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Date Posted: 17:34:01 06/22/01 Fri
Author: Lieutenant Gabriel Michaels
Subject: Gabe tossed the metal plate aside....
In reply to: Lieutenant Gabriel Michaels 's message, "The wind was particularly biting today..." on 11:13:26 06/17/01 Sun

...as he re-entered the shelter of the burned-out structure that had been his home for over a month. He slumped to the ground and inspected his pack to see how he was doing with rations. It wasn't good; even raiding all the abandoned pods for supplies as he had done, there ultimately was a limit. Gabe closed his pack, saving what little he had for when he was truly starving. Gabe chuckled grimly; hunger was a constant now.

"Would anyone recognize 'chunky' Michaels now?" he said aloud, bitterly emphasizing the nickname his rival Wilson had given him, the name his ensigns used behind his back without realizing he knew they were doing it. Gabe picked up the chunk of polished metal he had found outside, turning it over. Even he didn't recognize the gaunt, weak figure whose sunken eyes stared back into his own from the surface of the polished, unidentified metal. The normally steely Lieutenant would sob were he not afraid his tears would freeze. NO one was coming back for him; he WAS going to die. How on Old Earth had everything gone so wrong?

* * *


"DAMNIT, Braddock!! Pickup those rifles NOW!! Hard to believe a klutz like you is related to the warhero I flew with back at the academy! It's only in John's memory that I took a worthless punk like you into my unit...I thought I could make you into somewhat the soldier your brother was! The rate you're going, you'll be lucky to have Tankup or Managorr as a CO! Now MOVE!! This isn't a drill or a picnic; we have to get some units planetside and make repairs before those TLA goons come back!!"

Madness. Nothing was making sense on the mission to Michaels. Howitzer sending the entire flagship of Rugby to some facility they never heard of run by suspiciously helpful little plastic men?! It was laughable--hard to believe he coexisted with such beings!! Whoever the prisoner was they were transporting, he must have some importance to Howitzer. Sometimes the Captain played things too close to the vest, perhaps a leftover trait from his adventuresome youth 'boardhopping' with the 'hero of the SPUniverse' Motocron(Michaels was still unclear on how the Vehicon dirtbike had earned the nickname--but it and accompanied every bar fable told about his adventures with the Captain).

As an officer, Michaels appreciated the need to tell your subordinates things on a need to know basis. Thing was, there were plenty that he felt HE needed to know! Even evacuating down to the planetoid below, having him put Ensign Grey in charge of some units--why? What did they hope to gain? Scans showed the world barren--conditions hostile--and only one hotspot that might be a structure. Would they really find supplies to make repairs?

They found far more than they bargained for--Grey's delusions of having pursued his lady-doctor friend through a portal as she was carried off by something called an 'Electriad' or a 'Powerline'--even though several other officers backed up his story, Michaels chaulked it up to the cold affecting his brain. And then they found the structure itself. Massive, composed of an unidentified alloy their instruments could not penetrate. Many readings showed the metal to be in a state of 'flux', a scientific impossibility. Curiousity and desperation got the better of the marooned crew, and they went in.

There was a bizarre recorded message, hacker-gibberish spoken by a holographic monkey head, or so Gabe thought at the time. But the countdown was very real, as was the massive explosion that sent them hurtling out into the ice and snow as they fled. As Gabe lay helpless beneath a slab of metal, he heard laserfire and shouts that their enemy had returned. His feeble cries of "Wait---I'm alive! Under here! Don't...go..." went unheard as the crew packed into the remaining pods and shuttles and returned to the SP Boardhopper to face the enemy. Gabe must have lost consciousness, because the next thing he remembered was the awful silence as he forced his ice-crusted eyelids open, finding his body heat had melted the snow enough for him to crawl out from under the metal. He looked around at the smoking ruins of the odd base and the demolished shuttles and pods left behind by the SPB crew. Clutching his shoulder in pain as returning circulation initiated a torturous throbbing, he made his way to the warmth of the burning base.

* * *


Gabe had long since lost track of time since that fateful day, but by his estimate a month and a half at least had passed. The only other event of any significance had been the strange frozen metal hand he came across, protruding in the snow. As baffling as the gargantuan, unnatural formation had been, even more unsettling was his inability to locate it again. The next time he explored that sector of the wasteland, spacing his treks out as necessity and stamina dictated, he found nothing but an immense valley. Either he wasn't in the same spot(Gabe's mind was constantly challenged by how boring and monochromatic this place was) or some giant had dug himself free of the ice and soared into the heavens. And though the less likely possibility was in fact the truth, Gabe was as much searching for the hand as he was salvation.

The world was a mystery. It was too small to be a planet, yet had an atmosphere. It wasn't a moon; there were no other heavenly bodies in sight in either the nighttime or daytime sky. And though the environment wouldn't support a human for long, he wondered why other than the building and the hand he'd seen no evidence of any kind of indiginous species. Machine life, an alien seal or polar bear, something, ANYthing. Gabe may have begun to accept imminent death, but thought of dying without knowing what sort of world had claimed him? It was the tiniest of sparks that kept him alive, his curiousity sustaining his life by ever so much. And the mystery was not without clues; he had come across scraps of printouts, all in what appeared to be binary code, strewn about the collapsed entrance to his shelter. They were singed and torn, but he had peiced them together, and tried desperately to make sense of them. Once he had thought he found the title of a section, and that it had said something about "Elemental Terraforming"...but that too made about as much sense as the raw binary itself.

"ARGHH!!! THIS IS HOPELESSS!!!!" he cried, slamming the metal plaque into the ice upon which he sat.

The cracks appeared subtly and quickly, giving GAbe barely enough time to realize what had happened before the darkness swalled him, his pack and the strange "Ice Computer" plague into darkness.

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