“Well…Crap.” I said as I tried to stand up again. The spider's sticky webbing was like superglue. I was stuck. I looked at the beast and it was focused entirely on me, ignoring anything that Voice or Sam did to it from the sides.

  It rose up on its rear legs, bringing its spinnerettes on me once more. I was screwed; I couldn’t dodge, so I was going to be fully engulfed. Just as it seemed to tense its abdomen, Voice’s blade severed the single load-bearing leg on its side. It began to topple over and twist as it fell, rolling away from me. The splurge of webbing, just missing me to the side as it collapsed.

  I shot it with another as Voice and Sam both proceeded to stab at its prone form. Kelsey took another of its eyes with an arrow. That girl was scarily accurate with that bow. It rolled back over and started dragging itself towards me. Missing three of its legs on the left-hand side made that more of a slow drag.

  Voice took out the last of its legs on his side, collapsing it to the ground. That slowed it even more, but it was now within melee range of my Battlestaff, and crawling closer. I swung at it with a enhanced one-handed swing.

  Voice took a grip on its hindquarters and dragged it away from me. There was a look I could only describe as anger in the spider's face, as it snapped its slobbering jaws at me. It was using its remaining legs to drag itself to me. Sam and Voice began chopping at them. Unable to get to me, it tried to turn on the ones severing its limbs. It was too late for it, though, as it was now no longer able to turn on them quicker than they could keep circling.

  I watched the thing circle around a couple of times, trying to bite or spray Voice, its body getting slower and slower from both Sam and Kelsey’s Arctic attacks, as the magic debuffs stacked upon each other.

  With Voice now holding its attention, Sam was free to finish delimbing it. With its limbs gone, the five of us were then able to defeat it relatively safely. Being stuck like I was gave me time to think more about what I was doing. I worked out that my mana regen rate lets me fire a once every 5 seconds.

  Once it stopped moving, I relaxed and fell back into a sitting position…

  Which I came to hugely regret the moment I did it.

  Not only was I still stuck, but I was now stuck with my left hand and bottom glued to the ground, not just one foot and a knee.

  Now, I can’t be certain, Kelsey and Daisy were both behind me and out of sight, but I'm pretty sure all of my friends here thought this was the funniest thing they had ever seen.

  I should have become really suspicious when Sam and Kelsey held a rope between them in front of me. They told me to hold my free arm up and then the pair of them started running forwards so the rope would come in at me. At the time, I really thought they were just going for a momentum yank to try to pull me out of the stick.

  So you can imagine my surprise when I heard “Fire in the hole!” from Voice, and the area around me suddenly became engulfed in flame just as the rope hit me, hooked under my outstretched arm and then yanked me.

  Daisy was quick to cast heal spells on me, and between that and my armour’s mana shield, I came out unscathed, but still…

  I’m also pretty sure Voice cheated somehow when he won the rock-paper-scissors game they did behind my back to determine who was going to ignite the patch of webbing around me. His grin every time he tells anyone about how he had to set me on fire is way too suspicious.

  Once we had got our mana regenerated and had consumed another meal, we carefully started to explore the comm hub. Once more, the smell of burnt hair permeated the space, and there was thick burn residue over every surface. Daisy made the first move, but we soon all followed and got all the windows that we could find open and let air start to circulate the office space.

  Just through the door was a relatively short entrance corridor. On one side was a counter window. Opposite the entrance was a magnetic-lock door. If the building was powered up, we would be hard-pressed to get through what seemed like a strong reinforced door. Without power, though, it was easy to just pull open.

  The other side of the door revealed that half the space was an open- plan office, ten cubicles, each with an unpowered computer terminal. In some, there were small corpse bundles where the spiders had killed some small prey and saved them for a later meal.

  The side of the building was split into smaller rooms and a corridor leading down the middle. The first room was once a meeting room. It looked like the spiders had used it for some kind of nesting area underneath what was once a skylight. Broken glass showed this was where the spider had fallen. The crushed table and the large numbers of crushed egg sacs bear witness to the result of that fall. The remaining eggs looked to have been cooked by the fire, as the webs had burned. We found a ladder in a cupboard leading up to the roof. Voice climbed up to see if there was anything worth salvaging while we continued clearing the rooms.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  We found what was apparently the manager's office. The door had been locked, but the key left in the door meant that it was easily rectified. Unable to get in here, this was one of the first rooms we found that was untouched by the fire and didn’t smell of burnt hair. Some files had been left behind and Daisy volunteered to see if they contained anything relevant.

