Shadow Seed 1: The Misbegotten (66 page)

Estefan glanced about.  The chamber was roughly hewn, its surfaces uneven and scarred with Diatainium wrought x-beams reinforcing the lopsided arch wherever
it was needed.  The ground was level, dull grey, and dimpled giving it a degree of traction when stepped upon.  Some unknown substance had been sprayed over the ice below them.  To Estefan it appeared like tartan - the spongy, brick-red material used to coat the running tracks of the world when he was teenager, only this was the wrong color.  Brilliant Eco-Halogens circled them, ensconced in heavy copper-like bowl bolted into the surface of the ice itself.  There was only one other portal aside from the one they used to enter the chamber.  It was carved on the opposite wall, hacked into the ice - a set of sizable twin metal doors.

Looking at the space holistically, Estefan could tell this was no more than a parking garage, emptied for their sake.

“My honored guests, if you would follow me,” gestured the guide.  He stood a few feet away from the knot of them, pointing toward the doors on the other side of the chamber.

The Keeper nodded.  The Synod formed up about him, though he reached out to hold Leda’s hand, walking beside her the entire way to the portals.  She smiled up at him, somewhat surprised at the
open display of intimacy, but then again, she’d never been pregnant before.  She wasn’t used to the “Royal Treatment”.

Hamza strode up to a large round, glowing sensor within a pattern of intricately carved filigree at the center where the two doors came together.  He leaned forward, his face was almost pressed against it, his lips moving fast as he spoke into the domed radiance.  When he finished, he waited a few heartbeats, then put his hands to either side of his face, palms forward, splayed.  His thumbs and forefingers touched his chin and temple respectively.  He remained motionless until a rumbling, baritone thrum reverberated throughout the room, twanging their bones like tuning forks.  A series of clicks and clacks came from within the doors and they opened.

Hamza was through them before they gaped fully, the rest of their group striding after.  Estefan and Leda were bunched in between a double ring of bodies.  The passage beyond was ten meters wide, but it was still crowded with some many bodies traversing through it at once.

Their host led them down the long hall until it was crossed by an identical one, a third of a kilometer into the heart of the Mount.  He turned to his right without hesitation and led them another seventy meters before coming to
another intersection.  This time he turned left.  Then turned left again about ninety meters form their last turn, down a flight of stairs, turned the right, then left, then another series of right hand turns until he walked them down a spiral staircase that seemed to have no end.

By then, Estefan and his wives were so disoriented; each of them knew they would need assistance in getting back to the Skycars on their way out.  This was probably the intent of their roundabout journey in the first place, but none of them worried overly much.  After the fiasco upon their arrival, not even Flavia expected anything clandestine occurring in the near future.  Hamza would see to that personally.  The symbiotic relationship between the Federation and Aegis Synod was too important to jeopardize it any further.

Next, they were led down corridor after corridor of curving, canted and sloped passages, even more confusion than the right-angled ones above.  The Keeper gave up trying to guess how far under the Mount they’d traveled, pushed all thoughts of what direction they walked and decided to follow Hamza Ahmed Khali-Bhall’s lead.  He cleared his mind of all else.

Finally, after what seemed an interminable time, they came to a colossal door, blocking the way from floor to ceiling, a door unlike any they
’d seen thus far.  Estefan smiled crookedly at Leda.  He shrugged his shoulders at Katie when she glanced their way a moment later.

It was a hinged door to a vault, complete with spoke handwheel, keypad punch, timelock and palm print reader.  Estefan hadn’t seen anything like it in almost two hundred years.  It looked brand new.

Their host walked straight up to the Diatainium-steel alloyed behemoth and began working the redundant safety measures and within ninety seconds had the enormous, fifteen foot thick obstruction swinging open on perfect balanced pivots.

Behind it was the last thing any of the Synod had expected to see – the folding doors of an elevator.

