On our private feed, ART-drone said, What the hell are you doing? Your stats are dropping.
I was just thinking about alien contamination, I told it.
Stop that immediately, ART-drone said.
Right, good luck with that. I was thinking about it because I am currently standing in front of what is clearly a Pre–Corporation Rim site. A lot like the one where I redacted.
Yeah, this was where we’d started, back at the beginning of the file.
“So it looks like the other colonists were right about this place,” Iris said, deeply reluctant. She had been held prisoner by colonists under the influence and direction of viral alien contamination that had given them a violent drive to get off the planet. She had escaped with only half her crew and one of her parents, and had to leave the other behind. She didn’t want to do this any more than I did, except somehow she had a lot more control over her neural tissue. “We have to check it out.”
“Yeah.” Tarik had been with her for that whole thing and he didn’t look happy, either. He reached up like he was going to rub his face, then remembered his helmet and put his hand down again. He sighed. “Yeah.”
I had already sent ScoutDrone2 ahead. It was able to go at nearly its top speed down the wide corridor, the lighting and width and breadth of the tunnel allowing it to take the turns without running into walls, though its flaky navigation scan was getting a little better the farther it got away from the terraforming engines. The Pre-CR corridor was continuing to head northeast, toward the foothills.
I said, “Ratthi needs to stay in the shuttle.”
Iris nodded. “Follow us from the air. Just not too close.”
Ratthi’s sigh was audible over the comm. On ScoutDrone3’s camera view I could see him leaning back, wincing with worry. He said, “Ah, we don’t have a choice, do we.”
Tarik kicked the tire of the vehicle. “Should we take this? If they are still alive down here somewhere, moving it might upset them.”
Ratthi said, “But you’d be driving it toward them, not away. And we can put it back if this is where they want to keep it.”
Humans from Preservation have no concept about what happens in the Corporation Rim to humans who borrow corporate property, even if they put it back when they’re done.
You could make a case that I should have done this alone. (In the company, or any other corporate context where I still had a governor module, I would definitely be doing this alone.) But in this context the humans expected to go, and I wasn’t going to argue about it. If the colonists were still alive and I found them, I needed Iris and Tarik to talk to them, since Ratthi would be in the shuttle. Isolated as they were, the chances of them recognizing me as a SecUnit were low. But I just couldn’t talk to strange humans about important shit right now while pretending to be a human, I’d fuck it up. And fucking it up could mean Barish-Estranza hauling everybody off to be slave labor.
Tarik got the vehicle running while Iris recorded a brief report for ART-drone to send to its bot pilot iteration. Bot pilot would upload it to a pathfinder that would then take the report out of the blackout zone for ART-prime to find. “The battery still has juice in it,” Tarik reported. He had climbed into the driver’s seat and was scrolling through the controls. “Either it’s a really good battery, or someone charged it within the past ten years or so.”
Iris took the bench seat behind and to his left, looking around optimistically for safety restraints. “It doesn’t look like it’s been moved in a while.”
I took a fold-out jump seat within arm’s reach of Iris so I could catch her if she fell out. It would be hard to get Tarik, too, from this angle, but ART-drone floated up and attached itself to the opposite side, within easy grabbing distance of him. (This was a gesture of trust from ART, I know that. Iris is its favorite and it was trusting me with her.)
On the comm, Ratthi said, “This is killing me. Just be careful.”
Tarik got the vehicle moving, slowly at first and then increasing the speed gradually as he got used to the controls and the traction. And we headed into the dark.
41.32 minutes later, I said, “Stop.”
Tarik hit the brake control on the steering device, not abruptly enough to throw us out. He and Iris didn’t slide forward because I grabbed the safety harness of Iris’s environmental suit and ART-drone grabbed Tarik. (Not so much grabbed as leisurely lifted an arm and extended it across his chest .02 of a second before the jolt as the vehicle stopped.) Iris glanced back at me, startled, and then smiled. “I forgot how fast you are.”
(For a human, I was fast. For a SecUnit, I felt like I was moving in slow motion.)
(The only reason I wasn’t panicking more about that is that ART-drone is slower than ART-prime but that is still really fucking fast.)
On the comm, Ratthi said, “What is it? Are you all right?”
He and Tarik had been having a rambling conversation about Pre-CR history and ruins; neither one of them had certifications in it, but they knew a lot about it, or at least they thought they did. Iris had been talking to ART-drone on their private feed; I couldn’t listen in but I could tell the connection was active. I was too tense to even think about media, let alone watch anything, or even run it in the background.
Ratthi had access to the team video feed I was sharing, he had just forgotten about it because for the past forty minutes it had been so boring. I pulled it to the front of his interface and he said, “Oh!”
ScoutDrone2, approximately three hundred meters ahead of us, had encountered an even larger space. It was still at the same depth as this tunnel. There had to be an opening to the surface somewhere in it because it looked like a hangar for aircraft and vehicles larger than our shuttle.
I counted six landing platforms extending out from the walls or on pylons, fanned out to allow access from above. The light was inadequate, which suggested the light we had in the tunnel was an emergency backup system. The hatchway must be up in the ceiling somewhere, probably not unlike the one for the terraforming construction access, except maybe nicer and not made by the lowest bidder. But ScoutDrone2 couldn’t see the upper part of the chamber without going up there, and I wanted it to stay where it was in the tunnel entrance. If anything in this chamber came rushing out toward us, it would be nice to know what was coming our way.
And something might come rushing out, because one of the platforms was occupied.
The vehicle looked like an aircraft, sort of like the ones the main site colonists had built for themselves. A little like a hopper, if a hopper was bigger and had more things sticking up off it and more windows.
All three humans were watching the video now in the team feed, as ScoutDrone2 turned slowly to get the best view, its stupid borked scan picking up sporadic metallurgy readings that ART-drone identified as being associated with Pre-CR builds. In case there was any doubt, which there pretty much wasn’t.
Tarik did a little annoyed sigh. “Why in the name of everything holy did those colonists think coming up here was a good idea? After they’d already had a contamination incident?”
“Maybe they didn’t understand how dangerous it was.” Iris sounded calm but she had both hands pressed to the chin plate of her helmet like she was willing something to happen, like maybe for the whole Pre-CR installation to just disappear. (I could have been projecting, there.) “If they’d had any idea … Surely they would have at least warned the other colonists, and not just described this place as a cave system.”
On my shuttle drone-cam, I could see Ratthi’s face was worried, though he didn’t sound like it over the comm. “Even if they didn’t understand all the implications, so much of their trouble has stemmed from that bunker excavation under the first Pre-CR structure. They must have known.”