Straight to Steemit Novel: Sojourn: Chapter 8 - Machinations

Preamble

This is chapter number eight in my straight to Steemit Novel Project.

Past Entries
Chapter 1 - The Road.
Chapter 2 - The Evening Road.
Chapter 3 - The Roadside
Chapter 4 - The Hotel
Chapter 5 - Destination
Chapter 6 - The Cave
Chapter 7 - Discoveries

A new chapter will be added in six days time. The cover image may change from week to week.

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Chapter Eight – Machinations

Meredith’s figure was dwarfed by the stationary heat signature on the thermal camera’s screen. It was unclear why she had stopped dead in her tracks, because the heat signature wasn’t moving. She must have sensed something.

I caught up, and could feel why she had stopped. Heat radiated from the opening in the tunnel, and the temperature differential was noticeable. “Why are we...” Roger stopped. “Wow, That’s some heat.” He was looking over my shoulder at the thermal image. It was indistinct, a blob. The entire group had now gathered around the camera. The air temperature wasn’t unbearable; but in contrast to the coldness we had meandered through so far, it was warm. The air was humid, too.

“Let’s check it out,” I suggested, moving forwards. The fact that the blob of heat was not moving was a good sign. If it was, that would be bad, given the fact that when it first registered on the screen, it was about nine times wider than Meredith’s form.

I slowly moved forward, and rounded the corner to where the heat was emanating. Here, the shaft appeared to be finely crafted out from the Earth, and looked as though teams of men had worked at length to ensure the stone was ground down to a dull sheen. Light bounded around the tunnel. There, at the end; the heat source loomed.

Metal, polished to a fine sheen, arranged in rows angling off to precise angles. It was a massive construction, and did not appear to be held together with any traditional bolts or screws. “Looks like a radiator,” Roger stated; and it did; except it was about 3 metres tall, and there was no telling how far into the tunnel it burrowed. It created an impasse, blocking the way.

“Acting like a radiator too,” Meredith had approached, tapping the thermal imaging camera where the screen read 80C. “Wouldn’t want to touch it,” Violet warned, as Malcom stood there, bewildered by the rows and rows of fins that were precisely placed. “Radiators cool things,” I said… so then what is it cooling? “Then what is it cooling?” Roger had moved closer in a bid to see if anything was sitting near the heatsink. He didn’t get very far.

“Too hot.” The thermal camera confirmed that fact, and Violet chimed in “You’ll get burned severely if you touch it, that 80C is the ambient temperature around that thing, who knows what the actual temperature is on the surface.”

“Well, this can’t be a dead end,” Meredith looked confused, and a little sad; she brushed an errant lock of hair that had fallen out of the loose bun atop her head aside. “We haven’t found any traces of those that came before.” It was true, and the massive radiator wasn’t the sort of thing that you could bring down into a cave, even Ikea wouldn’t be able to effectively flat-pack the parts to get them through the narrow openings through which we have traversed to arrive at the current location.

I swapped cameras and took images of the radiator from a few angles, ensuring that I did not get too close. There was a mirage effect visible through the camera lens, which managed to distort the parallel, razor sharp metallic fins. There were no mechanical sounds, no fan, and no visible heat source, yet the heat sink appeared to be very efficient, with the warmth contained within the tunnel. Zooming in on the edges of the fins showed them to be of an aluminium like appearance, but it was impossible to say exactly what material they were constructed from.

In sections the fins were parallel, and in others, there were areas of circular extrusions, with geometric spirals radiating outward, more and more fins progressively smaller; until the material ended in a sharp, single point. The thermal camera had just enough resolution to allow me to discern that different parts of the device where different temperatures, and the outermost fins looked to be almost at the ambient temperature. It was a magnificent piece of engineering, but it held no answers.

I turned to catch up with the rest of the group. The heats source behind me, I could see that the corridor we had come down was a junction. To the left, where we had come from, and directly in front, more polished rock. There had to be some signs of something soon. “What would produce that much heat?” Malcom asked the group.

