2 Hours Later. 15:35 Apus Minor, Beta Site
John stood up in the transport as it was finishing touching down on the makeshift landing pad. He reached back and gently detached his battle rifle from his suit’s back. There was just enough dexterity available to him in the hulking suit to retrieve the rifle somewhat smoothly.
Numerous messages were exchanged regarding that silly problem. Most of the users never bothered stowing the battle rifle on their backs. The military’s response was to give its troops large slings. While effective, John didn’t like the idea of a large chunk of rope or leather hanging off his suit waiting to get snagged on something. John snapped back into focus as he heard one of the scientists shout from behind him.
“There’s nothing here to fight Lieutenant,” Dr. Jennings shouted.
John grinned inside his helmet, “Bart, can you copy my location?”
Bart responded quickly in their private channel, “That’s a hard copy. We’ll have the cavalry ready for extraction if something goes sideways.”
“Good man,” John responded to Bart before closing that line as he turned back to look at the scientist, “I prefer to be ready for war at all times.”
Lina walked past Kenneth, “Not every place is hostile. We’ve never seen any of the local predators anywhere near this site.”
“It’s presumed the Predecessor buildings give off an ill-omen the beasts can sense,” Gavin said confidently as he walked down the ramp.
Following Gavin were five newcomers. Well, newcomers to the scientists that is. It was clear as day who they were to John. Their mannerisms and speech were much more brutish and less refined than the scientists. Put simply they didn’t belong there, though ironically, they fit right in with John.
And like John, they exited the ramp with weapons drawn. Whether or not they were taking cues from John or if they were as distrustful of their situation mattered little. It was one more bit of evidence that proved they weren’t with the core group.
Dr. Hamelin then began walking down the ramp while looking at a data slate, “Lieutenant, the other structure is a ten-minute walk into the cave at the base of the mountain over there, followed by a descent into the mountain that will take longer.”
“Then let’s get to it,” John turned and began walking.
Mateo chuckled as he slapped Dr. Hamlin’s back lightly, “It seems like the man has no patience. But the sooner we get there sooner y’all can do what you do.”
“Let’s follow the brutish oaf,” Lina said quietly to the group.
John began walking towards the large cave opening at a steady pace. Just before he entered it, he looked up as the shade enveloped his form. He cocked his head a bit to see a few blue skies. Would he see that again? Could his demise occur deep under the earth? Those grim questions lingered in his mind. Try as he might, he couldn’t shake them fully from his subconscious.
Just twenty paces into the crag John locked his battle rifle to his back. This was in part because the close quarters would make using it difficult, and also because he didn’t feel like making everyone deaf when he fired it. His next action took those near him off-guard. The oversized bowie knife was quickly drawn and held at the ready. John’s left arm shot up and held his hand in a fist.
“Lieutenant, what…” Mateo said before he was interrupted.
“Shut up and be quiet,” John hissed.
John’s suit could easily amplify the ambient noises in the cave. Heavy breathing was clearly heard. He also swore he heard what were claws or talons scrapping against the rock floors. Then a chattering beak sound could be heard.
“Fucking hell,” John tensed up.
His caution was not heeded by one of the presumed pirate guards. One of them slipped by John and walked forward. Towards the sound of an annoyed beast of unknown size and shape. John was about to say something. But then it happened. Time froze for John in that instant.
A large animal covered in matted grey fur leaped out at the man in front of John. It stood on its hind legs, reaching eight feet tall, and roared at the intruders. Whatever the animal was, it was muscular. The lights from the scientists were pointing in every which direction, which made identifying fine details difficult.
Whatever it was it was incredibly pissed off at the intruders. This displeasure was shown by a one-two combination of a claw slash across the main’s chest. While that attack alone was likely deadly, the follow-up left the man gasping for breath and bleeding profusely. A beak bit down hard on the man’s shoulder and sliced right through bone and muscle like a hot knife through butter.
John dashed forward, knife in hand. The animal roared in defiance and lunged at John. His left hand caught the angry animal’s paw. The animal reached out with its other arm, but John was ready for it. His right hand shot out and then down, cleanly bisecting the arm through muscle and bone.
