“That’s if my arms don’t fall off first,” Broadhurst piped up.
“Pussy!” Kalschacht replied from further up.
Kathryn chuckled as they all continued their descent into the black abyss. After about an hour the light from Kathryn’s torch glinted off something. As she climbed down a little further, more of the surface was revealed to the torch light.
“Hey, I’ve got something down here!” She shouted up to the others.
A myriad of torch beams all flickered across to follow where her own beam was pointing.
“It looks like the roof of some kind of ancient elevator,” Gomez said.
They neared the structure, and Gomez’s assessment was proved to be correct, whether it still worked after all this time, was anybodies guess.
“You see, what did I tell you!” Gomez said smugly.
“Okay smartass.” Kathryn replied.
They managed to inch their way around this elevator, groping in the pitch blackness as they did so. Finding that the elevator was stopped at a rather large room. The stale air stank, they could all smell it even through the filters built into their suits. Casting their torches over this gloomy looking interior, they quickly found it was abandoned. There were no bodies here, everything looked pristine, as though it could have been built yesterday.
Mira looked over the walls of the room, as she cast her torch upon it, she could make out strange alien writings in places, etched with incredible precision into the walls themselves.
“I really wish we had a linguist with us, to study these symbols.”
“Well, I’m no language expert, but I’ll try to give it a shot,” Gomez replied as he peered closer to the etchings, his forehead furrowed in thought.
“It looks a lot like Arabic writing that we see on Earth, but where Arabic uses lots of curves and dots. This is sharp, angular, very incisive.”
Kalschacht also looked over the writings, “It takes one hell of an advanced laser to make etchings this fine, this precise, our best scientists don’t have lasers anywhere near as sophisticated as that what made this.”
“Who then, professor?” Kathryn asked.
“My guess would be the only race we know of with this kind of technology, would be Solarians.”
“But the writing doesn’t match the script Solarians typically use,” Gomez offered, “at least none that I’ve seen.”
Kathryn thought the writing looked sharp, aggressive. Just like the sharpness of the giant pylons on the surface, the warning signs were beginning to mount, still she pressed on.
They continued to explore the dark, eerily silent room, their beams came across a corridor that extended into the blackness beyond. They slowly, nervously made their way down the tall, but rather narrow corridor, Broadhurst and Kalschacht began to speculate amongst themselves.
“This place is getting weirder by the second,” Kalchacht said.
“You’re telling me.”
“Let’s look at the facts, the structure we’ve seen so far and the writing rules out Solarian architecture. The laser etching is so fine it rules out Krenarans, plus we don’t have any evidence they use lasers in anything anyway, so who the heck built this place?”
“That’s just one more piece of this puzzle, perhaps it is an entirely new species, one we’ve never encountered before.”
“That’s the only conclusion I can come to right now as well.”
Gomez cut in, “and look at the writing, the structure, it’s so sharp, so angular, almost blade-like, could this be an aggressive species?”
That is just what worries me, Kathryn thought as she overheard the three men’s conversation.
“ Who knows? Who knows if they are even alive or dead? If they are alive, it seems a terrible waste to build a structure of this scale, and then just abandon it.”
Kathryn continued listening into the conversation with interest, this facility, the events surroundings it were creepy, there’s no doubt of that. Nevertheless, they were also intriguing, here was a three hundred year old mystery to be solved, and she was determined to solve it.
She checked the status panel on her suit, realising she hadn’t done so for quite some time now. She had plenty of air left, the display also registered that it was an oxygen environment, albeit rather stale. Gingerly she pressed a control on the display to activate her re-breathers. Acting like tiny vacuum pumps sucking in the surrounding oxygen as she walked, filters inside her suit screened out any harmful microbes and purified the air, making it breathable again. It was akin to the smell of a slightly polluted city. The re-breathers came in handy from time to time as it allowed her to switch off her air tanks, only using them when she absolutely needed them, thus extending her mission.
In theory at least, the re-breathers allowed her to work indefinitely within a suitable nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. In practice however, filters got clogged up, and equipment failures meant otherwise.
She also checked over the temperature on the display, it was showing thirty one degrees, the temperature had gone up four degrees since she last checked it on the surface. She thought it might go up by the occasional degree or two, but not by four, that was odd in itself.
“ Let’s see if we can find some sort of power source, or command facility for this place,” she said into her helmet mic.
“Kathryn’s right, the sooner we get the lights on, the less creepy this place will look,” Broadhurst replied.
The gathering of troops and scientists began to venture down this long dark corridor, the torchlight cast shadows off the exposed supports that ran down its length in even sections, even these looked sharp. Like metallic fins, ready to slice open the unwary, they ran down the entire corridors length.
Their torchlight illuminated what appeared to be a doorway, there was more of the alien writing around it. The door itself however, did not open. Instead, two of the burly Sicarian guards stepped forward, and with an almighty heave, managed to open the door just slightly. The door itself, was again unlike anything the E.D. F had known, it opened diagonally. After another great heave, it was open sufficiently for people to step through.
What they witnessed horrified and intrigued them in equal measure, casting their torches around the long, wide room, there were dozens of cylindrical tanks all arrayed in organized rows and filled with a clear liquid. Inside these tanks were the rotting corpses of long dead aliens, shadows played across their grisly forms, making it look like they still moved. Several times Kathryn found herself involuntarily flinching as she looked over the grisly menagerie.
There was a spider-like alien in one, in another a millipede looking creature, six feet long, with hundreds of hook shaped legs and possessing of five yellow, unblinking eyes. Kathryn shuddered as the team passed by the grotesque assortment.
They came to a final pair of tanks, the team immediately recognised the occupants; they contained the half-decayed bodies of Solarians.
“ Why are Solarians here?” Kathryn whispered nervously into her helmet mic.
“I’m not sure, they could have been captured and brought here.” Kalschacht replied.
“Not an end I would like,” Pryor said solemnly as he looked up at the half rotted carcasses.
“The Krenaran’s took prisoners all the time, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that other races do so as well.” Gomez pointed out.
Kathryn circled the containers, looking closer, “look at the scarring on the bodies, the open wounds, the lacerations, this was done while they were alive, like they were tortured. Except the cuts are so clean, so fine; a great deal of care was taken to cause maximum pain to the victims.”
“Some of them have had organs removed,” Mira said as she studied the spider-like alien, her torch revealed a perfectly cut circular hole in its back.
“This place is beginning to creep me out,” Broadhurst said. “If you guys need me, I’ll be outside.” The sight of the half-rotted bodies had made him sick to his stomach. As he turned to leave something flopped into his face, panic shot through him, his pulse raced “get it off me! Get it off me!” He screamed out in terror.