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Rediscovery, Chapter Five: Imperfect Circle
Posted By: Smackblasta<Natemeep@aol.com>
Date: 13 June 2006, 5:13 am
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Goro'tesh led them unerringly through the twisted streets of the ruins, only pausing twice to consult with the map Arla' was holding. After only half an hour, they came to a smaller building, in surprisingly good shape after thousands of years neglect. The hovertransport following them set down, and a small perimeter around the building was quickly established.
Arla' looked at the squat structure, then to Goro'tesh. "Do you know what's inside?"
Goro'tesh shooked his robed head. "We are sorry, but Tono'fass has no recollection of what is inside this building. He only remembers that it was important to the races that once lived in this city." Goro'tesh paused, and focused on Arla'. He seemed about to say something, but then turned back to the structure.
Tase' walked up to them, nodding to Goro'tesh before turning to Arla'. "We've finished establishing the perimeter, and Hickers is rigging some shaped charges for if we can't find a way inside."
Arla' chuckled at the thought of the explosives-happy Unggoy bent over a workbench, cackling madly as he put together the charges. "Are you sure we should let him do that?"
The older Sangheili snorted in amusement, regarding the building. "I don't think it'll be necessary, the door should come open with a little work." He nodded to Goro'tesh again and trotted off, shouting a few orders as he went.
Entering the structure proved an easy task, for once it was found that the door was jammed, Goro'tesh simply tore it out of the wall. A pair of armed Sangheili went inside, followed by Arla', Tase', and Goro'tesh. The Lek'Golo was strangely insistent on going with them, which unnerved Arla' slightly.
The inside of the structure was covered in a thick layer of dust. The entire building was taken up by a single room, with a five D-unit wide hole in the center. One of the guards shined his flashlight down the hole, peering into the gloom. "Looks like a gravlift shaft to me, goes down about... a hundred D-units. I'll rappel down and check it out." He detached a rope from his belt, and fired the anchoring spar into the floor. Tossing the rope down, he slipped from sight, the other guard shining his own flashlight down to keep an eye on him.
The edge of a universe, shrivelled into a blackened husk by the fires of damnation.
The dawn and dusk of an Epoch, doomed to circle its passing without ever ending.
A land covered in the blood of innocents, sating the ravenous thirst of a false deity.
The bones of the world ripped out to reveal what should have never have been found.
Opening his eyes, Arne' sighed and reached for the light. The timepiece next to his hammock read just after 3rd. "Typical..." Ever since discovering the String of Pearls, he had been plagued by formless, shapeless dreams, robbing him of rest and upsetting his thoughts during the day. Grabbing his robe, he shrugged it on as he left his quarters for the galley, hoping that putting something in his stomach would help him sleep.
He found a pot of protein stew simmering on the all-night stove, and filled a bowl to take to a table. Inside the main room, he saw Bane' sitting at a table as well, similarly attired. Arne' sat down across from him, nodding to the off-duty captain. The older Sangheili nodded back. "Can't sleep either, Arne'?"
"No, I can't. I keep wondering about these planets we've been finding. Every time we find a system with the right classifications, any planet that's the right distance from the star to support life is.. glass." He paused, staring at the far wall. "It can't be natural. It's as if something targetted every life supporting planet and wiped it out."
Bane' twitched a mandible. "The crew is picking up on that as well. But you can't blame them, you did handpick them for their intellect." He was silent for a moment, then continued. "Overall, it's starting to cause a loss of moral throughout the ship. We expected to find dead civilizations, but not dead planets. Captain Selethas says that the Tides of Knowledge is experiencing the same problem."
Arne' took a long swallow of his soup, then looked back at Bane'. "I think it's about time to turn around. The crews could use some time off to relax, and it's getting close to the return date anyways. If you agree with me, I'd like you to ask Enla' tomorrow and see what she thinks." He glanced back to the wall, taking another sip of his soup before meeting Bane's gaze again. "I hate to turn around, though. I can't help but feel like the explanation for the dead planets is staring me in the face."
