The blue light from the stasis pod cast Mark's shadow across the floor in a slow pulse. The same pace as the heartbeat displayed on the panel above the tank, each rise and fall of the biosignature quietly insisting that the being suspended in the clear medium was still clinging to life after a span of time that shouldn't have been survivable.
Mark stood at the edge of the well, staring down at the Strathari's face.
The half that remained was angular and strong, with high cheekbones and a jawline that looked like it had been carved from stone. Unlike Anahrin, who had pale skin, this one's skin was a pale bronze, almost luminescent in the tank's glow, and fine silver-white hair floated around the skull in the clear medium like a halo caught in slow motion. The closed eye had long lashes that rested against the cheek with an almost peaceful quality, as if the warrior were simply sleeping rather than trapped in a state of near-death for longer than human civilization had existed.
Anahrin had stood eleven feet tall, almost twelve, and this one looked shorter, though not by much, but enough to be noticeable. It was maybe nine and a half feet, maybe ten, a height that was still enormous by human standards, but its body was different. Where Anahrin had been lean, scholarly, and elegant, this Strathari was denser. The shoulders were broader, the chest thicker, and even in its state, the body carried a compactness to it that spoke of a life built around physicality rather than intellect.
"Marcos," Mark said quietly, his voice barely carrying in the silence of the DNA vault. "Is there any way you'd be able to interface with this thing?"
"Let's see," Marcos hummed through Mark's helmet. "I'm attempting to connect now... The pod's systems are ancient and use standard Strathari data protocol... I believe I might be able to piggyback through your armor's proximity sensors if you keep your hand on the housing."
Mark placed his armored palm flat against the smooth surface of the tank. The material was almost organic, and he felt a faint vibration running through it like a second heartbeat layered beneath the first.
"Got it," Marcos said after a moment, his tone shifting to something more clinical. "Accessing diagnostic logs now. Mark, this is... holy shit. This is considerably older than I expected."
"How old are we talking about?" Aurelia asked from behind him. She'd been cataloging the wall-mounted tanks with her armor's scanner, moving along the rows with methodical precision.
"The pod's internal chronometer indicates that it was engaged four hundred and seventeen thousand, three hundred and ninety-two years ago," Marcos replied. "Give or take a few decades for calibration drift."
Severus let out a low whistle from where he stood near the vault's entrance, his rifle resting across his chest. "Now that's one long nap."
"What about a designation?" Mark asked, not taking his eyes off the face in the tank. "Any way you can manage to pull anything on who this is?"
"Working on it," Marcos replied. "Okay, so it seems the pod's memory core is heavily fragmented, but I'm recovering what I can through your suit's proxy connection... Okay, here's what I got. This Strathari's designation was a Vanguard-Sentinel Seven. Rank appears to be an elite combat pilot, assigned to facility defense. There's a secondary identifier attached to the record, which looks like a name. The closest English translation I can pull from the dialect is... Talos. Derived from the Strathari 'Tal'oshen,' which roughly means 'Shield Against the Dark.'"
Mark let the name settle and looked at the destroyed left side of the face, at the empty socket where an eye should've been, at the missing arm and the sealed stump where the right foot had been amputated. 'Shield Against the Dark' was a fitting name, and the cost of earning it was written across every inch of the body in the tank.
"I'm also pulling casualty data from the pod's last recorded burst," Marcos continued. "This pilot was part of the defensive action against the autonomous mechs we found upstairs. According to the logs, he personally destroyed thirty-seven hostile units before sustaining critical damage. He was carried here by another pilot, sealed into stasis, and then... no further entries. Whoever brought him here never came back."
Mark's jaw tightened at the number this so-called Talos had taken down. He'd barely survived fighting two of those things, and that had been with the Shepherd's railgun doing the heavy lifting. Yet, Talos had torn through nearly forty of them on foot, or rather from the cockpit of one of the humanoid mechs they'd found standing over the wreckage upstairs. It had cost him two limbs and half his face, but he'd held the line.
