I had to do a lot of planning before I could take on this chapter. Next chapter is going to be the last one where Sam Knight is doing solo runs. I had been thinking about the necromorphs, Dead Space and how could I incorporate them and then it popped into my head while I was in the shower. I liked the idea but it required a totally new chapter 11. Hopefully you like what I did. Chapter 12 to follow soon.
As always I welcome feedback and reviews. Also I am very grateful to all the people who signed on to follow my story. I know the updates are slow but every time I see a new email with a new follower I am urged back in action.
Edited 30.05.2021 for grammatical, stylistic and logic errors. Added a codex entry.
05/01/2174 Tau Volantis
Let's just be clear first, I am not a piloting genius, I am far from Joker or Cortez, but I am better than Vega. So my landing wasn't pretty but the shuttle was in one piece, mostly. It was on the ground and with some minor repairs to the thruster assembly it would take off again. It wasn't entirely my fault either. As it turned out the snowstorm covering the planet was made up not just of snow clouds. Once my shuttle dipped low enough I was met with a layer of pure thunderstorm. Sandwiched between the upper slow atmospheric currents carrying frozen water vapour and the lower warmer faster currents carrying snow clouds the middle layer turned into one huge electrical storm fed by the potential difference between the upper and lower layer of clouds. There after getting hit with a few dozen lightning strikes the shuttle lost power as the on-board computer thought that the mass effect core had built up a critical level of charge and shut it off. For then next ten seconds the shuttle fell like a brick. Luckily it was better streamlined than the true flying brick – UT-47, so I still had some basic aerodynamic control. After wrestling with it for another half a minute I managed to stop it from falling straight down. By that point the shuttle was out of the thunderclouds and the emergency power came back on so I had the thrusters back but not the mass effect core.
There was no time for fear, no time for anything but the purely automated responses drilled into me by the instructors so that is what I did. Most spacecraft kinetic barriers are manually adaptable and so I switched them into crash mode and did one of the most aggressive deceleration burns I have ever encountered. Even my improved cardio-vascular and nervous systems were on the verge of blacking out as the shuttle's engines applied all their considerable thrust to the effort of saving it from being a pile of smoking wreckage on the ground.
Seconds later I exhaled in relief as I saw that both the speed and the altitude indicators were stable and were not flashing red anymore. There were however a few other yellow and red warning lights. Only two were actually important. In the heroic effort to slow down and stopping the shuttle from falling a few of the smaller thrusters burned out. The second warning was about the mass effect core being down and I had absolutely no idea if I could bring it back online until I landed and had a long, hard look at it. It was a simplified human version of a turian design so it should be pretty robust but still I had to find a place to land and fast.
After making sure that there is nothing that is going to make the shuttle fall out of the sky in the immediate future I switched my attention to the "incoming communication" notification flashing to the side of the more important readouts and tapped it.
"This planet is private property of Ishimura Corporation, any trespassers will be met with security and escorted to the temporary detention centre until deportation can be arranged. Any resistance will be met with deadly force." the message said and repeated after a few seconds. Automated threats, not that they would deter anyone serious enough and you had to be to actually get here. Corporate owned planets existed but they were rarely owned by a single corporation, too much of an expense no matter how big and powerful you are. Even Noveria was owned jointly.
