The Cardinal Directive: Supplemental File #16

Speculative Fiction

[Start of Season 2]
[Previous]

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>> Supplemental File Located
>> Data suggests recording date prior to Mission Log #48
>> Play?
>> Confirmed. Now Playing Supplemental File #16

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When the footage chitters and clicks to life, it begins with audio only, several discordant sounds fighting for attention.

Screeches of the dead. Hurried impacts against hard ground. The rustling of canvas and zippers, the skittering of pebbles underfoot. Fast moving water in the mid distance.

And then, quiet.

The visual clicking into being comes from a rather unexpected place — on high in a large, well-lit but sparingly furnished room. Lining the right wall are a small collection of screens and monitors along a row of desks, each of them dark at the moment.

The desks are instead piled with an assortment of various items. Cooking utensils, spare oxygen tanks, spare suits and repair kits, buckets of dark soil, and so on. There’s not much, but what is there has been meticulously sorted into categories. There’s some amount of rhyme and reason to it all, but clearly nothing concrete yet about where everything belongs and should be stored.

There seems to be three doors, but the camera isn’t at a good angle to see what lies beyond them.

The ever-present hum is not absent here, indicating that we’re still deep underground. However, there is another sound just outside, a creaking and groaning of turning machinery, and the movement of… water?

There’s no time to speculate further. The middle door opens quietly, two figures slipping inside and locking it behind them just as quickly.

“That’s the last of the supplies from the first base,” Sebastian said, carrying a backpack’s worth of miscellaneous materials over to the desk and setting it down, beginning to sort through it. Alison was right behind him, pulling a densely packed blanket free from her pack.

“Too hot to need any more bedding. Probably better used for bandages.” She balled it up, hucking it over to him to catch, and he did.

He set it aside with their first aid kits, well aware that bandaging wouldn’t be what they would run out of first, but it was good to have anyway. For his sake, if not hers. They’d never gotten around to discussing that phantom break in her leg she’d mentioned.

The unpacking and sorting were necessary forms of work and there was little to talk about while they did it. Still, this silence wasn’t completely born of concentration, and he knew it.

“I just don’t get it.”

“I know,” he sighed.

“We need to keep moving, Sebastian. —I think there’s a way if we follow the river.”