Superhero Adventures, UK Style

Inspired by the novel “Search and Rescue” by Ian Thomas Healy
Certain characters in Arctic Rescue were suggested by David J Hargis

The Balance were only now realising that the air inside the circular chamber Akira had teleported them into was both drier and warmer than they were used to with an unusual metallic tang. As they moved towards the door the light emanating from the walls and ceiling got brighter. The height of the door in front of them was less than one metre fifty and shaped like an inverted coffin without a handle or hinges though it apparently opened by separating into two. There was a small hole in the centre of the floor in front of it. The chamber walls were metallic but the floor was made of stone.

From the other side of the door again came the same female voice as before. “I Veterok, Call me Tanya… You able get out, Da?”

Alira smirked, “Sorry, it’s not your Da, I’m me, Akira of the Balance.” There was silence from the other side of the door for several seconds then, “Able get out, yes???”

Akira touched the door and reached out with his senses, feeling its atomic structure. He’d never felt anything like it, its artificial structure was unique and denser than anything he’d ever experienced previously.  For a second he doubted his ability to manipulate it but muttered when Banshee asked if he was “planning to turn it into paté as well?” that he’d try.

He concentrated and the area of the door around his fingers dissolved momentarily into sand and fell away reconstituting itself into its original composition as it dripped down but no matter how hard he focused he couldn’t alter the whole door. It did however leave a gap that he could see through and what he could see worried him. On the other side, he could see a petite woman surrounded by four of the larger pentabugs.

He shouted to Veterok to stand back from the door as they were coming through and opened a portal to the other side of the door. The three of them immediately jumped through ready to do battle and rescue the damsel.

Their primary attention as they emerged was on the smiling woman in front of them and on the four very alert, metre-wide, five-limbed silver pentabugs surrounding her. To their surprise, they weren’t attacking either her or them.

They found themselves facing a petite woman with long blonde hair, piercing blue eyes and flawless, intimidating skin dressed in a brown top, fingerless gloves and white jeans stuffed into designer boots. On top of this was a long, green, short-sleeved cloak, fastened with a clasp at the neck. She smiled and waved her hand at them.

“Okay, da? Okay… Ah, pyat’ krabov na nozhkakh na angliyskom? You call Buggyrs, da? They are friends, rescuers they save the crew of ship and bring them here. We followed. Come, come I show…”

She turned and immediately began walking down the corridor towards another circular room, waving for them to follow her and her metallic entourage almost as though she was in command of them. They couldn’t help noticing that the corridor circling their chamber was three metres high and almost twice as wide.

Before they followed them, they noticed another of the small tapering holes located in the corridor just in front of the door. The light in the corridor was provided by what they assumed were organic fibre optic cables embedded in the walls, which looked as though they were grown in situ. Not all of them were still working though, leaving certain sections of the corridor in a dim twilight.

The circular corridor led to another circular corridor though this one had a large door off to one side which also resembled in general shape a large bulky coffin standing on its head though it looked misshapen, organic almost and twice as large. Other doors nearby were smaller, identical to their chamber door as though designed for two completely separate races and why did the doors widen out so close to the ground? What did that mean for the race or races that used them?

There were carbonised burns and shattered fragmented segments of silver metal everywhere, which seem to indicate a battle had taken place here at some point.

They caught sight of a shambling, misshapen shape in the distance. There was something slightly familiar about it. A light flickered and momentarily they caught a good look at it before it stumbled through the door. The creature resembled the back half of an elephant standing on two tree trunk-like legs, with a maul-like mouth in its belly surrounded by spiralling row after row of sharp triangular teeth. It currently had two ‘arms’ each consisting of a mass of tendrils and tentacles swirling back and forth. It stood three metres tall and the majority of its mass consisted of clusters of amorphous blobs, faintly luminescent; with several eyes and temporary organs constantly forming and un-forming upon its body as it shuffled through one of the larger doors, which closed behind them.

Mace asked, “What is that?” Veterok almost snarled as she looked up and saw the creature as it vanished through the door, “Ignore, mindless brutes they are, we go core da?” They couldn’t help notice that her face betrayed intense disgust towards the creature. Akira leant over and muttered, “Perhaps they are married?”

Veterok walked towards one of the smaller coffin-like doors on their left and she signalled towards one of the pentabugs, which shuffled forward and stuck its bulbous rear limb into the hole located in front of the metal plates. Like the one in their chamber this seemed to be shallow and the hole tapered not unlike a pencil sharpener. The limb slimmed as the fibres inside the bulbous part of the limb seemingly interfaced with the mechanism inside and the door opened splitting into two parts, which swivelled into the wall with an almost silent click.

