Fearless Travellers
There was a flash of blue light, and a weird sensation of being stretched, but as soon as it started it was over. Mac realized he had his eyes closed, so he opened them.
Sand. An endless sea of sand. That was all he could see.
How disappointing. One would expect that the first thing one would see when travelling to another planet via an artificial wormhole should be more exotic, but alas, it was not to be. Mac holstered his weapon and produced his aetherographer, even as he heard the starportal effect behind him.
Evans stepped out of the gate, holding a nasty-looking piece of equipment Mac to confess to himself he didn’t fully recognize. He thought there were pieces of a Tesla gun in there, but he couldn’t be even sure. Evans’ prowess with machines in general and weapons in particular never ceased to amaze him.
“Sorry, Evans, we’re alone,” he said.
The look of disappointment on her face was even worse than his.
“Oh,” she said. “What a pity.” She pressed a series of levers and buttons in her weapon, and somehow several pieces of the rifle folded themselves into smaller spaces. She shouldered it.
“One day you have to show me how you do that, Evans,” Mac said.
“You know you get quickly bored, Mac,” she said. “Get moving, the twins will be here any second.”
No sooner had she stopped talking that the portal hummed once again. This time a large shade appeared, then stretched into reality.
A two-horse war chariot had just crossed space and, some argued, time. The horses, black both of them, whinnied. On the chariot, the O’Brien twins smiled. They were almost naked.
“What are you wearing?” Mac asked.
“We’ve already donned our disguises, sir,” the female twin asked. She moved from side to side. “Do you reckon they’re correct, sir?”
Mac blushed furiously. The thoughts he had were not correct on oh so many levels, starting with the fact that he was the twins’ superior. Well, technically he was.
“Amanda, you two are the experts,” Evans interjected, already moving towards the chariot. “Stop asking us. Pass our disguises over, there’s no one around. We better get moving.”
“There you are, ma’am,” the male twin said, handing her a satchel. Evans started disrobing immediately.
“Evans!” Mac said. Impossible as it seemed, he was yet a stronger shade of crimson.
“What? There’s nothing you haven’t seen before here?”
“You were injured then!”
“And? Moreover, what do you want me to do? First of all, we have to blend in as best as we can, and then it’s not as if there’s a way to build a changing cabinet in this war chariot, is there?”
“Actually…” the male twin started, but a stare from Evans silenced him.
“Come on, Mac, we must go!” Evans added, halfway into dressing, or undressing, as a warrior in this alien world.
Mac took his own satchel from Amanda and handed her his aetherographer. His own attire consisted of a short plaid skirt and a suit of armour comprised of just one metallic plaque for his chest. The rest of the disguise was sandals and leather shinguards, and a leather helmet. Amanda handed him his weapons: a sword and a bow.
“Tesla-blade and explosive arrows,” she smiled. “One never knows.” Mac nodded. Being over-prepared never hurt. He looked around him. The four of them were similarly clad and armed. The horses pawed the ground nervously.
“Let’s go, Adam,” Evans told the male twin, who was holding the reins.
“Aye, ma’am!” he said, a little bit too enthusiastically. “Giddy up!” The horses whinnied and started trotting.
++++
At first they thought it was a mountain at the edge of the desert. It didn’t take long to realize it wasn’t, unless a mountain had really odd contours. It could have been trees, but they were too regular.
“Obelisks!” Adam whispered.
“A sea of them,” his sister said.
Even though the four of them knew what to expect, it was breathtaking. Row upon row of obelisks raised from the sands up into the sky, growing taller as they approached. But they also spread out to the sides into what looked like a forest of stone.
Adam directed the horses to his right. “I see an opening there,” he said.
Mac could sense Evans fidget beside him. He couldn’t blame her: this was unsettling. Adam was right, there was an opening.
“Sphinxes! Bloody sphinxes!” Amanda said. Mac thought of reprimanding her for her profanity, but he was just too amazed. At the feet of the obelisks lied, one after another, hundreds of sphinxes, each one easily twice or three times as large as the Giza monument. And the opening, as Adam had called it, became a long paved road that appeared to roll on for miles.
“What’s that?” Amanda asked.
“Our objective,” Evans said.
It looked like a wall, but as they approached they realized that the huge obelisks and sphinxes had distorted their perspective: the wall must have stood hundreds of feet tall, and now they could distinguish details. Filigrees adorned the top, steles covered in hieroglyphs and paintings depicting gods blanketed the side of the wall.
But it was the gate that stood out. Or rather, the two immense statues, their height reaching that of a thirty-story building, that seemed to stand guard at its flanks. Two female pharaohs, or queens, watched the road with impavid eyes. Aside from their royal regalia, they were dressed basically like Mac, Evans and the twins. The gate itself was just an opening on the wall, with a richly ornate frame and no doors. An eerie light originated at the gate, and beyond it many more statues, half the height of the gate guardians, stood at each side of the road.
The war chariot approached the gate.
“Someone’s coming!” Evans shouted. Adam looked out, but the other chariot was keeping to its side of the road.
Amanda and Mac were watching the guardians in awe when it happened. They crossed the threshold just as there was a flash, exactly at the same instant the other charot crossed in the opposite direction, and Evans could have sworn she saw the four of them riding that other chariot. She stared out at her own image, disregarding the new statues by the road and the shapeless light in the distance.
An acrid smoke took her out of her reverie.
“Bloody hell,” Adam swore.
“Manners!” Mac said.
“Sorry, sir, but the gate burned all our equipment,” he said. “Our weapons are not working. Well, not the extra punch they have. Blades still cut and all that.”
“No! No, no, no!” Amanda said, and rushed to check one piece of equipment. “Oh, no…” she moaned.
“What’s wrong?” Mac asked.
“Your aetherographer,” Amanda said, pointing to the charred box. “It’s gone as well. You know its secondary function.”
“You mean the beacon? The beacon home?” Mac said.
“Yes. We are marooned here.”
~~~~
This is my accompanying entry for the Weekly Writing Exercise: May 15–21, 2017 at the Writer’s Discussion Group on Google+. I am responsible for creating the prompts for the Exercise, so I don’t take part, but I still like to write a story each week.
I’ve been late writing my entries for the past weeks, and this one hasn’t been different. In contrast, my stories get a bit longer, I don’t know why. Still, that’s the privilege of being the organizer of the exercise… I can bend the rules.
This week I just started writing and I suddenly realized I had gone full steampunk Stargate. I then decided to plunge ahead and have fun.
