Yeah, apparently I've had this for a year. Not much has changed. Hrmm... Maybe over Christmas break I'll actually break down and write those stories I was talking about a year ago. Oh well. And I've been getting shorter winded. I used to type out pages of stuff. I guess I've just gotten it all off my chest. I dunno why. Oh well.
Anyway, I'm watching White Chicks right now. It's a TERRIBLE movie, but not as bad as I'd feared. Like, take every buddy comedy ever, it's terrible. Wait...
Oh my God. I've been doing this for a year and I was about to my first anniversary rant about White Chicks! Someone kill me. So, new topic... Ummm.... I've got it. A brand new story, which I will make up right here on the spot. There's no telling whats going to happen. Ready? Here I go. (Yeah, I have a tendancy to write myself into my stories.)
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Greg rapelled down the tunnel. His rope was tied to his truck, currently on the surface twenty meters above him. He glanced up, at the daylight rapidly grew smaller and farther away. He glanced to the sides, and saw the dust covered walls all around him. Looking down just revealed more darkness, rising up to surround him. It was in this darkness, as his body thoughtlessly plunged deeper, that Greg's mind began to wander. He thought back to his ships long journey to get here, and how that even after this, he still had another month in hyperspace, alone, before he reached the nearest colony world. Another three months after that he would spend traveling with some company, at least.
Greg sighed. "Another four months till Virginia Prime, and Mayleen..." It'd been that long since he'd said goodbye to his beloved wife. He hated that his job was keeping him away from everyone he loved, but the money was good. Very good. And in between the months of travel, he did usually get a good solid day or two of fun work. That's the real reason. Love what you do and do what you love. That's what Greg's dad had taught him. And besides, after only 5 years of treasure scavaging, Greg had earned 40,000,000 Unicreds, enough for he and Mayleen to retire on for a long while.
"After this last find, at least." Greg focused on the light now coming into vision beneath him from the drill scout he'd launched earlier, creating the tunnel he was now dopping down. Greg's time in hyperspace hadn't been spent idly. He'd spent his days pooring over maps (both starmaps and the usual kind) and historical essays, searching for this one site. The last of the original fourteen Earth Venture Expiditions.
The EVE project had been humanity's first careful steps into deep space. Over a dozen probes, loaded with stasis-helf crews and enough supplies to start a colony that would hopefully one day contact Earth again. It was a terrible failure. After a millennia, none of the colonies had been heard from. The main flaw in the plan was that for the most part, the probes had been launched blind. Remains of seven of the fourteen ships had been found inside of stars or gas giants. Four had landed, and the inhabitants were found mauled by the native predators. Two more, surprisingly enough, had been passed by ships traveling at lightspeed, found drifting hundreds of light-years from earth. The last one, Pod 14, was similarly dismissed as lost.
By most, anyway. Greg thought he'd been able to track it down. Using collected readings of anomalous readings of sublight drive trails intersecting hyperspace drive trails, along with Starmaps dating back to the early Third Millenium Standard Years, he was able to track down a possible landing spot for the mysterious EVE Pod 14. As he touched down on his drill pod's landing pad and looked around, Greg started to believe that he was right. Two hundred lightyears from earth, this planet, Marvis 87, was a footnote to a footnote on Unification Starmaps. It was set apart, though far from unique, by it's pecular structure, having a thin crust surrounding a light atosphere underground, and a lower, more fertile surface under the darkness. On his initial approach, Greg's scan's had revealed a single hole in the outer crust, just the size that an EVE pod would have made if it had tried to land.
As he looked now, he saw no ship where it should have been, but what he did see amazed him. A gigantic city had sprung up, seemingly abandoned now, with buildings growing almost up to the roof. Apparently the colonists had been fearful of piercing the crust, for fear of causing a cave in, crushing their budding settlement, so many buildings were exactly the same hight, and no higher. A more detailed look showed a large garden had been build under the inital impact hole, directly in the only direct sunlight their claustrophobic city ever recieved. Aside from that, apparently they had set up a number lamps to light their lives.
Also, as Greg looked upon the land, he found a number long unused drilling vehicles. "Apparently they found something worth digging for," Greg mused. He wandered into the villiage, his visor feeding him still more miscelanious facts from around him, all of it being recorded into a computer on his back. He looked past it, at the marvelous archetecture surrounding him as he walked through the city streets. The computer was just showing him data and figures, but he was walking through
history. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. It was very much in an Ancient Earth style, obviously free from the much more cosmopolitan tastes Unification Citizens were surrounded with from the myriad of species comprising it.
As he thought about that, his mind wandered back on course: the colonists. Where were they? Surely some remains had to be here. Greg flicked a switch on his side, activating the bioscanners in his visor. Slowly the green, almost ghost-like sillouettes of decayed bodies appeared, contrasting and overlaying the dirty-yellow sides of the buildings. As he followed them, slowly creeping through the barren streets, he noticed a definite cluster effect to the bodies, a focal point of death, so to speak. Greg felt a grim look come upon his face. The worst part about relic hunting, he thought, was the dead. He couldn't stand looking at them. Eventually, though, the bright green filled up his vision, and he had to flip his vision.
