(Recommended listening: Sushi for Everyone by Brian Tyler from "The Final Destination" Soundtrack)
Vela's blue cruiser dropped out of warp orbiting the planet Cerulean. The ship circled the planet a few times before swooping in for an atmospheric entry. Vela, with Nae sitting shotgun, scanned her screens as they soared over the harsh Cerulean sands.
"This planet seems barren," Nae commented. "Not much to see, besides rolling dunes of sand."
"This area used to be the site of a mining operation by the Mole Brothers," Vela offered. The mention of the Mole Brothers made Nae visibly flinch. "I'm sorry. Touchy subject?"
"I'm fine, please continue," Nae recovered.
"They used to run some small operations out here with a Tribal labor force, but eventually abandoned the site and the Tribals here. The harsh environment proved too damaging to their equipment, and ended up costing more in repairs than the ore was worth."
Curious, the Tribal asked further. "What did they mine here?"
"The only thing worth it's weight in gold."
"… You mean Gemini, right?"
"Exactly," Vela responded. Gemini, the main export of the entire system, was a highly valuable resource. The Tribals made a living by mining it and selling it to the Union, a position that gave them great standing with other races.
Gemini were a special type of ore. More crystal than metal, it stored massive amounts of energy inside itself, and could be used to power machinery, ships, or even power the Jet Force Battle Suits. The gems had been instrumental in providing the Gemini Team with the resources to battle Mizar's army in the past.
"I've got something here…" Vela spoke. "A structure, a few miles ahead. It's almost directly on the pole, just like Barry said."
"He was pretty vague when he talked about it," Nae warned. "We'll have to be careful."
"I'm so tired of having to be careful."
The "structure" Vela noticed was really nothing more than a gigantic box sitting in the middle of the tundra. Metal all around, it had no windows and only one entrance that they could see. Vela guessed that it was about six levels high, and about four times as long.
Making sure to dress warmly, Vela and Nae left the ship and approached the building on foot. As they walked, the experienced officer took note of the lack of any supporting structures around the building. Usually laboratories had an external power plant, or decon facility, or… something. the entire area around this structure was, for all intents and purposes, flat.
A wide, porous ramp extended up from the snow to the main entranceway, which consisted of a humongous mechanical blast door locked in place by counterweights. A small keypad on the side was covered in snow, and didn't seem to be receiving any power.
"Well, I'd say this place looks pretty abandoned to me," Vela started. "But this trip is gonna end real quick if we can't get inside. The access panel's out, and there's no way we're forcing this sucker open."
"I don't see any windows or ventilation shafts," Nae observed. "I wonder where they got their air from?"
Vela paused, thinking. There was no way in besides this door, but there was no power to it. The real issue was finding a power source.
"We could us the ship to jump start the door," Vela mused. "But I don't like it. This feels too much like a trap. One way in, one way out, no power, no ventilation, abandoned, in the middle of nowhere... I definitely don't like it."
"If we don't do this now, we'll just have to come back later," Nae pointed out. "This was your agreement with Barry for making your weapons, right? You should honor your word."
"I don't have a problem with honoring my word. I have a problem with trusting Barry."
"Then trust your brother. He gave you this mission because he thought you were best suited to carry it out. Or do you want to go back and tell him it was too suspicious?"
Vela could her blood starting to boil again. There was no way she was going to tell Juno a sap story like that!
"I've got some cables in the back. Let's crack this thing open."
Twenty minutes later, Vela successfully routed power from the engines of her Cruiser to the circuits for the door and it's control panel. After a quick data hack, the door slowly began to open. The counter weights on the side of the door lowered, lifting the sizable door slowly. The door hadn't risen more than two feet when Vela suddenly went into full alert.
Standing in the doorway were no less than fifty bright blue drones. Vela whipped out her Tri-Rocket Launcher, taking aim. Several seconds passed, both sides staring the other down before Nae placed her hand on Vela's arm.
"Calm down," she spoke low. "They're not a threat to us." To support her statement, Nae walked up to the nearest Drone and tapped it with her bow. The Drone trembled, then crumpled, it's arms, legs, and head detaching themselves before they hit the ground.
