Junebug watched in amazement as the door irised open before them. Inside was a strange swirling opalescence like the surface of a soap bubble but opaque to the eye. She looked dubiously at the holographic line that her helmet had projected as the limit of the shield. She moved forward cautiously while the Terrans hunkered down pointing weapons at the building, though what threat they thought would emerge from it she had no idea.

Reaching the projected limit of the shield she took a small ultraviolet marking beacon, a flat cylinder the size of her palm and tumbed it on before tossing it like a discus. The plastic unit bounced off the wall of the newly risen building and fell to the snow. A continual strobe of ultraviolet light pulsed from the unit, clearly visible to her helmet which was set to carrot such things.

“Looks like the tech shield is down entirely,” she called back to the Terrans and without another word stepped across the threshold. Absolutely nothing happened, whether temporarily or permanently, it seemed that the defences that had protected this place were down. She trudged the thirty meters to the wall and retrieved the beacon, turning it off and clipping it to her belt. The rest of the party was moving cautiously forward, even Sven who had more reason to fear technological disruption than the rest of them.

Junebug moved to the portal and unslung her Terran plasma rifle. Holding it by the grip like a vast pistol she slid it into the opalescent portal so that the rubberized eyepiece of the optical sight was on the outside but the end of the lens was on the inside. Rather than crouching down to look through the sight directly, she touched a button on the stock of the weapon that remoted the sight picture to her helmet. It was a technique which was occasionally useful for shooting from positions where you didn’t dare stick your head up, but more frequently used by command staff to view what their troopers were seeing. The sight picture opened in her helmet in a small window in the upper right corner.

“Whoa,” she breathed and stepped through the portal vanishing from sight.

Junebug stood at the edge of a vast city of bone white monoliths. At least her mind told her it was a city even though none of the ‘buildings’ had any recognisable function. The portal still shimmered behind her, set into a large lintel of the same cream white material. Here and there ancient and twisted trees coiled towards the sky in odd spiral shapes, their bark curiously rough in a place where everything was so smooth. The air above her head was filled with hundreds, or thousands of what appeared to be floating leaves of pale blue, though they bore no resemblance to the foliage of the trees and were completely independent of any kind of support.  The volume of space here couldn’t possibly fit into the entryway she had come through. Looking up she saw that the sky above was completely black, lacking any visible stars. 

Curiously she flicked her helmet selector to through its various modes, thermal revealed nothing other than that the place was of an unusually uniform 25.3 degrees but the return on the lidar was so chaotic and fragmented that the helmet display crashed back to regular viewing with a trailing stream of red error messages. The movements sensors too were going crazy. Although the blue leaves, or whatever they were, appeared stationary they must have been moving enough to trip the motion detection program. The atmosphere sensors reported breathable, if slightly too oxygen rich, air so she pulled off her helmet.

There was a slight movement behind her as one of the Terran commandos stepped halfway through the portal. The man, Rosenant she thought his name was, paused halfway through the portal, giving the distinct impression of being cut in half. He stuck his head back through the portal and then stepped fully through. A moment later York appeared, snowflakes still decorating his hair and an irritated expression on his face.

“Captain Cyckali, did it occur to you that the environment here might be animical to human life?” he asked acidly. Junebug shrugged her shoulders.

“The bunker wasn’t and nothing in the old records suggested humans and ancients had different metabolic requirements,” she said her smile hardening as she continued to speak. No doubt the Terrans had drones and other such equipment which they would have used before sending anyone through the doors.

“Besides you can fuck around on your own time, the sooner we are done with this the sooner my crew and I can be on our way.”