by J. R. Rain
“Timur, you are a cheater. Ask your fifth wife.”
“Hah!” Timur takes a swig of vodka. “The only reason I had five wives is because you have five sisters. If I was a smarter man, I’d have started with the oldest and gone down instead of the other way.”
Vadim throws something small at him, and they both laugh.
I also try to peer into his thoughts, but he’s as blank as the other guy. Wow. I am both worried and fascinated.
Timur passes the bottle to Vadim, who takes a pull from it, then hands it to me… and he finally notices that I haven’t taken off my facemask, sat down, or said a word. His gaze shifts to my blank chest—where my name isn’t. His eyes widen in alarmed shock. Both men slow to a near standstill as I swing the AK-47 off my shoulder and bring it around butt first, cracking Timur across the head. The hit throws him backward off his chair, unconscious. Vadim lunges for the rifle on the table in front of him.
I let my AK fall from my grip to the floor and pounce, clamping my left hand down on Vadim’s rifle while rabbit punching him in the throat with my right. He grabs his neck and staggers backward, gurgling.
“You’re a nice guy, Vadim. Wouldn’t you rather just chill out and have some vodka? I don’t want to hurt you.”
He gurgles, shocked by hearing a female voice. Judging by his expression, it takes him a few seconds to do the math. Female voice plus how hard I hit him equals probable vampire. Confusion goes to full on panic. He struggles to take in a big breath for a shout, but winds up coughing. I leap on him, tackling him into a slide that stops right at the edge of the phone-booth-sized hole in the floor.
Vadim twists like a wrestler who doesn’t want to be pinned, throwing me off to the side. I’m faster to my feet, but only by a second. He draws a knife and charges at me. I sweep his leg and introduce his face to the ice up close and personal, but it doesn’t knock him out—merely stuns him. His hood and jacket are too thick, frustrating any chance of a sleeper hold. I really don’t want to kill the nice guy who just wanted a drink. So… I yank his hood back to expose his neck—and discover a thin white cloth cap like what astronauts have under their helmets, only it’s crisscrossed with a rainbow shimmer of metal wiring, like a printed circuit. That has to be the interference device. The instant I grab it, Vadim rams his elbow backward into my gut, lifting me off my feet for an instant. I bark out an oof, but keep my hold on the cap. He appears to realize I’m trying to pull the thing off him and emits a startled yelp while clamping both hands down over his head, desperate to keep it on as if his life depended on it.
“Relax, Vadim. If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.”
His eyes widen, but he doesn’t let go.
“Sorry, man.” The best way to get a guy’s hands away from his face…
I deliver a fairly light kick to his crotch. Sure enough, he grabs himself without thinking. I yank the thin cloth cap off his head before he’s even gotten a solid grip on his junk. The second he looks up, he’s mine.
Because I feel bad for him, the first thing I do is make him forget suffering a kick to the groin. Next, I make him forget seeing me. Last, I program him to go back to the table… and ignore everything except Timur, vodka, and whatever card game they’re playing for a few hours.
Vadim ambles over to his chair and sits, staring off into space while his brain chews on my commands.
I drag the unconscious Timur back into his seat and remove his brain shield. After forcing his eyelids open with my thumbs, I also erase myself from his memory. He’s going to think he had too much vodka and fell face-first on the ice… which isn’t too far from the truth. Just minus the badass vampire part. He also gets a strong compulsion to ignore anything going on except for his friend, the booze, and the cards.
Okay, phase one complete.
I stuff both cloth caps in my jacket pocket. Those are coming home with me for further study—and not necessarily back to Langley. I really don’t need these things reversed engineered and mass-produced. They look ridiculous and are extremely obvious, but they’re quite effective. With the stolen technology safely tucked away, I grab Anatoly’s AK and head over to the big hole in the floor. Not that I’m planning to shoot anyone, but a rifle lying on the floor would cause questions if anyone else walks in. But, yeah, I will shoot someone if I have to.
Anyway, the opening has a fairly useless fence of orange cord around it on stakes pounded into the glacier. Inside, a steep staircase cut into the ice leads down about thirty feet to a flat, metallic surface. Okay, that’s… odd.
