The Awakening (The Hyperscape Project Book 1) (31 page)

Suddenly, the
door in front of him slid open. “Quick!” he yelled, motioning for Arya to go
through. “Karg, come on! Let’s get the hell out of here!”

Nick ducked
through the four feet thick doorway into the next chamber, with Karg squeezing
through right behind him. Arya was already marveling over shelves full of
artifacts and manuscripts that lined the walls of the chamber. She threw her
head back and released a scream of joy that reminded Nick of a large cat’s
roar.

“We did it!” she
exclaimed. “The Royal Archives! It’s the most magnificent thing I have ever
seen. I’ve dreamed of being inside the Royal Vault since I was a child. There’s
enough in here to keep me busy for the rest of my life. Thousands of years of
Arisian history.” She held out her arms and spun like a graceful ballet dancer
as she took in the sight of it all.

Nick smiled. It
was good to see something bringing joy to her life. She had seen so much
tragedy. So much bloodshed. He turned to look at the marvels that were never
meant for his eyes to see. Cases full of objects filled the shelves in front of
him. Jeweled crowns, royal scepters, all sorts of beautiful things. Down the
row, books that looked hundreds, maybe thousands of years old were stored on
shelves from floor to ceiling. What secrets could possibly be contained in
their pages? He could only wonder.

As he panned
around the room, a familiar object drew his attention. Inside a glass case in
the middle of the room, cradled by a special pedestal, Nick’s hyperspace probe
sat like a museum display. The charred I.S.A. patch lay at the base of the
probe, mounted right above the Arisian words
The Prophecy of ISA.
 
The sight of it made him feel his own mortality, right down to his bones. There
was no denying it any longer. His probe and the patch on his arm had indeed
ended up two thousand years in the past. Just thinking about it made his head
spin.

But what if…?
Nick yanked at the patch on his arm. The Velcro let go with a loud
shook!
He held his patch up to the charred one in the display and compared the two.
There were no discernible differences between them. He slid the strap of the
heavy pack off his shoulder and dropped the bag down onto the floor with a
thud. Rummaging through the bag, he managed to find a lighter of sorts. The
small device was apparently designed to start a fire, not in the same way as a
good old lighter from home, but it would work fine for what he had in mind. He
pulled a knife from the backpack and proceeded to hold it over the flame of the
lighter until it got good and hot. Quickly picking up his patch, he pierced it
with the hot knife. The synthetic fibers melted away, leaving an oblong hole
about three quarters of an inch long. Once again, he held the patch up to the
one on display. If at some point his patch was going to travel back in time,
then this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to study this peculiar type of paradox.
If he damaged his patch, the one in the case would have to miraculously change
also.

 He looked
at the patch in the case. Nothing. No change like there should be,
theoretically, anyway.

“Nuts!” he
muttered, disappointed that there was no change in the patch from the past.

“What?” Arya
asked from across the room.

Nick stood
there, shoulders slumped, eyes on the patch in the display. “It should have
worked. I don’t understand.”

Arya came to
stand beside him. “What should have worked?”

Nick was so engrossed
in the failure of his experiment that he was surprised to find Arya standing
next to him. He flinched at the sound of her voice so close then glanced in her
direction. “If my patch traveled into the past, then this hole I just made has
to show up in the one in this case. But it didn’t.” Nick rubbed the back of his
head and continued to gaze at the patch in the case.

Arya stared at
the hole in the patch. “Unless you journey back to a time before you made the
hole and cause the you from that time period to travel back two thousand years
into the past.”

Nick sighed as
he slumped a little more. “You had to go and say that. Now I’m more confused
than ever.”

Arya leaned
around the glass case to take a better look at the probe. “At least you found
the probe. Why don’t you see what you can find out from the probe’s data while
Karg and I figure out how the hetek we’re going to get all of this stuff to the
ship?” She patted Nick on his shoulder and walked away, leaving him staring at
his patch and mumbling.

Arya caught up
with Karg halfway down the long room. He was studying. Not the
objects
in the room, but the room itself.