This corridor sloped 45 degrees down into the darkness. Veterok floated slightly above the ground as she pointed down into the dark and said, “Core, da?” Mace couldn’t dismiss the impression that Veterok’s cloak was somehow acting as a set of wings as it suddenly billowed out behind her.

They copied her as each of them hovered above the sloping corridor floor and followed her down the sloping corridor. Her metallic company seemed unaffected by the slanting floor with one even skittering up the wall before following behind them.

A hundred metres or so later they came to another of the smaller doorways, which again one of the pentabugs opened with its rear limb.

On the other side stood another female, the Ethiopian Yemayikadi was waiting, a smile on her face as she saw that Tanya was accompanied by the three of them. Yemayikadi was a tall, Amazonian-like Ethiopian in a skin-tight purple and black body suit, but what stood out most were her pale blue eyes highlighted by the purple armoured tiara she wore to hold her long black hair away from her face and the almost luminous tattoo of a lizard on her right shoulder. She signalled with her gloved hands with their armoured bracers for them to approach.

She then asked in good English, “Your pilot, she is not with you? She would be safer down here rather than having to endure the weather above.  If you want, I could send a couple of these mechanoids to go with one of you while you fetch her?”

They had apparently been down here for some time yet knew that their pilot was a female? Everything about this situation was proving to be suspicious. Banshee immediately turned insubstantial but still fully visible, just in case. She went on to explain, “Our pilot will be fine, despite the weather. She’ll be okay where she is.”

Akira interrupted to ask, “Are the crew safe?” Even as he asked he couldn’t help notice that four more of the mechanoids appear out of the darkness and silently headed passed them, back the way they had come.

Yemayikadi explained that they had followed the mechanoids back here after watching them rescue the ship’s crew. She stopped and asked if they had heard of the Silver Storm? When they nodded, she went on to explain, “These creatures, mechanoids, are formed of living metal and are related to the nanites that form the Silver Storm. The nanites are designed to repair genetic and physical injury. These mechanoids are the next step up and designed to rescue anyone injured or at risk and transport them to safety, we think. Doc’ Samaritan has a theory, admittedly mostly guesswork, that the nanites must have been stolen by Terminus and reprogrammed into a way of activating metagenes rather than following their original purpose, which was to provide structural repair. The mechanoids are formed of liquid metal and can shape themselves as needed but we haven’t figured out how to fully do that yet. We sent them out to fetch you but we didn’t manage to program them properly hence the confusion. Come! Let’s take us to the crew and you can see for yourself that they are being healed.”

Liquid metal? Mace shivered as she realised that the buggers could have easily killed them by pouring themselves into their lungs and tearing them apart from the inside but thankfully hadn’t.

Yemayikadi went on to explain that the rest of her teammates as well as the ship’s crew had been injured in the storm and taken to the base’s medical facility for treatment, if they would only follow her.

She turned, and walked towards the darkness, which spluttered into dim light. In front of them was a large chamber. On either side of them were what looked like a variety of glass tubes and gigantic transparent chambers each containing a specimen preserved in some sort of fluid.  There was a variety of fauna; including a wolf, an octopus and a bear amongst others. Then, as they stepped towards the displays, the lights around them suddenly refocused and formed into a holographic diagram of the solar system clearly showing a highlighted satellite in solar orbit around the Earth and Sun.

Mace figured it first; the satellite had to be the Earth’s so-called second ‘moon’, in reality an Aten asteroid known as Cruithne. Its orbit looked different to its current kidney-shaped path round the Sun and the Earth, which made her think that this display had to have been made thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years previously.

Yemayikadi and Veterok seemed to be in a hurry and tried to herd them forward towards the centre of the chamber. As they did so the lights in the chamber realigned again to highlight the central path through even more  of the cylindrical ‘glass’ containers on both sides filled with all sorts of species, some local to the depths of the arctic ocean, all now floating in a viscous-like fluid.

The specimens inside these tubes all looked strange and disturbing as if they had undergone mutation – tendrils and tentacles erupted from various locations on their bodies and they often sported eyes in abnormal places splitting through their skin or fur. In some cases, the creatures had obviously died when the tentacles (so like those of the shambling creature they had seen in the corridor) had grown out of their mouth and face.

