That would have been encouraging, before redacted.
Chapter Five
FINALLY, WE WERE CLOSE enough to see the dark opening into the hangar at the end of the corridor. Without me having to say anything, Tarik slowed down almost to a halt, then stopped when we were about ten meters away.
ScoutDrone1 had already reached it and started a search pattern, and I sent ScoutDrone2 in after it. A shaft of dim daylight and a sand drift on the floor had led it immediately up to a big seam in the ceiling that should be part of the hatch system that allowed the ships in and out. A small section had been cut open at some point, large enough to allow in the aircraft that was parked on the landing platform. The shuttle, following our progress from the air, had already gotten there and found the opening. ART-drone was building a map using ScoutDrone1’s movements.
Ratthi and Iris and Tarik were examining the video views from the drones inside and the shuttle’s cameras outside. The hanger area was darker than they expected, since they had been viewing it through the drone camera’s dark vision filters. They were speculating about whatever equipment failure or natural disaster had buckled the hatch so somebody had to cut a hole in it or something, I didn’t really care.
Because ScoutDrone1 had also found the entrance to the Pre-CR installation the hangar had been built to access.
It was on the farthest wall, where the shadow was deeper, directly opposite this tunnel. When completely open, it would be big enough to fly our shuttle through. (Which was something we absolutely would not be doing, because holy shit no, what a bad idea.) It was set between two giant rounded half-pillars carved out of the rock wall, angled back as if to brace the sloped stone slab above it. I guess that was the pillars’ purpose; if they were supposed to be making the place pretty, they weren’t doing their job.
My drones had skimmed over the hangar’s floor panels, which were a stone/metal combination that Ratthi said were common in Pre-CR structures, and which were coated with layers of dust. No signs of recent traffic so far, but that wasn’t convincing evidence that this place was uninhabited. The hole in the overhead hatch meant there was a lot of dust in the air and it would settle frequently, covering tracks and signs of movement.
I got out of the vehicle and said, “Iris, you and Tarik should return to the shuttle. ART-drone can get you up through the broken hatch to the surface. You can locate a landing spot for a retrieval with the ground sensor.”
Iris looked toward the far side of the hangar, in the direction of the interior hatch which she wouldn’t be able to see in the dark at this distance. (Iris had augments for extra feed connectivity and storage, but nothing for vision or anything else helpful under the circumstances.) There was a frown in her voice. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?”
Well, no. Obviously.
She continued, “Remember pulling out of this mission and going back to Peri to report and regroup is always an option.”
She had a point, but we were close. If the separatist colony had failed and there weren’t any survivors here, we could be done by the time the humans needed to eat again and we wouldn’t have to plan a follow-up mission. “It’s fine. I’ll notify you immediately if I encounter any not-dead humans.”
I was trying to lighten the mood but that one absolutely did not stick its landing.
Then Ratthi tried to help and made it worse. “You mean not dead, of course, as opposed to un— Ah, never mind, I’m going to stop talking now.”
Tarik did a body language thing that started as an aborted clap on my shoulder and ended with an awkward shrug as he remembered I wouldn’t like it. He said, “Just remember you’ve got backup.” I suddenly got why Iris had brought up his past in sanctioned corporate murder; she wanted him to think about his current job vs. my job, about who would make the security decisions. How we had something in common, I guess.
ART-drone didn’t say anything but I knew it was happy that I was sending the humans back to the shuttle.
As ART-drone gave first Iris and then Tarik a ride up through the hatch opening, I crossed the expanse of the dark hangar and stood in front of the installation hatch. It was partially open, a long dark line down the center, a very very dark line, indicating the emergency lighting from the tunnel was not active in there, either. I called ScoutDrone1 and 2, and sent them inside.
Humans. For fuck’s sake, why would the separatists want to live here? Because they were afraid? If the theory in my save-for-later tags was right, and Adamantine had had an early warning about the hostile takeover of its headquarters and assets, and told some of the colonists that another corporation might want to come along and eliminate any evidence of alien contamination so the planet wouldn’t lose value … This place might look like a potential shelter.
And it was doable with the resources at hand. The Adamantine main colony site had some underground bunkers for food production that they had mostly stopped using once they got their oxygenating crops started under the air bubble; there would have been spare hydroponic equipment and growth supplies available. Even if this place hadn’t had its own still-functioning power source, the terraforming engines were right there to tap, and the terraforming techs among the colonists would know how.
I was getting drone video of the installation, sort of, kind of. It was so dark, the drones’ filters weren’t working well, which meant mine wouldn’t, either. With my scans still borked and barely any visual, there could be a hundred alien contaminated humans standing around and I wouldn’t know they were there until I bumped into one.
I’m not actually stalling, okay, I’m doing stuff. The drones, I’m waiting on the drones.
I could have been wearing armor for this part.
(So earlier, after redacted, Three had told me that I could wear its armor, if I wanted. Well, it hadn’t used those words. It hadn’t gotten the idea yet that it might have personal possessions that belonged to it and no one else, so it had gotten me to follow it to ART’s secure storage where the armor was being kept and just stood there pointing at the door with a confused expression.) (Yes, it had taken 2.3 minutes of questioning by both me and ART and Overse and Turi to figure out what it was trying to tell us.) (The armor was equipment and Three didn’t understand why I didn’t just take it.) (Because I didn’t fucking want it, that’s why.) (And I left this out when it happened earlier, but while we were still at the router site and Ratthi and Tarik and Iris were volunteering for this mission, Three had asked me again. The armor was still in secure storage, but someone could have put it in a drop case and a pathfinder could have brought it to our position. And I said no again.)
(Yes, I know now it was a mistake. Three had offered me its drones, too; it had a lot more left than I did, after all the shooting and using them to bore holes in hostiles’ skulls and getting stepped on by Targets. And I had said no. Murderbot, why are you like this?)
From the shuttle, watching through my feed, Ratthi said, “Why are round hatches more frightening than square ones?”
Iris and Tarik were up on the surface with ART-drone, on a flat stretch of rocky ground at the base of a plateau. They had just located a safe landing spot with the ground sensor and signaled the shuttle to come down. From the shuttle’s camera, the plateau looked natural, the same dark rock streaked with red mineral deposits, as the rest of the area. But the extrapolated map ART-drone had constructed said the installation had to be under it. Confused, Tarik said, “What?”