Second Earth (7 page)

  
“What is it?”

  
“Let me show you.”
She stepped up to the hologram that was at her chest level.
 
She dipped her fingers into the projections
and began moving the simulated rubble, as if the image were made of clay and
she was a master pottery sculpture. The fragments moved, reoriented themselves,
and then reformed into larger bits one after another. After a moment, Shawn
realized that—with the computer’s help—Melissa was rebuilding that section of
the base to its appearance before its destruction. Several minutes passed as
she continued to manipulate the image until at last she stepped back. With a
wave of her hand she moved several outlying buildings out of the view until a
lone building dominated the projection.

  
Shawn was
understandably impressed with her skills at the computer, but the nondescript
building he was looking at didn’t seem like it was worth the effort. It was
essentially a cube-shaped office, perhaps forty feet on each side, with a
single entry door and no windows. “What are we looking at here?”

  
Melissa stared at
the image. “This is…
was
…the Special
Projects Theory and Design building.”

  
“Special projects?”
he inquired. “What type of special projects?”

  
As the image of the
cube building spun slowly on its axis Melissa felt a cold breeze blow in
through the destroyed windows opposite of the terminal. “The kind that this
base shouldn’t have.”

  
T
he streets below the skimmers looked like ocean waves frozen in
time. They were warped, twisted, and cracked in hundreds of places—more than
Shawn could count in the few minutes it took the Marine craft to reach their
final destination. They were now on the far side of the base, beside the
remains of buildings that were on the eastern edge eight-hundred-foot-wide
crater that had swallowed the remainder of the complex. Shawn could see several
of the surrounding streets had simply fallen into the mouth of the abyss. Their
goal, the Special Projects building was in complete ruins, probably due to its
proximity to whatever had caused the crater in the first place. All the walls
had collapsed in on themselves, and there didn’t appear to be a navigable way
inside.

  
And, just as Cal Vross had described back on
Darus Station, there were indeed bodies. There were hundreds—thousands of them,
it seemed. They were crowded near what remained of the three fallout shelters
within a few minutes’ walk of the crumbling Special Projects building. The
bones of the victims were, in some places, piled four high on top of one
another, as if they’d been scrambling to get into the shelters before whatever
had destroyed them had taken their lives—efforts that had obviously been in vain.

  
“Looks like there was a bottleneck at the
door,” Adams remarked, his pulse rifle at the ready.

  
Shawn nodded slowly. Beyond what was left of
the shelter door, the entire structure looked as if it had caved in on itself.
“For all the good it would have done them.”

  
Melissa walked to the nearest pile of bones,
indistinguishable from any other around them, and leaned down toward the
remains. She withdrew something from her pocket that Shawn couldn’t make out
from his distance, reached out, and waved the device over the remains.

  
“Whoa there, lady. Let’s play a little game
called ‘look but don’t touch’, okay?”

  
Melissa continued to wave the instrument
above the bones in a slow, sweeping motion. “I’m not going to disturb them,
Commander, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
  

  
He wasn’t really sure. There was a certain
respect that needed to be paid to the deceased; of that there was no doubt. But
something else was tugging at the edge of his mind, something he couldn’t put a
finger on. Caution, he decided, was going to be the word of the day. “What are
you doing, anyway?” he asked as he stepped closer.

  
“Taking some fragment samples. I’ll analyze
them when we get back to the carrier.” A moment later she stood, and then
walked back to where rest of the team had assembled.

  
Choosing to leave the skimmer behind, it was
decided that Raven and Private First Class Montoya would circle the remains of
the Special Projects building to the west, while Shawn and Sergeant Adams would
search to the east. Melissa found herself truly alone for the first time on the
planet’s surface, and began probing for clues on her own. She looked at the
large blocks of rubble, knowing full well that the small team would never be
able to clear enough of them to get into what was left of the structure. As she
stared at it, an image of the last letter she had received from her father
popped into her mind. She recalled his unusual sentence that specified he’d
been working on a ‘special project,’ and it dawned on her that he might have
stood near this very location at some point in the recent past. She looked
around for anything out of the ordinary, but there didn’t seem to be anything
there except dust and debris.

