4th Quarter YE 37, Kotoku I, Near the northern pole.
Terranigma - Mysterious Pit
The series of events that had led to the diminutive form of Sesshoseki Tamamo standing upon a short rise of barren snow dusted rock, in the cradle of a deep ravine had been most unexpected. What had begun as a naively optimistic venture into asteroid mining operations, squirrelled away in a system so far out of the public eye that the UOC, and even the Lorath Matriarchy had failed to colonize it after a decade, had turned into a series of unexpected discoveries.
After a few months, she'd made a few lucratively rewarded hauls of materials in the outer asteroid belt of the system. As the resources gained from mining endeavours were funnelled into the expansion of what she hoped would become her mining fleet in the system, it became possible for more whimsical actions to be taken. The first of this being the exploration of the local planets in the system, and orbital scans of the bodies.
This had alerted Tamamo to the presence of an anomalous, and unknown signal on Kotoku IV which had lead to the identification of an artificial structure of unknown origin. Spurred by the discovery, her wayward Caernarfon drone travelled further inward through the system, finding another anomaly on Kotoku III, though the electrical storms proved too great to allow for firm identification.
Kotoku II had proven devoid of anything of interest, and had led to the expectation that all within the system had already been found.
Then had begun the scan of the watered dirt ball of Kotoku I. The minimal microbial life was nothing new, and expected as a result of the stable atmosphere and active ocean. What had been unexpected was the presence of a large alien structure featuring similar spectral features to the initial discovery on Kotoku IV, only much larger.
Not wanting to irritate her amicable Lorath hosts, Tamamo had gone with the safe option and reported the discoveries to the Matriarchy. What had been a little more spirited was the negotiation that followed in which she purchased a mercenary licence, equipment, and had offered to clear and secure the structure.
Now she was standing just outside of the hermetically sealed dome that had been constructed over the only opening to the structure that she could find, and in minutes she would put a subjective year's worth of work into cracking open the facility and beginning her work.
But first she had another task.
Armoured as best a she could manage and equipped with what little she had for weaponry, Tamamo found herself standing before the mechanical form of a modified Militant drone that had been brought down to the planet's surface. After a moment of appraisal for the piece of Freespacer craftsmanship, Tamamo broadcast a burst of encoded RF signals, keying into the dormant machine and starting up its systems.
In orbit she knew that there was likely some sort of alert calling to the Captain, and soon enough through the wonders of telepresence, she'd have a durable facsimile of the legendary mercenary at her side. Someone she could rely on to support her within the heart of the unknown facility, who would also be unlikely to cause unnecessary damage to the local infrastructure. A rare mix of traits.
The single eye of the unit flickered on, an angry red before flicking to a swatch of orange, while the 'mouth' of the thing made a brief series of sine-waves before flattening. Shoulders rolled with a whir, fingers flicking up and down, joints going stiff, then relaxing without falling over. Robotic motions as part of the startup process, then some distinctly human behaviour came about as it stretched like an athlete.
"Kept you waiting, huh?" A digitized facsimile of Luca's voice came over the speaker, quickly looking at themselves and performing some experimental moves with the chassis he was hotseated into. First, taking advantage of abnormal limb rotation offered by the robot, then patting himself down and realizing there was an ammo chain sticking out of his left forearm.
He didn't recognize the thing immediately, but the interface Luca was looking through could see that it was some manner of autocannon. "What else have I got on this?" He kept inspecting himself, grabbing himself in the crotch, then shaking his legs.
The initial activity was met with silence, the featureless mask of a Gust Kit the only observer as Tamamo watched the modified Militant come to life. Luca's mannerisms were immediately apparent as he started to explore what was likely an entirely new experience. So far it seemed that things were operating optimally.
Eventually however she decided to speak up, "You have not kept me waiting long. You need not worry yourself... As for features, you have a pair of analogues to your Grapple Stunner, Echelon seemed to think that you'd appreciate them. Though with the hardware they have a much higher energetic output... Since there was no flesh to worry about damaging." After a moment's pause Tamamo added, "Notably your autocannon is loaded with Freespacer made plasma HEAT charges. It should be sufficient for heavy stopping power. We however needed a smaller weapon for when we don't want to punch holes in things, as such we have a more familiar option in the form of a lightly modified HHG. It wasn't designed for robotic hands after all."
Lapsing into silence again, Tamamo tilted her head slightly to the left as she waited to see what sort of response she would get from Luca. After all much depended on his comfort with the arrangements.
'Luca' looked at the handle of the HHG. The trigger guard had been enlarged, the grip was almost rifle sized - turning into some manner of cowboy carbine in the hands of a regular person. The button to release the cylinder protruded more obviously to make it easier to hit. The Militant war android unholstered it and gave it a few experimental pointings at things in the distance, draws, sudden aims, and swings to gauge it.
"Not bad." Luca said, now looking about himself now that he was comfortably settled for the moment. "Where the hell are we, anyway?" He stepped around his locale, taking in everything he could because he'd never seen anything like it. He attempted to breathe, a sigh coming through his comms before he realized that he didn't need oxygen.
"Well..." There was much to answer, after all where they were wasn't exactly a prime touristing location. "We're on Kotoku I, a planet that to my knowledge has never been actually landed upon within the decade that we've known about it. It has been swept from orbit with scanning equipment by the SAoY, UOC, and Lorath and yet no one bothered to do anything here.
"We have mostly water and bare stone, the majority of the planet is home to nothing beyond a few cultures of microscopic life forms... Except for here, at the bottom of a chasm near the north pole." She pointed down the length of the clear bio-hazard enclosure to a strange dull dark-teal semi-circular wall only notable because it was slightly inset into a much larger domed structure of similarly unimpressive make, against which their enclosure pressed up against.
"According to scans, this building is full of living things, the issue is that we have no idea who built it, and so far as I can tell it hasn't been touched in at least a century." Pointing to the far end of the enclosure Tamamo indicated a trio of stone-like pillars buried in more familiar wires and computer systems, otherwise only notable for their clean cut state, and the contrast between the dark teal stone compared to the surrounding reddish rock.
"As the first living soul to pay attention to this lonely portion of known space, I offered to poke around and discover what there was to find. This explains why there are a trio of Raptor-Class vessels sitting in low orbit above this barren world.
"Once I open the door and the sensors confirm I havn't unleashed a plague into this enclosure, we have twenty-four hours to get to the heart of this place, and secure it... Any questions?"
Luca was unable to make facial expressions in his current state, but he was looking long and hard at the unknown structure. A place his charms wouldn't work, where he'd have to think about what he was doing rather than relying on the fear he struck into people. After all, if whatever was in there had never ventured out - they wouldn't have heard of him.
"So... this is some sort of Black Claw installation, you think?" He offered, sounding out of his depth as he crossed his arms. "My dad was in contact with someone who uncovered one once." Something was just plain off about the area, and Luca couldn't put his metal finger on it.
"The tech was pretty ... strange. Dad didn't go into detail. Last I heard of this friend of my dad's, they were in an institution," he sighed, "drawing crazy shit on the walls all day and reading books with their toes."
His gaze trailed off to the exclusion zone Tamamo had set up, and he contemplated whatever could be within.
A moment of quiet contemplation followed Luca's explanation, and the brief tale of the discoveries found within a Black Claw installation, as such her answer was cheerful, if somewhat unsettling, "Well the good news is that this isn't a Black Claw facility as far as I can tell. The bad news is we have no idea who made it."
There was a pause before she elaborated, "It doesn't match up with what little we know of other Black Claw emplacements, the materials of the structure are different for one, and the architecture is a little more modest from what I read... Really the only reason I even managed to figure out how to get into this place was thanks to the translation software that Yamatai has in its possession. The stuff that they used during contact with the Lorath and other local alien life."
She paused, turning to join Luca in the contemplation of the huge structure before telling a small lie, "I honestly only figured out how to open doors so far... Hopefully we don't need much else."
Turning her attention to the Luca-Bot, Tamamo inquired, "Is there anything else you want to know before we get started?" He shook his head.
"With any luck, if we can't open a door, we make one..." Luca mumbled as he started heading towards the containment perimeter Tamamo had set up, looking for an airlock to walk through. "What's our bug-out plan? Escape and/or nuke the place?" He asked, keeping things duly diligent.
After a moment's pause Tamamo hurried after Luca's Militant, skipping lightly across the bare rocky landscape toward the nearest and only airlock, a glassy, complex structure visibly made of several layers of components. "The ideal scenario is to escape and erase the location from orbit. However, in the name of preventing some sort of doomsday plague or genetic super-weapon from escaping onto the planet and maybe getting spaceborne, the arrangement is that any breach of containment has the location glassed."
Luca nodded as he approached the doors to the airlock. "Gotcha. There's no collateral here, except for us. Who's handling the glassing?" He didn't know what the fox had to muster as he waited for her to open the doors, unfamiliar with the technology and concerned he'd break the interface with his metal fingers.
"The LSDF, their credentials checked out. Didn't want to hire an amateur y'know?" The joke aside Tamamo delivered the encrypted key that allowed them into the transparent enclosure, the door proving to be a three piece affair that hissed as it slid open, allowing them to enter a small intermediary.
As the section sealed behind them, the pumps started to run evacuating the chamber or external atmosphere creating a temporary vacuum before, re-balancing the pressure, washing them down with biological control agents, and then they were into the friendly side of the enclosure. A small space barely 150m from end to end. On the one side, the alien facility's inauspicious smooth door, and on the other a cluster of wires, server shelves, and other oddities.
Pointing toward the door, Tamamo suggested, "Head over there, and I'll get the keys, and open the door... Who ever built this place was pretty paranoid I think... The outer door has no controls built into it. So you have to open it from the pillar things." She soon added, "Scans suggest the immediate area is empty... But be ready anyway."
He raised his left arm into a ready position, bracing it by grabbing his elbow with his right hand once he was in position, giving the nod to Tamamo. "Ready when you are." He said as he kept a scan on the monolithic doors and stayed behind a server shelf to remain concealed if something was waiting for him.
The process of opening was thankfully rather hands free, largely because Tamamo was certain that whatever had designed the interface was not under five feet tall, and was possessed of at least more than two limbs.
Looking between the cables snaking up the lengths of the pillars Tamamo imagined the flow of information, on their way to the pico-jelly interfaces configured to mimic the input of alien hands against strange not-quite stone construction.
The 'keys' that she collected consisted of a portable combination data bank and processor the size and relative shape of 10cm white plastic cube, nested in a gym bag along with with ten 'interface' units, short, white plastic cylinders with three equidistant protrusions that contained weak gravitic clamps to hold their metallic pico-jelly underside against whatever interface she encountered that would hopefully allow her to interact with whatever structures existed within the building.
As Luca tried to overhear noises from Tamamo, hearing some sort of input, some feedback to tell him when to strike. He didn't hear a single thing, the chamber barely echoing to the environs.
As the unlocking sequence completed, the door came to life, the exterior face sliding down, and into the ground, unsettling only in that the process was silent.
The sight beyond was underwhelming to say the least. An undecorated, circular dull grey platform rested just beyond the portal, the room around it smoothly curving upward to form a dome within. Notably despite the apparent continued life of the facility, the small room immediately beyond the first door was unlit. Whether by component failure, or design was unknown.
As Tamamo kept her attention on the reports from the sensors, ensuring that the disappointment was microscopic as much as macroscopic, she eventually could do nothing but shrug, and comment, "I suppose this is our way in."
"Suppose so... I'll take point." Luca said as he emerged from cover and started moving in first, walking low, hugging the wall and whatever cover he could - moving extremely cautiously as he was unsure of his capabilities in operation.
He flicked a lamp on his robotic body on, shining a light inside, only to see that everything swallowed bright LED array lighting. Though the chamber was quite small, and the grey disk he was standing on somewhat wobbly. Perhaps it was nerves, but he couldn't explain it at all. "Tamamo, this place isn't right."
It was as simply as he could boil his feelings down, scanning for targets as he waited for her to cover him before advancing.
Trotting toward the opening the gym bag containing the supplies slung over her shoulder, and the omnipresent form of a Fatboy visible in her hand. Tamamo closed the distance and stepped up onto the platform along side Luca's temporarily mechanical form.
Uncertain how to comfort the man, she tried some levity, "If this were right, we'd be sitting in the lounge of the Kestrel discussing a movie." She wasn't sure her words had done well to convey the idea, but it was a shot.
Sending a digital command back to her console at the controls, Tamamo turned and watched the door slide up out of the 'floor' the light of the outdoors dying slowly as the portal sealed.
Interestingly to her at least, was the lattice of locks and secondary seals that formed on the inside, the wall of the chamber seeming to flow as the way out was engulfed in weave of metallic strands.
After a moment the platform shifted, dropping down into the floor, a smooth passage swallowing the disk, as the entry above continued to seal, lock after lock, adding further layers between them and the outside.
Looking up, Tamamo was a little startled when the platform levelled off and stopped. The ceiling sealing a final time and for a moment it seemed that they had come to nowhere in particular, with nothing to do. Confused she was about to voice her concern only to be interrupted as ports along the top of the chamber irised open spilling a pitch black fluid into the chamber, visible only due to the swirling gold motes that illuminated the fluid like phosphorescence as it splashed and pooled.
Watching this process, Tamamo rolled her shoulders and commented, "Your body will be fine. It's built to handle a vacuum... I'm just glad that I thought to water proof my equipment on a whim... Not that this stuff seems much like water."
"Some sort of oil?" Luca wondered, thinking it was something to do with maintenance, or perhaps decontamination or security. All possibilities he'd seen from the movies he loved, but which of them was on the money?
The comment that Tamamo had been made was largely for Luca's sake, the room rapidly filling with the level of the liquid approaching her chest, only moment from engulfing her, and soon even the taller frame of the Militant was completely submerged. The one bright side being that neither of them were in any danger of drowning, and whatever was pouring in on them seemed for the moment harmless.
