Chapter 3
Yes, we just did something wrong
Keelic set out as planned after mother stuffed him with a huge breakfast, various warnings, and instructions to be home well before supper.
Hours later, standing on a treeless knoll, he surveyed the bluff and cave entrance. The cliff was covered with vines reaching upward, while others dangled from the height above. The cave mouth was overgrown with plants that grew in a chaotic green net. Getting there would require a short climb. Clear pastel-blue water flowed from the cave entrance and leapt down the rock face into a pale-blue pool. Violet moss lined the stream and clung to cracks where water seeped from the rock.
Using the vines, he climbed up beside the cascade, and entered the cave. Water gurgled from pool to pool along the cavern floor. He touched off his hood, took out his recorder, and switched on the suit’s lights.
Glass-like needles in jumbled heaps covered some areas, and large pyramid crystals grew from crannies in pools of still blue water. In others, irregular clusters of rounded white knobs clung to the sides. About thirty meters in, the stream flowed down the cave over wide, step-like dams a few inches high that stretched completely across the cave. Pale creatures scampered away from his light. He checked the stunner scanner. All the animals were relatively small, none dangerous that he knew of.
Farther along he found rock stalactites and stalagmites in weird shapes. He came to a small lake and found that he could go no farther. The other side was a jumbled mass of boulders that tumbled from the ceiling to the bottom of the lake. It was deep and full of the many-colored glowing aquamites. Keelic touched his hood and stuck his head into the water with the recorder. The aquamites did tight swirls around one another whenever they came near.
Something moved near the bottom and he edged forward to see. A white animal undulated from beneath a stone, snapped up a mite, and returned to its hole.
"Cold," he said.
Another one swam out directly in front of him. He jerked back, hit his elbow on a stalagmite, and lost his grip on the recorder. It bounced once on the rim of the pool and splashed in. He watched it sink, flashing its light as it tumbled down the steep rock wall, raising a cloud of silt.
"Dreep! Liquid Dreep!" he swore, stopping with a spasm as he realized that his mother could be listening if she opened the comlink without talking. He checked, and with relief saw that the link was off.
Still, he had to get the recorder back. Even though his father had absolutely forbidden him from going into any water bodies, he stepped into the pool. The suit kept him buoyant, and he had to use the wall to climb down headfirst. He had gone underwater in suits before, but never by himself, and never this deep. He kept a tight grip on the stone. At the bottom, sediment obscured his view, and he lost sight of the recorder. He waited, feeling the water pressure squeezing him, but the current was slow to push the sediment clouds away.
He pulled his legs down and gripped a rock with them. His suit lights lit up the area, but the sediment was too thick to see the recorder, even with its light. He began feeling around, found something, and pulled. It came loose, but was much larger and heavier than the recorder. He pulled it close, and lost his grip on the stone that kept him down. He floated upward staring in disbelief at what he was holding pressed against his faceplate. Reaching the surface, he clutched it to his chest and paddled to the edge.
His hood slid away at a touch, and his mouth dropped as he looked with an unobstructed view at a vintage Mark V Nuclear Laser Rifle from the Galactic War.
A hand strayed to his com, then stopped. His parents would never let him keep it, or even let him return here. He checked the stunner’s scanner, but all it showed were cave creatures.
With care, he washed caked sediment off the weapon. Except for many scratches, it looked undamaged. He found a rock to sit on and lay the weapon on his lap.
Taking a deep breath, he touched the Status button on the activation pad. It began to glow, showing six charges out of ten unused. Trying to remember what he had read about GW weapons or seen in the vids, he pressed a button marked with a symbol he recognized as Target Finder. A small grating noise came from the weapon, and a black scanner rose from a hatch on its top. A control panel was revealed as a small door slid away. Symbols indicated target type selection, scanning modes, evasive modes, and magnification. He raised the heavy weapon with difficulty, and looked into the scanner.
