Castaway Planet

Galactic Calendar 259872/ 2000 [ Sol Year 4387/ Day 153 of 365. Sol standard year]

Days after of Crash landing/ 1

Uninhabited Island / Unknown Complex

Galactic Standard Time / 1045

Zane kept one eye on his surroundings and another on Bryce as they ran down the hallway. He couldn’t believe what he had learned about his friend, but it made sense. That was why he always seemed to be working all over the ship, he must have been creating a route. People like him always did recon before they did their missions. And how he was cleaning the escape capsules, he must have been creating a way to leave the ship.

“So, ideas? I’m thinking old military base personally,” Bryce said, causing Zane to look at him and squeeze his rifle.

“Maybe, but who made this place?” Zane asked absently. He understood that Bryce’s personality was a mask, and he wondered if he was his target.

“We need to try and find a computer system, I’ll try and hack it,” Rodolphe said with a shrug as he led the way.

“You could do that?” Zane asked and Rodolphe remained silent as they walked, Bryce moving ahead of them.

Zane reached out and grabbed him. With a glare Rodolphe turned, to see Zane holding his other hand to his mouth in a gesture of silence.

“What is it?” Rodolphe asked quietly, a worried look in his eyes.

“Bryce hit the wall head first, he was knocked out! And he left a stain of blood on the wall, but a minute later he’s like that? Not normal man,” Zane said just as softly. Rodolphe looked at him before looking back towards where Bryce was leading the way ahead of them.

“Wait, what? Really? Could you have been wrong about how hurt he was?” Rodolphe asked and Zane shook his head.

Zane looked back at where Bryce was walking ahead of them, a scowl on his face. He didn’t want to say it, but

“I don’t know man, but there’s something not right about him,” Zane said as he looked at Rodolphe.

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“If he’s hiding anything, that’s his business. We’ll deal with it if, and only if it becomes a problem,” Rodolphe said as he looked ahead, his eyes on Bryce.

He didn’t want to admit it, but Zane was right. He had seen Bryce, and the guy was so full of wonder back when they were on the Spirit. He just seemed so ignorant sometimes. It was like he had never seen things even people from frontier planets knew about! But something about this passageway was bothering him. He could have sworn that this was slopping down, but it seemed to be straight.

“Before you say anything, is there something about this hallway that seems wrong?” Rodolphe asked softly.

“What do you mean?” Zane asked and Rodolphe just sighed and shook his head.

“I don’t know, but something’s different. I could have sworn that it’s been sloping, that we’ve been going down,” Rodolphe admitted, Zane blinked and looked around.

Rodolphe didn’t want to worry him, but something was wrong with this place. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it was there. He had seen the use of gravity tech to mess with a person's perspective before. But this was different, there seemed to be something else that he couldn't put a finger on.

“Slopping?! Are you mad!? How could we not…… oh, grav-tech. But why would…….” Zane trailed off as he looked around, a strange look in his eyes as his thoughts went wild.

“Hey, guys? You okay?” Bryce called from twenty feet ahead of them.

Rodolphe nodded, raising his voice as he waved at him. “Yeah, just needed to ask Zane if he saw that snake thing die, you?”

“No, I saw them fight but that’s it! The cave-in must have turned it into cave pizza! So, let’s find a way out guys!” Bryce called out and Rodolphe laughed. Before he could move on, Zane grabbed his shoulder and glared into his eyes.

“I mean it, something’s wrong with him,” Zane hissed and Rodolphe nodded,

“As I said, if it matters, we’ll deal with it, but until then let it lie,” Rodolphe said sternly, and Zane glared back and turned away.

“Fine, but when this blows up, I’ll say I told you so!” Zane said coldly and walked ahead.

Rodolphe looked at him before he sighed and looked at the walls. There were a few scratch marks on the walls here and there, and this wasn’t giving him good feelings.

He had seen markings like this before, during a raid on a research station run by them.

He didn’t want to even think about what this might mean for where they were. He wanted to leave, go far away, and never go deeper into this. But go where? They had no other way to go, it was here to die!

And now he had to deal with Bryce’s situation! He knew about nanites that could heal people fast, but they were only used by elite operators. And the idea of Bryce being one of them was hard to swallow. He didn’t seem the type, and that was something. He had always thought of Bryce as someone who was a joker, a clown but a civilian, but he was really special ops? He wouldn’t have believed that in a thousand years!

“So, we’ve been walking for… I think maybe ten minutes, and nothing. Any ideas guys?” Bryce asked from ahead.