Arla' followed Tase' through the darkened corridor, staying a careful five paces behind the experienced security officer. She halted as he held up a warning hand, sweeping his pulse carbine to both sides of a T-intersection. He glanced back at her. "Left tunnel's caved in, same as the rest of the structure. We go right." Fifty paces further in, his barrel-mounted flashlight illuminated a blast door large enough for a Lek'Golo to pass through without having to crouch.
She shined her flashlight around again, the beam showing walls pockmarked by innumerable craters in the metal. The door itself was covered in scorch marks, the black carbon soot still clinging to the surface after thousands of years. "It looks like a battle was fought down here, Tase'."
He nodded, still looking at the door. "Judging by the other collapsed corridors and the overall spread of the damage, I would say a retreating action. Whoever it was that was forced to retreat," he gestured to the door, "barricaded themselves behind that." He looked back to her, angling his head slightly. "Do we open it?"
"We brought the portable powercells for a reason, didn't we?" She nodded to the technician behind them, and he quickly located the door's access panel. Within moments, the corridor lights sputtered with a weak red glow. He moved back, and she stepped forward to the holographic display panel that popped up next to the door. "Amazing that it still works after all this time. It looks like the power outage wiped the lock codes." She looked back to see Tase' and the other two guards taking up firing positions in front of the door. She tapped the activation button. "Here we go."
The corridor darkened again as the door shuddered, motors protesting loudly after so much disuse. The door juttered open slightly, and screeched to a halt before it had recessed halfway into the wall. The three D-unit wide gap exposed only blackness beyond. Tase' nodded to the other two guards, and carefully stepped through the gap.
Moments went by, and then Tase's hand stuck back through the opening, motioning them to follow. They walked through the gap single file, those with weapons holding them at ready. Arla' pulled a light-globe out of her pack, thumbed it on, and tossed it ahead.
The room's size wasn't impressive, no more than fifteen D-units wide and twenty long. The room was a mess, furniture turned over, wall plates ripped out and used as impromptu barricades. What caught their attention were the bodies. A dozen ancient corpses were slumped behind the barriers. She walked up to the nearest one and shined her flashlight over it. The contoured gold armor the body was wearing still cleanly reflected the light.
"Course set for Sangheilus Secundus, ETA twelve days."
Bane' nodded, his eyes on Arne's back. The young Sangheili leaned on the bridge railing, staring through the viewscreen into the eerie non-blackness of slipspace. Seeing he was obviously preoccupied with something, Bane' walked up to him, leaning against the railing as well. "Something bothering you, Supervisor?"
"No, Captain. Everything's fine."
Bane' snorted, dropping the guise of military protocol. "Nokh-shit. A blind Terak'ii could tell there's something wrong. Tell me what it is, Arne', I can't help if I don't know what it is." He watched the other Sangheili's face closely, gauging his reaction.
Arne' chuckled ruefully, shaking his head slowly, but saying nothing. Bane' stayed quiet, waiting. The silence stood for several moments. Just as Bane' started to shift uncomfortably, Arne' waved a hand at the blank screen. "I just have a feeling this isn't over yet. Something we've missed, or something that we've still got to see before we get home. I... did you feel that?"
Bane' narrowed his eyes, looking over his shoulder at the Unggoy at the navigational console. "Why did we change course, helmsman?"
The Unggoy punched in a few commands, bringing up a holographic map of the surrounding space. "Long range sensors detected a gravitational anomaly on our current course." A black sphere in the holograph started flashing as the holograph zoomed in on the area. "I took the liberty of replotting our course a safe distance around it."
"I see. Good work, helmsman. Keep me informed." Bane' turned back to Arne', only to find him staring at the starmap. "Something else bothering you now, Arne'?"
The dawn and dusk of an Epoch, doomed to circle its passing without ever ending.
