Beknownst to very few, the guild was evolved from a religious sect that developed a technological twist and a business edge. This melding of apparently unrelated spheres would at first sound unprofitable. But in actuality it was this marriage alone that secured the guilds future. Centuries ago, when religious fanatics formed the first sect and diverted all of their energy into the science of technology, they truly evolved their work into a weird art. Unrivaled in their knowledge of the laws that bound the universe and all things within it. They wielded their power like a magic wand over the heads of the unorganized foundations. At one point they were referred to as 'technomancers' . Freelance witches organized under a union selling off bits of hard and software, monopolizing the profit to further their own inner goals. On the way back to her quarters, Kate thought about her conversation with the good doctor. She knew that there were problems with the dome. If the corporation had let the guild know what the purpose behind building the dome was, beyond creating an isolated environment, they would have been able to predict any sort of problems. The guild didn't know that it would be used for containing animals. As the sun first peered from behind snow peaked mountains, its heat pierced the blue waters of the lake that Sam Henton slept beneath. It was a research outpost. Skillfully placed under a body of water with sky lights that shimmered from morning sun light refracting through the surface nearly twenty feet above. Slowly he drew his head up. The outpost had been abandoned since the last solar summer. A real scientific laboratory, beakers and all. Sam stood up from the couch upon which he had slept. His back cracked as if each vertebrae individually popped in succession. Groggy, he sat back down. the suns light was warm, even through the waters its radiance penetrated. He drew breaths slowly , wishing for coffee. He went to on of the sinks. In the bottom, a small aquatic insect crawled slowly. As he washed it down the drain he wondered how it could get from its own environment, the lake, into this completely sealed off air filled lab.. Probably somewhere in the pipes a breach went unnoticed. And somehow the invertebrate got through with out the lake water flooding the entire freshwater system and the outpost with it. Insignificant. What was important now was survival. A glorious morning of bold deciduous and coniferous trees tall like the red-wood of earth dawned before him as he stepped out of the lab and into the wilderness of brightside. Bird like song filled the air which was already thick with the buzz and call of the worlds lesser fauna. A panorama drawn straight from paradise. But this eden held Sam Henton newly realized immaculate fear. As if pulled out of a nightmare, animals of great destructive power had somehow been wrought by this seemingly pure biosphere. They slaughtered Alex Nura When he and Sam first encountered them. Within the blueprint of this world, this brightside, this experiment was to finally prove that evolution, such as that which would spawn these monsters in such a short period of time, was virtually impossible. But the time for rationalization was long past. The morning sun was bright and he squinted his eyes. In the moment his eyes shut he remembered his trip on the solar sail. A space ship that rides across space at the speed of light drawn by a sail that harnesses solar radiation emitted from stars as propulsion. The sail itself resembles the arora-boreealice. When viewed from the depths of space it is a vision like no other. Then He thought of Alex, the look on his face. the pure terror in his eyes. But he knew he must not dwell on this. Now he had to move. He stalked the primordial jungle like a cat. As silently as possible yet sensitive to every sound, eyes always scanning the surroundings. His main goal was to avoid the beings that destroyed his former comrade. Although he tried to focus on the moment his mind wandered. Insects flew around him and the call of a muriade of birds and other animals echoed through the trees. He thought of irony. How much of a fools assumption it was for people to think they could shackle something like life, creation. He saw the look on those fools faces in the science stronghold when their pet project turned on them. It frightened him. He had tried to warn them, but rather than see the truth they ignored him, and began to silence him. His warning went unheeded. They made their mistakes. Mistakes that proved to be fatal , he wished he could of convinced them of the truth. They met their solid proof the night he escaped. Proof that displayed stealth, cunning, and brutality only to be matched by that of mankind itself The intruders struck without warning and without quarter. Ironic because he, the only person in the brig at the time, was the only one as far as he knew to go unnoticed and survive the massacre. It had been two days now since he had left science stronghold one. Although he had not eaten, he had been drinking clean water from fast flowing steams but the salt level in his body was dangerously low from sweating a great deal. His muscles would spasm from time to time causing him severe pain. It was during the hottest part of the day when he noticed the smell of something. A stench he couldn't quite place. It held a subtle familiarity to him, like something out of a dream. As he neared its source it grew more potent until he needed to tear some cloth from his shirt and cover his mouth and nose. He could see through the trees that there was something of a structure in the distance. As he came upon it he knew exactly what it was in the back of his mind but wouldn't counciously admit it until he saw it. The tree line broke and there he