The Dig

[Semir Gerkhan]

4-5-834 AS

Planet Pygar, one of the many Zoner existing settlements.

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PSI Agent Luke Garcia

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Luke Garcia held his portable communication device up to the payment reader of the bar and then stood up from the bar stool he had been sitting on next to the counter for the last hour. He nodded vaguely to the waiter and headed toward the door, taking one last look around.

The bar was populated with people chatting loudly, playing cards and drinking drink after drink. That club was always crowded, and people tended to be quite impaired by alcohol, so Garcia used to frequent it when he was making his routine rounds trying to gather some useful information. That day however, it was emptier than usual, and among the regular customers whom he was accustomed to seeing, a certain general uneasiness reigned like a shadow.

That anomaly had caught Luke's attention from the first moment he arrived and had activated his unconscious alerts as a trained agent, which had encouraged him to hang around for a long time, listening to conversations, playing a few hands of poker and buying drinks to some of the more talkative regulars. After just over an hour and a half of painstaking work, and having lost a few hundred credits, Luke had discovered information that could surely interest his superior.

The Pontifical Service of Intelligence, or The Key, as it was commonly known among the people of the New Covenant Church, had several agents like Luke distributed throughout many of Pygar's settlements doing the same task as him. Nothing in particular was sought, but the PSI Director, the Magister Yuri Orlov, always liked to have everything under control, whether in his own house or in the neighbors'. After all, within The Key everyone knew that Orlov was obsessed with surveillance, and he was determined to know as much as he could about both enemies and allies. The Director always said that information was power, and the Sacred Mandate of Deux needed men with power to be carried out. However, Luke was quite convinced that Orlov personally enjoyed finding out other people's secrets.

The agent left the bar and headed through the underground galleries of the settlement directly towards the nearest monorail stop. He went down to the platform and waited for the next unit to arrive, while he lit a cigarette and his head was pondering what he had just discovered. An alien artifact? In Pygar? Well, if you knew something about the planet, in theory it didn't have to be so strange, after all it was here where the Rheinlanders had found in 795 AS the artifacts that had started the Nomad War. However, after the war the Order had explored Pygar intensively, and it was assumed that none remained. Certainly, if this story turned out to be real, Director Orlov was going to be very pleased in knowing about this finding, given his latest efforts to gather as much knowledge as possible about the Nomads.

This sudden interest of Orlov could have been considered heretical by the teachings of the Church, but Luke thought it was quite understandable, considering that lately Nomad activity had skyrocketed a lot. Just a week ago there had been a fairly serious battle in Theta against a huge contingent of xenomorphs, near Freeport 9, in which the two destroyers of the Pontifical Navy had participated along with a Corsair fleet. That encounter hadn't gone very well, and the human forces had had to withdraw after suffering considerable casualties and damage.

Bad business, really. From what was known, the aberrations were becoming more and of increasingly larger sizes, so no matter how heretical it may seem, in this case Luke agreed with the Director. The Church needed to know more about these impious monsters in order to confront them with any chance of victory. In any case, if the believers in the Faith were not yet ready for something like this, The Key would take care of hiding what they should not know. After all, that was part of their job too.

The monorail connected directly to the hangars core where García had his ship landed, so the agent arrived there in about 15 minutes. His cover was to play the identity of a small basic commodity trader who bought low off-planet and sold high on Pygar, so he moved around in a Sunburst-class freighter that allowed him to go unnoticed among the many foreign traders visiting the settlements on the planet. He completed routine access checks, accessed his vessel, and took off toward Faith Haven.

Unlike many other Zoner settlements located in Pygar, Faith Haven had its underground part located in a relatively small cave system, which had no connection to the vast complex of galleries that connected most colonies. Therefore, it could only be accessed by air, or much more dangerously, by traveling across the surface of the planet. Luke flew through a Grade 4 electromagnetic storm for the next hour until his sensors picked up the beacons of the NCC settlement's landing pads, and he was able to see its two characteristic and gigantic biodomes among the sand clouds.

