The Awakening (The Hyperscape Project Book 1) (30 page)

Between Karg
poking him and that
thing
scaring the daylights out of him,
Nick
was struggling to breathe. “Don’t turn your back on it, Karg,” Nick huffed.
“They always do that in the movies and it’s never a good thing.”

He shook his
head as Karg ignored him and walked off. “Why do they always turn their back on
the monster when they think it’s dead?” he muttered to himself.

He forced
himself upright again and stared cautiously at the creature. Scaly skin, large
claws, and big teeth. It looked surprisingly like a Velociraptor, only much,
much bigger. It appeared to be very dead, but he wasn’t going to take any
chances.

Karg washed his
dung encrusted boot in a nearby shallow stream of water. Even he was having a
problem dealing with the stink. “What
is
that thing, anyway?” he asked,
as he peered over his shoulder at the huge animal sprawled on the ground.

Arya shrugged.
“I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s a
dinosaur. Or a cousin of one, by the looks of it,” Nick replied.

Arya gave him a
puzzled look. “You have these things on your planet? It’s a wonder your species
survived.”

“Well, no we….”
He scrunched his eyes at her. “What’s that supposed to mean, a wonder we
survived?” Nick paused, waiting for an apology that never came. “Never mind.
These lived on my planet millions of years ago. We only know about them from
fossil records. They kinda sorta predated us.”

“Oh, well, that
explains it then,” Arya quipped back with a grin. “Come on, we need to get
moving. There may be more of them nearby.”

Nick carefully
stepped around the huge corpse, keeping his pistol aimed at its head as he
went. The monster’s body faded into the fog as they made their way through the
jungle. Nick couldn’t help but look back every few seconds to make sure it
wasn’t following. He just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was playing dead.
He’d watched too many creepy movies growing up. The monster always came back to
life. Right when you least expected it.

“Hey, guys, why
do I have the rear, anyway?”

The forest floor
gave way to a bog of sorts. Nick’s boots squished and slid in the smelly mud as
he pushed to keep up. Soaked and covered with mud, solid ground slowly emerged
under his feet again as they trudged forward. They had finally come to another
rocky outcropping where he could get a firm footing.  A short distance
ahead the blank stone face of a mountainside stared back at them.

The team
approached the rocky vertical face and stopped. Nick looked left, then right,
then up. Nothing but rock as far as he could see in the fog. “Now what?”

Arya adjusted
the setting on her scanner, but it was no use. The rock resisted her scans.
“The properties of this rock make it impossible to scan. But the coordinates
are five hundred feet that way.” Arya motioned in the direction of the solid
rock wall. “Inside this mountain.”

“Sounds like the
perfect place to hide something. I bet we aren’t equipped to dig five hundred
feet through solid rock,” Nick said to Karg, out of the side of his
mouth.  “Told you we should have brought more stuff.”

Arya turned and
gave him a stiff glare and went back to fiddling with her PDU. Holding the
scanner out in front of her, she stepped closer to the rock wall and brushed
some of the vegetation aside with her free hand. She rubbed her fingers along
the rock then stopped on an indentation. Using one finger, she outlined the
small impression while examining it with the scanner.

“What do you
make of this?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the screen of her PDU.

Nick walked over
and peered closely at the small oval depression in the stone. He brushed some
dirt out of the crevice with his fingers. It wasn’t exactly an oval. There were
some indentations on either side of the top and a faint pattern carved into the
main depression. Nick struggled to make out what he was looking at. It seemed
familiar somehow, but why he wasn’t sure. Maybe if he could clean up the rock
face a bit he could get a better look.

Arya held the
scanner in front of the dent, flipping through different visual wavelengths. As
she flipped to ultraviolet, a clearly defined image of what lay beneath the
dirt encrusted surface emerged. Her eyes widened as she turned and stared at
Nick.

One look at the
image and Nick quickly holstered his pistol. He knew exactly what she was thinking.
He reached up and pulled the amulet from under his shirt and held it out. The
shape and design on the amulet matched perfectly. Pulling the necklace over his
head, Nick held the amulet in front of the carved relief. With a nod from Arya,
he pushed it into the indentation.