stood starring at what was once science stronghold two. There was noone around. The stench was very strong here. he neared the open door the ss2 and would have entered but the smell of what he now realized to be rotten human flesh was too overwhelming. he didn't need to go in to understand that the same fate had taken these people as the ones at ss1 the night he escaped. He looked at the ground , it was toiled with sub humanoid foot prints, this too he recognized. He sat down onto the earth in front of the door for a moment to think. It was hot and he was hungry, flies buzzed over his head into and out of the door on their way to eat and lay their eggs in the carcasses within the labs. he grew numb. he couldn't think, only stare up at the sky. After a few minuets like this he notices a sound. A sound of small motors whirring on and off. The sounds came from somewhere behind the stronghold. As he neared them he couldn't help but get excited. His hope was that he had lucked out and that the supply ship had arrived and was functioning. The supply ships were completely automated, run exclusively by robots. As he rounded a corner he heart soared, there was the ship and there were the robots unloading supplies into the hangar. Like ants they worked meticulously. So efficient. Sam looked at the robots like old friends had hadnt seen for too long. he wanted to embrace them. He walked up and past them right onto the ship. The loading drones were bulky robots, comparatively dumb. He was looking for a hacker droid. These metallic minds were not commonly used for espionage or stealing information as their name might imply. They were more interpreters and doctors to the electronic animal kingdom. When a system needed to communicate to another system to hacker would break the foreign systems language code. Or if a computer virus was encountered, the hacker would either ask the virus to leave or study the system and its ailments in order to force the virus to delete. In a strange bit of irony most of the hacker droids were easily hacked into by someone with a rudimentary knowledge of the field. If Sam could hack into the hackers systems he could use them to reprogram the entire ship and all of the robots within. This process would be necessary unless one could find a general remote. Just like the one Sam found on the wall in the entrance to the ship. A hand held device whose functions could be changed to operate or program most on the systems on the ship. One button and a small screen, the button turned the remote on and off, the screen displayed icons which could be scrolled through like a menu, to select which robot or system or group of robots you wanted to interact with. Meanwhile under the dome, Kate James worked from beneath a troubled brow. She knew there were problems with the dome but her knowledge was partial. The way things were run sometimes infuriated her. Such a lack of communication between the guild and the foundations could only invite mistakes in operation of the shield and its functions. She knew that the guild needed its privacy and she was raised to protect that privacy. But in her mind she thought how if she were in control things would be run differently. Her job at hand was testing liquid magma that ran through the planetoids core in underground rivers. Her tests would only be inconclusive because she could only check the lava underneath the dome. There was an entire half of these subterranean conduits that spanned the realm of brightside. Brightside being controlled exclusively by the foundations. Occasionally the magma would erupt onto the surface under the dome but the denizens here were mostly immune to the extreme temperatures produced by such an event. Kate's report to her superiors in the guild would be the same as the last; that the activity levels were mostly the same apart from an unusual peak in biological content. Silicon based microbes existing in white hot liquid magma. The irony was in the fact that these life forms were introduced into the artificial environment contained within the dome, and although a great deal of mutation and adaptation was to be expected, this was completely unheard of. But of course the living beings were a concern of the scientists employed by the foundation. Hers was but to maintain the threshold of the shield. And there fore her discovery would most likely go unnoticed. Sam Hentons Goal was to access the robots ships main computer. He Was looking for something, something that would aid in a search for something else. The hand remotes Biodisplay screen quickly it up. As Sam parussed the menus his hope was to find within the ships cargo or maintenance holds a device not unlike the one he used now. This new divice would allow him to trace a signal transmitted by a lost droid. After finding the item with the remote, the task of ordering one of the loading drones to fetch the signal tracer was a simple one. As he waited He broke open one of the unloaded cargo crates containing food rations. Within the five minuites it took his to fill his belly the Drone had returned with the tracer. After not eating for so many days the food sat in his stomach like lead. He sat down with his back against a create and starred into the afternoon sun. As the drones continued their work of taking cargo from the ships bay and stacking each box onto the loading platform it seemed ironic to Sam that there was noone to bring the creates into the complex, let alone anyone alive to use the contents. Sams eyes closed for a moment and he slept. He dreamt of bees and hornets. Bees are relatively peaceful animals, living their lives from day to day collecting pollen and making honey to feed their little grub babies. Hornets are somewhat closely related to bees but they live an altogether