All gone, everyone's work destroyed, she thought sadly, shuffling up the curve of the lab ring. Anything they didn't note down on comp — lost forever. She reached the sealed doorway to the clean room and looked inside. Here, most of the lights were still off, but two spots shone inside the containment chamber. A rust-red and ochre cylinder stood in a stainless steel cradle, anachronous and startling with irregular chips and flakes of stone amid the clean, smooth lines of the laboratory. Gretchen swallowed. The artifact — what else could it be? — was sectioned, cut clean in half as by a surgical beam. A metal-clad emitter ring hung poised above the cylinder, distended from an equipment pod. She guessed the cut was very narrow, perhaps only a millimeter across.
She started to sweat again, and the fans spun up in the suit, trying to keep her temperature constant. Reflexively, she looked down, checking the pressure seal on the door. With power returned, the panel showed three green lights and one red. She blinked.
The door seal failed. Oh god. Gretchen stepped back, and then stopped, gritting her teeth. Too late now, too late weeks ago. Whatever was inside escaped, ate through the containment pod, through the door seals, right out into the ship. She unclenched her hands and stared at the door. Adrenaline hissed in her blood, making her arms tremble.
After a long moment, she clicked her mike open. "Magdalena, are you busy right now?"
A growl answered, and a string of curses. Gretchen smiled, though the motion felt strange. "Yes, sister, I can wait. I'm in lab ring one. Take your time."
Gretchen sucked the last of a threesquare from her food tube and stood up as Magdalena and Bandao drifted down into the lab ring. The Hesht was still surrounded by a cloud of tools and cargo bags, but the gunner seemed to have accumulated some of the bulkier items.
"What's our status?" Gretchen asked, catching Maggie's paw and drawing her to a stop on the deck. Magdalena yawned in response, showing an ebon mouth filled with white teeth. Her fur was rumpled and one ear lay flat back against her head while the other was canted forward.
"All we have is sssrst-ta — tail feathers," the Hesht snarled. "Fuel cell power is up, main comp is up, the main reactor is still down, and we're lacking power in most of the ship." A gloved paw flexed and Gretchen noticed the Hesht's z-suit was fitted with a flexible metal mesh to accommodate extended claws. The fine mail glistened like fish scales. "Isoroku-san thinks this tangle-tailed weapon chewed up most of the power conduit runs. Some survived, so we have lights in the main core and some sections, but everything replaced three maintenance cycles ago is gone."
Gretchen wrinkled her nose. "Bad parts?"
Maggie nodded. "The repair logs show they swapped out most of the original conduit for new two years ago, as part of a systems upgrade. The new conduit was supposed to have a higher load tolerance, so they replaced all of the high-draw lines with this yherech-kwlll — pardon — inferior product. So the lights are on, some comp panels are up, but most of the hatches don't work, and the drives are offline, along with sensors, weapons, and the boat bay doors."
"Okay." Gretchen stared at the hatch into the clean room. "What about this one?"
Maggie shrugged. "The lights are on, try it."
Gretchen took a breath, nodded abruptly and stepped to the door. Then she stopped, unwilling to touch the controls. She felt Bandao and Maggie staring at her and became aware of the man's shipgun, raised and pointing past her at the door. A smile twitched her lips. Instinct! Danger in the high grass! As if his gun will stop this thing, if it's still in there. Her forefinger stabbed the button and the hatch trembled. A motor whirred — the sound audible even through her suit insulation — and the heavy steel recessed, then drew up into an overhead panel.
There were bits and pieces of metal and ceramic scattered on the deck. Gretchen recognized the metal inserts from the soles of a pair of dig boots much like her own. The deck surface was a dark, irregular metal, and she realized the usual nonskid coating had been destroyed. She padded across the deck, giving a wide berth to the tumbled parts of a belt, a pen, a scratched and dented v-pad. Her eye shied away from two irregular shining white pebbles. Someone's teeth. I didn't need to see that, she thought fiercely.
The comp panel running the isolation chamber had power, but had gone through an abrupt shutdown. Gretchen studied the glyphs for a moment, then tapped in RESTART and RESUME. Magdalena leaned in at her side, staring into the chamber.
"These are the seal status indicators?" The Hesht ran a metal-sheathed claw across a line of winking red glyphs. Gretchen nodded, watching the system start up. The panel seemed sluggish, and one pane displayed a constant list of init errors. Magdalena hissed. "Sloppy work. The entire seal is gone. Why don't they make them of solid metal or ceramic?"
Gretchen shrugged, concentrating on getting the panel operative again. "Company probably bought from the low bidder. Here we go…"
A v-feed opened on the panel, showing the interior of the isolation chamber and the rocky, corroded-looking cylinder. Gretchen slid a control down, and the image rewound with a flash, ending with a similar image, though now the cylinder was intact and the lighting slightly different.
"Replay," Gretchen muttered, finding the glyph for movement-returning-to-the-source and tapping the stylized warrior in a loincloth holding two reeds crowned with white fluff. "…with audio overlay." Another tap, and a timer began to run in one corner of the image.
For a moment there was no sound and Gretchen frowned. Magdalena laughed softly and her claw-tip danced across a series of controls. An excited male voice suddenly filled Gretchen's helmet comm.
"…on day six-flint-knife, in the month of Offering Flowers, an artifact described by image log seven-seven-two was recovered from the surface of Ephesus Three with some assistance from Miss Russovsky, a post-doc performing a routine geophysical survey of the planet. This is the first artifact we have found which is of an obvious and patently manufactured origin." There was a throaty, satisfied laugh, and Gretchen's nostrils flared. She decided she did not like the speaker, whoever he was. Assistance? You mean this Russovsky found the damned thing and brought it to you like a good little student — or did you take it from her?
"Initial analysis shows a metallic cylinder surrounded by a matrix of sedimentary rock. The encrusting mixture is of interest, indicating the cylinder lay in mud or clay. Preliminary isotopic decay readings suggest an age for the matrix of nearly three million years." The laugh came again, and this time there was a sense of relief in the voice. "This places the artifact well within the timeframe of known First Sun activities."
Gretchen felt the cold chill flood back into her stomach. What a fool!
"Doctor McCue has suggested that we isolate the artifact and send it back to the Company labs for more extensive examination, but I believe it is safer and more prudent for us to make an initial survey here, aboard the ship." The voice settled, becoming pedantic and measured.
"She suggests the object may be dangerous, but if so, would it not be wiser to examine the artifact here — far from inhabited space? Any violent event would then affect only this one ship, and of course, myself. A loss, to be sure, but far better than losing Mars or Novoya Rossiya!"
Gretchen shook her head in amazement at the man's ego. She could feel him thinking, even through the distance of the recording, and he was so, so eager to see what was inside the cylinder. Any real thought of caution or wariness was entirely disregarded.