Zane instinctively assumed the stable freefall position. He spotted Zzuull below angling for the cave entrance. A prop-plane buzz overhead caused him to crane his head: ten or more yellow jackets appeared over the ledge above and promptly dived on him, bringing their rifles to bear.
Zane tapped the SHE selector and popped a round into the cliff face just ahead of the diving yellow jackets. The shockwave propelled him down and further out, pelting him with sharp-edged rock that didn't penetrate his PA suit. His paratrooper instincts cut in again as he spun his body around and got his feet underneath him.
The landing was breathtaking. Literally. It happened too fast for him to react or even remember. The ground was just there – and then he wasn't.
His next awareness was sunlight in his eyes and being dragged across the gravel. The sunlight dimmed and receded into a circle. Tilting his head he saw Zzuullzhrun. She was dragging him to safety...into the hole in the rock?
He couldn't say how much damage his body had sustained. His NDs were no doubt working overtime, even if his aug suit had absorbed the lion’s share of the shock. He felt more numb than anything. The fact he'd awakened meant he was going to live. The NDs would keep him comatose if he were mortally injured.
His blue waspish companion leaned him against a stone wall. She stooped to peer into his eyes. Not likely to see anything since the carbine lens worked one way. She lifted his rifle, turning it over in her six-fingered hands.
"No," he said in a hoarse whisper. "It won't work for you." He reached for it but she pulled it out of range, working the strap securely over her right shoulder and moving to the cave entrance to peer out. Gazing past her, Zane made out a few sprawled yellow jacket bodies. Had he killed off the whole pursuing unit?
The way Zzuull rushed back and hauled him to his feet suggested otherwise. He concentrated on making his legs work – on placing one foot ahead of the other. His suit divined his intentions better than his wobbly legs, and he shuffled along with his alien savior further into the darkness. The Laser Amplification and Infrared System function in his goggles activated automatically. They were in a large, smooth-walled cave with no end in sight.
Zzuullzhrun directed him into a sharp left and pushed him down toward a body-sized opening. She urged him forward. Zane had never suspected he was claustrophobic until he eased into the cave wall and started clawing his way inward. He saw no hint of light ahead, and his goggle's clear LAIS illumination of the narrow tunnel only heightened his sense of being confined.
A crawl of faith, he thought. He preferred by far his faith-leap off the cliff ledge. He had no sense of a destination, no hint of a light at the end of the tunnel. He heard Zzuullzhrun scrabbling along behind him, which provided some small relief, but not a lot of reassurance. The lack of communication between them was unnerving. He had no idea if they were going somewhere or merely hiding. But she kept pushing on his feet so he kept crawling forward.
Buzzing like hoarse mosquitoes sounded behind them. The yellow jackets were in the cave. Could they spot the small entrance? Zane had no idea how good their night vision was. Zzuull seemed to be working on prior knowledge, as if she knew this place offered escape opportunities, but he wasn't even sure about that. Maybe she was just "winging" it?
Zane wished he could locate his humor when his hand struck a solid surface, and feeling around revealed only rock and compacted dirt. Yet the wasp-alien kept tapping his feet.
"This is it," he whispered. "Dead end."
Zzuull hummed and made ratcheting sounds as if delivering a complex lecture. At moments Zane thought he heard words lurking in her elaborate chorus of incoherent noises. But even the imaginary words sounded foreign.
"I have no clue what you're saying. I'm telling you this tunnel or whatever it is just ended."
Zane watched her claw at the dirt and motion him forward. When he didn't respond – perhaps not realizing he could see her - she tapped his feet and clawed and pounded the dirt loudly. She wants me to claw and smash my way forward? That implied she thought they could break through to somewhere. A guess or had she done this before?
He clawed into the dirt, which surrendered easily enough to his suit-reinforced fingers. He squirmed forward another two or three feet until he encountered what felt like solid rock. It was with more frustration than conviction that Zane punched the rock. It gave. Suppressing a surge of optimism, he hit it harder. The rock moved an encouraging few inches. He started slamming it with his palms and it continued to slide, finally breaking free. Cool air entered and the darkness lightened a few minuscule shades. Echoes of the dislodged rock smacking hard surfaces as it fell to places unknown diminished into silence.
