The craft landed on its assigned pad. Outside, servitors and tech-priests moved about, securing fuel lines and muttering litanies to appease the machine spirit. The man inside made the final checks before opening the cockpit. He pulled gloves over his hands and checked the holsters on his sides. The two under his arms held .45 semi-auto Smith and Wesson's. A little large for him, but enough power to stop just about anything in its tracks. The two hip holsters held laspistols, and the sheath in the small of his back held his combat knife. A blade that was 12 inches long, its blade was monomolecularly thin, sharpened by lasers. The blade was made for him by Matt and was a cherished position, as it signified the bond between them. His thought drew away from the blade and remembered Matt's promise:
"Don't worry. I'll come back for you."
The words echoed in Adam's mind as he popped open the canopy and was blasted with a heat wave from the desert air. A servitor came up to the side of the craft and attached a ladder to let Adam get down. He climbed down and took a look at his surroundings. It was a desert wasteland for the full 360 degrees that he looked. Frowning, he walked over to one of the tech-priests and asked, "Where's Juniper Port?"
The tech-priest looked up from the maintenance checklist and turned its head to Adam. A mess of wires, tubes, and various plates formed the skull of what was once a human head. "You're standing on it." The priest replied in a mechanically replaced voice. Adam instinctively hopped backwards and looked down to see if he really was standing on a city that he didn't about.
"Not literally," the priest said, with a twinge of mechanized sarcasm. "You humans always take that reaction. We are on a elevator platform that will take us down to the spaceport and the city."
"Oh," Adam replied. "Why is the city underground?"
"Because the temperature at midday reaches around 200 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature humans usually collapse from exhaustion, which result in death in most cases. The natives however have adjusted their bodies to the point that the heat doesn't affect them as it does offworlders. Does that answer you question?"
"Yeah, I guess if that's all you can tell me. So what's this place called again?" Adam asked.
"The planet's name is Baal. This is the homeworld of the primarch Sanguinius, progenitor of the Blood Angels Space Marines Chapter. Usually the local tribes send participates to the games in order for new recruits to be chosen. You're lucky, you got here just in time for the games."
"Games? What kinds of games?" Adam asked. "Like the old Olympics?"
"Olympics?" The tech-priest looked at him with a blank stare. "What are the Olympics?"
"Uhhh . . ." Adam thought about how to explain it, then remember Matt telling him not to mention the past. "Nothing. I don't know. The term just popped into my mind. He he he."