“What in the name of god was that!” Akimbe shouted over the warning sirens, and wailing of the red alert klaxon.
“ A beam of pure energy captain, of what type, I have no idea,” Strandzhar replied.
“Is the alien structure still intact?”
“From what I can tell, yes sir. It seems as though the entire facility was designed to emit a beam of that magnitude.”
“A weapon?”
“If it is, it would be a clumsy one. It could only fire in a single direction, and only then at a stationary target.”
“True, but if that beam did hit, nothing would be able to withstand a direct hit from that kind of power.”
Kathryn and the rest of the panicked scientists were desperately trying to find some way to shut down the facility, to prevent a repeat of what had just happened. So far, they could find nothing they could understand.
The loud thrumming had diminished into a low barely audible groan, the station was definitely awake now, and it had awoken with an almighty scream too.
“Guys, come take a look at this,” she heard Gomez say from across the room, she and Kalschacht came over to join him.
“What is it?”
Gomez pointed toward a display, now fully lit, it was showing power readouts throughout the base, it also showed a three dimensional cross section of the entire facility.
“My god,” Kalschacht exclaimed in wonder, “the place is like a huge underground city, we haven’t even explored half of it.” He peered in closer, studying the three dimensional map in more detail, “If I’m looking at this right, the whole facility is built over a massive geo-thermal vent.”
“That would explain the temperature rises,” Kathryn cut in.
“The thrumming noise is a giant rotating collider, collecting the energy and exciting it, thereby turning the immense heat and pressure underneath into massive amounts of raw energy.”
He stepped back a moment, stoking his chin in contemplation, “This whole facility is nothing more than a super advanced, geo-thermal power station. Kathryn have you any idea of the amount of power a facility of this size can produce?”
Kathryn nodded blankly, “rather a lot, I guess.”
“Rather a lot is the under-statement of the decade, this facility can generate virtually unlimited power. If we can find a way to replicate this technology, we would have virtually solved E.O.C. A’s power needs overnight.”
He turned back to the display, “it must have some kind of collector somewhere, a means of storing the energy it produces.”
The physicist touched the display in an effort to find a control to zoom out of the facility, he quickly found that he could manipulate the representation by touch alone. Gradually managing to pan out, at first he could not see anything, then continued panning out further and further until he had zoomed out all the way to the upper atmosphere of the planet itself.
There it was, in orbit. What appeared to be a large collector, faintly resembling a mushroom, its under- surface was wide, in order to collect as much energy as possible from the beam that shot toward it, and was full of small energy cells, all of which must transfer the accumulated energy to a storage facility in the centre of the mechanised ‘mushroom’.
“This is showing that there is a collector,” Kathryn said, stating the obvious, “but our scans did not detect anything in the atmosphere when we entered orbit.”
“It’s showing there was a collector,” Gomez corrected for her, “don’t forget, the data is three hundred years old.”
“And no doubt in that time, the orbit of the collector would have decayed and burned up in the atmosphere long ago,” Kalschacht replied.
“But the facility still believes it is there; so is transferring its energy to it, as it would normally,” Broadhurst added.
“So what would happen to the beam of energy, now that the collector has burned up?” Kathryn asked, fearing the answer to her question.
“It would simply continue on its journey through space,” Kalschacht answered.
“Possibly hitting the Copernicus in the process?” It was the answer Kathryn had most feared. The realisation of the enormity of what had just happened hit all of them. “We need to get a message to the ship, see if they are okay up there.”
Kalschacht warned, “if a beam of that power has hit the Copernicus, the entire ship would be atomised within a split second, nothing could withstand it.”
The entire team exited the small control room and hurried back out onto the adjoining corridor, hurrying towards the elevator, it was easier going now as the lights were now fully lit, they could all see in front of them without having to resort to flashlights. Even though all the ceiling lights emitted was a soft, eerie, almost twilight like glow.
“Perhaps the inhabitants are sensitive to light,” Gomez offered as though reading Kathryn’s thoughts.
“Could be,” she replied breathily as she hurried.
They quickly made it to the end of the floor, and strangely enough, the elevator appeared right in front of them, fully operational. Inside there were several strange buttons within a panel near to the door. It consisted of a button for each floor, written in a form of roman numerals, although sharper as though each number was a weapon, like a dagger. There was a separate symbol, this was completely alien, none of them could understand it.
Using a process of elimination, they found that this symbol represented the surface, and so they pressed it.
The small elevator whipped them up to the surface at a speed of several hundred miles per hour, yet the occupants felt nothing, just the gentle sensation of the device picking up speed as it left off, together with a gentle deceleration as they closed with the main hatch itself.
They had to climb the few remaining steps to the entrance, and once back out to the howling winds of the surface, it was a struggle to stay on their feet.
Kathryn gingerly touched her wrist comm. as a powerful gust of wind buffeted her. “Jacobs to Copernicus, are you receiving?”
There was no answer.
“We’ll need to get to the shuttle and perform a scan to see if she is still in orbit!” Pryor suggested, shouting over the noise of the intense howling winds.
“Okay let’s go!”
It was only a short walk to where the shuttle was landed, but it felt like a trek battling against the prevailing winds. Strange we haven’t heard back from that corporal yet, Kathryn thought to herself.
They made it to the landing site, and she flipped open a small cover on the shuttle’s fuselage and pressed a control secreted within, slowly a side hatch opened, Kathryn gasped at what she saw, “my God!”
The reason they hadn’t heard back from Corporal Jankov was due to the fact that he was unconscious on the floor of the craft. His entire face horrifically burned, his nose none existent, just a mound of seared flesh, his lips nothing more than a cracked and scorched parody of a mouth. Worst of all his eyes had been completely burned out of their sockets, miraculously though, he was still breathing through that charred mouth of his.
Kathryn immediately rushed into action, tiptoeing past the corporal’s prone body and opened one of the overhead storage lockers onboard, picking out a large med-kit.
Being a fully trained triage nurse, meant Kathryn had experienced all manner of traumatic scenes like this throughout the Krenaran war, silently she cursed that she had to experience one more.
While Kathryn tended to the grievously wounded Jankov, she asked Kalschacht if he could get a message to the Copernicus, a far higher sense of urgency to her voice now that they had wounded; it was now an emergency.
Sergeant Rachthausen quietly helped her with his fallen number two. She was far too busy with her work to notice him much before, but now she realised that Rachthausen was immense. A big, broad, muscular, burly sergeant, although his blue eyes hinted at a gentleness that his quiet nature confirmed, it was slightly odd to find
