Chapter 26
A Tomb in the Rocks
Chapter 26
Stan’s computer led the boys into a field of great curving flakes of rock peeled up from the ground like frozen cresting waves. Joey traced his gloved fingers along the edges. As the flakes grew more dense, the beauty of the formations gave way to frustration. Joey and Stan climbed over, around, and under the flakes, taking care not to snag their suits.
After a time the formations thinned, and the ground started to level, and then ended all together. They stood on the lip of the biggest crater Joey had ever seen. The wall swept away from them in either direction, and met again in the distance. The far side was lost in the shadow of another asteroid, but it was clear that something broke the crater wall up in a way that looked too regular to be natural.
“The other side is a couple kilometers away,” Stan said.
“Okay, let’s go,” Joey said and stomped his heel.
“I think maybe we should go around.”
“Won’t that take longer?”
“Yeah. Another few hours at least.”
“So let’s jump. I bet we make it across in three jumps.”
Stan looked over the edge. Directly below, the bottom was swallowed in shadow. He licked his lips.
“Yeah,” Stan said.
“Is the jump making you nervous?”
“Stupid, isn’t it?”
“Really stupid.”
“Okay,” Stan said with a sigh, “I don’t think we should do so many jumps though. We’d use to much HTP. Let’s jump down, then walk the rest of the way.”
“Okay.”
Stan stomped his heel, then the boys leapt out from the edge in a low arc. They weren’t going to make it past the shadow. Landing in the dark made Joey’s stomach flutter in a way he hadn’t felt since yesterday’s jumps. But the landing was uneventful.
He swept his eyes around. Down in the bowl of the crater, the wall towered over them. They could easily make that jump, but it still felt confining. Only slight ripples and occasional cracks broke up the smooth plain of dark rock between them and the next jump.
Joey took the first step forward and Stan didn’t immediately follow. And when he passed into the direct sunlight he saw why. His white Angel suit glowed against the near-black rock. Stan checked the chart on his arm computer. He pointed across the field.
“We have to go straight across,” Stan said, still hesitating. After scanning the sky for a long moment, he set his jaw and started forward.
“I want to run,” Joey said, looking back over his shoulder.
“Me too. But it would use too much oxygen. We are well past any mining operations for this cluster; this is it for supplies. Watch the sky while I navigate.”
“Okay.”
They fell into a silent march across the plain. Joey scanned the sky in methodical sweeps. The creaks and hum of his AGLS, and the little pulses of micro thrusters, grew louder and louder in his ears. Even though he would never hear the dark ship, he imagined the cacophony of the suit drowning out its approach. Sweat beaded on his upper lip and brow.
“Do you know who makes the comic books?” Joey said, desperate to distract himself.
“What?” Stan said after a long silence, as if it just dawned on him that Joey was speaking.
“The comic books. Do you know who draws them?”
“They are done by a company on Mars.”
“If I went there could I see how they make them?”
“I thought you were going back to TMS.”
“Well, yeah, but I want to know how they make the lines. You know how they get them so black?”
“I’ve never read them. My dad said comics are for…” Stan trailed off.
“What?”
“Nothing. I just started thinking I hope this tomb is worth it,” Stan said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s been fun running around with you. But we could have done that closer to home, you know. Without the danger.”
“I don’t know. A thousand-year-old tomb. That might not be human.”
“Yeah. That would be neat.”
“And you figured out how to jump to another asteroid. I bet Tom from your book never did that.”
Stan beamed with pride.
“That was pretty awesome.”
They walked on, their goal never seeming to get closer.
“His name was Felix,” Joey said after a while. “He was my dad’s friend, and he was always nice to me.”
“What?” Stan said, confused.
“Felix was the miner who was killed by the Trojans a couple days ago.”
“Okay,” Stan said. “An Olly, right?”
“We’re all a little Olly, remember. His name was Felix. He was my dad’s friend, and he was always nice to me. Your turn.”
“His name was Felix…I’m not doing a reffie ritual.”
“Why don’t miners get tombs? Or funerals?”
Stan didn’t answer for a long moment. Joey looked at him. Stan’s eyes were furtive, looking anywhere but at Joey.
“It’s hard to explain.”