Zane crawled cautiously forward. His goggles illuminated what appeared to be a caldera lined by a narrow, rock covered ledge – just wide enough, Zane thought, for a person to stand and walk on without imminent danger of falling off.
Zane squeezed out of the tunnel, hanging awkwardly for a moment to avoid falling over the three-foot ledge a body's length below the opening. He scrambled to one side when Zzuull emerged like a pupa from a cocoon. She wasted no time in snatching up rocks and stuffing them into the opening. Zane spotted a large wedge-shaped rock that he guessed weighed well over 300 pounds. He hefted it without too much fuss – it was more awkward than heavy in his augmented state – and crammed its pointy end into the tunnel opening with all his suit-enhanced strength. He had no idea if it would prove adequate to stop the yellow jackets, but considering how hard he'd worked to dislodge a much smaller rock he chose to be optimistic.
But Zane saw bigger questions – the biggest being what the hell do we do now?
Zzuullzhrun seemed to have an idea. She pointed downward into the cavernous caldera that extended far beyond the range of his Laser Amplification and Infrared System – which was about two hundred meters in pitch darkness. He had the feeling she didn't mean for him to climb down.
"Where to?" Zane pointed downward and raised his hands palms-up. The alien regarded him blankly. He held his hands a few centimeters apart. "How far down does it go?"
She raised her hands, matching his, and for a relieved moment he thought she was confirming his optimistic guess. Then she spread her arms wide.
"Of course," he sighed.
Something thudded against the rock blocking the tunnel. A muted thump. The yellow jacket in the lead. He didn't see one of them dislodging it any time soon if ever. And if they did break through, he could easily kill them as they emerged - unless there was an army out there. But that didn't answer the larger question. Zzuull was motioning insistently to the caldera. Zane tapped his DAH rifle and pointed to the hole they'd just filled in. Did she understand they had no reason to run? Or was there something to be gained from going down the rabbit hole?
In reply to his thoughts, she snatched up a sharp stone and started scratching out a figure in the wall. The stone made only a faint impression, but the caldera was clear enough, and so was the long rectangle she scratched at its base. So she'd been here and knew where they were going. And the implication was that arriving there was a good thing. Though nothing in her drawing acknowledged the pain he would suffer from the fall.
The yellow jackets continued to thump the rock, without any noticeable effect. The dirt along its sides wasn't even stirring. Zzuull came up to Zane, startling him by wrapping her arms around his chest and lightly buzzing her wings while pointing into the caldera. She's telling me she can help slow my fall. Considering what happened with the yellow jacket, Zane was skeptical, but she seemed to know what she doing so far. He nodded to her. She indicated that he go first, but he motioned for her to precede him, tapping his rifle and the wall above the stone. She nodded with understanding and hopped off the ledge. He waited for her fall about fifty meters before jumping backwards after her, painting the area ten or fifteen meters over the plugged exit with his laser sight.
It was unnerving to face upward while he fell, but then "unnerved" was his new middle name. Just as
he was losing the angle on the selected spot – around the two-second mark - he pulled the trigger.
The explosion pressurized the cavern with a bass tuba blast. The shock wave bounced off the rock, dissipating most of its energy before catching up with Zane and slapping against the far side. Zzuullzhrun was there when he bounced clear, signaling she was ready to help slow his fall. Zane rotated facedown into the stable position, holding his rifle outward in both hands. Zzuull curled her legs around his waist and started beating her wings so powerfully that he felt caught in a helicopter downwash even while the upward air was blasting his face. A glance over his shoulder reinforced the comparison: her wings weren't so much beating as oscillating – moving so fast they were as nearly invisible as a helicopter's rotor.
