It was dark inside the bone-white structure. Dark enough to make the forest outside seem brightly lit. It was almost as if something was actively suppressing the light in order to make the passageway difficult to traverse. There were glowing blue conduits along the walls, but these did very little to actually illuminate anything. Their glow only seemed to extend a few inches off the wall. If that.

“Good grief, it’s dark in here,” Skinner observed as he fumbled with his rifle. A moment later, he switched on the flashlight mounted beneath the barrel. He pointed it around in the tunnel, the light reflecting back off the polished surfaces. Even the powerful flashlight didn’t penetrate far into the gloom. Skinner felt the hair on his neck stand up.

Syyla nodded wordlessly, kneeling near a thick cable on the floor. “Intentionally so,” she said. “Something is acting as a dampener. It’s a deterrent.”

“A deterrent?” Skinner asked, turning and pointing his rifle back towards the entrance. “Why?”

“To keep people out,” she said as she stood up. “Come on. Let’s follow this cable. It’s not part of the ruins. They likely had a base camp in here somewhere. Maybe we can find a functioning transmitter and call for help.”

“Or we could get ourselves shredded down and eaten alive by those monsters,” Skinner said. “And I don’t mean the bugs.”

“Gaphet are far worse than that giant thing,” Syyla said. “Trust me, I would know. Now are you going to stand there shaking or follow me? I could use the light.”

Skinner stayed behind her left shoulder, aiming the light ahead of them as they followed the path. It sloped downwards quite steeply after a few feet before branching into five different corridors. Syyla reexamined the cable before taking the third one from the left which led them down another sharp incline. The moment they reached the bottom, the dark gloom seemed to lift. It was still dark, but Skinner could see his flashlight penetrating much further into the darkness. It no longer seemed artificial.

“We seem to be out of the darkness,” Syyla said. “Or at least the worst of it. We can’t be far from their camp now.”

“How are you so sure there is a camp?” Skinner asked, looking around their current chamber.

Syyla examined a door on the far side of the room. The cable they’d been following led through a small aperture near the base and the door didn’t fit the rest of the architecture. In fact, it looked as if someone had installed much more recently. “They were mining things from a ruin they found in the forest,” she said. “It was an illegal operation and several people knew it. They had a camp here where things would be appraised before being sent back up to the main colony.”

“Ah,” Skinner said. “You seem to know a lot about this. How do I know you’re not involved in it?”

“Even if I was,” Syyla said as she turned on him, “it doesn’t matter now. We’re trying to survive – we can split ends about how I know things later.”

Skinner was about to debate it with her but decided against it. There was no sense in acting a fool just because he was the one holding the gun. “Fine. But I expect answers if we make it out of here alive. I’m still not completely sure I trust you.”

“Don’t think for a moment I trust you either,” Syyla said as she squatted down and examined a keypad in the center of the door.

“What are you doing?” Skinner asked, leaning over her shoulder to examine her handiwork.

“Picking a lock,” she said. “What’s it look like I’m doing?”

“Failing miserably,” Skinner said. “Even I can pick a lock faster than that. Here, let me have a go.”

Syyla shuffled aside as Skinner knelt down and examined the lock. It was fairly standard as far as digital locks went; a digital passcode would release a locking pin and allow them to open the door. The locking pin ran through the door itself to the other side where a horizontal bar was jamming their progress. “Hmm…” he said at last. “Yeah, these are a pain. I can get it, though. Just watch my back – without my CI I have no one watching my back.”

He carefully removed the faceplate from the lock, examining the wires inside. These locks looked tough, but in reality they were relatively simple. The locking pin was controlled by a series of electrical impulses that kept it extended. If those pulses were interrupted, the pin would retract and the door would unlock. Locks like these were generally cheap and unreliable; the equivalent of a simple padlock on a locker. With the right tools and knowhow even the worst of thieves could bypass it. It just proved that whoever was running the dig site was willing to cut corners wherever possible.

He wished he had Lumos to guide him—it made things much simpler—he’d done this before. Ironically, it was how he’d gotten paid enough to buy Lumos in the first place. He’d had to break into an old derelict and bring back some of the cargo, along with a pair of Taeski. The guy giving them the job had shortchanged them, so they’d had taken the liberties of ‘relieving’ him of some of his credits. The two reptilians had been more than happy to show Skinner how to bypass some of the simpler electronic locks. It was a skill he was most proud of.

It didn’t take him long to disengage the lock. A few disconnected wires resulted in the sound of the locking bar dropping to the ground on the opposite side. “There,” Skinner said as he stepped away and retrieved his rifle from Syyla. “See? I told you I could do it.”

“Indeed you did,” she said. “Well done. Shall we see what’s inside?”

She stepped around him and slowly pushed the door open, peering into the dark interior. It wasn’t as dark as the entrance of the ruins, but the pitch-black chamber beyond didn’t give much indication as to what lay within. Syyla disappeared into the opening without a word, and Skinner could hear her stumbling about in the darkness until suddenly a series of lights winked on. He’d been just about to step through the doorway and the sudden illumination blinded him for a moment. “Ha!” she said triumphantly. “I knew there was a camp in here somewhere!”

The interior of the dark room definitely fit the brief. Cots and crates of supplies were scattered around along with several rows of machinery. Skinner approached one of them, examining it cautiously until he realized what it was. “Aha! A CI terminal. Now we’re talking!”

He pulled out Lumos’s chip, removing the current CI from its housing and slipping her into it. He fiddled with the power supply for a moment, reconnecting the terminal to one of the main conduits before powering it up. “Lumos? You there?”

