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Chapter One: Dust and Echoes
Posted By: Smackblasta<Natemeep@aol.com>
Date: 13 January 2006, 4:53 am
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"Set off the charges!"
Jepli cringed behind his plasma barrier as three deafening explosion shook the ground in front of him. Clouds of dust accompanied chunks of rock as they flew twenty d-units into the air, and Jepli opened his eyes just in time to see the shield flare as one rather large specimen landed right on top of it. Despite his training, he couldn't help but yelp in alarm, cover his head, and hope that the shield held.
A moment later, the ground stopped shaking, and the sangheili in charge of the operation called out orders. Jepli uncurled from the ground, shook his head to stop the ringing, adjusted his rebreather mask, and hopped out from under cover. He waddled over to meet up with his team, helping the other two unggoy struggle with a large container of explosives.
Half a Tg-unit later, the three unggoy were looking down the hole in the ground, a dozen units wide and twice as deep, made by the several sets of charges they had placed previously. As they peered over the edge, a pair of sangheili arrived and started rappelling down the side of the hole.
One of the other unggoy, stepping back from the hole, looked to Jepli. "Think they'll find anything down there?"
"Nope. Scans showed solid ground for a whole tD-unit," said Jepli, as he fiddled with the container's seals, "so help me get this crate open, we need to start fitting the descent rigs onto these charges. The placement team will need them in within a Tg."
Arne' Thasunee landed lightly on his feet, surveying the cavern the previous blast of charges had uncovered. The beam of illumination from his flashlight pierced through the stale, dusty air, showing a worn ovalish chamber, fifty units wide at it's longest point. His team partner, Arla' Selethas, set down next to him, apprehensively looking at the cracks in the ceiling. Her normally soprano voice was tinged low with worry and muffled by her respirator. "Maybe we should have used smaller charges on that last one."
"We didn't even know this was here, Arla. Ground scans didn't show empty space for another thousand D-units." Stepping forward toward the far end of the chamber, Arne' shined his flashlight on the walls and ceiling. Something about the walls bothered him. In fact, something about the entire chamber bothered him. "Hold on a unit. This cavern... the walls are too regular." He changed course and quickly made for the end of the chamber. "The stone is worked. Something made this chamber, Arla'!"
Whipping back around, Arne' fairly ran back to her, grabbing the petite sangheili by the shoulders and picking her up off the ground in his excitement. "We've found it! Three years of jaunting between star systems, and we've finally found it!"
He set her down and stepped back, taking a breath from his respirator to calm himself, and walked to the far end of the chamber, motioning her to follow. He swiped his hand across the wall, several millenium worth of dust and dirt coming off at his touch. The surface underneath reflected the light of Arla's flashlight, and she stopped in her tracks, amazed.
"Proof, Arla'. Proof that the Dead Zone was populated before the Cataclysm." The surface underneath the grime was metallic, and set into that metal wall was a door.
After a Tg-unit of explaining what they had found through their comms and telling the unggoys on demolitions to put the explosives on standby, Arne' and Arla' started documenting the site, which had immediately been designated as Dig-1-1.
Arla' looked up as she sampled the wall, the chemical sampler in her hand vibrating slightly as it examined the wall's composition. Arne' was busy measuring the chamber's dimensions with a laser-scanner. "Odd that we found this on the first try for this planet," she said, "don't you think?"
Arne' clicked off the scanner, typing the results onto his wristpad. "Fourty-eight D-units wide at its longest point, thirty for its width, the east end is sealed off by an old lava flow... and to be frank, I had a feeling about this one."
"You had a feeling about the last two as well, and they turned out to be busts," She retorted, glancing down at the composition display, and read out, "The walls read out as sandstone, but the scans show metallic reinforcement a foot or so inside. This chamber was built to last, it wasn't just luck that kept it from collapsing after the blasts." She held the display out to him, and he busied himself typing in those results into his report.
"Interesting... and no, this time was different. The last two I was hopeful, I'll admit it, but here I just... knew we had to be here. Felt it in my gut."
The two locked gazes for a moment, then both looked toward the unopened door at the far end of the room. Without exchanging a word, they packed up their gear and trotted over to the metal wall. Arla' sampled the wall's material, while Arne' took a quick moment to examing the way the wall was set.
"High-grade aluminum for the first... tenth of a tD... really just a skin over a hardened carbon-based plastic shell. The plastic isn't much more than a tD thick on it's own, too.... ready to open it when you are." She stepped back from the wall, looking up at him. He stepped forward, examining the door. The manual latch was set less than two D-units off the ground, hardly coming to even Arla's waist. He leaned down, fumbled with the latch, and pulled, but the door stayed stubbornly shut. He pulled harder, and slowly forced the door open, long-disused hinges squealing in protest.
Stale gas rushed out of the open door, causing both of them to take cautious steps back. Arla' held up her sampler, analyzing the gases as they poured out. "Mostly nitrogen, methane, assorted hydrocarbons associated with decomposition.... something died in there, a long, long time ago. You still want to go in?"
He answered her jibe with a glare, holding up his light and crouching through the three D-unit high door. Arla' followed him in, just having to stoop a little bit to clear the entrance.
Shining his flashlight around, Arne' revealed a half-cylinder shaped room, twenty D-units long and ten wide. Lining each wall at regular intervals were cot-like beds, and on several of them, piles of long-disused equipment could be seen. Carefully walking to the nearest bunk, he lifted one of the piles by an obvious harness, and examined the bulky apparatus, before setting it back on the bed. Arla's flashlight cut another path through the dust-clogged air, and together they walked to the far end of the enclosure.
"Rebreathers," Arla' said, motioning to another of the packs as they walked, "and not just any rebreathers." Arne' nodded, and they stopped at the far end of the room, shining their lights on the floor there. The beams lit up the long dead corpses of the room's last two inhabitants.
"Unggoy rebreathers."
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