Terri wept, shaking her head and rubbing her face. Silence prevailed for several long moments as Terri slowly pulled herself together.
“So what will it be?” Rosalyn said, looking between her two friends. “Are we doing this or not?”
Terri took several deep breaths. Her words were faint, and another curse or two escaped her lips before she finally conceded, “I’ll come.”
“We’re with you, Roz,” Sam added, looking uncomfortable. He didn’t seem like himself anymore, and not just because of those troubling burn wounds on his hands. She would ask about them later.
“And you understand that we may not return, right?” she pressed.
They nodded.
Her heart lifted. “…Thank you both,” she said. “Should we get moving?”
Terri slumped back to the floor, her energy utterly spent. “I’m gonna need to get some rest before we do anything. Just fifteen minutes, that’s all I need, or I’m going to collapse.”
Rosalyn gave her approval and the three of them sat or laid down and took a short rest. Even amid the gory scene and filthy reek in the silo, Sam and Terri actually managed to fall asleep—a testament to how exhausted they must have been—while Rosalyn picked up the neutron-scatterer and watched the entrance for any sign of intrusion. She didn’t need sleep. She would get plenty of it pretty soon—one way or another.
She let a few extra minutes pass, by her count, before waking them up. “Alright, let’s go,” she said to them as they stretched and struggled onto their feet.
She turned and started for the blasted-off door she’d entered through, not looking back. The gun bounced on her stomach, and she took only one hand to steady it.
Her physical exhaustion from the fight with the evolved monstrosity that once was Randy wasn’t nearly as draining as the emotional toll it had taken on her, combined with the emotional toll of the argument she’d had with Terri, but by sheer willpower she somehow managed to throw all of that into the back of her mind and trudge onward. The others followed, amazed at her steel exterior and wondering how deep it went before it hollowed out. Or even if it did.
She stepped onto the metal landing just outside the silo’s second floor and viewed the remains of what she’d done to the chamber earlier. The boiler water was still flowing, albeit at a lesser rate now, probably to peter out before too long. The water looked cooled down now, thanks to the destruction of the boiler, and there was no trace of any alien around. Rosalyn spotted a ladder to her right and climbed down to test the water. It was warm, but safe, about a foot deep but draining away in all directions.
The three headed back to the main room of the factory, Rosalyn readying herself to have to defend them at any moment.
“Did SNTNL tell you exactly where the reactor is?” asked Sam as they stepped to their right along the edge of the factory, just beyond the flow of water. They watched the water spilling out over the floor’s edge directly in front of the open chamber like a waterfall after river rapids, falling down over machines and onto ramps and conveyor belts on down all the way to the very bottommost floor.
“Not exactly,” Rosalyn responded, “just that it was the furthest down we could get in this factory. We’d know it when we found it.”
They started down an enclosed, zig-zagging staircase. The further down they went, each of them noticed how corroded the place was getting. Some staircases had become outright ramps, and many pieces of machinery had their exterior shells eaten through, revealing gears and wheels and belts within. The acid-secreting aliens were eating away at this place. They must have had some control over how much acid they could excrete, or they’d never get across places that had thin bridges or floors. Their capacity for destruction was frightening.
Another change they noticed as they came further down was the light. A faint but distinct reddish-yellow painted the metallic structures around them, filling them with a sense of foreboding.
Finally they descended the last staircase and found themselves on the bottom floor of the tall factory room. Their feet splashed in churning water that was rising very slowly. There were no bridges or staircases leading downward anymore here, just machines and floor and a bold light coming from a large opening in the wall in front of them. Silently they approached it, hearing both the distant, echoing hum of the reactor and the sounds of aliens screeching and roaring.
The opening was a wide tunnel that dove starkly down at a nearly forty-five degree angle. A well-kept cable-car system looked like it could transport them down, with a wide gondola attached to thick cables running down the ceiling of the angled tunnel. Water trickled down the tunnel from the factory floor, but didn’t look like it would affect the functionality of the gondola. They stepped into the open gondola and marveled at it. Down there, deep in the heart of the mountain, would be the reactor. They could already feel the air grow hotter. The thrum was palpable.
Terri found a silver button that turned on the gondola, and it lurched forward and began moving, stuttering as it did. It was sleek and simple, with benches all along two walls and no walls or railings whatsoever on the other sides. They sat down to regain their strength, but kept a wary watch around on all sides.
The light grew brighter. After a couple minutes the gondola burst out of the tunnel and into a huge, metal chamber that took their breath away all over again. It was a strange shape, like a diamond, and stretched down from where they hung along the cable for at least four hundred feet. All around on each wall were scores and scores of metal structures built into the sides of the wall, many of them connected to one another in a network, so far away from the astronauts’ eyes that they looked tiny: little lights blipping distantly.
