“An airshaft?”
“With no opening to the outside?” She shook her head. “And it’s so smooth.” She knelt down and brushed away some of the dust on the floor. “It’s almost like glass. Our boring machines are good, but nothing like this.”
Eustus frowned. None of it made much sense. It’s almost as if someone had bored out the tunnel almost to the cliff face from the inside, he thought. “Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out what it is,” he told her.
Enya leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “I love a man with a sense of adventure,” she told him.
Wondering what they were getting themselves into, he followed her into the cave.
“This is unbelievable,” she said after they had gone about three hundred paces into the tunnel.
“This thing’s as smooth and straight as a pipe,” Eustus said quietly as he followed the slight downward angle of the floor. The echo inside was becoming increasingly eerie, and he had to fight back the urge to grab Enya and head back toward the rapidly fading light behind them. “Has any evidence been found of any other sentient races having lived on Erlang before your people arrived?”
She shook her head as she walked onward, following the white beam of light from the flashlight.
“No, nothing. People have looked, of course.” She did not add that only the Raniers had had the time and money for archeological pursuits. “But only animal bones and such things have been discovered. No paintings, carvings, pottery, or any of that kind of thing, and certainly no tools or other signs of a sentient race.”
Eustus frowned. His brain knew something, he could sense it, but he just could not quite make out what it was. I’ve got all the pieces, he thought, I just can’t put them together right.
Something hard and sharp in his pants cargo pocket rubbed against his leg.
The dragon’s claw.
A tunnel made neither by human hands, nor by nature.
The dragon’s claw. A weird rock that was sharp enough to draw blood.
“Oh, my God,” Eustus groaned as he shuddered to a stop, the hair on the back of his neck standing at stiff attention.
“What?”
“Give me the light, Enya!”
Her eyes wide with concern in the pitch darkness, she handed the tiny torch to him.
Grabbing it from her, he shone it on the dragon’s claw he had carefully extracted from his pocket. “Oh, shit,” he murmured. “I knew I’d seen this before.”
“Eustus, it’s just a rock,” she told him with utter conviction.
He looked up at her, his face creased with fear, something she had never seen him show before. “No it’s not, Enya. It’s Kreelan metal, a blade from what Reza calls a shrekka, the most lethal blade weapon the Kreelans have. They can penetrate armor that’ll stop a pulse rifle cold. You said these things have been found all around here?”
Enya nodded. “Yes. I mean, it’s not like thousands have been found, or anything, but all the ones that I know of – probably a few dozen over the years – have been picked up around the valley outside. Eustus, are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Once you’ve been tagged by one of these, or seen someone else get hit with one, you don’t soon forget. I would’ve recognized it sooner, except that it’s in terrible condition, and the center hub is missing.” He thought about that for a moment. “Enya, this thing must have been here for a long time. An incredibly long time. Kreelan blade steel is the toughest material known. It lasts forever and stands up to practically anything. Some metallurgists are even convinced that it’s some kind of quasi-organic material, able to reshape itself, to maintain its edge and balance without any kind of sharpening.” He looked at her. “We’ve never been able to duplicate or reforge it.” He looked down at the blade he held gingerly in his hand. “This thing must have been here for thousands of years.” He looked up at her. “Maybe longer.”
Enya was very quiet for a moment, until the eerie silence in the tunnel made her afraid not to speak, just so her ears could hear something. “So, you think this tunnel was made… by them?”
“That would seem to fit,” he said quietly, turning the shrekka blade over in his hand.
“Then what is this place?” Enya asked. “And if there were Kreelans here at one time, where did they go? Why did they leave?”
“I don’t know. But I guess nobody can say anymore that the Kreelans have never ventured beyond the Grange. Because they were here, all right. At least they were when our ancestors were still learning how to finger-paint on cave walls.”
“Could… could they still be here… down there?” She tilted her head toward the darkness of the tunnel.
Eustus shook his head in the reflected light, but with less conviction than Enya would have liked to see. “If there had been any still alive here, I’m sure your predecessors would have met up with them. I’ve never known Kreelans to be particularly shy around humans.”
“What should we do?”
“I think we should go back and get Reza. He’s the only one who could make any sense of this, and–”
He broke off as Enya collapsed. Her hands covered her ears, her mouth open in a silent scream of pain. Even as he made a motion to help her, the sound erupted in his skull like an explosion, knocking him to his knees. The flashlight fell from his hand, went out as the switch hit the smooth rock, plunging them into darkness.
The voices had returned. The keening wail rapidly grew and multiplied into the chorus that he had heard outside, but in the tunnel it was so loud that his teeth rattled.
“Come on!” he screamed into the gale of sound, his words carried away as they left his lips. Staggering to his feet, he felt in the darkness for Enya, suddenly terrified that something had happened to her. But his desperately groping hands found her arm, and frantically he seized her and pulled her to her feet. Dazed and deafened by the sound that was now so powerful that it seemed to be jarring his insides loose, he ran through the tunnel, dragging Enya behind him, trusting his feet to guide him down the center of the curved floor, running toward the distant light.
