Willow, Gateside

The stairs led to more hallways, of course. With more blast doors. Except the doors were on the floor. The remains scattered across the floor, torn to pieces. Willow stepped over the pair of them, Rose and Xavier following close behind. Between Willow and the floating shields, she occupied the entire hall.

Willow took a second to catalog a second corpse. They didn’t have dog tags, so there would be no ID, but there should have been 8 people at this compound. That was 2 accounted for. Willow’s ping could only find living targets.

The hallway opened to recreational rooms — abandoned gyms, accumulating dust, a carpentry workshop, and even a full size swimming pool. All of them featured at least one corpse.

The bunker wound deep into the Earth — way too deep for a facility that had only been here a few years. Either the government was hiding advanced technology for construction or building the gate while it was closed, using the time dilation to compress the duration of the project Earth-side.

Probably both.

This deep into the bunker, most of the rooms transformed from living quarters and amenities to industrial workshops. The team swept the rooms one at a time, pushing in slowly.

Willow stepped into a room on the left side of the hallway, spear extended, shield up.

The room was as dead and quiet as the rest. Beyond a screen of reinforced glass, a little silver ring sat on a table. A control room sat on this side, panels and screens available to operate the dexterous mechanical arms.

Their group was quiet. Between the three of them, no one spoke, staring at the hole blown through the side of the control room, the metal bent outwards like there had been a contained explosion. Willow stepped through.

On the opposite side of the room from the control room were shelves. A living vine grew out of one of them, crawling around the wall of the room. Some shelves held items — withered and disintegrating plants, mostly, but also dimly colored spheres with ornate patterns and flourishes.

Others held scrolls. Willow pulled one off the shelf, opening it. It featured characters like kanji, but none that Willow recognized, alongside illustrations of what looked like a human nervous system, depicting arrows and written instructions.

“What language is this?” Willow asked, turning and presenting the scroll.

Rose took it, looking it over. Then she turned and stared at the hole in the wall before speaking. “Not mandarin. Unless it was some weird cypher language. Not Japanese, either… you don’t think a Confederation warlord sent someone here, do you?”

Xavier stepped beside her. “No…”

“A mystery for later. Do we have orders to recover anything?” Willow asked.

“No.” Xavier said, looking up and down the shelf. “I’d love to take the scrolls, though. You want the plants?”

“Do you think you can contain this for me, Rose?” Willow frowned at the one vine that was alive before cutting off a section at the end. “Definitely not putting it in the house.”

A sphere of dark, translucent energy formed between Rose’s hands, and Willow dropped the vine into it. The sphere sealed itself, floating up in the air and hovering behind Rose’s shoulder.

“We will have to take a trip to the garden later.” Rose said.

Willow was already circling around the table, below the giant control arms. The arms hung limp, like they were being used before suddenly being abandoned. Willow pulled the silver ring off the table, flipping it over in her hands. It was cold — more than just the way metal was when you touched it. It wasn’t like holding an ice cube, but it had a noticeable chill. Willow pocketed it.

“Looting government installations. Just like old times.” Xavier said, though he was pulling the scrolls free. He, too, passed them to Rose, and they joined a hovering sphere before they continued back down the halls. They passed several rooms full of stacked computer and server shelves, stopping once again at a room containing a single scroll. There were cameras above for imaging, with LCDs on the walls displaying images from the various manuals. It looked like they were trying to translate them.

Willow wondered how the government got their hands on these. She was sure she would find out soon enough. The group stopped through one more room, similar to the room that had contained the ring, but this one was empty, except for some paper waste on the floor. The arms featured more than just manipulation arms as well, notably, one arm appeared to be a flame thrower, while another ended in a metal block, as if for a hydraulic press. It was a room for destructive testing.

Finally, they stopped and swept into a monitoring room. They accounted 6 of the corpses so far. Rose swept in front of the computer.

“Think it records far enough back?” Rose asked.

