[ Welcome to Impact ]
[ 01: Planetfall ]
[ 02: Washed Up ]
[ 03: The Beach ]
[ 04: An Un-natural Cave ]
[ 05: Conjunction ]
[ 06: Contemplating the Singularity ]
- More to come
[ Appendices: Random Stats and Stuff ]
[ Some public domain OpenSim textures ]
[ My VR WishList ]
I scaled my way up the cliff-face to the shaddow -- tiring but not actually difficult, there were plenty of firm hand/foot-holds. I was right -- it is a shallow cave, though there is a lot of loose rubble at the back that I can probably remove if I am very careful that none of it is supporting part of the roof. It could be useful if the so-far pleasant weather turns bad. I have no idea what the long-term weather conditions here are like. Hopefully I am not enjoying what is just a brief pleasantness between long terms of bleak conditions!
Okaaaayyy.... Having pulled some stones away from the back of the cave, I found a strait surface and a 60° angle. Definitely not natural. Further stones pulled down revealed a strait tunnel -- obviously machine cut! Semi-regular hexagon (or corner-truncated equilateral triangle if you prefer) in cross-section and leading into darkness. I can just make out a chamber in there. Nothing about the passageway shape says "human" to me: nor should it - humans only just entered the Large Magellanic Cloud a few decades ago and there is no way I can be any but the first human on this world.
Cleared most of the stones away so there is some more light in there. It is dusk and I am tired - I should wait until early morning when the sun will shine strait in. Could be dangerous, could be security systems active. The stones blocking the entrance indicate I am not likely to meet any aliens - assuming this is the only entrance. I will have to be very careful.
Morning. Didn't sleep much. I really should be sleeping through this whole daylight period and exploring tomorrow, but I am too twitchy.
I again scaled the cliff and the tunnel was there exactly as I had left it, except sunlight poured down it, making it decidedly less creepy. There were no holes or markings on the tunnel walls at all -- they look highly polished and slightly metamorphic compared to the raw stone outside -- like they were heat-cut with a powerful laser.
I'm now at the end of the tunnel. There is a single spherical room. The hexagonal tunnel continues on at the other side. At my feet is a metal mesh making a flat floor above the bottom curving surface of the bubble. There is a hole in the middle of the mesh and a column of darker stone(?) from top to bottom of the space, with a gap in the middle.
I bit back my nervousness and entered the bubble-room. Light reflected off metallic curves on the spherical wall. To my left was the closest and I immediately saw it was a column of equipment racks -- each rack unit identical. Each had a small inset panel in the top-left and small transparent holes that may be lamps or readouts, but if so all were dead. The whole place had a stillness of complete inertia.
The tunnel on the far side is a shallow dead end. Empty except for a centred red pot. The pot is glazed ceramic of the unrefined kind -- an art piece, I would guess: people capable of laser-cutting a space like this from solid granite would not be using baked mud for any practical reasons. It is sealed with an unglazed ceramic plug -- sealed tight. I don't think I want to open it. Call me a wimp, but the historical reference "canopic jar" springs to my mind. One artifact left sealed up in a dead and abandoned room on a (presumably) abandoned planet. The light from the sun shining down the tunnel had gone. The entryway itself was still visible as an anti-silhouette, and I made my way back to it and out.
After another too-short sleep, I returned to the cave again. I had appropriate tools now and found one that fit the fastening bolts at the front of the rack modules. I was thinking they might be fancy locking devices, but they were just screw catches. Having turned the screws at each end of a module a half turn, I had to jump out of the way as the rack box slid silently and fluidly out of the wall under its own power. Just as well, considering how heavy the thing must be. The beings that had built the place must have been a good deal larger than me... or at least the equipment they used for maintenance must have been.
Not a technology like anything I was familiar with. Crystalline, probably photonic. Still partially powered, if the dim glow from the 'circuits' embedded in the solid transparent block was anything to go by, though no hints as to function.
I thought about it for a while, drew several blanks, then started to push the rack back in. As soon as I started to push, it noiselessly drew itself back under its own power, making me jump almost out of my skin! The fastening bolts clicked themselves back into the locked position.
I took a full 8 hours sleep this time before setting about dismantling some metal struts and gear wheels from the service pod. The articulator arms were deformed beyond their origional function from heat stress, but I was able to use them as plain metal struts well enough.
I scaled the cliff and fastened the strut I had made above the cave entrance manually winding the manipulator claws open to clamp in to pockets in the rock. The tow cable was barely long enough to get back down to ground-level so I could begin hauling equipment up to the cave. The nano-fabber was a problem as it weighed a good bit more than me, so I had to make a wire-basket from a shorter length of cable to fill with rocks to add to my own weight to counterbalance it. Finally I had the 'fabber and some other salvage I didn't want to loose to a major tide in the cave. The fabber console even provided some light in the space - enough to get around without tripping and falling on the metal mesh floor, which had already claimed the skin of both my knees and an elbow.
[ Chapter 05: Conjunction ]>