Rodolphe looked ahead at him. He was looking back at them at the edge of one of the dark spots. Calling up the data from one of his internal nanites, he saw that it had been fifteen minutes. That was surprising, and then there was the size of the hallway. He was starting to wonder just how big the specimens this place released or caught were. But the only creatures around were the ones outside, that feline and the snake. Then their ancestors must have been the captives, that made sense if...

He went still realizing what that meant. He looked around with new eyes, suddenly everything made sense. This place was created with those creatures in mind. They could have even evolved due to the interactions with whoever had lived here. That meant that this was a Ruin, from the ‘Unknown War’, and that made him even more worried.

“Guys, I think we’re in a Ruin. It makes sense if this was built to study the creatures here,” Rodolphe said with a solemn tone.

Bryce looked at him in shock as Zane looked around in horror.

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Bryce felt his heartbeat faster, as he tried to calm down. He was in a place that took living things apart to study them, just like there. He had promised himself when he escape that he would never set foot in one of these places ever again.

“So, one of the really old precursor civilizations made this place? It’s in great shape, I’d say this was built only a few thousand years ago, not a few million!” Bryce said, forcing himself to make a joke.

Zane just glared at him and Bryce held up his hands and took a step back, holding his hands up. He was about to say something when he realized something was keeping him from moving forward. “Guys? I found the end.”

Rodolphe and Zane moved, putting their hands on the darkness. As they pushed against nothing but felt something holding them back, they realized what it was.

“Energy shield has to be. Must be like the ones on the ship to deflect meteors,” Zane said to Bryce’s right.

Bryce meanwhile pushed against the darkness, searching for a weak point. He had gotten through one like this when he escaped, and the science was the same. If this was like that one… he started to push against it in quick succession and grinned as his hand sank deeper and deeper. He grinned and turned to look at the others, watching them. He kept pushing against the shield until it broke, waiting to see the reactions of the others.

Zane had been pressed against it and fell through it when it broke. On the floor, he blinked and looked around as Bryce walked forward and squatted down in front of him, grinning.

“Have a nice fall season man?” Bryce asked with a joking tone and reached down a hand. Zane pushed it away and got up on his own as Rodolphe walked past them and looked into the distance.

“How the hell…… what the hell?” Zane asked and Bryce turned around, his eyes going wide as his blood froze.

Ahead of them was a large wall with a ruined doorway. It looked like something had demolished it. Through the large eight-foot tall and six-foot wide hole, they saw a large chamber beyond. The view caused him to feel nothing but pure terror.

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Rodolphe walked into what he could only describe as a holding pen. The chamber was large, maybe more than sixty feet wide, a hundred feet wide, and tall. The chamber had three rows of cages, each one ten feet wide and tall with open fronts. There were rows of them down the chamber and up to just below the ceiling. And there were walkways between them ten feet wide. All in all, there were four rows of cages with two of the rows set against the walls. Far above the ceiling were half-spheres that were illuminating the chamber, their blue light shining down.

In each of them were bones of creatures, each one having died and wasted away. Looking around, Rodolphe felt bile rise in his throat as he saw many bones in the cage. Whenever this place was abandoned, it had still been operating. They had just left the specimens in their cages to die.

“So, it was slopping down t into this nightmare then,” Zane said as he looked closer into one of the nearest cages.

Bryce stayed quiet, looking around the chamber with wide eyes. Rodolphe thought that there was a spark of something in his eyes, something that he just couldn’t place. But one thing he knew Zane was right about, this place was a nightmare. And something about the cages was bothering him, something he couldn’t catch.

But whatever it was, that wasn’t important. Finding another way out was. But there was a better chance than before, at least based on this. If things were kept in cages, then that meant that there had to be people to study them. And if there were people to study them, then they needed a way in.

“Spread out, there’s got to be a door here. We force it open and then we can find another way out,” Rodolphe ordered, and Bryce laughed a little.

“Sure about that?” Bryce asked as he looked up to the nearest cage, a strange skull with six eyes in a circle staring back at him.

“What do you mean?” Zane asked as he and Rodolphe turned and looked at Bryce.

Bryce seemed to feel their stares, he turned, shrugging before gesturing at the cages. “What, you can’t see it? What are they all missing?”

At his words, Rodolphe looked at the cages while Zane glared at Bryce with a hard look.

“I don’t know, why don’t you tell us?” Zane asked in a cold tone and Bryce blinked before shrugging.

“Chill out Z! I mean there’s no way for anything to get out or look into the cages up there!” Bryce said and gestured towards them.

Zane just blinked while Rodolphe went still.

Rodolphe slowly looked up at the cages, a cold feeling going through his bones. Now that Bryce had said it, he saw exactly what he meant. No debris of any kind of walkways was set below the openings of the cages, so how had things gotten into them? And for that matter, how were things fed? He looked down the passage between the nearest row and saw that it went on for a good hundred feet at least.