The sound only grew stronger, until he was sure that his eardrums must burst.
“Not much farther!” he shouted to himself, even though he was unable to hear his own voice.
Suddenly, he stumbled and fell sprawling into thin air. “What–” he cried. The fall was not far, less than a meter, but the rock he fell upon struck him a stunning blow, and Enya landed right on top of him. The two of them lay there, dazed, as the voices ebbed and flowed, then slowly died away into silence.
After a few moments, he finally had enough strength to do more than hold his eyes open. “Enya?” he croaked. He was struck with surprise at being able to hear his own voice through the ringing in his ears. He thought he would be totally deaf.
“Here,” came the muffled reply. She was lying beside him now, breathing steadily.
“Are you all right?”
“I think so,” he managed. His head hurt like hell, he had a split and bleeding lip, and he might have twisted an ankle, but nothing was broken. “You?”
“I’m all right. But there are better ways of getting me to fall on top of you in the dark. Where are we?”
Now there was a good question, Eustus thought, smiling at her humor. She was tough. He liked that. “I don’t know. I thought I was running toward the entrance. I could see a light. But… I guess I must have run the other way, deeper into the tunnel.”
Pause. “You saw a light? At the far end?”
“Yeah. But now that I think about it, it wasn’t the right color. Too cool, not yellow like the sun. Bluish, sort of.” He found her face with his hands, held her to him. “I guess the tunnel just ended here… wherever here is.”
“Where’s the light?” she asked. She kissed his hands, glad they were both alive, but increasingly curious about where they were. What was this place?
“Dropped it in the tunnel. We should be able to find it on the way out.”
&nbs
p; Still trembling from the force of the voices – or whatever it was – that had struck them, Enya raised herself to her knees, trying to orient herself in the darkness.
But it was not completely dark. Somewhere in front of her, it was impossible to tell just how far, she could see a dim bluish glow like a smudge of watery blue paint on a black canvas. “Is that the light you saw?”
Eustus turned over so he could look where she was, orienting himself with her body. “That must be it, but it was a lot brighter when I saw it. It was a point of light, like a star, not like it is now.”
“What could it be?”
“Some kind of fire, like methane burning? That burns with a blue color, doesn’t it?”
Enya shook her head in the darkness. He felt her hair brush against his hand. “No, we should be able to distinguish the flame clearly. This looks like the light is being diffused, or something. I’m going to see what it is.”
“Wait,” Eustus said, digging into his utility pouch. “We don’t have the light, but we can still get some light in here. I don’t smoke, but this is too handy an item not to carry. Here, use this.”
Enya heard a clicking sound, then saw Eustus’s bruised face in the yellow light of the tiny flame of his cigarette lighter. Behind him, she saw something else. She pitched backward, screaming, her eyes wide with terror.
With reflexes honed through years of combat, Eustus drew his blaster, rolled in the direction of the threat, and fired three times. Only after the crimson energy bolts flashed from the weapon did he get a glimpse of what he was shooting at.
A Kreelan warrior.
He fired twice more for good effect before he noticed that there were others, all around him. His nerves jangling with dread, he reluctantly took his finger from the trigger. If they had wanted to kill him, he would have long since been dead.
“Give me the lighter,” he said in a shaking voice, still holding his pistol at the ready. His nose filled with a strange odor from the work his blaster had done, but it was not the customary stench of charred meat. It was more like burned dirt or dust, with a tang of molten metal.
Enya reluctantly surrendered the tiny lighter, then scrambled to her feet, following Eustus as he stepped closer to the warrior he had killed.
They saw immediately, however, that she was already dead. Long dead.
“Lord of All,” Enya whispered as she stepped around Eustus, kneeling beside what remained of the corpse. “It looks like a mummy.”
The skin, where it showed through the extensive armor the Kreelans wore, was desiccated and shrunken over the bones. The eye sockets were empty, the silver-flecked orbs that had once filled them long since shriveled to nothing. The hair, still meticulously braided after all this time, clung tenaciously to the skull. The hands were skeletal, making the talons look all the more deadly.
“Let’s look at that one,” Eustus suggested, interested in examining a whole specimen. The one he had shot was missing its entire torso, and the smell, while not terrible, was very unsettling.
“Why are they still standing?” Enya asked quietly. As far as the light could reach, there were corpses standing at attention in what looked to be a circle, facing inward. Facing what? “Did someone somehow prop up the bodies?”
“From what I’ve seen, they were probably this way when they died,” Eustus said. “I’m sure no one touched them after they were dead. Kreelan anatomy’s a lot different than ours. It could be that their skeletal structure is more durable after they die, breaks down slower, maybe.” They sure seem that way on the battlefield, he thought. “Besides, Reza told me once that the Kreelans remove the collars from their dead, kind of a last rites thing. These ladies still have their collars on.”
“Except, my love, that these aren’t ladies,” Enya said.
