Silva turned to Sara. “There are things the Elif have kept from humanity. We were not trying to deceive you, but not telling you gave us the chance to uplift you to the point where you could fight the Teifen when they eventually found you.
“This vault is in working order, but in standby mode. If we try to force our way in, the self-destruct programming will destroy the contents. The contents could contain construction plans for everything from ships to cores, but we are not sure. It could contain nothing more than the bodies of those left behind in the war. But if you were able to touch and remove a core, then you are qualified to open the vault.”
Sara gave them a hard look, trying to understand, but the pieces refused to fall into place.
“Very well. Take me to this vault, and I’ll see what I can do,” Sara said, standing and putting Alister to her shoulder, where he climbed up and held on.
The two Elif made their way around the table, as if they were heading off to their own executions.
29
“It’s the central most vault, under what we believe was the seat of government for the city. The building is just on the edge of this park,” Silva said, leading the way through the rain.
Sara got on the comm with Baxter once they were weaving their way through the grass and occasional trees. The rain had let up, lessening from the raging downpour when they had first arrived to a steadier shower.
“Baxter, I’m going to be heading into an unopened vault here in the city. The director seems to think it may have information on the cores, maybe even on how to make one. Be sure the city is fortified by the time I get out. I have a bad feeling about this whole situation.”
Baxter replied after a few seconds. “Aye, Ma’am. The defenses should be up in the next twenty minutes. We have AA guns setting up now, and the armored division is getting their suits ready as we speak.”
The armored division was made of troopers in heavier Aether suits. These suits stood ten feet tall and were armed with large, heavy rifles that could fire small gauss rounds, and shoulder mounted cannons and missiles. Sara was glad they had them in addition to the AA guns. A heavy trooper could take out a fighter ship just as easily, but were far more mobile and could be used in ground combat, as well.
“Good to hear, Baxter. Do you know where you will need me, if it comes down to it?”
“I decided to make you more of a floating stop gap. Your powers will be useful in an all-out fight, but, to be honest, you’re far too valuable to be used on the front line, Ma’am. We still need to get home,” he said, a little apologetically.
Sara knew he was right. She wasn’t a trooper; her first duty was to the ship. It still didn’t feel great to be seen as the backup.
“You’re right, I need to keep myself safe for the rest of the crew. But I’ll be breaking out a can of whoop ass, if I get the chance.”
Baxter gave a chuckle. “Yes, Ma’am. I look forward to seeing that. I’ll hold down the fort while you see if there is anything we can do for Cora.”
Sara smiled, and jogged a little to catch up to the two doctors. They came to a large building that had a turn-of-the-century, Romanesque look to it.
There’s an evolution to everything, including architecture, she marveled.
The building itself was in relatively good shape, in that it was still standing, but as soon as they went through the opening where three sets of doors had once stood, Sara could see that the roof had collapsed so long ago that there was a small forest growing in the rubble.
Dr. Romis led them to a set of stone stairs that had been cleared by her people, and lit with temporary lighting installed along the walls. She led them down into a basement, and Sara was struck by how much it looked like any other basement in a typical building on Earth. There were distinct and alien differences—like the flooring not being tile or wood, but some type of polymer, along with no apparent lighting other than what had been strung up by the scientists—but overall, a hall looked like a hall.
There were openings where doors had hung at one time, but there was no sign of those materials now. If they had been wooden, they had disintegrated beyond even a pile of rubble. After a few turns and another set of stairs leading down what Sara guessed was three floors, they came to a hall that ended in a large door.
Sara was surprised at how much it looked like the entrance to a bank vault, with large, thick, alloy slabs set in a stone and metal frame. There were workstations set up near the door, but the space for twenty feet in front of it was clear. Even the dust and debris had been swept away, leaving the door looking as if it was nearly brand new.
“Here we are,” Dr. Romis said, flourishing a hand like a game show host.
“Wow, that is impressive. So, what do you need me to do? Is there a scanner or something, like on the core’s box?” Sara said, stepping past the two and taking in the door, her hands on her hips.
There was a hesitation, and Sara turned to see Dr. Romis shrug. “I have no idea. There has been no activity from it since we uncovered it. We monitor it constantly, but it’s powered down, as far as we can tell.”
Sara frowned, and turned back to the door. “What do you think, Alister? Do we need to magic this thing open, or what?” She caught Alister’s shrug from her periphery, and that put a smile on her face. She was enjoying the little shit more and more.
After a few minutes of consideration, Sara decided to take a closer look and started walking toward the huge door. A clunk vibrated from it once she reached within an arm’s length, and Sarah stopped at once to look at everything, but she couldn’t see any difference.
“Oh my, it’s giving off a faint signal. There’s power running through it,” Silva reported from behind her, watching the monitors.
“Well, that’s something,” Sara said, examining the door closely. Unlike a bank vault door, there were no handles to turn or combinations to enter. She thought about the scanner she had pressed her thumb to when retrieving the core and had an idea.
