Page 3 of The Captain’s Bounty (The Collectors #2)
The electrified hum beneath her feet moved up through her legs a half second before a splintering sort of noise made the seemingly solid bricked wall jump. Cracks appeared, not just in the mortar between the stones, but in the stones themselves.
“What the?—”
“There’s a door behind this wall,” she breathed. “We’ve just opened it.”
Dex raised a brow at her. “Well, you just lost your Guild invitation. You know that, don’t you?”
A finger of doubt finally penetrated the haze of discovery, but it wasn’t quite enough to bring her back to her scholarly senses.
She knew it was wrong, that it went against all her training and her own best interests, but the compulsion to explore was too strong. And besides, GIASS had their chance.
“Well, then, they should have funded my dig,” Lissa declared. “Corporate did, and I think they’d want as much information as we can give them, don’t you?”
“You’re walking a dangerous line, lady.”
“I’m an archeologist,” said Lissa with a sniff. “Danger is my middle name.”
“Mine’s Carmen,” Boaz grunted, hopping off the ladder and getting out of the way of those still coming down it. “They bury all the dead miners here or what? What the hell kind of tomb is this?”
“It’s not a tomb.” Swallowing hard to keep back a surge of rising excitement, Lissa stubbornly clung to every shred of professionalism that she could. “I’m telling you, it’s a temple.”
“It’s dangerous as hell, and if this is now a Corporate operation, we’re not doing this without a security detail and lot more reinforcements.” Dex took her firmly by the arm, and she allowed herself to be drawn back to the sand mound.
Standing in the light beside him, she scowled while he called orders up to his men to shore up the entrance.
A real ladder was brought, as well as lights and excavation tools.
It took perhaps an hour to radio in the discovery and ready a small party of eight men to join them in…
whatever this was. It was the longest hour of her life.
She was all but shaking with poorly suppressed excitement by the end of it.
Still, she’d done it.
After years of blood, sweat and tears— God, the tears—at last, she’d done it.
This wasn’t just a great find, this was phenomenal, and if she played her cards right, it might be enough to…
well, not erase, but maybe eclipse the damage her con-artist brother had inflicted the day he ruined not only his life, but the entire family’s as well.
Picks, shovels, lasers and men were lowered into the temple-esque room, and finally, they were ready.
“All right,” Dex looked at her. “You made the discovery. Pick a door.”
The giddiness was almost more than she could bear, and just hearing him say those beloved words again was enough to make her forgive him anything.
“That one.” She pointed to the cracked brickwork that she was sure now sheltered a hidden but newly opened door behind it.
Photographs were taken, sketches made, depth readings taken of the brick-and-mortar wall blocking their way, and Lissa herself manned the laser, carefully cutting an access hole along the edges of the rock slab through to the other room.
There was no gust of stale air that blew past her as the blockage was removed and the open doorway revealed.
It wasn’t even fully dark on the other side.
Glowing blue letters and symbols lined the walls in vertical columns, just as it did this room.
They pulsed, rhythmically shifting from dull to bright the instant she stepped through and stood in the hall.
The floor beneath her feet was the same smooth, marble-like tile as the first room.
The only exceptions were the light sconces embedded high in the walls that came flickering on as soon as her presence was detected.
Starting at the threshold where she stood, they lit up the length of the hallway.
Gaping archways branched off from this incredibly long corridor at various points both to the left and right, while flickering silver-blue lights quickly chased back the darkness.
“This is a big ass temple,” Boaz said in what was, for him, a reverent tone.
“Built by whom?” Dex replied, significantly more reserved. “And why is the air so fresh?”
“It’s recycled,” Lissa said, her gazing skimming along the walls and ceiling. “There’s ventilation. It’s still working.”
“Buried this far under the sand with no access to the outside?” Dex shook his head.
“Impossible. Shit, nothing about this place makes sense. Cutirut couldn’t support life until Corporate moved in, and still can’t outside the terraform zones.
Who built this? Ceron is the only planet in this system that had any kind of intelligent life and they were still in the early Smelting Age when the asteroid hit. ”
“You really have done your homework, haven’t you?”
“I try not to be entirely useless,” Dex replied dryly.
