Conestoga-2
"I guess we went through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. What? Look, I'm an Army major, not an English major."
Through The Looking Glass
At first, the stabbies thought something had gone wrong. The hazy image through the portal showed darkness. This was not too unusual; a breach could often open at night. It became more confusing when the first probes were sent through and returned, as they showed pictures of the other half of the very room they were in, the key difference being the lack of light and a lot of crates. They double checked the readings, saw no evidence of immediate danger, and gave the all-clear to the first-in team.The other side was indeed a version of the room they'd just left. Larger, as it had not been subdivided into breach safe rooms, but was in its earlier configuration as a bulk storage area. There was quite a bit of dust, and any number of crates and boxes stacked in irregular piles and rows, with narrow passages between them. And silence, the team's footsteps echoing eerily. Faded signage indicated it was Conestoga Base, Storage Room 2.
Initial speculation was this was a close parallel to Baseline, just one where the breach events of the 2010s had never happened, leaving Conestoga Base as it had been, a relic of the Cold War. Since, even then, it had never been completely unused, the team moved cautiously, not wanting to draw attention from whoever might still be stationed here.
The first clue things were wrong was that the stacked, and empty, boxes had dates indicating they were packed in the mid-1990s, and were once full of bulk foods. They were empty, piled haphazardly, and some were marked as belonging to some other room.
When the double doors on the north end made scraping noises, the team dimmed their lights and huddled behind a particularly tall pile of empty crates. Light came from the open door, but the internal lights stayed off. They heard footsteps, echoing voices, a thud, more steps, and the door scraping shut again. Another three empty boxes, all marked as MREs, had been added to the pile nearest the door.
Spy gear is of course part of a first-in team's loadout, albeit often ending up non-functional for one reason or another. The people who had entered earlier could be heard departing, then there were sounds of a creaking elevator, then stillness. Cautiously, the team continued to explore.
With access to the base's full, pre-BREACH, blueprints, they were able to wend their way through little-used access tunnels and emergency stairs, narrowly avoiding discovery, slowly piecing together the situation. On this world, Conestoga Base was used for its first open secret purpose, to serve as a long term shelter in the even of a nuclear war. They determined it happened some time before, to the point where there were teenagers, sullen and bored as always, who had grown up in the base and frequented some of the same little-used pathways. The team filched what they could of newspapers, computer disks, and log books, scanned them, and slipped back to the portal.
Analysis, and a little speculation, put together a working theory. The 1991 Soviet coup had succeeded. (This was not the first world where that had happened, but in most of the others, it merely delayed the inevitable, leading to various configurations and alliances of a post-Soviet world.) Here, the crackdowns that followed were more successful, and the Eastern European nations which had pulled back from Russian control in the prior years were partially reclaimed, through "spontaneous" uprisings against "counter-revolutionary" governments. NATO was willing to let the Eastern Bloc return to the status quo generally, in exchange for peace, but were more adamant about supporting the newly reunited Germany. This became a constant flashpoint that made it harder to return to a state of detente, and in 1999, a conventional war began. Somewhat ironically, Poland was used as the launch point for an invasion of Germany. Neither side desired a nuclear exchange, but neither side desired to surrender, either, and in 2001, someone pushed the button.
Two decades later, radiation levels surrounding Conestoga Base are too high to safely evacuate. As far more bunkers had been built and kept stocked as tensions escalated in the 1990s, it's known there are other survivor strongholds. While post-war conditions are not nearly so bad as on Tranquility (the overall missile technology there was higher, as was the power of the weapons themselves), or Pittsburgh it's still pretty dismal. As supplies in the base dwindle, it's obvious that stopgaps to supply food and recycle air will not last forever. Within a few years, there'll be no choice but to leave.
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