HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES: Emerald of Earth -- Chapter 1 and 2

HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES: Emerald of Earth

 

 

 

CHAPTER 1

IN THE JUNGLE

 

Emerald Anastasia Nhia Okon Marcillon wanted to scream. Near the center of the Chicxulub impact crater, the compound where she and her parents lived had been overrun by soldiers pretending to be professors and college students.

All ten of them strutted as if the land was theirs. The four elders directed everyone, including Mom and Dad. Emerald bristled, hunkering down in the underbrush looking up at their research station. No one bossed her parents around! Dad hated the military and so did Mom sometimes. There’d been plenty of soldiers at the station. They were nosy, paranoid and ignored her ‘cause she was a kid. Academic types ignored all of them, intent on their own research. She took a deep breath – salty, humid scent of rotting jungle; manure smell from an old-fashioned cattle ranch not too far away; semi-sweet stench of boiling sugarcane; hint of chemical smell from a portable latrine.

Calm down. Listen. Don’t make a mistake.

This group of soldiers was doing worse than ignoring her – they were watching her. One or two touched their chests like they had concealed guns. All of them were in better shape than the usual wingnuts visiting the compound.

 “THE most buff professors the world has ever seen,” Emerald set her ipik to record mode and spoke in Portuguese. “There’s something really strange about all of them.” She turned it off. She fingered the necklace of tektites Mom and Dad had given her on her twelfth birthday. Beads of meteorite impact-melted glass strung on Mexican silver wire, the twelve black teardrops clicked as she moved. Ducking down behind a stump her father had cut with his own axe when they’d established the research station, she listened as two of the ‘professors’ passed.

The older one was saying in English, “Whoever gave them clearance to do this research was insane!”

The younger one, a woman, snorted then replied in Spanish, “Everyone thought it was insane when they were slapped with a Confidential security clearance, Colonel .”

“The only reason EGov granted it was because he’s Vice-Captain Marcillon’s nephew. Though I heard she wanted to make their whole song and dance Sensitive Compartmented Information,” said the Colonel. He muttered something about military intelligence being an oxymoron. Then they were gone, heading down the path that led to the highway between Progresso and Telchac Puerto. They weren’t acting like the haughty professors, adamant researchers, internet news fact-checkers, save-the-world college students and other wingnuts who usually showed up at the research compound. There were still three or four of those as well. One was digging holes looking for roots that would cure Alzheimer’s, another was searching for some Lost City of the Mayans, and a cryptozoologist wanted to find a link between chupacabra and the coatimundi common in the Yucatan jungle. She sighed. Those she could handle.

The soldiers were eerily quiet, disciplined and listened carefully when Mom – Dr. Nhia Marcillon – lectured on her and Dad’s Shattered Spheres Theory of the Solar System.

Emerald liked to think that she believed her mother, but so many other people thought Mom and Dad were crazy. Now that she was practically thirteen, she had to make up her own mind. When she was ten, eleven, and twelve, there was nothing more fascinating than the possibility that alien intelligences on Venus had conquered the Solar System! The possibility that they’d been colonizing the other planets sixty-five million years ago made it sound boring at first. But when she accessed Mom’s 3D scenarios...

That was one of the problems. Dad had blocked her access to the Shattered Spheres file. Not that that had stopped Emerald. But Dad had given up on the Shattered Spheres Theory.

Emerald shook her head. She’d ask questions if she could, but she never really, really wanted to. High functioning autism made her hesitate before talking to anyone about anything, and she’d been this way all her life. Most days, she felt like she was one of Mom and Dad’s alien People. She more or less got what the rest of the world was talking about – though sometimes not. She knew she was supposed to chat with people and understanding languages wasn’t any trouble. Spanish, English, French, Chinese, Portuguese, and Italian were pretty easy if she could listen to people speak it for a while. But she never seemed to get the hang of saying the right thing at the right time. Or doing the right thing at the right time. She was an alien on the worst days, a permanent tourist on the best.

