Chapter Twenty-Nine
Madelaine and Jack drove to the abandoned mine. He parked her rental car on a dirt road he knew went nowhere. It was out of sight from any cars passing by on the country road they used to get here.
They’d discovered this place when they were in high school, when having time together all alone was a premium treat they didn’t often get to enjoy.
At his house, there were six siblings and various girlfriends and other friends popping in and out all the time. His brothers didn’t even live at his parents’ house full-time, but they were always visiting. Interrupting.
Meanwhile, at Madelaine’s home, her younger sister, Natalie had a knack for tracking them down whenever they tried to sneak away for a few private kisses.
She tracked them like a bloodhound because Natalie wanted to have endless tea parties with the two of them and all her dolls, thereby foiling all of their quiet kissing plans.
They exited the vehicle and Madelaine grabbed the new backpack out of the back seat. She’d found a larger pack in Diesel’s secret bunker. It fit the assembled device better than stuffing it in her old pack and maybe needing to cut it out in a hurry to place it inside the Mechanism.
Jack locked the doors and they walked toward the property they needed to enter and search. He pulled his mini Maglite out to direct them to the hole in the fence that allowed them unfettered access.
Jack switched off the flashlight and stared into the darkness beyond the rusted chain-link fence that was almost completely obscured by some sort of pervasive vine.
“I can’t believe this place is still here,” he said softly.
Moonlight filtered through the pines surrounding the abandoned mine. Beyond the vine-encrusted fence, hidden beneath decades of weeds and brush, stood the collapsed remains of the old Alienn Mining Company auxiliary shaft.
The lopsided, chipped and fading red paint rendering of a skull and crossbones above a message spouting “Danger: Do Not Enter” was still affixed to the fence beside a gaping hole that allowed entrance, if one knew where to look.
Despite everything—the weeks of searching, the danger, the truth she’d been forced to keep—being back here somehow made it feel simple again. Just Jack and Madelaine back at home, where they’d been the happiest.
The cardboard box that used to contain the housing Winslow had given them remained in Diesel’s underground hiding place.
Her new oversized backpack now held the assembled Device, waiting to be deployed.
The blue stone from Malvoraxis Veil, the petrified wood from Verdara, the clear thick circuit board from the locker on Keirios, the uniquely carved housing from Winslow at XkR-9 and, finally, the silver bauxite nugget from the Fearless Leader on Earth.
Seventeen years of Alpha-Prime and Paladin Cabal planning after a greedy thief threatened to destroy everything.
A century of preparation in total. Almost two months since the star Dravo had exploded and begun the process of poisoning two galaxies.
All of it had come down to this lonely hillside outside Alienn, Arkansas.
Madelaine looked toward the mine entrance. “Do you really remember?”
Jack nodded. “I do. It’s just that the symbols didn’t have as much of my attention as you did.”
“Still a charmer, I see,” Madelaine said.
“Thanks.” He turned toward the cave entrance. “As I recall, they were in several places, leading further into the cave, and even we weren’t daring enough to find out where they led.”
“Yes. Weren’t we were worried about scary aliens from somewhere we’d never heard of, lingering like a nightmare if we tried to find where the symbols ended?” She smiled. “Turns out we were right. Alpha aliens had created them all along.”
“Tonight, we’ll throw our fear aside and follow the symbol breadcrumbs. I truly hope we find the Mechanism.”
“So do I,” Madelaine said. “Since we can’t make it to any of the other places by the three in the morning deadline. This is currently our best and only option.”
“I agree.”
He clicked on his mini Maglite. They squeezed through the broken fence and followed the old path.
Nothing had changed. The same weathered trees. The same rocks. The same cave entrance. Even the initials they’d carved into a cedar tree remained.
J ? M
Jack stopped. “Well, look at that.”
She touched the carving. “We really thought we’d be together forever.”
“I never stopped thinking we would.”
Her eyes filled. She wanted to have that forever with Jack but had not figured out a way to make it happen. Once this errand was complete, there would be another and more after that one. She was the Paladin Courier for life.
Together, they stepped into the mine and started walking as best as they remembered to where they’d seen the symbols on the walls.
The tunnel descended farther than she remembered. Their lights swept over old tracks and crumbling support beams.
Then Madelaine stopped. “There. We sat there, just a few paces from where the symbols started.”