“Point is, Cerons couldn’t have done this, so it had to be someone else, coming from outside this solar system to put what sure looks like a manned station on a lifeless moon, and who then locked up and left it for…
” Dex ran a grim stare around the room. “…a long, long time, but used a lock that any old Earth-monkey could open ages later, and everything still works?”
Lissa smiled at him triumphantly. “Yes.”
“Impossible,” Dex said again. “That kind of tech simply didn’t exist back then.
Hell, we don’t have the technology to do this now.”
“This isn’t our technology,” Lissa reminded him with a laugh. Her excitement was building, her hands all but shaking as she spun back to face the others. “Who’s got the mapper?”
Mouth flattening, no doubt already regretting giving her lead, Dex folded his arms. “Stine?”
A man behind him hefted a satchel off his shoulder, stepping up to Lissa before placing his pack on the ground. Opening the fold-over top, he pulled out a white drone, set it on the floor and powered it on.
Flashing green lights on the tips of each wing signaled its brief startup calibration before the motor started whirring.
A gentle cloud of disturbed dust billowed out from under the drone as it rose into the air.
Twin sonar disks folded out. Emitting its first ping as it drifted forward, the drone flew off down the hallway at just faster than she could easily walk, sending out pings every two seconds.
Pulling a tablet out of the satchel next, Stine switched that on too and Lissa sidled up next to him so she could watch over his arm as her discovery came alive in glorious 4D blueprint mapping.
“This place really is huge,” Boaz noted, laughing again.
Joining them, Dex watched as the drone drifted into the first open archway, sending out pings that gradually bounced back to fill in the map rising from the surface of the tablet.
“This place is a maze,” he corrected, and Lissa had to admit he was right.
She glanced from the tablet, to that first archway where the silver-blue wall light was flickering, and then back down again.
The mapper was steadily pinging away, sending back a confusion of corridors without rooms, snaking turns that lead to more turns, and dead ends that culminated seemingly without purpose.
“Send out another one?” the man asked. When Dex nodded, he dug the secondary backup drone out of his now empty satchel and started it up too.
Lifting off the ground, it took off. Synchronized with its twin, it drifted into the next archway down, and Lissa watched in growing astonishment as the maze on the screen grew larger.
“ What is this?” she marveled.
Doing his job, the photographer moved off down the main hall, documenting the layout and every panel of flashing lights and letters on the walls.
He had ventured only perhaps fifteen feet when he suddenly stopped, looking down at his foot.
“Uh… guys? The tile under me just clicked when I stepped on it.”
“Nobody said anything about boobytraps before I came down here,” Boaz told Dex, much to Lissa’s annoyance.
A staticky click from somewhere overhead startled everyone, and they all looked up as, calmly, a masculine voice began speaking in an unfamiliar language.
“Hello?” Boaz called back.
“It’s a recording,” Lissa and Dex both said at the same time. Turning to the others, Dex asked, “Can anyone understand that?”
Lissa couldn’t count the number of language aptitude enhancing shots she’d taken over the course of her career, or the languages she was now fluent in.
The words calmly washing down over them weren’t familiar, and as she stood listening intently, not so much as a single twinge of mental recognition tickled at her brain.
“We are alone down here, right?” Boaz breathed.
Lissa was still searching the ceiling for the hidden speakers when she heard the second click, and then the voice began again, this time in a different, but still unknown, language. “It’s a prerecorded message. If we aren’t alone, I’ll be seriously surprised.”
Circling behind Stine as he continued recording the growing maze on his mapping tablet, Dex softly asked her, “Have you ever discovered anything like this before?”
“I’ve never even heard of another discovery like this before,” she replied.
“Neither have I.” A tic of muscle jumped and clenched along his clean-shaven jaw. He neither looked nor sounded excited to be experiencing it now.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Boaz suddenly said, attracting their attention.
“We’ve got working lights, working pre-recorded messages, clean ventilation, buttons flashing on the wall.
” He gestured all around them, grinning as if it should be obvious.
“There’s working power cells in this thing!
” He got excited again. “We get a tenth of a percent of the profits from every new patent Corporate gains through reverse-engineering new tech. We’re going to be rich! ”
Lissa turned and gave Dex a hard stare. “Is that so? And here I thought Corporate sent us to look for astatine.”