My cleats and superhuman agility make climbing down only slightly terrifying. Bracing my hands on the side walls, I make my way from step to step, some of which are barely four inches deep. Whoever dug this tunnel clearly has never heard of OSHA.
Eventually, I reach the bottom and find myself standing on what appears to be stainless steel. Faint lines give off the sense of individual panels, like the outer hull of a ship. Oh, shit. Seriously? This thing is a spacecraft? No… it can’t be. My ancestors had to have simply made buildings out of metal because… well, maybe it was a trend or something back then.
Five tunnels lead away from the base of the stairwell, but none go more than a few feet into the ice except for one at the left diagonal, which follows a groove in the metal that bears a striking resemblance to a slightly recessed footpath. It goes about thirty feet away from the horribly-carved stairs to a metal wall with a rectangular door.
Scorch marks, dents, dings, and scratches cover it, though none appear to have caused significant amounts of damage. I catch my hands shaking from the battle going on in my head. That does not look like the damn door to a spaceship. Nope. It’s a bunker of some kind that just happens to bear a strong similarity to what the collective consciousness of human creativity thinks a starship door would look like.
However, I’m also flying high on adrenaline. Even if it turns out to be a completely horrible idea, the thrill of discovery pulls me over to the door. It might be all for naught as it appears the Russians have hit this thing with all they had and didn’t accomplish much.
“Hello,” I whisper, noting the slight tremor in my voice. “What are you?”
I place my hand flat on the door, in awe that I might be touching something that’s tens of thousands of years old and potentially made by my forebearers. If things go really wrong, watch me wake up some ancient vampire overlord who flies out of here to destroy the world and make me his love slave.
Hmm...
Right. Now I know I’ve been watching too many bad movies.
A faint prickle of sentience whispers at the tip of my brain. My heart nearly stops. It takes me a moment to process that I didn’t just have some ancient evil vampire reach out and touch my mind. The feeling coming from behind this door isn’t a full sentience. In fact, I’m not sure what it is. I’ve never encountered anything like this at all. Something close in front of me reacts somewhat like a living mind, but it doesn’t have active, conscious thoughts… merely a whisper of basic activity going in an endless blank loop. It’s just kind of there, probably not even aware of its own existence.
Whoa. Did someone bury a Kardashian under a glacier?
Once my confusion at encountering such a sensation fades, I reach out to it with a telepathic hello.
It reacts with a weak mental reverberation, as though I’d spoken into an empty can. Hmm. This facility houses a telepathic amplifier, right? Whatever mental energy I’ve encountered here could simply be another psychically active machine. I think about various things from pushing a mental doorbell to turning a knob to desiring the door to open to telepathically telling it to open up.
The instant I command the non-mind to open the door, a loud psssh blasts out from the seams and the dull silvery metal slab sinks inward a few inches before swinging to the right on hinges.
I really don’t like what I see on the other side: a small chamber with a similar door only eight feet away.
It’s a goddamned air
lock.
Holy shit… this is a spaceship.
Chapter Twenty
Evolved
I collect my jaw off the floor and reorient my mind from excited, thrilled panic to ‘agent on a mission.’
Plenty of land-bound buildings have airlocks. Usually they’re run by the CDC, but still. I may be bending over backward to refuse to accept the most obvious explanation here, but I really don’t want to find a spaceship buried under a glacier in Russia.
I don’t want to think of myself as an... alien. A part of me desperately wants to be from my home planet. Then again, what’s the difference? Technically speaking, I was born on Earth. I’m definitely not 40,000 years old. Water is likely here only thanks to frozen asteroids crashing into the Earth before any life existed.
Maybe we’re all aliens, down to the single cell amoeba.
Anyway, the airlock smells cold and stale. It’s spotless, no dust. Some manner of writing marks the wall to the left, but I have no idea what it says—or even what language it is. I snap a photo of it with my armband and approach the interior door.
It, too, has a psychic ‘button.’ As soon as I order it to open, the exterior door behind me swings shut. Well… I suppose I should feel somewhat safe that none of the Russians are going to be able to get to me in here. Leaving might be an issue, but for the time being, I relax ever so slightly.
