Jaunt (13 page)

“Congratulations, gentlemen, looks like we have a good relief cartograph here. Take a peek.” Louris held out his holobook, which displayed an image of the basin’s subsurface. Horizontal striations combined in the taiga strata with red, unnatural clumps to paint a picture of the unseen world beneath their feet.

Gilmour looked up from the holograph. “What’s our first order of business?”

“Locating those red splotches. De Lis gave me a simulated image of the strata, with instructions on what to dig for first. According to him, the clumps are more of the metal specimens you and Mason encountered in Nepal.”

“The ground is cluttered with them, Chief,” Mason noted. “There’s much more here than we ever found in Nepal. How are we going to transport them all back?”

“We’re not. A few samples of the metal for good measure, but our prime mission is to find those jewel objects. The doctor believes by digging up the metal, it’ll lead directly to them. That’s why we’re here. Any other questions?”

Silence provided his answer.

“All right then. Get out your pickaxes and shovels so we can go home.”

Sectioning the basin off into quarters, the agents gridded the alpha segment and began the rigorous process of uprooting its first set of specimens, a target just meters away, under the rocky terrain. Because the cartograph was so precise, the agents ably predicted how far they needed to dig before striking the crater’s riches.

Diamond-tipped industrial pickaxes broke open the taiga permafrost, allowing their shovels to take the team to depths of one to three meters, more than enough to reach the metallic debris waiting patiently for them. In the event standard tools weren’t hardy enough to crack the earth, Louris had packed a rather heavy instrument they referred to as

“The Liquidator,” but more prosaically called the Solidified Strata Fluidation Device, capable of temporarily liquefying soil by sound waves in order to more easily dig for specimens. Its use was limited, but could come in handy in the event the taiga below ground was rock solid.

Gilmour and Mason positively identified the first specimen as belonging to the extraterrestrial debris. The five men then released the twisted metal from its encapsulated home and hauled it out for the first round of spectral analysis. The mass was about twenty kilograms—remarkable for its dimensions—but this fact had allowed it to be easily buried quickly after its plunge to Earth. Gilmour’s holobook scanned the interior of the debris, piercing the entire mass except for a scattered group of small, unidentifiable materials suspended inside.

He glanced at Louris. “Chief, we’ve got some. Let’s open her up.”

The five agents, armed with a variety of cutting and grasping tools, invaded the tangled scraps of metal. Working feverishly, they revealed the pitted remains of the mass, guided along by continual scans of its interior by their holobooks. After an hour of peeling away the layered debris, Louris shuddered to think how long it would have taken the agents to search for the jewel objects had they not had the advantage of spectral analysis available to them.

With a gentle unwrapping of the thin metal, Mason revealed a deposit of two jewels, which Constantine, wearing radiation gloves, removed. The group marveled at the quivering objects now in their possession, taking the time to appreciate their quarry before sequestering the twin jewels into a portable lockbox. Pursuant to de Lis’ orders, the agents lifted the emptied metallic debris and placed it back into the earthen tomb, careful to snip off a small specimen before reburying it.

The group headed for the next target, sixteen meters up the side of a collapsed mountainside, where debris was embedded inside an avalanche of rock and earth once comprising a near-plateau thirty meters or more tall. After defining the exact coordinates of the site, they removed their hiking gear, putting on the appropriate climbing footwear and gloves. Once pitons had been hammered into the rock-studded earth at the foot, they ran a reinforced cord through to begin the ascent. Louris took the lead, gingerly sliding his feet into the best available slits in the rock slab. Mason, McKean and Constantine scurried up the rock behind him, leaving Gilmour to stand watch on the ground, a sentry over the newly acquired specimens.

Climbing the fifty-degree slope took no more than forty minutes; the four agents moved at such a clip, Louris privately predicted they’d be on the floor again in just under two hours. He scanned the face with his holobook, and upon reaching the correct height, secured the cord inside the final piton. Louris then lightly hammered out two lateral bootsteps to allow himself room as Mason ascended. Mason caught up next, using his gloved hands to clear out the sparse flora that wound up the side of the slope, making their retrieval and analysis of the remains much simpler. McKean and Constantine remained a few steps below to facilitate the quick removal of material from the site.

Pickaxes in hand, Louris and Mason lightly tapped into the slab, careful not to disturb too much of the surrounding rock, or damage the important material just centimeters under the surface. Piece by piece, the subsurface was exposed, revealing rock not seen by the elements in two hundred years.

Mason scraped away orange and yellow lichen from his side, evidence that at one time this rock had been exposed to the elements. So far, so good. Their scans of the area, while nearly guaranteed, were only as good as the programmers and users, so it was a relief to know that the team was doing something correctly.

