What greeted us on the other side of the gate most immediately was one of those “space islands” as are described by the gate explorer Ben Parker… as in what had at one point been a planet or moon but due to excessive interstellar conflict was rendered to little more than a sparse, barren asteroid. What lay beyond it was an awing expanse.
This side of the gate seemed to be the least decrepit of ruins on the space island. Ruins which had noticeably and supremely bizarre architecture, or did at least by our standards. Labyrinthine structures (mostly their remains) and crumbling edifices dotted isolated floating chunks of the blighted and disintegrated landscape while the foul colors of polluted atmospheres dominated what planets were intact.
“There’s radiation around here, also keep filtration and life support systems on this atmosphere is not really made for us to handle.” Drake starts running more scans. He reads the scans, “The radiation and pollution is not too bad for the living mechs biology, which is a good thing since we have to wait for an hour before we can return wouldn’t want them dying on us.”
“Right-o!”
Drake started taking samples from the ruins and soil, even from the air, “None of these readings make any sense. Everything is coming up as unknown elements, the only thing my scanners are giving me accurate readings for is the radiation and air pollution, also there is a huge gravitational force a hundred miles that direction.” Drake’s Antithesis points off to the left.
They leave the gate heading into the indicated direction, more ruins dot the way, and at each Drake collected more samples. Eventually Drake finds something of note, a pile of the metal that the gate was comprised of. Drake stopped them and loaded all of it into storage containers, “Lets take this back to the gate before we move on.”
So they began the trek back, “Do you think there is an excavation site around the area? Maybe we should do some searching in that area before heading back to see what’s behind the gravitational field, any ideas on what’s causing it? Maybe some kind of black hole generator or gravitational shields or….”
“We’ll have to ponder that out later! It’s got a reason more than likely but it looks like we’ve got company.”
On the way back to the gate they found a squad of twenty black twisted mechs guarding it. The mechs looked like they were once like the living mechs but had been starved way past the point of emaciated. Their bones blacked by the radiation, their eye sockets hollow, their teeth filed into deadly spears. Upon them spying us they charge howls reverberating off the ruins their weapons shrieking to life.
Drake didn’t hesitate to send Mad Moe and Fake Phil charging ahead, as he activated his Torsion Helix formation, “Time for dodging.”
A sensor in my Neural Recalibrator told me the Muon Junctions in my three beast mecha were working overtime… the shielding thus far held while alternating rows of Diablis Nozzles and Smelters from Giga Rex and Claymore unloaded scorching liquid death with Quanta not far behind, her Harmonic Disruptors humming as they sent out bolt after crackling bolt of piercing Niodically accelerated energy.
“I don’t know what those are or even how those are but apparently ‘true’ zombie mechs are a thing in this dimension?” Quanta then asks Drake if she should initiate her shelling protocol… via an indicator light on his Antithesis’ display highlighting her Quad Ferrite Storm cannons, salvos of Wrecker Shots and M2Z Assault Guns, pair of Hex Cannons, Big Bertha Cannon and Six Shooter. I have Claymore discharge his three Swirly of Doom lasers… a rather precise ray weapon which emits waves that deform the structure of its target turning it inside out before obliteration. So far the shields are still holding.
Drake agrees to let Quanta handle firing, while his AI handled scans and he piloted the mech through the battlefield, his dodge was maxed out with this configuration and hardly any shots hit his shields, the enemy weapon discharges were all the same radiation that coated the ruins and soil samples. “Well that explains that,” Drake mutters to himself. The mechs themselves had poisoned the environment here.
I sit there blinking dumbly at the information on Claymore’s Image Stabilizer which Drake patched on over… “Radioactive zombies, that’s weird.”
“Just speculating but I think that there was a war, and that they had used these radiation weapons not realizing the damage they would cause to everything.”
“I’m starting to think, judging by all the polluted atmospheres and these space islands, so many fragments, that that sort of mentality was the rule rather than the exception around here.”
Drake and myco take out the mechs after a grueling thirty minutes of heavy fighting. Drake felt drained.
I jettison a container with a stim pack over to Drake and his Antithesis after dosing myself;
You can use rockets to guide the path of a container in environments lacking proper atmosphere as a particular field application.
Drake inserts the stim pack, and finishes his tea flavored hatorade, another of his better inventions; in his opinion regular hatorade seemed to mask the tiredness instead of alleviating it. Feeling vitalized and his mech recharged Drake places the sample containers before the gate. “Mad moe, Fake Phil I want you to stay here and guard the gate and samples, more hostiles appear you’re to send the samples through the gate and eliminate the threat, understood?”
“Yes.” the clones answer, Drake smiles. “Such good boys they never disappoint unlike some…” Drake thinks of his recent failed batch of clones they made good target practice but starting over on his mech human hybrid clones was a complete pain. He takes down a few notes while he waits for Myco to decide on their next course of action.
The energy auras around my three beast mecha crackle, deflecting the small bits of charred zombie mecha debris remains from the battle we just got through. “We should probably take a look at one of the nearest planets or the source of that gravity well that your mech was pinging earlier… Image Stabilizer Drake, Quanta and Claymore each have a Hawkeye Marksman to enhance one of their eyes. His Stabilizer is indicating to me we may have missed it before but there appears to be a settlement nearby here, a space station perhaps?” Giga Rex squints through his Long Range Sensor equipped eye trying to peer past the smoke not picking up quite as much at first as his brother and sister had but then suddenly stops, sniffing the “air”, noticing it too. “Smells, humans but not; Not humans?”