Tamamo could see Luca's orange IFF profile looking intently at the autocannon on his arm, keeping his fingers flexing to see if there was any change in activity or feel. He was trying to get a bearing of what was around him instead of rolling with it.
To Luca though, Tamamo's IFF profile, outlined in cyan, was still. "Have you seen any, um, motifs? Artwork? Stone carving? Architecture?" He recalled not spotting anything on the way in, but in his defence he'd only been there a few minutes. "There's lots of nothing here, Tamamo."
There was a bit of a shrug visible thanks to the IFF, an act that Tamamo noted was rather easy despite being submerged in a strange fluid. Her response came quickly enough through the channel, "Apart from the pragmatic use of domes, and circular shapes, they had cylindrical pillars... And now these complex locking mechanisms. Maybe they were utilitarian?"
The answer was weak, but it was honestly all she had. If the outside of the massive structure had sported any sort of decoration, the years had made sure nothing had survived, on the outside at least. Though admittedly the interior wasn't looking much more lively.
Before she could say more on the subject she felt rather than saw the motion of the platform, the acceleration being suggestive of heading toward the larger central dome, "I guess we'll have to wait and see..."
Paying attention to her internal HUD, Tamamo estimated that they had travelled approximately two hindered meters, a small distance given the size of the facility. Only to stop, and then rise. Apparently the entry mechanism was akin to a u-bend in a pipe.
As they slowly rose the chamber slowly drained, the fluid running off of the metal of the Militant body, and her Wind suit without beading or leaving a residue. Whatever it was it didn't cling.
With a minor sense of disappointment, Tamamo noted that the room they had arrived in was functionally identical to their point of entry. For all she knew they had gone nowhere.
The slow process of waiting for the locks to disengage brought an uncomfortable amount of time to observe their bleak surroundings, before the final door started to open, shifting and twisting into the floor, forming a lip between them and the space beyond.
The sight that met them was uncanny.
Terranigma - Laboratory
Immediately beyond the threshold of the room they occupied, there seemed to be a placid black flooring, mirrored on the ceiling. What ruined the illusion however were the softly glowing cyan tendrils, creeping up the walls of the roughly circular passage. The lights glinted off of the points on Luca's Militant droid.
The sound of dripping water, and the sight of golden concentric circles exposed the floor for what it was, more of the same strange fluid, the ceiling likely of a similar composition, though how the fluid remained suspended above the air of the passage was unclear.
Luca stayed in the middle of the room rather than staying close to the walls. He wasn't too keen on having another tentacled encounter by something whose name he didn't even know. He was trying to gaze through holes in the liquid floating through the air, thinking it was a smokescreen.
"This is some pretty advanced stuff. Are you sure its not Claw?" He asked, drumming the fingers on his elbow nervously.
"Am I sure?" Tamamo echoed the question, "No. Just from what I could tell this wasn't built like other Black Claw facilities." Deciding that nothing ventured, nothing gained, Tamamo trotted forward out from the centre of their platform and stepped toward the 'floor' only to sink in to her thigh.
Looking over her shoulder at Luca's Militant, Tamamo sighed softly, before stepping forward a couple more paces as she commented over the channel, "It feels like trying to walk through the roots of a mangrove forest. Apparently the local life likes to grow on more than just the walls."
Luca would've raised an eyebrow at her, but he didn't have any way of expressing his incredulity aside from staring at her. "You seem awfully clam about this." Luca said as he made sure to keep one of his long arms out in case Tamamo needed a pick-me-up.
There was a pause as she considered this before the flat almost emotionless reply came, "I've been operating under similar circumstances for a long time. I've learned that you can either freeze up and panic. Or you can do something."
To illustrate her point with action, Tamamo took a few steps deeper into the corridor visibly tugging against something beneath the inky blackness, as gold blossomed into view as the fluid splashed around her.
"We've got twenty three hours, and thirty minutes. We might as well get started." Casting another look over her shoulder to the armoured simulacrum of a man, Tamamo wondered if he'd follow.
He reluctantly begun moving ahead, metal feet squelching through it as he made very deliberate, and wary steps. As he got towards Tamamo she noticed he was keeping his neck up for as long as he could before he would be eventually immersed.
"Gotcha..." he said as he made sworls and gold pitter patter in his wake. "So we have no idea who these are, how they live, or what this place is for."
He cricked his neck as he continued moving through the fluid. "Who else's scouted this planet before? A lot of people have been past here recently."
"Well as I mentioned in passing before," Tamamo began as she wandered forward, "No one really. We've known about the system since before the UOC split off, but no one has ever landed here before. Mainly just orbital scans. There just wasn't really anything to look at I guess. With so many paradise worlds around with fun and exciting plants, cute animals, and locals to subjugate, why pay attention to a dust ball like Kotoku I?"
There was a moment of silence as she stumbled over a particularly dense portion of whatever was growing, "So, I think I'm the first person planetside, after I offered to poke around... I half expect the Matriarchy sees me as a convenient scout. Since I'm Neko I'm less expensive to have down here exploring. Tougher, less likely to get the plague, all that... So, I guess we can take comfort in knowing that the things we run into here are likely to be native. Which should mean mostly squishy fleshy stuff... Unless we just have a fancy root system growing in here."
"Fair point on the paradise worlds. This place is just plain blank. Just like the rest of this place until now." He was looking around the fluid, unsure if the way he was seeing through this stuff was due to anomaly or if he couldn't actually see anything. "Something fish like perhaps? Maybe all these roots are some sort of biological computer?" He asked, noting the eerie colours and the detail in these roots, far more intricate than the rest of the surroundings.
He seemed to walk into a webbing, encountering a little bit of resistance before tearing some membrane open near the edge. "Ick, something like cobwebs too." He pointed out, surprised that cobwebs being underwater was a new discovery.
Tamamo glanced back in time to watch the curious happenstance, as the 'ceiling' blackness tore open and poured down on the militant. As harmless as the floor the black and gold cascaded down amid the contrasting ambient cyan, before slowly stopping up and ceasing.
As much as she hated to voice it, Tamamo eventually spoke up, "We'll have to look and see... Too much is unknown with this place."
The response was carried in the silence between the two for a while, the regularity of their surroundings and the quiet sounds of disturbed fluid amid infrequent drips, settled in enough that when they finally did happen upon something new it stood out severely.
Nestled in the upper right of the corridor was a larger structure that looked vaguely like a plant bulb, half submerged in the blackness and seeming to twitch and pulse irregularly. Slowing her pace, Tamamo left her Fatboy at her side instead opting to point up toward the new object to draw Luca's attention, wondering if they should avoid it or pre-emptively destroy whatever it was.
Luca snapped into action at the indicated area, reticle over the bulbous, roiling thing. He aimed the autocannon, taking a lower combat ready stance. "Didn't you bring anything?" He asked as he stayed still and low while indicating for Tamamo to stop.
Halting her advance at Luca's indication, Tamamo replied simply, "I have a Fatboy, but it isn't exactly the most elegant of weapons for this sort of situation. I had to give up the possibility of carrying heavier weapons to ensure I could carry along the bag of 'keys' since getting stopped by a locked door honestly seemed a poor idea."
Returning her full attention to the bulbous thing, Tamamo contemplated her options before adding, "It'll be simpler if we just destroy it. No use tempting fate."
He pointed his left wrist at the thing and loosed an experimental burst of autocannon fire at the large plant bulb. He wanted to see what a small spray of fire would do from this thing before deciding to increase or decrease his efforts. The brass casings splashed into the gilded oily substance and caused a ripple in the waves.
The flashes of autocannon fire were followed an instant later by a flash of billowing grey smoke and soon quickly all that remained was a glowing spot of slag, casting a bright orange light over the previously cyan dominated passage.
After a moment spend admiring the results of the Freespacer made weapon Tamamo spoke up, "Well... That did the job. Glad that this passage isn't filled with interesting things." Paying no mind to the way that the tendrils squirmed and writhed where the hole had been burned in their midst, Tamamo started off again, deciding that the injured lattice wasn't worth investigating for the moment, much more intent on progressing somewhere that wasn't this hall.
Luca seemed to limber up a little when he realized that he did have the means to retaliate on his left arm. He begun moving in more earnest, invigorated by the little victory. "You think this isn't interesting? Sheesh..." Luca said as he waded through the stuff and acted as overwatch for Tamamo. Wading through the stuff had reached a familiar rhythm too.
The next leg of the journey passed with little fanfare, apart from a few tendril infested holes in the wall that seemed to have possibly been a part of a ventilation system, the journey was thankfully uneventful.
A tendril covered wall marked the end of the tunnel, however cursory inspection revealed that it was something akin to a large vault door. Which in turn allowed Tamamo to actually put her bulky kit to use. Pulling the bag over her shoulder, Tamamo retrieved a trio of the white, circular, plastic interface units before setting about savagely tearing at the tendrils, hunting for the control pannel paired with the door.
A few minutes of exploration revealed a surprisingly small raised oval, of a purple-ish hue, the apparent interface lit by a dull glow. After clearing away the surrounding tendrils Tamamo placed one of the plastic 'keys' on top of the object, the gravitic clamps affixing one of the device in place. Prepared to wait a while while she figured out how to open the door, Tamamo was startled when the door unexpectedly started to rotate the disengaging locks sounding a deep vibration that she felt more than heard. As the portal opened, the door rolling out of the way, the fluid suddenly shifted and washed the small, light girl through the opening along with much of the weakened tendrils.
Luca in his much more stable and heavy Militant was able to watch as Tamamo surged forward a short distance before being dashed against a stairway on the far side of the doorway. Tamamo's armoured form quickly pushed herself up, as the fluid started to equalize, revealing that beyond the door was quite different than the corridor that they had wandered down for several tedious minutes. They had found a brightly lit corridor.
As she started to look around Tamamo ventured a guess over their comm line, "Luca... I think we were in a broken, or infested part of the facility. This side of the door is clear of those tendril things, and well lit. Also I think there is air a little further up the stairwell..." As she trailed off Tamamo worked to gather up her scattered gear, hoping that she wouldn't find herself washing through the rest of the doorways.
That was something that clicked to him. "Huh, didn't think of it that way. This place is so plain otherwise." Luca pointed out as he watched Tamamo use one featureless object with another. He couldn't wrap his head around how she was able to keep a track of what was what.
"So maybe this thing we're walking on, and potentially through is some sort of science project?" He made a clicking noise. Clicking his tongue produced a different sound over radio.
"That or they had very strange ideas about decoration." Packing the scattered objects back into her gym bag, Tamamo walked back toward Luca, carefully disengaging the final interface unit over the lock and waited to see if the door would roll closed.
After a moment spent in stillness Tamamo decided that she could indeed recover the interface unit, and it too returned to her bag before she led the way into the well lit section, the stairs leading up higher into a dry portion of the facility, the light filtering down like looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool.
As they marched their way up the stairs, the clean white lights flanking them on either side set into circular fixtures, Tamamo looked about, her vision slipping over the smooth curved walls of the circular passage.
Strangely the entire thing lacked any sort of visible seams, appearing to have been cast in a single huge piece, not a familiar trait to say the least, the continuous unbroken nature of the facility giving it pseudo organic form as the walls blended seamlessly into the lights, and even the stairs upon which they ascended.
At the top of the stairs, Tamamo paused briefly before stepping forward just far enough to let Luca's Militant to reach the top as well. The first notable feature of the facility beyond the initial entry point and the singular door, happened to be what vaguely looked like a security check point, a denser cluster of lights being interspersed with what could have possibly been lenses radiating along the entire circumference of the passage in a tripple helix arrangement giving the hall the feeling of a vortex.
Near the door, Tamamo could spot a pair of the purple-ish blemishes that looked similar to the lock on the previous door, she had passed through.
Considering the space before her, Tamamo inquired, "Should I try opening it nicely? Or should we pre-emptively eliminate anything that looks like a threat? Which do you feel better about?" While she had her own opinions, Tamamo trusted the instincts of the man in the machine that she had brought along, after all he hadn't earned his reputation by having a poor intuition when it came to danger.
His intuition was being fooled by the lack of things to go on. He didn't know what to expect, so his gut signals were heavily conflicted with a lack of context. Nepleslians? Thankfully predictable. Yamataians? Like clockwork. Lorath? Ducks in a row. The other alien races could merely keep him on his toes - but whoever built this place wasn't giving him answers. "I'm not a fan of the things on the bands. Could be 'dual purpose'. I'll go first."
He stepped up and took the lead for Tamamo keeping his wrist-gun lowered, but alert. His eyes followed the pattern of triple-helix bands slithering through the corridor. Had he had any hair, it would have risen as a chorus of shrill whines similar to the sound of a focusing camera heralded his robotic form's passage, echoing from the pattern around him.
The myriad of small noises coming from every direction made the experience cloying despite being hardly louder than the metallic report of his own footsteps against the flooring. Despite the subdued cacophony there was no further reaction, no spooling of weapons, no whine of discharging hyper-capacitors, merely the unsettling feeling of being watched.
Within seconds Luca was standing before the sealed portal, able to examine the purplish blemishes to either side of the wall, appearing to be some sort of mixture between a keypad, and visual display. The material giving the same sort of semi-soft impression that hard rubber would, implied it was intended to be interacted with, however like most things in the facility they were woefully without instruction.
Luca looked back over to Tamamo and waved for her to advance. "Clear to me," he said, looking at the inscrutable keypad and daring not to touch it. He didn't know what its purpose was, or if he'd agitate something by touching it. Tamamo had a fairly good grip on it all. He heaved a sigh as he looked about, back to the door and a hand on his hip.
