Magenta Monster

The anomalies were getting clearer as the ice melted, but it was also making Amy’s job harder. The ice was becoming dangerous, and the tunnelling could now end up causing the whole area to collapse. She locked her jaw in frustration at the thought of politicians arguing for nearly a century about such an obvious problem. The world was warming, her world was diminishing.

She attached the spikes to her shoes and once more checked her ropes and equipment. Nodding to Alec, she swung off of the ice cliff and down into the white and blue depths. The ice water blue suffused her and she felt the thrill of descending into the planet’s icy heart. She chastised herself for getting poetic; the heart of the planet was of course fire… Well, sort of, except it wasn’t, it was just really hot.

At sixty feet she was dangling in the middle of a turquoise tinged pit. It stretched away beneath her into a deeper twilight blue and then down to the richest of deep colours before somehow becoming black. She controlled her own descent, squishing the chest jammer and allowing the rope to slide through. A second regulator was gripped in her other hand and it was mostly a smooth ride. Her lungs already felt cold.

Her yellow lighting, on her helmet and suit, seemed out of place. She altered the tones on the LEDs and smiled when she remembered her granddad explaining the actual water-proof flames he’d had to wear to the ice caves. He’d showed her his old rig once and they’d lit the flame. What was it again, “aconite”? Whatever it had been, it stunk.

“Are you getting the melting patterns?” she asked. The little click in her ear told her the battery was in energy saving mode, which was exactly what it should have been in. Voices always sounded strange on the system, due to the lack of echos.

“Yes, but you are jerking your head around to much again,”

“Affirmative,” she said, sighing; the image of an old fictional android always popped into her head, every time she said the damn word, and she knew the head jerking was an issue but it was so hard not to just look around in awe – no matter how many ice caves she descended into, each was intrinsically different and beautiful.

Something caught her eye and she smiled at the thought that she was jerking their view, “do you see that?” she breathed.

“The striations?”

“Yes, they look like tool marks, almost like one of the modern borers had created this tunnel,” her eyebrows pushed together in that way her aunt reckoned would age her. “They show signs of having melted slightly and refroze but they are definitely bore markings but… that can’t be.” She looked up the shaft.

“It is probably from boulder movement.”

“They do not look like slick’n’slides!” she snarled. “They are not beveled in the same way and they are continuous, so unless we had a spinning rock, I don’t see how they could have formed.”

“You can’t be serious Amy, think about the age of the ice,”

‘Is it possible the Russians or Germans or someone were here during that war? The one with all the secret tech?”

“I think you mean the second world war… It’s possible, but the tunnel boring technology only really took off in the 80’s.” She found herself nodding.

“Ok well they are definitely odd, we can agree on that.”

“Affirmative!” there had been a slight laugh there; she was glad it was only her core team today, though she would blush like anything if a transcript of that was sent out to the Professor. Her feet brushed the floor.

The spikes helped her get purchase and she unclipped herself from the rope, extended her stick, and headed through the tunnel. It was dark blue and hushed, like being at the bottom of the sea. The scritch and scrunch of her movement was harsh and alien. Stalagmites of ice grew as dangerous spikes from the floor, and there was an insistent drip-drip, which was ominous as she was underneath a lot of ice and water and needed the ice of the cave to be structurally sound. She messaged through what she was hearing, and her voice echoed, bouncing back to her.

She shuddered and hit the thermal button on her suit, it would drain batteries, but it was what it was for. She paused to stare into the ice, and squinted, trying to make out what she could see. Shapes seemed to drift and loom; she shook her head and inwardly warned herself about getting too fanciful.

A metallic clatter made her jump. She had not been looking where she was going; bar the accreted spikes growing out of the floor, the tunnel was smoothly even, but she had caught something with her boot and sent it skimming into the strange twilight gloom. Looking around she saw the object and picked it up. It was a belt buckle, gold and decorative; she could not really make out the features on it. She was no archeologist either, but it looked Viking to her and that had to be completely wrong, unless it was a victorian fake? That would work; the victorian explorers gotten every where and not all of it had been recorded. Shrugging, she bagged it up and reported it in.

There was excitement at her find, but she was more interested in a twisted column of ice she found, bulbous and lumpy like an over waxed candle that had been left to burn in some restaurant for too long. She took some of her own images of it for scientific and artistic reasons and then continued on, listening to the distracting buzz of her team discussing the buckle.

There was a sharp corner in the tunnel, and turning it, she stopped and stared. The shapes that had loomed, that had floated in the ice – they were there set out before her. “Statues,” she said quietly to the team up above.

“Thousands of statues,” they stood tall and firm, some half melted or grown over by new ice. She made sure her camera took in the fine details as she walked around the nearest. “Are you getting this?”

“Affirmative… we think you may have been right about the tunnel” in a daze she nodded, forgetting they could not see her.

“These are definitely not natural,” she muttered. She began to document them; her suit had warmed her nicely, so she switched it off to save her battery. She was going to get as much of this done as possible and there was a hell of a lot of it.

