The Conduit: Chapter 9

Early in the morning, as Max rolled around beneath a sheet, enjoying a visit from the astral plane visitor haunting his dreams, he jumped out of bed as the buzzer at his door alerted him someone was there. Max got up, slid into a pair of pants, and hurried across his private quarters yelling, “I’m coming.” As Max opened the door, the look on Jensen's face told him something was wrong.

“Get dressed,” Jensen suggested, “We’ve got a problem.”

The look on the head of security’s face was grim. Max went to his bedroom and grabbed a T-shirt and a pair of boots. He put on boots and pulled the shirt over his head as he rushed through the doorway.

By the time Jensen took Max to the lower gangway, he had already filled his boss in on what the final patrol of the night shift had discovered. As they approached, several security staff were busy securing the area while others examined the evidence. There was a blanket lying over a body waiting to be bagged.

“Jesus,” sighed Max.

Jensen shook his head, commenting that Jesus had nothing to do with what he was about to show him. He handed Max a pair of gloves. As he knelt next to the body of his man, Carter, Jensen covered his nose. There was an unbelievable wretchedness to what lay beneath the blanket. Jensen hadn’t seen such savagery since working in Africa.

Max nodded that he was ready, and Jensen uncovered Carter Holmes’ remains. It stopped Max in his tracks, forcing him to take a moment before looking closer. Most of the left side of his throat was ripped out. The torn flesh around the wound appeared to be the result of an animal attack.

“What the hell could have done that?” Max wondered loudly.

“I don’t know, boss. Whatever it was, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen. But look at his hand.”

Max moved the blanket where Jensen pointed, finding that Carter’s right hand was missing part of his index finger. He looked up at Jensen, struggling with the shock of it happening on a sea station full of people he’d come to know. There wasn’t anyone aboard whom he could imagine doing something so horrific.

“Was he tortured?”

“It looks bitten off to me, but by what, I couldn’t say,” Jensen admitted before asking, “What do you want me to do here? You’ve got to know, some of the boys are itching to tear through every living soul on this dammed rig until we find answers. I’m not saying we should, but I’m not saying we shouldn’t either.”

Max’s initial reaction was to make everyone a suspect and question them all. There were too many people for that to be an efficient way of doing things. Fortunately, there were other ways to get things done, particularly at a station with such high security. Max instructed his head of security to pull the video footage from mid-yesterday until two hours after the body was discovered.

“Get him down to medical. Tell the doctor to make an autopsy her top priority. Post a guard with him,” Max ordered. “And double patrols from dusk to dawn. I don’t want less than to two-man teams. We’ll make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Max walked away from the scene with an ominous feeling. He needed to see the security footage. He felt responsible for the murder. Max questioned himself; had he been so distracted that he missed something? Was there someone at the station who wasn’t supposed to be there?

The winds howled around basecamp as Anu hurried through the frigid weather, as snow whipped around her. Most of the members of the expedition were inside, but it was important that she alerted Jonas to the drone mission having taken off. Already, after just a brief flyby, they had discovered something previously unknown.

Anu opened the door to find Jonas resting. She crept inside and knelt next to him. Nudging his shoulder, she called his name. Jonas opened his eyes, looked at her, and smiled.

“I haven’t woken up to a woman in some time,” he smiled. “It must be time.”

Anu nodded, telling Jonas that the drone was in the air, and they reported finding something on their first pass. She didn’t want to tell him what, only that he needed to see it for himself. Anu had seen the footage, and she still didn’t believe her own eyes. As she described how significant it might be, she urged Jonas to come with her.

Jonas and Anu hurried across the camp. He was amazed the drones could fly in such conditions as the winds howled around them. As they got into the command tent, Jonas came to a dead stop, shocked at the footage playing in front of him.

“What the hell is that?” he questioned the command team.

Anu admitted that they were hoping he could shed some light on what they were seeing. Nobody in the command center had expected to find such a site, much less at the elevation they were flying. What they were seeing hadn’t been recorded in all of history. They were stumped by the mysterious structure on the screen.

