Chapter 2
Treasures of a Lost Age
Peering out into the dark hallway, Lanyar made a mental decision on which way to go. He thought to himself that he would go to the lower sewers today, searching for anything he could salvage. He knew several passages that the other boys of his troop didn’t know of and several large long forgotten store rooms where he hadn’t been yet.
Making his way down the hall, he turned left and proceeded another several hundred meters further, before turning right. Here a long forgotten elevator, locked forever with its doors half-open, seemed to be crammed into the shaft at an eerie angle. Lanyar squeezed through the doors and looked up at a trapdoor ajar. He had used the elevator shaft many times in the past, and was quite adept at jumping high enough to get a good grip on the edge of the door leading up into the elevator shaft. With a grunt he pulled himself onto the top of the dead elevator and made his way to the service crawl space. This indention once allowed the engineers of this building to travel the length of the elevator shaft in safety. Now it was used by Lanyar to easily descend into the lowest bowels of the giant building. After wiggling past the corrupted elevator, he looked down into the darkness. His eyes, even with the help of the eye film couldn’t make anything out, the world below the surface of Thaysha was a cold and dull grey universe. Lanyar swung himself back around and began to quickly climb down the ladder into the black void below.
At last, Lanyar reached the bottom door in the elevator tube. This door was closed, however, rusted shut from the water and condensations of ages of unuse. Lanyar sometimes wondered how long these buildings had stood, and he even once asked Bort, his Salvage Master, but the gruff man just shrugged and said nothing. Lanyar had always thought that Bort was a rather dull and witless fool, and had attained the Salvage Master’s position only through his ruthlessness rather than any intellectual pursuit of the salvage he and his other friends had brought back.
Lanyar stepped out into the empty elevator shaft and looked up into the total darkness. The optics inside his eye film buzzed and hummed and finally settled on ghostly cyan lines disappearing out into infinity. He turned back towards the rusted door and dug into his pocket for several seconds until he found a small box. About the size of his thumb, he peeled back the top and pinched out a dull brass metallic bauble. Placing it on his outstretched palm, he ran his index finger back and forth across the bauble. Like a kernel of super heated corn, the thing popped, growing twice as big, with six segmented metallic legs and a series of green coppery hued antenna. Even though very practiced into awaking the rust gnawer, Lanyar always flinched when the small robot unfolded.
Placing the oxide vacuum on the door, the little monster began to quickly eat away at the rusted spots. As the robot gnawed at the corroded steel, it broke it down molecularly with little evidence that the rust had existed at all. The air began to reek of pungent sulfide and the bottom of the shaft became so warm as to dry the walls of its condensation. Even Lanyar began to feel the heat uncomfortable, and as he moved the small roving beetle around to the various rusted spots on the door, he stripped away his outer jacket After an hour, Lanyar gingerly popped the rust gnawer from the door, bobbing the object back and forth between his hands as someone would with a very hot potato. As the thing cooled, it recoiled in on itself and after a few moments returned to the small button sized bronze broach that was quickly placed back in the box and shoved into the boy’s pocket.
With a small bit of effort, he pulled the two elevator doors apart and entered into a hallway that had lay silent for more than a two centuries. the hallway was rent like a children’s straw from some ancient cataclysm; the hallway floor buckled in many places, the walls were twisted and misshapen, and several large tungsten girdles jabbed down from the ceiling and buried themselves into the broken floor.
Crawling, ducking, and climbing through the wreckage, Lanyar made his way to a small cabinet. The hall was as completely dark as one could get, and only the eye film showed basic cyan outlines of the largest obstacles in Lanyar’s way. Popping the cabinet door open, he found a large wheel with a red knob poking up. The boy had seen this in many other halls and rooms further up in the building and he hoped this apparatus still worked. Taking hold of the knob, he began to turn the wheel; slowly at first as the ages of rust, goo, and old grime ground away, then more quickly under some internal torque. As the wheel gathered speed, a purr could be heard throughout the long hallway, followed by electrical pops and snaps as circuits garnered long forgotten charge. Lanyar began to sweat, even in the cold, as he continued to grind the wheel around and around. throughout the hallway lights started to glow, instrument panels lit up, and internal machines began to feed on the electricity.