"They're… frozen?" Vela lowered her launcher.
"These are White Drones," Nae took a closer look at the Drones. "They're the typical scientists of the Drone army, not very adept at fighting or shooting. They only look blue-ish because they're frozen."
"You realize that's not a good thing, right? Do you see the stances these drones are in?" Vela circled the group. "They're all reaching for this door, like they're trying to escape. I stand by my previous statement. I don't like this."
"It's freezing in here, too," Nae shivered. "It's colder inside than it is outside."
"Let's make this quick then," Vela strode into the cold coffin, with Nae close behind.
Deep in the recesses of the compound, a lone scientist, long dead, stood guard over his charge. The console before him, covered in frost and dust, had long before died with him. Gun in his right hand, data chip in the other, he sat as a monument to those who'd worked here. Lived here. Died here.
On the upper right hand corner of his panel, a small analog thermometer, not affected by the loss of power, steadily began to rise. Minus fifteen degrees, and counting.
The main entrance led the pair to a freight elevator in the center of the facility. It soon became apparent that the complex was much, much larger than just six stories. Dozens of floors were sprawled out beneath them, extending far below the surface of the ground. Vela noticed a placard on one of the walls near the elevator.
"We're on level five. This building's actually ten stories tall, with many more floors underground."
"But we came in the main entrance…" Nae spoke to herself.
"We must've come in through the service entrance, for machinery and supplies. The lower floors of the compound must be buried in sand, snow and ice."
Unable to take the elevator for lack of power, Nae and Vela made finding a power source their next objective. Watching for any rusted or decrepit steps, they proceeded down the stairs that bordered the edges of the building. Between the outer corridor with the stairs, and the center with the freight elevator, hundreds of small enclosed laboratory spaces sat undisturbed.
Upon closer inspection of these labs, some sported failed biological experiments, long dead, while others had plants and vegetation that somehow thrived in the dark, below freezing environment.
Remains of Drone scientists and soldiers were everywhere, most frozen solid like the ones at the entrance, while others were missing limbs and seemed to have died from blood loss. On these, long gashes could be seen where whatever had attacked them had done it's work.
Severely creeped out, Nae clung to Vela's arm, feeling a little safer in her presence. Truth be told, Vela was just as disturbed as the small Tribal next to her. Despite this, she struggled to ponder the situation logically, forcing herself to ask questions about the nature of of the wounds and predicament of the Drones before their demise.
At Deck 1, Nae tugged on Vela's sleeve and pointed to a drawing on the wall. It was written in green blood, probably by the legless Drone scientist laying dead at it's base. Several calculations were written, in a math that Vela didn't recognize. The final result, though, was clearly displayed, as it was circled several times by the Drone scientist.
"Negative Seven," Vela read aloud.
"What's negative seven supposed to mean?"
"I don't know, but I bet it's important. Make sure you remember it."
Next to the writing on the wall, a blueprint of the compound was engraved into the wall. All the floors from the tenth level down to the twenty fifth deck were listed, with a small diagram of the layout for each. Vela pressed a few buttons on her wristwatch, then scanned the diagram with her arm. After a few seconds, a chirping noise could be heard.
"Here, take this." Vela took off and held the small watch to Nae, who took it immediately.
"What's this?"
"It's a mapping device. It'll keep map out the place as we're walking through it, and it shows our locations relative to each other. If you can find a layout, like this one, it'll save the entire map at once. I only have one, so you're borrowing mine. I set it to track me."
"Why are you giving me this?" Nae asked. "Don't you need it?"
"I'm pretty good with directions," Vela explained. "And just in case we get separated, hopefully it'll make you feel a little safer knowing exactly where you are."
The Tribal smiled and strapped it to her arm. "Thank you."
"According to this map, there are some Emergency Gemini Generators down on the twentieth floor, and the main control room is at the dead bottom, on twenty five."
"Did you really have to say 'Dead Bottom'?" Nae sighed.
Vela and Nae continued their downward descent, checking each and every floor for signs of life or clues to the mystery of the abandoned lab. On each floor, they turned up nothing but more dead bodies, failed experiment rooms, and more grotesque writing on the walls.
