The Styx Strikers

by Thor Zollinger

  Jake and Tarra were out first, since they were in back closer to the hatch. The tunnel was moist and the air smelled of mist from the river flowing over the rocks. Jake jogged over to the base of the ramp walkway and started up. Tarra was close behind with a big grin on her face. Every footstep raised a puff of dust or a splash of water. Pointing down, “Look, our footprints are the only ones, no one has been here in years.” The walkway wasn’t straight, it followed the contour of the uneven wall, and followed a dark uneven seam in the rock wall upwards. “The path follows the strata up the wall making it harder to see. You’d almost think this was natural, if you didn’t know it was a way up.” Tarra nodded and followed Jake up to the top landing to the smaller access door.

  The manway was closed off by a painted metal door, rounded in the corners like a door inside a ship. The door was painted to blend in with the rock wall. Tarra could see and feel the edges of the door frame up close. Jake grabbed onto the handle and pulled. “Nope, it’s locked.” Jake tried harder, but it didn’t budge.

  Tarra reached over and pulled up on the finger latch next to the card reader slot in the wall panel. It moved, but not very easily. “Here let me try.” Jake pulled on the finger latch, but it didn’t open the door. “Locked. Better get Hai up here.” Jake and Tarra started walking back down the walkway and passed Hai and Zane on their way up. Hai had his code cracker in hand. Dan wasn’t far behind, he had another sandwich in one hand and a thermos of juice in the other. Jake wanted to get a closer look at the big door down below and continued back down.

  Standing below in front of the big door, Tarra noticed Ariel had wandered over to the side and headed over to see what she had found. “So, what’cha doing over here?”

  “Oh, just looking at this little door next to the big one. I thought Sven said the only other door he found was the one at the top of the archway.”

  “He did, he must have missed this one. Is it locked? The one at the top is.”

  Reaching forwards, Ariel pulled on the finger latch… Click. The door was unlocked. Ariel turned to Tarra and whispered, “Shhhh, don’t let the guys know… we’ll be the first inside.” The two girls quickly pushed the door open, slipped inside, and quietly closed the door behind them. Bjorn and Jake hadn’t even noticed, even though they were only standing ten meters away in the blackness in front of the big hanger sized door. It was really dark after all. The only lights were the ones they had left on from the two vehicles, and the night vision goggles didn’t work that well when you saturated them by glancing at the vehicles headlights.

  Chapter 12 “Exploration” –––––––––––––––––––

  Ariel and Tarra found themselves in a small vestibule with another door on the other side. Opening the second door with a hard shove, the girls stepped out into a cavernous dark space, musty with the smell of lubricants and diesel fuel. They couldn’t see anything. There was absolutely no light at all, the night vision goggles didn’t even work. “Wow, Ariel. Are you still with me? It’s as black as a tomb in here.” Tarra reached out with her hands and felt her way back to Ariel and the door again.

  “Don’t say that! Yes, I’m still here. Head back to the door, we need to feel around for a light switch or something.”

  Just then Tarra remembered her zipPhone. “Hang on, let me get my phone out. We can use it as a flashlight.”

  “Right. I forgot about that.” Keying the buttons on her phone, Tarra blinded herself when she turned the light on. “Ahhh! Dang goggles! She pulled them down around her neck and let her eyes adjust for a minute. “Ok, that’s better. Wow, would you look at this! This room is huge!” Tarra strained her eyes, but still couldn’t see the end of the long hanger bay. Her light was too small. She could see open bays on both sides of the hanger, with lots of big things in them. There wasn’t enough light to see what was what.

  Ariel got her phone lit up too and the two girls began looking around them in awe. Ariel was looking for a light switch next to the door they had just entered and found one. It didn’t work. Next to the switch though, she noticed a large power breaker handle. Pointing at it, “Isn’t this one of those big breaker thingy’s, like in my Dad’s warehouse?”

