“HOLY SHIT!” James exclaimed. The Ranger bucked, its front end lifting into the air and slamming back down. Another earthquake had started; this one violent and showing no sign of slackening. The line of troops surrounding them broke as soldiers fell or ran away. The engine of the Ranger whined to life, the three-tonne transport rocking on its suspension from the violence of the quake. The engine was humming now, a sharp arrhythmic sound as Peter climbed back up from under the dashboard. He was bleeding from his forehead but he said nothing as he put the Ranger into gear and tore out of the compound.
“Pete! Over there!” James shouted, pointing. Echohawk and Santino were staggering away from the dig site. Peter swung the transport over to where his mentor and the Chief of the Laguna Band were, reaching around to open one of the two back doors on his side of the truck-like vehicle.
“Get in!” Peter ordered. Someone had rallied behind them, realizing they were stealing a military transport. Shots were fired, ringing off the back of the transport. Echohawk and Santino scrambled aboard and the stolen Ranger took off.
“Where to?” Peter asked.
“Back towards Laguna,” Santino replied, “Let’s get the hell away from this place!”
“What’s going on?” Echohawk asked, “You were working the console before this went down.”
“It looks like the object beneath us is causing the quakes,” James replied, slipping on a headset and beginning the process of hacking into the Ranger’s Grid backbone, “I think it’s trying to unearth itself!”
♦♦♦
Short siren blasts sounded from the intercom speakers throughout the station. General Harrod’s ship had completed hard dock and his soldiers were now desperately trying to re-route power to bulkhead doors that had been sealed, their wiring and control circuits either torn out or just incinerated. Bloom stood by Major Benedict as the two of them hovered by the console where Boucher sat, overseeing Donnelly’s progress. She and her team had aligned the microwave dish and were now trying to tune in to the satellite’s control frequency. Boucher kept his hands ready at the console’s keypad. Once they had access to the satellite he would begin the process of hacking in.
“How long?”
“I’ll only need a couple of minutes,” He replied, “Once we have the satellite linkup. We’re hacking into K-Sat 213; Concord 3 actually launched that satellite a few years ago, so we have its startup protocols in-system. It’s just a matter of making the satellite think we’re restarting its command sequences without actually shutting it down.”
“I don’t know how much time we have,” Bloom said, “I expect very little.” Boucher nodded, his dark features growing more determined.
“I’ll get it done, Lieutenant-Colonel,” He said, “Don’t worry about that.”
“We’re in!” Donnelly’s voice called through their headsets. Boucher lowered a monitor boom over his left eye and began a furious dance of fingers across the keypad in front of him. Bloom followed the action from her own monitor boom, but the large strings of code meant little to her. Her background was engineering, not code-crunching.
“Almost there…” She heard Boucher say after some minutes. But his voice was not the only sound she heard. There was the shriek of a bulkhead being forced open, barks of orders and troops rushing to secure locations…they were close, very close.
“Almost got it…” Bloom looked at Boucher as he said the words then hit the button to seal the command module’s hatches.
“I’m in!” Boucher said triumphantly, “I’m connecting to the INN Grid Spar now.” They heard pounding on the main hatchway into the command module.
“Hurry it up Captain,” Bloom advised. The pounding on the hatch became more determined and a moment later the door shuddered as they began forcing it open.
“Captain…”
“I’m beginning to downlink the data from the scan, now,” Boucher announced. And then the power to the command module was cut. A moment later the bolts holding the hatch into the command module were cut through and the door was forced open.
“Freeze! Nobody move!” an aggressive, frightened soldier bellowed.
“You’re too late, Colonel Bloom,” General Harrod said, immediately after.
FOUR
THE UNEARTHING
When they first arrived the land around them was lush with life. Animal, vegetable, even microbial, in quantities far beyond anything previously recorded or predicted. What had begun as a simple catalogue of an overly fertile world became an epic task. It was a challenge they met eagerly, devoting themselves to the task of determining why a relatively small world would harbour such a wide variety of life. They had been diverted from their core mission to study this tiny world; perhaps they would find some of the answers they wanted, here.
The Ship and its crew gave no thought to this change of plan. Though the process of uncovering the secrets of life on this small world could well take ages, they themselves were ageless; their mission was already thousands of years old by the time they had been diverted. Another thousand, more or less, would mean little to them.
And so it was that the Ship came to be nestled in the earth of this far-distant world, fecund in its varieties of life. The Ship already held a catalogue of life from a thousand other worlds, but this one was unique. So varied was the plant and animal life that it would merit a special place in the archives. Explorers were sent to all the continents and all the environments on the world to study and collect tissue and fluid from each life form they encountered. The two hundred thousand strong crew devoted themselves entirely to the task of the catalogue, over the course of the next several dozen years.
