Barbara gave him a sidelong glance. “What?”
“The moon,” he said, smirking. “Heard it was hollow. Didn’t you know? Whole damn thing is a Martian spaceship, created to keep an eye on us Earthlings.”
Their guide, an uptight tick of a man named Norris, slid his attention over to him. His features came in flickering bursts of light as the speeding elevator passed line after line of embedded cathode tubing, spread every fifty feet or so. They were blipping by at a rate of about one per second. Norris adjusted his wire-frame glasses.
“Just kidding, Norris.”
“I was just going to say,” he said, glancing from her, back to him, as if careful how much to say in advance of the big show, “that you are closer to the truth than you realize.”
Blake swallowed, nodded. Didn’t care for the geeky little man. Thought he was peevish and petty. The kind of guy who’d cheat at chess. He looked back at her.
“Kinda far from the jungles, aren’t ya, doc?”
Barbara looked at the darkness of the hard floor beneath their weighted boots. He suddenly felt like an ass without fully understanding why.
“I had to leave a very important project for this,” she said, throwing a steely glance at Norris, who noticed but simply turned away. “Years of work to be finished by someone else.”
“The Africa thing. Eve,” he stated, knowing very well the project she’d been heading up. The hunt for the Mother of us all. The DNA string that tied us all together. Scientists universally mocked the idea, but she was a follower. A leader, rather, he thought.
Norris snorted.
Blake’s brow bent and a muscle in his jaw twitched, but Barbara just sighed, as if relieved to have it out in the open. The hostility.
“I assure you, doctor,” Norris said, looking straight ahead, the pulses of light making him shimmer, “this is more important than any project you’ve ever been part of.”
She shrugged. “Well, whatever it is I’d like to get to it already,” she said, not bothering to look at either of the men riding into the moon with her. “It’s been a damned annoying six weeks.”
Barbara. It had been a few years since they were together, but Blake throught she looked exactly the same. Maybe even better. Kind of hard to tell in the space jockey suits they were all sporting, but at least they were able to ditch the headgear at the top. She was right. Six weeks isolated on this rock. Cut off from everyone, everything back on Earth. Protocol, they said. Top Secret. Until now. The secret was buried deep, whatever it was and whatever clandestine lair they were being asked to opinionate upon. And based on their light gear, it was air-tight.
Blake watched the flickering lights glance off Barbara’s cheek. He didn’t wonder if she still thought of him that way. Waste of his brain’s oxygen.
He knew she didn’t.
“I second that,” he said. “We’re gonna hit Earth pretty soon.”
“Not quite,” Norris said under his breath. It was a quip, but there was something in Norris’s tone that straightened Blake’s smirk. He was getting the feeling this expedition was not of the “pleasant discovery” or “scientific breakthrough” nature he was usually called in for. This felt like something else.
A turbine blew out like a jet engine winding down and the elevator slowed as if riding a flattening bubble of pressurized air. The trap came to a soft stop, there was some loud machinery, a rush of air that mussed his hair and made even Barbara run a hand through her own blond mane, smoothing it down and making him think about her that way all over again.
Blake felt the doors open but saw nothing. He began to squirm a little inside. The dark was total, and astronauts, training or not, could get as squeamish as anyone when trapped in a foreign place in the pitch black. Throwing in the fact the place was approximately a hundred kilometers beneath the surface of the moon didn’t help with the heebie-jeebies. Not a bit.
Norris stepped out of the elevator and overhead lights barked on, illuminating a long steel-floored hallway about the length of a football field. The walls were chiseled moon rock.
A rush job, Blake thought, and stepped out of the box.
“After you, commander,” Norris said, and smiled. Showed teeth.
Blake declined taking the lead.
2
THE LAST OF SECURITY DOORS sealed behind them. It had seemed like an eternity of hallways and metallic stairwells, all it of jutting deeper and deeper, like a tangle of man-made arteries, into the belly of the moon.
Blake was about to make a gibe about his hourly rate when he heard voices. Lots of voices.
“Last door,” Norris said, never slowing his quick pace the entire way. Blake felt a pang of embarrassment at how heavily he was breathing to keep up and promised himself a new exercise regimen once he returned to Earth. He was in his forties now and it was important….
“Jesus,” Barbara said.
With a flick of the same ID card he’d used to open the last dozen or so doorways, Norris triggered a large slab of metal the size of a garage door to slide silently away. “Well, almost the last door,” he added, his face slapped with a fool’s grin, his eyes fucking twinkling.
But Blake had no time for Norris, because he was following Barbara through that door, into a city.
“What is this?” Blake asked, almost inaudibly.
Norris wouldn’t stop smiling, a new trait that would drive Blake mad had he the capacity to concern himself with the trivial little man. “We call it The Site,” he said. Blake was waiting for him to rub his hands together maniacally, but he quickly thrust all thoughts of their chaperone aside, took in the wonder of what laid before him.
A cavern, brilliantly lit by light sources the size of houses stuck fast into the carved ceiling and walls. A cavern the size of a small town, easily a mile in length, half that in girth. Men and women in uniform, navy-blue jumpsuits walked and crawled over the surface of the cavern, some wearing goggles, all wearing gloves. They had tools, and—Blake realized with a sudden shock of reality gone sideways—what they were doing.
Barbara looked at him and he met her eyes, his own astonishment reflected on her face, her smile almost beautiful enough to be distracting.
“They’re excavating,” she said.
