“Weyland!”
“You can’t help him,” Sebastian said, dragging her along.
Lex struggled against him.
“Lex, we have to go… hurry!”
From behind came a blast of hot air—and something else. They both saw a flickering light at the far end of the corridor. Then a fiery figure hurled out of the darkness toward them—the Predator, its form sheathed in roaring flames that did not seem to harm the creature in the least.
Sebastian grabbed her arm and they both ran. They hadn’t gotten more than a few yards before Lex heard the sound of massive feet pounding through the darkness, gaining on them.
Sebastian rounded a corner and spied a stone barrier rising up from the floor directly in front of them. If it closed before they got through it, they would be trapped in the corridor with the Predator.
By the time they reached the threshold, the barrier was halfway up. Sebastian lifted Lex and practically threw her over the stone wall. Then he leaped up and caught the edge, hauling himself across the top of the door and down the other side.
Just as the opening was about to seal, one of the Predator’s throwing disks sailed through and ricocheted off the far wall in a shower of sparks.
On the opposite side of the door, the Predator turned away from the stone barrier to see a black monstrosity uncoiling from a pillar, its segmented black exoskeleton blending in perfect camouflage with the architecture.
Rearing up, the Alien prepared to strike.
But the Predator was faster. Its throwing disk streaked through the air and bit deep into the Alien’s shoulder, severing its arm. Then the metallic disk arced gracefully around and vanished into the shadows.
The Alien flailed its ravaged limb, spraying acid blood on the surrounding pillars.
The Predator slammed into the Alien, its booted foot snapping its foe’s bony chest plates. The monster howled as it was hurled to the floor, the Predator weighing it down. They battled, hand to hand, as the Alien’s lifeblood gushed from its hemorrhaging stump.
Finally, the Predator pinned the squirming Alien to the stone floor with one clawed hand. A throwing disk whizzed over their heads, and the Predator lifted its free hand to snatch it out of the air.
With one quick, violent motion he brought the disk down on the Alien, severing its tittering head from its thrashing body. Bubbling acid gushed from the wound, sizzling on the cold flagstones beneath it. The dead Alien twitched once, then stilled.
Sebastian and Lex raced through another doorway and discovered a new chamber.
The cavernous room was lined with millions of hieroglyphic characters and dozens of elaborately painted panels covered in pictographs and artistic representations depicting, Sebastian assumed, events of historical significance to the long-lost civilization that had built this pyramid.
Sebastian approached a thick stone wall etched with a swirling, abstract design. A dozen or more small peepholes had been cut into the wall—each affording a glimpse into the chamber of pillars from which they had just barely escaped. Sebastian peered through one of the holes.
“Look!” he whispered.
Lex joined Sebastian and glanced through the opening.
From high above they could observe the grisly brutality of the scene. The Predator loomed over the bloody carcass of the Alien it had just decapitated. As the humans watched, the hunter threw back its arms and looked heavenward, as if in prayer. Drawing a knife from a hidden sheath strapped to its waist, the Predator sliced off one of the fingers from the Alien’s double-thumbed hand.
Next the Predator reached up and fumbled with the pressure valves at the base of its mask. With a hiss of escaping gasses, the vacuum seal was broken. A moment later the creature lowered its faceplate to reveal two feral eyes, a noseless face covered with pasty-gray flesh, and crablike mandibles that flexed and clawed at the stagnant air.
Clutching the faceplate in one hand, the Predator used the severed finger as a writing implement, etching a design into the faceplate’s hard, cold metal with the Alien’s acid blood. A sizzling hiss could be heard as he carved a stylized thunderbolt design onto the mask’s smooth forehead.
“What is he doing?” Lex whispered.
The Predator held up the mask, displaying it in the feeble light. Grunting in satisfaction, it flipped the mask over to reveal a mirrored surface lining the interior of the eye slits. Using that reflective surface, the Predator lifted the bloody finger and branded the same pattern on its own forehead. The acid smoked and sizzled, and the Predator roared with pain. But the alien hunter did not stop until the thunderbolt design was complete.
“He’s blooding himself,” Sebastian replied after a long silence. “Tribal warriors of ancient cultures do it. Mark themselves with the blood of their kill. It’s like a rite of passage—a sign that they’ve become a man.” Then he grinned. “This is all starting to make sense.”
He turned away from the peephole and scanned the hieroglyphs around him, tracing the patterns with his eyes and caressing the carvings with his fingers.
“Yes!” he cried, eyes bright with the rapture of discovery. “This is starting to make sense….”
CHAPTER 25
“I want to show you something.” Sebastian led Lex to a panel between two stylized cenotaphs that rose fifteen feet from the flagstone floor. He pointed to a particular section of hieroglyphs carved into the stone wall.
“This outlines some kind of manhood ritual…” he began. Sebastian pointed to a pictograph that strongly resembled the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t creatures that first attacked them. “These creatures. These hunters. They’ve been sent here to prove that they are worthy to become adults—”
“You’re saying they’re what? Teenagers?”
Sebastian shrugged. “Who knows how long these creatures live? Perhaps for thousands of years. However old they are, this is their rite of passage.”
His hands traced a pictograph—a stylized star field with what appeared to be a predatory raptor winging its way across the void.
“That’s why they didn’t carry those guns with them to begin with—”
“Part of the ritual,” guessed Lex.
“Right. They had to earn them, like a knight earning his spurs.”
Sebastian slapped his palm on the hard stone. “The whole story is here. The glyphs themselves are difficult to comprehend—not quite Aztec, not quite Egyptian—but they’re perfectly preserved. And with a little bit of informed speculation I can fill in the blank spots…”
He traced his hand along a stylized pictograph. Despite the bizarre, primitive iconography, Lex easily recognized the image. It was the Earth, as seen from outer space. And over the planet hovered a circular disk of fire, undoubtedly meant to represent a spacecraft dropping toward the planet from deep space.
“As I said before,” Sebastian began, “the Aztecs used multiples of ten. These symbols right here roughly approximate the Aztec symbol for ten, so a little mathematics is in order….”
Sebastian paused, calculating.
“Five thousand years ago they found a backwater planet… our planet Earth. They taught the primitive humans how to build and were worshipped as gods…”
His finger moved down the pictograph, to a familiar triangular shape, with a fiery disk hanging above it. Wavy lines surrounding the disk were clearly meant to depict a mysterious power source radiated by the spacecraft.