Worlds Away (19 page)
She turned to Fairamai. “I have a question about the writing
on the star beacon monuments. Actually, I have two, but the first one is, ‘What
do those messages really mean?’ ”
“I am not certain the translation program will give you the
correct context of our message,” Fairamai said. “The line was written in one of
the earliest languages from our southern continent. No one has spoken it in thousands
of years, but according to our linguists, it reads,
‘Observe the gate of
creation and the endless sky of your future. Great and terrible is the power of
Aether.’ ”
Justine deduced that, in a rudimentary form, the messages
were similar, and could be written in any number of ways.
Here’s the star
beacon. With it, you can travel to other solar systems. Use the technology with
care.
“The database says all the monuments have the same writing
samples,” Justine said. “So yours, out here, has our Mayan message on it. Did
the Xtôti write on all the beacons?”
Shaking her head, Fairamai said, “You still do not
comprehend. The star beacons all share the same space outside light. Some of
our scientists believe there may only be one star beacon, and what we see in
normal space is a metaphysical representation. Our technology cannot accurately
measure the star beacon. We can only hypothesize. The monuments are connected
to the star beacons on a level we do not understand.”
“So, if the Xtôti wrote on one, the writing would appear on
all of them?”
“That is our theory,” Fairamai replied.
“So,” Justine asked, drawing her words out, “if one of them
were destroyed…?”
Giving that amused screech of laughter, Fairamai said, “They
cannot be destroyed. Believe me, it’s been attempted many times by many
different systems.”
Sierra
de las Minas :
Guatemala
:
In the morning,
Nadia came for Michael.
“Your friends will remain here to ensure your cooperation,”
she said, casting a suspicious glance at the others. Her rifle was crooked in
her arm, and it was as if she wanted someone to try to escape.
“You said you would send someone back for Diego and Migel,”
Michael said.
“Yes. We brought them here last night. They’re in the main
house.” She glanced at Humberto. “They will both live as long as you all
continue to cooperate.”
Michael didn’t want to give her any excuse to follow through
with the threat. Sharing a concerned look with Humberto, he got up and followed
the young woman out of the barn. Before he left, he looked back. “It will all
work out,” he said. Yaxche gave him a nod.
Outside, there were several more people than the day before.
A second cargo truck was there, and it was filled with both electronic and
digging equipment. Tucked deep inside the cargo area was a compact excavator.
Alondo was standing near the rear of the truck, going over
an inventory list. He looked up as his sister and Michael approached.
“I think we have everything we will need,” he said to his
sister, “provided it is not too deep a cave.”
“So long as we are not chasing a fairy tale,” Nadia said,
raising an eyebrow at her brother.
“I can’t guarantee what’s there,” Michael said, and felt a
shudder go down his spine at the malevolent scowl he got from the siblings.
Nadia practically spat out her words. “For you and your
friends’ sake, let us hope we find something worth our while.”
In a businesslike manner, Alondo said, “We have four laser
radiation detectors. Once we reach the mountains, you will program the
frequency into them, and instruct the teams what to look for. Your map showed
an area of ten-thousand hectares. We have used a recent satellite scan to
eliminate more than eighty-percent of the area that does not show any
subterranean gaps. I’ve marked the remaining possible locations on these maps.
With four teams, we should be able to survey all possibilities in one or two
days. We’ve paid the local authorities to look the other way for that amount of
time. If we haven’t found what we are looking for by then…” He gave Michael a
hard look.
They all turned around at the sound of a third truck
rumbling up the dirt road. It pulled a long trailer, on the back of which were
four military-style all-terrain vehicles.
“A loan from a colonel in the Guatemalan army,” Alondo said.
A knot formed in the pit of Michael’s stomach. Once again,
he was being swept along with the tide of events. At one time, he was the CEO
of one of the most important corporations in the world, and was at the
forefront of future exploration. Now, in less than two decades, he was nothing
more than a pawn in an international and interplanetary power struggle.
How was he possibly going to be able to save Sol System from
the Kulsat when he hadn’t been able to save Kenny or Alex from Chow Yin? Even
Humberto’s intervention had only delayed his being abducted and used by Oscar
Ruiz’s children.