Arne' walked toward the holograph, pointing at the marked anomaly. "Is this holograph built realtime with the sensor readings?"
"Yes, but I don't see..."
"This gravitational anomaly is lopsided, look. According to the readings, it's consistant with a black hole. But a blackhole wouldn't have this swell to it, it would be perfectly spherical." He turned back to the helmsman. "Replot that course as close as you can safely bring us to that gravity well. I want to take a closer look at it."
Bane' straightened up a little. "I don't think that's a good..."
"Do it, Captain, please. We need to look into this closer, I'm sure of it." Arne' walked back to the railing, leaning against it and staring into the main viewscreen again, but this time filled with excitement rather than apprehension.
The corpse was a Sangheili. Six other Sangheili bodies occupied the room as well, one with faded blue armor and the rest adorned in black. Four dessicated Unggoy were intermixed among them, all of the bodies collapsed behind various parts of the barriers. What Arla' had originally thought was the twelfth body was an empty suit of massive plate armor, piled on the ground next to the bare earth of a stripped out wall.
Tase' caught her gaze as she and the technician set to work documenting the room. "Impressive find, Supervisor. In one fell swoop you've proven that Sangheili populated the Dead Zones with the Unggoy."
She twitched a mandible in amusement as she scanned the room, before hitting her communicator. "Arla' Selethas to Base Camp."
"Base camp reads you clear, go ahead."
"Please send additional personnel to the building we're at, home in on the transponder signal from our hovertransport. I think we're going to need about twenty people, and have them bring a portable gravlift. We're going to need it to move everything out."
"Acknowledged, Supervisor. Additional personnel should be there within the Tx-Unit."
Arla' nodded to herself, satisfied, and bent down to re-examine the gold armored body. The armor was well crafted, with plates covering all of the most vulnerable portions of Sangheili anatomy. "The armor this body is wearing doesn't really looked damaged, there's no obvious wounds on the body that could have killed it. Judging from it's positioning, it looks like it was standing behind this barricade and just fell over."
Tase' looked over another of the bodies, and peered at the rest of the room. "Same for this one as well. Despite the mess, this room didn't see any combat. Whatever chased them in here didn't follow. Something else killed them, instantly."
"I wonder what..." Arla' jumped as the door screeched wide open, whirling to point her flashlight at the entrance. Five lightbeams converged to reveal the hulking, cloaked form of Goro'tesh standing in the passageway, the leaves of the blast door shoved fully into the the recesses. "What in the world?!"
"We apologize for distressing you, Supervisor Arla' Selethas. Tono'fass passed on a memory regarding this room, and we felt it necessary to see this with our own sight." The Lek'Golo stepped fully into the room, looking over the bodies. The orange glow under his hood intensified for a moment as it passed over the golden armored corpse, before coming to rest on the empty suit of armor next to the wall.
Arla' unconsciously took a step back, clearing her throat. "It's alright, Goro'tesh, but please give us some warning next time you feel like coming down... wait. How did you get down the rope? It shouldn't have been able to support your weight." She felt a shiver run down her spine as the Lek'Golo turned it's gaze on her.
"We came down because we had to, Supervisor Arla' Selethas." Goro'tesh plodded over to the mass of metal against the wall, reaching down and picking a piece of it up. Without a word, he tucked it into his robe and came over to Arla'. "Tono'fass does remember two things about this room. He was here when the Cataclysm came, though he does not know to call it that." He paused, bending down to touch the chestpiece of the golden armor. "Secondly, this Sangheili was a true champion of his people and a great leader of their military. His name was Sahne' Selethas, and he was your ancestor."
Arla' felt her stomach go cold as the Lek'Golo straightened to his full height. He pulled out the helmet he had taken from the old armor and placed it on his head. "There is a war coming, Supervisor Arla' Selethas. None will lay a hand upon you with malice in their intent as long as we still stand. Our life, our body is yours to command."
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