Kali's Fire (Kali Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Sonja pulled up a view toward the rear of the hopper. A thin, transparent violet light extended from the walls and all around them, like a permeable barrier. The hopper was two-thirds of the way through it.

  “A warning, maybe,” Cody said. “Or maybe that’s where the neutronium ends and the degenerate quark matter begins.”

  “Why didn’t the skeeters see it?” Hayes asked.

  Cody shrugged. “Maybe only large objects are detected. Or maybe even life signs.”

  “We’re about thirty meters from those lights at the bottom,” Sonja said.

  Hayes drummed his fingers on his armrest. “Fuck it. We’ll keep going. We’re already most of the way through this barrier or whatever it is.”

  Hayes applied thrust in bursts until the hopper was moving at a meter per second, until they cleared the barrier, which closed up behind them, according to rear cameras. Just ahead were the lights, marking the bottom of the tunnel. Hayes added a single long burst in reverse, and the hopper stopped. On the HUD, all magnification was gone, and only a series of three lights sat before them.

  “Three meters,” Sonja said. “Sir, I have a suspicion that we’re at the bottom.”

  “Roger that.” Hayes activated the stabilizing controls so the hopper wouldn’t drift though not much chance of that existed in zero g. “Well, great. Now what?”

  The lights formed a sort of triangle. The light to the left was indigo, and the one on the right was blue. The one below the other two was a dark green. The lights were just that, lights with no discernable patterns, no source, and no other sort of instrumentation. Cody couldn’t even see the end of the tunnel.

  “What the hell do they do?” Bodin asked.

  Cody had an idea, but he didn’t believe anyone would like it. “Let’s try to manipulate it and see.”

  “No.” Sonja narrowed her eyes at Cody. “What if it activates a weapon system? What if that’s why that Kali ship upstairs is missing its engines?”

  “But why would it do that?” Cody pointed at the lights. “You’d think the technology wouldn’t allow us this far in the first place. And if it did, why would it only destroy the engine core of a space vessel and not destroy it altogether or throw the ship out of range of the star? If it’s a trap, why put it at the bottom of a neutron star? The Antediluvians could certainly create more efficient booby traps.”

  “Good points, Doc.” Hayes threw up his hands. “Sure, I’m game.”

  Hayes ran his hand over his holocontrols and brought up a separate console as Sonja slapped her hand to her forehead. Outside, claw appendages on the end of a snakelike arm appeared from within the hopper and reached for the lights.

  Hayes waved a claw outside. “Your idea, your call, Doc. Which one?”

  “Try the green one,” Cody said. “It’s separated from the other two for a reason, I suppose.”

  The claw reached for the green light. When the claw passed through it, the light turned white.

  “That didn’t do much.” Hayes tried again, but the light remained white.

  Hayes ran the claw through each of the upper lights. Each blinked on and off three times then also turned white. “I think I broke it, Doc.”

  “That or the mechanism doesn’t like the claw,” Cody said.

  “How would it know?” Bodin asked.

  “Ancient technology isn’t like anything we’ve seen before.” Cody pointed at the claw. “Even simple devices act in complex ways, almost as if they have their own intelligence. Archeologists have tried using robotics before, but sometimes an alien device refuses to function unless a person is directly interacting with it.”

  The lights shifted again, returning to the indigo, blue, and green pattern it had before.

  Cody rubbed his chin. “One of us needs to go out there and operate those lights directly.”

  “You’re not going out there, Cody.” Sonja threw her hands in the air. “What the hell are we doing here? What if those controls shut this whole thing down and we get crushed under the weight of a star whose density is only a pubic hair away from becoming a black hole?”

  Cody waved his finger around the hopper. “I find it unlikely the Antediluvians would allow the structure around them to be deactivated while they were inside. Whatever is keeping the neutronium at bay is permanent.”

  Bodin grimaced. “I hate to say this, but if the toads used this contraption and they didn’t jack it up none, we could probably use it, too.”

  “Yeah, I get what you guys are saying, but—” A light flashed on Hayes’s holoconsole. “What the hell?” He pulled up readouts on the hopper’s HUD, showing a list of variables. “Oxygen, nitrogen… There’s air out there. That wasn’t there before.”