Dominating the room in its center, of course, was the energy reactor itself. It was comprised of two parts: the upper and lower. The lower section looked like a grayish cylinder reaching all the way up from the very bottom of the diamond-shaped room to near the middle, rippled with patterned lines and spotted with lights. Of similar substance but more coppery in color was the upper section. It was slightly diamond shaped in itself, and it hung down from the top of the room to just above the lower part’s tip, with about a fifty foot gap between them. The two sections were attached to each other by a number of strong, thick, metal columns ringing around the circumference of both sections like a cage. What lay within that cage seemed to be a sort of inner core that was attached to the upper reactor section, dark in color and emitting a strong beam of light into the hollow bottom reactor.
The beam’s hum dominated almost all noise in the enormous room, buzzing the crewmates’ frames ever so slightly even as they hung suspended in the air. Cords spread throughout the entire room like a web, a full-on travel network. A few other gondolas hung in random spots around the huge room. The suspended cord they traveled along now, leading to the reactor, showed that unless they switched directions, the gondola would continue all the way onward until it reached a small platform just on the edge of the lower reactor’s top, set between two of the huge connecting columns.
The road to the inner core.
Each of them felt an impression that hushed all other concerns and thoughts. This place was remarkable, and above all it thrummed with power.
It was the end.
The spectacle was so transfixing that it took a few moments for them to realize that the gondola had stopped and turned right at a junction. Rosalyn turned and saw their new destination: one of the metal structures attached to the wall. It was rounded, sort of hourglass shaped, with spires in the top and bottom, lights along its edges, and windows lining the middle and near the top.
The gondola stopped with a chunk at a landing beside the structure.
“What is this?” Terri asked. “Why did it stop here?”
“It could be the control room,” suggested Rosalyn.
They looked at the structure carefully. The windows looked dim, for the most part.
“WHAT IS THAT?!” screamed Terri, reaching up to point at the windows.<
br />
Rosalyn and Sam saw it just before it disappeared: a shrouded shape in the long window moving the opposite direction from them. Sam swore and gripped the seats along the gondola, not wanting to move. Rosalyn held up her gun anxiously.
The shadow had been shaped like a human.
“You both saw that thing, right?! Oh, hell. You can go in there, but not me,” said Terri instantly, shaking her head. “Hell no.”
“All the same,” said Rosalyn with a cock of her head, “we have to get in there if we’re going to figure out how to destroy this thing.”
Sam looked at her with unease. “Something’s off about this, Roz. All of this. Do you feel it?”
She bit her lip. “…Yes.”
Frantic screams of aliens echoed out from the reactor. The dim buzz of power emitting from the colossal thing felt as if it was making their very atoms convulse.
Sam stood beside Rosalyn and said thoughtfully, “Maybe…maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. …I wanted to ignore this feeling, but I just…I’m not sure this is the right thing to do. You said it yourself—SNTNL’s sudden reappearance, you getting healed, the cryo-pod—it’s all too much. We could be getting set up somehow.”
Terri wiped her face, fear getting the best of her. “Do you really think that…that there could be something wrong with SNTNL?”
Sam shrugged aggressively. “I don’t know! I don’t want to believe that. But all of this is just very convenient.”
“By the time we find out for sure, we could all be dead. I think you’re right. Let’s go, Roz. Please. If we get out of here now, we might be avoiding some unforeseen catastrophe. W-we can find some other way to stop anyone from finding this place.”
Slowly, Rosalyn lowered her gun. The thought of leaving brushed against her mind.
But then she allowed the thought to drop down into the deep, endless darkness at the unseen bottom of this humongous reactor room, and she pictured what would happen if they left now. “I’m still the Captain,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ve been set up, or what. But we have to keep going anyway. Stay on the gondola if you want, but I imagine you’ll be safest beside the woman with the gun.”
She looked at them and saw two individuals who could hardly have wanted to follow her command less. But, to their credit, they both breathed a sigh and said nothing to contend against her.
She walked stoically onward, gun-first, and they followed her with great trepidation. There was an empty doorway leading inside the structure. The front hallway had a decayed rug on the floor and artistic carvings on the walls, but everything looked messy, strewn with debris. Someone had left this place in a hurry.
The hum of the reactor and the echoing screeches decreased in volume in here, and for that at least, they were happy to be inside. They searched the warm and desolate rooms carefully, listening for the sound of breathing or footsteps. After searching several empty rooms they entered into one with a large window overlooking the reactor and a number of buttons on control boards. All of them were illegible, being written in an alien script.
Sam looked to his right and screamed, leaping back. Terri’s scream followed, and by the time Rosalyn turned to see what had alarmed them, Sam was pointing at a Seclurm-evolved alien on the ground and saying, as if to reassure himself, “It’s dead.”
Rosalyn still struggled to keep her nerves when she looked at it. It was one of the acid-secreting ones, with its translucent, drooping flesh and curled antennae for eyes. It had been disemboweled somehow, and bled a great pool of purplish blood, or acid, onto the floor. The acid had eaten a large hole in the metal flooring, exposing electrical wires and pipes below. The reek of its blood and exposed bowels was similar to what they had smelled in the silo.
“Strange,” remarked Sam with a wrinkle of his nose. “I didn’t think they hunted each other.”
“Oh, they do,” muttered Terri, waving away the reek.
