“I need him to analyze the skeletons. Moreover, it’s not his first sensitive project with… the Security Tower. Here’s the approval,” Tadeo said and handed over a hologram.
Then he turned his head toward him.
“Gill, this is the bunker comman—”
“Right… checking now,” the commander sputtered, rudely interrupting Tadeo. He blatantly ignored the cherished Antyran palm ritual, which didn’t really surprise anyone.
Same pleasure meeting you… I hope I won’t have to meet your sorry mug too often, thought Gill, annoyed by his lack of manners. He was never too happy to meddle with security’s bullies, and this particular soldier seemed to be one of its finest embodiments. The commander held the hologram near a wall scanner until a green light lit, and then he moved off their path.
“Move to the elevator! Down to the last level!” he waved his hand vigorously to encourage them to speed up their steps.
The descent went on forever. Gill glanced through the transparent walls at the countless layers of basaltic rock in which the secret base was dug, below a training garrison built at the surface as a decoy. Surely very few Antyrans were aware of this. It was quite remarkable how the security forces managed to excavate something that huge right in front of the temples’ nostrils. But he couldn’t help wondering if Baila XXI knew about this place. Most likely, yes—his spies and agents swarmed the Shindam’s Towers and informed him about pretty much everything. And considering what a ruckus Tadeo must have caused with this expedition, everyone in the elevator was in mortal danger if the temples found out the slightest thing about it.
As they dropped lower and lower, he started to feel the cold numbness of fear seeping into his bones. Even though he was aware that few archivists had the good fortune to die of “natural causes” at a ripe old age, he’d rather get killed outside, bathed in starlight, than buried alive like a baski10 in this stinky hole.
The elevator finally stopped. Gill walked briskly behind Tadeo through a series of armored doors and reached a long gallery, better lighted than the entry tunnels. Looking through the thick glass walls on the corridor’s sides, he saw a long row of laboratories stuffed with all sorts of unidentified machines and displays.
“You told the ‘nice’ commander something about err… some skeletons?” asked Gill, dispelling the silence.
“We found the skeletons of the gods!” replied Tadeo, grinning from gill to gill.
“What?” Gill exploded, filling the cavern with long echoes.
“As you heard. Look here,” he said, pointing to a large automatic door, which opened when they reached the area in front of it.
They stepped inside a round room whose wall to the corridor was made of ceramic glass. The god lay on a table in the middle of the room, bathed in a bluish glow coming from a bunch of lights hung on a portable stand. Gill approached it slowly, holding his breath, not daring to believe that what he saw was real. Two scientists in blue robes were carefully measuring the skeleton.
Did the bones belong to a god? No one knew what a god should look like. There were no descriptions, except the ones of Beramis, a giant firewall, and Belamia, an eternal twister. The skeleton, in any case, didn’t resemble a firewall or a tornado. It looked just the way a skeleton was supposed to look. But what a skeleton! One thing was obvious to everyone in the room: the bones didn’t come from their planet and had no connection to any living or long-gone Antyran species.
Its stature was similar to that of the Antyrans, but the similarities ended there. Its bones were more robust; the big, elongated skull had prominent arches, and its strong arms had wide hands with four long fingers, ending in claws. It was bipedal, and—another amazing detail—the tail was missing!
“Can it be a genetic manipulation?” Tadeo asked him. “Look at the pelvic bones, they’re—”
“No. I don’t see how somebody could build such a thing,” Gill babbled, hardly finding his breath. “I’ll tell you more after checking the others. Did you say you found more of them?”
“Yes. And we found the remains of a ship. A golden one, just like the Fire Chariots.” Tadeo grinned with the serenity of someone having no worries to squeeze his tail.
“A Fire Chariot? How did a Fire Chariot end up on—”
“Shot down. We found a hole this big,” said Tadeo, showing him the size with his hands. “Some sort of a laser beam.”
As Tadeo happily revealed more and more details of the unbelievable story, Gill felt claustrophobic again and had to fight the urge to run back to the surface to get some fresh air. What a huge mistake I made to answer the call this morning, he thought.
“The anatomists are checking the remains. Soon, we’ll have more details,” said Tadeo.
“How old… how old do you think they are?” murmured Gill.
“Several hundred, maybe a thousand years. Look at the bones! They spent quite some time underground.”
“Right. At first smell, I’ll give them over five hundred. Anyway, they’re pretty well preserved. I hope we can date them.”
“I thought that myself,” Tadeo said with a smirk. “What if they came from another world, with a different isotope frame? The radioactive dating would… jump off the scale,” he uttered in a low voice, aware that he just said the biggest conceivable blasphemy.
“You’re insane,” whispered Gill, although he wasn’t sure anymore that he was saner.
A sane Antyran wouldn’t be here, two steps away from the… creatures.
“The other skeletons are here, too?”
“Yes, back there,” Tadeo said, waving his hand toward a pile of black crates stacked in a corner. “There’s one in another lab I want you to check out. Someone will lead you to it.”
“Are there any children?” asked Gill.
“Only adults. There’s no visible sexual dimorphism.”
“Maybe they’re all males?”
“That’s one of the things I expect you to tell me,” Tadeo said, still smiling.
“Of course. I’ll start working right now.”
Surely the soldiers won’t let us out of the bunker until the research is finished, but I need my microtomograph, my spectrometer—
“I asked for your tools,” said Tadeo, interrupting Gill’s thoughts. “They’re in the B8 lab with the other skeleton I told you about. I’d like you to study that one first. But before you leave, take a look at this.” He leaned over to reach the contents of a crate and carefully lifted out a golden bracelet. “I found this thing on his arm,” he said, pointing at the skeleton on the table.
Gill took the object. It was cold to the touch.
“Quite light and smooth, without ornaments. Oh, look, a painted effigy, a black star with three curved rays.”
“What could be its use? Some sort of ritual?” wondered Tadeo.
“It’s too simple for that; it doesn’t seem decorative. All of them had bracelets?”
“Maybe—we found the remains of fourteen individuals and only six bracelets. I suspect the others may have been destroyed on impact.”
“The star is a button. We managed to open it earlier,” said one of the Antyrans from the security team who was measuring the skeleton.
“What?” Tadeo jumped, surprised. “How did you do that? Show me!” He took the bracelet from Gill’s hands and handed it to the other scientist.
“Very simple,” replied the researcher. “Just press here on the three-rayed star.”
One of the bracelet’s sides opened, uncovering eight strange symbols, the likes of which Gill had never seen in his entire life.
“They look like buttons!” exclaimed Tadeo, taking the artifact back to examine it closer. “This can only mean the bracelet was some sort of device. I wonder what these buttons do…”
“Absolutely nothing,” said another security lab worker. “I’ve pressed them a couple of times, but they can’t work after so many years!”