“It is open! It is finally open!” a worker shouted through the ice tunnels. This information went amazingly quick to James as the welding took more than two days overall. James just remembered what his first researcher Eli said “The door is about four meters thick, whatever lies beyond is either really valuable or very dangerous.”
James quickly pulled on his safety suit and moved down to the security door.
The Research group had somehow managed to pierce through what appeared to be an artificial construction countless kilometers beneath the surface, at a depth where nothing should have been able to live. As the group trudged on within the impossibly vast facility and Bacchus silently whispered to James “Who the hell constructed this?” Closely leaning in to Bacchus, James just answered “No clue. No clue at all.” There was simply no sign of “How” this got there or “Who” made it.
“Jonathan?” James questioned. “Yes?” A guy some lines behind them responded.
“You have discovered the door, right?” James asked that without changing a move.
Jonathan lifted his eyebrow to a questioning unsure look, but answered. “Uhm… Yes?”
“Great, at least now we know how to call this installation, we call it Kramer construction” James stated.
Jonathan Kramer was really surprised about this, he had seen himself just a small worker, doing his digging job, being just one the smallest gear within this. “This..., thank you sir, this is… an unexpected honor.”
Two days into their sub-expedition, James had decided to set up a stationary base directly in the artificial halls to keep the team sheltered from the cold outside the building itself, and to be closer to the whole construction. Flying there and moving down there every time was taking too long and consumed too many resources. The first things brought down there were food and water supplies, construction goods and finally the crew housings and life-support-systems. The whole process took up a whole day.
Upon the fourth day of the exploration of this place, the team started to find more and more building rooms, hubs, debunked databases, laboratories and even more oddly, more halls lined with wires, cords and other electronical things with odd markings amongst them. That was until they found the massive 'vault' under the ground.
After the basic station, which initially was called after the antarctic researcher Amundsen, was completely constructed the whole crew was ordered to the conference room for some meeting or announcement. Everybody sat at a table, nipping awkwardly on their water rations, awaiting instructions of what they would be doing the next days. The whole staff entered the room and James already started talking before he even entered the room. “Ladies and gentlemen - as you might or might not have noticed - we have found something. Something of fundamental value. Tomorrow we will launch further investigations, but I think right now, some celebrating is in order.” Most of the people present did not have a clue what James was talking about, but everyone raised their glasses anyway.
When the exploration of the underground structure stretched into the fourth day it was about time for everyone to see the vault like construction with their own eyes.
What lied before them was gigantic structure built into the ice, not entirely comprehensible by just looking at it. For a long time everybody watched the object , too astonished to say a word, until a skinny man with sunken in eyes and pale skin turned towards the group. Dr. Eli Starkweather pulled out a small notebook and started something that seemed to be a short lecture “This object is about 16,43 kilometers in length, 843 meters wide and 989 meters in height and 76% of it is embedded in ice. On the other side of the object is a second cave. The frozen areas indicate an age between 500-900 years of the object with a guarantee of 72%. The source of the signal is currently unreachable within the frozen parts of this object. The material of the object is contained of an unknown alloy, metal or something else. Thank you for your attention”
Looking like a robot Eli stuffed the notebook back into his pocket and moved to his instruments on the left side in slow motion.
James looked over to his people “I am sorry for this extra work, but we must relocate the base into this icy dome.” Another one of James’ sudden orders. There was some moaning and a few other expressions of annoyance but everyone started to get to work.