“That’s random,” I said. “Do recognize the species?”
“No idea.”
I was about to pick one up and examine it closer, but Ana-Zhi grabbed my arm. “Leave it. They could be bombs for all we know.”
The only exit was a door to the north, leading to a short hallway which ended in a T. We could go either east or west. I felt we had been heading west in general so we continued in that direction. But Ana-Zhi wasn’t moving. She just stood there with her arms folded.
“What’s wrong?”
“This is a waste of time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re just wandering around, hoping that we stumble upon a communications station.”
“You have a better idea?”
She leaned against one wall. “Not really.”
“C’mon, the next door we come to could be it.”
“Or it could be a storage closet filled with Yueldian toilet paper.”
“What?”
“I say we go back. Let the princess spend some quality time with the LVX scrubbing through the Ambit.”
“For what?”
“To pinpoint the location of communication station.”
“That might take a while,” Chiraine said over the comm channel.
“Yeah, well it beats randomly wandering around the bottom of the core. I hate to say this, junior, but I think we are well and truly fucked.”
I checked my Aura. “No, in thirteen hours, seventeen minutes we’ll be fucked. Look!” I motioned towards the drone, which was flying slowly west down the hallway.
Ana-Zhi let out a loud sigh of disgust, but she walked with me as we followed the drone.
The hallway angled to the northwest, then the corridor widened into a long room with doors to the north, south, and west. The west door was quite a bit larger and heavier than all the others. Kind of like a blast door.
I went over to it and checked it out.
“You think they’d put a comm station behind something like this?” Ana-Zhi asked sarcastically.
“Only one way to find out.”
I used the donokkal on the door’s control box and was rewarded by a clang as the door’s internal locking mechanism released. I pulled on the handles and heard a hiss of air. That meant the pressure was being equalized.
Ana-Zhi heard it too and told me to be careful.
I slowly opened the door and looked inside.
Interior lights flickered on and I saw that the room was octagonal and maybe ten meters across. Two open doorways led in opposite directions: north and south out of the room.
The space looked like some sort of control room. There were several workstations arranged around the room—all powered on. On every wall hung big display screens and the screens were alive with strange images. The displays showed all sorts of volcanic landscapes. On one screen, streams of lava cascaded down dark cliffs into bubbling pools. On another, a dark castle loomed over a vast plain of fissured stone. Large winged creatures soared over jagged hills enveloped in a shroud of toxic-looking mist. These scenes looked familiar, but I couldn’t place them. I tore my eyes away and surveyed the rest of the room.
Towards the middle of the chamber I saw that someone had piled all the chairs in a hill of furniture. Bizarre.
I took one step in, with Ana-Zhi right behind me.
“Do those images look familiar to you?” I asked.
“No. That’s not Yueld, but I’m not sure where it is.”
“Could this be the comm station?”
“No idea,” she said.
We both wandered around the room, clicking at control surfaces, trying to see if we could turn anything on or off, but nothing we did changed the strange images on the displays.
All the while, the little drone buzzed around the north doorway, zooming down the passage, and then zooming back when it noticed that we weren’t following it. At least, that’s what it seemed like to me.
“Let’s get going.” I moved towards the north exit.
“Other way,” Ana-Zhi said.
“What?”
“I’m sick of following that thing. Its guidance system is probably scrambled. Follow me!”
“I don’t think—”
But she was already moving quickly down the southern hallway.
The little drone flew around in circles—almost like it was panicking.
“Jannigan, come on!”
I hurried after Ana-Zhi. This corridor was narrow and featureless, with plates of metal on the walls and just the barest illumination from light strips along the ceiling. After a couple of dozen meters, the corridor ended in a pressure door, which was unsealed.
“Everything okay, guys?” Chiraine asked over the comm.
“Yeah, if wandering around aimlessly is okay to you,” Ana-Zhi said.
Ana-Zhi led the way through the door and directed her hand-lamp into the tunnel beyond. This passage was even narrower and rounded like a tube—with ribbed vaulting every four meters or so. Kind of creepy. It reminded me of the inside of a gullet or something, but Ana-Zhi seemed to think that we were finally on to something.
“If this doesn’t lead us to the comm station, we’re heading back,” Ana-Zhi said to Chiraine.
Chiraine tried to reply, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Her transmission was all garbled. Probably because of the plating.
As we walked down the tunnel, I noticed long scratch marks along the floor and lower parts of the wall. It almost looked like something large had been dragged through here.
“Here we go.” Ana-Zhi squatted down on the floor.
I moved closer and saw that she was peering down a manhole-sized hole that had been cut in the floor with a torch.
“Now things are getting interesting,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Whoever came before us was very motivated to find a way down to the level below us.”
“But I thought we were at the bottom level? Chiraine, can you confirm?”
But there was no reply other than a burst of static.
“Yeah, we are at the lowest functional level,” Ana-Zhi said. “But if this place is like most space stations, it probably has another hundred meters of superstructure behind the hull. That’s what’s below us.”
“What’s down there?”
“That’s what we are going to find out.” She crawled down and disappeared into the hole.
I rushed over to the edge. “Hey, Ana-Zhi? You okay?”
“Never better, junior. I think we’ve got something here.”
Curious, I
