Ascendant Saga Collection: Sci-Fi Fantasy Techno Thriller by Brandon Ellis (best novels to read in english .txt) 📗

He put his clothes on and sauntered out into the hall.

“What the hell are you doing, Jaxx? Get your ass back in that room.” Fox butted against the wall across from Jaxx’s door.

“I can’t sleep. Care to walk with me?”

He knew the answer before Fox spoke.

Fox gave a sly grin. “You walk. I’ll follow.”

“You don’t want to be extra close? Hold hands, perhaps?”

“Screw off.” He shoved off the wall and prodded Jaxx to start walking.

Jaxx rolled his eyes and walked down the hall, down other hallways, up stairs, down stairs, waving at guards. This was all fine and dandy, but he wasn’t getting lethargic and Fox continued to follow him occasionally speaking gibberish codes in his communication’s device.

“You about done walking, Mr. Jaxx?”

Jaxx twisted around and started to walk backwards, facing Fox. “Don’t you ever get tired?”

“No.”

“Do you really think I’m a threat? I’m an archaeologist, for crying out loud.”

Fox bared his teeth. “Then why in shits-hell-hole did you take the pictures, Jaxx? If I was Slade, you’d be digging ditches with inmates.” But we need you.

“What did you just say?” asked Jaxx, turning down another hallway and passing doors, hoping he didn’t wake other scientists.

“I said I’d send you to prison, you son of a bitch.”

“No, after that.”

Fox stopped, and shot him an odd look. “You hearing things, Jaxx?”

Jaxx paused and tried to extend his mind field into Fox’s thoughts. Apparently it didn’t work that way. All he got was some crappy 70’s disco song on a loop. Something about a “starship trooper.”

“I told Slade not to trust you the moment we took off in the helicopter in Peru,” said Fox. “We don’t take kindly to those who defected from the SSP.”

“Defected?”

A voice came over Fox’s radio. “Code one-one-nine. We need you up top, Captain. Code one-one-nine.”

Fox didn’t hide his irritation. “Get back to your room.” He took off at a fast clip, leaving Jaxx by himself.

“SSP? Defected? How could I defect from a fictional organization that Slade and Doctor Donny put in my head?” Fox believed it though. You didn’t need to be a mind reader to figure that out.

“How could I defect from the SSP? To where?”

He headed back to his room, chewing over what Fox spit out.

Now, he wanted answers more than ever. Screw jail time. If they caught him, so be it. They’d let him out again. They needed him. There were Beings on Callisto, Beings who perhaps wrote—or better yet—spoke Atlantean. Who else on Earth knew Atlantean? No one. He was safe.

He jogged to the RIOUT room, making his way to another computer. He turned the screen on, adjusting the brightness as low as his eyes could tolerate.

He searched the computer’s database for SSP. Nothing came up. He searched under Slade Roberson. Again, nothing spectacular. Next, he searched Richard Fox. Nothing.

Duh, spell it out, Jaxx.

He typed in Secret Space Program.

Zilch.

This wasn’t the computer he needed.

He leaned back, scratching his head, catching something peculiar on the screen. The term secret brought up something else, secret syllabary.

What an odd term. He scrolled down to the “syllabary” and clicked. The file opened up a list of photos, all images from the TECS IV satellite.

He clicked on a picture dated May 9th. A hieroglyph in Atlantean writing. A closeup, yet he couldn’t see if it was on a pyramid or another structure. Yet, easy to decipher; water symbol, bird carrying a branch, the sign of the zodiac symbol for the age of Leo, and the winged disk.

His mind calmed, as if the Atlantean hieroglyphs were the only things in the room, or in life for that matter. Water and the bird carrying the branch meant the last great flood. Not the only flood in Earth’s history. His studies had found several great deluges throughout time. This, however, was the most recent. The sign of Leo gave it away. It coincided with the end of the Atlantean era—12,500 years ago—around the time of the last ice age melt. Now, the winged disk was odd. That meant many things in one ornate hieroglyph. The sun passed through the center of the winged disk which represented the sacred gateway into the next age of the Zodiak. The center of the disk, however, wasn’t hollow like it should have been. Instead, it had another circle in the middle, though slightly smaller and pock-marked.

He clicked out of there and went straight to the internet, typing in Callisto.

As he suspected and should have remembered from when he first entered Underfoot Black, Callisto was pock-marked. It told Jaxx that the gateway was either Callisto or the gateway landed the Atlanteans on Callisto. Either way, the circle in the middle of the disk was most likely the Jupiter moon.

The wings of the disk represented flight. Why would they have a gateway to Callisto and then flight?

“That doesn’t make sense. Did they fly to Callisto or use a gateway to get to Callisto? Both? Are there two ways to get to Callisto?”

The symbols confirmed that the Atlanteans created the structures on Callisto during the last great deluge, at least to Jaxx. He slumped in his chair. He was on the cusp of a great discovery, but if he told any of the other scientists on the team, apart from Jon Shaughnessy, they’d laugh him out the room.

He went back to the file and clicked on the next image. The time on the computer’s clock showed only a few more hours until work started.

He pulled up more glyphs. A basket with a handle on the right side, a bird looking west, a greeting hand, a sun, and a symbol for water. The hieroglyphs directly below were the serpent, a bird looking west, and another basket with the handle on the left side.

If he knew which type of building this was etched on instead of this zoomed in portion of a wall, it would be much easier to figure out, because right now