The Unearthing

by Karmazenuk, Steve; Williston, Christine

  “Here is the Spirit of the Lord made ready to fill us all with the His power. But only the Faithful may receive this Communion, for only the Believers are Holy.” At once and as one His Disciples began reciting the Creed of the Observants:

  “I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth and in Jesus Christ His Only Son who saved the world from sin in death and in dying restored life. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Son of the Son of God, promised to us when the Spirit of Christ descended on his Apostles. I believe in the Divinity of the Son of Christ, in His power to make God whole so that the Lord may return to Earth and in the Everlasting Glory of the United Trinity, Amen.”

  When they had finished they approached, kneeling along the communion rail that surrounded the altar. The pills were designed to be fast acting and dissolved under the tongue. Ashe placed the pills into the waiting mouths of each of His disciples, saying the words “The Spirit of Christ” to each. Seconds later the drugs were taking effect. Ashe heard one of His supplicants moan as though in the throes of pleasure. Another sounded as though he were in agony. Another was laughing. But all had Received the Gift. He took His own dose last, His eyes rolling into His head, His heart trip hammering, His breath turning to fire and ice. When he looked out at His Congregation He saw that they were as He had left them, slumped around the Communion rail or staggering back to the pews. He saw ribbons of color weaving through the room, making the image before Him all the sharper all the clearer. He saw the world as His father meant it to be: pure and under His control.

  “And now we are full of the Lord,” He said, His voice a clear hypnotic monotone, “And now you can be open to His Word as I speak it. So say I, so sayeth the Lord.”

  “So say you, so sayeth the Lord,” His congregation replied, those having returned to the pews now sitting, but unable to stay still.

  Others had paired off indeterminately, lying against one another, fondling, rocking, but paying Ashe rapt attention. Almost all were paying Him full attention. Only a few did not. One was too busy convulsing, his body unable to handle the dose, another one passed out, one hand under her blouse, the other twitching and flopping against the rail, as if both autonomous and spastic. Another appeared to be choking on his own vomit. None of them had taken Communion with a pure heart. Any of these Faithless that survived, Ashe would order killed.

  “We must strike out at our enemies,” Ashe said to those remaining, “The time has come for us to act. We are called upon to Soldier for My Father, to Soldier for Christ. We may be called upon even to be Martyred for Him. But if His will is not served the Trinity will not be united and the Devil will rule Heaven and Earth. His will is that we strike out against the Ship and those who serve it. My will is that we strike them. My will is that we smite them in the Name of My Father. My will is the will of the Lord.”

  “Your will is the will of the Lord.”

  “Lord Jesus My Father let My people be an army unto You. Let them strike in the Name of Your will. Let their every attack bring death and their every death be a sacrifice unto You.”

  “So say you, so sayeth the Lord.” They sang Onward Christian Soldier, then, with perfect clarity and coherence. He looked out on them, contemplating them: His soldiers, ready to march into war for Him, ready to kill in His name, bearing His Father’s standard before them as they butchered His enemies. The song ended and they turned to Him expectantly. He would not leave them wanting.

  “My children…My Soldiers, we must now plan for these attacks. We must now prepare ourselves to fight, to die, in My Father’s name,” He said, “And I will give you a war to fight, a cause to die for. I will give you the salvation not just of Mankind, but of Heaven. I will give you the war against the Devil, the war for the Ship, the war against those who serve it. If you will not fight for Heaven, what will you fight for? If you will not die for God, then who will you die for?”

  “We will die for the Lord our Living God,” His congregation responded, even as they were lost in thrall to the drugs: hallucinating, convulsing, engaged with themselves or others, still they knew the words:

  “We will die for Our Saviour Lord Jesus Christ and for His Only Son.”

  “Then let us begin making our plans.”

  ♦♦♦

  The transports rolled their way across the ramp, pulling up in front of the slope down to the Pyramid. Even after the dust settled from halting the vehicles the members of the Ship Survey Expedition took a moment before deciding to step out towards the Pyramid. The Shipsong seemed a little louder today, the sun’s reflection off the gold of the Pyramid and the Ship just a little brighter. But finally the Shipsong became less haunting and more taunting and one by one starting with Andrews, they stepped from the vehicles. Echohawk began giving instructions to the subordinate members of the Ship Survey Expedition. They quickly began setting up a small base camp. The support vehicles were turned around facing back the way they’d come, in case a quick getaway became necessary. Doctor Cole shouldered her medical kit and the two EMTs that were to accompany the SSE did likewise. Aiziz and Andrews had their equipment packed and ready, as did Doctor Kodo and Professor Scott. James and Peter stood ready, both wearing headsets equipped with cameras and viewers. James panned his camera over the expedition as the base camp’s toilet facilities mess tent and medical center were set up, speaking lowly into the microphone cradled against his cheek. Peter scanned the Pyramid, standing a short distance away from the rest of the expedition. Echohawk looked over his team members one last time, ensuring everyone was ready.

