Hive Jefferson was dead. 

There was no other way that anyone who has spent the majority of their existence could describe what it was like to step into the empty hive city; While every hive had their areas that had been abandoned or fallen into ruin, there were always hums or the roars of distant machinery and humanity to remind the listener that they were never truly alone for better or worse.

There was no echo of distant machines or mulling crowds when the 8th Legion stepped over the threshold. The only noises they could hear were their own footsteps and the distant cries of neglected stone and metal as they finally gave out from centuries of neglect. 


Konrad found the place reminding him somewhat of the Ghosthive in Houston, but this place felt unnerving in a vastly different way: The Ghosthive had been unnerving due to being the home of predators that didn’t belong in a sane universe, but he couldn’t help but shake the feeling that they were old enough to have caused early humans to fear the dark.

Jefferson held the heavy air of somewhere in which something utterly horrific had taken place, but the source of that horror was much more mundane in origin. The solders of the Pan Pacific had decided to use the time that fortifying the 8th’s foothold had granted them to load up everything of value they could carry… and destroy everything they couldn’t in an act of scorched earth.

The extent of the damage was still being worked out. The environmental shielding had been shut off and sabotaged so that the hive was completely exposed to the radioactive, polluted environment that was the wastes outside the hive and the ventilation systems had been made to pump toxic fumes instead of air for an extended period of time. A different investigative force was making its way to the main reactor to see what its current status was; Early reports were promising, since the core still existed rather the be a massive, empty bubble of wreckage that could turn a man into charcoal from the inside out within seconds.

Konrad’s squad were tasked with investigating the current state of various water treatment and recycling plants throughout the hive. Truth be told, the report wasn’t promising so far. The two stations they had visited so far, there had been far less water in the system then their should have been for a hive of this size; The fact that there was still [i]something[/i] in the reservoirs suggested that the retreating solders had taken a considerable amount of it with them rather then there being a hole somewhere in the pipe system. 

Of cause, the putrid sludge that remained couldn’t really be called water anymore. Between the waste, toxic chems and what he could only assume were the corpses of the former water treatment staff, recycling it into something even remotely close to clean water was going to be a tall order… and if his dealings with the old water guild back home was anything to go by, he doubted that the new guild that would arise if Hive Jefferson was repopulated would honestly bother to remove the corpses before putting the swill back into circulation.

Still… it was possible that they hadn’t poisoned the stations further down the hive. Go down far enough and adding toxic chems to the water supply might actually make it [i]safer[/i] to drink after all.