A circular panel the size of his head flickered a few times before the familiar image of his CI companion blinked into view. “Captain?” she asked, looking around the room for a moment before looking at him. “What is our status?”

“I should be asking you that,” he said. “I’m glad you’re unharmed.”

“It’s a CI. Of course it’s unharmed,” Syyla muttered as she looked over a Data Pad that had been abandoned on a cot.

“Shut up,” Skinner growled before turning back to Lumos. “Are all of your systems functioning?”

“Affirmative,” she said. “What do you need?”

“Can you use this terminal to scan the structure and tell us if there’s any equipment we can use to send a distress beacon?”

“One moment, Captain,” the Erythian hologram said, holding two of her three fingers to each temple. The holographic image flickered, changing from a dusky blue to a vibrant green as she scanned. A few seconds later she removed her fingers and shook her head. “This system is a closed loop, Captain,” she said, almost sounding irritated as her color returned to blue. “While I am able to read the maps of the facility, it is only due to the fact that this terminal is connected to a power source deeper down. If there is a transponder or communications array, it is currently off the network.”

“Beans. Just our luck,” Skinner said. “Okay, if you can read the facility maps, what can you tell us about it? Are there any rooms that could have housed communications equipment? Or a relay station?”

Lumos scanned the facility again. “Unclear,” she said at length. “There is an extremely large chamber at the bottom of the facility and most of the network cables appear to be leading there. It is difficult to tell, as two floors down the systems are locked.”

“Locked?” Syyla asked, looking over from her Data Pad. “What do you mean locked?”

Lumos stared long and hard at Syyla before turning back to him. “Captain?” she asked, looking at him for direction.

“Answer the lady,” Skinner said. “She’s in this too.”

Lumos nodded before addressing Syyla. “While a variety of systems appear to simply be non-powered or damaged, a large number of them on the lower floors were intentionally deactivated and locked. Unless my Captain were to place my chip in those terminals, I cannot reinstate them. They appear to have been locked to prevent access to the large chamber at the bottom, which does not bode well for its contents, given our current situation.”

Syyla tapped her chin, looking down at her Data Pad. “That must be why I can’t access too many of these files,” she said. “Most of these Pads were storing their information in a server system. If that’s offline—”

“And it appears to be,” Lumos said. “I can only detect a few systems in place. Two levels down there is an array of kinetic barriers which still have power and there are multiple defenses in place. When the generator in this room was activated, it also began a cascading power effect through the structure. Numerous rooms are showing power, but they are only sparsely connected to the network – likely due to scanning probes or taps. I believe they were trying to learn more about this structure even as they were looting it.”

“Can you tell what this structure is?” Syyla asked.

“No,” she said. “Although I can partially see the data matrices in the structure, I cannot ascertain their purpose. It is beyond my ability to compute.”

“How far?” Skinner asked.

“Considerably,” Lumos said peevishly. “Much of the data matrices are completely beyond my ability to even quantify, let alone decipher.”

“Can you make a copy of any information you can? Maybe we can get it analyzed later.”

“Already doing so, Captain,” Lumos said. “I have created a data packet and secured it for transport. Later on, provided we survive, we can possibly upload it to a more powerful processing station and attempt to decipher it.”

“Good idea,” he turned back to Syyla. “So what’s the plan. There’s no communications equipment here.”

“We don’t know that,” the Heil said. “There could be something in the lower levels. This is just a preliminary camp – possibly for guards. There are no facilities or food rations here. Something tells me this area isn’t their main one.”

“Yeah, but it sounds like they worked pretty hard to lock the lower levels down. I’m not so sure we should go in there.”

“Then stay here. Hand me your CI and I’ll go unlock them,” Syyla said, holding out her hand.

Skinner’s eyes narrowed. “Absolutely not!” he spat. “Lumos stays with me.”

“Don’t be stubborn,” Syyla said. “I could find the station and get us out of here!”

“Captain, if I may intrude?”

“Go ahead,” Skinner said. “What is it?”

“While your newfound Heil companion does make a point about possibly finding our way out or accessing a reliable means of communication, I do believe caution is to be maintained. The lower levels of this structure were, as you so poignantly put it, locked down intentionally. The network set up by the colony seems to indicate that they were in the middle of researching something earlier today when they had to lock it down.”

“That’s recent!” Skinner said. “Where is the crew then? There’s no way they made it back up to the colony that fast! Especially when… oh… oh no… oh nononono… I don’t like this at all.”

“What?” Syyla asked. “What is it?!”

“Those creatures that attacked the colony,” Skinner said, talking to Lumos. “They had to be made from similar constructs to the ones we saw on Schunston. This ruin shares a similar structure, doesn’t it?”

“Affirmative, Captain.”

“So the crew was probably working here when those things attacked. That’s what went wrong. But those things don’t look spacefaring – they don’t have ships or anything. So… how’d they get here?” he turned and looked at Syyla. “They didn’t. They were already on the planet. And I’ll bet you twenty credits that those stupid orb things were among the ‘artifacts’ these poor souls were digging up.”

“If that’s the case and they did sell them, many planets could be in danger,” Lumos said. “And I recommend finding a communication source immediately.”

“Yup. Sounds like that’s what we have to do,” Skinner said with a sigh. “Oh well. It was nice while it lasted. Let’s go, Syyla. Down the rabbit hole.” He pulled Lumos’s chip out of the socket and tucked it back into his suit. “Let’s just hope we don’t run into whatever they were trying to seal off down here.”