RELEASE
The wind and sun met on her back as a biting weight,
pressing her forward over him. She continued to struggle to find a comfortable
spot next to him as she worked to bring him towards release. Her sweat beaded
on her face, rolling down her face in dirty rivulets toward her nose where it
would collect and fall in drops like tears to crash upon him.
She sat up to catch her breath, moving her jaw side to side and
twisting her neck to keep them loose. The sun and wind changed the direction of
their attack to meet her face. She tied up her hair tighter and prepared to
commence the real work, wiping her face with her shirt. She considered taking
off her shirt, but the brutal assault of the wind and sun discouraged her.
Taking a deep breath, she straddled him and began to move
rhythmically never letting her full weight down, positioning to use her body as
the tool. She didn’t picture him as the man he was beneath her, but as a fierce
rock-muscled warrior – a granite block of a man with sharp features and the
stench of blood on him. She imagined his ferocious mouth tearing into her
throat like a tiger, his vise-like grip squeezing the life out of her as if she
were prey. She could smell his sweat, feel his heat burning her more than the
sun itself. She bit her lip and winced in pain at the unexpected sharpness of
her own teeth.
For a moment, she lost the rhythm and this dance with him
became a chore. She cursed to herself and readjusted her position over him,
taking a moment to look around her. Her holster and the antique revolver she
carried in it was digging into her hip, and she slid it around to lay against
her lower back. The wind churned up small cloud of sand and dust around her.
The horizon was empty of life, of movement and sound. There was only the wind,
the sun, the woman, and the man … and the dance.
She lived for this moment. She detested the courting, the
foreplay. She hated the time it took to find a man like this, searching
endlessly through an ocean for that one glass of water that is more special
than the rest. She craved the final buildup, the intensity coupled with the
velocity of it – those last few seconds when the reversal becomes impossible.
She had reached this same point in the dance with many men, and less often with
women. Many times she had been disappointed with the climax, and many more
times she had ruined and broken the men and women she had danced with.
And then she felt it, a change in the vibrations - a slight
groan beneath her. She felt those tiny vibrations radiate out and encompass his
whole body exponentially. She found a counter-rhythm and pressed even further,
seeking to pull him upwards into that sweet release. Her whole body began to
vibrate with his and she recognized this feeling as the point of no return. He
was coming whether she wanted him to or not.
She inched her hands behind him and pulled upwards, she had
stopped breathing and bit her lip until it bled. Suddenly, she felt the release
as it happened. He rose from the ground, the sand pouring off his back and rolling
off his sides in waterfalls. A sudden odor assaulted her and she breathed it in
as a smile of triumph creased her sunworn and sandbeaten face.
And then his skull came off.
Unfortunately, the slope they were on wasn’t a friendly one
and his head began to pick up speed as it rolled away from her. She used the
well-developed muscles in her thighs to propel herself off his body and onto
her feet. She dived for the head and missed, sprawling painfully against the
rock and sand as her excavation tools scattered away from her. The head
continued to pick up speed and she bolted upright into a sprint, the scree of
the mountainside tumbling around her in rivers. She lost her footing and fell
back, caught in the rockslide. She could still see the head rolling away ahead
of her and struggled to regain her footing but found it impossible.
Then she remembered the cliff ahead. It wasn’t a high cliff,
but if she were to fall from its edge, she would definitely break her legs or
her arms or her back, all depending on how she landed. The skull careened off a
stationary boulder and changed direction, angling towards her. She was about
even with it, and still gaining speed towards the cliffside when she spotted a
rock outcropping that could save her. Gritting her teeth, she dug her heel into
the ground and heard a snap. The adjustment was enough to have changed her
trajectory, and she prepared herself for the impact.
At the last second she reached out to grab the outcropping.
Her grip was true, but the velocity of her fall caused her to swing wildly from
the cliff’s edge. Her elbow popped and she screamed, but out of the corner of
her eye she saw the head. Desperately she reached out and made a miraculous
save in mid-air by hooking the skull in the eyesocket.
Loose rock poured over her for several seconds as she hung
there. Her ankle was radiating pain, her elbow was numb, and the voice above
her was sarcastic.
