Warily, Mariah stepped closer, peering down at the parted earth. There, smeared with loosened dirt, she could see what appeared to be a pale blue metal plate. It was not a painted blue but rather it was metallic, like the oily sheen on chrome. She felt goose bumps rise on her arms, despite the heat. It was hard to explain, but looking at it felt—well, it just felt
wrong
somehow to Mariah. “What is that?” she asked.
“Not sure yet,” Domi replied, getting back to her feet. “Guessing it’s the source of all your radioactive.”
“Radioactivity,” Mariah corrected automatically, muttering the word.
Domi walked a circuit around the tight confines of the forest clearing, sweeping overhanging fronds away with her feet, dragging her toes through the dirt as if feeling for something. “It’s buried all about,” she explained. “Not very big.”
“Is it one thing or lots of things?” Mariah asked.
“I think it’s just one thing,” Domi said. “Big as a Sandcat.” A Sandcat was a multipassenger assault vehicle, roughly the size of a small truck or an old army tank.
“A...spaceship?” Mariah asked, hardly believing she was saying the word.
Domi nodded. “Small one,” she said “Maybe one-man. But yes, probably. It’s not from around here anyway.”
Chapter 2
Domi and Mariah set to work searching the area close to the Juruena River for more clues about what was buried beneath the soil. At some point, Mariah’s laptop announced the completion of its spectroscopic analysis with a ping, but Mariah was too keyed up to notice. Instead, she stuck close to Domi, trusting in that old adage of safety in numbers.
She need not have worried. Whatever it was that had been buried under the ground had been there a while, and while the local flora had been “infected,” for want of a better description, there was no indication that the object itself had any semblance of life, either its own or any life form operating in tandem with it. In fact, the whole area remained just as remote and forgotten by intelligent life as it had when Mariah and Domi had arrived.
It took forty minutes to find a way down to the thing, one that was larger than the hole Domi was capable of digging with her limited tools. Mariah had brought a survey kit with her that included a small trowel, which proved better suited to digging, though progress was slow.
In a quarter hour the albino woman had uncovered a great swath of metal sheeting before revealing the edges of what appeared to be a door.
“Got lucky,” Domi said with a smile.
Mariah wasn’t so sure. “I’m going to speak to Cerberus,” she said. “Bring them up-to-date with what we’ve found here.”
“Good idea,” Domi said as she worked her fingers around the groove of the door, mapping its edge.
The Cerberus people had seen a lot of alien artifacts since they had set themselves as guardians of Earth. Some had been majestic feats of technology that hung outside the atmosphere with an almost impossible beauty. Others had been ancient beyond imagining and had been on Earth for so long that they had come to be incorporated into the locals’ way of life, worshipped as sights of great spiritual interest or esoteric knowledge.
For a spaceship to be hidden so shallowly below the surface told the geologist two things. One, it hadn’t been intended to be hidden here, or if it had, it was done in a hurry; and two, it had not been here very long. In simple terms, the earth shifts over things that are buried, sinking them slowly deeper as more detritus covers them. That’s why, when people went looking for them, the skeletons of dinosaurs weren’t sitting plumb on the surface of the ground where the carcasses had rotted.
So, given that the artifact had not sunk very far below the surface, Mariah would guess it either got here recently enough to just barely start to be covered—which didn’t seem right, since the plant life over its resting place had been altered—or...?
“It crash-landed?” Mariah whispered as she reached her laptop on the rock overlooking the river. “Wow.”
Mariah was a scientist first and foremost, and she respected and employed the scientific method in her investigations. Which meant she wasn’t about to turn a little educated guesswork into a statement of fact just like that. She would ask Cerberus for advice and then she and Domi would proceed from there.
Quod erat demonstrandum,
as Clem Bryant was wont to say.
Mariah automatically glanced over the laptop’s screen, nudging the touchpad to bring it back to life from sleep mode. It showed the results of the spectrographic analysis. There was a charge to the soil, and it had a higher level of radiation than it should. Furthermore, the soil was much more alkaline than Mariah would expect, although that hadn’t seemed to have any negative effect on the flora growing here. “Domi said the plants were alien,” Mariah reminded herself.
The Annunaki, a bored alien race who had interfered with man since the days when he was still cowering in trees from saber-toothed tigers, had been a thorn in the side of Cerberus for a long time. Highly advanced, Annunaki technology was characterized by a melding of semiliving traits, something expressed most obviously in their sentient womb-ship,
Tiamat.