"Marcos, what's the status of the pod itself?" Mark asked, forcing himself to think past the awe and into the practical. "I know Anahrin had said the Strathari made things to last, but I doubt they ever expected something to last this long. How much time does he have?"
Marcos' response wasn't reassuring in the least. "The pod is failing. The power reserves that have kept this system running are nearly depleted. Nutrient recyclers are at fifteen percent efficiency, the cellular regeneration matrices went offline roughly six thousand years ago, and the stasis field itself is destabilizing. At current degradation rates, I'm projecting complete system collapse within ten thousand years, maybe eleven if we're generous."
"What would happen if it collapses?" Mark asked.
"The stasis field drops, and four hundred thousand years of cellular decay catches up instantaneously," Marcos said, matter-of-factly. "He'll age to dust before he hits the floor."
Octavia, who had been silent for an unusually long time, finally spoke. Her voice was quiet. "How does something survive that long in a box?"
"This specific Strathari stasis technology works by slowing cellular decay to approximately one one-hundred-thousandth of the normal rate," Marcos explained. "Every second this pilot spent in suspension, his body aged roughly three milliseconds. In biological terms, he's only aged about twelve years since the pod was sealed. The technology is elegant, bordering on art, but it also requires an uninterrupted power feed. The moment we disconnect this pod from the battery banks it's currently tethered to, the internal reserves will sustain life support for approximately three hours before full shutdown."
"Three hours," Mark repeated.
"Three hours," Marcos confirmed. "Give or take twenty minutes depending on how much jostling the pod takes during transport. Every vibration or sudden change in orientation increases the power draw on the internal stabilizers."
Mark straightened and turned to face his three Elites. "We need to get him to the clinic. We've got a three-hour window from the moment we unplug, and we've got quite the distance to cover just to exit this place."
Severus shifted his weight, and his tone carried caution. "My lord, before we start planning the how, I think we should discuss the whether."
Mark was about to respond, but Severus held up a hand. "I'm not saying we leave him here to die. I'm saying we should consider what we're waking up. Hell, this thing destroyed thirty-seven autonomous mechs in a single engagement. Granted, we've seen the weapon he used to fight them, but we've also seen what one of those mechs can do. Whatever's in that tank isn't a patient, but a weapon. One that went to sleep fighting, and might wake up the same way."
"Your caution is noted," Mark said in an even voice. "And I understand your concern. But, to my knowledge, he's the last of his kind, Severus. The last one besides me who carries Strathari blood that isn't diluted by a hundred thousand generations. I'm not going to let him die in a tube because we're afraid of what he might do when he wakes up."
Severus held Mark's gaze for a moment, then gave a single nod. "Then let's figure out how to move an alien up a five-hundred-meter staircase in under three hours."
"We're not taking the stairs," Mark said, turning to look at the corridor that led back toward the central hub. "We'll be going up the elevator shaft."
The shaft was forty meters on a side, a massive square column bored straight through the rock from the hub level all the way to the cavern above. And though the platform itself was dead, sitting at the top of the shaft, the shaft was open below it.
"If we can get the platform out of the way, or cut through it, the shaft gives us a straight line to the surface cavern," Mark said. "Wide enough for one of the quadcopter transport drones Marcos has made the schematics for to descend and make the lift."
Octavia tilted her head. "How big are these transport drones?"
"The drones are five meters across, while the shaft is forty. That should be plenty of clearance, even with cargo," Mark said. "Question is, would you be able to get a drone down here, Marcos?"
"I find your questioning of my abilities disturbing," Marcos replied with mock indignation. "The only challenge is the platform blocking the base of the shaft. It's dead weight sitting on unpowered rails. However, if we can cut through the ceiling panel of the car, a quadcopter drone can descend through the opening, land in the hub, and we can load the pod onto the cargo platform. From there, it's a straight vertical ascent to the surface cavern, then a short flight to the clinic."
"What about the facility entrance?" Aurelia asked. "The doors are only open ten feet."
