The Unearthing (9 page)

Through it all, during the dark times when individual animals first learned to eat their young to survive, during the great ice ages that reshaped the continents, during the aeons it took for those same glaciers to finally recede and the flood oceans that followed to rise and fill with life and then to recede and leave their mark on the resurfacing land, for the millennia it took for life to return in force and prosperity to a world all but obliterated by an incomprehensible violence and nightmarish devastation, the Ship lay buried, resting, healing and waiting, while above the Mammals began to flourish.

A small feral creature, designed for ruthlessness, cunning and adaptation emerged. Its lineage was an unbroken chain of evolution, leading back to primitive creatures who had survived the Cataclysm. Had the Cataclysm not occurred, they would have been hunted to extinction by the smaller carnivorous dinosaurs as tasty little morsels. With the dinosaurs gone the furry little mammals’ fate had been forever changed and forever changed the fate of the world. Following the Cataclysm this creature’s descendants spread out across the globe, diversifying, multiplying, adapting to a hundred different environments. In one corner of the world they thrived well enough to begin evolving: creating language; then leaving the trees; learning to hunt, to use tools and then learning to walk upright. The most significant discoveries this primitive species could make after that were the mastery of fire, farming and the domestication of other animals. Their place on the planet was established. In less than a million years the world was theirs.
Below, the Ship rested healed and waited. It slept with its masters final instructions etched forever into memory: Heal and wait.

At last the Ship’s wait was over.

♦♦♦

The Ranger raced across the desert back towards Laguna. The ground shook constantly and violently now; it was all Peter could do to keep control of the wide, heavy vehicle.

“How could it be unearthing itself?” Santino asked, desperately afraid. They were being pursued and this gargantuan object that had lain dormant beneath their feet for sixty-odd million years was suddenly waking up like some mythical giant.

“The earthquakes are centered right around the object,” James replied. “And looking over the record the quakes actually started with very mild tremors the moment the orbital deep probe scan began.”

“And what makes you think the object is causing the earthquake?” Echohawk demanded.

“Because the quake zone only extends as far as the outer edge of the object itself,” James replied.

“How’s it coming hacking into the Grid backbone, James?” Peter asked.

“Not good.”

“You’d better hurry up,” Echohawk advised, “We’re about to have some company!” He looked out the back windshield at the receding dig site. One of the helicopters that had come in with the troops was rising into the air.

♦♦♦

Colonel Isaac Jude picked himself up off the violently shaking ground and watched the Ranger tear out of camp with a mix of stunned surprise anger and the grim admiration that a hunter has for clever prey. People were scattering everywhere around him but he knew the four in the stolen Ranger were the most pressing. He used two fingers to press his headset tighter into his ear, quickening his pace towards the landing area as the aluminum shelter behind him began to collapse.

“Knight to Rooks One and Five,” he hollered to be heard against the din of quaking chaos around him, “Get ready for dust-off. Rooks Two, Three, Four and Six to the Rangers Three and Six; we have targets on the move.” The affirmative call-backs came from his soldiers; members of Jude’s elite covert operations team were referred to as Rooks. Jude staggered his way to the landing pad where his pilots were climbing aboard the helicopter, its blades already rotating for takeoff.

“Lock onto the transponder frequency for Ranger One,” Jude said, speaking his command into the microphone of his headset, “Our main objective is the safe capture of the information held by the people within. Secondary objective is their live capture. Repeat: their live capture is secondary to our mission.
Very
secondary.”