“Oh nova!” Zane whispered in horror and Bryce only nodded; his expression grave as he looked around the chamber.

“Yeah, that. I don’t know how this place was operated or when it was built, but I don’t think it was by one of the good guys in that war. We might have just changed where we die,” Bryce said bitterly and Rodolphe let out a sigh, but Bryce kept speaking. “But we’ve gotta try, I mean I don’t know about you, but I don’t roll over and die when things get hard. I bulldoze my way through them.”

Rodolphe nodded and looked at the rows, before coming to a decision. “We’ll check both paths, but together! If something was living here or found a way in, we face it as one!”

Without another word, the group moved on. Without a word, they went down the path on the right, hoping they were ready for what was ahead of them.

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The last of the rocks had been pushed away. Behind the rocks, the creature stopped and coiled, crossing its new arms. It had eaten the fanged feline and taken everything it had, growing that much stronger. But it was weak now, weaker than it had ever been. All it could do now was either retreat or go on, but then there was a problem. If it retreated, then the master of what it had killed would send scouts. With how it was, it would soon be tracked down and killed.

It didn't have the strength to stand against it or its hunters, it needed to heal. And to heal it needed to eat. It needed to gain something, anything to grow stronger. It had detected the scent of the prey it was hunting, so it was there. With its strength and what it had taken, there was little chance that it would be prey to the hunters. So, with the choice made, it moved into the hole it had made, stopping as soon as its head passed through the opening. It looked at the passageway, a strange feeling going through it as it recoiled in fear. This place… belonged to the creators. That made this a different matter if the creators were involved. That meant that…… where were the defenders?

The few times the creator's dens had been breached; they always sent their forces to destroy whatever dared to attack them. And the defenders came fast, within the beats of its heart! Did this mean that this place was………abandoned? It felt its lifeblood speed up, this was perfect! If it could raid the creators, the strength it could find in there! And if its prey was in there, it might gain some of the creator's goodwill by ‘protecting’ its den.

With that thought, it ran down the hallway, moving far faster than it thought it was.

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Zane looked around a scowl on his face. So far they hadn’t seen anything that might give them a way out, and all this was doing was growing his nightmares. So far, they hadn’t found anything that could tell them how to go ‘up’ the rows, and that was even worse. So far, he guessed that this place was built without living custodians in mind. It reminded him a little of a robot warehouse he had guarded once for his Family. People stayed in the guard rooms, the stock was taken and put away by hovering robots, and he hoped he was wrong.

“Real chamber of horrors stuff, right? I mean I want a new hotel, maybe one with a humor theme?” Bryce’s off-color joke made Zane look up, seeing him look into a cage to their right. He followed his gaze and saw another skeleton, but Bryce was looking at the bones. Looking closer Zane felt the blood leave his face, the bones looked like they might have been hands. He went still and slowly looked up, taking in the cage. The bones were where the bars would have been, like the body had been leaning up against it when they died.

Zane swallowed. He looked at the other skeletons with a new eye, not liking what he found. He could see that one in maybe ten was like that one, no telling how many above them were as well. He felt his blood leave his face as he tried to force away the thoughts, hoping that he was wrong.

“We got a way out of her after all!” Rodolphe’s excited voice caused Zane and Bryce to turn and look toward him. Ahead of them was the end of the room. There’s a large computer screen set against the wall and the remains of a workstation before it. To the left was a door five feet wide.

Zane spared one more look at the cages as Bryce and Rodolphe both moved to the station, hoping to find out how to open the door.

“So, what’s the plan?” Bryce asked and Rodolphe stayed silent and even Zane looked at him. Rodolphe walked behind the workstation and found a keyboard and smiled.

“This should be easier than I thought it would…….” Rodolphe went silent as he saw the looks, he was getting.

“Good, but the plan?” Zane asked and Rodolphe sighed.

“Look, original I thought someone modern made this. I thought I could use the battery in my rifle to spark something. But this is a Ruin, so… push buttons and hope something happens,” Rodolphe admitted, and they stared at him in shock.

Zane felt his mind stop, shocked and speechless. Then he felt anger spark in him, and he walked slowly towards the door to kick it.

“I don’t know what to say! I mean the chance that there’s power is………” Rodolphe trailed off as the screen on the wall burst to life. As shining light came from, weird circular symbols appeared on it before the door opened.

“That was easy, what’d you do?” Bryce asked and Rodolphe just shook his head in shock. Zane meanwhile had stopped just short of the door itself, looking out into a darkened corridor beyond.