Crescent (18 page)

The clinging bits of the structure were all that was left of the first mining site, as indicated by the PDA.

Cold air rose from the abyss—colder than the wind that roared across the planet’s surface. He turned to Ina, but she remained silent. Her unwillingness to speak was a sign of growing fatigue. He felt it, too. His urge to say, “What the fuck is this about?” translated to a mere lift of his eyebrows.

Gerald pointed beyond the opening to where a dark structure stood at the top of a nearby slope. It wasn’t far, but it was a decent incline. He glanced at the PDA. The building was their next waypoint. By the time Gerald lifted his eyes, Ina was taking the first hesitant steps of her ascent. He stopped her by grabbing the thick material of her excursion suit. With a few quick hand gestures, Gerald showed her how to hook up the supplemental oxygen supply that was contained in her parka. Once Ina was situated, Gerald took care of uncurling the oxygen line from his own excursion suit and inserted the small tubes into his nostrils. He increased the air flow gently and made sure it wasn’t set too high. Supplementing the air he was breathing was one thing, getting high off it and falling into the bottomless pit—that was another.

Ina inhaled deeply.
“Much better.”

“No way
we’d
make it up that hill without help. I should’ve thought of this sooner. I’m not used to crawling around on empty planets like this.”

“Isn’t it exhilarating?”

“I was thinking it was cold and tiring,” Gerald said. She looked at him and gave a shake of her hooded head. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “This is all very scientific and wonderful. Let’s go. Maybe we can reach that place before the rain starts.”

“Think so?” Ina said.

“Nope, but it’s worth a shot.”

(•••)

The pair walked for what felt like an endless stretch of time. With each thin inhalation Gerald took, he thought the rain would start falling to deepen his misery. He cast his eyes skyward and then brought them back down to look at a destination that had come no closer.

At long last, Ina and Gerald stood panting in front of a long, single-story building constructed from dark slabs of concrete. The concrete looked to be made up of the same dark material as
Anrar
III itself. An unimpressive metal door with a wheel protruding from its surface seemed to be the only way inside. From their vantage point, Gerald couldn’t see any windows. If there were any, they’d be obscured with ages of grit and dirt kicked up by the forces of nature.

Wind roared across the surrounding plains and flattened the parkas against their bodies. With the wind came more clouds. Gerald placed a hand on the building to steady himself. It wasn’t raining yet, but it would be soon.

Gerald looked at the door. He’d have put money on the entrance being sealed shut from prolonged exposure to the elements. Words were written on the pocked metal face in faded block letters that were obscured with clots of dirt and grime. Ina pulled the sleeve of her parka down over her hand and began to rub at the lettering with it. Gerald watched her for several minutes, then left her there and started around the perimeter of the building in slow, shuffling steps. He came across a slanting system of shelves that hung lopsided from the side of the building, ready to fall at any second. Long, metal tubes were scattered around the base of the shelves. He picked one up and wasn’t surprised to find it almost too heavy to hoist. He set it against the side of the building and unscrewed the top. Gerald nudged the tube with the toe of his boot and it fell over, allowing bits of dark rock to spill out onto the ground: core samples. He returned to Ina, who was looking at the door, perplexed.

“What is it?” he asked and she pointed at the block letters.

“Strange name for an outpost,” she said. “Does that word mean anything to you?”

At first the word teetered on the edge of legibility, but the block letters seemed to grow clearer the longer he stared at them. In an instant, they stood out starkly against the dark metal of the door. Gerald took two jerking steps backward, unaware that he was moving at all.
M-U-R-H-A-T-É.

“Murhate?” Ina asked.
She was staring at the door and not at Gerald.

“No,” he said and shook his head. “No. It’s pronounced Mur-ha-
tay
.”

“How do you know that?” Ina turned to face him. Half of her face was concealed by the hood; within, her eyes sparkled.

“I just do.” His first instinct was to run, but he felt a tingling of suicidal curiosity that made him incapable of fleeing.
Let’s see what’s behind door number one!
He found he was unable to speculate. Each time he tried to think beyond the door, a fog settled over his mind. He took in a deep breath. The air tasted of minerals and rain.

“Let’s get that door open,” he said at last. He heard the words falling past his lips, but couldn’t quite believe it was he who was speaking them. “We’ll check it out.” He cast a glance over his shoulder. The rain was still a good ways off.

Gerald wrapped his fingers around the metal wheel that protruded from the door’s face. The thing refused to budge. He looked up at Ina. She nodded and added her hands to the wheel. Together they grunted and pulled.
Nothing still.
They stood gasping for air with their hands on their knees. Gerald stared at the dark, pebble strewn ground. Luminous spots floated across his field of vision.

