Where had it come from? He searched around looking to see if anyone had been there or was about!
How recently had the opening in it formed?
He tried to recall if there had been any marks on it or anything there, and again he wondered how long ago it had appeared? Were there people inside? And how dangerous was it being there?
He moved directly below it and listened into it. It was only a few feet above his head and was a perfect circle at the same size as his height!
It still confused him greatly as he did not have a clue what he was dealing with and he realized that he had to investigate it as he would not forgive himself for letting go a chance of explaining it or getting some information! He was a keen scientist and had also investigated everything of the slightest interest.
He shifted the vehicle correctly below it and stood on the highest part of the vehicle and hoisted himself up into it, fascinated at the dangers and the impact of such a discovery! He had been waiting his entire life to see something like it! Even though the dangers were tremendous!
Light dimly beamed through the hole only lighting a small empty area and he looked about and moved into the darkness further in, where dim black shapes became vaguely visible.
He could not recognize if it was a room or large hall and he strolled slowly and blindly into it, wearily resting, and got ready to escape if he heard or seen anyone and stayed observing what the black shapes were, while he let his eyes adapt to the darkness.
He was sure what was confusing him and stopping him grasping small details was what the whole object actually was! The material it was made of was clearly unknown and capable of withstanding tremendous forces, and nothing was familiar to him, which he had not done in a long time and in such a way!
He felt strangely shaped black things about his front in the blackness, and smelled a musty synthetic scent in the air. His eye pupils slightly adjusted, to the blackness, and he stared at places covered in lines and curves.
He moaned thinking his tiredness and disappointment at not receiving any answers to what was going on! Surely it was something? They gunmen were willing to kill for it! The size and cost was tremendous, as well as their bringing in such equipment and building such an immense structure there!
It startled him and he could not grasp the purpose of such a thing! A curved part of a wall had shapes on it and he tried touching them and seeing if they did anything, but there was no response.
He moved further along to another area and observed a dark shape and had a feeling of something being there, like he was being watched!
Something lifted him and he gasped, and it shifted him away, with nothing visible holding him, and he felt some force moving him away into the interior of the black object, and he realized slowly that it could kill him easily!
He tried to theorize about it but there was nothing he could grasp! All he saw was strange dark shapes!
Was it of military origins? It could be to camouflage the technology and confuse any observers? Whatever it was the cost and time behind it proved that it could take warfare to a new level!
Blackness covered his vision and he felt a strange sensation like he was floating through space, and something opened at his front like an energy curtain, and he felt as though he had entered something strange!
A strange blue radiance shone out so dimly that he could not properly see what was there. It shone like a faint blue star.
It swiftly shifted away and his emotions ran amok when he started seeing spectacular views of space, and he could no longer feel any floor beneath his feet or see any of the black shapes.
An eerie sensation gripped him! Something was not right! He sensed a weird presence of something, which he never recognized!
Nothing but space formed around him in stages as though he were standing out in deep space, and he stood staggered trying get how it was implanted within his mind, and he watched a sphere of light floating through the darkness and passed him, and he realized that it had to be telepathically transmitted into his mind, covering his entire sight with vivid visions.
Strange displays of visions and sounds altered and vanished about him, and they reformed into other things, and visions of space appeared and vanished like something was searching through memories for something, and he was sure something was trying to adapt it to him, so that he could understand it. Some of the strange sounds and lights gave him artificial sensations, which he could not grasp the nature of!
He was sure he was picking up knowledge of things but he could not understand what they were, and he then watched infinitely streaking stars, of solar systems, flickering by.
Suddenly he realized the black object he was in was a voyager spacecraft, which had a new form of propulsion, with mind-boggling technology and powers, and an accuracy and capacity inconceivable, and was built to travel into deep space, and he watched its voyage across star quadrants and through clusters of stars, exploring vast unexplored stars.
He wondered what it had been designed to do! Had they built it to make contact with something that they had detected? Perhaps the radio signals from it had been detected?
He wondered if it was in a probe of immense proportions, as there was no mention of any humans!
There were sights of it exploring worlds, but he could not grasp its mission. He knew that it had to be more than for doing what normal probes did and that alien contact and deep space exploration had to be part of it! Had something made contact with them? Did they have a real Star War program hidden away?
Why did this voyager end up there, embedded in ice in the Antarctic? Was it there as it would not be detected by the rest of the world? It surely would be detected coming down even at the Artic! Yet he could not even imagine such a large object not being detected coming down anywhere!
Willis gasped as new visions appeared and he saw nothing but a vision of blackness, and it hurtled through the outer limits of space and time, racing into this universe, and he watched, staggered, realizing that it had traveled beyond the universe, and he realized it had a way of making vast leaps through space with it, but it was inaccurate, and that star traveling was needed to carry out the majority of its voyage!
