Page 2 of The Captain's Bounty
Back to work, she decided. She was tired and frustrated, and her mouth tasted like the desert she was digging in. But she wasn’t giving up. She’d dedicated her life to it, or at least the last eight years, and she wasn’t going to let a little something like heat exhaustion stop her from seeing this through.
Grabbing up her shovel, renewed determination creasing her brow, she stabbed the earth again, and–
Clang!
Lissa froze.
Striking rocks wasn’t uncommon, not in this digsite anyway, and yet there was something different in the note reverberating up through the shovel’s handle into her arms. Although she couldn’t see it, her instincts told her whatever she’d just hit was not a rock. And it sure wasn’t a cigarette butt.
Suppressing her emotions, Lissa scraped the shovel across the whatever-it-was, trying to feel out its dimensions. She could find no edges, but it was flat. Very flat. Not likely a natural formation of bedrock then, but something else, something made. Just notman-made.
Her archaeologist’s soul swelled, sending that ‘I’ve found something’ thrill like an electric shock all the way up through her tensing arms into the back of her skull. Excitedly, she scraped the shovel back and forth, shifting sand wildly off to either side, anxious to finally see what she and Dad had always known wasthere, but before the mystery object unveiled itself, she heard an almighty crack.
She blinked once hearing it, and again, trying to process what it meant, and then the sand under her shovel dimpled. Sagged. And then slowly began to rotate, swirling down faster in an ever-growing circle, draining away under her like water down a drain, and her belated sense of self-preservation finally woke up.
Sinkhole, her brain realized. She was no longer standing at the bottom of the pit; she was up to her knees in sucking sand that was pouring away to depths unknown.
“Help!” she yelled, alerting the men working the sifter of the danger. Everyone came running, but it was already too late. The sinkhole had her up to her thighs now and the ground that had been so dense under her feet for all the time that they’d been digging here was now pulling her under.
“Grab my hand!” shouted Dex, dropping to his belly at the lip of the pit and grabbing at her. Their fingers barely brushed, and she dropped again, sinking to her waist in sand that was now pulling the excavation supports loose. The walls began to slump inward.
She saw that “oh shit” look in Dex’s eyes as they both realized she wasn’t just beyond saving, but that he was going to die with her if he kept trying.
He scrambled back from the unstable edge just before it too began to crumble, and down she went, clawing at the sand as she was swallowed up to her shoulders, her chin, and then she was completely engulfed.
The scrape of sharp rocks raked her ribs as she was pulled under, down into whatever hole she’d opened up. Sand was in her ears, nose and mouth, while everything around her vibrated to the pulse of falling debris.
Being buried alive wasn’t a kind death. The sudden pressure of so much earth packing around her chest, refusing to allowso much as the smallest gasp for air, was both a blessing and a torture. She was already fighting that inevitable urge to suck air even as the press around her ribs pushed back against her lungs… until suddenly, the crushing grip around her feet was just… gone. She kicked in panic and dropped rapidly until her hips were wedged in this unseen opening. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t struggle, could only kick in futility while the pressure of all the earth above her built and built and finally the cork of her apparently abundant booty popped out of the bottleneck and she plummeted out into the empty black.
Her last words would have been, “Oh shit!” but she only had enough time to suck in the air to scream it before she hit the top of a conical mound of sand, still warm from the sun, and tumbled blindly down it onto an unseen floor and ultimately crashed hip-first on an uncompromisingly hard corner. Of what, she couldn’t see.
She scrambled the instant she stopped rolling, flailing to get out from under the sand still raining down from the ceiling above before it could bury her again. Blind in the absolute darkness, her hands and feet slapped against the unnaturally smooth surface under her, peppered as it was with loose sand. She got as far away from the danger—she hoped—as the wall she knocked into would allow before swiping at her face, spitting the sand from her mouth and nose, blinking wildly through stinging tears of irritation, and scrubbing with both hands to get it out of her hair.
She was alive! Not only that, but the pouring sand was already slowing to a trickle, allowing sunlight from the world above to filter in through the hole her shovel had made.
“Shit,” she breathed belatedly, staring in disbelief at the obsidian black walls, covered in alien markings so blue they seemed almost to be glowing. In silence broken only by the faint trickling of falling pebbles and her own ragged breath, she staredaround at the long-buried temple proper that her father had spent his life searching for… and which she had now officially re-discovered.
“Lissa!” her foreman bellowed from above. “Lissa, answer me!”
“I’m okay, Dex,” she called, her voice quavering. She wasn’t the emotional sort and never had been, but this...
This was it. This was what her father had spent a lifetime seeking, and if there was any justice in the universe, she hoped he could see it now, if only through her eyes. This made all the groveling to Corporate worth it. Even if it turned out to be nothing more than this room, it was undeniable proof of an alien race more advanced than anything humans had thus far encountered.
It was the discovery of a lifetime.
The sort of discovery that just might be enough to overshadow her family’s infamy, undoing the damage her idiot brother had done, and once more get them reinstated as archaeologists in good standing with GIASS.
She covered her mouth with both hands, taking it all in before her practical side took over.
“Looks like I broke through a weak spot in the ceiling,” she called, giving the rest of the room a quick assessment.
“Ceiling?”
“Ceiling,” she confirmed through a fierce smile. “There’s a room down here.”
“Like… a chamber? A rock chamber?” Oh, it did her heart good to hear the note of uncertainty in that Corporate voice. Almost as much as it annoyed her when he followed up with, “You got a scanner? What are the mineral readings?”
“The walls seems stable enough,” she called, ignoring the questions. “I don’t think I’m in any danger. I’m going to look around.”
