Jaunt (4 page)

Shajda soon led them to the familiar section of the path. He continued onwards, beyond a series of outcroppings that formed a natural barrier to the unaided and unfamiliar eye. Mason noted again the absence of crash strata, lending more credence to his private hypothesis of river flooding, which conveniently hid any immediate connection to a crash site.

A bowl in the structure of the mountains soon opened up, and they realized they had ventured into the bottom of a thousand-meter crater. De Lis and Waters crouched, scrounging around the exterior of the bowl with sample bags, ready to collect the first specimens. De Lis was curiously quiet, Gilmour thought. The agent at least expected the doctor to give some profound announcement, perhaps justifying their presence there. But true to the scientist he was, the doctor silently gathered his samples. Grappling for a useful purpose, Gilmour and Mason walked around the bowl’s perimeter, studying the layout of the land. Mason even briefly conferred with Valagua, but the historian could only serve to validate Mason’s flooding theory as the explanation for no visible signs of a meteor or other “normal” crash debris. Whatever had crashed here, neither the landscape nor the scientists were forthcoming.

At least yet.

Shajda suddenly tugged at de Lis’ and Waters’ arms, gesturing down to the bowl’s nadir. At first trying to ignore the guide’s incessant commotion, de Lis finally acquiesced and rose to his feet. Sighing, he and Waters followed Shajda’s descent. The Sherpa raced ahead some five meters into the crater, almost as if he knew what was down there.

“Slow down!” de Lis said, fanning the dust from his face. “You’re kicking up potential evidence.”

Shajda pointed to the bare ground repeatedly, drawing de Lis and Waters to the spot. The two trailed behind him with trepidation, regarding the soil cautiously. At the lip of the crater above, Gilmour and Mason watched the trio’s exchange with interest, if not outright amusement. Venturing that this was the best—if only—use of their time, they inched down the tracks left by the trio, taking note of the crater and its desolate contents, mainly its lack of eye-catching stones.

“Stacia, get some more samples from the bottom, just for measure.” De Lis looked back to their guide, exasperated. “I don’t see anything out of the ordinary here. Why do you keep telling me that?”

Waters retrieved several kilos of material and placed them in her bag while Shajda shoved a pile of loose rubble into de Lis’ hands.

“This is the same material Doctor Waters is getting. Why do you keep giving it to me?”

Shajda smiled and pretended to shovel with his hands. “Dig.”

De Lis paused; if Shajda was anything like that old abbot, then he knew this place’s secrets as much as he knew its trails. The doctor peered over to Waters, ready to give the Sherpa another chance. “Stacia, break out your pickaxe!”

Gilmour, Mason and Valagua walked up behind de Lis, puzzled at his swift call to action.

“Everyone, your pickaxes!” de Lis yelled. “Start digging!”

The five lowered their backpacks and removed their collapsible pickaxes, unfolding each to their full length. De Lis gathered the group at the very center, pointing out Shajda’s hand-scooped holes, then began his assault on the crater.

Cracks from all five pickaxes broke the hardpan open, revealing soil unseen for decades, centuries even. Ten hands peeled away the broken earth and tossed it aside, exposing the dark, rich underlayer.

Waters clawed a palmful and inspected the cake of burnt and unaffected desert humus closely. Flicking out a piece of burnt soil with her index finger, she compared it to a holograph of similar soil from her holobook. “This is definitely debris strata, Richard...maybe two hundred years old.”

“Keep digging,” de Lis instructed. “Let’s try to find the impactor by sundown.”

After several hours of excavation through two meters of ground, Valagua, Gilmour and Mason had uncovered a twisted chunk of metallic debris from its earthen cage, which, just moments earlier, Valagua had unknowingly whacked into with his pickaxe. Facing the darkness, de Lis and Waters rushed over to the trio and helped scoop out the reclaimed debris, eager to catch their first glimpse of the impactor before night reclaimed it. Taking shifts with their pickaxes and shovels, they managed to gain enough leverage to forcibly extract the metallic debris after several moments, lifting it out of the pit ever so slightly. With the team breaking for a moment, Waters scanned the meter-long debris with her holobook, allowing the device to estimate the material’s density and mass by its composition. Seeing the results, her eyes bugged out; the metal was denser than all but the most advanced industrial steel alloys humankind had yet conceived, little wonder it was able to survive a collision and remain in a good state. If this relatively small piece made it through, she had to wonder where the rest lay....