  “What? Oh yah. It looks just like one only bigger. Push the handle up and lets see if the lights come on.” Ariel put her phone in her teeth, grabbed the big handle with both hands and pushed it up… Chonk! Nothing happened. “Huh. That’s a disappointment. I was sure that would fix the problem.”

  “Try another one, there’s a whole row of them.” Chonk! Chonk! Chonk!

  “Nothing. Rats! Now what?”

  “Maybe the power is out. That’s what happens at the ranch when the lights won’t go on. Maybe we need to find the generator or something and turn it on.”

  “Yah right, like you know how to start a one hundred year old generator.”

  “Well… one of the guys might.”

  Just then a flicker of light came on from way up overhead. Then another. And another. “Hey, there we go! Maybe they just have to warm up or somethin’.”

  The light came on dimly in the side bay next to them and Tarra looked up. All she could see were legs… huge legs, and way up above she could see arms sticking out front, and a body. Walking backwards she got a better look at the massive machine, “That’s a mech. Holy cow, Ariel. That’s a mech, a really big one!”

  “Yah, I think you’re right. How many of them are there? One, two, three on this side. Six of them total. And there are a bunch of little garages down at the other end too. And one more huge mech at the very end of the room facing us. That makes seven of ‘em.”

  The two girls wandered down the length of the hanger looking up at the huge war machines on each side. It looked like the entire hanger had been carved out of the natural rock, but they did see sections that were beams and concrete around each mech. There were gantry cranes over each bay, and stairways and landings all the way up to the cockpit at the top of each of the machines. All kinds of tools were mounted in the bays for working on the mechs, manipulator arms, davits for lifting, articulated welding machines, and power cables ran everywhere.

  “Look, there’s a small bridge that sticks out that goes over to the cockpit on each machine. That must be how the pilot gets in.”

  Picture Pack: Deimos Hanger

  “Wow, and to think all this was here just waiting for us to find. Where do you suppose the guys lived that worked on these things?”

  “Uhmmm, I don’t know. Lets keep looking around until we find out.”

  The two girls wandered around the hanger for a while as the lights gradually came on, then they found a larger stairwell in one of the corners at the far end with brass handrails. Heading up the stairs, at the top they found a wide corridor that went all the way around the bays in a U-shape. The floor of the corridor was tiled with the kind of light grey tile you find in every hospital in the quadrant, with a reddish brown patterned border along the walls. There were offices and meeting rooms, and lots of storage rooms with parts in them off the mezzanine corridor. A lot of the doors were locked. It took them a while to walk all the way around the top. The corridor was mostly open on the side facing the hanger, so you could look down into the main hanger and see all the action from above. The girls found more lighting breakers along the corridor and turned them on as they walked around the upper mezzanine level. As the light level increased it started to get less spooky than when they came in. There was a thick layer of dust everywhere.

  The girls finally reached the forward end of the mezzanine corridor and found a windowless hallway in the rock wall leading across the front end of the hanger, bridging across the open end of the ‘U’. In the middle was a double doorway right above the center of the arch of the hanger door.

  “Hey, I’ll bet the guys are just on the other side of this set of doors.” Ariel’s eyes were all lit up. “Want to scare them?” she said with a mischievous grin? Ariel opened the double doors in
to another small vestibule just like the one down below and walked over to the single rounded steel door in the front wall. Tarra got ready to lift the finger latch and waited for Ariel to get ready to yank the heavy door inward.

  “1, 2, 3, Pull!” The heavy door swung inwards in a whoosh.

  Hai was down on his knees looking at the card slot, which had his electronics gear plugged into it. His mouth went wide open, just like his eyes. “Wow, what the heck?! I didn’t do that, did I?” The other guys jumped back startled and Dan almost got knocked backwards off the landing.

  “Hah!” Ariel said through the door. “Got Cha!”

  “Holy @#%^$^, don’t do that woman! You could have killed us!” Zane wasn’t happy, but Bjorn started laughing.

  “Well, that does it.” Sven said. “I’m not following you guys around any more, I’m following those two next time. How long have you two been in there anyway? You disappeared about a half an hour ago.”