“Do you notice
anything about this room?” he asked as Arya strolled up to him.

“Haven’t really
looked at it, Karg,” she answered.

“It reminds me
of the inside of an Arisian ore freighter, only much cleaner. With the
exception of the reinforcements to the walls and the shelving, this looks
exactly like the cargo hold of the one I was on as a refugee.”

She shook her
head, her green hair swinging behind her. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen the
inside of one.”

Karg’s brow
lowered in thought. He surveyed the ceiling for a long time then moved his gaze
to the far end of the room. “I wonder?” Looking ever more intrigued, he ambled
off down the aisle of books.

Curious, Arya
followed along behind, trying to figure out what he was up to. At the far end
of the long rectangular room, a door came into view. Arya leaned to see around
Karg as they neared the end of the room.

Karg walked up
to a panel positioned to the right of the door and pressed a button.

The door slid
open with a familiar
zip
, revealing exactly what he had expected to
find, a corridor with several doors on either side and one at the far end. He
glanced around. Nothing looked out of place, nothing threatening. He stepped
one foot inside the door and stopped. After the incident with the crushing
ceiling, he would be wise to exercise caution. He slowly made his way down the
hall, checking doors as he went. Crew quarters, kitchen, all the things he
remembered from his stay on an ore freighter. Finally, they reached the end of
the hall and the last doorway.

“Karg, I don’t
understand. This looks like a ship, but it’s inside a mountain,” Arya said as
she gazed at her surroundings.

“Exactly.” Karg
pushed a button on the wall, and the door responded by sliding open.

Arya peeked
under Karg’s arms at what was beyond the doorway. “It’s a cockpit! This
is
a ship!”

She pushed her
way past him and into the pilot’s seat. She flipped a switch on the instrument
panel, and the opaque windows of the cockpit instantly turned transparent. Arya
stared in awe at what lay beyond the forward window. In front of them lay a
short tunnel, even taller and wider than the vault room itself. She cocked her
head as she looked at the end of the tunnel. It was a solid rock wall. “How the
frek
did they get this ship in here?”

“They must have
carved out this cavern and built the ship
inside.”                      

A shout came
from the other end of the corridor. “Karg! Arya! Where the hell are you?”

Arya spun around
and saw Nick stumbling into the corridor. He looked even paler than normal.

“Whew! Wow! You
guys scared the crap out of me. Next time tell me before you go walking off
like that.” Nick noticed the cockpit Arya sat in.  Looking thoroughly
perplexed, he stepped inside the room. “Whoa! Talk about a ship in a bottle!”
Nick gazed out of the windows at the tunnel.

Arya smiled as
she saw the wonder in Nick’s eyes. Sometimes he was like watching a child in
awe of the world around him. It seemed like he was marveling over some new
thing every day. How could she not have a warm place in her heart for this odd
man-creature?

“I think we may
have found a way to get all of this stuff to the ship. Now if we can just
figure out how to get it out of the tunnel.” She turned her attention back to
the console. She needed to check the primary systems. Hopefully, everything was
intact and fully functional. “Did you find out anything from the probe?”

Nick pulled his
gaze away from the windows and looked down at Arya. “Hmm? Oh, that’s why I was
looking for you. I was able to access the data and I know how the patch ended
up in the past. It’s not my patch.”

Arya stopped
what she was doing and looked up. “What do you mean it’s not
your
patch?
Whose patch is it then?”

“I don’t know
yet. It’s going to take time to recover the data. Something caused a lot of
damage to the probe. I found out that another ship from earth had recovered the
probe, but the ship became trapped in a gravity well. The ship was out of
control and spinning down into the well. In a last ditch effort, the pilot
tried to open a hyperspace window to escape. The velocity and spatial
distortions forced the vehicle into the side of the window, where it was
destroyed. Before the ship was ripped apart, the probe was thrown clear of the
ship. It traveled through the window and into the past. The patch and the probe
were probably the only things that your people were able to recover.” Nick’s
mouth pulled down at the corners as he lowered his head. 