Louris’ gloved hand uncovered a deep sublayer of rock, a piece large enough to rest in his open palm. Beneath it, a glint caught the ambient light of the atmosphere. Consulting his holobook, he tapped out a larger piece of rock, soon revealing a shiny vein that appeared to run nearly horizontally. Using his fingers, he tugged at the vein, which stubbornly clung to the rocky sublayer. Deciding to dispense with gentleness, Louris wedged the tip of his pickaxe just under the vein, and applying elbow grease, pushed down on the axe’s handle, coaxing the material from the rock. To his vast surprise, the horizontal material readily separated, cracking the rock around it. He continued to wedge his pickaxe at intervals along the vein, diligently removing the eight-centimeter-wide metal.

Meanwhile, Mason had caught on and worked his way to Louris, the two meeting at some point in the middle. Determining that the vein’s breadth was for the most part exposed, the pair produced their industrial pliers and began wrenching the vein away from its rock cage. As they did so, the rock slab directly underneath the vein—but many centimeters thicker—cracked under the stress of the pair’s tugging. A terrible creak paused them both in mid-pull.

Louris inspected the fissure he had created. “Mason, you too?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a crack about the size of my leg running under my initial separation point. Looks like its going for my footholes.”

Louris nodded. The footholes the pair had tapped out were weakening the slab, which now threatened to crash to the ground in pieces, with them in tow. Unfortunately, the holograph of the mountainside showed that this site’s two red splotches were approximately eleven centimeters inside the metallic debris; the first, just straight ahead of Louris, and the second, about one meter below Mason’s position. They might be able to pry out the first object, but with the stress they created excavating it, the second jewel would be next to impossible to reach.

Louris frowned. “Mason, abandon your target. We’re going to devote as much manpower as possible to get this one,” he pointed at the rock in front of him, “out of here.”

Mason needn’t say anything. Yes, their primary concern was to excavate any and all possible jewels, but they were also burdened with the caveat of concealing their activities at all times. Louris could probably use The Liquidator on the rock slab to get to the concealed jewel, but they ran the risk of showing up on a seismograph. Clearly, tiptoeing around while performing industrial excavation were almost beyond possibility. Mason had no doubts that this was indeed a government operation.

Mason vacated his target and moved back to the dangling cord, where he and Louris would then employ their collective power to wrest the debris from its two-hundred-year-old tomb. Anxiously watched from below by McKean, Constantine and Gilmour, the pair gradually pulled the debris out a piece at a time, not fighting to keep it wholly together, if only because they would be hanging from the rock for the next few weeks. Ever so smoothly the flattened metal was released from the slab, creating only minor cracks in the mountainside throughout the delicate surgery. Using his holobook as a guide, Louris secured the largest chunk of the debris, the section that happened to house the jewel, and handed it to Mason. The section wasn’t particularly heavy, but cumbersome, measuring by Mason’s standards a good seventy-five centimeters. Descending three leg-lengths, Mason entrusted the specimen to Constantine and McKean, who then delegated it to the waiting Gilmour.

Mason quickly returned to Louris, who had already prepped the slab to be restored to its pre-excavation condition. Despite their efforts to the contrary, the mountainface would bear the scars of their climb for decades to come, until flora re-grew and erosion wiped away the traces of the dig. Louris descended soon after Mason, his final efforts being the removal of the pitons and—to the best of his ability—covering their footholes.

Once that had been accomplished, Louris met up with his agents, and all then changed out of their climbing gear and into their arctic garb. A bitter chill was blowing into the mountains, and the men were more than willing to bundle up to face the oncoming front.

“Number three secured,” Gilmour announced, placing the newest jewel into the lockbox, next to the other two.

“How bad does that front look, Mason?” Louris asked while buttoning up his overcoat. The air temperature had dropped by several degrees, and the chill was palpable, despite the perspiration from the heat of the climb.

Mason oriented his holobook towards the sky, discerning the air mass’ exact size and coordinates. “Doesn’t appear to be cause for much concern. Temperatures will be ten below zero, but shouldn’t be any precipitation.”

“All right, the third site we should be able to excavate before nightfall,” Louris said, referring to his holobook, which displayed the third site. Thankfully, he thought, it was another ground dig.

The five stowed their climbing gear back at the camp before heading out. Above them, the feeble sun began numbering the minutes of light on its return to the horizon, propelling the group to make use of the quality time remaining. The day would finish soon, rewarding them well. When the stars would twinkle again, the agents could take comfort in the fact that their mission had proceeded nearly to schedule, and they could only hope the accomplishment of their goal went as well.

Gilmour scrubbed his face, removing the last pebbles and particles of earth from his burgeoning beard. Stroking his wooly countenance, he forgot how many days the team amassed in the basin. Guessing by his beard’s length, he double-checked the mental count on his wrist chrono. The tiny device reported today as 18.10. Forty-one days! Gilmour moaned...somehow his memory erased a good week. Thinking back, he could recall why; the team had methodically surveyed ninety-four percent of the entire basin, bringing them to this morning, Louris’ projected final day. The exhausted agents were hours away from packing up for good, and they couldn’t have been more ready, judging by the bruises, scrapes and tendinitis each of them attained.