“Hello?” Kugara called out.
Nothing stirred. The guard shack was apparently empty.
She looked around. “I don’t get it.”
Nickolai took a deep breath and shook his head. “No humans here, not for hours. But . . .”
“But, what?”
“I smell old fires, explosives. Human blood.”
“Jesus. And they just leave the door open?”
“Maybe there’s nothing left to protect.”
Kugara pulled her small flechette gun and pointed it at the ground. “If you would do me the favor?” She nodded to the open gate.
Nickolai supposed that he should be grateful that she did him the favor of at least making the pretense of asking. He walked over to the door. There was some logic to being the experimental subject here; any traps were going to be scaled for a human intruder and might not affect him as badly. Even so, he suspected that tactics was only a secondary consideration in having him take the lead.
He pushed the gate with his artificial hand, and it swung inward. He had to crouch and step through sidewise to avoid touching the frame of the door, which could still be charged.
No traps were sprung on him, no sudden stun fields, and no guards emerging from the trees. Nothing happened other than leaves rustling in the breeze and the door slowly creaking shut. He walked over to the guard shack. It was a small temporary structure with one-way windows, barely twice as wide as he was; just tall and deep enough for a human to stand comfortably inside.
Around back was the entrance, which hung open like the gate. He opened it, and no one was inside.
“Nickolai?” Kugara shouted, still on the other side of the fence.
“No one’s here!” Nickolai shouted back from behind the guard shack.
There wasn’t room for him inside the building, but its shallow depth put the control panel within easy reach. He touched the panel and called up a series of small views of the perimeter fence. A few more taps, and he was looking at a series of views, presumably from inside the fence. He saw a number of temporary structures, and what looked like a landing area, but no people and no vehicles.
Also, many of the buildings showed signs of withstanding some sort of firefight. The area between the structures showed debris and shrapnel.
He heard Kugara approach him, but he was still startled when her voice came from near his right elbow.
“What the
It only took a moment for him to realize what she was talking about. A camera had just panned to bring into view something that didn’t belong here. Something that didn’t belong anywhere, as far as Nickolai was concerned.
The camera panned from a series of temporary prefab buildings to something that Nickolai couldn’t classify as a building or a plant or a geological feature. It was a twisting crystalline structure that seemed to grow out of the ground and repeatedly fold into itself as it reached up into the sky. The camera kept panning over more geometric forms that seemed to have been born out of the hallucinations of a Paralian mathematician.
Nickolai stared at the images in the small holo and couldn’t turn them into anything more than pure abstractions. If the shiny forms held a function, he couldn’t discern it.
“What is it?” Kugara repeated.
“It must be what they were fencing in.”
“Is it some sort of natural formation?”
He shook his head. “There’s no sign of anyone here. If these are the comm channels,” he tapped on a quiet part of the console removed from the security cam display, “there’s no talking going on around here.”
