Chapter Eight

"Re-entry sucks. I don't care what the government says about having new and improved inertal dampeners on all their ships. They're lying."

"At least it's better than it was. you should have tried re-entry 40 years ago."

"No, I shouldn't have."

Mila and Hawking were standing in an elevator shaft, waiting to be lowered down onto Earth. They had touched down about an hour ago, in a town called Houston 2 (the first Houston having been destroyed by a backfiring rocket twenty years or so ago.) Mila was excited and nervous. This would be her first time on Earth soil. She had been born and raised a Lucian: she had never set foot on the globe from which her parents came.

The elevator started to descend with a whoosh. Hawking was fixing the zipper on his suit. Mila looked at the elevator doors, as if expecting them to jump open the moment the elevator stopped."So," Mila said, more to break the silence than anything else, "where are you going from here?"

Hawking looked up. "Oh, about and around," he replied vaguely. "I'm doing some work abroad."

"Ah, I see," said Mila, though she did not see at all. Before she could open her mouth to ask Hawking what 'abroad' meant, the elevator came to an abrupt halt, knocking Mila off balance. She stumbled into the wall, then righted herself with a sheepish look to Hawking. He smiled. "It does that all the time. Why, my first time back--" He was interrupted by the elevator's voice, issuing from who-knows-where.

-Welcome to Earth. Please make your way down the landing platform and across to the main building. Our workers are standing by to help. Your luggage can be picked up in the main building's atrium. Have a nice day.-

The doors hissed open. Mila looked around, hardly able to breathe. Everything was so bright, and colorful, and full of life. On LuCA, everything had had gray tones, but here, the grass was green and thick, and the red uniforms of the workers glowed. And the sky--it was blue! Blue with a large, blinding circle in it that Mila knew was the sun. She looked around in awe.

"Well, are you coming or not?" Mila looked over at Hawking, who had descended the white landing platform steps and was now sitting in a little cart. Mila laughed. "Is that the Earth version of a rover?" she asked.

"This? No. Cars are much bigger."

"Caaaars." Mila played with the word. It sounded weird coming out of her own mouth. The C and the long A just didn't go together. "Caaaaaaaaaaarrrrssss."

"Mila, get in the golf cart."

Mila hopped in the other side. "Now there's a funny word. Golf. Golf. Gooolffff."

☯☯☯☯

"Snack baaaaarr."

"I knew we shouldn't have stopped for a smoothie."

"Smooothieeee?"

"Mila!"

☯☯☯☯

Mila was airborne again. She had taken the 2:00 PM flight out of the Houston airport. She was told that she would arrive in Cairo at 4:15 AM the next day. And then it was on to Nyklos. Hawking had said goodbye at the airport. He had been hurrying off "abroad" as well.

Mila looked down at the lights below her. She always felt safer, somehow, when she was in the air. It felt natural to be looking down at the world below her, as she had done on her journey to Earth. She rolled over in her hoverbed. Time to get some sleep.

And so Mila Arwyr slept, as the world passed below and the stars above.

Chapter Seven

Outside the windows, the moon was receding in the distance. Mila watched it go, squinting to find out if she could see even a trace of LuCA. But she had left the Moon around 12 hours ago, and now the Moon had rotated so that she could not see her home anymore. Mila sighed. She had heard stories and reports about Earth, had watched it's blue, green, and white swirled globe rise over the horizon every 24 hours, but she had never gone.

She was wearing the standard-issue Luna-Terra (travelers whose home was on LuCA) travel clothes: a silver jumpsuit, with the crest of LuCA embroidered on the breast. Terra-Luna (people whose home was on Earth) voyagers wore a silvery-blue jumpsuit with the crest of Earth on it, sometimes along with their country's flag underneath the emblem. Mila was also wearing LT (Lunar-Terra) shoes: silver boots with black soles and a zipper up the side.

She carried a backpack that had her essentials in it: for her, a tablet on which she had downloaded the location of the Nyklos burial site in Egypt, along with as much information as she could find on Thellas, the Llachar, Cori Ashrak, ancient forms of Latin, and the Nyklae mummies. She had stuffed a few Powerbars in the backpack as well, along with two hologram photos: one of her and Jakk as children, the other of her mother and father. The latter she pulled from her backpack.

