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Callisto's Stones: Chapter 1

The airlock slowly irised open with a swirl of disturbed dust. A slim figure was silhouetted in the opening before it cautiously stepped down to the rough stone floor. As the dust began to settle, more details began to emerge. The figure was wearing a tight, pale blue-almost white-body suit with a long angular helmet. Near the side of the tinted visor and along the side of the helmet was a black, red and yellow layered strip and below the strip was a gray elongated half circle filled in with green. Set in the curve was a single white pearl.

After the figure surveyed the initial room for threats, it crouched down and toggled a switch on its arm and, in a clear female voice, spoke, "GSI, this is Unteroffizier Katja von Weizsäcker. I have landed safely."

"Unteroffizier Weizsäcker, this is the German Space Initiative. We are reading you loud and clear," came the response from her wrist amidst the static. "You have permission from the Chancellor of the League himself to proceed."

"Understood. Proceeding," she replied with a small nod to the disembodied voice.

"Oh, and Katja? Good luck." There was a click, and the static died away. Katja stood up, stretched and looked at her surroundings again. Her ship had landed in a shallow depression on the surface of the moon. It was one of many possible landing sites picked out for her by Mission Control. She kicked at a rock. It bounced away and was soon indistinguishable from all the other gray chunks of stone littered about the valley.

"Whelp, here I am," she expressed to no one. "Step one, arrive on Callisto. Check. Step two, dot, dot, dot. Step three, return home a hero," Katja sighed. It had seemed so much clearer back on Earth. What exactly did they mean by 'go where no man has gone before'? "Am I just supposed to wander around?" She wondered aloud. Determined to make the best of it the astronaut stood up, dusted the seat of her suit off and trudged off in what arbitrarily seemed the best direction.

After a few hours, fruitlessly searching for anything of interest Katja noticed the sides of the valley were beginning to deepen, forming a groove in the otherwise flat ground. Pressing another button on her wrist Katja began to speak into the built-in microphone, "Log twenty six, initial signs of a water channel have been sighted, initiating further investigation," releasing the button, she sighed yet again before clambering down in the ditch, it was taller than she had originally guessed, it had to have been over two and a half meters deep.

A few more hours, a lunch consisting of half of a tube of, oh so yummy, wienerschnitzel and several kilometers more walking later, "Billions of 'marks in research and production and the most exciting thing to happen to me is a dried up riverbed, what's next, a cave?" as around the next curve a dark opening blocked the end of the canyon, "Speak of the devil." Katja depressed the same button and began to record, "Log twenty seven, first signs of underground geological formation sighted." After she finished her journal, Katja toggled her radio, "GSI, This is Unteroffizier Weizsäcker, I've found a cave, requesting permission to investigate"

"Katja, this is GSI, permission granted, hourly status reports will be required while you are underground," came the reply.

"Acknowledged," she responded with as she was moving inside opening. Once inside the light died off almost immediately. After fumbling around in the pack on her waist for a moment, she pulled out a long stick, which with a crack and a shake, began to emit a soft blue light. She hung the glow stick on a hook on her belt and proceeded further into the cave. Around three kilometers, according to Katja's pedometer, she encountered the Anomaly. "GSI, I've found..." she paused, "I've found a door."

" Unter...säcker...not...repeat...proceed...," the radio coughed out. Katja entranced, did not notice the dying static. The door was a massive structure, easily twice her height and covered in an array of pictographs. Snagging the glow stick off her belt, she bent forward to examine the pictures and then jumped back in alarm. The pictures on the door consisted primarily of a series of aliens with a lower half that seemed to resemble a snake and a distinctly human female upper half. Overcoming her initial shock, she peered closely. One of the figures, a woman-if you could call them that-was repeated over and over, in almost every single picture she could see. They did not seem so bad, if you ignored the bottom half; the figures looked like the pictures of women on Grecian urns. "...little town, thy streets for evermore/Will silent be..." quoted Katja as she fingered the final engraving, "Seems fitting...," She stared at the picture for a moment longer before shaking herself, "Moving on, how to get inside?" The portal had no visible hinges or handle. After giving it a rueful kick, she decided it was extremely thick. As she tried to rub her bruised toes through the shoe of her suit something unusual caught her eye. Blinking, Katja dropped to all fours and scurried to the bottom left hand corner of the door. Pulling her last glow stick from its pouch she examined her findings. From the wall next to the door there was a square stone peg with a hole through it. The end of the peg disappeared into the wall. Giving it an experimental tug, the peg went nowhere. Snorting, "Like, this is going to stop me" she pulled the tow cord from the spool attached to her belt and hooked the carabineer through the hole. She began to pull on the peg. Scaling the ground like it was a sheer cliff, the whining from the servos in her suit were quickly drowned out by the sound of rock grinding on rock as the peg slowly began to emerge from the hole. Grinning madly, she continued to pull as the door started to slide to the side, until there was a loud pop followed by a rush of air which would have knocked her down the corridor if she hadn't been attached to the wall, as the seal on the door broke. Whooping, she scrambled forward to look through the door. The walls of the cave had a different texture, becoming more rounded, potentially worked, thought the astronaut. The floor seemed less rough and a thick layer of sand layered the ground. As she walked forward, hand pulling the glow stick off her belt she noticed that the grinding sound was back and growing in intensity. Looking back she saw that the door was closing, and quickly. In a panic she dropped the light and scrambled back through the door to safety. Realizing that she had left her last light on the other side of a rapidly closing door Katja made a split second decision. Fumbling with her belt, she managed to get the clasp off as the she dived through the gap as it shut, almost squishing herself in the process. After taking a moment to catch her breath she wanted to hit herself, "I could have simply just opened it back up and grabbed the light!" she lamented, "Well, there is no use crying over spilled milk." Katja sighed. Now what was she going to do?

Gathering up her discarded light, she almost tripped over the skeleton. After a girlish shriek that made her glad that there was no one within nine hundred million kilometers to hear it, Katja squatted down to examine the long dead corpse. It was true to the pictures, a human looking torso with the lower body of a legless lizard. It was wearing the remnants of some sort of cloth. "Gods, I wonder how old it is, this area must have been sealed for any of this to have survived," she looked around, "it must have been centuries at least... millennia even! I wonder why it's way out here... Maybe it was standing guard?" she looked down, "or it could be the remains of the person that decorated the door" as she saw the chisel in the bony hand. "Whelp, time to find an exit, otherwise I'll end up like you," she told the body matter of factly. Standing up she assessed her choices, three directions to pick from. Glancing at the compass built into her arm, she saw that it was spinning wildly. "Oh. Of course," she said acidly, "That makes my choices: left, right and center, how scientific." Snatching the chisel with a mutter of apology, she tossed it up into the air. "Center it is," Katja remarked as the chisel landed facing away from her. Wearily she scooped up the tool and trudged off down the center passage.

After trying her radio for the umpteenth time with no results she plopped down to the ground to rest. Boy, am I tired, she thought. Her stomach rumbled, she wished had eaten the entire tube when she had the chance. When was that, a couple hours ago or has it been longer? Time had lost meaning for her kilometers ago. In addition, everything seemed to be a lot dimmer now and that was not because the glow stick was fading, which it was, she thought ruefully. I'll just take a nap for a minute to gather my strength, she thought. She closed her eyes and her head dropped to her chest as she dropped off. In the silence no one saw her light fade to nothing.