The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Mango, Destructor Destructor, and NottaTank.
Operatives Victor and Thomas Bommel.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
Mark stood near the front of the automated maglev transport, his hands resting lightly on the metal railing as the train tore through the dense jungle at nearly three hundred kilometers per hour. Beneath the flatbed carriage, the superconducting electromagnetic coils hummed with a deep, resonant vibration that traveled up through the deck and into Mark's boots. The newly laid tracks floated seamlessly over the treacherous ravines and crushed foliage, an elevated example of human defiance cutting straight through the heart of the prehistoric wilderness.
It took barely two minutes to cross the eight-kilometer expanse from the city walls. As the transport began its rapid, calculated deceleration, the towering, jagged foothills of the northern mountain range loomed ahead. They were massive structures of dark basalt and ancient stone.
The maglev slid smoothly into the makeshift staging area just outside the primary excavation shafts. The moment the carriage locked into its magnetic mooring, the reality of the mining operation hit Mark like a physical wall.
The noise was a tangible entity, and even with the massive deep-core borers temporarily idling, the staging area was a chaotic symphony of humming generators, shouting miners, grinding treads, and the furious hiss of cooling vents trying to bleed off excess thermal energy.
But worse than the noise was the suffocating heat.
The moment Mark stepped off the carriage and moved toward the mouth of the central tunnel, a wave of stifling heat washed over him. The ambient temperature of the alien jungle was already brutal due to the humidity, but inside the rock face, combined with the trapped exhaust of the heavy industrial machinery, it was like stepping directly into the throat of a blast furnace. The air was thick, tasting heavily of vaporized coolant and pulverized basalt.
Mark sent a quick mental command to the pendant resting against his chest, and a soft, mechanical hiss echoed around him as the sleek, black plating of his armor materialized out of nowhere, weaving itself seamlessly over his body, sealing tightly at the collar as the helmet enclosed his head. Instantly, the oppressive heat vanished, replaced by the cool, regulated flow of his suit's internal climate control. His HUD flickered to life, overlaying the dusty, chaotic tunnel with tactical telemetry, thermal readouts, and a direct link to Marcos.
"I'm in the main tunnel," Mark announced, his armored boots crushing the slurry of mud and coolant beneath his feet. "Marcos, you on the line with me?"
"Unfortunately, Mark," Marcos's voice replied smoothly in his earpiece. His casually sarcastic tone was crystal clear despite the thick interference of everything around him. "I'm piggybacking on your suit's sensors to receive live vitals and environmental data. Looks like you're walking into an oven."
"Yeah, well, thank God for my armor," Mark muttered, keeping his voice confined to the suit's private comms.
He pushed deeper into the shaft. The tunnel was massive, a perfect forty-meter-wide cylinder carved directly into the bedrock. Lumen strips had been hastily bolted to the ceiling, casting flickering white light through the haze of settling rock dust.
After about three hundred meters of walking, he finally found the people he was looking for. Sarah and Mike were standing a safe distance back, their carbon-weave jumpsuits caked in a thick layer of grey grime, both of them drinking heavily from insulated canteens. Aurelia stood much closer to the rock face in her own Elite armor, a high-powered lumen-rod gripped tightly in her hand.
The automated boring machine had already been reversed on its massive treads, pulled back fifty yards from the end of the tunnel to clear the operational space. Its front face was ruined, and three of the primary cutting teeth were sheared off, the metal warped and blackened by localized friction heat.
"Sir," Aurelia said, stepping back and turning her lumen-rod toward the end of the shaft as Mark approached. "The area is secure, but the thermal radiation from the drill impact is still dissipating. Whatever it is we hit, the surface is completely unharmed."
Mark stepped past the Elite engineer, coming to a halt just three feet from the rock face.
It was exactly as she had described over the comms, but seeing it in person sent a creeping spike of adrenaline straight through Mark's nervous system. Embedded within the jagged, violently fractured basalt was a dark, matte grey metal, completely non-reflective surface that clearly didn't belong here. There were no scratches from the hardened drill bits, no heat scoring, or any signs of geological decay.
