Eye of the Dracos ec-3 Page 2

  “Sure thing,” the soldier unclipped a small torch from an accessory rail under the barrel of his pulse rifle, passing it to her carefully.

  She switched it on and shone it down into the darkness, the beam could not illuminate the bottom, just a constant swirling mist. However, it did show that the sides of the giant hole were filled with small but lethally sharp concentric rings that ran as far down as she could see. Jesus, anyone falling into this would become swiss cheese, real quick, she thought, as she looked into the endless pit.

  Footsteps were approaching from behind, she spun around startled, lost her footing and began to fall backwards into the aperture. She screamed, flailing wildly, panic flooded through her. She felt a steely grip clamp onto her wrist, pulling her steady again. The torch, flung from her outstretched hands, disappeared into the gloom without so much as a clatter.

  “Godamnit Kalschacht, don’t sneak up on me like that!”

  “Err, sorry. Hey we found the entrance,” he replied with an excited nod.

  “Excellent!” Kathryn replied, excitement grew within her. Now she was going to have a good look into this place, and followed the German scientist to a relatively small hatch, sunk gently into the smooth surface.

  “There’s no keypad, or discernable means of entry,” Romaine said.

  “We’ll have to find some way to prise it open,” Kalschacht replied.

  “Are you kidding me, those hatch doors must weigh a couple of tonne apiece.” Pryor argued.

  “We have a set of pneumatic pryzors in the shuttle. In the emergency kit, used for forcing an exit in an emergency, can’t we use those?” Kathryn said, turning to Kalschacht.

  The German nodded an affirmative. “It’ll be close to their limit, but they should be okay.”

  “Okay you and Pryor go get them, take a couple of guards with you in case you need help, we’ll be waiting here.”

  “Understood,” Kalschacht replied as the two scientists made their way back to the shuttle, waving to a couple of bored looking guards to accompany them on route.

  “So what do you think so far?” Mira asked, as the two women stood over the dull metallic hatch.

  “We are either looking at the greatest scientific discovery since the formation of the E.D. F, or the greatest threat since the Krenaran invasion, I’m not sure which yet.”

  “It certainly is mysterious, strange metals impervious to scans, who knows what we’ll find down there.”

  Broadhurst cut in, “the whole place gives me the creeps, I can’t help thinking that maybe we are disturbing something that wasn’t meant to be disturbed.”

  “Me too,” Gomez added.

  “Will you two stop. We’re scientists, where’s your sense of adventure, figuring out things like this is what we do,” Kathryn chided them both in mock anger.

  “Well, you’re the project leader,” the two of them nodded.

  At length Kalschacht, Pryor, and the two guards returned, hefting the heavy looking pryzors, they looked like long thin cylinders with a powerful magnetic clamp at either end. In the centre was a bulky panel containing a pneumatic pump, and a laser energy pod, that powered the thing.

  The four men gradually lowered the heavy piece of equipment onto the hatch surface, with a ‘thud’ the magnets gripped the hatch.

  Kalchacht and Pryor both looked at one another. With a silent nod, they each flicked a switch at precisely the same time on their respective ends. This activated the attached laser pod, which in turn powered the pneumatics that slowly, but with tremendous force pushed the telescopic bars inside away from one another, thereby gradually opening the hatch.

  A loud scream of tortured metal greeted them, followed by a grinding noise, as the hatch doors, not opened for three centuries slowly parted. Allowing the assembled scientists their first glimpse of, and access to, the mysteries contained within.

  The group shone their torches down what appeared to be an immensely deep shaft. There was a set of metal rungs forming a ladder etched into the sides of this tunnel, their torches however could still not illuminate the bottom.

  Kathryn looked down with a sense of nervous trepidation, more to do with the fear of the unknown than of anything else. However, she knew she could not stay up here with the howling gales that threatened to blow them all down this great shaft anyway, so she elected to make her way down into the dark gloom, one rung at a time.

  The other scientists gradually followed her, beams from torch lights cast eerie shadows as the team descended into the gloom.

  “Hey Kathryn, I wonder if we’ll find the facilities inhabitants when we get down there?” Gomez said into his helmet mic.

  “What like some subterranean city?” Pryor cut in.

  “Who knows?”

  Kathryn was silent, she was trying hard to contain her breathing, although all she could hear were her own shallow, nervous breaths. She did not like this, descending into the darkness; her nerves steadily increased.