“This is real?” questioned Jonas.

“It’s the feed from drone one. We flew into the new cave formation,” explained a technician.

Jonas scratched his head as he sat at the table with the monitors. There was a structure inside the cave, something large and distinctive. As he enlarged the image, capturing stills from the hovering drone, his eyes widened with excitement. Being the first archaeologist to head a team into something like this was going to make his career for him. He needed to get up there as soon as he could.

The technician flying the drone activated the lights to give them a better picture of the structure. It was practically impossible for what they were seeing to exist. At more than two miles up, the construction of something this complicated would be nearly impossible by modern standards, but what they saw in front of them was old. There’d never been anything like this found on Earth, at least not inside of a mountain.

“How do you think it got there?” asked the drone pilot.

“I have no idea,” admitted Jonas.

“How long do you think it’s been there?”

It was another good question, and one Jonas wasn’t prepared to answer. The cave formation was large. The structure inside it appeared to be carved from the inside of the cave, meaning that the technology was highly skilled and advanced. Jonas looked at the sides of the interior, seeing rocky formations that take hundreds to thousands of years to form. He knew that what was on the screen was impossible, and yet, it was real.

“How soon can we go up?”

“The weather service predicts we’ll be able to start the climb tomorrow morning,” announced Anu.

Jonas didn’t like the idea of waiting another day to begin the ascent. He asked the drone pilot to give him a view of the cave opening. Looking at the opening, Jonas questioned whether a chopper could land on the site. It would take them a couple of days to climb it, but with an opening that large a chopper could make regular runs back and forth between the base camp and the site. With the unlimited resources he was given to study the site, Jonas looked at Anu.

“Are you thinking what I am?” he asked.

“I seriously doubt it,” admitted Anu.

“That’s got to be forty feet by fifty to sixty feet,” he suggested.

“And?” she asked.

Jonas looked at the team, smiling. He was convinced that with the right pilot, he could expedite the ascent, taking them up the mountain and to the site by chopper instead of a long and arduous climb. They just needed a chopper pilot willing to fly in and out of the cave.

“Where are you going to find someone crazy enough to take that risk?”

“I’m going to call a friend back home,” he told them. “We need a military pilot, someone that’s seen action.”

Jonas pulled a satellite phone from his jacket and dialed. He talked to someone for a while and then smiled at the rest of the room. There would be a pilot sent to them within the hour. They would be able to be on-site tomorrow and not work their way to the cave. He still had to examine the images and the data from the drone missions. The question remained: how was there a small fortress inside of a mountain in the middle of some of the world’s toughest terrain? And who put it there?

Senator Jameson walked into a chamber where the rest of the group were meeting in person for the first time in three decades. The group rarely met in person, unless something significant was occurring. The Senator insisted they meet, as what he was going to share with them was not something to risk getting out to the public. As secure as their systems were, he categorized this as above-top secret information.

The senator carried with him a file, a file he still didn’t understand. The images that Mr. Quinn sent to him were both miraculous and disturbing. He read the initial briefing, and after comparing the photos he printed to other structures around the world, he also detected traits of Mayan, Egyptian, and Asian design. Although they knew little about the origin of the structure inside, the initial geological samples added to the mystery that was unfolding along the desolate area of the Himalayan Mountain range.

The first geologic sample a drone could collect helped them develop a possible age of the structure. If the testing was accurate, the senator had no explanation he could give the group. There had never been anything like this discovered, and this would be the first structure to be dated past seven thousand years. The dates Jonas transmitted were unbelievable, but the geologist running the tests indicated that the stone structure inside the cave was seven to twelve thousand years old.

Taking a seat at the table, Senator Jameson thanked everyone for making the trip. He announced that a pilot would transport the excavation team, along with Mr. Quinn, to the site. They would make six runs up and back to transport personnel and supplies, and there would be a temporary camp set up inside the mountain.

“What are they excavating that’s so important?” asked the Russian Ambassador, Alexi Russev.

