“He didn’t make it,” Pierce replied. Details could wait. There were no guarantees that any of them were going to make it yet.
Wong reached the ramp and headed into the lander. Pierce stopped at the bottom, dropping to one knee as she turned to cover Howard who was still ten meters out.
“Gordinski, I will be closing the ramp in eleven seconds,” Wong advised.
“Roger,” Gordinski replied.
Pierce reloaded her rifle, firing at anything that moved. She aimed for the rising bubbles of dust, the eruptions where a worm might be about to surface.
Howard sprinted, leaping a fresh crater, and kicking up dust.
“We’re on!” Pierce yelled. She dragged Howard by the arm and they ran up the ramp. Wong worked the controls, the ramp sliding up behind them. Once it locked in, the door slid shut and sealed.
“Gordinski, we are onboard and ready for evac.”
The lander shuddered and tilted, Pierce grabbed a handle bar and steadied herself as the floor shifted. The drag of gravity intensified as the ship accelerated. Howard slid into a seat, slamming the buckles of the safety harness into position.
Pierce found her own seat. Wong walked easily, adjusting to the changing angles as the ship maneuvered.
The ship’s interior rang with the blows of meteor fragments striking the hull and then they were clear.
“We all good back there?” Gordinski asked from the pilot’s capsule.
“Five by five,” Pierce replied and closed her eyes.
NET NEWS FEED: American Water Corporation is reporting the loss of their primary lunar water prospecting facility after a severe meteor impact event. Due to the catastrophic nature of the event, the underground facility was destroyed with no survivors. American Water, chief of operations, Dylan Mali, said today that the future of lunar prospecting lies with current and future generations of autonomous robotic units, such as the Wong model of service android. Claims that Black Light Security military units were involved in the destruction of the facility were categorically denied by both American Water and in a written statement by Black Light Security.
GUARD DUTY
S.D. Perry
PFC Gaines was a horror nerd. The nerd thing, whatever, half the squad was nuts about video games or guns or football; everybody had their thing. Daniel “Robbie” Robb liked mixed martial arts, himself — Anderson Silva was the GOAT — and he enjoyed a good horror flick every now and again… but Gaines didn’t want to talk about Jigsaw or Leatherface, he was a book guy, and he’d read every story ever about caves and monsters and military experiments gone wrong, and he wanted to share. He wanted to talk about what was in the chamber behind them, and what it might mean.
Fucking Gaines. It was 0230 and they were nearly a mile into the side of a mountain, alone. The engineers had run a line of lights all along the roof of the main tunnel, but the lights weren’t that bright and parts of the tunnel were wide. Heavy shadows gathered to either side of the long slope in front of them, leading up from the crack they’d been set to guard. The few openings to dead-end side tunnels were as black as deep space.
Robbie leaned against the cold stone wall, half-listening to Gaines tell another stupid story, wishing he was down here with anyone else. The squad had been pulled off a base rotation in Afghanistan a week ago, flown to the Al Hajar mountains in Oman to set up camp support for a trio of military scientists, all officers. The brass joined a small group of civilians already working the “dig,” a tunnel system uncovered in a spring landslide. The lead Army doc, Captain Pruitt, had locked things down tight. No access to the BFD room that had everyone spazzing out without permission and an escort. The civilians were pissed, but they were working on Federal grant money and couldn’t say shit. Sarge said the only reason they weren’t already locked out was because they’d agreed to help Captain Pruitt. Although why the Captain thought he’d get anything useful from a couple of academic gray-hairs and a half dozen sloppy grad students, Robbie couldn’t figure.
Robbie had initially been happy about getting pulled out of the boiling, deadly desert to babysit scientists in an insurgent-free zone, but this was his first shift watching the Rosetta Room and he fucking hated it. A million tons of rock were balanced over his head and the cold was bone-chilling and Gaines wouldn’t shut the fuck up with his creepy shit. Robbie was only letting him talk because the silence of the tunnels was worse. Except for a few bats and bugs right at the jagged opening, the system was totally dead. No moss, no spiders or whatever, nothing. All the guys who’d pulled watches had talked about the unnatural quiet and Robbie had nodded along, but he hadn’t really understood. It was like being buried alive.
“… so the narrator and the pilot go down into the ice caves and find all these murals that tell about how these creatures had their own civilization, millions of years before mankind even existed,” Gaines said. “And they learn that those monsters they found, that they thought were dead? They’re actually immortal. And then they start hearing all these sounds coming out of the dark, and that’s when they realize they’re not alone down there in the tunnels.”
“What the fuck?” Robbie snapped. “Are you kidding me? Can you talk about anything else?”
Gaines pushed his glasses up his nose. “I can’t think about anything else. Have you looked in there?”
He nodded at the crack between them. Three feet across at the middle, and tapering slightly at the top and bottom, it ran all the way up the eight-foot wall at the very end of the tunnel system. It reminded Robbie of a cunt, but not in a good way. Absolute blackness lay on the other side. They were calling it the Rosetta Room because it had a bunch of languages carved on the walls, like that one famous stone.
“Yeah, and?” Robbie asked. “Writing on the walls, a rock in the middle.”
“There are drawings, too,” Gaines said. “Of things, with claws. And it’s not just a rock, it’s some kind of altar. With an inscription, and when the translation programs are done running—”
“Yeah, they’re going to figure it out and then somebody will read the inscription,” Robbie said. “You said already. Here’s the thing, though — you really think anything’s going to happen? Do you actually believe in magic occult shit? Really?”
“Actually, I don’t,” Gaines said. “I mean, I never have before. But dude, if it’s all bullshit, why are we down here guarding it? The university team only got here two weeks ago. When they saw what they had, they sent an urgent request for extra funding, right? With pictures. And within days, we’re here to back up Pruitt, who also got pulled out of some active shit to take this thing over. Since when does the military give a crap about ancient runes? Somebody high up on the chain doesn’t think it’s bullshit, at all.”
“So? Lot of people believe in angels, doesn’t make ‘em real. And you’re overthinking it, dude. Isn’t it way more likely that the pictures got flagged because it’s some kind of code? Sarge says maybe terrorists have been using it to pass messages, or something.”
“I don’t think so,” Gaines began, but before he could get going, they heard sounds. Voices, but distorted by distance, unintelligible. A woman was talking, her voice rising and falling, an edge of desperation to her tone. The sound swelled through the tunnel, carrying through the barely contained blackness.
Had to be Datlow. One of the gray-hairs, an American archaeologist in her fifties. Total lez, probably, unless she was banging the equally unappealing language prof, the Arab with the nose hair problem.