Hamza spoke in rapid Arabic to the commanding officer of their security detail, who, in turn, shouted a brisk command to his troops.  At once, they came to attention, divided equally, lining either side of the passageway.

“They will be guarding us from here,” explained their guide.  “Only a selected few have access to the Holding.”  His smiled nervously, entering a fourteen digit code into yet another keypad and the elevator opened; heretofore, darkened lights illuminating as they stepped into it.

It was mostly made of -plexi, held together by thin brackets of metal, but once their descent began, they could see they were actually within a triple-hulled conveyance, more pill-shaped than cube-like, not your typical configuration one would expect of an elevator.

Their speed was gradual at first, but steadily increased until the support beams within the shaft – some twenty meters apart – were flashing past them so swift
, it was hard to keep track of them.  There must’ve been motion dampers built into the elevator itself, because none of them actually felt they were plummeting downward at close to what people on Earth would say was terminal velocity.

After a couple of minutes, Estefan leaned toward Hamza.  “How far are we going down?”

“Quite a ways,” replied the other man, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands clasped behind his back.

Estefan was forced to nod when their host said nothing else.  He kept his face as rigid as he could manage.  He was used to getting complete explanations when he asked a question.

“It’s making me feel funny,” Leda said, hugging herself about the waist.

“It’s always like that in your first trimester, sis,” said Mena with a mollifying tone.

Sandy sniggered playfully.  “She’d know, girl, since she’s given birth to more babies than the rest of us.”

“That’s right, huh?” thought the mother-to-be, gazing at her
sister-in-marriage in a different light. 
She’s done this eleven times already!  My god!

As her side, Estefan gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and seemed about to add something to the conversation when they suddenly burst forth from the frozen tube
, still plummeting.  Gasps of pure amazement rippled through them as they suddenly found themselves beneath the two-mile thick ice sheet of the large moon, surrounded on all sides, by a hidden, planet-wide ocean.

“The colors!” exclaimed Tirza, stepping toward the Plexi, her face a fraction of an inch away.

They never should’ve been able to see through the stunning azure of Europa’s ocean, encased as it was underneath an impenetrable layer of ice, but they could.  They never should’ve been able to see at a distance, but they could.  Everything should’ve been as black as coal, a featureless inky darkness no light could pierce, yet… it was the exactly opposite.  It was like gazing through a man-made aquarium, the water crystalline, the light ubiquitous.  Tirza was certain she could see for kilometers through the chilly depths.  It was so vivid, so infused with clarity, she could hardly breathe.

“How is this possible?” she asked breathlessly.

Hamza shuffled to her side.  “It is the proto-bacteria in the water itself.  It is bioluminescent.  In fact, almost every microbe, organism and fully formed creature in our ocean gives off its own light to some degree.  Our scientists have come to the conclusion that it is a defense mechanism, targeting the specific aspect of concealment.”  He bobbed his head as if the concept overwhelmed him as well, despite the fact he had been born and raised upon the Jovian moon.  “The non-predatory life-forms are typically the brightest; some can set nearly a hectoliter of the ocean ablaze with light, which is simply incredible.  Don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” muttered Tirza, her eyes dancing about as creatures of wondrous variety began to come into view.

They watched in silence as they continued to descent into the primordial depths.  It wasn’t long before larger organisms began to shimmer and dance into existence, some not all that different than those living in the abysses of Earth, others, though, were otherworldly and terrible.

There was a school on eel-like creature, coursing through the frigid waters with long dorsal and ventral ridges, ending with a large posterior, fanlike fin.  Only its head was bulbous, almost spherical with equally large eyes and a mouth no bigger than a tiny slice at the bottom of it
s round head.  There were avian-looking fish with beaks and incredibly long wings, though they swam instead of flew.  They saw beetle-shaped coruscations attached in great swaths along the tub containing the elevator, they even appeared chitinous as would earthly bugs, but they were gone so fast none of them could make out much more than those features.

