I smiled at her, but inside I couldn’t help feeling some anger welling up. Anger towards Yates. I wondered how he’d act when I told the team that I thought my father was still alive and that we were going to recover him from the bowels of Bandala. Yeah, how might that go over?
We sealed ourselves in the airlock and once Galish gave the okay, opened up the outer bay doors, extended the ramp, and I took my first step on an ancient alien orbital fortress.
The gravity was pretty good here. It was impressive that their generators kept humming away—even after nearly 700 years.
“Look alive,” Ana-Zhi said. “Jannigan, no lagging. You and the sled need to keep up, got it?”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
The landing deck was a cavernous space with gantry cranes, mech and refueling stations, cargo depots, and what appeared to be shield projectors—everything was barely lit by faint glow tracks along the floor and ceiling. We hiked across the deck to its back wall. There, set into a plated archway, was an airlock.
Galish used Xooth’s donokkal to do the honors. The blast doors opened to reveal the interior of the airlock itself. It was plenty big and the sled had no trouble fitting in.
We had to sit around for a bit until Yates figured out how to trigger the admission sequence, but soon we were into the fortress proper.
Ana-Zhi had us stop and wait at the beginning of a wide entry hall while she did some environmental scans. I gazed back at the Freya through big hyaline observation windows. It felt weird, but good to finally be off the ship—doing something useful.
“SE/EA deviation only point one two,” Ana-Zhi announced. “We could probably breathe this soup if we want, but let’s not. It’s a bit on the chilly side in here. Pressure’s at 600 millibars. Gravity’s at point nine. All in all, not bad. Not bad at all.”
Even with my external audio monitors cranked up, Bandala was as quiet as a tomb. I powered up the sled’s lighting array and Galish helped launch our recon drones so we could get a better look at our surroundings.
“This look familiar, Yates?” Galish asked.
“Actually, no. We might’ve come in through the other side of the landing deck.”
The hallway itself was immense—probably thirty meters wide and thirty meters tall—and it stretched out into the darkness, running perpendicular to the airlock.
As far as I could tell the hall was largely empty, except for the shells of what looked like some maintenance bots. The walls of the hallway were a different story, however. They were adorned by strange murals depicting hellish-looking landscapes with rivers of burning lava and jagged peaks of black volcanic rock.
I walked closer and shone a hand-lamp at the wall to get a better look. In one of the murals I saw what appeared to be a hooded humanoid figure kneeling beside a corpse on the shore of a bubbling lava lake.
In another, a black citadel stood on the edge of a cliff. It looked strange and haunted with dagger-like spires, spindly towers, and weird-looking turrets.
“We’re not here to admire the artwork, junior,” Ana-Zhi said.
“If you can call that artwork,” Galish sneered.
“Get a move on.”
We passed through a tall archway into some sort of cargo depot. At least that was what it looked like to me. Lined up against one wall stood a row of ancient-looking hover-carts. A confusing array of illuminated beacons ran down at least a dozen separate corridors.
“This is starting to look familiar,” Yates said.
“Oh yeah?” Galish said.
“I think so. If I was smarter, I would have brought the old mission logs. But I never thought—in a million years—I’d be back here.”
Maybe it was my imagination, but Yates seemed pretty stressed. Like something was gnawing at him.
The depot had more gantry cranes as well as a bunch of tall automated cargo bots standing lifeless in the shadows.
“Let me check the coordinates,” Ana-Zhi said.
After studying her AuraView, she pointed to one of the corridors. “I think that will take us in the right direction.”
The corridor was a big metal tube that splintered off from the depot. We followed it for ten or twelve minutes before Ana-Zhi called for us to halt.
“I fucked up. This doesn’t connect. We need to go that way.” She pointed off to the right.
So we backtracked to the depot and then she chose another tunnel that looked exactly like the first one, but veered off in a slightly different direction.
Galish double-checked Ana-Zhi’s interpretation of the topo. “These tubes all go to different storage galleries. The Yueldians would load up carts full of their stolen treasures and transport them through these tunnels. None of them seem to connect.”
“Why can’t you just find the right tunnel on the map?” I asked.
“The topos are incomplete,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Thanks, Chiraine,” Galish said sarcastically.
“It’s not her fault,” Ana-Zhi said. “If the data isn’t there, it isn’t there.”
We continued forward through this tunnel, which seemed to bring us closer to where we wanted to be. So far, Bandala seemed rather innocuous—just a vast warehouse-type structure that had lain empty for 700 years. The biggest challenge we faced was not getting lost.
“Hold up,” Yates said. “We’re going to need to stop and deactivate the next zone.”
“Already?” Galish asked.
“Better safe than sorry. Believe me.”
It only took him ten minutes or so to access the next zone on the defensive grid and shut it down. Then we continued down the tunnel.
“Are you sure we haven’t overshot the location?” I asked.
“No,” Ana-Zhi said. “I don’t think so, but we are going to need to go up soon.”
Finally the tunnel opened up to what Galish called a gallery. It was a vast circular chamber with a big center column that rose up ten stories or more. Both the inner and outer walls of this chamber had rows and rows of large square doors inset into them. Maybe
