“You’re too excited, egghead,” she said to him.
“We’ve been through this,” he said back.
She tapped on his oxygen tanks, directing his attention to the fact that they weren’t properly connected to his helmet. “Don’t get yourself killed before we get the chance to leave the transport.”
She saw him flush through the visor of his helmet as he began to rectify the problem. A quick double-check of everyone’s equipment followed before the transport’s doors opened. Its shields were left active to keep the hostile environment out. The shields were programmed to iris slightly and allow them to step past it, then instantly seal up to prevent loss of atmosphere.
The shields onboard the Carl Sagan and other ships had the power to work the same way. If weapons needed to be fired with the shields active, they would open just enough to let projectiles through then quickly close. Transports and probes got a similar treatment as they were launched from the docking bay.
Chevallier felt the ice beneath her feet crunch as they stepped onto the unexplored frozen planet. She looked up and saw the faint white light of Sirius B radiate down from the clouds and light from Sirius A which appeared as a slightly smaller bright blue and white object in the skies opposite of the white dwarf. Hills made up of glaciers littered the land, frozen shores that were once beaches became eternally crystallized when the planet began to freeze over. A layer of white mist hovered around the snow and ice cover pillars that encircled the alien-made buildings up ahead.
“Well, where to first?” McDowell asked.
Pierce began to walk ahead and scanned the ice around them with his EAD and said. “Well lets—”
“I was asking the captain, egghead.”
“Let’s check out the fort thingy up ahead,” Foster said pointing at the alien structure in the distance. “We got probes bringing back data on the ice anyways.”
The five moved away from their transport and trekked across the snow and ice, generating a symphony of crunching footsteps as they neared the alien buildings. Foster and Pierce armed with their EADs took readings on every icy rock they came across. McDowell, Chevallier, and Kingston kept their rifles clasped in their hands, ready for the unexpected to leap out at them without notice.
At the front of the alien building they found a staircase that rose toward its front entrance. It was covered in ice, almost as if water had been escaping from it during the big freeze. Pierce and Foster took more readings with their EAD and sent the data back to the Carl Sagan and EVE for further analysis. A group of frozen trees next to what appeared to have once been a garden caught Pierce’s attention.
“How is this possible?” Pierce said, checking the readings of the frozen trees.
Chevallier approached him and looked at the frozen garden up and down. “Well last time I checked when things get extremely cold, stuff like trees snap-freeze.”
“These plants and trees shouldn’t exist,” Pierce said. “Not enough time passed by on this world for them to evolve.”
“Maybe someone planted them?” Foster said.
“Perhaps,” Pierce said and pointed at a small forest off in the distance. “That’s a lot of tree planting, though.”
Everyone’s eyes shifted toward the open entrance of the structure, a place where none of the sensor scans could see, a place where none of the probes went. What awaited them there was a mystery no one from Earth, the empire, or union knew. McDowell, Chevallier, and Kingston were the first to take on the challenge of climbing up the slippery and frozen steps. Well it wasn’t much of a challenge for them as their combat armor was designed to work in all environments. The EVA suits the captain and science officer wore? Not so much. The two struggled for a bit, slipping a few times which generated laughs from the three triumphant Hammerhead members. Eventually they made it up and everyone entered inside the pitch-black chamber of the building.
Helmet lights flickered on and illuminated the hallways before them, while the light from holograms of Foster and Pierce’s EAD glowed and continued to reveal their findings. The walls, ceiling, and floors where made of some sort of metal alloy. Statues were displayed along the walls, they looked like serpents, perhaps lizards? It was hard for Chevallier to tell, as many of them were damaged, while others were encased in ice that had spread from the ceilings.
“For sure this is alien,” Pierce said as they ventured deeper in.
McDowell chuckled. “Ya think?”
“I mean the design of this place. It’s not Radiance or Hashmedai in design according to our knowledge of their species.”
“An ancient building perhaps?” Foster suggested. “Both the empire and union had been traveling in space for centuries, the Linl too before they joined the union.”
Pierce tapped one of the commands on his EAD and spoke into it. “EVE, is there anything in Radiance’s database that matches the layout and composition of this fortress?”
A miniature version of EVE’s hologram appeared and hovered above Pierce’s EAD. “Accessing database, please standby,” EVE said. “Negative, Dr. Pierce, ancient structures built by the Hashmedai and Radiance races are different to what you have discovered. Furthermore, it is unlikely this structure is related to the Lyonria.”
Chevallier cocked her eyebrow. “The what?”
“Lyonria, an extinct ancient civilization,” Pierce said.
“Never heard of them,” Foster chimed in.
“It’s something Radiance never really spoke a lot of,” Pierce said. “They discovered several of their ruins throughout the galaxy. It should all be included in the Radiance database if you want to brush up on it.”
EVE’s projection began to speak. “Please keep in mind, Radiance at the time of our departure from Earth knew only fragments about the Lyonria. This could be an early construct of theirs, or perhaps a later one that was not documented by Radiance scholars.”
“Meaning?” McDowell grunted.
“We either found a new type of Lyonria ruin,” Pierce said. “Or we found a totally new race.”
They stopped as they entered a large central chamber. Motion detectors, or something similar, detected their presence as they entered. Lights, bright lights, powered on and revealed what was before them. They had arrived inside a circular room. There were three ring-shaped platforms, one on the outer edge, one in the middle, and a smaller one in the center, and a deep, seemingly bottomless pit below. Oval shaped objects were along the walls while an object that resembled a holding device rested on the middle ring.
“OK,” Chevallier said looking around. “This is cool.”
A bridge appeared as they approached the ledge, it stretched out and connected with the remaining ring-shaped platforms. They casually walked across the bridge, looking around for any danger, and taking scans of the apparatus around them, and the central ring with the strange-looking storage container. Pierce performed lengthy scans of it and carefully reviewed the data that populated his holographic screen.
“There’s your psionic,” he said. “There’s someone inside, possibly a person, and there’s psionic energy bleeding away from it.” He took another look at his readings. “Actually, there’s a lot of psionic energy here.”
“A tomb perhaps?” Foster said as she stepped closer to it.
Perhaps too close.
The containment device activated and began to emit waves of blue energy that rippled through the chamber. Survival instincts kicked in and three rifles rose up expecting danger. No such danger was detected, at least not through Chevallier’s targeting scanner.