The Alien Element

Home > Other > The Alien Element > Page 12
The Alien Element Page 12

by M. G. Herron


  “Wouldn’t we find more fragments, and maybe some weapons, if that were the case? Flint arrowheads? Sharpened obsidian? It doesn’t add up. Besides, evidence indicates the cities in this area being abandoned, not destroyed. Not to mention, this structure looks so different from the other Mayan ruins that have been discovered…”

  “How do you know the people who built it were Maya at all?” Talia said.

  “They had to have been,” she said. “You heard what Audrey told me when I called her earlier today. She dated the samples we gave her between 200 AD to 1000 AD. That’s close enough to the Late Classic Maya in this area to be part of the same culture as Lagunita and Tamchen. They had to have been Maya.”

  The others shifted their weight and cleared their throats.

  “What if,” Ross said, “it just wasn’t finished?”

  Eliana considered this for a long moment. “That’s an interesting theory. So not just the carving, but the whole structure is incomplete. It would explain why there aren’t as many stones as you’d expect, why it’s so far away from any other structures, and why there are no reliefs, if those were done last. The cornerstones were just to mark the place. The foundation of something…tall.”

  Ross nodded.

  “But why so far up here? And how did they even get the stones up here?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe the carving was done by someone else, later, after the structure was built.”

  A rustling sound came from the bushes to their left. Ross drew his machete from its sheath with a metallic hiss, and turned, holding the blade before him and stepping in front of Lakshmi.

  Two low fan-shaped palm leaves burst apart as a brown tapir galloped onto the path. It snorted with irritation and tossed its head as it charged toward Ross.

  He brought his machete around instinctively, but halfway through his swing he recognized the animal and redirected the arc of the blade, jumping aside awkwardly as he fought his reactive momentum. The sharp edge of the machete thunked into the trunk of the tree near Eliana’s feet.

  She pulled her foot back just in the nick of time as the blade sank into the soft wood. The tapir snorted, continued down the path, and trotted out of sight.

  Ross cursed. “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “It surprised me.”

  Eliana blew out the breath she’d been holding. Then they all broke out into laughter, the tension burned away by the sudden, harmless surprise.

  She squatted down to stabilize herself and steady her trembling limbs. She was overcome with a helpless laughter. As she laughed, the worry and fear bled out of her, and she lay on the log and let her sweat-soaked body be supported by the old tree.

  Bugs buzzed over her, but that didn’t bother her. She hardly noticed the perpetual insects any more. Even Lakshmi didn’t seem bothered. She sat down next to Eliana, still chuckling, and rolled up the legs of her pants. Lakshmi took off her boots, and wiggled her toes in the air.

  “Really well done, you guys,” Eliana said. “I mean it. Let’s take some photos, and then call it a day.”

  After a long, lazy dinner, Eliana dug her phone out of her tent and hiked up to high ground, where the signal was better, and stared at the screen while she thought about calling Amon.

  Her anger had faded, but not her sense of injustice. Yet she found that she wanted to share the accomplishments of her team with him. Celebrating among themselves was fine, but telling Amon would be better. Plus, she missed his voice.

  She scrolled to his name in her contacts. She pressed the call button. And hung up before the first ring had finished.

  What was she thinking? She couldn’t talk to him. For a minute, she considered calling Renee and talking to her old mentor instead. She would appreciate her team’s work. She was an anthropologist herself. Renee had left a voicemail two days ago, actually, though Eliana didn’t call her back. She re-listened to it now.

  “Hey Eliana, I know you’re probably out in the field again now, but I wanted to invite you to the faculty luncheon next Sunday. The editor of National Geographic, Bryce Varley, will be there, and he said he’s very interested in meeting you…”

  Eliana looked at her calendar. Sunday was tomorrow. She would have to pack now and leave first thing in the morning to make a flight back work. The very idea exhausted her.

  Forget it. She deleted the message and drove back to camp. After locating the nice bottle of smoky mezcal she’d saved for a special occasion, Eliana crouched outside the flap of Lakshmi’s tent.

