Legions of Orion (Star Crusades Nexus, Book 1) (25 page)

“
It’s a casing, not
alive,” he sad quietly and
looked up at
the other shapes.

“What about them, are they the
same?”

Khan was already checking the shape of
a similarly dressed man.

“
Same here.
I
t’s like they have been turned into
stone,” he said in wonder.

Spartan wasn’t convinced.

“Stone, or maybe these are just
shells.”

He pushed his hand
to the face of the woman, and the outer layer cracked open like old
porcelain to reveal the bones of a long dead woman. Spartan took a
step back and lifted his head. The lamp on his also armour lifted,
following his gaze as he scanned through the massive
hall.

“There must be hundreds of them in
here, each of them lying down and protected by these fragile
coverings.”

The other Jötnar
spread out and checked the other bodies, but apart from physical
size, they all followed the same pattern.

“
General, they all
have their armour and a pattern of a weapon. I’m sending you all
the data now. I think we’re going to need a research team down
here.”

“Understood. Can you see anything
else?”

Spartan looked
around again, but the wide-open space appeared to contain no more
doorways, hatches or shafts. There was nothing but dust, rubble,
the arched ceiling supports and the hundreds of encased
bodies.

“
Negative, General,
this is it.”

Khan tried to lift
one of the figures, but it crackled and splintered in his armoured
forearms. He looked back to Spartan with a guilty
expression.

“They’ve been here a long time.”

Spartan nodded at him.

Yeah, I
don’t doubt it. What I want to know is who the h
ell are they?

* * *

Jack took the lead with the marines
following in a loose column. Their suit-mounted lamps filled the
derelict structure with dull orange streaks that emphasised the
rocky outcrops with hard shadows. Once a few metres inside, he was
able to perform a full three hundred and sixty degree turn to
examine the inside.

Impressive.

Though most of it was now in ruins,
there had clearly been a number of substantial arches, most of
which now lay in heaps on the ground. Only a third of the area was
traversable, as the rest had fallen in to create what looked more
like a ribbed tunnel than a large domed interior.

“Jack, what have you got?” asked
General Rivers over the comms link. Although the commanding officer
was able to watch a video feed from each person there, it was still
difficult to gauge depth and dimensions from such a small and
grainy image.

“It’s definitely man-made and old. Same
kind of architectural structure as the stuff found on Hyperion,
I’d say
.”

The Sergeant of his
m
arine squad pushed forward to stand
alongside Jack. He looked directly at the man-made sections of the
area so that General Rivers could get a good view.

“
I think I should
take over from here,” he said grimly.

Jack lifted his hands submissively.

“Sure, go ahead, I’m sure you’re
familiar with this kind of site.”

The
m
arine looked at him and moved ahead
along the tunnel. He tapped the marine-wide audio band so that all
the unit commanders could hear him.

“
This is Sergeant
Ajax. W
e’re moving into the tunnel. Will
advise.”

“
Understood,
Sergeant, be careful down there,” came back the General.

They pushed on
forward, but this time there was no spare room for either Jack or
Wictred to do any more than follow the rear of the squad. Wictred
didn’t really seem to care, but Jack was becoming more and more
annoyed by the second. He pushed passed the last marine to speak,
but Sergeant Ajax stopped and lifted his right hand in a fist. The
entire squad dropped to their knees. With there now space to move,
Jack pushed ahead and reached the Sergeant who waited a short
distance ahead of the others. Jack made to step past him when the
Sergeant grabbed him.

“Watch your step, boy!” he snarled.

Jack ignored him and
quickly felt a sickening sensation as his right foot moved out into
the blackness and touched nothing but empty air. The Sergeant
yanked him back, and he fell backwards and to the ground
ungracefully. Wictred pulled himself forward, but upon reaching
them both, he stopped and looked in the same direction as the
Sergeant. Jack sat upright and shook his head, anger now starting
to well up from inside. Wictred grabbed his arm and pulled him up,
pointing ahead. Jack could see little at first until the infrared
imaging part of his armoured suit adapted to the lighting
conditions.

“
Wow!” was all he
could manage at the spectacle of the place. Gone was the small
corridor, and instead, they were greeted by a vast open space like
an ancient arena. The low level was a dust basin, and a number of
galleries were cut into the walls, just like the one they were
presently stood upon. Large metal shapes and craggy spikes littered
the ground, but it was the shapes at the far end that intrigued
Jack.

“
What is it?” asked
the Sergeant, seeing the look of recognition on his
face.

“
My father described
a place like this, an assembly point for Biomech warriors and
machines. He said it was buried deep inside Hyperion, but nobody
ever found it.”

Wictred nodded slowly and pointed to
the shape in the distance.

“
That is the same
shape as the O
rb on Hyperion.”

They all looked at
the large stone structure that had been blasted by something
powerful. The stone around it had fused as if it had been
superheated by some kind of terrible weapon. Marks along the
ceiling and wall expanding outwards, and substantial damage had
been caused. Wictred leaned over the edge and looked
down.

“How far do you think?” asked Jack.

Wictred shrugged
and
dropped off the edge. Sergeant Ajax
rushed to grab him, but instead watched the Jötnar drop at half the
rate he’d expected.

Low
gravity,
he thought, hoping no one had
realised his obvious error.

Wictred hit the ground with a gently
bump and crouched down to absorb the impact. He looked up to
Jack.

“It isn’t far, you should be able to
make it.”