"This was a huge operation," Vela commented. "We've seen about two hundred Drones so far, but no sign as to what killed them. What were these guys working on? And where is this thing that massacred them all?"
"It shouldn't matter, right?" Nae piped up. "There isn't anything that could survive for an entire year without eating."
"There are plenty of perfectly preserved frozen bodies around," Vela argued. "If there was something still alive, it wouldn't have to look very hard for food."
"You're not making me feel any better about this, Vela," Nae whimpered.
After two hours of treading lightly, the pair reached the Generators. Each of the machines had a fuel cache of liquefied and re-hardened Gemini, and both seemed to be in good working condition.
"It doesn't look like these have ever been used," Vela crawled out from under the engine, satisfied that everything was in working order.
"This is high quality, refined Red Gemini," Nae inspected the power source. "This costs a small fortune to melt it down and re-solidify, and it sells for about a hundred times as much. The machinery isn't too shabby either."
"You know how this stuff works?"
Nae fell silent for a moment. "I worked for the Mole Brothers, unwillingly, for a majority of my life. It wasn't until you came through and rescued me that I even knew there was such a thing as 'outside'. When you've been in the mines that long, you tend to pick up a few things."
"I'm sorry we weren't able to get to you sooner," Vela murmured. She'd been the one who'd gotten access to the mine from one of the Mole Brothers, and used an elaborate disguise to recover a vital piece of technology and rescue the Tribals that had been forced into labor there. Vela had been traveling with one of those Tribals this entire time without even realizing it.
"Don't be," Nae laughed. "I'm not. I owe you and your family my life. If any of you ever need anything, all you have to do is ask."
"Well, in that case…" Vela put her hands together. "Could you possibly get these machines to run? I'm not so good with the mechanical stuff. Just the electrical."
"Yeah, sure," the young Tribal accepted. "I'll have them up in no time!"
"Cool. While you do that, I'm going to head down to the Main Control Room. When they're running, give me a call on the radio."
"Wait, you're leaving me here alone?" Nae's countenance fell.
"Don't worry," Vela reassured her. "For all my talk, the likelihood of there actually being something alive down here is slim to none. Whatever it was is probably frozen along with everything else."
"Did you really have to say 'Probably'?"
Vela descended the last flight of stairs to the twenty fifth floor, skipping over a particularly rusty looking step on the way down. The bottom floor was flat, with no laboratories between the outer wall and the center. The only open direction for Vela to go was to her left, which according to the diagram she'd seen earlier, was the direction of the Control Room. The path led her down a dark hallway, where the light pouring in from thirty stories up didn't even begin to reach.
Popping a flare, Vela continued for another fifty feet before coming to an open area. Holding the flare out at arm's length, she scanned the room. The Main Console was in the center of the room, facing outward from the hall. Sitting in the control seat was a frozen Drone, much like the rest.
Unlike the rest, though, this Drone didn't seem to be panicked, frightened, or trying to get away from some unknown horror. He just sat there, back straight, head forward, a gun in his right hand, and his left hand held up, clenched.
Drawn to the clenched fist, Vela took a closer look. He was holding a Zetabyte Data Chip in his hand, as if trying to advertise to whoever saw him. Trying not to disturb the body, Vela grabbed one end of the chip and tugged firmly. The Drone's body instantly crumbled to ice dust.
So much for not disturbing the dead.
A distant rumbling caught Vela's ear, and whirring could be heard inside the control console as it started to once again receive power.
"Got it!" Nae's voice came over the radio. "I told you I could do it!"
"Good work," Vela replied into the mike. "You can either stay there or make your way to me, if you're up to it."
"Okay, I'll be there in a few minutes after I finish up here."
"Aye, keep me posted."
Vela took one gloved hand and wiped the frost of the console screens. A layer of ice was over everything, and none of the touch controls worked anymore. Frustrated, she searched until she found a manual keyboard stashed in one of the cabinets. She grunted when she realized all the controls were in the Drone language. She could navigate, but she couldn't understand what she was seeing.
All right then, let's start with the most suspicious thing...
The Data Chip slid easily into the docking port of the console, and a file bin popped up on the main screen immediately. Unsure of where to start, she clicked on the first item.