Alien Gears

Chapter 5: Cranium

CRANIUM

I had arrived deep within the skull of the COLOSSUS. Things had become much more sophisticated after entering this area. Within the skull, there were rooms full of ancient looking computer terminals alongside futuristic hologram projections, featuring massive seats and huge, boxlike monitors. There was nothing living in any of these rooms. Everything was similar looking and nothing interesting was appearing. I called back to inform of the situation and I was advised to keep searching. I found a rather interesting room quite soon after this in a bone chilling encounter.

After leaving one of the longer halls, I entered a room with a long window on one side. I decided to take a look through it and ended up leaping back in shock. There were huge mechanical walkers outside this room. Two of them. They were definitely much larger than humans. A second look through the window showed they were still there. I looked again and thought about the strangeness of the picture. I realised something; maybe on this oversized mechanical reptile, all the working humanoids wore massive suits of armour. There might actually be members of the ancient ancestor race on board. I wasn't sure if this hunch was correct but looking at the things through the window they looked very much like they could contain adult human beings within.

I decided to go out the other door of the room and walk across the corridor that would take me right in front of them. I sprinted across the first time. The second time I took it slightly slower. After many attempts, I stood facing both the giant metal humanoids and had a stare-down. Nobody moved. I approached one of the somewhat man shaped-constructs. It was over eight foot tall, nearly touching the ceiling. It was probably four foot in diameter with a wide can-shaped body. Its head was made up of a tinted glass hemisphere based on a solid metal plate. I reached out my hand and touched one of the glass globes.

Nothing happened. Either these things were dead, or if they were suits they had been left here to be operated as a defence for whatever was behind them. I decided to duck beneath the crossed arms which blocked the passage. Still nothing happened. I got back to my feet and went through the doorway that these metal exoskeletons had been standing watch over. This room had even stranger contents.

A great circular console pillar made up the centre piece of the room. Aside from the flashing lights and shiny crystalline edges, its other defining feature was the amount of cables extending across the room. The whole setup looked like an old rack based telephone interchange. I remembered something I had hardly touched in my kit bag and pulled out the mechanical camera. I would have used this before but I had never been in a location where I was either safe or close enough to get a decent picture because of the nature of the camera. It worked rather well in the closer confines of rooms like this. I decided to use it to snap a picture of the stationary guards in their immobile state outside the room.

After taking a closer look at the console banks and not working out much, I reported in to catch up with the ground crew. 'I've now got several pictures of the brain-works of the COLOSSUS but I haven't worked out what anything does yet. Oh and you do realise that whoever built the COLOSSUS built a set of eight foot tall robots or mechs or something. I'm just going to snap a picture of them as there are two of them, dead as statues, outside the d.....oh, holy crap.' I gaped at the doorway. They had vanished. Both of them. Without sound or trace the walkers had gone away somewhere. Which meant that they were alive. Which was incredibly bad.

I called in a request on the radio, feeling rather uncomfortable and exposed. 'Major, you need to triple the perimeter. These guys are alive on here. They've just vanished. So we have eight foot tall killer looking robots. To me it looks like they could receive a tank shell and just keep on walking like nothing had touched them. So we're going to need some bigger artillery down here.' The major acknowledged the request and said he would see what he could pull but stressed the fact that I needed to work out what was going on in here. Exasperated was how I felt and it caused me to do something extremely stupid. I went up to one of the rack consoles with loads of cables plugged in, tangled into a huge mass. I pulled one free. Nothing happened.

So I pulled on another cable. The lights went out but an auxiliary light came on and bathed the room in a green haze. I kept pulling out cables, laughing hysterically as screens went on and off around the room. In my insanity I was giggling at the prospect of giving this gigantic robot brain damage. Everything was fine until I pulled the last cable. It was one that hooked the console I was vandalising to the one in the centre of the room. Nothing remotely bad had happened and then I pulled it out and all hell broke loose.

Alarms began to blare. Flashing red lights bathed the soft greenness of the room in deep crimson. The shaking began again, much harder, and deep rumbles sounded from far below. I grabbed at a handhold on the side of the console unit as the room continued to shift. The ceiling flipped and I hung from the console above the domed pit that took up most of the space below. My handheld radio began to squawk madly and I attempted to make it down along a massed line of cables, to what now seemed to be the floor.

I picked up the radio and shouted 'Major, what the hell is going on....' The major's voice cut in over mine 'Lance Corporal there's no time, you've got to get out of there right now. COLOSSUS has just rolled over and it seems to be in early stages of coming online and mobilising. If it goes hostile we have pre-staged weapon systems already targeting it and you are likely to feel some large tremors. Now we know that it can be damaged internally, we have a payload of bunker busters being flown in to the carrier off the coast. If that thing gets up anytime soon, in seven hours' time we'll be ready to blow the electronic brains out of this beast. If you're not out by then, well, it's not me calling in the airstrike. Good luck soldier.' The major had cut the radio so I began to make my exit.

I had hastily returned to the complex grid of hallways and computer rooms which surrounded the core, where I had just been. I wasn't rushing too fast though. I needed to be careful. The great metal men who had disappeared from their position had to be hanging around here somewhere and I had no idea what either of us would do if we encountered one another.

The design of the interior of the COLOSSUS was chaotic, but brilliant. While I had great difficulty in navigating the corridors on my return back to wherever the rail station was, I had discovered an undeniably amazing fact about the insides of the monstrosity. Some of the rooms were fixed to gyroscopes, so the internal contents could be operable regardless of the effects of gravity, for example if the COLOSSUS turned upside down and got back up quickly. Whoever engineered this technological masterpiece, whether it had been ancestor or alien in origin, were masters of physics and metallurgy. It was too bad that whoever had built the monster had populated the corridors with more guardian mechs than I had hoped. I was soon to discover just how much of a pain these hulking walkers could be.