Releasing her glove and letting it open, she freed her right hand and pressed it to the center of the door. Nothing seemed to happen, and then there was the whining sound of a servo motor. Sara pulled her hand away, closing the glove with a thought, and attempted to raise a shield, cursing when the spellform wouldn't come.
“Shield,” she said a little too desperately for her liking—but Alister gave her what she asked for, and a spellform blazed to life. She fed it with power, and a golden bubble wrapped around her in an instant.
The shielding, it turned out, was not necessary. The whining was the sound of the motor pulling in the lock pins around the edge of the door. When the whining died down, a second grinding sound was accompanied by a hiss of pressure escaping the vault as the atmospheres balanced. The door began a ponderous swing open, and Sara had to back up to let it pass in front of her.
It took nearly a minute for the door to open all the way, revealing a dark interior. It was the black of long dark places not seen for thousands of years. Chills ran down Sara's spine, as she realized she was about to step into a preserved tomb of ancient history.
Sara dropped the shield and motioned for the two of them to come closer. “Stand beside me, I’m going to put a shield around us. I don't want to come across any more automated defenses, like we did on the derelict.”
The doctors came and stood beside her, looks of wondrous anticipation on their faces. Sara powered the new shield Alister gave her, this one a little larger than the last, but small enough to still fit through the round opening of the vault.
Sara turned on the headlamps in her suit and stepped into the darkness.
30
Stepping through the circular door, the golden orb of her shield shimmering in the dark, Sara was surprised there were no laser blasts to welcome her. She swept her headlamps from side to side, but all she could make out was empty darkness. After a few shuffling steps, she reached the center of a room.
“Most of the vaults we entered were large facilities used
for storage. This looks more like a lobby,” Dr. Romis said, squinting. “I think that’s an elevator,” she pointed at the vague outline of a double door on the opposite wall.
Sara took a few steps forward and had to agree; it did look like an elevator.
“Well, shit. How are we supposed to use that without pow—”
She cut off her words as a hum began below her feet, and she dropped into a defensive position. It felt familiar, and it took her a moment to realize it was reminiscent of the ever-present hum on the Raven.
It was a reactor starting up somewhere below them.
After a pregnant second of fear and uncertainty, the lights slowly came on. The brightness gradually ramped up, as if the circuits were waking from a deep sleep. Soon the chamber filled with a soft white light, revealing a white, circular room. An elevator was on the far side, with slits in the wall to the left and right of its doors; there appeared to be barrels of some kind of gun sticking out of each slit, but they didn’t move.
Sara approached a slit to peer inside and saw that the rooms on the other side were pillboxes where the main entrance could be defended. The guns were obviously unmanned, and the rooms beyond filled with dusty boxes she assumed contained ammo. The guns were traditional firearms, as evidenced by the chain of bullets fed into the sides. The make was unfamiliar, but the form was undeniable.
“Okay, that is really strange. It’s like looking at artifacts from an alternate reality. That is a fifty-caliber machine gun, but I’ve never seen a design quite like it,” Sara said, examining the artifacts.
“Everything looks brand new,” Dr. Hess said, examining a pristine wall. “How can this be so old and not show signs of deterioration?”
“We hypothesized the vaults were hermetically sealed; this is the first one I’ve seen that was not destroyed when we opened it up. Up until now we were just guessing, but the condition of this place proves they were actually sealed and not just closed up,” Dr. Romis said, leaning down and looking through the slit with Sara.
The lighting coming from some unknown source set Sara’s teeth on edge. “Let’s see if we can get the elevator working.”
She stepped up to the double doors of the elevator and looked for a button, but saw nothing on the wall. She let her hand free of the suit and touched the metal of the door itself. There was a blue line that scanned over her fingers from inside the metal, as if the whole door were a scanner. Sara pulled her hand back, and the doors slid open silently, revealing a large cargo elevator. She looked at the two scientists and shrugged as she led the way in.
There were no buttons inside to select a floor, but the doors closed as soon as they were inside, and the car began to lower with a jerk. Nothing indicated a floor, or depth, but Sara guessed they were traveling a long way. They rode in silence for approximately a minute before the car began to slow and finally stop, the doors sliding open.
Sara first noticed the two machine gun boxes facing the elevator. They were set up on the floor of a massive room that had to be at least three stories high, and fifty or more meters wide and deep. The lights were on, revealing long lines of bunks set up in rows. Small rooms were built in the corners, with windows and doors looking over the main room. It looked more like a barracks than a refuge, and Sara reasoned that it was a barracks of a sort. On the far side, she could see a set of double doors that opened into a hall leading deeper into the underground complex.
“The skeletons,” Dr. Hess said quietly.
Startled, Sara looked at him, but he was staring at the beds. She took a closer look and, with horror, realized that most of the beds contained a skeleton covered with a blanket.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Sara said, keeping her voice quiet for some reason.
