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Welcome to the Future: Chapter 3
Lieutenant Commander Jane Shepard was not a woman who used hyperbole lightly. If life had taught her anything, it was that things could always be worse.
Fights could always get tougher, the stakes could always get higher, and the situation could always get more fucked up. She had learned how to keep things in perspective, and she had learned it the hard way. A kid who was bigger than you trying to take your lunch was an inconvenience. A Batarian mercenary armed with a Kishock Harpoon Gun was a problem.
By that measure, N7 training had been difficult enough to push her to the extent of her abilities, but it had not been hell, as so many of the other graduates had put it. Defending Elysium from the Batarians until reinforcements arrived had also been a difficult task, and one that had come with a high chance of failure, but it had obviously not been impossible, or the defence would never have succeeded. And likewise, the mountains of Noveria had not been freezing, they had just been cold.
The structure below NK386, however, was truly freezing. The research team had stated in their reports that the temperature inside the structure had been -197 degrees Celsius, which Shepard had understood to be very, very cold. She had therefore ordered the ground team to prepare accordingly, which in this case meant that they were all wearing heavy, vacuum-rated hardsuits equipped with internal environmental controls. It had apparently been the first time that any of the Normandy's crew had seen Miranda wearing something other than one of her customary skin-tight suits, given by the number of double-takes she had collected while walking to the hangar bay.
And yet, even with armor designed to withstand the cold of deep space, Shepard could feel the chill of the thin atmosphere contained within the structure. Moisture fogged on the inside of her helmet's visor every time she exhaled, threatening to blind her, but the helmet's dedicated anti-fogging systems managed to keep the level of condensation to a minimum.
She found it difficult to believe that the research team had actually chosen to set up their camp inside the structure. How they had managed to survive in these conditions for over a year was completely beyond her.
As she stepped cautiously through the narrow tunnel, the rest of her team trailing loosely behind her in single file, Shepard noticed small clusters of jagged, crystalline spikes that had formed on the tunnel's otherwise bare, metallic surfaces. Visibility was still poor; though the blue lights that illuminated the tunnel had become more sparse as the team moved forward, they were still blindingly bright, a fact not helped by the presence of a thick mist that made the glare from the lights almost impenetrable. Anything further away than 10 feet or so was just a nebulous shadow lost in the blazing mist. She had turned around, once, to tell Kasumi to stop complaining about the cold- an unnecessary gesture, given the nature of radio communications, but human instinct still said that you turned to face someone when you spoke to them. She had seen Garrus, at her back as always, and Jacob, a few feet behind him, but beyond that there was only the barest hint of Grunt's bulk visible through the haze. Her HUD told her that Miranda, Kasumi and Mordin were only a few metres away, but if it hadn't been for their transponders, Shepard would have had no way of knowing they were there.
Reaching what seemed to be the end of the tunnel, Shepard gave the order to halt. They had no real idea as to why the Cerberus researchers had stopped reporting in, and Shepard wasn't about to dismiss the possibility of a hostile presence. And if hostile forces were present, this would have been a perfect area for an ambush. Emerging from the cramp confines of the tunnel into the comparatively large, dark space that it opened into, the team would be completely vulnerable. A few rounds, or a single well placed grenade would be sufficient to devastate Shepard's meager force of seven. Returning her shotgun to its stored position across her back, Shepard drew her Carnifex pistol and took the last step towards the mouth of the tunnel. Linking the pistol's built-in sensors to her HUD, she slowly panned it 180 degrees across the opening of the tunnel, scanning the area ahead for any signs of life. Finding no such signs, and mentally dismissing the possibility of an entirely synthetic force, she signaled the rest of the team to follow as she stepped forward into the next chamber.
Thanks to a combination of standard Alliance Military gene-mods and automated visual filters, it took slightly less than a second for Shepard's eyes to adjust to the darkness of the new space. What she saw vaguely reminded her of a cathedral she'd once seen a documentary vid about. The area was vast, nearly 200 feet wide, though it was difficult to tell. The mist that was present in the tunnel was still noticeable here, though it seemed to be much thinner. The far end of the chamber was too far away to be seen in the mist, as was the ceiling. Hanging in the middle of the space was what looked to be a giant pipe, roughly 30 feet in diameter, that stretched the length of the chamber. The bottom of the pipe was translucent, and a pulsating blue glow came from within it. The sides of the pipe seemed to be made of the same dull gray metal that had formed the walls of the tunnel, and that also formed the floor of this gigantic chamber. The floor directly below the "pipe" was smooth, except for a strange geometric pattern that seemed to have been polished into the surface, rather than etched or carved.
On either side of this smooth section of the floor were large spurs of the same crystalline substance that Shepard had seen in the tunnel. The clumps of crystal formed parallel lines on either side of the smooth area of the floor, like plants lining a 30 foot wide garden path. Beyond the crystals, the floor curved upwards like an immense half-pipe to join the walls. And in the center of the clear path, less than 20 feet away from the tunnel entrance, lay the remains of the Cerberus research team's base camp.
Author's Note: Alcatraz will show up next chapter, I promise. Also, my hopes of posting one chapter a week proved to be way too optimistic.