The Star Collector

by Matthew William

  The next room he came to was the office. That was the place someone would go if they were looking for money, although they’d be in for a sad surprise. Joe peaked through the window.

  Three bodies were stacked in a pile on the floor at the far end of the room.

  Joe’s stomach went into an instant knot. No three humans would ever choose to be resting in that position. They were certainly dead. It was the Visitor’s Center rangers; Tom and Linda Tomagashi and Zodiac Wells.

  Joe sighed. He knew all of them personally. They were good people.

  When he pressed the button to open the door the mechanism refused to work. He pressed furiously a few more times. Still nothing. Another cheap piece of crap. This place never got the funding it needed anymore. He looked to Tammy.

  “Go to the ship and get the crowbar... It’s under the sink.”

  Tammy nodded, left her stun stick against the wall, and went running down the hall.

  Joe stood there trying to see more of the room through the little window when suddenly the door slid open. A delayed reaction. Typical cheap operating system.

  Immediately the smell of blood and septic insides made him gag.

  Refusal to kill somebody or not, Joe wasn’t about to enter the crime scene alone if he didn’t have to.

  “Hey kid!” he shouted. His voice echoed down the cavernous corridor, but there was no answer.

  Joe took the gun from his holster, its textured pebble grip familiar against his fingers. He entered the room. The floor was covered in gore.

  He approached the stack of rangers. Now that he was closer he could see they had all been stabbed multiple times and their blood was everywhere. They were monsters whoever did this, senselessly murdering people at their place of work. Joe glanced down to make sure he hadn’t stepped in any of the fluids only to notice a pair footprints leading to the storage closet behind the desk. Joe’s skin went tingly. Whoever did this was still in there.

  He wrapped his fingers tightly around the gun. With bated breath, he approached the closet, and opened the door. It creaked on old hinges.

  Two Martians sat inside – flat nose having, sulfur tonic drinking, pink-skinned sons of bitches – maniacally chewing bubble meth. They wore grease-stained mechanic's clothes, which was a common occupation for people of that origin, and each of them held a weapon in their hands. A space-cricket bat for the man in front and a kitchen knife for the woman behind him. It was almost as if they were waiting for something.

  “Drop the weapons,” Joe said, training his gun on them.

  The man in front tossed his bat to the floor and the woman set her knife on a shelf. They both raised their bloodstained hands.

  “We’re officially unarmed,” the man said, as if it was a rehearsed line.

  His teeth were rotted and his face was speckled with blood. The woman behind him nodded in agreement. They were obviously tweaked out on the bubble meth they were chewing.

  Tom and Linda and Zodiac laid dead on the floor behind Joe, slaughtered by these lowlifes. His trigger finger suddenly became itchy.

  “Hey man,” the Martian said, apparently sensing the urge Joe was getting. “We’re officially unarmed.”

  “We told them to just sit tight,” the woman said nervously. “To sit tight and chill.”

  Joe took aim at the man’s head. He was about to breath his last.

  “No!” came a voice from behind him. It was Tammy with the crowbar. “They’re unarmed, Joe.”

  Joe stared at Tammy for second, wondering why the hell the outpost had assigned him this pain in the ass deputy.

  He looked back to the Martians. The man was now standing and the space-cricket bat came flying.

  It smacked into Joe’s forehead and his world went black.

  3

  When Joe regained consciousness, the ceiling of the Visitor’s Center was moving ever so slightly and his back was dragging along the smooth stone floor. Suddenly, whoever was pulling him stopped and the next thing he knew Tammy was standing over him with a concerned look on her face.

  “Are you alright, Joe?”

  “Come on,” he said as he tried to sit up. His head was pounding. The room spun. “We can catch them if we hurry.”

  “Woah, take it easy,” Tammy said, holding him down. “I got them.”

  “You got who?”

  “The Martians.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. They’re both cuffed in the ship.”

  “How?” asked Joe, feeling at the lump on his forehead. Was this all some sort of dream? He looked around. They were now at the front entrance, right beside the desk.

