The Osiran Legacy--Chapter Five

Doctor Who--The Crossover Internet Adventures
XIA #3--The Osiran Legacy
Chapter Five--"Crash and Burn"
by John Seavey

 "The ship only contains enough oxygen for a few hours flight. So, there is something of a time-limit on our little code-cracking and shuttle-piloting lessons here."

 "We're all going to die," said Marcus from the (relative) ceiling.

 "Never say die," Indy snapped out, snapping his whip around a protruding statue, and hauling himself over to a set of hieroglyphics on the far wall. "We've got three people with archaeological experience here--we can decipher these in time. Trust me." He looked down at them. "Shit," he muttered, "these don't make any sense at all!"

 "Professor Jones," Benny said, trying to repress a mean-spirited grin, "you're upside-down."

 "Right. I knew that." Using the wall protrusion to twist himself around, he once again looked at the hieroglyphics. "And call me Indy. So what are we supposed to be looking for?"

 "The controls to speed up the shuttle should be marked on the hieroglyphics. To the Egyptians who worshipped the Osirans, this ship was meant to represent the voyage of Osiris through the underworld at night; the passengers would pass through to the next world and be reborn. So we can start by looking for some sort of moon symbol and work from there." She paused as a thought struck her. "You're taking all this pretty calmly."

 "I've seen a lot of strange things," he said as he scanned his way down the hieroglyphics. "Next to some of them, this is a piece of cake."

 

The Doctor looked at Kraushaar as the guards grabbed his arms, the brim of his hat casting his eyes into shadow. "Most impressive," he said. "At least, by the lights of science as it stands now. You must have cost the Reich a lot in terms of research."

 Kraushaar barked out a laugh. "Unimportant, Herr Doktor. This new arm is as strong as ten men--you saw how easily I shattered that stone wall, ja? Soon, Der Fuehrer will use me as the template to create a race of Ubermenschen, and Europe will fall before us. Then, once we have deciphered the secrets of the Osirans, even the stars themselves will--"

 "Yes, yes," the Doctor said dismissively, "I'm familiar with the general theme by now. But you assume that you can open the tomb just because you have the key. The Osirans didn't build this place to make it easy for ham-fisted idiots like you to--" one of the guards gave him a hard shove, and he stumbled into the main chamber on his knees.

 "I should be careful, Herr Doktor," Kraushaar said as he walked in after them. "Your knowledge makes you useful to the Reich, but that usefulness is balanced against your insolence. Fraulein Kael does not make the decisions--I do. And if I decide your usefulness to be at an end, you will share Fraulein Shea's fate."

 "What do you--NO!" The Doctor turned to run, but his guard held him fast as the sound of gunshots could be heard, even over the muffling effects of the Osiran chambers.

 Kraushaar grinned, letting the flesh pull against the mechanical elements of his face. "Now, Herr Doktor, it would please me greatly if you made yourself useful."

 

The ragged man lay in the jungle, scarcely daring to twitch a muscle lest they find him again. He had had a name once, but that was fifteen years ago, before the expedition into the jungle, before the discovery of the pyramids. The Gumme had found him. They had killed his bearers, and destroyed his notes, but for him they reserved a worse punishment.

 "You wish to free Sekhmet," they said to him as they brought him into the central chamber. "You wish to know the mysteries of the Gods. We will show you these mysteries, and make you understand that the Gods are never meant to be known." Then they sealed him into the sarcophagus.

 At first, he thought it was to be a death of the kind he'd read about in those ghastly horror stories he'd read as a child; entombed in the coffin, he'd die a slow death of starvation, or asphyxiation. Perhaps some years later some future expedition would find him, and puzzle on his existence...

 Then the voices had started. Not in his ears but in his mind, they had whispered to him of a time four thousand years ago. He could still hear the whispers, see the images of a city in flames...

 

"Thebes burns, oh Pharoah," the High Priest said as he approached the ruler of Egypt. "We did as you bade and destroyed the gods. Their battle with Set made them weak, but not weak enough. Ra was the last of them, but he acted before we could destroy him. He spoke of a scourge of fire and blood, a whip of scorpions, a raging lioness who would turn this world into a charnel house." The priest paused, terror infusing his every word. "He has unleashed Sekhmet, oh Pharoah."

 The Pharoah turned to face his priest, and once again it was clear why the people believed the blood of Amun to flow through his veins. His eyes were filled not with terror, but with resolve as he said, "There is still a chance. Tell the guards to search for any relics that the Gods brought with them, from the oldest to the newest. If there is any chance of containing the vengeance of Ra, we must take it. If we do not, the world will be as the city of Thebes, and all that we have fought and died for will be in vain. We would rather die free than live beneath the heel of the Gods; but living free is sweeter than dying free. We will contain Sekhmet."

 

"I say, Indy," Marcus said, breathing heavily in the stale atmosphere, "I think I've found something!"

 "What is it, Marcus?" asked the younger man.

 "Here, just after the symbol for Osiris. There's a cartouche of what looks like a man with a bow--do you think it could be some sort of reference to speeding us up?"

 "There's only one way to find out," Benny said. "It should be touch sensitive. Press down on it."

 Tentatively, Marcus pressed down on the cartouche. Instantly, there was a flash of light and a sense of acceleration.

