The Red Flower was A War Factory

Do you know the red flowers? 

Do you know what they did there?

Can you imagine? 

What kind of secrets lay beneath the surface?

There was blood all over my hands. 

A dove or something like it flew through the air. Its wings struggled in the harsh wind. All the same I should have been running too but I watched it fly into the ash colored sky.  I could barely breath. For the first time in a long while there was no one else around me, not anymore anyway. I had grown so use to living in a crowd, inside a starship or colony surrounded by other humans I had forgotten what it felt like to be alone. I had never felt so cold. How long had I been on this world now? Five years, Ten years? No, more like fourteen or fifteen. Half my life. How did I get here? Have I always been lost in this nightmare? No. I all started on Errikus. I had already been living on the planet for years now. Fourteen. Almost exactly. I was a soldier, a human soldier that joined the Erikku guard, my assignment while I was away from the ship, away from my wife, away from my daughter. 

Errikus was a colony founded by the Eeks, a peaceful humanoid race and with the exception of their seven-foot tall stature and hideous face they were almost pleasant to look at. They were like abstract art. Multiple eyes ranging from four to eight sat on their large square foreheads. It was rumored that each Eek shared at least two brains. It was strange to imagine two beings sharing the same body the way they would. This was just one of hundreds of worlds they had at their disposal. Each world was governed independently. Errikus was so far out from most colonized worlds it welcomed everyone. They needed the trade. The world itself was an inhospitable jungle filled with alien beasts. The mega-city of Errikus sat behind a giant wall. Errikus was a beautiful mega-city with a spaceport and all stretching far into the sky. Fungus had been planted on and around the wall to help clean the air and veins of clean oxygen had been set up through every street. Factories pumped even more air into the atmosphere allowing us to breathe. The veins stretched over buildings and looked like wires hanging from building to building. The city was dirty but the air was good. Outside the city you would need an oxygen mask or an amazing set of lungs. Chemicals and dust from plants and animals poisoned the air outside. The city was the only place you could breath in peace.

 I along with a few thousand other humans had become temporary colonists here while our ships went to another world for some more exotic upgrades from a group of sentient machines calling themselves the Arr7. I was a part of an expedition. It all feels like it was just a dream now. A drone had found a small set of Lethe ruins. By god, the Lethe, what kind of creatures were they? The Lethe as far as we knew were an ancient alien race and the first to venture into the immer, the space our starships use to travel from point A to B.  It should have been a simple excavation but it all went wrong. We thought we were going to learn about them, research the red flower and discover something know one else would know. It was going to be a joyous expedition full of wonder and passion.  We thought we were prepared. We thought we had thought of everything. Oxygen masks, rifles, survival gear, rations we even had a drone watching us from the sky above. We didn’t even bother to record any goodbyes - it was only going to be a short trip. 

Our drop ship looked like a giant metal bird. It set down nearly a hundred yards from the ruins. We were so close we could see every bit of the alien structure.  Red, blue, and green vines twisted around a bright red metal that spread out like flower pedals from the brown soil that surrounded it. It was about the size of a two story house but that was only the tip of the iceberg. What we knew about the Red Flowers (aside from being ancient and all) was that they were mostly buried underground. Our first impression was that this must have been a research center or a small outpost.