We found the hatch. It was a pressure door set into the ceiling on the far side of the pillar. Unfortunately it was only a meter square. The sled wouldn’t fit.
14
“We have to backtrack,” Ana-Zhi said. “This sucks.”
“Hang on,” I said. “According to the topo, the bottom of the next gallery is up twenty meters or so and then over a hundred and fifty. I bet this hatch leads to an access tunnel that connects them. It’s just not made for cargo transport. They used the wide corridors for that.”
“You may be right,” she said.
“Of course I’m right. You saw the size of those hover-carts. There’s no way they could fit through that hatch.”
“I don’t see how that helps us,” Yates said. “You want to leave the sled?”
“The Kryrk is only supposed to be a meter long,” I said. “Maybe less. That’s what Sainecourt told me. Not so big that we can’t carry it.”
Yates shook his head. “We can’t leave the LVX here. That would be suicide.”
“He’s right,” Ana-Zhi said. “I don’t want a repeat of what just happened. We were lucky. There were only six security bots. Imagine a roomful of scrubbers instead.”
“No thank you,” Galish said.
“What if I go by myself?” I asked. “I could take the donokkal. Do a little recon. Yates, you can deactivate the next zone, can’t you?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t like it,” Ana-Zhi muttered. “Never a good idea to split up.”
We went back and forth for several minutes. “It’s literally less than two hundred meters away,” I said. “I’ll just check it out. See if there’s an actual connection. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
“Make it ten,” she said.
“You got it!”
“And we’ll be monitoring your video and audio at every step.”
“No problem.”
We ended up not even needing to use the donokkal on the hatch. Yates was able to open it remotely using the LVX. As I had guessed, the hatch led to a two-meter by two-meter access shaft stretching up. There was both a ladder and a step lift running up a rail along the wall. I chose the ladder.
I made it up through the vertical shaft and found myself in the corner of another large depot.
“You guys seeing this?” I asked into my comm unit.
“Affirmative.”
It was a twin of the depot we had walked through near the entrance, with a dozen or so cargo corridors fanning off back towards where the team waited—but twenty meters over their heads. Clearly I couldn’t take any of those corridors. They were all heading in the wrong direction.
A wide archway connected the depot to another immense corridor that was even wider than the cargo corridors and was broken up by more archways stretching for as far as I could see in the gloom.
I checked the topo on my Aura. I knew that there were no cardinal directions on an orbital fortress in space, but in my mind I assigned the location of the airlock as being in the southeast quadrant. The corridor I was standing in was northeast of the airlock, and up about seventy meters. The Kryrk looked like it was to the northwest, but there was another marker on my display.
Roughly six hundred meters due west was where Chiraine had noted the location of my father—if the life form in hibernation was my father.
I had to go. I had to see for myself whether or not it was him.
“You’re going the wrong way, asswipe!” Galish said over the comm unit.
“Yeah, I need to check something out.”
“Negative, junior,” Ana-Zhi said. “This ain’t no sandbox game. You go where you’re told.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by ‘sandbox game,’ but I ignored her command and kept walking.
The big east/west corridor intersected a wide north/south corridor, with a line of hover-carts against one wall. Everything was lit by directional beacons and faint utility lights and there was a lot of dust on the ground here.
In fact—
Holy shit!
There were bootprints in the dust.
“Jannigan, stop now,” Ana-Zhi said in a firm voice.
“I found tracks. Bootprints.”
“I don’t care if you found Jesus’s own coffee cup, you stop now, do a one-eighty, and return to us. Confirm, junior!”
“I think they are from the last mission,” I said. Suddenly my stomach felt queasy.
Then Yates came on the comm unit, speaking calmly. “You’re probably seeing our footprints, Jannigan. Yes, from the last mission. But you are outside of the zone I shut down, do you understand? Repeat, you are outside the safe zone and in serious danger.”
I heard him, but I didn’t care. I kept going, following the two lines of bootprints as they turned south and led through an archway into another depot room. There I was confronted by a mess in the dust: blackened bits of metal and machine parts everywhere. Like some kind of robot slaughterhouse. There were partial bootprints, as well, but everything was disturbed. Violently disturbed.
“Jannigan, get your ass back here now!” Ana-Zhi said. “We’ll all go around with the sled and investigate this together.”
“I’m really close,” I said.
This depot didn’t look like the others. On the west and south sides of the depot were a series of cargo tunnels extending away at various angles.
But the east side of the depot was different. There were no corridors. It was just a fifty by twenty-meter chamber crowded with a labyrinth of heavy equipment: clusters of storage tanks, power relays, rows of energy couplers and big transformers, and a bunch of floor-to-ceiling thermal cores that were as thick around as the sled. Maybe this place was some sort of power station or something.
But what had exploded in it?
“Jannigan, come in—”
I flicked off my comm unit and then the video feed, and inspected the dusty floor. When I aimed my hand-lamp at the ground at the right angle, I was able pick out the bootprints again amidst the debris. There were multiple sets, going in both directions along the farthest tunnel to the southeast.
I was about