Strange mutants in a landing craft are touching down at the edge of the space island Drake and I emerged from the Gate at. Obviously they are looking to make first contact but it is unclear if they are friend or foe.
“I would like to look to see if there was a mine near that area we found the metal at. But I guess we should decide after these newcomers make their intentions known. While we’re waiting have you thought of what could be causing the gravitational field?” Drake picks up his tablet, “The power output to make that big a field artificially would probably be between ten and twenty fusion reactors or something similar to a tiny black hole…”
“Well a space station implies that there is still some form of civilization left after these people have destroyed everything with their radioactive weapons…” Drake goes quiet as he notices that Myco hadn't said much since they passed through the gate. “Are you okay my friend, you’ve been awfully quiet on this expedition.. I’m used to you sharing my exuberance for new experiences and theorizing at everything we encounter. Is it the radiation?” Concern fills Drake, a rare occurrence in a man who seems conscienceless to the galaxy at large and the authorities in general and admittedly even to himself, but Myco had earned his respect and friendship and he would miss the old boy if he died.
“I’m in thought pal, no worries. Don’t worry about it. As you may recall due to a genetic engineering accident I’m ‘part Forerunner’. Not enough to know things about this, and I still don’t know much about how to speak Forebearer language; Drochah’s guttural script is something I doubt my human tongue could easily replicate, however… do these words mean anything to you Drake?: MalAkarSin RassajJa**, I think it’s sanskrit for something and I do know the glyph that means doom. Recognized that on an inscription on an inlay in the Gate before we first went through.”
I pause and consider what Drake has suggested “It could be my friend that whatever is causing that gravity well is some sort of massive automated apparatus… no reason it would necessarily be in the strictest sense organic. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty excited to be taking the first leap into another dimension in who knows how many eons too, I just… feel like I should know more about it; When my clan fought Drohchah oh-Thyehgr my head buzzed almost the entire time… but I do remember that at one point in the battle he called me an abomination that shouldn’t exist.” I laugh.
Taking some pills in one of the compartments in my mecha (yes you can store things in a living mecha… they make vesicles to hold stuff for you in certain “storage area” organs) clears my head a bit. “Something about this dimension I think may be making the symbiotic bacteria on my skin upset and has affected my stomach.” I open another pouch and start rubbing some ointment on my arms and neck. “You see, they react to things by producing different chemicals… most commonly an exocrine pesticide that mixes with my sweat but in this zone, if you will, they seem to be working backwards secreting some sort of a weak endocrine compound.” It doesn’t appear to be anything too strongly endotoxic but does seem to be adversely affecting my guts a bit. I sip some haterade to wash the remainder down then quickly patch Drake the results of some bioscans I’d run on myself some time ago so he can see what I was referring to.
“Happened to me one other time and it’ll metabolize, sure... but for some reason I haven’t worked out yet tends to cause gastric issues.” A transfected human with partially alien microbiotic fauna is a medical oddity, and as such, I had to develop a lot of my own treatments through further self experimenting since there wasn’t a lot of precedent for symbiosis of this kind in the medical texts you could turn to for reference. The particular drug and ointment combination I just took was one such “treatment.”
It says in the section of the medical history sheet I’d showed Drake that the hybrid bacteria formed what was essentially a partial exosymbiont which behaved as an extra tissue over my original fully human epithelium, explaining my odd inhuman skin tone. “Got my own treatment for it with me in here.” Claymore teases me: “I’m a precision duelist, not a human pharmacy!”
Thinking back on it a little more I take a clip that had been recorded from the Clan raid against Drochah, would be conqueror of the human race out-of-time and play it back a few times deciding whether to show it to Drake or not. In the recording Drochah practically spits the words out over the comm channel in it: “Are you of the accursed descendants of Roah or Kellek? I’d thought their blasphemous freak spawn had been removed from this timeline!”
I cut the clip and post a comment under it: I’m going to assume that those might have been genetic engineers from his time maybe, and by their children he may mean experiments.
Something about the context of how the time traveling tyrant said it strongly implied this to me.
That’s been getting to me lately Drake. Even though we all kicked his overlord ass when he tried to enslave humanity,... I WANT TO KNOW WHO THOSE OTHER GUYS WERE.
Drake goes quiet, very quiet….. “What were those names?”
I speak over the comm channel “Roah and Kellek.”
“I know them, my start in genetic research started from them… well their notes and journals… I came across an old encoded file in my youth and it lead to all my research as I learned and improved upon their works….. The location of my first lab was one of theirs… how did I not know that they were forerunner?” Drake is agitated at not knowing something that he feels he should have. All his research into forerunner and the other ancient civilizations and he missed that the start of his genetic experiments were built upon the work of two forerunner scientists.
“I don’t think they were human… but may have worked on humans. It’s weird but that in particular sticks to me the most from the temporally displaced Tyrant’s mad ranting… of all the things he blathered about.”
Submitted by Mycobacter#712744 & Drake Novum Scientist#706289
