Her Brother's Keeper - eARC Read online

  “Holy hell, Daddy, it’s early,” she complained. “Where are you?”

  “I’m on a flight to the city now, with your Uncle Wade.” He turned his handheld so Wade could see the screen.

  “Hi, Wade,” Annie said.

  “You look like hell, kiddo,” Wade said teasingly.

  “It’s because it’s stupid early in the stupid morning!” Annie insisted.

  Marcus turned his handheld back toward himself. “Annabelle, did you stay out late last night?”

  “What? No, daddy, I just couldn’t sleep.”

  “Uh-huh. Are you having fun?”

  “I am! I met up with Liam and Sandra, since they live in the city.” Marcus nodded. He was glad she got to spend time with her friends. Aside from the occasional field trip, she never actually saw her classmates. “Also, Carlos showed me around.”

  Marcus raised his eyebrows. “Who the hell is Carlos?”

  Annie rolled her eyes. “Oh my God. You remember Carlos! He was in my class until like four years ago.”

  Marcus dimly recalled a boy named Carlos on her class roster. “Right. You know the rules, Annie.”

  “I’m not having anyone stay in my room, Daddy. The hotel autoclerk checks in on me at night and in the morning, just like you told it to. It’s like being in prison.”

  Good, Marcus thought. “Don’t be so dramatic. I’m just being careful. Remember what I told you: no boys until you’re married.”

  Annie rolled her eyes again. “Oh my God, Daddy.”

  “Look, just mind yourself, okay? I don’t think your mom was kidding about building a tower. She’s preggers and super emotional right now.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Annie said. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know you can, baby. I’ll come see you as soon as I can, okay? I love you.”

  “I love you too. I’m going back to bed.” Annie cut the connection.

  Wade was laughing. Marcus shook his head at him. “Someday, you’re gonna have a daughter, and this shit won’t seem so funny anymore.”

  Wade folded his arms across his chest. “You make fun of the sexbot, but robots don’t have pretty daughters that attract every horny, teenage shit-bird within a hundred klicks of the rodeo.”

  Marcus sighed. “I can’t fault your logic there.”

  Chapter 11

  Zanzibar

  Danzig-5012 Solar System

  Equatorial Region

  Cecil Blackwood held his breath as Lang’s workers used a power drill to breach the final layer of rock blocking the tunnel. Dust drifted into the stale air of the newly opened chamber as the air pressure equalized. Cecil lifted his respirator and took a long drink from his water bottle. Zanzibar was a miserably dry world to begin with; these tunnels were even worse.

  Zak Mesa was right on top of the breach, making sure the workers halted as soon as it was big enough for a man to crawl through. “Okay, okay, that’s good. Everyone shut your tools down. We’re through.”

  Cecil joined his dour partner, looking into the impossibly dark cavern they’d just opened. No light had touched the chamber in over a century. “Well,” he said, turning on his light. “Shall we?”

  Zak may have been unhappy with the circumstances, but even he couldn’t completely conceal his excitement. “You men,” he said, addressing the dig crew. “Stand by here. Nobody come in unless we call for help, understood?” He was answered by several dull nods. “Good. Mr. Blackwood and I will make sure this is the right chamber, and that it’s safe, before anyone else goes in. We don’t know what’s in there. They buried this place for a reason. Whatever is in there could be toxic, radioactive, or even infected with some kind of alien disease.”

  Cecil very much doubted any of that was the case, and knew Zak did as well, but that wasn’t the point. Lang’s men looked at each other wide-eyed, now hesitant to go any further. Good, Cecil mused. Keep the skags out until we can figure out what’s in there. The last thing the two off-worlders wanted was a bunch of ignorant locals rummaging through a treasure trove of alien artifacts like they were searching for parts in a scrapyard. The relics inside were priceless.

  “That should keep them out for a bit,” Zak said. “You ready?”

  “You did most of the work, my friend,” Cecil said. “Take the first step inside.”

  Zak actually cracked a smile. He tapped his gaudy smart glasses, setting them to record, adjusted the brightness of his light, and stepped through the breach. Cecil followed immediately behind him.

