She’d need help, too. There was no way she could climb out by herself, not without gecko pads. The walls were over four meters high and devoid of handholds. Through the hole, she could see a blotch of sky, pale and distant. She couldn’t tell exactly how far she’d fallen, but it looked like enough to place her well below ground level.
At least it hadn’t been a straight drop. Otherwise she would probably be dead.
Kira continued to study the room, not moving from where she stood. The chamber had no obvious entrances or exits. The pedestal that she had originally believed to be a stalagmite had a shallow, bowl-like depression in the top. A pool of dust had gathered within the depression, obscuring the color of the stone.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Kira saw long blue-black lines cut into the walls and ceiling. The lines jagged at oblique angles, forming patterns similar to those of a primitive circuit board, although farther apart.
Art? Language? Technology? Sometimes it was difficult to tell the difference. Was the place a tomb? Of course, the aliens might not bury their dead. There was no way of knowing.
“Thermals up,” Kira murmured.
Her vision flipped, showing a muddy impression of the room, highlighted by the warmer patch of ground where the sunlight struck. No lasers, no artificial heat signatures of any sort.
“Thermals down.”
The room could be studded with passive sensors, but if so, her presence hadn’t triggered a noticeable response. Still, she had to assume she was being watched.
A thought occurred to Kira, and she switched off the scanner on her belt. For all she knew, the signals from the device might seem threatening to an alien.
She scrolled through the last set of readings from the scanner: background radiation was higher than normal due to an accumulation of radon gas, while the walls, ceiling, and floor contained the same mixture of minerals and elements she’d recorded on the surface.
Kira glanced at the blotch of sky again. Neghar wouldn’t take long to reach the formation. Just a few minutes in the shuttle—a few minutes for Kira to examine the most important find of her life. Because once she was pulled out of the hole, Kira knew she wouldn’t be allowed back in. By law, any evidence of alien intelligence had to be reported to the proper authorities in the League of Allied Worlds. They would quarantine the island (and probably a good portion of the continent) and send in their own team of experts to deal with the site.
That didn’t mean she was about to break protocol. As much as she wanted to walk around, look at things closer, Kira knew she had a moral obligation not to disturb the chamber any further. Preserving its current condition was more important than any personal ambition.
So she held her ground, despite her almost unbearable frustration. If she could just touch the walls …
Looking back at the pedestal, Kira noticed the structure was level with her waist. Did that mean the aliens were about the same size as humans?
She shifted her stance, uncomfortable. The bruises on her legs were throbbing, despite the Norodon. A shiver ran through her, and she turned on the heater in her suit. It wasn’t that cold in the room, but her hands and feet were freezing now that the adrenaline rush from the fall was subsiding.
Across the room, a knot of lines, no bigger than her palm, caught her attention. Unlike elsewhere on the curving walls, the lines—
Crack!
Kira glanced toward the sound just in time to see a melon-sized rock dropping toward her from the opening in the ceiling.
She yelped and stumbled forward awkwardly. Her legs tangled, and she fell onto her chest, hard.
The rock slammed into the floor behind her, sending up a hazy billow of dust.
It took Kira a second to catch her breath. Her pulse was hammering again, and at any moment, she expected alarms to sound and some hideously effective countermeasure to dispose of her.
But nothing happened. No alarms blared. No lights flashed. No trapdoors opened up beneath her. No lasers poked her full of tiny holes.
She pushed herself back onto her feet, ignoring the pain. The dust was soft beneath her boots, and it dampened the noise so the only sound she heard was her feathered breathing.
The pedestal was right in front of her.
Dammit, Kira thought. She should have been more careful. Her instructors back in school would have ripped her a new one for falling, even if it was a mistake.
She returned her attention to the pedestal. The depression in the top reminded her of a water basin. Beneath the pooled dust were more lines, scribed across the inner curve of the hollow. And … as she looked closer, there seemed to be a faint blue glow emanating from them, soft and diffuse beneath the pollen-like particles.
Her curiosity surged. Bioluminescence? Or was it powered by an artificial source?
From outside the structure, she heard the rising roar of the shuttle’s engines. She didn’t have long. No more than a minute or two.
Kira sucked on her lip. If only she could see more of the basin. She knew what she was about to do was wrong, but she couldn’t help it. She had to learn something about this amazing artifact.
She wasn’t so stupid as to touch the dust. That was the sort of rookie mistake that got people eaten or infected or dissolved by acid. Instead, she took the small canister of compressed air off her belt and used it to gently blow the dust away from the edge of the basin.
The dust flew up in swirled plumes, exposing the lines beneath. They were glowing, with an eerie hue that reminded her of an electrical discharge.
Kira shivered again, but not from cold. It felt as if she were intruding on forbidden ground.
Enough. She’d tempted fate far more than was wise. Time to make a strategic retreat.
She turned to leave the pedestal.
A jolt ran up her leg as her right foot remained stuck to the floor. She yelped, surprised, and fell to one knee. As she did, the Achilles tendon in her frozen ankle wrenched and tore, and she uttered a howl.
Blinking back tears, Kira looked down at her foot.
Dust.
A pile of black dust covered her foot. Moving, seething dust. It was pouring out of the basin, down the pedestal, and onto her foot. Even as she watched, it started to creep up her leg, following the contours of her muscles.
Kira yelled and tried to yank her leg free, but the dust held her in place as securely as a mag-lock. She tore off her belt, doubled it over, and used it to slap at the featureless mass. The blows failed to knock any of the dust loose.
“Neghar!” she shouted. “Help!”
Her heart pounding so loudly she could hear nothing else, Kira stretched the belt flat between her hands and tried to use it like a scraper on her thigh. The edge of the belt left a shallow impression in the dust but otherwise had no effect.
The swarm of particles had already reached the crease of her hip. She could feel them pressing in around her leg, like a series of tight, ever-shifting bands.
Kira didn’t want to, but she had no other choice; with her right hand, she tried to grab the dust and pull it away.
Her fingers sank into the swarm of particles as easily as foam. There was nothing to grab hold of, and when she drew her hand back, the dust came with it, wrapping around her fingers with ropy tendrils.
“Agh!” She scrubbed her hand against the floor, but to no avail.
Fear spiked through her as she felt something tickle her wrist, and she knew that the dust had found its way through the seams of her gloves.
“Emergency override! Seal all cuffs.” Kira had difficulty saying the words. Her mouth was dry, and her tongue seemed twice its normal size.