“This is a well-known fact,” Ratthi said, from the copilot’s seat. He had my camera view up on a display surface. “Round hatches are terrifying.”
“This is fact where?” Tarik demanded as the shuttle landed in a whirl of dust. “Why are any hatches terrifying?”
Two drones were not enough for this job, but there was nothing I could do about that. Shielded from the terraforming interference by all the rock, their scans had started to function again, but only at extreme close range. I had clearer camera feeds and actual movement checks and that was a fucking relief, let me tell you. Even if right now all I was getting was darkness and the occasional too-close view of a wall as the drones’ guidance system detected one just in time to keep from smashing into it. This was going to be the slowest scouting run these drones had ever done, but at least it was happening.
Also, while I could understand Tarik’s confusion, Ratthi wasn’t wrong. I ran a quick query on hatch shape in my media storage, focusing on popular adventure and suspense/horror dramas and the high incidence of hazardous fauna, raiders, human and/or bot murderers, and/or magical fauna, unidentified but terrifying dark presences, and straight up monsters associated with round hatches. I sent the results into the team feed.
ART-drone said, You wasted processing space on that?
“Eighty percent,” Ratthi said, genuinely shocked. “I thought I was making a joke.”
As the ramp lowered, Iris swung up onto it. “It’s not the shape of the hatch,” she said, “it’s the symmetry of the columns to either side.”
I said, “I’m not running the query again.” My two pitiful drones were still getting nothing on visual but they were giving me some data indicating relative positions of walls, ceiling, and floors, and their limited close-range scan picked up something that was probably dormant power conduit under stone veneer. But there just weren’t enough of them to build a real sensor map of a space as large as this appeared to be, even with their full scanning capacity. It was even larger than the hangar, and mostly open.
Iris and Tarik were through the airlock and inside the shuttle now. They let their helmets disengage and fold back. Tarik dropped into a seat and Iris leaned on the back of Ratthi’s headrest, watching the display screen.
ART-drone floated back down through the hangar hatch to return to my position. I should have told it to get into the shuttle and stay with the humans, but. I hadn’t.
“Let’s wait and let the evidence stand for itself,” Ratthi said. He meant the hatch evidence. Yes, we were still on that.
Iris is correct, ART-drone said, it’s the symmetry of the hatch’s placement between the two columns and the equal size of the space to either side. To individuals subject to suggestion, it implies that something is about to cross the line of sight.
By “individuals subject to suggestion” it meant “idiots.”
Tarik said, “You know if this place is empty, all this monster talk is going to sound ridiculous.”
Iris’s tone was dry. “I hate to tell you, but it already sounds ridiculous.” She added, “SecUnit, do you have a plan to proceed?”
ScoutDrone1 alerted and I told it to halt. Its camera had just detected artificial light, and it didn’t match the emergency lighting in the tunnel corridor. It was identical to the battery lighting used in the Adamantine main site. Well, here we go. “Contact,” I said. Space monsters and dark presences weren’t going to need battery light. Alien-contaminated humans, however, would. Probably.
“What? Where?” Tarik frowned at the feed display.
“The drones are reporting in,” Ratthi explained. He opened a private feed connection to me and said, SecUnit, you’re not telling us what you’re doing.
Shit, he’s right. I am fucking this up again. On the comm, I said, “A drone encountered artificial lighting in a corridor.”
Trying to cover for me, Ratthi was telling Tarik, “Just always assume there are drones doing something.”
ART-drone said, Before contact was made, all findings were preliminary and inconclusive.
Yeah, that’s ART-drone covering for me, too.
I shared my drone video with the team feed, which I should have done earlier, but the results were so minimal … I just hadn’t shared it. What, it hadn’t occurred to me? I was ashamed of it? I don’t know, I need to snap out of this.
Iris frowned. “If you find anything that might be a sign of compulsive construction, get out of there immediately.”
Ratthi made a thoughtful “mmph” noise, which I translated as him not considering the presence or lack of compulsive construction as indicative as we hoped, but not wanting to say it aloud and bring the group down.
On the drone video, the outline of a corridor was taking shape as the light grew brighter. It was a lot like the tunnel but the material was lighter in color, the floor darker. There was no decoration, like there had been in the other Pre-CR site. But if this place had been built by the same Pre-CR group, it probably wasn’t intended to be a major occupation site. I guess. I have no idea, don’t listen to me.
There was also no sign of graffiti, but it was hard to tell if the graffiti in the Pre-CR site had been another sign of alien contamination affecting the humans or not. We hadn’t seen any so far in the Adamantine colonists’ habitation. (Ugh, tag this bullshit piece of data for delete. There was graffiti in Preservation Station, for fuck’s sake, sometimes humans want pretty pictures on the walls. It could mean anything or nothing.)
ScoutDrone1 followed the light into a larger passage, turning a corner … It was another hatch, smaller, sized for humans and not large cargo containers. The battery light was stuck or mounted to the wall to one side of it.
Ugh.
This is supposed to be my job/reason for existing, right, doing the dangerous thing so the humans don’t have to. And I need to do it, right now. I said, “I’m going in. ART-drone will stay at the entrance.”
I should accompany you, ART-drone said.
Iris said, “Peri, it’s SecUnit’s call.”
I didn’t want to argue in front of the humans (I know, right? Like we’ve never done that before. But I didn’t want to do it now) so on our private feed, I told ART-drone, You need to not undermine Iris’s authority right now. And you need to stay at the entrance so if anything chases me out you can slow it down so the shuttle will have time to take off.
ART-drone said, Your attempts at emotional manipulation need work. But your point is taken.
I kept my camera feed on the shuttle’s larger display surface and crossed the last bit of hangar floor to the hatch. The open gap between the huge doors was more than wide enough for me to walk inside.
With the data the drones had sent me, I had a sensor map (a half-assed sensor map) that I could use to enhance my dark vision filters. So I could see to a certain extent, enough not to run into a wall. Though everything was in grayscale, and details were fuzzy. I was in an entrance foyer, large enough for heavy cargo bots or hauler bots to wander around in. The forward wall was open to the giant space that ScoutDrone2 was currently attempting to map singlehandedly. (Intel drones are supposed to do this kind of thing in swarms, which did not make me feel super competent right now.) The righthand wall had an opening that was probably the entrance to a large lift shaft, possibly where the cargo was meant to get shunted as soon as it came in through the hatch. I checked my scan and for once it was good news. With the thick layer of rock overhead shielding us from interference, I had limited function back, though not as much as the drones had right now. But I could tell the lift wasn’t powered up, at least. And the percentage chance of being surrounded by silent alien-contaminated humans dropped to fluctuate in the low 80s. Oh, and there was a metal safety screen that had been pulled across the shaft entrance to keep anyone from falling in. That might be an indication that an orderly shutdown of this site, or at least of this entrance, had occurred at some point.