Roger offered a response, scratching the stubble on the side of his face as he did. “Energy.”

“Electricity, down here?” Meredith couldn’t comprehend.
“Not sure how anything would survive down here without any electricity.” Malcom was clearly a man not used to living without. “If it is electrical,” Violet guessed; “Then that means we’re going to encounter something intelligent.”

“Could they be human?” Meredith bit her lower lip, unsure of what we would encounter. I wanted to find whatever it was that made the device we had just encountered. It was massive, majestic, and seemed to be not the sort of thing that you would imagine a human mind could engineer. “We should find out soon.”

Roger perked up, thinking that something had appeared on the thermal camera. It hadn’t. “Let’s hope that whatever it is, it won’t be as large as that … thing.”

The rocks that created the passageway remained smooth, and featureless, almost having the appearance of a marble floor. The passageway meandered left, and right, and left again, like a road cutting its way through a forest on the edge of a valley. I had always wondered why roads were built the way in which they were in areas like that, and this passageway was no exception. It appeared that it was windy simply because who ever made it, liked things that were windy. It would have been far easier t tunnel in a straight line.

“This tunnel looks to have been created by who ever made that machine.” Violet seemed to read my thoughts. “It is definitely not natural in its texture.” She ran a hand along the wall, and it made the same sound you would expect from a hand running along a polished mirror. It squeaked. “Do ya think that whoever made the tunnel made it just big enough, or spacious?” Meredith stretched upward, and she wasn’t able to reach the ceiling of the space with her hand, “If I was making a tunnel, I wouldn’t waste time making it any bigger than what was required.”

“What if it was already that tall, and they just polished the rock?” Roger asked, as we navigated another bend. The ceiling lowered around the corner, but so did the floor, forming yet another downward slope. To the edges, there were more of the metal honeycomb grills, and none of them appeared to be warm according to the thermal camera.

“There’s no doubt this is manufactured,” I said, motioning towards the honeycomb grids in the stone, stopping to capture yet another image of the strange construction. Further down the tunnel, and the thermal camera was showing regular patches of heat ahead. There were cavities carved out of the ceiling from which light diffused, even though there was no discernible power source. The tunnel had transitioned to a hallway.

There were still no signs of life. At least it was no longer dark. The light that filtered through had a yellowish hue. “What is this place?” Violet spoke with a certain sense of wonder in her voice, even though the walls were still raw stone, and unfinished, the illumination made it feel like a place, a space that entities had constructed in order to feel as though it wasn’t underground.

Malcom announced a hypothesis: “Could be an underground vault, maybe it contains the treasures of an old society?” The glint in his eyes suggested a desired career path in documentary, not as the news anchor he had become.

There was a staircase leading up. “The vault entrance!” I joked. A handrail had been carved into the rock wall along side the stair case, causing a smooth, recessed space to catch one’s balance. It was uncomfortably low. There was no erosion on the polished staircase, and it ascended sharply. “Anything on the predator vision?” Malcom asked, pointing at the thermal camera. I angled it to the top of the staircase, and there did not appear to be anything of significance on the screen. “Nothing.” It only appeared that the air ahead, at the top of the stairs, was slightly warmer.

Roger began to climb the stairs, ascending two at a time. They were steep, and he placed his hands on his knees as he climbed. “Long way up,” he puffed, continuing his ascent. I started my climb up the stairs. It wasn’t easy work. The steps were narrow, and my feet were large; I could see why Roger was taking two steps at a time. I did three. I could hear Malcom wincing as he climbed, his ankle was probably still giving him some sort of grief.

Roger reached a landing and stopped. He was breathing heavily, and didn’t look prepared to make the further ascent up the remaining stair case. The others arrived, and for the first time, Roger was showing signs of flagging. “We need to rest.” Violet sat, back against the smooth wall. The landing we had decided to take a break on was fairly large, and the staircase had widened as it ascended. I sat by Violet’s side.