Then as they headed into the centre, they realised that these displays showed even more partially converted figures.  This included several early humans including a Neanderthal, as well as a sabretooth Smiledon and a mammoth all split apart and with tendrils and tentacles bursting out of the skin, distorting them. The growths were of pulsing multicellular protoplasmic masses or tentacles burning out of the face and chest, faintly luminescent and filled with gelatinous bubbles; with multiple eyes and temporary organs constantly forming and un-forming on them.

Both Yemayikadi and Veterok ignored the horrors around them as they walked towards a couple of tubes lying open in front of them. Banshee turned towards Yemayikadi and asked, trying hard to keep the anger out of her voice, “Are you sure the bugs are trying to repair the crew and not turning them into something else?”

Yemayikadi turned, undisguised anger in her voice. “It was the original builders who did this; the mechanoids have been reprogrammed and now have a different function. Now they serve us.”

They reached the empty chambers and saw another of the Arctic Rescue team standing in front of them. A slim redhead they immediately recognised despite the dimness of the light, as Djevelfisk.

Djevelfisk was apparently young, blue-skinned, short and msucular and seemed uncomfortable in her own skin as though she didn’t believe in herself. Unlike the others, she wore normal swimwear rather than a costume as she was obviously immune to the arctic cold and it took them a minute to realise that her hair was in fact a wig.

Before they could say anything to each other, they realised that she was surrounded by six silent Russian Special Forces troops carrying rifles. The soldiers will not speak or for that matter blink.

Then they realised that the tubes behind Djevelfisk contained bodies. It addition there was a heap of discarded human bodies just behind them. As the lights around them got brighter, it became apparent that the bodies on the ground consisted on a mix of the living and the dead; apparently formed of the eight crew from the Atlantic Night and the murdered bodies of the same Russian Federation troops (Spetsnaz) that now stood unblinking in front of them, guns extended.

A moan came from one of the sailors indicated that those lying in the heap weren’t all dead. They could now clearly see that the tubes behind the three empty ones were occupied; by Arctic Rescue including the real Yemayikadi, Veterok and Djevelfisk. The stasis tubes had rendered them unconscious, a thick syrupy fluid had started to cover their heads and faces but apparently, hopefully hadn’t converted them yet.

Seeing the goo still covering the crew, it looked as though they had originally been stored in the cylinders, (could they have been analysing them?) only for them to be discarded when they had captured the meta-humans? Looking at the dead soldiers lying around them and back at the same soldiers standing in front of them it was clear that the tubes weren’t needed to duplicate their physical appearance.

While they tried to make sense of all this, the Djevelfisk in front of them began to change, growing in stature and bulk. It was hard to figure out whether or not it was changing into its natural state or not. It now stood on two camel-toed limbs, its ‘arms’ constantly varied between thick cable-like hooks before splitting into multiple tentacles before reforming into hooks or claws again. These limbs at the shoulder split into two before being absorbed back into a muscular upper torso, held erect by multiple spines. The upper torso consisted of a single mass that mostly consisted of organic armour surrounding what they assumed was the creature’s head under an armoured hood which protected a horrific ‘face’ which consisted of a gaping hole in the centre surrounded by multiple eyes on long mobile stalks enclosed by a dozen tentacles that never stopped twitching and wiggling. It was a horrific sight.

The creature gestured with its tendrils towards the ‘Yemayikadi’ and ‘Veterok’ standing with them and they will suddenly manifested their own tendrils in response from their now altered ‘hands’.

Light glistened off a gathering of mechanoids crawling towards them from out of the dark.

Akira stepped forward even as he pulled up his protective barrier, “We’re going to give you one chance to let the captives we came to rescue go peacefully or you’re toast.” At first, there was no indication that the three creatures understood the intended threat.

Mace readied a new sheath into her arming mechanism and wondered what was their purpose in being here? Alien invasion fit their knocking out worldwide communications but they seemed to be trespassers here in this alien base and they were clearly opportunists rather than being in total control and what was the situation with that shambling thing they had seen on their way down here?

When in doubt, perhaps they could ask? “So what is your plan then? You’ve obviously been here for long enough to reprogram the mechanoids, so why attack that ship or Arctic Rescue?”

To her surprise it worked, the creature standing in front of began speaking in perfect English the voice genderless, “We had hoped that by blocking your communication signals and navigational aids that we would manage to remain undisturbed until we were ready, but no matter. We have already managed to integrate your primitive monitoring facility on the surface into the control systems here and are now ready to progress our plans…

As I believe you have surmised, we are not the builders of this base; we only discovered this site existed after our enslavement and subsequent escape from an island prison at the hands of your species, an ocean away.”

