Cutlass Sharpened (3 page)

Stephanie didn’t comment and got the men back
on task. “Boys, set your scanners on broad spectrum. Steven will
take us to the planet’s lakes down in the southern hemisphere since
water will likely have a higher chance of housing complex life.
Stone, you take the northern. Deegen, the equator. Relay
information through mine and Jessica’s terminals…” as she kept
giving orders Renee walked into the cockpit to stare out the front,
holding onto both front seats.

“
We’ll rendezvous in sixteen
hours. By then we’ll have scanned everything.” Said Stone’s deep
timbre.

With that the three supersonic ships broke
formation to work on gaining all information.

After about four hours Renee
found Sparky asleep as Steven commented “If anything, this planet
is rich in iron. This desert planet is
loaded
. If they avoided these damn
sandstorms… We could make a mint with the mining protectorate.
Galicom would drool if we claim it and give them an offer. Too bad
it’s lacking gold and francium.”

“
Papa doesn’t care about
mining opportunities.
You
know that.” Renee said as they made a second pass
over the algae and small insect packed lakes.

“
Too bad. If I didn’t know
the man was a pirate I’d swear we were damn pioneers with all the
places he sends us to on his hunches. Another waste of
time.”

“
Maybe not.” Silence
followed Stephanie’s words. Even Stone and Deegen listened more
acutely. Instead of turning to the two beside her, Stephanie’s
concentrated expression on her flat, translucent holo-screen filled
with images had her speak with her better half. “Babe, overlay
Stone’s forty ninth quadrant and set up a three dimensional display
on the shuttle’s main table.”

“
On it.” Jessica’s soft
voice came through.

Renee backed away as Stephanie’s chair
swiveled all the way around and got up. Renee and the other woman
moved to the interior table of the ship surrounded by a dozen
comfortable chairs, but the blonde woman touched the clear table
made of pure crystal and tiny lasers in the interior edge all the
way around activated in conjunction with the lamp high overhead to
create a three dimensional display of Stephanie’s desire. It took
just a few moments to render a perfect miniature display made
entirely of light with sensors that could manipulate whatever the
user wanted.

Displayed were a range of sloped peaks. Renee
was greatly confused, and not one to hold onto her words she asked
“Mountains? Why are you looking into mountains? I thought you said
water was an ideal place to look.”

“
Normally yes, but if my
hunch is right, the captain may have
not
sent us on a wild chase. If you
look closely, these
aren’t
mountains. When I taught geology as a teacher’s
assistant for my archeology degree she told me to never look at
anything at face-value. Look for what’s
not
there rather than what
is.”

“
I don’t get it.”

Stephanie was all about history and was one
who almost never lost her temper. Woe be to those when she did.
Renee on the other hand only had patience when treating a patient.
For anything else she was quickly bored and easy to set off.

The glamorous blonde beauty
demonstrated with her hands. “Look at how the range lines up with
an old fault line. I’d bet my left arm that those weren’t
mountains, but volcanoes. They only looks like rounded mountains
due to constant battering of lethal sandstorms generated by the
desert.” She discarded all but the largest of them all.
“
This
one in
particular struck me as strange for over an hour, but I couldn’t
quite put my finger on it till Jess fixed it for me like this. What
do you see of this volcano?”

“
Nothing?” She
guessed.

“
Precisely.” Stephanie
grinned all the way to her pointed eyeteeth. “Nothing. The volcano
looks like a mountain.”

“
Uh, I’m with Renee.” Steven
said after setting course along with the fighters to the place the
blonde was interested in. “I’m confused. Isn’t a mountain a
mountain and a volcano a mountain too?”

“
Not at all.” Stephanie’s
normally calm navy blue eyes sparkled with interest of discovery.
“If you look at this big one. It tells me it either was built by
the largest opening or was the last to be made to retain its
stature. If you look at the others around it…” she pulled her hands
together in the hologram to show the extinct volcanoes near it.
“What do you see now?”

