“The Cradle never made noises like that.” 595 mused, consigning a quick note and audio recording to her classified internal black box. A particularly violent judder forced her to rebalance her footing. “How are we doing in there, fellas?”

Saddam crunched over and took a handhold on the comms mast next to Dr Ngata, just as the soil underneath the stocky scientist gave way. “Woooaahhhh take it!” Ngata roared, rapidly sinking up to his armpits in the black earth. A deep, v-shaped landslide opened up underneath him, sending a massive stream of material clattering down the side of the valley. Dr Ngata disappeared briefly, until his suit lights came on halfway down the valleyside, still moving fast to the bottom. “Tai! What’s happening?!” Dr Wetherall called from the opposite side. A crackling storm of white noise was the only reply.

Saddam locked into position as the mast tottered precariously on the edge of the landslide, with no Dr Ngata holding it upright. Servos whined in the supersoldier’s suit as he held one of the support feet as well as the mast itself. “Pull it down and towards you from the other side, i don’t have this for long.” He said to Nirann and the lead scientist. He could already feel the ground weakening beneath his feet. “Where is Dr Ngata?” Dr Wetherall asked; his line of sight was almost entirely blocked by the bulky mast. “He’ll be alright, just focus on moving this back from the edge.” Saddam urged both of them.

“Athena, get eyes on Dr Ngata!” Thebes ordered. “Yes sir.” the sniper confirmed, just as the ground abruptly stopped shaking. For a few moments, the only things to be heard was grunting over the shared channel by the people wrestling with the mast, and the frightened whimpering on the Simrothians. Then, one more deafening [url=https://freesound.org/people/drzhnn/sounds/199939/]sound[/url] echoed around the valley, which 595 recorded, and a bright burst of light blinded 595’s night vision. She put her hands to her eyes while it adjusted. The Simrothians shoved their faces closer to the dirt.

When 595 took her hands away from her eyes after a couple of seconds, she was looking right at the source of light. Far away, a thin finger of white luminescence reached from the shoulder of a mountain, up into the dark sky. “Look.” She said, pointing to it. “There’s something over there, on that mountain. What's that at the source of the beam?” Gradually, the light dimmed until the surrounding mountain range was shrouded in gloom again, but the source was still clearly illuminated. 

“Looks like some kind of structure!” 595 commented excitedly, zooming in as far as she could with her implants. “That has [b]got[/b] to be what we came for.”