The moment the water hit the sphere it hissed and smoke trawled out. “Agh!” I yelped, the metal suddenly turning boiling-hot. It fell, and steam poured from the ground.
Aster, gloves on held it. “How much do you think we can sell this one for?”
There were a few clients I had in mind. World governments, for one, charged more than they really needed to for alien artifacts. A representative from the U.S Department of Defense was a client I could easily phone.
So I thought. “A few thousand,” I assured. “Worth the trip here.”
Me, Aster, and my bodyguard (where had he gone?) had traveled to the market to seek out old artifacts. Aster, with her ability, would sense if these artifacts were objects of the interesting kind, and we’d buy them from the clueless merchants.
Then we’d turn right back around and sell them to shady rich people for a more than decent profit.
It was an easy game, save for the fact that self-proclaimed artifact bounty hunters were after us and the fact that handling cursed artifacts without proper precaution could just as easily wipe us (and bystanders.) off the map.
A clean cut man with dirtied hair and ripped clothes raced up to me. “Hey boss,” it was Matt, and with someone in tow, gripped tightly by the collar. “This guy says he knows you.”
I looked at the fiery redheaded man with odd, dark tinted glasses beside him. “I don’t.” I looked at the man more carefully. “Nope, and Matt- release him.”
Matt did so and the guy fell to the floor. He picked himself up and extended a hand. “My name is Quincy Kieni,” he pointed to the sphere Aster was holding, “and uh, that sphere belongs to me.” I looked at him in confusion. He scratched his chin. “Okay, not really- but I was about to buy that.”
I shook my head. “Well you can’t have it.”
He sighed and started to wave his hands rather eccentrically. “Well, I’ll pay you double!” He began to rant now, “You don’t understand how important that is. You tourists don’t realize that-”
“Okay,” I cut him off. “What’s so good about this?”
“You’re not going to believe me,” he continued, “but it’s an alien artifact. Debris from a crashed ship east of here. Now, I’ll pay double-”
Aster laughed at his words. “Yeah, we kinda already know that.” He stopped and saw the gloves. “We’re in the artifact underworld, you?”
He nodded- then tried to seize the sphere. Matt caught him again. “Okay, fine,” he hissed. “Can I at least propose a deal?”
This was getting tedious. “What deal?”
He cleared his throat dramatically. “For the past week-” he coughed, cutting himself off. Matt gave me a look, “I’ve heard rumors of a fallen meteorite east of here messing with phones, electronics, et cetera-et cetera.” I wondered where his rumors came from. “Also according to some Company scanners I stole- anyway.”
“Whoa!” I snapped. “You stole Company scanners? Not cool!” The Company were the people after us- those who stole artifacts for themselves in order to keep the world ‘safe’.
And getting in their way mostly led to death. “That’s not the important part,” he mused. “Look, I know they’re doing recovery somewhere nearby-” he pointed to the sphere. “I can put together a spell or something and track down the rest of the ship.”
I saw what he wanted then. “You want to work together.”
He nodded shyly. “I’ll locate the spaceship. We get in and out.” He gestured to his little messenger bag. “I got a list of spells in there. Invisibility, Bloomshape, Sanctified…”
Joining forces with the strange little magician would definitely put more Company men on our trail. However, recovering more artifacts for ourselves could net me enough money from my contact at the DoD to essentially bribe our way out of any Company trouble.
I sighed heavily. “Okay, you got a deal.” Matt released him, and for the second time he fell, splashing mud all over us.
Quincy Kieni, as it turned out, was not good at magic at all. The first three attempts to cast a location spell on the artifact ended in a series of sparks, fires, and explosions, each time worse than the last.
“Not to worry,” he seethed, “seventh times the charm!” At least he was right about that one.
Black smoky lines erupted from the sphere and pointed us east, cutting across hills and roads.
So we began the journey walking and splashing in the rain, the short fiery magician leading us forwards, whistling a tune to himself so annoyingly I considered cutting off the deal.
Matt walked beside him, making sure he didn’t pull any tricks. I and Aster walked behind, eyeing our surroundings for safety.