She stood up and looped back into the jungle, picking up the trail that headed back toward the trailer to the adjacent giant silver tent the Combined Forces people had put up when they arrived. Made of solar cells, the dirt underneath had been razed of plant life, pounded flat, sealed with a resin and was swept clean every morning by minibots. There were chairs, tables, big solar fans that ran all day and most of the night and a half dozen computer stations. There were always people sleeping on the tables beneath tipis of mosquito netting. Cliques of young soldiers would circle their chairs, lean back and then text each other for hours, the only sound beside jungle life and wind was the click of keys and bursts of laughter. Then people would glance at each other, smile then bend over their ipiks again.

At first they acted like she was a regular kid and that the files regarding her autism were a cover story so she could spy on them. They’d talk at her, smile, offer her candy and little trinkets. But Emerald would only glance at them and move away. Not too far away, because she was able to intercept a few of their texts. They had some kind of encryption whose code kept randomly changing, but she’d break it, read then repeat the process each time it changed.

They’d learned that they couldn’t make her talk and pretty much had given up on her. Everyone except that pushy one who kept talking to her but wouldn’t ever look at her like everyone else did. She wiped her forehead on her tan T-shirt sleeve then pulled the front of the shirt up to wipe her upper lip. She tied the material in a knot and hopped up on her stool in the corner.

Usually after a week like this, she’d become effectively invisible to the visitors. But this group still seemed to see her. Maybe sneaky precision and analytical thinking was something the professor-soldiers really liked. They old ones would pepper her with questions, but she wouldn’t respond. One or two of them realized that she was listening when they’d find her comments on their organic tablet computers – otabs – posted anonymously to their websites or on their RLife accounts.

Sometimes, it made her friends. With this group, the oldsters seemed to be getting more and more paranoid. The circle of old people in the tent leaned more tightly together as she settled herself, then they got up and walked away, following the other two in the direction of the road into Progresso.

She was pretty sure this group saw her as self-centered, aloof, pedantic, unable to sustain eye contact, rigid, lacking spontaneity in social interaction, completely uninterested in their interests, and obsessively concerned with her own.

The younger soldiers – the ones pretending to be college students – were both more flexible and less paranoid. The only thing that was important about her to them, was that she was a spectacular cook. Her authentic quesadillas, pizza Napoléon, and Brazilian feijoada, a hearty meat stew made from pork and black beans, had made her a few friends. She smiled as the elders left and the youngsters relaxed and started texting about music, Rlife, ‘casts, clothes, v-games, and only a little about aliens and space exploration. Sometimes they even spoke out loud.

One of the women who seemed very uncomfortable in her blue jeans and a yellow, buttoned, sleeveless shirt, the front halves tied together in a knot glanced at Emerald and smiled. Emerald loosened her own knot, not meaning to imitate Rashida Dewidar.

Rashida came over, turned and looked toward the ocean and said, “Hi, Em.”

Emerald looked away, wrinkling her nose. She hated that nickname.

“Oops, sorry,” said Rashida.

Emerald thought that the woman wasn’t sorry at all. She tried the same thing every day, like she was probing Emerald to find out if she really was autistic – high-functioning Asperger’s to be precise. Even though Emerald wasn’t very good at interacting with other people, she watched movies all the time. She knew how she was supposed to act. She’d seen enough fictional mysteries to know that Rashida suspected her of something, just not what.

Rashida said, “So, some of us are going to be shipping out in a day or two.”

Ha! Shipping out was a military term. She’d been right figuring them for soldiers. She still didn’t know what they were doing here. She looked at Rashida. The woman was the only one who’d even tried to talk to Emerald in the past two weeks. She seemed friendly. She was friendly with Dad, too. Mom didn’t like her, but Mom didn’t seem to like anyone lately.

Emerald pulled her opad out from where she tucked it in the small of her back and accessed a file she’d made on the soldiers. She’d rated each one to see which ones were smart and actually aware of what the elders were talking about and which ones were just doing their duty in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. Rashida was one of the ones who seemed to know what was going on. She tried to sneak a look at Emerald’s opad.

Emerald reached down to scratch her ankle, tipping the ‘pad forward to give Rashida a good look. Sitting up, Emerald smirked. A lot of good a peek did the older girl. Emerald was writing in Mayan today. She said, “Ba'ax ka wa'alik?”

“What?”

Emerald repeated herself and Rashida made a face and said, “Mosh fahmah.”

