Dedication (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 1) (20 page)

There is a gentle meander in the course, and, along the right side, a cliff has slowly risen up where the once roaring stream had eaten into the hillside. Along the face of the cliff, eddies in the stream have—over many cycles of storms—eroded large smooth pockmarks, but one of these marks is not as smooth as the others. It has a crack as tall as Jackson running through the middle. The bottom half of the crack is smooth from the where the water and wind have worn down the rock, but the top comes to a sharp point where the overbearing cliff rests above it. But what is really relevant to the exhausted group is that what was once just a crack in the rock has been widened enough that Jill’s shoulders can fit through, and the rest can make it if they turn sideways.

Too tired to speak up at first, Florence makes her way over to it and peers inside. A blessedly cool breeze toys with the sweaty strands of hair clinging to her face. That is all the proof she needs to call the others over.

“Guys, I think I’ve found something,” her voice is hoarse and faint, but in the still air, it travels easily.

Taking point, she leads the others into the cavern, feeling her way along the narrow crack. Initially, with eyes stunned by the glare of the creek bed, the crack appears to be completely dark, but as her eyes adjust, the tunnel seems to resolve itself from the blackness. She slides between the rocks, and the passageway gets progressively narrower until she can barely squeeze through. Then she gets stuck.

Closing her eyes in exhaustion, she lets out a sigh. At least it felt good to get into some shade for a few minutes, but now, she thinks, it is back to the heat, glare, and dust outside. Opening her eyes, she looks longingly one more time back down into the cool darkness of the crack before telling everyone to turn around, but as she stares, she realizes that the darkness isn’t complete. There is a faint light illuminating the space beyond.

Florence pushes her way past the protrusions blocking her passage and nearly stumbles as the crack widens, bending slightly before opening into a small cave. It is lit, she realizes, by a shaft of light piercing through the roof. This must be where the small stream that had widened the crack poured in from the surface.

Illuminated by the ray of sunlight, Florence collapses in a niche against the wall and watches the others squeeze into the cave. They each have a different expression of relief on their faces as they enter. The rocks are cool to the touch as they sit upon them and allow the space to embrace them, cocooning them from the harshness outside.

*

William wakes because he is shivering, thirsty, and hungry. The cave is now completely dark. The small patch of sky visible through the hole in the roof shows a field of bright stars, but their light is not strong enough to illuminate more than the barest outlines within the cave. Sitting upright, William sips from his water reservoir. The taste of dust and sleep in his mouth coupled with the plastic of the container turn the fluid putrid, but the slightly warm and completely stale liquid is the best he has ever tasted.

As he begins to move, he realizes that his body has only been acting as if it is cold because it is no longer too hot. With the baking sun gone, the desert has certainly cooled off, but the temperature is nowhere near cold. The rocks radiating back the energy from the day ensure that the cool breeze only manages to be refreshing.

He pulls out the detector and switches it on. The indicator instantly jumps up to a higher reading than William can remember seeing the day before, despite the fact that they are deep in a cave. With no way of judging how long they have slept, and fearing that they may only have a few hours left before the merciless sun rises again, William wastes no time in rousing the others. Despite cautiously inching though the darkness, arms outstretched, he still manages to step on someone’s foot and fall face first onto something soft.

Whoever he lands on lets out an indignant yelp, her exhausted dreams interrupted by William’s face-plant into her chest. She proceeds to push, shove, and kick to thwart whomever is attacking her. When coupled with William’s apologies, the resulting racket serves exceptionally well in waking the rest of the team up.

Managing to extricate himself before receiving too many more blows to the head, William tries to organize everyone and get focused back on the task that they are in this wasteland to complete.

“We need to get moving,” he says. “If we don’t find our target by the end of the night tonight, I don’t think we’ll be able to make it another day out there in the heat.”

“You didn’t have to be so rude about waking us up,” an irritated voice snaps back. “You head-butted me in the chest.”

If there were light in the cave, William would be able to see Florence rubbing her chest where he struck her when he fell and glaring in the direction of his voice. She would also be able to see the embarrassment on his face over having accidentally managed to grope the best looking girl on the team. That isn’t to say that Jill is not good looking, William thinks to himself, only that she lacks the classic beauty that Florence has. Bringing his mind back to the task at hand, William continues, apologizing again to Florence.

“I’m sorry, I tripped and fell. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Are you ok?” A noncommittal grunt is all the response that he receives, and so he continues. “I checked the scanner again before waking you guys up. It looks like the target moved while we slept. At least, the signal is stronger than I remember it being all day yesterday.”

“So you’re saying that someone beat us to it?” Jill inquires with a hint of relief in her voice. Her stiff legs are not looking forward to the trek across the sand, even if the sun isn’t beating down on them.

“That’s the only explanation that makes sense,” William admits.

“So we’ve lost,” Mike whines. “Then why’d you bother waking us up? Let’s just stay here until they come and retrieve us.”

“Because,” William continues, exasperated, “even if another team beat us to the objective it doesn’t mean it’s over. If we’re still picking up the homing signal, that means they haven’t been extracted yet...”

“...which means we can still steal the object and call for our own extraction,” Jill finishes his sentence.

“Whatever,” Mike says, attempting an air of nonchalance to make up for his blunder. “I just want this whole dumb thing to be over.”

With all more or less agreed that they should at least go check things out, they slide back out the cave’s entrance. Now that it is completely dark and they have had some rest, it seems to take far less time before they are all standing in the dusty riverbed. With only the stars for illumination, everything has an eerie pallor: The red-brown dirt, which earlier that day had looked like the hard powdered remnants of a brick factory, seems to have softened into a velvety smooth surface. Every step they take sends up a small puff of dust, leaving a slightly hazed trail where they have walked.