Once he did, he was able to see unobscured the reason all these people had died like this. A treasure room. Glimering piles of gold, the kind of stuff told in legends. This couldn't be happening. It didnt. It just didn't happen. Sure, relic hunters loved to dream about it, but honestly, this wasn't supposed to happen. And yet it was. Greg was face to face with an honest to God treasure room. And aparently a rather fatal one, judging from the piles of dead bodies littered among the piles of gold. As Greg surveyed the room, he found a central point, to both the treasure and the corpses, appeared to be a large altar in the middle of the room. He walked up to it, in half-disbelief of where he was. Greg looked at the dust covered plaque adorning the monument.
"For helping us to get where we were, this great wealth is left in loving memory of our forefathers, the first generation of Earth Venture Expedition Pod 1" Pod one? That had been found decades ago. That couldn't be right. Greg extended a hand, and wiped some dust from the plaque, revealing instead, Pod...
"18?" Greg said aloud. "Then this means, there were survivors of the survivors? Fourteen launched her own pods!" That last bit Greg said excitedly, and a little too loud. The cavernous room began echoing, and as it did, heard an inhuman rumbling coming from all around him. "Oh shit, I woke the guard dogs." Greg grinned at the two sentry robots slowly awakening from their centries slumber. He wasn't going to wait for their systems to boot fully. Reaching for a pair of pistol blasters at his hips, Greg set at a dash for the door, and back to his ship. He'd done enough treasure hunting for one day.
The machines, however, were not as friendly. A pair of lumbering, ten story, faceless metal golems came charging out of the treasure room, each one more than armed to take out any would be bank-robbers the colony could spit at them. Greg, though, had half a millenia and the combined technology of ten thousand square lightyears of civilization. He could hold his own against these relics. The real challenge, for Greg, was bringing himself to shoot up these antiques, no matter how deadly they were. As the machine's gunfire traced its way closer to his path, Greg leapt into the air, and a pair of hover jets on his back fired, propelling him higher into the air. Greg spun and looked at his adversaries, and saw that they were indeed able to raise their guns above the horizon. "Fuck, and I thought you guys wouldn't use drones to go duck hunting." Greg took a few potshots at the drones before juking and hiding on the top of a building, out of range, for now.
Unfortunately, it wouldn't buy him much time. Looking left, Greg saw another building with a wall torn in, seemingly by those guard drones in one such chase. He wasn't safe for long. Even now, the sound of bullets ricocheting of the side of his own building rang clearly to his ears. Greg peered over the ledge and took a couple of shots at the "head" of one of the monster robots, managing to take out its sensor unit, effectively blinding it. After ducking for cover, Greg looked over again and tried to similarly blind the second unit, but found that both it and the "blind" bot were prepared for him this time. "So, you can talk to each other, hmm?" This was going to be a little harder than he thought. Greg rolled away from the edge and stood, surveying his landscape weighing his options. Straight ahead he was what might be his only option. A river, and crossing it a golden gleaming suspension bridge, apparently leading off to the mines.
Greg launched off, and dove in over the mechs, distracting them from their twisted demolition attempt. He zigged and zagged down the streets in front of their fire, dancing, occasionally taking a random shot back at his persuit. He was actually enjoying the danger, in spite of it, or perhaps because of it. As he neared the bridge, though, a stray shot blew out his starbard hoverdrive, causing him to lose altitude. Greg hit the ground at a run, and dashed towards the bridge, off to the left side. He started firing in two different directions. One gun shot behind back at the walking death mechs chasing him. The other, though, was shooting ahead, fraying the delicate suspension wiring. Meanwhile, the sub par accuarcy of the robots was completing the job on the wires Greg passed. Greg soon felt the bridge starting to sway.
After the twenty somethingth cord broke, the bridge jerked to its side. Using his remaining hover turbine, Greg was able to maintain his footing on the tumbling tower. His foes were not so lucky. The lead one, the blind one, fell first, landing in the water and frying out, just like that. Apparently the colonists weren't expecting much rain. The second drone, though, was a little smarter. It jumped off the bridge, and landed with one foot on the island that was its compatriates head. It stood there, for a second, balanced like a six-year-old balerina, until it made a surging lunge to shore.
Greg, meanwhile, had made it to the cover of a mine. The drone followed him in, but was unable to see where he had gone. It's visual sensor no good in the pitch black mine, the machine began to improvise.
Bang. A bullet rang from the machine's turret into the nothingness.
Bang. Another.
Bang. "Sonar," Greg thought to himself. "I am impressed." Unfortunately for the machine, the colonists hadn't seen any reason to program the caves topography into the machine, so it couldn't recognize a man resting flat against the wall. After the tenth step into the building, the machine found itself as Greg's new mount. Like an unscratchable itch, Greg was in the machines blind spot. With surgical precision, Greg sliced into the top of the machine. Just above the sensor unit was computer core of the robot, its "brain". And Greg wanted it. Let the historians have their eighteenth pod out of fourteen. Greg wanted the machine who could use sonar.
When he slipped the computer core out of the mech, it went dead, silent in an instant. Greg sighed with relief and slid off to the ground. He packed the core in his pocket, and headed out the door. After surveying the rest of the city, finding nothing of particular intrest, returned to his drill probe, and began the long slow trip to the top. "So," he thought. "There are still four other EVE Pods out there. I wonder if they're as interesting as this one...."
The End.
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Wow, that was fun. Alright, I'm off to bed. Be sure to tell me what you thought.
