Turns out, not much survives a planet-wide atmosphere ignition. Everything was either ash or melted to slag. The others didn’t have vehicles, so I was the one going further to hit up potential interesting sites while they collected samples for Cerri to analyse.

Bundit’s feet whirred beneath me in quadruped mode to give me better speed across the open terrain. The way it was handling the broken and scorched terrain was incredible, and it made me feel all warm and proud.

Despite my fervent hope, however, the terrain that Bundit was so effortlessly traversing never got more interesting. The entire world was grey soil and small, hardy plants with tough exoskeleton-like trunks. In the distance, I could see their long fern-like fronds dancing in the wind, but as I neared, they pulled all their greenery inside their hulls. It was pretty obvious that life had learned to hide from the massive flash fires that routinely spread across the globe.

My target destination was some sort of underground facility that appeared to have been abandoned even before the calamity that’d torched the planet. We’d picked it up when Cerri used a seismic scanning device. Since we didn’t really find anything in the nearby husk of a city, I volunteered to run out and take a look at the abandoned facility.

Approaching the site, I could immediately see an exposed concrete building of some kind, although its surface was warped and coated in ancient glass slag. Closer still, and it was apparent that the building had once been entirely underground. The area above it must have been the entrance, although little remained of that besides blackened and twisted steel.

“Closing in on the site,” I said, radioing back to the group and switching on my feed. “Looks pretty munted from out here. I’m going to do a higher resolution scan to see what I’m dealing with.”

“Good idea, Alia,” Cerri’s voice replied, sounding distracted.

Curious, I asked, “Find anything on your end?”

“It’s like we suspected. We have a thin layer of very uniform glass, then a thick layer of ash and debris with periodic lines where it was partially melted. As time goes on, the intensity of the ash and melt layers diminishes. There was some kind of massive global impact event several thousand years ago that caused this,” she explained with something akin to fear in her voice. “If I had to make bets, I’d say someone pounded this planet with large calibre ship railguns from orbit. I don’t have to bet, though, because we found pieces of depleted uranium everywhere at the level of the impact event.”

“Jesus,” I muttered, feeling a chill rattle up my spine. “Well… hopefully I don’t meet any scary mutants down this hole.”

“Depleted uranium, little one,” Cerri murmured, even more distracted now. “It’s very stable.”

“Let me live my fallout fantasies,” I grumbled, coming up on the concrete shell. “I’ve arrived, so I’ll start working on gaining entrance.”

“Be careful,” she farewelled me.

The huge bunker blast doors that had once protected the interior of the structure were melted into a sloppy mess that reminded me of an ice cream after a hot day.

Fixing bundit’s right arm firmly against the door, I steadied myself and pulled back with the left, then struck once, hard. Sensors within the feet of Bundit picked up the vibrations and used them to construct a more detailed map of the facility below me.

As the map on my view screen began to populate, I wondered how I was going to get through the door. Would I get to use some of my cooler toys? Maybe even the unnecessarily large plasma cutter? Definitely the ULPC.

I withdrew my mechanical fist from the door and mentally cycled through to the ULPC, then activated it. The right forearm swivelled and opened up to reveal the tool, which swung into place while the forearm closed up again. The ULPC wasn’t really a tool, at least not in the way you’d expect. It looked almost like a zweihander that’d had the blade almost removed down to the start of the ricasso. So basically, it had the crossguard, and then about a foot of metal beyond it.

Clenching my fist, the blade roared to life with a flickering burst. Its colour changed rapidly from green, into purple, then blue and finally, as I adjusted the many nozzles inside the ricasso, a translucent white. This wasn’t some lightsaber though. It was a wild beast made of surging fire so hot it could melt through the steel of the door in front of me like it was cotton candy.

Careful not to carve a chunk off Bundit, I manoeuvred the blade until it was pointed at the door, then began to cut. I pared pieces of the door off like I was making some sort of gourd-based halloween decoration.

It didn’t take me long to get through, and I quickly extinguished the flame again. Didn’t want to waste fuel on something that was basically a glorified torch when I wasn’t actively using it to slice metal.

Beyond the abused blast door, a dark room was lit by the headlamps on Bundit, revealing a swath of old badger corpses. They littered the place, huddled in groups at the back, while others in military garb lay collapsed at their posts. At the very rear of the room, another heavy steel door stood mangled and partially open. Not enough for any of the adult badgers to fit through, though. My heart ached for this proud group of people. They and the rest of their race deserved better than this.

Careful not to disturb the dead, I pushed onwards to the mangled door and ripped it off its hinges. I almost tried to step into the next room, only for Bundit to take over and clamp a hand over the door frame. Shit. Elevator shaft.

“Thanks, Bun,” I said gently, patting the console in front of me. Bundit chirped happily in response.

