“I’m sure that’s the case,” Hirune said. She checked a panel on the nearest decontam cubicle. It still had power, but the doors were all in the upright position. (Always a relief. Cubicles that something may be hiding in are no fun.) Hirune tried to get it to download a usage report to the feed, but its internal storage was empty.
I checked Kader and Vibol, who were both glued to their feeds, though Kader still had a channel open to station. There was some interference, but he was still getting pings and answers from the station Port Authority. It probably was the atmospheric shielding that was blocking the team inside from contact with the station.
Anyway, it was time to get moving. I slipped out of my storage cubby. I went down the corridor and cycled the lock, not allowing it to report the incident to its log. Kader had heard the lock open on the station when I boarded but this time was too occupied watching the team in the feed to notice.
I stepped out into the cooler facility air and let the lock close and seal.
The team had already moved out of the decontam room and headed toward the bio pod to check its status. I started down the corridor. I’d missed my armor off and on before this, usually when I was having to walk through large crowds of humans in transit rings. After being forced to do it to survive, plus traveling with Ayres and the others, I was sort of used to talking to humans and making eye contact, though I didn’t like it.
This was the first time I missed my armor because I felt a physical threat.
I moved silently through the decontam room and took the exit corridor, then turned down the branch that led away from the bio pod, toward the geo pod. This corridor was the same as what I was seeing on Miki’s camera and the team feed: no damage, no signs of hasty departure, just quiet corridors.
(I don’t know why I expected to see damage and signs that the human staff had run for their lives; there was no indication that this was anything but a planned abandonment. Maybe I was thinking of RaviHyral again. You’d think once I’d seen the place, found out what had happened, the partial memories would fade. Not so much, it turned out.)
It shouldn’t have been weird, but it was weird. I had Miki and the team backburnered, so I knew exactly where they were, and their voices filled the silence in the feed. But there was something about this place that made my human skin prickle under my clothes. I hated that.
I couldn’t pin down what was bothering me. Scan was negative, and this far away from the team there was no ambient sound except the whisper through the air system. Maybe it was the lack of security camera access, but I’d been in worse places with no cameras. Maybe it was something subliminal. Actually, it felt pretty liminal. Pro-liminal. Up-liminal? Whatever, there was no knowledge base here to look it up.
The team was proceeding down an outer corridor. On their left side, big bubble ports looked into a purple-gray cloud swirl in the storm, on the right were open passage locks leading down into the various engineering stacks. On a private channel to Miki, Abene said, This place makes my skin shiver, Miki.
I think so, too, Miki said. Even though it’s empty, it’s like someone might step out in front of us at any moment.
Well, Miki wasn’t wrong. Something glittered in the air ahead, but when I reached the lift junction it was just an emergency marker display, floating below the ceiling and listing emergency exit procedures in thirty different languages. HubSystems offer continuous translation, and I’m guessing non-corporate political entities had something similar for their feeds, but in an emergency you’d want to make sure the instructions were clear even if the feed was down. There it was, cheerily doing its job in this empty hulk.
I tapped my private connection to Miki. I’m about to use a lift, Miki. If your scan picks up the power fluctuation, please don’t tell anyone.
Okay, Rin. Where are you going?
I have to look at the geo pod. It’s part of my orders. The lift responded to a ping and arrived 1.5 seconds later, by which time I remembered that I’d told Miki my job was to provide extra security for the assessment team. Oops.
Fortunately, Miki understood about orders and it didn’t occur to it to question me. Be careful, Rin, Miki said. This place makes our skin shiver.
I stepped into the lift and told it to go to the central geo pod. The door slid shut and it whooshed away. I tracked it on the schematic, as it curved past the giant bulbs used for atmosphere dispersal. I considered telling Miki that I was here to collect data on possible alien remnant violations by GrayCris. Nothing I was doing would hurt Abene or the team or GoodNightLander Independent, and I was already lying about so much. But Miki would tell Abene immediately, I knew it would. Not that her team wouldn’t figure out on their own soon that something was sketchy about the terraforming facility. (Like the decontam room near the passenger lock; you don’t need a clean facility for terraforming but you might if you were scavenging alien bio remnants.) But if Miki told Abene, she would ask how it knew, and I knew Miki would tell her about me. It wouldn’t lie to a direct question.
Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas.
(Yes, that was sarcasm.)
The lift stopped and the doors opened into another empty, quiet corridor. I followed it around and found the big hatchway into the main geological hub. It was a large semicircular space, with a section of ceiling that had been left clear. I’d seen the storm through Miki and the humans’ cameras in the corridor on the way to the bio pod, but seeing it with my own eyes, no interface to interpret it, was different. The clouds were like a constantly moving structure, colors not so much swirling as in slow, ponderous motion. It was immense, and wrong, and terrible and beautiful all at the same time. I stood there for what I later clocked as twenty-two seconds, just staring.
Something must have bled over into the feed, because Miki said, What are you looking at, Rin?
That jolted me out of the spell. Just the storm. The geo pod has a clear dome.
Can I see?
I didn’t know why not, so I made a copy of the visual, scrubbed any code that might identify me as a SecUnit from it, and passed it to Miki over the feed. Pretty! Miki said.
Miki ran the video a few times as it followed Abene down a ramp. They had passed a lift junction, but it wasn’t big enough for all of them at once and Wilken sensibly refused to split the group. On the feed from Wilken’s cam, I spotted hovering marker displays with the descriptor symbols for biological hazard potential; they were nearly there and I needed to get a move on. I wanted to be tucked up back in the shuttle and watching Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon by the time they finished their check of the bio pod.
The access consoles had been shut down and the data storage would have been removed entirely, which was way more secure than just a system delete. But that wasn’t where I intended to look.
The schematic showed that the facility used diggers. (Actually geological manipulation semiautonomous … something something, apparently I deleted that out of permanent storage. Anyway, they aren’t bots, they’re just extensions of the geo systems.) The diggers have their own onboard storage for their procedures and tasks, but they also have scanning capability and they log what they find. I found and booted their interface console and yes, the diggers were still here, tucked under the geo pod, curled up in containers three times the size of our shuttle, inert without their parent system.