Jack looked to
Sergeant Ajax who looked unimpressed at the idea. Rather than
discuss it, he ran and leapt from the edge. The gravity was much
lower than Earth standard, but it was still enough to make him feel
more than a little nervous. He built up speed and covered nearly
fifteen metres horizontally from the ledge before crashing
ungracefully to the ground. The impact was hard, and his gut
instinct said something had broken. Even so, when he stood up,
there was little trouble other than a few more scratches and dents
in his armour. Wictred stood his ground, simply throwing him a look
that told him to follow him up to the devastated orb. Instead, he
stopped next to a pile of twisted and smashed metal. It was covered
in dust, but unlike the structure itself, it looked as if it had no
more than a decade or two’s worth of dust on it. He brushed the
side of it with his hand to reveal dull and pitted
metal.

“
Uh, does that look
like...” he started, but a thumping sound made him spin around. He
lifted his carbine up to face the danger, but it was the Sergeant
and the other marines who had dropped down to join them. All landed
safely, other than the youngest corporal who managed to hit a rock
and fall over onto his back. He quickly lifted himself up and did
his best to hide the embarrassment of such a messy
landing.

“
My sensors are
picking up a decaying power source around that thing,” said
Sergeant Ajax. He lifted his left arm and activated the main
sensors on his suit.

“Yeah, part of it is still active.”

Wictred pulled at a
slab of masonry, and with his final tug, it lifted and broke in
two. As it dropped, it struck another piece that fell down and
smashed. With a low rumble that seemed to shake the ground, many
more pieces broke apart like a great domino effect. It went on for
almost thirty seconds before calm returned and the dust started to
settle.

“
Maybe next time,
you don’t touch anything,” said Jack sarcastically to his old
friend.

Wictred was about to
respond when the dust finally cleared enough to reveal a number of
badly smashed and damaged machine
s. Their
shapes were hard to determine as they were covered with what
appeared to be broken limbs.

“
They must have been
covered by the masonry,” said Sergeant Ajax.

He looked up and lit
the ceiling with his suit-mounted lamp.

“Yeah, look. Half the ceiling must have
come down at some point and buried them down here.”

Wictred, ever
curious when finding new and unusual things, took a step nearer the
closest of the damaged machines. He reached out and lifted one of
the appendages, to the bemused expressions of the others. It was
joined in multiple places and as thick as a man’s leg. At the end
nearest Wictred was a flat, hardened piece of metal, shaped much
like a blade, but it was badly scored and chipped in
places.

“
Uh, is it me or
does that thing look like a weapon?” asked the Corporal.

Sergeant Ajax tapped his comms button
immediately.

“
General, we have
something down here. I suggest you check our feeds.”

He then signalled for the rest of his
squad to step back. Jack and Wictred did the same without
question.

“
Sergeant, good
work. Stay where you are. I’ll send a team down to...”

“
General?” he called
out, but the communication outside the cavern had been completely
blocked out. He beckoned Jack to come to his side.

“
Something’s
blocking our
signal! We need to get out
of here, and fast!”

He turned around and
took a step forward but stopped as if he’d hit a wall. Jack looked
down to see a large metal spike jammed through his armoured chest
and sticking out of his back. From the ground, the smashed machine
started to move, each of its appendages shaking and grinding from
the dust and damage. Wictred, Jack and the three remaining marines
took a number of steps away from the machine that had so brutally
killed Sergeant Ajax. Across the floor at least half a dozen of the
machines were starting to move. It was a fraction of what littered
the cavernous space, but it was enough to change their mission from
discovery to combat.

“
Okay, stay calm and
get ready,” said Jack in a slow, firm voice.

Though he wasn’t
military, none of the m
arines argued.
They each lifted their rifles and aimed at the moving
shapes.

“Looks like we’re in trouble again!”
chortled Wictred to himself.

Then the first of
the machines pulled its blade from the still corpse of Sergeant
Ajax and lifted itself up onto its creaking legs. Although smashed
and damaged, it still managed to reach nearly two metres in height
before moving menacingly towards them. Jack pointed his weapon at
its centre.

“Kill them all!”

In the shifting political
upheaval of the creation of the Alliance
,
some colonies prospered while other withered in importance. Proxima
Prime was one of the few that managed to maintain its position.
Though the disparate colonies on its surface still harboured
grudges from the violence of the Uprising, they prospered through
the new trade opportunities offered via the Interstellar Network.
Both Prime and Terra Nova became the most populous and significant
planets in the Alliance...until the acquisition of New Charon in
the Orion Nebula.

Proxima Prime

The surface of the moon showed numerous
sighs of impact damage, much like the early photographs of Earth’s
only moon had shown hundreds of years before; craters from the size
of a man’s hand through to those as large as a starship covered the
surface. But unlike the lunar surface, both a viable atmosphere and
the magnetosphere of the planet it orbited protected this moon. By
all accounts, this should have reduced the vulnerability to orbital
damage. General Rivers looked at one of the holes in the rocks
nearby and wondered if there was a possibility the damage was
man-made. He was in no doubt that he was seeing damage, but he
still had no idea what had caused it.

Those engineers had better get a move
on!

A series of flashing indicators lit up
on his tactical display. It was a simple, but instant indication,
that he had just lost both communication and IFF contact with
Sergeant Ajax’s unit underground.

“
Sergeant, respond!”
he repeated for the fifth time
, but there
was no change.

One of the
lieutenants had already redirected their last drone to the area,
and it was bringing back surface shots of the location where the
squad had entered. It showed nothing of use,
unfortunately.

“Wait, the drone is picking up
vibrations through the rock walls. Yeah, it’s weapons fire.”