Most of the Target Finder selections had no effect that he could detect, but some were obvious—heat, movement, organic, and vegetative discriminations were easy. Before his arms got too tired, he discovered that he could combine different modes to look for combinations like organic, warm-blooded, moving. The rifle even had the ability to look through objects and scan what was behind them. Heaving a big sigh, Keelic lowered the rifle to his lap.
The communicator spoke and he jumped.
"How are you doing, Kee?" asked his father.
"I’m okay."
With a sinking feeling, he looked down into the now clear water at the recorder.
"Get any good recordings?"
"Some," he said, praying that Father would not ask for a visual.
"Well, it is time for you to come home. Sarah’s compiling an excellent dinner, and she will feed us both to pouncers if you are late."
"’Kay, I’m coming. Keelic out."
As fast as possible, he dove for the recorder. Before letting go to float back up, he gazed across the lake bottom to the dark hole where the water poured silently from beneath the boulder jam. Holding the recorder tightly, he floated to the surface and climbed out of the pool. A few taps on the recorder’s panel erased everything after the aquamites. After viewing the last minute to be sure, he began searching for a hiding place for the rifle. He was well into the forest before finding a suitable spot, and stuffed the rifle into the rotted fibers of a downed Patamic tree.
Halfway back, he remembered that he hadn’t eaten lunch, and decided to stop for a drink and a bite to eat. He climbed the closest tree, and sat on the round bump on the treetop that would become the tree’s giant seed bulb.
Late in the evening, Keelic slogged into the west dining room covered with gray mud and bits of green foliage.
"You’re late," his mother admonished.
"Did you see how far I got?" he asked, avoiding his mother’s gaze.
"You’re late," his mother said.
Keelic sagged.
Father said, "Yes, I did, almost eight kilometers round trip. Very impressive. How was the cave?"
"I found—"
His mother interrupted, "First, young man, you will go to the clean room."
Father nodded, and Keelic sagged again, dragging his feet.
"Don’t put your belt in with the suit. Wash it in the sink," his mother called after him.
In bed later, he looked up the Galactic War and the weapons used. There was an entire section devoted to the Mark V. Within a reactor housed in the stock, a controlled nuclear reaction produced a split-second gamma-ray pulse that was organized into a coherent beam. He also learned that the weapons had been used near the end of the war in the assaults on the last Quat-lat Kay-ku–held worlds, and were instrumental in routing the extragalactics from their strongholds, being one of only a handful of infantry-portable weapons capable of piercing a Quat’s armor. Production of the rifle had ceased at the end of the war because of radiation hazards. The weak shielding required to make the weapons portable rendered them easily damaged and thus highly toxic.
Radioactive? What if the weapon was damaged? No, Anny’s health scans would have picked that up when he got back. Perhaps a soldier stationed on Ermol had dropped it, or lost it in a battle here. When Keelic looked up bases that had existed in the last ten years of the conflict, Ermol was not listed. The region of space where the Ermol system was had not even been probed before the war.
He did some queries, paying attention to the dates and locations. Most of the Galactic War had happened a quarter turn
around the galaxy over two hundred years ago.
He looked up the geologic mapping of the planet that had been done in the first planetary surveys. A vague flooded cavern complex showed beneath the bluff, but no detailed scans had been made of it. He zoomed out the view of the area. A bunch of depressions marked as sinkholes showed on the top of the bluff. He panned and focused on one. Nothing remarkable.
As he was about to quit the system, a feature caught his eye. A very small line ran up the face of the bluff a few hundred yards east of the cave. Zooming in on it showed that it was very regular, almost like a...
Keelic killed the screen. He checked where his parents were in the house, then hurtled down his stairs and up into the observation tower with its scanner scopes.
"Anny, I’d like to be private."
He called up a holo of the bluff, and zoomed in on the spot. He told the scanners to filter vegetation. A ramp barely a meter wide followed a zigzag path up the face of the bluff.
"Penetration scan the area."
Only rock showed along with the flooded caverns, but the resolution was poor, showing no detail.
"Reset system."