Seventeen meters below the surface of the icecap, the evaporation lasers finally hit metal. Jace checked his pitons to make sure they were securely hammered in, and carefully rappelled down the ice tunnel until he stood on the surface of the artifact. "Jace Andron to Satellite Base," he said into his helmet-mike. "Do you read me, Satellite Base?"
"Confirmed," Nadine said, her voice crackling slightly with static. "If you're calling for a weather update, we're not showing any razor storms coming through for--"
"I've found it," he said simply. He didn't need to say anything else--they all knew what he was down there for. They'd been waiting for this transmission for the better part of a week. "I'm standing on it, Nadine. I'm literally right on top of it."
There was a long pause, then Nadine cut in. "I've just informed the team," she said. "We have a four-hour window to send them down by shuttlecraft before the storms get bad again. Can I send the go signal?"
"Give me forty-five minutes," Jace said, unclipping a laser cutter from his belt and kneeling down to examine the metal surface. "Five years of studying tectonic scans ought to buy me something, right?"
"You're paying the bills, boss," Nadine replied. "Just remember to keep in radio contact, okay? This isn't exactly a nice neighborhood anymore. The team's going to be on standby in case anything happens to you."
Jace flipped the switch, and the laser cutter began boring into the thick metal plating. "A thousand years ago, this used to be the Australian Outback," he said, slowly cutting a hole big enough to crawl through. " I don't think it was ever a nice neighborhood."
It took ten of his forty-five minutes just to cut through the hull. Whatever they'd found, it was designed to withstand massive impacts. That probably explained why it was still intact even after centuries under the ice--whoever made this thing made it to last. Ecological collapse, solar flares, shifting orbits, advancing glaciers...whatever this place was, it had survived all of it. The last building on Earth...and Jace Andron had found it. He kicked the metal plug and watched it fall into the hole with a long silence ending in a satisfying clang.
He waited a moment for the metal to cool, and descended through the hole. A hovering glowsphere followed him down, giving light to the enormous cavity all around him. He'd deliberately aimed for the largest open space in the structure, hoping that it would have the most significance to whoever built the place, but this felt like...a temple, perhaps? A cathedral? It was possible. It would explain the eccentric shape of the thing, the way it was half-buried into the ground. Religion made people do strange things, especially if this thing was around in the last days before the Great Collapse. There were legends about the people who'd chosen not to evacuate the planet, the beliefs that had driven them to stay when everyone else fled to the stars. Maybe they'd built some sort of bunker out here, away from the mutants and the rogue 'bots, to try to outlast the Collapse?
Jace checked himself. It was never a good idea to start speculating before viewing the evidence. He finished his descent to touch down onto a floor made of polished stone, and activated his comlink once again. "Nadine, you still hearing me?" he asked.
"...rely," Nadine said in a static-choked drawl. "...out ever...rd word, I..."
Jace unclipped the rope from his climbing harness. "I get the picture," he said wryly. "I'm just going to keep talking--whatever you don't pick up, the omni-corders will get. I'm documenting everything." He began walking, looking for a wall so that he could get an idea of the size of the chamber.
"There's absolutely no dust or debris," he said as he walked, dictating his observations into his omni-corder. "The floor appears to be solid marble--I can't even imagine how they got this much marble out here, even before the Collapse. The room is huge, but it's completely empty. It looks to be some sort of assembly hall. The acoustics are amazing in here. No furniture, but there's a strong religious overtone to the architecture--it's clearly designed to draw your eyes to the front of the hall." He changed direction slightly as he spoke. "I'm heading that way, to see if there's an altar or some sort of..."
Jace stopped. His voice trailed into silence for a long moment. When he finally found it again, it was merely as a whisper in the massive audience hall. "...dear god," he muttered to himself, the omni-corder forgotten in shock. He broke into a dead sprint, the glowsphere barely keeping up as he ran for the front of the chamber.
All he could think of as he ran was the stories. He'd read them as a child, fairy tales of derring-do and heroism from a long-dead world. Stories of men and women who could fly through the skies without rocket-belts and shatter stone with their bare fists, fighting a never-ending battle for truth and justice against all sorts of monsters and madmen. He'd never really forgotten those old stories, even when he grew up and learned the darker, more complex histories behind them. The Age of Heroes, the last great era of Earth civilization before the Great Collapse.
He'd seen artifacts of the Age of Heroes. He'd touched the xenonite knuckles that WildRose used in the final battle against Imperil, he'd seen with his own eyes the empathic crystal that held Professor Psyche's last message to humanity. He'd even gone as far as the Olympus system to see with his own eyes the Dyson Sphere the immortals had made when they withdrew from the universe. He knew all their stories, and he knew how they all ended. All except one. This one.
The raised dais jutted a full thirty feet from the chamber floor, a pyramid of steps leading up to a granite throne. And above that throne, Jace saw the emblem that had launched a billion nightmares. His banner had been flown by a thousand impostors over the centuries, all claiming to be the legend returned. They'd said he was behind the Tyronian Purges, that he was the secret leader of the Sirian Death Cults, that he was working behind the scenes to orchestrate an endless parade of human misery. It had been a thousand years since his last confirmed sighting, but humanity still held its collective breath waiting for him to return. And here it was. The crimson fist, ascending from a lightning bolt. The symbol of Doctor Damian Darke.
"It's his fortress," he rambled into the omni-corder as he surmounted the steps two at a time. "His floating island, I can't believe it! They said it was damaged in the Battle of Sydney, but I never imagined, oh my god, this is the biggest find in a thousand years! We'll be able to rewrite the histories of the Heroic Age with this find, we...oh my god. Oh god." He could see someone at the top, now, a figure on Darke's throne. It couldn't be--it was impossible--he couldn't be--
Jace reached the top. Doctor Darke's skeleton stared back at him, still wearing his red-and-black outfit, mocking history with a grin that could never fade.
