5. Chapter 5 - Matt
The command post occupied the shattered remains of what had once been the monastery’s outer chapel.
At least, Matt assumed it had been a chapel at some point.
Time and collapse had erased most of the original structure centuries ago, leaving behind broken stone walls reinforced with temporary steel supports and heavy waterproof tarps stretched across the exposed ceiling.
Portable generators hummed from one corner while floodlights cast hard white illumination across folding tables crowded with excavation maps, sensor equipment, weapons cases, and half-drained coffee cups.
Nobody inside the command post looked rested.
Matt stepped through the entrance behind Baptiste while rain hammered steadily against the tarp overhead. The sudden warmth inside seemed strange after the freezing storm outside, carrying the smell of damp clothing, old stone, overheated electronics, and exhaustion.
Several operatives glanced up as they entered before returning their attention to the monitors spread across the central tables. Matt noticed the same thing he had outside: everyone avoided looking toward the excavation entrance for too long.
Like eye contact with the mountain itself had become uncomfortable.
Commander Vale crossed toward the largest display screen near the center of the room while Keene set the sealed case onto one of the nearby tables.
A woman in tactical gear stood waiting beside the equipment monitors with a tablet tucked beneath one arm and enough visible exhaustion beneath her eyes to suggest she had not slept in at least a day.
“Mr. Reynolds,” Vale said, “this is Dr. Elara Petrescu, lead archaeological consultant for the excavation.”
The woman looked up. Sharp gray eyes studied Matt with quick clinical focus before flicking briefly toward Baptiste and Keene beside him. “You’re the new operative,” she said.
Matt looked back at her. “That kinda sounds temporary.”
“It probably is,” Baptiste replied.
Matt glanced sideways. “You continue being spectacularly bad at encouragement.”
“I believe in consistency.”
To Matt’s surprise, the archaeologist smiled faintly before she looked back toward the excavation maps spread across the table.
“You arrived at an unfortunate time,” she said.
“That sentence has literally never led anywhere good.”
“No,” Keene agreed. “It has not.”
Dr. Petrescu activated one of the nearby displays, and a three-dimensional rendering of the underground excavation rotated above the table in pale blue light.
Even after seeing the scans outside, the full image unsettled Matt instantly.
The monastery itself occupied only the uppermost layer of the structure.
Beneath it, the mountain opened downward into something enormous.
Ancient corridors spiraled through the earth in overlapping geometric patterns that looked far too deliberate to be natural cave formations.
Massive chambers branched outward beneath the excavation site at irregular depths while entire sections of the lower structure remained obscured behind distorted scan interference.
Matt stared at the projection for several seconds. “How deep does this go?”
“We don’t know,” Dr. Petrescu admitted.
The answer landed heavily in the silence around the table.
“We lost accurate mapping below level six approximately four days ago,” she continued. “The lower structure does not remain spatially consistent for extended periods of time.”
Matt blinked once. “I’m sorry, what?”
“The corridors change.”
“That feels like something architecture should not do.”
“It isn’t architecture,” she replied.
The room seemed to grow quieter after that sentence.
Matt studied the rotating map again while something uneasy tightened beneath his ribs.
The lower chambers no longer resembled ruins the longer he looked at them.
They looked organized. Intentional. Like something had designed the structure beneath the monastery according to rules no human mind fully understood anymore.
And somehow the worst part was that none of the people in the room appeared surprised by that conclusion.
Dr. Petrescu enlarged one section of the map near the center of the display. “This chamber sits approximately three hundred meters beneath the excavation site. It is the deepest point we’ve managed to scan reliably.”
The highlighted chamber dwarfed the corridors surrounding it.
Matt focused on the display. “And what’s in it?”
“We don’t know that either.”
Baptiste folded his arms across his chest. “You sent recovery teams into an unstable underground structure without identifying the primary site first?”
“We identified enough,” Vale answered before Dr. Petrescu could respond.
Matt looked toward her. “That sounds like the kind of sentence people say right before everything goes catastrophically wrong.”
Vale met his gaze evenly. “You are beginning to understand Valker operations.”
“That is not comforting.”
“It was not intended to be.”
