Revelations

CHAPTER FOUR

The Beast’s Caves, near Archangel, Russia

It had taken two days to calm down the personnel in the camp. Paul spent most of that time keeping an eye on the beast and providing it with food three times a day.

Eventually, Boris had gotten sick of arguments against keeping the Beast. The weapons were now stowed because the creature was at least captured, if not dead as the base survivors wanted. So, when everyone was at a meal in the mess hall, and one of the research group started ranting about how it was too dangerous to keep captured and should just be killed, Boris decided to end the arguments of how dangerous it was by changing in front of everyone.

A Pricolici form was far more frightening than the Beast.

He was only slightly concerned that Bethany Anne might have something to say about that. Janna had gone over all the records he could gather from the group of scientists and the few soldiers left here. All of the former NVG seemed to share a cynicism about governments in general. After Boris had informed them of the nature of Konrad, and the organization they were formerly working for, he offered them a choice.

Work for him to work off the ‘debt’ they owed him for trying to wipe out an entire town or leave. About a dozen had left, after having their fate described to them in grisly detail if any information about the Beast was released

The most likely outcome, of course, was point-blank ridicule.

Everyone would assume they’d been drinking too much or taking drugs. If they did manage to get someone to believe what they were saying, then the best they could hope for would be a bullet to the back of the head once it reached Boris.

So he was revealing his form to people who already agreed to work for him. Strangely enough, after he’d shown them his other shape he could feel that there was less concern about the Beast and, oddly, less fear about him.

The vast majority of those remaining were scientists. That he could take a different form may have made them nervous, but it also made them incredibly curious. Boris was a window to the technologies that the mysterious TQB was making.

Note to self, Boris thought, changing in front of scientists brings its own new and annoying challenges.

The loyalty of the remaining soldiers was solid as a rock.

For them, Boris had done the harder task of capturing the beast rather than killing it. This showed that he was skilled and confident. Next, he insisted on training them in hand-to-hand combat for at least an hour a day.

For the soldiers, how easily Boris, Paul, and Janna threw them around solidified in their minds their rightful place as leaders.

Finally, it had been one of the scientists and not the soldiers that had been advocating killing the beast. The soldiers as a group didn’t really care one way or the other, as long as it couldn’t hurt them. In his alternate form, they saw someone of great strength and power, someone worthy to lead them.

During the days, Boris started organizing a plan to explore and map the caves. There was still something interfering with any attempt to map it with sonar or echolocation technologies. Boris had a gut feeling that there was something far more important than the Beast in that cave. The last time he’d had a gut feeling this strong had been when he had felt his mother was in trouble. His feelings had been accurate, and he had been right to worry.

At least this time the feeling did not have the overtones of doom and death along with it.

The whispers he and Janna kept hearing also concerned him. It wasn’t like they were words, at least not words in any human language. It was almost like hearing constantly running water from a brook.

On the morning of the third day after the capture of the beast, Boris put his foot down. They were going to explore the caves. He would lead one group, Janna another, with two more groups reconnoitering at the same time. Paul would remain to guard the Beast, much to his disappointment and Alecta would compile any maps that their explorations produced.

Without the Beast and the mysterious disappearances, the mapping went fairly well. One group got trapped behind a cave-in that Janna and Paul were forced to clear. After that, the scientists slowly stopped muttering about killing the Beast.

The cave system was enormous, but after a week of mapping, Alecta noticed that there was one interesting feature. A straight arrow hole that seemed to have been bored through from the entrance to deep within the system. After discussing this with the scientists and soldiers, it was agreed to try and explore the tunnel as far as possible.

Boris would lead the group, and they would take supplies for the ten days. If they hadn’t returned by the tenth day, a second group would travel three days, with extra supplies, down the same route. They would stop at that point and make a camp. Sending half the team back for supplies as needed.

It took four days of travel in the caves, staying as close to the curious feature as possible. Sections of it cut through cave roof, then disappeared into walls, leaving unstable sectors, forcing them to circle around it using other caves. As Alecta had pointed out, it could be followed because of the regular nature of the edges it produced. Sometimes the group lost sight of the straight arrow hole punched into the rock.

With careful navigation, they returned to following it.

Everyone was shocked by what they found at the end of the feature. The wreckage of what looked to be some form of space craft. With what Boris knew, he was sure it was a Kurtherian spaceship that had been wrecked here. With the family warnings and the odd beast that had been guarding it, he was feeling sure this was the one responsible for the nanites inside his mother and himself.

As he approached what looked like a campsite in the large cavern that had been set up for a being smaller than most humans, the whispering grew louder.

At that point, Boris decided it would be far safer to pull back at least a short distance before setting up a camp. He sent half the group back along the route they’d taken. He made sure that they had enough glow paint to mark the way clearly.

They definitely needed to get Shen out here. He was the only qualified expert technologist of this area in Russia that Boris trusted. Those Romanovkans with the skill who had been in the town had been too tempted by the siren’s call to space.

Wilderness near Archangelsk, Russia.

It had taken four days for Boris to arrange for a both transport and a protection detail for Shen to the Archangelsk site. He had already sent off blood samples from the Beast to TOM and Bethany Anne to give them some background. As there was little urgency beyond curiosity involved in this, they had a low priority for analysis. It seemed unlikely that the creature was a Were, although checking that did have higher priority.

TOM had told them to expect results in two or more weeks, especially with all the government activity looking into possible alien sites.

Bethany Anne had already given them a well done and congratulations, in her own unique way, for finding and securing the third landing site.

With her assistance, they had moved more than a hundred of the former mercenaries from Boris’ town, and a group of about thirty trusted ex-mercs who wanted in on whatever TQB was doing that had contacted Boris through back channels.

Boris welcomed the new blood from outside. They would have skills and techniques he was less well versed in. They would also be an enormous asset to improving the effectiveness of his small force. Everyone who arrived at the site had accepted the removal of all personal electronics, and understood their communications would be limited and watched.

The site, like the other sites that TQB had already vetted, was simply too dangerous and valuable to treat with any laxity in security. Janna was happy that several of the trusted mercs were taking some of the strain of leadership off of Boris’ shoulders.

It gave her a chance to organize time alone with him. That time alone helped both of them relax and recharge.

Compared to the constant combat operations they had faced while rooting out Konrad’s organization from Western Russia, this post was almost a holiday. A holiday on the icy side of hell maybe, but one nonetheless.

One item had been identified by TOM from the pictures, combined with the emissions that the ship gave off inside the cave. It was evident that the damaged vessel had a crude, somewhat inefficient, and very dangerously modified Etheric energy converter.

This was probably the reason the computer in the cave still seemed to be fully functional and active. No one had yet come up with an answer as to why this ship was here, or how it had crashed. ADAM was still running an analysis of the wreck and debris to try and piece together the ship’s original design.

The analysis of the alloy scrapings had confirmed that the ship was more than two and a half thousand years old. No Kurtherian would have built a ship with such comparatively fragile alloys when the alloys that had been used to make, for example, TOM’s own ship were cheaper and tougher.

That is not to say that the ship was delicate, it most certainly was not. It was made of material at least ten times harder than any alloy the native technology of Earth had yet developed.

They had decided to delay the analysis of what seemed to be the ship’s computer until Shen arrived, despite the fact that it had apparently been removed from the wreckage. It wasn’t its size that would identify the era which it came from for Tom, but rather its design and processing power. As with humans, the design could define a period of history that such an artifact could be placed in.