The Alpha Protocol: Alpha Protocol Book 1 by Duncan Hamilton (free ebook reader for iphone .TXT) 📗

his suit and double-checked all his seals and contact surfaces. Everything looked to be in good order, so he joined Sergeant Price at the airlock.

Price was his ever-ominous presence in his black Marine combat armour. He had his carbine slung in his arms, rather than locked in its thigh holster. The sight of it out and ready to go was a little unnerving, another reminder of the potential danger of what they were about to do. The locals might be the most dangerous of the lot. If they’d been making a decent sideline in smuggling artefacts off the planet, they might not prove happy at the prospect of losing the source of income. Samson nodded to Price, put his helmet on, pressured up his suit, and set off down the landing ramp.

The farmstead was burned to the ground.

In his excitement at discovering the void with his sensor sweep, Samson hadn’t paid much attention to the farm—he had just assumed it would be as he expected. That was very definitely not the case.

‘What do you make of that?’ Samson said.

‘It’s burned down,’ Price said.

Behind the concealment of his helmet, Samson grimaced at the looseness of his question and his expectation that the galaxy-wise Price might have an answer for everything. Price took pity on him, however.

‘Can’t see anything that looks like weapons fire from here,’ Price said. ‘If it was an orbital bombardment, there’d be charred craters. If it was a ground assault, I’d expect the damage pattern to be different—things blown up and outward. This all looks like it just burned down. With that much space between the buildings, I’d say it was done deliberately.’

Samson smiled to himself—perhaps Price did indeed have all the answers.

‘Maybe the farmsteaders abandoned the place, and burned it down before they left.’

‘Maybe,’ Price said. ‘But construction materials are at a premium out here. More likely they’d have left it up to be dismantled and sold, if they were planning to move on.’

Another mystery, but this one wasn’t Samson’s to solve.

‘Let’s move toward the void, see if we can find our way to the spot where it looks like they were digging.’

The ground was dry, crunching underfoot, and Samson didn’t envy anyone trying to make a life for themselves in agriculture. It would take a lot of effort to get a good yield out of that ground. What made it worse was that the surface was uneven, undulating hollows and rises quickly giving way to larger, craggy features that jutted up from the ground. They reminded Samson of termite mounds, or a soft landscape that had been carved into unusual shapes by the wind.

Samson surveyed the crags as he walked. They looked ancient—features of the planet’s surface shaped over millennia. It was entirely possible that they were ancient, but to Samson’s surprise, his scan indicated they were definitely not natural.

He went closer to one of the ‘termite mounds’ and gave his scanner the opportunity for an in-depth investigation. There was a metallic, artificial structure beneath the crumbling mud shell. Samson looked up across the landscape. There were thousands of mounds. If every one of them was an artificial structure, this site would be as big as the largest of human cities.

It took a very long time to completely cover up a city—longer still for that covering to look as worn and weathered as the landscape here. Samson felt his skin tingle with the magnitude of it.

It hammered home to Samson how fleeting everything was. They might well be standing over the remnants of a civilisation that had existed here well before man had even discovered how to make fire. He remembered the old conspiracy theories of how the Nexus was actually an artificial construct. If so, might this have been the home of the race that built it? The possibilities seemed endless.

Caught up in his imagination, Samson forgot that Price was standing behind him with an expectant look on his face.

‘Whatever’s under here,’ Samson said, ‘someone built it. Something. Let’s get to the earthworks site.’

‘Don’t know what I was expecting, sir,’ Price said, ‘but this ain’t it.’

‘No,’ Samson said. ‘It’s not really what springs to mind when you say “ancient alien ruins”. Still, who knows what’s beneath us.’ He raised his wrist console and opened a communications channel.

‘Samson to Bounty.’

‘Go for Bounty.’ It sounded like Corporal Féng.

‘We’re going to explore for one hour,’ Samson said. ‘If we’re not back in two, your orders are to get back to the depot and wait for the Peterson.’

‘Acknowledged, Commander,’ Féng said.

‘We better move on carefully,’ Samson said. ‘The ground could be thin enough to fall through. The earthworks are this way.’

‘Over there, sir,’ Price said.

Samson followed the direction of Price’s pointed finger, and saw what appeared to be a hole in the muddy crust of one of the crags. Samson scanned the ground between him and the hole, as he had been doing since entering the termite mound area, but it appeared to be thick and solid enough to walk on. Content that he wasn’t going to fall into a bottomless abyss, he and Price made for the hole, which looked too small for a man to crawl through. He crouched next to it and peered inside. The torch on his wrist console didn’t penetrate very far into the darkness—which went on for a long way.

‘I can’t see anything,’ Samson said, ‘but that’s the void we detected on the other side. Wonder what’s in here.’

He looked up at Price, who shrugged.

‘Only one way to find out, sir.’

Samson nodded and started to carefully break away the edges of the hole. The mud was windblown and sun-baked, and he was able to pull off large chunks with little effort. It wasn’t long before the hole was large enough for him to get through. He put his head in and looked around, but it was still too dark to see anything. He couldn’t tell where the floor beneath him was, nor how far down the void went. Not knowing anything