  Inside the air was stale and dry. Dust danced and swirled in their flashlight beams, disturbed for the first time in over a century by their excavation. The chamber had smooth walls, and had been precisely cut out of solid rock. It was rectangular, five meters high and eight meters wide. They could only barely see the back wall through the dust and darkness; Cecil estimated it to be twenty-five meters long.

  “Holy shiz…” Zak said, trailing off.

  “Indeed,” Cecil agreed. Each side of the chamber was stacked with containers and crates. They were covered in a thick layer of dust, but all appeared to have their seals intact. Each was marked with a hard-copy contents manifest, several pages long.

  Zak examined the manifest on one of the crates. “Cecil, this…this is big.”

  “So it would seem, mate.”

  “No, look at this! The contents, the grid coordinates of where it was found, how old they think it is, all of it! Everything has been extensively cataloged! This will lead us to more dig sites!”

  “You mean it’ll lead Lang to more dig sites,” Cecil said gloomily.

  Zak’s brief moment of cheer drained out of him. “Damn it. Damn it all. This is an archaeological gold mine. This isn’t right, Cecil. It isn’t right that that maniac is going to hoard this stuff and sell it to the highest black market bidder! It doesn’t belong to him.”

  “Steady, man. You’re right, of course. It doesn’t belong to us, either. Or the Concordiat. The beings it does belong to have been gone for millions of years, Zak.”

  “I get that. But…damn it, Cecil, this stuff needs to be studied! It belongs in museums and laboratories! There’s so much we could learn from it.”

  “We’re not going to learn anything if Old Man Lang has us shot. These artifacts have waited for eons. If they have to wait a few more years to have their secrets revealed, it doesn’t matter so much.”

  Zak exhaled in obvious frustration. “You’re right. Let’s just get this over with and get off this stupid rock.” He swung his flashlight back toward the door. “I suppose there’s no sense stalling. Lang is going to—augh!”

  Startled, Cecil spun around. “What…?” He then saw what Zak’s light had settled on. “My God.”

  “You okay in dere?” one of the workers called, approaching the breach with a light.

  “Ah, yes, we’re fine,” Cecil replied. “Stay outside, please. We, uh, need to make sure it’s safe before anyone comes in.”

  In a dark corner, off to the side of the breach, partially concealed behind a stack of crates was what looked like a campsite. On a crumbling bedroll were two mummified corpses, holding each other in a silent embrace. In the impossibly dry, virtually sterile tomb they had been sealed in, the two people had been remarkably well preserved.

  The two adventurers approached the bodies quietly, as if they were afraid of disturbing them. Their eyes were gone, their skin dried out into a grayish-brown, leathery texture, and their teeth had yellowed, but they were unmistakably human. One man had died sitting up, with his back against the cold chamber wall. The other was lying so that his head was in the sitting man’s lap. Both of their mouths gaped open; their empty, dry eye sockets stared into oblivion.

  “They must have been trapped when the tunnel was sealed,” Zak observed.

  “But look,” Cecil pointed out, “they have a stockpile of supplies. This wasn’t an accident. This was done intentionally.”

  “Why bother bringing supplies?” Zak wondered. “This had t
o have been a suicide mission.”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps…I don’t know. This tunnel was sealed right before the Maggot assault on Zanzibar, correct?”

  “That’s what the records say. The artifacts were hidden as the Maggots approached the planet.”

  “I wonder…suppose this was meant to be temporary? Suppose they wanted to stay with the artifacts, hoping to be rescued when the fighting was over?”

  “This place is probably a better survival bunker than any other place you’ll find on Zanzibar. There weren’t many survivors from the Maggots’ orbital bombardment, only a few thousand out of some fifty thousand colonists.”

  “A tragic fate,” Cecil said quietly. “Surviving the bombardment only to die in here, buried alive.”

  “They didn’t use all of their supplies.”

  “They may have run out of air. There’s a CO2 scrubber over there,” Cecil pointed, “but it could have failed on them.”

