Free Stars of Charon (Legacy of the Thar'esh Book 1) by Sam Coulson Page B

harm in it. “I notice nobody gives you a nickname.”
    “Ju-lin
is my nickname,” she responded.
    “It is?”
    “Yeah, my
full name is Juliette Linnaea McCullough, and if you ever use it I will burn
you down.”
    “Juliett-”
    She spun
around, flashlight in one hand, and plasma torch in the other. “Burn. You.
Down. Not another syllable!”
    “Not a
word,” I couldn’t help but smile.
    “God, why
did I even say anything?” She turned back forward and kept walking. “Clearly
that you’re so damnably pitiful, you got me feeling bad for the village
outcast. I’m such a sucker sometimes.”
    Or
maybe you have more in common with the village outcast than you want to admit , I thought to myself.
    “Ho-now,”
she jogged a few paces forward and stopped. “What do we have here? Oh hell,
look at that. That’s no fossil. Growd may be onto something, look at those-”
    As I approached, she
pulled a pair of thumb-sized bulbs out of her pockets. She twisted them both,
as she did, the little orbs began to glow brightly. She tossed them both to the
rocky ceiling above us, they stuck to the stone, casting light all around us
and illuminating the cavern.
    With the
lights I could see that the cave had opened up into a large room, the walls,
for the most part, were the same dark stone as the rest of the cavern, but the
far wall was sheer and white like the stones on the surface.
    “More Tevarite , but look at it, it’s flawless.”
Ju-lin was right. Though the stones on the surface were cracked and worn, this
one was as smooth and flat as steel with a clean shine on the surface. “There,
see in the middle, that must be it. I’ve never seen writing like that.”
    I stood
next to Ju-lin, looking at the shapes etched onto the center of the Tevarite.
There were two of them about a meter apart. The core of each of the shapes was
a perfect circle, with a series of bisecting lines and small twisted shapes
throughout. There were common shapes between them, but they were individually distinct
and I did not see a pattern. Where one had blank space, the other had a
patchwork of jagged lines, where the first had two parallel lines that twisted
like snakes, and the other had a rough patchwork of chaotic shapes.
    “Does it
make any sense to you?” I had expected her tone to be teasing, but instead it
seemed hopeful.
    “No,” I
paused. “Maybe it’s not even writing. It’s hard to tell, but they look too
intricate to be pictures of something, maybe it’s a diagram, or a schematic?”
    “A
schematic of what?” she asked glibly. “Maybe a super weapon? Or maybe it’s
instructions on how to bake a cake.”
    “Or maybe
they are stories,” I said absently.
    “A
story?” Ju-lin questioned, looking at the pictures. “I don’t see how you would
get that. Unless each is somehow telling a scene-”
    “They are
both different from the other, maybe the message somehow tied to what is
missing between the two rather than what they have in common,” I offered.
    “Well,”
she looked over to me thoughtfully. “I have no idea if you really know what you’re
talking about, but at least that sounded clever.”
    “Thanks,”
I paused. “I think.”
    “Let’s
unpack this gear, get some scans of this place and get out of here. If we hurry
we can be back at the Downs in time for breakfast.”
    I slipped
the heavy pack from my shoulder and started to assemble the tripod while Ju-lin
configured the scanning sensors. As Ju-lin had explained to me on the hike up,
the sonic resonance scanner would do more than take pictures. By using a
combination of ultrasonic waves, and full spectrum visual scanning the scanner
is able to take and store a full holographic image of the area, including
subsurface features, Lee had figured that we would have one chance at getting
in, so he wanted us to capture as much data as we could.
    “Just
about set,” Ju-lin said as she snapped the last of the panels in place.  “There
we go, hold the tripod, and