“I’m not going to play this game,” Ana-Zhi said.
Chiraine continued. “We know that Bandala’s primary purpose was to secure valuable artifacts, safely away from Yueld.”
“And it’s got thousands of galleries,” I said, turning to Ana-Zhi. “Right?”
“Yes,” she sighed impatiently. “Five hundred and seventy-six galleries per level. Twenty-one levels. You do the math.”
“Twelve thousand ninety-six galleries,” Chiraine said. “But we know there has to be more than just storage space here.”
“Of course,” I said. “We saw lots of cargo facilities, corridors, loaders, hover-carts, cranes.”
“And security, power, defenses,” Chiraine said.
“And maintenance,” Ana-Zhi said. “All that cargo equipment won’t maintain itself.”
Something had just occurred to me. “Wait a second. Let’s go back to the galleries. You said that there were five hundred seventy-six galleries per level.”
“Yes,” Ana-Zhi said.
“On all twenty-one levels, right?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“What do you mean?”
Chiraine jumped in. “That’s a piece of data that was recovered years ago. It’s pretty much common knowledge.”
“Do you see what that means?”
Ana-Zhi scowled at me. “Just tell us.”
“It means that the floors are fairly uniform.”
“That’s true,” Chiraine said. “I mean, you can just look at the topos and you’ll see that. Same layout on every level. Four quadrants, a grid of access corridors. All around the core.”
“The core,” I said excitedly. “That’s the key!”
“We don’t really know what’s in the core,” Chiraine said.
“But we do!” I said. “Besides a few landing decks, most of Bandala is taken up by galleries. And that’s what’s been recorded in the Ambit.”
“You’re right!” Chiraine said. “All the boring stuff—life support, power, defense, command center, crew quarters, medical—and communications!”
“Exactly!” I said.
Ana-Zhi shook her head in disgust. “Why didn’t you just say we need to go to the core? I didn’t really need a lesson in facilities planning.”
17
After Chiraine made sure the zone was clear, we retraced our steps through the large ruined hallway, and then back west towards the central corridor. Then we headed north towards the core.
If the corridor hadn’t been so dimly lit, I’m sure we could have seen the core, since it was only a few hundred meters away.
“Easy,” Ana-Zhi warned. “I don’t like the looks of this.”
“I’ve shut down the grid in this zone,” Chiraine said. “We’re clear to proceed.”
As we drew closer, we could hear the hum of the life support and ventilation systems. I noticed that there was a lot less dust and debris in the corridor as we got closer to the core. I wondered if there were maintenance bots that worked in this area.
Finally we got close enough to get a good look at what was in the center of Bandala. It was a cylindrical tower ringed by a suspended walkway with various pressure doors and hatches running around its perimeter.
“One of these doors has to lead to some sort of lift,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Probably the one right in front of us,” Chiraine said.
“Stay here,” Ana-Zhi said.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just a quick walk around the perimeter.”
She was back in a few minutes. “We’re at the intersection of four wide corridors. I’m fairly sure this is the absolute center of Bandala.”
“I guess that’s why they call it ‘the core,’ right?” Chiraine said.
I used the donokkal on the pressure door in front of us. It opened into a ten-meter-wide hallway leading into the heart of the core. And as we stepped in, an array of bright lights along the top of the walls winked on, illuminating the hallway.
“That’s better,” Ana-Zhi said. “It’s almost like they are welcoming us.”
“I’ll take welcoming lights over welcoming security bots any day,” I said.
The hallway was plated with large panels and ran north into a central circular room, fifty meters in diameter. There was a large gravlift in the center and numerous doors set in the walls of both the hallway and the chamber. Lots of options here.
We spent the next fifteen minutes or so opening doors and peeking in rooms at random, but didn’t see anything that appeared to be a comm station. There were plenty of machine shops, fabrication bays, parts storage, and bot maintenance stations.
“Would they have grouped different functions on different levels?” I asked. “You know, like medical on one floor, the command center on another?” I knew that was contrary to how most space stations were designed, but I also knew that Bandala had been built 700 years ago by a race who maybe didn’t share the same design principles as humans.
“It’s possible,” Ana-Zhi said.
“More than possible,” Chiraine said, “Think about it. Would you bury a communications array under a kilometer of metal?”
“No,” I said. “I’d put it as close as possible to the hull.”
“You know what else they would put close to the hull?” Chiraine asked.
Ana-Zhi snorted. “More guessing games? Really?”
“Wouldn’t it make sense to have some kind of emergency shuttlecraft or lifeboat or something at the bottom of the core?”
“Sure,” Ana-Zhi said. “There might be something like that. But even if we find some old shuttle, chances are it won’t be space-worthy.”
She was right. Bots and enviro systems could last a millennium but even a fairly simple drive needed to be maintained regularly. Still, it was worth checking out if we ran into a lifepod or something.
“We’ll keep our eyes open for something like that,” I said.
“In the meantime…” Ana-Zhi looked at the gravlift. “Which way is it going to be? All the way up or all the way down?”
“I vote for down,” I said. “Psychologically it seems closer to the planet.”
“Down it is.”
We had our procedure for traveling through vertical shafts down pat: force the door open with the donokkal, disable the security grid, hang on to the cargo net, and ride the sled to our destination. Which, in this case, was the very bottom of the gravlift shaft.
Fortunately the lift’s platform was somewhere above us, and we were able to travel the eleven levels without dealing with any obstructions. We still had to take it slow, because roughly every four levels, we had to stop and allow Chiraine to clear the next zone.
Finally we arrived in a