Without looking up, Emerald said, “I know you didn’t understand. I said it in Mayan. What do you want?”

Rashida blinked in surprise and said, “How do you know Egyptian?” Emerald shrugged and Rashida waited for more, didn’t get it and said, “Nothing.”

“No, that’s what I said to you in Mayan,” Emerald said, surfing for the internet page on the Combined Forces. “Ba'ax ka wa'alik means ‘what do you want?’” She held up the opad so Rashida could see, “Have a nice trip.” She hopped off the stool and headed into the house, feeling claustrophobic under the tent.

Rashida followed her. “Emerald, I want to talk to you.”

Emerald ignored her and hurried into the trailer.

Mom and Dad were arguing.

She needed to get away from everyone. She knew it wasn’t how her parents wanted her to behave. She knew it wasn’t how she wanted to behave. It was just that sometimes, she had to get away. She had to be by herself. Dad said, “We need to get out of this limelight, Nhia! It’s driving me crazy. It’s driving all of us crazy.”

“We can’t stop now. If the military will fund the research, we can validate the theory once and for all! We got the money because of your aunt!”

“Of course we did! But we can’t validate the theory if the military makes all of our data top-secret! I hate her for what she did! I hate her control over us!”

“She doesn’t control us and our research! They said they’re not interested in classifying our data – only verifying it.”

“And you believe them? Since when did you place your trust in the military-industrial-congressional complex?”

“Your aunt is your family! She’s been a soldier all her life and famous since she became the first woman to breathe the air of Mars! Since when did you start doubting all of them? We’ve worked for the government before...”

Emerald ran out the back door, nearly tripping over Rashida. The young woman cried, “Wait, Emerald! I didn’t mean to…”

Rashida’s attention was suffocating. Emerald spun away, sprinting into the jungle beyond. “Emerald!” Rashida called again.

Emerald’s parents stopped arguing. A moment later, she heard her mother shout, “Emerald?”

Emerald ran, cutting off the main trail following a faint animal trail that led to the Gulf north of them. Behind her, she could hear Rashida pounding after her. The noise stopped abruptly, replaced by a sound that reminded her of mumbletypeg, a knife throwing game the young soldiers played when they were bored. Two people with one knife faced each another with their feet shoulder-width apart. The first player took the knife and threw it into the ground as near their own foot as possible. The second player then repeated the process. Whichever player sticks the knife closest to his own foot wins the first challenge. Each player took one step to the right and repeated the throwing. They kept on until one of the ‘professors’ showed up and they got back to work.

The noise in the jungle sounded like a couple of people were playing a really, really fast game, the knives stabbing into the ground like they were racing.

Emerald cut off the animal trail, hunkering down so she’d break the fewest number of undergrowth branches and stems. Her pulse pounded in her ears as she ran back toward the regular trail then turned and headed back toward the Gulf. She stopped, squatting, breathing open-mouthed, listening intently. The heavy foliage soaked up sound like a sponge, and she couldn’t hear the woman any more.

Instead, she heard dirt tapping followed by the thunk-chunk of a shovel biting into the jungle floor. Scowling, she crept through the undergrowth, focusing on the sound until she was close enough to push aside a branch and see.

The lady root digger was hard at work, wiping her forehead with a wrist then attacking the jungle floor again. But she hadn’t just begun. After breaking new soil, she glanced around as if looking to see if anyone was watching, then she hopped and dropped down into a hole as deep as her waist. She took the shovel and dug again, this time the blade making a dull thud as if it were hitting something hard and hollow. She bent over, disappearing from Emerald’s view and a few moments later straightened up, both arms down as if she were pulling a giant plug from a drain.

She climbed out of the hole then reached back in and with a grunt, hauled out a cube of dirty pastel orange. Emerald touched the tektite necklace, the teardrops oddly warm to the touch.

Muffled but much closer than she’d expected, Rashida called Emerald’s name. The root digger spun, kicking the box back into the hole then frantically threw soil back into the hole. She’d nowhere near covered it when Rashida called again and the woman sprinted in the direction of the Gulf.