A few quick steps brought the smaller armoured figure to his side, the plastic-like cylindrical devices once again finding their way to her hands, only this time she held one out to Luca before speaking softly, "I think we should aim to put them on at the same time, like one of those timing puzzles in games. It might not be needed, but better safe right?"
Gesturing, she demonstrated placing the object with its silvery underside centred over the purplish blemish without actually touching it, "Like that, we'll count down from three, and on 'go' we place them."
Luca took his cylinder and stood in position with the cylinder. "I should probably hang onto this, yeah," he said, turning the featureless cylinder over in his hand a couple of times before raising it. "Count us down."
"Three," She shifted slightly mirroring Luca's position,
"Two," A brief check with her suit's sensors to ensure they were both in position.
"One," Then the moment of anticipation, like stepping over a precipice knowing that you were about to fall.
"Go." As Tamamo spoke the word, she steadily pressed the cylinder forward, pressing its underside against the blemish on the wall. Luca pushed his in too, using mechanical precision and watching Tamamo's movement to emulate her smoothness. He had his palm against the cylinder for a couple of moments, looking at Tamamo and wondering if something wasn't right.
Impressively Tamamo noted that both interfaces reported contact with a nanosecond's span the precision greater than she'd hoped for working with two people, however her attention was momentarily grasped by needing to network the two devices to the small hardened data bank that she carried letting her research and investigation of what little she could access of the facility's systems from the outside do the work.
Letting out a sigh to show that the tension had passed before she spoke, Tamamo voiced aloud, "Still don't know if we needed to do that, but things seem to be proceeding cleanly shouldn't be long now."
True to her word, the somewhat familiar sound of heavy vault locks echoed from within the door, felt through the floor as much as heard. Then with a hiss what turned out to be the first of three doors opened rising into the ceiling and exposing a second, then third, and finally forth portal, each shifting and raising making it clear that if power was lost they were supposed to stay put, using gravity to ensure they locked.
Immediately the impression that they had opened something important was plain, as the gap left by the doors was nearly three meters thick before the corridor continued beyond, a series of patterned lines visible inset into the floor leading deeper into the facility. "Looks like the place is opening up," Luca pointed out the bleeding obvious. To affirm that things were happening to calm his nerves.
Of more immediate interest however were the doors to either side of the inner portion of the doorway, both horizontal sliding doors, and both partially ajar. With a nod Tamamo ventured forward, content to let her interface remain stuck to the wall for the moment, as she crept Fatboy in hand toward the twinned doors.
As the small armoured woman neared the door, a new sound reached the pair, a distant shrill cry, a sound that was lost somewhere between the scream of an angle grinder and someone drowning. Echoing down the hall, faint at first but soon joined by a chorus of others.
"Does anything in your findings say much about screaming noises?" Luca asked, raising his arm and taking a couple of steps back.
"Nope," The response from Tamamo was flatly casual, "Seems we get to kill stuff now."
"What else is new?" Luca asked, ensuring his wrist cannon was loaded, then drawing his HHG. It was, he grinned as he pointed it forward. A bit of cockiness was returning to him now.
Still intent on reaching the twinned doors, Tamamo continued to slip forward only to freeze as a desiccated porcelain limb surged from within the righthand portal, uneven plated 'fingers' grasping the edge of the door and with a scream of warping metal it began to tear it open, little care given to the proper function of the construction.
As the metal settled into place and silence a dry, uneven rattling rasp signalled some sort of breathing. A sound that was interrupted as Tamamo hopped back, discharging the Fatboy the laser dumping its energy into the organically armoured limb causing it to flare with light as it combusted, a sharp crack sounding as the carapace shattered exposing the charred flesh beneath.
Before Tamamo hit the ground in her effort to make room between herself and the target a bubbling, blood curdling scream filled the air in their immediate proximity. It was almost as if the thing did not like being shot by a laser. Go figure.
As the scream died down in volume the entity started to heave itself from within the room, revealing a vague head composed of a honeycomb of thread like chitin restraining a mass of objects that looked like over sized pomegranate seeds were they not tremoring and swivelling betraying their purpose as eyes.
Distantly the approaching chorus of uncanny screams from deeper in the facility and the dull rumble of approaching limbs suggested that their odds were about to worsen.
"So!" Luca said as he levelled his HHG with the fruit-like head covered in eyes. "Do you suppose these are some more experiments?" He asked as he pulled the hammer back and pulled the trigger. A HHG-WHITE round screamed out of the barrel and towards the thing.
The effects were impressive to say the least, the lattice caved inward with a sharp crack echoing the report of the HHG as it fired. The round caved in the fleshy interior and splattered the hall behind with red-purple fluid in a satisfying fountain.
It gave Luca some relief that they were still relatively ... squishy. A headshot seemed to solve the problem here, but his only worry was how many heads he'd have to shoot.
The thing took a moment to die, hemorrhaging gouts of the colourful blood across the hall as its visible limb flailed, slamming into the ceiling only to snap with a wet crunch as the musculature overwhelmed the integrity of the bone.
For her part Tamamo was quick to move forward slipping past the thrashing corpse to heave open the opposite door and poke her head inside, "Luca, I didn't find any record of these things so I can't tell you much about them... However this looks like a security station. With time I might be able to figure out where to go from here. You mind holding the line?"
Pausing the armoured woman glanced back toward the Militant before swivelling to look deeper into the facility. Expecting more of the things to come barrelling into sight at any moment. Luca grabbed something from a pouch that'd been bolted to the robot and twisted the top off it. A shower of white and red sparks came from the top, and he tossed it into the void with his spare hand while keeping his HHG and wrist-cannon pointed towards the entrance.
While the lighting wasn't strictly necessary it did provide an additional boon, a sense of depth. As the flare bounced, it became clear that the length of the hall ahead was deceptive, the uniform rounded features lending to a stretched appearance. To this end as the flare skidded to a stop nearly a hundred and fifty meters away, Luca became well aware of just how skewed the visuals of the location were.
As Tamamo vanished into the side room Luca could spot the first of the things ahead, the similar alabaster and red-purple skittering into view around an implied corner, notably with many more limbs than the initial example had sported. As it scrambled closer toward the flare on the ground, its size became apparent, nearly twice the size of an ID-SOL in height alone as it barrelled down the corridor blotting out the view behind it.
"Big guy spotted!" Luca said as he started firing at the thing, adjusting his aim with the flash of every gunshot - white specks of burning hot propellant still visible in the blackness. "Moving fast!" Luca yelled as he fired his eighth shot and switched to the wrist gun.
The shots caught the creature in one of its arms at first, the wet pop of breaking chitin signalling the impact before it's arm impacted the floor and nearly snapped clean off. Two shots plowed into its 'sensory hive' collapsing the delicate piece of anatomy, the thing losing balance and falling into a heap of damaged and bleeding limbs, just in time for a pair of smaller misshapen forms to skitter over its back.
These met the first of the wrist mounted autocannon the 25mm shells engulfing the pair in brief, violent roars of plasma. The few limbs that escaped the inferno tumbling to the ground and grasping blindly at the air no longer with a body to direct them.
Luca seemed satisfied with his handiwork, but kept watch in case the echoing noise of cannon fire, plasma and mass-driven bullets would attract anything else. With a break in the fight, he started to reload his HHG, pushing the empty cartridges out with a clatter to the floor, and pushing a speedloader in-
He missed, accidentally bumping the tips of the bullets against the cylinder structure and looking down in confusion. It seemed his ultra-fine motor control still needed work in this metal hull. He made a click of annoyance and shoved them in properly, tossing the speedloader away and looking up.
A nearly imperceptible shift in the comm-line heralded a message, "I found what I think is a computer, working on trying to turn it on. It looks like nothing I'm familiar with... Here's hoping." Notably his companion was being more verbose than usual, perhaps she was trying to keep him calm in the alien circumstances.
Her message had however come on the eve of the second wave, jagged chitinous protrusions tearing through the first corpse as the latest arrival scramble to get past and at the source of the disturbance while smaller members of the creatures paused to feast upon the entrails of the dead.
Past the skittering limbs and amorphous core bodies Luca could see that the corridor was beginning to fill and backstuff with the things, indicating that had the terrain been more open circumstances would have been much less favourable.
Chris Geehan & Dan Byrne-McCullough - Welcome to the party, pal
Luca had a chokepoint, a decent amount of firepower, and saw a taste of what these things were like. They were cannibalizing each other, so they were definitely not the ones who were responsible for this ... unless they mutated grotesquely into what he saw slapping towards him now. He took a couple of steps back and double checked what he'd put into the HHG.
He'd grabbed a speedloader of RED rounds before. There when I need 'em, Luca grinned as he held the HHG with both hands, right thumb ready to pull the hammer back with every shot he was about to take. He spent a moment in a wide-footed stance, sizing up the amount of competition a task made difficult by the seemingly random array of limbs present on the things creating a shifting forest of porcelain-like chitin behind the leading beast.
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!
The first red round slipped past the chitin and flared, the detonation relieving the creature of two of its larger limbs at the shared shoulder, a warbling scream only briefly heard before a second red impacted its chest, or perhaps underbelly, the conflagration silencing the beast.
The a third clipped one of the flailing limbs as the beast fell, however others detonated further down the corridor raising a cacophony of shrill bubbling shrieks in the wake of the explosions. Music to Luca's ears (microphones maybe?), like a very violent choir with some serious percussion.
His initial five shots were aiming for the smaller ones who were skittering around the corridor, and he focused the last three heavily explosive bullets at the big guy. "Tamamo, status update!" he asked, keeping his mind off how much the big one was still lumbering forward, and the thought there'd be even more.
Amid the detonations of the red rounds, and a near encounter with a wayward limb that sank its clawed digits into the corpse of Luca's initial kill despite being relieved of its owner, Tamamo replied softly, "Start-up screens and encrypted multi-character passwords are apparently vogue across known space transcending culture and species. I'm beginning to wish I had brought a server on a trolley." She paused, "Just hold them off a couple more minutes."
As simple as the request was the mounting pile of charred bodies that were eagerly pushed aside or interacted with by means of a variety of colourful mouthparts made the prospect a little daunting.
"Tamamo, I'm going to have a mountain of corpses by the time this is over!" Luca tried to remain optimistic as he was using the chokepoint doorway for all it was worth to continue funnelling the alien beings into a killing floor. He was spraying autocannon until the minimum safe distance begun to close rapidly between him and the ball of mouths and limbs. "Fuck it, I'm going in!" Luca declared, the whine of electricity and mechanisms becoming alive on his right arm.
First, he fired his Grapple Stunner-like tool into the ceiling to zip himself up, and fire downwards over the crowd, now getting a lay of the corridor ahead and a good count for numbers as he fired from the elevated position.
There was a limitation he didn't have in this robotic form - fine control of how he swung via gravity manipulation. The recoil from the autocannon was amplified by having nowhere to ground himself when he did it subconsciously normally.
At this point though, spraying fire wasn't going to be seen as particularly wasteful - there was plenty to choose from. He let go and dove into the middle of it with his new Grapple Stunner, eager to test the Phoenix Punch. Apparently the limitations had been removed, Tamamo said? He was about to find out.
Tamamo could hear a thunderous crash echoing from the corridor Luca was supposed to be pulling guard duty from, and looking over to it, he didn't seem to be standing at the doorway. He came stumbling out a few moments later, smouldering and covered in a film of purple-ish, watery liquid interspersed with specks of something else. There was an errant limb clinging to his ankle, which he shook off as well.
"I'm giving Echelon a raise." Luca said, seeing Tamamo's ears flattened before he turned around. "That is one hell of a punch..." He scanned the corridor again, and everything was too broken, exploded and splattered apart to mount a coherent counterattack. "Any luck?"
Tamamo's response came in the form of an echoing metallic thrumming, slowly approaching their location before falling silent. Sighing the small woman pulled her Gust kit's helmet back on and replied, "I managed to lock down the doors that aren't on our route to the control centre. Also I turned on the containment protocol, so whatever they have in here to deal with an escape should be turned on... I just hope that my forged 'employee' IDs for us work. You'll have to forgive my lack of confidence with the native systems."
Stepping away from the glowing panel, a series of concentric interlocking rings of angular 'text' visible as she stepped away, once again shouldering the gym bag before her helmeted face pointed up toward Luca, "From here it should be a matter of walking, or climbing over bodies."
Luca looked at the floor and shook his head as he waited for Tamamo to direct him to where he needed to be. "I already climbed over one pile... they were very grabby, like fangirls in Yamatai," he noticed that a single hand was still crawling towards him before stomping on it. "They really don't know when to quit."
Nodding Tamamo made sure she had her Fatboy at the ready, a reassuring pat on the gym bag her last check before she stepped out into the corridor and witnessed the carnage in the wake of Luca's efforts. Pausing for a moment she tried to pick out a path onward, commenting as she started forward, "Glad to see you're enjoying the hardware."
The path forward was initially peaceful, apart from a few moments taken to discharge the Fatboy into objects in the mass that seemed intent on moving still. Eventually the mass of corpses thinned out and Tamamo led down a left fork in the path, making their way down more of the uncannily undecorated halls.
The approach of another of the aberrations was cut short by a the appearance of some sort of floating drone, a metallic shape that looked like a pair of nearly two meter cubes had been overlaid over top of each other orbited by a trio of angular spear-head like apertures.
Before Tamamo or Luca could fire at the creature the drone acted, three golden lances of plasma arcing out before the apertures started to spin, the rotating beams carving the beast into charred chunks in just under a second. Then like nothing happened it drifted along, on its duty.
Luca raised an eyebrow. "Employee ID working out for you?" He said, wondering if she'd managed to hack herself some free dental while she was at it.
With a bit of nervousness Tamamo admitted, "I wasn't sure it would work." She honestly hadn't expected the first proof of concept to be so effective, and in hind sight she wished she had taken the time to double check her work. The alternative was likely an unpleasant end.