But carved deep into the metal were intricate, interlocking grooves. They were flawlessly geometric patterns that flowed across the surface with an almost hypnotic symmetry. It wasn't a random decoration, but actual words. Words that caused Mark's heart to hammer against his ribs and for his breath to be caught in his throat. He knew exactly what this was.
Memories he had begun to forget about due to the responsibilities of leading this colony suddenly clawed their way to the surface. All the time he spent with Anahrin on that desolate planet, the letters were all over the decaying factory, even Marcos's own code. These were, without a shred of doubt, Strathari letters.
No one else in humanity knew about the Strathari save for Mark and Marcos. The only two beings in the entire universe who held the memory of this empire.
Mark forced his breathing to steady. Aurelia was standing just a few feet behind him, and while he trusted the Elite engineer with his life since she and the rest of the Elites were bound by an absolute, unbreakable loyalty to him, he was acutely aware of Mike and Sarah huddled further back in the tunnel.
He didn't mind if his Elites knew the truth, but he couldn't show his shock right now. He didn't know if he was ready to share what he knew with the normal people of the colony. He couldn't let the civilians realize that he understood exactly what he was looking at, or how deeply it confused him to see it here.
"Sir?" Aurelia asked, noticing his absolute stillness. "Are you picking up any anomalous readings on your suit's sensors?"
"No," Mark said, turning just enough to acknowledge her. "Sensors are clean. But I don't like the look of this. If this is an artificial structure, there could be automated defense grids, and the thing could actually still be active, but since our scanners can't penetrate, we won't be able to know."
"My thoughts exactly," Aurelia agreed, her grip tightening on her magnetic rifle.
"I need to run a deep-packet diagnostic on this metal," Mark said. "Aurelia, take Mike and Sarah. Fall back to the staging area. Set up a hard perimeter and keep the civilians behind the line. I don't want anybody near this tunnel until I know exactly what we're dealing with."
"Sir, you shouldn't remain here alone," Aurelia protested, her mind instantly seeing the vulnerability. "If there is a hostile reaction-"
"If things go sideways, I have the armor, and I have Marcos monitoring my vitals," Mark cut her off, leaving no room for argument. "You're may be a super soldier, but you're also an engineer, Aurelia. I need you alive to continue defending and building the city, and I need those civilians secured. Now fall back, that's an order."
Aurelia hesitated for a fraction of a second, but obeyed her orders. "Understood, sir. We'll hold the staging area."
Mark stood perfectly still, his back to them, listening to the crunch of their boots as Aurelia escorted the two miners down the tunnel. He waited until they were completely out of earshot, until the only sound left in the shaft was the hiss of his own suit's climate control.
"Marcos," Mark whispered, his voice shaking slightly with the overwhelming weight of the discovery. "Tell me you're seeing this."
"I am seeing it, Mark," Marcos replied, his casual demeanor was replaced by a tone of reverence. "I matched the syntax the moment your optics focused on the carving. Those are Strathari letters."
Mark stepped closer, his armored fingers reaching out, hovering just millimeters from the ancient metal, genuinely afraid to actually touch it. "I don't understand, Marcos. This shouldn't be here. We shouldn't be finding this."
"The Strathari empire spanned hundreds of thousands of worlds, Mark," Marcos explained gently. "When Anahrin was compiling my foundational code, he embedded his own decryption matrices and his linguistic mastery into my cognitive architecture. That is the only reason I can read this. Without him, this would just be meaningless geometry to me."
"Read it to me," Mark commanded softly, tracing the outline of a glyph in the air. "What does the door say? And how old is this place?"
"Translating the exact syntax is complicated since their language relies heavily on multi-dimensional contextual concepts, essentially mathematical poetry, rather than linear grammar," Marcos cautioned, his processor working through the dead language. "However, the specific way these glyphs are angled and stamped into the metal is highly distinct. This specific dialect and carving method were exclusively utilized during the Strathari Expansionist Era."
Mark frowned beneath his visor. "Expansionist Era? Give me a timeline, Marcos. How long ago are we talking?"
"Well, the Expansionist Era was a period of aggressive, unfettered cosmic exploration for their species," Marcos stated. "It began approximately four hundred and twenty-one thousand, seven hundred and seventy-seven years ago, and it formally ended three hundred and fifty thousand and twelve years ago."
