by JE Gurley
The blocks were not sandstone as were most of the Huresh buildings, subject to erosion and decay. The lightly veined opalescent stone resembled marble but had the durability of granite. It retained its luster after eons of sandblasting by the relentless winds. The building abutted the cliff rather than stood apart from it, as if its builders had used the multi-hued sandstone layers as a backdrop for their creation. The building was not ornamented by massive columns or statues, as if the building itself expressed the will of its builders, simplistic, yet powerful.
“They don’t look Huresh,” Cici said. “I suppose it could be from a much earlier period, but why was it constructed way out here? The nearest city is at K124.”
As Dax watched the structure loom larger as they approached, he wondered that as well. He believed the answer to that question was part of overall answer concerning Loki.
Plia parked the ATV as close to what appeared to be the entrance as possible. The triangular entrance sat at the top of set of wide steps whose bottom was half-buried in the sand. The ten-meter-wide stairway had two-meter-deep treads and meter-high risers. It consisted of three platforms of diminishing widths until they became the same width as the five-meter-wide, six-meter-high entrance. Two large stones, carved to fit together so tightly they resembled a single stone, formed the entrance. Unlike any other Huresh buildings, the entrance stones bore carved, intertwining vines with triangular leaves gracefully winding up their faces.
“That’s different. I’ve never seen that motif before. It’s beautiful.”
The oddly spaced steps were difficult to negotiate. Dax felt like Jack confronted with the Giant’s castle staircase. Clambering up each step wearing his suit, lugging his rifle, a pack with food, water, and extra power cells for the laser wore him out. He stopped at each landing for a quick breather. He noticed Ivers, Cici, and Plia had no difficulty. Romeo, like him, sweated profusely in spite of the cooling unit in his suit and gasped for breath halfway up.
Just inside the entrance lay an open portico formed by rows of square stone columns that had once supported a raised wooden roof. The columns, like the door lintels, bore engravings of vines, some with vestiges of the metal used to ornament the grooves. Many of the columns had collapsed, creating a narrow passageway that wormed through the pile of stones.
“We’ll leave our packs here,” Dax said. “Bring your weapons.” The building set his nerves on edge. He did not like it. His itching scalp argued against entering, but he had no choice.
They crawled on hands and knees through the portico rubble before eventually reaching a long, wide corridor. The corridor ended in a large room. Part of the roof had collapsed, and sand had accumulated over the centuries, filling the room to a depth of three meters in some spots. Whatever the room might have once contained had long since turned to dust. The room was windowless and had only the single entrance. He thought it odd the top of the pyramid had a single room. Two shallow holes, partially refilled with blowing sand, marked spots where Rathiri’s expedition had excavated.
“This part of the building is built into the cliff face,” Cici said.
Dax glanced up at the opening in the roof. The cliff loomed dizzyingly only a few meters away. He walked around the room slowly, examining the walls and floor for anything out of the ordinary. His scalp itched. He knew something was there, something he was not going to like. After ten minutes, he found what he was searching for.
“Look at this,” he said.
Ivers walked over and saw Dax staring at a depression in the sand near one wall. “There’s nothing there, just another hole.”
“No,” he insisted. “Watch.”
Ivers stared at the spot. After a minute, he saw what Dax had noticed. “I’ll be damned.”
“What?” Cici asked joining them.
“The sand,” Dax told her. “It’s moving.”
“Moving?”
“The sand is trickling down a hole, and sand from the room is moving to replace it, like water down a drain. It’s hard to spot. I understand why Rathiri missed it.” He looked at Cici. “If he missed it. Sand blows in to replace the missing sand. There’s something, an opening beneath the sand.”
“It might take longer than we have to dig down to it,” Ivers pointed out.
“Not if we blast,” he said with a grin. “Romeo, bring a homemade bomb.”
Cici was appalled at his idea. “You can’t use explosives. This is an archaeological site. You might damage it.”
“I intend to.” He pointed to the floor. “Whatever the Ravers are after is down there. I want to find it first.”
A rush of possibilities coursed through Dax’s veins. After so many days of reacting to events, of watching friends die, he was now prepared to break the tragic cycle before more died. He knew he was right about the building and its connection to the Ravers. He could feel it like a tiny voice whispering in his ear telling him what to do. The secret lay below their feet. Director Rathiri suspected some connection but died before he could reveal what he had learned. Unless we’re both insane, he thought.
Romeo brought the bomb and handed it to Dax. “Everyone had better leave,” he said. With the short fuse, he would have very little time to get far enough away from the explosion, especially if he brought the entire structure down on top of him, which looked like a distinct possibility. He no longer cared. His life needed resolution even if that final resolve was death. He gave everyone time to clear the area, dug down against the wall, and placed the bomb. The fuse was short, and he was no speed demon. He shredded up some papers from his utility belt and placed them in a pile on the sand. He then laid the fuse on one side of the pile to give him a few seconds extra head start.