Proceeding down the hall, the handiwork, and drones themselves cropped up periodically, a few that needed to be politely skirted around, as they passed rows of sealed doors deeper into the facility.
The first notable change occurred just before the end of their journey, an open door leading into a circular passage that was decorated with a web work of silver-white symbols the first decoration that they'd encountered in the entire facility.
Stepping along curiously, Tamamo commented, "Just this last door to key open and we're home free... 22 hours remain. Not bad right?"
"We get results." Luca affirmed, looking at the last door. "So what do you suppose is behind here, then?" He asked, having forgotten a bit about the scale of the facility in the heat of the moment, and all the travel they'd been doing through the empty corridors - save for the weird drones. He was going to ask if any of them reminded Tamamo of Koa, but figured it'd be off colour.
"According to the security station, this should be the central hub of the facility. So, administration? Hopefully from here I can tap into the full facility and figure out the state of things." Tamamo answered casually.
He looked at one of the drones floating nearby. "I've never seen anything like whatever's floating around here. Seems right up your alley too, with all the floating rods and balls."
He realized what he just said and snorted, covering a mouth that wasn't there before looking at Tamamo with barely contained laughter. "Sorry, too easy."
"It's fine," Despite the cool answer her voice strangely carried amusement, unexpected from the small woman, as she stepped forward one of the interface cylinders in hand ready to interact with the quartet of purplish keypads flanking the doorway.
Reaching up to place the object, there was a soft sound like paper sliding across a table as the ceiling irised open the unblemished surface revealing itself to be composed of thousands of interlocking parts. From the void a drone unlike the others if only due to its ring-like form composed of jagged geometric shapes dipped into their presence bobbing in the centre of the door.
Turning, Tamamo started to move, speaking up, "Luca sho-" A flash of golden light cut her off, Tamamo's right arm vanishing in a gout of plasma. The detonation of what had been her arm pitched the small armored form across the corridor to slam into the opposite wall scattering her Fatboy and the contents of her bag.
With only an instant to act Luca closed the gap with the drone by firing his grappling hook at it, simultaneously launching a blanket of autocannon fire at the thing as he was reeling himself in, snapping it back when he'd gotten enough lift to reach the alpha drone, jet-propelled.
The autocannon rounds illuminated the thing causing it to glow hotly where they struck, the many faceted shape glittering in the flashing light, apparently whatever it was made of it was tougher than the creatures that inhabited this place, glowing with the heat from the autocannon shells it rotated to face Luca's charging form, slower than it had initially moved though likely no less deadly.
Before it could discharge a second time however, the heavily modified Militant grabbed onto a ring and smashed through it with the heavy Phoenix Punch - trying to shatter some of it apart. If autocannon couldn't, this would. Luca didn't have much else on him which could shatter whatever xenomaterial it was composed of.
The results were strangely anti-climatic if no less effective, the ring crunched beneath the impact of the blow, sounding more like glass underfoot than any sort of destruction, fissures apparent in the circumference of the ring before it fell to the floor in a trio of pieces.
As the still hot drone fell to the floor, a rattling noise could be heard above signalling the arrival of additional hardware. The objects while looking more obviously like weapons, with complexity, and multiple components fell to the ground ingloriously. It seemed that without the core component the rest of the system had failed to activate properly.
Falling to the floor with the rest of the components, and landing hard was Luca, forgetting that it wasn't anti-gravity the Militant had, but thrusters. The heat of the moment lead him to smash into the floor, crumpling and shaking some of his components loose.
"Owwww ow ow - wait, hang on I don't feel anything." Luca mumbled, realizing that even though his Militant body's arm was clearly out of its socket, he didn't feel an smidgen of pain. All he got was a polite readout telling him where the damage was.
Then he realized that there may have been someone who could still feel. He looked over his shoulder, blanching. "Tamamo!" he said, trying to get to his feet and looking for the Nekovalkyrja.
While the initial attack had been clean, being pitched across the corridor had for better or worse splattered the walls, ceiling, and floor with royal blue hemosynth, the lack of red out of place given what had happened.
Beyond the modern art of the corridor Luca could see the small armoured form of Tamamo lifting itself off of the ground like a marionette lifted by its strings, her feet meeting the ground before her helmeted head turned to regard the dripping stump that had been her right arm.
"What was that? Middle management?" Luca asked, still unable to get to his feet and shuffling on his hands and knees over. He glanced over his shoulder, scared that it might reassemble itself.
Looking toward the remains of the ring, and the pile of fallen hardware Tamamo gave a shrug, made uneven by the missing limb before answering coolly, "I guess. Seems we didn't have sufficient privileges to access this section of the facility. Note how the other drones don't seem to care about us even now."
True to her suggestion a pair of the odd guardians idled in place several meters behind their position, apparently oblivious to the confrontation that had occurred.
Using the time that they had Tamamo used her remaining arm to pick up one of the fallen interface units and picked her way over to the door, before sticking it onto the security pad. Looking to Luca she paused before crouching to acquire a second interface, "You look pretty beat up. Going to rest for a bit?"
Luca gave Tamamo a nod. He looked at the Militant droid's right leg. It absorbed a good chunk of the impact from Luca landing, not to mention his right arm was slammed up pretty bad. "Yeah ... I don't know how I stopped that thing, didn't think it was going to work." He mumbled, shuffling into a more comfortable position against the wall and letting Tamamo take the other interface.
Assessing the state of the Militant's structural integrity, Tamamo was once again glad that they had gone with telepresence rather than risking the genuine article. If the damage had been anything like this to his fleshy form Tamamo wasn't sure she'd have been able to get the Captain out of the facility alive. After all she had no clear idea on if there were any sort of pathogens or otherwise in the environment. Dragging a bleeding Minkan over a pile of alien corpses seemed a bad idea as well.
As she considered this, her remaining arm went through the motions of slotting each interface over the appropriate 'keypad' not that that is what they were quite... They were more akin to biometric scanners that hunted for some form of encrypted key.
Thankfully Tamamo had a good substitute to the key, having spent a long time in overclocked simulation rooting through the operating system that she had access to on the surface. A week of real time had been five years for her at sixty fold time. A huge amount of processing power burnt away, spent plumbing the intricacies of an alien language and their defensive systems, many failures made that would have proven fatal on this outing.
Not that she could tell the truth, not yet at least. As the final interface settled into place Tamamo waited for the data bank she'd carried along, its nerimium plated box keeping the valuable information protected inside. Minutes passing marked only by a slow drip of royal blue hemosynth from her mostly sealed wound.
Eventually the doorway opened and Tamamo found herself looking into a dimly lit circular room, broken up by concentric circles of faintly glowing magenta structures that reminded of hexagonal crystals. It seemed that their goal was at hand.
Looking to Luca's Militant frame Tamamo inquired, "Want me to pull you in?" Luca nodded, edging closer on his good side and reaching out to be dragged.
"Yeah, I should be able to stand once I'm up." Luca said, looking at his stricken leg, leaking fluids in places, and loose in others exposing the under-frame. "Getting up's the tricky bit, and I don't think holding my right hand's a good idea." His right arm was still sparkling and crackling with energy, some of the containment broken in the fall, crossing some wires.
Nodding, Tamamo shouldered her fatboy and gym bag, once again loaded up before hooking her left hand under the chest of the Militant chassis and began hobbling awkwardly into the room pulling Luca's robotic body over the threshold.
Once inside Tamamo watched the door close sealing them in the half-light of the room, and heaved a sigh of relief. They had made it. Now all she had to do was take control, and call the LSDF in orbit.
Before she did so, she kept up her part of Luca's request and using the wall to help her out, pulled the Militant automaton to its feet, resting its weight against the wall until Luca could figure out how to stabilize himself once upright. The droid shuffled in place for a bit, grasping onto the wall as he found his feet.
Once she was certain that Luca wouldn't fall over Tamamo shuffled off into the forest of crystalline structures, her Fatboy discarded for the moment as she fumbled with the bag she carried. Thankfully the structure of the thing was something that the security station had described, albeit unwillingly, and she had an idea of where she had to place her tools.
Once in place the room illuminated, as she started up the core systems, blinding white light illuminating the surface of the domed room giving it an oily appearance like a puddle of gasoline, only on a white background.
Quiet light footsteps were all Luca had for a short while before Tamamo returned, her helmet once again removed the tips of her ears twitching excitedly as she approached the Captain's Militant once more, cheerfully commenting despite the alien surroundings, "I made it in. Seems like we managed to pull it off." There was a pause, "I'm sorry this was so awkward."
Luca wasn't entirely sure what success entailed here. The surroundings had been so alien, and the feedback from things he watched Tamamo interact with so abstract he had to take Tamamo's word for it. "So, what happens now, aside from us getting out of here?"
He started to move shakily, walking with a noticeable hobble. "Who gets to keep what's in here?"
Tamamo seemed to blank out for a moment, perhaps considering the questions, before eventually slowly blinking her focus returning a comfortingly familiar mannerism in an alien place, "Well... I have to get in contact with the LSDF, I would imagine they'll want boots on the ground and some New Tur'listan scientists in fancy suits and coats in here... After all this is a goldmine of information in their territory."
There was a moment of hesitation as she glanced aside before continuing, "I don't exactly think that I have the pull to argue with the Matriarchy... So I'm going to merely try selling my services as an asset. Maybe I'll learn something. Worst case is I get cleared and they pat me on the head and send me back to the Kestrel."
There was another pause, Tamamo's expression softening a little before she finished, "From here there aren't any negative complications."
"I'd hope not. Well, with any luck, this is a pay bonus. We gave 'em twenty four hours, we got it done in under two, you said it yourself." Luca pointed out.
"Well, we're the ISC Phoenix after all. It is only natural that we'd exceed expectation." There was a bit of a grin, fitting in where it was expected, "Are you going to disconnect and wait up on the Kestrel? There isn't going to be much to do around here, and I'm better at entertaining myself than others. I'll be in radio contact so you can check in if you're worried."
Tamamo tilted her head to the left as she spoke watching the robotic body as if it were his natural one seeking the little tells that haunted every natural born man, woman, and child. Perhaps it would give an idea of his state of mind.
The robotic hull nodded. "If you've got everything under control here, guess I'll move on. I definitely need to stretch my proper legs after wearing this..." The Militant grabbed itself on the head. "Helmet? Spaghetti bowl? You saw it - crammed full of wires."
He chuckled a little, showing those little signs of body language, the way Militant swayed a little, as though it was breathing, little signs of emotion obscured by the lack of a visible, friendly face, but his body language said enough. "See you later."
The war android stiffened suddenly, before letting its original programming and in-built artificial intelligence resume functioning as Luca got out of the hotseat. It watched Tamamo for a few moments before looking around, making quiet beeps as it ran a diagnostics scan on itself, detecting the broken limbs, the extra parts, the presence of the HHG and ammo, and making notes aloud to get those fixed. It'd follow Tamamo around as its mobility permitted it to.
There was a pause, spent watching the Militant, making sure that Luca was truly disconnected, and that she was alone. Then Tamamo turned it off.
Walking back towards the centre of the room, looking up at the augmented reality overlay, the alien script something that she could read thanks to the extensive time spent deciphering the local systems. Mostly the diagnostics were clean, though 40% of the facility reported being overrun by breached containment.
All in all a small problem between LSDF forces and integrated resources. Thinking of the LSDF, Tamamo signalled for the radio array to activate, opening communications with the outside world for the first time in half a millennium as she reported the route into the facility, and the present status to the LSDF Vus'hien. She recommended sealed Wind or dedicated hazmat suits for the approach, but apart from the risk of drowning on entry the facility was relatively harmless. Even more so once they took control properly.
As the return from the orbiting ships began, Tamamo sighed and looked at the large gold outlined lettering in the centre of her field of vision.
Contagion detected. Please seek medical aid for decontamination.
Riding a shuttle up into low orbit to rendezvous with the Crimson Kestrel a couple of hours after securing the facility, Tamamo fidgeted and glanced at her patched up stump of an arm. She remembered stepping out of the tank, surrounded by Lorath techs, and then the digital message displayed over her HUD that filled her in.
What she had been through was the process of securing an alien biological research facility on Kotoku I. What she didn't remember was what had happened after she had shut the Militant off. According to Koa on the surface though, things were handled, though for now they'd be working in separate places.
As the shuttle made contact and the airlock cycled, Tamamo stepped out and back onto the familiar floors of the Crimson Kestrel, everything returning to normal, while nothing remained the same. It would be an interesting future to explore.
The first thing she was greeted with shortly upon arrival was a cold beverage; A glass of icy water with cubes floating in it. Luca had a can of beer in his other hand, and he invited Tamamo to relax a little on the Kestrel before she headed back into the field out in the Lorath backsectors. He looked worn out without having done any physical activity - acting as the Militant.
Accepting the glass of water, Tamamo sipped at it curiously before drinking deeply. After a moment she pulled it away from her lips, smiling up at Luca, "Thanks for coming with me. I couldn't have done it without you."
Luca raised his can to her, returning a smile. "Not a problem," he replied before heading towards a couch and plopping himself down, heaving a big sigh. "Who's place did we go knock on anyway?" He asked.
"Officially? Some Pirate Lord's den, that's what we're getting paid for by the by. Unofficially... I'm still not sure. Maybe I'll find out later, but for the moment the place is getting canvased and secured." Tamamo paused once again drinking thirstily from the glass before chewing on an ice cube, the crunching filling the time before she finished, "How much we learn beyond this depends on what the LSDF feels like sharing with civilians."
"Always a bit cagey, the birds," Luca figured, basking for the moment, staring at the ceiling, wondering if his experience in the war droid was going to be another episode for his personal history. He saw (and punched) things he'd never seen elsewhere. After a bit of quiet in the air, he figured he'd let it be, taking a sip of his beer and letting Tamamo recover at her own pace.