“Boy, the shit you do to save the skull of a man that’s been
dead for three centuries.”
Anya grunted and tossed the skull up to her partner.
“If you’d have been helping me instead of masturbating over
the marble architecture back there, we
might have just pulled a perfect specimen out of the ground,” she spat
at him.
“Hey, that’s some seriously gorgeous craftsmanship you’re
badmouthing,” he replied. “And let me tell you, if I weren’t an android, I
probably would masturbate over it.”
He pulled her up and handed the skull back to her. “He’s a mongoloid.”
Anya scoffed at him, but then looked at a few features of
the skull she hadn’t noticed before.
“And I just ruined him, Aarin,” she said, stomping off in
disgust.
The walk back to the dig site was taken in silence. As she
approached the mummified torso, she realized that in her haste and panic she
had ripped the body in half, and it lay in a crumpled heap. In exasperation,
she ran a hand over her face and sighed.
“Fuck!” she exclaimed.
Aarin walked past her and reached down into the cavity the
torso had left in the clay.
“Hey hey, what’s this?” he asked.
She walked over to see what the pseudo-man was talking
about. He held in his hand a small metal box with a padlock holding it shut.
---
“We’re not opening it,” was the frank declaration from the
Project Lead. His name was Darren Walls and his eyebrows spoke threats worse than
words – their hairy prominence was rivaled only by the thick fury of his
yellowed-white beard. The top rims of his thick eyeglasses pressed against the
thick hair of his unibrow, making the white hairs seem like frost creeping down
the lenses. When he removed his eyeglasses, one felt as if the ferocious
unibrow would be unleashed to undulate forth and strangle, like the tentacles
of some elder god.
Walls had a fierce power over his people and they listened
to him, and followed him without question.
Technically, Anya was not one of his people.
“I’m opening it,” she stated flatly. “I found it. It’s my
discovery. I’m opening it.”
Aarin shifted with a look of discomfort on his face and
tried to press further into the wall of the observation station’s briefing
room.
Walls reached a hand up to remove his eyeglasses and it
seemed that the diameter of the circle of archaeologists, geologists, and
various other team members grew in anticipation of the release of the unibrow,
like mortals before the Kraken unleashed.
Anya stood her ground and cut him off before he even
started. “Aarin did not spend hours freeing the body from the ground. I did. I
don’t give a damn if he put his hands on it first. The work was completed by my
hands, the sweat was mine, and this,” she said, holding up her arm and the
sling that held it, “is what I paid for it. Now give me the box, and the
hammer. I should have just opened it there.”
Walls stopped short of his eyeglasses and instead stroked
his beard. It almost looked like defeat, but to those that knew him better,
this indicated maneuvering.
“Jenkins.”
Tad Jenkins, the resident biologist, acknowledged his call
to the floor and cleared his throat tentatively.
“He’s right,” he stammered out. “There’s no telling what
might be inside. From our preliminary studies of the box, it appears to be
airtight and has held its seal. Any number of biological or chemical hazards
could lurk inside. Ancient diseases, deadly bacteria, poisonous gases …”
“Anya, I don’t care if the fifteenth reincarnation of sweet
and sunny Jesus is in there waiting to be freed to shit rainbows and peace on
the galaxy. We’re not opening that box,” Walls stated gruffly.
“Let one of the andies open it.”
The voice was an unfamiliar one to the group, as it had
never been used in the briefing room. The assembled members of the expedition
looked around for the source before realizing it had been spoken over the
room’s communications unit.
“Who is that?” demanded Walls. “This is a private
conference. You’re not authorized to be listening to these proceedings.”
“This is Chief Communications Officer Taggart, and I’m
authorized to listen to anything I desire to hear on this station,” came the
reply.
Walls chewed his mustache in controlled fury at being put in
his place.
“If you would rather make this a larger issue, I can have
your financiers on the hotline in just a few seconds,” continued the silky
voice of Taggart. “I would advise against it though. While I share your fears
about the dangers of opening the box, I know for a fact that its contents – if
valuable – and whatever fortune and glory may accompany them will be surrendered
to the Ulysses Group.”
