Page 4 of The Captain's Bounty
“Wait.” Dex grabbed at her arm, but she shifted, putting herself between him and the buttons she had pressed, following the pattern in three quick taps that hit four buttons total.
The electrified hum beneath her feet moved up through her legs a half second before a splintering sort of noise made the seemingly solid bricked wall jump. Cracks appeared, not just in the mortar between the stones, but in the stones themselves.
“What the?—”
“There’s a door behind this wall,” she breathed. “We’ve just opened it.”
Dex raised a brow at her. “Well, you just lost your Guild invitation. You know that, don’t you?”
A finger of doubt finally penetrated the haze of discovery, but it wasn’t quite enough to bring her back to her scholarly senses. She knew it was wrong, that it went against all her training and her own best interests, but the compulsion to explore was too strong. And besides, GIASS had their chance.
“Well, then, they should have funded my dig,” Lissa declared. “Corporate did, and I think they’d want as much information as we can give them, don’t you?”
“You’re walking a dangerous line, lady.”
“I’m an archeologist,” said Lissa with a sniff. “Danger is my middle name.”
“Mine’s Carmen,” Boaz grunted, hopping off the ladder and getting out of the way of those still coming down it. “They bury all the dead miners here or what? What the hell kind of tomb is this?”
“It’s not a tomb.” Swallowing hard to keep back a surge of rising excitement, Lissa stubbornly clung to every shred of professionalism that she could. “I’m telling you, it’s a temple.”
“It’s dangerous as hell, and if this is now a Corporate operation, we’re not doing this without a security detail and lot more reinforcements.” Dex took her firmly by the arm, and she allowed herself to be drawn back to the sand mound.
Standing in the light beside him, she scowled while he called orders up to his men to shore up the entrance. A real ladder was brought, as well as lights and excavation tools. It took perhaps an hour to radio in the discovery and ready a small party of eight men to join them in… whatever this was. It was the longest hour of her life. She was all but shaking with poorly suppressed excitement by the end of it.
Still, she’d done it.
After years of blood, sweat and tears— God, the tears—at last, she’d done it. This wasn’t just a great find, this was phenomenal, and if she played her cards right, it might be enough to… well, not erase, but maybe eclipse the damage her con-artist brother had inflicted the day he ruined not only his life, but the entire family’s as well.
Picks, shovels, lasers and men were lowered into the temple-esque room, and finally, they were ready.
“All right,” Dex looked at her. “You made the discovery. Pick a door.”
The giddiness was almost more than she could bear, and just hearing him say those beloved words again was enough to make her forgive him anything.
“That one.” She pointed to the cracked brickwork that she was sure now sheltered a hidden but newly opened door behind it.
Photographs were taken, sketches made, depth readings taken of the brick-and-mortar wall blocking their way, and Lissa herself manned the laser, carefully cutting an access hole along the edges of the rock slab through to the other room.
There was no gust of stale air that blew past her as the blockage was removed and the open doorway revealed. It wasn’t even fully dark on the other side. Glowing blue letters and symbols lined the walls in vertical columns, just as it did this room. They pulsed, rhythmically shifting from dull to bright the instant she stepped through and stood in the hall.
The floor beneath her feet was the same smooth, marble-like tile as the first room. The only exceptions were the light sconces embedded high in the walls that came flickering on as soon as her presence was detected. Starting at the threshold where she stood, they lit up the length of the hallway. Gaping archways branched off from this incredibly long corridor at various points both to the left and right, while flickering silver-blue lights quickly chased back the darkness.
“This is a big ass temple,” Boaz said in what was, for him, a reverent tone.
“Built by whom?” Dex replied, significantly more reserved. “And why is the air so fresh?”
“It’s recycled,” Lissa said, her gazing skimming along the walls and ceiling. “There’s ventilation. It’s still working.”
“Buried this far under the sand with no access to the outside?” Dex shook his head. “Impossible. Shit, nothing about this place makes sense. Cutirut couldn’t support life until Corporate moved in, and still can’t outside the terraform zones. Who built this? Ceron is the only planet in this system that had any kind of intelligent life and they were still in the early Smelting Age when the asteroid hit.”
“You really have done your homework, haven’t you?”
“I try not to be entirely useless,” Dex replied dryly. “Point is, Cerons couldn’t have done this, so it had to be someone else, coming from outside this solar system to put what sure looks like a manned station on a lifeless moon, and who then locked up and left it for…” Dex ran a grim stare around the room. “…a long,long time, but used a lock that any old Earth-monkey could open ages later, and everything still works?”
Lissa smiled at him triumphantly. “Yes.”
“Impossible,” Dex said again. “That kind of tech simply didn’t exist back then.