Pursing her lips, Emerald backed up slowly, made her way back to the trail and then hurried back to the station. With the jackknife she usually carried, she marked a trail, making certain she knew exactly how to reach the hole with the box in it and leaving Rashida to fend for her soldierly self in the jungle among the coatis, jays, spider monkeys, agouti and parrots.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2

ON THE BEACH

 

By the time she reached the trailer, Mom and Dad had stopped arguing and they were deep into their formal presentation. Why had they waited until now to bring out their little show? Usually it was the first thing researchers and professors saw. Mom was the speaker, Dad the stoic scientist, nodding sagely off to the side. Mom was the enthusiast, ramping up the energy in the room then startling her audience. Sometimes Emerald wondered how she could have been the silent child with downcast eyes and unable to speak to strangers. She slipped into her usual spot – under the desk that held both Mom and Dad’s laptops, the wifi router and a micro satellite uplink. At the back of the desk where a person would normally put their legs, Emerald had cut into the wall and removed a piece so that she could not only sit under the desk, but would actually be inside the wall and very much out of anyone’s way.

She could hear Mom pacing back and forth, then stop suddenly. The low hum of the holographic projector was creating a 3D image of a star system that appeared to float in the middle of the small lab. Mom would gesture to it as she said, “The evidence we’ve gathered so far clearly indicates that a massive object – probably a microscopic black hole – grazed Uranus and tipped it on its side.” An invisible something struck the gas giant, throwing off a jet of plasma. “A fleet of invading interstellar warships – the Júwàirén – using black hole energy technology probably experienced a disastrous explosion. Debris swept through the Solar System, certainly missing Saturn but raining down on Jupiter and setting off the Great Red Spot hurricane.” A flash in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter set its gases roiling. “The worst was yet to happen,” she continued as the image zoomed in on a blue, reddish-brown and white Mars. “The surface was covered with shallow oceans that teemed with microscopic life forms. A large rock, possibly an asteroid knocked from a stable orbit and carried on the shockwave of the explosion, slammed into the planet, blowing away much of its air allowing the oceans to boil away under low pressure.” The image zoomed closer, focusing on a world that was obviously Earth in the Cretaceous Era. “The asteroid struck off the coast of what would one day be the Yucatan Peninsula. The dinosaurs and thousands of other life forms, already environmentally and genetically stressed, were launched into extinction.” She paused for effect and as the image swung away from Earth’s nuclear winter, it stopped this time on another world. It was a virtual twin of Earth with a silvery moon and abundant water – though its surface showed less brown, and more green, the continents were smaller and more scattered, a smaller proportion of the world was land than on nearby Earth. “This is the world of an alien, probably sauroid intelligence; native to the planet we now call Venus. They were aggressive and powerful. Spreading through our Solar System, we have evidence that they conquered beyond it. The invasion fleet had come to put a stop to it.”

Emerald could see it in Mom’s face as well as Dad’s. They hadn’t been fooled by the military pretense at all! They’d known there were soldiers in the compound all along.

On his chair to one side, Paolo Marcillon, Emerald’s Dad, glanced at the faces of the Combined Forces officers. He shook his head and rubbed his temples. Nhia shot him a look but continued, “But the accident that destroyed the fleet and saved the sauroids next threatened them with the mindless destruction of chance.” A massive debris cloud – the remnants of the invasion fleet – after dropping a few pieces in the Earth-Moon system, slammed full force into Venus and its moon. Nhia took up the narration, “An object nearly large enough to split it in half hit the moon, knocking it cleanly out of Venus’ orbit, where it drifted until the Sun captured it again, the molten scar on its surface glowing red hot for nearly a century. The world we call Venus was pounded by meteorites sleeting through the vacuum of space, fielding one object large enough to reverse Venus’ rotation.” She paused – as she had one hundred and twelve times before – before she finally said softly, “The Solar System had been reshaped and the intelligences on the new, second planet of the shattered star system were extinct. We are the heirs of those shattered spheres. We are the ones who must piece together the details. We are the ones who must find the bits of technology that we can use to go to the stars...”

There was a pause. A “professor”, who now spoke like a general; Emerald knew exactly who he was, an older man whose hair and moustache were completely gray said, “Thank you very much, Drs. Marcillon.” By the sounds on the floor, he stood slowly. “Unless you have some material evidence to support your theories, I think it may be time for us to go.”

