Cath

The Cradle

“...Vreta? Guys?” 595 asked, floating a bit closer, regarding each of them with her deep, dark eyes in turn. She instinctively tried to access her implants, but found she couldn’t access anything. She couldn’t find a connection to the rig either. “What...happened? How did we get here?” She awkwardly signed to the group.

More of their kind swished frantically past, just as the Agent felt the ripples of what felt like an explosion wash through the reef. For a moment, everyone stopped, listening to the current. The fluctuations grew stronger, and some of the group further down the tunnel turned and fled back towards them.

“We should-” 595 began to sign when the entire reef shook violently with another explosion, much closer this time. A gigantic surge of superheated water crashed through one of the nearby passages, turning the whole area into a whirling maelstrom.

Overcome by aquatic fear, 595 turned tail and fled, but was instantly buffeted by the surge, tumbling into the sides of the tunnel and losing her bearings as all hell broke loose. 595 shouted out, her skin pulsing wildly.

Ravening Horde! A zombie game where players are the zombies!

I also like it! Neat idea. Will there be dice involved or anything like that? I know you mentioned points...

The Cradle

“Your old name no longer applies. You’re a faithful servant of the Institute now. An instrument through which we accomplish the will of the Cradle, together.” The Director-General continued, both hands clasped on the desk in front of him.

Like everywhere in the Institute, his office was almost completely dark. Thin blue chemical lights stapled the walls about halfway up, leading to the door. The main illumination though, came from the two sets of augmented eyes which stared unblinkingly at each other.

Two walls of the office consisted of giant windows, including behind where the Director-General was sat. The Cradle’s white fibrous material whirled against the glass like a howling blizzard.

Agent 595 stood up perfectly straight in front of the Director-General’s desk, arms neatly folded behind her back. She was the happiest and most excited she’d ever been, but maintained a neutral expression. Her tutorial was finally over! Now the real work could begin.

“How do you feel?” The DG asked, studying her closely.

“I feel ready to get started, sir.” 595 replied levelly.

“Good, because I have your first directive. Take two of the novitiates, capture 127, and bring him to me. He’s lost his way, and will not return to the Institute willingly. If he tries to escape, kill him. Think you can handle that?”

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Good. You’re dismissed.”

595 turned and walked halfway to the door.

“Oh, Agent?”

She turned and stood at attention again. “Yes, sir?”

“Don’t take too long - this is just the start.”

---

When 595 woke up, she was underwater. She tried to open her mouth and gasp for air, but realised she couldn’t do that. She thrashed around desperately, but could see no way out of the cave-like complex she was in. She began swimming quickly down one of the passages, only stopping when she realised she wasn’t drowning. In fact, she felt completely at ease in the water. She looked around.

She appeared to be in some kind of vast underwater reef. All kinds of vegetation and wildlife clung to the rock around the edge of the circular passage. There were a myriad of different pathways, and she found she knew where she was. She was in her residential colony, just a short swim from the city centre.

As her senses gradually acclimated to her surroundings, 595 became aware of a shrill warning sound coming from nearby. Something must be wrong - she recognised it as the evacuation alarm.

Suddenly, a tightly packed group of pale grey flesh exploded past her. 595 shouted out in surprise at the unfamiliar sensation of them calling for her to escape with them. She didn’t even know what they were, so wasn’t about to join them.

Then she sensed a familiar voice, and swivelled to look towards the caller.

Four long swimming creatures approached her. They looked like the kind of giant predatory cephalopods that’d been apparently hunted to extinction on most of the Human planets 595 had visited. She instinctively backed up, unwilling to get too close, until she realised who they were.

The Cradle

The Archive

“Intriguing! This could be an archive, cold-stored to maintain integrity through millions of boot ups.” Dr Zimmermann chattered excitedly, sifting through their findings so far. “Freyr, you seeing this?”

“Umm...yeah. Sorry.” Freyr muttered, massaging her eye sockets. She put her hands on the holo-map console and blinked hard a few times. It felt like she had a migraine coming on, which should’ve been impossible. She closed her eyes again, and a voice rang out as if they were right in front of her.

“Mom, what’s this one?” Amy looked up at her with wide eyes, a tiny finger pointing to the 3D fish projected from the holopad. A gentle wave lapped against Freyr’s toes, leaving a soft pillow of foam.

“No…” Freyr managed a hoarse whisper, otherwise transfixed in place. She couldn’t move.

---

595 studied the bright hole in the floor and bit her lip. She considered sending a virus in there to reconnoitre, but didn’t want to aggravate the Navigator anymore than they probably already had. ”So you are learning…” a familiar voice whispered part of a muffled sentence in her ear. She looked sharply around, but saw no one apart from the Rothian soldiers on her other side.

