You’re reading Celeste Rising, a SciFi pirate yarn. Find the previous chapter here.

Luigi took a step inside, not quite believing his eyes. This is a bunker?

He quickly glanced at his wrist. The readouts showed a vacuum just like the one outside the bunker. Their helmet torches cut long, narrow cones of bluish light out of the darkness.

“It’s a cemetery,” he said. “The walls are lined with caskets. Hundreds of dead bodies.”

“Don’t waste our time on that,” Carruthers said. “Let’s move on.”

“Wait.” Luigi went closer to one of the caskets. It was an elongated oval pod. A Plexiglas window was right above where the face would be. Luigi hesitated for a moment. Do I really want to know what’s under the Plexiglas?

He stepped closer to the curved window. He lowered his head so that his torch shone directly into the depths of the casket. There was something grey inside, an uneven, textured surface that reflected the light.

“Fabric.”

“Fabric?” said Carruthers. “You’re wasting our time to rummage through a clothes chest?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Luigi. “I can’t see inside...” He tilted his head, tried to shine the light at an angle that wouldn’t make it reflect back.

His heart stopped. Carruthers had crept up from behind to get a peek. He got one all right. The little man gave out a choked scream and stumbled backwards, tripping and landing on the floor.

Luigi drew a sharp breath. He could feel his heart beating against his ribs.

“It’s a mummy,” he said. “Inside this casket is a f--ing Egyptian mummy!”

He bent over the next casket to the right, then the next.

“The same. All of them.”

Carruthers scrambled to his feet.

“What the f-- happened here? I thought... Where are the soldiers?”

“Perhaps these are the soldiers.”

“Mummified? Who’d do such a thing? Kill dozens of soldiers and package them up like this?”

“No wonder the government tried to cover that up.”

“Let’s open one.”

Bandages. Holes where the eyes would have been. Empty sockets. But under the bandages was a body. Luigi could see the contours.

“No uniforms,” Carruthers murmured. “They look exactly like the things in museums. Those kings from Egypt, all bandaged up.”

“Enough of that,” Luigi said. He wanted to get out of that place as soon as possible. “You said there’d be a box.”

“I think I see it.” Carruthers stepped ahead, and his torch illuminated a bright cone of dust. Something was at the end of it, standing right at the centre of the bunker. He almost fell over his feet as he tried to run towards the box in the low gravity of the comet. He managed to half float, half fall towards his target, until he bumped into the side of the box and came to a halt.

Luigi ran his fingers along the intricately carved box that twinkled gold and turquoise under his head torch. Who brought these things here? He was no expert in Egyptology, but he didn’t need to be one to recognise the typical figures in their white loincloths painted on the side, decorated with golden hieroglyphs all over. Animal-headed gods and eagles spread their wings. Scarabs and sun discs hanging low in the skies. Barges transporting the dead to the afterlife, guided along by dog-faced demons.

“Why did they hide these things here? Who would do such a thing?”

An abandoned comet, falsely labelled a hazard. A locked military bunker full of dead soldiers -- if they were soldiers. Egyptian artefacts, a decorated box that belonged in a museum. It didn’t make sense.

“It’s the right box,” Carruthers said. “I’ve been told to look for that.”

Luigi was about to step closer to the box when Carruthers lifted his hand. He was holding a laser cutter and pointing at him.

“Stay away,” the small man said. “This thing is ours.”

Without waiting for Luigi, he grabbed the lid and started to pull at it. The box was only about a metre tall, and even Carruthers could lift the lid up by himself. He stuck his head into the opening, still pointing his weapon at Luigi.

“Don’t think of moving,” he said.

It was the last thing Carruthers said. In the next moment, his head shot backwards out of the box, and the rest of his body followed, spraying a bright arc of blood into the air. It unfolded like a crimson Chinese fan in the low-gravity environment, red pearls sailing all around his body like a ballet of butterflies. His body crashed into the opposite wall and collapsed against one of the caskets. Some kind of projectile was sticking out of his broken visor. For a few moments, his body still twitched. Then he lay motionless.

Luigi took a step towards the box. As Carruthers had fallen backwards, he had pulled the lid away with him. The box was now open, and Luigi could see the mechanism that had fired the projectile. It was empty now, disarmed. There had only been one shot. A last defence of the mysterious designers of the box.

Luigi reached inside. So this was what Carruthers and his company had been after. A little statue. He lifted it out of the box, holding it in the palm of his big, gloved hand. It was Anubis, god of the dead. The figure of a man with the head of a jackal, holding an ankh, the symbol of life, in his hand. But something was wrong. The ankh. It didn’t look right.

Carruthers could use some life magic now.

The figurine was untouched. It didn’t look ancient at all. No wear, no marks of any kind. It looked like something that had been made yesterday, clean, perfect, gleaming in the light of his helmet torch. Surely it helped that it had spent the last eighty years outside the solar system, locked in a box in the vacuum of space. But what had happened before? Who had brought this thing here? What crazy project had transported a bunch of mummies -- or were they soldiers? -- a box and the figure of an ancient god from Egypt onto the surface of this comet? And why in God’s name would anyone want to do that?

He carefully put the figurine back into the box and lifted the whole thing up. It was surprisingly light in the low gravity, almost floating along beside him as he slowly turned and walked out of the bunker. He felt his hair rising as he walked along the long line of caskets, forcing himself not to turn around and look back. He breathed with relief when he stepped out of the bunker and pulled that metal door shut behind him.

Half an hour later, he was back on his ship and taking off. The box was safely strapped into Carruthers’s empty seat.

Inside the abandoned bunker, something stirred. A body in a ripped space suit slowly, carefully, sat up, still unsure about its movements. It didn’t seem to mind the projectile that was stuck into its face, or the fact that the visor of its spacesuit was broken.

It got up, swaying from side to side, like a toddler still getting used to walking on two legs. It took a few more steps, heading towards the entrance of the bunker. It lifted a gloved hand and typed a sequence of numbers into the keypad. The door slid open, a rectangle of bright stars in the surrounding darkness.

It stepped out into the open. Far above in the sky, it could see the red navigation lights of the departing spaceship, two blinking dots in the deep black of space. It nodded.

Its time had come.

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