  “Lakshmi? Can I come in?”

  “Oh my,” she said, “have you been hiding that from us?”

  Lakshmi was lounging on her back, reading a book by the light of an electric lantern. Eliana handed her the bottle, and she took a small sip without sitting up. “Mmmm. I love the taste of mezcal. It’s like tequila, but drinkable.” Lakshmi glanced down at the cell phone, which Eliana was now twirling through her thumb and forefinger. “Did you talk to Amon?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t right now.”

  They drank together for a bit in silence.

  “What’s on your mind?” Lakshmi finally asked.

  “I’m trying to figure out our next move. What should we do now?”

  “You’re in charge, you tell me.”

  “I didn’t just hire you for your organizational ability,” Eliana said. “Or your legs, though they are lovely. I’m asking you for your opinion.”

  “We could call it off for a while, take a break. We’ll be able to publish preliminary findings based on what we found here.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?” Eliana said.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “I’m just worried what people will think.”

  “We all have to face that eventually,” Lakshmi said. “You’re not usually one to hold back if you believe in something.”

  “I am this time. I need to know more.”

  “We’re mapping out the area. Every building block counts. They’ll take the preliminary findings.”

  “Maybe that’s for the best. You guys deserve a break.”

  Lakshmi stared at Eliana for a second, then shrugged. “Or we can keep looking. It’s not so bad out here. Kind of peaceful.”

  Eliana took another drink. The mezcal burned her throat. She passed the liquor back to Lakshmi.

  “There’s a lot of jungle here,” Lakshmi said. “Lagunita and Temchen were lost until 2014. And now this place. Who knows what else is in this jungle?”

  “Yeah,” Eliana said. “We’ll need more supplies. But I don’t know.”

  “Are you scared of what we’ll find or what you’ll have to do with it?”

  “Both, I guess.” Eliana took back the mezcal, and cradled it in her arm. “I’ve never been one to worry so much. I hate feeling this way all the time.”

  “You were the one who taught me what lay on the other side of fear.”

  “Folly,” Eliana said. She raised the bottle to her mouth, but Lakshmi snatched it out of her hand before she could take a sip.

  “No,” Lakshmi said. “You told me that all the best things in life are on the other side of fear. We learn as much from our successes as our failures. Remember?”

  Eliana smiled sadly. “The speech I used on you on the way out to do our field work in Utah. A lot has happened since then.” She didn’t tell Lakshmi that she’d cribbed the lines from one of the science fiction novels she was reading by lantern in her tent in the field, like Lakshmi was doing now. The words had impressed Renee, her mentor, so she thought it might also impress her friend. She was young and foolish back then.

  “The stakes are higher now.” Lakshmi tilted the neck of the bottle back at Eliana, who took it from her gently. “But that doesn’t really change anything, does it?”

  Eliana took another swig, then stoppered the mezcal bottle with the cork. Her body buzzed with a low level of intoxication. She felt calm, and braver than she had a moment ago. It was a
lways good to talk to Lakshmi about these things—it had a way of clarifying her thoughts.

  “You’re right. I want to push on. Keep looking. Let’s talk to the others about it in the morning.”

  18

  Rupture at the Airlock

  Amon sprinted off the Translocator platform before his eyes had fully adjusted, and bumped into Wes McManis. Wes stumbled back against a railing by the loading ramp, cussing. He had bleary, bloodshot eyes and wore jeans bunched up at the tops of his cowboy boots. Clearly, he’d been awakened after a long night and it wasn’t pretty. His hairy stomach spilled out from under a rumpled button-up flannel shirt, and he stank of a woman’s cloying perfume.

  “What in the hell is going on?” Wes demanded.

  “What are you doing here?” Amon said.

  “I told Roger, the security guard up at the 24-hour checkpoint, to call me if anything suspicious was going on. He said he heard a suspicious commotion, an alarm or something.”

