All is Fair Ch. 04

With a deep sigh, she unsnapped her safety harness and climbed out of the seat before heading back to the airlock to retrieve that god-awful suit.

Ten minutes later she was ready to go, suit on, pack on her back, and stepping into the airlock. Ships in space never really come completely alongside each other. It's not that it was physically impossible to attach two ships together directly by their airlocks; it was just that it was generally incredibly dangerous, and it was rarely, if ever, necessary. Every airlock on every ship she had ever heard of had a docking collar. This was an extendable, enclosed, airtight, and semi-flexible gangway that could stretch from one ship across the vacuum of space to join it to another. Or, in this case, reach out over the rapidly flowing waters of the river beneath her and onto the cliff face.

She was not thrilled by the idea of getting any more of that compound into her airlock - that shit was clearly dangerous - but considering she had already left the ship and then returned to it once already, it was probably a bit late to be worrying about that, but sighing anyway, she opened the airlock's hatch and stepped back out onto the planet.

Kicking her toes into the brown, dust-covered ground, she adjusted her pack on her shoulder, then rechecked her scanners. The ship had, in the very short time it was in the river, actually been washed about half a mile downstream, but the elevation reading was showing only a twenty meter difference between her current position and the nearest of those three vault readings.

The scene of utter devastation left behind by something like a tsunami was difficult to put into words without having seen it before, and it was even more difficult to anticipate if you were expected to walk through it. It was a big river, in terms of width, depth, and the speed of the current; it was not a body of water to be trifled with. The fact that it had carved this ravine into the landscape was proof enough of that. But as with many cases of natural erosion, it had been given some help. Wind and gravity had helped make the canyon wider at the top than it was at the bottom; all of that mass had fallen to the bottom of the ravine and formed fairly broad banks on each side of the river. But whereas the river itself was wide and fast-moving, it was relatively calm looking; it was serene even. It was totally at odds with the debris and wreckage deposited onto the banks by the tsunami and the receding flood waters, the river banks providing an apparently perfect spot for all that wreckage - the chucks of masonry from shattered buildings, wrecked hover cars, people's possessions, the remains of uprooted trees, the piles of earth that had recently collapsed from the ravine itself, even large parts of that washed away town - to end up. The hour spent traveling that half a mile was less about walking and more about climbing over, through, and around the broken remains of civilization that had been dumped here.

Finally, though, after countless times wondering why she hadn't simply backed her ship up a few hundred meters to bypass all of that unnecessarily expended effort, her computer beeped at her, alerting her to the fact that she was directly above one of those readings. She dumped her pack at her feet and took proper stock of her immediate surroundings.

A frown instantly appeared on her face.

There was a near-perfect circular break - for lack of a better term - in the carnage that had been dumped onto this part of the river. The wreckage and debris that littered both banks of the river literally just stopped, skipped about a hundred meters, and then started again. She could see the curvature of it with nothing more than a glance, and now she was looking more carefully; she could even make out little chunks of rock pressed against the wall of the ravine - rocks that at first glance may look like they were half buried within the wall itself - that were actually loose, just being held in place by some invisible source. And yet, according to her sensors, there was nothing there.

No energy readings,

No harmonic fluctuations,

Not even a break in the airflow over the area.

There was nothing, at least nothing that was detectable by the highly advanced sensors on her ship. Annoyingly, she hadn't looked over the edge of the canyon from the destroyed town directly above her - and looking at the walls of the ravine she would have been relying on to support her weight had she tried, she was happy she had noped out of that idea - but that aerial view of this location would have been able to give her a much better view of what she was dealing with.

Her mind was already working, though. Hypothesis and theories bubbling up, building higher, and then burning away as new ones grew to fill in the flaws of the ones that preceded them. The wreckage, the debris, the stuff carried along by the wave, would have been carried through this ravine at force, significantly more force than above the ravine. Enormous volumes of fast-moving water pressed into a confined space created pressure, a shit load of it. These chunks of broken buildings and the stalks of trees half the length of her ship would have been traveling along this canyon at hundreds of miles per hour. Fast speed meant more kinetic energy... and what was designed to suddenly absorb huge amounts of kinetic energy while letting slower, less energetic, safer matter - like her, for example, or the comparatively slow-moving water - pass through it?

"It's a shield," she murmured in wonder to herself. Her frown only deepened. If it was a shield, why weren't her sensors picking it up? And how the fuck was it being powered? If this really was an ancient vault of some description - and the readings she was getting certainly suggested it was - then it had been sitting here, buried, for countless millennia. How the fuck was the power still on for those shields to be active?

More importantly, if the power was still active, the power generation system that fed it must be, too. Decades of research on the Primis had been stymied by an inability to activate the ship's power; systems that were right there, under their fingertips, were still infuriatingly out of reach. If the power system in whatever was beneath her was still functional, it could give them everything they needed to know to send those research efforts through the bulkheads.

Suddenly, the extra effort was looking like it may start to pay off.

Heh. Maybe there was more optimist in her than she had thought.