different life style. They are hunters. In some cases the hornets will prey upon the bees, thats what was happening in Sams dream.... It was a sunny day in a lush forest. More bight and beautiful than ever could truly happen, except in someone's dream of course. The blue of the sky was brilliant and surreal and the deep greens of the foliage complemented the sky and its perfect clouds like the colors were created just for that purpose. Within the lucious trees could be heard a slight buzzing, a happy buzzing. The sound of worker bees carrying the fruits of their labor into their perfect fortress, their hive. Pollen Caked around their legs as they flew into the dark warmth of their home. Workers passed guards at the entrance as if they knew each of them. Friends. As the day went by the bees worked happily, until one of the guards notices a subtle vibration that was not its own and not welcome. It was the reverberation of vibrating air beaten off of the wings of an approaching insect just out of range of sight, a hornet. Five times as large and twenty times as heavy, a solitary hornet scout was a behemoth compared to its brethren the bee. Clad in crimson and black chitonous armor a hornet can out run and out maneuver any bee, it can crush two bees within its mandibles at one time and its stinger venom, being ten times more deadly, is capable of continuos attacks, whereas a bee can sting but once in its life. The hornets desired food was bee larvae, bee babies. The hornet flew fast towards the bee hive, As the guard bee sent out a signal to its family to join in a warning song. Simultaneously the bees beat their wings against the hive walls, this means "stay away". But their warning was in vain. The Huge hornet landed on the outside of the hive and excreted a chemical marker. A scent that is detectable to other hornets from great distances and tells all that the scout had found what it was looking for. As the bees continued their warning song from within the hive the first of the savage horde joined its comrade on the outer shell of the hive, within seconds eleven bloodthirsty hornets had arrived. The bees wasted no more time. The song had ceased now another wing beat was echoed through out the hive the call for solders. As the Hornets neared the hive entrance the solder bees came rushing out and an air battle ensued. The solders outnumbered the raiders four to one but they were desperately overpowered. The worker and drone bees still inside the hive began moving the tiny larvae and eggs into the innermost chamber of the hive. Here in the heart of their fortress the sounds of the battle were muffled but audible. Some of the guards joined their fellow bees in flight to try and force the attackers away. Although three of the hornets were on the forest floor torn to bits and lifeless the bees numbers were dwindling. As a vital last moves the solder bees began to sting the hornets. Hornets spun to the ground in death throws with two or three dying bees clinging to them, stinger still embedded into the monster hornets withering bodies. The bees were drawing towards turning the tides when the last of the remaining guards and solders thrust their stingers into one brutish opponent to pull it down. But there were still two hornets. One was missing one and a half legs and the other bore a bee thorax and stinger sticking out of its abdomen. The Hornets slowly walked into the hive there was only light here at the entrance. As they moved inward the temperature was noticeable greater. This was quite unfortunate for the hornets. Its is know that a hornet is greater in size than a bee, and that two hornets could very well kill all of the worker bees the drone bees and even the queen bee without the defense of their guards and solders. All in order to devour the helpless juveniles. What is only slightly less commonly known is that certain species of bee have developed alternate defenses, tactics of a sort. Bee know what hornets dont know, and what they know is that bees can survive at higher temperatures than hornets. But it would be impossible to create that amount of heat throughout, or even in a solitary chamber of the hive. The hornets drew deeper into the hive driven with bloodlust. The inner hive was a magnificent work of nature. Tunnels and halls sprang out high and low, they would surly find themselves lost if they could not smell their victims. Suddenly the worker and drone bees rushed upon the hornets who did their best to batter and sting the onslaught of bees. But the were too many, legions of bees clutched each hornet, as two bees were slain three would replace them. The formed great writhing balls of bees around each hornet until the hornet could no longer be seen. The bees did not bite the hornets nor did they sting. What they did was vibrate every muscle in their tiny bodies. Each one of them flexing and relaxing every muscle ten times a second. The temperature at the center of the piles of bee grew. The hornets struggled, biting and stinging in every direction. But the more frantically the threw about the more the heat grew. The bees continued to ball around the hornets and vibrate. The hornets each expired, in part due to their own struggling. As the bees relaxed and began to repair what damage had been done, a gentle rain shower began outside of the hive. The bees worked inside the hive meticulously. they disassembled the hornets into many, many tiny pieces. Although bee larvae feed on a main food staple of honey, an occasional change in diet can be quite beneficial. Sam Woke to the humming and buzzing of the robots finishing the unloading |
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sorry its not finished yet, I'll be adding more very soon |
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