  “Oh, about that long I guess. We found a door down below that was unlocked, and went inside. I turned on some of the lights…” Ariel said it with a cute smile and patted Hai on the head. “Hi Hai.” She liked saying that.

  “And you didn’t tell us? Thanks a lot.” Sven was a bit miffed he didn’t get to go in first. “We’ve been up here trying to get this dang door open. We were almost ready to go down and get the plasma torch to cut it open.”

  “Hey, a little blue light just came on…” Hai was still plugged into the card slot. Tapping a few keys on his cracker, it ran a series of number codes through the card slot and ‘Snap’ the lock released. “Huh. All it needed was a little power. You girls must have turned the power on to the door when you turned the lights on.”

  Bjorn pushed past everyone and headed in through the vestibule. Ariel led the way in and took them north to one side of the mezzanine so they could look down into the hanger bay. On the way Tarra noticed the mezzanine corridor had a big branch leading off to the north. “Hey look Ariel, there’s another hallway we haven’t been down. I’ll bet the living quarters are down that way.”

  “Wow, check out the mechs! Holy @#%^$^!” Zane was dumbfounded. “They left all the equipment behind! Wow, this is freaking awesome!” The guys ran off down the corridor to see if they could figure out what models of mechs there were in the repair bays. Ariel and Tarra were more interested in exploring the new hallway they’d found. Sven wasn’t sure which way to go, but he was so astonished at the mechs he ran off and followed the guys down the corridor.

  Tarra found another lighting breaker and shoved it upwards… ‘Chonk’. After a minute, the lights up the new corridor started to flicker and come on. Not all of the lighting fixtures in the facility still worked, but enough of them came on to make exploring the hallway easier.

  “Hey look. I think we found the cafeteria.” The large space to their right was filled with tables and chairs, and there were stainless steel food serving stations all along the far east wall. Griddles and sinks were behind the serving stations, with swinging doors heading back into the kitchen area. Everything had a thick layer of dirt on it, the floors, the tables, the counters, everything. “I’ve seen a dirty kitchen before. Lets try further down the hallway.”

  The girls wandered out back into the main corridor and headed further north, finding a large equipment room with lots of electrical switchgear, compressors, ventilation equipment, and lots of boring stuff inside. The next set of double doors led east into an isolated hallway with nice wood doors all along the south side. The hallway floor was a nice rosy marble tile with fancy gold edge trim patterns. The walls were paneled with a light colored wood, with gold borders painted on each panel. The light fixtures were much nicer than the boring ones in the rest of the facility, these had a nice frosted glass cover with etched design work around the edges matching the borders on the paneling.

  Sticking her head into the first room on the right, “This one has a fancy door. I’ll bet the Captain lived in here. Look at that huge coffee table and all those comfy leather chairs.” All of the walls were lined with a dark cherry wood paneling and all of the fixtures were a notch above the ones in the hallway outside. This room wasn’t as dirty as the cafeteria had been.

  “Hey look, magazines and books.” One wall of the room was lined with built-in book cases, which still held quite a large number of volumes. “I haven’t read a real book in long time. I always use my tablet.” Tarra picked up one of the magazines and looked at the date, “These are only about forty years old. It looks like they left here not too long after the first exploration teams arrived on Wayfarer. This place isn’t as old as we thought it was. I wonder why they left?”

  “I wonder why they never came back.” Ariel continued further into the room and opened the door into the next interior room. The light was flickering badly, but she could see restroom facilities and a marble shower room to the right and a big bed on the far wall. She opened the closet and some of the built in drawers, but they were all empty. “He didn’t leave any clothes behind, he must have known they weren’t coming back any time soon.”

  “Pictures of big buildings and cities and stuff. Definitely a man. Let’s try some of the other rooms. This looks like it’s the officer’s hallway we’re in, if there’s any good stuff to be found it’ll be down this hallway. Enlisted men don’t have it as nice as officer’s do. We want to find anything worthwhile first before the boys make their way down here.”