Joey laughed. He stopped and made a sweeping gesture around the lava field. Stan looked around, still not meeting Joey’s eyes.
“What else are we going to do?” Joey said.
“I guess it’s just not in our traditions.”
“Well, the aliens get tombs,” Joey said as he started walking again. “The villagers get a rock with their name on it, and they get singing. I want singing. When we get back I’m going to teach people to sing, and we’re going to sing for Felix. Then we’ll all say something we liked about him.”
“Boy, you’re going to be eating ear with noodles soon,” Stan said.
Joey laughed but it faded. They had reached a point where the end of the field looked as far away as the beginning, and both looked unreachable. Without realizing, they had both started walking quicker. The fear of the dark ship had them almost giddy.
“When we get back,” Stan said, “I’m going to stay inside for a month.”
They forced themselves to slow only to find that they were half walking, half running again.
“You know, sometimes it seems like you don’t want to answer my questions.”
“Sorry. My mind is elsewhere a lot of the time.”
“Like just now.”
“Look!” Stan said, and pointed.
In the distance, black faceted spires of rock stabbed twenty meters up from a low area in the crater wall. The asteroid that had put the area in shadow had moved along. Sunlight flashed off the facets and seemed to illuminate the inside of the spires, making them glow dully against the black sky. Joey had spent his entire life around asteroid terrain, the jagged and smooth, the hard and soft, the angled and rounded. He had never seen something as geometrically clean as this formation. Nothing other than equipment brought there by men. Nothing except the tile that sent them on this mad journey.
There were dozens of six-sided columns that shot straight up, then tapered to chisel points at the head, and stood in a line like a great wall. The wall ran at least a hundred meters along the edge of the plain. The last spires on either end were shattered, great chunks ripped from them by some collision long ago.
They arrived to the base of the wall tired. The anxiety of being so exposed had them panting as if they had been running. Joey calmed his breathing and walked right up the face of the nearest column. He ran his hand along the pitted surface, wiping away dust and revealing them to be galaxite. Sunlight scattered inside it, split into a thousand diffused beams by the heavily pitted surface.
“Someone built this?” he said.
“I don’t know, but it doesn’t look natural,” Stan said.
“Maybe the someone made galaxite too,” Joey said as he walked for the end of the wall, dragging his hand along it the whole way. Bathed in the dull glow, he tried to imagine what it would look like cleaned of dust and free of the pitting.
“Maybe. I wonder how long it has been here,” Stan said.
“A thousand years.” Joey shrugged.
They reached the ruined end of the wall and clambered over rubble to see what was behind it. Any clue to what the wall had been part of was a crater now. Like so many things in Joey’s life lately, the ruins raised more questions than answers. If he were a good miner he would have kept his small tank of knowledge full. Instead, he let the tank grow so big it could never be filled. Olly must have had the biggest tank of them all before me. Joey chuckled to himself.
“What are you laughing at?” Stan said.
“I was thinking they’ll change Olly’s name in The Book to Joey,” he said as he jumped down to the edge of the crater, his feet kicking up motes of fine black dust.
Stan laughed as he jumped down, and the motes ballooned into a cloud. The dust danced around their legs, then was puffed away by the AGLS dust-repellent system. With no atmosphere, the dust settled quickly, only to be kicked up again with the slightest shuffle of their feet.
Stan pointed to a bright sunlit asteroid in the sky.
“There it is. The penultimate asteroid.”
“The what?”
“The jump before the last one. Unless you think you’ve had enough.”
“Not even close,” Joey said.
“Okay. I figure we could go off this big thing.”
Stan patted one of the broken columns. It lay like a dimly lit ramp to the sky. They only needed to run for the end and jump. They had done it so many times now, but it still got Joey’s heartbeat up, and his palms sweaty. And now that they were so close, it was like the end of a shift at the crater. A couple more big swings and the day would be done. A couple more jumps and it would be time to go home.
He felt his breath quicken. He had that air-starved suit feeling. It was so bad he had to check that he still had air. The levels were good. He reminded himself to trust the suit. The alarms would go off if anything was amiss.
Stan climbed the fallen spire.
“Stop!” Joey said in an urgent whisper. “They’re coming.”