There was a squeak. They both looked up, the breath catching in their throats. They looked first at the wheel and then at each other. Squeak. Right before their eyes, the wheel turned.

“Can there be someone in there?” Ina asked.

“Jesus. No.
Of course not.
You yourself told me how long these fucking mining stations have been here.”

“Maybe Kendall and his people beat us down here?” Ina took a step away from the building.

Squeak.

“Maybe.
But I don’t think so,” Gerald said. He felt his bowels shift. “Fuck. It’s
gotta
be automatic,” he said. “Machine assisted bulkhead. I’m sure that’s it.” Yeah. He sounded sure, but he felt a lance of ice run through his veins every time the wheel chirped. The sound was too damn out of place.

The wheel began spinning at blurring speeds and then stopped abruptly. Its chirp was replaced by a terrible moan of metal rubbing stone as the door grated open. Darkness thicker than peat lay beyond. Ina waved something in front of his face. He looked at her stupidly, unable to focus on the object.

“Are you all there, Gerald?” she asked.

“Yeah.
Just…
 
Shit.” He shook his head and took the object from her. The heft of it told him it was a flashlight before it registered to his eyes.

If the darkness in the long building wasn’t impenetrable, it was damn near close. It wrapped around them like a thick blanket. The cones of light cast by the flashlights did little to hold it at bay. There were more of the shelves inside, climbing all the way the ceiling and stacked high with core samples. The whole interior of the building seemed to be a large storage facility, Gerald thought as they pushed further into the darkness. The tall shelves began to recede and the floor sloped downward.

“A geological outpost,” Ina stated matter-of-factly. The beam of her flashlight painted the dusty shelves with light as they passed. “Scientists were stationed here and they analyzed core samples that were brought in from all around the planet.”

Gerald didn’t respond. He couldn’t respond. He had stopped walking and was busy trying to determine whether his knees were about to give out.

His flashlight was aimed dead ahead.

Gerald had seen death before. Recently, even. But what he was looking at now—it was unnatural.

(Part XIII)

Gerald had been a brave kid, growing up. Without fail, he had always been the one sent to check out the haunted house while his friends waited on the other side of some rusty fence, shaking in their hand-me-down boots. Gerald was brave because he had never been superstitious. He didn’t believe in ghosts, the boogeyman, or monsters—none of it. Not even god. It was difficult to fear something you didn’t believe in. So why, he wondered, was a god he didn’t believe in putting his convictions to the test now?

The storage shelves inside
Murhaté
, the geological station, were pushed back against the thick walls, creating a wide clearing. The shelves leaned one against the other, and based on their cockeyed angles they had been pushed there in a hurry. The resultant open space was filled by a large circle of roughly hewn, black stones. Gerald surmised the rocks were carved from
Anrar
III’s
surface. Long, jagged shadows cast by the invading beams of Gerald and Ina’s flashlights cut through the circle. Gerald raised his beam to illuminate a ring of soot-colored metal that was suspended above the center of the circle of stones. The ring was almost as wide as the clearing itself. It was hung in place by a high
criss
-crossing of thin cables. Shards of black
Anrar
III bedrock were set into the circumference of the metal ring at regular intervals.

The sight was creepy, but the abstract art display was not what had Gerald shaking in his boots like his young friends so many years ago.

The misshapen
thing
dangling at the center of the metal structure—that’s what had Gerald’s knees threatening to fail him. It might have been a person at one time. Tatters of fabric hung from petrified flesh so dark that it looked to be made from the rock of the planet itself. The poor creature’s wrists were bound by cables, its arms spread wide. Splintered, blackened bones and shreds of obsidian material were all that remained of a midsection. The pieces were bent outward, like the person had exploded from the inside. Two limp cables snaked across the floor. These flaccid cords were attached to two black stumps—all that was left of the poor bastard’s lower half. A pile of debris littered the center of the circle.
Twisted bits of metal and hunks of stone.
As Gerald moved closer, fragments crunching beneath his boots, he trained his light on the strange cadaver. A few long strands of golden hair still hung from a scalp that was lumpy with protuberances.

Ina knelt beside where the debris was concentrated. The pieces of metal and rock obscured the dusty floor. Her fingertips sifted through the scatter. Ina was looking for something.
For what?
She muttered to herself under her breath—Gerald could not distinguish what she was saying, but her whispers carried like phantoms in the dark, cold space. The shadows seemed to be creeping in closer around them. Ina continued to work her gloved hands through the bits of metal and stone. He aimed his flashlight where she was working and for a second Ina went out of focus. Gerald blinked and she was clear again. It’s just a trick of the light, he told himself.