Calling their break over, de Lis produced a line of osmium-nanotubular cord and tied it to one end of the debris, securing it with a winch that Gilmour and Mason had earlier drilled into the lip of the bowl. On command, the two agents and Waters pulled on the cord, while de Lis and Valagua pushed the debris up and out of the excavated hole, then clearing the lip of the bowl, where they left it lay. Hunched over and grabbing their knees, the team paused for a few breaths.

Looking up from his work, de Lis caught sight of a lone planet twinkling high in the ultramarine atmosphere. Clapping his hands once, he said, “All right, we’ve just lost the sun! We need to get this back to the camp.”

Waters retrieved the winch while Valagua wrapped up the cord and placed it over his shoulders. With Shajda donning the group’s rucksacks and leading the team back to the camp, de Lis, Valagua, Gilmour and Mason hoisted the debris up between the four of them and arduously began the trek back with their cargo.

What are we doing here?

The two agents headed away from the jumpjet after leaving the impactor in the mobile lab. De Lis had dismissed the group afterwards, instructing them to get a good night’s rest. But the same question kept repeating in Gilmour’s mind, forcing him to rethink their true purpose here.

“Why
did
de Lis select us? Our specialty is intel and investigation, not archaeology,”

Gilmour said, his irritation getting the better of him. “De Lis said we’d do nicely, but at what? So far, we’re just his grunts.”

After entering and sealing off their end of the tent, Mason removed his rucksack and his hiking clothes, replacing them with his warmer slumber garb. “This is the government’s baby...there’s a reason they sent us. The Russians don’t know we’re here. If we can keep this quiet, then we’ve won.” He rubbed his eyes and sighed. “Maybe that’s why. We’re discreet.”

Gilmour slung his rucksack to the floor. “Get me behind the lines...but don’t have me digging up two-hundred-year-old garbage. That’s not my game, nor the IIA’s.” Privately, he wondered just who de Lis was really serving; himself, or someone above them all. The morning alarm roused Gilmour and Mason from their respective cots. A blinding dawn sun steadily infiltrated the tent canopy’s thin fabric, inciting them to dress once again into their hiking gear.

Exiting the tent after a sponge wash and a quick course of field rations, Gilmour’s and Mason’s ears picked up the jogging footfalls of Javier Valagua rounding the corner from the jumpjet. The historian stopped before the two and removed his sunglasses, his feet blowing dust into the morning air.

“Agent Mason, Agent Gilmour. We’re about ready to open up the wreckage.”

Gilmour’s attitude hadn’t shifted much since the night before. “And we’re needed for this...?”

Oblivious to the agent’s facetious words, Valagua said, “This is the big moment, why we’re here.” He checked his wrist chrono. “We’ve got two minutes, agents.”

Trained to obey their orders despite any personal misgivings, Gilmour and Mason joined Valagua on the return path to the jumpjet, shelving their thoughts for now.

Once inside, the trio bypassed the cramped seating to enter the mobile laboratory, situated at the rear of the craft. The lab itself was not much larger than three square meters, and came equipped with a island centered exam table, which was now inhabited with the debris recovered from the crater. Each wall was sloped down from the ceiling to the floor, brimming with cabinets, racks and shelves of diagnostic tools and other scientific equipment unknown to the two agents.

De Lis welcomed the trio back to the lab, where he and Waters had donned goggles. Waters crossed in front of the trio to a box-shaped console bolted to the lab wall, where she drew a half-meter long laser torch. After typing in a short sequence of buttons on the console, Waters stepped back to the exam table and the wreckage.

De Lis tossed goggles to Valagua, Gilmour and Mason. “You’ll need those.”

Whipping the torch’s hose around her, Waters soon fired up the device, eliciting a blue spark from its curved head. She minutely adjusted its intensity with a twist of its nozzle, then subjected the debris to the torch without hesitation.

