*KTHUNK*
He took his position as the rest of the AEGIS elite squad breached the immediate door.
Sweeping ahead, he moved forward, aiming ahead with practiced precision.
Comanche-Two moved silently in parallel, as he continued to push into
the room.The first real opposition appeared like a dimly back-lit shadow, running headlong into the group. Instincts took over and he felt his fingers tighten on the pulse rifle, compensating for the recoil as he dropped to a kneeling position. The target staggered backwards, falling with arms flailing wildly from the impact of the shot. Firing a second shot to ensure the target would not get up, he moved, still crouching, forward to a more defensible position.
Comanche-Three was engaged by the sounds of the weird twang that semi-silenced gunfire made. Waving his hand forward, he moved to support Comanche-Two and Three, taking only the briefest moment to take stock of the tactical situation beyond what the initial intelligence had been. The group had modified the building down to the support structures, and had done so without alerting anyone, or for that matter, utilizing traditional mechanical methods. There was an alien, inhuman quality to the interior, one that had him thinking about that old movie in which a group of marines faced that group of elliots. It wasn't a pleasant memory....the truth was, it had scared him when he had seen it as a young boy and the images of the bound-up colonist and exploding alien had stuck with him. He could actually hear his breathing now, felt his heart racing slightly, and he had to consciously work to ensure the anxiety remained suppressed.
Two more tangos emerged from the shadows, giving him just enough time to take aim before he fired. It was weird how they just seemed to rush forward, no consideration to their position or cover, or for weapons fire for that matter. Comanche-Three seemed frantic about something, and he zeroed in on the discussion, using the OP-SET to switch to infra-red. Comanche-Three was correct, that the group of tangos had no body temperature. Feeling a jolt of cold anxiety pass over him, he gripped the handle of his rifle, changing the rounds from 'stun' to 'live'.
His telemetry showed the downed Tangos, now slowly struggling up. The initial shock should have kept them from being able to move for hours, let alone get him. He crooked his head as he saw the first tangos on their feet. Breaking from his cover, he fired on the slow moving figures, taking no chances as the smart-system guided the shots directly to the heads. He had seen enough zombie movies to know firing anywhere else would be pointless. Moving room to room, he fired six salvos in total, stopping finally at the junction in the center. Meeting up with Comanches Two, Three, and Four, a barely audible check between confirmed the same on-site SoS data and that none had been touched, let alone bitten before continuing forward.
The central chamber actually dropped three stories, each floor emptied and dug up,with a precision that made everyone a little jittery. It wasn't just the host of 'others', it was the way in which the construction had been performed. He was by no means a mathematician, but he could understand that the chamber had been built to odd geometric angles. The descent downwards met little resistance, and within a few moments, they had descended past ground level into the sub-basement.
For a moment, he didn't quite know how to react to what he was seeing. A single dark obelisk stood in the center of a flat floor. Figures were bound nearby, in various conditions, while a single point of access, a small geodesic red oval seemed to pulse with some unholy ruby-colored light. In that moment, he felt the most afraid - not for what he was seeing, but for what he could not comprehend. Comanche-Three broke formation and ran screaming up the ramp, while the other two remained steadfast, if not immobile.
He thought he could hear it even through the OP-SET. For a moment, he had to check several times to make certain he was not picking up outside chatter. The Obelisk, or rather what the Obelisk represented seemed to be *whispering* to him. The language was unknown, but somehow he knew the intent, and for a moment, he felt himself listening.
He shook his head, feeling the heaviness of the room, and then focused to shut out all other distraction. Seeing that Comanche-Two and Four had become immobile, he raised his rifle and fired at the red oval. The piercing sound caused the OP-SET to overload, and it was minutes before he had fully recovered from the effect. He roughly became aware of other AEGIS agents shaking him, trying to get him to respond, and when he finally motioned them away, minutes had passed.
He took off his helmet and stood looking at the room. AEGIS had already begun to clean-up the site, treating those still alive, and working to dismantle whatever the Obelisk was. For a moment he simply stood watching everything, until his eyes caught something on the walls. Lighting the area up with a powerful halogen, he stopped completely and felt his body shiver again. Replacing the helmet, he manually patched into his signal comm, hoping the transmitter still functioned.
'Go' was the only word uttered from the other end of the comm.
'I think....I think you need to see this'
'How bad?'
'Uh....' he felt him pause, 'I think....real bad'
As he stared upwards, Fer-De-Lance knew he could not make sense of the imagery or scrawled equations against the wall. Somewhere in the years of training and education, he knew he recognized the complex glyphs as mathematics, but unlike he had ever seen before.
'Site Two cleared' Fer-De-Lance added, 'It's worse than the others'