Vibrations
rumbled at their feet as dirt fell from vertical grooves in the wall, just left
of where they stood. A ten foot high, eight foot wide section of the rock face
moved back several feet and then slowly slid into a pocket within the solid
stone mountainside, revealing a dark passageway. The three leaned into the
doorway to take a peek down the long and mysterious tunnel into the unknown.

“That’s so
takei!” Arya voiced, her eyes glowing with wonder.

Nick looked over
at her with his usual confused expression. “What the hell is takei?”

“Oh, sorry. It’s
slang for…well, it kind of means….”

Karg
interrupted, reading from the screen of his PDU. “Here it is. The forty-seventh
edition of the Interstellar Dictionary defines takei as ‘
practically perfect
in every way.
’ But you’d probably just say
cool
.”

“Cool,” Nick
replied, nodding in agreement as he peered back into the depths of the black
cavern. “I’ll take the rear,” he quickly spit out.

Arya raised her
brow. “Now you
want
to be at the rear?”  She continued scanning,
but still couldn’t get any definitive readings. It was a most unusual rock
formation. The crystalline matrix combined with its high metal content
scattered the scanning beam, making it hard to determine where the passageway
led.

She reached
down, pulled out her pistol, and switched on its built-in light. “Lights,” she
commanded.

The boys drew
their weapons and flipped on their lights, glancing at each other nervously as
they prepared to enter.  Arya led the way, followed by Karg, with Nick
bringing up the rear. Several yards into the black corridor, the stone door
shut behind them considerably faster than it had opened.

“I knew it. I’m
telling you, I knew that damn door was going to shut behind us,” Nick grumbled.
“Hey, wait up.” Nick stumbled forward, trying to catch up to the silhouettes of
his teammates as they slipped into the darkness in front of him.

Arya’s light
fell onto a metal door ahead of them. Tri-tanium by the look of it, and damn
solid. As they approached, much to their surprise, the door opened
automatically. Beyond the door, a larger chamber loomed in the inky blackness.
Oddly, the floor on the other side of the doorway was no longer stone, it was
metal. Arya cautiously stepped inside. Recessed lighting in the ceiling
gradually illuminated what lay in front of them. A rectangular metal room
emerged from the darkness. The entire thing was built from solid tri-tanium,
even the ceiling. They were in one big metal box. No markings, fixtures or
furniture, except for a door at the far end and a control panel on the wall
next to it. The team turned in circles looking for any sign of danger as they
crept toward the door at the far end.

The door behind
them sprang closed, the slamming sound echoing off the walls of the chamber
like the loud roar of a stick of dynamite.

Nick spun around
and stared at the door. “Damn! How stupid are we? Do we even have a plan for
getting out of here?”

Arya ignored him
as she examined the panel near the door. “Nick, bring the amulet here.”

Nick jogged over
and handed the necklace to her. An indentation in the panel similar to the one
outside caught his eye.

Arya pressed the
amulet into the depression.

Nothing
happened.

“Sket!” she
hissed.

Hoping something
had simply glitched, she removed the amulet and pushed it back into the
indention again. Clanking sounds, like heavy gears grinding away in giant
machinery echoed through the room.

“Sounds like a
giant safe door unlocking,” Nick commented.

“That’s what I
was counting on.” Arya stepped back with a smile, confident that they would
soon be in the secret Royal Vault.

Another set of
gears began to grind somewhere outside the metal walls.

“That seems like
a good sign. The door should open any moment.” She readied herself to go
through the door as soon as it opened. “This has to be the door to the vault,
right guys?”

A creak in the
ceiling made her glance up. “Frek!” she screamed. The ceiling was slowly
lowering, moving terrifyingly closer with each second.

“Holy—“ Nick
instinctively pointed his gun at the ceiling.

“Like that’s
going to be any freking help at all!” Arya shouted at him.

Karg raised his
four arms up and pressed them firmly against the metal that was marching down
on them. His muscles flexed as he tried to slow the encroaching ceiling. The
strain was abundantly clear in his clinched jaw. Karg’s face tightened more as
a bead of sweat rolled from his forehead.  “Don’t know how
long…I…can…do…this,” he whimpered, his legs trembling from the effort.