Gilmour and Mason watched the invisible laser pierce through the debris’ outer layer, a twisted bar of dark metallic material. The scream of the wreckage bounced between the tight walls of the lab, making Mason think that de Lis should have provided earplugs, too.

De Lis, now outfitted with thermal gloves, assisted with the procedure, lifting the first bar away after Waters had removed it from the carcass. She then cut her way around the perimeter of the debris over the next few minutes, working to expose what appeared to be a compacted sheet lying flat against the interior of the wreckage. Once the sheet had been cut, de Lis peeled back the charred metal canvas, allowing it to rest open halfway.

Inside, more twisted metal lay compressed together, perhaps due to the centuries it had spent locked in earth. De Lis picked at the various layers of material with pliers, eager to learn what lay beneath. He gestured Waters to gently cut down the center of the metal, enough to unlock more of the layers.

Waters skillfully maneuvered her way into the wreckage like a surgeon. Adjusting the laser accordingly, she started to uncover the central layers, which proved to be difficult; the metal whined under her torch, resisting her efforts to pry it open.

She looked at de Lis for a course of action; he gestured for her to up the power. Again, Waters adjusted the torch, strengthening the photon frequency. Refocusing on her task, she took the torch to the metal while de Lis worked at it with his pliers, attempting to wrench the compact material loose.

A loud hiss and a pop from inside the wreckage startled the assembled group, leaving de Lis shouting, “Stop!” In his pliers were clamped the last metal layer, smoking fiercely.

Waters extinguished the torch and removed her goggles. Setting the torch down, she inspected the specimen in the doctor’s pliers. Valagua, Gilmour and Mason followed her study with their own.

De Lis placed the metal into a sample dish, saving it for future analysis.

With a lamp, Waters spotlit the hole in the wreckage, examining the crumpled layers for any other hidden layers of composition. She threw her gloved hands inside and rummaged around, feeling the tough metallic material on all four sides. Her fingers detected nothing different until they brushed against a smooth, bulbous object lodged between several layers of twisted debris.

“Richard, there’s another object in there...it’s not part of this metal.”

“Can we get a better look?”

“I think we can.” Waters crossed to the other side of the lab and opened a cabinet, removing a long, slender wand. At one end was a centimeter-wide sphere, which she grabbed with her right hand, extending the wand out to a full meter.

Waters made her way back to the table. Above it was situated an holographic monitor, planted on a descending deck, which she pulled down to view. With the flip of a button, Waters activated the monitor, giving them access to the three-dimensional view produced by the spherical holo-cam at the end of the wand.

She fed the wand into the mouth of the debris, producing alternating infrared, ultraviolet and optical views of the shaft on the monitor. The group watched as the holocam wound its way through the hole, finally coming to a halt at the end. Waters rotated the sphere until it caught a glimpse of her quarry: a black, globular object that separated itself from the other, similarly colored metal by its unusual UV spectrum.

De Lis placed an index finger near the monitor. “There—Stacia, get a closer view.”

She magnified the holocam’s image threefold.

Intrigued, de Lis tapped a button on the monitor deck, which performed a cursory analysis of the object’s EM spectrum. Below the image, a series of peaks and troughs were displayed. “You’re right, Stacia. That’s not metal. Spectrum is organic, heavy in calcium and oxygenated minerals.” He exchanged a look with Waters. “Let’s get it out of there.”

Twenty minutes later, Waters and de Lis had carved up the remaining wreckage, temporarily placing the disjointed pieces around the lab’s walls. Waters, with a pair of pliers in her hands, reached over to the metal layers containing the organic object. De Lis held the metal while Waters extracted the object from its centuries-old entrapment.

The object popped out sooner than Waters anticipated, dropping out of the pliers. Only good reflexes by her left hand kept the object from hitting, and most likely smashing, on the lab’s reinforced metal floor. Throwing the pliers down, she grasped the object in both hands, allowing all in the lab to glimpse the unusual artifact under the glare of real lighting. A shade of mottled brown stained the artifact, as if bruised.

The five said together, in immediate synchronicity, “A skull.”