Rosalyn scanned around the room briefly to ensure no other predator was among them while the others caught their breath. Then she approached a computer terminal by the window, which turned on a basic, two-dimensional screen more akin to what the astronauts were used to rather than the typical three-dimensional projections they had seen on alien terminals thus far. Rosalyn set her gun to the side and looked at the screen, uncertain what to do with a wide selection of buttons to press that all looked utterly meaningless to her.
“Hey,” said Sam after glancing to the corner behind some storage shelves. “Look!” A gun hung by its strap on a peg on the wall—one of two guns, both exactly like Rosalyn’s.
Terri went over and somewhat nervously picked it up. “How convenient is that? Two guns happen to be sitting right here for us?”
Sam hesitated, but not wanting to be caught off guard by an attacking alien, he stooped down and picked up the other. “This is getting really weird. I hope these things work,” he grumbled, testing the weight and feel of his gun after strapping it around his back.
That was convenient, Rosalyn thought. There’s no doubt in my mind now; something else is at work here.
Why did that knowledge fill her with such unease?
In case they got ambushed by anything hostile, Rosalyn gave them a quick crash course on what she had learned about the neutron-scatterers from SNTNL’s earlier instruction and her own experience. By the time she finished, Sam and Terri both felt much better about staying here, despite the blanket of anxiety over them.
Rosalyn turned back to the screen and tapped it. What appeared on the screen took her breath away.
“Look…these are camera feeds!” she said, examining each square video that was laid out on the screen in a grid. There was one of the reparation room, and another of the energy reactor, and another of an elevator, and many more they did not recognize. One of them was blank. There seemed to be many more possible feeds to view that were not currently on the screen besides.
“This room must have access to camera feeds from dozens or hundreds of rooms within the ruins!” noted Sam. “That’s incredible.”
Rosalyn tapped on the video feed of the energy reactor, blowing it up to full screen. She tapped a few more buttons, and the screen reacted by popping up a vector model of the energy reactor labeled with many indecipherable scribblings.
She smiled. “We’re making some progress.”
“Yeah, I dunno. Is there anything we can learn from this computer when we can’t understand a thing it says?” Terri asked doubtfully.
Rosalyn didn’t answer. She kept tapping things, sliding her finger across the screen to move information boxes that appeared and to tilt three-dimensional depictions of parts of the reactor like dioramas. She got a good look at its depiction of the inner core of the reactor, with the dark cylindrical core itself firing a beam of light energy into the bottom reactor through a ring-shaped platform where another computer terminal was set and the finer points of control for the reactor could be altered.
“You may be right, Terri. I can’t make sense of this,” she said with a sigh. “SNTNL? Are you here?” she called.
They waited several seconds, but heard no answer.
She grit her teeth. “Damn it! SNTNL said it would help us when we reached this place. Just when we need it the most.” Again she wondered whether they could even trust the A.I..
Even though it seemed fruitless, she kept searching. For a little while she abandoned looking at the reactor core and examined some other things in the city in general. She found pipeline information that she was convinced was the Seclurm liquid being pumped throughout the city. She tapped on the pipe, and then tapped on the information box that popped up. A larger information box appeared above that, complete with a vector photo in sparse detail of a humanoid creature with long limbs and a wide head. All three of them looked at the drawing with wide eyes.
“That must be one of the aliens who lived in this place,” Terri remarked.
“What do you suppose that’s trying to say?” queried Sam as he gripped his gun,
his back to the window so he could protect their flank.
Rosalyn thought for a brief moment, squinting her eyes at the image. “I think…it’s telling us what kind of DNA is present within the Seclurm that’s being pumped through the city.”
Terri raised an eyebrow. “So…Randy was evolved to look like one of those human-looking aliens? Are you sure about that?”
“No, it couldn’t have been. But then again, he didn’t look exactly like the other aliens we’ve been seeing around here. He must have gotten a mix of the acid alien DNA and these alien humanoids’ DNA…”
That raised a ton of other questions in her mind, and she pondered on them for a few moments with squinted eyes. For instance, if Shauna was evolved with Seclurm containing DNA from the humanoid, former inhabitants of this place, why had she ended up evolving with a tail and claws and fangs? SNTNL had said that only “feral” DNA in Seclurm would turn a human being into something monstrous and predatorial.
It didn’t add up. Something about her current understanding of the situation must have been invalid.
Rosalyn shook her head and forced herself to look at the information on the reactor again.
A message box appeared suddenly on the screen, and within it she saw:
rosalyn this is sntnl. ive loaded a basic english font into the computer. please read what i have to say.
“Whoa—look at this,” she breathed.
Sam and Terri stepped up and gawked. The letters were distorted and choppy, very crude in appearance, but they communicated clearly what was meant to be said.
“SNTNL?” exclaimed Terri.
“Can it…hear us?” asked Sam.
“I don’t know. SNTNL?”
we dont have much time. more aliens are converging here. if you turn on the speaker i will be able to hear your responses. we need to come up with a plan fast.
Seclurm: Devolution Page 29
