Writing in Public: Story 4 (Novella) Chapter 19
[image error]CHAPTER 19
The morning had started out hot and got hotter by the time the jeep arrived at the pointy rock. This time, Brooks drove, Jian sat in the passenger seat, and Hope in the back. It was noisier riding in the backseat, and she wished she sat in the other backseat. The exhaust was pretty bad.
Hope had only looked at the rock from a distance. Now Brooks parked in the rock’s shadow. Only slightly cooler. She unscrewed the cap to a bottle of water and unclogged her throat of dust.
While Jian went around to the front of the jeep to contact Kangjun, Hope and Brooks got out and walked to the base of the rock. Hope craned her neck back and looked up. She pressed her hand against the rock. Even in the shade it was warm.
“For a rock,” she said, “it doesn’t look rock-like.”
Brooks tapped on it with a knuckle. “Feels like a rock.”
“You aren’t going to taste it, are you?”
He laughed. “No. But you know, I saw photos of the Sphinx in Egypt, before they restored it and put a preservation field around it. The erosion reminds me of that.”
Hope remembered that. It had been a big job, and no one had been sure it would work. The statue had been eroding for years because of the rock bed it was carved out of it. Limestone, or something like that. Water had gotten up into it from underground.
Then she stepped back, and back again until she could see it better. “Maybe this is manmade. If it, it must mean something to the ghost.”
She found herself turning a circle, looking for the ghost. For once in her life, she wished a ghost would show up.
The only ghost she saw was the ghostly shape of Graul hovering above the jeep’s hood. Jian had taken off her wrist comm and laid it on the top of the hood. About time they finally got through.
Graul was saying, “—Is a statue. It fell over and was covered up with sand.”
Hope looked up at the pointy rock again. “Be an awful big statue.”
“It is,” Graul said. “Your camp is sitting on the back end of it. Looks to have once been a marker for ships coming into port.”
“Water here?” Brooks said in amazement.
It was hard to imagine that all this dry, purple dirt was once a waterfront.
“So this is a really old ghost hanging around?” Hope said. That’d be cool if she could talk to such an old ghost. It’d be like seeing the Sphinx and talking to the ghosts of the builders, or even one of the pharaohs.
“We’re still translating the records,” Graul said.
“Any estimate on that, sir?” Jian asked.
“No. We don’t know where to look. It could be five hundred years ago or a thousand years ago.”
Jian pressed her lips together in deep thought. “It has to be recent. I think the aliens know exactly what the ghost is. If it was five hundred years ago, that gets lost with time. Try a hundred years.”
“And check on the other aliens who died off,” Brooks added. “The ones nearby couldn’t have created that statue.”
“Good idea.” Graul’s eyes focused on Hope. “I take it you haven’t had any luck.”
Hope shook her head, looking down at her feet. “No. The ghost isn’t cooperating.”
“Maybe the ghost doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Then why did it tear up the camp, sir?” Brooks asked.
“Because sometimes you get so angry that you get stuck and don’t want to talk to anyone.”
That was interesting. Hope worked through it in her head, thinking she’d have dig around the ship’s archives for Earth history. There were places where the ghosts couldn’t could to rest, because what had happened to them was so horrific. They were stuck there, locked to Earth in misery and anguish, unable to move on.
It would be awful to be stuck in anger like that forever.
“We have to be ready to pull the plug,” Graul said. “Your call, Ms. Delgado.”
“Mine?” Hope squeaked, exchanging glances with Brooks and Jian.
“What about Mel, sir?” Jian asked.
Graul shook his head, giving them a rueful grin. “Mel does know what she’s doing. But she’s like everyone else in Alien Affairs. Thinks there’s always another chance to work the problem out. Sometimes there isn’t. Ms. Delgado, you know ghosts. What do you want to do?”
Hope hated this. What if she was wrong? She clasped her hands behind her back to hide her trembling.
But as she spoke, she knew there was only one answer. “We need to get out of here. The aliens don’t want me talking to the ghost. They just want me to kill it, whatever that means. I can’t give them what they want. They already weren’t happy with us when we met in town. It’s only going to get worse.”
Something caught Graul’s attention, and he looked off screen. Hope thought she heard a muffled voice. But it was Graul’s body language that frightened her. He’d instantly gone into alert mode. Both Jian and Brooks were mirroring it now, like some military switch had been turned onto high.
Graul disappeared from the image for a moment, leaning over—Hope guessed—to look at the computer on the table top. Then a new image sprang up in his place. It showed a computer generated overhead view of the scientist’s camp. A line of figures was approaching the camp at a rapid pace.
“Looks like we just went to worse,” Graul said. “They’re armed.”
Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: GALCOM Universe