Terranigma - Mysterious Pit
The series of events that had led to the diminutive form of Sesshoseki Tamamo standing upon a short rise of barren snow dusted rock, in the cradle of a deep ravine had been most unexpected. What had begun as a naively optimistic venture into asteroid mining operations, squirrelled away in a system so far out of the public eye that the UOC, and even the Lorath Matriarchy had failed to colonize it after a decade, had turned into a series of unexpected discoveries.
After a few months, she'd made a few lucratively rewarded hauls of materials in the outer asteroid belt of the system. As the resources gained from mining endeavours were funnelled into the expansion of what she hoped would become her mining fleet in the system, it became possible for more whimsical actions to be taken. The first of this being the exploration of the local planets in the system, and orbital scans of the bodies.
This had alerted Tamamo to the presence of an anomalous, and unknown signal on Kotoku IV which had lead to the identification of an artificial structure of unknown origin. Spurred by the discovery, her wayward Caernarfon drone travelled further inward through the system, finding another anomaly on Kotoku III, though the electrical storms proved too great to allow for firm identification.
Kotoku II had proven devoid of anything of interest, and had led to the expectation that all within the system had already been found.
Then had begun the scan of the watered dirt ball of Kotoku I. The minimal microbial life was nothing new, and expected as a result of the stable atmosphere and active ocean. What had been unexpected was the presence of a large alien structure featuring similar spectral features to the initial discovery on Kotoku IV, only much larger.
Not wanting to irritate her amicable Lorath hosts, Tamamo had gone with the safe option and reported the discoveries to the Matriarchy. What had been a little more spirited was the negotiation that followed in which she purchased a mercenary licence, equipment, and had offered to clear and secure the structure.
Now she was standing just outside of the hermetically sealed dome that had been constructed over the only opening to the structure that she could find, and in minutes she would put a subjective year's worth of work into cracking open the facility and beginning her work.
But first she had another task.
***
Armoured as best a she could manage and equipped with what little she had for weaponry, Tamamo found herself standing before the mechanical form of a modified Militant drone that had been brought down to the planet's surface. After a moment of appraisal for the piece of Freespacer craftsmanship, Tamamo broadcast a burst of encoded RF signals, keying into the dormant machine and starting up its systems.
In orbit she knew that there was likely some sort of alert calling to the Captain, and soon enough through the wonders of telepresence, she'd have a durable facsimile of the legendary mercenary at her side. Someone she could rely on to support her within the heart of the unknown facility, who would also be unlikely to cause unnecessary damage to the local infrastructure. A rare mix of traits.
The single eye of the unit flickered on, an angry red before flicking to a swatch of orange, while the 'mouth' of the thing made a brief series of sine-waves before flattening. Shoulders rolled with a whir, fingers flicking up and down, joints going stiff, then relaxing without falling over. Robotic motions as part of the startup process, then some distinctly human behaviour came about as it stretched like an athlete.
"Kept you waiting, huh?" A digitized facsimile of Luca's voice came over the speaker, quickly looking at themselves and performing some experimental moves with the chassis he was hotseated into. First, taking advantage of abnormal limb rotation offered by the robot, then patting himself down and realizing there was an ammo chain sticking out of his left forearm.
He didn't recognize the thing immediately, but the interface Luca was looking through could see that it was some manner of autocannon. "What else have I got on this?" He kept inspecting himself, grabbing himself in the crotch, then shaking his legs.
The initial activity was met with silence, the featureless mask of a Gust Kit the only observer as Tamamo watched the modified Militant come to life. Luca's mannerisms were immediately apparent as he started to explore what was likely an entirely new experience. So far it seemed that things were operating optimally.
Eventually however she decided to speak up, "You have not kept me waiting long. You need not worry yourself... As for features, you have a pair of analogues to your Grapple Stunner, Echelon seemed to think that you'd appreciate them. Though with the hardware they have a much higher energetic output... Since there was no flesh to worry about damaging." After a moment's pause Tamamo added, "Notably your autocannon is loaded with Freespacer made plasma HEAT charges. It should be sufficient for heavy stopping power. We however needed a smaller weapon for when we don't want to punch holes in things, as such we have a more familiar option in the form of a lightly modified HHG. It wasn't designed for robotic hands after all."
Lapsing into silence again, Tamamo tilted her head slightly to the left as she waited to see what sort of response she would get from Luca. After all much depended on his comfort with the arrangements.
'Luca' looked at the handle of the HHG. The trigger guard had been enlarged, the grip was almost rifle sized - turning into some manner of cowboy carbine in the hands of a regular person. The button to release the cylinder protruded more obviously to make it easier to hit. The Militant war android unholstered it and gave it a few experimental pointings at things in the distance, draws, sudden aims, and swings to gauge it.
"Not bad." Luca said, now looking about himself now that he was comfortably settled for the moment. "Where the hell are we, anyway?" He stepped around his locale, taking in everything he could because he'd never seen anything like it. He attempted to breathe, a sigh coming through his comms before he realized that he didn't need oxygen.
"Well..." There was much to answer, after all where they were wasn't exactly a prime touristing location. "We're on Kotoku I, a planet that to my knowledge has never been actually landed upon within the decade that we've known about it. It has been swept from orbit with scanning equipment by the SAoY, UOC, and Lorath and yet no one bothered to do anything here.
"We have mostly water and bare stone, the majority of the planet is home to nothing beyond a few cultures of microscopic life forms... Except for here, at the bottom of a chasm near the north pole." She pointed down the length of the clear bio-hazard enclosure to a strange dull dark-teal semi-circular wall only notable because it was slightly inset into a much larger domed structure of similarly unimpressive make, against which their enclosure pressed up against.
"According to scans, this building is full of living things, the issue is that we have no idea who built it, and so far as I can tell it hasn't been touched in at least a century." Pointing to the far end of the enclosure Tamamo indicated a trio of stone-like pillars buried in more familiar wires and computer systems, otherwise only notable for their clean cut state, and the contrast between the dark teal stone compared to the surrounding reddish rock.
"As the first living soul to pay attention to this lonely portion of known space, I offered to poke around and discover what there was to find. This explains why there are a trio of Raptor-Class vessels sitting in low orbit above this barren world.
"Once I open the door and the sensors confirm I havn't unleashed a plague into this enclosure, we have twenty-four hours to get to the heart of this place, and secure it... Any questions?"
Luca was unable to make facial expressions in his current state, but he was looking long and hard at the unknown structure. A place his charms wouldn't work, where he'd have to think about what he was doing rather than relying on the fear he struck into people. After all, if whatever was in there had never ventured out - they wouldn't have heard of him.
"So... this is some sort of Black Claw installation, you think?" He offered, sounding out of his depth as he crossed his arms. "My dad was in contact with someone who uncovered one once." Something was just plain off about the area, and Luca couldn't put his metal finger on it.
"The tech was pretty ... strange. Dad didn't go into detail. Last I heard of this friend of my dad's, they were in an institution," he sighed, "drawing crazy shit on the walls all day and reading books with their toes."
His gaze trailed off to the exclusion zone Tamamo had set up, and he contemplated whatever could be within.
A moment of quiet contemplation followed Luca's explanation, and the brief tale of the discoveries found within a Black Claw installation, as such her answer was cheerful, if somewhat unsettling, "Well the good news is that this isn't a Black Claw facility as far as I can tell. The bad news is we have no idea who made it."
There was a pause before she elaborated, "It doesn't match up with what little we know of other Black Claw emplacements, the materials of the structure are different for one, and the architecture is a little more modest from what I read... Really the only reason I even managed to figure out how to get into this place was thanks to the translation software that Yamatai has in its possession. The stuff that they used during contact with the Lorath and other local alien life."
She paused, turning to join Luca in the contemplation of the huge structure before telling a small lie, "I honestly only figured out how to open doors so far... Hopefully we don't need much else."
Turning her attention to the Luca-Bot, Tamamo inquired, "Is there anything else you want to know before we get started?" He shook his head.
"With any luck, if we can't open a door, we make one..." Luca mumbled as he started heading towards the containment perimeter Tamamo had set up, looking for an airlock to walk through. "What's our bug-out plan? Escape and/or nuke the place?" He asked, keeping things duly diligent.
After a moment's pause Tamamo hurried after Luca's Militant, skipping lightly across the bare rocky landscape toward the nearest and only airlock, a glassy, complex structure visibly made of several layers of components. "The ideal scenario is to escape and erase the location from orbit. However, in the name of preventing some sort of doomsday plague or genetic super-weapon from escaping onto the planet and maybe getting spaceborne, the arrangement is that any breach of containment has the location glassed."
Luca nodded as he approached the doors to the airlock. "Gotcha. There's no collateral here, except for us. Who's handling the glassing?" He didn't know what the fox had to muster as he waited for her to open the doors, unfamiliar with the technology and concerned he'd break the interface with his metal fingers.
"The LSDF, their credentials checked out. Didn't want to hire an amateur y'know?" The joke aside Tamamo delivered the encrypted key that allowed them into the transparent enclosure, the door proving to be a three piece affair that hissed as it slid open, allowing them to enter a small intermediary.
As the section sealed behind them, the pumps started to run evacuating the chamber or external atmosphere creating a temporary vacuum before, re-balancing the pressure, washing them down with biological control agents, and then they were into the friendly side of the enclosure. A small space barely 150m from end to end. On the one side, the alien facility's inauspicious smooth door, and on the other a cluster of wires, server shelves, and other oddities.
Pointing toward the door, Tamamo suggested, "Head over there, and I'll get the keys, and open the door... Who ever built this place was pretty paranoid I think... The outer door has no controls built into it. So you have to open it from the pillar things." She soon added, "Scans suggest the immediate area is empty... But be ready anyway."
He raised his left arm into a ready position, bracing it by grabbing his elbow with his right hand once he was in position, giving the nod to Tamamo. "Ready when you are." He said as he kept a scan on the monolithic doors and stayed behind a server shelf to remain concealed if something was waiting for him.
The process of opening was thankfully rather hands free, largely because Tamamo was certain that whatever had designed the interface was not under five feet tall, and was possessed of at least more than two limbs.
Looking between the cables snaking up the lengths of the pillars Tamamo imagined the flow of information, on their way to the pico-jelly interfaces configured to mimic the input of alien hands against strange not-quite stone construction.
The 'keys' that she collected consisted of a portable combination data bank and processor the size and relative shape of 10cm white plastic cube, nested in a gym bag along with with ten 'interface' units, short, white plastic cylinders with three equidistant protrusions that contained weak gravitic clamps to hold their metallic pico-jelly underside against whatever interface she encountered that would hopefully allow her to interact with whatever structures existed within the building.
As Luca tried to overhear noises from Tamamo, hearing some sort of input, some feedback to tell him when to strike. He didn't hear a single thing, the chamber barely echoing to the environs.
As the unlocking sequence completed, the door came to life, the exterior face sliding down, and into the ground, unsettling only in that the process was silent.
The sight beyond was underwhelming to say the least. An undecorated, circular dull grey platform rested just beyond the portal, the room around it smoothly curving upward to form a dome within. Notably despite the apparent continued life of the facility, the small room immediately beyond the first door was unlit. Whether by component failure, or design was unknown.
As Tamamo kept her attention on the reports from the sensors, ensuring that the disappointment was microscopic as much as macroscopic, she eventually could do nothing but shrug, and comment, "I suppose this is our way in."
"Suppose so... I'll take point." Luca said as he emerged from cover and started moving in first, walking low, hugging the wall and whatever cover he could - moving extremely cautiously as he was unsure of his capabilities in operation.
He flicked a lamp on his robotic body on, shining a light inside, only to see that everything swallowed bright LED array lighting. Though the chamber was quite small, and the grey disk he was standing on somewhat wobbly. Perhaps it was nerves, but he couldn't explain it at all. "Tamamo, this place isn't right."
It was as simply as he could boil his feelings down, scanning for targets as he waited for her to cover him before advancing.
Trotting toward the opening the gym bag containing the supplies slung over her shoulder, and the omnipresent form of a Fatboy visible in her hand. Tamamo closed the distance and stepped up onto the platform along side Luca's temporarily mechanical form.
Uncertain how to comfort the man, she tried some levity, "If this were right, we'd be sitting in the lounge of the Kestrel discussing a movie." She wasn't sure her words had done well to convey the idea, but it was a shot.
Sending a digital command back to her console at the controls, Tamamo turned and watched the door slide up out of the 'floor' the light of the outdoors dying slowly as the portal sealed.
Interestingly to her at least, was the lattice of locks and secondary seals that formed on the inside, the wall of the chamber seeming to flow as the way out was engulfed in weave of metallic strands.
After a moment the platform shifted, dropping down into the floor, a smooth passage swallowing the disk, as the entry above continued to seal, lock after lock, adding further layers between them and the outside.
Looking up, Tamamo was a little startled when the platform levelled off and stopped. The ceiling sealing a final time and for a moment it seemed that they had come to nowhere in particular, with nothing to do. Confused she was about to voice her concern only to be interrupted as ports along the top of the chamber irised open spilling a pitch black fluid into the chamber, visible only due to the swirling gold motes that illuminated the fluid like phosphorescence as it splashed and pooled.
Watching this process, Tamamo rolled her shoulders and commented, "Your body will be fine. It's built to handle a vacuum... I'm just glad that I thought to water proof my equipment on a whim... Not that this stuff seems much like water."
"Some sort of oil?" Luca wondered, thinking it was something to do with maintenance, or perhaps decontamination or security. All possibilities he'd seen from the movies he loved, but which of them was on the money?
The comment that Tamamo had been made was largely for Luca's sake, the room rapidly filling with the level of the liquid approaching her chest, only moment from engulfing her, and soon even the taller frame of the Militant was completely submerged. The one bright side being that neither of them were in any danger of drowning, and whatever was pouring in on them seemed for the moment harmless.