  Cody checked the readings. “It’s a duplicate of the air in the cockpit.”

  Outside, the lights grew brighter as they approached the hopper. Hayes reached for the controls, preparing to reverse thrust.

  Cody leaned forward into the front of the cockpit. “Wait a second, Lieutenant. Look.”

  The lights stopped a couple of meters from the hopper’s nose. The indigo flashed then the blue then the green. Each light turned into a seven-pointed star and spun in place. Then the lights returned to their original, round shape.

  Cody got out of his seat. “I’m going out there.”

  “What? Hell no.” Sonja jumped out of the copilot’s seat. “You are out of your goddamn mind if you think I’m going to let you go out there.”

  Cody couldn’t help but smile at her. She’d hidden things from him, which he wasn’t happy about, but she still cared, at least.

  “Sonja, you saw that display of power outside.” Cody pointed at the lights, which had turned into seven-pointed stars again. “This mine is asking us to go out there.”

  Bodin snorted. “So?”

  Cody held up his hands, gesturing at the lights. “So, this is Antediluvian technology that’s made contact with us. In every recorded instance of such a thing, where the technology seemed to beckon to those around it, the device performed harmlessly. The only time such technology has been dangerous is when people simply picked up a device and toyed with it without invitation.”

  Bodin held a hand to his face. “You crazy, Egg.”

  “Cody, don’t do it.” Sonja’s face was ashen. “Just stay here. Please, God, I’m begging you.”

  The color had left her face. In that moment, he realized why he was angry with her. She was leaving, and he didn’t want her to go. He’d grown more attached to Sonja than he thought he would, so much so he was starting to forget what life was like when she wasn’t there. She must have been thinking the same thing. That was why she was trying to keep him from going into danger, to make sure she wouldn’t lose him… because she had lost someone before.

  “I’m right about this, Sonja.” Cody winked. “I’ll be fine out there. I’m coming back. Understand?”

  Sonja put a hand to her face. Cody wanted to hold her, but stupid regulations forbade it.

  Bodin strode to the rear hatch and pulled up the holocontrols. A readout appeared, followed by a green light.

  “Gonna open the hatch,” he said, “with your permission, sir.”

  “No.” Sonja gritted her teeth. “LT, don’t let him. Even if there is air out there, we don’t know what the environment is like. What if he touches the star itself?”

  “Nothing would happen.” Cody didn’t want to antagonize her too much because she knew where he slept. However, he couldn’t ignore the archeological find sitting outside. He wanted to see it up close. “The skeeters touched it, and nothing happened to them. But to be safe, I won’t touch the outer edge of the chamber.”

  Sonja touched her clasped hands to her chin. “Oh, God, Cody.”

  “I’ll be fine.” Cody made the readout by the rear hatch larger so everyone could see. “Look, the gravity is still zero. I’ll cling to the hopper as we move around. I won’t touch the surface.”

  Hayes sighed. “Oh, Christ, why not? But use
a tether.”

  Sonja took Cody by the hand. “If you die out there, I’m going to kill myself and come after you so I can beat you senseless.”

  Cody grinned. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me.”

  “I’m serious, Cody. Bodin, you go with him.”

  “Damn straight. Not letting our boy do something stupid.” Bodin opened a panel on the hopper bay and pulled out a couple of tethers. “Doc, get ready to float.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Cody attached the tether connected to his suit to another hookup, of which the hopper had plenty, as he crawled across the top of the hopper. The main part of his helmet was retracted into his suit. A majority of the helmet itself was a dense transparent material, the makeup of which was unknown to Cody. In case of sudden depressurization, the helmet would slam shut in less than a twentieth of a second and pressurize. Sonja wanted him to keep the helmet closed, but he wanted to test the air outside.

  Cody’s comm chimed, and Hayes spoke. “How’s the air?”

  “Smells like the hopper,” Bodin said.

  “Good observation.” Cody sniffed the air. “I’d say something read the interior atmosphere and duplicated it for us.”