Akira was for ‘twatting’ them straight away but caught Mace’s hand signal to wait. Better to learn their plan first just in case stopping the nine creatures in front of them wasn’t enough.

The creature suddenly pointed towards Banshee, ““You were there then as well I think and partially responsible for our liberation.” That’s when Banshee realised where it had seen something similar to this creature before, on the island of St. Kilda – the alien they had called the Unity… Though hadn’t they been told afterwards that there had been three of them? If that was the case, where did the silent unblinking creatures come from?

Mace also remembered the Unity both from St. Kilda and her encounter with Changeling at Claremont Academy – and that the Unity was a metamorphic race that had conquered hundreds of planetary systems on the Trailing edge of the Ziru Sirka Empire. They could morph into any shape or disguise themselves as any species they wanted.

They were the great terror of the Ziru Sirka Empire as well as most other sentient starfaring races, their bogeyman in fact and if their presence on Earth were revealed, the other races would probably attack this planet to make sure it never became a Rha’Zhak staging post.

While this was going through their minds, the creature continued talking. It stepped forward then gestured round the chamber, “This base is advanced even by our standards. Unknown alien visitors to your world built this location when your race was just starting to take its first steps towards sentience.

This ancient race must have found surviving elements of our racial prototype, primitives, hiding here and they blasphemed by attempting to genetically re-enslave them as well as geneer them to better serve as their slaves. When that failed to work, they tried to emulate their genetic versatility by first trying to combine it with other species before building it into their nanotech creations.

By combining their liquid metal robots with their gene-manipulating nano-bots they creating a hybrid that combined Unity genetic versatility with the subservience of robots; a sacrilege but one we can use to bring another world into the sanctification of the Monarchy.

We intend to open a transcendental bijection of the space-time continuum, an asymptotic projection that can be disassembled into a permanent and stable fold in the space manifold manifesting itself between this world and Unity space. We will use it to return back to our home world and then it will allow our attack forces to cross back and envelope this backward world into the blessing of the Unity. As you saw as you entered this chamber their initial experiments prove that your race and its lesser lifeforms are genetically compatible with conversion to Unity.”

Akira had to ask, “So what is your cunning plan?”

“Thanks to the use of the nearby abandoned base, we were able to send out a signal to block your transmissions and thereby allow us time to rig up a gateway home. We lacked the ability to broadcast the signal in sufficient strength from here alone but thanks to your race’s stupidity we found everything we needed close at hand and are now ready to proceed. I think your species would make excellent subjects for conversion but I cannot take the chance of discovery before we are ready.”

Akira interrupted again, “You could just go home and we wouldn’t have to twat you. Why attack us, we’re obviously an advanced species!”

As he spoke, a silver coffin-shaped mechanoid moving like a centipede on multiple legs entered the chamber and ejected another dead Russian soldier onto the ground before unmerging into three of the larger pentabugs.

Enough, they had to act before they managed to hurt or kill any more humans. There was also the headache that had started to affect them ever since the creature had started talking. They had to act before it became debilitating.

Mace unleashed a series of bolts – first at the morphing Yemayikadi, Veterok and Djevelfisk which missed when they twisted their bodies in an inhuman way, though she did manage to hit a couple of the soldiers though it seemed to do less damage than she had expected.

Banshee used the opportunity to let out a shattering shriek at the tubes, which seemed to melt the ‘glass’ rather than shatter it, allowing the rest of the Arctic Rescue team to collapse forward and almost fall out of the tubes. Their movement seemed to indicate that they were slowly recovering consciousness.

The Veterok duplicate was able to unleash an energy blast from the clutch of tentacles that now formed its hand. Thankfully, Akira managed to dodge just as the unhit Russian Special Forces marched towards them – though he was surprised that they didn’t attempt to fire their guns. Possibly that was a bonus as their headaches were making it harder to concentrate.

Mace elected to multi-attack just the three main duplicates, Yemayikadi, Veterok and the creature that had been Djevelfisk though it now seemed to be in the process of changing into a second Akira.

Mace’s bolts hit the “Akira” several times in the temple and thankfully her headache instantly ended only for the pain to restart seconds later. Meanwhile, the “Akira” was obviously in pain from her attack. She hadn’t time to focus on it as the “Yemayikadi” gestured and a blast emanated towards her. Thankfully, one of the “Russian Soldiers” stumbled forward into the path of the blast. That is when she saw that the rifle was just an organic extension of its now elongated arm. It moved like a mindless zombie and its ‘rifle’ club swung over her head. Another soldier tried to club at Banshee with its ‘rifle’ but the organic mass passed through her insubstantial body and smashed into the wall behind her.