“Definitely.” Xavier said.

“Now we just need a password.” Willow said, looking up at the locked screen. Rose was already on it, flipping over the keyboards and pulling a sticky note free.

“Every time.” Rose said, typing the password in. “Aw, no luck.”

“What’s the password?” Xavier asked.

“Let’s see… it’s Ilovemyjob13.” Rose paused. “Let’s try Ilovemyjob14. And… we’re in.”

The screensaver cleared on the monitors, showing cameras on every room in the facility. A 7th corpse was quickly accounted for. Rose reversed the recordings, moving backwards at x16.

“There.” Willow said, and the recordings paused.

There was a 9th person. He wasn’t any of the corpses — he was taller than any of them. And wider. Built like a professional athlete, and buck naked. Scars layered over his skin, inflamed skin covering almost every inch of his chest and stomach. Callouses concealed his fingers, his nails chipped and his face covered in a day’s worth of stubble. He had a hand extended.

The 7th scientist’s body was exploding in the frame, something blowing through his chest.

But there was something weird. There were three people in the room. Rose played it forward, and the three of them watched quietly.

A sword burst through the 7th scientist’s body, landing in the man’s outstretched hand. He turned, staring down at the 8th scientist with eyes glowing with fury.

She cowered on the ground, nearly bowing to him. He spoke a word in an unfamiliar language, a single, harsh syllable, but the scientist didn’t react. He turned away, prowling down the hallways, and we watched in mute horror as the man pounded through the doors, tearing apart the scientists he came in contact with. His fists basically made them explode. He was Awakened. But what was he doing here?

“Are they making artificial Awakened?” Xavier whispered.

“You’d think they’d have cloning vats and more food for that.” Willow replied, leaning forward as if she could get a better look by getting closer to the screens.

The man cleared the facility of every living scientist except for number 8, who still sat on the floor in mute shock, shaking and crying.

Then he turned back, ducking into the room that had held the ring, punching through the wall instead of using the door. He laughed, then stopped when he saw his ring. He stared at the shelves before grabbing and holding a few items — some of the more brightly colored spheres, which he popped into his mouth, a second ring that was gone when we arrived, and a handful of manuscripts.

We watched him on the cameras as he moved room to room, arriving at the second control room we had reached. Instead of being empty, a set of clothing was on the table and shelves.

The man got dressed, pulling clothes on slowly, taking his time. He cracked his neck, heading back to the room where the scientist cowered.

She leaned up, begging as he entered. He looked at her for a second, then shrugged, and swung his sword.

The air opened up.

“That’s a gate.” Xavier said. “He just… opened one. With a swing.”

“What the fuck?” Willow asked.

The man turned to the scientist, offering a hand. She stared up, confusion and fear clear in her body language, then reached out, tentatively taking his hand. Then they disappeared through a hole in the world. Rose rolled the tape backwards, showing the clip. The man, the artificial Awoken, the alien, whatever he was, sat on a table in the back of the room, hooked to dozens of monitoring devices.

And the 8th scientist was applying an electric shock to his chest.

They restarted his heart. And he came back to life.

The group rushed out of the room, down the hallway to the last room — the 7th corpse sat on the ground. Right next to the gate. Dying leaves and dirt scattered the room around the gate. It was smaller now, shrinking with time. It wasn’t circular and even like most gates — it looked like a wound, a fractured cut in reality, pulsing with power. You could follow the star on the other side, moving through the sky at a visible pace, the entire world dyed a hue of red through the gate, opening into a hill overlooking a towering forest.

Rose stepped to the side of the room, examining the wall while Willow looked over the medical equipment and corpse.

“Found where the sword came from.” Rose said. “Maybe it was stored in one of the other bunkers. We should rendezvous.”

Willow inspected the wall. There was a hole blown through it. The sword had moved through hundreds of feet of dirt and stone, brushing it all aside.

The group turned back, staring into the artificial gate.