Strangely, his hardsuit interfaced perfectly with the mysterious machine. Why was it responding to him? He had never once been authorized to use anything like it before. And yet it recognized him and opened for him. His mind was dulled from days of unending anxiety and exhaustion that he could not understand why an old ship with old equipment had equipment that was better than any he had seen before. The Lionheart was a type he never seen and only vaguely recognized from its unit registration. An old ship filled with new warmachines ,buried deep under the ice on a planet at the edge of the galactic rim. How does one comprehend that? It seemed like a jumble of words had popped into his tired consciousness to confuse and distract. He had to speak to someone , anyone . Keeping all of these thoughts and feelings bottled up was tearing his psyche apart. Maybe if this were some place warmer and familiar he wouldn't have trouble being a hard-jawed commander whose only words were seemingly strings of orders and commands. But here in the damp and grim , surrounded by walls filled with things looking to make their way inside, there were few if any commands he could give out that could assure success. Get the monkey off his back , he thought, before it was too late.
Status alerts popped into existence in front of his eyes within the confines of his visor. His bracers unfolded themselves into three panels, lifting up at the wrist motor. The hand assembly flipped over with the forearm panels combining to form control sticks. His remaining arm panels slid into slots on the pilots chair, locking into place via magnetic clamps. The helmet flaps splayed out and snapped onto the headrest, forming the data-link to the rest of the mech. A triptych of shin panels formed at each leg before folding down to link to the foot pedal actuators.
His chest plate opened up and snapped onto his back, forming the rest of the chair and clamping him solidly to the pilot bay safety frame. Now the control panels began to light up with their holographic projectors. An iridescent sensor globe flashed into existence with an array of moving contacts ; his team was methodically searching the area around him.
On his screen, six green dots moved through a grid search pattern, steadily making their way across the bay. The sensor globe estimated not just the location but the acceleration ,mass and the elevation as well, using an array of ultrasonic and gravimetric sensors. A red triangle appeared on the display , a small warning that another network of sensors had been triggered. His mind generated the command that ran through his head piece and into the thick cables that stretched out from the chair. The mech flipped through its vision modes to reveal the thermal imaging mode.
While the team were bright as candles in the forest of dormant mechs, it was the walls that gave off the deepest red as if splotches of blood were seeping out from sore wounds. They did not stay still. At the finest resolution , he could see the tips of their bug legs radiating heat in a 6 point star formation , tapping along the walls on barbs. When the thermograph warped , the center of the hot splotches turned cold blue. The walls were splitting open.
"Get in a mech now!" he screamed through the radio. "Hostiles incoming!" he screamed once more. His mind raced, going through the start up and arming process. He grunted and huffed as if a massive amount of physical exertion was needed to move the firing pins and the ammo loaders. The red "MASTER ARM" message bled through all the holographic displays.
Dizzy and Reaper were running on instinct. A grid pattern search was the easiest to handle with their tired heads ,reeling from no sleep. Go down on column, turn, go down the next column until there weren't any left. Reaper babbled on about a theory he had. That there was a multiverse and all the possible universes were connected intrinsically. Every time a decision is made, a new universe springs up. One where the decision was made, one where it wasn't and an infinite stretch where the decision was just slightly different.
Dizzy scoffed. The physics of such a structure were beyond anything that the modern science could test. It wasn't a theory, it was just a bunch of words strung together. And even if there some truth to it, what would be the point? If all these different universes were distinct and separate then there was no reason to care about them. There was no way to interact. Reaper couldn't explain how it would work. But that didn't stop him. After the last few days, he knew that something was up. A ship from the near future , sitting under ice for decades and filled with otherworldly monsters. It was the plot to a science fiction book.
"That is just stupid. That would mean that this ship is from the future. Maybe this thing was always here and the guys who abandoned us were stealing tech from it. What if all our stuff was derived from this thing?" Dizzy blurted. "Ah slag!" she yelled out.
She had just committed the same transgression that she had only a few moments earlier admonished Reaper for. A speculation that sounded incredibly unreliable. What, she thought, what the hell? That would mean that their mechs were based on designs dug out from an ice mine. And everything they used, their arms, their hardsuits, had to have bits and pieces of tech from a ship that oddly enough was nearly the same as one being constructed out of a Republic dry-dock.
What the hell, none of that is right , she told herself. Reaper was just a conspiracy theorist. Well, not only. She knew something wasn't right. Although she knew that one day first contact would be made, she never imagined it like this. She had an entire collection of Star Trekkers videos that her father gave to her. It was the exhilaration of exploration and the possibility of meeting new and unique species. The production values were outright terrible in many of the videos but the awe of feeling connected to the universe had overwhelmed any loss of disbelief. Thats why she joined the Star Corps. But as it happened, being in the Star Corps and being an explorer were two different things.