Walls lowered his head in thought and he missed the smirk
wrinkling its way across Anya’s face.
“The clean room isn’t equipped for this,” Jenkins
interjected. “Suppose something bad is inside. The android will be
contaminated, and the clean room would be unusable for the rest of our time
here. It’s meant to keep specimens from being contaminated, not keeping
specimens from contaminating the clean room. We’ve got four months left before
the Ulysses transport comes back this way. That’s a lot of wasted time.”
“I don’t like it,” barked Walls. “I’m not endangering our
mission for a mystery box that can be opened under better circumstances at a
later time.”
Aarin stepped forward and stood before Walls.
“I’ll do it. We can use the airlock.”
“Explain how that’s going to be any different,” said
Jenkins.
“Since I can directly interface with the scanning equipment
remotely, I can open the box in the airlock. If you get an alarm, blow the
airlock.”
“I’m not losing another android,” said one of the
technicians. “We’ve got too few as it is.”
“You’ve lost andies because you’re incompetent!” shouted
Anya. “Why should your own failures affect the ability of the rest of us to
make decisions in line with our objective on this planet. I didn’t get chosen
to join this expedition because I’d run from danger.”
“You were chosen –“ began Walls.
“I was chosen because I would open the damn box!”
The tension in the room thickened with the increase of
volume. The communications unit audibly clicked off in the heavy silence that
followed.
“I am not an employee of the Ulysses Group, and I do not fall
under the boundaries of your tyranny like the rest of these apes. Commander
Wilkes would have –“
“Commander Wilkes is dead!” roared Walls. His eyeglasses
were off and his face was purple with rage. “This is my expedition, it is my
decision. The box stays unopened and if I decide to chuck it out to deep space,
I’ll damn well do it. Wilkes is dead because of careless stunts like this. It
should be you under twenty tons of rock on the surface with those andies. I
want you off my damned station immediately!”
“You can’t do that,” Anya protested.
“Jenkins, get security up here and send this miscreant back
down to the surface,” Walls barked as he pushed through the crowd of people in
the briefing room. “You can live in a god damned tent and starve for all I care.
The box stays locked up, closed, and quarantined, and this meeting is
adjourned.”
When the security team arrived, Anya shook off their grip
and walked to the shuttle dock in silence.
---
“What I’m saying is the geological signature is not
indicative of an asteroid impact.”
Kaizu was the Chief Geologist for the expedition – short in
stature, and with an extensive vocabulary of geological terms, he was not
exactly the most accessible man.
“From what we’ve seen so far, there are multiple points of
maximum impact, and the different levels of exposure to radiation we’ve found
in the many urban areas we’ve collected data from don’t match with what we’ve
been told to expect. The spot where you found your man and your box was the
least affected area on the planet, and we cannot explain how that is possible
considering how many maximum impact sites are in this vicinity.”
“What do you expect?” queried Anya. She stood over the
latest survey by Kaizu’s team and studied it against a simulation being played
out on a handheld screen. The dust whipped around them as they stood together
under a makeshift canvas canopy. “This disaster happened three hundred years
ago. This colony had all but been completely abandoned. Even this simulation
reeks of researchers that just don’t care what the truth is.”
Aarin approached them and tossed an apple to Anya.
“You look pale,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said in reply. “You could get shut down for
this, you know.”
Aarin shrugged and smiled. He took a place between Kaizu and
Anya over the survey and studied it without speaking.
“It just doesn’t add up,” said Kaizu with a sigh.
“Maybe we’re not considering all the possible scenarios,”
Anya offered. “I mean, forget what we’ve been told happened here. Forget that
you’ve seen the data from the unmanned expeditionary teams. What if we’re not
looking at an asteroid impact event?”
“I don’t see what else it could be. This much destruction is
indicative of a major collision.”
“But how do you explain the readings from the opposite side
of the planet?”
“It’s possible that the colonists had developed some way to
break up the object, but only succeeded in showering pieces of it across the
entire planet.”
“How impossibly huge would that asteroid have to be to have
made impact points this devastating across the entire planet?” Anya asked.
