Billions of stars...infinite possibilities.

[relicworlds-blog]

Relic Worlds Short Stories Collection 3

All the short stories that have been going up this season are brought together in this one collection that is now available on both Kindle and paperback.  Both are available on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Relic-Worlds-Short-Collection-Stories-ebook/dp/B073RST1QL/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1507018475&sr=8-2&keywords=Relic+Worlds+Short+stories

These stories tell the tales of Lancaster’s adventures between books 3 and 4.

[relicworlds-blog]

Lancaster James and the Hunt for the Uther Maris - Part 3

Lancaster came back to consciousness slowly and painfully this time.  He ached almost everywhere.  He felt numb everywhere else.  He believed he had been revived by several slaps to the face, but he couldn’t be certain.  He was too weak to move; too weak even to resist the gangster who had him by the back of his shirt.  All he noticed about his surroundings was that they were no longer in the cargo bay. Instead, they were in a corridor next to an air lock.

Nikos saw Lancaster notice the outer door and said in a no-nonsense voice stripped of all pleasantries, “If you aren’t willing to tell me what I want to know, you’re useless to me.  So I’ll throw you out this air lock into deep space where your body will never be found.”

Lancaster tried to speak, and as he did, he found that each word came out in a drunken slur.  “If I tell you, you kill me anyway.”

“Not true,” Nikos said, his pleasant voice returning.  “You’re more valuable to me alive.  You see, I know that you are better at xeno-historical research than me. You always have been.  I may have the doctor title, but your knowledge and skills far exceed mine.  I need you to help me find what I’m searching for.  To know what I’m looking at.  Without you, I’ll just be glossing over dusty objects; many of which will be valuable. So come with me and live like a king, Lancaster.”

Lancaster could not help but smile.  Though he hated Nikos, he had always sought approval from the official society from which Dr. Kazakis had come, and this was the first time he could remember hearing it.  He kept grinning, even looking away; remembering how long it had been that he had…

Nikos grabbed Lancaster’s face and turned it toward him.  His own face revealed that he was out of patience, but he still spoke in that kindly manner, though with a tight jaw.  “If you don’t help me, I’ll still get what I want if I have to kill everyone you care about to get it.  We’ll kill your partner, we’ll kill everyone at that university you work for… We’ll kill Mika, and we’ll get that Constellation Crest she’s hiding. And then I will have the location of every secret in the galaxy.”

Lancaster could not help but smile pathetically.  He was unable to laugh, and this was the closest he could get. He then met eyes with Nikos with a “get real” expression and said, “You’re going to kill Little Jack. Really.”

Just then, the ship’s alarm sounded; a squawking, raucous noise, the sure sign of a low rent civilian vessel.  Just as everyone was reacting to the sound, a loud explosion was accompanied by the ship shaking violently.  All four of the men in the corridor stumbled.  The gangsters tried to regain their footing, but found they were beginning to float.  The suction from the floor that created the artificial gravity was failing, as were the lights, and anything else that used power.  While the thugs began to scream in panic, Nikos waited for the reserve power to kick in.  Even lesser ships usually had something to fall back on that was not attached to the main power plant in case it was taken out.

While they waited, Nikos looked at Lancaster.  He was holding onto the floor, smiling.  Nikos simply asked him, “How?”

Lancaster didn’t answer.  He didn’t want Nikos to know about the tracking device in his jacket, nor the button he pressed to warn Little Jack of danger.  Lancaster also knew that Little Jack had methods of entering a star system undetected, dropping out of spectrum drive in the outer ring, using the sensors to find his target, then jumping through spectrum to appear very close to the target; close enough to get a hit on it before it was able to turn on its defense systems.

After nearly a minute of stumbling in the dark,the lights and artificial gravity turned back on.  After everyone landed hard on the floor, they saw Lancaster.  He had not in any way tried to escape.  He was just holding onto the grating of the floor with a large smile on his face.  “Keep a gun on him!” Nikos ordered, and the thugs did as he said.  All of them were looking around, wondering what would happen next.

Just then they got their answer.  They saw outside the windows of the airlock doors a vessel pull up and stop, then connect to the outside air lock door.  Nikos called for reinforcements, and in a few moments, they had a crowd of armed syndicate soldiers in the corridor looking through the same window they were looking.

They saw the outer air lock open and a small figured step through into the airlock chamber.  He wore large, frosted over glasses that covered nearly his entire face, and a thick, padded, black outfit.  He was in no hurry, strolling casually inside.  They noted his two custom crafted laser pistols with various settings; the kind only the most skillful gunmen carried.

Lancaster looked at Nikos and noticed he was growing uneasy.  But as Little Jack took his time, Lancaster became uneasy as well, wondering if his partner was trying to come up with a plan.

The small man was stretching his neck in different directions, cracking his knuckles, as though preparing for a fight.  One of the gangsters said, “I’m tired of waiting.  Someone open the door so we can crack his shaft.”

One of the thugs stepped forward toward the control panel.  Little Jack did the same, each of them arriving at their own side of the door at the same time.  Little Jack was so short that only his glasses and forehead were still visible in the window, and they were staring straight at the gangster who had approached the door controls.  Unnerved by Little Jack’s calm behavior, the woman kept her gun pointed straight at where Little Jack’s body would be, and she pressed the button to open the door…

Nothing happened.  She pressed it again, and a few of the others shouted at her to get the door opened. “He locked us in,” she said baffled.

Nikos had an idea what was about to happen, so he hurried for the door toward the front of the ship.

A hood flapped over the back of Little Jack’s head, and a mask covered over the front. He lifted a gloved hand which was holding a detonator.  Every eye grew wide in the corridor except Lancaster’s.  He laced his fingers as tightly as he could into the floor grating.

Little Jack pressed the trigger.

The ceiling exploded, and the syndicate crew was sucked out.  The one with a gun on Lancaster tried to hold onto him, but his grip slipped, and he tumbled outside with the others.  Lancaster’s legs flew up as well, but he kept hold of the floor.

Nikos made his escape, throwing open the door and slipping through just as the explosion occurred, then closing it before he could get sucked back out. Little Jack paid him no attention. He opened the door, reached in, and grabbed his partner, then yanked him back out, closing the inner airlock door behind him.

Lancaster was panting as he dropped to the floor.  “Come on,” Little Jack said, and he began toward his ship.

“Wait! We need to get the artifact.”

Little Jack wanted to argue, but he sighed, knowing that if it got left behind, their trip would be for nothing.  “What does it look like?”

Lancaster described it to him, and Little Jack agreed.  But he first had to put Lancaster in his ship so he wouldn’t get sucked out when he opened the door to the corridor again.  Once Lancaster was safely stored, Little Jack entered the syndicate’s vessel and made his way to the hold.  They were using a cargo ship with a standard design, one Little Jack knew well.  It wasn’t far away from the airlock through which he was walking.

Once he arrived in the room, he spotted the equipment they had used to torture Lancaster.  He shook his head, muttering, “Amateurs.”  He scanned the items in a shelf behind glass.  Some were relics, some were standard equipment on a ship.  While he was searching, another doorway opened. Without turning toward it, Little Jack raised his pistol and fired, hitting the first person through the door, who tumbled back onto his partner, and the door slammed shut again.  Little Jack blasted the door controls, hoping that would keep it stuck for a little while.  He then shot the glass of the container, reached in, and grabbed the artifact Lancaster had described.  He picked up Lancaster’s pack and shoved the item in there.  He also shoved in Lancaster’s jacket, and slung the utility belt over his shoulder.  He saw his hat, but didn’t want to use the other hand to carry it, and it wasn’t carrying tools as the jacket was, so he left it.  Thus equipped, Little Jack made his way back to the corridor.

The door closest to the front of the ship opened with a couple thugs behind it. Their guns were drawn and they fired immediately.  Little Jack fired back instantly, shooting the enemy laser bolts out of the sky, deflecting them into the walls.  He then fired two more rapid shots into them, killing the thugs.  He pressed a button on the gun with his thumb and the cartridge on the bottom of it swiveled and locked in place.  He fired again, and a small rocket flew down the hall and exploded at the end.  Little jack didn’t want anyone else bothering him.That done, he made his way through the airlock, and onto Odin’s Revenge.

As they pulled away and flew into spectrum drive, Lancaster pulled the artifact out of the pack.  It was not the Maris.  Instead it was a device with a square bottom and a round head with spikes, some of which had a few blood stains on them.  Lancaster smiled with delight.

“I thought we came for the Uther Maris,” Little Jack said.

Lancaster shrugged and said, “This was much more big ticket.  And more valuable.  The Uther Maris was still in development by the Siguerans, so it won’t work no matter how many R&D people they put on it.  But this…” Lancaster held the item aloft as well as he could in his weak state.  “The Taiper Anslees is a deciphering machine, and it can lead us to one of the most important discoveries in the galaxy.”

There was a silence as Lancaster beamed with pride, and the light outside dimmed from the glow of a star system to the darkness of the brane in spectrum drive. “And they were beating you with it.”

“Ironies will never cease,” Lancaster said, as the star system disappeared behind them.

The End

[relicworlds-blog]

Lancaster James and the Hunt for the Uther Maris - Part 2

Lancaster awoke to his face crashing into water, his head held down by one of the gangsters.  There he was held, now conscious, and unable to breathe.  Up to this point, Lancaster had kept his cool relatively well.  But now he shook and seized, trying to get air. At last the hand yanked him up, and he sucked in a huge breath.

Nikos Kazakis was sitting in front of him, just past the trough of water into which Lancaster was being dunked.  His hand was still inside the metal glove.  He was leaning over, his eyes peering empathetically into Lancaster’s. “You didn’t credit you’d get away from us that easily, did you, Mr. James?  We’ve still got things to talk about.”

Lancaster merely sputtered and spat out water.  Some of it went toward Nikos.  One of the gangsters grabbed him tightly, ready to dunk Lancaster again, but Nikos waved him off.

“We all have standards,” Nikos said.  “Yours are perhaps more noble than most people’s, and that’s admirable.  I respect you.  I really do.  But you must acknowledge that you are alone in most of these beliefs.  The universe does not spin on good intentions.  In reality, profit is king.  Now, you can accept that, and live as royalty, or you can die uselessly.”

Lancaster stared Nikos down.  He had no snarky remark, and he knew the longer he looked at his old nemesis silently, making Nikos think that he might say something, the more time he bought.

Nikos at last grew tired of waiting and he nodded at the gangsters, who dunked Lancaster underwater.  This time, Lancaster had had time to prepare.  So he held his breath, and for a few seconds, was having little problem, though he squirmed so they would think he was drowning and bring him up faster. Then Nikos grabbed the edge of the metal tub with his electronic glove.  Lancaster felt a devastating shock jolt through his body.  His scream of agony went silently into the water, and turned to air bubbles that rolled to the top.

After what felt like an eternity, Lancaster was pulled back up, gasping and panting.  Almost immediately, Nikos was in his face, shouting, “Where is your partner?  The little guy who drops you off!  Where did he go to get the other piece?”

Lancaster was shivering, coughing, and looking around him panic stricken, half drowned and half electrocuted.  Nikos grabbed him with both hands, small amounts of electricity still emanating from the metal glove as a reminder.  He met Lancaster’s eyes with his own and demanded, “Tell me now!”

Lancaster’s blubbering suddenly stopped.  He looked back into Nikos’s eyes, and he saw something that gave him confidence.  Lancaster’s facial expression changed to joy and he began laughing.  The more he laughed, the angrier Nikos became.  At last Lancaster said, “You’re not asking because you want the other half of this piece.  You know it was never finished being developed.  You know it won’t work.  What you want to know is where he went because you know it’s an ancient factory where they developed new items and you want to find all of them.”

Lancaster looked around the room at the other gangsters.  He had already seen in Nikos’s eyes that he was correct.  The other gangsters were even worse at hiding their shock.  They were caught.  That mattered little in the greater scheme of things because Nikos still had the upper hand, but at least Lancaster knew what he was actually searching for.  He had meant to intimidate Lancaster, then “settle” for information on the planet.

When Lancaster looked back at Nikos with the smile across his face, Niko yanked his head back into the water himself, then turned the power of the glove up.  The electric shock knocked Lancaster unconscious immediately.

 *          *          *

 Lancaster stood before the door made up of roots trying to decipher how to open them. The Siguerans often left behind some secret way that they could re-open their hidden passages whenever they returned. These were secrets that were meant to last millions of years, so they involved miraculous feats of genetic engineering and evolution.  Some would never be solved by those who happened to pass by them.  But Lancaster was determined to try.

He thought about what he had seen, and wondered if he would need to study the few remains of the ruins for some sort of clue.  He considered everything in the woods.  Just as the trees that formed this door with their roots were not here when that wondrous civilization was around, yet now they formed the door, so too should the key be something that had formed during their absence.

The animals cackled teasingly all around him, and Lancaster had to remind himself it wasn’t toward him.  But then he remembered the birds.  He did not hear them now, but he had heard them earlier.  They had all whistled one specific tune over and over without variation. It was enough to drive someone listening to it insane, and he wondered if it affected the mental health of the animals who lived here.  But that exactness was not common in nature.

Lancaster pursed his lips and whistled the tune as best he could remember, mimicking the birds as exactly as he thought possible.  When nothing happened, he tried again, then again, and on and on, altering it just a little to try to get the notes just right.  He did it enough times to satisfy himself that he must have stumbled upon the correct tune and inflection at some point, but still nothing happened, so he surrendered and considered other possibilities.

But then he returned to the thought again.  If the key had indeed been the bird song, what would have stopped one of the birds from fluttering down here and opening the door on accident?  The Siguerans would have altered the necessary tune to match their voices to make sure only they could open it.  Sigueran language was, in fact, musical in tone.  They had evolved with multiple orifices through which sound emerged along their spines and long necks.  As such, their methods of communication involved musical auras; their conversations like orchestral arrangements.  Lancaster had heard an ancient transmission of their speech before. It sounded like whales speaking through a mixture of oboes and saxophones whose notes occasionally drifted out of the wavelengths that humans could hear.

Lancaster removed a sound recorder from a pocket and recorded himself whistling the bird tune into it.  He then used filters that came with the recorder which he never expected to use. They were designed into the device for young people to play with when they wanted to remake popular tunes or friends’ voices into their own creations.  He hoped there were enough filters for him to do what he wanted to do now.

Crouching down in a clearing as far away from logs and other underbrush that could be hiding dangerous animals, Lancaster meticulously went through every note altering the sounds to as close as he could remember the Sigueran language. At last he got it where he wanted it. It was an educated guess, but it was as good as he was going to get.  Lancaster took the recorder to the door, held it aloft, and played the finished tune.

The last note faded away into the cacophony of animal noises with no results. For several seconds, Lancaster was convinced he had wasted his time.  But then, a crackling of wood groaned out of the tangle of branches, and the roots receded like fingers slowly letting go of something they had grasped.  The door lost its shape, but as the last wooden fingers pulled away, a dark hole was revealed.

Wide-eyed, Lancaster stepped toward the opening.  He stopped just short of it, returning the recorder to its pocket, then pulling out his Illuminator, which he shined into the darkness; switching through several light spectrums to see if anything was inside.  It was spacious, but sparse.  Nothing appeared to be moving, and nothing resembled an animal, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any hiding, so Lancaster moved cautiously inside.

The floor ramped downward, opening broadly into a large underground chamber. Thin beams of light sneaked in between tree roots above and crisscrossed through the room.  The walls were flourished with winding décor, a sign of Sigueran architecture; carved with the sort of designs and skill of their appearance during the Second Epoch of life in the galaxy; a time before they enslaved the brilliant stone artisans known as the Tesklavo.

It was a lot of pomp and circumstance for a single altar with only one item on top. But this was no simple item.  It was the Maris, one of the two pieces that, when combined, could be used to do massive damage.  The altar was no simple decoration either.  It looked like tree roots winding up out of the ground, its ends, like tendril fingers, reached up to the sides of the artifact, which nuzzled inside like a comfortable nest.  Interspersed along its edges were dots of flowers and other greenery whose faces turned up as though watching whomever came near.

Approaching it cautiously, Lancaster could tell that it was not natural wood, nor anything that would biodegrade.  Rather, the altar was constructed of material that would last the eons until the Siguerans’ return.It was probably also protecting this important artifact.  Taking the Maris would not be easy.

Lancaster took from another pocket yet another scanning device.  This one detected the inner workings of machinery. Whether mechanical, electronic, or some other automation, the Machination Scanner helped Lancaster figure out how the item worked.  He ran it over the entire platform, watching the screen and readings on the back as he did. He found an unknown gaseous substance at the base of the flower stems, which Lancaster believed meant that they would spray him with some deadly chemical.  The roots, meanwhile, were made up of a malleable substance which would react to anything happening within their palms.

Lancaster began with the flowers.  He pulled a small aerosol can from his utility belt and sprayed a foamy substance over the flowers to block their attack.  He then poked the backs of the roots hard enough to get their attention. As he suspected, they curled backward, reaching for the hand that was poking them.  He did this with several of the roots, careful to stay out of their reach when they pulled back toward him.

