Chapter 38: 38: The Underneath: Part One

When I had lived back on Earth one of the things I liked to spend my time in the evening doing was watching people exploring abandoned buildings. There was something strangely eerie about people walking through places that used to be filled with people and then suddenly wasn't.

Now that I was walking through an abandoned building myself, I felt quite a bit differently.

It was like I had been transported from my fun and powerful Sci-Fi adventure into the middle of a horror movie directed by Ridley Scott himself. The only difference was, we didn't have any movement sensors to tell us if we were in danger of something creeping up on us.

The chances of that were likely, too.

When we got into the interior of the warehouse we were met with the immediate stench of iron.

The floor was slick with blood, viscera and fragments of bones. Body parts, torn apart and savaged with teeth marks, littered the walkways. As we had walked through it all I'd felt bile rise up my throat, and I'd only just about managed to keep it down. None of us said a word to one another, we all knew what that meant.

Someone… No… Something had been here before us, and for all we knew they could still be down there

If there was someone, or something, still lurking underneath the warehouse complex then we had it on good authority that it would probably be yet another Null Space Invader. Neither Yr'Arl nor Fal could detect any other manna signatures.

From below the warehouse the automated clanking of boxes being moved about sounded distant and warped, like the steady thumping of footsteps drawing ever closer. The lighting strips above us flickered ominously as if they were ready and waiting to give out at any moment.

"Okay, Rin," I said as we walked through the winding corridors of the base. "I'm going to need you to direct us to the main office. The place wherever the head of the Clan here would have done most of his business. Maybe there'll be something there that will help us track down their headquarters or another base that might have something more usable in it."

Rin gave a shaky nod and started walking. I made sure to position myself slightly in front of her, if something were to come barrelling down the corridor toward us I'd want to keep the girl safe and out of harm's way.

Our footsteps echoed in the metal corridor, each one echoing throughout the rest of the structure, not quite loud enough to block out the steady dripping of the blood from the warehouse above.

<Why're you so jumpy all of a sudden, man?> BB said. His voice cut through the silence and almost made me jump out of my skin.

I was terrified because I'd already seen what a Null Space Invader could do, and that was when there was a fighter on my side who was so skilled and so powerful that I knew they'd be able to hold their own. Or at least, I thought they'd be able to hold their own. Then they'd thrown themselves off a bridge. I knew that the people with me were strong, with the exception of Rin, but none of us were strong to the level of Lara. Our only real hope was my new sword being able to pull something crazy off.

"What do you think happened here?" Fal asked, her hands raised in a defensive posture, ready and waiting to fire off an energy blast at a moments notice.

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"I think, whoever's been letting Null Space Invaders loose on this city, had more than one up their sleeve," I said. "I think we've got a growing infestation on our hands, and we're going to need to take them out… quickly."

"That would be the most logical conclusion," Yr'Arl cut in.

After a few more moments of walking Rin stopped in front of a door.

"This was the main office," she said. "They would run all of their business from here. If there's going to be any clues that we can find, then this is the room that they'll be in."

Fal approached the door slowly and opened it a crack, ready for anything that may have jumped out of the gloom. She crept in slowly with Yr'Arl and me at her back.

The room was empty.

I let out a breath that I hadn't realised I was holding.

"Okay," I said and pointed at what appeared to be a computer terminal on the desk in the centre of the room. "One of you get started on booting that thing up, I'm going to look through all of the cupboards and drawers for any hard copies that might give us an idea of where the main Clan Pren base actually is."

I was trying to stay hopeful as the three of us worked on our tasks, but something inside me knew that things probably weren't going to work out the way that we wanted them to. The Guard had already scoured this place before closing it up, and they hadn't found anything about the location of Clan Pren's super-secret hideout then. Why would our search now be any different?

The cupboards were bare of anything except dust and cobwebs. It was a bit odd to me that there would be spiders on a city like this, in the middle of a raging ocean. If everything had to be teleported down from orbit, how would spiders have made the trip?

<They… didn't,> BB said, his voice as worried as my thoughts were on the walk to the office.

If that was BB's idea of a joke, it didn't land.

<I'm not joking Jacob… spiders are unique to Earth, nothing else has evolved like them on any other charted planet. Whatever left that webbing… it isn't meant to be here.>

Before I could think up a witty retort to BB's teasing my thoughts were derailed by a scream.

Long, piercing, and clearly in pain.

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