Tiamat
had been destroyed over a year ago, committing a kind of honorable suicide while still in orbit around Earth following the disastrous rebirth of her offspring. Parts of
Tiamat
had survived, however, and a great chunk of the ruined spaceship had literally regrown as the Dragon City, an uninhabited settlement on the banks of the Euphrates River.
The strange plants that had sprung up on this site might have a similar origin, Mariah theorized, peering back into the forest. Could the plants be some kind of alien technology? A warning system, perhaps?
Placing a radio mic/earpiece over her left ear, Mariah tapped a code into the laptop and boosted a radio signal to the Cerberus redoubt back in Montana. “Hello, Cerberus?”
There was a pause of a few seconds while the signal was bounced off a satellite before a familiar voice answered.
“Hello, Mariah,” Donald Bry began cheerily from the Cerberus comm desk. “How are things in Brazil?”
“Hot,” Mariah said as she wiped sweat from her damp hands on the legs of her pants.
“I hear they have an awful lot of coffee in Brazil,” Bry taunted, recalling the words of an ancient song.
“We’ve not drunk any so far,” Mariah replied. “But we’ve found something here that’ll keep us awake at night, Donald. What appears to be a spaceship, alien in design, is buried a little way back from the Juruena River at our current location.”
There was no need for Mariah to give the specific location; all Cerberus personnel were surgically fitted with a transponder that broadcast their location, as well as details on their health such as heart rate and brain activity, back to the home base in real time. The transponder was a harmless nano-engineered attachment that was filtered into the bloodstream, making it near impossible to remove or disrupt. Back in the Cerberus operations room, Donald Bry would already be looking at a triangulation of Mariah and Domi’s position on his computer monitor.
The radio communication itself was achieved via the Commtact, a top-of-the-line communication system discovered by Cerberus personnel among the artifacts of Redoubt Yankee a few years earlier. The Commtacts bounced a signal from the Keyhole Comsat satellite, which had been accessed by Cerberus for such a purpose, providing near real-time communication no matter what location the Cerberus field personnel wound up in. As a rule, field personnel had the Commtact surgically embedded beneath the skin behind an ear, where the unit could be activated at will. However, following some recent problems with the Cerberus base, Mariah had opted for a handheld version. It was another reminder that she wasn’t a true field agent, she was a scientist. Exploring buried spaceships was well outside of her comfort zone.
“How large is this spaceship?” Bry asked. He made the question sound ordinary, though it was clearly anything but.
“It’s still buried, so we can’t be sure,” Mariah replied. “Domi estimates it’s roughly the size of a Sandcat.”
“And where is Domi now?” Bry asked after a moment’s consideration. Naturally, he could pinpoint her location accurately using the transponder, but that wouldn’t tell him anywhere near as much as the eyeball report of a person on the ground.
“Still investigating the ship,” Mariah said.
At the other end of the communication, Mariah heard Donald Bry’s sharp intake of breath. “Is that wise?” he asked.
“I have full monitoring equipment here,” Mariah reassured him. “And I’m just activating the camera unit now. There’s no sign of hostile life, just some rather beautiful plants.”
“Okay,” Bry replied. “Keep me apprised.”
“Will do.”
Mariah closed down the communication with Cerberus and reached into her rucksack for the portable video camera she had brought. The unit was roughly the size of her balled fist and fit snugly into the palm of her hand. Its carrying strap doubled as a handle, so that all she needed do was point and shoot. She flipped open the screen and checked the battery life—it was fine, there was plenty of recording space in the little unit, more than enough to film the inside of a Sandcat, or something of equivalent size.
Leaving her laptop, Mariah began to march back to the clearing where she had left Domi.
* * *
B
Y
USING
THE
TROWEL
,
Domi had worked her way around the edge of the hatch in the spaceship’s skin. Revealed, it was three feet wide and just a little more than that high. She figured that whoever used it was either very short or they were used to ducking.
There was no sign of a handle or door lock of any kind; both the surface of the door and its surrounds were smooth. In fact, had it not been for the way the specks of dirt had become lodged in the seal, Domi might not have noticed the hatch at all.
