Eric watched Bishop flinch when the green fluid from the inoculation pistol shot into his shoulder with a snap of the pistol's trigger. He held on to the spot where he had just gotten injected and tried not to show any form of pain, especially since the other crew mates were present.

"I'm quite surprised you're not crying," Ramon teased Bishop who pulled his shirt over his head.

"A lady's got to learn to toughen up at some point," Jo said with a chuckle.

"Don't make it sound like I'm a sissy," Bishop replied, sitting upright on the bed.

"You are a sissy," Kindra's words came out sounding more affirmative. Bishop looked at her for a moment, her face still had several scars on it and asides that, she looked pretty much fine.

"Netrac," Eric started, "we all take doses of that from time to time out here. It's the only way we survive harsh radiations."

"You had me drink mine, why do they get injected?" Kindra asked.

"You were healing remarkably fast, unlike them." Eric answered. "Those shots have been altered with ­nano-surgeons to help with internal lacerations which would need an enhancer for speedy healing."

"I sure do need my arm back like yesterday," Jo flexed her arm cautiously in an attempt to feel how much progress she had with healing her broken arm.

"Were you able to recover any of our things from the Ark?" Bishop asked, facing Eric. "Without the gears, we're useless out here."

"Our team had been able to salvage them in bits," Eric said as he led the way out of the room they had been in. "Pretty small ship it seems like from the look of things."

"That's correct," Jo answered. "Small, fast and supposedly tough. I still can't explain what happened."

S'posedly tough eh? Ramon thought to himself. Whoever had designed the Astro Ark and assigned it to the team for this task sure did have some explaining to do when Ramon returned back to Phase II – if­ he made it back. Maybe Bishop was right after all when he said this was TriTech's version of mass murder. Perhaps a Soeul 979 V2.0? Whatever, man.

Kindra was pleased when the elevator's door glided open, stifling halfway across. Eric pushed it through and Kindra was the first one out of the tight elevator's room. Unlike the last time Eric had been there, the room had been rearranged to be more spacious and also give the hall an all new feel.

"Rogue?" Eric called out while the others were struck in awe of the columns of beat up mechanical parts.

"Aye! One moment," her response echoed across the open space.

"We had packed light, hadn't planned to stay out past a week" Jo said to Eric as she ran a finger over the smashed transparent glass which had once been an indterface for running scans for the AA-519. "The primary task was to get the Porter to Section 19 of the Ruins, have him decrypt whatever synergist pods were out there and jet back home."

"Did someone mention synergist pods?" Rogue appeared from behind an engine wiping off greased palms. Her vest had been smeared with black oil which also adorned parts of her face.

"Meet Rogue, she helps with making all things scrap look beautiful again," Eric introduced the older lady to the crew.

"I'd always thought it was about time Section 19 got exploited," Rogue said, "and then y'all come along."

"Come and take a look for yourself," Eric said and then led the way further into the storage station.

"What have you been able to salvage so far?" Kindra dropped the few parts she'd been going through and walked up to where Rogue stood beside her work bench.

"A few intact parts – and that's a miracle!" Rogue said. "A lot of the gears took a good beating and would take a bit to sort those out."

"Any form of communication tools you could put together?"

"I've been trying figure out how that one works," Rogue said, gesturing to a fractured CC on her work bench which sprawled with wires and devices like wares being displayed for sale. Kindra walked up to the work bench, amongst a few other gadgets was a smashed CC. Kindra picked up the device which had popped open.

"This is of no use anymore," Kindra muttered, attempting to get it powered up but to no avail.

"It wouldn't be of much benefit if it's meant for communication. The Ruin's way too reactive to get word out."

Kindra tossed the device back on the table where it crashed into the pile of other things. There's got to be a way.

The others emerged a while later and gathered around where Kindra and Rogue had been. Whatever I was that had seen must've triggered a sense of hope which was reflective in their face. It was a huge relief for Eric's group to have been able to salvage most of their useful gears, that meant less if all else failed, there was still a chance at Eureka.

"Yo Eric, let's be real here for a minute now," Ramon started, "y'all didn't just wake up to find yourselves in this facility, did ya?"

"They want to hear the doom day's story," Rogue took a sip from the can on her work bench. There was always one of those available while she worked, "Y'all take that someplace else."

"What's she mean by that?" Ramon's eyebrow furrowed, "what ain't you saying."

Eric looked them over one after another, their eyes glared with so much curiosity, ears itching to hear what was to come next. They knew there was something yet to be told, something Eric was keeping away and their interest just peaked now that Rogue describes it as a doom day's tale.