  
She slid off her backpack and withdrew her
electronic map, unrolling the paper-thin, semi-transparent device and bringing
up the model of Addison Field and Delta Base. She initiated the self-centering
mode and the map zoomed in to the team’s current location outside the Special
Projects building. As she studied the map she realized that she was about
twenty yards from the building’s former entrance door. She decided it seemed
the best place to start looking for clues, even though she had no idea what she
was looking for.

  
Following the map closely, Melissa rounded a
large pile of debris until she was standing a few feet away from where the door
should have been. In front of her was a large wall of irregular concrete blocks
and steel beams bent at odd angles. Surely there was no way to enter the
structure from this side. She examined the flexible map once more, looking for
the first time at the areas surrounding the Special Projects building. There
were the remains of a postal office to the north, and a small park to the east
and northeast. The base’s motor pool was south of her current location, well
inside of where the large crater now dominated. Melissa turned so the former
Special Projects building was now behind her and she began to absently pace
east across an unusually clear section of roadway.

  
She was watching the map intently as she
walked, and it wasn’t until she tripped over a large chunk of gravel that she
looked down to see what she had stumbled over. There before her was a series of
similarly shaped chunks of plaster and concrete. Though this wouldn’t have been
at all unusual to find here, Melissa took instant note that the debris was
aligned in a near-perfectly straight line parallel to the street, and that it
was set too far away from any other remains to be a coincidence. The line was
about four feet long, with the size of the dozen or so blocks steadily
increasing as she traveled the arrangement to the south. She licked her lips
and held the digital map to the line of debris on the ground, and found there
was no digital counterpart for this particular formation.

  
Shawn and Raven’s teams, having come up
short on their investigations, rounded the building at the same moment Melissa
made her discovery. She heard them talking behind her and knew she had found
what she was looking for. “I’ve got something over here.”

  
Scrambling over debris, the two pilots and
the two Marines rushed to her side and looked down at the map she was studying.

  
“What did you find?” Shawn asked excitedly.

  
“This formation of debris. It’s not on the
map,” Melissa cried enthusiastically.

  
Roslyn gave her a sideways glance. “What’s
so unusual about that?”

  
“Nothing,” Melissa grinned, leaning down and
laying a hand lightly on the smallest of the rocks. “And that’s exactly what
makes it unusual.”

  
Roslyn turned back to Shawn. “I think I’m
beginning to see why you would think she’s a little touched in the head,
Skipper.”

  
Melissa scowled at Shawn. “Did you really
tell her that?”

  
“I didn’t say anything,” he defended. “Maybe
it’s just obvious by the way you’re admiring this pile of rocks.”

  
“This isn’t just some random pile of debris,
Shawn. This is a clue.”

  
“Um, says who? It could have come from
anywhere.”

  
“You’re suggesting I’m grasping at straws?”
she asked, still studying the smallest parts of the line in great detail.

  
“You’ve got to admit,” Brunel piped in, her
dark hair fluttering in the afternoon breeze, “it’s a little strange. I mean,
this whole area is a disaster zone. Why would this lone pile be organized in a
perfectly straight line?”

  
The fact that the usually logical Lieutenant
Commander Brunel was in some way defending Melissa’s eccentricities told Shawn
even more caution was warranted—if only for the sake of his sanity. He reached
down and pulled Melissa gently away from the formation.

  
“What on Third Earth was
that
for?” she asked as she stumbled to
her feet.

  
Shawn held his hands up. “Just being
careful. It could be a trap. Remember, that slimebag Cal Vross was here a
number of times. There is no telling what he could have left behind for
unsuspecting OSI agents to stumble across.”

  
“Like a bomb?” Melissa replied sarcastically
while leaning back toward the pile.