Once enough of the roots were folded back, Lancaster prepared himself near the edge that was most clear.  He looked the shrine up and down one last time, then he leaped forward and grabbed the artifact!  The tendril roots snapped inward like fingers into a closing fist.  Lancaster pulled back as quickly as he could, slipping through two of the branches just as they came together.  He had in his hand the Maris, the reason he had come.

Relieved, and satisfied, Lancaster tapped the brim of his hat, placed the Maris into his bag, then turned toward the door…

Silhouetted at the entrance was the figure of a man waiting for him.  There was another behind that man, and likely more behind them both.  The ones Lancaster could see bore the confidence of people who had not come across him by accident.

To be continued...

[relicworlds-blog]

Lancaster James and the Hunt for the Uther Maris - Part 1

Lancaster felt every knuckle land against his cheek like a rough-hewn brick wall.  His face was going numb, and his eyes were beginning to glaze over.  He could barely see now, and it was for the best.  Lancaster wasn’t about to give these thugs the information they wanted, and the sooner he could sink into the comforting embrace of unconsciousness, the better.

Though Lancaster hadn’t gotten a good look at them, he could tell that the men giving him the beating were large enough that they could do a lot more damage. And they were taking breaks between poundings.  This wasn’t just so they could ask questions.  They were trying to keep him from going under.  And there was a small pool of water nearby clearly intended to be used if he did.

The tiny ripples on the surface of the water, mixed with a distant, low hum, confirmed a suspicion of Lancaster’s; they were on a ship of some kind.  What type and how big it was, he didnot know. But it was larger than a flying home… perhaps a cargo vessel, judging by the metallic interior and lack of décor. Lancaster’s body was chained to a metal chair; something not made for comfort but for work purposes.

All Lancaster knew for certain was that the ship they were inside of belonged to a crime syndicate that wanted the two pieces of an artifact he had been seeking; something called the Uther Maris.  The two names each stood for one half of the relic.  When put together, the joined pieces would create a powerful gravitational weapon; one that could disintegrate matter in a given area, causing everything around it to get sucked into the vacuum and crushed.  Such a particle disruptor could tear objects and people apart for a very long distance.

The gangsters had one of the two pieces for this weapon, the Maris.  They had gotten it off of Lancaster when they captured him.  Now they needed the second half, and they knew that Lancaster could find it.  They were going to beat that location out of him.

“Come on, chum.  This can’t be worth it to you,” one of the thugs said after landing one of his harder punches.  “You’re not getting this piece back, so you might just as jondo give up the other one and we’ll let you go.”

Lancaster could see the second thug chuckle at the last sentence; confirmation that they were never going to let him go.  Once he provided the location of the Uther, they would throw him out an airlock, waiting only until they had confirmed the location if they were smart; and these two didn’t come across as particularly brilliant.

“He’s not heading on telling us,” the second thug said, resigned.  “We might as well kill him.”

They weren’t covering their faces.  They definitely planned to end his life sooner or later.  Lancaster’s best hope was to make it later, and hope for an opportunity to escape sooner.  He made the attempt with a snarky remark.  “If you loosen these chains a little, I can lean over and you can kiss my…”

Another fist slammed across his face, then another, and another.  It wasn’t pleasant, but Lancaster hoped it gave them enough satisfaction that they would put off throwing him into deep space.  He also hoped that each swing would knock him out. They didn’t.  But the panting coming from the man beating him implied it was wearing him out.

Lancaster spat out some saliva, and noticed some blood mixed in with the bile. It was getting bad; but he thought of how many people the syndicate would kill if they put the two pieces of the Uther Maris together.

The second thug saw that the first was needing a break, so he told him to stand aside, and he came at Lancaster with another relic they had had stored on a shelf; one that fit well in his hand and had sharp corners.  He brought it down on Lancaster’s head, ‘causing a loud whack and spinning Lancaster’s head.  A ringing overtook Lancaster’s ears, and he began to see flashes of light dance before his eyes.  He was unable to focus before another heavy blow came down on his head, knocking it the other direction; then a third blow knocked it back again.

Lancaster felt like a rag doll at this point, and he was barely able to pull up his head.  Sticky fluid was now drooping from one side of his mouth, and he could feel his skin swelling by one of his eyes.  He was able to open it enough to see the item the gangster was holding.  Like the Uther Maris, this was ancient Sigueran; an artifact in its own right.

Breathing heavily, the second thug said between labored breaths, “So, Mr. archaeologist; you will tell us where the second piece is that we’re looking for. You will tell us now.”

One side of Lancaster’s mouth raised in a slight smirk.  They didn’t even know the name of what they were search for.  Then he nodded at the artifact his assailant was holding and said, “Careful with that.  It’s valuable.”

His face turning red, the thug beat him again with the relic, then again the other direction.  Lancaster had hoped he would.  Sweet unconscious was drawing nearer with each blow, and he hoped it would be strong enough that he wouldn’t wake up easily, even with inducements.

But a calm, familiar voice interrupted his plan; one Lancaster had not heard in almost a year, and it made his heart sink, as well as his skin crawl.  It was Nikos Kazakis, Lancaster’s old rival, and he said, “He’s an anthropologist, Caros, not an archaeologist.  A big ticket distinction.”  Nikos’ voice was accompanied by steps landing on a metallic staircase as he descended into the room.  A light from above captured his faded second class suit worn with a first class gait. His body stood perfectly erect like a statue with one hand held behind his back, as though holding up his spine. Something about his clothing revealed the mileage Nikos had been through while on the run and in hiding from some of the more powerful corporations.  But he wouldn’t let it hurt his pride, nor his posture.  “An archaeologist would comprend the value of something.  An anthropologist only credits life; as though it holds any value at all.”  He stopped on the last line, his head dropping below the line of the ceiling. His typically clean cut face was covered in mossy, uneven hair.  He had shaved recently, but not in the last couple days.  Darkness under his eyes said he had slept about as much as he had shaved.

“Hi Nikos,” Lancaster said, trying to sound informal.

The second thug raised the artifact, ready to strike Lancaster again, but Nikos interrupted him while he continued down the steps.  “Put that thing away, you’re going to break it.  Mr. James over here registers that it belongs in a museum, like so many of the rest of the trinkets we dig up.  He doesn’t understand their true value.”

The first thug placed a chair before Lancaster and Nikos stepped up and sat in it, placing the hand that had been behind him into his pocket.  Lancaster noticed he had obtained a bit of a limp. From which enemy Nikos had received it, Lancaster didnot know, but he figured it was probably a good story.

Nikos looked deep into Lancaster’s eyes.  He probably surmised what Lancaster was thinking, especially from the sly smirk on his face.  But he ignored it and continued his thought.  “If he did, he’d know that where these items truly belong are not sitting uselessly under some glass case.  Nor do they belong in the hands of some gangsters to hurt people.  No, they belong in the hands of wealthy corporate interests who magically turn them into money.  People like us find these toys buried in some ancient ruin.Then we show them to some CEO or acquisitions executive and, poof.  The item disappears from our hands, and tens of thousands of electros appear in our bank accounts.”

“You’re selling your soul for tens of thousands now?” Lancaster asked.  “It used to cost hundreds of thousands.”

Nikos smirked.  “You got me there, Lancaster James.”  His good nature sucked away whatever small slam Lancaster was trying to make.  Then Nikos continued, “There is a growing arms race between the corporate empires.  They have aprended the value of our play things, and they are all gathering them up for hostile takeovers of one another.  Pleasant with it or not, we will all have to choose sides sooner or later. Anyone who doesn’t will be figured an enemy to everyone.  You can either profit from it, or die as an innocent bystander who happened to be in the way.”

“You want me on your side again, don’t you?” Lancaster sighed, stalling again for time, and slightly annoyed.

“I really just want you to give me the information I need,” Nikos said.  “But if that means cutting you in on the deal… I’m a businessman.  I comprend when it’s in my best interest to lose a little to gain a lot.”

Lancaster rolled his eyes.  “No matter how many people you hurt.  No matter what damage…”

Nikos yanked his hand from his pocket and slapped it against the side of Lancaster’s cheek.  The hand was covered in a metal glove that was itself wrapped in electronic parts with small ridges and tiny needles.  Lancaster felt them all dig into his skin, and before he knew it, electrical surges were coursing through his head and neck.  It came so sudden it made him shout, and he continued to scream in terror and pain as the currents shot through him back and forth in waves. Despite his best efforts to hide his feelings, Lancaster could not help but reveal his pain, and he soon could feel froth building up around the side of his mouth.

Nikos spoke loudly so Lancaster could hear.  “I found this little beauty at a Zeborno ruin!  Wonderful isn’t it?  No need to answer, just enjoy it!  I magged to keep it for myself because I just couldn’t part with this one.”  Nikos pulled the glove away from the side of Lancaster’s panting face.  A long line of drool connected to the floor.

“So what do you say, my old friend?” Nikos asked.  “You ready to make a deal?”

Lancaster took in a few deep breaths to recover.  Laboriously, he lifted his eyes to Nikos.  Then he said, “I can suggest a few more things you can do with that glove of yours.”

Nikos reacted without thinking.  Furious and tired of waiting for the information, he smacked Lancaster as hard as he could against the side of his face with the metal glove hand.  It was too much for Lancaster’s senses, and at last he felt the numb, sweet relief of unconsciousness.

 *          *          *

 The flames of re-entry parted like an orange-red curtain, revealing the golden emerald woods below.  A shimmering, reflective string wound its way through, cutting a swath for the river that glowed blinding white when catching the local sun’s light.  Lancaster’s eyes were wide as they took in every inch of the land below.

“Sensors,” Little Jack reminded him from the pilot’s seat.  Lancaster was supposed to be watching his monitors in the co-pilot’s seat which were providing local GPS readings and various scans of the ground. The latter were not providing much information, as Lancaster had expected.  The Siguerans were known for having left little of their presence on any planet.  They were usually discovered when exploring the ruins of whatever nearby civilization they had conquered.  But here, their lost city had been on its own, and Lancaster did not expect to find much in the way of ancient structures; especially from a couple miles above the ground.

They knew the Sigueran ruins were here, however, as it was marked in the Siguerans’ own Constellation Crest, which Lancaster and his team had been using to locate ancient sites across the known galaxy.  Therefore, the local GPS directions would be their greatest guide. This was the site of one of the two pieces of the Uther Maris.  The other was listed as being on a planet that was currently being scouted by corporate surveyors.  It was better for Little Jack to go retrieve that piece since he was better at sneaking in and out of locations without being detected, and Lancaster was better with wild environments such as this one.

Thinking about this fact, Little Jack asked, “Why did these aliens put the two pieces in separate places so far away, anyway?”

“The Siguerans were only developing the technology in the Uther Maris,” Lancaster explained.  “They were still working on the Uther part of it on the world you’re going to.  The Maris was done and is somewhere down there.” He pointed at the trees below.

“Why didn’t they finish it?” Little Jack asked.

“They built something much more powerful.  The TaiperAnslees.  But we have no idea where that is.”

There was a short pause before Little Jack changed the subject.  “You know there are a lot of creatures that want to have you for a meal down below.”

“Nah. I taste too bitter,” Lancaster retorted as he pressed his hat on his head and headed out of the cockpit.  He was now running through his head everything he needed to know.  The Siguerans didn’t leave a lot to find; but they often had some hidden cache preserved and protected by chambers that lasted the eons and genetically engineered animals and plant life to protect it until they emerged from wherever they disappeared for millions of years.  Despite his happy-go-lucky tone to his partner, Lancaster knew he needed to be extra careful.

Little Jack flew Odin’s Revenge to just over the tree tops, the bottom tips of the wings nearly skimming their peaks.  He had gotten good at detecting clearings in the nearly five years of dropping Lancaster off on planets like this.  Today he had the added benefit that he didn’t need to land, so he found a clearing that he could lower into that was close to the site, even though it wasn’t big enough for his entire ship.  He stopped, hovered, and lowered just a little, snuggling in among the branches of trees that were all leaning away from the thrust keeping them aloft. “Drop point,” Little Jack said into the intercom.

Lancaster heard him, and he opened the bottom doors, revealing the chaotic swirling of the woods below him.  Attached to a wire line, Lancaster dropped out and hurtled to the grass.  A few meters up he slowed, and he landed gently on the ground.  He tapped his Talki, the signal to Little Jack, and the wire retracted into the ship. Lancaster cleared out of the way, and the hover thrusters were joined by the liftoff boosters, and Odin’s Revenge disappeared into the sky.

The roaring of the ship was replaced by the cacophony of the jungle.  Though slightly quieter, it was no less tempestuous. The local animals were disturbed by the intrusion, and they made their objections known.  Some seemed to be calling to each other, perhaps going about their daily chatter.  Lancaster tried to be as inconspicuous as possible.  He usually had a great deal of information on animals on a planet he was exploring; but not this time.  This was a world that didn’t even have a name, it was so far off the beaten path of human planets.

The woods virtually boasted at being untouched.  Lancaster had to perpetually run his Flora Scanner ahead of him to detect animals hidden in the tall undergrowth.  The massive trees grew unchecked, their roots spreading out like spider legs just before entering the ground and rippling in and out of the mud like ocean waves; sometimes bridging gaps where the land dipped into ravines. Atop the trees, birds sang an exacting tune repeatedly, all of them conforming to the same notes in an endless cycle.  It may have been enough to drive Lancaster mad if it weren’t for the other animal noises that chattered all around him.

It wasn’t long before Lancaster spotted short, spiked mounds peeking out of the earth. Their color and texture conformed to the jungle; they even had yellowish leaves growing out of dirt upon them.  But Lancaster knew how to spot an unnaturally manufactured structure built by an intelligent species.  He approached them and confirmed his suspicion.  Scraping off some of the layers of mud, he found carved stone wound in the corkscrew design the Siguerans often used.  Looking around, he saw other sudden contour changes to the ground typically associated with construction.  These formed well with the jungle, just the sort of integration the Siguerans would have wanted.

But Lancaster was still certain they would have left a cache of something behind, especially after marking it on their master map, the Constellation Crest. There would be a building, or at least a few rooms, somewhere out here.  He just needed to find it.

This was why Lancaster James carried with him a trove of technological tools. Between his jacket covered with pockets inside and out, and his utility belt, he carried a seemingly endless supply of whatever he needed in almost any situation.  The trick was remembering which pocket whatever he needed was in. He took his time and located his Infundibulator, which he used to scan the ground and surrounding hills for underground cavities.  The device’s accuracy varied depending on the ground type, but it was never extremely reliable.  However, it did often point him in the correct direction.

In this case, he found evidence for gaps in the ground not far from a dip in the earth. Several trees grew on the edge, and the ravine was covered in their tangled roots.  This somehow made sense to Lancaster, who began to climb down the roots like they were stairs.

Arriving at the bottom, Lancaster turned in the direction he believed the underground structures to be.  The web-like roots interfered with his search, but from what he could tell, the gully’s wall was nothing more than mud.  There was no door, as far as Lancaster could tell; even one left over from centuries of misuse.

But then Lancaster got a hunch.  He stopped trying to look past the roots and he began staring into them.  They emerged from the ground, reaching up near the muddy ravine’s edge, the two sides connecting at the arched top.  Much of the rest of the door was out of place unless one looked directly on, in which case several branches of the roots that grew out a few meters from the other parts fit into the shape of the doorway perfectly, completing it.  It was an optical illusion Lancaster had nearly missed.

This at last posed another question; how to open it?  The wood was too strong and immovable; and even if it was forced or cut, that would likely lock him out from ever getting inside where he wanted to go. Worse yet, this would be the exact type of place the Siguerans would set a trap; something that utilized nature to capture and murder trespassers.

He had to figure out how to get through this door, and he had to do it right on the first try.

To be continued...

[relicworlds-blog]

Lancaster James and the Worlds of the Dysonsphere - Part 2

Lancaster yanked his arm away from the skeleton’s hand and stumbled away as quickly as he could.  The alien skeleton, its head still buried under the virtual reality helmet, rose and started toward Lancaster.  Backing away, Lancaster noticed the other alien remains seated throughout the enormous room. They, too, were turning their heads toward him; all of them in unison.

Lancaster made it to an aisle and began running down the steps.  A thunderous crackling rattled throughout the chamber. It was the breaking of bones as the undead beasts pulled free of their restraints, most of them leaving the bottom quarter of their limbs behind as they stood from their chairs.  They walked on the fractured husks of their legs like stilt walkers down the aisle, their splintered arms reach for Lancaster.

He was nowhere near the bottom of the stadium seating where a perpendicular aisle would lead him to the exit.  In fact, the stairs of the aisle seemed to be stretching out, growing further away before his eyes.  He quickened his pace, but the faster he moved, the further the end seemed to be.

It was at that moment he realized that, though he could feel the sensation of ancient bones clawing at his sides, he could not feel the bottoms of his feet, and his hands felt numb.  There was a dream-like quality to what was happening.  Was it just too surreal?  Or…

Lancaster stopped where he was.  The skeletons converged upon him from all sides.  A loud growling noise was emerging from their mouths.  The voices joined together as one overbearing roar. Lancaster closed his eyes to concentrate.  He lifted his numb hands and held them close to his head where his hat would go.  The ancient bodies were all around him now, grabbing him, clawing at him, shredding through his clothes, his skin.