He lit one side of the papers and ran. Slogging through the loose sand in his suit boots felt as if he were trudging through a quagmire. He heard the fuse ignite before he crossed the room. Reaching the corridor, he knew he was out of time. He hit the ground, covering his head with his arms. Seconds later, the bomb exploded. The floor quaked violently. The giant stones groaned in protest of awakening from their millennia of slumber, sifting dust down over him, but they held. He expected the floor to give way beneath him, but it did not. As the echo died away, he returned to examine his handiwork.
The explosion had blasted away several meters of sand, revealing the top of a triangular opening and several stone steps similar to the ones out front leading beneath the wall. It was a start. The others joined him.
“It’s a doorway,” Cici gasped in amazement.
“But where does it go?” Romeo asked.
Dax got down on his hands and knees and began digging. “We’ll find out.” As his blistered hands dug into the sand, he wished he had brought a shovel. He considered sending someone back to Fortune’s Luck for one, but he did not want to split the group. They all joined him, digging like a pack of dogs searching for a lost buried bone.
Within an hour, they had excavated the hole sufficiently to determine the steps led to another room or passageway. He had feared sifting sand filled the entire space, but their digging revealed a void. He squeezed through the opening on his hands and knees and discovered a space large enough to stand beyond it. Switching on his suit lights, he gawked in wonder.
He stood at the top of a long tier of steps descending into a cavernous space. Sand covered the steps, creating the slip face of a dune ten meters high. His light could not illuminate the far end of the room. The walls and ceiling, carved from the native rock, met fifty meters above his head, forming the point of an enormous inverted V. Rows of statues lined niches along each side of the room, disappearing into the darkness. Those nearest him revealed only their heads. The subjects of the statues caused palpitations in Dax’s heart.
“This isn’t Huresh,” Cici said.
“Not unless they liked statues of Ravers.”
Each of the statues was a Raver, all bearing the same pose, standing straight and tall with their arms folded over their chests and heads bowed.
/> “They look different,” Ivers said. “They have eyes.”
“They’re wearing clothes,” Romeo snorted. Dax saw that Romeo was right. Each Raver wore a sort of cloak with pockets.
“They’re smaller than Ravers,” Cici observed, “and more defined. Look at their hands. Instead of long talons, they have fingers designed for grasping. Their legs are less elongated.”
“And that’s not armor under those togas,” Ivers noted. “They have scales, but more like a lizard.”
Dax listened to their observations, but his mind had already leaped to the most logical conclusion. The pieces of the puzzle fit so neatly he did not doubt his outré presumption. “This is the race that created the Ravers.”
Cici stared at Dax. “What do you mean?”
“This reptilian race was the original inhabitants of Loki. The Huresh, who we called Lokians, the builders of the cities, invaded and terraformed the planet, wiping out the reptilian race. Before they died out, they created a doomsday weapon, one that ensured their world would never be colonized by anyone else – the Ravers.”
Cici wrinkled her brow. “It makes sense in a macabre kind of way, but why are the Ravers coming here? A homing instinct?”
“We’ll find the answer down there,” Dax said. She still did not see the significance of the pyramid. He suspected he did, and the thought troubled him. He began walking and sliding down the dune, using one gloved hand thrust into the sand to brace himself.
As he walked down the room, Dax counted the statues – fifty-four, perhaps six more buried beneath the sand. Was the number significant to the race they sculpted them? He glanced back to see the others still standing on the steps. “Anyone else curious?”
“I’ll bring the weapons,” Plia said.
16
The flat pyramid and the room built into the cliff predated the Huresh ruins by a thousand years. The members of the unnamed native race were master craftsmen. They had carved the niches and statues from the dense sandstone as they excavated the room. Slabs of the same marble-like stone as the exterior lined the walls and ceiling of the room. The floor was highly ornamented. A mosaic of smaller polished stones created a river winding through a landscape lined with forests, hills, and expanses of grasslands – Loki as it had once looked. To Dax, the loss of such a world was sufficient cause to wish its despoilers eliminated. The base of the wall beneath the niches bore colorful bas-relief images of animals, birds, and sea creatures, the vanished flora and fauna of Loki.
“It’s beautiful,” Cici observed.
Dax had to agree. “It was.” It looked as Earth had looked before mankind had dirtied the air, fouled the oceans, and driven the wildlife into near extinction. A flash of light along one wall gave him a start. He stopped and aimed his laser, but he saw nothing. After a few seconds, a soft glow slowly illuminated the room from a source set high in the walls.
“Power, after all this time,” Plia said. Her voice held a degree of admiration for the builders. She had shown little interest in their find. He was glad she had discovered something that could break her shell of icy stoicism.
Walking down the twin rows of Raver statues gave Dax the shivers, as if he expected one to come to live and attack him. In spite of how the neat even rows pleased his sense of balance and his OCD, the statues repelled him. As he studied one of the statue’s faces, he noted the differences between the creators and their creations, the Ravers, as he knew them. The beings depicted on the statues were not blind. Their large round eyes gazed outward filled with intelligence and pride. Their mouths revealed rows of normal-sized teeth, not the black, razor-sharp teeth of Ravers. Their bearing denoted dignity.
“This must have been some kind of religious complex, a temple,” he proposed. “Maybe these statues represent former high priests or leaders.”
“Did these people devolve into the Ravers?” Romeo asked.