Gingerly, she worked the head of the trowel around the hatch’s edge again, using both hands to wiggle it here and there as she sought a way in. When she reached one of the shorter edges—the one she had come to think of as the top edge, even though the hatch plate was actually lying parallel to the ground right now—Domi felt something begin to give. She wiggled the trowel again, scraping it back and forth along the lip until she located what seemed to be a catch. The blade of the trowel was too thick to hook beneath the catch, so Domi placed it to her side and drew her knife once more.
In less than a minute, Domi had her knife under the part of the hatch she had snagged, and she felt something pop as she placed pressure there. There was a gasp of release as the hatch popped open, and Domi rolled back as the door pulled away on sliders, disappearing into the body of the ship. She smelled the trace of stale air as it dissipated around her.
Domi peered into the hatch, her free hand reaching automatically for the pistol she had tucked into her waistband. The hatch appeared dark and empty, the only illumination coming from the sun’s rays filtering down through the tree canopy.
Domi took a step forward, scenting the air for danger. Unlike Mariah, Domi’s Commtact was embedded beneath her skin, giving her immediate access to her communications. The radio communications device traced the line of her mastoid bone.
Like Domi, most of the members of the Cerberus field teams had a Commtact surgically embedded beneath their skin. The subdermal device operated via sensor circuitry, incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was implanted in each subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals. Dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, even if a user went completely deaf they would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device.
Commtacts also functioned as real-time translation devices, providing they had enough raw vocabulary from a language programmed into their processors. Furthermore, because they were directly connected to the body of the user, they could amplify speech no matter how quiet. For a moment, Domi wondered if she should radio back for advice...but where was the fun in that?
Her mouth set in a grim smile, Domi climbed into the rectangular hole and dropped down. Inside, the ship smelled musty, the faint aroma of sweat—or perhaps it was pheromones—on the air.
Out of the sun’s glare, Domi waited for her keen eyes to adjust. Unlike the hull exterior, the inside walls were soft. Domi stepped closer, pressing her hand against one wall. It was covered in some kind of padding; small roundels of cushioning bubbled across the surface like the grips on a sneaker shoe.
She moved away from the wall, stepping deeper into the interior. It took a moment to work out what she was looking at—not because it was alien but because, Domi realized, the ship was upside down. She was standing on the ceiling in what amounted to a small cabin that might fit four people comfortably, six if they squeezed. The cabin was empty and there was a viewport on the far wall through which she could only see darkness—the soil that the ship had sunk into.
In front of the viewport was a desk-like series of controls arranged in a graceful arc. Despite the controls, there was no sign of a pilot’s chair—instead, there was a simple bench arranged to either side of the control board, running the length of the walls and large enough to seat two adults each.
Between the two benches was a square block that— reversing it in her mind’s eye—Domi guessed would touch as high as her belly. The square unit was decorated with cuneiform patterns and looked damaged by smoke, a watery gray-black streak marring most of its surface. Though she shouldn’t understand them, Domi thought she recognized the patterns—they looked a lot like the writing she’d seen on Annunaki objects.
“Damn snake-faces,” Domi growled as she padded across the ceiling to get a closer look at the box unit that dominated the cabin.
* * *
“D
OMI
? A
RE
YOU
THERE
?”
Standing at the clearing, Mariah saw immediately what had happened. The top of the space vehicle was exposed, showing a five-foot tract of uncovered metal where Domi had worked at the earth. Even here it was barely twelve inches below the surface, just enough to hide it from prying eyes.
Mariah stepped closer, feeling the hairs on the back of her neck rise. “Domi?” she called again, raising the camera to shoulder height.
She saw the hatch then, a dark square in the ground. “Domi?”
Domi’s voice came back a moment later, echoing in the cavern of the ship’s cabin. “Down here,” she said. “Just taking a look around.”
Mariah toggled the switch on the side of the camera and set it to record, using the eyepiece to frame up a clean shot of the open hatch. “Time now is 11:45,” she began, before giving the date and location. “Domi and I have found what appears to be an alien spaceship, which I speculate may have crash-landed here within sight of the river.”
Mariah took a step back, belatedly deciding to get a full shot of the area, as well as a wider view of the exposed hull of the spacecraft and the open hatch. As she did, she became aware of a noise that she had not noticed before. It sounded like the old stable her uncle used to keep, the sound of agitated horses as they stomped their hooves on the ground.