Rise of the Altered Moon: Altered Moon Series: Book One (The Altered Moon Series 1) (19 page)

The two explorers donned their helmets and gloves, sealed the seams of their biosafety suits, activated the internal respiratory filters, and stepped into the airlock chamber. CJ opened the outer door and lowered the access ladder. He climbed down followed by Gina, who ran a quick sensor sweep of the area. They proceeded across the sand-blown rocky basin to the entrance of the excavation.

The ground that surrounded the excavation showed signs of recent heavy activity. There were drag marks of cargo sleds, tread marks of landing gear, and the footprints of many different people. CJ and Gina both drew their K-13s and cautiously approached the mouth of the subterranean tunnel. They moved in and followed the tunnel into the ground. It began to take the shape of the corridor the deeper they went inside. Erosion by centuries of wind and sand had wiped clear any semblance of the exterior of a building. The further they went, the more the features began to take the familiar shapes of walls, stairs, and columns.

The areas of illumination from their lights swam over the surface features of the corridor. The helmet lights shined on what was just in front of them, while the wrist lights lit up whatever they pointed it at.

“Watch for trip wires and be careful where you step,” CJ warned Gina. “They may have had the time to leave some party favors behind.”

“Copy that, Cap,” Gina acknowledged.

The corridor led to a grand balcony that ran along three sides of a massive audience chamber. A raised platform sat at one end of the chamber that had a long table and fifteen high-backed elegantly wrought chairs. An antechamber with several doors filled the space behind the ancient table. Time and gravity had worked their magic over the ages on the ancient chamber. Chunks of rubble from the walls and ceiling lay on the floor among centuries of sand and dust.

The balcony was half-moon shaped with two stairways that wound down around the perimeter of the chamber. They opted for the right side and headed around the corner when they saw three armed figures in EV suits standing at the top of the stairway.

“Ambush! Take cover,” CJ shouted, as he grabbed Gina and they dove behind a large kiosk of stone.

“Behind us,” Gina yelled, pointing at four other figures at the top of the left stairway.

CJ and Gina rolled into prone positions and took aim at their attackers. The signature blue sizzle of Gina’s Rellia K-13 charged hydrogen particle pistol tore through the chest of the last man on the right, who just stood there…not falling, not firing back, not moving at all, in fact.

“What? Ha…they’re scarecrows,” said Gina, as she got up, laughed, and walked over to the four fearsome props. “Space suits propped up with posts…ohh!”

Gina backed quickly away as her light landed on the contents of the cracked and broken space suit helmet. The suit’s occupant stared out at them with eye sockets that had been empty for quite some time, judging by the outdated EV suit that the corpse was enshrined in. The orbital ridges stood out in sharp relief against the deep black of the empty sockets. The patch over the fresh hole burned by Gina’s K-13 read ‘Elias Vinson Salvage Company’ which was word-wrapped in a circle around the image of a Star Tug salvage vessel. The patch on the left side of the red-and-grey EV suit read, ‘Talbot, Robert R.’ with an old-style command symbol underneath it.

“Sorry, Commander Talbot for shootin’ ya…again apparently,” Gina said, in reference to the small hole in both the helmet and the commander’s forehead.

“Teaches him for jumping out at you like that,” CJ smirked, as he looked out the corners of his eyes at her.

“That’s right, he’s lucky he was already dead.” She had a slight sneer and raised eyebrows indicating ‘he shouldn’t have messed with me.’

They wound their way down the stairway, which took the better part of half an hour as they picked their path along broken stairs and chunks of rubble. The biosafety suits protected them from the atmosphere and were lightweight, but with exertion levels like this it still got a little steamy inside of them. A chamber floor that looked like an obstacle course for parkour runners didn’t help any. CJ and Gina followed the footprints and other tracks up to what had to be where the leaders of the Union of Allied Worlds sat before the rise of the Marlacuer Empire.