She motioned for them to follow and walked around the gun embankments to the first row of beds. A dark brown skull stared blankly up from a rotten pillow. It looked human, but then all the races’ bones looked similar. She began walking to the other end of the room, heading to the hall. The skulls of the long dead stared blankly to the heavens as they passed, sending shivers down Sara's spine.
She felt Alister's grip tighten, and she noticed he was staring at a particular bed. She glanced over and saw that a body was covered like the rest, but unlike on the other beds, there was a second, small skeleton curled up beside it on top of the blanket. She leaned in and saw it looked like a small animal of some kind, not unlike a cat.
It’s a familiar, she realized.
She reached up and patted Alister before moving on.
The hall proved to hold several doors leading to supply closets and other such facilities, but a pair of double doors at the end of the hall held the small group’s attention, and they made their way to them.
There was another scanner on the wall next to these doors, and Sara put her thumb to it. After the light passed beneath her thumb, there was a clack of bolts sliding to the open position, and, in a sudden rush, the doors slid open.
They found a control center inside with a large darkened view screen on the far wall. There were rows of consoles—each powered, but with no information on their screens. They stepped into the room, and the doors slid closed behind them.
“I’m pretty sure there are no automated defenses in here, Captain. You can drop the shield, if you’d like,” Dr. Romis said, eager to explore the room.
“I think you’re right. Stay close, though, just in case.” Sara dropped the shield, and the two doctors immediately disregarded her words and spread out to examine the pristine equipment.
Like kids in a candy shop, she thought, shaking her head.
Sara looked around, trying to determine the purpose of the control room. What is it controlling?
She walked around the row of consoles, noting that the three rows were tiered, each with about ten stations and a clear view of the main screen. The whole setup reminded her of photos of Kennedy Space Center, back when humans were first traveling to space.
Alister jumped from her shoulders and began smelling his way along the back row, while each doctor had a face planted in a console, trying to understand the ancient setup.
Sara noticed a booth behind and above the entrance, with a set of stairs to either side of the double doors they had just come in through. She headed up a set to investigate the glass fronted booth. As soon as she crested the window, she was met by the empty gaze of a skeleton seated in one of the two swivel chairs in the tiny room. The back wall of the room was full of what Sara thought to be racks of servers, their little lights blinking in random patterns. She opened the narrow door on the side of the booth by pressing turning a handle, much like she would on Earth.
“Docs, you should come up here and check this out,” Sara said, taking in the skeleton, which was slightly skewed to the side where the body had slumped.
It sat at a desk with a set of monitors arrayed in front of it, facing a screen that was blank except for a cursor blinking in the top left corner. The skeleton’s hand rested on top of a box on the floor next to its chair—a box very similar to the one that had been attached to the tank where they had retrieved the core.
Dr. Hess saw it as well, and his eyes went wide. “Is there a core in that box?”
Sara examined it and found the little scanner pad in the side. The box unlatched, once she pressed her thumb to it. The sudden movement jarred the hand bones, and they fell apart, causing a chain reaction that traveled up the skeleton’s arm to the rest of its body. Sara jumped back as, with a clatter, the skeleton fell apart, bones bouncing on the ground, shattering with the impact.
Once the bones and pieces settled, she leaned in and flipped the lid of the box open. There, sitting loosely in the socket, was a silvery sphere, warping the reflection of Sara's faceplate as she stared into the shiny surface. She could see that the core had been un-cradled, likely when she had pressed on it, and it was loose enough to pull out. She reached down and picked it up, the cool surface as slick as the one in her belt pouch.
> She looked to the two doctors, who stared at the sphere like it was a holy object. Alister reached out from where he sat on her shoulder and smacked the top of the sphere with a paw, as if telling her to drop it. His actions weren’t urgent, like she was in danger, but more like he wanted her to put it back. She cocked her head at him, and he smacked the sphere again, then looked at the socket.
Each time Alister smacked the core, the two Elif’s breath caught in their throats. Sara found that a little funny, but understood what Alister was saying. She put the core back in the box and this time pressed it in until it clicked. She could see her thumb print marring the perfectly reflective surface when she pulled her hand away. A ring of lights began coming on around the socket, as if it were filling a gauge to full power. Sara noted the core had begun spinning in its cradle; if it were not for the smudge she’d left on its perfectly reflective surface, she would never have noticed it spinning at all.
Suddenly, the control room came to life. All the monitors lit up and started to scroll data across their screens. Sara couldn't read any of it, but the characters seemed almost familiar, as if several different foreign languages were combined into one.
Dr. Romis pulled out a tablet and started recording the words as they flashed across the screen. “It’s a boot log. The system’s coming online.”
“You can read that?” Sara asked, looking at the tablet.
“Oh, yes. We have records of this language from when we were allies. We can understand the spoken language through the translation device,” Dr. Hess said, indicating the small button on his collar that almost all Elif wore. Sara had thought it was some kind of racial emblem, or military device.
“Wait, the Aether doesn’t translate language for you, like it does for humans?” she asked.
Genesis: War Mage: Book One (War Mage Chronicles 1) Page 18