“There’s no way the colony would have the explosives to be able to break up an
asteroid that big.”
“Unless they used nuclear weapons,” Aarin said.
“Nobody has nuclear weapons anymore,” countered Kaizu.
“Yeah, but three hundred years ago some of the outlying colonies
still did,” said Anya as she turned and walked out into the wind and sun.
“What was the name of this planet?” she asked from outside.
“The Empire calls it Lucifer,” replied Aarin. “But who knows
what the natives called it.”
---
The shuttle door slid open and Anya stepped out timidly,
looking left and right. Taggart reached his hand up to help her down, but she
ignored him. The communications officer was a large man, but his girth belied
the power underneath the uniform. Having spent his entire career as a security
officer with the Ulysses Group, Taggart was not a man to be trifled with. He
had suppressed colonial uprisings in a number of systems and had personally led
the force of commandoes that had rescued the Galactic Emperor in the last
Central Revolution. Why he was a lowly communications officer now, no one knew.
“You’ve got about forty-five minutes before Walls comes back
from his survey on the surface,” he said to her. “And you had better hope he
doesn’t go looking for you there.”
“I’ll only need five,” she said. Aarin followed her out of
the shuttle and the trio made their way to the laboratory in silence. Taggart
used his security clearance to open the laboratory and then the vault where the
box was being quarantined.
“I hope you’ve made your peace, andie,” Taggart said as he
removed the box.
Aarin solemnly took it from him and pulled a small hammer
and chisel from his coveralls. They made their way through the silent halls of
the station until they reached the nearest airlock.
“How many people are left on board?” Anya asked Taggart.
“Twenty or so,” he replied, beginning the sequence to
pressurize the airlock. “Walls took most of the elite to the surface.
Apparently they found a complex deep beneath the surface – right where Wilkes
and those andies met their demise.”
The door to the airlock hissed open and Aarin stepped in.
“If I see so much as a flicker on any of the alarms,”
Taggart said as he left to man the control room, “I’m blowing the hatch.”
Anya smiled at Aarin as she shut the door and switched on
her communicator.
“Thanks, Aarin. I really appreciate you doing this.”
“Hey, just because I’m not human, doesn’t mean I’m not built
to be just as curious as you are.”
Aarin flashed his perfect smile and bent down, placing the
box on the floor.
“Are we ready?” Anya asked.
“Waiting for the test readings from Aarin,” came the reply
from the control room.
A few seconds passed before Taggart came back with, “We’re
good to go.”
Aarin calmly placed the chisel against the square portion of
the lock and began to hammer on it with force. It took a total of fifteen
strikes before the lock broke in half and fell to the floor. Anya and Taggart
were holding their breath as Aarin reached down and slowly lifted the lid.
Nothing happened.
Aarin waited several seconds to let any foreign bodies
register on the scanners if they happened to be present. He then nodded to himself
and opened the box completely.
“It’s just some paper,” he described to them. “Written in
Common, though the letters seem a bit strange.”
“Hey, Taggart,” Anya said into her communicator, “You can
let him out now. Anything in there would have registered already.”
There was silence and the door to the airlock remained shut.
“Taggart?”
Aarin started to read what was on the paper, while Anya left
to go to the control room, she could still hear him over her communicator.
“My name is Xia Yan, a proud scientist of the East Asian
Confederacy. The events of the last three days will not be recorded on video or
by audio recording devices. In order to power the environmental shield that
protects our beautiful island of Japan, all other electronic devices are rendered
useless. I write this now with pencil and paper, the slopes of Fuji, in the
hopes that one day someone will find it and read my words and know what has
happened here.”
When Anya reached the door leading out of the room directly
connected to the airlock, it did not open automatically.
“We, the descendants of those people who first were victims
to nuclear power as a weapon, were the first to completely condemn it. It took
centuries of separating ourselves from the growing power of the Eurasian Union
and the Global American States, to form the East Asian Confederacy and to
finally raise enough funds and support to build the shield which now allows me
to write these words. Unfortunately, our best intentions and our best efforts
have fallen short.”
“Taggart, open the door!” shouted Anya. She typed in her
personal code but the screen only flashed: ACCESS DENIED.