He looked up at the hanging thing. Maybe it wasn’t even real.
A sculpture or some such nonsense.
Everything did have an abstract art sort of feel. But Gerald knew that wasn’t true. A sculpture didn’t belong in the geological storehouse, any more than the circle of stones or metal ring. It wasn’t a damn art show. But, shit, there it was. He panned his flashlight around the scene. There was a cart off to the side of the circle with a dirty plastic box atop it and two holes in its face. It reminded Gerald of the incubators that premature infants were placed in. There were two sizable black boxes mounted atop short tripods. These boxes looked to be speakers, the kind you’d see with a public address system. An optical disc player sat below one of the speakers. He returned the flashlight beam to Ina.

“What are you doing?” he asked her, his voice was swallowed by the wind that howled outside the structure. The storm was almost upon them. “Ina, what are you doing?” He spoke louder this time.

“It has to be here somewhere.” She looked up at him; her eyes flashed onyx in the beam of his flashlight. “This is the only place it could be. There should be some of it left.
A piece, at least.
Right here.”
Her voice trailed off.

She’s talking like a crazy person again,
he thought
. Like in the cafeteria when I first met her.

Gerald decided that it was best to ignore her for the time being. He’d let her play in the dirt for a few minutes while he attempted to make sense of things. He moved away from her and deeper into the circle, beneath the metal ring, but when his foot crossed over the ring’s lower curve his stomach did an abrupt somersault. A shock, electric and cold, jolted up his leg and knocked him off balance. He landed on his ass.
It just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?
he
thought. He was ready to cut the visit short when Ina shrieked—in delight. He clambered to his feet.

“This is it!” Ina exclaimed, and stood so abruptly that she tottered back over. She got onto her knees, where it took her several moments to regain her breath. “I knew it,” she said, between gasps. “I knew it.” She held something up in the beam of her flashlight: a palm-sized piece of stone. Gerald at first mistook it for more black stone, but when it caught the light of the flashlight, it took on a deep crimson hue. It was a stone knife.

“What the hell is that?”

“This, my dear, dear Captain Evans, is
sanguinite
.”

“Miner’s Bane?
That shit is just a myth—a made up mineral to blame accidents on.” There was a rustle somewhere deep in the station. The wind howled. Gerald looked around uneasily. “Geology lab is over, Ina.
Time to go.”
She was ignoring him and continued to speak.

“This has got to be it!” She held it in front of Gerald’s face. “Look!” She shone her flashlight through it.
Red again.
Yes,
he thought,
I get it.

She was out of breath again and Gerald took the opportunity to interject.

“Great.
Lovely.
Why is
this such
a big deal? What does it have to do with archaeology?” Gerald began to move toward the way they had come. Ina remained planted.

“No one has ever presented, for lack of a better word, hard proof of its existence—even after entire mines had been shut down because of it.”

“So say the rumors,” Gerald interjected but she ignored him and went on.

“And now we have it.” She pointed the knife in his direction. “The stone is a clue to what happened here—
it’s
part of all of this, somehow.” She gestured to the stone circle, a frown creasing her pretty features. “You don’t understand.”

“And I don’t really care
,
to be honest with you. Even better, I don’t want to know. I want to finish my job and get paid. To finish that job, I have to get you back off this rock. And now, it’s time to go. I don’t give a shit about pebbles,” Gerald said. He reached out, grabbed her by the arm, and yanked her to her feet.

“But there is more to see down here, Gerald. I didn’t come here for pebbles…”

“Some other time,” he said. Ina pulled herself out of his grasp and took a step away from him.
Here it comes,
he thought.

“We’re paying you very well, Gerald,” she said.
And there it is.

“I understand that. And you’re paying me well for a reason—my expertise. And my expertise tells me it’s time to get going.”

A rumble of thunder shook the entire building. Large, puffy clots of dust floated down from unseen ceiling rafters; the motes looked like large snowflakes in the shafts of light. The hanging cadaver trembled and began to sway.

“I could always leave you here and come back later,” Gerald said, but he wasn’t serious. He was annoyed, and nervous.

“You certainly could leave me here. Maybe that’s what you should do. And come back later to get me.” Ina nodded once.

“How long do you think the power cell in that flashlight will last? I can’t remember for the life of me if I charged it or not.” This blow seemed to connect. She glanced back up at the corpse that still swayed, and then to Gerald.