  “Maybe they gave up and just killed themselves,” Zak wondered, darkly.

  Cecil managed a morbid grin and patted his partner on the shoulder. “As always, you are the ray of sunlight that warms my life, Mr. Mesa. If we get out of this alive, I’m going to triple what I promised you in our contract.”

  “Yeah, well, worry about the staying alive part before you worry about the money part.” He glanced down at the two mummified corpses again. “Hmm,” he muttered. The historian bent down and picked up a dust-covered tablet computer off of the floor. “I wonder if I can get this working. There might be useful information on it.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Cecil said. “I’m curious about what brought these two down here. It’ll also give us something to do while Lang’s people sort and carry off the artifacts.” He watched Zak’s demeanor darken as he swept his light across the rows of sealed containers. The historian said nothing, but shook his head sadly.

  * * *

  Aristotle Lang’s workers were impressively gentle with the ancient alien artifacts. The old man had given explicit instructions that they be delivered intact, and no one wanted to provoke his wrath by damaging something. Before the containers were removed from their now-unsealed tomb, Zak scanned their manifests and uploaded them to his handheld. The information on those documents would be useful not only to Zak and Cecil, but to future generations of archaeologists and historians.

  Assuming, of course, they were able to get that information off Zanzibar.

  Rather than let Zak indulge in his moping about their unfortunate situation, Cecil encouraged him to examine the dead men’s tablet and see if its data storage was intact. It had been sitting on the floor of that chamber for over a hundred standard years, but it wasn’t as if such personal devices had changed much since then. On the contrary, the technology had plateaued long before that. The software changed over the years, but the hardware remained essentially the same.

  The tablet’s battery had long since died. Cecil had to dig through a bag of adapters, but he was able to find one that would allow Zak to connect his handheld to the found device. The climate in the tomb was dry enough that the tablet’s systems were intact. Cecil went off to run interference with Lang for a while, and let Zak focus on his discovery in peace.

  A few hours later, the Avalonian aristocrat rejoined his partner at his ad hoc work station in the tunnel. Lang’s men were nearly finished clearing out the artifacts, and paid the two off-worlders no mind. “Any progress?”

  “Quite a bit,” Zak said absentmindedly. “It’s slow-going. The operating systems aren’t compatible, so my handheld has to translate everything.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Yes. It is now. I actually planned for this, you know.”

  “You planned on finding mummified corpses with an intact computer?”

  “Not exactly, but I expected to find a few prewar devices during this treasure hunt. I downloaded a program designed to let my handheld talk to old or unknown systems. It seems like it’s working pretty well. I’m getting just about everything.”

  “Show me.”

  Zak nodded toward his screen. “Cecil, look at this. They weren’t just two random guys. They worked for the colonial government. They were xenoarchaeologists assigned to the excavation of the alien artifacts!”

  “Lang will be happy, I suppose,” Cecil said.

  “No!” Zak looked around conspiratorially. The two adventurers were out of earshot of Lang’s men. “We can’t give this information to him, Cecil! We can’t! We have to get this off-world!”

  “What good will that do us?”

  “It probably won’t do us any good. But it’ll spread the word. People will know.”

  “All it means is that treasure hunters will come to this planet by the score.”

  “Maybe. But it also means the Concordiat will send in research teams. They’ll send security to protect them. With a find like this, they may even get off their asses and annex Zanzibar. It could civilize this place, put an end to the warlords and the chaos and the fighting.”

  “Cecil, everyone already knows that Zanzibar was once inhabited. Hardly anyone cares.”

  “It’s because they don’t know how much of that civilization remains! Look at this, Cecil! The xenoarchaeologists deliberately scrubbed the records. They were hiding the information!”

  “But why?”

  “Here,” Zak said, turning his handheld so Cecil could see the screen better. “The owner of the tablet was this guy, Dr. Meriadoc Loren. The other guy was Dr. Lee Potts. I think they were a couple.

  Cecil raised an eyebrow, and his lip curled slightly, but he didn’t comment. “I see. So what happened, then?”