Mom said softly, “We have evidence, Commander Shinichi.”

His reply was just as muted when he said, “Go on.”

“One of your operatives has already discovered some of the evidence, Commander. I’ll offer you a bit of advice, however: don’t try to open the box on your own. We’ll cooperate with your people – but the timetable and conditions under which we will cooperate will be ours.” He started to turn away as she added, “If you try your hardest and set your best people to break any of the six of them open, they are set to destroy the evidence inside.”

Commander Shinichi studied her for some time before he said, “We’ve imposed on your hospitality long enough, Ma’am; Sir.” He and the other “professors”, subordinates in one way or another, stood with him. One carefully studied the space where the 3D images had been then walked out.

The “professor” and his retinue strode back into the heat of the jungle and Paolo said, “We’ll never see them again.”

Nhia scowled at him and snapped, “There’s no need to curse the presentation just because...”

Paolo stood up, shaking his head. Despite the air conditioning, the air was humid, overly warm. “I’m not cursing something that has failed ninety-six times! Why can’t you just admit that no one is interested in investing in our wild science fiction?”

“It’s not science fiction!” she exclaimed, swiping her hand through the hologram, making it vanish. “It’s hard science! We’re...”

“We were once respected paleoxenoarchaeontologists – we invented the field! People came to study with us! They still want to – but not in this freaking jungle! We have to go back...”

“You’ve lost your sense of adventure, Paul,” he hated it when she called him by his anglicized name. She knew that very well. “You were so brave and daring when we first met...”

He cut her off, “You had some modicum of good sense when we first met...”

They both heard the door slam as Emerald left the trailer. Their argument died as they turned, avoiding each other’s eyes. Paolo started walking. “I’ll go after her. It’s my turn.” By the time he reached the airlock, it was standing open to the hot and humid Yucatan Peninsula air. In the distance, he heard Emerald’s retreat. He called out, “Emerald?” 

“I just want to be alone!” she shouted over her shoulder. Emerald Marcillon fled through the airlock that kept the equipment in the mobile home cool and dry and stomped out into the humid Mexican night.

“Onde você pensa que você está indo, moça?” her father called after her, holding the airlock door open.

“Leave me alone!”

The muffled voice of her mother called her father back inside. He hesitated then closed the lock slowly.

The soldiers were no longer making any pretense of being professors and college students. The older men and women barked orders and the youngsters hurried around, pulling down the tent, packing equipment and moving it all out to the road that ran from Progresso to Telchac Puerto. By the time the sun sank into the misty heat of the jungle, the soldiers were gone and the station was silent but for the cries of monkeys, squawks of parrots and the coatis chirping, snorting, or grunting with joy, appeasement, irritation or anger.

She didn’t want to go back into the trailer because there’d just be another argument. The sense of being trapped, walled in and helpless would just upset her and she’d start to get angry. Tonight, she just wanted to think about the crate the root digger had pulled out of the ground – she had a sudden thought. What made her so sure that the digger was a regular scientist and not a soldier? If the woman was a soldier, then she had probably sent the crate into Progresso with the luggage they’d moved out. She needed to see if the crate was still there.

But not yet. When she went into the jungle at night where it was so calm; peaceful despite the wildness and violence. But it was a different kind of noise. It wasn’t Human noise.

She ran silently down to the beach then headed back toward the jungle, staying above the water line but still on solid, wet sand. She angled up away from the water and finally picked up a game path, running until she was panting. Stopping abruptly, she listened. Nothing but the jungle, the shouts and moving racket from the station were swallowed by densely packed trees and undergrowth. Diffuse green light leaked down from the canopy.

It took a while before she could find the right trails to lead her to the root woman’s excavation of the box, but when she found it, she was surprised when she leaned over to look down. The box was still there, exposed. Frowning, she stared down at it. The tektite felt warm around her neck and she touched them. They felt no warmer than the air around her or her skin, so she shook her head. Looking around, she couldn’t find anything like a shovel or rake, so she started to kick soil back into the hole. If her parents had buried it, they’d wanted it hidden for a reason.