Their headaches were now intense and numbing even as the image of the other Akira solidified.

Akira was meanwhile trying to blast the three Unity, as he thought the soldiers were was what the “Djevelfisk”, now mirror image of himself, had referred to as primitives which the Unity had somehow metamorphosed into the shape of the soldiers. If he succeeded in taking those three down, would it render the ‘soldiers’ uncontrolled?

The blast knocked “Veterok” down leaving her, it, incapacitated and paralysed. He focused on the other “Akira” and with a shout of “there is only room for one of me, I’ve already been down that road before!” he fired and blasted it into unconsciousness.

With that, he turned and focused for one last time of the remaining Unity, “Yemayikadi” even as the Balance realised that some of the silver mechanoids were pushing the semi-comatose members of Arctic Rescue back into their tubes and were regurgitating a clear fluid that was resealing them in the tubes.

Akira fired on the “Yemayikadi” and succeeded in rendering it unconscious and was rewarded with the remaining “Russian soldiers” reverting to their original form and shambling away as though the attack had been instantly forgotten. Their headaches also vanished.

Banshee and Mace focused on their other attackers; the horde of mechanoids gathered around the tubes and approaching them. A terrorising scream coupled with an EMP bolt reshattered the tubes and reduced the pentabugs in their way into an inert pool of silver with only their fifth limbs left unmelted.

Akira smiled, “If you want to get our rescuees out of here we each need to grab some of the legs so we can open the doors, or would you prefer a bit of breast?” he grabbed several out of the pool as Banshee checked on the crew and soldiers. Unfortunately most were already dead, however four of the sailors were still alive though seriously injured. Thankfully, Banshee managed to pull the members of Arctic Rescue out of the tubes. The cyborg Doc’ Samaritan was busy stabilising the still living crew even as the young Inuit in the domino mask was lighting up the chamber and making sure that no mechanoids sneaked up by sniping at them. Flare had to have been what had attacked the mechanoids on the ship and in this place as indicated by the silver remnants scattered around the corridors before they had succeeded in rendering her unconscious. Her frightened shots blasted the mass of mechanoids into splashes of silver on the walls and roof.

That’s when Banshee realised that her training had to be about learning restraint not about building up her power, as uncontrolled she could probably turn supernova, though that might prove useful, later.

They had no idea how the gateway into Unity space was activated but they suspected that the monologue had been a deliberate act to keep them off-guard while they activated it. The fact that their commdots were still non-functional also indicated that the communication blackout was still operating and that at least was being sent via the nearby covert Distant Early Warning monitoring station.

Meanwhile Akira tried to persuade the Danish Isskulptør, His short curly hair and dark face revealing his mixed heritage, to totally encase the three Unity in ice. He was extremely hesitant though since he didn’t want to be responsible for killing anyone, even if the Unity were responsible for the deaths of so many but Akira persuaded him that the fate of the whole world hung on him.

He reluctantly tore the moisture from out of the air and poured it into surrounding the Unity with ice completely before they headed for the surface, using a mechanoid fifth limb to jam each of the doors they passed open.

Mace did think that the so-called primitives must have been trapped inside the base with the mechanoids for millennia before the arrival of the Unity so resealing them inside should not kill them.

Akira used his theurgical-kinetic ability to float the injured survivors through the tunnels. He felt guilty about leaving the dead behind but knew he had to focus on the living as well as Doc’ Samaritan who refused to leave his patients and anyway was capable of generating a heat shield round them protecting them from the weather outside.

Focusing on levitating his passengers, Akira had to allow Banshee and Flare to lead the charge through the base against the hordes of bugs that were trying to prevent their leaving. A one sided fight that left the mechanoids as inanimate lakes of silver or shattered into fragments.

They managed to return to the chamber they had first entered. The reality was that they had to stop the gateway opening, restore the communications and hide the fact that Unity had arrived on Earth. So, it was business as usual for the Balance. The aim of the Unity had been to open a wormhole above the station and send a message to the Monarchy – an invitation to a free lunch.