At a certain point Aster began to shiver. Not from the rain but- “We’re getting close,” she noted. “It’s not all debris-” she reached out into the ether and froze, “-Company Men- and- something else.”
I asked her if she could tell what it was. She couldn’t. The journey continued, and the boisterous Quincy started to the quiet, now muttering the tune underneath his breath.
And over a hill and through the brush we saw it. A river, cutting through rocky hills in a small unassuming valley.
And there it was, large and looming. A great metal disc, pulsing with energy and symbols that glowed against the rain. Smoke churned out as water reacted with the metal- just as the sphere had done.
All around the crashed ship were people. Explorers sent from the Company, bagging artifacts, taking photographs and even loading off large pieces of the ship itself into trucks coming and going.
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They marched with urgency as the rushing waters eroded the ship, more and more parts of it being washed away.
“Well,” Quincy murmured, “this is a larger operation than I thought they’d send.”
I squinted. “Look-” I pointed to something like a chair being brought out. A dead body, short, gray, and clearly non-human lay dead on it, “a gray.”
It’s dead, large eyes, black as night looked eerily at us, sending a chill down my spine. “That’ll fetch a price,” Matt noted. This was true- corpses, though we never had the chance to recover one, sold at astronomically high prices, pun intended.
Quincy seemed to disagree. “But think of the blood in that thing,” he mused. “So many different applications to science. Cancer, the Flu, Covid…”
“For a magician,” Aster joked, “you seem to care a lot about science.”
I silenced them. “And we better get in there before they take all of that loot away.” I turned to our newfound magician. “So do your thing. Invisibility?”
He reached into his bag and whipped out a phone, opening an app and observing a photograph of a spellbook. “Well, see,” he nervously began, “I don’t exactly know that one.” I looked at him rather angrily. “But I can make them think we’re one of them?”
I sighed. “That’ll do.” That in fact, as we would find out soon enough, wouldn’t do.
The man read out the words and waved his hands eccentrically, and gold lines surrounded us like snakes, swirling around us. “Done.” And then he started to race down the rocky hill.
“Matt, keep an eye on him.” He nodded and went after the magician.
Aster and I followed, entering the camp and nodding to the clueless agents. We went into a tent, found a couple of powerful devices and pocketed them into our bag- one enchanted to fit in an unknown number of items.
We made sure not to take anything that looked particularly dangerous. Or important enough.
“The grey-” I remembered, “do you think we can?”
We observed the men transporting the body onto a truck. “Too well guarded.”
A woman came up to us, a look of annoyance in her face. “You two!” she snapped. “Stop idling about and get to work!”
The spell held, though the lines seemed to waver. “Yes, ma’am,” I replied. “Where to?”
She gestured. “We need more people inside the ship.”
I nodded and we headed off, the lines now starting to vibrate. This was not good. Her eyes were on us, and we quickly entered the alien ship before she saw through our deception.
The inside was definitely larger than the outside. It had seemed relatively small on the outside, enough to carry maybe a crew of four, or five.
But the inside was ginormous. It was a maze of halls crawling with Company Agents scanning and scraping samples of highly reactive metal.
Aster tugged at me, and we found a room deeper in. “Something’s here,” she whispered.
“Hey!” a voice shouted. “That area hasn’t been deconned.”
“We’ll uh, handle it,” I lied. The agent handed us a mask and we put it on, entering the room and closing the door behind us.
“Woah,” Aster gasped, shining a flashlight onto the room. It was some sort of… morgue. Dead alien bodies, oddly humanoid and gray, now decaying sat on tables across the room, some cut up, some still preserved, pristine and glimmering in an unknown yellow liquid.
I felt an odd sense of fear- and being watched by something hidden inside the room, watching with deep, bulbous black eyes.
The door opened behind us, and a woman with stark blue hair walked in. “Woah is right,” she agreed, spraying a bottle of something into the air. “What designation are you from?” She looked at us intently, and the spell started to drift. “Do you even have clearance to be in this deep?”
I looked at Aster in confusion, then back at her. “We, uh, got sent here by the woman in charge.”