Mark staggered back half a step, staring up at the indestructible door. If Anahrin was around 2,500 years old 3 years ago, and had spent 274,792 years in a cryo-sleep, then that meant that he had been born around 277,295 years ago. Even at the end of the era, three hundred and fifty thousand years predated Anahrin's birth by tens of thousands of years.
"What the hell were they doing out here, Marcos?" Mark asked in genuine confusion. I mean, this is uncharted space. Why build a massive vault out here?"
"Remember, Mark, just because it's uncharted space for humans, it doesn't mean that it is for other races. Also, it's a damn red dwarf trinary system. I can't even put into place how much of an anomaly this place is for them to not be interested in it," Marcos said in a disappointed tone. "Anyways, during the Expansionist Era, the Strathari were not merely exploring the cosmos for resources, but also cataloging and experimenting. They were deeply fascinated by localized biology, which led to the seeding of worlds and the manipulation of DNA on a planetary scale."
Mark blinked, his mind flashing back to the events of the past 2 months. He thought about the massive wolves with sapient problem-solving skills and highly developed frontal lobes that Dr. Corven had mapped. The armored water buffalo that could flip a transport truck, and the raptors that hunted with coordinated, almost militaristic tactics.
"Marcos... I'm just spitballing here, but..." Mark started, his voice slow as the pieces began to align in his head. "The ecosystem outside our walls... the things we've been fighting... Is it possible they aren't just native aliens?"
"You are referring to the striking physiological similarities between the native fauna and extinct Earth species," Marcos said, following Mark's train of thought instantly.
"No, I- yeah, yes I am," Mark breathed, the realization chilling his blood. "Could this whole planet just be some giant, abandoned petri dish? A genetic laboratory?"
"Well, I'd call that theory the most statistically probable conclusion," Marcos confirmed. "The Strathari must have visited Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. They harvested genetic samples of early canines, bovines, and avian dinosaurs, and brought them here to this facility, where they altered them. And considering how such an advanced species, such as the Strathari, most likely possessed the technology to perfectly clone animals, they also engineered them to survive in this hyper-oxygenated, high-gravity environment. It's clear that Rubrion Prime isn't just a wild planet. It is a Strathari terrarium that has been running unchecked for nearly a quarter to half a million years."
Mark took a slow step back from the massive door, the weight of the truth pressing down on him. But it wasn't just the animals. As Mark stared at the ancient glyphs, the darkest, most profound secret Anahrin had ever shared with him on that dead desert planet echoed in his mind. His theory of humanity's true history.
He had already shared that humanity descended from the Strathari, likely a direct result of a group sent to Earth by the cataclysm he had caused. Humanity did not evolve from primates. That was simply a lie built on misinterpreted biology. When Mark pushed back, saying their closest relatives in the animal kingdom were monkeys, Anahrin stated that monkeys were likely the result of an intentional genetic experiment conducted by the Strathari, using a cocktail of Earth's indigenous DNA and their own. Because the Strathari had utilized their own genetics to build the primate line, modern human science had been completely misled by the high percentage of shared DNA, mistakenly identifying a creator-creation relationship as a linear evolutionary one.
This was the reason why humans appeared so similar to Earth's great apes while possessing cognitive traits, abstract reasoning, and highly developed frontal lobes that had absolutely no terrestrial precedent. The reason the "missing link" remained missing was because humanity had never discovered a Strathari corpse. Their remains either utilized a biological composition that either decayed entirely without fossilizing or existed on a frequency that human technology simply wasn't able to calibrate before Earth's destruction.
Thus, while humanity shared the most DNA with monkeys among Earth's known species, they shared an even deeper, undiscovered percentage with a race that came from the stars. Humanity was left as the only surviving "success" of the Strathari's attempt to restart their population with crippled technology, for which the primates were merely the rough draft.
As luck would have it, Mark hadn't crash-landed on a deserted, hostile rock. They had crashed into their creators' abandoned experiment.
Before Mark could process the overwhelming weight of things, his comms channel crackled to life.
"Commander Shephard," a voice said. It was Davis, a lieutenant from the Vanguard mercenaries, who was overseeing the secondary excavation shaft.