The inner door opens without a sound. I step past it into a narrow corridor that goes about twenty feet to a T-intersection with another corridor. Halfway between where I am and the intersection, two doorways face each other. Both appear to be small storage rooms that have long ago been emptied of all contents. Who or whatever made this place must have taken everything with them when they abandoned it here.
I stick my head past the end of the small passage and peer in both directions along a hallway that makes me feel like I’m in a submarine. Every thirty feet for the entire length in both directions, there’s a bulkhead. Based on the number of bulkheads, I’d estimate this thing’s total length is around 1,200 feet. Again, I’m really not liking how much this place looks like a ship.
Numerous doors line the walls in both directions. I randomly decide to turn left and start exploring. After three clanking steps, I pause long enough to take the cleats off my boots and hang them from my belt. The first door I peek into looks like a locker room. Again, all the storage compartments are open and the only thing here are a few towels. The fabric has a pale blue lustre, but I don’t recognize the material. Either way, they’ve lasted countless eons. I stuff one in the same pocket with the brain shield caps. It’s always a good idea to have a clean towel.
Keep calm and don’t panic... or something like that.
I wander among a series of chambers, many of which contain only a simple metal-framed bed and a small writing desk, almost like staterooms. Another chamber appears to be a cafeteria, though the kitchen portion is quite small. Three large machines along the back wall remind me of soda dispensers with only one choice. No idea why it surprises me to find what appears to be dried blood on the nozzle. I lean closer, pulling my facemask away from my nose, and sniff… but it’s so damn old the only noticeable smell is metal.
Three staterooms later, I find what could’ve been some manner of officer’s quarters. The room is larger with a desk that still has a computer on it. Naturally, it doesn’t turn on… and except for having indecipherable letters on the keyboard, it looks only slightly more futuristic than the home computers I’m used to seeing. Honestly, it kinda looks like something Apple would come up with… an all-in-one thing like an iMac.
Hmm.
I take out my camera, open the image of the wall writing I took, and try to translate it by finding the symbols on the keyboard and replacing them with English based on QWERTY, but it generates a meaningless jumble of letters. Nope. Similar keyboard, even to the number of keys, but the arrangement isn’t even close.
This computer does, however, have the weird trapezoid-shaped ‘USB’ connectors that would’ve fit the memory stick Jake got a hold of. That’s a connection impossible to ignore. The Dominion is certain the device is of Origin manufacture. For that to be true, this facility I’m in must also be of Origin manufacture. As if the psychic doorbell hadn’t been an obvious enough clue. That we came from another planet is starting to sound more plausible than time-travelling future humans who developed psychic abilities. Ugh.
I keep making my way down the corridor past more bedrooms, another office or two, a conference room, showers, and several large chambers full of machinery I don’t recognize. It’s clearly not the amplifier, so I don’t linger. Most unsettling of all, this place doesn’t smell like anything. If I had to call the scent in here anything, I’d say ‘staleness.’ I don’t think anyone has been in here for an extremely long time.
Upon reaching the end in that direction, I poke another psychic button on a promising section of wall, and a giant armored bulkhead door in front of me slides open. Okay, this is just like playing a video game, but better. The room beyond is massive, easily three stories tall, with catwalks snaking back and forth between five gargantuan cylinders, each about fifteen feet in diameter, covered with an incalculable number of smaller pipes, component housings, and wires. All of which makes me think of ridiculously large jet engines removed from their cowling.
Umm.
I blink, and stand there gawking at the five massive engines. Okay, fine. I’m in a starship. I give up.
Might as well take pictures.
Alas, the photos rely on the flash and don’t really convey the enormity of everything since most of the background is pitch black. The little electronics suite strapped to my arm is basically a smartphone without the cellular network hardware. It doesn’t have night vision, so I’m stuck running around like an idiot for a few minutes to get a couple decent still images of the nearest engine. Is it a good sign there’s no obvious damage here? Would that mean they landed on purpose, as opposed to crashing? But why the hell would they leave a spaceship in Severnaya Zemlya? Is that like the alien version of parking all the way at the back end of the lot in hopes no one messes with the car?