After several labored minutes Lanyar stopped cranking the wheel and looked at a small digital readout at the bottom of the cabinet. It flickered in tired red letters: 15 minutes, 34 seconds of Emergency Power. Turning back to the the hallway and the many doors branching off from it, Lanyar returned to the the wheel and continued to spin it, checking regularly at the gauge below until it read over an hour. He nodded to himself, thinking that should give him enough time to determine if there was anything of value here. He could always return and add more power if needed.
Setting off down the now lit, and increasingly warmer and inviting hallway, he climbed over fallen girders and ducked under several wall plates.
He came to his first door, which appeared to have been rent by some terrific force ages ago. Looking inside, the room was small, not much more than a closet. In the center was a large steel boiler, its skin peeled away like that of a rotted banana. Large rusted pipes, bent askew like reeds in a cyclonic storm shown where the explosion had taken place. Huge gouges inside the room also showed where metal fragments from the boiler had torn into the walls, destroying control circuits. Lanyar stepped into the room and looked around, fingering what remained of the controls and more valuable fine tooled gears and high density threaded fittings. Grimacing, Lanyar realized that most were made of steel, brass, and copper…not worth hauling back to the station. All of the circuitry that controlled the flow of heated liquid, Lanyar guessed water, were destroyed or had been exposed too long to the cold damp conditions of the place.
Moving down the corridor, Lanyar caught something that made him smile. Stenciled on the next door was a symbol he had seen a couple of times before and had been told by many that it always held a cache of wondrous technological marvels. The Symbol was scarlet red, two circles entwined upon each other with three electrical charged bolts, stripped black and yellow emanating from its center. Lanyar scurried towards the door, skipping two other drab grey doors to reach it.
In the center of the marked door a small glass window peered into the room, double paned in thick glass, the vacuum had been compromised and now heavy drops of condensation clung to the inside glass. Rubbing the outside of the portal, Lanyar stood on his toes to stare into the room; it was as if looking through the eyes of some strange bug with the heavy droplets of condensation skewing and magnifying the interior, distorting it to a point where it was difficult to make out anything in great detail.
Lanyar stepped back from the door studying its casing, looking for any release mechanism. The edge of the door was encased in a durable black polycarbonate rubber. Probably a self-replicating rubber sealant, Lanyar had seen this in some of the upper rooms of the tower he lived and worked. It was usually a sign that the contents were guarded against outside influences of temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, or atmosphere. To one side of the door a keypad and digital readout glowed in soft emerald green. Lanyar studied this and knew that perhaps with the right code the door could open, although he doubted that there was sufficient power in the batteries to release the inevitable magnetic locking pins that held the door closed. The key combination could also be anything, and to randomly punch numbers in was both futile and sometimes dangerous.
The boy remembered the tale that Botic told him about a foolish garbage collector who stabbed in a wrong key series into another such door, as this, and the hallway filled with a toxic agent that rendered the entire area poisonous to this day, and even worse killed several of the collectors who was working the area stripping the area of its valuable nytrium and solicontric laser-machined parts.
Lanyar wetted his lips and desperately peered again into the room. Not much was visible through the cloying mist, but he did make out an immense table. On its top was a strange tri-manus metal claw, clasping a cube of opulent scintillating magenta and orange crystal. Rubbing futilely on the glass he squinted and looked again, thinking he saw a fiery glow emanating from the object. Lanyar stomped his foot in frustration. How could he be so close to something so valuable and not be able to get at it. One last time he looked thru the small window, trying to gain any other vantage of what lay within the vault.
Out of the very corner of the window he caught the glimpse of what might be another door. He looked down the hallway he was in and spied a darkened hallway running of in that direction. “Perhaps I will still be lucky this day, laddy” He mused to himself as he scrambled down the broken passage.
Lanyar made his way further down the hallway to a point where it T’d into another unlit shattered corridor. Branching off in several directions additional halls ebbed into darkness in the old building.
Turning his eye-film back to the ultra-violet mode, he made his way towards the door he spied from the opposite hallway. This corridor differered from the one he had entered the level of the building, in that it exhibited far greater structural damage. After several hundred years even the best structures buckled from stress and condensation, but this hallway almost seemed to look as if a bomb had been detonated within it. What further peeked Lanyar’s interest is that carbon scarring was visible on some of the roof and wall panels; scarring of this type only resulted from phaze rifle emissions. In all of years he had searched the rubble of these buildings, he could remember only one other time seeing damage like this, and that was in a military barracks hundreds of kilometers from here.