The animal recoiled in pain, but John squeezed his left hand and pulled the animal back towards him. Were he in a smaller variant of power armor, it would be unlikely he could have kept the animal in place. But within the Broadside, he was able to overpower the animal.
And then he ended the fight just as quickly as it started with one more slash of his blade. The animal’s head was sliced clean off. Its head flew over his shoulders and landed at the feet of several scientists crying and shouting frantically behind him. The animal’s body fell forward and brushed off of John’s pauldron, arterial spray painted his brutish power armor a dark ochre.
Lights flashed every which way but eventually, they focused on John’s chest plate. He turned to face the scientists; his eye lens glowed an ominous dark red. Then he took several menacing steps toward the scientists. He leered at Dr. Jennings as he looked down at the diminutive man.
“Local fauna doesn’t come here much? That is precisely why I came here with this gear,” John all but hissed the last words, “Now what in the fuck was it that I just killed?”
Two of the suspected pirate guards ran past him to their fallen comrade. He was still alive, but only just. The sad truth was that there was nothing anyone there could do. They began trying to help their compatriot in vain.
John flicked the knife violently before rubbing it on Kenneth’s coat and sheathing it. He turned to look at the pirates rendering aid to the fallen one. He pulled his pistol from its holster, turned, and walked over to the men. John waited a moment before he spoke.
“Stand aside.”
The pirates did so out of surprise. Just when they realized what John was holding, a single gunshot rang out in the cave. The two guards behind him and the two on either side of the now, very dead, pirate drew their weapons on John.
“The fuck you do that for?” shouted one from behind.
“MURDERER!” another said.
With his left-hand John slowly, and not subtly at all, deactivated the magnetic lock and flicked off its safety with his thumb. The pistol pointed at one of the men to his front, but as he rotated slowly, he was now able to point the submachine gun at one of the other guards.
“Flinch and I will kill you,” John hissed, “Your idiot compatriot rushed ahead to his death. I did the merciful thing and ended his suffering.”
“He could have…”
“Died more slowly and painfully the more you tried to save him. Look at those claw marks,” John’s tone shifted, “LOOK AT THEM. They shredded his ribcage. That monster took out a foot-wide bite from his shoulder. How many arteries did that sever? Where’s the nearest medical doctor and surgeon? His arm is being held on by damaged tissue.”
John sighed before reupholstering his pistol and attaching the submachine gun to its magnetic mount. The weapons the guards had were no more deadly to John than a squirt gun was. Their empty posturing was understandable, but unnecessary. Besides, he didn’t need to kill anyone else at the moment.
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“My word,” Dr. Hamelin said as his hands shook a data slate violently, “What on earth was that?”
John squatted down and picked up the animal’s dead head. He looked at it closely. Then he activated all of his forward-facing lights. Surely the features he saw on the animal’s head were wrong. Well, wrong by Earth standards, they weren’t exactly on their homeworld.
“Nope. I did see that correctly,” John sighed loudly as he stood up, “Please tell me this isn’t named the way I think it is?”
Lina said plainly, “It is an owlbear.”
“Cool, magical monsters are real,” John walked over to the body of the beast and shoved it aside with relative ease, “Come on, let’s keep going.”
“We’re leaving?” one of the guards said still huddled over the body of their fallen.
“Nothing we can do for him at the moment. On our way out y’all can take him out and bury him or whatever,” John said before continuing deeper into the cave.
The scientists shone their lights on the cave floor. They tried to avoid as much blood as possible. But given the bloody fight and size of the animal in question, that was an impossible task. Red blood was stepped in by everyone. No one looked as bloody as John due to the care taken in avoiding it as much as they could.
Ten more minutes of walking deeper and deeper into the cave got them closer to their location. John’s suit of armor unceremoniously scrapped against the rock walls in several positions. A fast egress out of there was a virtual impossibility. John carefully mapped all of the danger points along the way. If he did need to get out of there in a hurry he’d at least know where and when he needed to perform my delicate maneuvers.
The cave then opened up into a large room. A crevasse several hundred feet deep was off to John’s right. Looking down at it allowed him to see an exterior wall of the Predecessor structure. They were nearing their target.