A nearby monitor crackled suddenly with static. Everyone in the room looked toward it at once.
For several seconds nothing happened except interference and distorted audio hiss. Then a burst of sound cut through the static hard enough to silence the entire command post.
Heavy, uneven breathing crackled through the static, and Matt could feel the hyena surge instantly into alertness. The audio lasted barely three seconds before dissolving back into silence. Afterward, nobody moved or spoke.
One of the technicians near the monitors swallowed visibly before adjusting several controls with unsteady hands. “Signal spike from the lower relay station,” he said. “Same as before.”
Matt turned toward him. “Before?”
Dr. Petrescu looked exhausted suddenly. “We’ve been receiving intermittent audio from below level three for the last sixteen hours.”
“Why was that not included in the briefing?”
“Because most of it sounds like this.” The technician replayed the recording.
Static filled the room again before the breathing returned, low and distorted beneath layers of interference. This time, though, Matt caught something underneath it. Not words exactly. More like movement.
Slow, measured footsteps echoed through the recording before cutting off abruptly halfway through the playback. Matt felt the hyena sharpen instantly at the sound, every instinct locking onto the silence that followed.
Around him, the room had gone perfectly still again. Not from fear alone. Everyone was listening.
Baptiste spoke beside him without taking his eyes off the monitor. “That is closer than it was earlier.”
Nobody contradicted him, and honestly that was worse than the recording itself.
Vale muted the recording, but the silence left behind sat heavier than the audio itself. Rain hammered steadily against the tarps stretched overhead while static hissed faintly through the surrounding equipment, and for several long seconds nobody inside the operations center spoke.
Matt leaned back from the monitor, more aware now of how crowded the command post had become.
Operatives lined the outer tables reviewing sensor data and excavation maps while technicians monitored motion readings from deeper beneath the monastery.
Several people kept glancing toward the excavation entrance visible through the partially open chapel entrance, as though expecting something to emerge from the darkness at any moment.
Commander Vale rested both hands against the edge of the operations table. “Timestamp?”
One of the communications specialists checked the scrolling data beside the waveform display. “Transmission came through nineteen minutes ago,” she answered. “Level four relay picked it up for approximately seven seconds before the signal collapsed again.”
“Movement?”
The technician studied the display. “Still active.”
Vale folded her arms. “One contact?”
“That’s the problem.” The technician enlarged the sensor feed. “We can’t tell.”
“How can you not tell?” Matt asked.
“The signal keeps overlapping itself.” She looked up. “Either we’re tracking multiple entities moving together… or one entity moving through areas dense enough to create false returns.”
Silence settled over the command post.
“Which do you think it is?” Baptiste asked.
The technician hesitated.
Matt looked at the fluctuating signal. “I don’t know which answer I like less.”
He had spent enough years around military personnel to recognize the exact moment experienced people started mentally recalculating survival odds, and several operatives near the back of the command center had just reached that point simultaneously.
Baptiste folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t like unknowns.”
“Neither do I,” Vale said.
Matt looked between them. “You people are saying that with an alarming amount of calm.”
“We are professionals,” Keene said from near the rear table.
Matt glanced toward him. “No, professionals usually pretend things are fine right before disaster. You all have already skipped ahead to the deeply concerning acceptance phase.”
A few nearby operatives smirked faintly despite themselves, but the tension inside the command tent never truly eased.
Vale touched the display again, and a layered schematic of the excavation appeared across the central monitor. Ancient tunnels spread beneath the monastery in uneven spirals, though nearly half the lower structure remained incomplete where scans failed or simply stopped altogether.
Matt pointed toward the dark sections. “Those areas are unmapped?”
Soren answered first. “Not unmapped. Unresolved.”
Matt looked at him flatly. “You have a unique way of making things sound significantly worse. You know that, right?”
“It’s part of the job.”
Matt let out a quiet breath. “That is not the reassuring answer you seem to think it is.”
Soren adjusted his glasses before zooming deeper into the lower excavation levels. “The original archaeological team believed the monastery had been constructed atop older subterranean ruins. Subsequent scans suggest the lower structure extends far beyond the documented foundation.”
“How far?”
“We don’t know.”