An Alien Cache is Discovered ‘So, what do you think it is?’ Captain Zaro asked. He was only half listening. Likely it was another cinder cone like the last three moons. Years in college studying the finer points of command, another six months trying to get noticed then finally a ship of his own – directing it between the stars, meeting alien species, bartering under triple moons while the night sky is alive with meteorites. Then the reality hit home; go to the backend of nowhere and do repeated scans of dusty little moons around a dull red sun barely indistinguishable from the background starfield hoping to find a few mu’s of collidium, jacium or possibly some stone that would make nice facias on some planet bound bureaucrat’s office. That was two years ago and other than three visits for maintenance in an especially dull outpost Zaro and remaining crew had done little else. ‘… Sir? I said they seem to be artificial.’ Zaro was across the deck in a single stride. One of the benefits of low spin gravity.

He double checked readings as on each maintenance visit anyone that had shown enough promise and competency to get promoted to veteran status was replaced with someone fresh from training. The data however was unmistakable; there was a small cluster of cinder cones on this asteroid that had high levels of complex compounds according to the spectral analysis. Had this been a larger world, they would easily have been overlooked. In fact, there was a much larger featureless ball sunwards that also had quite a lot of dust sectors but nothing in the way of useful minerals. Might be worth double checking if this proved interesting.

As the ship was orbiting only a few kilometres above the asteroid and relying on attitude and manoeuvring thrusters due to the lack of gravity, it didn’t take long to put down. Even so, Zaro and two rookies were suited and waiting in the rotating airlock by the time the grapples engaged with planetary surface.

The small mounds were little more than a dozen metres in height with a typical ascent angle of around thirty degrees. Scaling up the cinder cones proved straightforward enough. Three billion years of cold had effectively welded all but the upper few centimetres of regolith to a firm surface and the micro-gravity made for easy ascent. Dust from each step or jump was quickly left behind, following lazy parabolic trajectories and leaving the boot prints of the team visible for next few hundred thousand years.

The top of the caldera scaled was found to be only a couple of metres in diameter and thick rime of dusty ice lined the inside. This would have once spewed cryo-gases such as nitrogen and possibly oxygen along with carbon dioxide powder and fine dust particles. If sufficiently cold, the oxygen may well have welled up in liquid form, spewing over the top as mud and blanketed the surrounding terrain in a thick layer of dissipating fog. Or something like that. Zaro was always a bit vague over the actual temperature states. Maybe it would have been liquid nitrogen and oxygen clouds. Jack would have known, till some bastard back in the heart of the Empire saw fit to drag him off last maintenance due to his exemplary record.

He dropped a glow globe down the tube. It descended lazily, illuminating ice and silica scintillations while pushing data back up to his heads-up display. Nothing particularly unusual until it got to a dozen or so metres below mean surface level; then things got interesting. As it hit what was presumably a natural bend it popped a relay to maintain signal and carried on though the rock and ice walls had been replaced by something that appeared pearlescent. Organic? Then the feed cut out.

‘Imhez, get down there,’ commanded Zak. Imhez turned from peering into the hole to the captain.
‘Not a chance, I’ve seen what happens. I ain’t going down there. I’ll get another globe.’

Wisdom prevailed though Zak was annoyed that his authority was challenged. Maybe he will file a recommendation for Imhez and promote him off the ship on the next maintenance. In the meantime, while awaiting his return with the replacement globe, Zak had Beili take samples of the material around the cone and determine minerology. This proved as dull as expected until Beili stepped into a crack and his boot came out with flakes of pearlescent material. As Zak jumped down the side of the cone to join the rookie the ground started to crumple and when Zak touched down the terrain had changed sufficiently to send him tumbling in slow motion down the rest of the slope. As he lazily spun he caught a glimpse of gas erupting from the ground where he last saw Beili. Screams first of panic then agony erupted across the coms before the signal started to glitch and within a few seconds dropped out completely. Rock and the shattered remains of Beili were launched up into the black, carried by the dissipating gas.

Liquid bubbled in the newly formed hole, boiling and forming thick mist, spreading out and quickly rolling up the sides of the cone and sweeping over the captain. The sudden increase in pressure sent his suit into critical as it detected rapid temperature drop across the membrane. Emergency response kicked in, inflating the suit to near spherical shape with a gas injection to act as a pressure barrier between the cryo-liquid exterior. This also had the effect of popping him to the surface and washing him downhill.
Within seconds it was over. Zak, his suit now deflating was more than a hundred metres away from the slowly crumbling cone. The liquid had all but boiled off and dust was slowly returning to the ground. His coms were rebooting and pins and needles were throbbing in his fingers and toes. His face shield was covered in a thick layer of frozen icy mud that the visor wipers was having difficulty removing. It settled for partial success and Zak slowly returned to his feet, holding his head an odd angle in order to get a half decent view of his surroundings.

Eventually his coms kicked back in, hallway through what was likely a running monologue from Imhez, both excited and petrified, with a repeating refrain that Beili vanished.

He staggered over to where Imhez had stopped on the far side of a large crack in the ground extending from the now inverted remains of the cinder cone. Looking down revealed the pearlescent lining of a roughly cylindrical cave maybe a two kilometres metres deep and approximately sixty in diameter though occasionally drawing in not unlike a stack of bubbles.

‘What is it?’ asked Imhez. ‘No idea. Mine shaft?’ Suspended on translucent threads extending inwards from each of the narrow section at the top of the bubbles was a small blob maybe a couple of metres in diameter. ‘You think those things made this?’ ‘Yup,’ replied Zack. ‘Why?’ ‘Beats me. You drop that globe you are holding and let’s see if we can find out what the hell they are.’ A few days later, having finished the accident report, Zack and Imhez looked at the fifteen blobs, now neatly stacked in the cargo bay. They still had no idea what they were for, but testing had discovered that they could convert a mass of rock into base elements, excavating a volume equal to a standard cave. Unfortunately, when their connectors to the walls were severed the pearlescent sphere quickly decayed and the entire cave became unstable and collapsed in on itself within a matter of hours. There were still a few of the blobs buried deep under unstable rock and ice and no doubt there they will stay forever. Zack finished the report stating that the true purpose of the blobs is unlikely to ever be known and when they tested, they couldn’t find a way to keep the blob from shrivelling up into little more than a husk and risking the rest was considered a waste. On the plus side the hole created was stable unlike the ones found initially. With suitable drilling equipment, power and facilities they could be used to create a series of cave extensions to a base. Time to check out that dust world. There may be more cinder cones and more of those strange artefacts below. Pearl Cave Module A free special action can be used by a base in a land sector to exhaust Pearl Cave Modules in order to create a quantity of cave complexes equal to 10 times the Cave Modules exhausted.