♦♦♦
They believed, naively, that the enemies of their Purpose and the threats to Life had been left far behind when they had landed their massive Ship on this small world in a distant galaxy. This mistaken assumption would prove to be their downfall.
Sirens wailed throughout the Ship as the extensive catalogue within was secured. They had little time. No time to safely take the Ship away from the planet and no time to prepare the stasis systems for their habitation. Their inattention had condemned them to die. But the Ship could be saved, as could their catalogue. They had calculated the size and trajectory of the approaching asteroid. It was massive, deadly and was deployed to strike dangerously close to their position; it was only luck that had spared the Ship from being at ground zero of the projected impact site They prepared the Ship, giving it instructions and a cargo so precious that it should survive the destruction of this world even if the Ship’s crew could not. After the impact the Ship should sleep and heal. It should wait. When all was ready the Ship began powering down and alone in the last, its crew waited in the darkness for their deaths.
♦♦♦
The asteroid slammed into the Earth with a force of immeasurable magnitudes. The shockwaves from the strike blasted out across the planet, levelling everything on one continent and raging out tidal waves the size of mountains to obliterate as much as they could on the others. The fire blast created by its impact shot up into space. A fury of molten sulphur stone and metal seared out, burning the land and burying the Ship in the scorching fires of Hell. There were probes still out across the world when the first shockwave hit. Those that survived the shearing hurricanes did not survive the firestorm. They were pummelled by heaps of molten slag as large as they were; slammed into the earth, which itself roiled in revolt as it burned and broke open. And of the many forms of life on the once-fecund little world, few were left alive in the firestorm’s wake.
Those who lived through the violence of the Cataclysm were almost all wiped out in the time of gentle famine that followed. Little vegetation was left and as the leaf eaters died so did most of their natural predators. Armageddon’s Holocaust had visited the dinosaurs and most of the other forms of life left on the world. The dust of the Cataclysm spread, blocking out the sun and the stars in the last. Only the heartiest creatures lived through the thousand-year nigh
t, the hundred thousand-year winter. Those who were smart enough to adapt and cunning enough to evolve were the ones who survived, who prospered, after a fashion. And everything they witnessed, the destruction of their fertile paradise, the descending of the Long Dark and the Great Cold was engraved in them all, the first and most powerful racial memory. So powerful was the trauma that the memory of it was made part of their genetic code, passed down to their descendants, eventually becoming the unconscious birthplace of all nightmares in all creatures in all the world.
Through it all, during the dark times when individual animals first learned to eat their young to survive, during the great ice ages that reshaped the continents, during the aeons it took for those same glaciers to finally recede and the flood oceans that followed to rise and fill with life and then to recede and leave their mark on the resurfacing land, for the millennia it took for life to return in force and prosperity to a world all but obliterated by an incomprehensible violence and nightmarish devastation, the Ship lay buried, resting, healing and waiting, while above the Mammals began to flourish.
A small feral creature, designed for ruthlessness, cunning and adaptation emerged. Its lineage was an unbroken chain of evolution, leading back to primitive creatures who had survived the Cataclysm. Had the Cataclysm not occurred, they would have been hunted to extinction by the smaller carnivorous dinosaurs as tasty little morsels. With the dinosaurs gone the furry little mammals’ fate had been forever changed and forever changed the fate of the world. Following the Cataclysm this creature’s descendants spread out across the globe, diversifying, multiplying, adapting to a hundred different environments. In one corner of the world they thrived well enough to begin evolving: creating language; then leaving the trees; learning to hunt, to use tools and then learning to walk upright. The most significant discoveries this primitive species could make after that were the mastery of fire, farming and the domestication of other animals. Their place on the planet was established. In less than a million years the world was theirs. Below, the Ship rested healed and waited. It slept with its masters final instructions etched forever into memory: Heal and wait.
At last the Ship’s wait was over.
♦♦♦
The Ranger raced across the desert back towards Laguna. The ground shook constantly and violently now; it was all Peter could do to keep control of the wide, heavy vehicle.
“How could it be unearthing itself?” Santino asked, desperately afraid. They were being pursued and this gargantuan object that had lain dormant beneath their feet for sixty-odd million years was suddenly waking up like some mythical giant.
“The earthquakes are centered right around the object,” James replied. “And looking over the record the quakes actually started with very mild tremors the moment the orbital deep probe scan began.”
“And what makes you think the object is causing the earthquake?” Echohawk demanded.
“Because the quake zone only extends as far as the outer edge of the object itself,” James replied.
“How’s it coming hacking into the Grid backbone, James?” Peter asked.
“Not good.”
“You’d better hurry up,” Echohawk advised, “We’re about to have some company!” He looked out the back windshield at the receding dig site. One of the helicopters that had come in with the troops was rising into the air.