Now, if he didn’t cooperate, more innocents would die. There
was every possibility they would all die anyway.
Michael couldn’t remember ever feeling so low.
∞
The troop set up a base camp fifty meters outside the tree
line at the base of the mountain range and waited while Michael calibrated the
radiation detectors.
While raw Kinemet gave off ultra-high electromagnetic
radiation—more so than gamma rays—and could disrupt any electronics in the
nearby area, the radiation of a Kinemat, such as Alex, was non-ionizing
electromagnetic in the extremely low-frequency range. If a Kinemat was not
utilizing the radiation, the only means to detect it was with highly sensitive
detectors.
When Michael was finished, Alondo split up the men into four
teams and handed out coordinates of the most likely locations. Nadia stayed at
the camp with the trucks and the excavator. Her task was to coordinate the
search with the teams, and provide a communications hub for them.
Alondo took Michael with him. After taking his place in the
back seat of one of the terrain vehicles, Michael sat back and kept quiet.
Until they found the cave that entombed the alien—if it did, indeed, exist—he
didn’t have much to do other than go along for the ride.
The forest of the range was sparse, and the trees were
spaced far enough apart for them to ride between the trunks. There was also an
intricate pathway system the park officials had maintained for years. From the
story Patli had told, it was doubtful the cave would be too far up any of the
mountains. Michael doubted they would have to walk any great distance from the
vehicles.
While he concentrated on keeping his teeth from clattering
together, and his bones from rattling from the jarring ride, Michael considered
the younger man beside him. It was alarming how much groundwork Alondo had done
in such a short span of time. His attention to detail was meticulous, and he
commanded the men with an ease that seemed to be an inherent trait. If he’d put
his skills to legitimate trade, Alondo could easily have led a company to
prosperity. It was too bad he had baser motivations. Internally, Michael
sighed. It seemed the universe ran on greed, jealousy, and revenge.
When they arrived at the first prospect—a small area of rock
surrounding an outcrop—Alondo got off the vehicle and motioned Michael to grab
the radiation detector from the storage compartment on the back.
As they approached the outcrop on foot, Alondo called his
sister to let her know where they were. Once he’d finished checking in, he
turned to Michael.
“All right, let’s see if there’s anything there.”
Michael set the laser radiation detector on a tripod in
front of the rocks, turned it on, and aimed at the center of the pile of
rubble. It was a similar device to the ones surveyors used on asteroids. Idly,
Michael wondered if the Kinemet would react to the laser and produce an effect
similar to the one that had quantized Macklin’s Rock.
After the initial discovery of Kinemet, every mining company
on Earth went on the hunt for the element in the hopes of improving their
fortunes. After years of surveys, however, no sign of Kinemet was found.
Now, here they were searching again, but this time it wasn’t
for the element itself, but the residue of the element. They were working off a
lot of assumptions, but the one thing Michael clung to was that if there had,
indeed, been a Kinemetic being buried here, he would give off the same
electromagnetic signature as Alex. It was a well-documented frequency.
It took several seconds before the readout spat out the
results of the scan. Every spec of matter on the Earth gave out its own form of
radiation, and the computer listed every frequency it found: oxygen, silicon,
iron, calcium, magnesium, and many other innocuous elements.
Michael adjusted the laser a few degrees and waited for a
second readout, which ended up being similar to the first except for a trace of
jade—a quantity much too small to warrant the effort of excavation. He
continued to play the laser around the area, and only stopped after half an
hour of searching.
All the while, he could feel Alondo’s hawk eyes watching
him.
“Sorry,” Michael said finally, “there’s nothing in there.
From a geological standpoint, it’s probably nothing more than a crevice caused
by a natural shift.”
He expected an outburst, but was surprised when Alondo spoke
into his radio to touch base with his sister and inform her that the first
coordinate was not a hit.
Alondo crossed the spot off his map. To Michael, he said,
“One down, fourteen more to go.”
∞
By late afternoon, they’d surveyed five locations. Some of
the areas were buried by rock slides, some from sunken earth, and one had been
a wide-open tunnel whose opening was half a meter in diameter. Both Alondo and
Michael had started when a lowland paca darted out. The rodent had obviously
adopted the cave as a home, and was more frightened by the encroaching humans than
they were of it.