  “I used the stun stick,” Tammy said proudly.

  “Seriously?”

  “I learned a thing or two at the academy, Joe,” Tammy said with a grin.

  “Okay. Well... I’m impressed,” Joe said. “Did you remember to take the keys out of the ship?”

  There was worry in Tammy’s eyes.

  Joe turned to the front window just in time to see his Crown Vik flying past. He turned slowly back to Tammy. “Please, tell me more about this academy.”

  “I am so sorry,” Tammy pleaded, her face flushing.

  Joe climbed to his feet and labored to the window. He leaned with his forearm against the glass. The Crown Vik left the Visitor’s Center parking lot, followed closely by the Martian tug ship. They both careened through space towards the diner.

  “What are we gonna do?” Tammy asked.

  Joe just watched as the ships flew away.

  “What should we do, Joe?”

  “Wait a second,” Joe said. “I just want to see if they can figure out the clutch.”

  The two vessels continued on their flight paths. The Martian tug ship ignited its advanced thrusters and was launched out into the asteroid field. When the Crown Vik tried to do the same, its engines stalled and the thrusters stopped blasting.

  Joe turned to Tammy with a grin. “Now you see why I wouldn’t let you drive?”

  The Crown Vik continued through space with nothing to slow it down and crashed violently into the docking bay of the diner.

  Joe tapped on the window. “That was a new paint job.”

  “What’s our plan now?” Tammy asked, grabbing him by the shoulders.

  “We can call in for some help,” said Joe, taking the two-way radio from his shoulder and ringing the outpost. “It just might take a few hours for anyone to get here.”

  “Outpost headquarters,” Tyrone the operator answered. The guy had a great voice, he could have been a radio host.

  “Sheriff Corbit here,” Joe sighed. “We’re at the ruin’s Visitor’s Center. We need a ride and a mechanic... and an undertaker.”

  “Oh my gosh. Is everything okay?” the operator asked.

  “Not really.”

  “We’ll have somebody out there in an hour.”

  Joe hung up.

  “An hour – that’s not too bad,” Tammy remarked.

  “Yeah, except an hour is code for two or three hours.”

  Joe gazed out at his crashed ship. There would have been an air leak and the sudden impact would have certainly killed whoever was inside.

  With a groan he collapsed to the floor. That blow to the head had really shaken his gray matter.

  He sat up next to a rack of brochures and books that the center had for sale. One of the covers caught his eye.

  The Talashaa

  – Architects of Forgotten Dreams

  by

  Enoch Applebottom

  Joe had read that book years ago and it had shaken his life to the core. The person he was been before; his beliefs, his thoughts, his feelings, was lost and gone forever. That had never happened to him prior to that. Or since. He lost his copy of the book somewhere along the way and never bothered getting another one.

  It’s funny, the books that change your life the most you tend to read the least.

  Joe took a crisp new copy from the rack and thumbed through its pag
es.

  “I almost wish there was more to inspect here,” Tammy said, out of the blue.

  “What do you mean?” Joe asked, looking up. The girl was pacing the room, her hands shoved into the pockets of her gray uniform.

  “There are no missing threads.”

  “No. There aren’t...”

  “And you said it yourself when we pulled in. ‘This has all the makings of a botched robbery,’ and that’s exactly what it was.”

  “Hmm,” Joe said looking around. “Now I’m skeptical.”

  “Oh what, because I said it, it makes you skeptical?” Tammy asked.

  “It all fits too nicely.”

  “What’s that even mean?”

  “It’s a weird situation, isn’t it?” Joe stated. “What was the motive here? There’s no money. Nothing worth stealing. Why were they telling the rangers to just sit tight?”

  Tammy went silent. Apparently she hadn’t thought of all that.

  “I say we have ourselves a little look around,” Joe said.

  “Now, we’re cookin’,” Tammy replied.