She pressed her thumb to the printlock on the back, and the hologram sprang into life. Her mother's smiling blue eyes looked out at her. Her father's arms were around her mother, and he was smiling as well, his chin on her shoulder. Mila suppressed tears as she looked at her parents. When Mila was barely a year old, both of her parents had died in a rover malfunction, along with the two others that made up the rest of their team. Mila had been brought up by the community of LuCA since then.

"If you don't mind me asking, are those your parents?" Mila jumped, and turned around to see a man wearing the TL (Terra-Luna) uniform behind her. His gray hair was combed neatly and pushed behind his ears. He was leaning forward on his hands, and Mila could see that he wore a gold ring set with a black stone on the middle finger of his right hand. She vaguely recognized the flag on his uniform as the UK one.

"Um, yes." Mila said, clicking the hologram shut.

"Ah," The man said, and this time Mila picked up on the accent in his voice. On LuCA, the colonies' inhabitants spoke a variety of languages, but the main one was English. The accents definitely differed, as many families came from different parts of Terra. The younger LuCA generations had developed a dialect that was a bit of everything. Mila had only heard a few people, mostly Elite, speak with accents.

After a short, semi-awkward pause, the man spoke again. "Where are my manners?" he asked, throwing his hands in the air. "Aster Hawking, History Head of the LuCA improvement company." He offered a firm hand for Mila to shake. She took it, saying, "Mila Arwyr, LuCA resident. Labor class. Engineer." He smiled deeply. "Ah, Mila Arwyr."

Oh no, don't let him say anything about the lab incident, Mila prayed silently. Please.

"You're the one that trashed a few labs a couple of months ago."

And, here we go. Mila forced a smile. "Yes sir, that's me." He waved his hand. "No need to call me sir. Hawking will do fine."

"Yes, Hawking, the lab incident was my fault."

"Oh, I'm not here to punish you, Mila," he laughed, and she couldn't resist smiling as well. "I recognized you because I knew your parents, the ones in that hologram." He nodded to the small cube in Mila's hand. "You did?"

"Well, I only knew them for a couple months, but we grew close. I was on LuCA when the...uh, accident happened. It was horrible."

"I know."

"You look like them." Mila had never been told that she looked like anyone. "Thank you, sir--er, Hawking."

Hawking smiled. "So, what brings you to Earth?"

"Research," Mila said, not technically lying. "I started to take an interest in Egyptian burial sites." She decided to take a risk. "Especially the Nyklos case." Hawking nodded his head. "Yes. I heard about it on the news when I was just a kid. Even though it happened almost 50 years ago, it's amazing that no one understands what happened there."

"Yeah. You'd think with all our technology, someone would know about it."

Hawking laughed softly. "What?" asked Mila, suspicious. "Nothing," he responded. "It's just that one of the last memories I have of your mother is talking about this very thing, and she said exactly what you did."

The two of them sat in silence for a while, thinking their own thoughts, each not wanting to disturb the other for fear of bringing tears to their companion's eyes.

Chapter Six

"Ah, Mila Arwyr," the ULOS official smiled his cold smile at her. "Nice to see you again."

"The pleasure is mine," Mila said, though her words were far from the truth. She hated ULOS, with it's synthetic voices, the manner in which the Elite customers looked at her, and the feeling of inferiority she got every time she walked through it's polished doors.

Mila was sitting in a silver chair in a small office. Across the glass desk, the ULOS official was polishing his glasses. "So, Mila," he began. Mila tried hard not to let her hatred show. "I understand that you took a rover out at approximately," he checked his watch, "0900 Terra hours yesterday. Your companion was Jakk Cynor, and you returned at 2304 Terra hours. Is this correct?"

"It is."

The man sniffed. "Jakk Cynor filed a report saying that you had found evidence of a ULO. Is this true?"

Here comes the hard part, Mila thought. She leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table. She saw the man flinch as she moved closer to him. Idiot. "What you have to understand about my friend," Mila said, trying to make her voice as close to the silky tones of the Elite as possible, "Is that his imagination is, to say the least, wild. What we found was an oddly shaped rock that looked remarkably like a satellite. Jakk was convinced that it was a ULO of some sort, and he insisted on filing a report immediately. I inspected the rock, I even took the liberty of running some tests on it. It is a perfectly normal moon rock, despite what my friend might have said."

The official seemed to be buying her story, though you could never tell with ULOS. After a few awkward minutes of silence, he answered. "Very well, Mila. I shall cancel the report. Have a nice day."

Mila rose. "Thank you," she said graciously, dipping her head for effect, before turning and gliding out of the room.

