Chapter 16 – A valuable find

I received a disrupted call from David again. Out of what he was saying I could only make out ‘Jim’, ‘you’ and ‘bravo’. Other than that there was too much noise in the signal to understand. I hoped he wouldn’t worry about me and began carefully inspecting the room with crawler vehicles.
There was a door leading out of the room. It was much lighter here and I seemed to be in some sort of corridor. I understood that I was in the secret base now as there was light everywhere and a few security cameras. I made sure none of the cameras see me and began slowly making my way towards one end of the corridor.
It reached a dead end soon with just one door. Surprisingly the door was unlocked. I walked in. It was a small room. Must’ve been a small storage area as I could see a lot of broken electronic equipment lying there.
- “Well I doubt anything interesting here.” I said quietly to myself.
But as I was about to exist, something caught my eye. It was another one of those electronic diaries. It was glowing from inside of a metal crate. I dug it out from the rest of the rubbish and decided to enter the file. It was dated 2108.
- “Wow! This one’s pretty old too.” I got interested.
The file seemed to be someone’s diary. He was a V.E.N.U.S. member and was talking about his mission. Someone seemed to have experienced the same hell as me and encountered the same beasts.
I read on and some of my thoughts started twisting. First of all his name was the same as my dad’s. Secondly he was talking about waking up from a coma after a crash landing when humanity arrived on planet Venus. Thirdly he spoke of his find that he had a 14 year old son that he didn’t know about and to be honest I was about 14 when we arrived to Venus. My analysis told me that this must’ve been my father’s diary. But I remember being told that he died from the crash landing of the ship where he was and that apparently there were no survivors. Why would they hide from us the fact that he was alive? And this were the V.E.N.U.S. members who informed me and my mother of that. Are they really behind all of this? It made sense. How else would that robber know all our tactics and when to expect us. But how come I didn’t know about this?
I disconnected my radio because of increasingly high suspicion and decided not to trust anyone, not even my own boss. These scums will definitely pay for my father’s death and for every other crime they committed.
I took this diary with me as well. Both of them could be handy as evidence when I make it out of here alive. I decided to head the other way through the corridor now. As usual I was avoiding to be seen by security cameras. There were numerous rooms to my left and right but all were locked.
I then reached a fork in the corridor. I stopped and thought for a while whether I should go left or right. My instincts told me to go right and here I reached some stairs leading up. I went up those stairs and was in another corridor. This one was smaller. Most rooms were locked, but the double door at the end was wide open. I decided to take my chances and to head through it, holding my finger on the trigger of MAγ-sniper rifle.
When I went through the double doors I found myself in a medium sized room. I avoided the security camera and began walking towards the next door when suddenly the double doors behind me closed loudly and the lights went out.
Something was wrong and I could smell it. I tried activating my night vision goggles but they ran out of power due to me using them so much recently, so looked like I had to continue in the dark when suddenly I heard a voice:
- “Stop where you are!”
I froze.