Woods took a step forward her full lips tugging into a grin as she beheld her audience. It must have seemed like quite a group. A massive Hex being held back from extracting blood vengeance, an eeriely calm cyborg, a pilot who was sassing the most dangerous man on the ship, a girl barely out of here teens and a mercenary captain who had officially been charged with murdering five Terran commandos. 

She cleared her throat and touched the hologram with a fingertip. The map expanded to twice its original size. The hologram was so clear and perfect that Junebug thought she could see the oceans slowly moving in their tidal flows. Terran holographic tech, like everything else, was state of the art. The world had three continents one of which was a polar plate. Two red dots blinked in steady rythym. 

“This,” she said in a clear melodious voice, “is Site Alpha.” Images, some from satellite, some from helmet cams populated in the air. It seemed to Junebug like they came from another lifetime but she recognised the lush tropical jungle of Saavran. There were other pictures, clearly taken after the fact with professional imaging equipment, showed a devastated forest and a vast, vaguely anthropomorphic ridgeline. Junebug shuddered, she had worked hard to put the strange golem thing that Neil had stopped from waking up out of her mind.

“Even after three years of research we haven’t made much headway into understanding what happened,” Woods explained.


“The original caverns you penetrated appear to have vanished. Sonar and other remote sensing gear suggests that the ‘guardian’ as we are terming it is a solid undifferentiated mass,” Woods explained. Junebug’s lips compressed into a frown.

“We saw it move though it cant be solid,” she objected. Woods nodded at his.

“Yes we did, current theory from the experts is that it is some kind of super fluid solid that can harden itself when inactive. Whatever control chamber you penetrated must have been subsumed.” Taya leaned forward clearly rapt to be learning about an adventure that had occured before she had joined the crew.

“Which brings us to Site Beta,” Woods went on. The image rotated to bring up a red dot on the polar plate. More images appeared of strange cyclopean architecture thrusting up out of a sheet of perma frost.

“It only became active after you fucked up Alpha, and so far we haven't been able to get so much as a sensor drone within half a kilometer of the edge of it.”