Between the gear and my dad, there was no space for passengers, so Ana-Zhi draped the cargo netting over the sides of the sled and we all hung on for dear life.
We rose slowly and didn’t get more than twenty meters when two small drones flew into the shaft through the open doors and followed us up.
Reflexively, Ana-Zhi drew her RB, but I told her to hold up. I recognized the drones. Well, at least one of them, anyway.
The smaller of the two was my own micro drone—the one I had launched to lead the prowlers away from me. It must have escaped.
The other drone was a bit larger and it was a model that I didn’t recognize. Maybe it was Yates’s drone.
The two drones flew up and landed on the sled, perching beside one another.
“What the hell?” Ana-Zhi eased the sled to a halt.
“One of those is mine,” I said. “Is the other yours?”
“It looks like it found a friend,” Chiraine. “Weird.”
“That’s not weird at all,” Ana-Zhi said. “They’re programmed to flock together if they go out of the bounds of their command zone. The weird thing is that other drone.”
Now I was getting worried. “Could it be Yates’s? Is it a bomb?”
Ana-Zhi looked at it closer. “No, it’s not a bomb. That’s an MJ-13 D-Wing.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to us?” Chiraine asked.
“They don’t make them anymore. They haven’t for six or seven years.” She pointed to my drone. “That’s an MJ-55. The current model. Beck Salvage is pretty good at keeping our gear current.”
“I don’t get it, then,” Chiraine said. “What’s an old drone doing in Bandala?”
I thought I knew the answer to that. “It’s my dad’s.”
“No,” Chiraine said. “It couldn’t be…”
“No, Jannigan’s right,” Ana-Zhi said. “Seven years ago, we would have been using the 13s. But how the hell did it stay alive for so long?”
“No idea,” I said. “But it’s sure a loyal little contraption.”
We continued up the shaft until we reached level 12 of Bandala. Using the donokkal I opened the door to this level, and Ana-Zhi piloted the sled out into a cargo corridor. Before we jumped off the sled, I directed my hand-lamp towards the ground, looking for bootprints.
Nothing.
I didn’t think Yates had come this way, but I wanted to be sure.
“Chiraine, lock down this zone,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Already on it.”
Once the area was clear, we took the sled north along the corridor towards the central core of Bandala. It was slow going. Every ten minutes or so Chiraine had to check to make sure that we had not entered a new security zone, and if we had, she needed to shut it down.
We passed numerous side hallways and passages—most leading to depots which connected to storage galleries. The layout seemed very similar to the level we had come in.
I checked every intersection for bootprints, but didn’t find any until we were halfway to the central core.
“There!” I pointed to where the dust was disturbed. A single set of prints crossed the main corridor and headed west. “That’s Yates. I recognize his small feet.”
Carefully, we followed the bootprints. They wound down several corridors, doubled back a few times—as if Yates didn’t know where he was going—and finally emerged into a cavernous space leading to a landing deck. As far as I could tell we were in the northeast quadrant of Bandala.
This area looked much different than the entrance area of the landing deck we had come through.
“What the hell happened here?” Ana-Zhi.
The place was a wreck, with heaps of mechanical refuse, partially collapsed walls, stacks of blackened and broken equipment, and dead mechloaders that towered like ancient statues. I swept the room with the sled’s lighting array to get a better sense of where Yates had gone.
Chiraine said, “Looks like there was some sort of attack here.”
She was right. Huge metal panels and braces had been set up on the outer walls. They were partially covered by a strange organic-looking ooze. It almost looked like a lava flow.
“What do you supposed this is?” I asked.
Ana-Zhi picked at a section with her knife. “Hardened crusts of suppression foam, it looks like. They had some sort of breach here.”
I tracked Yates’s prints to an airlock door near one of the few observation windows that hadn’t been covered over.
“He went through here.”
The three of us pressed up against the window and looked out. I’m not sure what we expected to see. The landing deck was littered with lifters and gantries, power hookups, and thermal exhaust ports. But there was no Mayir ship. And no sign of Yates.
“That’s pretty,” Chiraine said.
I turned to look where she was pointing. It was a nice view of the planet Yueld—a swirly green marble floating in space.
“It kind of looks like your biklode,” I told her.
“What, you mean this one?” She pulled out a little sphere from her belt pouch.
“Are you serious? Where did that come from?”
“My life’s work is on here,” she said. “I keep it with me at all times.”
“And yet you trusted it to me.” I remembered how she passed the tiny orb to me in a kiss right before the Faiurae took her.
“Yeah, well. You have a trustworthy face,” she said with a shy smile.
“You two want to get a room, or what?” Ana-Zhi said.
Under other circumstances, I would say that might be a splendid idea. But we were running out of time.
“We should look for that comm station.”
“We can’t just wander around willy-nilly and hope that we run into it,” Chiraine said.
“You have a better idea?” Ana-Zhi said. “Or better yet a directory to this facility?”
“Let’s try to think this through logically,” I said. “What do we know about Bandala?”
“We don’t have time for this, junior.”
“I think he’s right,” Chiraine said. “Let’s break it down. We have some knowledge of Bandala from the topographics and the data we extracted from the Ambit. We know that it has twenty-one levels.”
“It’s a cube,” I offered. “Approximately one point five kilometers in every