“Yeah, well,
buddy, big guy, it’s not working anyway,” Nick said as he frantically looked
around the room for an off switch.

He glanced over
at Arya.  She was busy punching symbols on the panel. Nick hadn’t even
noticed the grid of symbols before. He moved to take a closer look. The symbols
appeared to be a keypad, and the millions of machines in his head confirmed it.
The translated values appeared before his eyes. Numbers. A glance above the
keypad revealed a symbol that defied translation. To the right of that was a
short line, followed by a dot, followed by three more short lines.

“Do you know
what these mean?” Nick asked, pointing to the row of symbols.

Arya was still
frantically punching different key combinations. Each time she punched a
sequence an error buzzer sounded. “No idea. I suspect it is something that is
only revealed to highest members of the Royal Court. I’ve never seen them
before.”

One glance at
Karg let Nick know they were in a losing battle. No matter how hard Karg
strained, he couldn’t slow the ceiling’s relentless march downward. His muscles
quivered under the enormous force.

“Buddy, you
don’t look so good,” Nick mused.

“No sket!” Karg
roared then collapsed to the floor.

Nick figured
their weapons were probably useless, but what the hell.  He ran to the
other door and fired two rounds at the seam. The blasts ricocheted off the door
and whizzed around the room, causing everyone to duck to avoid getting killed
by the bolts of plasma.

“Will you knock
that off!” Arya yelled as she furiously worked to figure out what code would
possibly open the door, or at least stop the ceiling, which was now a third of
the way to the floor. “Nick! Get your arsk over here and help me figure this
out!”

Nick jumped to
his feet and ran over to her in a semi-hunch. The ceiling was creeping lower
and would soon block the access panel, cutting off any chance they had of
saving themselves.

“Okay, four
lines and a dot. It looks like maybe the answer fits in these spaces. Like
something-point-something-something-something. This dot could be a decimal
point.” Nick studied the symbol directly to the left of the dashes. A circle
with another symbol inside it. “Looks like Japanese to me. No, never mind, that
wouldn’t make sense.”

“Hurry up!” Arya
frantically screamed.

“Yeah, yeah!” he
yelled back.  “I got that part! You don’t have to remind me!”

He stared at the
odd symbol for a moment then tilted his head to look at it from a different
angle. He wiped some of the dust off with his fingers, and badah-boom! The
symbol suddenly made sense. “Pi!” he screeched.  “It’s goddamn pi!”

“What?! You’re
hungry at a time like this?” Arya stared at him as if he’d gone loony.

“No, not that
pie.  Pi. Only it’s shown here upside down.” He pointed to the symbol
within the circle. “It’s one of the most important mathematical constants. The
relation of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. But why would this panel
have a symbol from Earth mathematics? Unless….”

They both looked
at one another and simultaneously yelled. “The prophecy!”

Nick placed his
thumb and index finger firmly on the symbol and twisted. “It looks like this
may—”
Click
. The circle began to turn. Nick twisted it all the way
around until the symbol was right side up, and then it stopped with another
click. “There, now the symbol is right side up.”

They both looked
up.  Nothing had happened.  The ceiling continued its relentless
march, inching down frightfully close to their heads. They were running out of
time.

“Wait! Okay, I
got it now. The dashes and the decimal…it’s the value of pi!” Nick took his finger
and pressed the buttons as he spoke. “Three-point-one-four-one.”

A series of
clunks emanated from deep within the structure, echoing around what was left of
the diminishing room. Then silence. All three of them looked up.  The
ceiling had stopped just inches from the top of the panel.

“Great God
Awmighty!” Nick shrieked.  “I thought I was gonna be a squooshed
pancake!”  He plopped down on the floor and rolled around for a moment,
reveling in the fact that he was still alive.  They were all still alive.
He took a deep breath and smiled.

Another clunk
and Nick stopped smiling. His gaze panned around the room. “What now?” he said
in a low voice.