He paused for a moment to take in the scene in front of him. Tiny beams of light shone through fissures in the mountain above them from high above. They reflected off a holding pond, due to the recent drought being only partially full, onto the sheer face of the far wall. The metallic minerals in the wall reflected a little bit of light in every direction.
“You can see the Predecessor wall down there,” Dr. Hamelin said as he stood beside John, “Though you likely already noticed.”
John nodded, “Do you believe this facility was above ground at one point? Or did they build it into this mountain?”
Dr. Jennings then answered as he caught up with them, “We haven’t been able to successfully carbon date the structure. If it was built within the last fifty thousand years, then it was built underground. Older than that then plate tectonics have dragged the structure deep into the crust.”
“Fascinating, though not at all reassuring,” John said cryptically.
“The scanner is now far from here,” Dr. Hamelin said eager with anticipation, “We shouldn’t dilly-dally.”
John looked back up at the beams of light. They were a beautiful thing to look at. Was he getting sentimental? Possibly, but equally possible was a simple fact that it may be the last time he would see that. He found it curious that he found himself feeling desperate for a great many things. John closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Once more unto the breach,” John said under his breath before turning and continuing the descent into the mountain.
From that point going forward they were able to see more of the alien structure. It was impossible for John to tell how old it was, but he recalled reading a fair bit about plate tectonics and how different types of rock are created. The cave system looked positively ancient, far older than a mere fifty thousand years.
It was surprising how it was still standing. The aliens had made something so strong that it forcefully resisted the planet’s best attempts at destroying their great work. It would take millions of years for subsidence for the planet to properly claim the alien structure, but even now it resisted being destroyed.
John laughed to himself at the thought that a group of hairless apes from some random ass backwater planet would likely finish the job long before the plant could. Humans were great at a number of things. They were amazing builders, but they had to be for they were equally adept at destroying things. He couldn’t fault the scientists for their curiosity, he got that, he would fault them for their haphazard process of mitigating risk.
The process of getting to the primary site’s scanner was frustratingly slow. But fifteen minutes later they arrived. John presumed it’d take him under twenty minutes to get back to the surface if he were unencumbered. Surprisingly his communication channel back to the base remained on and working. But the familiar sound of static began to intrude upon that channel.
“Here we are,” Dr. Hamelin said, “We are frankly not sure if this is a primary entrance or not.”
John looked up and saw the massive door. It was at least forty feet tall and nearly twenty feet wide. It was hard to not be impressed by it. The two doors seemed to be perfectly sealed against one another. The doors were different from the walls though, there were no gouges of any kind within them. Whereas the walls of the structure clearly showed pitting.
“Interesting, have you asked why the doors aren’t damaged in any way?” John said as he zoomed his view screen onto the perfectly smooth doors.”
“We suspect it’s a different material, or that it’s been denser through an unknown to us process,” Lina said.
“Dr. Hamelin, we are detecting similar energy readings as the previous teams that have gotten this far,” Kenneth said, “Now’s as good as time as any for the Lieutenant to try and open them.”
John turned around to face the scientist, “You know if this shit goes sideways, we’re all dead right? Like full-on super dead.”
“Getting cold feet?” Dr. Hamelin began egging John on in a taunting manner, “I thought all of you military types were all bravado all the time.”
“Oh, I have bravado in spades Doctor,” John said sarcastically, “I also have my own self-preservation instinct and it is screaming at me to say, ‘fuck it’ to this nonsense.”
“It’s far from nonsense…” Kenneth insisted before a hand gesture from Dr. Hamelin silenced him.
“By overzealous compatriot is right though. This is a monumentally important mission. It solves the question of 'Are we alone?'”
John shook his head, “That question was answered two centuries ago when we saw fauna on another plant.”
“Intelligent life Lieutenant, that has always been the most important question. Are we alone in the universe? That is finally answered with this.”
John turned and stepped towards the scanner, “We’ve always known that intelligent life existed before. Y’all aren’t the first to find these ruins, nor will you be the first to enter. It’s doubtful that any intelligent life exists besides us.”