Lancaster was betting everything on this being a correct guess.  He shoved his hands skyward, seemingly at nothing but the air around his head…

But then the virtual reality helmet lifted off his face.  This time for real.  It fell onto the remains of the alien next to him, shattering its bones into pieces.  The dead remained still, their covered faces staring at the glowing doom that was building up in front of them.  There was a frightening, sad silence to it all.  The calm normalcy of it was what truly gave Lancaster the chills.  Everything they had built over thousands of years was about to be wiped out forever, and there was only stillness.

The only sound besides a distant hum of life support power was Lancaster’s heavy breathing, and a deep thumping he heard within his ear.  His heart was pounding dangerously fast.  Could the machine have been trying to kill him through a cardiac arrest, he thought.  If so, it could still be after him, and was likely aware of his presence and where he could be found.

It was time to go.  Lancaster rose and hurried for the door.  As he neared it, he remembered he had left it open, but now it was closed; and upon trying it, he found the door locked.

Behind him he heard a whizzing noise that was growing louder.  Lancaster turned and saw, far in the distance, above the sitting skeletons, a white, mechanical arm was racing in his direction.  Hanging beneath it was a bulbous module pointed in the direction it was moving.  Lancaster’s time was short.  So he hurried up the steps toward another door he had noticed earlier.  He was pretty sure it had been open.  As Lancaster neared it, he thought he heard the gasping of a closing door, and when he arrived, it was shut, and, predictably, locked.

The whirling of the mechanical arm was getting louder now, nearly upon him. There was no time to try for another door.  Lancaster turned and saw it nearing.  The arm was attached to well-hidden tracks in the walls and ceiling which, now he could see, formed a complex web of paths far into the distance.  The headpiece was pointed right at Lancaster, and the center was beginning to glow intensely.  An energy weapon, Lancaster thought.  There would be no escaping, so his only option was…

“Oh, hello,” Lancaster said politely, making no motion to run and looking as friendly as he could; despite his complete awareness that an affable look to humans could be the opposite for aliens and their ancient robot counterparts. He was also betting on the fact that, since the AI had learned human speech inside the virtual reality world, this robot would be part of the same system, and would understand him.

The headpiece remained staring at him and the glow persisted, but the robot made no other move.  It seemed to be contemplating this intruder in the morbid silence of the room.  Just as Lancaster was contemplating walking away, a long echo, like audio playing backward, rolled in like thunder from distant speakers to ones nearby.  “We read you,” it said.  But it was not a mechanical voice, nor an alien one.  It was clearly the voice of a human, and one trained as a communications officer as it had that formal, emotionless voice.  Then, “Comm channels clear and secure.”

Lancaster winced.  “Who is speaking?”

“This is…” it replied in another voice, then switched to yet another, “orbital base…” then another, “home to… 785624315721…” it said each number in a different voice, then finished, “individuals.”  After a pause, another rumbling rose up until it said very sternly, “Identify yourself!”

Lancaster jumped at the change in mood, then realized how it was speaking.  He and Little Jack had recognized the fact that this system sat in the middle of several communication lanes.  It had likely picked those up and was using them now to form sentences.  The machine would likely use whatever communications had been sent based on the words, not taking the inflections into account.  Lancaster had to be careful however, for it could work the other way as well.  The robot eye could be speaking softly in a child’s voice just before it was ready to strike.

“My name is Lancaster James,” he said.  “I saw your structure and thought it was wonderful, so I wanted to vis inside.”

The light at the front grew brighter as Lancaster spoke.  He feared it might be ready to shoot, but, since it didn’t, he began to think this was what it did when it was processing new information. Then the light shrank and turned red, and a fearful, human voice said quickly, “Intruder alert!”

“No, no!” Lancaster shouted.  “Not an intruder!  Not a…” He thought about the sorts of communications that would be coming through here.  Their words would be what the machine heard, and ostensibly understood, the most. “Friendlies,” he said. “Allies.”  He was betting that the majority of communications that passed here would be diplomatic or military, so he was trying those words.  “Peaceful, non-aggressive.”

“Not a threat,” the machine said after its thunderous backward echo.  Then, “Welcome.”

“Thank you,” Lancaster said taking in a deep, relieved breath.  He thought through what questions to ask, and he decided to go with a general overview.  “Can you tell me about yourself?”

The tumbling sound was now followed by voices from advertisements, and was thus much more chipper.  “We… provide the perfect atmosphere… to suit your needs… for an… eternity.”

“To fit our needs,” Lancaster said.

“That’s right!” came a voice from a gameshow.

“You give them another life to live inside the computer.  A utopia.”

“You win again!  What prize does he go home with today, Bobac?”

“They built you to create the world, then they escaped into it,” Lancaster continued to guess.

The gameshow voice was replaced by multiple other voices, “They… built the… world. Then me… to… maintain it.”

“And you maintained it all these years,” Lancaster mused.

“Please… define year.  I cannot… understand.”

Lancaster was confused.  It had integrated the meanings of all these other words, but year escaped it.  Then, looking out the huge window, he realized that the machine was part of the structure built around the star.  It probably understood the passage of time, but the concept of a year as measure by circling the sun would be meaningless to it. “You gave these beings a perfect life. And when they died you continued to maintain their world,” Lancaster said.

“Their world… persists… Grows,” the machine said.

“Evolves,” Lancaster said in awe.  “Do the creatures in the virtual world know they’re artificial?”

“Do you… know… if you’re… artificial?”

Lancaster shrugged.  It had him there.

“We can… give you… the perfect life,” the machine said, each phrase an excited advertisement.

Lancaster had to admit to himself that it was a temptation.  Though a fake world in his eyes, it was real enough to those inside it who had evolved over millions of years to become as real a world as any he had ever witnessed… And they were happy, something Lancaster couldn’t always attest to being.

Little Jack presently reminded him why this was not an option.  His voice broke in through the Talki and warned Lancaster that they would need to leave very soon unless they wanted to be swallowed up by the star; and Little Jack made it clear that he was not in favor of this option.

“There… is… plenty of room… for…your friend…also.  So… Tell him to… come on down!”

Lancaster froze for a moment.  It was not that he couldn’t think of what to say; quite the opposite.  He had such a plethora of questions and curiosities, and only a narrow passage of time through which to say anything.  As such, every thought was jammed together and no one idea could make its way through to his lips.

After a few of these precious seconds had passed, a clattering resounded across the giant window, and the growing sun was replaced by visions of the perfect virtual world inside the computer.  The weather was warm with just the right amount of soft sunlight; every creature was exquisitely beautiful and looked happy and satisfied; they were enjoying every perfect thing their world had to offer.

“When… my people… passed… I… continued… their worlds… Then they… evolved.”  The last word in that sentence was Lancaster’s voice projected back to him.  “Their… stories… are written into… me.”  The huge screen now changed again, this time to a star map of the nearby area. Several lines crossed from one star to another, all traveling through the star system of the Dysonsphere.  “With… no more… of my own… studio audience!... I have listened… to other… species… Their… signals… have passed… and I have… listened.  I have… studied… their syntax.  I have… studied… their beliefs.  I have… prepared.”

“Prepared for someone to keep you company,” Lancaster said, staring directly at the glow in the middle of the headpiece.  “You’re lonely.”

“I must… serve,” the machine said.

“In all of your evolution, emotion wouldn’t be out of the question,” Lancaster said reflectively.

The computer said nothing in response to that; only stared at Lancaster, and the front screen returned to its ominous view of the growing star.  Lancaster pulled himself together.  He didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news, especially since he didn’t know how this machine would react.  If it felt loneliness it certainly could feel fear, and that could cause it to take bad news poorly.  But he had to tell it.

“I’m sorry to tell you this.  That star… The one where you’re getting all your power, it’s about to explode.  It’s going to destroy this whole structure; everything in it… Everything you’ve built… I’m sorry.  But we can get some of your programming out.  Maybe enough to be your consciousness…”

“No.”

“We should at least try…”

“No,” the machine interrupted again.  “I have… monitored the star.  It is… unstable… but… well within safety parameters.”

Lancaster paused a moment, tightening his jaw as he thought.  This is a machine.  It must react to reason.  “I know it’s hard to hear.  But I’m telling you, that star is going to go…”

“NO!” the machine shouted, and the bulbous headpiece began to glow again. Lancaster dashed immediately to the side, and a bright beam of energy shot from the eye of the device, bursting against the wall.  Lancaster looked back, hopeful that it had shot open a hole through which he could escape, but there was no such luck.

However, the overall system in the room was apparently having a fit; and every door was opening and shutting in rapid and unsynchronized succession.  Lancaster dashed for the one he was closest to, trying to time its rhythm as he approached it.  There was no regular beat; and to make matters worse, it slammed down from the roof as fast as a guillotine.  Lancaster would just have to take a chance on getting cut in half.

Without slowing his momentum, Lancaster readied himself, then he leaped through as the door was raising.  He felt the wind from its wake as it slammed down behind him, cutting into the floor.

The lights were flickering on and off at irregular intervals now like the doors, and there was a strange, wavering alarm wailing.  Lancaster stumbled to his feet and adjusted his eyes to get a bearing on his surroundings.  He recognized the corridor that would lead to the airlock, and he fixed on it.

Behind him, the door held open for an extra beat longer so the mechanical arm could slide through, approaching Lancaster from behind.  Lancaster spun around, saw it, and dodged just in time to avoid another light blast.  He then hurried down the hallway, weaving behind bulkheads and support beams as he went. The robotic arm was in hot pursuit.

“The star seems to be affecting the space station early,” Little Jack’s voice said through Lancaster’s earpiece.  “It’s heating up.”

“That’s the base itself,” Lancaster explained as he kept moving.  “It’s holding a tantrum.”

Suddenly everything went black.  Every light turned off and all became still.  The rolling howling alarm fell silent, and the doors latched shut.  The air rapidly grew cold, and still.

Lancaster only thought briefly about how he would continue to run in the dark, but something in his instinct told him that was no longer a necessity.  Then he realized that he no longer heard the mechanical whirring of the metal arm as it hurried in pursuit.  Wherever it was, it had stopped moving.

“Hello?” Lancaster called to the darkness?

Nothing. The air grew colder.

“Hello!” Lancaster shouted more boldly, less afraid of being shot and more afraid of being alone.

There was nothing for a time.  Then the voices from human signals returned.  “Why… bother… Everything you… gather… throughout your existence… eventually… disappears.”  It was spoken in a volume so low Lancaster could only hear it because of the lack of any other stimulus in the room.

“It doesn’t have to disappear,” Lancaster said.  “We don’t have room for all of your AI programming, but we can take some of the stories from your memory banks.  Your best ones.  Their memories will live on long past you.”  There was a long, discouraging silence.  Then Lancaster called out, “What do you think?”

There was no answer from the machine, but there was from the walls themselves, which began to groan and buckle.  The heat he began to quickly feel explained all Lancaster needed to know.  The star was beginning to expand rapidly.  Little Jack confirmed this as he told Lancaster he needed to get out of there quickly.

The lights began to blink on and off, and Lancaster found the robot arm hanging limp in the middle of the corridor; still, unmoving; the face of its headpiece facing the floor.  Lancaster knew he should run, but he couldn’t help but slowly approach his former attacker. As the Dysonsphere chambers moaned under the pressure of the warping metal, Lancaster laid his hand on the bar of its keeper.  “Do you want someone with you when you pass?” he asked.

The arm pulled up slightly and the headpiece looked up from the floor, but not at Lancaster.  It watched its twisting home dying.  “No…Lancaster James.  We all… pass from… this universe… alone…  I am the… keeper… of the Chiotho.  I must… preserve… their worlds.  You must… take them… and… share them.”

“I will.”

“Go… I will transmit to your vessel… as long as I can.

Lancaster looked into the face of the headpiece that was now directly in front of his.  It was roughly the size of his head, and though it had only a smooth surface with electrical energy crackling across it and a metal arm out its back, the machine somehow expressed emotion in its body language, and it seemed to be accepting its fate, and its final responsibility.

Then Lancaster turned and hurried toward the airlock.  His feet slid along the floor as it tilted side to side; the entire corridor twisting like it was a towel being wrung.  The walls were squealing now, both near and afar, like the enormous structure was crying out in pain.

Somewhere beyond all these noises Lancaster heard Little Jack calling for him through the communicator.  His partner rarely showed urgency, but Lancaster could hear it in his voice now, even though he couldn’t make out his exact words.  So the xeno-anthropologist hurried as fast as he could.  He began to lose hope when each hallway looked so much the same that he began to doubt his own sense of direction.  But then he recognized the familiar entrance, and he sprinted for it. Using the momentum of his run, he punched the open button and swung inside, pressing the close button once past the periphery while also shouting to Little Jack that he was in.

Already prepared with the unlatch lever, Little Jack yanked them free of the Dysonsphere and hurried away.  The growing sun was right behind them, and he accelerated as quickly as he could.  As he did, his partner stumbled into the cockpit. “You know how to make a last minute exit,” Little Jack said.

“Are we receiving data signals?” Lancaster asked.

Little Jack looked.  He had been more concerned with getting away without frying.  “It’s filling up our memory banks,” he said a little annoyed.

Lancaster nodded and fell into a chair relieved.

“I assume you’ll tell me later when you’re transferring all this data to a different computer?” Little Jack said.  He opened up a rift in space ahead of them and Odin’s Revenge was slowly pulled into it; their escape into Spectrum Drive.

Lancaster nodded again as he watched the rear monitor.  The unrelenting flames of the star were rapidly closing in on the Dysonsphere, which was shaking now like a spider web in a strong wind.

The Dysonsphere Keeper monitored the tiny ship it had transmitted to as it disappeared into a dimensional gateway; three dimensional space sealing up behind it. Its greatest programming was safely away.

As for the rest, the Keeper sent out one final transmission.  It broadcast every piece of data; every signal received, every opinion expressed, every feeling emoted, every observation witnessed, every experience lived, every thought imagined, every story, every event, every world… all of it, the Dysonsphere Keeper transmitted out into the universe. Perhaps someone else will intercept it, and they will integrate it into their own worlds.

When the signal was sent, the Dysonsphere had only seconds left to exist, and its Keeper’s work was complete.  It sensed within its chamber where it had first discovered the human that its hat was still resting at the foot of one of the seats.  A couple sensor wires dropped onto the hat and wrapped around it.  The Dysonsphere Keeper soaked in the hat’s information, its sensation, its meaning both substantially and insubstantially into its memory banks…

Then the Dysonsphere was swallowed whole by the expanding sun.

THE END

[relicworlds-blog]

Lancaster James and the Worlds of the Dyson Sphere - Part 1

Odin’s Revenge emerged from Spectrum space into a dim, lifeless system.  Ahead of it sat a bright star; compact and luminescent… ready to go supernova.

The system was unlisted on many human maps; and scanning the area, Little Jack could see why.  There were no planets, nor hardly even any celestial bodies; just a sparse asteroid belt far out in the reaches of the star’s gravitational pull with minimal debris.

Little Jack and his partner Lancaster James had been directed to investigate this star system because it was listed on an important map created by an ancient species that had wanted to wipe out all other civilizations.  This map had been leading the pair to the ruins of ancient civilizations that held within them the secret of what had happened in the centuries before humans took to the stars.

There was a strange reading close to the star itself.  As Little Jack began to hone in on it with the sensors, Lancaster James raised up in his seat, recognizing it.  He saw first one, then two, then several more belts surrounding the star, all crossing one another at a single point on each side.  “A Dyson Sphere,” he muttered in awe.

Though Dyson Spheres had originally been theorized in the 20th century300 years earlier, only evidence of one had ever been found, and that had been in pieces, orbiting a star like an asteroid belt.  Nothing of any value had ever been recovered from it.  But this looked entirely intact.

Little Jack looked at him strangely.  Though his expressions were usually hidden behind his large, frosted over glasses, Lancaster could read his mood by the way he held his head and the tightness of his jaw.  So Lancaster explained, “It’s a megastructure that surrounds a star, capturing its energy for incredible amounts of power.  It could only be built by a highly advanced civilization.”

“And one that doesn’t want to be found,” Little Jack said.

Lancaster shrugged, “I’m not so abso about that.”

Little Jack hit a switch to put some data onto the main screen on the console. “It’s close enough to the star to hide in its radiation.  If they’re so advanced, they could have settled on more planets.”

Lancaster’s jaw dropped with anticipation.  If this had remained hidden from human detection, perhaps it remained hidden from all other species and avoided the great purge that had destroyed every civilization in the known galaxy.  Maybe these aliens were still there.

His hope dropped when he remembered the star would be exploding soon, and certainly, any intelligent creatures on board would recognize that.  But he held onto a little hope.  “See if you can signal them,” Lancaster said.  Little Jack pressed some buttons, sending an electronic signal that simply expressed their presence, and a communication with a standard human greeting of hello.  They waited for a few minutes and sent out a couple more signals, but there was no response.

Then Little Jack heard something faint.  He switched to headphones that he quickly placed over his ears.  The signal was still faint, so he twisted some audio dials to focus in on the sound and amplify active sound frequencies. Finding it, he switched the sound to the main cockpit speakers so they could both hear.  Through the fuzzy hiss they began to make out the sounds of voices. As they became clearer, words formed… human words.  Little Jack cleared the signal some more and they were able to distinguish what the words were saying.

