Chapter 2 - Death
Chapter 2
Date 31st Augsta â€" Evening
Location: Everonth Mountains Excavation Site
The sun was setting in a beautiful fashion on most clear evening along the mountains of Everonth. The sun had almost set, leaving a beautiful haze of red and oranges in the sky.
A car pulled up outside the Excavation Site which was a small area just outside the artefact which lay silent embedded into the mountain.
Lamps flickered from inside the tent where Remmy was still sat up working on the machine, her peered at it through his tired eyes and cursed himself for still not discovering the secret between making it work. However they had found something else that day which could have proved to be even more interesting...
In the centre of the Excavation Site there now laid a massive interestingly complex machine which appeared like a massive sphere made from a metal frame which complex, sharp looking spires that descended off it. The metal was impossible to analyse or even to break with current Terran technology, the scientists had found it on outside hull of the artefact, easily removed with cranes, it seemed to be somehow attached to artefact and broke off easily despite being made from a metal which nobody had ever seen before.
However the most interesting part of the sphere was in the centre, as contained within the centre was a teenaged girl who was bound to it by chains which kept her silent prison, she wore a mask, an ominous looking mask that had no eye holes or nose pieces. The girl was also of a race that nobody had ever seen before, she had no fur, no tail and her skin was a pale colour. Her hair however was long and red, like fire as she stayed perfectly inside the sphere.
Diamond took the cup of coffee on his side desk inside one of the tents as he read through some documents that had been discovered with the girl's prison. These documents had somehow corrupted every computer system within the radius of the Excavation Site to display words in Terra-Nova which was ancient language of Terra that had stopped being used over one hundred and fifty years ago. However attempts at system wiping had failed to get the message off the laptop computers and attempted to baffle the many scientists that have gathered.
Diamond himself worked as a Cryptologist and occasional engineer for Phoenix Grace Corporation, a large shipping corporation that employed millions of people to range in everything.
Diamond recalled a conversation that he had had with Remmy only a few hours after he arrived.
"You think you can fix that... thing? Di?" said Remmy, his eyes fixed on Diamond. Diamond looked back at the strange device that Remmy was working on, it looked like a larger version of a graphics card for a standard computer except that it was encased metal and the internal circuits were unlike anything he had ever seen before.
"Where did you find that?" asked Diamond in a calm voice.
"Well, we sorta found it lying around on a rock when we dug up that.. thing out there... when we confirmed it was from that thing... the "Valkyrie"
"Are you absolutely sure that artefact is the Valkyrie?" asked Diamond, picking up one of the many pieces of scavenged metal which lay inside Remmy's Engineering Tent.
"It matches the files we found at the Ruins!?" shouted Remmy, looking slightly annoyed at the fact that Diamond doubted his word... again.
They had never really seen completely eye-to-eye, Diamond played it safe and Remmy Scarlet was a known risk taker.
"Alright!" said Diamond, raising his voice slightly and giving Remmy a sharp look. "So what could this be then?"
Remmy also immediately calmed down whilst still looking at Diamond, he sat down in his chair that table with the long oblong "thing" which he picked up in one hand.
"It's an access key to get inside the Valkyrie"
"Oh really? I am not so sure"
"See, Di, you ALWAYS doubt me!" shouted Remmy again, getting up and almost looking like he was going to hit Diamond, he clenched his fists but then relaxed.
So now Diamond was sat in his own, tent on his own with only the sound of armed guards walking past his tent and the occasional rush wind to comfort him. He sighed at the incident, why did Remmy always lose his temper with him? Did he feel threatened?
Diamond pushed these thoughts to the back of his mind and decided to continue work at analysing the ancient code that had appeared on all the computer systems in the camp.
"Est, Rama, Kestra, argo, melth" he said to himself over and over again, he had directly translated the words hours ago but they still made no sense, almost like broken parts of a sentence.
"Kestra... Soul... Fall... Last... Contain..."
He ran these words through his head over and over again, assuming that "Kestra" was a person, he cross-referenced with all the 200 years of history since the Great Repression which wiped every persons memory, computer banks and left Terra a wasteland but still nothing. He ran his fingers through his main and took off his jacket, letting his wings stretch out.
"What could this mean?" he asked himself.
Outside the same fox scientist that had been talking to Remmy earlier was sat by the Girl's Prison Sphere and was trying to work on fixing his laptop. He preferred to work outside and as far away from Remmy as his could, he was refitting the hard drive on his laptop.
Suddenly he felt a strange sensation up his arm which seemed to act like a shooting pain up his arm and into his head. He winced.. clutching himself and too far away for others to see.
He got up afterwards, his expression was blank as he got up, ignoring the laptop complete and walked over to the armoury.
BANG!
A gunshot echoed in the mountainous region and then panic which people running about the place. Diamond got up in a hurry, forgetting to put on his jacket and ran out to where the gunshot had come from. A crowd was gathering outside of the tent where the shot had been fired from. He fought his way through the mound of people we were horrified or running away from it. He went inside the tent, quickly launching through the door and looking down at the floor, he could see Remmy.
"Oh no! Oh God no!" he thought to himself as Remmy was lying on the floor with a gunshot wound to his head and the device that he was working on was missing...