Giza’s storming hadn’t taken her far, so Rush walked to the mountain ledge she was pouting on and sat down. Giza tried very hard not to find it funny when Rush’s armored butt made a clanging noise as he sat down, and failed.

  “I’m sorry,” Rush said.

  “Did Liam tell you to say that?”

  “Yes.”

  Giza huffed and scooted away again.

  “You shouldn’t apologize just because someone told you to,” Giza said.

  “I agreed with him.”

  In a roundabout way, Rush’s defense worked. It was a good reminder to Giza that Rush was on a very different wavelength than she was.

  “You should’ve at least pounded on the door and told us you were alright,” Giza said.

  “I was focused on the task at hand,” Rush said. He looked down at the blank shell of his own helmet, and then focused on Giza’s pouting face. “I am...not used to working with people. Especially not people who care about me.”

  That made Giza start pouting for entirely different reasons.

  “Sorry. I definitely overreacted,” Giza said. “I should’ve figured you were just thinking a little differently.”

  “Okay.”

  As Giza took a last few deep breaths, Rush fiddled with his helmet. Giza watched him fiddle until she could bear his silence no longer.

  “We’re done apologizing now,” Giza said.

  “Oh. Good.”

  Rush put the helmet back on.

  “Do you want to keep exploring?”

  “I do.”

  “Do we need Eiffel and Jack? Where did they go?”

  “They- oh shit,” Giza said. “They went to go get the others to try and help!”

  She hopped to her feet and ran down the mountain to go unorganize the search party Eiffel and Jack had spent the past hour organizing. Luckily for Giza, Rush did not think about her lack of communication long enough to notice any hypocrisy.

  “Hello again, Rush,” Jack said, once he returned to the mountaintop. “Giza thought you were dead.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “I noticed,” Jack said. “Nice armor.”

  “Could use a bit of polish,” Eiffel said, as he tried and failed to spot his reflection on the metal shell.

  “It’d never last,” Giza said. “Come on, let’s get back to it.”

  She led the way back into the facility, and they rejoined Liam. Rush took his place back at the head of the group as he showed them the parts of the facility he had already explored.

  “There’s a few offices on either side, maybe some computer scrap,” Rush said. “That room has more deactivated drones. All the Kell Cells are overgrown, but there might be other useful material.”

  He pointed to the door he hadn’t gone through yet, the one leading deeper into the facility.

  “And then there’s that door. I haven’t gone through there yet.”

  “Well then I think we know our next step,” Liam said. “Let’s all take a step back and let Rush do his thing.”

  Eiffel happily returned to the hallway while Jack, Giza, and Liam stood in the doorway. Rush put his hand on another palm scanner and braced himself as the door slid open. He gazed into the unknown beyond, and found it continued to contain the unknown.

  “It’s dark.”

  “What?”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “It’s dark,” Rush repeated. “There’s no lights on in there.”

  “Well...does that suit not have a flashlight, or something?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a combat suit on a space station where the sun never sets,” Liam said. “Why would it have a flashlight?”

  “I’ve got a flashlight,” Jack grunted. Having a light source helped when doing some of the electrical work he’d been in charge of before Rush showed up. “One second.”

  Nothing had jumped out to kill Rush yet, so Jack assumed the coast was clear. He stepped up alongside Rush and shined his light into the newly-opened room. They found a few feet of hallway, and a wall of sheer black.

  “Woah.”

  Jack took a few steps forward to the end of the hallway, and found a dilapidated guardrail separating him from a pure black void. He resisted the urge to lean over and gaze into the abyss to see how deep it really was.

  “There’s a really big hole in here, guys.”

  “A big hole?”

  Liam, Giza, and Eiffel crowded onto the narrow walkway as well. Giza tried to lean over the edge, and Liam hooked a hand into her collar to pull her back.

  “Holes don’t have any scrap to sell,” Liam said.

  “Well, it does look like there’s a door over here,” Eiffel said. Jack turned the flashlight that direction, illuminating a single secured hatch. Further examination with the flashlight also revealed a console near the door. Recognizing his cue, Rush stepped up and held out a hand towards the console, and then stopped.

  “Rush?”

  “There’s no interface,” Rush said. “Not like the others. Just a button that says ‘Open’.”

  “Well, opening is what we want to do,” Giza said. “Hit it.”

