We showed her where on the topo we needed to go and then she accessed the defensive grid for that zone. In a few minutes she was able to shut it down.
“Now we just have to figure out how to get up one level with the sled.” I quickly explained to Chiraine how we had found some narrow access shafts, but they were too small for the sled.
With Ana-Zhi looking on, Chiraine used the scanner function on the LVX to try to fill in some of the blanks on our topographics.
“This is weird,” Chiraine said.
“What?”
“You said we’re going to find your father here?” She showed me an area on the LVX’s display.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”
“Weird.” She moved to working on her Aura. “Hold on, I need to double check something.”
While Chiraine worked, Ana-Zhi turned to me and said, “We need a gravlift or a cargo shaft in order to take the sled up.”
“Shouldn’t there be something near an airlock?” I asked. “I mean, if the Yueldians had cargo they needed to store on a floor that didn’t have a landing deck, they would need some way to move it up or down.”
Ana-Zhi nodded. “Good thinking. Once the princess here is done with whatever she’s doing that’s so important, we’ll head back to the landing deck. Check around for some kind of vertical cargo shaft—at least big enough for a—”
“I knew I was right!” Chiraine said. She leaned over and showed us the info on her Aura.
“What are we looking at?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“This is where the Tabarroh Crystal was found.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
As far as I knew, the info was never shared outside of the company.
“Six months after the last mission I found a reference to the Tabarroh Crystal in node A548.”
“You found it?” I asked. “On your own?”
“Yes.”
Ana-Zhi nodded. “She’s right about the location. I remember that from our debrief.”
“So what are you saying?” I asked.
Chiraine tapped another section of the topo. “This is where your father is. Look how far away it is!”
She was right. The location of the Tabarroh Crystal was easily a kilometer away from where I had found my dad’s body.
“That doesn’t make sense.” According to Yates’s account, the security bots had overwhelmed them right after they found the Tabarroh Crystal. But that was impossible. My dad’s body was not even between the Tabarroh Crystal’s vault and the landing deck. It was in the opposite direction.
Ana-Zhi put her hand on my shoulder. “This is interesting and all, but we need to get going, Jannigan.”
She was right. The clock was ticking.
We found the gravlift fairly quickly, but it was a bit farther east than the central corridors which bisected this level and a bit north of the landing deck. Access to the shaft was through a pair of heavy doors ten meters wide. I used the donokkal to open them.
The shaft itself was about eight meters square and completely open. One misstep and I’d find myself tumbling down a couple of hundred meters into the bowels of Bandala.
“Where’s the platform?” I asked.
“Probably at the bottom,” Chiraine said. “Let me see if I can call it up here.”
“Don’t bother,” Ana-Zhi said. “We’ll take the sled. Just make sure that there’s no active security in this thing.”
Chiraine spent a few minutes using the LVX to scan the area. Finally she gave the all-clear and we began to ascend the shaft. We went up 70 meters and then I opened the doors to that level.
Ana-Zhi guided the sled out into a long cargo corridor that was a twin of the one we had just left. Soon we found ourselves at the big four-way intersection where Ana-Zhi had saved me from the prowlers. Their lifeless shells were still scattered around.
Chiraine kneeled down to examine one. “Definitely seventeenth century technology. Look at this locomotion system. And the sensors. Analog antennas. What were they thinking?”
As we passed under the big archway into the eastern depot, Chiraine saw the dead arthrodes. “Ugh. These things belong in a museum.”
“They worked just fine when they were trying to slice me to ribbons,” I said.
We left the sled and made our way to the maze of storage tanks, power relays, transformers, and thermal cores. Chiraine seemed to think that this was the power substation for this quadrant.
Once we got to the coupler closet with my dad, she gasped in surprise. “Oh my god, it’s really him. Sean Beck. And he is alive!”
I explained about his attempt to hook his suit up to the coupler and how I had discovered that the cable hadn’t even been connected.
“He’s very lucky,” Ana-Zhi said. “I don’t know how his suit is still running after seven years.”
“I’m almost afraid to move him,” I said.
“We don’t have a choice.”
It took a while, but we carefully extracted my dad from the closet and the complex of machinery and got him onto the sled.
Ana-Zhi checked his bio monitor display. “Everything’s still good, but I’d feel better if we could wake him up.”
“Me too.”
With the sled, we headed back to the cargo shaft. It was an easy run, but the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up the whole way. I kept expecting another squad of prowlers to round the corner and start blasting at us, but luckily we made it to the shaft and prepared to ascend again. This time, we’d be going up five more levels to where the next landing deck was—the landing deck where Yates had likely escaped from.
“You’re still checking the zones?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“Yes, mom!” Chiraine said in a perfect imitation of a teen girl. She explained that it was a bit problematic to travel vertically in a safe way because the security grids were organized by level. She had to check each one individually, and there were fifteen levels above us.
After what seemed like forever, Chiraine finally told us that the way was clear and we got ready to
