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

joke or not. Hidden behind the tinted visor of his helmet, Price was impossible to gauge.

‘Let’s just hope there’s none of them still here to greet two unwelcome visitors. Or whoever it was that destroyed the Sidewinder. We’ll look around a little more and then go back up to the surface. I think it’s pretty clear that we aren’t going to be making first contact this afternoon.’

21

Samson’s locator was still refusing to give him a solid position, making him reluctant to venture too far away from where they had entered. From where he stood, he could see the bright beacon of hope that was the opening to daylight they had come in through. As soon as they lost sight of that, they would be completely in the dark. Literally. There was something primally terrifying about venturing into an alien darkness and leaving the light behind.

‘I wonder what this place was,’ Samson said. ‘An outpost, or a major city? I don’t think we’re going to find an answer to that with these torches. Think it’s safe to use the floods?’

He watched Price play with his datapad for a moment, then his faceless black helmet nodded. ‘My low-light isn’t powerful enough to work down here. If there is anything out there, it’s likely used to the dark, and it’ll know we’re here long before we know about it. I reckon the floods will give us an advantage, if we encounter anything.’

‘Fair point,’ Samson said. He hit a button on his wrist console, and the powerful lamps in the shoulder pieces of his suit lit up, casting a wide cone of light out in front of him. He didn’t worry about blinding the Marine, as his visor would instantly react to control the amount of light getting through.

Samson did a slow turn, taking in everything around him. The light reached three or four hundred meters with good intensity, and gave a shadowy hint as to what was beyond. It seemed they had come in at the side of a building’s external wall, and were standing in a plaza of some description. It was bone dry and there was no light, which meant no vegetation or rot. Other than some scattered piles of debris, which seemed to be from collapses from the shell that had formed over the city, everything looked fairly intact.

The first thing that struck Samson was how similar this place was to a human city. There were boulevards lined with tall buildings, plazas, walls, steps. Steps—he realised there was a lot to be learned about the beings that lived here from that, and he headed for them. One thing that struck him as odd was that none of the buildings seemed to have any windows, or anything that differentiated a wall from other features. The whole place was eerily empty. He could be forgiven for mistaking it for a human city, and the absence of any people, or activity of any sort, was haunting. He had to keep reminding himself that it must have been uninhabited for a long time. Centuries, at least. Perhaps millennia.

He got to the steps and knelt beside them. He brushed off a layer of the dust that seemed to cover everything, until he got down to the surface proper, which appeared to be made of the same compound as the wall he had scanned. It was difficult to tell, and he realised that style played a part, but each step looked a little higher than he would expect those in a human city to be. Nonetheless, it suggested to him that whatever had lived in this city had walked about on two legs, or an approximation of them, and that they weren’t all that different in height to the average human. These were questions that would be explored by people far more qualified than him, but he liked having a sense of what the beings who had lived here were like.

‘How’d you reckon the city got cocooned like this?’ Price said. ‘Seems very strange.’

Samson followed Price’s faceless gaze skyward, and recalled how smooth the underside of the ceiling had been when he was coming down and could still see it. It was the complete opposite of the rough, craggy surface. It looked as though it had formed on a bubble that had later burst. He realised that was exactly what had happened.

‘A force-field,’ Samson said. ‘They must have had some sort of force-field over the city that all the sand and clay settled on, before it eventually failed.’

Price directed his black visor at Samson. ‘Why make a force-field that’s not big enough for the buildings it’s covering? There are hundreds—thousands—of them poking through the top.’

Samson thought for a moment. ‘It must have been pressed down under all the weight, or maybe once its power started to fail it retracted before dying completely, leaving the hardened build-up intact.’

Price nodded in what Samson assumed to be a thoughtful fashion. They walked down the steps, and Samson continued to look around, searching for any of the clues he considered the norm to a civilisation—writing or decoration. Would it be the same as what he had seen on the metal artefact?

They wandered through a void of darkness, pierced only by the beams from their shoulder floodlights, until they came to what seemed to be a rotunda of some sort. Each step echoed out into the emptiness, dulled by the layer of dust that did indeed seem to be pervasive, occasionally falling from the ceiling like a dead drizzle on a dead city.

‘I wonder what all this was like when it was lived in,’ Samson said. ‘With light, and life.’

Price didn’t reply, but Samson wasn’t looking for an opinion. There was no way to speculate. Beyond the size of the steps, they’d seen nothing to indicate what the inhabitants had looked like, nor what they liked or were interested in. The city was the skeleton of a civilisation—a pencil sketch with none of the colours added. Perhaps there would be