Because they needed massive amounts of lithium quickly, Aurelia had designed the mining operation to run multiple boring machines in parallel. Three massive tunnels were being carved into the mountain side by side, separated by sixty meters of solid rock, all working for maximum efficiency to increase their extraction yield.
"I'm here, Davis. Go ahead," Mark answered, forcing his voice to remain steady, pulling his attention away from the alien door.
"Sir, we're in Tunnel Two, running parallel to your position," Davis reported, his voice echoing slightly over the comms. "We just broke through the rock face, and the boring machine punched right through the basalt... but we didn't hit lithium."
"Let me guess, you hit another metal wall?" Mark asked with a sigh.
"No, sir. We actually hit nothing," Davis replied, sounding unnerved. "It's just an open void. We breached into some kind of massive underground cavern, and our scanners can't even find the back wall."
"Alright, hold your position, Davis. Do not enter that cavern," Mark ordered. "Pull your men back to the staging area and fall in with Aurelia to set up a hard perimeter. Nobody goes down Tunnel Two until I give the all-clear."
"Copy that, Sir. We'll be pulling back now," Davis confirmed, sounding relieved.
Mark turned away from the Strathari door and jogged back out into the staging area, moving quickly past the confused miners and Vanguard mercenaries, crossing the sixty meters to the entrance of Tunnel Two.
The secondary shaft was identical to the first, carved perfectly round and choked with dust and heat. Mark jogged past the parked, idling boring machine, reaching the end of the tunnel where the massive drill had simply punched a clean, jagged ten-meter hole straight through the mountain rock.
Beyond the breach, there was no solid stone. There was only absolute, consuming darkness. Mark switched his optics to a deep-penetrating thermal and night-vision composite as he stepped through the breach, leaving the mining tunnel behind.
The transition was a jarring assault on the senses. The oppressive, sweltering heat of the mining tunnel instantly vanished, replaced by an ambient temperature that plummeted near freezing. The air here was entirely still, devoid of any ozone and coolant smell, carrying instead the dry, metallic scent of undisturbed dust and ancient, stagnant time.
The bone-rattling roar of the industrial machinery outside was entirely muffled, swallowed by the sheer, cavernous scale of the space he had just entered. Mark's HUD fought to compose an image, the low-light sensors working overtime to pierce the gloom.
He was standing on a natural stone ledge overlooking an underground cavern of impossible, mind-bending proportions. It was a subterranean void so vast that Mark's high-powered helmet emitters couldn't even find the ceiling. The walls curved away into the pitch-black distance, smooth and glass-like, hinting that this cavern had not been formed by water or magma, but had been bored out by technology.
Thick dust fell slowly through the air, drifting like grey snow in the beams of his helmet lights. Every breath Mark took sounded deafening inside his helmet. Every micro-adjustment of his armor servos echoed like a gunshot in the hollow silence.
Mark's gaze cut down from the ledge, sweeping across the flat, perfectly leveled floor of the cavern basin roughly fifty feet below him.
"Mark," Marcos called. "Look down there. Ten o'clock."
Mark adjusted his gaze, his suit's optics magnifying the area.
Resting on the smooth, obsidian-like floor of the cavern were two massive objects.
At first glance, Mark's brain tried to categorize them as small spacecraft or fighters. They were roughly fifteen meters long, resting horizontally on the stone. But as his optics enhanced the image, the comparison fell apart.
There were no wings, thrusters, exhaust ports, or intakes. There were also no visible cockpits, glass, or viewports of any kind. They were flawlessly seamless, resembling elongated teardrops or jagged shards of polished black glass. The dark metal absorbed the light from his armor, reflecting nothing back.
"They look deliberately placed," Mark noted quietly, his eyes tracking the undisturbed dust around them. There were no impact craters, no shattered rock, no drag marks to suggest a crash. "Marcos, what am I looking at? Are these vehicles?"
"Even better," Marcos replied, and to Mark's surprise, the AI sounded almost entirely unbothered, his casual arrogance returning in full force. "I am currently running a deep-packet inspection on their localized electromagnetic emissions. They appear to be automated sentinels. Combat mechs, to use human terminology."