The markings. The same strange symbol that appeared on every package and the rendering of the Mechanism. A spatial spiral inside a triangle inside an oval where Madelaine’s thumbprint always went.
The symbol repeated lots of times along the walls, guiding them deeper and deeper into the abandoned auxiliary bauxite mine shaft.
“Honestly, I’m surprised they are here at all, since this wasn’t the first location the Mechanism resided.” Madelaine sent a beam from her flashlight to a hand-sized symbol on the wall.
“Maybe Tando Elroy wanted to make sure the galaxies were saved…after he milked them for as much money as he could and went scot-free before telling the powers in charge where he’d left it after he stole it from Alpha-Prime.”
“Probably. For all the good it did him.”
“Who do you think murdered him?”
Madelaine had considered it, of course, but she wasn’t ready to voice her thoughts.
“I don’t know, but it had to be someone involved with this errand.
Someone in the Paladin Cabal perhaps. Hard to know for certain.
” At least not yet. Madelaine might go on a quest to discover who murdered Tando Elroy, just to satisfy her own curiosity.
Instead of retreating like when they’d been younger, they followed the symbols deeper, finding a short corridor cut in a ninety-degree angle to the right. Probably an entrance or access tunnel to the part of the auxiliary mine where bauxite had been found by Alienne Greenly nearly a century ago.
Where searchers found the silver bauxite nugget that completed the assembly of the device for the Mechanism to do its job.
Diesel said that was what kept Alpha-Prime leadership on Earth after the Lost Colony incident.
The scientists developing the Solution—specifically, Bravo Elroy—needed a nugget of pure bauxite of a certain size that could be shaped into what was needed.
While Alpha-Prime had many bauxite mining operations across the known galaxies, those places mostly produced pea-sized bauxite chunks and bauxite dust. Much like how gold was collected on Earth.
What eventually became Alienn, Arkansas, was the first place they’d found larger pieces of bauxite. The silver bauxite nugget in the device had been found over eighty years ago in this very mine, and it was why Alphas had decided to stay on Earth even after the disastrous Lost Colony incident.
The short tunnel led to a left turn into a longer tunnel that seemed to descend at a steeper angle.
After walking fifty yards or so, they could make out a light at the end of the passage. The closer they got, the brighter the light, until they didn’t need their flashlights anymore. Jack stowed them in his own backpack.
The passage opened into a vast cavern. Madelaine gasped. Some sort of light source lit the space from above. It was a luminescent light blue. There were creatures that lit up at night after being in the sun for part of the day. Was there a skylight above that triggered some kind of bioluminescence?
In roughly the center of the football field sized space and seemingly embedded in the stone floor sat something enormous. Just like an eight-foot-tall phone booth from the last century or a 1970s computer. Metal, crystal, old and beautiful.
The Mechanism waited for them. Sleeping. Ready to fulfill its destiny.
“We found it,” she whispered.
“Of course we did.” Jack laughed.
They stood there staring at it in awe. Thousands of silver lines wound through transparent crystal structures housed within metal and what looked like wooden accents.
At chest level was the circular socket she’d seen in the renderings.
The socket was exactly the size of the assembled device Madelaine had in her oversized backpack.
Below the socket was the large, hand-sized oval. Maybe the beast required her whole hand to start this thing up instead of just her thumbprint. That made sense.
“You know,” Jack said. “It occurs to me in this instant and seeing the Mechanism that perhaps there were more of these Mechanisms than just one built in different places across the galaxy that could launch the device. You know, just in case.”
Madelaine nodded. “I agree, because if Tando Elroy removed the one on Alpha-Prime, I can’t see a way for him to get it inside the mine without someone from Alienn noticing. Unless he has the ability to teleport objects with his mind from one place to another.”
“Not likely. If he had that power, he would have teleported himself out of jail or out of the hands of the bounty hunter who caught him.”
Madelaine grinned, thinking about one more possibility. “Or they fed him kale every day to keep his powers at bay, like Indigo Jones.”
Jack laughed. “I really love that idea, even if it doesn’t turn out to be true.”
Madelaine approached the Mechanism. “You’re right. This enormous beast has been here a while. It hasn’t been reconstructed with duct tape and wishes after being disassembled and stolen from Alpha-Prime.”
Madelaine was grateful. She turned toward Jack. “We did it. Thank you for everything, Jack.”