Part II

Many years earlier

After three years in exile, Victor had almost run out of drinkable fluids and had been fortunate enough to find a source of water. The ground scanners had picked up an underground well in the middle of nowhere and he had immediately deployed the geo observation probes for further inspection. They had reported back with findings of an underground lake, several hundred meters below the surface. Strange as that had sounded to Victor, something even stranger would come to reveal itself. The cave lake was not a natural formation, but an artificial water reservoir, designed to hold volumes of water equal to the needs of a major habitat district. He had run it through the onboard archives but no records of any colonisation expeditions out in the deserts had been found and certainly not any of single reservoir constructions. He had spent the next twelve hours contemplating this in one of the dark, empty, cargo chambers, as he always had done when he had discovered something monumental. Planning on how to proceed was of utmost importance, and he wasn’t sure what this finding could mean. Usually he was satisfied with sitting behind a monitor to direct and observe but something pushed him this time. The feeling of that this was something rare, extraordinary intrigued him and it felt like a calling of sorts. He decided to descend himself down the tunnels the probes had dug out of the sand.

As he put on an exo-rigg, and primed its maniple arms and sensors, he felt very comfortable and safe. This was strange because the rigg itself weighed over a quarter ton, but it gave him the strength that was necessary to bear it and to carry out the heavy labour the deeps had in store for him. He thought back on the times when he had commanded vast legions of mine and factory workers, and how they had carried out the dangerous task he was about to perform on a daily basis. Shuttling down a two by four hundred meter long tunnel, with only a thin wall of melted rock as barrier between him and millions of tons of sand wasn’t a thing he was used to but he couldn’t ignore the calling that this unknown archaeological discovery whispered to him. What secrets of knowledge did it have in store, what history lay in its past? His curiousness outstripped his sense of danger and he secured himself in the elevator and descended down underground. After a hundred meters his fears started to leave him and return to the surface and his back-mounted lightcasters, as well as his eyes, stared down the tunnel.

The cage stopped and hanged a few metres down from the breach, in the caverns ceiling, where he was free to look in all directions. The cavity was apparently enormous as the lightcasters wasn’t enough to penetrate the darkness. He shot a few rocket flares and suddenly all was revealed to him.