Chapter 1
"Konnic, you're breaking- kzzkt ."
Nari sighed and tapped her earpiece. "Vakko, I'm getting voidsign here. I'm going in even if I don't have comms."
The voice over the comms crackled. "Well, Amaki's - kzzkt - able to - kzzkt - then. Get back - kzzkt - safe."
"Whatever you say, boss," Nari frowned, stepping further into the chamber.
Precursor ruins were dark, especially this far underground. She was entering a long hallway, the walls almost invisible, dimly reflecting her biolights with a faint magenta glow. Complex geometric patterns adorned the metallic surface; some artistic relic of a civilization long since vanished.
She glanced at her holo. As she unclasped her lower right hand, a screen materialized above her palm, glowing with a sonar-like display. Near the top of the screen, a few bright dots stood out starkly against the darkness, marking that some form of void was ahead. Probably crystals - those were the most common.
The nerian crept further into the hallway, scanning the environment for any potential danger. Precursor ruins were usually fairly safe, but the Precursors had sometimes decided an area needed additional protection. That protection that hadn't gone away alongside them, especially in deeper portions of a facility like this, shielded from the elements. She'd rather take things slow than get chopped up by lasers or something.
After a few minutes, she came across a bin in the middle of the hallway. Shining her flashlight over it revealed a myriad of dark crystals, shimmering with all colours of the rainbow, never able to settle on just one.
Void crystals; that's what she was really here for, at the end of the day. They had a slew of important applications throughout the galaxy, but nobody knew how to make them, so the only way to get them was by raiding Precursor ruins. They were so crucial to galactic infrastructure that even the Compact tolerated scaving; over the centuries, the practice had shifted into a legitimate industry, rather than just being for thrill-seekers looking for adventure.
Void crystals were hard to find in bulk. The eight crystals in this bin were actually quite an exciting find; they often came in groups of two or three. Nari took off her backpack and set it on the floor, then grabbed the crystals and loaded them in one at a time; they were fairly fragile, and she didn't want to risk dropping any. As she moved the crystals, the dots in her scanner stopped displaying in the direction of the bin; still, there was some sort of large signal further ahead.
Putting her backpack back on, she couldn't help but notice a small humming sound in the distance, the same direction as the signal. She shined her flashlight towards the noise, only to illuminate a downward-sloping ceiling; evidently, the source of it was a bit lower down.
Against her better judgement, Nari crept forward past the bin. Predictably, the ground began sloping downwards; she tried to dig her claws a bit into the metal in some sort of attempt to get more stable footing, to limited success. Still, despite feeling more than a little unsteady, she managed to shimmy her way downwards.
After a few minutes, the ground evened out. Before her was a somewhat small chamber, a few metres across on each side, with a strange device in the centre. A void conduit slashed through the ground, the dim rainbow glow of void rushing through it faintly illuminating the room. It pumped into a complex circular structure, its sides lined with abstract geometric shapes. Colourful lines of energy zipped around the interior circle, racing in curved patterns to mark the area within.
That explains the voidsign, I guess.
As she watched, the void energy in the object's interior began to spin faster and faster, and a scene materialized in the centre: a tranquil, overgrown Precursor ruin, illuminated by pale green sunbeams, blood-red foliage splitting through the metal and retaking the long-abandoned environment. Nari squinted; it didn't seem to be a two-dimensional image, and if she moved her head, things in the background moved in parallax, like she was peering through a window.
Is this a portal?
It sure seemed like one, but she'd never heard of any Precursor tech of that sort; the Slipways weren't instant like this. Slowly, she climbed the object; a brief stairway sloped upwards to the opening, and once she was in front of the centre, she reached out one of her wing-hands to touch the image.
It went right through.
By now, any doubts she had that this was a portal had long since evaporated. Her brain was running in overdrive, trying to come up with explanations for how this existed, and more surprisingly to her, how nobody had discovered it yet. It was definitely using void to distort spacetime like the Slipways did, but something this instant and direct was unheard of.