Tamamo could see Luca's orange IFF profile looking intently at the autocannon on his arm, keeping his fingers flexing to see if there was any change in activity or feel. He was trying to get a bearing of what was around him instead of rolling with it.
To Luca though, Tamamo's IFF profile, outlined in cyan, was still. "Have you seen any, um, motifs? Artwork? Stone carving? Architecture?" He recalled not spotting anything on the way in, but in his defence he'd only been there a few minutes. "There's lots of nothing here, Tamamo."
There was a bit of a shrug visible thanks to the IFF, an act that Tamamo noted was rather easy despite being submerged in a strange fluid. Her response came quickly enough through the channel, "Apart from the pragmatic use of domes, and circular shapes, they had cylindrical pillars... And now these complex locking mechanisms. Maybe they were utilitarian?"
The answer was weak, but it was honestly all she had. If the outside of the massive structure had sported any sort of decoration, the years had made sure nothing had survived, on the outside at least. Though admittedly the interior wasn't looking much more lively.
Before she could say more on the subject she felt rather than saw the motion of the platform, the acceleration being suggestive of heading toward the larger central dome, "I guess we'll have to wait and see..."
Paying attention to her internal HUD, Tamamo estimated that they had travelled approximately two hindered meters, a small distance given the size of the facility. Only to stop, and then rise. Apparently the entry mechanism was akin to a u-bend in a pipe.
As they slowly rose the chamber slowly drained, the fluid running off of the metal of the Militant body, and her Wind suit without beading or leaving a residue. Whatever it was it didn't cling.
With a minor sense of disappointment, Tamamo noted that the room they had arrived in was functionally identical to their point of entry. For all she knew they had gone nowhere.
The slow process of waiting for the locks to disengage brought an uncomfortable amount of time to observe their bleak surroundings, before the final door started to open, shifting and twisting into the floor, forming a lip between them and the space beyond.
The sight that met them was uncanny.
Terranigma - Laboratory
Immediately beyond the threshold of the room they occupied, there seemed to be a placid black flooring, mirrored on the ceiling. What ruined the illusion however were the softly glowing cyan tendrils, creeping up the walls of the roughly circular passage. The lights glinted off of the points on Luca's Militant droid.
The sound of dripping water, and the sight of golden concentric circles exposed the floor for what it was, more of the same strange fluid, the ceiling likely of a similar composition, though how the fluid remained suspended above the air of the passage was unclear.
Luca stayed in the middle of the room rather than staying close to the walls. He wasn't too keen on having another tentacled encounter by something whose name he didn't even know. He was trying to gaze through holes in the liquid floating through the air, thinking it was a smokescreen.
"This is some pretty advanced stuff. Are you sure its not Claw?" He asked, drumming the fingers on his elbow nervously.
"Am I sure?" Tamamo echoed the question, "No. Just from what I could tell this wasn't built like other Black Claw facilities." Deciding that nothing ventured, nothing gained, Tamamo trotted forward out from the centre of their platform and stepped toward the 'floor' only to sink in to her thigh.
Looking over her shoulder at Luca's Militant, Tamamo sighed softly, before stepping forward a couple more paces as she commented over the channel, "It feels like trying to walk through the roots of a mangrove forest. Apparently the local life likes to grow on more than just the walls."
Luca would've raised an eyebrow at her, but he didn't have any way of expressing his incredulity aside from staring at her. "You seem awfully clam about this." Luca said as he made sure to keep one of his long arms out in case Tamamo needed a pick-me-up.
There was a pause as she considered this before the flat almost emotionless reply came, "I've been operating under similar circumstances for a long time. I've learned that you can either freeze up and panic. Or you can do something."
To illustrate her point with action, Tamamo took a few steps deeper into the corridor visibly tugging against something beneath the inky blackness, as gold blossomed into view as the fluid splashed around her.
"We've got twenty three hours, and thirty minutes. We might as well get started." Casting another look over her shoulder to the armoured simulacrum of a man, Tamamo wondered if he'd follow.
He reluctantly begun moving ahead, metal feet squelching through it as he made very deliberate, and wary steps. As he got towards Tamamo she noticed he was keeping his neck up for as long as he could before he would be eventually immersed.
"Gotcha..." he said as he made sworls and gold pitter patter in his wake. "So we have no idea who these are, how they live, or what this place is for."
He cricked his neck as he continued moving through the fluid. "Who else's scouted this planet before? A lot of people have been past here recently."
"Well as I mentioned in passing before," Tamamo began as she wandered forward, "No one really. We've known about the system since before the UOC split off, but no one has ever landed here before. Mainly just orbital scans. There just wasn't really anything to look at I guess. With so many paradise worlds around with fun and exciting plants, cute animals, and locals to subjugate, why pay attention to a dust ball like Kotoku I?"
There was a moment of silence as she stumbled over a particularly dense portion of whatever was growing, "So, I think I'm the first person planetside, after I offered to poke around... I half expect the Matriarchy sees me as a convenient scout. Since I'm Neko I'm less expensive to have down here exploring. Tougher, less likely to get the plague, all that... So, I guess we can take comfort in knowing that the things we run into here are likely to be native. Which should mean mostly squishy fleshy stuff... Unless we just have a fancy root system growing in here."
"Fair point on the paradise worlds. This place is just plain blank. Just like the rest of this place until now." He was looking around the fluid, unsure if the way he was seeing through this stuff was due to anomaly or if he couldn't actually see anything. "Something fish like perhaps? Maybe all these roots are some sort of biological computer?" He asked, noting the eerie colours and the detail in these roots, far more intricate than the rest of the surroundings.
He seemed to walk into a webbing, encountering a little bit of resistance before tearing some membrane open near the edge. "Ick, something like cobwebs too." He pointed out, surprised that cobwebs being underwater was a new discovery.
Tamamo glanced back in time to watch the curious happenstance, as the 'ceiling' blackness tore open and poured down on the militant. As harmless as the floor the black and gold cascaded down amid the contrasting ambient cyan, before slowly stopping up and ceasing.
As much as she hated to voice it, Tamamo eventually spoke up, "We'll have to look and see... Too much is unknown with this place."
The response was carried in the silence between the two for a while, the regularity of their surroundings and the quiet sounds of disturbed fluid amid infrequent drips, settled in enough that when they finally did happen upon something new it stood out severely.
Nestled in the upper right of the corridor was a larger structure that looked vaguely like a plant bulb, half submerged in the blackness and seeming to twitch and pulse irregularly. Slowing her pace, Tamamo left her Fatboy at her side instead opting to point up toward the new object to draw Luca's attention, wondering if they should avoid it or pre-emptively destroy whatever it was.
Luca snapped into action at the indicated area, reticle over the bulbous, roiling thing. He aimed the autocannon, taking a lower combat ready stance. "Didn't you bring anything?" He asked as he stayed still and low while indicating for Tamamo to stop.
Halting her advance at Luca's indication, Tamamo replied simply, "I have a Fatboy, but it isn't exactly the most elegant of weapons for this sort of situation. I had to give up the possibility of carrying heavier weapons to ensure I could carry along the bag of 'keys' since getting stopped by a locked door honestly seemed a poor idea."
Returning her full attention to the bulbous thing, Tamamo contemplated her options before adding, "It'll be simpler if we just destroy it. No use tempting fate."
He pointed his left wrist at the thing and loosed an experimental burst of autocannon fire at the large plant bulb. He wanted to see what a small spray of fire would do from this thing before deciding to increase or decrease his efforts. The brass casings splashed into the gilded oily substance and caused a ripple in the waves.
The flashes of autocannon fire were followed an instant later by a flash of billowing grey smoke and soon quickly all that remained was a glowing spot of slag, casting a bright orange light over the previously cyan dominated passage.
After a moment spend admiring the results of the Freespacer made weapon Tamamo spoke up, "Well... That did the job. Glad that this passage isn't filled with interesting things." Paying no mind to the way that the tendrils squirmed and writhed where the hole had been burned in their midst, Tamamo started off again, deciding that the injured lattice wasn't worth investigating for the moment, much more intent on progressing somewhere that wasn't this hall.
Luca seemed to limber up a little when he realized that he did have the means to retaliate on his left arm. He begun moving in more earnest, invigorated by the little victory. "You think this isn't interesting? Sheesh..." Luca said as he waded through the stuff and acted as overwatch for Tamamo. Wading through the stuff had reached a familiar rhythm too.
The next leg of the journey passed with little fanfare, apart from a few tendril infested holes in the wall that seemed to have possibly been a part of a ventilation system, the journey was thankfully uneventful.
A tendril covered wall marked the end of the tunnel, however cursory inspection revealed that it was something akin to a large vault door. Which in turn allowed Tamamo to actually put her bulky kit to use. Pulling the bag over her shoulder, Tamamo retrieved a trio of the white, circular, plastic interface units before setting about savagely tearing at the tendrils, hunting for the control pannel paired with the door.
A few minutes of exploration revealed a surprisingly small raised oval, of a purple-ish hue, the apparent interface lit by a dull glow. After clearing away the surrounding tendrils Tamamo placed one of the plastic 'keys' on top of the object, the gravitic clamps affixing one of the device in place. Prepared to wait a while while she figured out how to open the door, Tamamo was startled when the door unexpectedly started to rotate the disengaging locks sounding a deep vibration that she felt more than heard. As the portal opened, the door rolling out of the way, the fluid suddenly shifted and washed the small, light girl through the opening along with much of the weakened tendrils.
Luca in his much more stable and heavy Militant was able to watch as Tamamo surged forward a short distance before being dashed against a stairway on the far side of the doorway. Tamamo's armoured form quickly pushed herself up, as the fluid started to equalize, revealing that beyond the door was quite different than the corridor that they had wandered down for several tedious minutes. They had found a brightly lit corridor.
As she started to look around Tamamo ventured a guess over their comm line, "Luca... I think we were in a broken, or infested part of the facility. This side of the door is clear of those tendril things, and well lit. Also I think there is air a little further up the stairwell..." As she trailed off Tamamo worked to gather up her scattered gear, hoping that she wouldn't find herself washing through the rest of the doorways.
That was something that clicked to him. "Huh, didn't think of it that way. This place is so plain otherwise." Luca pointed out as he watched Tamamo use one featureless object with another. He couldn't wrap his head around how she was able to keep a track of what was what.
"So maybe this thing we're walking on, and potentially through is some sort of science project?" He made a clicking noise. Clicking his tongue produced a different sound over radio.
"That or they had very strange ideas about decoration." Packing the scattered objects back into her gym bag, Tamamo walked back toward Luca, carefully disengaging the final interface unit over the lock and waited to see if the door would roll closed.
After a moment spent in stillness Tamamo decided that she could indeed recover the interface unit, and it too returned to her bag before she led the way into the well lit section, the stairs leading up higher into a dry portion of the facility, the light filtering down like looking up from the bottom of a swimming pool.
As they marched their way up the stairs, the clean white lights flanking them on either side set into circular fixtures, Tamamo looked about, her vision slipping over the smooth curved walls of the circular passage.
Strangely the entire thing lacked any sort of visible seams, appearing to have been cast in a single huge piece, not a familiar trait to say the least, the continuous unbroken nature of the facility giving it pseudo organic form as the walls blended seamlessly into the lights, and even the stairs upon which they ascended.
At the top of the stairs, Tamamo paused briefly before stepping forward just far enough to let Luca's Militant to reach the top as well. The first notable feature of the facility beyond the initial entry point and the singular door, happened to be what vaguely looked like a security check point, a denser cluster of lights being interspersed with what could have possibly been lenses radiating along the entire circumference of the passage in a tripple helix arrangement giving the hall the feeling of a vortex.
Near the door, Tamamo could spot a pair of the purple-ish blemishes that looked similar to the lock on the previous door, she had passed through.
Considering the space before her, Tamamo inquired, "Should I try opening it nicely? Or should we pre-emptively eliminate anything that looks like a threat? Which do you feel better about?" While she had her own opinions, Tamamo trusted the instincts of the man in the machine that she had brought along, after all he hadn't earned his reputation by having a poor intuition when it came to danger.
His intuition was being fooled by the lack of things to go on. He didn't know what to expect, so his gut signals were heavily conflicted with a lack of context. Nepleslians? Thankfully predictable. Yamataians? Like clockwork. Lorath? Ducks in a row. The other alien races could merely keep him on his toes - but whoever built this place wasn't giving him answers. "I'm not a fan of the things on the bands. Could be 'dual purpose'. I'll go first."
He stepped up and took the lead for Tamamo keeping his wrist-gun lowered, but alert. His eyes followed the pattern of triple-helix bands slithering through the corridor. Had he had any hair, it would have risen as a chorus of shrill whines similar to the sound of a focusing camera heralded his robotic form's passage, echoing from the pattern around him.
The myriad of small noises coming from every direction made the experience cloying despite being hardly louder than the metallic report of his own footsteps against the flooring. Despite the subdued cacophony there was no further reaction, no spooling of weapons, no whine of discharging hyper-capacitors, merely the unsettling feeling of being watched.
Within seconds Luca was standing before the sealed portal, able to examine the purplish blemishes to either side of the wall, appearing to be some sort of mixture between a keypad, and visual display. The material giving the same sort of semi-soft impression that hard rubber would, implied it was intended to be interacted with, however like most things in the facility they were woefully without instruction.
Luca looked back over to Tamamo and waved for her to advance. "Clear to me," he said, looking at the inscrutable keypad and daring not to touch it. He didn't know what its purpose was, or if he'd agitate something by touching it. Tamamo had a fairly good grip on it all. He heaved a sigh as he looked about, back to the door and a hand on his hip.