 "Well," Benny said, "that brought us into hyperspace. We should be arriving on Mars within minutes now. Problem is, we have no way of slowing down, no way of landing safely, and Mars hasn't been terraformed yet, so when we do land, we won't have enough oxygen to sustain ourselves."

 "You know a lot about all this," Indy said in a suspicious tone of voice. "Where did you find out?"

 Benny squirmed a little under his glare. Finally, she said, "Well, if you've already learned this many weird things, one or two more isn't going to hurt. I'm not from your time. I'm Head of Archaeological Studies at a university several hundred years in your future." The lie slid easily off of her lips, as always. Someday, she'd like to be able to present real credentials, she thought to herself; until then, simply being brilliant and well-informed would have to suffice. "I'm an expert on Martian culture and Osiran influences on ancient and primitive cultures. And I know quite a lot about the twentieth century, too."

 "You mean to say that they study that in archaeology?" Marcus asked indignantly. "It ought to be a historical subject."

 Indy sighed. "Let's leave the university politics out of it for now, alright? You said these things were touch-sensitive. Are there any other glyphs on here that will do anything if you press them?"

 "Possibly," Benny said, "but I wouldn't try it. Half of them are likely to be booby-traps. The Osirans were a pretty paranoid bunch."

 Indy shrugged. "We're going to die anyway, right? Fifty-fifty's good odds right now." And with that, he began to run his fingers along the lines of hieroglyphics.

 There was a bright flash of light, and then silence.

 

"Well, Doctor," Katherine Kael said as she looked over from the sarcophagus in the entrance chamber, "have you uncovered anything of value?"

 The Doctor peered over his bifocals at her, taking his gaze off of the pillar that had claimed the life of one soldier already. "The text seems to be composed mostly of warnings," he said, putting an extra layer of frost into his voice. "The tomb is one of their most sacred areas, and the priests went into great and inventive detail in coming up with traps for the unwary. This pillar is just the first such trap; beyond that," he pointed to the sealed door, "is another. I can't make out what sort, exactly, but it seems to--"

 Kraushaar interrupted him. "But have you figured out how to deactivate the pillar safely?"

 "Possibly. But I wouldn't advise it. This pillar is more than it seems. It's a psionic dampener, part of the field generator that imprisons whatever's inside there. It was originally used to isolate harmful psionic radiations from the crew of the Osiran's thought-powered vessels, but it seems to have been quite inventively adapted by someone."

 "Herr Doktor," Kraushaar said wearily, "I am not interested in your pointless speculations about the things beyond that door. We will find that out by opening it. I merely wish you to deactivate that pillar. Now."

 "I'm really not sure that I understand the opening sequence correctly," said the Doctor as he tried desperately to play for time.

 "Then if you get it wrong, you will have already paid the price for your failure, and Fraulein Kael will begin deciphering it. Now, Doktor. I grow impatient."

 "Alright," said the Doctor, "but don't say I didn't warn you." He began to twist, in minute degrees, the knob at the base of the pillar.

 

Captain Zeitflur staggered down the hallways of the pyramid, hopelessly lost. His eyes burned with agony from the blinding light that had been unleashed when the shuttle took off, and he was certain that he would never see again. But he had the satisfaction of knowing that when he did rejoin the group, Herr Kraushaar would recommend him for new eyes. He, too, would join the ranks of the Ubermenschen.

 

The Osiran shuttle dropped out of hyperspace as it entered the gravitational field of Mars. However, its relative velocity was still quite great, and the gravitational pull of the planet only increased its speed. At this point in its flight, priests in the nearby tomb on the Tharsis Plateau would begin to slow the craft down and guide it into the pyramid for its return journey, but there were no priests to do so. The craft began to tumble end over end as the thin atmosphere of Mars tugged at it. Within moments, it slammed into the dusty landscape and exploded in a burst of energies that humanity would not learn to harness for several thousand years. The crater it left behind was quite spectacular.

 Nobody walked out of the explosion. Nothing inside the craft could possibly have survived.

 

The pillar let out a blinding flash of light as the Doctor pressed in the final lever. The falcon's head shrieked once, then went silent. "There," the Doctor said as the door began to open. "Done."

 

Zeitflur blinked in astonishment. His vision had returned! But it was strange vision indeed. Everything seemed tinged with blood, like his eyes were seeing through a pool of dark wine...and there were voices, just on the edge of hearing...

 

Cleo Shea's eyes opened as well, and a dead heart beat again, and lungs clotted with blood inhaled once more...

 

The door slid open to reveal another chamber, larger than the first. At the far end was another sealed door, but no-one noticed it. Their attention was on the mummies.

 They stood in serried ranks, dozens of them--not the thin, withered things that had been found in previous tombs, but massive creations of all sorts. Some were missing arms, others legs, still others heads. On some, the wrappings had decayed or been torn loose to reveal the glint of metal.

 "Quite the scrapheap of servitors," the Doctor muttered to himself. "I wonder if any of them still work?"

 His query was answered when the mummies began to lurch out of the chamber, their arms outstretched as they advanced upon the soldiers.

 To Be Continued In Our Next Thrilling Installment...

 "In the Grip of the Mummy's Curse!"

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