She'd promised Vakko that she'd be quick, and for a little while she contemplated turning back, bringing her spoils with her, and looking further into the portal another time. There was plenty more to harvest from this ruin, and this wouldn't be the last time she visited. Still, she knew in her heart that if she didn't at least step through, she'd regret it forever.
Fuck it.
Nari took one last look around at her surroundings, then turned forward and walked in.
The first thing she noticed was the gravity.
Genli was a pretty small planet, so the gravity there was noticeably lighter than the galactic standard. After stepping through the portal, Nari stumbled for a moment; it felt like she was significantly heavier, closer to her weight on Nexus. Evidently, she was on a different planet, which wasn't too surprising; the lush environment around her looked nothing like Genli.
Gathering her footing, she glanced around. The floor and walls were once again made of Precursor metal, black and glossy like she'd come to expect. Less normal was the extreme overgrowth of foliage; some of the panels of the metal had split apart, vines and brambles twisting through the gap. She'd never seen that happen to a Precursor structure before - even a plasma cutter had trouble getting through the metal sometimes, so that kind of damage being done by plants was surprising.
The portal was in a small room, similar to the Genli side, with an archway opening up into what seemed like a hallway. The opening below the arch was mostly obscured by a curtain of maroon leaves; she stepped forward to get a better look at what was beyond that veil, but suddenly stopped as she heard a noise behind her, like a machine powering down.
Nari glanced over her shoulder, and concern quickly overtook her as she saw the image of Genli tear apart and disappear. That didn't bode well. Still, the portal on Genli had been powered off until she approached it; maybe it only activated when someone was walking up to it?
She turned around and walked back towards the device, up its steps and right up to its aperture. Nothing happened.
Shit.
Growing increasingly worried, Nari gave the side of the portal a smack with a wing-arm, then another blow with both right arms. No dice.
The nerian furrowed her brow. What's wrong with this thing? Power?
Come to think of it, that might actually be the case - hadn't the one on Genli been powered by void? She stepped back down the stairs, and sure enough, there was a void conduit embedded in the floor, going up towards this portal too. A conspicuously empty void conduit.
Okay, two ways to go from here.
Nari's first idea in a situation like this would be to get into contact with her crew. If this planet had Net access somewhere, she'd be able to send a message and reach them pretty easily. They wouldn't even have to come pick her up; they could just reactivate the portal on the Genli side and she could walk back through.
Her second idea was to reactivate the portal on this side. Precursor ruins usually had a void source somewhere, which produced void that flowed through conduits to power whatever odd technology they had in the facility. She could follow the conduits back to their source and try to get it flowing again, and hopefully that'd get the portal back up and running.
She wasn't sure which approach would work better, but neither would be possible within this small room. With a frown, she turned away from the portal and stepped through the veil of leaves out into the hallway.
Nari quickly realized she'd wrongly assumed there was a hallway here.
The platform outside the portal room wasn't really a hall so much as a catwalk. She'd expected a symmetrical structure, with more rooms mirroring the one she'd been in. Instead, the ground dropped off into open air, the edge blocked off by a railing, with a stunning view of the megastructure she seemed to be in.
Usually, ruins were somewhat small structures; they sprawled out a fair bit, but for the most part, they were just outposts. There were a few exceptions, like the city-like structures of Orchid or the complexes on most of the homeworlds, but even those didn't compare to...this. She'd never seen anything like it, or even heard of anything like it.
Beyond the platform, a chasm spread off into the distance, walls of Precursor metal framing each side before curving rightward on the edge of the horizon. Far out, the roof and part of the outer wall had buckled in, shards of metal lining the floor as sunlight streamed through the opening, the atmosphere giving it a pale green hue. The shards looked small from this distance, but Nari could tell that was just perspective playing tricks - each of those pieces was probably larger than the platform she stood on.
On the ground far below was a dense jungle, red trees fighting for the scarce light peering into the structure. Given its haphazard nature, she reckoned the forest below hadn't actually been planted by the Precursors; it probably started growing after they vanished, and slowly took over the floor. There wasn't any sign left of what the Precursors had used the ground for - maybe they'd just left it as dirt.
