Discovery (standard:science fiction, 1515 words) [6/8] show all parts
Author: Goreripper	Added: Dec 02 2000	Views/Reads: 2911/1755	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
The narrator arrives on Daktar to follow-up his colleague's amazing discoveries there... and finds even more amazing things.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

ancient beyond time, was second to none. When it gave at last, it was 
accompanied by a loud pop followed by an eerie sucking sound and a 
noisome odour which even infiltrated our biosuits. 

We had opened a tomb 100,000 years old, and what we were to discover
inside was to leave us aghast. 

Within, the darkness and silence was total. The floors were covered with
a layer of dust which had not been disturbed since whatever doom had 
befallen the place so long ago. The walls, floor and ceiling were 
smooth and had once been covered with textured tiles. Most of them had 
long since lost their adhesion and dropped to the floor in piles, 
choking the passageway as we moved along it, the lights in our helmets 
cutting swathes through the unsettling silence. Each of our footsteps 
sounded like loud reports; our voices when we spoke were like peals of 
thunder. The echoes were to haunt us for days afterward. We passed dark 
junctions where black, silent halls met and crossed, and several times 
we found locked and sealed doors in the walls on either side. This 
passage was most obviously a main artery however, for it was wider and 
higher than the others that met it, and we silently decided to continue 
to follow it, noting each intersection so that we could map this place 
in later exploration. 

After a distance of about a span, the corridor began to gently slope
upwards and ended at a wide and high antechamber, closed at the far end 
by a very large door. Unlike the other doors we had seen, many of which 
had been open to some degree, this one was thick and bulky and closed 
from top to bottom, giving the impression of being some kind of blast 
door that could prove to be difficult to get past. Judging by the 
distance we had traveled into the facility, Guillamo was of the opinion 
that the heart of the complex lay beyond this door, the nerve centre of 
our lost civilisation's settlement here. 

It was too late to seek another way through and with the number of
doorways and passages we had crossed en route to this spot, that search 
in itself could have lasted another day if we had attempted it on foot. 
One of our junior colleagues arranged for the stellar explorer to be 
moved closer to our location and we set up a temporary base in the 
antechamber, which was easily large enough to accommodate us. After 
building an electroplasma airlock in the access passage we were able to 
humidify the room and spend the night free of our suits while we made 
preparations to remove the blast door and examine the areas beyond. 

Meanwhile, a crew in the second stellar explorer had returned to orbit
and after pinpointing our location began mapping the complex from 
space, learning in only a short time that the cluster of domes we had 
seen represented a mere fraction of it. This was a virtual city that 
plunged under the hill for several spans and spread out in a wide 
radius, but their examination appeared to confirm that the area we were 
attempting to enter was the main building although the equipment was 
not sensitive enough to tell us what we would find there. 

The blast door proved difficult to penetrate and most of the next day
was spent in an effort to get through. When at last the thick iron 
portal had been breached, it revealed only another sealed door beyond, 
but this was similar to the others we had already seen elsewhere and we 
decided to tackle it after another night's rest. The next morning, we 
finally got inside. 

Before the last door was cut open, we dehumidified the antechamber and
returned the atmosphere to its natural state. We were not about to take 
the chance that anything beyond the sealed portal would be damaged by 
sudden exposure to a foreign atmosphere. With the preparations made, we 
had the last door open in a matter of minutes and stepped into a site 
which would soon account for almost 80 per cent of the archaeological 
treasures unearthed by the initial Discovery expedition. 

END OF PART SIX 


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