BGS: Sekhmet

[Sekhmet]

"Jon?"
"Yes?"
"I need you to gather a few people and head out into the wastes, grid sector k_08."
"Why?"
"We found a cave entrance... it's old. There's technology in there that predates the City."
"Predates Neocron? I'm on my way."

An hour and a couple of calls later, Jon Lawrence had assembled his team at his apartment. There was Joanna Chase, their resident weapons expert; she was surgical with a Tangent Assault Rifle... from half a kilometer. Their researcher was named Corey Holmes, a recently graduated student that was already at the top of her field. She could glance at a piece of technology and tell you who, where and when it was made. A few minutes of tinkering would yield how it worked and what it did. Mike Warren was Corey's boyfriend and so he ended up tagging along as well. He didn't actually have any specific role in the group, he just helped out wherever he was needed. No one knew how, but Mike could take relatively mundane objects and make something totally different out of them... one time he grabbed a few metal plates, a pipe and some random wires and crafted an assault rifle. Jon was the group leader, the one with the contacts inside City Administration, N.E.X.T. and Tangent Technologies. He could get inside information on any potential site and be there with all the necessary equipment and vehicles days before any other team heard of the place. He'd also get them very, very cheap.

“You won't like this Joanna, but the plan is to gene rep over to the Military Base, then drive from there. I've already made the arrangements with the Mercs,” Jon said to his team. Joanna frowned, not wanting to meet up with her former unit again. Mike whispered something to Corey, which made her smile and barely contain a giggle, but Jon ignored it for now. Knowing Mike, it would've been a comment on Joanna's lack of courage, her being the soldier after all. “Sorry to get you all up early, but time is of the essence. I'll fill you in on the drive from the base.”

An uneventful gene rep trip and walk to the garage later, the four teammates threw their stuff into a truck and they were off, heading east to sector k_08. “OK Jon, why are we going to the middle of nowhere?” Asked Corey.
“One of my contacts in City Admin told me they found a cave with real old stuff in it... if we could explore the cave system fully and find a piece of technology older than Neocron itself, we'd be rich! Think of the possibilities! It could be a newer copy of the Ceres Disks!”
“We know what the possibilities are, Jon.” Corey said, although Jon's words weren't lost on her. This could be big. Joanna didn't seem too interested, but she was getting her fair share of whatever they earned. Still, the over-enthusiasm of scientific types tended to annoy her. Mike was quiet, as usual.

[Sekhmet]

Half a day later they arrived at the cave, just as the sun was starting its descent across the sky. A single S.T.O.R.M. Bot greeted them as they neared the cave entrance. Jon parked the truck a few yards a way and jumped out to talk with him. After a quick conversation, a handshake and the handing over of a cash cube, the S.T.O.R.M. Bot left at a brisk jog towards the treeline. Moments later an APC roared to life and rumbled southeast to the small outpost near Yutano mine. Joanna shook her head in amazement at Jon's contacts. Jon smiled at her reaction, offering a modest shrug as he helped Corey and Mike unload their brand new equipment from the bed of the truck.

The truck was moved to take the place of the APC after their baggage was safely inside the mouth of the cave. The cave itself wasn't very impressive and was fairly hard to find, which explained why no one had touched it until now. Corey was as anxious as a school girl going out on her first date, examining every little bit of the cave in the modest light of their battery powered lamps. Mike followed her around pretending to know what he was doing, which mostly consisted of random comments to his girlfriend. Jon was busy setting up the rest of the equipment inside the cave, having unpacked several padded boxes and removed their contents of computers, scanners and the like. It wasn't long before they figured out the cave system was fairly simple in design; it had only one path as far as they could tell. Gathering their things, Corey with various tools, Mike with an over-sized flashlight, Jon with a scanner and Joanna with her rifle and medical supplies, they ventured deep into the cave.

“We've been walking deeper and deeper into this damned mountain for the last three hours, Jon. Can we take a rest for a while?” Corey asked, her aching feet finally beating out her curiosity. Jon looked to everyone else, then nodded in agreement.
“Ten minutes, then we continue on. We left most of our heavy... and expensive... stuff at the entrance, unguarded. I'd had to come back and see it all gone.” Jon explained.
“Fair enough.” Corey smiled and sat on the dusty, stone floor with Mike as she opened a power bar and shared it with her boyfriend. Joanna didn't show the least hit of fatigue, but she sat as well, checking her assault rifle not because she expected trouble, but because it was something to do while Corey rested.
“I'm gonna walk down a little further and see what's around the next bend. I'll be back in a minute.” And Jon was off. He turned the corner and found himself staring at a metal door. He just blinked.