  “Yah, they won’t be distracted by the mechs forever. There isn’t much dust down here, the doors must have kept most of the dirt out all these years.” She patted the bedding, but it didn’t look very inviting. Little poofs of dust rose with each pat. “We could clean this up in a jiffy, if we had a working washing machine and a vacuum.”

  “And water. That gold tap in the bathroom didn’t have anything in it when I turned the faucet on.”

  “We can get the boys to work on that.”

  The two left the Captain’s room and went into the next one. “XO’s quarters. It’s just as nice, but a bit smaller. Another man, from the pictures on the walls.” The paintings were all of different planets, as seen from a dropship in space. The girls quickly checked all the drawers and closet. “Nothing. Zippo. Nada. Let’s try the next room.”

  The next room had wide carved double doors. “Holy cow! Jackpot! Check this out, this must be the officer’s wardroom.” The space was quite large and well furnished. At the near side of the room was an entertainment area with a wet bar, a wall sized vid screen, a dart board, and a circle of about a dozen big leather chairs and sofas with a couple of coffee tables in the middle. Most of the chairs faced the big vid screen. The cabinets above the bar were filled with fine crystal glassware and china, with the ‘Marik’ Free Worlds League logo on it. The other end of the room held a long carved wooden dining table, with matching low-backed chairs, one for each officer. It had two large candelabras in the middle, a white table cloth, and napkins with gold rings were set at each place. Behind the table was a set of swinging doors that went back into the kitchen area down a narrow hallway through the butler’s pantry where there were warming ovens, hot plates, and a big refrigerator. There were matching serving sideboards at strategic locations around the table to facilitate the dining service.

  Picture Pack: Marik Crest

  “Take a look at this… This is ancient medieval armor.” The walls were lined with an extensive collection of historical swords and armor, framed by swags of purple cloth held to the side by gold braided silk ropes with tassles. “I see helmets, gauntlets, breastplates, and all kinds of arm and leg doodads. This sword is really old, look at all the corrosion on it. And so is this shield.”

  “Look at all these long pole thingy’s, this is some kind of crazy spear or something. This one has a large curved hook on the end and a big knife blade sticking straight out.”

  “Oooooh, I like the hilt on this sword, it’s got lots of jewels inlaid in gold. I see emeralds, rubies, sapphi
re, tourmaline, and pearls all the way around the handle. There’s a matching dagger too.”

  “This one has fancy designs etched into the blade. I’ll bet this stuff is worth a fortune.”

  “Not that currency means much here on Wayfarer.”

  “What the heck is that?” Tarra stated in awe pointing at an odd skull hung next to one of the helmets on the wall. “I don’t recognize that at all. It looks all weird and alien.” Touching it lightly with her fingers, “It’s petrified. An ancient petrified skull.”

  “Is it some kind of dinosaur? It looks kinda like that.”

  “I don’t think so, it looks kinda humanoid in a way. Elongated though, with some kinda reptilian beak. Maybe some distant… Wait, maybe it’s one of the Ancients from Lahti who terra-formed Wayfarer millions of years ago.” Tarra furrowed her brow and tried to remember if she’d seen anything in her studies that showed what the archeologists thought the Ancients looked like. She couldn’t recall ever seeing a picture of them anywhere. All of the carvings she’d seen had headdresses or helmets on. Nobody knew what they really looked like. “Wow” she breathed while stepping back from the skull.

  Picture Pack: Petrified Skull

  On the opposite wall Ariel had found a set of maps of Wayfarer in a fancy gold frame. “Take a look at this, these maps have locations marked on them with little gold stars. I can see our continent and I’ve found our base right here. See the little gold star right there next to the river?” Ariel was pointing at the map to show Tarra where they were right now. “And look at these other little stars over here, and here. What do you suppose they are, more bases like this one? There are more stars on the other continents too.” Ariel took some pictures of the maps with her zipPhone. Remembering the camera in her phone, she and Tarra also took pictures of the entire room just for good measure.