His descent slowed almost as much as if he'd opened a parachute. His eighty miles per hour dialed back to a sedate thirty or forty. The caldera walls were no longer rushing past – he could actually make out interesting details in the rock formations. He wondered how long Zzuull could expend that level of energy. They were extraordinarily strong flyers considering the force it had to take to get their own mass airborne - along with weapons and small packs – but with his PA suit and tools Zane knew he weighed 210 – 215 pounds, and slowing him down this much had to be taking its toll. How far were they going to fall anyway?
The seconds ticked by. Zane found it impossible to estimate how long they'd been falling. It felt like an hour, but he doubted it was even a minute.
His LAIS goggles detected ground coming up fast. A broad crack split the apparent caldera floor. Zzuull steered him toward that crack, briefly increasing her wing oscillations. They slowed a few more miles per hour, slipping through a six or seven-meter wide section of the crack – which felt more like inches to Zane as they fell through.
A floor appeared one hundred meters below. Zzuull released him and he wind-milled his arms to get his legs under him. About one breath later he hit the floor.
This time he didn't black out. The aug suit shored him well enough at the thirty or forty MPH impact that he almost kept his footing – breaking his fall with a sideways roll. Zzuull helped him to his feet, not much the worse for wear.
"Thanks," he said.
"Esss," she replied. Zane wasn't sure if she was saying "yes" or just making an agreeable sound.
They'd arrived in a wholly different world from the surface. The shiny blue-grey walls and symbols were familiar – testifying to the same technology they'd encountered in the alien space ship hangar and suspension (burial?) chamber. His goggles' narrow field of vision permitted him to piece together their surroundings one patch of wall and ceiling at a time, but the big picture was undeniable: Zzuull had found an entrance into the advanced aliens' world.
Zzuullzhrun hummed out some words. The lights came on. They were standing in a rectangular chamber about a half-kilometer in length with curved ceilings 100 meters high. Multi-colored lines and symbols or words adorned the walls, ceiling, and floor. Zane recalled portions of Command Central in the Nellis AFB underground complex: color-coded demarcations for equipment placement, emergency routes, and compartmental doors. He suspected these lines and symbols had rather different meanings.
Zzuull added a whistling note to her hums, and a square hung in the air. A holograph, Zane assumed, but it appeared more solid. More whistling and humming produced a square outlined in glowing white on the face of a black globe next to other squares. The view panned back until the globe was surrounded by stars. That was when Zane realized he was looking at Animus.
So they were in an area where the advanced technology was operational, despite the single crack in the ceiling. Zzuull had somehow discovered it and learned to operate at least parts of it – enough to learn something about her world's place in the cosmos. To know there is a cosmos. Or something beyond her closed-off world.
Zane had wondered briefly before what the fly-wasp people thought about their four-walled world. Surely, they had probed the walls and learned the dimensions of their cage? He wasn't sure about the ceiling, which they might not have reached yet, but that was just a matter of time, even with balloon technology. What did they think about the artificial sun and stars? Did they know they were artificial?
Zzuull clearly had to know that now.
Zzullzhrun pointed to Animus and to herself and then signed for Zane to do the equivalent. Assuming he understood her, how was he supposed to describe his world and its relationship with Animus? The paper and oddly shaped pen Patricia had used in the air ship would be handy now. Zane made a gesture of drawing something on an imaginary paper along with a helpless shrug. Zzuull said something and Zane was startled when a large notepad and a spherical pen appeared in the air in front of him. He reached out and touched the paper. It was real paper, not a hologram. So was the writing device. The machine or AI his wasp-friend was communicating with had a matter-manipulation capability that the scientists in Space Command had been working on for decades without success.
Seizing the paper and pen, Zane could think of nothing better than to draw a rough portrait of Earth, with the American continents and adjoining oceans front and center. As he drew, his rendering of his world materialized before them, as large as a house. Zane added the moon at about the right distance and size. He drew a stick figure of himself on the Earth with a smiley face.