She shook her head. “Fuck it. Take my hand.” 595 holstered her main gun and grasped the rugged alloy of Vreta’s armoured palm, ignoring his protests. “Don’t let go.” She directed a brave smile straight at the spook’s visor and winked, then her visor slid back over her face. The red targeting triangle blinked on, and 595 began walking them carefully towards the edge of the hole. She was leaning towards it at a thirty degree angle, holding Vreta’s hand at full stretch behind her.

---

”That’s an Outreman Anglerfish.” Freyr heard herself say in her head. She felt a tear squeeze through the gap in her clenched eyelids. “They use a bioluminescent fin to lure other animals into biting range. They’re very similar to deep-sea predators on other worlds, and we’re not sure why.” Freyr stroked Amy’s head, brushing a lock of hair out of her eyes. “Eww, he’s ugly.” Amy stuck her tongue out, then laughed and looked up at her.

“It’s not real, it’s not real.” Freyr whispered, bent over the console. With a titanic effort, she raised a hand above her head. She patted herself on the back of the head, willing the seizure to end. She was vaguely aware of people talking, but couldn’t hear what they said.

---

On closer inspection, the liquid in the hatchway was more like a gel. It lapped against 595’s boot as she carefully planted it next to the edge. She checked her grip on Vreta was solid, then carefully leaned over to take a look.

The bright light initially dazzled her screen and sensors, then subsided to a bearable level. It illuminated the walls of the square hatchway as it plunged into the depths of the cube below. The gel seemed to go down for miles, ending in blackness at the bottom. She could see moving parts, like clockwork intersecting the tunnel.

“You’ve been selected from your peers to realise our true cause. Congratulations...Agent 595.” The Director-General smiled at her.

The Cradle

Freyr nodded. “An audible fossil…” She murmured, deep in thought. From the unfocused corners of her vision, she vaguely noticed the Rübezahl clamped to the underside of the cube like a tic. Information had begun streaming back to the rig, indexed and prioritised by the program on the fly.

“Is it possible those creatures on the audio file are having the same conversation we are, right now? Or could this just be another expression of the entity’s psyche. An imitation of life...” Freyr mused, looking up at the mission timer. Her mind was whirring away at top speed despite her outward tranquility.

---

595’s boot crumbled a fragment of masonry into dust. They advanced in as tight a formation as the labyrinth of destruction around them would allow. The Agent’s heart was pounding in her chest, but her breathing was measured and deliberate. Her suit’s internal sensory suite was going haywire, detecting threats and changes in temperature around every corner. In the end, she switched it off, focusing on her own eyes and ears.

Unfortunately, they were just as provocative. The closer they got to the shaft of light, the more footsteps 595 felt around her than those of the ground team. Snatches of conversation drove 595 to manually scan dozens of dark nooks, only to find nothing there after all.

The throne the Navigator had greeted them from before had been destroyed by a large chunk of the roof. They carefully crept around it, forced to skirt almost to the side wall. 595 gulped to wet her dry throat when she finally clamped eyes on the source of the light.

A pool of liquid, lapping at the stone edges of a narrow hatchway that headed into the depths of the floor below. The shaft of light shone right through the liquid and into the sky. The flying creatures above flew all around the light, avoiding its narrow blade.

The Cradle

595 paused, but didn’t turn to look at Vreta. She didn’t want him to see the conflicted expression on her face, so she stared into the shaft of light before them instead.

It would be a technical triumph to escort the ground team back to the rig with very little to show for their efforts. She could jumble the spectrometer, and return to her low-level sabotage of scientific data from on-board the mobile lab. Out here, she suspected they were in danger of making a discovery even bigger than in their last expedition.

And yet, she still couldn’t bring herself to stop now. She could feel the Navigator calling to her. Even though the thought filled her with cold dread, the Agent had to know what it was saying.

“You head back to the rig if you want - I’ll be right behind you. In and out, two minutes max.” 595 answered in the end. She looked at Vreta, her whole face tense, and nodded encouragingly. “It’s ok. I have my transit station. Just make sure you get the civilians out of here if something happens.”

With that, 595 took a deep breath and began edging forward again, her chin resting on the stock of her raised gun. She understood if the death-averse Rothians wanted to retreat, but for the first time in a long time wouldn’t have objected to a bit of company.

---

Freyr bristled when Marae interjected, but held her tongue. They only had hours left to make contact with this thing - they couldn’t afford to be cautious anymore. As much as she hated herself for coming to this conclusion, Freyr was willing to risk the lives of everyone on the ground if it meant saving billions. But she was also beginning to realise how the Rothians operated. Despite appearing fully invested, they still believed they could survive this unscathed.