The static-choked voice of air traffic control echoed through the cabin. "Ship with identifier Bravo Lima Six Two Victor, you're entering the airspace of the Faith Heaven colony. Indicate intentions."

Garcia activated the microphone on his headphones, while connecting to the control tower's frequency. "This is Bravo Lima Six Two Victor, commercial freighter, requesting permission to land."

"You're cleared to land on pad B, navigate to the beacon and wait for contact with the tractor beams. Have a nice day and Deux be with you."

The intelligence agent landed his ship and went directly to the Pontifical Palace taking an underground bus, and once there he accessed by showing his PSI credentials. He wasted no time and a few minutes later he was entering Yuri Orlov's office, which unlike the rest of the offices in the Palace, it was in a part of the building that was below the surface. The Director of The Key barely looked up from his desk to glance at it, and soon returned to focusing on the report in front of him, with a look of annoyance on his face. Luke stood at attention with his hands behind his back and remained silent as he waited, until Orlov finally sighed, turned off the screen of his device, and fixed his questioning eyes on his subordinate.

"Agent Garcia, what brings you here?" The Magister leaned over the desk and rested his chin on his clasped hands. "I hope it's something important enough to come and tell me personally, instead of sending me a report, as everyone."

Luke cleared his throat and said a single sentence. "It's an X Protocol, Your Eminence."

Orlov raised an eyebrow, and a flash of interest appeared in his eyes. He then pressed a button under his desk, causing a sliding titanium plate to block hermetically the access door. From that moment on, that office was a completely soundproof bunker and inaccessible to anyone from the outside.

The Director got up from his seat, walked around the desk and stood in front of Garcia, leaning on the table. "Report immediately."

Orlov had barely whispered the order, and seemed completely calm and relaxed, but Luke knew that this information must have sent him into an internal anxiety attack. The Magister had been waiting for something that would come under the name of X Protocol for a long time.

"I've fairly credible information that an extraterrestrial relic has been found on the planet. The information doesn't come from the most reliable channels, but there are too many channels separately repeating the same story for it to be simple drunken nonsense." García was quite convinced of the veracity of the information, but he still had to persuade his boss. "Furthermore, it seems that the news is spreading like wildfire. It's not talked about openly, and I guess that's why we haven't heard anything here yet, but it's something that's present in people's whispers. There are colonists who are leaving, I suppose due to fear that what happened 40 years ago will be repeated." The agent shrugged. "I don't know how to express it correctly but there is something solid in all of this. A few months ago, when we believed that the Corsairs could end up invading Pygar, the inhabitants of the colonies were determined to stay and defend the planet with their lives. Now however, people pack up and leave... It's evident that the fear is authentic, and it has to be based on something real."

"Do we know anything else about this artifact?" The Director opened his arms. "Who discovered it, where is it, what exactly is it about?"

Luke shook his head. "Nothing yet, Your Eminence, but I've been aware of this today and by chance. This's another of the details that makes me think the information is good, that it has been something sudden. Last week no one was talking about this and now it's on too much people's lips."

Yuri Orlov nodded slow and thoughtfully. He was silent for a few seconds and then spoke again. "This is worrying news, agent Garcia. As we already know, everything related to Nomad aberrations is very dangerous and usually ends in heresy and ruin." The Director clenched his fists. "However, we're talking about the potential existence of an impious artifact on the very soil of our planet. The risk is maximum for our people and for the rest of the inhabitants of all Pygar, so we've no choice but to face this situation thoroughly." The Magister stood up and sat down behind his desk again, without stopping watching Luke with eyes blazing. "I'm going to authorize an investigative operation without limit of funds." Orlov pointed at the agent with a finger that looked like a claw. "You've discovered it, so you will have the honor of organizing it. Choose 5 agents you trust, inform them and we'll meet here in 24 hours. By then I want a complete plan of action that will lead us to discovering what the hell is going on, and where that relic is, if it exists. Once we know that, we can assess the threat and study the possibility of destroying it..." The Director showed a devilish smile that froze Garcia's blood. "...or taking possession of it, if it's the Will of Deux."