TRAPPED ON TALONQUE, along with MISSION TO MAHJUNDAR and ESCAPE FROM ZULAIRE are three of my oldest scifi romances and at that point I always stuffed way too much plot into the books. They should have been duologies, I think now, but live and learn. TRAPPED ON TALONQUE is an alien sleeping beauty tale of sorts, with an ancient alien woman trapped in a healing chamber for thousands of years and used as an oracle by the planet’s residents.

At one point, the Main Male Character Nate and his sidekick Thom find themselves escorting a local ruler to an ancient alien warehouse deep below a pyramid. I thoroughly enjoyed writing this scene is all I’m going to say!

The excerpt (Bithia is the ancient alien woman. The locals who accompanied Nate and Thom have been rendered unconscious by a protective feature of the facility. Celixia is a friendly priestess.): 

A high-ceilinged room stretched in all directions as far as he could see with his enhanced night vision. The place was lit only in the immediate vicinity, although Nate felt sure the lighting would follow them as they moved farther into the storehouse. There was a definite pattern to how the ancient explorers had run their operation, which was reassuring under the current conditions.

“Old man Fr’taray was quite a packrat,” Thom said, walking a few paces beyond where Nate stood. He did a slow three-sixty. “Or am I understating the situation?”

Containers vaguely resembling crates or barrels—objects with no human-equivalent name—were all piled in a messy heap of random stacks suggesting haste or panic, or both. It certainly wasn’t the orderly warehouse Nate had visualized.

“Wonder what actually happened, what her father was called back for?” Nate said, surveying the mess. He squatted by the nearest object, which was an orange cylinder. He touched the symbol he now recognized as shorthand for “open.” With a click, the container split neatly in two, spilling a dried substance onto the black stone floor.

“Food? Sample of the local spices?” Thom asked.

“Could be either or both. Or neither. We’ll never know. You try one.”

Thom eyed the assorted piles for a moment and plucked a tiny blue and green triangular object off of a perilously askew stack of squares and rectangles. He shook his selection slightly. “Good things come in small packages, as my gramma used to say. I push this, here?”

“Right—you got it.”

“Hey, we’re experts now.” Thom laughed. “Oops—damn!” His container had held dark green liquid that now splashed onto his sandaled feet and the floor, creating a massive puddle. Thom tossed the partially deflated triangle back onto its former resting place and stepped gingerly away from the liquid. “As much fun as this is, now what?”

“You see anything like a red box, about, oh, this big?” Nate mimicked the size with his hands, much as Celixia had shown him.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. We’re required to find one specific thing in all this mess?” Thom’s laugh broke off abruptly as he took a closer look at Nate’s expression. “Seriously? We need this box? For what?”

“Bithia didn’t mention it, but Celixia was adamant that freeing her from the healing device requires the contents of a red box.”

Hands on his hips, brow furrowed, Thom eyed the vast room with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “I’m game. We have time while old Sarbordon sleeps. Bithia said they’ll be unconscious as long as they stay down here. For sure no one’s going anywhere before we report back. Any ideas where you’d like to start? Hints from Celixia?”

Nate shook his head and considered the challenge. “This aisle runs straight through the room. Let’s see if there are paths branching off. You watch to the right, and I’ll take the left. If this red box is so damn important, maybe Fr’taray left it, I don’t know, where somebody besides him could find it.”

“If he left it here at all. Working off intel thousands of years old doesn’t give me much confidence.”

The two soldiers advanced straight into the room, back to back for defense, warily eyeing the treasure horde of the ancients. The illumination source followed them, as Nate had expected. He found it eerie and disconcerting to be in the center of one pool of light in a vast darkness. The exposure was counter to all his training, as well as his well-honed instincts for self-preservation.

The light in the lift shaft stayed on even as they got farther and farther away. A reassuring beacon.

“I feel like a goddamn target out here in this spotlight,” Thom said after three or four moments of cautious pacing through the stockpile. “Like a pair of idiot cadets on their first war sim, walking right into an ambush.”

“Let’s finish the sweep and get the hell out of here. This is a waste of time, I’m afraid.”

But after only another five yards, Thom came to an abrupt halt, staring off to the right. “Nate.”

“What?” He pivoted and stopped, stunned by the sight that had caught Thom’s attention.

There was a side corridor hat had been hidden by the piles of containers until Thom drew even with it, the charred remains of a body, skeleton showing through ashy black layers of burnt clothing, lay on the cold stone floor.

“Well, I’ll be moon-damned.” Nate walked toward the remains.

“These crates and things have burn marks,” Thom said, eyeing the black score marks. “Firefight?”

“Shows all the signs.” Nate knelt by the body of the long-dead alien explorer. “Burnt to a crisp. No way to tell if the victim was male or female. From the size, I’d guess male.” He rocked back on his heels, scanning the area in frustrated bewilderment. “Damn, what happened here? She swore to me her team had no deadly weapons, or at least not the type I was visualizing, like our blasters.”

Thom moved past him. “Maybe she didn’t know,” he said over his shoulder. “Command don’t confide in the lower ranks, even if she was his daughter. Here’s another guy.” Thom was about ten yards deeper in the warehouse. “Shot in the back. At least he—it—is facedown, which tells a tale. And Nate—”

“What?”

“I see a red box.”

Nate got to his feet and sprinted to join Thom. “Where?”

Thom pointed at the second corpse and the red box cradled in one arm, partially hidden underneath the body.

“I hate to have to tell her about this,” Nate said. “I wish I knew who these people were. Not her father, I hope.”

“Happened a long time ago.” Thom’s eyes narrowed. “Or did it? How are these bodies so well preserved?”

“This will be today’s news for Bithia, I’m afraid. She told me this warehouse has a version of a stasis field that keeps the contents fresh. I guess the effect covers corpses to some degree too. I think it’s safe to assume these bodies date back to her time or thereabouts. Help me get the box loose. At least we’ll have it to show for this expedition.”

VS Note: There’s a lot more to the scene but I don’t want to make this post too long!

Depositphotos

TRAPPED ON TALONQUE