She walked to a slanted column that ended only a meter above her head. Sucking in a quick breath, she dipped her knees and jumped.
The rough edge of the stone dug into her fingers as she caught hold of it. She swung a leg over the top of the column and then, with a grunt, pulled herself up.
Kira stayed on all fours, clutching the uneven stone while she waited for her heart to slow. Then she carefully got to her feet atop the column.
From there it was relatively easy. She jumped across to another angled column, which allowed her to scramble up several more, like climbing a giant staircase, aged and crumbling.
The last meter was a bit tricky; Kira had to wedge her fingers between two pillars in order to support herself as she swung from one foothold to another. Fortunately, there was a broad ledge beneath the crack she was trying to reach—broad enough that she had room to stand and move about.
She shook her hands to get the blood back into her fingers and walked over to the fissure, curious what she would find.
Up close, the gleaming white seam looked metallic and ductile, as if it were a vein of pure silver. Only it couldn’t be; it wasn’t tarnished.
She targeted the seam with her overlays.
Terbium?
Kira barely recognized the name. One of the elements in the platinum group, she thought. She didn’t bother looking it up, but she knew it was odd for a metal like that to appear in such a pure form.
She leaned forward, peering deeper into the crack as she tried to get a better angle for the scanner.…
Bang! The sound was as loud as a gunshot. Kira jerked with surprise, and then her foot slipped, and she felt the stone shift underneath her as the whole ledge gave way.
She was falling—
An image flashed through her mind of her body lying broken on the ground.
Kira yelped and flailed, trying to grab the column in front of her, but she missed and—
Darkness swallowed her. Thunder filled her ears and lightning shot across her vision as her head bounced against the rocks. Pain shot through her arms and legs as she was pummeled from every direction.
The ordeal seemed to last for minutes.
Then she felt a sudden sense of weightlessness—
—and a second later, she slammed into a hard, jagged mound.
4.
Kira lay where she was, stunned.
The impact had knocked the breath out of her. She tried to fill her lungs, but her muscles wouldn’t respond. For a moment she felt as if she were choking, and then her diaphragm relaxed and air rushed in.
She gasped, desperate for oxygen.
After the first few breaths, she forced herself to stop panting. No point in hyperventilating. It would only make it harder to function.
In front of her, all she saw was rock and shadow.
She checked her overlays: skinsuit still intact, no breaches detected. Elevated pulse and blood pressure, O2 levels high normal, cortisol through the roof (as expected). To her relief, she didn’t see any broken bones, although her right elbow felt as if it had been smashed by a hammer, and she knew she was going to be sore and bruised for days.
She wiggled her fingers and toes, just to test that they worked.
With her tongue, Kira tabbed two doses of liquid Norodon. She sucked the painkiller from her feeding tube and gulped it down, ignoring its sickly sweet taste. The Norodon would take a few minutes to reach full strength, but she could already feel the pain retreating to a dull ache.
She was lying on a pile of stone rubble. The corners and edges dug into her back with unpleasant insistence. Grimacing, she rolled off the mound and onto all fours.
The ground was surprisingly flat. Flat and covered with a thick layer of dust.
It hurt, but Kira pushed herself onto her feet and stood. The movement made her light-headed. She leaned on her thighs until the feeling passed and then turned and looked at her surroundings.
A ragged shaft of light filtered down from the hole she had fallen through, providing the only source of illumination. By it she saw that she was inside a circular cave, perhaps ten meters across—
No, not a cave.
For a moment she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing, the incongruity was so great. The ground was flat. The walls were smooth. The ceiling was curved and dome-like. And in the center of the space stood a … stalagmite? A waist-high stalagmite that widened as it rose.
Kira’s mind raced as she tried to imagine how the space could have formed. A whirlpool? A vortex of air? But then there would be ridges everywhere, grooves … Could it be a lava bubble? But the stone wasn’t volcanic.
Then she realized. The truth was so unlikely, she hadn’t allowed herself to consider the possibility, even though it was obvious.
The cave wasn’t a cave. It was a room.
“Thule,” she whispered. She wasn’t religious, but right then, prayer seemed like the only appropriate response.
Aliens. Intelligent aliens. A rush of fear and excitement swept through Kira. Her skin went hot, pinpricks of sweat sprang up across her body, and her pulse started to hammer.
Only one other alien artifact had ever been found: the Great Beacon on Talos VII. Kira had been four at the time, but she still remembered the moment the news had become public. The streets of Highstone had gone deathly quiet as everyone stared at their overlays, trying to digest the revelation that, no, humans weren’t the only sentient race to have evolved in the galaxy. The story of Dr. Crichton, xenobiologist and member of the first expedition to the lip of the Beacon, had been one of Kira’s earliest and greatest inspirations for wanting to become a xenobiologist herself. In her more fanciful moments, she had sometimes daydreamed of making a discovery that was equally momentous, but the odds of that actually happening had seemed so remote as to be impossible.
Kira forced herself to breathe again. She needed to keep a clear head.
No one knew what had happened to the makers of the Beacon; they were long dead or vanished, and nothing had been found to explain their nature, origin, or intentions. Did they make this as well?
Whatever the truth, the room was a find of historic significance. Falling into it was probably the most important thing she would ever do in her life. The discovery would be news through the whole of settled space. There would be interviews, appearance requests; everyone would be talking about it. Hell, the papers she could publish … Entire careers had been built on far, far less.
Her parents would be so proud. Especially her dad; further proof of intelligent aliens would delight him like nothing else.
Priorities. First she had to make sure she lived through the experience. For all she knew, the room could be an automated slaughterhouse. Kira double-checked her suit readouts, paranoid. Still no breaches. Good. She didn’t have to worry about contamination from alien organisms.
She activated her radio. “Neghar, do you read?”
Silence.
Kira tried again, but her system couldn’t connect to the shuttle. Too much stone overhead, she guessed. She wasn’t worried; Geiger would have alerted Neghar something was wrong as soon as the feed from her skinsuit cut out. It shouldn’t be long before help arrived.
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.