The amplifier is clearly not here.
I double back down the main hallway, running until I pass the sideways passage I came in from, then proceed to go door to door, exploring more common rooms and storage areas. Four alcoves—two per side—hold spiral stairs that go up and down. Crap. This thing is huge. 1,200 feet is like aircraft carrier huge. Okay, I’ll be here for hours searching. Maybe I can find a schematic on the bridge.
Damn. I called it a bridge.
Right. Right. Okay. It’s a ship. Get over it, Mina. Stop freaking out. Embrace the awesomeness of making a discovery like this. Ehh, not quite. I work for the CIA. No one’s going to know about this, anyway. No civilians, that is. At least, not for a while, and when they do—if ever—it won’t be my name plastered on the news.
All things considered, that’s probably a good idea.
I didn’t join the CIA to become famous. I did it because I figured it would be a great way not to be bored. At least on that point, it delivered.
Assuming the bridge is at the top, I dart into one of the spiral stairwells and go up to the uppermost floor. Based on the engines being to the right, I head left. It occurs to me a short distance into the hall that the air temperature is reasonably normal up here. I check my armband and it’s showing sixty-two degrees. The only way that could be possible is if this ship still somehow worked. It’s beyond belief that a 40,000 (roughly) year old anything would still work. Then again, the computer I saw didn’t look that much different from what we have. This thing simply can’t be that old. It just can’t be. Just... impossible.
A pair of pneumatic doors sluggishly slide out of my way at the end of the corridor. I’m assuming the unreadable word stenciled on them translates to ‘bridge’ since that’s what I find behind them. Like whoa. Straight out of Star Trek. They even have the fancy chair in the middle. The
re’s no electronic viewscreen, only a strip of transparent material like the cockpit window of a massive bomber looking out at armored plates. Did whoever left the ship here expect it to be covered by glacial ice? Why would they close the ‘blast shields’ over the windows?
I cross the bridge toward the front row of seats, the center two probably where the pilots sat. Each has a little joystick that looks so damn ridiculous compared to the size of this thing I almost laugh out loud.
“Incinerated,” says a sudden, clear male voice behind me, speaking Latin.
“Fuck!” I shout, spinning and grabbing my Beretta.
I’m still alone. For three seconds, the loudest sound in the world is me breathing. I aim my sidearm back and forth at various stations, chairs, and terminals. Nothing looks too terribly futuristic, more like I’ve gone onto the deck of the latest generation of Navy warship. The emptiness is damn eerie, even without considering the thirty-some-odd feet of ice above my head.
“Who the hell said that?” I ask. “Ghosts better remain made up.”
Seconds pass of nothing… then the same voice says, “degradation.”
I jump and spin left, nearly putting a bullet into a flat panel monitor around where the voice came from.
“Who are you?” I ask in my best rusty Latin, while reaching out with my thoughts. No living minds resonate anywhere in front of me, merely another one of those psychic buttons. What the hell. I poke it telepathically.
A tennis-ball sized purple gem on the desk near that monitor I almost shot lights up with a faint glow. Said monitor flickers to life, displaying the face of a man who appears to be in his later twenties with longish brown hair and a silvery-blue jumpsuit. He looks pretty much human except for the horrible 1960s hairdo and violet eyes.
“To any who are capable of receiving this message, this is prince Lucius Caelius speaking on behalf of my father, Aurelius, who perished mere hours ago. Diplomatic measures with the Disciples of Phara have failed. They have initiated the unthinkable and launched high-energy particle weapons against the Kingdom. My father, in his usual rage, responded in kind. The scientists were right. Our combined strikes set off a chain reaction in the upper heavens which has incinerated our world’s atmosphere. Trillions are dead, burned alive where they stood. Only a handful of us remain, hidden underground in sealed bunkers. There’s…” He bows his head. “There’s nothing for you to return to. By the time any of the ships who might receive this message reach Elysar, we will all be gone. The farm is all we have left. Those who remain here in the palace bunker have no way to reach the launch site. The world outside will only destroy us faster. It has been my greatest honor to serve as your king, even if my reign lasts only weeks. Farewell.”