Hedgemaze

The Hedgemaze

Someone made this.

— Dr. Laura Uzoma, BREACH Xenobotanist

The initial assumption was that the breach opened in someone's garden, or a park attraction. Initial scans showed near-Baseline atmosphere, gravity, and illumination. The plan for the First-In team was to go through, release some aerial drones to find the presumed buildings nearby, make a guess as to culture and TL, and proceed from there.

The first pass of the drones showed no end to the maze. Control was dodgy; signals dropped within a few hundred feet. At a guess, the maze stretched a minimum of five miles in all directions. When some hasty modifications were made to let the drones fly up out of control range and drop back down on a timer, things got worse and weirder. Once it passed about 500 feet up, something flashed across the sky towards it. Drone parts rained down.

Lt. Jake Sturmborg, heading his first first-in, decided it was worth trying to recover the wreckage, particularly the SSD containing recording data. Despite concerns about whatever took down the drone, the team proceeded, based on the limited aerial maps they had recovered.

The first parts found showed no evidence of explosive damage; they looked as if they'd run through a metal shredder. The density of debris indicated it had fallen over a relatively small area, raising hopes of recovering the vital components.

The maze opened up into a wider area, a circle about 500 across, with paving stones arranged into a spiral pattern and three larger, flat-topped stones, about two feet high, set in an equilateral triangle in the center. They looked like seats or stools. There were also bushes set apart from the maze.

Then the "bushes" revealed themselves as animated plant-creatures, taking the exploration team by surprise.

One was killed and one critically injured before a 'fighting retreat' was ordered, trying to find a path back through the maze to the point where their portkeys would work. Lt. Strumborg earned a posthumous medal of valor for his actions luring the creatures down one route while directing the surviving members of the team to head towards the breach point.

Despite the best efforts of BREACH engineers, it still took several hours for weaponized defoliant sprayguns to be hacked together and a rescue team sent in. Sturmborg's body was found due to the tracker in his unform, but it was already partially absorbed into the maze and recovery was deemed high-risk due to the unknown nature of the plants that were intertwined throughout his body. The Kudzilla incident had not been forgotten.

Further Study

Future missions were more successful, but only added to the overall mystery. Using 'chains' of drones to overcome the range limits of all forms of wireless communication, BREACH was able to determine the maze extended at least 50 miles in all directions. Drones crossing a height limit of about 500 feet were set upon by fast-moving constructs seemingly made of brass and steel, with faceted glass "eyes" and four multi-jointed "arms" ending in rending claws and spinning saws. The propulsion method is speculated to be either a reactionless thruster or a low-power conventional thruster moving a nearly-massless craft.

Until the clearly artificial "air patrol" was confirmed, some at BREACH speculated the "maze" was some sort of immense natural life form that happened to grow into regular patterns, while mumbling slightly if anyone asked them about the cut-stone paths in the various clearings.

Estimates of the horizon, day/night cycle, and so on lead BREACH to conclude this is, or was, an Earth-like world. The idea the maze could be planetary is mind-boggling; it may be extremely large, they argue, perhaps the size of a small nation, but it must end somewhere. Animal life seems limited to small insects and worms, of unknown, but unspectacular, species. The "living topiaries" come in many forms; "turtles" and "snakes" being common, but one drone, dipping low to avoid the "air patrol", spotted a crudely humanoid figure with sword and shield, just before said figure smashed it down.

To say that BREACH dendribotanists want to set up a permanent base and study the hell out of this world is understatement. Multiple proposals to "safely" capture the topiary have been submitted to BREACH, PAIN, and other organizations, but so far, no official approval has been granted.