"The drone can compress its rotor arms to fit through a seven-foot gap if I override the safety margins on the folding mechanism," Marcos said. "It won't be graceful, but it'll work."
"Wouldn't there be an issue with cutting through the platform?" Mark asked. "I mean, last time we tried cutting Strathari metal, our boring machines lost their teeth and didn't even leave a mark."
"Yeah, well, that was the exterior armor," Marcos corrected. "The outer shell of this facility was engineered to withstand orbital bombardment. On the other hand, the interior structures and the infrastructure are built from a significantly lower grade of alloy. Still considerably harder than our S-Alloy, make no mistake, but not the same class of material as the outer hull. Think of it as the difference between the typical warship's armor plating and its interior bulkheads. Both are metal, but one is designed to take a few hits from railgun slugs and the other is designed to be practical."
"You sure the spider drones can cut through it?" Mark asked.
"Yup," Marcos said. "However, this interior alloy is harder than the S-Alloy, so it won't be fast. We're talking minutes per centimeter rather than the seconds they're used to. But if I run forty of them in rotating crews of ten, cycling fresh units in as the active drones overheat, they should be able to carve an opening wide enough for the quadcopter in around ten hours, maybe less.
"Plus," Marcos added with something close to genuine fascination, "this gives me an opportunity to directly sample the interior alloy's composition while the drones cut. Every pass of their cutting arrays would generate particulate debris that their onboard sensors can analyze in real time. I've been staring at this facility's metallurgy since we cracked the outer doors, and, as you know, the exterior alloy doesn't match anything in my database. If the interior grade is a simpler variant, it might be the stepping stone we need to eventually reverse-engineer the harder stuff."
Mark looked at his team. "Alright. Do as you plan. Aurelia, stay here with me. I want a full inventory of these tanks before we leave. Severus and Octavia, you two head back to the surface and coordinate with Dr. Corven on the clinic setup. She's going to need a bigger version of the Shepherd's healing chairs printed and assembled, and I want a hoist system rated for at least six thousand pounds mounted to the ceiling of the largest examination room."
"Six thousand?" Severus asked.
"Strathari bone density is several times greater than that of a human's," Mark said. "Even missing an arm and a foot, this pilot probably weighs around a thousand pounds. The pod adds another thousand, maybe two on top of that. I'd rather over-engineer the lift than scrape him off the floor."
Severus gave a crisp nod and turned for the corridor with Octavia following, but she paused at the threshold. She looked back at the stasis pod one more time, at the battered humanoid mech pilot who'd fought from a cockpit not so different from the ones she'd once known, and something crossed behind her visor that Mark couldn't read. Then she was gone, her boots thumping up the first of the massive stairs.
As the sound of their footsteps faded, the faint mechanical whine of the spider drone swarm began to filter down through the facility. Marcos had already dispatched forty of the compact, multi-limbed repair units. They were descending the staircase in a skittering column, their cutting arrays warming up and their sensor packages primed.
Mark turned his attention to the walls of the vault where the cylindrical tanks stretched from floor to ceiling in neat rows, each one glowing with that same soft blue light that pulsed at a tempo so slow it could've been mistaken for stillness. The first few rows held thousands of sealed units, each one humming with systems that had been built to last forever and had nearly managed it. Aurelia's scanner logged each one as she passed, the data streaming back to Marcos for cataloging.
"I'm reading over ten thousand individual samples across the intact units," Aurelia reported, her voice carrying a tone of amazement that she couldn't quite suppress. "It's only genetic material with no actual organisms. The database headers are sorting them into three categories. Roughly three thousand tagged with a designation I'm reading as 'Pilot Lineage.' Another two thousand tagged as 'Scholar Lineage.' And the remaining five thousand are labeled as..." She paused, cross-referencing with Marcos. "Experimental synthetics. Hybrid combinations of Strathari base genetics and foreign biological material."
"Foreign as in what?" Mark asked.