Scratching his chin, Lanyar finally crawled over the last obstacle and stood before the door that he had spied from the other corridor. His eye-film hummed as it brought a hundred million transistors to bear on the site before him. Even in the day when he happened across the deserted military outpost, he had never saw a body, but there crumpled over the remains of the pressurized sealed door, lay the remains of somebody.
Lanyar took a step forward, then froze. He stared at the remains, transfixed at the seared and mummified bones. It wasn’t that Lanyar hadn’t seen death before, living on Thraysha was a harsh and unrelenting world, but never had he found anything like what lay before him. The outer buildings of the settlement, before it was evacuated, was a research center with very little dangerous activity. Scientists and their families came and went, studying the planet’s eco-system and geology. In all the news reports, never had Lanyar read about any disturbances, accidents, even criminal activity. How did this body end up here? Perhaps the body wasn’t that of a scientist but of another treasure hunter, from decades ago that got caught in falling debris?
Walking slowly forward Lanyar bent over the body and poked at it. It still wore a lab coat, stained and dirtied, the sigil of the colonies scientific arm visible on it’s breast pocket. The bones of the man lay connected from flesh dessicated and from clothes that would never disintegrate. His body was beginning to fossilize, with the flesh and bones absorbing minerals from the surrounding ambient air. Moving the remains, crackeled and shattered the calcium crust that blanketed the corpse, he searched the hollow remains.
Furrowing his brow, Lanyar considered the possibilities that the person still could have found the jacket, long after the evacuation of the colony, then died. Peeling the stiffened coat back, he searched the pockets. Lanyar found a plastic ID badge, and turned it over and over, trying to see if anything was still visible. In the darkness of the hall, he couldn’t make anything out and was forced to crawl back out over the twisted pylons and beams. The first hallway still glowed from the auxiliary power, though that might end at any moment.
In the light he could barely make out the badge ID number and name. The poor fellow worked in the geology labs, section V, 3rd shift. At one time there was a picture of the man, but that had long ago dissolved just as his flesh withered from his bones.
Crawling back towards the body, Lanyar again noticed the carbon scarring of the walls, and the rent metal walls…his hair on his neck prickled and he slowed and looked up and down the hall. There was something really wrong here, he thought to himself. He was about to leave and forget that he had ever even seen ever been here, when he noticed a bulge in what would have been the leg of the scientist. His pants and sock clung to a shattered femur, but strapped to the it was a metal wand about six inches long, with a bulbous metal and glass head. Reaching gingerly forward, he wiggled it free from the dead man’s harness and pulled it close.
A cracked and aged button at the bottom of the metal stick, was the only visible control, the head was dense black glass or plastic, surrounded by a metal frame. Almost like a magnifying glass he could barely see through the dark glass, though it didn’t appear to magnify.
The day that started out like any of the other thousands of days that Lanyar had gone off into the ruins of the old colony was becoming anything but normal. Most items that he would find he would simply place them in his satchel and examine them in more detail at a later time, perhaps while he ate or just before he went to sleep. But this item was so unique that Lanyar had to know what it did.
He held the device out at arm’s length, squinting his eyes and turning his head away, almost expecting it to explode; he toggled the switch. After several seconds he opened his eyes to view a projection from the black glass. It formed a three-dimensional hologram of a orange and red crystal, sitting on a massive table. the crystal surged to life within the hologram flashing schemtics and projections of distant and forgotten places. In a whirl of purlsing images it revealved a time and place long before man had even controlled fire, when the galaxy was under the clenched fist of another species…an empire without end, and a people that thought they would rule the universe until the end of time. The people of today, even in the 43rd century of man, would have considered them gods, they wielded power of such magnitude to change orbits of planets and sway the paths of galaxies…but they were gone, all of their knowledge lost, all forgotten about, a fraction of what they held sacred lay perhaps in the ancient memory crystal.
The projection quit, the glass bulb at the end of the wand, flickered one last time and lay dark. for the first time Lanyar noticed that he was bathed in thick sweat and that his body steamed, he was so enraptured.
Unbeknownst to Lanyar, sixteen thousand miles overhead, in a rotting geo-sysnchronous orbit a battered satellite flared to life. The thing had been reduced to nothing more than a hunk of twisted metal, its antennas and and solar panels blown away a hundred years ago — it ran on only a trickle of wattage from a near dead nuclear battery. But it had received the signal it was meant to wait for, its mission was done, and it could activated the beacon deep within its charred remains. A beacon that sent a single message to a point a six thousand light years away: “Archon’s Gate is Open”.