Most of it was arbitrary; messages and conversations.  A little of it was entertainment.  None of it was intended to be beamed here; they were intercepting signals.  Little Jack confirmed this fact by finding populated star systems on each side of them. Looking at the star map Little Jack had up, Lancaster also saw star systems on different sides of them that had once been populated by other civilizations.  There had probably been plenty of broadcasts that came through here, but not a lot of traffic considering the lack of planets on which to land.

As the two men listened, they got closer to the mega-structure, looking it over carefully as they did.  Against the vastness of the star, each strand of the framework was like a string circling a globe, but the closer they got, the more they found that these bands were massive constructs, about three kilometers thick on all sides, which then stretched billions of kilometers around their host sun.  They were made of a metal alloy common among advanced alien civilizations that had learned to mix their metals to last; though the architecture here was stronger than anything they had ever witnessed.  It had to be to last millennia against the ongoing strain of a star.

Little Jack was surprised to detect power surging through the Dyson Sphere, but Lancaster wasn’t.  The concept of these structures was to continually capture power from a star to meet the needs of an ever-growing population, regardless of whether that population was still present or not.  As long as the structure stood, it should continue to siphon power.

“Where do you want to go in?” Little Jack asked.

“Best spot should be where the rings converge,” Lancaster said.

Little Jack flew them to the convergence point that was closest to them.  The entire structure was spinning slowly around the star, which was particularly visible at the lit up hub where an access hatch spun in place.  Its continual twisting was enough to make one dizzy.  Being an experienced pilot, however, Little Jack had landed in a number of centripetal gravity stations where one had to match the spin of the hangar opening, so he was used to this maneuver.  He took a minute or so lining up the ship along the central axis such that the bottom of it was facing the Dyson Sphere, then fired the thrusters on one side to make the ship spin.  Carefully, he adjusted the speed to match the structure, then he lowered onto it.

As they got closer, Lancaster nervously prepared himself to board.  He was full of anticipation and excitement. Theoretically, the beings who created this megastructure could still be inside, living their lives isolated from the rest of the galaxy.  However, if they were still there, they likely had a reason for wanting to remain isolated and might not greet intruders.

Nevertheless, he put on his favorite jacket with the many pockets, and popped on his hat.  He wouldn’t need a space suit since Little Jack was covering the access hatches with a pressurized umbilical.  The question was how breathable it would be on board the vessel.  Most life they had witnessed had developed on oxygen-based planets, but it was entirely possible for a species to live on something poisonous to them.

As such, Lancaster wore an oxygen mask and approached the hatch.  It was large for him, about five meters across, but strangely it wasn’t large enough to drive a ship into it.  Perhaps, he considered, this was where they plugged in the nose cone?  Or maybe they were a small species.  He had come across ruins the size of human toys before, and this could be the same; though it was hard to imagine such a small species building something so enormous.

He found a key pad, one that was just below human hand height, and with digits perfectly sized for his fingers.  Studying the symbols on the keys, he recognized their shapes.  Lancaster yanked out his notebook and flipped it to the tab he suspected.  He was right; they were Chiotho.

This made sense as throughout the existence of the Chiotho, a large contingent of them rallied for isolationism.  During their era in the galaxy, a number of civilizations had connected and created a senate from which to make decisions.  The Chiotho, though not antagonistic toward them, had begged off and cut their own path.  To an extent, they had been right to, as they survived the purge longer than the others. But non-interference would not spare them, and they were eventually wiped out by the Siguerans; a murderous race that destroyed most civilizations, and was likely still out there somewhere hidden away until they found that humans had set foot out in the galaxy.

The Chiotho had wielded extra fingers on their hands at the base of their palms.  Their keypad reflected this, with a second row curved under the first.  Lancaster would likely have to use both hands to type in the correct combination, whatever it was.  He paged through his studies on the Chiotho and found the most likely series of keys to be used for entering a space dock.  He found the matching symbols on the key pad and pressed them, combining the top entries with the bottom ones, similar to the way a person plays the piano.  To his amazement, Lancaster got it right on the first try!  It was also to his horror, as the door opened before he was ready, and his heart leaped in fear at what could be on the other side.

It was empty.  Just a rather large chamber with a control center on one side and a doorway on the other end.  There was no keypad here, so it seemed it would open easily.  But Lancaster didn’t want to intrude.  He already felt like a thief sneaking into someone’s home; he didn’t wish to continue to impose uninvited.  “Hello?” he called out.  It was an absurd and fruitless gesture, as was his next statement, “I come in peace!” He could have said “I’ve come to kill you all” and it wouldn’t make any difference.  Not only would an alien species speak a different language; after evolving in a completely different way, they would have an entirely different method of speaking altogether.  For all they knew, Lancaster could be farting.But Lancaster still felt it best to make his presence known on his terms.  Allowing them to find him would be more dangerous.

Lancaster opened the inner door and continued into the structure.  Lights blinked on, illuminating a narrow corridor. The architecture was efficient with little flourish, the same as he had seen at most Chiotho ruins.  It was also very sterile, either untouched or reverently cleaned.  This continued to be the case as he followed several corridors, each one being illuminated by lights that blinked to life.  Side doors led only to small storage rooms that either held tools and replacement parts, or computer access points.

Despite finding very little, Lancaster moved slowly, cautiously.  If someone was to exit a door or walk around a corner, he didn’t want to appear to be charging them.  He stopped suddenly, however, when, upon entering a room, music began to play.  It was exacting and complex, yet had a logical simplicity to it.  And of course, it was unusual to his ears.  Lancaster thought it sounded like someone was playing Bach backward.

At long last Lancaster emerged into a very large chamber, far different from the narrow corridors through which he had been maneuvering.  A giant window facing the star stood before him.  It stretched up far above, disappearing behind support beams and the white, metallic architecture beyond.

No lights had turned on as he entered.  None was needed, the bright sun illuminated everything within.  It was even brighter than when it was originally used as that star had swelled in its death throes.  It wouldn’t be long now before the core collapsed and he would have minutes to escape.  Time was short, and Lancaster needed to learn all he could as quickly as possible.

Lancaster turned around to study the room.  There he was faced with rows and rows of thousands of seats, and in each one was an ancient skeleton.  Their large, bulbous heads were covered over with domes that resembled human hair dryers, and their hands were enveloped by metallic claws.  They sat in luxurious chairs that were lined with metal and electronics.  They were aligned upward through the giant room in steep stadium seating until they disappeared from sight.

Just like every other room, this one was fastidiously clean, despite being filled with the dead.  It was no surprise to not find cobwebs as there would be no animals left behind to lay them, but the absence of dust from the ancient decomposed bodies was confusing. Lancaster stepped up to one of the seats and looked it over.  Their feet, too, were bound, and he now also saw small, thin hoses that hung next to the arm bones.  Lancaster deduced quite quickly that they had once fed fluids into the alien bodies. They would need them if they were to be locked away here indefinitely, even permanently.

Lancaster pulled from one of his larger pockets a handheld device that measures DNA, and he scanned the bones of a few of the skeletons.  As he leaned over one, he accidentally knocked into it and the bones fell apart like loosely stacked boxes.  The noise was so loud it sounded like a wall had been knocked over, and he jumped up as if worried he’d be in trouble.  Of course, no one was to answer.  Just thousands of inert corpses staring blankly into their metal helmets.

He looked over the results of his scan and confirmed that they were indeed Chiotho, though their DNA had altered slightly from earlier grave diggings, implying these had come earlier or later than the others he had studied. Lancaster guessed that it was later.

This also fit the personality of the Chiothan culture.  They had wanted nothing more than to isolate themselves from the rest of the galaxy, and there was no better way than to do what Lancaster now believed they had done; go into a virtual reality that they had created. By building a platform hidden away around an obscure star, one that would perpetually soak in power, they could build a computerized world that they could all live inside and never leave. Their bodies would need to be maintained with nourishment and fluids, and their excrement removed, which could all be automated through tubes and machinery.

Doing so would give them a utopia in which to live, but a utopia is hard to escape, and it served to reason that they would never leave, never interact, and never procreate; and thus, their species would die, fade away into oblivion. The Siguerans didn’t need to destroy this species; they had destroyed themselves with pleasure.

Despite the species itself being gone, there was something equally fascinating left behind.  The Chiotho had built an entire world in which to live, and the power generated by the star would have kept it alive and growing.  What might have evolved in the millions of years since the passing of the builders’ civilization could be anyone’s guess; and Lancaster only needed to look to see.

He returned to the skeleton he had accidentally knocked apart.  Its head had slid out of the dome.  Its skeletal arms and legs remained in their constraints, and Lancaster had no interest in replacing them with his own, so he left those alone.  Instead he removed his hat, placed it on the chair next to him, and lowered the dome onto his head.  It was large and bulky.  Though the Chiotho were thinner and shorter than humans, their heads were about one and a half times their size, and were oval, with the long side sticking behind them. As such, Lancaster had to hold it in place, and he stuck his eyes close to where the Chiotho had been so he could see what was happening in their world.

The first thing Lancaster noticed was how every color was like a muted neon or a pastel.  Nature and the ground was softer in colors, while built structures that rose out of the ground like opulent castles wore the harsher ones.  But nothing appeared out of place.  Everything blended as though it had all been painted with a single brush in one stroke.  The air smelled of citrus and freshly cut grass, which seemed odd to Lancaster as he had not plugged anything into his nose.

The whispering wind fused melodically with soft bird hums.  And then another sound added to it.  Lancaster turned to find a creature approaching him.  He pulled away, impulsively defending himself, but not having his feet in the stirrups, he was unable to go anywhere. The beast got to him and immediately revealed there was nothing for him to fear.  It rolled and tumbled while it chirped and rattled.  It was the most adorable creature Lancaster had ever seen; as though designed specifically to please him.

The creature then stood and took his hand, and suddenly Lancaster was swept away, flying over the idyllic scenery, passing over the rolling hills, and the brightly colored platforms of the castles.  Creatures on it saw him and waved.  Some he could tell were smiling, others, not so much.  But he felt a warmth from them.  He recognized some as Chiotho, and he pulled toward them, but again, without control of the hands or legs, he was limited.

The creature landed them in another perfect environment around a crowd of more perfect creatures.  They tasted fruit from plants that regrew the moment they were picked, they drank of multi-colored streams, frolicked beneath waterfalls and played atop the cloud-like grass.  Without missing a beat they all welcomed Lancaster in their own ways.  They were beings of all shapes and sizes, no doubt programs from within the Dyson Sphere’s matrix.  Lancaster then began to recognize some; species of civilizations that lived in nearby star systems.  Had they visited?  Were they part of this?

Then a single soul stepped through the crowd, strutting toward Lancaster.  Her long, flowing, red and black hair blew sensitively in the wind.  Her olive skin was squeezed perfectly into the form fitting toga-dress, and her confident green eyes pierced into Lancaster’s as though hypnotizing him. It was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  And when she almost reached him, he suddenly realized she had features similar to Mika, his employer, his ex-wife, the woman he still secretly pined for.

His fearful recoil did not stop the woman.  She arrived at him and embraced Lancaster.  But her body did not hold him.  Rather it enveloped him in an ethereal cradle.  He felt suddenly warm, like a baby in the womb.  A radiant comfort overcame him like nothing terrible could ever happen in the universe.  “Be at peace, my love,” came the voice.

The words snapped Lancaster out of his slumber, and he threw off the headpiece. It was unusual enough for the machine to be showing him a human woman, one that appealed to his sensual and nurturing desires, but for her to speak human words, and to speak them correctly, that shook him to the core.  How could something programmed millions of years before humans existed create something such as this?

Then he realized there was a sound above him; a loud, angry noise.  It was an alarm.  The klaxon cacophony was nearly deafening.  Then the domed heads of every skeleton turned to face him.  Every one of them turned his way, even those in seats far above and nearly out of sight.  There were thousands.

Lancaster’s heart skipped a beat.  Then one of the skeleton arms grabbed him.

To be continued…

[relicworlds-blog]

RPG Storytime: Relic Worlds 1 - The Secret of the Desert Tomb

Today’s Relic Worlds Short story is a video from the spin-off series Tales of the Black Lotus.  This is a video of the role playing game using miniatures used in the game.  It’s part of another series I have called RPG Storytime, which is being used this time to showcase the story from our series.

[relicworlds-blog]

Relic Worlds, Pick Your Path - Book 5

The fifth and final Pick Your Path book was released on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback format this month.  In Pick Your Path books, the reader decides what the heroes will do as they try to locate the hidden treasure.  In this particular one, Lancaster James is searching for the Catacombs of the Forgotten.

This completes the Pick Your Path series.  If you reach the end and find the treasure in all of them, you can go to the website for a special prize!

[relicworlds-blog]

Lancaster James and the Lost Tribe of the Raginor

The jungle was thick with fog so dense it felt as though Lancaster James and his partner Little Jack were slicing through a solid substance.  The mist clung to every leaf and vine, every tree trunk and every bush, as though it was a web attached to them.  Waving away the vapor, it was only replaced a moment later, like water refilling the ocean that had just been scooped.

The cackling tick of insects and birdsreverberated just out of sight in every direction.  Most seemed small and harmless, but Little Jack kept his two pistols Huginn and Muninn ready for those growls he was hearing both above and below, and for the slithering he heard near the ground and in the trees.

They were keeping a particularly close lookout for signs of cracks in the earth.  When flying into the area they could see from above that the jungle was interrupted by deep canyons whose bottoms were beyond the capabilities of their sensors.  One wrong step and they could be tumbling for a very long time.

They tried to watch around them as well.  Lancaster and Little Jack had come to this planet to locate the remains of a Raginor city that was supposed to be somewhere in these woods.  It had been listed on a map within an artifact known as the Constellation Crest.  Ruins were all they expected to find since the Raginors had lived about a hundred millions years ago, and because they had been targeted by the original owners of the Constellation Crest, the Siguerans, who were known for conquering and destroying entire civilizations.  They had, no doubt, killed the inhabitants of this planet, and Lancaster only hoped they left behind enough for him to learn something about this once thriving culture.

The flora and fauna were consistent with Raginor traditions of habitat.  The trees were wide, tall, and firm.  They had a unique pattern of thick bark that stuck out of the trees as they corkscrewed their way up the trunks like thin ridges. Their leaves were wide, and felt like plastic.  Barely over half of them were green; the rest were shades of orange, purple, and pink, and a few stood out as red.  Lancaster avoided those; his research had told him they were poisonous, and he didn’t want to test the hypothesis.

Lancaster drew his Illuminator again and scanned the area around him.  The device aided his sight into areas his eyes could not see by delving into other light spectrums, and sonar, as well as other means to detect what was in front of it.  He studied his readings as he could audibly hear Little Jack growing impatient behind him.  Lancaster’s own breath of disappointment revealed his lack of success at finding anything.

“The Siguerans could’ve destroyed it,” Little Jack said, referring to the lost city for which they were searching.  “Or the jungle might’ve eaten it up in the centuries since.”

Lancaster drew in a deep breath.  He was hesitating, trying to come up with some reason to keep going rather than accept the truth.  But he held his breath mid-exhale.  His forehead furrowed and his eyes squinted in concentration of a thought he just had. The Raginors were known for the dexterity of their hands, climbing as much as they walked.  Their choice of settlements in forests may not be a fluke. He hurried to the nearest wide tree trunk and looked it over.  He felt at the bark that protruded up around the circumference.  It was just wide enough that one could fit his foot on it, and could walk it like a tight rope performance.

Lancaster scanned up the tree with his Illuminator, confirming that the narrow ledge wound its way up far along the trunk.  “I credit I found the lost city,” he said.

Little Jack stepped up behind him and said, “Only one way to aprend.”

 They had been climbing slowly and steadily for a quarter of an hour.  Despite their speed, they had gotten rather high.  They couldn’t see the ground, though they had lost sight of that only a couple meters up.  But they knew it was a long way down, and one slip would spell their doom. “They couldn’t be bothered to build hand rails,” Little Jack complained.

“Raginors didn’t need it,” Lancaster argued.  “They…”

“Was just being clever,” Little Jack said before his partner could ramble into a lecture. Lancaster got the hint and stopped talking.

The fog had lifted the further up they went, and now they could actually see more than 20 meters.  Presently, Lancaster caught his breath at what he beheld.  Platforms supported roughhewn structures that clung to the trees.  They were covered over by leaves and vines which embraced them in camouflaged hugs, but Lancaster knew an intelligently designed building when he saw one, even through nature’s attempted cover-up.  He started toward it a little faster.

“Hold… Hold.  Hold!” Little Jack said, having to get more insistent with each use of the word. Lancaster was mesmerized by his goal and he had to be snapped out of his excitement.  He looked back at Little Jack, who motioned toward the bark-stairs in front of him.  They stopped. And they didn’t look as though they had worn away; they simply weren’t built into the tree anymore.Lancaster looked across the chasm toward his goal, and he wondered what the Raginor had been thinking.  Had there been a draw bridge that was on the other side?  There were a number of branches that hung in between which would have blocked any such bridge, but they wouldn’t necessarily have been there millions of years ago.