Senator Jameson was prepared for the question. He still didn’t have an explanation for the discovery, other than that it was something amazing. He passed around photos from the drone expedition and gave the rest of the group a chance to digest what they were looking at. Many of them looked back at him in disbelief as they discussed the pictures amongst themselves. There was a general feeling of awe and disbelief among the group.

“This isn’t real,” suggested Lee Childs, the United States Deputy Director of National Intelligence.

“I assure you all, what you’re looking at is from a drone expedition earlier today. These are genuine images from the inside of the cave,” the senator assured them.

“Who put it there?”

Senator Jameson admitted that they didn’t know. The site appeared to be thousands of years old, he explained.

“It possibly predates modern recorded history,” he sighed.

“How old is it?”

Senator Jameson handed out the report from the onsite geologist. While it was preliminary, the report told the story of how the strata in the cave appeared, and how old the sample taken with the drone made the structure appear. After he passed out the report, he waited for them to read it before continuing.

“Seven thousand years,” mumbled Sara Atwood, the UK Prime Minister.

“That’s what the initial report says?”

They all looked around the room at each other. Each member understood the significance of what they were seeing. Suddenly, any concerns about expenditure went to the bottom of their lists as they all agreed this might be what they were looking for. As members of the group, they all realized this might be the reason they were founded. Their only question was what's next?

“Well, now we wait on the two assets we have in the field, and hope that the containment system developed by Commander Shepherd will hold the girl until we learn if she’s the one that we’ve been waiting for,” explained the senator.

“And if she’s not?”

Senator Jameson didn’t want to think about the possibility the one they were looking for was already out in the world. They had spent nearly one hundred billion dollars between the containment unit’s development and the search for the one. Now that they may have found the original prison that held the creature, finding the creature was their top priority. He didn’t know if the girl was the thing that came out of the cave, or if she’d witnessed the thing that left nothing but carnage and bloodshed in its wake, but they were determined to find her.

Jonas sat in his chair, a harness across his chest, wearing a headset so he could listen to the chatter and hear the pilots. Three choppers lifted off from their basecamp, beginning a measured ascent to the mountain site. Anu sat across from him, looking through the plexiglass window in the sliding door. Unlike Jonas, she was smiling and appeared to be enjoying the flight.

Unfortunately for him, Jonas was not a fan of flying and found chopper flights nerve-wracking. Flying into hot zones and using choppers to get into hard-to-reach regions of the world, he’d spent a good amount of time aboard aircraft like these and had ditched from more than one before they crashed. As he white knuckled his way through the flight, the cocky and self-assured pilot announced they’d be taking a leisurely trip past ten thousand feet and “into the unknown.” His sense of humor made Jonas uncomfortable.

“So,” Anu yelled into the mouthpiece on her headset. “What do you think we’ll find?”

Jonas looked at her. He wasn’t sure what they’d discover in such a remote location. What the drones revealed was already hard to fathom; a structure carved into the side of a mountain at more than two miles above sea level. A team of historians believed the chamber was hidden beneath ten and fifteen thousand years ago. It would mean the structure predated the pyramids and Stonehenge.

“It’s hard to say,” he admitted. “The whole things a mystery. Who built the dammed thing?”

Anu knew he was right. They had no idea who might have been behind the structure they saw in the drone footage. But what they saw was as amazing as anything she’d ever laid eyes on.

“Lady and gentlemen,” announced the pilot, “This is where things get tricky.”

Jonas looked toward the front of the chopper as the pilot lined the craft up with the massive opening. At nearly thirty feet high and sixty feet wide, there was plenty of room to slide a chopper into the cave. It was the turbulent winds at that elevation that made it dangerous to fly into the cave. Even with the available clearances, one mistake would leave the pilots with a mere blink of the eye to compensate, or they could smack into the stony sides of the mountain opening.

As the chopper bounced side to side, feeling the effects of turbulence around the opening, Jonas gritted his teeth as the rest of the passengers and pilots closed their eyes and hoped for the best. Jonas looked through the top of the chopper, asking himself why he had taken this job. He was starting to regret the so-called chance of a lifetime.