  Joe nodded and stood up, slipping the Applebottom book into his jacket pocket. “Please don’t refer to this as ‘cookin’.”

  Behind the front desk was the screen for the security camera program with an ancient keypad next to it. After reading the instructions, Joe punched in 001. It brought up the feed to the room they were in. Not much to see there. In order to get to the next camera, Joe had to reset the system back to a blank screen before punching in the next number, 002. It was tedious. Probably the cheapest program on on the market.

  002 was the tour pod bay with it’s lone, decrepit shuttle.

  003 was the office with the three dead rangers. Nothing new to see there.

  004 was labeled “Throne Room” and was under renovation. A space rat scurried across the floor at the bottom of the screen. Joe got up to channel 015 before his deputy distracted him.

  “What exactly are you looking for?” she asked.

  “Anything moving,” Joe said, he looked back at the blank screen with a blank mind. “Damn it. Lost count.”

  He started over from the beginning.

  001: entrance, nothing, reset.

  002: pod bay, shuttle, reset.

  003: office, corpses, reset.

  004: throne room, space rat, reset.

  And all the way up to 015 before...

  “Find anything?” Tammy asked.

  “Shut up!” Joe yelled, losing count once more.

  Tammy walked over to the window and stared out, presumably at the mess she had made.

  Joe started again.

  001: entrance, reset.

  002: pod bay, reset.

  003: office, reset.

  004: space rat....

  Joe leaned in and squinted at the image. The space rat scurried along from the bottom right corner of the screen to the left, just as it had every time before. Either that space rat was exercising or the camera feed was on a loop.

  This was getting fishy.

  “Something weird’s going on here,” Joe announced.

  Tammy came to look at the looped image of the space rat. “What’s in the throne room?”

  “More than they’ve been letting on.”

  Joe marched through the Visitor’s Center, following the map he had remembered was in the back of Enoch Applebottom’s book.

  “Have you ever read that thing?” Tammy asked, nodding to the paperback in Joe’s hands.

  “Yeah,” Joe replied.

  “It had some interesting parts,” Tammy said. “But most of it was bunk.”

  “Alright,” Joe said. He added book critic to his mental list of Tammy’s many secret talents.

  “The way he discredited Talashism was brilliant, I have to admit, but once he got into the science, well... he was going off all the wrong assumptions.”

  “How do you mean?” Joe asked.

  “Well, for one, the universe isn’t as old as he thinks it is,” Tammy said.

  “And how old is it?”

  “Around seven thousand years.”

  Joe stopped in his tracks and busted out in a cackle. It felt so great. He hadn’t laughed that hard in years.

  Tammy just winced.

  “Oh… you’re serious,” Joe said. He shook his head and continued down the hall. “Follow me, Tammy, through these ruins that were somehow built by a civilization in the past seven thousand years, before they all died out and never got around to contacting us.”

  Tammy didn’t say a word, which was probably for the best. Joe’s gut was beginning to tighten. Although this was risky and all signs were telling him to leave the throne room alone, he just had to see what was going on in there.

  “I’ll give you some credit,” Joe said, after feeling bad for literally laughing in the girl’s face. “You’re not afraid to have an opinion that’s different from everybody else.”

  “Why are you impressed by that?”

  “Believing what the crowd believes usually means you’re wrong.”

  “So do you think the crowd’s wrong now?”

  “You mean like – where we all come from and why we’re all here sort of thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t pretend to have the answers,” Joe said. “Because that’s impossible. That’s the closest thing to an answer that I think exists.”

  Tammy was quiet for a moment as they trudged down the long corridor, the sound of their steps echoing off the incredibly tall ceilings. “But you’d say you’re impressed with me though, right?”

  It wasn’t the first word Joe would use. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, have I impressed you enough to warrant at least one more day?” Tammy asked.

  Joe sighed. “I really don’t think I should be giving out jobs based on people’s weird beliefs. It’s about being qualified.”

  “How am I not qualified?”