Quickly locating the signal source I banked the shuttle carefully to avoid stressing the thrusters that I still had, and let the sensors go into active scan mode again. The cloud cover was so thick that it was impossible to say if it was day or night, the darkness was near absolute and only the faint glow of what I suspected was the constant lightning discharge made the darkness into a cold grey gloom turning everything monochrome. I doubted that even the best pilot could fly out here using only his eyes, the shadows, the snow and the lack of variety to the landscape made it impossible to judge distances. Half an hour flight time at barely over 500kph and I was setting down in what had appeared to be a natural cavern in the side of a hill on first glance but once inside the signs of engineering by a sentient mind were clear. The entrance to the cavern was wide enough for several shuttles to fly in without endangering each other and inside, it could fit two or three frigates like SR1 Normandy easily. Despite this being an alien world and alien design by a mind so twisted that it could see a species wide suicide as the ultimate goal the purpose of this cavern was easy enough to understand, it was a covered landing field. Would make sense that the species that lived on this planet would require something like this, the weather must have been better when they were still alive and building this but I would not expect it to be radically different. Inside there was a row of shuttles, all of them human-made and clearly intact with no discernible damage. Whoever piloted them must have known about the middle layer and taken countermeasures. Landing the shuttle on the other side of the huge bay I took stock of the equipment I had. The armour and weapons I had were aimed at blending in, they were the kind that an average merc would wear, not cheap but easily available. Nothing that would allow anyone to discern identity of the wearer without taking some intensive scans. They were solid enough when dealing with pirates or mercenaries but I had the feeling that I would need more than that for what is coming next. The snow covered tomb world, insane suicide cultists, inhuman and inhumane experiments. All of that made me wish I had waited for response from HQ, I know that they preferred when we were making decisions on how to carry out our missions on our own but this was serious enough to warrant some backup. No use crying over spilt milk however so I geared up. Taking 16 grenades, twice what I usually have and even an extra ammo block. Full weapon loadout too, sniper rifle in the form of the trusty M-92, ERCS Banshee Mk6, M-3 Predator and a Storm Mk4 shotgun. Usually I took only the weapons that would suit the particular situation or engagement type but this time I had no real information what was going to oppose me or what kind of environment is going to be deeper inside this ancient alien mega-structure.
Stepping out of the shuttle I felt the temperature drop even inside the suit. It compensated quickly enough but for a few moments the wind chill made me shiver. Or maybe it was the knowledge of what happened on this planet and my imagination working overtime to conjure up spectres of long dead species. Holding the Predator at the ready I quickly crossed the cavern to where I saw some doors. When I was approaching the hill in the shuttle I had tried to scan it but the presence of several heavy metals such as iron, nickel and lead made it impossible to get any detail. All that the sensors would tell me was that the density of the area was far less than it should be considering presence of metals.
The landing bay was constructed from a curious blend of concrete, lots of heavy metals in it and it had been fashioned into huge slabs before somehow being fused together. This type of construction was usually called megalithic on Earth. Approaching the door I was greeted with the first sign of modern technology, a basic airlock, prefabricated for building bases and camps in hostile environments. Bypassing their basic lock code was a matter of seconds and I was in.
Corridors, endless corridors, a labyrinth of crisscrossing, winding corridors. Dark grey walls marked in what I assumed was necromorph script but worn down and faded over the thousands of years of being exposed to the wind. The airlock might have been modern but the facility inside was still original necromorph construction, apart from the lights which must have been put in by the people who were now down here. Equally spaced every 10 steps they were again the basic orange LED light, just bright enough to navigate around. I have been inside it for nearly an hour and I had found plenty of artifacts that would have made any xeno-archaeologist jump with joy and plenty of evidence of recent human presence here. The walls inside were made of the same stuff as the cavern outside so my omni-tool scanning feature was useless, all it was getting back was endless echoes as if the corridor itself was constructed to subvert any attempts at scanning. As I was checking the map again, it was automatically filled in by the mapping software in the omni-tool showing me where I had been already, a security mech walked around a corner.
"Intruder detected" it said before aiming it's weapon and firing. Security mechs have been around for a hundred years at least and their current iterations were pretty good at dealing with simple situations, no one however would expect them to fight trained soldiers and win unless they had at least ten to one numbers on their side. But then again usually they were not so trigger happy either. I dove for the ground and twisted, aiming roughly at it's upper body as I squeezed the trigger several times. It must have been the cheapest version as it didn't have any shields and two shots impacted full force with the rest either missing or harmlessly passing through less important areas of it's body. First blew out the lower part of it's head and the second hit it squarely in the chest. Slowed down but not deterred it started to aim the weapon again but I swept my leg bringing it down from it's feet and then with a couple more shots disabling it's arms. It was sent on a patrol, so it must have some kind of map of this place including the origin point and identities of whoever gave the orders.
