Dek closed the door behind him and bowed her head, listening as his footsteps retreated in the direction of his assigned quarters. She remained in the same spot long after they’d faded to silence.
His attempts to forge a bond of trust with the a-com…with Dek…seemed to have fallen flat. In her position, trust surely wasn’t something that came easily.
But then, it didn’t come so easy for him, either.
Mission first. Always.
Telon retreated to his quarters and prepped a bowl of kibble for Cassie. She gobbled her feed with enthusiasm while he slipped off his field boots. Perching on the narrow bunk, he sent a quick fieldstat to Dr. K.
UPDATE:
Site orientation performed.
Personnel patterns and activities defined.
Direct convo established with a-com.
Day 1 objectives complete.
Preparing to initiate recon at sundown.
“What do you think, girl?” he asked his little colleague, who looked up from her feed bowl. “Think we should grab some sleep? Big night ahead.”
Cassie yapped once before devouring the rest of the morsels in her bowl.
Sno kicked back on his bunk, gazing up at the featureless ceiling while he reviewed the day’s events in his head. The mattress depressed when his four-legged buddy jumped up on the bed. She dug at the covers, arranging her nest to her liking before curling up in a tight ball beside him. Soon, she was fast asleep.
He envied Cass her quick surrender of consciousness. He never found it quite so easy to let go of the world and drift off.
Especially with the a-com’s stormy jade eyes haunted his thoughts.
5
Graveyard shift. Four members of Dek’s security team were in their assigned sectors, manning the night watch. The science crew were all tucked in for the night. None of LaGuardia’s three moons yet cast its light through the break in the cave high above, and a deep inky blackness filled the great hole in the ground that she called home.
Dek crouched on the roof of her quarters, listening, eyes closed, senses keen. Her intuition told her something was amiss, and she’d learned never to ignore the feelings of gut-deep tension and restless unease. They were her wired-in early warning system. She slipped on her night vision goggles, checked the settings, and did a slow pan around the immense cavern. There! By the lifts. Movement.
Someone attempting to access Lower Cave?
Gigadam!
If she sounded the alarm, it would alert the prowler before she’d had a chance to ID him. Best keep this on the down low. Dek debated alerting the security detail via her wristcom and nixed it. This was one guy. She’d handle it.
Dek glanced around. Returning via the ladder and exiting her quarters in the dead of night might draw too much attention. She’d have to figure out a stealthier route.
She sidled to the wall of black lava adjacent to the modules. Telon claimed that was how he’d accessed the roof in their encounter yesterday. If he’d been telling the truth, well…what led up could surely lead down.
Perching on the edge of the roof, she aimed her goggles at the sheer cliff, scoped out the most likely path down then jumped across to land on a narrow ledge. Quickly picking out a series of hand and footholds, she made her descent.
Once her feet hit sand at the bottom of the wall, she stayed in a low crouch and soundlessly made her way downslope to the ridge of lava rock that concealed the lifts then ducked behind it.
The unit on the right was definitely in motion. Taking the second would announce her presence, so she scanned her access codes into the hatch controls beside the lifts and slipped into the vertical maintenance tunnel.
She donned her gloves and gripped the ladder rungs with both hands, then pressed the sides of her feet to the outside supports. Moving her hands to the sides of the ladder, she slid quickly down the long, hundred-footspan drop to the lower level, letting her boots absorb the friction of her drop. Once she reached the bottom, she pressed a hand to the ground, listening, but also feeling for vibrations or footfalls outside. There were none.
After switching the hatch controls to manual, she slowly rotated the lever to release the locks then inched the door open just enough to scan the area outside.
No bodies. No movement.
Dek eased the hatch out enough to angle through and hunkered down by a boulder to wait and watch, scanning the darkness with her night vision in a slow sweep.
The floor of the Lower Cave was marked off in a series of grids—some excavated, some not. Here and there, jumbled boulders of dark lava broke the flat expanse of sand, providing plenty of hiding places for her lurker. Dek crept cautiously through the maze of excavations, taking care not to disturb them. She went still when she spotted a large figure against the far wall of the cavern but released her breath when she recognized the shape.
It was just a peculiar geological formation, a hulking stalagmite the science team had jokingly adopted as their site mascot.
To Dek, their pet rock seemed about as friendly as a nightmare, looking like a contorted gargoyle when the site illumination was operating—a still-life monster coated by time in translucent milky-gray layers. The daunting monolith rose to a height of ten footspans above the floor of Lower Cave, its misshapen bulk looming silently over the archaeologists who worked the site by day.
Dek did another scan of the site. No sign of an intruder. No movement. No sound. Whoever had ventured into Lower Cave seemed to have vacated it just as quickly. But she hadn’t heard the lift engage, so to be certain, she needed to do a thorough physical sweep to clear the area.
Moving with slow and calculated steps, she glanced down into some of the excavations with her night vision, seeing the shapes of the sea life embedded in the hardened sand. The creatures had come to rest here long before the first colonists had arrived on planet. Nothing of the creatures that had made these impressions had survived the millennia, only their complex but delicate silhouettes.
And that was the earth-shaking find here.
LaGuardia, or Draxis as it had once been known, was settled by humans more than thirteen thousand calendars before, after being declared a dead planet. It had the right environmental conditions—air, water, friendly sun, tolerable climate—but no life of any kind. Not a microbe. A completely lifeless rock.
The early scientists were baffled. Draxis should’ve been a garden of Eden with its perfect conditions. They theorized that if life had ever existed here, even at the microbial level, some sort of cataclysmic event had sterilized the planet. Possibly a gamma ray burst or a nearby star going supernova, but such calamities should have also affected the atmosphere. Whatever the cause, no one could explain how all life—even the tiniest microorganisms deep underground—could’ve perished.
The first colonists had forged an artificial ecosystem and jump-started the planet’s bionetwork. All these thousands of calendars later, the planet’s biosphere was still in the fledgling stage, but it was slowly expanding outward from the cities in great fertile rings, covering more and more sections of the barren sands as time marched on.
If those early pioneers had discovered the sea life secreted in this old lava tube, it would likely have set them on their ears. It proved that at the time of the unknown catastrophe, life had indeed evolved and been on the rise. Until something had annihilated every living thing on the planet—probably only a few thousand calendars before humans arrived.