“Wow,” CJ said, as he gazed in wonder at the ancient and ornate table.

“Nothing but ghosts now,” Gina said.

“Come on…you gotta be impressed with this,” CJ persisted.

“Only if we can fly it outta here,” she said.

“Gina, Gina, Gina,” CJ teased and shook his head. “You gotta see the finer stuff in life. Look at this chair for example. How gorgeous is that? They’re probably worth a fortune.”

“Then why didn’t the other guys take them?”

“Well…there must be something better further on, eh?” he countered.

The trail led them past the council table and into one of the doors of the antechamber. The far left wall of the small room had been demolished to expose a hidden vault. The heavy door of the vault had been completely removed and lay a short ways away on the floor.

The end of the vault was in shambles with a broken crate and a pile of datpads and micrographite memory chips that had spilled out and onto the floor. Several small drawstring bags and three medium lockboxes were still on the shelves. Other items lay here and there on the floor in little craters of freshly disturbed sand and dust, dropped in haste and left behind. The vault had been emptied in a hurry. By the looks of it CJ and the crew had chased the raiders off before they were done with their haul.

“Oh, ho, ho…jackpot!” Gina’s tone was one only a treasure hunter could understand. “These datpads and micro-mem chips could have counsel records on them that are older than the Empire. What’s here could be worth a small fortune. Captain, we need to get this stuff back to
Moonshadow
and get the hell out of here
.
”

“Right, let’s grab what we can carry out and we’ll come back for the rest,” said CJ. “Don’t make contact with the
Moon
until we’re off this rock and on our way back.”

“Roger that.”

The first load back up to
Moonshadow
wasn’t so bad; they hauled the drawstring bags, the cases of datpads, and the micro-mem chips fairly easily. The subsequent loads with the lockboxes didn’t fare so well. The first box out was the heaviest, but at least it had handles for gripping. The second, while lighter, had only the magnetic panels for a cargo lift and not even a decent squared-off corner to hang on to.

“We’re grabbing a rope this time,” CJ said, as they wrestled the second box back to the ship and sat down for a second.

“No shit,” Gina agreed breathlessly. “Sorry, I mean, no shit, Captain.”

“Don’t worry about it. That was a bear getting that shit up here.”

“Yeah, and we’ve got one more to go,” Gina said, as she stood back up. “Time’s running short; we’ve been gone a long time with no word to the others. They’re going to start to wonder.”

“Hmm…you’re right. Let’s see how fast Boss is on the pickup of a little impromptu code talk.” He thumbed the comms unit. “Home base, do you read? This is
new guy
, come in.”

“Roger…ah, new guy…read you loud and clear.” Boss’ voice came over the comms.

“Yeah, howdy there, home base,” CJ said. “Thought you’d want to know everything’s okay and we’ll be back soon.”

“Copy that, new guy. Home base is standing by.” “C’mon G. Let’s round up that last box and skeeedaddle.” CJ circled his hand over his head.

“Oh, you have been hanging around Boss too much,” groaned Gina in mock dismay.

The third lockbox gave them a bit of a surprise when they tried to pick it up. It wouldn’t budge, not a centimeter, not a millimeter even.

“There’s got to be a release somewhere,” Gina said. “Let’s look around. It would have to be hidden in the vault, I think.”

They spent more time than they intended looking for the release catch for the third lockbox, but eventually CJ found part of the wall was designed to hide it in plain sight. He gripped the edge of the catch and pushed two buttons on the hidden side with his index and pinky fingers. The lid of the third lockbox popped up with a click.

“There we are,” he announced, quite pleased at having figured out his first treasure hunting puzzle lock. “This has got to be the most valuable piece, if we had to go through all that just to get to it.”

He lifted the lid of the box, reached in, and pulled out a child’s mobile of the star system. The planets of the mobile began to glow one after the other when they reacted to the photonic energy of their lights.

“What the hell is this?” he asked out of irritation to no one in particular.