In the distance, swam some sort of leviathan, no more than a darker shade of blue against the lighter closer to them.  It was billowed like a cumulonimbus cloud, but was so indistinct and amorphous; it could’ve been a large school of oceanic beings, rather than a single entity.  There were hundreds more, all shapes, guises, and forms.  Some infinitesimal, some broad and sweeping as their limbs meandered through the currents of this hidden water world.

They had been so wrapped in the scene before them, they had forgotten, in the ten minutes they been scrutinizing the vast array of life in front of them, they’d been descending, at an incredible rate, the entire time.  It wasn’t until an overpowering glow from below, made them stare down even further, to even deeper, unimaginable depths.  The fantastic shape of the Holding came into view and for the second time, there were gasps abound.  It was monstrous, nearly a kilometer in diameter.

“It is round?” asked Ruby, both hands and forehead on the transparent side of the elevator, her eyes glued to the vista below.

“The correct term for its shape is a truncated icosahedron, a more rounded version of a twenty-sided sphere.  The additional surfaces not only allow for a cleaner appearance, the added strength they give is tremendous.  This is crucial, of course, because the Holdings outer surfaces are withstanding a fraction less than 199,736 kPa, which is the equivalent of 1,971 earth atmospheres – absolutely crushing,” explained Hamza.

Estefan did a few quick convers
ion calculations in his head, metric weights and measures true nature still eluded him, having been taught the English system in school as a child.  Then, his eyes bugged out of his head when he figured the pressure in terms of psi (pounds per square inch) – 28,969.224! 
Holy shit, that’s a lot of weight!
  He peered down at the Holding through the transparent floor, marveling at the magnificent feat of engineering.  Estefan could only guess at how they had managed to build it, let alone keep it moored in place at such a depth.  He wanted to ask, but decided against it.  Hamza most likely didn’t have the authorization to disclose such delicate secrets regarding the Federation’s treasure trove, tucked away on the middle of Europa’s endless ocean.

His long-time allies had been busy these many years.

The Holding came at them quickly.  Within ninety seconds they were swallowed by it, and the beauty of Europa’s hidden seas vanished.  They traversed a no more than a quarter of a kilometer, decelerating the entire time, until at last the elevator stopped and opened, revealing another corridor.  This was long, but much narrower, the floors, walls and ceiling were all made of Diatainium and steel, thick and bulky, devoid of decoration.  Things, in the Holding, were purely functional, or so it seemed.

They walked from the elevator, passing so many doors Estefan lost count after a hundred meters.  Hamza led them to the third to the last on the left-hand side and produced a two-pronged iron key and inserted it into the locking mechanism.  He had to turn it five complete rotations, while internal levers and tumblers clinked and clanked from within.  With the final turn, a hissing sound emanated from
every end of the door.  It was pressure-sealed, the air within heavier than that in the hall, leaving a sweet, brunt scent in their noses.

Hamza pried open the door as a tiny Eco-Halogen twinkled on, radiating with enough light to show another spiral staircase, going down.  It wasn’t a long trip, only a few decks, and deposited them before a transparent wall, easily three feet thick, flawless, clear.  Behind it, there was nothing but a small dais atop which stood a pedestal, exactly one meter tall.  Resting in the center of the pedestal’s upper surface sat an innocuous pair of sunglasses.

“Finally, my Lord, we are here,” announced Hamza proudly.

“Where?” asked the Keeper, trying to keep the incredulity from saturating his one word retort.

“Why at the vault of the Shadow Spark, of course.”

Estefan’s brow furled.  “But there’s nothing but a pair of sunglasses in there.”

Hamza Ahmed Khali-Bhall’s smile was so broad it was borderline ridiculous.

The Keeper stared at him in silence for a time, then, “You have got to be kidding me!”

Their host merely nodded.

“Are you telling me the greatest weapon ever known to Mankind is hidden with
in a pair of Ray-Ban Aviators?”