Fifteen minutes and several security mechs reduced to scrap later I stood in front of a staircase winding down to the lower level. I knew now from the map inside the bots logs that his facility had several underground floors overlooking a huge empty cavern on the bottom. From the topographical map I got from scanning the area I had thought that the necromorphs tunneled into a natural hill. I was wrong. The whole thing was artificial, a huge pyramidal shape with a flat top like a cross between a mayan and egyptian pyramids. Over the eons it had been worn down into a smoother shape appearing more natural. The bots logs noted that the personnel with security clearance were at the bottom of this facility right in the region of the huge void. Notes left by Isaacs were pure speculation when it came to this place and so far I had not find any surviving computer systems of necromorph origin to tell me what was the purpose of this place or what could be down there. Stepping carefully down I wondered what Nicole and the rest of her people were still doing here. Even if they had some kind of falling out between them that destroyed their big ships there were at least two or three shuttles in the bay right now that were capable of interstellar flight. They could have sent for help. Unless of course they were still trying to dig up whatever secrets this world held. I wondered if they knew what the Obelisks did and if Nicole knew what had happened to her husband. If she did and she still continued on with the mission then the only choice at that point I would have would be to kill them. People like that are too dangerous, letting them live would only allow them another chance to try it again. Especially since there was currently no evidence linking any of them to the infected terrorists or the massacre on that ship so even if I handed all of them over to authorities they would likely walk away with a fine for breaking Citadel law by excavating a dead alien civilization without permission. Hopefully it was a choice I wouldn't have to make.
This level was a repeat of the previous one, a labyrinth of corridors and mostly empty rooms with bots patrolling them in a pattern that made it easy for me to avoid them or ambush them when trying to go around them would have taken too long. Only when I neared another staircase down I noticed the climbing temperature of the environment around me. Until then it was at a steady -10C, cold but tolerable when compared to the -50C outside, not including the wind chill factor. Now it was slowly climbing. Which meant that there was a power source large enough to heat up the huge space.
Holding my weapon at the ready I walked down the stairs and through a shorter than I expected corridor to emerge into an enormous cavern. I couldn't see much since it was all in darkness with only a faint outline of long staircase down leading to a camp on the bottom, the only illuminated spot I could see. My omni-tool beeped, it was notifying me that the space I was in was too big for the automap feature to map, which meant that the void was at least a kilometre long from where I was standing. Whatever was down there was clearly massive. I was just about to start down the path when I saw movement.
Three shapes resolved themselves from the background, all humanoid as far as I could tell but wearing large flowing robes made out of innumerable pieces of cloth wound around and around until only the most basic shape could be discerned. Their hoods were drawn far down so I could not see their faces. At first they appeared unarmed but a moment later I saw that they were armed after all, if those vicious looking scythes with a pistol grips on their belts were any indication.
I stood there watching them as they had simply stopped a dozen paces away and made no move to draw their weapons or in fact do anything but stare at me. If they were actually staring at me and not at the ground. The hoods made it impossible to tell where they were looking. Deciding to risk it I put the gun back on my hip.
Two of them looked at each other and then one gestured for me to follow and started down the steps. I waited for a few seconds to see if the others are going to move but seeing no reaction from them I followed. As I stepped down the first flight of stairs the others followed without uttering a sound. I needed some answers and while no doubt shooting all of them was the safest approach to take, gathering intelligence required sacrifice. I just hoped that it wouldn't be me this time.
Secondary Codex Entry/Extinct Civilizations
While protheans are the best known extinct civilization and they are credited with the creation of the mass relays, Citadel and the remnants of their bases provided most of the species known in the galaxy with the technological leap needed to use faster than light travel the galaxy has at many points in it's history been home to other civilizations. Several of the better known ones are inusannon and zeioph but there are dozens of worlds in the galaxy that bear the tell tale signs of an advanced civilizations. Some have left behind baffling monuments of inscrutable purpose, others have left only the signs of war or industrial pollution as proof of their existence. Ancient cities, outposts, stone or metal monoliths covered with alien writings all have been carefully noted and promptly declared off limits by the Citadel Council. Research into these civilizations is almost always met with scorn and ridicule by the foremost minds of the galaxy in the field of history and archaeology, and it is not a surprise that most of them are asari. Their long lifespans have given them an overwhelming advantage in the field and they have dominated it for the past 2500 years. It is rumoured that several monasteries devoted to Athame in asari space have been used as repositories of ancient artifacts from dozens of civilizations even more ancient than protheans. But as such monasteries are not open to visitors and are under protection of Justicars or asari huntresses it is impossible to verify.
Due to this fact any remains and artifacts left over by extinct civilizations are sought after by every single galactic power, locations of these finds are closely guarded secrets until research teams make sure that there is nothing left over that can be used. Corporations like ExoGeni are afforded more leeway than others as they take on the task of researching such places and the risk of breaking Citadel law in case of a valuable find. So far there is no information of any significant discovery made from the remains of any other civilization other than protheans.