  “Good thing nobody farted on the way down,” Bodin said. “How far up does the air go, anyway?”

  After a delay, Sonja answered, “Up to that purple screen above us.”

  “I bet that’s what scanned the hopper interior. It probably also acts as a barrier for the atmosphere.” Cody inched forward, detaching and reattaching the cable to a more forward section of the hopper. “Let’s keep moving.”

  Bodin crawled over the hopper behind Cody. “What do you think would happen if you fell into one of these things? I mean from orbit.”

  Cody mused for a second. “First, your joints would be dislocated. Then, your skin would be torn off.”

  “Oh, damn,” Bodin said.

  “Then your muscles would be ripped from your skeleton, followed by your organs. Then your bones would be crushed, and the molecules of your body would be ripped down to their atoms, which would then be broken down into—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it, Egg,” Bodin said. “You’d die horribly. That’s all you had to say.”

  Hayes spoke. “Nobody’s dying today, kiddies. Just keep your shit together. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” Bodin nudged Cody. “Keep moving, Egg. I’m looking to get out of here.”

  “Right.” Cody crossed the canopy and latched the line onto a hook on the nose of the hopper. “We’re here.”

  The lights from the hopper illuminated Cody and Bodin but not much else. The three lights hovered less than a meter from them. Cody couldn’t make out any additional details.

  Bodin floated down toward Cody, a hand clinging to the line attached to the hopper so as not to float farther toward the bottom of the shaft. “Why’d those lights get closer to us?”

  “The controls are making it easier for us. Like I said, they’re inviting us.” Cody started to reach out. “Any preference?”

  Bodin pondered the lights for a moment. “Your call, Egg.”

  “For God’s sake, Cody,” Sonja said. “Be careful.”

  Cody wanted to wink at her, but the tone of her voice told him she wasn’t happy. No point in poking the bear.

  “Don’t worry.” Cody chose one at random. “Let’s try blue.”

  Cody reached for the blue light, and as he did, the light brightened. As his hand passed through, it felt no different than his hand passing through air. But the effect was very different.

  Bodin’s eyes widened. “Oh, shit.”

  The entire chamber lit up in a brilliant light. Cody couldn’t detect the source of the multitude of pinpoint lights that had simply appeared, surrounding them. The collection of tiny lights had to be several times the brightness of the hopper’s lights, but the display didn’t hurt his eyes, and it didn’t illuminate the walls of the tunnel.

  A series of white spots littered the area like a million fireflies, but all of them held steady. The pinpoints of light surrounded Cody and Bodin, as well as the hopper, but most were clustered on Cody’s left, where the lights were so numerous they overlapped one another. Just to the other side of the three activation lights was a larger dot, much brighter than the others. It, too, was surrounded by the smaller lights.

  Sonja’s sounded panicked on the comm. “Guys, what’s going on out there?”

  “It looks like a star field.” Cody nearly laughed. “I bet that larger light is Kali’s star. Guys, if you compare this with our charts, this view is the view of the stars from where we’re standing, assuming we could see through the star.”

  “I’ll check.” Sonja’s voice quivered a little.

  Cody reached for the blue light again, but nothing happened. He touched it several more times. “Nothing’s happening.”

  “That ain’t true, Egg.” Bodin pointed at the bright white light hovering in the distance. “That big one moved a little. Keep doing what you’re doing.”

  Cody continued to manipulate the blue light. The brightest white dot on the map continued to scoot minutely across the virtual sky.

  “Cody, I’ve made a comparison,” Sonja said. “I’ve just eyeballed it, but from what I can tell, the stars on the other side of the white dot resemble stars on the opposite side of the Kali system if you saw them from here.”

  Cody ran a gloved hand through his hair. “I think this is a record of some sort, marking points in time by showing the stars.”

  “But for what?” Bodin asked.

  Cody ran his hand through the indigo light. The white light representing Kali shifted, bit by bit, back to where it was before. After a moment, it stopped moving. He continued to run his hand through the light, but the white dot remained still.