  “Well all right,” he called, “Let’s go see if we can get inside!” They approached the Pyramid, the sound of Shipsong wrapping itself around their footfalls. Andrews stepped up to the panels of runic script and numeric glyphs and pulled out his console, switching the device on with the pressure of his thumb. Andrews and Aiziz had determined that there was a hidden recurring pattern in the blocks: seven runes and five glyphs were scattered repeatedly throughout the message. Andrews moved to the keypads to the left of the door, studying his display.

  “Well, here goes nothing,” He said. He found the runes and glyphs that made up the pattern and keyed them in, sequentially. Each rune yielded after the slightest pressure and slid effortlessly into the back of the keypads. Andrews repeated the sequence on the bottom keypad. When he reached the last rune he paused looking into James’ camera with a grim smile.

  “Let’s see what happens now,” He said, pressing in the last glyph. From somewhere in the Pyramid before them there was a loud, echoing thud. Everyone stepped back from the door, almost unaware they were doing so. The door itself began rumbling; another thud sounded from the mechanism behind it. The door cracked away from the rest of the surface of the Pyramid and began sinking into the ground on a diagonal drop that matched the angle of the Pyramid. A gust of old, stale air escaped the Pyramid, blowing past the members of the SSE as they stepped cautiously back towards the opening doorway. The door dropped fully into its recess, stopping with another loud thud. The members of the SSE crossed this threshold into the Pyramid.

  The ceiling of the chamber ended a little less than five meters overhead. The interior was black, bare and devoid of any marking or design other than a large golden circular dais, raised up in the center of the room. A meter in through the door this ring rose from the ground wide enough to step onto before dropping back down to the floor on the inside. The expanse of floor inside the ring filled the Pyramid’s cavernous interior and was grey in color, not the same rich black of the rest of the walls and ceiling. As they stared at this new phenomenon a small black dot appeared dead center on the grey floor inside the golden ring.

  “What do you make of that?” Echohawk asked Scott, as the engineer bent to examine it. A breeze was blowing; it took Scott a moment to realize that the dot was in fact a tiny hole Before he could report this to the others the hole suddenly opened a little further and the floor inside the ring dropped slightly towards the opening. The breeze see
med stronger. As they watched the hole in the floor got wider from pockmark to pothole to pit; it collapsed back a bit and then get wider still.

  “What are we looking at?” Echohawk asked, mystified.

  “It’s behaving almost like,” Kodo stammered, stepping forward for a better look, “Like an arterial valve.” As he finished speaking the hole opened completely, the grey floor disappearing entirely. They knelt around the edge of a precipice looking down a long, black pit. The wind gusted violently and they were forced to back from the dais The wind peaked and then levelled off as a weak gale. Echohawk stepped cautiously back towards the opening, squinting against the wind. Scott, Kodo and Aiziz all wanted a better look at what was going on and joined him. As they reached the lip of the hole, a rushing whine could be heard. Echohawk peered down the hole, which was blacker than he could gauge. He caught movement somewhere below then lost it in the shadows and wind. When he caught it again he realized it was much closer and still coming.

  “Get back!” he yelled. A half-second longer to react and he’d have been too late. Kodo, Aiziz, Scott and Echohawk fell backwards, barely in time to get out of the way. A massive golden ovoid rushed out of the opening, halting as it crested the dais. The peak of the thing stood nearly as high as the ceiling, and it was twice as wide as it was tall. The object was hollow; though it was ringed with large bands of the same golden alloy that made the Ship, its walls and floor were crystalline, transparent. The wall of the thing split open seamlessly where the SSE stood facing it.

  “Now what?” James asked.

  “I think that would seem obvious,” Echohawk said, “We call in to base camp and then climb aboard.”

  “Are we certain that it will be able to bear our weight?” Andrews asked, “Presumably it hasn’t had passengers since it was buried here.”

  “Based on everything we’ve seen so far,” Scott replied, “I think we’ll have to make a leap of faith and assume that it does. This Ship was meant to cross interstellar distances. We can assume that it was built with longevity in mind. Just because ninety per cent of our consumer goods are designed with built-in obsolescence doesn’t mean the Ship will be as well.”

  “I suppose not,” Andrews said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced. Aiziz settled the matter by climbing into the lift and stepping to the back. She waited expectantly, a bemused look on her face as one by one the others joined her inside. They looked around at the transparent walls of the conveyance. The golden floor and ceiling were flat and highly polished. The black walls of the Pyramid’s insides stood silent guard around them. They looked at one another, each of them wearing an expectant, nervous face. There were no buttons on the inside of the egg-like lift car; no apparent way to direct it. Then the door slid shut, the seams of the portal disappearing, leaving them inside an immaculate crystal bubble.

  “Mimetic crystal?” Scott mused aloud. “I wonder how--” He was cut short as with a sudden lurch, the lift started moving. It dropped half a meter, stopped and then began to slip more slowly, fluidly, down the shaft beneath it. Soon they were surrounded by the darkness of the tunnel, the lights from their headset cams the only illumination provided.