“What do you think we will find?” I asked.
“Rocks.”
“Anything else?”
“More rocks.”

Meredith had a worried look in her eyes. “I hope we find the people that came before us…”
Malcom’s exasperated voice puffed out a few words as he finally joined the group. “Do we know anything about the people that came before?”

“You already know the answer to that,” Meredith mumbled, her eyes downcast. She looked vulnerable, spent. “We know nothing.” Roger spat the words viciously. He had caught his breath. He was leaning against the wall, and for the first time, looked like a frail, old man.

Violet made no comment, but rose to her feet. She started climbing up the stairs, heading onward to whatever came next. Malcom wanted a rest, but we wouldn’t let him have one. “I need some time here guys.”

“You can catch up!” Meredith had switched back to beaming positivity, prancing up the stairs after Violet. Roger trudged upward. I stayed behind with Malcom. “What do you think we will find?” I asked him.

“Probably not dwarves, but maybe some sort of government experiment gone wrong. The things we’ve seen so far, the vastness of this place, and the way it has been unfolding so far… it can’t be something that we have no knowledge of. It has to be us.” The suggestion that there was something alien, or unknown in the facility still tickled my fancy. “Maybe there’s a whole city down here?” I suggested, before going back to the matter at hand.

“Do you think your ankle can hold up?”
“It has to,” He stated, putting on a strong face. He started the climb up the stairs and I followed. There was some excited murmuring coming from the top of the stairs from Violet and Meredith. It wasn’t until I took in the view at the top of the stairs that I saw what the murmuring was all about.

The stairs expanded into a plaza, and there were columns of rock arranged in a half circle, that formed a window to the vista that stretched below. There were elaborate staircases that lead off in numerous directions into what looked to be a small town of about fifty to sixty residences carved out of the very Earth. The sizes were varied, and the architectural stylings were bathed in light from a glowing rooftop.

“Holy crap.” I exclaimed, taking the vision in.
“There’s a whole civilisation down there!” Meredith’s excitement was palatable.
“Town.” Violet corrected.
“It could be a civilisation,” Malcom mused. “It looks so … ancient, I don’t think it’s a living; breathing one though.”

Roger looked uncomfortable – open spaces mixed with narrow alleys seemed like a difficult tactical situation as far as he was concerned. “A Lot of ground to cover.” He was leaning against one of the columns, which eroded into a guardrail of stone, preventing any one from plummeting into the rocks below. You would need to take the stairs, no shortcuts. “What’s lighting the place so well?” Malcom asked as he finally made it to the top to join the group. “The ceiling,” I mused – but through what means? I had no idea.

The whole scene was bathed in rich light, the artificiality of which was not immediately obvious. It could have been a sundrenched morning in Eastern Europe, with a mixture of geometric, very precise structures, coupled with more decorative minarets.

“Shall we keep going?” Meredith asked, a sense of wonder and true adventure in her eyes. She looked like an excited child, eyes bright, and the whites of her teeth gleaming. Malcom seemed invigorated at her suggestion, and was quick to respond. “Yes, let’s go!”

“The staircase, spiraling down to the left.” I said. It wasn’t until we got closer that I noticed a unique feature around the railing, and it looked recent. Red fabric, coiled and tied around the railing. I moved to examine the fabric further, it wasn’t red fabric.

It was white, only red due to the fact that it seemed to be drenched in blood.

Violet pursed her lips, recognising the volume of blood as being a potentially fatal amount. The fact that there were no trails leading to the point suggested that the garment was placed there after the fact. There were also no trails on the staircase below. “There’s going to be trouble ahead…”

We all knew, and there was a somber mood that instantly cut through the positivity. “Too much blood,” Violet stated, moving to comfort Meredith, who had begun to sob at the scene. “No way to know if it is human,” Meredith had a stunned look on her face, and looked away from the garment, which seemed to stick to the rock.

We had found our first clue as to what happened to those that came before.