♦♦♦

Lieutenant-Colonel Margaret Bloom reclined in her bunk, feeling the pull of the tumbler-generated gravity weighing her down towards the outer bulkhead of the habitat carousel. She was listening to the rumble of the large spinning module of the station. It was strange how after hours in zero gravity the relatively light two-thirds Earth-normal of the carousel made her feel tired. She and Majors Benedict, Cohen and Captains Boucher and Donnelly were housed together, becoming the first people in the history of the Concord space station series to ever inhabit the brig. Little more than a set of four bare-bones beds and a bathroom facility along the outer bulkhead nestled behind the waterworks and electrical supply housings of the habitat carousel, the brig was still built as a jail; one never expected to have been used. Bloom had had enough of sitting. She began pacing, walking up the long round floor of the brig. It was like walking up a constant incline; when she stopped Bloom was almost directly overhead from her subordinates. Gravity inside the spinning carousel was along the outer bulkhead and this created three hundred and sixty degrees of floor space. Interestingly, if one of them were to jump high enough they would break free of the gravity and hang suspended and weightless in the air as the rest of the room spun around them. From Bloom’s angle, her personnel were over her head. Likewise, they were looking up at Bloom.

“Did you get the signal out, Exo?” Bloom asked Benedict, craning her neck to make eye contact.

“Not in its entirety,” he replied, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant-Colonel.”

“No worry,” She said, “Our next move is to figure out how to get out of here and stop Harrod from taking the data off-station.”

“Not likely, ma’am,” Donnelly said. “I’m sorry. But on three sides we’re along the outer bulkhead. The only inner wall is twice as thick as standard bulkheads with a hatch that only opens from their side.” Bloom paced again, completing her circuit around the floor.

“We can’t just sit here,” Bloom growled. But in truth, she herself didn’t know what more to do. Harrod had won. She’d given him the opportunity to seize the station from her when she’d locked most of the personnel up in the habitat. Any claim she had that Harrod had planned to violate World Space Agency property or international treaty was gone. She and her command staff could be hauled away, court-martialled privately and locked away or otherwise disposed of, permanently. But there had to be something…
anything
that they could do.

♦♦♦

The tremors were worse. With the collapse of the shelter came a series of violent fissures in the ground. Two of Echohawk’s assistants fell into one such rending of the earth to their abrupt and violent deaths. Other people were racing for vehicles or running away on foot. At the dig site was bedlam. But had anyone been able to see the quaking site from the air from even a few meters they would have seen the underlying order to the chaos. Not the whole area was quaking and collapsing. There remained a long, stable landmass extending from the edges of the object to the Pyramid whose unearthing had started the matter. Just before it reached the dig, the stable section of land stretched out in a ring encircling the Pyramid and everything around it for most of a kilometre. Beyond this land bridge the rest of the ground was cracking and shaking, while pinpoints of brilliant royal-blue light began shimmering through the fissures in the earth.

♦♦♦

“We have target in check Knight!” The call brought Jude forward to the cockpit. The windscreen of the cockpit was a giant display and not an actual window. Onscreen an enhanced image of the stolen Ranger appeared, lit up from the surrounding territory and locked in by several sets of crosshair targeting sights. Telemetry on the vehicle’s speed, passengers, onboard electronic and photonic activity surrounded the bottom of the display. Jude ignored them. The Ranger’s movement was erratic as it was thrown around the unstable ground burying the object, as it continued to attempt to unearth itself.

“Arm the ion gun,” Jude said, “Disable their electricals.” Rook Five, the helicopter’s gunner, nodded and began to work his panel. Rook One continued his deft piloting. The gun would fire a sweep of ionized energy at the target, instantly disabling any electrical or electronic equipment aboard by overloading it.

“Charging,” Rook Five said. A staccato pinging noise became one long whine.

“Fire!” Jude commanded. An arc of electric white fury shot from the bottom of the helicopter. But instead of striking the Ranger dead center and crippling the massive truck-like vehicle, it only glanced impotently off the rear fender. The Ranger had been thrown from the force of the quaking ground. As the helicopter banked to pursue, a sudden flare from the ground exploded, blinding them all temporarily as the viewscreen’s RF system compensated for the affront.

“What the hell just happened?” Jude demanded as the helicopter suddenly veered away from the flare.

“I don’t know!” Rook One called as he struggled to stabilize the helicopter. As they regained control, the viewscreen returning to normal, Rook Five reported:

“Knight, it looks like some kind of energy wave shot from the ground; I think that the object caused it.”

