Sacred Groundby Richard Ong |
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| part 2 of 3 |
“Mommy?” cried a little girl’s voice in the mist. “Mommy, where are you?”
“Samantha? Samantha, sweetheart, I’m here. I’m over here!” Abigail said.
“Mommy, where are you?” the little girl cried. “I’m scared.”
“Oh, don’t be. Don’t be, sweetheart. I’m here. I’m over here,” Abigail pleaded to the mist.
She couldn’t understand what she was doing here. She didn’t know why there was a thick mist all around the area. She looked down and saw that she was dressed in a blue and yellow jumpsuit. Hadn’t she been standing outside sealed in a bulky padded outfit and helmet just a moment ago?
She remembered stepping onto a black powdery beach while her boots sank deep with every laborious step. She remembered seeing the halogen-illuminated face of her husband, Simon, behind the glass bubble of his own suit and heard his voice over the headset. His smile assured her that everything was going as planned. She couldn’t remember why they were out there in the open but she remembered what she did.
She felt a draft of cool air through her jumpsuit and she put her arms around her body.
“What about my wife?” said a distant voice like an echo in the mist. The rest of the words were obscured though it sounded like Simon’s.
“That all depends,” said another voice, further off in the distance. She saw a shadow move away from the source of that voice. It bore a hideous shape and she suddenly felt colder though not from the mist. It was as if a knife had opened up at the pit of her stomach and sucked the warmth of her own body from within. It lasted for but a moment till she felt the presence of someone she intimately knew cover her lower half with an invisible shield that restored some of her own heat. The voices became a distant murmur and the malevolent shadow of the other was replaced by the image of another memory.
She suddenly fell deep into a chasm.
She remembered moving images like those of a video in which Simon and Albert lowered a small rig from the belly of Lamdru One. She remembered making some calculations on the control panel of the derrick and giving the thumbs-up as Albert flipped on a switch and held onto a control stick.
She felt the rapidly increasing vibrations of the platform as the diamond and tungsten carbide bit spun and bore a hole into the black sand and rock underneath. The rig had only been operating for a few minutes when it suddenly shook with such a violent force that threatened to tear the structure apart and topple the ship, which was straddling the drill rig with its landing struts.
She remembered her husband’s voice over the radio as he shouted at her too late. She had lost her balance and toppled over the edge of the platform. Her suit slammed against the slope of the sinking black sand and she tumbled down to the bottom. The light from her helmet illuminated a swirl of dust and rock kicked up by the spinning teeth of the drill. Death seemed certain until she managed to grab hold of the side of the drill collar at the last moment.
The vibration stopped and she lost her grip on the metal. She fell on a hard surface beside the drill bit, which had suddenly stopped spinning. Its teeth were jammed and rendered immobile by the cracked surface of the bedrock on which she laid.
Gingerly feeling her arms and legs for any broken bones, she found that she had miraculously survived the fall with no more than a few bruises that would last for weeks. She stood up beside the silent drill and aimed the light of her helmet down over the edge of the bedrock where a visible dividing line separated it from the tumbling black sand like a long, thin rectangular hole.
She turned around and surveyed the flat bedrock on which she stood. The dividing line curved at a near ninety-degree angle in one corner. She walked around the drill assembly and traced her light over the perimeter of the dividing line that separated the bedrock from the regolith around her. Her survey ended when the line disappeared into the far wall of the sand. From her observations, she concluded that she stood on a platform having at least one angular corner. The bore created by the drill had exposed one side of the mysterious bedrock.
An idea occurred to her: she grabbed the multi-phased radar gun from her belt. She squeezed the trigger and slowly adjusted the frequency.
Her mouth opened as the graphical image slowly formed on the radar scanner display. She slowly swept the radar gun as she retraced the path she took following the dividing line between the bedrock and the regolith.
She ran her scan a second time, then a third before her finger eased up on the trigger. She spoke into her headset microphone.
“Simon, you won’t believe what’s down here. I am standing on top of an incredible piece of artifact that is roughly... three meters long and two meters wide. The structure itself — according to my radar scans — might be as tall as ten meters or more. An initial analysis of the spectra between the regolith and the artifact suggest several peculiar shapes, some sloping downwards in a very interesting pattern. We’ll need to dig around the object to get a better picture of what it is and ... wait a second... oh my God.”
“Abigail? What is it, honey? What’s wrong? Your signal is breaking up,” said the faint voice of her husband amidst the rising static of the communications channel.
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The little girl, who barely reached to Abigail’s waist, smiled at Abigail. Her arms were outstretched and exposed like the rest of her to the hard vacuum of space with nothing more than a thin blue print dress to cover her pale skin.
“Mommy,” — she smiled — “there you are, Mommy. I — found — you!”
Abigail stood transfixed in front of her daughter. A mixture of maternal longing and an internal scream from her reason threatened to tear her apart. As she reached out and touched the tiny hands with her gloves, a shadow fell over her and she felt herself sinking deeper into the pit.
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Copyright © 2011 by Richard Ong
