Chapter 21 - Warg Valley

Chapter 21

Salran Mountains, Starnor Imperial Border Territories

In flight, approaching Warg Valley

Airah hummed as they flew through the air. She hadn't necessarily been that much of a flying sports enthusiast back in the Galactic Empire -she liked it when she'd tried gliding through the air with a grav suit and a jetpack of course, but it wasn't something she would spend her days doing-, but she was growing very fond of flying in her dragon form. She felt less maneuverable, sure, but it felt...right, and made her feel powerful, in many ways.

Airah flew over the side of a mountain, and suddenly...

"I think this is it." Called out Stellyra, her avatar keeping pace with her partner's body, as she gestured at the vista in front of them. "Warg Valley."

Airah nodded as she looked at the newly revealed landscape. 'Warg valley' was perhaps an understatement, this place was freaking huge. She always imagined valleys to be tiny, encased between two high mountains, but this could have housed a fair sized city, easily. Hell, it's shape was very much suited to that, it looked like-

Her mind came to a stop.

It looked like an impact crater.

"Hey, Stellyra, are you seeing what I'm seeing?"

The AI frowned.

"Yeah. The valley's geology it...it's a crater."

"I had the same thought. Impact crater?"

"Hold on." The AI closed her eyes briefly, and Airah smiled. The AI was very good at doing complex calculations like this, but it could still take her a few seconds to just marshall all the parameters -and put a few mathematical guesses in the mix- and actually run the program. "Alright. Yeah, definitely impact. Low angle, relatively. Large mass, orbital re-entry velocity? Something either got pushed out of orbit, or was already on its way for a controlled landing when someone shot it down."

Airah blinked, and looked at the landscape.

"You can guess that much from just a look?"

"It's not a guess, more like...complex deductions." A screen of equations and observations popped up in the air. "Basically, in terms you can understand without a thirty minutes presentation, the crater is too shallow, even allowing for erosion, and too wide to be a higher velocity, but smaller object. Same energy, yes, but it would have left a completely different pattern. And beyond the valley, the rocks scattered, they look like a debris field." Airah looked up, and blinked in surprise. The AI was right, the other side of the valley looked like someone had made a giant shotgun whose buckshot was made out of rocks the size of skyscrappers and fired it. "My guess is? Something came in low, not quite horizontally but far from vertically, and hit the base of the mountain that used to be here."

"I see. So, a ship, not a bombardment munition?"

"Yeah. Or a space station. Whatever it is, I don't think it was meant as a weapon. Might have been an asteroid but…at this angle, it would have broken up and we'd have multiple impact sites. Plus asteroids just don't come at such velocities, it'd have hit at interplanetary velocities, not orbital re-entry ones."

Airah nodded. Virtually every orbital bombardment system preferred to hit the target from as close to vertical as possible. For purely kinetic weapons it was simply to avoid loosing too much energy (or outright loosing the projectile altogether) to atmospheric friction, while for missiles or just nukes fired out of a railgun it was a question of avoiding point defence fire. And most asteroids, contrary to popular belief, were glorified gravel piles with a few more cohesive rocks in them, and they rarely tended to survive re-entry, and asteroids in the solar system tended to move far faster than the comparatively anemic speed required to fall out of a terran type planet's orbit.

"Fair enough." Airah peered down. "Should we land and take a look?"

"I...don't think needling the giant scary wolves things with a stick is a good idea until we know they won't turn us into their dinner. Some air observation would probably be better."

"Sure." Airah looked around. "We can also settle on some of the mountain slopes. Pick one with a cliff, in one of the bare areas to boot, we'll see anything coming from hundreds of meters away, even if they can climb sheer rock."

"Wouldn't put it past those things, but it sounds safe enough."

Airah nodded, and started slowly banking into the valley.

*****

"Comfy." Said Airah as she settled her massive dragon body on the cliff.

"You're basically a biological, fire proof and breathing battle tank. You'd find hot magma comfy."

"Well, hey, like a cat you gotta love warmth." Airah blinked as she looked at the landscape. "Found any oddities? Any more, I mean?"

Stellyra nodded. Over the course of the hour long recon flight they'd found some...strange things. Notably, the trees, the undergrowth, basically everything in the valley was just slightly wrong compared to outside it. Well, not completely, some of the species contained in there seemed to have spilled out, but mostly on the other side of the mountains from Kaisersgrenze, in the debris field in fact. The most logical explanation would be that it had something to do with what crashed here, but what in the hell could create its own ecosystem like that?

"Yes. These." She gestured, and a holographic screen appeared, showing several images taken as they were flying around. "Didn't catch them at first, but they caught my eyes once I reviewed everything as an ensemble."

Airah frowned. Those looked like mounts of dirt and moss. Oddly...similar mounds actually.

"Are those tombs of some kind? Cairns?"

"No. At least I don't think so. Look." She projeted a holographic map, and red dots appeared at each location of the structures. "See? They're evenly spaced along the valley in a straight line. And they're running parallel to the mountains."

Airah looked at the map, then her eyes widened.

"Not parallel. Between the mountains. Those are bridge pillars!"

"Bridge pillars?" Stellyra blinked. "Why would anyone build a bridge there?"

Airah chuckled, and gestured at the valley with a massive, scaly hand.

"This place has probably been infested by something nasty, if not wargs, for a looong time. If I had to cross it, I'd rather make it as safe as possible."

"Then why not dig a tunnel?"