"Wait, you're already inside their systems?" Mark asked, finding a sloping ramp of natural stone and moving slowly down toward the cavern floor, his rail-pistol raised and tracking the shadows.
"Please, Mark," Marcos scoffed lightly, almost offended by the question. "I was coded by Anahrin, just one of the brightest minds his species ever produced. My foundational architecture is built on their logic. These machines are running on a decentralized combat matrix that hasn't seen a firmware update in hundreds of thousands of years. I sliced their primary firewall the moment your optics registered their chassis. Cracking their outer security layer was like taking candy from a mathematically impaired infant."
Mark reached the cavern floor, his boots making loud crunches against the ancient dust. He began to close the distance to the two objects. "If you're in, read their logs. Tell me why they're here."
"Their logs are heavily fragmented due to age, but their core directive remains intact," Marcos explained as Mark walked a cautious circle around the first structure. "They are designated as perimeter guardians, which most likely means that they were stationed here to protect whatever is behind that massive door you found in Tunnel One."
Up close, the sheer scale of the object was intimidating. It towered over Mark as a sleek, featureless monument to a civilization that had conquered the stars. There were no joints, panel lines, or rivets, as if it were a single, continuous piece of engineering perfection.
The atmosphere of the cavern felt subtly wrong, as if the space itself were waiting for an inevitable release.
"If they're guardians, why aren't they doing their job?" Mark asked, keeping his weapon trained on the seamless dark metal. "Well, I guess with however many years they've been here, they've probably exhausted all their-"
A sound that Mark felt in the marrow of his bones interrupted him. It was a deep, sub-audible hum, like the shifting of tectonic plates miles beneath the earth.
"Uh... Marcos," Mark whispered, putting his rail-pistol in his inventory and summoning out his railgun. "Tell me you're getting that."
"I am detecting a massive, instantaneous surge in quantum-electromagnetic energy," Marcos's voice replied, the casual arrogance instantly evaporating, replaced by genuine alarm. "Mark, their core hardware is booting up."
"I thought you said you sliced them! Shut them down!" Mark demanded, quickly taking a few steps back.
"I breached their linguistic and sensor layers, but I cannot shut down their power grid!" Marcos replied, his voice strained. "The damn awakening sequence isn't software-based! The moment Tunnel Two breached the cavern wall, it likely altered the atmospheric pressure and ambient temperature, triggering a mechanical failsafe. It's a hardware trigger, Mark! I- I can't fucking hack it!"
A thin line of dim, icy-blue light suddenly traced across the seamless surface of the first structure, flowing smoothly over the dark metal, branching into flawless geometric patterns that mirrored the glyphs outside the mountain.
Behind the first mech, the second one began tracing with identical blue light as the machine closest to Mark began to unfold in a solid, seamless metal that simply seemed to shear apart along invisible fault lines without any sound of grinding gears or hiss of hydraulics. The dark alloy separated without a whisper of friction, shifting, sliding, and reconfiguring over itself like the scales of a metallic serpent.
Mark took a couple more slow, deliberate steps backward, his weapon raised, and his breath catching in his throat.
The sleek, horizontal teardrop shape contorted, rising from the cavern floor in a slow and utterly terrifying display of advanced mechanics. Thick, multi-jointed limbs extended downward, planting massive, digitigrade metallic feet onto the stone. The main chassis elevated, twisting and locking into place to form a broad, heavily armored torso.
It rose into a towering bipedal mech, standing a staggering fifteen meters tall, easily double the height of the modified loader mechs they had been using.
It possessed no head, cockpit, or interface of any kind, and where a face or an optical sensor cluster should have been, there was only a smooth, sloping cowl of dark alloy, glowing with pulsing, geometric blue lines. The design was entirely alien and devoid of unnecessary detail. It was a weapon stripped down to its purest, most lethal geometry.
Seconds later, the second machine completed its identical, silent transformation, rising to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the first in the cavernous room. However, they did not immediately attack. Their movements were fluid as they turned their massive, faceless torsos, scanning the cavern.
