The Unearthing (8 page)

“Lieutenant-Colonel?” Benedict’s voice came through the intercom.

She toggled a switch on her headset.

“Go ahead, Major.”

“Ma’am, the microwave dish has been uncoupled from the array and we’re currently trying to locate a satellite we can hack into.”

“Good news Major. But the
Trafalgar
is minutes away from hard dock,” Bloom advised him, “And we won’t have control of the station for long after that happens.”

“We’ll be ready on time,” Benedict assured her, “You have my word on it.” The confidence in Benedict’s voice came through even in the tiny speaker in her ear. He’d changed a lot from the fighter jock she’d known during the Australia conflict. He’d been scared shitless back then. During the attack their entire squadron was taken out in one violent assault by suicide flyers and antiaircraft fire coming in from ground and orbit. The boy that Jack Benedict had been was gone, now. The man who took his place someone that Bloom would want watching her back any day.

“Roger that Exo,” Bloom said, “Contact me when you’re good to go.”

“Will do, Ma’am.”

“Banshee out,” Bloom said, ending the comm with her pilot’s Callsign.

♦♦♦

There was a sudden rumble and then the earth shook. Nothing violent and not for very long but there had been a definite quake. The people confined to the lab at the edge of the Laguna dig made a frightened noise, followed by nervous, excited conversation. The soldiers looked to their senior officers for orders, who in turn looked to Colonel Jude.

“What in Hell is going on?” Jude demanded, “What was that?”

“Earthquake, Colonel?” One soldier offered. James and Peter saw their opportunity and pushed their way past their colleagues to the front of the barricade.

“If you let us get to the main console, we can tell you exactly what’s happening,” James called, “We have Doppler seismology equipment set up all over the area. We can use it to get a Richter count and find the epicentre.” Jude eyed them suspiciously. Then he nodded to two of the guards, who escorted James and Peter over to the console. The two soldiers stood behind them as they got to work. Surreptitiously, James moved his console to his lap in order to access a keypad that it was blocking. They were bringing up the Doppler seismology systems, reviewing the mild quake that had just shaken the area.

“Well?” Jude asked from behind them.

“We’re at the epicentre of the quake,” Peter reported, “Looks like whatever it is we’re digging up did this.”

“How is that possible?” Peter looked at him contemptuously.

“You tell us Colonel,” He said, “You’re the one who stopped us from digging and stopped our scan halfway in.” Another quake hit, this one longer and more forceful. People screamed this time, as many of them staggered and fell. James and Peter regarded each other, both knowing what had to be done before this quake subsided.

“
EVERYBODY RUN!
” James bellowed, rising to his feet, knocking over his chair. He and Peter shoved past their guards and the Colonel who were already off-balance from the quaking ground. The wave of people broke, stampeding for the exits from the shelter. The soldiers at the site did their best to evacuate everyone in an orderly fashion, but the bedlam was out of control. The tremor stopped by the time James and Peter cleared the building, but the people they had been held prisoner with were still panicked and scattering.

“Which way?” James asked. Peter looked around and then pointed towards one of the Rangers.

“There!” he said, dashing off. James was at his heels and they could hear the sounds of more footsteps behind them. James didn’t turn around. He didn’t want to. A soldier was standing by the open door of one of the vehicles, speaking on a linx and consulting the console system in the dash. Jackpot. Peter slammed into the soldier from behind, knocking her into the door and pushing the stunned woman aside. He climbed in as James raced around to the passenger side door. They were locked in just as their pursuers caught up to them. The soldiers that had been guarding them were hammering on the vehicle as Peter tried to hotwire the starter, while James began connecting his console to the Ranger’s system using an elaborate octopus of cables. The transport was being quickly surrounded by troops—with guns drawn.

“Hurry up Pete,” James growled. Floodlights hit the Ranger, turning night into day inside the cab. Colonel Jude was marching towards the human shield forming around the vehicle. He, too had his sidearm drawn. James had no doubts about their fate should they be hauled out of the vehicle. Troops were grabbing at the doors now, trying to get the transport open. The locks were shut but it wouldn’t be long until someone produced a master key or an electronic override. Peter was playing with wires and fuses under the dashboard while James began trying to slice into the console. Maybe he could send the information out, before it was too late; maybe he could—

“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 night, 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.