A few quick steps brought the smaller armoured figure to his side, the plastic-like cylindrical devices once again finding their way to her hands, only this time she held one out to Luca before speaking softly, "I think we should aim to put them on at the same time, like one of those timing puzzles in games. It might not be needed, but better safe right?"
Gesturing, she demonstrated placing the object with its silvery underside centred over the purplish blemish without actually touching it, "Like that, we'll count down from three, and on 'go' we place them."
Luca took his cylinder and stood in position with the cylinder. "I should probably hang onto this, yeah," he said, turning the featureless cylinder over in his hand a couple of times before raising it. "Count us down."
"Three," She shifted slightly mirroring Luca's position,
"Two," A brief check with her suit's sensors to ensure they were both in position.
"One," Then the moment of anticipation, like stepping over a precipice knowing that you were about to fall.
"Go." As Tamamo spoke the word, she steadily pressed the cylinder forward, pressing its underside against the blemish on the wall. Luca pushed his in too, using mechanical precision and watching Tamamo's movement to emulate her smoothness. He had his palm against the cylinder for a couple of moments, looking at Tamamo and wondering if something wasn't right.
Impressively Tamamo noted that both interfaces reported contact with a nanosecond's span the precision greater than she'd hoped for working with two people, however her attention was momentarily grasped by needing to network the two devices to the small hardened data bank that she carried letting her research and investigation of what little she could access of the facility's systems from the outside do the work.
Letting out a sigh to show that the tension had passed before she spoke, Tamamo voiced aloud, "Still don't know if we needed to do that, but things seem to be proceeding cleanly shouldn't be long now."
True to her word, the somewhat familiar sound of heavy vault locks echoed from within the door, felt through the floor as much as heard. Then with a hiss what turned out to be the first of three doors opened rising into the ceiling and exposing a second, then third, and finally forth portal, each shifting and raising making it clear that if power was lost they were supposed to stay put, using gravity to ensure they locked.
Immediately the impression that they had opened something important was plain, as the gap left by the doors was nearly three meters thick before the corridor continued beyond, a series of patterned lines visible inset into the floor leading deeper into the facility. "Looks like the place is opening up," Luca pointed out the bleeding obvious. To affirm that things were happening to calm his nerves.
Of more immediate interest however were the doors to either side of the inner portion of the doorway, both horizontal sliding doors, and both partially ajar. With a nod Tamamo ventured forward, content to let her interface remain stuck to the wall for the moment, as she crept Fatboy in hand toward the twinned doors.
As the small armoured woman neared the door, a new sound reached the pair, a distant shrill cry, a sound that was lost somewhere between the scream of an angle grinder and someone drowning. Echoing down the hall, faint at first but soon joined by a chorus of others.
"Does anything in your findings say much about screaming noises?" Luca asked, raising his arm and taking a couple of steps back.
"Nope," The response from Tamamo was flatly casual, "Seems we get to kill stuff now."
"What else is new?" Luca asked, ensuring his wrist cannon was loaded, then drawing his HHG. It was, he grinned as he pointed it forward. A bit of cockiness was returning to him now.
Still intent on reaching the twinned doors, Tamamo continued to slip forward only to freeze as a desiccated porcelain limb surged from within the righthand portal, uneven plated 'fingers' grasping the edge of the door and with a scream of warping metal it began to tear it open, little care given to the proper function of the construction.
As the metal settled into place and silence a dry, uneven rattling rasp signalled some sort of breathing. A sound that was interrupted as Tamamo hopped back, discharging the Fatboy the laser dumping its energy into the organically armoured limb causing it to flare with light as it combusted, a sharp crack sounding as the carapace shattered exposing the charred flesh beneath.
Before Tamamo hit the ground in her effort to make room between herself and the target a bubbling, blood curdling scream filled the air in their immediate proximity. It was almost as if the thing did not like being shot by a laser. Go figure.
As the scream died down in volume the entity started to heave itself from within the room, revealing a vague head composed of a honeycomb of thread like chitin restraining a mass of objects that looked like over sized pomegranate seeds were they not tremoring and swivelling betraying their purpose as eyes.
Distantly the approaching chorus of uncanny screams from deeper in the facility and the dull rumble of approaching limbs suggested that their odds were about to worsen.
"So!" Luca said as he levelled his HHG with the fruit-like head covered in eyes. "Do you suppose these are some more experiments?" He asked as he pulled the hammer back and pulled the trigger. A HHG-WHITE round screamed out of the barrel and towards the thing.
The effects were impressive to say the least, the lattice caved inward with a sharp crack echoing the report of the HHG as it fired. The round caved in the fleshy interior and splattered the hall behind with red-purple fluid in a satisfying fountain.
It gave Luca some relief that they were still relatively ... squishy. A headshot seemed to solve the problem here, but his only worry was how many heads he'd have to shoot.
The thing took a moment to die, hemorrhaging gouts of the colourful blood across the hall as its visible limb flailed, slamming into the ceiling only to snap with a wet crunch as the musculature overwhelmed the integrity of the bone.
For her part Tamamo was quick to move forward slipping past the thrashing corpse to heave open the opposite door and poke her head inside, "Luca, I didn't find any record of these things so I can't tell you much about them... However this looks like a security station. With time I might be able to figure out where to go from here. You mind holding the line?"
Pausing the armoured woman glanced back toward the Militant before swivelling to look deeper into the facility. Expecting more of the things to come barrelling into sight at any moment. Luca grabbed something from a pouch that'd been bolted to the robot and twisted the top off it. A shower of white and red sparks came from the top, and he tossed it into the void with his spare hand while keeping his HHG and wrist-cannon pointed towards the entrance.
While the lighting wasn't strictly necessary it did provide an additional boon, a sense of depth. As the flare bounced, it became clear that the length of the hall ahead was deceptive, the uniform rounded features lending to a stretched appearance. To this end as the flare skidded to a stop nearly a hundred and fifty meters away, Luca became well aware of just how skewed the visuals of the location were.
As Tamamo vanished into the side room Luca could spot the first of the things ahead, the similar alabaster and red-purple skittering into view around an implied corner, notably with many more limbs than the initial example had sported. As it scrambled closer toward the flare on the ground, its size became apparent, nearly twice the size of an ID-SOL in height alone as it barrelled down the corridor blotting out the view behind it.
"Big guy spotted!" Luca said as he started firing at the thing, adjusting his aim with the flash of every gunshot - white specks of burning hot propellant still visible in the blackness. "Moving fast!" Luca yelled as he fired his eighth shot and switched to the wrist gun.
The shots caught the creature in one of its arms at first, the wet pop of breaking chitin signalling the impact before it's arm impacted the floor and nearly snapped clean off. Two shots plowed into its 'sensory hive' collapsing the delicate piece of anatomy, the thing losing balance and falling into a heap of damaged and bleeding limbs, just in time for a pair of smaller misshapen forms to skitter over its back.
These met the first of the wrist mounted autocannon the 25mm shells engulfing the pair in brief, violent roars of plasma. The few limbs that escaped the inferno tumbling to the ground and grasping blindly at the air no longer with a body to direct them.
Luca seemed satisfied with his handiwork, but kept watch in case the echoing noise of cannon fire, plasma and mass-driven bullets would attract anything else. With a break in the fight, he started to reload his HHG, pushing the empty cartridges out with a clatter to the floor, and pushing a speedloader in-
He missed, accidentally bumping the tips of the bullets against the cylinder structure and looking down in confusion. It seemed his ultra-fine motor control still needed work in this metal hull. He made a click of annoyance and shoved them in properly, tossing the speedloader away and looking up.
A nearly imperceptible shift in the comm-line heralded a message, "I found what I think is a computer, working on trying to turn it on. It looks like nothing I'm familiar with... Here's hoping." Notably his companion was being more verbose than usual, perhaps she was trying to keep him calm in the alien circumstances.
Her message had however come on the eve of the second wave, jagged chitinous protrusions tearing through the first corpse as the latest arrival scramble to get past and at the source of the disturbance while smaller members of the creatures paused to feast upon the entrails of the dead.
Past the skittering limbs and amorphous core bodies Luca could see that the corridor was beginning to fill and backstuff with the things, indicating that had the terrain been more open circumstances would have been much less favourable.
Chris Geehan & Dan Byrne-McCullough - Welcome to the party, pal
Luca had a chokepoint, a decent amount of firepower, and saw a taste of what these things were like. They were cannibalizing each other, so they were definitely not the ones who were responsible for this ... unless they mutated grotesquely into what he saw slapping towards him now. He took a couple of steps back and double checked what he'd put into the HHG.
He'd grabbed a speedloader of RED rounds before. There when I need 'em, Luca grinned as he held the HHG with both hands, right thumb ready to pull the hammer back with every shot he was about to take. He spent a moment in a wide-footed stance, sizing up the amount of competition a task made difficult by the seemingly random array of limbs present on the things creating a shifting forest of porcelain-like chitin behind the leading beast.
BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!
The first red round slipped past the chitin and flared, the detonation relieving the creature of two of its larger limbs at the shared shoulder, a warbling scream only briefly heard before a second red impacted its chest, or perhaps underbelly, the conflagration silencing the beast.
The a third clipped one of the flailing limbs as the beast fell, however others detonated further down the corridor raising a cacophony of shrill bubbling shrieks in the wake of the explosions. Music to Luca's ears (microphones maybe?), like a very violent choir with some serious percussion.
His initial five shots were aiming for the smaller ones who were skittering around the corridor, and he focused the last three heavily explosive bullets at the big guy. "Tamamo, status update!" he asked, keeping his mind off how much the big one was still lumbering forward, and the thought there'd be even more.
Amid the detonations of the red rounds, and a near encounter with a wayward limb that sank its clawed digits into the corpse of Luca's initial kill despite being relieved of its owner, Tamamo replied softly, "Start-up screens and encrypted multi-character passwords are apparently vogue across known space transcending culture and species. I'm beginning to wish I had brought a server on a trolley." She paused, "Just hold them off a couple more minutes."
As simple as the request was the mounting pile of charred bodies that were eagerly pushed aside or interacted with by means of a variety of colourful mouthparts made the prospect a little daunting.
"Tamamo, I'm going to have a mountain of corpses by the time this is over!" Luca tried to remain optimistic as he was using the chokepoint doorway for all it was worth to continue funnelling the alien beings into a killing floor. He was spraying autocannon until the minimum safe distance begun to close rapidly between him and the ball of mouths and limbs. "Fuck it, I'm going in!" Luca declared, the whine of electricity and mechanisms becoming alive on his right arm.
First, he fired his Grapple Stunner-like tool into the ceiling to zip himself up, and fire downwards over the crowd, now getting a lay of the corridor ahead and a good count for numbers as he fired from the elevated position.
There was a limitation he didn't have in this robotic form - fine control of how he swung via gravity manipulation. The recoil from the autocannon was amplified by having nowhere to ground himself when he did it subconsciously normally.
At this point though, spraying fire wasn't going to be seen as particularly wasteful - there was plenty to choose from. He let go and dove into the middle of it with his new Grapple Stunner, eager to test the Phoenix Punch. Apparently the limitations had been removed, Tamamo said? He was about to find out.
Tamamo could hear a thunderous crash echoing from the corridor Luca was supposed to be pulling guard duty from, and looking over to it, he didn't seem to be standing at the doorway. He came stumbling out a few moments later, smouldering and covered in a film of purple-ish, watery liquid interspersed with specks of something else. There was an errant limb clinging to his ankle, which he shook off as well.
"I'm giving Echelon a raise." Luca said, seeing Tamamo's ears flattened before he turned around. "That is one hell of a punch..." He scanned the corridor again, and everything was too broken, exploded and splattered apart to mount a coherent counterattack. "Any luck?"
Tamamo's response came in the form of an echoing metallic thrumming, slowly approaching their location before falling silent. Sighing the small woman pulled her Gust kit's helmet back on and replied, "I managed to lock down the doors that aren't on our route to the control centre. Also I turned on the containment protocol, so whatever they have in here to deal with an escape should be turned on... I just hope that my forged 'employee' IDs for us work. You'll have to forgive my lack of confidence with the native systems."
Stepping away from the glowing panel, a series of concentric interlocking rings of angular 'text' visible as she stepped away, once again shouldering the gym bag before her helmeted face pointed up toward Luca, "From here it should be a matter of walking, or climbing over bodies."
Luca looked at the floor and shook his head as he waited for Tamamo to direct him to where he needed to be. "I already climbed over one pile... they were very grabby, like fangirls in Yamatai," he noticed that a single hand was still crawling towards him before stomping on it. "They really don't know when to quit."
Nodding Tamamo made sure she had her Fatboy at the ready, a reassuring pat on the gym bag her last check before she stepped out into the corridor and witnessed the carnage in the wake of Luca's efforts. Pausing for a moment she tried to pick out a path onward, commenting as she started forward, "Glad to see you're enjoying the hardware."
The path forward was initially peaceful, apart from a few moments taken to discharge the Fatboy into objects in the mass that seemed intent on moving still. Eventually the mass of corpses thinned out and Tamamo led down a left fork in the path, making their way down more of the uncannily undecorated halls.
The approach of another of the aberrations was cut short by a the appearance of some sort of floating drone, a metallic shape that looked like a pair of nearly two meter cubes had been overlaid over top of each other orbited by a trio of angular spear-head like apertures.
Before Tamamo or Luca could fire at the creature the drone acted, three golden lances of plasma arcing out before the apertures started to spin, the rotating beams carving the beast into charred chunks in just under a second. Then like nothing happened it drifted along, on its duty.
Luca raised an eyebrow. "Employee ID working out for you?" He said, wondering if she'd managed to hack herself some free dental while she was at it.
With a bit of nervousness Tamamo admitted, "I wasn't sure it would work." She honestly hadn't expected the first proof of concept to be so effective, and in hind sight she wished she had taken the time to double check her work. The alternative was likely an unpleasant end.