A low, harmonic sound suddenly emitted from the machines, vibrating through the cold air and sounding like a choir of synthetic voices holding a single resonant note. The blue lines on their chassis flared brightly as they processed sensory data from their environment, and suddenly a grid of pale blue light erupted from the faceless cowl of the lead mech, washing over Mark in a geometric pattern. Mark felt a strange, tingling sensation deep in his muscles as the scanner penetrated his armor, peeling back the layers of his physical biology.
"Mark, they are performing a deep-tissue biometric handshake," Marcos warned rapidly. "They are reading your DNA signature at the cellular level! I am establishing a real-time translation feed directly into your HUD."
The harmonic humming shifted, glitching and stuttering as the ancient machines attempted to interface with the biological data they were reading. A voice ripped through the cavern, booming from the chassis of the mechs, letting out a series of harsh, guttural clicks and flowing, multi-tonal vowels.
"Zul'kash en'tari. Vok'nor keth," the distorted, booming voice declared.
Instantly, Marcos's synthesized voice overlaid the alien transmission in Mark's earpiece, translating the intent with flawless precision.
(Entity detected. Commencing analysis.)
Mark held his ground, his railgun aimed directly at the center mass of the closest machine while the mech's blue scanning grid pulsed faster. The light intensified as it hit the Strathari genes Anahrin had stitched into Mark's body to save his life. The machine physically flinched, its massive chassis taking a half-step backward in algorithmic confusion.
"Gen'tek Strathari," the booming voice continued, the words echoing off the vast walls. "Vos'kol ryn. Kael'thos... nul."
Marcos translated rapidly.
(Genetic match: Strathari. Sequence corrupted. Authorization... null.)
"Marcos," Mark whispered, panic finally bleeding into his voice as the blue lights on the mechs began to shift. "Please tell me these fucking things aren't going to shoot me!"
Before Mark could react, Marcos bypassed Mark's internal speakers entirely, hijacking the external acoustic amplifiers built into Mark's armor and broadcasting his own synthesized voice at maximum volume, speaking flawlessly in the harsh, guttural language of his creator.
"Xen'tar! Vora keth'ra!" Marcos's voice roared through the cavern.
(Halt!) Marcos translated in Mark's ear. (Acknowledge creator sequence!)
The towering mechs froze for a single second as the blue geometric lines tracing across their dark alloy chassis flickered, analyzing the perfect dialect. But the creator sequence Marcos had tried was based on Anahrin, and it wasn't like he was of royal blood or anything. The genetic code buried inside Mark's blood didn't carry the high-tier command privileges required to override the protocols of an ancient Expansionist-era black-site guardian. To the rigid, unyielding logic of a four-hundred-thousand-year-old security matrix, Mark wasn't a creator. He was an abomination.
The mech's lines shifted, bleeding from a cold, icy blue into a harsh, glaring red. The harmonic hum vibrating in the air sharpened into a high-pitched whine as capacitors charged.
"Kor'sari tek'vul," the mech declared, its voice dropping into a register that shook the dust from the cavern ceiling. "Keth'ra... xel."
Marcos's translation was immediate and terrifying.
(Override rejected. Contaminant... purge.)
Thick, segmented panels on the forearms of both mechs slid back flawlessly. From the dark recesses of their arms, massive, multi-barreled weapon systems deployed, locking into place with a series of sharp, metallic clicks that sounded like the cocking of a guillotine.
"Mark," Marcos's voice screamed over the private channel, stripped of its casual arrogance and ringing with pure, unadulterated panic. "Get the fuck out of there!"
But Mark had already spun on his heel and was running before Marcos even finished the sentence. "You didn't have to tell me, I'm pretty sure I got their message!"
He pumped every ounce of strength his legs could generate, his boots tearing chunks of stone out of the floor, quickly closing the distance to the entrance of Tunnel Two.
Behind him, the whine of the charging capacitors reached a deafening crescendo just as he threw himself through the jagged breach, diving headfirst into the stifling heat and darkness of the mining tunnel just as the air behind him ignited.
A low-power slug from the alien railgun ripped through the space where his torso had been a second prior. The shockwave of the projectile passing through the tunnel entrance shattered the rock face, blowing a massive crater into the basalt and sending a tidal wave of pulverized stone crashing over Mark's armored back.
---
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