“Not enough time has passed for that much evolutionary change,” Cici replied.
“No, they created Ravers from their own kind,” Ivers said. “By some process, part genetics, part bioengineering, they turned citizens into super soldiers, rampaging beasts designed to kill anything it encountered. They knew they were dying, wiped out by the invaders, and directed all their efforts into extracting revenge.”
“I feel sorry for them,” Cici admitted. “To lose your world … it’s more than I could have born.”
“Don’t,” Dax snapped. Cici’s sympathy for the builders annoyed him. They were the victims of an invasion, and for that, he felt sorry for them, but they had descended into racial madness, choosing an unthinkable form of retaliation. He doubted the subjects for bestial transformation were all volunteers. “Whatever their motivation, their creatures are loose out there. They killed our friends. We have to stop them.”
He quickened his steps. Somewhere in the underground complex lay the answer. They had to find it if they wanted to survive. Cici was right about one thing. Despite his anger at them, he understood their reasoning. Bereft of their world, wiped out like the buffalo on Earth or the Bey’s Helix Elk on Glorious, the indigenous race chose not to go out meekly. They set loose a horde of monsters created from their own flesh. The Huresh were not an invading army; that assault had already taken place before their arrival, the terraforming process that had changed the landscape and exterminated a species. They were colonists, planted and left to thrive or fail on their own. They weren’t soldiers, but farmers, builders, businessmen. They could not face the Raver threat. The Ravers had done their job, but now, having reawakened, they did not know that job was over. Humans were the new threat, and they would face the same fate.
The grand hall was over four-hundred-meters long. The far wall was blank except for two metal doors. Plia carefully examined the door on the right. “It has an electronic lock, but I think I can bypass it,” she said. She placed a small black disc over the door lock and plugged it into a port on her suit. Using her suit computer, she ran a decryption code. After twenty seconds, the door emitted a loud click. “There.” She pushed the door. It split into two diagonal halves, which slid into opposite recesses in the wall.
The short corridor revealed beyond the door led to a series of interconnected rooms. Time had long ago decayed whatever organic materials they contained, but several of the rooms contained the rusted remains of scientific apparatus, most of whose purpose was indecipherable. Time had taken its toll on it as well, but several large slabs of stone contained the remnants of restraining devices where the victims, willing or unwilling, underwent the transformation process. Dax tried to imagine the pain and agony the stones of the room had absorbed, but failed. It was beyond his comprehension.
“I’m sure the science people will be interested in this,” Ivers said.
Dax sneered. “Yeah, like I trust the military with monster-making equipment.”
He had seen enough. He turned abruptly and retraced his steps to the other door.
The left-hand door revealed a sloping ramp descending deeper into the bluff, illuminated by sparsely spaced lights in the ceiling. They emerged into a second cavernous space. He heard Cici’s sharp drawn breath as the lights flickered on as they entered.
Like the first hall, the long walls contained rows of niches; however, the recesses did not contain statues. Instead, each of the hundreds of vertical glass-enclosed cavities held a Raver in suspended animation, duplicates of the Ravers in the lava tubes. This was what attracted the Ravers like a magnet – their kin awaiting reawakening in the cryo chamber.
“Oh, my God!” Cici exclaimed, as her gaze fell on the rows of glass crypts. “There are so many.”
“An army,” Ivers replied. Ivers’ voice was cold. He saw the creatures as a threat to humanity. If they ever got off planet, they would be.
Dax didn’t understand what they were doing there. “But why didn’t the indigenous population release them?”
“Maybe they didn’t need them, or maybe they died before they could,” Ivers suggested.
Cici’s face was ashen, he eyes wide and wild with fear. “Are they alive?”
“Yes. They’re just sleeping.” Ivers ran his gaze the length of the room. His expression was grim. “We have to destroy them.”
While Dax agreed with Ivers, he thought it more likely they would only succeed in awakening them. “We’ll never kill them one at a time. We don’t have time. Our company should arrive soon.”
Ivers would not be deterred. He had come to Loki to kill the Ravers. It did not matter how many there were. “There must be a kill switch somewhere, a means to shut down the power to the crypts. Without life support, they’ll die.”
“Or awaken. The ones in the lava tubes didn’t need any fancy technical support. They simply dug a hole and went to sleep. What if killing the power brings them out of stasis all at once?” The thought made Dax shudder. He turned to Romeo. “Go outside and keep watch. As soon as you spot a Raver, call us on the com link.”
“You mean alone?” he asked.
His fearful expression made Dax reconsider his suggestion. He wouldn’t order anyone else to risk their life. “Okay, you stay here. I’ll go.”
Romeo sighed deeply and shook his head. “No, I’ll go. You know what you’re doing here. I don’t.”
“If you see anything, hurry back here.”
“You betcha I will,” he said as he climbed up the sand dune and left.
Plia walked farther down the chamber. “Dax, there are several corridors off here. One might lead to a control room or power facility.”
“We’re doing nothing standing here,” he said.
They followed one corridor, but it quickly branched off. Dax chose one at random. The next corridor divided again. “It’s a damn maze down here,” Dax griped, frustrated with the progress.