  The wind from the open hatch howled above. Filling the empty chamber with a strange dull whine, it resembled that of a wild animal in pain. The further they descended the fainter the whine became.

  Kathryn’s arms began to ache from the descent, and she looked back up the shaft, she could just about make out the other puffing forms of the scientists all slowly following her, as well as the soldier escorts. Although she could now no longer see the hatch above them, she was enveloped in the darkness, and this added to her nerves. Jesus, she thought, this must run hundreds of feet down, it was almost like being entombed.

  She swallowed her nerves again, and resolved to continue down the immense dark shaft.

  “Jeez, how far down does this thing go?” Pryor asked, as though reading her thoughts.

  “No idea, but we just have to keep going until we reach the bottom.”

  “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 wou
ld 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.

  The guards hearing the commotion whirled, and immediately readied their weapons. Panic spread through the nearby members of the science team too, they all spun around, to see Broadhurst fighting with a dead alien arm.

  The team all looked up to see what the arm was connected to, their flashlights revealed the bodies of more dead aliens. Their rotten stomachs and chests sliced neatly open, entrails and viscera hung in grisly dried clumps, unseeing eyes stared down blankly at them. Yet more horrific body parts adorned work benches, where experiments must have been conducted upon them, although now these body parts were little more than withered husks, long since dried out, just like the bodies suspended above them.

  The air stank, the reek of death and decay was everywhere, aged blood had gathered in dried up pools that gave off a sickening crunch when one of the scientists accidentally stepped upon it.

  The scientists, terrified and disgusted at the horrific display hurried out of the room, and regrouped in the corridor outside. The Sicarian guards, used to seeing maimed bodies on the horrendous battlefields during the Krenaran war, casually regrouped with the panting, nervous, sweating scientists.

  “That was not a laboratory, that was a slaughterhouse,” Kathryn said, trying to get her breath back in an effort to calm her jangled nerves. Her heart pounded in her chest, she could hear the others breathing through their helmet mics.

  “The sooner we get these lights on the better,” Kalschacht said breathily.

  The team continued onward, past two other doors, which also contained grisly mockeries of laboratories, what appeared to be a toilet facility, and a storeroom, before hitting a dead end.

  Inside the storeroom however, they had discovered some intriguing clues as to what might have built this structure in the first place. They found a rack of black bodysuits, all of which were designed for a being of similar size to a man, yet much taller. Kathryn considered that the wearers must be around seven feet tall, which is very similar to the height of a Solarian.

  They also found a myriad of different bladed weapons, curved blades, serr
ated blades, blades sharpened so fine, that their edges were almost microscopic. The evidence was mounting Kathryn thought, whoever these people were, they were an incredibly aggressive race who seemed to take great care in torturing their victims. Dare she think it; are these perhaps even more aggressive than the Krenarans were? The thought made her shudder noticeably.

  After a walk of about an hour, they had made it back to the elevator shaft.

  Captain Johnatan Akimbe was pacing the bridge of the Copernicus uneasily, as the small survey ship orbited the planet far above the science team. The sophisticated sensor suites onboard had been tracking the landing party for almost half an hour, the conditions down there weren’t ideal, winds had picked up on the surface, and his sensors were showing a storm surge coming in from the north east that looked pretty nasty. On top of this, they had lost contact with the landing party once they had begun to descend into that alien facility, due to the effects of the strange metal the whole thing was constructed from. That was almost two hours ago, he had no idea if his people were alive or dead, all he could do was wait for an update.

  “Anything yet?” He asked Ensign Strandzhar, the relief geologist onboard.

  “Nothing,” he repeated for the umpteenth time.

  Sensor images from the surface were showing that the shuttle was still intact, there was no signs of a fight, nor any movement down there. Therefore, Akimbe reluctantly had no choice but to wait.

  He relaxed into his old, worn leather captain’s chair. Secretly he wondered why E.O.C. A had any business wanting to colonise a world as inhospitable as Auriga III, it didn’t even have a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. Yet the powers that be labelled it as one of their top priorities. He wondered whether they knew something he didn’t about this world. The Auriga system itself was close to the south eastern tip of Solarian territory, and with the discovery of these new structures, no doubt scientists from the research division would be clamouring all over the place like a flock of wild geese in the years to come. The thought amused Akimbe, and he smiled gently to himself.