“Would it have killed the Yueldians to put up a sign or two?” Ana-Zhi grumbled. “This Way to Communications Station.”
“Where’s the challenge in that?” I said.
We set to work exploring the area and checking doors, being careful to stay together and within sight of the sled. There were dozens of doors along the four main corridors, and as Ana-Zhi had noted, they were all unmarked. Some of them led to other hallways; some led to rooms. This would take forever.
“Hey!” Chiraine shouted. “The drone! It’s just took off!”
I looked where she was pointing and saw the old MJ-13 speeding off down one of the side corridors.
That was strange.
“Don’t just stare at the blasted thing!” Ana-Zhi said. “Follow it!”
I activated the magtouch repulsors on my boots—just a bit—to give me some extra speed, and raced after the little drone. It weaved in and out, around corners, through passageways, and finally stopped and hovered in front of a door. The door was ajar, but its controls had been torn open. By a laser cutter from the looks of it. The tool had been tossed nearby.
“Someone was pretty eager to get into this room,” Ana-Zhi huffed, trying to catch her breath as she jogged up behind me.
“Where’s Chiraine?”
“With the sled.”
Ana-Zhi picked the cutter up and inspected it. “Definitely one of ours. Human, I mean. Not Yueldian. But old.”
“How old?” I asked.
“Hard to say. It’s got an old-fashioned boost inductor. Could be thirty or forty years ago.”
“So from one of the first three missions?”
“Probably,” she said. “But it’s weird. I never heard of an expedition going this deep into Bandala.”
I glanced over at the little drone, which was still bobbing in place in front of the door. “I think what’s weird is that this drone seems to be guiding us here.”
“Agreed, that is weird. But we need to check it out.” Ana-Zhi contacted Chiraine and filled her in on what we had discovered.
“The sled won’t fit through that door,” Ana-Zhi told Chiraine. “You’re going to need to stay with it.”
“Why me?”
“Because you’re running the LVX. I need you to keep scanning the area.”
She reluctantly agreed.
Ana-Zhi and I squeezed through the door, weapons drawn. As we moved, the drone followed us into the room. I wondered why it wasn’t leading the way like it had a few moments ago. Maybe it was my imagination, but the little drone looked scared.
We found ourselves in what appeared to be a galley, with Yueldian-sized tables and chairs. Various cabinets and storage units lined the walls, and on one of the tables were what appeared to be eating implements and several piles of a dusty powder.
“Mmmm, looks delicious,” Ana-Zhi said. “We probably could reconstitute that if you’re hungry.”
“I’ll pass.”
Two doors led out of the galley. We could either go north or continue east. When I went to examine the east door, I saw that it had been welded shut. I called Ana-Zhi over. “What do you think of this?”
“Something valuable’s in there,” she said.
“Or something dangerous.”
“We could get that laser cutter and find out.”
“I don’t think we have time.” According to the chron module on my AuraView, the Fountain would be opening in five hours and closing nine hours after that. We were right down to the wire, and I had a sinking feeling that we wouldn’t make it. I pushed the thought from my mind and checked the north door.
This was some sort of storage room, stacked with crates. Probably foodstuffs, long since turned to dust—like whatever was left on the table.
With the drone following along, we continued through a door leading north which opened into a long room filled with rows of what appeared to be beds—although these beds were a meter longer than any bed that I had ever slept in.
“Yeah, even Sky Reavers need to sleep and eat,” Ana-Zhi said.
There were two exits out of this habitation module—east and west. To the west, through a pressure door, was some kind of life-support bay filled with a row of cryocapsules, again sized for Yueldians. I walked along the row, peering inside of each capsule. Even though they were all empty, I was getting pretty creeped out.
“That’s strange,” I said. “Why would they need cryocapsules on a fortress?”
“No idea,” Ana-Zhi said. “A lot of this stuff just doesn’t make any sense.”
There was another life-support bay to the east of the room with the beds. It also had a row of cryocapsules, but one of them was missing.
“What the hell?” Ana-Zhi poked at the floor with her boot.
On the ground there was a clear outline of where the capsule had been. Severed power, data, and coolant cables poked through a broken hole in the floor. It was like someone had just plucked the capsule off the ground and whisked it away somewhere. But these things were huge. They probably weighed five hundred kilos and would be a tight fit getting through the doorways.
Ana-Zhi thought maybe the unit had been out for repairs when Bandala was abandoned, but that seemed like a stretch to me.
“No, there’s something really strange about this,” I said.
“We’re not here to solve mysteries. We’re here to find a goddamn comm station. Let’s keep going.”
The next room had racks of electronics equipment—all smashed to bits. Broken display screens and control panels. Toppled data boxes and workstations. I felt my gut twist. Was this the comm room?
“Do you think…?” I trailed off.
Ana-Zhi picked through some of the debris, then looked around the room. “No, this isn’t what we’re looking for. It’s too small. This is some sort of data analysis bay. The princess would be right at home here—if it wasn’t all broken to shit.”
“I heard that!” Chiraine said, over our comm channel.
“Yeah, well, nothing to get your hopes up about, sweetie,” Ana-Zhi aid. “We’re just ankle deep in junk here.”
We continued west into another storage room. This was filled with dozens of identical statues, each about a half meter tall. The statues were of some small humanoid