And hold for the applause.

☯☯☯☯

Back in her room, Mila pulled the book she had found in the library out of a compartment under her bed. She flipped carefully to the page that mentioned the Llachar. "Scan," She ordered her interface. A green light clicked on and ran over the page in Mila's hands.

-Scan complete-

"Send it."

-To where?-

"Jakk Cynor."

-Message sent-

Mila sighed. "Thanks, interface." She carefully wrapped the book in white cloth and placed it in her pack. She zipped up the bag and grabbed her dark blue jacket. She hastily put the jacket on, grabbed her bag, and headed for the transporter. "Interface, lock my room," she called over her shoulder. "I won't be coming back for a while."

☯☯☯☯

Mila pressed the red button in the booth. "State your name and business," came the cool voice. Mila took a deep breath.

"Mila Arwyr. I'm going to Earth."

Chapter Five

"So you're saying that after this little rectangle opened itself, spewed death threats at you, and told you that you had the 'blood of the Llachar', it self-destructed, leaving nothing behind."

"Well, when you put it that way, it does sound a little fantastic."

"Just a little, Mila?!"

Jakk and Mila were sitting in Mila's quarters. She was perched on her bed, swinging her legs back and forth as she told her story. He had taken one of Mila's kitchen chairs and dragged it into the small space that was her bedroom.

"What are we going to tell ULOS?" Jakk ran his hands through his dark hair and muffled his face in them.

"You mean, you told ULOS about the rectangle?" Mila was furious now. "Jakk! You know I wanted more time to examine it!"

"Yeah, and you handled that so well," Jakk retorted. "You blew the thing up!"

"It self-destructed," Mila snapped, thinking to herself how much her remark sounded like a line from a ridiculous science fiction story. [[haha, I love making fun of myself :P]]

"Whatever," Jakk said, standing up. "I'm going to go back to my quarters. Have fun telling your little lie to ULOS." He stormed out of the bedroom, stomped over to the transporter, and started tapping in his address on the transporter controls. Still sitting on the bed, Mila listened to the transporter's whoosh and Jakk's angry footsteps.

When the noise had subsided, she arose from her seat and despondently dragged the chair back into the kitchen. She grabbed a Powerbar* from her cabinet and headed for the transporter.

☯☯☯☯

The library on LuCA was the only place that didn't fit in. Most of the colony was constructed of a silvery white metal known as stromn, with matching furnishings. The library had stromn walls, to keep out the relentless nothing that was the moon's atmosphere, but the theme of the room could not have differed more. Oak paneling covered up the walls, and huge bookcases towered up to the vibrantly painted celling that had long since started to fade. Desks made of dark wood were placed around the space, and these were lighted by lambs that looked like glowing orbs floating around the room.

Mila sat at one of the spacious desks, flipping through a leather bound book with yellow, cracked pages. She had scanned what felt like every book in the library for any mention of the Llachar, and so far, nothing. Mila put her head down on the book, placing her cheek on it's withered surface.

Suddenly, a word caught her eye on the page beside her. "Llachar," Mila read quietly aloud. She lifted her head off of the desk and bent over the book.

{In the year 2048, Thellas discovered several preserved mummies on the Nyklos site. These corpses were buried deep underground, in solid gold caskets inscribed with runic symbols. These same symbols appeared on the sides of the tunnel leading down to the burial site.

The mummies, referred to as Nyklae, all had the same piece of papyrus lying on their chest. On this papyrus was what appeared to be a lyric of sorts, written in three different languages, one of which was an archaic form of Latin. Thellas translated as much of the message as he could. It reads as follows:

In this tombe of greate honour lies the kings of the Llachar, continued in their greate legacie by the Chosen of the Llachar, who carrie their Bloode as princes of Terra.

In these bodies were found traces of blood that had been preserved by an unknown rite since the subjects died. These blood traces were set to be brought back to a lab for further examination, but on the night before the shipping, Thellas's camp was ravaged and the samples destroyed. The intruders also killed most of Thellas's expedition, including the scientist himself.

An assistant named Corai Ashrak escaped with his life, and two years later, brought a second expedition back to Nyklos. The tunnels were found sealed, and the bodies, as well as the blood they contained, was lost.}

Mila sat back in her chair in astonishment.

[[*About the Powerbar: I love these snacks (not sure if anyone else does) and I simply HAD to put one in there because I saw them recently on a show I was watching...it's just a personal joke XD]]