“We are sending Jackson down,” she winced but acknowledged the statement. Some of the statues were less human than others; it made her uneasy. Though she disliked the woman, any company would be a good thing.

“Send food” she stated and decided to try and work out the dimensions of the chamber she was in. It was not very high, and looked as if it had been cut onto the ice. The chamber itself had been man made; she felt the thrill of that realisation and made sure she got the images to prove her point.

One statue seemed to stare at her accusingly, Amy smiled at herself and spoke to it, “Bet it’s been a bit boring down here?” once again her voice echoed in a strange way and she was relieved to hear Jackson’s clumsy thumping and screech sliding. The other woman would have optics equipment so that they could survey the chamber; it was going to take a while and her stomach reminded her that she’d requested food.

A petite thing, Jenna slide a crate across the floor to her. “Your food”, she snarled. Amy took one look at that and the equipment and felt bad, she should have gone back to the descent tube to help.

“Sorry, I didn’t realise you’d be lugging that lot.” Her sentiment did little to quell the other woman’s annoyance.

Sighing, she decided to just plough on and pointed out the most interesting features she’d found so far. “That statue there looks like your old-school sci-fi alien” she laughed; the other woman pinned her with the look but went to investigate the tall thin statue with wide forehead and thin pointy jaw. The eyes were large and it seemed to be inquiring whether they needed anything or if they were lost. Amy gave herself a mental shake and went back to the food crate.

The cold was starting to seep through her expertly engineered clothing once more but she hoped the coffee in the thermos would help stave off her having to turn the suit’s heater back on. She would have to do it soon but the longer she left it the longer she would get to spend in the cavern collecting information.

She grimaced at the bitter taste; it was not real coffee, it rarely was anymore. Three years ago a fungal attack had wiped most of the plantations out and it had become stupidly expensive. She poured in the sugar that had been sent and sipped it thankfully anyway.

Caving in, she put the suit’s heater back on and then helped Jackson with the surveying. The chamber was pretty much perfect and the statues were in some sort of pattern, they wouldn’t be sure what it was until they popped the data into some sort of display form, but they were definitely in a purposeful pattern.

“What’s that at the centre?” Jenna asked and Amy screwed up her eyes to try and see what the women was gesturing at in the gloom.

“Looks like a hut?” she said.

“Strange hut, maybe it’s a crane?” the other woman remarked. Amy stepped forward a couple of paces, trying to get a better look; she shrugged and conceded that the other woman was probably right.

“It is a bit low, isn’t it?” It also looked as if it was pointed or arched. They both started to stride towards it at the same moment, it would have been funny with anybody else but the sense of rivalry she felt with this woman was extraordinary. She would have reached the structure first if she hadn’t been so puzzled by it that she just stopped mid stride.

“It’s a pyramid?” she cried.

“Certainly looks like it, not a stepped one either.”

“I thought they were all stepped?” The other woman glared at her.

“Under the cladding, yes, but not as finished articles, this one is smooth sided like the ones that were destroyed in Egypt.”

Amy didn’t know why this was important but could tell from the other woman’s tone that cladded or stepped had some sort of impact on the significance of the pyramid. She just played it safe and nodded away as the other women went on about construction details.

She let the words wash over her as she examined the stone it was made out of. It was beautifully cut, almost as if they had used high pressure water or… lasers. If she could get a sample she’d be able to tell but she didn’t want to hack a piece off of the structure, it would be criminal to break a perfect thing to see what made it so perfect. Instead she radioed in ordering the bits for a field lab and trying not to grind her teeth when she discovered they didn’t have everything she wanted.

She ran her gloved hand round the impossibly fitted stones, until she reached the fourth side, there the fabric of her glove snagged on a slight rise. Looking around she noticed that just below the ice there was more stone, “there’s a patio!” she cried, and the other woman came slipping and sliding around and knelt down.

“It’s a balcony,” she breathed with awe.

Amy dropped down too to try and stare through ice and rock, what she saw made her dizzy.

“How… how far down do you think it goes?” she breathed in excitement.

“A way,” replied Jenna, which really was not helpful. She bit back a tart response and stood thinking about the raised stone of the fourth side.

“I think there’s a door.” She said, the other woman raised her eyebrow but followed her forward. She gestured to the slight rise and Jenna smiled.

“Perfect!” she cried and then to Amy’s surprise the woman took out a knife and shoved it in the crack.

The door stiffly creaked open; the air was bitter within and Amy stood back fearing half-remembered stories of curses.

“Wuss”, the other woman barked, and adjusted her suit to become a walking beacon.

Their comms units burst into life “Don’t go in! Wait for the team,” came the panicked voice.

Amy tried to grab Jenna but she threw her arm off and was lost into the darkness within. Amy stared at the dark gaping maw of the ancient monument and shivered, what had she found?

She wanted to run, run far away, she’d seen some old old film about a pyramid under the ice – it had not ended well, she recalled.

“Are you coming?” snapped Jenna.

Looking behind her, Amy hesitated, and then entered the darkness.

Posted: Friday, November 7th, 2014 @ 11:18 pm
Categories: Story, The Punks World.
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