The question, however, assuming that it was a shield, was why her sensors were only picking up three points of contact with the ancient material. Clearly, the shield itself was formed from a form of energy that the sensors couldn't detect. That would explain why they couldn't see the shield itself, and if they couldn't see the shield, then they couldn't see what was beneath it. Except they could. At three different points. One of which was only a few meters below her feet.

Speculation, as her father had taught her, was an unwinnable sport. If she wanted answers, she would need to go get them. And right now, after coming so far, and finally being in range of something that could truly be worth something meaningful, she really fucking wanted answers.

********

Harmonic laser tunneling was a slow, painstaking, and meticulous process. There were probably miners and archeologists all over inhabited space who would vehemently disagree with that, considering the alternative was digging by hand, but it was slow to her.

It was, essentially, an automated process by which a scanner drone the size of a standard Earth soccer ball was allowed to scan the composite ground in an area, determine the ideal path of mining - based on the user's target destination - and then automatically deploy its mining lasers to carve a tunnel toward it. Where objects, such as large, structurally essential rocks, could be avoided, the drone would tunnel around them, in cases where the ground was too weak to support mining without collapse, portable force shield emitters were deployed to bear the load, and the tunnel was only ever big enough for a single person to traverse while crawling, assuming that person was okay with small spaces and not in much of a hurry.

The point of it was to allow someone like Laura to gain access to underground positions, it was in no way suitable for mining or for excavating ruins. It was useless for digging out large quantities of rock, and it would, in no way, facilitate the amount of equipment that could potentially need to be removed from the vault if it was still functional. Besides, those shield emitters were good for a few days, maybe a week, but couldn't hold forever. Laser tunneling was a temporary measure that would allow her to reach the closest of those three points, and that was it. What happened when she got there was entirely down to her.

It took a little over six hours for the tunneling probe to do its thing, and the sun's light, what little there was of it through the cloud, was already beginning to fade. Considering the cloud blotted out a huge amount of that light to start with, it was as close to dusk as mattered - regardless of the time of day - by the time her computer told her that the probe had reached its destination. But tunnels were already dark. She could have been entering when the sun was at its apex in the sky, on a planet with a perfectly clear sky, and it still would have been pitch black in that tunnel, so there was no reason to let something like nighttime dissuade her from entering immediately; it would have been dark in there regardless, and those six hours had done nothing to calm her sense of building anticipation.

Dropping down to her hands and knees, she took a deep breath, secured her scanners, her tools, and her sidearm on her belt, and crawled into the opening.

The tunneling probe would find its own path from A to B, but it would take some rather obvious things into account while doing it. The most obvious was the fact tunneling straight down was not really an option. There had to be an incline, of course, but it had to be one navigable by a normal human without the use of climbing gear. In this case, that descending, twisting, and turning path was well over fifty meters long, and on your hands and knees, in the dark, with the walls pressing in around you, that was a pretty long way. Twenty meters on a fairly shallow gradient, a ninety-degree turn to the left, another twenty meters, albeit on a steeper downward slope and curving around various geological obstructions the probe decided to avoid, and then, finally, another left turn and another 10 meters, with the last of them leveling out to something close to a flat plane... and suddenly out into a vast, subterranean cavern.

Vast wasn't the word. The cavern was enormous. Stretching out into the darkness in all directions, only the floor, the ceiling, and the wall through which she had just entered were clear to her in the dull glow of her lantern. Even turning her light source to its highest possible, almost blinding setting, the shadows swallowed the illumination long before it defined the other walls in this huge cave. It wasn't the ceiling that held her attention, though, even though it was laced with an invisible force stopping the water flood through small cracks in the roof and holding back the river directly above... it was what was below it.

Half buried in the floor of the cavern, still looking in remarkably, impossibly good condition, considering the length of time it had been down here, was something that her young mind had committed to memory dozens and dozens of times over. It was the Primis. Or at least another ship of the same mammoth classification, and only the top few decks at that. But there was no mistaking it. The outline, the contours, the shape of it was so unique and so distinctive as to be immediately recognized by eyes who had wandered over those curves more times than could be counted.

And directly in front of her, at the point that her scanners were saying an ancient alien compound was present... was an open hatchway.

********

Crow. 3

Nodding goodbye to Michaels and Valdek, he watched the slightly younger man wheel the elder back into his room. Michaels' display before his men had been nothing short of inspiring, and coupled with that Scoittish-sounding warcry, he was now a little more confident that the surviving Marines would join their cause. But his display had exhausted him. Michaels, whether his soldier's pride was willing to admit it or not, had taken one hell of a beating during the battle, and he needed time to rest. Crow hoped that now his men had seen him, and he had given something to rally behind, that he would take the advice of the doctors and actually rest. He doubted it, but one could hope.

Valdek, the younger-looking of the two men - although he had no idea if he was actually younger - had been heartbroken and horrified to learn that it had been his oldest friend's division selected to attack the beach. He hadn't been able to stay in the command center for the invasion, and part of the reason Crow had been so hesitant to order the lethal bombardment was that there was no way to guarantee Michaels wouldn't be killed in it, and thereby alienating one of the rebellion's most gifted naval tacticians.

