“Who do you think murdered him?”
Madelaine had considered it, of course, but she wasn’t ready to voice her thoughts. “I don’t know, but it had to be someone involved with this errand. Someone in thePaladin Cabal perhaps. Hard to know for certain.” At least not yet. Madelaine might go on a quest to discover who murdered Tando Elroy, just to satisfy her own curiosity.
Instead of retreating like when they’d been younger, they followed the symbols deeper, finding a short corridor cut in a ninety-degree angle to the right. Probably an entrance or access tunnel to the part of the auxiliary mine where bauxite had been found by Alienne Greenly nearly a century ago.
Where searchers found the silver bauxite nugget that completed the assembly of the device for the Mechanism to do its job.
Diesel said that was what kept Alpha-Prime leadership on Earth after the Lost Colony incident.
The scientists developing the Solution—specifically, Bravo Elroy—needed a nugget of pure bauxite of a certain size that could be shaped into what was needed.
While Alpha-Prime had many bauxite mining operations across the known galaxies, those places mostly produced pea-sized bauxite chunks and bauxite dust. Much like how gold was collected on Earth.
What eventually became Alienn, Arkansas, was the first place they’d found larger pieces of bauxite. The silver bauxite nugget in the device had been found over eighty years ago in this very mine, and it was why Alphas had decided to stay on Earth even after the disastrous Lost Colony incident.
The short tunnel led to a left turn into a longer tunnel that seemed to descend at a steeper angle.
After walking fifty yards or so, they could make out a light at the end of the passage. The closer they got, the brighter the light, until they didn’t need their flashlights anymore. Jack stowed them in his own backpack.
The passage opened into a vast cavern. Madelaine gasped. Some sort of light source lit the space from above. It was a luminescent light blue. There were creatures that lit up at night after being in the sun for part of the day. Was there a skylight above that triggered some kind of bioluminescence?
In roughly the center of the football field sized space and seemingly embedded in the stone floor sat something enormous. Just like an eight-foot-tall phone booth from the last century or a 1970s computer. Metal, crystal, old and beautiful.
The Mechanism waited for them. Sleeping. Ready to fulfill its destiny.
“We found it,” she whispered.
“Of course we did.” Jack laughed.
They stood there staring at it in awe. Thousands of silver lines wound through transparent crystal structures housed within metal and what looked like wooden accents.
At chest level was the circular socket she’d seen in the renderings.
The socket was exactly the size of the assembled device Madelaine had in her oversized backpack.
Below the socket was the large, hand-sized oval. Maybe the beast required her whole hand to start this thing up instead of just her thumbprint. That made sense.
“You know,” Jack said. “It occurs to me in this instant and seeing the Mechanism that perhaps there were more of these Mechanisms than just one built in different places across the galaxy that could launch the device. You know, just in case.”
Madelaine nodded. “I agree, because if Tando Elroy removed the one on Alpha-Prime, I can’t see a way for him to get it inside the mine without someone from Aliennnoticing. Unless he has the ability to teleport objects with his mind from one place to another.”
“Not likely. If he had that power, he would have teleported himself out of jail or out of the hands of the bounty hunter who caught him.”
Madelaine grinned, thinking about one more possibility. “Or they fed him kale every day to keep his powers at bay, like Indigo Jones.”
Jack laughed. “I really love that idea, even if it doesn’t turn out to be true.”
Madelaine approached the Mechanism. “You’re right. This enormous beast has been here a while. It hasn’t been reconstructed with duct tape and wishes after being disassembled and stolen from Alpha-Prime.”
Madelaine was grateful. She turned toward Jack. “We did it. Thank you for everything, Jack.”
He wrapped her in his arms. “Of course. We make a pretty good team,” he said, squeezing her tight.
Before she could tell him she agreed wholeheartedly, subtle sounds from across the cavern that signaled they were not alone put Madelaine into immediate fight-or-flight mode.
She couldn’t flee so she readied herself to fight.
Clap. Clap. Clap.Slow applause echoed through the cavern from a single spectator.