  
Shawn was quick to grab her forearm,
spinning her so her face was inches from his own. “The only way I’m letting you
near that pile is if there’s a bomb hidden in there that subjects you to a
healthy dose of common sense when it explodes in your face.”

  
The fire behind his eyes informed Melissa
that he meant it. She found herself flustered at his nearness and it wasn’t
until she remembered that Raven and the two Marines were close by that she
snapped out of a rather pleasant—albeit short-lived—daydream. She pulled away
from Shawn’s grasp and fixed her hair. “Fine. Have it your way. But I assure
you it’s harmless.”

  
Adams, his pulse rifle at the ready, walked
to the edge of the debris line. “You don’t think someone put this here after we
touched down, do you?”

  
Melissa shook her head vehemently. “No, I
don’t think so. None of our sensors reported any kind of life readings on the
planet prior to our landing on the airfield.” She folded the map, placed it
back into her backpack, and then withdrew a small portable scanner. She leaned
down and aimed it at the concrete arrangement.

  
Shawn was quick to reach a hand out for her,
but a quick turn of her head and a glimmer in her emerald eyes told him to
momentarily back off. He straightened and she offered a weak smile, silently
thanking him for his momentary trust. With the push of a button, a soft beam of
red-white light emitted from the top of device, making contact with one of the
large chunks on the ground. Within seconds the ray stopped as the computer
began processing the molecular core sample.

  
“This material has been completely saturated
with baryon particles,” Melissa said, shaking her head in confusion.

  
Private Montoya gripped his weapon tightly.
“Is that dangerous, ma’am?”

  
“No, they’re completely harmless to
humanoids. However, they are very useful in eradicating some diseases and—”

  
“Let’s skip the science lesson for now,”
Shawn inserted impatiently. “Tell me why we need to find these hunks of rock as
important as you do.”

  
“Agreed,” Raven said. “What purpose is served
by flooding a chunk of concrete with baryons?”

  
Melissa took a deep breath. “Well, as I was
going to say before I was rudely interrupted, if the material is small enough
in size, flooding it with baryons makes it appear invisible to most standard
sensors.”
 
She smiled. “If, however, the
object is larger than, say, two square feet, the baryons begin to decay
rapidly—and the sensors would pick up the anomaly.”

  
“Why would someone want to make this section
of debris invisible?” Sergeant Adams asked.

 
 
“Because someone didn’t want anyone else to find it unless they knew
what they were looking for,” Melissa replied. She pointed her scanner at the
next portion of debris and took another sample. “This one has less baryon
saturation than the last.” She aimed and took a sample from the piece of debris
on the opposite side of the first she had sampled. “This one contains more
baryons.” She continued down the line of debris to the south until she came to
the last chunk of material. It was shaped roughly into a diamond, its points
oriented directly north and south. Melissa leaned in and took a final sample.
“This piece has three times the amount of baryons as the one before it.”

  
“What does that mean?” Shawn asked.

  
“Like I said before, it means it’s a clue.”
She leaned down and reached for the piece of debris. Sergeant Adams and Private
Montoya were quickly at her side, pointing their rather imposing-looking pulse
rifles directly at the lump. Raven silently took two steps behind Shawn, who
was now standing directly behind Melissa. As Melissa lifted the mass out of the
way, something shiny briefly came into view before it was swallowed by dirt
that rushed in to fill the void. Melissa reached in to retrieve the object, but
Shawn put a hand gently on her shoulder.

  
“Okay, that’s really enough excitement for
me today,” he said with a forced chuckle. “Let’s just all relax for a second
and let the Marines handle this one, okay?”

  
Placing the debris in her hand aside,
Melissa clenched her teeth and tightened her hands into fists before slowly
standing up. If Shawn Kestrel was intent on protecting her every move, she
would at least allow him this one moment of chivalry. She unclenched her fists
and stepped backward into his chest.

  
Shawn withdrew his blaster, sidestepped in
front of Melissa, then motioned to Adams. “Go ahead, Sergeant. Let’s see what
we’ve got.”