  We broke through the last door by kicking it open. Like the other locked door, this one also opened into a room untouched by the spiders and turned out to be a combined storage room and maintenance bay. It had exactly what I was looking for. On one of the shelves, there was a box marked, ‘Colony Standard Antenna, for global ComNet access.’

  Storing it, though, did fill up most of the remaining space in my [Inventory].

  “Fusebox,” Sam called out. “Looks like the isolation switch was pulled, rather than the fuses tripped. Turn power back on?”

  “Wait for Voice to come back down. Just in case.” I said.

  “In case what?” Voice asked from the doorway.

  “In case you were touching something live,” I replied. I saw Kelsey, Sam and Voice were away from anything. “Daisy!” I shouted out, “You touching anything which could be powered?”

  “Errr, No…” was the confused response.

  “She was sitting at the desk when I walked past,” said Voice.

  “Might as well see what powering up this place does.” I nodded to Sam, who pulled a lever and then flicked some switches in the panel. There was that electric hum you hear when electricity starts flowing through a system. Then we heard a series of beeps. The vents started blowing air into the room and there was a loud scream from the other room.

  We found Daisy staring at the now-lit-up executive’s desk. Holographic displays were showing a computer's boot cycle as it ran an extensive memory test. The scream had been one of shock, but she was perfectly OK once she realised what was happening.

  “Anything in those documents?” Voice asked.

  “Maintenance reports mostly. Nothing that can help us, but we should submit them to the Explorators. I think they would reveal a lot about how the civilisation here handled their bureaucracy…”

  The terminal finished booting up, the old-school text screen was replaced by a stylised V spinning in the air, and then being replaced with a generic GUI.

  “Some kind of WhoAmI?” Voice asked. In the top right corner, it said ‘User: Daisy Brooks’

  “Try swapping,” I said.

  When Voice took the chair, the name changed to say ‘Vox Veritas.’

  “Interesting,” I said. “Think it is part of the HUD interface?”

  “Would make sense. Would be a really easy, effective login system. Wouldn’t have to worry about people walking away, leaving unauthorised access, people forgetting their passwords…”

  “Then why was that password system at the central stores?” Sam asked.

  “Ohhh!” Daisy said. “I think I read something about that… early in that log.” She pulled out some of the paperwork she had stored from earlier. “Yep, here it is. They had to switch to an older system after they purged themselves of the personal integrated interfaces.”

  “Ok, you two keep exploring what you can in here, we’ll go see what we can find on the other terminals.” Sam declared

  We left the pair of them, the three of us picked a terminal each and started exploring what was available on it. Like with the others, as soon as I touched the system, it identified me.

  I started with the status icon. A screen popped up displaying the status of the ComHub. It was dominated by a series of errors, indicating there was a connection error with the transmitters/receivers. Power was confirmed to those systems, but they weren’t getting any data.

  “Did you see any broken cables when you were up top?” I asked Voice from the door to the office on my way to the ladder.

  “A lot of them weren’t plugged in,” He said, looking over at me from the reports he was reviewing. “Why?”

  “Status page said there was a communications error, I thought I would see if I can fix it.”

  “It’s a bit of a mess. I’ll give you a hand.” I saw a brief look of disappointment flash onto Daisy’s face and a bit of a resigned one on Voice’s.

  “That’s ok,” I said. “Let me take a look, and I’ll call if I need any help.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, if it’s a big enough job, I’ll call for everyone!” I grinned at the pair of them.

  The ladder was a pretty easy climb and took me up onto the roof. There were metal walkways crossing between the skylight windows. A cable run led from a box near the hatch I had climbed out of, across the roof to another box below the tower. From this angle, it looked like the cables for the various communication devices were threaded through the core of the tower, and then ladders connected to the spiral of platforms which rose up the tower.

  The nearest cable box looked intact, and opening it just revealed a series of green blinking lights. With nothing to indicate the opposite, I took this to mean they were all functioning. I crossed over to the next box. This one had some red blinkers and some solid red lights. Checking the back, I found that some of the cables had been yanked out. Looking at one, I realised it had been designed to be an ‘easy disconnect’ to avoid damage if the cable is pulled upon. None of the disconnected cables I tried had the length to reach the box. So whatever had pulled them out was still a problem.

  I looked at the tower, shrugged, and started to climb the first ladder.