Part IV

The flares reached the bottom and he was stunned. He peered out on a cityscape much larger than the scanners had picked up but what astonished him most was that almost every building was intact. The streets were clean and tidy and the statues that escorted them on each side looked as if they were made recently. Boutique windows sported fashion wares and vehicles stood parked at the pavement. It was almost as Victor expected to see people walking about, doing their daily business. He was hanging over a large building that must have been the water reservoir and he lowered himself down on its roof. He immediately started taking caps for the archives and his amazement bounced from a library building to something that looked like a theatre to a glowing object far in the distance. If there was light, there was a power source, he thought, and then there was probably someone who maintained that source.

His curiousness turned into shadowy caution; if somebody lived here they would already be aware of his presence, after all, his excavator were everything except noiseless. The roof buckled under his exo-rigg burdened weight and he thought it a good idea to secure the lift and move further into the habitat. He probably should have returned to the surface and brought down some security equipment but his curiousness got the better of him and he skulked, as quietly as a quarter of a ton equipped Tech-Lord could, down into the darkness.

The air was stale and Victor felt like a ghost when he stalked the dead streets. No dust covered the benches along the way and it seemed like the whole habitat where in some kind of stasis. The trees in the parks had not shed their leaves, instead they had a thin white film around them and he reached out with one of the maniple arms to pick one and study it but it was instantly crushed by the crude gripper. He tried to take other less fragile samples and many objects were made out of an odd looking metal and he stood for a while and considered a waste bin when something slid around the corner of a building behind him. Heavy duty, back mounted, light caster immediately illuminated the spot where he had heard something but to no avail. He primed the pneumatic geo-crusher in his tool arsenal and ran to meet whatever lurked around the bend.