  “If it functioned the same way as the other consoles, why would it be designed differently?” Rush said. “One second.”

  Rush put his palm on the flat metal, and let Elvis’s silver tendrils probe the device. The nanomachines retracted even faster than usual.

  “Elvis says this isn’t a digital system,” Rush said. “It’s analog. I’m not sure this is going to open the doors.”

  “Well, it’s going to open something,” Liam said. “Let’s just hit it anyway and see what opens up.”

  “I’m not sure we should,” Rush said. “Let me examine it a bit longer, maybe I can find out what it connects to.”

  “Come on, Rush, just open the doors,” Giza said. After a moment of examination, and a moment reflecting on how Giza had been mad at him earlier, Rush finally relented and hit the button. He slammed his palm down on the corroded yellow button, and felt a shiver through his spine. Then he felt a shiver through the ground.

  The floor beneath their feet shook, and the ancient railing started to hum loudly as loose components shook and vibrated. A bone-shaking grinding noise started to echo through the cavernous opening in front of them as the entire mountain shook.

  “What’d we do?”

  Eiffel’s question was punctuated by an earsplitting crack, and a sudden lance of light shot into the chasm of the darkness.

  “Oh shit.”

  A few shards of broken slag metal tumbled down from the newly formed crack in the ceiling. Maybe it was just the cacophony consuming the entire chamber, but no one heard them hit the bottom.

  “I think we opened the ceiling!”

  Under normal circumstances, the light and fresh air would’ve been a blessing. Unfortunately, the facility was still partially buried. There was about a ton of slag metal still on top of a ceiling that was now struggling to open.

  “Time to go,” Jack said. For once, he and Eiffel had the same thought, even if they weren’t quite on the same page. Eiffel was just a few pages ahead. He had already raced towards the door, only to find it closed and securely locked.

  “Rush!”

  Eiffel was unceremoniously shoved aside as Rush grabbed the door to no effect, then put his hand against it and repeated the process of extending Elvis’s silvery tendrils.

  “It’s sealed,” Rush said. “It’s on lockdown until the roof finishes opening.”

  “Goo in your brain tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s three-hundred years old, Rush,” Eiffel whined. “Push on it real hard, maybe it’ll break!”

  “It won’t.”

  A thunderous impact rang out as one of the boulders of falling metal slammed into a wall above them. Eiffel screamed and tried to press himself as flat against the door as he could as another boulder came down and knocked out a chunk of the walkway they had just been standing on. What was left of the railing came loose and went tumbling down into the seemingly infinite darkness.

  “Rush! Do something!”

  As the others started to scream, cower, or both, Rush examined his options. He had an ancient system trying to open for the first time in centuries, and a layer of slag metal rapidly coming to pieces on top of it. The door was sealed, and the only other possible exit was down a hole so deep the fall would almost certainly kill them all. Another boulder dropped down, and the roof above them shuddered. Rush did the math, and saw that the odds weren’t good.

  “Elvis, the energy redirection field from the drone can protect me from falling, yes?”

  “Yes, though I would not advise trying it,” Elvis said.

  “What about someone I was carrying?”

  “If you placed yourself perfectly between the other party and the ground, you could conceivably save one other person,” Elvis said. The field it projected was roughly human sized and human shaped. It didn’t cover enough area to absorb three entire body’s worth of kinetic energy.

  Rush took a step towards Giza, and then stood his ground. While the others trembled at every tremor, he stood frozen in place, never flinching at any of the earthshattering impacts. Fear helped nothing.

  The rain of metal continued uninterrupted for two minutes. Then the grinding slowly started to quiet, the boulders became pebbles, and the ground beneath their feet steadied once again. The door behind them came unsealed, and Eiffel all but toppled through it, followed shortly thereafter by Jack. Rush took a step the other direction. The ceiling had opened all the way, bringing the ceaseless daylight of Scrapworld into the empty chamber.

  The vast cavern shot downwards, so deep even the searing sunlight could not reach the bottom. Rush wasn’t focused on what was down there, and neither were Giza and Liam. Something much closer to the surface had caught their attention.

  On the far side of the open chasm, a wall of weaponry and armor stared at them with cold, lifeless eyes. Even though she knew it was inert and pilotless, Giza’s fists still tensed at the sight of the mecha.