She watched Vreta and 595 talking to each other while her head worked on the new information they’d just received. Someone had been there before them. “Let me hear the voice clip.” Freyr asked. Soon after, an exchange of guttural clicks and growls assaulted her ears. She understood none of it. “So, we aren’t the first to tread this path. What were they doing here?” She murmured to herself, eyes still glued to the screens.

The Cradle

“Maybe.” 595 shrugged quietly, next to Vreta. They stopped in front of a downed pillar’s splayed segments when he addressed the whole room. The Agent listened with everything she had, but could only pick up the howling wind and ten thousand wings fluttering overhead...

Wait! What was that? “You guys hear that?” 595 hissed. She moved past Eti, vaulting the pillar to utterly focus on the soundscape. She could have sworn she heard two people whispering in the back of the hall somewhere. “Come on out! We just want to talk to you!” The Agent called, visor slithering off her face. Her naked voice echoed around the chamber, and the sickly blue light of her eyes shimmered off the masonry close by.

She inched forward slowly, gun half-raised in front of her.

---

“Not yet.” Freyr soothed Marae in the hypnotic voice a mother assumes with their fussing baby. She never took her eyes away from a dual display of the Rubezahl’s trail through the mountain and video from the ground team. “They’re alright for a few more minutes. Just let me know if the field changes in any way. Dr Zimmermann, initiate contact with the underside of the cube, please.``

“Very good.”

“Marae, I’ve defragged some of the data from that hotspot you found. You’ll want to take a look at this.” Dr Wetherall crackled from below deck.

The Cradle

595 hauled her cargo up the stone stairs, pistol raised to cover a gap between two of the Rothian soldiers. The bottom edge of the spectrometer bashed against each step with a muffled *thud*. No one made a sound; each of them were completely focused on their surroundings.

The rig’s lighting didn’t penetrate the temple interior. Apart from a few long shadows in the doorway, the contents were bathed in blackness. The Agent let her Cradle-tech augments adjust to the changing conditions as they crept inside.

The place was a mess. The roof had been torn clean off, and great chunks of masonry had fallen into the grand rectangular hall. Most of the pillars on either side of the central causeway had collapsed, with the few that remained looming out of the dark like watchful sentinels.

“This will do.” 595 murmured, putting the spectrometer down on the floor a few metres inside the temple. She pulled her main gun off the magnetised holster on her chest and turned it on. Ever so slowly, she brought it up to her eye, scanning up where the walls used to meet the roof. “You sense anything here with us?” She asked over comms.

---

“Hmm, maybe. There is a strange energy profile in the back. Can you check it out?” Freyr replied, a consolatory ‘I want to talk to you about your interesting idea’’ finger raised to Artek. She then looked at the ceiling while addressing the whole rig. “Any chance we can clean this feedback up, guys? It’s all over the place.”

Freyr watched the grainy video coming in from Vreta and 595 for a few seconds, before turning back to Artek. She spoke quickly: “But why not use this energy in a more useful application? Why build a temple instead of, say, teleporting the first expedition right to it, rather than have them trek cross-country? Why did it even need to see them in-person anyway? It was likely speaking through that worm, couldn’t it have explained the situation there and then?”

The Cradle

595 awkwardly changed course in line with the rest of the team. Part of her wanted to investigate the patch of snow Marae had warned them of, just to see what happened. But she restrained herself, and tried to focus on the mission. She had been tasked with running interference on this expedition, but she could sense there was still so much for her to learn from the Navigator. This might be the last chance she got, before handing over to the Institute back on Outremer…

---

“Sorry, ‘traps’ might not be the best word for them in this context.” Freyr chuckled over comms, closely watching Rübezahl's progress on the holo-map at the same time. Their creation was trickling through the mountain structure, heading towards the underside of the cube - the part Freyr suspected wasn’t being protected. It had detected a couple of symbiotic organics inside the mountain, which were causing low-level vibrations they’d been querying. “There are just a few spots we can’t access that we’d best steer clear of for your safety.”

Freyr then switched to the rig-only channel, to avoid distracting the ground team. “Marae, can we isolate those dark pockets with your program, to avoid messing with them?” She looked at Artek, who had joined her on the bridge to work more closely on the alien structure. “Any thoughts on the architecture? It looks different from the recorded video, right? Damage excluded.”

---

The temple ruins loomed over them in the blackness. The roof had collapsed, and 595 saw piles of debris through the open entryway. “Woah…” She whispered, when she noticed the mess of vine-like growths winding their way over the masonry. The temple had lost its clean lines and classical shape, to become more...organic. They made their way toward the front steps. "Are you seeing this?"

Song Reference time

You want me to forget you?
Ok, forget me too
You tell me you hate me, baby
Yeah, I bet you do