Of course, he didn't think for a moment that it wasn't intentional. He could only stop and admire the sheer scale of the Emperor's brilliance when it came to manipulative maneuvers like that. "Take the information we give you and win, ignore it, and be slaughtered, but if you do take it, the turncoat admiral's closest friend would almost certainly be killed in the process, thereby rendering the boon you gained from his joining your cause entirely moot". There was a certain malevolent genius behind those tactics, and even though he would never admit it, it scared Crow more than almost anything else. It was pure luck that Michaels hadn't been killed on the beach; the rebels had come terrifyingly close to walking straight into the Emperor's trap, even knowing it was there.

A worried frown had furrowed his brow as these thoughts rattled around the aging General's head while he was walking on autopilot beside the wonderfully capable captain.

Her smaller hand slipped into his and gave him a soft squeeze. Crow turned his head, noting the worried expression on her face, and answered it with a soft smile of her own. God, she was beautiful; she had always been beautiful.

So much like her mother.

"You okay there, old man?" she asked quietly, careful not to be overheard, even in the deserted hallway that led toward his office. Her hand was back out of his in only a few moments, but it had been a deeply appreciated gesture. Crow felt like the weight of the galaxy was resting firmly on his shoulders, and perhaps it was, but small moments like that reminded him what he was fighting for.

He nodded in response to her question but didn't say anything else as the Captain strode along next to him. Finally, they reached his office, and he opened the door to let her enter before he followed and closed the door behind them. Silvia was already pulling up a seat and settling down into it by the time Crow had rounded the desk and sat into his own chair. "How are you doing, Silly?" he asked with a contented sigh as the load was lifted from the soles of his feet and smiled at the nickname he knew she always outwardly hated. Of course, she would hate it if he stopped calling that even more; he knew it, she knew it, and she knew he knew it, but neither said a word about it.

"Doing pretty good, Dad," His daughter smiled back as she relaxed into her chair and crossed one of her long legs over the other while she absently fluffed her hair with one of her hands. "I think that went pretty well." She finished, nodding her head in the general direction that the mess hall would be in, give or take a few dozen walls.

Cornelius nodded, his hands coming up to loosen the top button of his formal military jacket. "So tell me about this Sergeant." He asked as he pulled two empty tumblers from his desk's top drawer and then a bottle of scotch from the second, keeping almost all of his concentration on her as he poured a few fingers' worth of the rich amber nectar into each glass.

It was subtle, and it was over as quickly as it had begun; it was a reaction he absolutely expected, having already seen it in the mess hall, but still would have missed it if he hadn't been paying such close attention. The slight flush of her cheeks, the dilating of her eyes, the soft, almost imperceptible intake of breath, and the faintest tug of a smile onto her lips. "He is on board," she nodded, smiling as she accepted the proffered glass. "I mean, you saw the footage from the beach; he's exactly the kind of soldier we're looking for. He was, by far, the most advanced of the Marines before the artillery hit, and when he was retreating, he fought his way through the clones like they were nothing."

"A good fighter then?"

Silvia let out a huffed laugh. "Put it this way, he's not someone I would have liked to have been up against."

Crow's eyebrow raised itself at that. It was high praise indeed. Silvia West - irrespective of paternal pride - was one of the most capable soldiers he had ever trained, and what inordinately little she lacked in combat skill, she more than made up for with tactical awareness and leadership ability. "Go through it with me," he sipped from his glass, his lips tightening over his teeth as the burn worked its way down his throat.

"It was instant, Dad." she started. "I mean, I'm quick, but I'm not that quick. As soon as his feet hit the sand, he was assessing. He made it to cover, lost one man KIA and one wounded in the process, but didn't crumble like a lot of the others..." he saw the slight flicker of regret in her eyes at that part, the same one he had been feeling so acutely since the event. "...he was looking. Straight away, he was looking. He spotted the cliffs immediately, and you can almost see him processing, wondering why we weren't using them to flank him. Even after his men were hit, he kept his cool. He rallied them and then advanced. Jesus, it was brutal, but it wasn't cruel. He did what he needed to do to achieve his objective without gloating over killing the clones. He came up with a strategy on the fly and executed it without any input from Command. In fact, the only two times he heard from his superiors actually slowed him down. One time was to bail out his own Captain, who managed to walk three squads into a crossfire, and the other was when Michaels ordered him to hold position for backup just before the ping. If it wasn't for those two, he may have even made it off the beach. But then..." she winced.

"The artillery hit." Crow nodded. He had seen enough of those recordings to know the carnage he had unleashed on those men and women.

"That... That was hard to watch." she nodded softly. "They were like family to him, Dad, and we killed them. It was the closest I saw him come to breaking."

"No," Crow shook his head. "I killed them."

Her eyes softened as she looked at him. She was perhaps the only person who knew how much of a toll that decision had taken on the aging officer. "You didn't have a choice, Dad."

"I know, I just..." he sighed. "It's okay. So how did he recover?"

"He didn't really. His squad rallied around him, the two surviving members, anyway." she looked lost in thought as she spoke. "I didn't watch many of the recordings, and all the ones I did watch showed Marines losing friends, but there was something about the way they were with him. It was like..." she frowned. "I don't know how to say it. It was like they would have ignored him if he ordered them to leave him there."