  Cody frowned. “I’m guessing this is the most recent image. The others may be in the future or the past. I can’t say.”

  “Hate to mention this, Doc,” Bodin said. “But what do you think the green one does?”

  “One way to find out.” Cody reached for the green light.

  At his touch, it brightened and remained bright even after Cody removed his hand. A few seconds later, the light vanished.

  Hayes shouted, “Doc, what’d you do?”

  “I just touched the green light.”

  “Maybe it took another picture of the stars,” Sonja said. “Maybe that’s what this thing does.”

  “Possibly, but why put it in the bowels of a neutron star?” Cody reached for the place where the green light had once been. “I don’t know what—”

  A glow appeared in the bottom of the chamber, just below the control lights. Cody tried to step back, but that was impossible when floating.

  “Oh, shit.” Bodin grabbed the tether with one hand and Cody with the other. “Hold on, Egg.”

  Bodin yanked Cody back by the arm, pulling both of them away by the tether until they were pressed against the nose of the hopper. Cody’s eyes never left the light as it rose from the base of the zero-g column. The small globe of light was the size of Cody’s fist. It rose toward them, passing through the space where the green light had been, and stopped within arm’s reach of Cody.

  Bodin chewed his lip. “God damn, Egg. This shit’s too much.”

  “It’s all right.” Cody leaned forward. “I wonder what this is.”

  “Another control system?” Sonja asked.

  “Possibly.” Cody wrapped his hands around the light and caught his breath. “It’s solid.”

  He gripped the light. The object was small enough he could block out the light by closing his fist. “Feels smooth, like a marble.”

  “So ancient aliens are sharing their marble collection with us?” Bodin grumbled. “I didn’t think to bring any.”

  The walls flashed until everything around him was a bright white, but it didn’t blind Cody. When the light disappeared, an image hovered over the three lights. It was a star map, identical to the one that wrap
ped the entire cave but smaller. It briefly hovered in the air then faded away. The blue and indigo lights flashed briefly then returned to normal, followed by the green light reappearing. The star map had vanished.

  “The fuck just happened?” Bodin patted Cody on the arm. “Let’s bug out. I don’t like this.”

  “All right.” Cody held up his hand, still gripping the small orb of light. “But what do I do with this?”

  “Take it with us,” Hayes said. “It’s an artifact from ancient aliens. I’m sure there’s dozens of guys in a nearby puzzle palace who’d love to crack its secrets.”

  Cody tried to pull it closer, but that took a little effort. “It has mass but not much. Two kilos, maybe.” He reached for the towline. “We should be aboard before—”

  “Contact! Zero, zero by…” Sonja blinked at her console. “Shit, this doesn’t make sense.”

  “You’re detecting the surrounding star, Gunny,” Hayes said. “There’s nothing out there.”

  “No, sir, I’m not.” Sonja frowned at her console. “I haven’t gotten a whiff of the star since we dropped into this hole. But then I get this on gravimetrics.”

  “Oh, shit. I know what this is.” Hayes ran his hands over a small section of his controls. “Space-time is being bent right in front of us but in a microscopic area. It’s not a gravity drive in the distance but something far denser up close. Almost like a singularity. But if it were that close, all of us would be dead.”

  Cody lifted his hand. “It has to be this orb.”

  Sonja blinked. “That’s either a black hole or…”

  “Or it’s degenerate quark matter.” Cody held up his fist. “My God, I’m holding exotic matter in my hand.”

  Hayes’s eyes widened. “If that weighs two kilos like you said, Doc, it’d be enough catalyst to allow at least two hundred spaceships to travel faster than light.”

  Cody laughed out loud. All around him was a gold mine to end all gold mines. More than that, he was like a prospector finding an entire continent made of solid gold. The importance of such a find was beyond calculation. Experiments with wormholes, which were mere microns in diameter, required exotic matter. Countless numbers of ships in yards required it as well, and particle accelerators floating in space ran night and day to produce the material. Containment was an issue as well, but now they had access to nearly inexhaustible amounts of exotic matter, so much Cody couldn’t see human civilization—or Spican civilization, for that matter—running out anytime soon.