After their pulses returned to normal, Alondo said, “We’ll
do two more today, then complete the rest of them tomorrow. You look
dehydrated. Have some water, and I’ll check in and see how the other teams are
doing.”
Michael had just enough time to find the canteen on the seat
of the vehicle and take a sip before Alondo hollered at him.
“Team Three thinks they may have found something.” He
hurried toward Michael, trying to read his map while he moved. When he got to
the vehicle, he put the map on the seat and found the location of the other
team. “There. We can get there in ten minutes.”
Despite himself, Michael found his heart thrumming with
excitement. Was their long shot really going to pay off?
He climbed onto the back seat, and held on while Alondo
drove to the site.
∞
By the time they got there, the other two teams had arrived,
and within minutes, Michael could hear the engine of the compact excavator as
it slowly picked its way through the forest to them. Nadia stood on a riser
outside the cab, one hand holding her close to the vehicle. She had her rifle
in the other hand.
A dozen meters out, she jumped from the excavator and
trotted up to meet her brother.
Alondo smiled at her, and then turned to Michael. “All right,
let’s verify the findings.”
They scaled a short rise to an area where there had been a
massive landslide. From the looks of the overgrowth, it could have been decades
or centuries since anyone had been there. There was only one way to tell
whether this was the spot.
Michael approached the laser operator, but his eyes were on
the readout. “What did it find?” he asked.
“Kinemet,” the man said, and Michael gave him a sharp,
questioning look.
“Surely, you mean you detected the ELF radiation?”
Shaking his head, the man pointed to the readout. “See for
yourself.”
Michael refreshed the screen and read the results. It was
positive for the high-frequency radiation of Kinemet. The laser indicated there
was a very tiny amount of the element, but left no doubt that it was there.
Perhaps the story had been wrong, and there wasn’t an alien
buried beneath the mountain. There were dozens of other possibilities to
explain the presence of Kinemet, the least of which was an alien visitor.
Seeing Michael’s expression, Alondo asked, “What does this
mean?”
“It’s possible there’s a natural deposit of Kinemet here.
Perhaps a meteorite heavy with the element fell to the Earth a long time ago.”
He shook his head. “For all we know, someone could’ve stolen some and buried it
here sometime in the past twenty years.”
Alondo and his sister shared a greedy look. “A gram of
Kinemet is worth a million on the black market, what with the Emperor’s
embargo. Perhaps, if we continue to search, we will find more than that.”
Nadia turned and signaled for the excavator operator to move
closer.
Slapping Michael on the shoulder in congratulations, Alondo
said, “It seems we may have found the pot of gold at the end of your rainbow.”
He laughed. “An alien grave site. What a story! I knew you were trying to—how
do you say it?—pull a fast one.”
∞
It took the excavator operator nearly half an hour to remove
enough of the rubble to reveal a narrow crevice in the face of the mountain. A
blast of fetid air rolled out, and Michael had to hold his nose together with
his fingers.
From a case on his belt, Alondo produced a handheld
spectrometer and leaned over to make himself small enough to fit in the
crevice. In his free hand, he aimed a high-powered flashlight into the darkness
within.
Nadia, with her rifle, motioned for Michael to go next, and
she followed right behind him.
The cave was dark, and the flashlight cast eerie dancing
shadows on the walls. They didn’t have far to go before the spectrometer lit
up, indicating they were right on top of the source of the Kinemet.
To everyone’s surprise, there wasn’t a deposit, or a vein
from a meteorite, or even a buried cache of the kinetic element.
What they found was a perfectly preserved body, covered in a
thick layer of dust.
The figure was short, like a boy, but the head was reptilian
in shape, with a curved eye ridge that traced around the sides of its bald
head. It had large, wide-spaced eyes and a beak for a mouth. Its skin was
leathery; pale white and mottled with blue patches.
Michael was the first to recover from the shock, and he
knelt beside the creature, feeling at its neck and wrist for a pulse.
It had to be the alien from Patli’s story. The Grace? If so,
he’d died over a millennium ago.
