And I realized I really didn’t want to go down there. Even though what we could see of it was clearly unused, and the hatch probably hadn’t been open since the terraforming installation had been completed however many years ago. But I wanted to let the drones do it.
I had to go down there. It was stupid not to go down there. This was just a construction access point on a planet that would have a general risk assessment in the low 30s if not for the alien contamination. That’s not helping. All right, come on. If I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t do my job. I said, “Wait here until I check it out.”
Iris smiled and did a good job pretending that she didn’t know anything was wrong. Tarik looked uncomfortable but stood up from the controls and stepped out of the way. Yeah, uh-huh, this is great.
The lift platform controls were down at the bottom of the well and probably too much of a pain in the ass to make work anyway, but there was a manual access tube with a stairway thing to one side. It was covered with sandy dirt and dust but not blocked. I climbed down into it and then forced my right boot onto the first step of the stair.
Okay, it was easier once I got started. I climbed down to the bottom of the well.
The daylight coming down from the hatch above helped. I could see the two tunnel entrances, both big enough for folded construction cranes and bots and haulers. This time I remembered to send my camera view into the team feed.
On the comm, Ratthi said what everyone was thinking: “This looks fairly normal. I wonder what the second tunnel is for?”
Yeah, I wonder, too. The rail system led into the tunnel that headed west toward the base of the terraforming installation. I sent ScoutDrone1 down it to verify and kept ScoutDrone2 hovering over my head to watch my back. The other tunnel went off toward the northeast at an angle that was odd, considering the orientation of the rest of the space. I couldn’t see into it from here so I started across the floor, my boots losing traction in the soft dirt we’d just let in.
“Storage, maybe,” Tarik said. He was at the access tube, leaning down as far as he could to see the space without violating my implicit instruction not to follow me. “If there are any admin offices down there with intact devices, do you think…”
He trailed off, because ScoutDrone2 was getting video that I was still sending to the team feed.
Yeah, that’s weird.
I was picking up faint light, not much for an industrial-sized corridor, but still. If the terraformers had left emergency lighting on … There was an obstruction.
I told myself it was unlikely to be an alien-contaminated bot. Really unlikely. Maybe a little likely. I made myself keep walking.
Okay, it was a vehicle. A flat one with wide wheels designed for rough terrain, with benches instead of seats and the steering apparatus in front. It wasn’t for the surface, unless the humans were wearing protective suits, or unless whoever was transporting the humans didn’t give a crap whether they got hit by ground debris. So yeah, probably the latter. It was for the surface and the workers had used it down here where they were less likely to get injured. (And it being here wasn’t the weird thing; this had been a work site, there could be all kinds of equipment abandoned down here.)
The weird thing was that just past it the mostly smooth curving sides of the tunnel stopped in a pile of rubble where there was another opening.
The building crew for the terraforming cargo installation had encountered an existing tunnel, larger, square, made of smooth gray artificial stone that was mottled just a little for what had to be aesthetic reasons. I could see that, because there was active emergency lighting, little blue flat squares of it about three meters up the tunnel walls. My risk assessment finally caught up to what was happening and hit the roof.
We were looking at a Pre–Corporation Rim site. A Pre–Corporation Rim site that was drawing power.
We didn’t know what had happened to the Pre–Corporation Rim colony that was on this planet long before Adamantine arrived. We just knew that at some point the Pre-CR group had encountered alien contamination, that it had been severe enough to result in “compulsive construction” of a structure over their original mostly underground habitation, and that nobody was here when Adamantine arrived however many years later to start terraforming. The fact that the Pre-CR group had left equipment, including an active central system, behind in that original habitation, indicated that they had left in what Arada had euphemistically described as “disarray.” If they had left, if they hadn’t all died or killed each other, their remains weathered to dust.
And no, we couldn’t do a systematic archaeological survey of the Pre-CR site to discover what had happened to the Pre-CR colonists because the compulsive structure and the original habitation under it got blown up and buried in a whole big thing that happened. And the alien contamination was, you know, still under there. Waiting for more humans to forget or lose the records of it, and come back, and excavate the strange colony site to see what had happened there.
Redacted
Okay, alien contamination. The thing about it is that a large percentage of alien remnant materials are harmless and inert. The commonly identifiable ones are classified as strange synthetics, and you can get licenses in the Corporation Rim and multiple other independent polities to mine them and research them and work with them.
But even for the ones that aren’t harmless and inert, a contamination incident is not an attack or a trap. It’s not actually considered hostile in the same way as someone shooting you or telling a CombatBot to shoot you or something trying to eat you or melt you or smash you or whatever. There’s no intentionality, as Ratthi explained once.
It’s like if there was a hostile that killed us all and then a rockslide fell on us and buried us and then a couple of thousand corporate or Preservation standard years went by and then aliens showed up and dug us up, and they, I don’t know, touched the human food, or pulled apart the shuttle’s power source, and stuck their hands or fungus-tentacles or whatever in it, it might poison them. It might just kill them, it might make them very sick, it might affect their neural tissue, or do weird things to their cells and cause their bodies to change, or all of those things.
Not all Pre–Corporation Rim sites are alien-contaminated, obviously. A lot of them became long-term occupation sites, the nucleus of what are now independent polities or Corporation Rim–owned planets (page 57, paragraph 6, Introduction to the History of Human Expansion, Volume I, eds. Bartheme, de la Vega, Shanmugam, et al, Cloud Sun Harbor University Press). But abandoned sites are sometimes abandoned for a good reason, and humans didn’t understand back then how careful they needed to be with alien remnants. (Or maybe they did and they just didn’t care. I mean, let’s be honest, which one is more likely? I’m just making an observation here.)
Back on ART, during one of our strategy sessions for Plan A: Get the Hell Out of Here, Thiago had pulled some research about how so many of the known alien contamination sites were underground, were uncovered via construction or mining or exploratory digging. The idea was that maybe the contaminants were hazardous material the aliens had been disposing of, and they hadn’t expected anybody to come poking into the ground in those places. So that was even less intentionality and even more bad luck. I don’t know why that’s objectively better than ancient aliens out to get us. (How would that work? “We’re dead, but we’re taking you hapless fuckers who might wander by thousands of years later with us, ha!” Yeah, I don’t think so, either.) But it is better, weirdly enough. Shit happens, basically.