  Amon narrowed his eyes. “Who else does Roger talk to? Do you have someone spying on me?”

  “What? I—” Wes’s face flushed. “How dare you accuse me of spying on you. If anyone is acting suspicious, it’s you. You’ve been here three nights this week. Did you clear any of this with the LTA?”

  Amon grunted and shoved past Wes. He joined Reuben, who was still watching the wide monitor of the holodeck. Amon leaned in close with Reuben and spoke in a low voice.

  “What was the alarm for?”

  “It’s programmed to sound an alarm if we lost connection to the platform. Scared the crap out of me—we’ve never had that happen except in trials before, and that was intentionally. Something is going on up there.”

  “Do you mind?”

  Reuben nodded and let Amon step in to the middle of the holodeck.

  Amon opened the camera feed at the Dome 2 platform and projected it onto the screen—it was black, offline. He pinged the platform, but it didn’t respond either. The connection indicator was an uncharacteristic red color.

  He split the big glass screen into four quadrants and brought up more camera feeds. One showed the door of the SOLARPulse-1 and the broad overlook window in one shot, although the glare from the overhead light at this angle didn’t afford them much of the view. Another camera showed the inside of Dome 3, the pressurized area for repair and maintenance of the fabricators. Only five or six of the twenty-five scientists were there, and they were all huddled at the airlock window, gazing out.

  “Is that the direction of the reactor?” Reuben asked.

  Amon nodded.

  In the last quadrant, bottom right, Amon brought up the exterior camera on top of Dome 2. It was filled with dust from the fabricators. Men ran in the distance, their strides comically elongated due to the low gravity. A couple of blocky fabricators, their outlines similar to Zambonis or huge riding lawnmowers, stood still in silhouette—they’d all been turned off.

  He looked for a camera feed at the nuclear reactor, but that was offline as well.

  “What the hell happened?” Wes said.

  “Reuben,” Amon said, breaking their concentration and pulling their eyes to him. “I want you to put me inside the tunnel near the nuclear reactor.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes. You can do it.”

  “Too risky. I don’t trust it. It’s one thing to move somewhere on earth because the planetary body’s relative velocity stays the same, and the distance is shorter. Without the platform—”

  “You have to. I’ll get a suit.” Amon began walking toward the storage side of the lab.

  “Remember what happened last time?” Reuben called after him.

  “What happened last time?” Wes asked.

  Reuben grunted. “The electronics fried and cut off life support systems.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Their voices cut out when Amon passed through the plastic curtain into the small warehouse space, where the spare high-mobility space suits were kept—light, thin models with a wide range of motion and made of lightweight but durable fabric, weighing only fifteen pounds.

  The suits were difficult to squeeze into in the best of times. Now it felt like getting dressed took ages, although he knew it was only a few minutes. They had many clasps, seals, and zippers, and it took agonizing long moments for Amon to shed his clothes, climb into the suit, and check the oxygen tanks. He sealed the helmet, a plastic bubble that gave him about three inches of clearance around his face, and full use of his peripheral vision. He turned the oxygen on as well as the electronics so he could speak to Reuben, albeit with a slight delay.

  When Amon ambled back into the Translocator room wearing the suit, Wes and Reuben were both watching one of the external camera feeds. The dust was static as it hung in the atmosphereless firmament. They seemed to be working next to the tunnel. Wes turned his cell phone over in his hand nervously. Then he flicked it open, sent a quick text to someone, and returned to flipping it over and over and over.

  “Who are you texting?” Amon asked.

  “Enzo,” Wes said. “I’m telling him what’s happening.”

  “Let’s do this, Reuben,” Amon said.

  “No way.”

  “I’ve resolved the electrical issues.”

  “How many times have you sent yourself through in a space suit since the first time?”

  “Well, I haven’t yet, but—”

  “But nothing.”

  Amon walked onto the Translocator platform and gave Reuben a thumbs up. “You can do this. Right inside the tunnel—the air is the same pressure as here, remember.”