Then he got it. The branches were the draw bridge.  Raginors walked with their hands as well as they did with their feet. They could swing through the trees with the same ease as on the ground.  The branches were simply a different kind of road for them, one that others would have difficulty following; including him.

Lancaster explained this to Little Jack, who reminded him how far down it was. “Thanks for that,” Lancaster said.

“Just figure you should know since it figures to've slipped your mind,” Little Jack responded.

“Yeah. But if I don’t go across to there, we mosed here for nothing.  The branches are sturdy,” he said, pulling at one of them.  “And there are plenty here.  I can put my feet on some of them while I grab with others.”

“You aren’t a monkey,” Little Jack told him.

“Or a Raginor,” Lancaster continued.  But he was bound and determined, and Little Jack knew he couldn’t change his mind once it was made.  So he said no more, and he watched his partner prepare himself.

Lancaster plotted a course in his mind along the trail of branches, determining where each hand would grab and each foot would step.  Then he launched himself forward, nabbing one branch, then another, placing a foot down on yet another.  He didn’t dare stop.  He may not be able to balance in one place.  Instead he retained his momentum, hurtling through the corridor of branches. He realized suddenly with horror that his right foot had landed on the wrong branch, and it broke his entire rhythm. His plotted course was gone, and the branch he had launched himself toward was not the one he had planned on. He grabbed it, but he didn’t know where he was going next.  He swung a little slower and longer as he found somewhere to land his left foot. With no time to think, he skipped over toward his right, finding a branch to grab onto while in the air.  He swung, but found no branch to step on, so he pressed his foot against the tree trunk and found a branch on the other side to grab.  He was close now, but a single miss would mean he’d tumble to his doom.  He quickly plotted another course to take him the rest of the way, and he followed it, hoping the branches were strong enough. The last one looked a little flimsy; and indeed it broke under his weight.  But luckily he was only a meter away from the platform, and he leaned forward and grabbed onto it, hanging on for dear life.

Pulling himself up, Lancaster found himself at the edge of the Raginor city.  Enclosures of all sizes clung to the trees, covered over by leaves and branches that embraced them within their wooded grasps. He had made it.  A light rain drizzled overhead, dissolving into steam where Lancaster stood, and settling into mist below.  The buildings were connected by planks which, though overgrown with every kind of plant life, were steady enough to remain intact.  The most Lancaster heard of any structural buckling was the occasional creaking noise.  Though he was still amazed, Lancaster was used to this by now.  Advanced alien civilizations had developed architectures and alloysthat lasted millions of years; a practice that was a blessing for every xeno-archaeologist and anthropologist practicing today.

Despite this, however, Lancaster still had to be careful.  Though the structures were sound, they had sat on trees this entire time; trees which did not always remain inert.  And so ancient cracks could result in larger breaks should he test them too harshly.  As he looked around, he noticed a few sections that had given way, and so he maneuvered cautiously through the town.

Within the buildings were partial floors dividing each level like balconies. These were accessible to one another through crisscrossing pegs and bars, and occasionally branches.  He hopped from level to level, searching for some clue as to the purpose of each building. He found none.  They were all empty.  And not empty as in the furniture had nothing on or in them; but utterly empty. This town had been abandoned; not lost due to an extinction event.  The Raginor here had likely picked up their things and moved.

As Lancaster scanned a room, he turned to see a large bird he had not formerly noticed. It stood proudly on the windowsill on the opposite side.  The bird was large, about half the size of Lancaster, and did not look afraid.  Nor did it appear to be threatening.  The bright purple and orange feathered animal simply studied Lancaster curiously.

Lancaster returned to his work, pulling a device out of one his jacket pockets which could measure the age of synthesized materials.  As he lifted the item, he noticed the bird again.  It seemed to be a little closer, but he saw no signs of movement, and it was standing perfectly still, staring at him.  Lancaster kept his eye on the fowl a little longer, then turned to one of the walls.  He chose a part and wiped away dirt and greenery...

A nearby noise attracted Lancaster's attention, and he turned to see the strange bird now standing less than two meters away from him.  It was motionless once again, as if it had always been there.  It was, at the very least, self-aware enough to know how to play the old game of Red Light, Green Light.

Lancaster now kept his eyes on the bird while he raised his hand with the device to scan the wall.  He turned his head very briefly so he could make sure that his hand was over the correct part of the wall as he turned back toward the animal.  In that little time, the bird had begun to move; and now it continued to waddle toward Lancaster even though he was looking right at it.  Then it began chattering.  At first Lancaster only thought about how uneven the bird's call was, but suddenly he realized that it was not a common animal cackle. It was making noises with patterns that sounded a lot more like the syntax of language!  His eyes wide, Lancaster bent down, lowering his face to the height of the bird.  He listened carefully for anything he might recognize from another language, or to catch on to whatever the birds' was.

The next time that the bird said something Lancaster had already heard, he tried repeating it back.  The bird straightened up, and somehow looked annoyed.  It was silent for a moment while Lancaster made the noise again.

Then the bird lashed its neck forward and swiped Lancaster's hat right off his head. Lancaster had only time for a yelp before the bird spread its wings, fell back, and hurried out the window. The move had been so sudden that Lancaster didn't fully understand what was happening until the creature was out of sight and his head felt naked.  Lancaster could hear it chirping off in the distance, as though mocking his failure. Leaping to the window, Lancaster caught one last glimpse of it, and his hat, disappearing into the fog below.

Lancaster pulled his Walki up to his mouth and called Little Jack.  "Would you like to do a little bird hunting?" he asked.

"Why?" Little Jack asked suspiciously.

Lancaster hesitated.  He knew that Little Jack would not live it down if he learned that Lancaster lost his hat this time to a bird.  So he just said, "Never mind.  I'm piking my way down."

 Lancaster used his Geomagellan, a mapping device that had recorded the major landmarks when they flew over the terrain before landing, to locate his next destination. He laid in the coordinates for the nearest canyon and led them in that direction.  Little Jack again watched closely for creatures to jump out at them through the fog.  He began watching for birds, but after noticing Lancaster didn’t have his hat anymore, he deduced the real reason his partner had wanted him to be on the lookout for one.

Lancaster had set out for the canyon based on a hunch.  The Raginor had left their tree city, but for where?  He had measured the age of the structure to the era just before the Siguerans had placed this planet on the map.  That told Lancaster that the Siguerans had narrowed in on the Raginors, and the Raginors had determined to move on.  If they had left for another part of this planet, it would likely be to somewhere that was not as easily visible from space.  Thus, the canyons.  It was at least worth a look.

The fog cleared ever so slightly as the two men came to the lip of the canyon.  It was sudden, and straight down into oblivion; and they were glad the device had warned them ahead of time when they were coming up to it.  Lancaster pulled out of his jacket his specialized Prismatic Binocs that allowed for him to see distances in various spectrums and get scientific readings on the objects on which he had focused.

On this part of the planet, the sun never rose to the top of the sky; it always shone at an angle.  As such, most of the canyon never received sunlight, and ice had formed along the edges only a couple dozen meters down from the top.  The Prismatic Binocs revealed a change in temperature from 30 degrees Celsius to below zero in a matter of yards.  They could both hear the crackling of the ice shelves as they echoed in the darkness below.

Lancaster could not make out any structures that he had suspected were there.  All the Prismatic Binocs could come back with were readings of steep walls and thick ice shelves with occasional large boulders.  Nevertheless, Lancaster had a hunch, and he didn’t want to leave without at least trying. He attached a line from his grappling gun to one of the larger and sturdier trees.  He attached the grappling gun to his belt and approached the edge.  “Make sure nothing touches that wire, will you?” he said to his partner.

“You afearedd a bird will make off with that, too?” Little Jack asked dryly.

Lancaster glared at him a moment, but Little Jack only stared back through his wide, frosted over glasses that covered half his face.  No one could win a stare down with Little Jack, so Lancaster didn’t try. He leaped into the abyss.

His boots tapped against the edge, first smacking dirt, which puffed around his legs.  Then they tapped against mud, some of which stuck to his soles.  Then they tapped against hardened mud, almost as tough as a rock.  Then they tapped against ice.  It had gone faster than he had ever experienced.  Lancaster tensed his toes a couple times in a specific pattern, then knocked the boots together and spikes came out the front.  He kicked them hard into the ice, and secured himself, testing their weight.  Once he got them securely fastened, he removed an Illuminator head band from his utility belt and he strapped it over the top of his head.  At the front of the head band was a light he could switch to any light spectrum, but he chose for the moment an automated adjustable white light that raised and lowered in intensity based on how far the nearest obstacle was to him.  That way, the ice that was directly in front of his face wouldn’t blind him, but he could still look across the canyon and see what was there without taking his hands away from climbing.

Slowly he lowered down into the darkness, his feet walking downward, kicking into the ice. Soon, no light reached him, and it could only be seen when looking directly up at the ever shrinking gap where sky was visible.  Below, not even his Prismatic Binocs could detect the bottom.  All that came from that direction was the snaps and crackles of the breaking ice.  It was getting louder, and occasionally there was a crashing noise as somewhere an outcropping of ice got too big and fell apart under its own weight.

The temperature dropped quickly, so Lancaster put on his spiked gloves and pressed a button inside his jacket that heated it up.  The hat would have had something similar, but it was instead keeping some bird’s nest warm.

After dropping for about twenty minutes, Lancaster switched to several other spectrums, trying infrared and ultraviolet.  Finally he left it on illuminated X-ray to see beyond some of the ice.  He had to switch between that and white light so he could see where he was going, but most of the time he didn’t need that. There was one direction for him; down.

The crackling of the ice was all around him now, though he could not see any of it. Each snap and pop could be coming from anywhere, even deep within the ice shelf, and its noise was being amplified through the acoustics and the incessant echoes.

A half hour into the descent, Lancaster was ready to give it up.  There may not be another city.  The Raginor were star faring, so they could have left this planet behind and settled elsewhere.  At any rate, there was no reason to be so certain they had built anything down this canyon.  Besides, he was running out of line.

He turned his head to look around the canyon, wondering if there was any sign of getting near the bottom.  There wasn’t, and none of his devices could even still detect the bottom.  As if aware of his conundrum, Little Jack called, saying, “Have you pinged to the other side of the planet yet?”

Lancaster didn’t respond; he just took one last look around him.  As the light from his Headband Illuminator brightened to reveal the opposite cliff side, Lancaster recognized a pattern.  The ice sheets seemed to fall in unusually perfect symmetrical order.  And some seemed to cross vertically.  It looked almost like the outline to a… building.  He followed the lines down as they dropped into the darkness far below. Then he followed them side to side, making out where one structure might end and another began.  Though the ice ebbed and flowed like waves in an ocean, there were enough distinct lines along them to reveal a pattern.  And that pattern repeated several times to the left and right.

Lancaster needed to get closer to effectively use the X-ray light.  So he told Little Jack he'd be a bit longer, crouched down facing the opposite side, and kicked off.  He fell quite a way, almost to the end of his line.  But he knew he had a lot of leeway, and he reached the opposite wall safely; cutting into the ice on the opposite end with his spiked gloves.

The light from his Illuminator twisted and refracted in the ice, revealing a masonry wall like a wavering ghostly visage, or an underwater treasure.  Shifting to the left, he could see an opening that led into a wider room.  Shining his Headband Illuminator in X-ray revealed the details of the room.  It was definitely Raginor.  There were several levels that stuck out of the walls like balconies, and crisscrossing rods for climbing.

He pulled out his Eco Analyzer and ran it over the ice, measuring its thickness.  A little over a meter.  He had tools that could cut into that, but the constant roars of the breaking ice reminded him that this might not be the safest option. Taking down a major support in the ice shelf could be like taking down a pillar on a building, bringing the entire structure down.

And so Lancaster kept looking.  The thickness of the ice wavered, but it was never much less than a meter.  Sometimes it grew to several yards where moisture had built up into a bulge.

He found one spot where the light from his Illuminator bounced through to the room fairly easily and intense, but the Analyzer said it was nearly two meters to the opposite side.  Lancaster wondered how this could be, and at last theorized that there could be an air bubble inside.  He decided to chance it, fully aware that if he was wrong, he could be bringing a huge shard of ice down on himself. Lancaster removed his precision laser cutter, set it to the proper cutting depth, and got to work.

Lancaster went slow enough to make sure he got through the ice, but he didn't disturb a lot around it.  As he got to the fourth side, he heard cracking deep within.  He froze his cutting hand and scanned the ice sheet all around it.  Nothing... Nothing that he could see at least.  So he kept going.

A rapid snapping like distant fireworks cackled from within the sheet he was cutting, and he saw a small, rough line form and break into several forks like a lightning bolt. But the sheet held, and the section Lancaster had cut came loose.  He pushed it forward, into the air bubble.  He had been right.  The piece crashed against the floor a couple meters down.

Lancaster pulled himself into the air bubble and measured the second sheet.  When he had the distance, he set it into the laser cutter and carefully cut into the second part.  Again, the walls groaned and crackled, but they held.  And he was able to push another square of ice forward that crashed onto the ice floor, this time right where Lancaster's feet were.

Lancaster pulled himself into the structure, stood on solid ground, removed the grappling gun from his belt and placed it securely near the opening he had made. Turning back to the room, he went about maneuvering up and down the platforms, aiding his climbs and descents with the bars that stretched across the rooms.  Unlike the structures in the trees, these were furnished and decorated in the fashion of the Raginors, which appeared the most like humans of any of the alien races.

About a quarter of each room was covered over in ice.  The rest almost might as well have been.  Most things were still intact, though few items that weren't heavy furniture still stood.  Like many Raginor structures, the doorways between rooms were not always at ground level; sometimes they were between two platforms, and sometimes one had to swing from one chamber to the other via bars.  These were freezing cold, even through Lancaster's gloves, and he tried to use these for fear he might get stuck to them.

Maneuvering through the rooms was further complicated by the fact that many of the walls were not built but rather were ice walls that had formed into place, and some entrances and exits were partially blocked.  Lancaster took as many photographs and holographs as he could, and encrypted them all with galactic and geo-coordinates so the scientific community could do further research.

After taking one of his photos, Lancaster noticed something on one of the shelves. Most of the items he had been passing were mundane, and few would function, and might even fall apart if someone picked them up.  But one item was something Lancaster had read about.  It was metallic, about the size of the palm of his hand, and pyramidal in shape.  He turned it over to look at the base and see if it had what he suspected.

Indeed, there were a pair of lines that ran parallel to one another, then formed a bulb at one end.  Lancaster placed his thumb over the bulb, then ran it down the lines.  The walls of the pyramid opened up at the front, revealing a few metallic rods that looked as though they should be plugged in somewhere. "A Sahu Crystal," Lancaster whispered to himself in amazement.  It was believed to carry data.  The museum where his ex-wife worked, and for whom he was working, had built a prototype machine that could read one of these if one was ever recovered.  This would be the best find of all.  Lancaster placed it in his bag he kept slung around his shoulder, and he also grabbed a few of the nicer looking mundane items to show off. The photos and the location would be the best treasures to get back, but these would at least provide something physical.

Then something else caught his eye that startled him enough to duck for cover. He panted in fear for a few seconds, peeking out at what he had spotted out of the corner of his eye.  It was still there; the outline of a form through which he could see, like a ghost.  He could make out a torso, and part of a head.  It was still, unmoving.  A part of the ice that had formed in the shape of a being?

Lancaster approached it cautiously, watching for it to move, but it remained perfectly still.  The form seemed to be leaning against a wall.  Its body was half formed, half missing.  Lancaster could make out a shoulder, part of a leg, what looked like pieces of three limbs.  It was delicate, like very thin ice.  Lancaster reached out to it to touch it, to see if it was natural or something formed. His finger tapped it lightly.  It felt like a very flaky crust.  Then it crumbled into dust at his feet within a second. He tried to catch it, but only managed to catch flakes.  Whatever it was, it was destroyed.  Suddenly, Lancaster was kicking himself for not taking an image of it first either in 3D or at least in 2D.  What the delicate half statue had been was a mystery, though Lancaster theorized it had been old skin of a Raginor which they shed every now and then, and the cold had frozen it in place for all these years... until Lancaster came and interfered.

He continued along, going vertical now, but trying not to travel too far from a direct path to where he came in.  This was an entire city carved out of the cliff, and it could go on for a very long time. He didn't want to get lost.  He hopped from one platform to another, occasionally grabbing rods as he went.  A long ice shelf sliced through the building on one side, and he climbed up it with one foot while he stepped up the various levels with the other like stairs.  He paused at each one, scanning each room, and photographing some.

At one point Lancaster stopped on a floor to go through his photo and holographs.  They all looked good, but one of them caused Lancaster to halt his breath.  It was from one of the first rooms he had stopped on during his ascent.  He spotted the shadow of a figure at one of the exits. Lancaster had not noticed it at the time he took the photograph, but it saw him.  The figure appeared to be staring right at him.

Lancaster quickly looked around to see if anyone was watching him now.  He found no one.  He switched through several spectrums on his Illuminator to make sure. He was alone.  Lancaster then turned his attention back to his Imager. The picture had 3D elements, so he shifted it to a projected hologram and took a closer look.  Sure enough, a shadowy figure stood there in the doorway. There was not enough light to reveal any details about it; just its shape, which was a torso with two legs and what looked like four arms.