The lines surrounding us started to vanish. “I need to see ID Tags-” she squinted as us- “now!” That was the moment the spell broke. Her brow furrowed and- “Intruder!” she shouted, “we’ve got artifact-”
Aster reached out and scrambled her mind. She fell, dazed. I heard the rumblings of people approaching. “Damn it!”
We backed into the morgue, the dead almost staring at us, wondering what would happen next. I shoved a table onto the door, and the agents of the other side started to knock.
“What-” the door started to open, “now-”
A uniformed man entered the room, saw us and started firing, bullets hitting the wall beneath us. They began to enter shooting as we hid behind a counter, firing back.
That was when the first man screamed.
Something leaped from the shadows slashing the man and pouncing off, leaving him bloodied and terrified. He fired around and screamed as it leaped back, falling to the floor, dead.
I dared a peek- claw marks, stab wounds. “We’ve got a live gray!” a second agent yelled. Radio chatter. “Non-lethals- the boss wants it alive!”
This was good news for us. A tranq dart would at least keep us alive- though spending time in a prison was not so good. On the other hand, more agents were coming down the halls, ready to seize the alien.
That’s when I had the plan. “Aster- this just might work, but-” I told her the plan.
She nodded and began to reach into the ether. Across us, the agents fired at shadows in darkness- there were two of them, fighting back. Agents started to be lifted into the air, carried by an unknown psychic and tossed aimlessly.
Then one of the Greys darted at us, and stopped. It bared claws and teeth sharp as knives and I grew scared for a moment.
But the plan had worked. Aster reached into its mind and- “A deal!” she whispered, harsh. She turned to me. “Let’s go!”
Temporarily, at least- they were on our side.
There were three, I realized, and we began to fight our way out. The agents started to retreat, overpowered by the surprise. The Greys led the way, and I headed out.
The hall ahead of us was clear, and in the midst of the confusion we quickly exited the craft. Outside was another mess though, and Quincy and Matt were shot and hid, spells cast, bullets deflected.
A Grey snarled and leaped at them. “Matt, Quincy!” I shouted. “Let’s get outta here!”
We were being surrounded. “The truck!” Matt shouted back, starting to back towards a truck loaded with artifacts. “I hotwired the truck!”
We ran, avoiding all we could. A bullet just barely grazed me and I yelped as I reached the truck. The others followed suit, climbing inside and I started it up- and so did the three extraterrestrials.
“Go, go!” Quincy shouted. “Should’ve-” the window shattered and a bullet hole emerged in the leather behind me, “made a Plan B.”
I hit the gas and charged forwards, knocking a tent over and spilling it’s contents. There was an explosion behind us, and suddenly, we were out of the hills and into fresh road.
Distracted by whatever chaos we had sown, they didn’t give chase. And it was smooth sailing from then; we headed into a little campground a little to the west, and stopped.
We got out, and cheered. The three aliens looked at oddly and seemed to nod, understanding. One had been shot and lay dying, leaking odd yellow from it. The two spoke words in a chittering sort of way to the third as it died.
It passed, breath leaving our world. The two stared at us with bulbous eyes and leaped into the trees, leaving us with the corpse of the third.
“So,” Quincy started, “that went rather well.”
“Are you insane?” Matt snapped. “We almost died.”
I shook my head. “But we got some great loot here,” reminding the two. “And we got…” I stared at the corpse, “that. It’ll pay off some of our debts and fetch a good profit for us all.”
“Ah, his share?” Aster inquired. “That spell was barely effective.”
The magician seemed nervous at that. “Well, I was actually thinking of another prize.” Oh dear. What more was he going to ask for? “You all seem like experienced people,” he pointed out. “What if I join you?”
“No!” we all shouted. He ended up joining us anyway. We did need a magician, and a rather useless one was better than none at all.
The alien artifacts- especially the corpse fetched a high price on the market. We, soon, were overflowing in cash. Sure, we didn’t know what our clients- much less the government was going to do with it.
But at the end of the day that didn’t matter. Our job was done, and we lived to see another day. Such was life in the world of the artifact underground- it’s really the small things that matter- the knowledge that you, at least, would live to see another day.
And that, by me, was okay.