Out in the distance, Nari could see dozens of other platforms spanning the gap between the walls of the chasm. Given that they all looked pretty much identical, she figured her platform was the same as them. Maybe this place was some kind of portal hub?
Regardless of its purpose, she knew she'd get lost if she tried to navigate this facility with her intuition alone. Opening her palm to activate her holo, she switched apps from her void locator to a 3D navigator. She had some gyroscopic equipment in her backpack which would track her movement and allow her to retrace her steps, like digital breadcrumbs.
Ideally, Nari wanted to reach the roof of the structure; unfortunately, she didn't have the slightest idea how. She usually packed a lot of rope, given that she dove into Precursor ruins for a living, but the nerian doubted she had enough to scale the walls of this facility. For now, she figured she'd just follow the void conduit back and see if she could find its source.
Taking a glance back at the portal room, and making one last mental note of what it looked like, Nari turned to the side and began to follow the conduit as it approached the inner wall.
She'd been walking for a while now.
This place was huge . Nari had surmised that already from the giant chasm she'd been in, but she hadn't really grasped the full scale of everything until now. It seemed that the full space within the inner wall of that chasm was utilized as a regular Precursor ruin, with its characteristic winding hallways and geometric sculptures. Obviously, it was the largest ruin she'd ever seen, but she wasn't even sure how much bigger it was than usual. Ten average ruins, maybe?
One implication of the size was that void sources were few and far between. Usually, ruins had just one, powering the rest of the facility via conduits stretching from that source. This ruin had challenged some of her notions about how these places were structured, but she figured that even if there was more than one source, there probably weren't more than five or so throughout the whole structure.
The end result of this was that she'd been wandering these halls for a few hours, and still hadn't found any void sources connected to her conduit. On the bright side, she had found more void crystals and other Precursor relics; her bag was getting pretty full.
Curiously, she'd noticed that this ruin seemed a lot more floral and decorative than most. Of course, a couple millennia after the Precursors vanished, the plants had run a little bit wild, and mostly escaped their planter boxes; still, there were planter boxes, which was surprising given that the Precursors usually prioritized function over form.
In fact, it seemed like she was currently in a garden. The hallways had opened up into a more open chamber, filled with large planters of wild red grass. Those planters were surrounded by walkways, some of which even had a few rectangular stools along them. Perhaps the Precursors used this room as a park, a nice spot to sit down and clear your mind.
The sides of the room were similarly tranquil; tiny waterfalls fell from pipes in the ceiling, landing in troughs of crystal-clear water, slowly draining at the bottom to feed back into the cycle all over again. It gave the room a sound like a brook in the woods, trading the usual sterility of a ruin for a much more peaceful atmosphere.
In the distance, Nari heard a faint buzz or rattle. Maybe there were insects in here too? That'd make sense, given the flora and moisture, but strangely, she hadn't noticed any animal life anywhere in the ruin. That wasn't enough to set off alarm bells yet, but it certainly put her on edge a bit - she didn't trust this place, halcyon as it may be.
Carefully, she followed the conduit through another doorway, opening into an even larger chamber. Where the past room had been lush and misty, this room felt cold and dusty; a few shrubs grew through the floor in the corner, but for the most part, it was just a dimly-lit room of Precursor metal. The floor of the room was arranged in a T shape, with her entrance in the middle. Ahead of her, a small stairway ramped upwards, and the raised floor in the rest of the room split off to the left and right, forming the top of the T.
The conduit ran up the stairs, so Nari did the same, jogging to the top and glancing down at where it went next. It split out to both sides of the room, but empty void conduits had arrows to mark the way they flowed, probably for situations just like this; she took a look and went to the right.
Nari continued forward to follow the conduit further. To her side, an additional stairway went upwards to a raised deck in the corner of the room. As she moved to pass it, she suddenly heard a loud whoosh and jumped back, startled. Quickly, she motioned to unholster her pistol, and turned to the side...
Only to be blindsided with a blurry blue shape directly to the head.