They had to devise a way of getting out and Akira wasn’t sure he could teleport this many to the surface assuming he could manage to focus on identifying a location to teleport to in the anonymous, icy wasteland above. Mace solved the problem by ordering everyone behind her before she fitted a couple of her experimental acid-heads to her bolt and firing them at the iris above them. The carborane super-acid immediately dissolved the seals and the entrance crashed down. They levitated or flew out only to immediately hear very strong and flowery language coming from a very harassed Annie. Banshee smiled as she transmitted a brief message, “having bug trouble, Annie?” over their Bluetooth connection.

They split up, leaving Doc’ Samaritan and Flare to melt the ice nearby, allowing the melted water to flow down in the crevasse, inside the base and through all of the open doors into the central chamber. As soon as it became clear that the base was completely flooded, a now conscious Yemayikadi persuaded Isskulptør to freeze it so that everything down below was sealed inside.

While this was going on the Balance joined Annie in dealing with the four remaining mechanoids that was attacking the Crate. Thankfully, it didn’t take long as the sight of a small Sun-like orb appearing above where the monitoring station should be, was worrying them. It was growing larger and stronger all the time. Who knew how long it needed to establish a link into Unity space?

In the Crate’s cabin there were pools of ‘silver solder’ and remnants of limbs where Annie has torn the attackers into non-functional pieces. Having loaded everyone onboard the Crate, Annie set off as fast she could for what she informed everyone had once been a secret American Distant Early Warning monitoring station built to detect any bombers or missiles being launched from the Soviet Union. From a distance, they could see three helicopters parked on the helipad. It appeared it had recently been ‘illegally requisitioned’ by Russian Federation troops, the same ones that had been killed and their bodies copied by the Unity primitives.

The soldiers must have been looking for the source of the radio blackout only to discover that short of blowing up the whole station they couldn’t switch it off or control the signal which is coming in somehow from somewhere else. Then the mechanoids must have attacked.

The nearby monitoring station was now deserted, of humans at least, all of the soldiers having been killed or taken by the Unity and the ‘bugs’ for experimentation and the transmission-blocking signal was being broadcast from the ancient crashed ship to their monitoring array.

Annie saw below her that there was an almost invisible heat trace that stretched out under the snow and ice from the crevasse towards the station. Apparently, the connection was a silver cable between the base and the monitoring station now covered in snow but radiating an intense heat signature sufficiently hot to melt the snow around the cable leaving a small line of unfrozen water running between the two locations.

This had to be the control link, the trace stretched across into the monitoring station, which they assumed was still sending out the blanketing signal that was blocking all airwave transmissions and needed to be either dismantled or destroyed.

Akira and Mace had an idea – as soon as they were close enough, Akira flew out of the Crate and theurgical-kinetically raised the three abandoned Russian helicopters on the helipad and hovered them over the monitoring station whereupon Mace fired an explosive bolt into one of the fuel tanks even as Akira dropped them. They exploded, spectacularly. Instantly worldwide communications came back online.

Unfortunately, the gateway was still opening and now stars could be seen in the centre of the blazing new Sun. They had restored communications but not stopped the invasion.

Then Banshee spotted that one cable composed of silvery liquid metal left the now iced-over base but four silver cables entered the monitoring station. Three had melted into liquid dripping down the wall of the station but one remained intact. Could it be?

She flew out and straight towards the remaining ‘cable’. Close up it was obviously composed of the same material as the mechanoids – possibly even composed out of them. She grabbed a section and it immediately started to defend itself by pulling most of itself clear of the other segments to defend itself. Banshee grabbed it and pulled even as she turned herself and it insubstantial. The final fibres tore free from its companions and the circuit broke – the second Sun started to fade into nothing even as the repurposed mechanoid components deactivated, with their final programming no longer valid they began to implode.

That just left a clean-up operation by both the Balance and Arctic Rescue to destroy any remaining discriminating evidence of the Unity and mechanoids presence. With NATO forces coming in following the explosion and unexplained second Sun in the sky they knew they would eventually need to talk to someone in authority about the alien base under the ice and the presence of Unity on their planet, just not yet and not to soldiers who might militarise what they were trying so hard to hide.

The Russian Federation troops were apparently all dead and NATO were close enough to secure the base though it may create a diplomatic incident as despite the base being located in international waters the Russian Federation were apparently claiming that the underwater mountain range the DEW station sat on was an extension of their continental shelf.

Meanwhile they had to transport Arctic Rescue back to Alert and hopefully they would have the facilities there to repair the damaged windscreen otherwise it might be some time before they could get home.

It was Arctic Rescue who had to ask whether anyone thought the Unity had managed to send a signal out?

Unity – https://mm3e.wordpress.com/2018/02/08/episode-27-back-to-the-past-pt-2/