"There might be a number of reasons it couldn't be possible. Water for one, if they were digging in the mountains rather than underneath them they might not have wanted to bother with all the flooding issues. Hell, there might have been fossile groundwater that got the waterproof layers separating it from the ground smashed by the impact. We have seen several sources and streams in the valley after all! If so, digging through that would be basically impossible."

"I...suppose that's a good point. Or it might be the impact itself?" Airah rose an eyebrow, and the AI's avatar shrugged. "If the object was big and tough enough, something could have survived. Big meteorites don't tend to leave much behind but some do. And if it was a ship, well..." She shrugged. "I mean, you do remember the Australian find?"

Airah nodded. After the siege of Earth and the burning of humanity's homeworld at the hands of the Conclave, a long reconstruction process had begun. It had taken a century for the planet to have any meaningful permanent population, and a millenia for it to truly become habitable again. The time it had taken wasn't because of a lack of technology -the Galactic Empire had become adept at reclaiming burnt out worlds out of necessity after all-, but the Conclave had sprinkled the entire planet with radiological warheads on purpose, and there simply weren't enough resources that could be safely diverted for the war effort that wouldn't be better employed elsewhere, notably on reclaiming a far more resource rich, and less damaged old colony world. The gradual reclamation of Earth had started with the oceans first, notably because it was easy to simply filter the water for the radiological elements than dig out the topsoil and process it, and eventually expanded from the coast and inland.

Which meant that it had taken almost the full millenia to discover the damned near intact Conclave cruiser buried in the middle of the Australian outback. No one was quite sure how it had gotten there -in the chaos of the fighting, with nukes, antimatter bombs and plasma shots flying everywhere and everyone packing the solar system with Electronic Counter Measures and jamming it was a miracle they'd even managed to pin down the day when the cruiser had come down-, but it had been functionally intact, primary reactor, communication systems, hyperdrive, everything. It had been an incredible find, notably because Conclave warships just flat out didn't surrender, and all of their vessels were equipped with multiple, redundant self destruct systems. Very reliable ones at that. It must have been remotely deactivated by one of their officers, intending to recover the ship before the relief fleet arrived to annihilate them, and they must have been so panicked when her devourer had emerged they never realized they forgot to reactivate the self destruct. The cruiser had hardly been the most advanced warship in the Conclave fleet, but it had proven a wealth of information on Conclave technology, military procedures and combat capabilities, which had saved countless lives.

"So you're thinking there might be a wreck?"

"That or some more or less intact debris. Many ships have heavily reinforced sections that can survive when the rest of the vessel has been destroyed. Reactor cores, missile magazines, the bridge..."

"Right. And G did say that this world was recovering from a dark age. Maybe this was a ship from something before that dark age came to be."

"Yeah." Stellyra shook her head. "Anyway, should we investigate that bridge? It's a straight line, so it shouldn't be too hard to find further pillars...and where it used to go into the mountains." The AI shrugged. "Who knows, maybe the tunnels are still good? Bridges don't last long without maintenance, but if some of the Maginot line tunnels survived the Conclave bombardment of Earth, these might have survived all this time."

"Yeah, let's take a look. I'm curious as to who built a bridge here, and why."

It took only a few minutes to take to the air again and start following the line of broken pillars to the closest mountain side they pointed to.

"The line ends...here." Said Stellyra as she pointed at a particularly dense forest section. "Probably a good idea to land beforehand though."

"Right."

Airah landed, and switched into her human form out of convenience for moving through the woods, keeping her sword drawn and her senses alert as she quickly moved through the forest, ready to turn back into her dragon form at a moment's notice. Even without knowing this place was inhabited by giant, man eating wolves, this place gave her the creeps.

She battled through the thick, somethings wall-like underbrush, before she suddenly burst through it and found herself face to face with the 'mountain side'.

"Oookay, what.the.fuck." Slowly said Airah as she gazed at the vista.

In front of her were two statues, each easily a dozen meters tall, flanking a giantic, rune encrusted door. A door that could have easily admitted her full dragon form without blinking. Shit, bit was big enough you could have driven a freaking galleon through had there been water, mast and all!

What was even more terrifying was that the door was softly glowing. The entire thing was enchanted!

"Well...Safe to say I wasn't expecting that." Simply said Stellyra, before elbowing her friend. It didn't actually move her body, and she doubt she'd have felt much through her scales anyway, but the mindlink dutifully transcribed the sensation. "Hey, look. Train tracks."

Airah blinked, and looked down on the ground. The AI was right, there were rails running into the door, and heading straight for where the bridge used to have been. They seemed almost inlaid into the ground as well, and in surprisingly good condition all things considered.

"Well...Holy shit. I suppose that answers some questions, but begs far more of them."

"Yeah. Have you looked at the statues? They're not what I'd call normal humans either."

Airah frowned and looked more closely at the statues, before nodding. They were in far worse shape than the door, covered in lichen and gods-know-what, but they clearly were the wrong shape for what she'd consider normal human statues. Far too wide, compared to their height. The statues looked like they were representing warriors in heavy armor, with a giant warhammer with its head down and both hands on the pommel. The facial features of the figures hidden behind gigantic helmets -provided the sculptor bothered making them and not just leaving the faces plain- except for a long, if time damaged beard.

"Dwarves?" It looked so stereotypical it was almost hard to say it out loud.

"Seems like it at least." Answered Stellyra. "They-"

Airah simply hadn't been paying attention. She'd been so focused on the dumbfounding discovery that she never even heard anything. Not that there would have been much to hear from such an accomplished predator.

The roar seemed to shake the rock of the mountain itself as the warg pounced on her from behind.