  “Dr. Loren was a dedicated diarist. He kept a running video journal of his work on Zanzibar. I haven’t had time to go through all of them, there are hundreds of entries. But this file was flagged; they wanted someone to find it. Watch.”

  The long-dead Dr. Loren appeared on the screen. His skin was pale and his hair was a silvery color. He removed his eyepiece before he spoke. “My name is Dr. Meriadoc Loren. I am a senior researcher at the Archaeological Administration for the Colonial Government of Zanzibar. If you’re watching this, it most likely means that I’m dead. I can only hope that this is being watched by human eyes, and that humanity survives somehow.

  “Four million standard years ago, Zanzibar was a living world with a thriving ecosystem. It was home to countless native species, including an intelligent, sentient, monument-building indigenous race we call Sapio zanzibarensis, or commonly, the Zanzibari. We don’t know by what name they called themselves, if indeed they had names in the way we understand them.”

  The image of Dr. Loren faded into the background, and was replaced with that of a short, bipedal being with grayish brown skin and a cluster of three dark eyes. It was holding a spear in its three-fingered hand, and wore what appeared to be polished metal armor. Curled up against its torso was an additional pair of arms, these smaller, each equipped with three long, delicate-looking fingers. “As you can see,” the archaeologist continued, “they didn’t much resemble humans, but were capable of making tools. We believe they were at a level of technological development roughly analogous to the Bronze Age on Ancient Earth. They built great cities, catacombs, bridges, and pyramids. They fought wars, they raised crops, they employed beasts of burden, and they utilized a primitive, hieroglyph-based written language.

  “There is no question that they were sentient, but there’s more to it than that. Some of the artifacts we’ve uncovered are anomalous. They don’t fit with the technology level of the Zanzibari. Some of these artifacts are made of advanced materials, through means the primitive natives couldn’t have managed on their own. I’m not supposed to talk about this, but I’ve heard that other teams of researchers are looking into it. What I am and am not supposed to talk about doesn’t really matter anymore.”

  The scientist could be heard taking a deep breath before continuing. “The mystery only deepens from there. Four million years
ago, something happened to this planet; we have not yet ascertained what. What we do know is that whatever it was, it killed Zanzibar. Today, the surface has been all but swept clean. It no longer supports native life of any sort, not even at the microscopic level. The planet’s seismic and volcanic activity ceased, its magnetosphere vanished, the oceans boiled away, and everything was just…wiped out. There’s still some debate over the nature of this cataclysm, but I personally do not think it was natural. And…it seems that we humans on Zanzibar are about to share the natives’ fate.”

  Dr. Loren’s face reappeared on the screen. He looked resigned. “As I record this, the extraterrestrials have broken through our defenses. The Zanzibaran Astro Guard and the ships from the Concordiat Fleet have all been destroyed. The aliens are approaching now, and if their actions on the frontier are any indication, the orbital bombardment should begin soon.

  “The transit points are blocked. There is no escaping now. We are completely cut off. There is something larger at stake here than our own lives, however. Whatever happens here today, humanity will likely, hopefully survive elsewhere. Zanzibar is just a small colony. We have thousands of them across known space. But for these people, the indigenous beings, this world was all they had. Nothing survived the last cataclysm on Zanzibar. Someone has to speak for them.” The camera panned, showing the two scientists’ campsite inside the freshly sealed chamber where their bodies now resided. “My husband, Lee, and I volunteered to stay here. We’ve been sealed in. Our odds of surviving the attack are probably better here than anywhere else on the planet. I’m not holding out much hope, but it’s possible someone will be left behind to dig us out.

  “If not…if not, then at least the artifacts are protected. Sealed in these crates is part of what little remains of a once-mighty civilization. If the worst happens, they will be preserved. They will be protected from the assault, but also from looters and grave robbers.” Zak and Cecil looked at each other uneasily. “We’ve scrubbed everything about our work off the network. We’ve seen what happens on other colonies after the aliens attack: as soon as they leave, the vultures descend to loot, steal, and take whatever they can, so we’ve hidden everything.”