 

By the time she’d buried the box and spread branches and other floor detritus over the scar, she was exhausted and it was nearly dark. Heading back to the station, she kept as much out of sight as she could, reaching the edge of the clearing and stopping.

The soldiers were gone and the lights inside the trailer were all on. The air around was still and humid and warm. Just the way she liked it. Keeping to the jungle, she made her way along the edge then over the dune and down the path, weaving through Yucatan scrub and scratchy green beach grass. Her tent was half way down a sand dune on a beach where the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico mixed. Dry palms and green alamo trees rattled in the breeze off the water. Five meters away, the slap of waves on perfect sand sounded with dulling monotony.

Slipping through the door of her tent then under a cowl of mosquito netting, she rolled on to her cot. She could just see the stars through the netting and the tent’s screen window and watched a low satellite move across the sky.

Through the thin windows of the trailer, Mom and Dad’s shouting grew louder when the breezes faded. The subject was always the same: the stupid Chicxulub Crater and the sixty-five million year old buried remains of a meteorite that hit Earth. It had contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs while killing off half of what life was left. Uncovering the mystery of the meteorite had been her parent’s passion for the twenty years of their marriage.

Dad wanted a normal life now and Emerald was starting to think maybe he was right. He wanted them to live in town, maybe have a normal job teaching paleoxenoarchaeontology in the US and the possibility of doing something besides work.

Mom argued that the real world was here, at Chicxulub and that they were so close to exposing real, verifiably alien artifacts that it would be immoral and irresponsible if they left.

The three of them living alone on the coast for almost two years now was crushing them all. Her parents had dug up six gray plastic boxes worth of junk that no one in the universe could possibly be interested in. Emerald had no physical friends, only people she chatted with on rLife, usually other Aspies like her – not that she wanted any, really, she felt better alone. She liked being alone – and tourists seemed bored with the Crater and rarely came any more.

Sometimes she thought that maybe she could handle ONE friend who lived somewhere nearby. Emerald sighed. She and Mom and Dad worked together great during the day. It’s just that they couldn’t be together for a single night without world war three breaking out. Maybe Mom and Dad were autistic, too.

Maybe they were just plain crazy.

Or they’d fallen out of love.

Lately Mom had been more excited while Dad seemed angrier. Something about alien something-or-other. Emerald sighed, rolled to her back and snapped on the halogen bed light. It wouldn’t be the first night she’d spent on the beach alone. In fact, she was starting to like it that way now that she was twelve and a half. She read a chapter from the classic science fiction book, PODKAYNE OF MARS, then turned out the light and settled down to listen to the waves whispering on the beach until she could keep her eyes open no longer.

 

She woke to a sound she’d heard before. After a brief, blurry instant, she recognized it as a fast version of mumbletypeg. The sound of knives being thrust into wet sand and pulled up fast over and over again came from the water, moving up the hill.

Frowning, Emerald sat up.

Through her other screen window, the Moon was setting, balanced like a huge, silver beach ball on the Caribbean. Against the Moon, she saw a robot spider – a thick platform jutting six legs and downward spikes. It didn’t move for several minutes then walked out of her line of sight.

Emerald slipped through the cowl, out of the tent and scampered down to the damp, firm sand on the Gulf. She sprinted along the beach until she could see the sharp, regular depressions where the robot had plunged its feet into the sand. She was even with the aluminum trailers of the house and lab. Up the dune again, she slowed then peeked over the ridge.

Dad pushed open the airlock and shouted, “Emerald!”

From out of the night came a cough and a hiss. Something whistled faintly through the air. Then the house exploded in a blinding fireball. The shockwave threw Emerald and part of the dune backward, tumbling into shallow water. Stunned, trembling, she waded back to shore, stumbled and fell to her hands and knees silently on the sand.

Emerald heard a second hiss and cough, a thud and another fireball rose, glaring white light at first, fading to red rolled into the sky. Shreds of hot metal rained hissing down on the beach. The sound of knives stabbing sand came over the dune again as a third missile shredded her tent. She curled more tightly on the wet sand ten meters from the alien robot, holding her breath.

A few moments later, the spider walked through the burning remains of her tent, splashed into the Gulf and was gone, leaving Emerald entirely and completely...alone.