For some reason its form was a mass of energy and it became unstable and it created vast unstable energy explosions across space and time, which he realized were so powerful that they ripped at the fabric of space and time and made regions temporary unbalanced and warp, with only its protective energy shield holding it from the effects.
Star formations flashed by, as it continued its pursuit of something, with its sphere of white glowing energy floating by like a colossal ghost. Voyaging through billions of stars, while transforming its energy states further from their original states.
Willis watched the visions vanish and the normal surroundings there emerge, and felt himself being moved away and was left standing at the entrance hole, where he gasped and saw the two gunmen standing below at his vehicle, who aimed their guns at him and ordered him to climb down!
Chapter 2
The Secret Military Operation
Once the military aircraft neared Ice Station X1 the soldiers aboard swiftly fitted on their parachutes and adjusted their gear, while receiving updates for the mission from Commander Craven.
Weaver gasped considering the dangerous mission ahead, and gasped again at what had occurred already! Certain things that had occurred interested him greatly!
There was more action than he could believe! What were the events that they were on the trail of? Were the soldiers on the plane being intentionally secretive or covering not knowing things for reasons? What had he let himself in for?
He was to masquerade as a soldier to get into the Antarctic ice station and basically find out what was happening there without getting caught, and to take any action if needed!
Sunlight blasted through one of the windows of the plane, giving him some warmth. The Antarctic conditions were slowly entering the plane and digging deep into his body,
and he gasped at the temperatures recorded there and at the fact they were at such a height, which increased it! Normally he did not mind the winter but he liked to get use to low temperatures, and he had not been anywhere as cold before!
So when the plane door was opened for them to parachute and the winds hit them he shuddered and put his helmet over his head!
He automatically dived out with the others gritting his teeth!
He started getting his body use to it, and could still hardly believe the location below and that he would be trapped there without help if anything happened! There was nothing for miles going into the flat white horizon! They had not even seen anything below since they passed the last ship over the sea.
He realized that they had made a mistake! They had been too keen to enter the mission and they had dropped down a greater distance away from the ice station than they should have! And he could barely even see it and only recognized it from the secret intelligence photos of the highly confidential underground base.
The fact that he had been a soldier and his military record and his keenest, fitness, and record of successful spy missions for the intelligence agency were the main reasons for him being chosen for the mission and to infiltrate the soldiers to enter the ice station.
They had given him little and he knew they had little to give! Basically they had little of what was happening and he was to get information!
He discovered little in what he had been told and really only knew that there were deaths occurring all over the ice station, and most had been killed by military weapons, which was why the soldiers were sent in to stop, and he was put there by intelligence agencies to find out more on.
Nothing added up! Who wanted to kill anyone at such a place? It was basically a military and scientist ice station and he could only think that another country was behind it! Yet who had done it and why had they been done it? There were no known cases like it on record, which they or he could find, and he had also unsuccessfully searched for comparisons!
Who could profit from it? They clearly would replace the people killed, and what good would it do for them! There had to be far more behind it! Surely other countries would not have any reasons or be able to profit from it with it being there.
It was there to cover that region of the world if needed.
Someone that he knew had been sure that they had discovered something and that the military and scientists there that knew about it were being killed, and if that was true he believed that he might be able to find something or someone with something.
He gazed over at the underground ice station gleaming with sunbeams and wondered what the hell was there! The case was important and something had to have occurred!
He recalled the immense size of it below the ground as he watched the others let out their parachutes, and he copied them and was left staggered when his entire parachute shot straight upwards, and flew away into the distance!
He gasped and examined the straps and saw that they had been deliberately cut!
He instantly dived towards the only person directly below him, where he could properly reach, and realized that the speed that he was traveling at by diving might be too fast to do anything, and that he would have only one chance and less than a second to grab hold of the other parachutist to save his life!
As he shot down he saw the plane vanish beneath the horizon and grasped the full dangers and loneliness of the Antarctic, and again realized the dangers!
He made himself move over towards the parachutist below and swiftly and powerfully grabbed his waist, and realized he could not hold on and swiftly grabbed a strap from him and tied it to the other soldier’s parachute straps.
Close to the ground he rested and considered his chances of survival and gasped! Someone clearly knew that he was there and had intended to kill him!
Chapter 3
The Gun Battle
Behind them, below the horizon, the sunlight vanished and the early Antarctic night engulfed the soldiers and Weaver studied his surroundings trying to explain why they had made such a mistake! The entire mission had been planned down the smallest detail!
