5.
Post tenebras lux
Jason Lock shoved aside another piece of debris and forced his way onto the lowest level of Zion. Down here, on levels that hadn't been visited in what looked like decades, he was hoping against hope that someone had stored away missing equipment. No one could find the heavy loaders that were usually used to hoist up a ship in dry dock to work on its underbelly. They'd managed to jury rig supports for the Jade Dragon but the Hammer was proving to be too oversize for her own good.
The enormous machines that kept Zion running, pumped above him, almost in time to his heartbeat, and he sneezed explosively as he disturbed a patch of dust a full inch thick. It burst into the air around him obscuring everything and he had to back away in irritation. But flapping his arms at it only made the storm of particles worse and Jason was forced to retreat. As he did, his attention turned and caught sight of a thin crack in the wall across from him.
"Commander?" Rand's voice echoed down the hall toward him. "We've found the loaders."
"Understood." His fingers probed the crack and the cleft on his chin deepened as he frowned. A fiercely blown breath blew the heavy dust out of the edges and then he did another and another, ignoring the fierce urge to cough. Panting as he finished he looked upon the outline of what was very obviously a door. There was no handle, or someone would have found it earlier, only the outline.
He set all of his weight aside it but the door didn't move. "Dammit. How the hell am I going to get you open?"
At the last word a tiny panel on the door turned to a murky green, barely visibly even with his efforts at cleaning. The door's mechanism ground heavily against the accumulated age that held it in place, but at last the servos managed to override the resistance, and the door cracked open. It froze only a third open but it was open.
Rand's insistence that all teams carry flashlights in the uncertainly lit corridors proved prophetic and Lock snapped his on as he peered through the narrow slit. He was a big man and it looked to be a tight squeeze but he managed to wedge his chest into the space and then it was only a matter of residual pain and a little bit of wiggling to get the rest of the way through.
Despite the heavy dust everywhere else in the labyrinth tunnels, this room's door had kept the interior relatively free of it. Lock stared at the maps laid in clear plastic storage cases, recognizing many of them as the tunnels that surrounded Zion. But these maps were not only of the tunnels, he could see additions and bi-levels that reached all the way to the surface. His skin tightened and crawled as he saw the blueprints for the city that must have existed directly underneath the sky.
He explored the closest artifacts first, reveling in the sense of history they contained. The machines had taken so much of it from them, but here, here were missing pieces.
The room appeared to be some sort of map room or archive. They were several cabinets and tables that held additional papers, mostly maps. But it was the one that had seen the most age and decay that caught his attention. It had been left on the furthest table naked of the plastic covering. The ink had faded in the air and the paper become more frail and fragile but Lock's eyes caught the fact that it was a wider and more expansive map of the sewers than anything he'd ever seen. It extended beyond the human fields that marked the furthest he'd ever sent a ship. They'd known that any exploration beyond them was a suicide run. Except these maps showed more, running more than three thousand miles beyond the edge of their territory.
He stepped back and the movement jostled the map suddenly. Lock cursed as it ripped down the center, but the damage exposed another sheet of paper lying underneath it. It took several aborted attempts to gently lift the map in order to pull out the sheet underneath it. He recognized the printer code. They still used machines that spit out the 8 point dot matrix but this paper was as old as everything else around him.
The shiver intensified as he realized what he was looking at.
Loss of contact: Agartha city
Time: 2108 hours
Brief as follows: Commander Jonas reported increased Sentinel activity in the tunnels. Fleet still in berthing per the Oracle's command. Infantry will be insufficient. Will attempt evacuation. End of message. No further communication attained. Must assume loss of Agartha. And all souls in it.
He looked back at the map, extended his vision beyond the fields, beyond the distance any sane captain would ever attempt. And then he saw it, a city in the earth that no one had ever thought to look for.
Agartha.
Latin translation: After darkness, I hope for light