♦♦♦
Colonel Isaac Jude picked himself up off the violently shaking ground and watched the Ranger tear out of camp with a mix of stunned surprise anger and the grim admiration that a hunter has for clever prey. People were scattering everywhere around him but he knew the four in the stolen Ranger were the most pressing. He used two fingers to press his headset tighter into his ear, quickening his pace towards the landing area as the aluminum shelter behind him began to collapse.
“Knight to Rooks One and Five,” he hollered to be heard against the din of quaking chaos around him, “Get ready for dust-off. Rooks Two, Three, Four and Six to the Rangers Three and Six; we have targets on the move.” The affirmative call-backs came from his soldiers; members of Jude’s elite covert operations team were referred to as Rooks. Jude staggered his way to the landing pad where his pilots were climbing aboard the helicopter, its blades already rotating for takeoff.
“Lock onto the transponder frequency for Ranger One,” Jude said, speaking his command into the microphone of his headset, “Our main objective is the safe capture of the information held by the people within. Secondary objective is their live capture. Repeat: their live capture is secondary to our mission. Very secondary.”
♦♦♦
Lieutenant-Colonel Margaret Bloom reclined in her bunk, feeling the pull of the tumbler-generated gravity weighing her down towards the outer bulkhead of the habitat carousel. She was listening to the rumble of the large spinning module of the station. It was strange how after hours in zero gravity the relatively light two-thirds Earth-normal of the carousel made her feel tired. She and Majors Benedict, Cohen and Captains Boucher and Donnelly were housed together, becoming the first people in the history of the Concord space station series to ever inhabit the brig. Little more than a set of four bare-bones beds and a bathroom facility along the outer bulkhead nestled behind the waterworks and electrical supply housings of the habitat carousel, the brig was still built as a jail; one never expected to have been used. Bloom had had enough of sitting. She began pacing, walking up the long round floor of the brig. It was like walking up a constant incline; when she stopped Bloom was almost directly overhead from her subordinates. Gravity inside the spinning carousel was along the outer bulkhead and this created three hundred and sixty degrees of floor space. Interestingly, if one of them were to jump high enough they would break free of the gravity and hang suspended and weightless in the air as the rest of the room spun around them. From Bloom’s angle, her personnel were over her head. Likewise, they were looking up at Bloom.
“Did you get the signal out, Exo?” Bloom asked Benedict, craning her neck to make eye contact.
“Not in its entirety,” he replied, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant-Colonel.”
“No worry,” She said, “Our next move is to figure out how to get out of here and stop Harrod from taking the data off-station.”
“Not likely, ma’am,” Donnelly said. “I’m sorry. But on three sides we’re along the outer bulkhead. The only inner wall is twice as thick as standard bulkheads with a hatch that only opens from their side.” Bloom paced again, completing her circuit around the floor.
“We can’t just sit here,” Bloom growled. But in truth, she herself didn’t know what more to do. Harrod had won. She’d given him the opportunity to seize the station from her when she’d locked most of the personnel up in the habitat. Any claim she had that Harrod had planned to violate World Space Agency property or international treaty was gone. She and her command staff could be hauled away, court-martialled privately and locked away or otherwise disposed of, permanently. But there had to be something…anything that they could do.
♦♦♦
The tremors were worse. With the collapse of the shelter came a series of violent fissures in the ground. Two of Echohawk’s assistants fell into one such rending of the earth to their abrupt and violent deaths. Other people were racing for vehicles or running away on foot. At the dig site was bedlam. But had anyone been able to see the quaking site from the air from even a few meters they would have seen the underlying order to the chaos. Not the whole area was quaking and collapsing. There remained a long, stable landmass extending from the edges of the object to the Pyramid whose unearthing had started the matter. Just before it reached the dig, the stable section of land stretched out in a ring encircling the Pyramid and everything around it for most of a kilometre. Beyond this land bridge the rest of the ground was cracking and shaking, while pinpoints of brilliant royal-blue light began shimmering through the fissures in the earth.
♦♦♦
“We have target in check Knight!” The call brought
Jude forward to the cockpit. The windscreen of the cockpit was a giant display and not an actual window. Onscreen an enhanced image of the stolen Ranger appeared, lit up from the surrounding territory and locked in by several sets of crosshair targeting sights. Telemetry on the vehicle’s speed, passengers, onboard electronic and photonic activity surrounded the bottom of the display. Jude ignored them. The Ranger’s movement was erratic as it was thrown around the unstable ground burying the object, as it continued to attempt to unearth itself.
“Arm the ion gun,” Jude said, “Disable their electricals.” Rook Five, the helicopter’s gunner, nodded and began to work his panel. Rook One continued his deft piloting. The gun would fire a sweep of ionized energy at the target, instantly disabling any electrical or electronic equipment aboard by overloading it.
The Unearthing Page 7