  “For the moment I’m going to ignore the fact that you left the keys in the car,” Joe said. “And say, that to survive out here there’s a sixth sense that one needs to have. It’s called intuition. You don’t have it. That’s why you couldn’t see that this whole thing was just a cover up for whatever is going on in the throne room here.”

  They came upon a doorway, standing four meters tall, in the shape of a semicircle. Joe quietly applied pressure and it swooshed open smoothly. This must have been an actual Talashaa mechanism; since it was still in working order.

  Through the doorway they came upon a massive, ornate cathedral. Joe’s jaw dropped and his heart pounded in his chest. Before him stood a gigantic statue of a Talashaa with all four arms outstretched, in what could only be assumed was an act of celebration, the smallest finger on each hand pointed skyward. The statue was so tall that its top was hazy in the distance. The sunlight shined through the windows of the room, giving it all an ethereal glow.

  Joe continued into the cathedral, past more and more Talashaa statues standing before massive windows looking out to the stars. It was all so breathtaking.

  The atmosphere was quite alien to his senses – air that smelled of cinnamon and fresh plastic, at a temperature that sat just above freezing. Fortunately, he had kept his jacket on. He rubbed his hands together for warmth.

  “This place is incredible,” Tammy said, examining the walls.

  “You’re not kidding,” Joe replied. “Now what was I talking about?”

  “The intuition I lack,” Tammy answered.

  “Yes, that’s right. There’s other things like integrity, honor, fortitude. A sheriff’s got to have these things.”

  They came to the end of the hall where the floor took a sharp slope down and throne room spread out before them like a mountain valley, the far wall of which was removed and looking out into open space. A vaguely blue atmosphere shield covered the expanse. It must have been cut out over the course of days with precision lasers. Joe approached the edge where the descent began to see what was going on below.


  At the bottom of that massive room, sat two ships. One was a transport vessel with the Chinese symbols for ‘emperor’ and ‘nation’ painted in white on its hull – property of the Chinese Galactic Empire. The other was an orange Corvette. Both vessels were parked beside an archaeological camp made up of Chinese military personnel and Martian gang members, their tweed blazers a dead giveaway as to whom they were affiliated with.

  Protruding from the floor in the very center of the room was a large obelisk – a five sided, slender pyramid with a small gray sphere at its top. A scaffolding ramp lead up to its pinnacle.

  “Nope,” Joe said as he turned to leave.

  “Where are you going?” Tammy asked.

  “First off, there’s two of us and about twenty of them,” he whispered. “And I don’t want to land on some governmental hit list. Not to mention the paperwork, oh god, the paperwork. I promise you, Tammy, it would be a nightmare.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Tammy snapped.

  “I’ve never been so serious in all my life. It’s better if we act like we never saw this. We can go back to the Visitor’s Center and lay low until our ride shows up.”

  “But you’re the sheriff,” Tammy said.

  “Yes,” Joe said. “So let’s get out of here before they see me.”

  “Aren’t you going to report it?”

  “What would be the point?”

  “They’re illegally stealing from an archaeological site,” Tammy scoffed. “This is a neutral zone.”

  “Look, a little lesson in the way the world works, Tammy. They’re gonna do it regardless. The only difference I can make is how much red tape they have to go through to get it done. You can report it if you want, but I’m leaving. If anything interesting happens, let me know.” He took one last gaze down at the crowd a hundred meters away.

  A man in a cream-colored suit and a well-trimmed white beard stepped out from the tent. He approached the scaffolding ramp leading up to the top of the obelisk. Everyone went quiet.

  “Is that... who I think it is?” Joe wondered aloud. He squinted and hid behind a nearby statue. If his eyes were to be believed, he would have sworn it was Enoch Applebottom.

  The Applebottom look-alike ascended the ramp while a man in a white lab coat followed after him, pushing a cart containing one lone black box. The cart’s wheels rumbled on the scaffolding planks. They were headed for the sphere atop the obelisk, it’s gray plainness in stark contrast to the rest of the ornate building.