Winter's Grip in System 9
Snow whips across the plateau as you run tirelessly. The
ill-fitting Elemental-Resistance Unit weighs you down. But you run all the
same. You need to catch him. The snow blinds your vision pane before your face,
sliding off moments after. You fire a laser into the distance, watching it
travel for miles like a marathon runner at light-speed, melting snow as steam
erupts in mid-air before re-freezing immediately after; the snow brought back
to life.
A thin outline
forms some twenty minutes later, your muscles taught as the complex comes into
focus. Another five minutes. The gate appears before you, its guards long dead,
but the Thief resides within its walls and you must have him!
Your hand touches
the metal chain-link fencing as you push the left gate askew. The snow beats
with greater ferocity as if trying to scare you away. It pummels your suit’s
visor even more, the flakes hitting the screen like a Kamikaze plane, melting
with the slightly-greater-but-still-below-zero heat. You make your way across
the courtyard, the footsteps you make being filled in again with lightning
speed; the imperium of the ice age. The gate blows shut behind you with a
clang.
The buildings
before you stretch behind a large dome, gunmetal grey amidst the white snow.
Outposts sit scattered across the lifeless courtyard, metal Environment
Emergency Bunkers. Human cocoons or incubators without inhabitants, the
residents of the planet having died 200 years ago. The planet known as 6667 of
System 9 was the epitome of a dead world. A planet where no species had adapted
evolved or changed and as a result, the surface had no life to grace, only
snow, despair and the ruins of a civilisation long left behind. But yet here he
was, the Thief. You press onwards through the snow and open the main door to
the ‘Centre HUB’, emblazoned upon the dome.
You enter a dark
reception, the final chaos of the civilisation’s then-impending collapse frozen
with upturned chairs, disabled Anti-Gravity Fields and scattered papers; all
frozen like the sheet of ice that was once the Great Ocean. You feel no warmer
having ventured in—doors. You press forward and across the marble floor, black
and white in swirls like galaxies and nebulae across the visible Systems. Your
footsteps thud as you approach a white room, stairs leading towards a basement.
The room contains the final experiments of the facility’s biologists, various
species now lying dead in incubation cages, their AG Fields having long-since
deactivated, the creature’s bodies frozen and un-decomposed, eyes wide and
frozen in death like time on the dead world.
You descend the
staircase, taking your time: CLANG. . . CLANG. . . CLANG. . . CLANG; your
footsteps hit the green metal with an echo. You walk for ten minutes before
arriving at a white corridor at the basement; a single automatic door set at
its end some fifteen metres away. You run towards it, radiating energy and
warmth-so-rare as you sense your target behind a simple sheet of metal. You enter.
The room is white, circular and small.
Uninspiring. The Thief lies at its centre. You smile beneath your suit as you
approach. His short brown hair is hard; stiff; and cold, frozen. His eyes are
wide open, their light blue shade the same colour as 6667’s sky. His lips are
white, as is his skin. Deathly white.
The silver case sits patiently away from his outstretched hand, calling for
you, asking if we can go yet. You wipe water from your visor, as if wiping your
eyes because you can’t believe what you’re seeing. He's really dead, which makes you sad in a way.
You take the case and run to
leave, yearning for its contents as you leave the body behind. . . A dead man, a dead complex and a dead planet save for one exceptional life-form.
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