The Anunnaki Legacy
by Bond Elam
Illustrated by Vincent Di Fate
You have nothing to say about it!” Superintendent Cantrell snarled. “When my ships get here, we’re going to start digging whether you like it or not, you got me?” He glared across the conference room table at Liz, his lips a bloodless smear through the gray stubble bristling from his chin.
Ensign Elizabeth McBride’s eyes narrowed to burning green slits. She would have liked nothing better than to grab the superintendent by his scrawny chicken’s neck and shake him within an inch of his miserable life. But newly commissioned science officers didn’t grab mining superintendents by the neck. No matter how much shaking they needed. Not on their first missions, they didn’t. Not if they ever wanted a second.
“Advocate Lassiter,” she said, turning to the balding, heavily jowled man who sat patiently listening to them from the head of the table. “I fully appreciate the superintendent’s concerns, but this is our first chance to pick up the Anunnaki’s trail in more than a generation. We need time on the surface. Time to explore and gather data. Once the superintendent’s ships start cutting away Slag’s core, any artifacts the Anunnaki left behind will be lost forever.”
“Get serious,” Cantrell groaned. He gave the collar of his business tunic an annoyed tug. “Slag’s atmosphere is full of hydrogen sulfide. There’s nothing down there but worms. Them, and that stinking ice algae they eat. Even if the Anunnaki did land—which I doubt, by the way…” He rolled his eyes knowingly at the advocate. “…there wouldn’t be anything left. With all those quakes, the surface is way too unstable.”
Liz gritted her teeth, forcing herself to remain calm. She was a Fleet officer. She wasn’t going to let some corporate loud mouth rattle her with a lot of irresponsible nonsense. Besides, it looked to her like Advocate Lassiter had heard more than enough of Mr. Cantrell’s rant. Any moment now, he was going to come down on the superintendent with both feet—a trampling that she intended to enjoy to the fullest.
Confident that she’d made her point, she carefully interlaced her fingers on the table and turned toward the advocate, waiting for him to respond.
Advocate Lassiter nodded his acknowledgement, then cleared his throat, smoothing the satin cuffs of his robe as he organized his thoughts. As the Council’s official liaison for their mission, he had both the responsibility and the authority to ensure that they left no stone unturned in their quest to track down the Anunnaki. The Anunnaki, after all, were the whole reason they had launched the Fleet in the first place—to reunite themselves with the ancient astronauts who’d visited Earth and set humankind on the road to civilization. At least, that’s what Liz and every child on their generations-long pilgrimage had been taught for longer than anyone could remember. All of which meant that Advocate Lassiter wasn’t going to let Cantrell’s ships anywhere near Slag until they’d scoured every square inch of the moon’s surface, no matter how stable or unstable it happened to be. Or so Liz thought—right up to the moment Advocate Lassiter reached across the table, patted her reassuringly on the arm and gave her a smile so sweet she thought his teeth would melt in his mouth.
“You know, my dear, Superintendent Cantrell does have a point,” he said. “Much as we may hate to admit it, seismic activity most certainly would have destroyed any artifacts the Anunnaki left on Slag’s surface long before we arrived.”
The advocate’s words jolted Liz like a slap in the face. This was the Anunnaki they were talking about—the beings who’d lifted their ancestors out of savagery, who might even have modified their DNA in the process. Advocate Lassiter couldn’t possibly believe what Cantrell was telling him, not with their best chance to learn something new about the Anunnaki in more than a hundred years. It just wasn’t possible. And yet, Advocate Lassiter now sounded as though he were more interested in helping the superintendent meet his precious quota than in completing their mission.
“Let’s face it,” Cantrell was saying as he leaned back in his chair and jerked a thumb toward the curved window of the conference room. “You haven’t proved that pile of junk out there was ever an Anunnaki ship in the first place. For all we know, it’s some old probe we sent out ourselves. Probably hit a meteorite and got itself blown to hell and gone before anybody even remembers.”
Struggling to marshal her thoughts, Liz looked out at the debris drifting off their port bow. It tumbled slowly over itself in the darkness—twisted shards of metal glinting in the orange glow cast up from Slag’s surface. There had been other finds, of course—bits and pieces, like crumbs left to guide them along their way—but never anything like this. Admittedly, whole sections of the hull were missing, and much of the internal structure had vaporized when the engines exploded. But the wreckage was the closest thing to a complete Anunnaki ship they’d ever found—even if it had been blown to hell and gone, as Cantrell put it.
“Wait a minute,” she said, looking from Cantrell to Advocate Lassiter and back again. “You know very well that ship wasn’t some unmanned probe. It’s been out there for more than a thousand years, since before we even reached this sector of the galaxy. It has to be an Anunnaki ship.”
“Yeah? Well, it’s nothing but scrap metal now,” Cantrell said. “And the fact is, we still have a fleet to supply. Which, in case you’ve forgotten, is what got us out here in the first place.”
“Your Grace,” she said, turning to Advocate Lassiter. “I’ll admit we didn’t find any Anunnaki glyphs on the wreckage, but the initial survey team found free oxygen in Slag’s atmosphere. A moon like this, with no sunlight—it shouldn’t have any free oxygen. Someone’s been here. They’ve modified the ecology. Dr. Tobias thinks they may even have reengineered the worms’ DNA. He thinks—”
“Tobias!” Cantrell rocked forward in his chair. “You’ve got to be kidding me. That washed-up old hack wouldn’t know his backside from a hole in the hull. If you think the Consortium’s going to put a mining operation like this on hold so you and that bumbling old fool can muck around in a bunch of worm slime, you’ve got another thing coming!”
“Worm slime!” Liz exclaimed. She brought both hands down flat on the table, lifting herself from her chair. “Is that what you think this is about—worm slime? We have a responsibility, Superintendent. To science, to the Council, to the Anunnaki themselves. You may have sold your principles to the highest bidder, but we have a whole fleet out there counting on us to figure out which way the Anunnaki are headed. And I, for one, am not going to let them down!”
She didn’t realize she was on her feet, glaring down at the superintendent, until she felt Advocate Lassiter’s hand on her arm. “Now, now, Liz, there’s no need for personal aspersions. No one here has sold anything to anyone.”
Liz looked down at the advocate’s face, at the patronizing smile painted across his features. Nothing she’d said had made the slightest difference to this man. His job, she suddenly realized, wasn’t to seek out new knowledge about the Anunnaki, wasn’t to help them reestablish their relationship with the race that had lifted humankind to consciousness; it was to keep a leash on her, to make sure she didn’t stir up too much trouble, didn’t get too much in the way of the Consortium’s “mining operation.”
“But we can’t just abandon our mission…” she said. She lifted a hand to her throat. Suddenly the air felt viscous, too thick to breathe. “We can’t just give up.”
“No, no, of course, we can’t,” the advocate said. “And no one’s asking you to. We wouldn’t think of it.” He turned to Superintendent Cantrell. “I’m sure we can afford Ensign McBride and Dr. Tobias some time on the surface, don’t you agree, Superintendent?”