A shiver ran down Lancaster's spine that shook his entire body.  He was not alone down here.  He quickly crouched and looked around himself.  He peered into every exit to the left and right, then up and down. He listened closely.  Silence, save for the constant, distant booms and crackle of breaking ice echoing through the canyon.  The vapor from Lancaster's breath hung languidly in the air ahead of him, as though it was afraid to move as well.  Was he being hunted?  Had whatever creature it was not seen him?

But Lancaster wasn't here to be a coward.  Discovery was his job, even in a dark, frozen city deep underground.  He returned to the long sheet of ice and lowered down until he saw where he had begun using it.  Then he hopped back down the platforms, trying to land more gently now to make less noise.  On one platform he knocked away from ice and it crashed against a level below, then tumbled into another, then ricocheted off a few bars before crashing onto its final platform.  At each point it made a loud crashing noise that echoed through every chamber and out into the canyon.

Lancaster stopped and watched the floors below.  If something had heard the noise, perhaps it would go to it and he could see what it was.  He pulled in his breath, breathing as little, slowly and evenly as possible.

After a few minutes, there was nothing, not even the sound of anything moving around. Whatever this creature was, it wasn't as clumsy as him.

At last Lancaster moved again, slower this time, quieter.  It was difficult as some platforms had to be leaped onto.  But he disturbed them as little as possible.  On the final platform he pulled his Imager as he was making his step and he slipped, crashing chest first onto the floor. The Imager slipped from his grasp and began to tumble down into the maze of levels.  Lancaster brought his other hand around and managed to catch it out of the air.  He sighed with relief, then rolled onto his back, looking at the Imager.

The room in the image matched the room he was in, and the shadow of the figure should be right...

Lancaster hopped up, realizing he had put himself into a compromising position on the ground.  He looked over at the exit where the shadow had been.  It was hard to see anything but darkness there.  The Imager had picked it up where his eyes saw only a black void.  He switched the Headband Illuminator to thermal imaging to see if the creature was still at the doorway.  It didn't pick anything up.  It was possible that the creature didn't give off much heat, so he checked several other spectrums and got nothing.

It was time to take a closer look at the entryway where the shadow had been. Lancaster stepped cautiously toward it in case it was a room or two away.  He put the white light on so he could see better.  The light crawled across the straight walls and waves of ice until it filled the dark hole, and revealed the wall of ice beyond.  Encased within it was a form with a head, a torso, four arms, and two legs.  Lancaster might have thought it was human if it wasn't so hairy, and if he didn't recognize what it was.  "A Raginor," he whispered to himself in amazement.

It wasn't quite what the Xenological Museum of Natural History had pictured.  They had a display of what they thought a Raginor would look like based on fossil fragments and cryptic records.  Very little solid data had ever been recovered of the Raginor, so they had had to make as best a guess as they could.  They had set it up as a sort of snake creature with two thin, spindly arms and legs that were like a spider's.  It had brown or black hair all over its body and eyes on the sides of its face.

Now, looking at this perfectly preserved specimen, Lancaster saw they had been pretty far off.  It looked more like a human ancestor, or a chimpanzee, though with far less fur. Its skin was scaly and shades of yellow and green.  It had occasional small suction cups at important locations for grip.  It possessed four arms and two legs, or perhaps two arms and four legs; the pair in the middle resembled both, but were wiry like tails.  The clothing was a one-piece with sealed seams along several joints where it could get in and out.  The posture of this Raginor was slumped against a back wall, as though it had been dead, then was frozen over.

Lancaster had several theories as to what had happened, but none had sufficient evidence to make a determination.  Besides, that could be more thoroughly discovered by an archaeology team.  He just needed to tell them how to get in. So that they could see what he was talking about, Lancaster scanned the cadaver with a Holocapture; going over the body slowly to make sure it captured every detail and filled it into the 3D model.

Looking at the virtual model, Lancaster noticed that one of the hands was outstretched almost to the edge of the ice.  Lancaster pulled out his hand heater and placed it next to the ice.  A layer became loose and melted away, dropping slowly to the ground below.  He pushed the heater closer, cutting his way to the hand until he had exposed a finger.

Lancaster put the heater away and removed a glove.  The cold immediately assaulted it, but he didn't mind.  He reached forward and touched the skin of the Raginor. It was hardened, but felt of leather. He even felt tiny ridges of a fingerprint.  A new sort of shiver ran down Lancaster’s spine, one that only comes from the haunting connection of a long ago past.  Or perhaps it was the accomplishment of one of Lancaster's greatest dreams; to touch a real intelligent alien life form.  He held his finger there pressed against the Raginor's for a time, and he scanned it with his watering eyes.  The alien's face was scrunched up, as though in pain.  This was common in the bodies of ancient animals, even when they were preserved.  But knowing that something caused the Raginors to go extinct caused Lancaster to see more in that expression; anguish.  Was this the last Raginor of this city?  Had they all died and only this one to carry on until it froze to death and got encased?  Lancaster hoped the Sahu Crystal would provide some answers.

To furtherassist the study, Lancaster sliced off a part of the finger's edge, and a hair. "Sorry about this, partner," Lancaster said.  "But your donation might just help us avenge your race."

Then Lancaster heard a growing rumble like rolling thunder coming straight for him. The deep noise was followed by rapid snapping, and the ground began shaking beneath him.  The ice was shifting where he was.

Lancaster dashed for the edge of the platform where he had entered.  He reached the edge of it just as the walls began to shift. Debris sprinkled on him as Lancaster leaped off the platform and grabbed a rod.  He kept moving as the entire area rocked back and forth.  He held tight to each rod he grabbed, stepping on a couple platforms as he made his way down to the level from which he had begun to climb. A sharp pain wracked his leg and he fell to the ground.  He had twisted his ankle as he landed.

A deafening screech from the side told Lancaster that he didn't have time to recover. He looked to see a large ice slab that hung over the room he was in was lowering.  Being between him and the doorway, the slab would cut him off from his exit.  So Lancaster got up on his one foot, and hobbled on his other toward the passage. He saw the sharp bottom of the slap; like a guillotine.  It was dropping as fast as he was moving.  He had to pick up the pace.  He placed forward his injured foot and ran on it.  The pain shot through his whole body, and he stumbled, but he got a little more speed.  The slab was passing the height of Lancaster's head, and he had only a moment left.  He kicked off his good foot and tumbled forward, rolling past the dropping ice sheet.

He just made it, but the pack was still on the other side.  With a yank, he brought it to him just in time.

Lancaster was panting now, lucky to be on the right side of the ice sheet.  However, he wasn't safe yet.  Though the tectonic movements had ended, the residual effects were still taking place.  Sharp ice shards were dropping from the ceiling, crashing to the ground as though they were being shot out of a gun.  Lancaster rose to his feet, but was still slow in the process.  One of the shards hit him as he was straightening, stabbing into his shoulder.  Another smacked his head and nearly knocked him unconscious.

Lancaster looked through the deafening rain of ice crystals and found the grappling gun and wire.  He B-lined toward it, hobbling as fast as he could.  One shard knocked his right shoulder down, though it was a blessing in disguise as he looked up to see a shard large enough to slice through his head coming right at him.  He dodged to the left, avoiding the blade, but landing on his injured foot.  He shouted in pain, but his voice was mute compared to the shattering noises around him.

He had to keep moving, so he set his eyes on the wire and he hurried forward, almost falling toward it.  Lancaster reached his hand forward to grasp the grappling gun and it was stabbed with a shard.  Screaming, yet still moving, Lancaster reached his other hand forward and grasped the handle.  More shards were hitting his back like rain, but he ignored the pain and jumped out the hole, attaching the gun to his belt as he went.  He felt it snap into place, and the wire went taut as he swung to the other end of the canyon.

When his body thudded on the other side, Lancaster coughed air back into his lungs and looked back at the hole.  White smoke billowed out of it, some of it clinging to the hole he had made, repairing itself.  The booming crackles echoed into the distance.  The ice around Lancaster had settled once again, and it was another area's turn. Lancaster began to think an expedition here would not be feasible, especially considering the cautiousness of the Universalis Arcanum.  But maybe the university where his ex-wife Mika worked could analyze the data from the Sahu Crystal and the DNA from the body, as well as the photos and holographs.

At any rate, Lancaster was making his way up out of the canyon.  His work here was done.

 The End

[relicworlds-blog]

Lancaster James & the Curse of the Hudrom Mine, Part 3

The globe was warm in Lancaster's arms, but it was bearable, and it would cool off as he went.  So he swung it under one arm while he grabbed the Illuminator with the opposite hand. He found the exit and headed for it.

But as he started to walk, Lancaster paused.  The fauna looked different somehow.  He shone the light on them and all the mushrooms that had pulsed to life with the rhythmic glowing of the globe now drooped lifelessly.  Nothing moved anymore.  The room had died when he took the globe.

Lancaster felt a sudden tinge of horrible guilt.  He reminded himself how much educational value there would be in studying this artifact.  It fostered life much the way a star does, and it retained its energetic properties through millions of years.  That had to be worth something; at least a little plant life.

But his conscience stopped him in his tracks.  He knew these were not mere plants.  They were somehow alive, and they knew the source of their existence, as exemplified by the way they all stretched toward the globe when it lit up. They had motor skills and sensory organs, and they were growing curious about their surroundings.  These were animals which were evolving.

Lancaster tried to make his legs outrun his nagging guilt.  After all, the mining corporation was going to get here soon, and they would take it anyway.  And they wouldn't use the globe to further human understanding of the cosmos.  In the long run, what Lancaster was doing would certainly help far more species than this one small breed.  

But his legs only took him a couple steps before he couldn't bring himself to go any further.  He couldn't run away from the truth that these conscious plants were the entire reason he sought out ancient treasures.  They were the end goal, not the means to it.  What was evolving on these walls was far more precious than any relic Lancaster could find in any ruins.

He took the globe back and he gently placed it on its pillar.  For a long, uncomfortable moment nothing happened. Lancaster worried he had broken it forever, and had doomed the plant species.  But then the intense light pulsated, and the mushrooms stood again, reaching for their source of energy.  Lancaster looked around him, smiling, certain he made the right choice. This species may have little to offer now, but give them a few millions years to evolve, and the possibilities were endless.

That is, if they were left alone by the miners and their corporate managers. This was highly unlikely, especially considering the valuable metals that were inside the sphere.  So Lancaster had to think fast of a way to keep them from it.  He ran his mind through several options as he paced around the room.

His eyes landed on the leaves of some of the plants he had saved.  As the light pulsated he noticed a purplish goo stuck to the bottom of some of them.  He removed from one of his pockets a device that checked for poison.  He scanned the goo with it and waited a moment to get the analysis.  The small screen said that it was only harmful if ingested.

Lancaster put the device away, then scraped out globs of the purple slime. He rubbed it over the exposed skin on his hands, then all over his face and neck, forming globs that dripped slowly off his skin like something out of a horror movie.  He tried to make it as horrific as he could.

When it felt as though the goo was sufficiently covering his face, he snapped off several leaves, apologizing to the plant for taking them.  "Sorry, but, well... This is for your own good." Lancaster hurried out and crossed the bridge.  He made sure to rub his hand over the stonework on the opposite side to cause the bridge to disappear.  Lancaster took one last look at the rays of light that beamed out of the building on regular intervals.  With any luck, it would be the last time human eyes would see it.  Then he hurried to the exit.

 Little Jack was chipping away at the rock with all his might and speed.  He used his frustration at the miners for refusing to help as fuel to move quickly.  He didn't know how long Lancaster had inside without outside air, and he hadn't heard from him in nearly an hour.  So he chipped and he cut and he pulled back rocks and scraped away mud...

And suddenly a hand emerged from the other side reaching right for him.  It was covered in a purple slime which lined the fingers in a crude webbing.  Little Jack leaped back, drawing his pistol Huginn and pointing it at the assaulting appendage.  "Rub this all over yourself!" came a voice connected to the hand from the other side of the rock wall.

Little Jack kept his gun before him.  "Get that out of my face!"

"First take some from me and rub it all over you!" Lancaster said, his hand spread wide in Little Jack's face.

"That's disgusting!" Little Jack responded.

More rocks fell away, and Lancaster began squeezing through.  Little Jack saw Lancaster had the sludge all over his own face and hands, and he was carrying another blob in his other hand.  "I don't have time to explain," Lancaster said, worried that someone could come along at any moment and destroy the whole idea.  "Put it on."

Lancaster and Little Jack emerged from the cave stumbling and coughing. Lancaster added to the sight by spitting out large clumps of phlegm.  They both feigned difficulty breathing.

Most of the miners kept their distance, but when a couple of them started toward the pair, Lancaster warned them to stay away.  "It's the curse," he said, making certain to throw in a couple coughs between words.  "The curse is a deadly chemical... which rises in the form of gas... It turns into... solid form on its host."  Lancaster finished, holding up a hand with the purple glob dropping from every finger.

Many of the miners, who were already keeping their distance, now rushed away. They didn't even want to be within a kilometer of this infected man.

Mika rose from her seat, concerned.  She didn't believe in any curse, but she did believe in diseases that could kill someone it infected.  She knew she would be risking herself to go near Lancaster, but she didn't care.  She started toward her former husband.

Lancaster looked at her for a brief moment and stole a wink.  It was barely detectable, and only something she noticed, but it was confident enough to tell her to play along.  She froze a moment, uncertain what to do.  If she was wrong about reading him, he could die from whatever he picked up.  She looked at Little Jack whose own expression was never helpful.  However, she spotted a very slight shake of the head as he looked directly at her, so she kept her distance.

"Is that what was killing the miners?" someone asked.  Lancaster noticed that it was someone from the union offices.  The union boss in particular was wide eyed, surprised to see Lancaster.  But the question itself could be a trap.  They had set the gases that killed the miners, so they could be asking to see if he was lying.

"No!" Lancaster said, still coughing between many of the words. "This is something far worse... It comes up... from crevices in the ground..."  Lancaster had coughed so much that he had now irritated his own throat, and he was coughing severely for real.  He used it.  "You must... You must quarantine that area... of the mountain... from everyone... All who enter... will die!"

Little Jack was concerned now, not for Lancaster's safety, but for his acting skills, which were becoming increasingly melodramatic.  He grabbed his partner and hurried him toward their ship, coughing and spitting on the ground.  The miners gave them a wide berth.

The managers didn't wait for orders.  They immediately demanded that seals be placed on the entrance.  When Pabu Grappa from the miners' union suggested they were being a bit hasty, several burly workers stopped what they were doing and approached him suspiciously.  "How many got to die to satisfy your curiosity?" one of them asked with a threatening posture.  It was clear that no one from the union or from any corporation was going to get them back into that hole.

The mining operation moved down the ridge.  Gang bosses ordered scouts to find good entry points to begin drilling, and their large vehicles with their enormous mountain cutting tools made their way behind.

The executives on site looked on disappointedly.  This was an expensive move, but losing their miners would be more expensive, especially in sight of their union reps.  To make certain there would be no problems from them, they assured Pabu Grappa and his co-workers that the entrance would be sealed, and there would be no way for anyone else to get inside again.

Pabu pretended to be reassured by the news, but knew this meant his mission for Burbank Corp would be a failure, and he would not be paid.  Grudgingly, he began preparations for moving his office.

Mika, returned to her little makeshift office disappointed and confused.  She had hoped they would find something to justify this excursion.  The university where she worked did not have unlimited resources to send them out, and they needed results to keep their expeditions going.

The monitor blinked to life as Mika tapped on her keyboard.  A file appeared in the center of the screen, and beneath it were the words, "Open alone".  Mika checked around her and saw that the few people who had been nearby were distracted with the move, so no one paid attention to her.  Still, she had the screen projected onto her table so she could control the size and look down at it, then she opened the file.

A plethora of pictures and 3D renderings of a subterranean building emerged.  In some, beams of light streamed out the windows of the hovel.  Images from inside the building revealed a brightly glowing sphere sitting upon a pedestal shining a nearly blinding light.  This only confused Mika more because the globe would be a target Lancaster would want to pick up.  Her bafflement heightened as the images progressed, focusing more and more on the plant life within the building.

Then she noticed it.  Flipping between two pictures taken from one spot she saw how the mushroom-like creatures shifted from one part of the vines to another.  Some even switched vines.  They were creatures.  And judging from their postures, they likely got their energy from the globe the way many animals got theirs from nearby stars.  She understood immediately.  Lancaster had left the device to save the creatures.

She had to sometimes remind herself that he was an anthropologist, not an archaeologist like herself, and his heart bled more for the living than for objects.  It was a different value than her, but she admired it.  This would be a hard pill to swallow, especially when she explained it to the school regents, but she couldn't help but respect his decision.

She even went so far as to help him.  Mika sent out an alert to all news wires on the Galaganet that this mining location was discovered by scientists to be poisonous and deadly.  She cited the miners who had died, and claimed their deaths were caused by the gases.  That should keep anyone from wanting to unseal this location again.

Her work complete, Mika packed up her things, and got out as quickly as she could.