“The difference with those before is that they didn’t have you,” Lina said, “You are the key to us gaining so much knowledge.”
“I find such optimistic outcomes dubious at best,” John looked around and took in the view, “All we’ll find inside this structure is dust and echoes of the distant past. And that’s if we’re lucky.”
“Such a find would be most exciting,” Gavin said, “Hurry now, activate the scanner.”
John made a face as he squinted at the newcomer. He knew exactly how much pressure was necessary to crush the man’s skull. Or effectively punch the man’s head off his shoulders. John turned around and walked down the final incline before a leveled-off platform. Halfway onto the platform John knelt down and looked at his surroundings more closely.
His eyes had played a trick on him. While he swore there was a gap at the bottom of the door the sheer darkness of the material toyed with the light that emanated from the scientists and John’s suit. He stepped toward the door.
When he was two paces away the scanner activated. A skull-piercing sound rang out. John went down to his knees immediately in pain. He looked around and quickly determined that it was not a sound, but psychically based because it only affected three people at the party. Two scientists were knocked and crumbled to the ground.
“Eve, activate…” John said between pained breaths, “That… fucking… amplifier.”
John let out a scream of pain. So silent had he taken and absorbed pain in the past. But he was howling in pain like a pathetic little child.
One of his hands was grasping his helmet. It was no sound, it was a psychic signal. A damned powerful one too. It felt like someone was scraping the back of his eyeballs with a rusty fork, then stabbing his frontal cortex.
John’s only goal was to nullify the signal. But that looked somewhat hopeless because he was on the verge of being knocked out himself. He had never felt such suffocating power before in his life. And this was coming from a scanner presumably connected to a door.
The psychic amplifier finished its booting process and roared to life in the nick of time. That familiar, and very awkward, anti-psychic energy began to build up around him. At that precise moment, he felt the pain subside slightly.
Not enough though, so overwhelmingly powerful was this signal that he could steel feel a sharp pain in his mind. Try as he might, John couldn’t build up and attach strong enough to reach the device. Too much of his suit's abilities were being used to dampen the scanning device’s effects on him.
“Maximum power, open the third channel temporarily,” John said as he tried to draw more and more power from deep within him.
John took a deep breath and looked within. Every ounce of power he could muster was being channeled. There would only be time, and energy, for a single attack. The amplifier was doing its job magnificently, he had never channeled this much psychic, or anti-psychic energy before.
His arm shot up and aligned with the device. He directed a wave of anti-psychic energy at the scanning device. Reality looked as if it were distorting around a dark black orb. But as soon as the attack was fired it disappeared.
But thankfully, the painful feeling ended as suddenly as it began.
As John was righting himself, the scientists looked around. It was obvious something had occurred, but it only affected two of their own. John was also clearly affected, but unlike their peers, he had done something.
“What happened?” Dr. Hamelin asked curiously as he walked closer to John.
“Psychic scan. A bloody powerful one,” John said plainly.
“Psychic scan? It’s not possible to…”
John chuckled, “It seems the Predecessors’ machines had psychic abilities. If I’m allowed to make an assumption about them that scanner seems to suggest they were a highly psychic race.”
“Fascinating,” Kenneth said, “The scanners have never detected a psychic wake like that before. My computer has estimated that burst had a similar amount of psychic energy as thirty grade 5A telepaths.”
John shook his head. The cameras inside his helmet confirmed he wasn’t bleeding. He turned around to look at Kenneth.
“There aren’t enough omega-grade telepaths in human history to match that output,” John sighed, “Trust me. That was no joke.”
“What did you do?” Lina said, “Their seizures stopped when you outstretched your arm.”
“That’s classified…”
John was going to add more to his statement, but the scanner was activated once again. This time it activated in a similar manner to the smaller site. The doors then looked as if they were going to be pushed outward. When the great doors had been pushed six feet out towards the scientists, they began to open inwards.
John walked slowly over to the center of the platform. He was the closest to the doors and was the first to peer inside. The first living being to see inside this location in countless millennia. John could hardly believe what his eyes were seeing within.
“Holy fucking shit…” John then stood in stunned silence.