David Sakmyster - The Cydonia Objective

“What are you worried about? The danger down there…”

“Is still real. It’s not like the traps don’t work anymore.”

“He just wants to see. He’s proud of you. Proud of us—what we did. It’s something before his time, and he feels left out.”

“Well, he wasn’t. He was a big part of it. If it wasn’t for him…”

“You and I would not have been apart. And you might not have found the way in with me holding you back.”

Her eyes are so profoundly large, green like the Emerald Tablet, so deeply resonant and magnetic. It’s as if she knows he’s lied to her. Knows he’s hidden it away, told her it was lost. Should he tell her? Is now the time?

He opens his mouth, but she’s leaning in. Her lips against his, silencing his voice. She pulls back, only for an instant. “Just think about it. We’re running out of time. A boy’s only a boy for so long.”

Caleb caught his breath and looked up to see Alexander and Rashi staring at him, both concerned. They stood between a gap between two enormous rows of shelves. Books as far as he could see in any direction.

“I’m okay. Just had a moment.”

Alexander moved forward. “Was it Mom?”

Caleb smiled. “Yeah… just, I haven’t been here since…”

A flash, an explosion of fire. A charred body, spinning around, and facing him, two green orbs in a blackened skull boring down at him, recriminating…

“Dad?” His hand on Caleb’s shoulder, Alexander pulled him up. His grip was strong, firmer than Caleb had ever remembered. It’s already too late. He’s not a boy anymore. And it’s my fault. “ I’m sorry,” he whispered.

And Alexander shook his head. “No reason to be.”

“I did to you what my mother did to me. She stole my childhood, and I never forgave her for it, not until the end.”

Alexander rolled his eyes. “I’m still a kid. I’m—what’s the word? Resilient . After we stop the bad guys and save the world, I’m still going to want to watch cartoons and play that 3D PlayStation you’re going to buy me for Christmas.”

A laugh mingled with a choking sob as Caleb stood up and hugged his son under the watchful gaze of the Keeper, Rashi. When they were ready, they made their way through the stacks and the shelves, the seemingly endless texts, volumes and tomes. While they walked, he took a moment to gaze fondly on all these works, and looked up at the sunlight-kissed levels above, all those treasures preserved here, hopefully for a long time to come.

At last, they made it to the elevator and accessed the locked sublevel. As the doors closed, Caleb glanced away from his son, out the doors and saw-

In the center of the library, on the marble floor in a shaft of light, Lydia stood alone, head bowed in silence.

The once metal-walledhallway was now decorated with ancient artwork: Sumerian friezes, Babylonian bas-reliefs, Egyptian murals… Caleb had walked this hallway more than a hundred times, and each time he felt as if he were coming home.

Into the vault, Rashi joined several other Keepers: two men and a woman busy at work at their stations. Hideki Matusi, bone-thin, yet regally elegant in a way Caleb always associated with ancient scholars, stood over a glass table, lit from below, as she analyzed scroll fragments with a microscope. She took a break from translating the ancient texts and came down to greet them.

She nodded sympathetically to Caleb. “We mourn for Lydia. But the work must continue, as she would have wanted it.”

Caleb looked down at his shoes, choked up.

But then Hideki smiled at Alexander. “Ah, the precocious child returns.”

“Hello Hideki!” Alexander waved, beaming at her. “Can’t wait to help out again.”

“Yes, yes, so long as you promise not to spill chocolate milk on any more priceless fifth-century BC papyri.”

“I promise.”

“I mean it.”

Caleb found it surprisingly comforting to laugh, to be distracted from the finality of loss. “She means it, Alexander. And so do I. Socrates would have been pissed.”

Rashi took a seat at the conference table, the very same one used by Nolan Gregory years ago when he had confined the Keepers down here for their protection. That day was the last great crisis for the Keepers. But now, they had lost two key members in the past week. One to tragedy, the other to greed. With Lydia and Robert gone, the Keepers needed a leader, and despite the regard they all held for Caleb, they knew he couldn’t step into the role held by his wife. Not under these circumstances.

Rashi took the reins, and she’d moved quickly but deliberately. They had to be extra careful, but they still needed to replenish their ranks. Hideki had a son, fifteen, who unfortunately showed no promise, or interest. Alexander was almost ready and could soon fill one of the gaps, but Rashi felt deep regret that she had never succeeded in bringing a child into the world. There was always adoption, but for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to that stage where she would have to admit it was physically impossible for herself.

But now, she had a new focus. Leadership.

Their enemies were closing in. What Caleb had discovered, what Robert Gregory was a part of… it stretched back to the dawn of human history, to the very origins of civilization. A conflict, dormant for millennia, about to be rekindled.

“If what we’ve discovered in these texts is true, then we have no time to waste. No time to grieve. No time at all.”

Hideki joined them at the table.

“All these scrolls…” She looked around at the hermetically sealed cabinets, the honeycombed alcoves, filled with the contents of the vanished Alexandrian Library, the most esoteric texts, some so ancient they had yet to decipher the language. “Everything you found, Caleb. And yet…”

“And yet,” said Rashi, leveling her gaze at him, “the one thing that could have helped us most prepare for this moment…”

“You kept from us,” Hideki finished.

Caleb swallowed and looked in turn at the Keepers. He met their stares of recrimination. “I can’t apologize. I didn’t trust you, it’s true, but…”

“You were right not to,” Rashi said, raising a hand. “We are not condemning. We’re merely stating fact, preparing the setting, so to speak. The foundation for what we must do next. We are not judges.”

“How could we be,” Hideki said, “when one of our own, our very leader, was corrupted?”

Rashi leaned in. “If you had not kept the Tablet from us, Robert would have had it, and he would have used it.”

“That,” Caleb said in a low voice, “is what I need to understand. How would he have used it? What are they planning? Xavier Montross saw something. And I did too.”

Rashi nodded. “I can guess. Destruction. You saw it on a scale unimaginable.”

Caleb felt Alexander’s eyes on him. Large, almond-shaped, glassy. A hint of jade, like his mother’s. “The Tablet itself is undecipherable. I got nowhere with it, and honestly I didn’t want to try. It was enough that it fell to me to protect it. But now… Now I wish I had tried a little harder. Maybe I’d know what it is we need to do.”

Rashi kept her head down, contemplating the lines on her hands, between her knuckles. “We’ll tell you what we know, but after this you must rejoin your sister. And the others like yourself.”

Alexander perked up. “More remote-viewers?”

“Soon,” Caleb said. He had seen it, too—brief glimpses of well-trained men escorting Phoebe and Orlando through caves in the desert, then onto a plane, heading back to some well-hidden facility in the snow-capped mountains of the Pacific Northwest. “Soon, and I know they’re looking for answers too, but I don’t believe they know the right questions to ask. That’s why it has to start here. It needs to come from practical research first, grounding us on what to set as our objectives. Otherwise we’re blind mice sniffing around empty cupboards. Wasting time.”