"As in not Strathari," Marcos answered for her. "Some of these hybrid samples contain genetic markers I'm matching to the fauna we've encountered on this planet. Proto-canine. Proto-avian. Proto-bovine. Others contain markers I can't match to anything in my database. The Strathari were blending their own DNA with species they'd collected from across the galaxy, which makes this vault not just a storage facility, but a seed bank full of genetic experiments."
Mark processed that in silence for a moment. This facility was like a library written in the language of life itself.
But the deeper Mark and Aurelia moved into the vault, the less orderly things became. Hairline fractures were running up the sides of individual tanks, the glass, or whatever the transparent material was, clouded and opaque where it should've been clear. Then the cracks became breaks. One tank had a chunk missing from its midsection, the edges jagged, and the interior dark and empty.
Mark stopped walking as they came across the first tank that had been destroyed, blown outward from the inside in a radial pattern of crystallized fragments that littered the floor in a rough circle. The base of the tank still sat in its housing, the mounting bracket intact, but everything above it was scattered across the floor and embedded in the walls and ceiling like shrapnel.
"Well," Mark said slowly. "I'm not a scientist, but this tank wasn't broken by external force."
"Clearly, it wasn't," Marcos agreed. "The fracture pattern is consistent with an internal pressure event, which means that something inside that tank expanded rapidly and burst the containment from within."
Aurelia crouched beside the debris, running her scanner over the fragments. "There's biological residue on the interior surfaces. Degraded beyond identification, but it's there. I doubt that whatever was in this tank just broke out. It most likely grew, and then broke out."
Mark's eyes swept the rest of the row, noticing that there were at least a dozen shattered tanks in this section alone, each one displaying the same outward-blast pattern. Something had developed inside these containers and had grown past the point the tanks could hold, and had forced its way free.
"Any wya to tell how long ago?" Mark asked.
"Impossible to determine precisely," Marcos said. "The biological residue is too degraded for reliable dating. But given the accumulation of dust and the crystallization pattern of the tank material, I'd estimate these ruptures occurred within the first few thousand years after the facility was sealed. Long before the power systems began to fail."
"So whatever broke out of these things has been loose in this facility for four hundred thousand years," Severus said over the comms from somewhere above them. His voice carried the particular flatness of a man who'd just had his earlier concerns validated. "Still feeling good about our rescue mission, my lord?"
"We haven't found any living organisms in this facility besides Talos," Mark said firmly. "Whatever came out of those tanks either died or found its way outside. Either way, it doesn't change what we're doing."
"Just making sure it's on the record," Severus replied.
Mark turned back to the shattered tanks, studying them. The ones that had ruptured were clustered in the experimental hybrid section. Whatever the ancient scientists had been growing in those containers had been volatile enough to exceed the engineering tolerances of technology that had otherwise survived four hundred millennia without a scratch.
He made a mental note to have Dr. Corven analyze the residue once they had the means to do so, and moved on.
---
A day and a half. That's how long the preparation took. Not the four or five days Mark had initially feared, but thirty-six hours of effort that left everyone involved running on adrenaline.
The spider drones proved their worth. The platform was made of the same interior-grade alloy they'd been walking on since entering the facility, which was nowhere near as monstrous as the outer shell that had laughed off their boring machines. However, it still fought the drones every step of the way. Their plasma-edged shearing tools, designed to slice through S-Alloy in seconds, took nearly a full minute to penetrate each centimeter of the Strathari material.
However, Marcos didn't seem to mind the slow pace.
"The crystalline microstructure of this interior alloy is fascinating," he reported, more to himself than to anyone listening. "It's a composite lattice of at least five distinct metallic elements interwoven at the atomic level, with a ceramic binder that appears to be partially biological in origin. Even this lesser-grade variant has a tensile strength roughly twelve times greater than our S-Alloy. The exterior shell, if it follows the same design philosophy at a higher tier, could be forty or fifty times stronger. I'm building a database from every cut the drones make. Given enough data and time, I believe I can begin to reverse-engineer at least this interior composition."