“What’s wrong?
That’s good news, right? It wasn’t you,” Arya said reassuringly.

“Yeah, but
chances are I knew the pilot. Probably that gung-ho Spaceforce pilot that the
military wanted to use for the mission in the first place. It also means that
the probe never made it to Earth. The only good thing is…that the other ship
and its technology were destroyed. Maybe Earth will be reluctant to send
another one after the first two disappeared. At least there won’t be two
hyperspace modules the Mok’tu can chase down.”

Arya placed her
hand on Nick’s arm in an attempt to comfort him. “Maybe we can try again. We do
have the probe, after all.”

Nick nodded in
agreement. “Yeah, it needs a lot of work, but I can probably get it
flight-ready again. But first….” Nick gazed out the window at the tunnel.

Arya
grinned.  “We have to attend to our current dilemma.”

Karg
interrupted. He’d been studying a screen in front of him for some time. “I
think I may have something. Look at this. See the metal tracks on the ground
stretching from the ship to the end of the tunnel? They actually appear to
extend into the rock wall. I was able to scan the surface of the wall and, just
like outside, there are crevices, grooves cut all the way around the wall at
the edge. At first, I thought it was just remnants from the tunneling process,
but the tracks make me think otherwise.”

“Are you saying
what I think you are saying? The wall is actually a door?” Nick questioned.

Arya whipped her
head around to look at the wall again. “Is it?”

Karg shrugged.
“Could be.”

Nick peered over
the instrument panel. “Karg, what’s that down there in front of the ship?”

Karg used the
ship’s scanner to pull up the area Nick indicated. “It’s…uhhhhh…I don’t know
what it is. It’s some sort of sled with two Kessler engines mounted on it.
Those engines produce enough thrust to move a—”

“Mountain!” Nick
exclaimed.

“Yeah, I think
you’re right.” Arya searched the console. “I bet there are controls for it here
somewhere.” She paused over a small section of controls on the panel then
glanced at Karg.  He gave her a quick nod. She reached down and pressed
the center button.

Outside the
ship, the two engines on the sled came to life. A blue glow illuminated the
cavern as a swirl of dust blew over the windows. A low roar vibrated up through
the floor, and the sled began to inch forward. Nick could feel the power all
the way to his knees.

Arya watched the
readout in front of her. “It’s on automatic. The engines are just above idle.”

The sled picked
up speed, slowly moving toward the end of the tunnel. The team watched intently
as it neared the wall.
Clunk
. The front of the sled bumped the wall and
came to a stop, engines still idling. Nick let out the breath he’d been
holding. He had expected something more to happen.

The intensity of
the blue glow coming from the engines quickly increased and so did the roar.
Dirt blew violently, whipping around the cockpit like a tornado. Through the
dirt, the glow of the engines dimmed but remained barely visible.

“The engine’s
thrust is climbing. Eighty thousand ketras,” Arya yelled above the noise.

“Yeah, I figured
that one out on my own,” Nick said sarcastically. “Is it me or is the glow
getting farther away?”

Karg looked back
down at his console. He had been so engrossed in watching the spectacle, he’d
forgotten about the scanner. “Yes! The wall is moving!”

As the sled
pushed the wall further down the tracks, the vortex of dirt began to calm and
they could see the massive block of stone slowly accelerating down the tunnel
away from them.

“Holy smokes!”
Nick exclaimed. “This tunnel must lead to the other side of the mountain.”

The block
continued its course away from them, gaining speed as it went. It moved along
the rails, gliding through the smoothly cut tunnel, the engines roaring at full
power. Suddenly, a shaft of light streamed in from hundreds of feet down the
tunnel as the massive stone block flew out of the passageway and crashed to the
canyon below. As soon as the sled cleared the opening, the engines shut down
and the contraption tumbled down out of view. All three of the team sat with
their mouth open. A two hundred foot, solid rock door just blasted out of the
side of the mountain, leaving an exit tunnel for the freighter. Sunlight beamed
through the settling dirt. In front of them, they could see the peak of a
distant mountain range through the billowing mist.