Then they heard it. An audible click from far away. But not quite a clicking sound. It sounded like metal drums beating from far away in the distance.
Tok.
Tok.
Tok.
“What was that?” C.C. said.
“Ren-tok,” the robot said. It had not lowered its arm.
Tok.
Tok.
Tok.
The sound came louder.
“That’s coming from the hills,” Anna said.
“We need to get out of here,” Emily said. “Everybody, get in your DSMUs.”
“Ren…t…ok,” the robot said with a final clicking in its chest.
Then the Golgothaquake hit.
Chapter Three: A Seismic Shift
1
The astronauts stumbled and fell to the ground. The combination of gravity sickness and seismic activity easily toppled them, despite the astronauts’ athleticism and fitness. And like any well-trained, mission-oriented team, as soon as the Golgothaquake stopped, the astronauts rose up and began working out the problems. Emily worked on satellite data while C.C. checked the seismometer in the Hab. Anna and Mathieu went to the DSMUs to verify their status.
Cole took the Doomsday Book and found a place to sit and examine the city for signs of damage. The pillars of one building crumbled, dropping the second story. Jedik-ikik statues were either leaning or fallen, but the ones around the first pyramid remained unchanged as if tethered to their spots by invisible chains. Cole mourned the loss of history. For all intents and purposes, he was the crew’s historian. His task was to evaluate the findings as well as act as the crew’s translator. He would guide them on which relics to return to the Anchor for portage back to Earth.
Ahead of him lay the broken remains of the largest statue in Ximortikrim. Mostly separated blocks now, the statue had once stood as tall as the highest pyramid and straddled a now crushed aqueduct. There were several theories as to what destroyed the statue, but they were nothing better than speculation. Cole’s hope was to discover some clue that would tell him about the statue. For now, though, he wanted a place to sit and sift through the stone book while the others figured out what was happening. The book was so heavy. He was getting tired of holding it up.
He brushed dust off the block as he placed it on his lap. Across from him was another stone. A Jedik-ikik soldier lay fallen across the stone. He propped his feet up on another giant stone and placed the Doomsday Book carefully on his lap. When the earthquake hit, he had rolled on his side to pro
tect the book. But it was heavy, and his arms were relieved to give up the book.
The soldier stared at him from behind the two egg-like eyes on top of his head. It was more than a little unnerving. Cole thought about moving, but he didn’t want to carry the book any farther, so he did his best not to look at the soldier.
On the stone below the soldier, an inscription caught his eye. Cole turned on his camera and clicked a photo of the inscription. The writing disturbed him. He did not like what it said, especially with the soldier lying there staring at him.
He got up and walked back to the group. He stopped halfway there. His eyes were to the ground to make sure that he didn’t trip on a rock or slip in the dust. Something was weird about the ground, though. He couldn’t figure out what was bothering him about it.
“You okay? You look like you saw a ghost.” Emily walked over and placed her hand against her husband’s helmet. It was the best she could do.
“This whole place is full of ghosts,” Cole said.
“I think it is just the planetary acclimation getting to you. Anna and Mathieu are double-checking the DSMUs. Once we’ve verified they’ve had no damage, we’re going back to the Hab.”
“Good. How is 51 Golgotha?”
“The satellite didn’t pick up anything abnormal, but it would’ve had to have been a pretty big seismic shift for the satellite to pick it up.”
“Hey, guys,” Mathieu called out. “We’re good to go.”
Cole took one more look at the ground and the dust, then he placed the Doomsday Book in the storage container and climbed into DSMU 5.
The DSMUs quickly left Ximortikrim and crossed through the jungles to the mountains. On the path, several aftershocks registered, one big enough that the DSMUs stopped and waited it out.
“This makes no sense,” C.C. said over the com. “In all our time monitoring this area, we never picked up any seismic activity. The Hab’s seismometer was brought solely for geological studies to verify soundwave experiments.”
“Talk to me,” Emily said. “What is the seismometer saying?”