“Are we alright?”

“Roger that,”

“Then resume pursuit!” Jude bellowed again. This time however, the Colonel sat down in one of the cockpit’s jumper seats and strapped himself in.

“That was really fucking close, James,” Peter cried as they sped away from the scene, “They almost fried us; you’ve got to hurry it up!”

“It would help if you’d drive us out of this fucking quake zone,” James retorted angrily, “Every time we’re jostled, I miss a keystroke and have to start over.”

“I’m trying, I’m trying!” In fact the distance they had given themselves from the Pyramid had lessened the violence of the quakes. But the ground was still shaking, still breaking open. Peter, James, Echohawk and Santino could only imagine how bad it was at the site.

“I’m in!” James said at long last The violent shaking of the ground began subsiding.

“Okay, give me the OS; I can send this to anywhere on the Grid,” James said.

“Send it to INN,” Echohawk commanded, leaning forward, “Everything we have; don’t bother filtering it--just send everything!”

“Got it,” As their attention diverted to James’s work none of them noticed the black helicopter as it closed on them from behind.

♦♦♦

“Target in check,”

“Fire!” Another bolt of searing white energy arched from the helicopter’s underbelly. This one hit the Ranger dead-on. Sparks danced across the vehicle’s surface as a black weld burn blossomed on its roof. Smoke billowed from under the Ranger’s hood and it rolled to a gradual stop. And it was truly motionless, for now they were well beyond the earthquake zone of the unearthing object. The helicopter circled around, coming in for a drop-down landing less than ten meters from the crippled armoured troop transport.

“Checkmate,” Jude said.

The inside of the Ranger went completely dark. The console and Grid backbone that James had been using was photonic; the circuit-frying surge of energy from the ion cannon hadn’t harmed their processing equipment. However the electrical power supplies for the devices had been destroyed.

“Oh, fuck!” James exclaimed as the helicopter touched down in front of them.

“How much was sent?” Echohawk demanded, “How much information did you get out?”

“I don’t know,” James said, “I don’t know, Prof! Enough, I hope.” The four men sat in silence, watching as two more Rangers pulled up: one behind them, one parked beside the helicopter. Troops debarked: seven in all. They were carrying heavy guns, all aimed at the Ranger. Echohawk and Santino saw the familiar figure of Colonel Isaac Jude debark from the helicopter: walking slowly, deliberately, coming to stand directly in front of the crippled stolen vehicle. In the silence imposed upon them by the death of their transport’s electric and electronic systems, they could hear the not-so-distant thunder of the violent earthquakes caused by the object’s unearthing. It was a wonder they hadn’t noticed it before. Watching Jude’s troops advance toward them, each man in the Ranger went through their own silent introspection. Echohawk thought of his daughter Laura; of Meg, his ex-wife. He wondered if he’d get to see either of them again.

Santino’s mind raced with indignant outrage. He’d come up against the American military before; during years of civil unrest among the Aboriginal Tribes of the Americas as they fought and eventually won the right to establish the Protectorates. Twice Santino had been fired on and had even found himself locked in what would have proven to be a fight to the death with one soldier had friends not intervened. Paul Santino was a veteran of conflicts with the oppressive nature of the military and so his mind was flooded with both outrage at this latest injustice and a grim satisfaction that this should be the way his life ended: locked in combat with the American military. Like so many of his ancestors before him, it would be White soldiers that would take his life. He vowed he would not go peacefully.

Peter sat with his hands on the wheel, staring with dumb disbelief at the approaching killers. They couldn’t possibly mean to kill them, he reasoned. Arrest them, yes. But not kill them. No.

James’ eyes were wide, his ears open, his nose breathing deeply of the air. Every sound, every sight, every smell seemed that much more clear to him. These were his last moments. He was terrified both of dying and that his last seconds of life might be spent grovelling, afraid and so far away from those he loved. This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.