“
Oh!” Renee squeaked out
first and pointed “Lava tubes! They all have cavities and chambers…
all but the
big
one!”

“
That’s my girl!” Clapped
Stephanie. “It is a dead volcano, but why would its core be solid I
asked myself. It was the newest in the range. Just because our
scans didn’t find a single sign of unnatural tool marks or
habitation doesn’t mean someone
didn’t
do something here. A standard
long range scan would reveal nothing out of the
ordinary.”

“
My wife’s a genius!”
Jessica lilted with pride and though she didn’t see it, Stephanie
blushed.

Stone reached the mountain first to report
“We won’t have long to work. My instruments detect a massive
oncoming sandstorm that will last a minimum of three weeks. You’ll
have no more than three hours before it hits. I’m also getting
something else.”

“
What?” Prompted Deegen
closing in on his position.

“
I’m uncertain. Could be
nothing. All the iron in the sand is making it difficult for
clarity. Likely boulders being tossed around. The average wind
speed in it is near eight and a half hundred kilometers per hour.
Our ships can’t handle that kind of onslaught more than five
minutes.”

Steven said “Copy. We’re an hour out and I’ve
activated the maximum output to reach in the shortest time.”

“
We’ll give a more in-depth
scan while we wait. If Stephanie’s hunch is right we’ll find
something irregular before you reach us.”

Steven climbed the shuttle up for thinner air
to gain all possible speed without needing to do another reentry.
Stephanie though kept her focus glued to the hologram getting
clearer analysis as the two Fighters flew around and around the
target and soon had her grinning from ear to ear. “Thought to hide
from me, eh? Not a chance.”

Roughly an hour later Renee stood beside
Sparky and felt the minor jostle of landing and lowering of
dampeners once reaching solid ground. She pressed the button which
opened the side cargo hatch and they exited first to find the two
sleek fighters landed side by side on the inner rim of the volcano.
She saw Satellite, Stone’s falcon, flying without need of an oxygen
mask since birds can live easily in higher elevations and Hunters
trained in harsher conditions so they didn’t require breathers
either. Renee and Jessica though already activated their suits
internal helmets to breathe comfortably. They could breathe, but
not comfortably so high up without suffering hypoxia. Renee found
herself mildly irritated towards the three burly mountains of
muscle. Sparky though tempered and soothed her mind without even
saying a word. “You find that gap she was looking for?”

“
Sure did.” Stone said,
rubbing his bald head. “If you call three microns a
gap.”

“
Only three!” Renee gasped.
“That’s thinner than a human hair. Too small for our eyes to
see.”

“
Oh, and we wanted to see
your faces to say it’s a perfect circle. A
perfect
circle.” Deegen tossed his
clean dreads back behind his broad shoulders.

The women stopped and stared in shock.
Perfect circles are naturally impossible. Renee felt excited and
could feel her adrenaline flow.

“
So it’s solid rock with the
exact composition of the volcano.” Said Stephanie as her angled
wrist let out a thin beam of blue light from the suits sleek
functions. The scan light was two meters wide and laser thin, but
it gave the wearer all it needed. “Oh this is interesting… the core
has microscopic silicate compounds not native to this
planet.”

“
So someone not of this
world used crystals to cover their tracks?” Renee said aloud and
eager.

“
A logical conclusion.” She
took an archeologists chisel and chipped a thumb sized chunk out of
the inner core and walked inside to drop it in the shuttle’s
analyzer.

While waiting Sparky
said
“I’m going to fly with Satellite and
keep an eye on the storm. Contact me before you do
anything.”

“
Alright.” She patted his
hard ribs before his four wings lifted his bulk into the air to
soar on the many thermals created by the hot, barren
planet.