The retire walls of the room had been set up with screens, the outdated slim strip of glass type, all of which had a handful of operators monitoring the displays on them. On one end wall, the entire base was being displayed. The crew stood amazed at its size. A lot of the monitors had static displays on them, revealing numerous variations of heat maps and landscape views, others relayed live radiation gradients on their screens.

"When you hear of a seventh degree reactor site, that's what is meant," Eric's eye scanned though the various screens and finally rested on one.

Bishop, just like the others stood in awe, shocked at the images his eyes behold. While Bathfog Ruins being a seventh degree reactor site had been mentioned during briefing, the imagery which had been portrayed was nowhere near the live footage before him. Bishop had been told to follow the Guardian's instructions if he planned to make it back to Phase II, but from the look on Ramon & Jo's face, it was obvious that they also weren't certain of what it was they were getting themselves signed up for.

"Seventh degree reactor sites," Bishop muttered.

"How did it get this bad?" Jo asked, still finding it hard to understand how it was that Eric and the rest of the people on site here had been able to survive for this long without getting killed by the monstrous radiations, if nothing at all.

"Our kind wasn't the first on the moon," Eric said.

"What t'hell ya mean by that?" Ramon scoffed.

"Before Phase I, there was the moon, colonized by a different species than our kind with a distinct life form almost similar to ours. They had been discovered after we marked the moon suitable for habitation."

"Why are you telling us all of this, Eric?" An impatient Kindra asked, "How does this connect?"

"Since the government couldn't share this finding to the rest of humanity, these species were evacuated from Phase I, shipped down here to the Ivory Towers." Eric paused, and then watched the reaction on the faces of his listeners. "Our Analysts observed them for 3 years studying how this form of life was able to inhabit Phase 1 without an entrée. And then there was the need for test subjects."

"Soeul 979," Bishop blurted, the dots were beginning to connect now.

"What t'actual hell!" Ramon cured, "ah knew this shit was too good to be true."

"Soeul 979 was all decoy," Eric didn't break a sweat while he spoke. He walked over to one of the screen and zoomed in on a location which revealed a layout similar to the Ivory Tower base. "We housed all twenty-five thousand passengers here for a year while rapid testing went on."

"You knew about it, didn't you?" Jo asked. "You worked on this project too."

"Yes, I did. This was going to be a breakthrough to the way we live."

"What?" Kindra scoffed. What? "I don't see any breakthroughs here!"

"Funding got pulled back. One thousand and sixty-four trials and still no spectacular progress. Whoever was sponsoring this wanted every little detail terminated – literally."

Ramon scoffed again at the obscurity of the story. "So let me get this man. Y'all sign up for this research thingamajig with kidnapped subjects, it doesn't play out well and so sponsors back out and the government basically signs your death warrant?"

"See those?" Eric pointed at the dotted triangles on one display screen. "Those are Bions, scouting for what was left of the massive nuclear exposure we'd been hit with in an attempt to bury this project. A few hundreds of us survived barely and are split across the two Ivory Tower bases. It's our fate now.

All comms to the outer world beyond the Ruins got damaged after the third wave of nuclear spikes ruptured into a quake and the real terror got unleashed."

The crew watched the several mecha-scouts patrol the empty, radiation torn roads of Bathfog. Bions, Ramon thought, our death angel. It really was a doom day story just as Rogue had mentioned. Stranded in a place like this and detached from the world with no means of communicating, it could only get worse. The news had Kindra flushed – this was bad news.

"ERIC!" One of the monitoring operators called his attention to the screen. "We got something out there."

Eric hurried over to the display screen, a heat source had been picked up, the signal wasn't strong and fluctuated – this was unusual.

"What is it?" Kindra's eyes lit up. The last time she had witnessed people panic over something unusual on a screen, they had woken up barely alive in a containment she was still having a hard time t wrap her head around.

"I think there's someone out there."

"Meggan," Jo blurted.

"Zed!" Ramon called out into the comm in his gloves, "get your boys, I'm sending coordinates over!"

There was a static frequency for a moment before a response came, "We're one man short Eric, the rest are out on the field."

"I'm coming with you," Jo hurried behind Eric as he moved briskly out of the room.

"Can't risk that, Jo" Eric's eye flashed a firm disapproval.

"You heard your man," Ramon said with a stern expression on his face. "Y'all are one man down and that's our brother out there. That's a Tech 9 Guard there, show some respect."

Eric paused for a little more than a moment, hesitant. "You obey every instruction out there. Every. Instruction."

"Grace and peace Jo," Ramon said, nodding in her direction as he watched her trail behind Eric.

"Zed, get the boys set," Eric said into the comms one more time. "We're hiking out."

=||=

Life on the moon! Ever wondered what this could be like?

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