“What the hell? Hey guys, check this out...” he shouted over his shoulder as he pointed his headlamp at the out of place structure. Joanna rounded the corner at a jog, followed my Corey and Mike a moment later. Corey gasped slightly, then moved closer to get a better look, directing Mike at where to point his bigger light. Joanna pounded on it once with the bottom of her fist, giving off a muffled thud indicating the door's thickness.
“Your friend was right, this door was made a very long time ago... I've never seen anything this old except the Ceres Disks themselves.” Corey said softly, pulling out a few tools to clear away the dust around what looked like a control panel and a plastic sign with engraved letters. As Corey finished dusting off the door, she noticed the sign simply gave instructions on how to operate the door. It would've been simple to open had it not required a code.
“I think I could blow through this with the explosives we brought. Shaped charges, wouldn't hurt the stability of the cave one bit.” Added Joanna, obviously in deep thought about how she would place the explosives.
“Only as a last resort,” Jon said with a bit of hope in his voice. As he began to think of a way in, Mike silently stepped up to the control panel, gently pushing aside his girlfriend and retrieving a wrist computer from who knows where. He strapped it on, then pried off the front panel of the key pad, letting it hang loose on its hinges. He then pulled out a wire from his computer and attached it to the exposed circuitry.
“What is he doing?” Asked Jon, the dim light not readily displaying all of Mike's actions.
“Oh, Mike is a Network Security Specialist, he only builds things in his off time,” replied Corey.
“You mean he's a hacker,” Joanna grunted.
“Shh, I'm working here,” Mike hissed, tapping his keyboard furiously as he fought against the internal defenses of the door. Minutes passed by without anything happening and Jon began to lose hope, looking to Joanna, asking her to fetch the explosives back at the entrance. She was just about to take off in a run as the door slid open. Mike grinned triumphantly and put away his computer and fixed the door's keypad before gesturing for Corey to enter.

[Sekhmet]

The room was a perfect hemisphere, twenty yards in diameter. At the center was a cylinder, reaching up for seven feet, and about four feet radius at the base. It seemed to be glass or plastic as it shined like either of those materials, but the material was frosted over completely. The entire room was freezing cold, it was one of the first things Corey noticed as she entered. A definite contrast to the hellish weather in the wastelands at the moment. The floor and walls were made of white marble, seemingly like it was cut from a single slab as the veins matched up perfectly. Unlike the dusty basalt that made up the rest of the cave, this chamber was the epitome of cleanliness. Their very entrance into the chamber had made it dirty. It was a strange feeling to Corey, having walked for three hours through an ancient cave that only seemed to get older and more grimy.

The floor wasn't without decoration, however. Curved lines made of granite seemed to be inlaid into the white marble and around the cylinder at the center of the room. It looked like a lop-sided oval around the cylinder, the thicker side to the right and thinner to the left. A line above (further away) the oval followed the oval's shape for a while but kept a general horizontal shape, with a width similar to the oval's. From the right side of the oval two lines flowed downward (toward the front door), one at a diagonal angle to the left and curling itself up while the other went straight down, shaped kind of like an arrow. As everyone else filed into the chamber behind her, they fell silent as they took in their surroundings as she did. Jon stood next to her and looked down at the symbol, trying to remember where he's seen it from, but drawing a blank. Corey didn't know either and said as much.

Along with the cylinder at the center of the room, there was a computer directly to it's left against the wall. To the right of the cylinder, the wall was cut in a square shape, the size of most doors. Mike immediately headed over to the computer, Corey checking out the cylinder while Jon looked at the symbol on the floor a bit more. Joanna felt a little left out so she went over to the cuts in the wall, hearing the hum of a reactor behind it. She pushed against the marble and it gave, sliding deeper into the wall a couple of feet then moving to the side, revealing a small fusion reactor that's nearly out of fuel. “Hey Jon, can you take a look at this?” Joanna asked, pointing out the fuel supply gage when he arrived.
“Looks like it'll run out of power soon... maybe as soon as a week from now.” Jon thought out loud as he examined the mini power plant with Joanna. It wasn't particularly advanced compared to modern technology, but it shouldn't have existed in the period between the third world war and the founding of Neocron. Jon turned to see what Mike was doing, glancing over his shoulder at the computer screen. “Looks like a simple enough system... what does it do?”
“It monitors and controls the cryo tube in the center of the room.” Mike said simply.
“Cryo... tube?” Jon rushed over to where Corey was, noticing she wiped away the frost and condensation on the outside of the glass to reveal a stunningly beautiful woman, either in her late teens or early twenties, frozen and sleeping peacefully within the tube. She was also naked, but Jon had his eyes on someone else at the time and he felt like it was cheating to dwell too long on this girl's physical appearance.
“She appears to be stable. Considering how long she's been in there, it's a miracle she's in perfect condition,” remarked Corey as she examined the device more. Jon nodded and moved back to Mike as Joanna came to check out the frozen girl.

“Can you get her out of there, Mike?” Jon asked. He shrugged, tapping a few buttons. There was a hiss as gases were being vented out of the tube and into the room, dissipating quickly with the help of hidden air filters. “I asked if you could, not to do it!” Jon shouted. Mike shrugged again, pointing towards the screen.
“It wasn't me,” was Mike's only excuse. A moment after it started, the tube stopped venting gas and the room's temperature noticeably increased to a perfect 25 degrees Celsius. The occupant shuddered once as the front of the tube lifted up, the girl falling out and into Joanna's arms.
“She's still unconscious,” Joanna said after she checked her pulse and eye dilation. Mike rose an eyebrow at seeing the girl, which received a glare from Corey, who then wrapped her blanket around the girl.
“Well... now that that's done, let's get out of here. Joanna, get your gurney out, we're taking her with us. We need to get her to a doctor soon. ” Everyone agreed and after more than a couple hours they exited the cave and were on their way back to the Military Base.

OOC: More to come later. The first person who posts what the symbol is on the floor of the chamber gets a prize!

[Brammers]

ooc: Nice story, and welcome to the THN!

I think I got what the symbol is. *Sends a PM* If I am right I'll let someone else have a go for the prize, since I may had a few hints already!

[Sekhmet]

OOC: Nope, not it. You're on the right track but that's not it.