Time flew by before Stephanie came out
carrying a green, clear piece of crystal no bigger than her
thumbnail saying “Jess came through. The crystal used to seal this
place used the native rock to fill the gap. This should undo what
was done. Everyone, get back. We didn’t find any traps, but there
could be. Plus we need to stay close to our ships in event of an
emergency. For all we know, nothing is down there, but the greatest
risk could be this cut down the caldera goes to the molten core.
Likely we’ll be uncapping a deadly pressure cooker. At the first
sign of vibration we get the hell out of here.”

Renee called Sparky who came back quickly,
the falcon not far behind as everyone came up against their
ship.

Stephanie sauntered over, placed the crystal
down relatively in the center and backed far away. As she met up
with Steven and the other two she said “Activation code:
Dissolve.”

Everyone tensed to hightail it out of there
should the worst come to pass.

The clear green crystal came alive and sunk
down into the rock that had been cleared of a thin layer of snow
before the shuttle even landed. The group watched closely as the
hole widened exceptionally to the width of the ten meter wide hole,
leaving the untouched ground alone as debris collapsed before being
blown loudly up and out of the hole by trapped pressure, but the
team wasn’t concerned. It was a natural effect built into all types
of crystal excavation. Wind currents carried the excess soil far
away.

Aside from Renee and Stephanie, the others
went inside their craft or risk choking on dust.

A half hour later the hole
gave one final mighty belch of black sand up high in a plume. With
just over an hour remaining before the sandstorm’s arrival everyone
stood around the edge of the deep hole. Waiting for new data scans.
It wasn’t long before Stephanie said “
Something
is certainly down there. The
ground is stable.”

“
We’ll be the judge of
that.” Said Stone while grabbing the miniature grappling hook built
inside his armor. The cable had thirty kilometers of hair thin line
with the pronged hook that looked fragile. Appearance would dictate
it would snap if any weight were applied to it let alone a man
weighing a hundred and forty eight kilograms by Earth Standard, or
Standard for short. The materials were so profound the cable and
hook could easily support four times Stone’s weight.

The other two Hunters followed him in hooking
their lines to the shuttle’s exterior clamp before bravely diving
headfirst down and running along the smooth vertical wall. They
fell just short of terminal velocity and powerful shoulder lights
spread out the darkness’s grip.

Eventually they applied breaks on their
cables to land in the bottom. Immediately their critical gaze
landed upon a strange mass seemingly grown from the wall like some
grotesque tumor. Deegen was the first to draw his circular chakram
blades and approach it while Steven said through his com “We
reached the bottom. It’s quite warm, but bearable. The air is
thicker too, but we found what looks like a silver and peach growth
down here. My scanner is telling me it’s organic and non harmful.
You two better get down here quick and see this. Maybe someone can
explain what it is for I sure can’t.”

“
Has it reacted to you or
moved at all?” Stephanie hooked up her own harness while Renee
rubbed Sparky’s neck before climbing into his saddle between the
double set of wings.

As he dropped down the tunnel, body glowing
brightly to push the dark away they heard Steven say “No, but it is
sure ugly to look at. I think whatever it is is long dead. Or a
cyst.”

“
Then don’t touch it till I
get down there.” Stephanie followed down last while Satellite
remained above, keeping an eye on the storm further that is wider
than his eyes can see across the horizon. The highly intelligent
bird didn’t like time constraints, but did as he was
told.

Sparky landed softly in an expertly done
descent by flaring all four wings and using thick muscle and
tendons made everything smooth. Renee dismounted and came only so
far as the Hunters had and she now knew what was meant by
eerie.

The object was veined with some kind of
silvery, liquid-like substance while over it was a layer of
yellowish orange skin containing some form of suspended fluid. Even
with Sparky and the Hunters’ bright shoulder lights it could not
fully penetrate the depth of whatever it is.

A zipping sound followed by a hiss of breaks
told of Stephanie’s arrival. She unclipped the harness and walked
over with her upraised hand brightly shining its own light.
“Fascinating. Babe, you recording all this.”