 Little Jack was reminding Lancaster of the very thing Mika was thinking about; they were returning empty handed.  Lancaster was hurrying in and out of the cockpit bringing disposable wipes and wet towels for them to clean their hands.  Little Jack refused to get the gunk all over his ship.  What they really needed was a high pressure chemical shower, but Lancaster wanted them to get out of there as quickly as possible, so he provided Little Jack with what he needed to get them out of the atmosphere. This included getting his hands entirely clean, because he would need to hold the controls tight for exiting the atmosphere, and he wanted his butt clean of the dust from the cave.

Lancaster silently took the chastisement during the cleaning and as they took off. Little Jack complained during the entire process as remnants of the goop dripped off his fingers onto the steering column.  Little Jack rarely showed expression, but his face was now turning red.  He was so fastidious he got tense over fingerprints on his controls.  This... This gunk would probably never come off.  And he reminded Lancaster of that fact.

Lancaster bided his time, quietly apologizing for everything Little Jack brought up.  Then, after they had left the planet and were in Spectrum drive, and after they had both had showers and gotten three quarters of the slime off, Lancaster sat down and explained that they were not going home empty handed.  He reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a fist full of leaves and he showed them to Little Jack, grinning from ear to ear.

"When are you going to show me what we thrusted all this way for?" Little Jack asked.

"This is it," Lancaster said.

"What?"

"This!"

"Leaves."

"Yes."

"You're saying this was worthy in line because of leaves."

"Absolutely."

"I could hit you."

"This is a treasure."

"I should hit you."

"No, listen.  New life was spawning there.  We saw the dawning of new life, a new civilization even."

"The leaves."

"No, the little creatures that looked like mushrooms..."

"Okay, I'm going to hit you now..."

"Just listen.  These leaves carry their DNA.  We can study how they formed, and how they are likely to evolve.  It may even provide us with a lot of information to cipher glowing globe in the middle of the room.  That's not only as valuable as the artifact itself, it's the very reason we're out here searching for relics in the first place, to put the pieces together; to understand the lives and civilizations that built them and used them."

Little Jack was silent for a long while.  He had hoped for something more tangible, and he knew that if they kept coming back with this sort of poetry Lancaster was spewing their clients wouldn't hire them for long.  But for now Little Jack silently turned back to his controls and looked out at the dark shades of the brane in Spectrum space.

Then he punched Lancaster in the arm.

The End

[relicworlds-blog]

Lancaster James & the Curse of the Hudrom Mine, Part 2

Lancaster curled into a ball behind the stalagmite.  Little Jack, who had spotted something just before the blast, managed to dive away from it just in time, though he was flown a few meters onto the hard ground.

“Lancaster!” Mika called.  “What happened?  Lancaster, do you register?  What's your sixty?  Little Jack!” Mika continued to signal to them. Hearing the explosion, some of the miners rushed to the entrance to see what had happened.  Others reacted with shrugged shoulders, certain it was the curse.

Mika was shaking.  She looked across at Otis Lyman, the mining foreman.  He closed his eyes in dismay and drew a deep breath.

At last, a crackling signal broke the silence, and Lancaster’s voice emerged. “Still here.  The explosion happened between Little Jack and I.”

Mika took a deep breath and collected herself with a sigh of relief before revealing her voice on the radio to him.  “Good to hear you’re okay.”

“Lost my hat, though,” Lancaster said.

“You’ve got a tril of those,” Mika responded.  Lancaster lost his hat on every adventure, yet he still seemed surprised by it.  “Is Little Jack near you?”

“We got separated by a cave-in,” Lancaster said.

Coming out from behind the stalagmite, the now hatless Lancaster studied the wall of stone and debris.  It was solid, perhaps even air tight.  He reported this to Mika.  “You have your breather, right?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Lancaster said absently, still looking for a way out.  Then he asked if Little Jack was okay.

“Superb,” Little Jack said dryly, also looking for a way through the wall.

“You’re trapped in a pretty small area,” Mika said.  “You’ll want to put on your breather sooner rather than later.”

Lancaster continued to scan the wall of debris with the Illuminator in one hand, and he placed the breather up to his face with the other.  Just before it reached his nose, he detected a faint odor. Looking around a moment, he realized it was coming from the mask.  That was not oxygen, nor any vapor chemicals intended to sustain him.  Without sniffing anymore, Lancaster ripped the mask from his neck and tossed it to the floor.

Lancaster put all the pieces together in his head: the shallow, recently carved symbols that didn’t match the alien architecture, the mask with the gas, the miners who died after wearing them; and as he put them in chronological order, he realized that the alien structure was found first, then the first “cursed” carving was found a couple days later, then the second was discovered the day after that.  Someone had learned of the alien structure, wanted it left undiscovered, carved out the symbols, then killed the first miners who found them so it would seem like a curse.

Who could have done this, though?  The rival corporation?  Lancaster looked down at the mask and remembered it was given to him by the head of the union.  Lancaster couldn’t imagine him having a reason to kill his own workers unless he was paid by Burbank Corp to do it.  The miners had shown the union rep the archway, and he had had a day in which to contact someone else before the murdering began.

Lancaster brought his Talki to his lips, “Mika, it was an inside job.  The symbols on the walls were f…”

The message cut out.  Mika called into the mic and turned the signal, but she couldn’t reconnect with Lancaster.  She then thought about it, confused.  There was no reason they should have lost connection.  If it was something in the stone of the mountain, it would have blocked their signal at the beginning.  The fact that they had spoken after the cave-in, and now lost the signal implied that the problem was something else.

Lancaster realized after speaking that he had lost connection.  All he could hear was fuzz.  He didn’t know how much of his accusation had gotten through, but someone must have blocked the signal.  He tried to shout to Little Jack, but the hard-pressed rock was too solid to hear through.  This meant it was air tight as well.  Lancaster had to get out, and soon.

He turned in the direction they had been traveling.  Just past the stalagmite and a little more of a curve stoned wall he found the faint, round outline of what appeared to be a giant gear.  Lancaster stepped up to it and brushed off some of the dust and sand, then scooped away some mud and tossed aside some rocks.

Slowly, Lancaster uncovered something that resembled a roll-away door.  It was stuck in place, but there were outlines of buttons and levers that were the size of his hand.  He traced the edges with his fingers, digging out crusted in clay that had collected over the millennia, and scraped off the front to reveal the symbols on the doorway.  He recognized some of them from the archway; the totem figures.

Lancaster picked up his Imager and found the pictures he took of the arch.  He found all but one of the creatures along the post represented on the door, so he continued searching.  At last he kicked away a clump near the bottom, and there found the button with the proper symbol.  Now he knew which buttons to press, but in what order?  Sometimes it mattered, sometimes it didn’t, but when it did, it was deadly.  Would he follow the pattern of creatures up or down?

Lancaster considered the Chiotho.  Whether an alien race chose their clues to go up or down depended on their culture.  He yanked out his notebook and ran the light over it.  Lancaster noticed himself coughing, the first signs that he was running out of air, so he needed to hurry.  Flipping rapidly through the dog eared pages, Lancaster came to the Chiotho section and looked over the pictures he had drawn and the notes he had taken.  He found another reference to a totem archway, but he hadn’t recorded whether the symbols were to be written upward or down. But, thinking back on his adventure to the Rendon Woods where he had seen those Chiotho ruins, he recalled following their messages up the tree.  The beginning of their thoughts, whether in the form of architecture, statuary, or crops, began at the base and worked their way up.

There was Lancaster’s answer.  He pressed the button that reflected the bottom symbol on the archway, then the next, and the next, and finally, the one at the top of the arch which was set in the middle of the doorway.  He heard an instant click, which was either a very good or a very bad sign.  He waited as the rusty clanging of gears groaned to life. A couple loud clicks reverberated in his small chamber, and the gear-like door rolled aside, crushing dozens of tiny rocks and scraping boulders.  Ancient air burst out like ghosts escaping their graves.  It was a stale smell, but a welcome one as it meant more time to breathe.

Beyond, blackness yawned, and the light of Lancaster’s Illuminator faded away into oblivion.  He stepped inside and followed the age-old corridor. The walls were far enough apart that he barely caught them both in the light, so he watched the floor instead.

His feet felt that it was flat concrete, not rocky like a cave.  That caused him to take notice when a series of bulges revealed a design on the floor.  Lancaster stopped short of it and knelt down.  His hand brushed away a little of the dirt, and he blew away at it, sending a narrow wall of dust into the air that revealed a design underneath.  It was a metallic carving of an animal that resembled a snake which wound from one side to the other like a wave.  Lancaster scanned the rest of the hall with several light spectrums in his Illuminator.  Finding nothing else carved or placed into the floor, Lancaster determined that this design held a strong significance.  Many of these alien races kept their valuable artifacts behind deadly traps that still worked, so he had to be cautious.

Lancaster stood, then carefully laid one foot on the metallic snake, then the other. In this way he made his way across until he reached the point where the dirt still covered the design.  He scraped it off with his foot, revealing a little more, then a little more, then more.  It was a slow process, but Lancaster made his way steadily across the corridor.

When at last Lancaster found the featureless head of the snake, he knew he was safe, and he stepped off the other end.  The walls of the corridor ended, and he had entered a large chamber, the sides of which he could not see.  What would have happened had he stepped off the snake, Lancaster did not know, nor did he wish to learn.

Dust in the air had built up quickly and steadily until it was at last pervasive. But a cool smell that penetrated Lancaster’s nostrils told him there was something more to it.  There was an aroma of moisture in the air.  In holding his light up in front of himself, Lancaster realized that what was limiting his vision was fog.    

He adjusted his Illuminator to cut through mist and see what was further inside the chamber.  He found that the floor continued ahead of him until it dropped down into a chasm. On the other side of the canyon was an ancient, elaborately designed building with large, imposing doors.

Lancaster stepped toward the cliff and looked out over it.  He could hear rushing water far below.  A river?  Or perhaps an ocean, he could not tell, and the Illuminator could not reach the bottom no matter what setting was used.  His foot, meanwhile, sank into the dirt floor that sat for more loose near the edge, so he stepped back.

Turning his attention onto the building, he found that, despite it clearly being the important structure in the chamber, there was no way to reach it.  The chasm was far too wide for a human, or a Chiothofor that matter, to cross.  Had the bridge been destroyed, he wondered.

A pulsating, thin light emanating from the building’s small windows and slicing through the fog caught Lancaster’s attention.  It faded and lit up at regular intervals.  He couldn’t imagine what could be causing this to happen, and the desire to get across the chasm became even stronger.

Lancaster studied the building as best he could from this distance, splashing his strongest light from the Illuminator across it.  He found vines draped over the structure which had thick little shapes attached to them.  He zoomed his Imager in on the vines and snapped a picture, then looked at it. The growths on the vines were a fungi that resembled mushrooms.  Outside, there wasn’t a scrap of foliage to be found, but in this underground cavern, life was literally sprouting.  There was nothing on his side of the canyon, so Lancaster was now desperate to get across.

He took a wider shot of the building with his Imager, this time getting a 3D image to record all the measurements, the nooks and crannies, all the details that explained what the building was so he could project it as a hologram.  He then sent the information over to his Pad, and set it to analyze the structure against other known buildings of alien make. Like Lancaster, the majority of the Chiotho had been fascinated with the cultures of other alien civilizations that had come before it.  Unlike humans, however, the Chiotho governments prized ancient discoveries, and ordered shrines to be built to house them.  These sanctums sometimes took on the architecture of the structures housed inside.  It could therefore offer a clue if Lancaster could get some more information about the building, so he used his Imager again to get a wider shot of it.

Once the image was captured, he sent it over to his Pad and had it analyzed against the large database inside.  The Pad took a moment to go through its extensive inventory, then at last presented several possibilities.  The most likely candidate was the Yorkorath, a race of which Lancaster and the university he worked for had an unfortunately small amount of information.  When he brought up the database’s image of the building in 3D, he also saw a symbol floating next to it.  This appeared to be the crest for that building, or perhaps that faction of the Yorkorath.  Who knew? There was no information about it in the database, so apparently not the university researchers, and it definitely wasn’t Chiotho.

Lancaster was stumped.  He leaned his arm on a partial wall next to him while he considered how he was going to get across the chasm.  He suddenly felt the arm sink in much the same way his foot had sunk into the dirt near the edge of the canyon.  He pulled away, and he felt something cling to his arm until he pulled it back far enough. He brought over the Illuminator and focused it on the wall on which he had been leaning.  He discovered it reforming just before it froze in place, like a caught child going into hiding.

Lancaster kept the light on the wall while he hovered his hand over the waist-high wall again.  He lowered his hand carefully, then rubbed it against the top of the wall.  He felt the rock turn into a more rubbery substance, and his fingers were able to mold it upward.  It even clung to his skin, and as he pulled up his hand, the wall followed like clay, releasing when he pulled hard enough, and slowly reforming back into place.  Lancaster set up the Imager and captured video of the strange, putty-like substance as his hand found its borders.  It covered about a foot of distance along the top of the wall, as though it was a single brick.

Developing a theory, Lancaster put the imager at one end of the brick and projected a hologram of the symbol shown next to the building.  He then traced the symbol into the malleable substance, making sure to get every detail right.  When it was complete, a low gurgling began to rumble, and the dirt he had partially sunk into earlier grew outward; molding and forming into a flat structure that stretched across the chasm.  It was taking the shape of a bridge!

Lancaster watched until it had built a platform all the way across, then faded into a lighter color along with the sound of crackling stones.  It looked firm, but if it wasn’t, Lancaster would have a very long fall to his doom.  He placed one foot forward and tested the bridge.  It felt like hard stone on a mountain, as firm as it could possibly be. He took another step, testing it carefully.  Terra firma. He took every step with extreme caution, especially near the middle; for not only was it made of an unusual architecture, it also had no support beams beneath it. He didn’t know how such construction was possible, but he wasn’t going to question it for the superstitious fear that his doubt would cause the whole thing to collapse.

At last he blew out a sigh of relief as he stepped off the opposite side. Looking back, he expected the bridge to disappear, but it remained.  He didn’t know how long he had, but he figured he should be quick.

As Lancaster turned toward the building, he heard a moist rustling emanating from it. He spread the light from his Illuminator across the whole face of the building and brightened it to see everything he could.  Nothing; and the sound had dimmed.  He figured that it could be a common noise from inside the caves, perhaps down in the canyon by the water, but it seemed different, closer, and he became extra cautious as he approached the building.

The front door was a sliding mechanism with a hand slot just below the height of Lancaster’s chest.  He grasped it and slid the door open.  This revealed a single large room that took up the entire building.  At the moment he opened the door it was pitch black inside, and equally silent, as though nothing was present to carry sound waves.

Just before he could illuminate the room, a bright glow faded up from a globe on a pedestal in the center, casting a golden hue across the chamber.  The walls and ceiling were covered in the vines he had seen on the outer walls.  Here, however, they had grown so wild the chamber resembled a jungle.

Then, as quickly as the glow had appeared, it faded away.

Lancaster used his Illuminator to check the floor to see if there was anything dangerous he might step on.  Nothing, including the vines, which were evidently relegated only to the walls and ceiling.  He nevertheless took every step cautiously, watching the floor as he laid down his foot, then immediately scanned the walls to make sure nothing was happening.  Just as he did, the light from the globe faded up again, casting everything in a golden aura.  It remained on the same amount of time as the first beam, then disappeared again.

In the still darkness, Lancaster heard the moist rustling again, this time from all around him.  He flashed one of the walls with the Illuminator and the noise fell silent in that direction, but it continued in others.  He turned the Illuminator, and as the light swept across the wall, the rustling he heard fell silent until it was only coming from the parts of the walls he hadn’t yet lit up.

All the noises faded as the globe pulsated with light again.  Lancaster stared at it, despite the damage to his retinas, for it felt like he was staring into the sun.  It was magnificent.  And to say it was mysterious was a gross understatement.  What caused it to emit light on these regular intervals, and how it still operated after millions of years was beyond Lancaster. He couldn’t even grasp what purpose the room had originally served, though he might be able to figure it out if he could look past the vines at the walls.  Just then the light from the globe went out and left him in darkness.

Lancaster noticed that the moist, sliding noise returned almost immediately as it got dark.  When he instinctively lifted his Illuminator to see what might be moving, the noises stopped in that direction, but continued in all others.  He decided to let the noises continue while he pointed the spot of his light down.  Manipulating the buttons with his thumb, Lancaster switched the setting of the Illuminator to ultraviolet.  He then pointed it at the walls again.

In the direction he had been pointing the white light, there was nothing of note. The vines hung limp as they had been when he looked at them before.  But as he scanned to the left he spotted movement among them.  Many tiny, dark dots were weaving among the vines.  Some of them were stalled where they were, reaching into the room.

Lancaster carefully stepped toward this wall, taking a quick look at his feet to make sure they were landing on solid ground each time without threat.  He made it about halfway when the light from the globe beamed again.  Everything on the walls fell limp, as though falling suddenly asleep.  Out of a strange sense of obligation, Lancaster froze as well, and waited for the light to dim again.