“The sheer quantity of nukes detonated was enough to flash
ignite the surface of the planet. We struggled initially to minimize the impact
on the sea floor, and in doing so, our losses due to flooding caused by
tsunamis was kept at a low six percent death rate. From this position, we could
see the planet boil around us. Typhoons lashed around the shield and lightning
crackled along its surface. No one outside could have survived, not here, and
not elsewhere in the world. They wanted us to believe that the Union and the
States were the cause – a sudden inflammation of old wounds that lead to an
immediate and inevitable nuclear war - but with our one satellite still in
orbit and able to transmit through the shield, we have discovered the truth.
Our friends who abandoned us, the Martian Colonists and their lackeys on Luna,
they delivered this nuclear salvo. Their beloved infant Galactic Empire and
their hatred of the traditionalist views of those of us who refused to abandon
this planet - that is what has caused this. Despite our best efforts, we
weren’t good enough, though. Our shield was good, but not eternal. In
twenty-four hours it will collapse and we will be exposed to massive amounts of
literal Hell on Earth. I only wish to say this to whoever may find this in the
future. The Galactic Empire has murdered an entire –“
The airlock hatch blew and Aarin disappeared with the box.
Likewise across the surfaces of the orbiting station, similar hatches blew and
every person still onboard was cast out to a cold and silent journey into the
void. Seconds later, in a section of the station that no one had paid attention
to during the expedition, sixteen nuclear rockets launched to their targets at
the sixteen different excavation sites across the planet formerly known as
Earth.
---
Taggart watched the last mushroom cloud dissipate with a
blank expression. His mission was accomplished. In four weeks, much sooner than
was related to the rest of the expedition team, a Ulysses craft would pick him
up and take him back towards the center of the galaxy – the center of the
Galactic Empire.
“I knew you were too eager to open that box for it to be
just curiosity,” said a voice behind him.
He spun around and there was Anya, a plasma-bolt rifle
leveled at him.
“I had already planned to open the box on my own, so I stole
Walls Security Clearance codes,” she said to him. “I guess you didn’t consider
me ambitious enough to go this far, huh?”
Taggart was silent.
“I don’t care about the men you killed. That was an
occupational hazard, but don’t think I didn’t know the truth of what happened
on this planet. Do you know who I work for?”
Taggart was still silent, his face a study in granite.
“I’m a member of the Gaian Collective, do you know what that
is?”
Taggart grunted, but did not take his eyes off her.
“We’re here for the truth,” she said, and held up the memory
card to her communicator. “And now we have it. Your precious Galactic Empire
has just lost its pristine reputation. It’s the same Empire that three hundred
years ago murdered seven billion people in the worst atrocity in the history of
–“
There was a loud crack that echoed through the control room.
Anya’s eyes dilated for a moment and blood spattered her lips as she tried to
breathe. She collapsed to her knees, and then slumped over to the ground. From
her position on the floor she bore witness to her murderer’s final acts.
Aarin lowered the antique revolver Anya always carried with
her as a good luck charm. It was the first archaeological find she’d made, and
she’d spent a fortune to have it restored to working order. The bullets alone
cost her three times the grant money she’d received for her first five
expeditions.
“Dammit, Aarin. Why’d you have to let her go on like that?”
Taggart yelled. “She could have fucking shot me at any second.”
Aarin stared quietly down at the female archaeologist who
only had seconds left to live.
“This is the last god damned time I sign up to work with an
andie. No retirement is worth this, not Acrutia, not the Jessuu Falls, not
Alpha Centauri.”
Taggart spun back around and began to systematically shut
all the airlocks on the station, checking also for signs of life still aboard.
“You know, I’ve a good mind to just shut you the hell off
for that shit – a fucking plasma-bolt rifle aimed at me and you –“
The loud crack was heard again and Taggart fell heavily
against the controls.
Aarin quietly walked over and pushed the communications
officer out of the chair. With a few quick keystrokes he set the station on a
collision course with the former planet Earth.
Three hours later, the last mushroom cloud that would ever
be seen on the planet finally dissipated.
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