She excelled in tactics and maneuvering but that wasn't enough to join the exploration and recon divisions. She made a mistake thinking that all she needed was a desire to see distant stars. It was the pilots who could fly the ships single-handed that were rewarded with that. She was suitable to be a soldier, an armarine to be shipped into battle aboard battlecarriers and drop ships. She could reach those distant twinkling stars when something near it needed to die.
For Reaper though, that didn't matter. The guns , the missiles, the explosives. Thats why he joined. He loved watching the old war movies his grand father collected. Brave men and women ,fighting against all odds. Burning with hot blood and blazing into battle spewing out fire like a frakking demon borne dragon! That was his aim, to join the guys who had the same idea. The Hellriders, the most elite dropship troopers in the entire Republic Star Corps, were the ones who shared his passion for explosions.
But it wouldn't be his choice. The personality tests were suspicious at first and then completely obvious. What seemed like an everyday interaction with a lieutenant or a lunch break with captain were tests to see how he would handle different social situations. They needed people who could handle themselves well. That was the problem. His mouth would not stop talking about his conspiracy theories. Aliens, reptilian overlords, robotic dopplegangers. He had all of these theories prepped as if for a galactic convention for nutjobs and crazies.
No, that wouldn't work with the Hellriders. They were the hardest and smartest of the entire military. They didn't need to add insane conspiracy theories to their roster . Rejected. That was the final decision. But his acumen with high explosives kept him from being dumped right out. He was allowed to stay ,keep his rank. Just not anywhere near sane people. He had an effect on them, something akin to a virus. Infecting them with stupid conspiracies and filling them with worthless paranoia.
So off he went, to become a mechgrunt, an armarine to serve as a first line combatant. It didn't seem to bother him much. All this was just plainly a stepping stone for him. What he was looking forward to was joining up with the secretive clandestine organization he called "Section 86". Often he would ramble about it, a group of conspirators experimenting on aliens ,contacting advanced civilizations and developing doomsday weapons for when humanity would need them.
The fact that he was one of the first to make first contact with a truly alien species, one that wasn't just an analogue to a terrestrial animal, one that was completely beyond any known form of life was lost on him. They were xenos to be burnt to a crisp without a second thought. No need to communicate, no need to suss out the details of the conspiracy that Reaper had only moments before contact had explained was the source of these interdimensional monsters. No interrogation and no autopsies. Just the rush of fear pumping into his flight or fight response, often a coin toss of a reflex. Crashing the land-runner as he ran from the first sight of alien animals or igniting flamethrowers at the first sight of zombified mechs.
All his the talk about shadow governments and alien interference were just to distract himself from the dire situations he found himself. Concocting a world where everyone had a secret identity and mission, where there were agents lurking in the shadows waiting for him to make a mistake, made him feel important. But it also rationalized the fears and anxiety he faced with every combat drop he endured. He had to fight the organization or they would win! Even if it meant sacrificing himself on an arid dust planet to secure a refueling depot that was drained of fuel. But now, with a real shadowy threat, none of that mattered. He never thought what he would do if faced with a bonified conspiracy. He never considered what he would do. No amount of preparation, no amount of knowledge of the Illuminati or Section 86 prepared him. His hands trembled at the thought of seeing the full form of the nightmarish creatures that were gnawing through the walls. Flight or fight, an equal chance of both. That was the most his mind would allow.
But right now, walking with his protective hardsuit partially open, all he could talk about was the conspiracy that brought this ship from a parallel universe. To say he had the best explanation for all the disturbing events leading to this would mean that no one else could even comprehend why it happened in the first place.
Karin and Ross were professionals. They took the grid pattern search seriously, marking all items of interest with neon reflective tape. They marked their path with glow sticks and kept their suit lights at the maximum brightness. They marked munition crates and ration boxes. They tapped fuel drums to see if they were full and unplugged rocket pack nozzles to check for blockages.
Karin's speciality was field mechanics. She had been a gear-head since she could remember, always by her father's side while he rebuilt classic cars. She would watch him methodically machine and polish parts into mirrored surfaces. It was a wonderful sight to see blocks of dull metal turn into cams and gears that seemed cut from diamond.
School proved to be too slow for her. Her desire to build was slowed by the need to pass certification exams. Eventually she lost her appetite for school altogether and instead taking up an apprenticeship in her fathers manufacturing plant. Her mother, a kind woman who only wished for her daughter to advance beyond dangerous physical labor into the fields of science was at first disappointed. But the smile Karin had when she worked days on end on a pet project was enough to prove that whatever Karin was doing was happy. If she was happy, so was her mother.