By hour ten, the drones had carved a hole through the platform wide enough to pass the quadcopter through with clearance to spare. The cut sections were nudged aside by the drones' manipulator limbs and left sitting on the car's floor.
Meanwhile, Mark and Aurelia completed the inventory of the DNA vault, cataloging every intact tank and every ruptured one. Of the original ten thousand-plus samples, approximately eighty-seven hundred remained viable. The rest had either degraded beyond use or had been lost to the containment ruptures. Still, eighty-seven hundred genetic samples were a treasure trove beyond anything Mark had dared to hope for, and Marcos estimated that the surviving battery banks in the vault would keep them preserved for at least another century without intervention.
On the surface, things had moved just as fast. Severus and Octavia had coordinated with Dr. Corven and Marcos to solve the most obvious problem: the clinic wasn't built for a patient who stood nearly ten feet tall and weighed over half a ton.
Rather than gutting one of the existing examination rooms and trying to make it work, Marcos simply rolled one of the 8x8-meter mobile nanoprinters into position against the clinic's eastern wall and extruded a purpose-built addition directly onto the existing structure. The new module went up in just a few hours, its walls fusing seamlessly with the clinic's original frame as the printer's blinding extrusion plane laid down layer after layer of reinforced S-Alloy. When it was finished, the addition was a single large room, roughly eight meters by eight meters, with a reinforced ceiling height of four and a half meters, sealed to the same micro-bacterial scrubber and high-lumen surgical lighting standards as the rest of the clinic.
The skeletal healing chair had been printed separately, each component hauled to the new room and assembled by hand. The thing was enormous, more of a reclining cradle than a chair, with articulated struts and support beams designed to distribute weight evenly across a frame that could accommodate a body of Talos's proportions. Dr. Corven had calibrated the chair's systems for non-human physiology under Marcos's direct guidance, who walked her through each adjustment step by step as he cross-referenced the Strathari biological data encoded in his own memory banks with the readings they'd taken from the stasis pod.
"Increase the nutrient feed's calcium saturation by a factor of three," Marcos had instructed at one point during the calibration. "Strathari bone metabolism operates at a rate that would strip a human skeleton bare in hours. If the chair can't keep pace with his bone metabolism, we'll lose him to systemic mineral depletion before the wounds even become relevant."
"And the organ reconstruction protocols?" Dr. Corven had asked, adjusting the emitter array along the chair's spine support. "You're telling me this thing can regrow a damaged liver?"
"It can regrow any internal organ, given sufficient time and nutrient supply," Marcos confirmed. "The chair accelerates cellular recuperation across every system it can reach. Damaged tissue, compromised organs, internal hemorrhaging, bone fractures, you name it. It works by amplifying the body's natural healing response and feeding it the raw materials it needs to rebuild. However, there are limitations. For example, it cannot regrow severed limbs since the regenerative framework requires an existing cellular scaffold to build upon. Once a limb is gone at the joint, the chair can seal and stabilize the wound, but the architecture for regrowth simply isn't there. That limitation applied even when Strathari were the ones using it."
Dr. Corven had absorbed that with a slow nod. "So we can save his life, fix whatever's broken inside, but the arm and the foot are permanent losses unless we find another way."
"Correct," Marcos said. "For now, keeping him alive is the priority. The rest is a problem for later."
Dr. Corven had followed every instruction with the focused intensity of a surgeon who understood she was operating at the edge of known medicine.
"I've never treated a patient whose bone density is multiple times that of a human's," she'd said during one of their planning sessions, her voice carrying equal parts excitement and quiet terror. "His cardiovascular system operates on principles I'm only beginning to understand because your AI is feeding them to me. If something goes wrong during extraction, I need you to know that I'll be improvising."
"That's all any of us are doing," Mark had told her.
A manual hoist system had been bolted directly into the reinforced ceiling of the new addition, rated for six thousand pounds. Severus had overseen the installation himself, personally testing each anchor point by hanging the full counterweight load for an hour before signing off on it. Overkill by a wide margin, but nobody in the room was interested in cutting it close.
---
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