She frowned,
then
nodded.”
Fine
, fine.”

Gerald ushered Ina ahead of him and turned for one last look. A flood of shadows had washed over their path, and in those shadows Gerald heard something flutter. Before he could even think to
indentify
the sound, it was gone. He turned to step through the open door and heard a whisper, harsh and dry. He looked to Ina to see if she had spoken, but her face was already obscured by the thick hood of the parka. For him to hear her whisper, she’d have to be up to his ear with her mouth exposed. Gerald quickly stepped out of the geological station and into air that felt super-charged with static electricity. He cast his eyes to the angry sky as thunder rumbled. Then
came
the impression of something rushing past him, causing Gerald to spin in evasion. The outpost door slammed shut in his face.

He took a deep breath and gazed up. It wasn’t raining yet and the sight of open sky helped bring back some sense of composure. The sky was bruised with dark, roiling clouds that looked absolutely swollen. Lighting arced to the ground less than a mile off—a little too close to their present location for Gerald’s comfort. He started away from the building. Ina followed in step.

The hike back to Bean was going to be anything but safe, but Gerald didn’t want to weather the storm in that
place
. The wind gusted. The assaulting particles of grit felt like a thousand tiny needles poking at his cheeks. He cinched the parka hood tight around his face and pulled the goggles down over his eyes. Ina did not have to be told to do the same.

(•••)

Albin
Catlier
finished the last drag of his cigarette. The tightly rolled stick of tobacco had burned past his knuckle, unbearably hot on his fingers and lips. He dropped the butt to the deck of the loading dock and stomped it out. The overseeing detail had taken longer than he would have liked. Had
Albin
known this task would have turned into eight hours of tedium, he would’ve rolled twice as many cigarettes. The farm workers were slow to fill the last of many long, gray crates. They were tired, which was no surprise. There were a lot of guns to move. Not to mention, they had spent the previous night disassembling the elaborate manufacturing systems that had been set up in the Farm’s belly. At least now the workers were filling the final box. If he had to endure another hour of overseeing the idiots,
Albin
would likely eat the barrel of one the rifles they had packed and shoot off the back of his own fucking head.

The workers placed the top on the crate. Magnetic locks activated with a loud
clank
that rolled off into the night. Two collector robots hefted the heavy container and disappeared down a service corridor. With the job done, the workers dispersed without a word. The entire stock of guns was now officially out of the Farm. Shipping and production would begin again in a new location, but not until the Core Sec auditor was gone.

That meant no sales. The stream of income from the gun running was officially dead for the interim.

Albin
was damned if he wasn’t getting paid, though. It wasn’t his problem if Kendall wasn’t able to make shipments. He glanced up at the security camera. A thick smudge of shoe polish covered most of the bug-eye lens.

Albin
hopped down from where he sat on the loading dock’s concrete platform and squinted into the empty shipping area. Only one of the large
floodlamps
was activated. It served to illuminate the area where he stood. That was it. The light was unable to penetrate into darkness that surrounded loading platform nineteen. The clicks and groans of the station echoed in the shadows.
Albin
shuddered involuntarily. He wished he had another cigarette. Distant eye nodes of a collector robot floated in the black void beyond the
floodlamp’s
dome of light, glowing sensors floating like a small swarm of orange fireflies.
Albin
stepped back into the Farm’s shipping and receiving office. The bulkhead slammed shut behind him, closing off the darkness.

“The
fuck’sammatter
wit’ you?”
Jacob asked and looked up from the several feeds that monitored the exterior of the farm house.

“
Nothin
’.”
Albin
seated himself at the table where he had left his tobacco and rolling papers hours ago and began to roll a fresh cigarette.

“They all
done?”
Jacob asked and yawned. His bloodshot eyes were rimmed by dark circles. He turned them back toward the feeds and giggled.

“Yep.
They’re done.”
Albin
placed the cigarette between his lips and got up from the chair. He walked across the small office and stepped behind Jacob, looking over the man’s shoulder. There were six feeds. One of them showed a children’s cartoon cat chasing a mouse with an oversized ball-peen hammer. The cat tripped and fell in a dramatic tumble of fur and dust, sending the hammer skyward; it landed square on the cat’s skull. Jacob erupted into laughter.
Albin
grimaced. The feed should’ve showed looped footage from an empty Hangar 19, not a damn cartoon. If any external monitoring stations accessed the loading dock feed, they should have seen a vacant concrete slab. With the cartoon running, the actual feed would be live.