The ice station was further away and the snow deep and terrain virtually impossible to get quickly through! It was incredible that they had actually not landed earlier than when the sun was going down. The incident with his parachute had been a major incident and he knew there was someone there against him and perhaps the mission, and he wondered who had access to the parachutes!
When a loud blast exploded out and a bullet hit and killed one of the front soldiers, beside Commander Craven, Weaver was not fully surprised, and realized that someone was attacking them!
It was lucky there was cover and they rushed below two small hills as bullets flew in hitting the snow all about them, and he realized that there were at least six of them, and that they had made the mistake of being too far away. The bullets were off and they had been lucky that they had hit the soldier.
None of them could see who was there though, and they were hidden away at different locations and moved around, and they were unable to recognize anything! Were they professionals and had planned the whole thing well before they had arrived?
The whole terrain was unfamiliar too them and they had the advantage over them! How could they move forward and get to the ice station without receiving many deaths?
He was unsure if they could survive there the night! They had no proper food or cover, and the temperature was dropping dramatically and none of them had adapted to the environment.
He wondered if they got lost if they could find the ice station there! The place was very hidden away! It was lucky they had seen it from the air and knew the direction.
He even wondered if it was the people from the ice station actually firing on them! If they had not known of their arrival and the situation there was worse than stated they could believe that they were being attacked!
He considered the region and what must be one of the most desolate regions of the world. They had not seen anyone since they had flown over the Antarctic sea, and was sure planes even avoided flying there.
What was staggering was that they were taking on so many soldiers! What did they actually intend to do? They surely could not expect to kill the entire group of soldiers, and if they had been informed about them they would have realized how trained they were! Yet could they be trying to scare them away? Yet that was absurd also, as they would have to go there! There was no where else out there to go to!
The mission now seemed flawed! Why had they not brought far more soldiers and more powerful weapons? The soldiers were shooting away unable to hit anything and their hidden enemy was ignoring it!
Yet they had put together a good team of everyone needed to carry out the mission at the ice station, and if they had landed next to it as planned nothing would have gone wrong! He wondered if it had been the captain of the plane who had landed them there or if it had been a mistake as it had looked at the time?
The adventure brought him back to life after such a long length of inactivity and lack of anything of interest. At times he still could not believe that there was anything out in such a desolate region, and that anything worthwhile existed there!
It was winter and deep snow shrouded everything around them, and he realized again that they would have to camp there. And having not slept outdoors in winter he gasped at sleeping in such thick cold snow, and considered if they would find his remains there one day, and wonder why they had done it. There had been accounts in history of vast drops in temperature and entire groups of soldiers and others being found frozen solid and dead! What if temperatures hit far lower than had been recorded, with there being no recorded proof or witnesses left alive!
The snow landscape was untouched by humans everywhere, and at times empty and hollow with no sound, and had a deep haunting silence that he had only heard before in thick winter snow landscapes. It reminded him of another world! An empty lost world absence of life with faint mi
sts surrounding regions.
What was shocking was how easily they had trapped them, and he was unsure if they even knew how they could avoid any large amount of deaths. If only they had taken a small landing airplane, and kept it there, but they could not have traveled there with the amount of soldiers and at that distance!
There was nothing to recognize anywhere, and he watched some of the men attempt to use communication devices to the ice station, and when they failed they tried to see if there was anything to pick up on it!
Another problem was that they had experienced a long exhausting day and had got more exhausted wading through the deep snow, and a peculiarity he noticed was a distant hum, similar to a distant engine whirling, out at an unknown place, and it started to drive him insane trying to identify it.
It was no surprise that Commander Craven eventually made them blast them with as many well aimed rounds to force some form of reaction, but they seemed to ignore it, and he knew that they would have to hit them with something or force them away!
It was incredible when thick snow piled down, and he knew that they could use it as it was virtually impossible to see through in the dark, and he realized he had a thermal weapon sight in his equipment and he used it to see what he could find through the darkness and blizzard! Yet they were too good at hiding!
“What are we going to do ...?” one of men finally spluttered, fighting for air, furious that they had been put in a situation.
Commander Craven stopped checking their weapons and showed how annoyed he was at his reply and at the way things were going, and walked towards him.
“We better agree to something ...” he shouted, giving glances about at things and realizing the mess of his expedition, and decided not to continue.
“Where can we go?” a soldier named Reeves continued, who was near Weaver, and Weaver had become close to as he was his most trusted person as he had been able to check him out more than anyone else there, which he had done before the mission, as he checked them all as much as possible to find out anything that he should know, and he had checked for the people that he could most depend on.
The Alien Star Chamber (Part One) Page 2