  “Yes, yes,” Reuben grumbled, “and adjust for the gravity differential and relative velocity…”

  The rings around him spun and a second later Amon was looking straight down a tunnel on the lunar surface. A klaxon blared inside the building. He took a hesitant breath. Everything seemed fine with the life support systems. He tapped the computer at his wrist that controlled them. When it lit up, he grinned.

  “Well done, Reuben!” he said over the noise of the klaxon.

  “What?”

  “I said well done!”

  “Amon, we can’t hear you. Huh, well that’s strange, I—”

  “Reuben? Hello?” Amon’s body broke out in cold sweats inside the suit. He’d been removed from the communication channels. “Damnit!”

  Amon looked around him in the silence. Well, he came up here to help, so he might as well see what happened and if he could actually be of assistance. One thing at a time.

  Still unsettled, Amon made himself walk forward. This tunnel was quite long, as the nuclear fission reactor was buried apart from the main site due to the possible radiation contamination it would emit in the event it was breached. For safety reasons, it was broken into sections about a hundred yards in length.

  Amon walked until he reached the airlock at the end of this section. He slapped the button to open it, entered, and waited till the door closed behind him. When it had, he pressed the next button and the door opened to let him into a connected section of tunnel identical to the one through which he had just passed.

  The tunnels had no windows. The interior walls were a stark white. Inset lighting ran lengthwise through the ceiling. Amon passed through three identical sections, curious as to why no one was in these tunnels. Was he even headed in the right direction?

  At the next airlock, he pressed the button, but the door wouldn’t open. Gazing through the clear window, he saw an identical section of tunnel. Except this one was filled with smoke.

  No, not smoke. Dust.

  Moon dust from the fabricators had drifted in to the tunnel. Which meant that the atmosphere has been voided. No wonder they hadn’t come through this tunnel. The airlocks shut down in the event of a breach.

  Another man in a space suit approached through the dust. Amon waved, and the man walked toward him. It wasn’t until he was on the other side of the airlock that Amon recognized him. It was Stanis. He said something, but Am
on couldn’t hear him. He shook his head.

  Stanis held fingers in the air in a pattern. One finger, two fingers, and then one. Followed by one finger, two fingers, and then five.

  Amon switched his frequency to that channel.

  “Amon!” Stanis’s voice came through his headset. “What are you doing up here? The platform went offline.”

  “I’ll explain later. What can I do to help?”

  “We could use the extra hands! Let’s get you through this airlock.”

  Producing a tablet, Stanis manually overrode the airlock to let Amon into the dusty tunnel, where he clapped him on the shoulder.

  “What happened?”

  “A rupture in the tunnel near the reactor. Took out the power, but didn’t touch the reactor, thankfully.”

  “The cause?”

  “Don’t know yet. It just blew. Happened to take out a main power line when it did. We’ll be on life support only until we can replace that. I thought we were beyond these sorts of accidents…”

  Over the course of the next several hours, Amon held tools, carried plastic material, and drove a rover back and forth between Dome 3 and the rupture at the airlock to bring Stanis’s team extra supplies. They eventually repaired the two-foot rupture in the cellular wall with a freshly printed section from a fabricator, sealing it with the old tunnel by cold welding aluminum and titanium alloys. Not trained for any of this work, Amon stood nearby and watched, fascinated with the procedure.

  After a while, he switched frequencies back to the one Reuben was on, to see if the connection had been reestablished.

  “Reuben, are you there?”

  “Amon! Finally.” His voice was shaky.

  “Sorry, I found Stanis and switched frequencies. Is everything okay?”

  “Amon, it’s…Agent Wiley. I think you need to see,” Reuben said. “You aren’t gonna like this, I’ll tell ya. Brace yourself.”

  “Hang on.”

  Amon swallowed once, said his goodbye to Stanis, and went back into Dome 2 so he wouldn’t frighten the astronauts.

  “Ok, I’m ready,” Amon said, and closed his eyes for the sudden shift.

 

‹ Prev