The night unlocks the hidden mysteries of the desert. During the day, the details of the rock formations were washed out by the glare and hidden by the heat shimmer that was rising from every surface. By the light of the stars, every pebble and every crevice has its hidden details partially revealed, each one taking on a multitude of shades of gray. Scanning the cliff face as they walk, William sees many more cracks, some larger, but most smaller, than the one in which they took refuge.

William leads the way, periodically checking the detector as the wash, which has gradually sunk into a canyon, meanders its way around rocky outcrops. Rounding a particularly large outcrop, whose spires seem to cut into the canyon like a row of jagged teeth, William glances down at the detector at the precise moment the signal strength jumps up by an order of magnitude. He freezes, knowing instinctively that he must be visible to whoever was responsible for moving it while they slept. He edges back slowly to where the rest of the team is bunched behind one of the rocky protrusions.

Scanning the canyon wall, William fights to make out any details. The diffuse glow of the stars blends everything in the distance into a gray and black blur, the rocks seeming to run together as if smeared by a giant thumb. He finishes scanning everything that lies in the direction from which the detector is registering the strongest signal, but he is not able to make out any details. Without any other apparent options, William starts to edge forward in the direction of the signal’s strongest reading, staying close to the rocks and moving slowly. But as soon as he steps around the corner, the moon rises over the edge of the canyon, casting its white glow upon everything.

Now the canyon and the surrounding cliff faces are littered with pitch black shadows and stark white rock faces, as if the contrast on William’s vision has just been turned up to the maximum. He hopes that the shadow he finds himself in is as impenetrable as the ones he is looking at, because it is the only thing shielding him from any eyes that may be watching. As his vision adjusts, he sees it: About halfway up the face is what he’s looking for. Painted on a flat face of rock above a shadowed area is the Junior Space Corps emblem. Following the ridge line with his eyes, he sees exactly the spot where he would wait for extraction if he had been the first to retrieve the object. Looking closer, he barely sees a flash of movement as something dashes from an exposed position in the moonlight to one in the shadows.

William cannot imagine there being any life in this desert except another bedraggled team such as his own, so even the glimpse of movement is enough to convince him that they’ve found the right spot. However, that glimpse of movement also clearly shows that they are watching for visitors; William can only hope he’s managed to stay hidden in the shadows and to keep his team’s presence unknown.

After edging back around the corner of the outcrop, he describes to the others what he has seen. He explains that the small path that snakes up the face of the canyon wall is clearly covered from above by the other team. Mike seems to think otherwise.

“I say we go up there and just grab it,” he says. “There is no one up there. I think the desert is just messing with your head.”

“I know what I saw,” William replies. “Someone, or something, definitely shifted cover when the moon came up. And the signal was clearly stronger once we all woke up than it had been this afternoon.”

“So what?” Mike continues. “You probably just did a better job aiming it with a little rest than when the heat was making you crazy. And if there is someone up there, we have these to take care of them.” He hefts the training weapon he is carrying and mimes a shooting motion, smiling unsettlingly. “The armorer told me that I have extra potent ammunition in this thing as a reward for my performance in the last exercise. It’s supposed to knock them out in half the time and is guaranteed to penetrate these suits. I’m going to go get this thing; you guys follow if you want.”

He slips around the corner, staying within the line of shadow that clings to the canyon wall. No one moves to follow him; instead they all look to William.

“They’re going to be expecting us to come up from the valley,” he begins. “We probably all got dropped at the same end of the valley and this is the most direct route, so if we get around behind them, they might not even be looking for us.”

The remainder of his teammates nod and gather their weapons, preparing to move. Jill is smiling wryly, and when William asks her why, she explains herself.

“If we can get into position quickly enough, we should have a great distraction,” she says, nodding her head in the direction of the slowly creeping Mike.

The rest of the team breaks into feral grins directed at Mike’s prone form. None of them feel the least bit guilty leaving him to fend for himself. It was clear during the maze exercise that he would have taken advantage of them if he’d had the chance. Since then, in their theoretical activities, he never once sacrificed his own personal gain for the benefit of the group. He may be the rising star of on their roster, but he definitely is not a member of the team.

The canyon wall looks as though it was eroded away by water swirling against the rocky teeth that now hide them from their objective. Though the water is long gone, the resulting loose rocks and boulders provide them with an easy climbing surface—at least easier than the sheer vertical faces that existed farther upstream in the canyon. Most of the way up, they are crawling on all fours, but in some places, they have to jump and pull themselves up onto ledges. In one spot, Jackson even has to boost the shorter members of the team up, since they can’t reach the next ledge. Despite a few additional scrapes and inhaling a lot of dust, they make it to the top without hearing any of the shouting that is bound to ensue once Mike encounters one of the sentries.

The ridge that has hidden their climb continues above the canyon and runs out along the plain before slowly fading into the terrain. Once they are all together at the top, they jog for a short distance along the ridge before cutting up it at an angle. This high up, it is not much more than a row of gentle hills, instead of the insurmountable wall of jagged spires that bites into the canyon below. As he reaches the top, William crouches down and then slowly crawls up to the peak to avoid being silhouetted against the stars.

Below is a small depression in the plain, near the edge of the canyon, and within it are the sleeping forms of three members of the other team and a bright red backpack with an antenna protruding from the top. Another form is laying prone at the edge of the canyon, scanning the floor below, while the fifth is unaccounted for.