“It’s pretty,” was all Gina could come up with.

“There’s got to be something else,” CJ complained, as he placed the mobile on the floor and searched the now-empty lockbox. “Nothing. Zip. This is what we came back for?”

CJ laughed slightly and shook his head in wonderment. He looked down at the mobile. A more serious look came over his face and he shifted to look at the mobile better.

“That’s not the Arzia star system—there are too many planets.”

“That looks familiar, somehow,” Gina said. She stood up and looked at the mobile on the floor before she scrutinized the vault wall. “Captain, look.”

An area on one of the walls was covered with a star chart laid out on a black-and-gold marble plate with what was assumed to be the Arzian star system; but it also had too many planets.

“It matches the mobile,” CJ said. “Shine your light on the mobile again.”

Gina lit up the child’s toy and the planets began to glow once more, one after the other in a pattern that repeated.

“The pattern…can you tell where it starts?”

“One sec, Captain,” she said, as she watched the pattern repeat a couple of times. “Okay, there are twelve planets. I’m numbering them from the center out. Here’s the pattern: eight, three, eleven, one, four, two, seven, five, ten, nine, twelve, and six. Then it repeats the same order.”

CJ looked the marble plate over for any clues; he pushed planets and ran his fingers along the edges; he shined his light on the planets and then the sun. Nothing happened. “Is there anything else?” he asked Gina.

“Not that I can see, Captain.”

CJ stepped back from the wall and crossed his arms in frustration. He stared at the black marble plate as if he could intimidate the secret to show itself. He turned his head to the right as he rubbed the left side of his neck and the answer literally stood right in front of him. The marble plate was anchored to a wall depicting the likenesses of many different people, all of them gazing happily up at the stars. One was a small girl with her right arm bent at the elbow across her stomach, her palm up and her fingers curled to her thumb, except for one. Her index finger stuck out slightly from the surface of the wall.

“G, look,” he pointed at the little girl’s finger. “Hang the mobile there.”

Gina hung the child’s toy on the little girl’s outstretched finger. The weight of the mobile pulled down on the finger, which rested on a pressure switch. A slight click sounded from inside the marble plate and the planets on it began to glow with a soft light.

“Good thinking, Captain,” Gina said. “You make a pretty good tomb raider.”

“Thank you, G, but we’re not done yet. What’s that pattern again?”

“Eight.”

CJ pushed the eighth planet; it settled in with a satisfying click. Gina read off the next number and CJ hit the corresponding planet on the diagram. They repeated the procedure until only the last one remained.

“Grab your gear and be ready to haul ass out that door if this thing is booby trapped,” CJ told her.

“Roger that.” She gathered up the rope and equipment duffle they’d brought down with them. “Set” she said when she got by the door.

CJ pushed the sixth planet on the diagram and dove toward the door, ready to haul ass as well. The wall rumbled as a seam that ran along the outline of the gathered people split and began to widen. A long-dormant power source moved energy along ancient conduits, powering the door and lighting systems. The seam opened a little over a meter when the effort to overcome ages of inactivity drained the ancient power system completely. The door stopped in its tracks and the lights dimmed away until the vault was lit once again only by their lights and the soft glow of the planets on the mobile.

“It’s enough to get inside,” CJ said. “I just hope it doesn’t close back up.”

“Here, can we wedge this block in there?” She pointed at a fallen block that lay nearby.

“Yes, good idea.” Together they moved the block into the seam of the door.

The feeling of excitement was almost too much to stand as they slid sideways through the door and into a chamber unseen by anyone in centuries. They panned their lights around the small chamber. Glints of bright metal reflected back at them from across the chamber. Fifteen statuettes sat on ornately carved black marble pedestals that surrounded the official Seal of the Union of Allied Worlds. The statuettes each displayed one name of the fifteen different star systems. Each one forged from platinum inlaid with gold, silver, and jewels.