When it did, Lancaster had the Illuminator pointed directly at the plants, and he was staring intensely to see what he could.  The glow of the globe faded, but the ultraviolet light remained; and just like clockwork, the plants rose again, as though returning to life. Lancaster found that the dark dots he had spotted moving were the same mushrooms he had spotted outside.  Some were sliding up and down the vine with an unseen mobility.  Others were reaching out toward the middle of the room.  Lancaster moved to the side slightly to look at more of the wall, and the reaching mushrooms turned with him, and froze when he stopped.  Baffled, Lancaster stepped back to where he had just been.  The mushrooms followed.  ‘Could it be?’ he thought.

Lancaster stepped toward the wall and noticed the mushrooms recoiled.  Some of them even retreated into the bramble of vines which, Lancaster could now see, went back more than a foot.  As he did this, the glow returned, and the plant life hibernated again.  He took advantage of the time and hurried up close, taking one of the many chances his ex-wife Mika had warned him against taking.

When the light dimmed again and left the wall in Lancaster’s purple glow, he studied the fungi coming to life.  One of them that was close tilted up toward him fearlessly.  Rather than scurrying away, as the others did, this one stopped close to his nose, studying him as he was studying it.

The small beast had tiny antennae and no discernible eyes.  There were discolorations along the membrane that could be sensory organs, but nothing besides the antennae that Lancaster could definitively categorize.  He lifted a hand to feel it.  The tiny antennae looked in the direction of the hand and the mushroom creature scurried away into the brambles along the vine on which it was connected.  A survival instinct.  Even more interestingly, another larger mushroom slid down the vine and cut Lancaster off from the first.  It swayed at him, the way a human would when readying to box someone. A protection instinct.

Lancaster straightened up, and as the glow relit the room, he looked on in awe. These were tiny, living, thinking creatures and plant life that had evolved in this chamber over time.  And it was still evolving.  He captured as many images, videos, and 3D captures as he could of the walls and ceiling.  He wanted to take a specimen, but he was certain they would die if he did, and it hardly seemed worth it.  He should have enough of this incredible discovery.

And now for the globe, which should provide the university with unspeakable information.  He walked toward it, slowing as he came near.  There were patterns on the floor which could be innocuous, or they could be traps.  Lancaster didn’t want to find out.  He placed his feet carefully to avoid them, spacing out his legs to steady himself.

He then looked over the globe, studying its patterns, its shape, sizing up its weight; how much effort it would take to carry.  The pulsing light was blinding, but it would likely go off when he pulled it up, but the researchers could probably turn it back on when he got it to Saberaux University.  What he needed to know most importantly was, would it set off a trap or an alarm?  He didn’t see anything; in fact it sat in a sort of bowl without any visible connections.  This didn’t mean there wasn’t any trap associated with it.  With power running through the device, there could even be wireless connections to something else in the room.

Lancaster scanned it with several spectrums in his Illuminator, and with other devices he had to aid him in such matters.  As he did this, more and more of the mushroom-like creatures came out of hiding and stretched out toward the intruder in the middle of their room.  They stared at him from their connected vines. Lancaster didn’t notice.  He was too focused on the globe.

At last, satisfied that he had checked over the device as much as he could, Lancaster put away all of his gadgets and held out his arms.  He shook out his fingers and tightened his muscles, ready to grasp the artifact.  It was glowing now, radiating heat that permeated Lancaster’s clothes.  He was waiting for it to dim; and as soon as it did, he snapped in his arms, grasping the globe.

 To be continued…

[relicworlds-blog]

Lancaster James & the Curse of the Hudrom Mine, Part 1

Through the wall of windswept sand emerged the shadow of a figure beneath a wide brimmed hat who leaned into the storm.  Breaking through the light brown curtain, his weather beaten face dissolved into view; his unshaven chin gritting tightly, his steel blue eyes searching.

They found their mark quickly; the sharp dressed woman whose neatly cut hair all but defied the laws of nature.  Her professional gait posed as though in a museum.  He knew this stance well; she was his boss, a woman he was once married to, Mika Sinovi.  “Welcome to Anovan, Lancaster,” Mika said with the formality of a diplomat, but a slight smile of familiarity.

Lancaster nodded and looked around.  The wind lightened here under the protection of the camp, so he could see clearer now than he had since he unloaded from his partner’s ship.  That partner had wanted to take some time securing Odin’s Revenge, so Lancaster was on his own to face his ex-wife and their business.

She had summoned him to this world to investigate a lead she had discovered at the university where she worked.  Their team was presently investigating a series of planets found on a map Lancaster had recovered, and Anovan had been one of them on that list.  It so happened that a mining colony run by the Hudrom Corporation was on that world, and they had recently uncovered alien ruins in several areas along the ridge they were mining.  They had thought little of it until recently when they believed they had released a curse.

That was Mika’s way in.  Corporations typically did not allow scientists onto their territory no matter how amazing the find unless they wanted an appraisal for their profits.  But now that the alien ruins were slowing productivity, Mika was able to convince the executives that their services would be beneficial.

Mika showed Lancaster to the mining foreman inside one of the long-term tents where she had a bunch of her computer analysis equipment.  The foreman’s crevassed face looked as worn as the land on which they mined, and whose beard was like a wild wood that had never been explored. His eyes bespoke an ongoing determination, yet a fear he could not shake.  “Lancaster,” Mika said to her partner and ex-husband, “This is Otis Lyman. Mr. Lyman, my partner Lancaster James.”

As Lancaster stuck out his hand, the man broke in, “She says you can figure out what’s killing my miners.”

“Well, I can try…”

“Says you can lift the curse what’s been causing the trouble.”

“I never said he can do everything, Mr. Lyman,” Mika said.  “Mr. James can go in and locate the source of the problem that’s viewing to be a curse, and I will be out here monitoring his progress with equipment to help him apprend it.”

Otis’s eyes shot from Mika to Lancaster, digging deep into his eyes the way he would a mountain.  “It doesn’t just view to be a curse.  It’s the symbols.  We uncovered the first of the cursed ones carved into the wall of a cavity, and three miners fell dead, starting with the one what located the symbol.”  As he described the story, Otis pulled flat photographs of the carved symbols out of a folder and placed them on the table. Lancaster picked them up one by one and studied them as the grizzled miner continued, “When we found the second, four miners died, beginning with the one what found it.  After that, no one’s going back.”

Lancaster looked over the second carved symbol.  The photographs weren’t very good; no one there had apparently been particularly good with imagery equipment.  They weren’t clear enough for him to make out what alien origins they were, and Mika’s equipment had not been able to recognize it.  “You said there were more ruins before you discovered these?” Lancaster asked.

“Wilco. She’s got them in her machinery.” Otis pointed at Mika, who was powering up the monitors on her work station.  She popped up several 2D and 3D images on the monitors and the hologram table.  They were pieces of buildings and pillars partially freed from their rocky imprisonment.  Several of them had hieroglyphs of creatures that looked like snakes.

A couple of the ruins were archways, the most prominent of which served as a support inside the mine itself.  Lancaster recognized the architecture as being Chiotho.  The archway inside the mine particularly interested Lancaster as its beam sides were like totem poles with important carvings.  Reading their symbolism, Lancaster theorized they once led to an important shrine that could hold valuable or perhaps powerful treasures.

“How did they die?” came a voice from the entry that startled them all. Standing there was a short figure in a long, dark trench coat that covered a slick suit.  This was Lancaster’s partner Little Jack, who had finished parking his ship to join them.  He stared blankly at Otis Lyman through his large, frosted-over glasses that covered most of his face, waiting for an answer.

“The curse,” the foreman answered as though to say of course.

“No,” Little Jack said definitively, then continued.  “Try again.  Where were they and what passed?”

Lancaster turned back to Otis a little embarrassed by the brashness of his partner, but aware that this was the question that needed to be asked.

Otis eyed Mika, then said, “Day we discovered it, we reported it to our union rep. Then everything was fine the next day; and day after that, we jonderedpast it, and Club Foot died.”

“Club Foot?” Lancaster asked.

“Everyone goes by a nickname.  Hardly anyone knows each other by their real names.”

“Go on, Mr. Lyman,” Mika said.

“Later that day,Trigger bit it.  Then the next day Braxton died.”

“How’d they die?” Mika asked.

“They all got very sick.  First couple ripped their masks off; said they couldn’t breathe.  They turned green, vomited, and died not long after. The others felt nauseous. Stumbled out of the mine or were carried out.  Something got in them, though.  They had breathing problems, then died day or two later.”

“And you credit that it was the curse of these symbols,” Lancaster said.

“Trouble began when we laid eyes on them.  You aprend something else and prove it’s not something the aliens left behind, we’ll regress to work.  Until then, our union rep’s standing behind us and we’re staying out of the mine.”

 *          *          *

 That union rep caught up with Lancaster, Little Jack and Mika near the main entrance of the mine.  They were getting instructions from the executive manager from Hudrom Corp who was cursing about the miners.  “Dango miners are all superstitious,” he was saying.  “Unsophisticated slackers looking for any excuse to avoid real work.”

“Those slackers work for you 12 hours a day for your paycheck,” said the union representative as he stepped up to the small group.  The executive rolled his eyes while the union rep introduced himself to the others.  “Pabu Grappa,” he said, then looked directly at Lancaster.  “You shouldn’t go in there, Mr. James.  There are some places man was not meant to venture.”

“Here comes the drama,” the executive said.  “We have ore to mine and I have superiors to answer to.  The sooner you can show them how crazy they’re being the better…”

“There is ore elsewhere.  Easy enough for us to mine,” Pabu said.  “Lives cannot be replaced.”

“Do you vis what I have to deal with on a daily basis?” the executive said to Mika, who tried to smile politely in return.

“I implore you, Mr. James,” Pabu said.  “Your skills are too great to be wasted in a place of doom such as this.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Lancaster said.  “I’ll be nove, though.  I’ve got some good backup.”  He motioned to Little Jack, who would be going with him into the mine, and Mika, who would be watching from the tent with all her equipment.

Pabu sighed, then said, “Then you should take this.”  He held out an apparatus that would go over the lower half of the face, one for Lancaster and one for Little Jack.  “It may be the only thing to protect you from whatever is killing my people.  And you’ll especially need it if there is a cave-in.”

Lancaster took the mask, then Little Jack did, a little more hesitantly.

“Now get in there so I can put my people back to work,” the executive demanded.

Lancaster and Little Jack eyed him, then Mika said more diplomatically, “I’ll get on the line,” and she hurried off to her station.  The two partners strolled toward the steep, rocky ridge and the yawning, blackness of the mine entrance.  Lancaster took a deep breath.  He had explored many dangerous worlds before, but this one played havoc with his nerves.  He was used to uncharted space where the dangers were a mystery.  Now he had been faced with the results of those dangers. He could see around him the friends of those who had fallen.  They were strolling around the work camp, keeping a comfortable distance away from the mineshaft, many of them watching him.

“Getting stage fright?” Little Jack asked, noticing Lancaster slowing down and assuming it had to do with being watched.

“Let’s get inside,” Lancaster said, and they stepped into the darkness.

Directly within the opening bulge sat a lot of the mining equipment; the vehicles, the heat-picks, the sonic cutters and other explosives.  A few paths led in various directions, but the larger main path was clearly visible, and had a magnorail path that led the way along the floor.  Lancaster walked along this main path, lighting up the way with his Illuminator while Little Jack used the sensors within his glasses.

“I’m in vorlie of taking our time,” Little Jack said.

“What do you mean?” Lancaster asked.

“That executive reminded me why I used to take jobs undermining thicktils like that.”

“Yeah, he was a tyl,” Lancaster said.

“I don’t mean the way he treated us,” Little Jack said.  “Corporations like this one work their employees to their marrow. They use them for all and the novas they’re worth to their dying day.”

“I’m abso it doesn’t help that the corporation is their nation,” Lancaster said.

“You speak up, you’re fired.  If you’re fired, you’re deported.  You lose your home, your family, everything.”  Though Little Jack spoke in his usual monotone voice, it was more than he usually said at one time.  Lancaster knew he was passionate about this.

“What do you register about this corporation?” Lancaster asked.

“Primary business is metallic materials.  Their portfolio’s narrow but profitable, their chief rival is Burbank Corp and they used to be part of the Cordova Barony.”

“Used to?” Lancaster asked.

“Bankruptcy, hostile takeover, that sort of thing,” Little Jack answered.

“Oh. Well, the planet’s on our map, which means the aliens who used to live here were once a target of the Siguerans. So let’s see if we can find anything about them.  Oh, and watch out for any ancient curses.”

“That’s your job,” Little Jack reminded Lancaster.

They soon came upon the alien archway the miners had discovered.  The supports on both sides were carved into designs like totems.  Little Jack could not tell if they were supposed to be animals or just some sort of archaic sculpture.  Lancaster explained they were a little of both.  Statues by the Chiotho tended to be so impressionistic that they typically formed esoteric shapes.  Wrapped around these posts connecting the constructs were more snake-like creatures, only these had thin wings that turned into insectoid arms, and their heads were bulbous knots with no eyes or mouth.  The top of the archway was still mostly buried in the ceiling rock, and what was revealed was worn down with no discernable shape or writing, if there ever was any.

Lancaster studied the structure and captured some images, as did Little Jack. They sent their findings back to Mika, who ran them through her computers at base camp.  “It’s Chiotho all right,” Mika said.  “This archway denotes the entrance to a shrine.  It could be a shrine to several things, a landmark, sacred preservation, government or holy site.”

“I didn’t hear anything about curses,” Lancaster said.

“I don’t have any records of them leaving any,” Mika reported.  “So this is new.”

“Or made up,” Little Jack said.

“Always a skeptic,” Lancaster retorted.

“That executive may have been a thicktil, but he’s on the bull to be annoyed about the miners’ excuses.”

“Let’s vis what they saw,” Lancaster said, and led the way further into the mine shaft.

The passageway now was a mixture of rough cave textures and smooth masonry on the walls and ceiling; alternating quickly between the two.  Lancaster surmised that this had been the alien hallway the miners had uncovered, but it had partly caved in, and the miners were cutting their way through.

A hundred yards further Lancaster’s Illuminator detected a carving up ahead on the wall.  He hurried forward, then slowed, realizing there could be some triggering device. He scanned the surrounding walls, floor and ceiling, switching through various settings on his Illuminator, to locate anomalies, pressure plates, weapons, gases, and other signs of traps. He found nothing.

Carefully, Lancaster set his feet down one by one, watching them settle and looking up now and again to spot any changes in the walls or ceiling. Nothing.  Little Jack had remained behind, standing still, his hand on his pistols Huginn and Muninn, watching through the sensors in his glasses, barely blinking.

When Lancaster arrived at the wall he crouched down to get a look.  It was crudely carved, but deeply cut.  Scanning the depth with his Fathomfinder, he found that the cuts was uneven.  As for the design, even he couldn’t make out if it was supposed to be an animal, or just a drawing; even from an impressionist’s point of view.

“It got real quiet out there,” Mika said, breaking the silence so loud that it caused Lancaster’s heart to jump.

“Phonicking you something,” he responded, and he delivered all the data he had collected to her.  Mika, too, was silent for a while.  Lancaster used the time to search around himself.  He found nothing, so he continued down the passage, which continued to follow the ancient alien hallway.  He could now make out brick layouts in the floor, and occasional flourishes in the design.  The miners must have made quick progress here as they got through nearly another hundred yards before the cave came to an abrupt halt.  Soon before it, another one of the crudely carved designs rested on an up-swinging stalagmite.

Mika at last responded, telling Lancaster that there were no records of that design anywhere in any of their databanks.  He had discovered something new by the Chiotho.

“I’m starting to doubt that it’s by them,” Lancaster muttered as he slowly approached the second carving.  Little Jack remained behind again, scanning the surrounding area with his glasses.

“What do you mean?” Mika asked.

Lancaster now pulled out another device from one of the many pockets in his jacket. This one measured the age of cuts into rocks.  It was by no means exactly accurate, but it could measure the difference between a cut done millions of years ago and…

“Recently made,” Lancaster said.  As he said it, Little Jack, still far behind him, focused in on one part of the ceiling.

“What?” Mika asked.

“Someone here carved th…”

“Cover!” Little Jack shouted, and just in time.  The cave between them exploded.

 To be continued…

[st-just]

Boatcity

[sciencefictionworld]

[sciencefictionworld]

[cyberclays]

Conceptship-08 - by Dmitry Vishnevsky

[just--space]

NGC 6188 and NGC 6164 : Fantastic shapes lurk in clouds of glowing gas in the giant star forming region NGC 6188. The emission nebula is found about 4,000 light years away near the edge of a large molecular cloud unseen at visible wavelengths, in the southern constellation Ara. Massive, young stars of the embedded Ara OB1 association were formed in that region only a few million years ago, sculpting the dark shapes and powering the nebular glow with stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation. The recent star formation itself was likely triggered by winds and supernova explosions, from previous generations of massive stars, that swept up and compressed the molecular gas. Joining NGC 6188 on this cosmic canvas, visible toward the lower right, is rare emission nebula NGC 6164, also created by one of the regions massive O-type stars. Similar in appearance to many planetary nebulae, NGC 6164s striking, symmetric gaseous shroud and faint halo surround its bright central star near the bottom edge. The impressively wide field of view spans over 3 degrees , corresponding to over 200 light years at the estimated distance of NGC 6188. Three image sets have been included in the featured composite. via NASA

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