“What? Of course they–”
“Look at the breastplates,” she said, pointing to the dust-covered armor of the nearest intact warrior. The dark metal followed the contour of the massive rib cage that once must have supported a formidable mass of muscle, but the form was clearly that of a male. “No breasts there.”
“Hold this,” Eustus said, handing her the lighter, his heart pounding with excitement. Humans had never encountered a male Kreelan, even a dead one.
“What are you going to do?”
“Check this guy out,” he said, taking his knife from its sheath and cutting away the armor from the mummy’s waist. “I’ll be damned,” he breathed. “Will you look at that. This Kreelan has an honest-to-goodness mummified pecker. The Confederation Academy of Sciences is going to love this.”
“What does it mean?” Enya felt slightly embarrassed, looking at the alien’s exposed genitals, shriveled though they were. Remarkably similar to a human’s, this one must have boasted a penis in life that would have been any man’s envy.
“Well, for one thing, we might be able to figure out how the Kreelans reproduce and how often. Kind of give us an idea of the Empire’s demographics, I suppose.” He shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know, except that it’s something no one’s ever seen before.”
“After seeing what you’ve got, I’m not very interested in an alien mummy’s privates,” Enya said lightly. The knowledge that they had found a potentially very important piece of the answer to the puzzle posed by the enemy thrilled her beyond the fear that still nagged at her from being in this strange chamber.
“Yeah,” Eustus quipped, “especially since mine’s a first sergeant.”
They both laughed, shedding some of their fear in the process. They were on an archeological dig now, not running for their lives from some unknown terror.
Now that they knew their would-be enemies were dead and crumbling with age, incapable of attacking them, Eustus held the light up and turned around slowly so they could see what else lay in the chamber. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to what looked almost like a tapestry of Kreelan runes that ran from the chamber’s floor to disappear in the darkness beyond the light’s reach. “We’ve got to get Reza in here. He could read this for us.”
“Eustus,” Enya said, thinking aloud, “have you ever read much about Terran archeology?”
“No,” he admitted.
“My father made me read things on every subject he could find a book on,” she told him. “He had me read them to him aloud, because he wanted to learn, too, but he did not know how to read himself.” Another legacy of the Raniers, she thought bitterly. “In one of those books,” she went on, “there was something about the old Egyptians on Earth, and what they called the pyramids. That’s where they buried their royalty, in big chambers inside the pyramid, usually with everything the priests thought the king or queen would need for the afterlife. Food, clothes, everything. And I think some of them even had soldiers, or replicas of soldiers, buried with them to protect them, or something. I can’t remember it all anymore.” Those days were a long time ago, before the police murdered her father during a “routine” interrogation.
“That’s what you think this place is? Some kind of burial vault for royalty or something?”
“Well, it has the right feel to it. I mean, who – or what – would be important enough to the Kreelans that all these warriors would stand around it, guarding it, I guess, until they themselves died?”
“But then,” he asked, “what happened to the others, the ones who brought these warriors here? There must have been some, right? And why did they leave?” He thought for a moment. “Wait a minute. Maybe not all of them did. If pieces of shrekkas were laying around, maybe there was some kind of battle here?”
“But then who are these people? The winners, or the losers? Or maybe someone else?”
“Who knows?” Eustus said. “But we haven’t found your king’s – or queen’s – body, yet.”
“Let’s move toward the center of the room.”
“Okay, but be careful.”
With Enya still holding the light, the two of them slowly moved toward where the center of the chamber should be, at least
according to the facing of the long dead Kreelan sentinels. There were a lot of them, probably hundreds.
“This room is really big,” Enya whispered as they moved through the darkness to a point where nothing was visible around them but the floor, which had been inlaid with colored stones or tiles that had remained like new, polished and free of any trace of dust. The lighter’s flame, tiny though it was, cast enough light that they could no longer see the blue glow that lay somewhere in front of them. “How long will this thing last?” she asked about the lighter.
“A few hours,” Eustus said. “I fill it up every time I use it. It runs on some kind of high-tech…”
Enya did not have to ask why his sentence abruptly ended. It didn’t matter, anyway. She would not have been paying attention. She had seen what had cast Eustus into sudden silence. “What is that?” she whispered.
Before them lay the treasure over which the ancient male warriors had been standing silent guard for countless centuries. Atop a spire of something resembling clear and slender glass sat what looked like nothing so much as an opaque crystal in the shape of some living thing’s heart. And at its center shone a faint blue glow.
The two of them stood there for a moment, transfixed by what they saw, by the simple but undeniable elegance and beauty of the structure before them, which itself stood only as high as Eustus’s shoulder. The crystal heart itself was a bit larger than a man’s fist.
“This is where the light was coming from, then,” Eustus said quietly as he moved closer. “The color’s right, but it’s so much weaker now. You can hardly see it at all.”
Looking more closely at the glassine pillar on which the heart was poised, Enya said, “I don’t know much about the Kreelans, but they must have incredible artisans. I’m not much of an art expert – Mallorys aren’t even allowed in the few good museums here – but my personal opinion is that there was an incredible talent and genius behind whoever made this.”
In Her Name Page 63