I backed up a couple of meters more before I stopped. Behind me, I could hear movement.

“Lauren!” Luna called out to me. I figured she was trying to get out of the rover to get to me.

“Luna, don’t. Do not move at all.” I commanded. “Nobody move. Not one finger.”

In the meantime, the blue light still shone brightly upon us. I tried to see where exactly it came from, but to me, it looked like it just directly came from the stone above. I couldn’t really see any kind of light fixture.

Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the light vanished again. But before I could do anything else, I could hear a voice, however, weirdly enough, the sound didn’t sound like it came from any direction, it was more like it was being projected right into my mind.

“Intelligent successor life sign detected. Opening the vault.” The voice was disembodied and sounded like multiple people were speaking at exactly the same time.

“What the fuck.” Blanchet commented. They had grabbed their head with their both hands. “Did anyone else hear people talk in French?”

“French? It was English for me.” Gunny replied.

“For me too.” Grayson nodded.

“Luna?” I looked at my girlfriend.

“For me, it was in my local dialect too.”

“I see…” I then looked back at the stone door behind me. It had just started to slide open, eerily silently.

The other squads had all trained their weapons on the door, they all looked incredibly confused as well.

“Stand down, everyone.” I commanded and signaled everyone to lower their weapons. “If whatever race built this wanted us dead, we probably would be already.” With the door almost completely open, it revealed a big hallway going down into the earth. Two parallel strips of blue at the ceiling light illuminating the inside.

“What do you want us to do, Commander?” One of my squad leaders asked.

“I’ll take squad Bravo with us while the rest holds up here.” I replied.

“You want us to go down there?” Grayson asked.

“Obviously, there’s not much to learn from up here, is there?”

“But… we could inspect whatever universal translator they have here…”

“Grayson…”

“Sorry Commander, I know, I’m just not very enthusiastic about going into an alien tunnel.”

“You were a lot less worried about heading into an enemy ship.”

“I know… but that was because you were kicking those alien’s asses…”

“You betcha.” Gunny gave Grayson a slap on the back.

“Let’s just head down and see what we can find.” I mounted back up on the rover and tapped Blanchet on the shoulder. “Your head’s fine, right? I can get someone else to drive.”

“It is, Commander. That stuff was just weird.”

“Alright.” I gave them two comforting taps on the shoulder and then looked at squad Bravo’s rover. “Bravo squad, you following?”

“Yes ma’am!” The entirety of squad bravo saluted me, after which Blanchet slowly turned the rover into the tunnel.

The other two squads setting up a defensive formation around the entrance.

“Now that the doors have opened, Ellie, can your scans see what’s inside?” I asked as we started going down the slope. It went on for so long that I really couldn’t see the end of the tunnel.

“No, Commander, something is blocking my sensors at the vault’s door. It must be some kind of shield that has been left up. I can however use the sensors that have been built into your suit to get a reading on the immediate surroundings. But so far I can’t detect anything.”

“Those lamps don’t have power flowing through them?” Grayson asked.

“Not that I can tell.” Ellie replied.

“Hmm, must be some kind of luminescent rock, then.”

“I don’t know.” Luna said. “Those lights weren’t on when the doors first started to open, they only started shining when the doors were about halfway open. So it at least needs some kind of mechanism.”

“Do you think it could be reflecting sunlight?” I propose.

“Maybe, but that would not explain the delay.”

“Hmmm.”

“Already the second mystery to be solved and we haven’t even started yet…” Grayson said. And he had the right of it. Whatever we’d find down here, it would hopefully give us answers, but it already had given us so many new questions and the only thing we’d done was open a door.

“Could we talk about the voice for a bit more?” Luna asked. “As we won’t be reaching the bottom of this tunnel for a while.”

“What part? That it could speak directly into our minds, that it spoke in our mother tongue, or what it actually said?” Grayson replied.

“Mainly that last part…” Luna looked at me.

“Intelligent successor life sign detected.” I quoted the strange voice.

“Yes.” Luna nodded. “More specifically about the successor part.”

“Mhmm.” Grayson nodded as well. “I had been thinking about that too. It strongly implies that we are dealing with some kind of precursor race.”

“Back in my youth, I played some games that had precursor races. They are races that came before but have somehow disappeared.” I said.

“I think I know a couple of those games too, Commander.” Blanchet added.

“That’d be a pretty basic explanation of it, but yes.” Grayson replied.

“I wonder if that race is directly responsible for what life in the galaxy is about. Because the word successor also implies that this is in some way planned. Especially since whatever opened the door was made to be able to be understood by anyone.”

“That they planted the seeds of human life, as our creators, and have then decided to just disappear?”

“Maybe they just thought that their time of existence had come and then decided to make an end of it, then ensuring that the galaxy still had some form of purpose after they left by putting us on a random planet.” Gunny said.

“That’s rather dark, Gunny.” I replied, but what I was personally more curious about is that Luna presumably also got that message in her head, meaning that if we got ‘seeded’ that that also would count for her race. And then, what about the Dokazuuk?

I thought about it for around ten minutes while Luna and Grayson had continued to debate about the existence of precursor races but I couldn’t really put everything in place without having more information.

“Commander.” Blanchet pulled me out of my thoughts. “I think I can see the end of the slope.”

“Hmm?” I turned my head towards the front of the rover, In the distance it did look like the blue light that had been accompanying us all this way down suddenly cut off and went in a different direction. “Can you slow her down a bit so we don’t accidentally end up dropping into a pitfall?”

“Yes, Commander.” Blanchet slowed down the rover, Bravo squad behind us did the same.

Both of our squads went really silent as we approached the end of the slope. Luckily, at the end of it we didn’t find a pitfall, but what looked to be the actual bottom of the facility. We ended up in an incredibly large domelike room, having entered from the only visible entrance. The blue lights had gone in opposite ways and were spiraling up the dome to light up the entire room for us. In the center of the room was a big round black pedestal or podium, but nothing really that looked like a power source for the force field around the planet.

“Stop the rover, Blanchet.” I said in a low voice. I had expected to hear an echo, but no such thing happened.

Blanchet did so without saying a word. The other squad stopped behind us.

“Can we dismount, Commander?” Grayson asked, his eyes were fixed on the black pedestal.

“Yeah, let’s go and see what it is.” I got out of the rover first and helped Luna and Grayson get out. Gunny and Blanchet stayed on the rover, while squad Bravo also dismounted and started spreading out around our vehicles.

Grayson, Luna, and I decided to go and take a closer look at the mysterious circle in front of us. When we approached the same voice we’d heard earlier spoke into our minds.

“Opening Milky Way star map.” The blue lights that were illuminating the room went out, leaving us in complete darkness, at least for a couple of seconds until from the black pedestal in front of us, light shot out and started dotting floating lights around the room. It soon formed an all too familiar Milky Way.

“Adapting interface to fit successor experience.” The voice talked again. “Adaptation complete.”

“Ellie, are you here?” I asked.

“Yes, Commander. It appears you have found a more advanced version of me. Please don’t replace me in the near future?”

“More advanced? I would say you have a nicer personality.” I chuckled. “But that’s not what I was going to ask. Is this also some kind of computer program?” I looked at the stars around us.

“I am not sure, Commander. However, I can try to overlay the star map with ours.”

“Please do that.”

At that moment, some stars in the Milky Way started to flash green. -Now what the heck is this?-