This time, I knew what to expect in the darkness, and leapt out into the void. Thrusters fired, and my descent became controlled. I hit the lift carriage with a crunch that dented the metal. A moment later, it collapsed. Well, I guess that was one way to get in.

Prying the elevator doors open wasn’t difficult, and from there I carefully scanned the next chamber. It was some sort of small foyer area with a stairwell in the middle and hallways going off in all directions. Checking the various hallways showed me that this had been a facility that housed permanent staff. I found common rooms and personal quarters for around four hundred people, although it was obvious that it had all been mothballed at some point before the planet was destroyed.

Down one floor was where things got interesting. Labs of all sorts stretched out in each of the cardinal directions, each containing pieces to a technological puzzle that I didn’t have time to decipher. Instead, I got to creating a 3d scan of the labs. All over Bundit’s chassis, little ports opened up and began to take videos of everything as I walked around.

Unfortunately, that floor didn’t contain what I was really hoping for. Servers of some kind. When my search picked up nothing and none of the terminals in the lab space responded to me, I made for the next floor down. This was more labs, but instead of tech related stuff like the one above, it housed biology research. Again, I catalogued that floor, then moved to the next one down.

That was where I struck gold. Through one door, I found a small fusion generator that’d been safely powered down so many years ago. What excited me further was how advanced it was. I could tell at a glance that it was a hundred or so years ahead of humanity within the game. When placed beside the fusion reactors of the real world, it made them look almost ridiculously crude. I wasn’t stupid enough to power it on, though. Who knows what damage had been done to it over the aeons.

Oh how I wanted to, though, because through a different door at the bottom of the staircase I finally found the servers. They were all nice and neatly disconnected from the power grid, so it wasn’t too difficult to take those cables and plug them into a port on Bundit’s chassis. Gosh, but I was thankful that the more modern ports from the Turshen’s parts database could interface with those of the older bunker tech.

When the computers safely booted up, I jacked in and took a look at what I had.

It was everything. Well, not everything, but close enough. I had Bundit do a skim of the information to tell me what it was all about, then compile a little report.

The base was once part of a secret network of government funded research facilities that were working towards a common goal. True FTL space flight. That isn’t to say that the badgers didn’t have it by this point, but from what the data suggested, they weren’t using aetheric drives. Instead, they had some sort of strange drive that the buns translated as a grease drive. Yeah, not the best name.

It was slower than aetheric travel by a significant margin. Enough so that it was taking too long for communication between the inner worlds of their empire and the outer ones. This comms delay was making it difficult for the government to effectively wield its power away from the prime worlds like the one I was on.

There was no mention of the other aliens in any of the documents that Bundit skimmed, so I had to assume they hadn’t encountered them yet.

Also, it was kind of depressing that all the scientists in this base had been barking up the wrong tree anyway. They were part of a team that was working on how to increase the speed of their grease drive, which had obviously not panned out, since their more modern ships had all been equipped with aetheric drives.

The data was too interesting to just leave here, so I asked Bundit to copy it all over for transport back to the ship. Bundit rather grumpily informed me that it would not be doing that, because otherwise its storage would pop. The buns made sure to get that point across with a cute little animation.They also told me in no uncertain terms that the connection back to the ship was spotty at best while I was all the way down here, so that wasn’t an option either.

Ah well, maybe the folks back in Exodus City would enjoy the data.

To that end, I went into my DH-Frame interface and pulled up my contact within the Exodus Science Division.

“H-hello?” A timid male voice asked on the other end of the line. “Who is this? I don’t recognise the name or designation.”

Clearing my throat, I tried to speak, only for nothing to come out. Agh, no! Not the time, voice!

“Hello, uh… this is Alia, with the crew of the Turshen in Digital Galaxies?” I finally greeted him. My voice sounded so weak and wobbly and stupid.

“Oh!” said the guy on the other end. “Hey! Uh, what can I do for you?”

“I have a data dump to give you,” I said. “It’s from an older alien facility, so it might not be interesting to anyone but historians, but I figure I should give you the upload.”

“Why not just put it on the ship servers and wait for the regular update?” he asked, confused.

The shrug I gave him caused Bundit to mimic my actions, and I had to scramble to keep myself plugged into the alien computers. Then I realised that this was only a voice connection and he couldn’t see me. “Um, I can’t get a stable connection back to the ship and my mech doesn’t have the storage capacity.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” he agreed, and I heard the sounds of a user interface being interacted with. “Alright, connection request sent to your frame. Do you see it?”

A little notification popped up, and I clicked accept on it. Suddenly, a holographic cable popped into existence. Picking it up, I turned it around in my hand. The cable itself faded off a few centimetres from the plug, like it was disappearing into the fabric of reality or something.

Taking it between thumb and forefinger, I poked it into the main viewscreen of my mech and watched as my buns got to work. The copy time was doing its best impression of a quantum particle, showing me times ranging from one minute to sixteen years. Time to play some non-VR games through my frame, I guess?