  “Everyone make sure your headsets are recording,” Echohawk advised, unable to conceal his excitement. Their progress downwards soon became evident as they passed through rings of blue light; each transition seeming to push them a little faster on down the channel. Although they felt no acceleration they began rushing past the luminous rings more frequently until they were launched from the outer hull into the vast interior of the Ship. The passage used by the ovoid lift car turned transparent, and before them all was golden and aglow. As far as they could see all around them in the gap between the inner and outer hulls was the ancient, secret interior of the Ship.

  “Allah keep and protect us,” Aiziz murmured, looking out at the wonders spreading out below. The inner hull was several kilometres below, held to the outer hull through a massive airframe. Black girders the size of villages, each honeycombed and a kilometre wide stretched out like the arms of an umbrella along the inside surface of the outer hull, reaching for the large disk of the inner hull. Everything else was golden but for shimmering blue trenches along the surface of the inner hull. The tube their lift traveled through undulated to accommodate them as though they were being swallowed. Other transparent tubes carried massive flows of energy up to the thick outer hull. From what they could briefly ascertain there seemed to be whole decks if not entire stations ringing the outer hull. More access portals like the one moving them along ran to and from these stations and the inner surface of the Ship.

  “There’s more than we could see in a thousand trips up and down this lift,” Andrews said, his voice hushed, “You’d have to bloody fly through here to see it all.” Like the others, he was now looking down at the looming inner hull. The tube carrying them descended straight into its topmost level, a large cylindrical outcropping.

  The lift car nestled itself into the center of a large, round chamber. The walls were golden, divided into a mosaic by a thousand fissures of strangely deliberate shapes. A band of blue energy ringed the chamber halfway up the rounded walls. The crystal car split open and there was a quick rush of air as the atmosphere of the inner chamber equalized with that of the car.

  “What are the odds that we’re breathing anything toxic?” Kodo asked.

  “Possible,” Cole said, “But not probable. I hope not, anyway.” Quickly, nervously, she drew breath and then exhaled.

  “In all likelihood the Ship sampled our atmosphere long before we entered,” Andrews said, “And endeavoured to match the interior atmosphere to our own. Otherwise we’d probably have asphyxiated on the lift. No, my guess is the environment throughout the Ship has been adjusted to be ideal to support us.”

  “Whatever the case may be,” Cole said, “We can breathe it.” As the SSE exited the car they noticed two sealed doors leading from the chamber. There were no panels on the doors, no visible way to open them. However, a large black slab of stone dominated the back of the room behind the lift car. On it was inscribed hundreds of runes, glyphs and other symbols. To the left of it was another elaborate iconic and runic keypad.

  “It’s the primer!” Aiziz exclaimed, grabbing equipment off straps on her utility pack. She was laser-scanning the images on the primer before anyone else reached her. Andrews studied the primer before walking around to the other side. The black stone on the reverse was bare but a panel stood out from it, a little more than chest-high. It was again covered with runes and numeric glyphs, as well as the stranger new symbols.

  “This time I think we’ll find it’s not quite so easy to proceed,” Andrews said, “I doubt the combination to the doors will be anything as simple as a hidden pattern.” He returned to the primer.

  “You expect we’ll have to input the response to some question? Some test of our understanding?” Aiziz asked.

  “Precisely,” Andrews replied, “The primer will give us a rudimentary idea of their language. There will also be mathematical sets, values such as less than, greater than; units…equation values as well, perhaps...true/false values…I would expect the periodic table will also be represented here.”

  “Then they’ll be expecting us to respond to some abstraction,” Aiziz said, “The atomic weight of caesium less the atomic weight of lead or some such.”

  “Most probably,”

  “Then you and I have much work to do.” Aiziz said, with a smile. James and Peter recorded as much information as they could, Cole and her EMT team stood watching and waiting to be needed or not and Echohawk Scott and Kodo were studying the lift tube that had brought them here.

  “What do you make of it?” Scott asked.

  “Its behaviour was too organic,” Kodo said, “The way the lift gate opened in the floor of the Pyramid, the way the tunnel seemed to swallow us…it’s indicative of biomaterial.”

  “Yes…but that would mean that the Ship’s components have been alive
how long?”

  “A long time,” Kodo said in awe, “A very…very long time.”

  “I’d like to get up to look at that airframe.” Scott said, “We have to find a way out there.”

  “In good time Doctor Scott,” Echohawk said, “I don’t want to risk having you climb the lift shaft.” Scott looked at him dejectedly. He had been looking at the gap between the crystalline lift car and the shaft that had conveyed them here with hungry eyes.

  “Of course not,” He said, resigned.

  “Take note of the dimensions of the stone,” Aiziz told Andrews as they made a detailed study of the artifact, “They may have some significance to the primer. We don’t know what cultural significance the size and shape of things had for the Builders.” Andrews looked at her, wryly.

  “I’ll leave you to make your own jokes Doctor Andrews,” Aiziz added,

  ♦♦♦

  There was painfully little else that could be done inside the Ship until the primer had been decrypted. After mapping the room extensively the SSE returned to the lift, all wishing to stay longer within the Ship.