>>5849410“I thought that, too.” He slides his shotgun over, keeping it pointed towards the passenger window, and you find yourself checking your laspistol as you slide into your seat and shut the door behind you. “But they're all too real.”
“Human flesh? What do they eat when there aren't travelers?”
“I don't know.” He admits. “Life finds a way, or maybe they do have something to eat and just enjoy the hunt." He glances over, and notices you checking the charge rating on your laspistol. “You're armed? Good. You know how to use that thing?”
“No.” You reply truthfully. The indicator on the back read an even fifty shots. Slightly under rated capacity, if you remember correctly.
“Better than nothing. Besides, you rarely need to aim to hit one of them." He cocks his head, as if readying for something. “Okay, get ready-”
He's interrupted by a loud metallic <span class="mu-i">thwack</span> that reverberates through the cage. Your stomach lurches again as the elevator comes to an abrupt halt, the pool of light spreading out around you illuminating thick, matted down and flattened soil, along with rows of barrels, lashed together to make some sort of barricade. The rusted remains of some kind of hab unit was around you, broken pipes and fixtures sprouting up from the ground at irregular intervals surrounding the barrels. You hear a whirring noise close to your door, and you look up to see that the crank is suddenly running backwards, disrupted somehow by the landing and letting all the tension out of the system.
Errat pulls the wheel around and reverses the truck off the elevator with a powerful whine from the engine, pulling as hard around as the wheels and the shape of the elevator will allow before pointing it straight and sliding forward. Almost as soon as the front wheels drop off the elevator, it starts to rise, and you can't help but hold your laspistol a little bit tighter as your sole escape route rises up into the ceiling. He pulls the truck around and runs you alongside the barrel fence until it ends, providing the two a semi-unobstructed view of the... darkness surrounding you.
All that you could see in the pool of light from the lumens is what appeared to be odd, rolling mountains in the distance. Twisted piles of metal, not quite intentional mounds, but a... dusting that lay all over the hive foundations. There were broken girders, shattered plating, false walls, plaster... relics from the missing floors above, like nobody ever came to clean them up. There was even ice on the ground, permafrost that appeared to have hardened the exposed dirt and made it into rocky patches.