Proceeding down the hall, the handiwork, and drones themselves cropped up periodically, a few that needed to be politely skirted around, as they passed rows of sealed doors deeper into the facility.
The first notable change occurred just before the end of their journey, an open door leading into a circular passage that was decorated with a web work of silver-white symbols the first decoration that they'd encountered in the entire facility.
Stepping along curiously, Tamamo commented, "Just this last door to key open and we're home free... 22 hours remain. Not bad right?"
"We get results." Luca affirmed, looking at the last door. "So what do you suppose is behind here, then?" He asked, having forgotten a bit about the scale of the facility in the heat of the moment, and all the travel they'd been doing through the empty corridors - save for the weird drones. He was going to ask if any of them reminded Tamamo of Koa, but figured it'd be off colour.
"According to the security station, this should be the central hub of the facility. So, administration? Hopefully from here I can tap into the full facility and figure out the state of things." Tamamo answered casually.
He looked at one of the drones floating nearby. "I've never seen anything like whatever's floating around here. Seems right up your alley too, with all the floating rods and balls."
He realized what he just said and snorted, covering a mouth that wasn't there before looking at Tamamo with barely contained laughter. "Sorry, too easy."
"It's fine," Despite the cool answer her voice strangely carried amusement, unexpected from the small woman, as she stepped forward one of the interface cylinders in hand ready to interact with the quartet of purplish keypads flanking the doorway.
Reaching up to place the object, there was a soft sound like paper sliding across a table as the ceiling irised open the unblemished surface revealing itself to be composed of thousands of interlocking parts. From the void a drone unlike the others if only due to its ring-like form composed of jagged geometric shapes dipped into their presence bobbing in the centre of the door.
Turning, Tamamo started to move, speaking up, "Luca sho-" A flash of golden light cut her off, Tamamo's right arm vanishing in a gout of plasma. The detonation of what had been her arm pitched the small armored form across the corridor to slam into the opposite wall scattering her Fatboy and the contents of her bag.
With only an instant to act Luca closed the gap with the drone by firing his grappling hook at it, simultaneously launching a blanket of autocannon fire at the thing as he was reeling himself in, snapping it back when he'd gotten enough lift to reach the alpha drone, jet-propelled.
The autocannon rounds illuminated the thing causing it to glow hotly where they struck, the many faceted shape glittering in the flashing light, apparently whatever it was made of it was tougher than the creatures that inhabited this place, glowing with the heat from the autocannon shells it rotated to face Luca's charging form, slower than it had initially moved though likely no less deadly.
Before it could discharge a second time however, the heavily modified Militant grabbed onto a ring and smashed through it with the heavy Phoenix Punch - trying to shatter some of it apart. If autocannon couldn't, this would. Luca didn't have much else on him which could shatter whatever xenomaterial it was composed of.
The results were strangely anti-climatic if no less effective, the ring crunched beneath the impact of the blow, sounding more like glass underfoot than any sort of destruction, fissures apparent in the circumference of the ring before it fell to the floor in a trio of pieces.
As the still hot drone fell to the floor, a rattling noise could be heard above signalling the arrival of additional hardware. The objects while looking more obviously like weapons, with complexity, and multiple components fell to the ground ingloriously. It seemed that without the core component the rest of the system had failed to activate properly.
Falling to the floor with the rest of the components, and landing hard was Luca, forgetting that it wasn't anti-gravity the Militant had, but thrusters. The heat of the moment lead him to smash into the floor, crumpling and shaking some of his components loose.
"Owwww ow ow - wait, hang on I don't feel anything." Luca mumbled, realizing that even though his Militant body's arm was clearly out of its socket, he didn't feel an smidgen of pain. All he got was a polite readout telling him where the damage was.
Then he realized that there may have been someone who could still feel. He looked over his shoulder, blanching. "Tamamo!" he said, trying to get to his feet and looking for the Nekovalkyrja.
While the initial attack had been clean, being pitched across the corridor had for better or worse splattered the walls, ceiling, and floor with royal blue hemosynth, the lack of red out of place given what had happened.
Beyond the modern art of the corridor Luca could see the small armoured form of Tamamo lifting itself off of the ground like a marionette lifted by its strings, her feet meeting the ground before her helmeted head turned to regard the dripping stump that had been her right arm.
"What was that? Middle management?" Luca asked, still unable to get to his feet and shuffling on his hands and knees over. He glanced over his shoulder, scared that it might reassemble itself.
Looking toward the remains of the ring, and the pile of fallen hardware Tamamo gave a shrug, made uneven by the missing limb before answering coolly, "I guess. Seems we didn't have sufficient privileges to access this section of the facility. Note how the other drones don't seem to care about us even now."
True to her suggestion a pair of the odd guardians idled in place several meters behind their position, apparently oblivious to the confrontation that had occurred.
Using the time that they had Tamamo used her remaining arm to pick up one of the fallen interface units and picked her way over to the door, before sticking it onto the security pad. Looking to Luca she paused before crouching to acquire a second interface, "You look pretty beat up. Going to rest for a bit?"
Luca gave Tamamo a nod. He looked at the Militant droid's right leg. It absorbed a good chunk of the impact from Luca landing, not to mention his right arm was slammed up pretty bad. "Yeah ... I don't know how I stopped that thing, didn't think it was going to work." He mumbled, shuffling into a more comfortable position against the wall and letting Tamamo take the other interface.
Assessing the state of the Militant's structural integrity, Tamamo was once again glad that they had gone with telepresence rather than risking the genuine article. If the damage had been anything like this to his fleshy form Tamamo wasn't sure she'd have been able to get the Captain out of the facility alive. After all she had no clear idea on if there were any sort of pathogens or otherwise in the environment. Dragging a bleeding Minkan over a pile of alien corpses seemed a bad idea as well.
As she considered this, her remaining arm went through the motions of slotting each interface over the appropriate 'keypad' not that that is what they were quite... They were more akin to biometric scanners that hunted for some form of encrypted key.
Thankfully Tamamo had a good substitute to the key, having spent a long time in overclocked simulation rooting through the operating system that she had access to on the surface. A week of real time had been five years for her at sixty fold time. A huge amount of processing power burnt away, spent plumbing the intricacies of an alien language and their defensive systems, many failures made that would have proven fatal on this outing.
Not that she could tell the truth, not yet at least. As the final interface settled into place Tamamo waited for the data bank she'd carried along, its nerimium plated box keeping the valuable information protected inside. Minutes passing marked only by a slow drip of royal blue hemosynth from her mostly sealed wound.
Eventually the doorway opened and Tamamo found herself looking into a dimly lit circular room, broken up by concentric circles of faintly glowing magenta structures that reminded of hexagonal crystals. It seemed that their goal was at hand.
Looking to Luca's Militant frame Tamamo inquired, "Want me to pull you in?" Luca nodded, edging closer on his good side and reaching out to be dragged.
"Yeah, I should be able to stand once I'm up." Luca said, looking at his stricken leg, leaking fluids in places, and loose in others exposing the under-frame. "Getting up's the tricky bit, and I don't think holding my right hand's a good idea." His right arm was still sparkling and crackling with energy, some of the containment broken in the fall, crossing some wires.
Nodding, Tamamo shouldered her fatboy and gym bag, once again loaded up before hooking her left hand under the chest of the Militant chassis and began hobbling awkwardly into the room pulling Luca's robotic body over the threshold.
Once inside Tamamo watched the door close sealing them in the half-light of the room, and heaved a sigh of relief. They had made it. Now all she had to do was take control, and call the LSDF in orbit.
Before she did so, she kept up her part of Luca's request and using the wall to help her out, pulled the Militant automaton to its feet, resting its weight against the wall until Luca could figure out how to stabilize himself once upright. The droid shuffled in place for a bit, grasping onto the wall as he found his feet.
Once she was certain that Luca wouldn't fall over Tamamo shuffled off into the forest of crystalline structures, her Fatboy discarded for the moment as she fumbled with the bag she carried. Thankfully the structure of the thing was something that the security station had described, albeit unwillingly, and she had an idea of where she had to place her tools.
Once in place the room illuminated, as she started up the core systems, blinding white light illuminating the surface of the domed room giving it an oily appearance like a puddle of gasoline, only on a white background.
Quiet light footsteps were all Luca had for a short while before Tamamo returned, her helmet once again removed the tips of her ears twitching excitedly as she approached the Captain's Militant once more, cheerfully commenting despite the alien surroundings, "I made it in. Seems like we managed to pull it off." There was a pause, "I'm sorry this was so awkward."
Luca wasn't entirely sure what success entailed here. The surroundings had been so alien, and the feedback from things he watched Tamamo interact with so abstract he had to take Tamamo's word for it. "So, what happens now, aside from us getting out of here?"
He started to move shakily, walking with a noticeable hobble. "Who gets to keep what's in here?"
Tamamo seemed to blank out for a moment, perhaps considering the questions, before eventually slowly blinking her focus returning a comfortingly familiar mannerism in an alien place, "Well... I have to get in contact with the LSDF, I would imagine they'll want boots on the ground and some New Tur'listan scientists in fancy suits and coats in here... After all this is a goldmine of information in their territory."
There was a moment of hesitation as she glanced aside before continuing, "I don't exactly think that I have the pull to argue with the Matriarchy... So I'm going to merely try selling my services as an asset. Maybe I'll learn something. Worst case is I get cleared and they pat me on the head and send me back to the Kestrel."
There was another pause, Tamamo's expression softening a little before she finished, "From here there aren't any negative complications."
"I'd hope not. Well, with any luck, this is a pay bonus. We gave 'em twenty four hours, we got it done in under two, you said it yourself." Luca pointed out.
"Well, we're the ISC Phoenix after all. It is only natural that we'd exceed expectation." There was a bit of a grin, fitting in where it was expected, "Are you going to disconnect and wait up on the Kestrel? There isn't going to be much to do around here, and I'm better at entertaining myself than others. I'll be in radio contact so you can check in if you're worried."
Tamamo tilted her head to the left as she spoke watching the robotic body as if it were his natural one seeking the little tells that haunted every natural born man, woman, and child. Perhaps it would give an idea of his state of mind.
The robotic hull nodded. "If you've got everything under control here, guess I'll move on. I definitely need to stretch my proper legs after wearing this..." The Militant grabbed itself on the head. "Helmet? Spaghetti bowl? You saw it - crammed full of wires."
He chuckled a little, showing those little signs of body language, the way Militant swayed a little, as though it was breathing, little signs of emotion obscured by the lack of a visible, friendly face, but his body language said enough. "See you later."
The war android stiffened suddenly, before letting its original programming and in-built artificial intelligence resume functioning as Luca got out of the hotseat. It watched Tamamo for a few moments before looking around, making quiet beeps as it ran a diagnostics scan on itself, detecting the broken limbs, the extra parts, the presence of the HHG and ammo, and making notes aloud to get those fixed. It'd follow Tamamo around as its mobility permitted it to.
There was a pause, spent watching the Militant, making sure that Luca was truly disconnected, and that she was alone. Then Tamamo turned it off.
Walking back towards the centre of the room, looking up at the augmented reality overlay, the alien script something that she could read thanks to the extensive time spent deciphering the local systems. Mostly the diagnostics were clean, though 40% of the facility reported being overrun by breached containment.
All in all a small problem between LSDF forces and integrated resources. Thinking of the LSDF, Tamamo signalled for the radio array to activate, opening communications with the outside world for the first time in half a millennium as she reported the route into the facility, and the present status to the LSDF Vus'hien. She recommended sealed Wind or dedicated hazmat suits for the approach, but apart from the risk of drowning on entry the facility was relatively harmless. Even more so once they took control properly.
As the return from the orbiting ships began, Tamamo sighed and looked at the large gold outlined lettering in the centre of her field of vision.
Contagion detected. Please seek medical aid for decontamination.
***
Riding a shuttle up into low orbit to rendezvous with the Crimson Kestrel a couple of hours after securing the facility, Tamamo fidgeted and glanced at her patched up stump of an arm. She remembered stepping out of the tank, surrounded by Lorath techs, and then the digital message displayed over her HUD that filled her in.
What she had been through was the process of securing an alien biological research facility on Kotoku I. What she didn't remember was what had happened after she had shut the Militant off. According to Koa on the surface though, things were handled, though for now they'd be working in separate places.
As the shuttle made contact and the airlock cycled, Tamamo stepped out and back onto the familiar floors of the Crimson Kestrel, everything returning to normal, while nothing remained the same. It would be an interesting future to explore.
The first thing she was greeted with shortly upon arrival was a cold beverage; A glass of icy water with cubes floating in it. Luca had a can of beer in his other hand, and he invited Tamamo to relax a little on the Kestrel before she headed back into the field out in the Lorath backsectors. He looked worn out without having done any physical activity - acting as the Militant.
Accepting the glass of water, Tamamo sipped at it curiously before drinking deeply. After a moment she pulled it away from her lips, smiling up at Luca, "Thanks for coming with me. I couldn't have done it without you."
Luca raised his can to her, returning a smile. "Not a problem," he replied before heading towards a couch and plopping himself down, heaving a big sigh. "Who's place did we go knock on anyway?" He asked.
"Officially? Some Pirate Lord's den, that's what we're getting paid for by the by. Unofficially... I'm still not sure. Maybe I'll find out later, but for the moment the place is getting canvased and secured." Tamamo paused once again drinking thirstily from the glass before chewing on an ice cube, the crunching filling the time before she finished, "How much we learn beyond this depends on what the LSDF feels like sharing with civilians."
"Always a bit cagey, the birds," Luca figured, basking for the moment, staring at the ceiling, wondering if his experience in the war droid was going to be another episode for his personal history. He saw (and punched) things he'd never seen elsewhere. After a bit of quiet in the air, he figured he'd let it be, taking a sip of his beer and letting Tamamo recover at her own pace.
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