At first, the images suspended before them as exact duplicates of his own childlike scrawling, but in an instant his world and the moon expanded into absolutely accurate three dimensions. Even the stick figure became him – naked and anatomically accurate. He wanted to make an excuse about the coolness of the room, but what was the point?
These weren't extrapolations of his own feeble artistic efforts, Zane realized. These images were the real thing: actual photographs as clear as anything taken by NASA or Space Command. That meant the designer of Animus and its machines knew about the Earth. But how much did they know, and what was their interest in his world?
Zzuullzhrun obviously had some questions, too, and by watching the changing images Zane could pretty well follow what they were. A lot of print that looked to Zane like squiggles from the top row of a keyboard appeared beside the images as Zzull spoke. Technical descriptions of Earth? That seemed to match the shifting topography of the planet, which struck him as a geology-geography lesson.
Then it became a history lesson: a time-lapse video of continents and oceans shifting, mountains growing, plants spreading a green blanket over the land – followed by creatures developing in the oceans and crawling onto land, changing form, multiplying. It was like watching an animated nature special, but these images, as with those of the Earth and moon, looked exactly like time lapse photography, as if cameras were poised above and over the Earth recording it all.
History had never been his thing, but Zane couldn't take his eyes off the images. The ultimate family album. He smiled at the wonder of it all.
Zzuullzhrun appeared mesmerized. She hadn't spoken for many minutes, appearing content to let the video play itself out. Most of what Zane was seeing fit his concept of evolution on Earth, but he had no recollection of cities featuring what appeared to be advanced technology rising and falling on various continents or of flying humanoid beings that strongly resembled the winged sentient creatures in this world.
Zzuullzhrun emitted a squeaky buzz that sounded to Zane like either a protest or sharp question. The video halted. After a halting inquiry accompanied by a flurry of hand gestures, another series of images appeared, detailing the rise of a winged species civilization – and its apparent sudden end when a monstrous-looking asteroid struck land. Not the asteroid that hypothetically killed the dinosaurs - the only creatures Zane could make out were insects, among which the humanoid winged species seemed to be top dog – but it apparently did a quite thorough job of eradicating the humanoid insects and most other life on the planet as well.
Zzuull asked more questions and the scene shifted away from Earth to the beings behind th
e surveillance and the apparent builders of Animus. The perspective changed to winged humanoids regarding Earth from space in the same ships Zane and his crew had discovered in the alien hangar, followed by another crew presiding over the creation of a giant planetoid. Animus?
Too much was missing to put it all together, but Zane knew a hell of a lot more than he had a few minutes ago. He wanted to stop the holograph and explore a thousand other questions, but it was Zzuull's show for now. If Horse was right, she was some kind of scientist in disfavor with the ruling powers here. She did seem cut from a different cloth, but until he could communicate with her it was all speculation. And until he could communicate with the AI or computer that was replying to her he could only speculate about it, too. He wanted to believe it could help them, that it could intervene somehow in their favor, but he figured that if it were a sentient AI it would be taking the initiative - asking them the questions and not vice versa.
Zane had a sudden idea: Could an AI this advanced somehow gain access to the Cheynne's computer/AI? If it were somehow able to link up with the Aerial Transceiver Surveillance Drone, that would link it to the Cheyenne's mainframe. If this AI could download its knowledge, or some significant part of it, into the Cheyenne's computer – which really meant into Patricia's mind - wouldn't that allow Patricia to understand their language and perhaps vice versa?
Zane motioned for Zzuull to halt her endless inquiries, which she did with an obvious show of reluctance. After sorting through his frenzied thoughts, Zane started a series of drawings – crossing out the first few before settling on a depiction that made semi-sense – every step faithfully mirrored and magnified in the air before them. The completed version portrayed them in the room, a line extending up through the ground to the Aerial Transceiver Drone, portrayed as an ellipsoid, to the eastern wall and the Cheyenne, which with Zane's clumsy artistic touch manifested as a triangle with windows. He could only hope it was enough, as pitifully unclear as it was, to communicate his idea.
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