Eranin Pearl Ruins
04 Apr 2018Namita Pear
Goldstein asks us to remove the sentinels, or guard dogs as I've taken to calling them. They don't wake up unless they can sense something that, I assume, they think they can kill. I first learned that they inhabited the site at COL 173 S. DZ-D C13-2, 12 A, as I drove our Scarab into it after thinking the area dormant.
Now, CMDR James Barrett and I sit in our vehicles atop a small jagged peak about five hundred metres away. It offers an excellent sight, and as I offer to dash forward and wake the group up, Wade begs into my ear to calm down. He is, evidently, patched into the music I have playing in the cabin: the same records of Hutton Orbital Radio we gathered at Lyakhov Dock, and have been listening to all Easter weekend. The song that has just come on, however, was its first appearance the entire time we've been floating about in Guardian space. A smile creeps across my lips. I am a sucker for the classics, and Hutton occasionally graces me by blowing the dust off of a few pre-Third-World-War songs. I turn the volume up, divert the power from my shields to my engine, and throw the throttle forward. My copilot sighs and I can hear himself pour a glass of gin as I speed forward, hitting the boosters and flying into the 'teeth' of this Guardian site.
Oh, don't give us none of your aggravation--
We had it with your discipline!
Oh, Saturday night's alright for fighting--
Get a little action in!!
The laugh bounces out of my chest, stupid, as I see the next batch of guard dogs wake up. They always rise in patterns of four, and I count the amount of lock-ons my visualizer starts whining about. I turn the lock-on tone off. Blue fills the dust around me, and my SRV weaves between obelisks and flies up and over a hill.
With great satisfaction I hear Barrett, somewhere, exclaim, "Holy shit!" over our communication channels.
I fly the other way, towards our start, and feel the slaps of Guardian weaponry hitting my shields. Elton John makes my controls vibrate with the rhythm. The flurry halts and I decide to counter-attack, boosting over the group and dumping a few hundred rounds into the glowing top of a sentinel as they charge up for a coordinated missile strike. I swear that I crashed into one, proximity alert screaming just as I see the missile massacre appear on the visualizer. But my angle is too steep, and by the time any hit me, over half of the launch has lost me and they soar past to circle in desperation for a target.
We'll stop there. Every event afterwards consisted of the Professor marveling audibly at James' camera feed, or me working a little more sensibly, but with no less glee (such a perfect old-world song to play!) as I take proper cover and use the turret to fire in defilade. I'm rather ashamed to admit I allowed my new pal to take out three of the four hounds... but, well, this was his first encounter with them. I still lead in 'dead alien kills'.
We capped the night off by retiring to our respective ships. The Professor and I talked, while Wade made me my dinner, about the intricacies of our being here.
"You seem to know much about the Guardian sites," he flattered me with.
In reality, I don't. Most of the knowledge I helped the lovably puzzled Mr. Barrett with was from my own perusal of the Canonn archives, which I had wisely downloaded after my second visit to the Meene system. However, I can't help but feel like he has a point. I bring a lot of experience to this little group; they've only visited a single, unguarded ruins before, while I've reconnoitered quite a few to date and am even making my own conjectures.
Regardless of the progress I will enable the Professor to make, however, I still pride myself on my humility and humanitarianism. The stars are a rather inhospitable place, and none knows this better than James Barrett himself, with the recent loss of his friend. Having the knowledge that, should something even worse than his buddy Blasius' fate (whatever that may have been; he implied murder) threaten us, I can at least be the second chance for our wayward group. I hope to instill the same hope that the humble survivors of the USS Jim Davis gave me when I saved them all from that inhospitable, high-gravity little rock I had the serendipity to crash into. If I can rescue seven escape pods, I can rescue the lot of us!
Still, these mysterious structures cloud my mind. Why are they built where they are?
The compact ruins at COL 173 S. DZ-D C13-2 12 A are built into very uneven mountains... and as the data Wade and I have collected keeps coming together, we think less and less that it's by pure chance. They are constructed near the pole of the planet, a tidally-locked, mass-light, low-metal, non-volatile world. What advantage did they seek to build it there? And they surely could calculate the geographic pole, so why not place it there?
Then there's HIP 39768. The one I still need to ask him about.
A solar system full of stars, most of them cold. One blazing supergiant to orbit around.
And something eating them.
Oddly, it is all familiar to me, as if it were from an old dream, but I can't exactly remember...
