It was made to look old and carved out of the ground by usage, but it wasn’t carved out of the ground. The road had been layered over the surface, just like the pavement had been long ago.
“Want me to see what that’s made out of?” Yash asked him quietly. He realized suddenly that she had opened up a channel just for the two of them.
“Sure,” he said. Better to be safe, after all.
She pulled out the wand, crouched, and extended it over the brown area without touching it.
Night had fallen completely, and that bit of gray that had come with twilight was completely gone. When she crouched like that, moving all the beams of light she controlled downward, the area around Coop had become completely dark.
That too suggested nanobits to him—not on the brown patch, but the barrier wall, the side of the mountain, and even the overhang—although it was still some distance from him.
Yash stood. “I don’t recognize the materials. They’re not naturally occurring, though. They’re manufactured, somehow. I can take a sample, if you want.”
“Are they safe to walk on?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I can’t tell you without examining it all closely, but I can say on first glance that I’m not seeing anything dangerous.”
He was about to walk on the brown area, then he paused. It might signal whoever had put it there.
Of course, if that was the case, then the skip itself had done the same thing when it landed. Not to mention the lights on their gloves.
He turned, and shined one of the beams toward the overhang and darkness beyond. As the light got closer to the overhang itself, the brown area spread out, covering three times the distance it had up here. He scanned as far as he could toward the edge of the overhang on the ocean side, and thought he saw brown going all the way.
Someone had deliberately placed this here, for what reason he could only guess.
“You think the Fleet manufactured it?” he asked Yash.
“Possible, I suppose,” she said. “But why? Nanobits would coat the surface quickly and would replicate themselves easily. There’s no reason to make them turn that shade of brown that I can see on first glance.”
She was still using the personal channel, as was he. The others were just standing near them, waiting to see what Coop would decide.
He took a deep breath and braced himself. He was here to explore, so that was what he was going to do. He was going to have to walk on that brown stuff no matter what.
So he stepped on it now, half expecting some kind of reaction around his boots.
Nothing happened. He didn’t even make footprints in the surface, given how wet everything was.
Yash stepped beside him. He assumed the others would do so too, but he didn’t tell them to.
Instead, he followed the barrier wall, the farthest edge of the brown patch.
“That wall’s made of nanobits, right?” he asked Yash through their channel.
She used the wand again. “Yeah. Really old too. Some of the bonding is starting to decay. I can see why. This environment is harsh. Salt, strong winds, and bad weather. You saw that a storm is coming.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not sure what that means for us.”
“We’ll find out.” She trudged beside him. He turned slightly, double-checking to see if his feet really weren’t leaving an impression on the surface. They weren’t, and neither were anyone else’s.
The entire crew was walking with him. Stone was staggering a bit whenever a gust of wind hit her. She apparently didn’t know how to use the microgravity in her boots to steady herself.
“You want to explain to Stone how to keep upright?” he asked Yash.
“Not particularly,” she said, but then there was a slight hiss as she flicked over to the group channel and explained the procedure to Stone, who thanked her.
The barrier wall rose higher the closer the team got to the mountain itself. He recognized the design: it really did look like a similar design to Sector Base T. In that design, the rising wall would merge with the mountain. The architects would have built a false mountain’s edge so that the locals wouldn’t know that the Fleet had commandeered some space aboveground. No one would have cause to come this close.
Coop held up his hand and stopped everyone again, then peered at that overhang. Its edges were too rounded to be natural. It probably wasn’t part of the mountain that the Fleet coated in nanobits. Unless he missed his guess, the overhang was made entirely of nanobits.
Underneath the overhang, the darkness looked impenetrable. As he got closer, that darkness should have receded some, or some natural formations should have shown up. But they hadn’t.
So this was all manufactured, just as he and Yash surmised.
The barrier wall on his right was almost as tall as he was. A broad expanse of pavement extended to his left, but at the very edge of that, he thought he saw another barrier wall.
In most Sector bases, walls like these shut down outside communication equipment.
“Lankstadt,” he said on the group channel. “You still able to monitor us?”
“Yes,” he said. “Everything is clear.”
Which meant there were three possibilities: the walls no longer had that function, the walls never had that function, or the walls recognized the Fleet-based equipment and let it continue to function.
Coop glanced at Yash, who shrugged one shoulder. She wasn’t going to comment on anything until she saw more.
Neither was he.
They walked the remaining distance. The wall narrowed in on them and got even taller. The smooth edges didn’t replicate the natural edges of a mountainside. Instead they sort of vanished into a general darkness.
The area underneath the overhang remained dark as well, absorbing the light.
Yash double-checked her readings and nodded at him. Without saying so, she let him know that they faced more nanobits.
“Captain,” Perkins said softly on a third channel. “I’ve moved the screen from my tablet to my hood. I’m getting a lot of warnings here, in a variety of languages, just like we got on that road. They’re getting more and more dire the closer we’re getting.”
Coop called up an outside communications channel on his hood—designed to see exterior warnings.
The clear panel was suddenly covered with red marks, flashing red words, and a large circle with a line through it, signifying stop.
“Wow,” Yash said beside him. Apparently Perkins had included her on that channel as well.
“I know,” Perkins said. “We’re really being warned away.”
Coop powered that channel down, so he didn’t see it anymore. “And yet we’re not,” he said. “Because those warnings should be broadcast to everyone, no matter what their technology.”
“This is Fleet-directed again,” Perkins said. “What the hell?”
She usually didn’t curse. Coop agreed with the comment, though. Why would a former Fleet base warn away any members of the Fleet and no one else?
“Is anyone else getting readings that make this area dangerous?” Coop asked on the group channel. “Are we missing something?”
“I’m not reading anything out of the ordinary,” Lankstadt said, “but I am using Fleet technology.”
“We’re not,” Stone said from behind Coop. “Bridge and I see nothing out of the ordinary.”
Coop didn’t like the fact that someone was trying to keep the Fleet away—or had tried to keep the Fleet away—but he didn’t feel alarmed by it either. If someone had taken over this base, then of course they would want to keep the Fleet away from it.
“The only thing that bothers me,” Yash said, “is the area we’re heading to. All of the nanobits around here are too smooth. That overhang is too obvious. That opening is clearly the opening into something else. If they had followed protocol—our protocol, granted—they should have demolished this opening. It should have rockfalls or something.”
Coop made a small sound of ag
reement in the back of his throat. She was right. The fact that no one had done that was as unusual as the fact that a city that used to surround a sector base had become a ghost town. Usually cities around sector bases grew. Only in areas that had not really had much of a community around them in the first place did the community vanish centuries after the Fleet left.
“We can’t make assumptions about procedure anymore,” Coop said, “much as we want to. The Fleet might have changed the way they closed sector bases.”
“Yeah.” Yash didn’t sound convinced. “Okay.”
Coop started forward again. The darkness ahead seemed profound. He didn’t call up the readings or any telemetry, since his suit was Fleet technology—modified, of course, but still Fleet-based.
The wind had grown even stronger. It eddied near the wall. Then rain started, big fat drops at first, followed by a complete downpour. Water started to puddle, getting inches deep in a matter of seconds. It didn’t drain into the brown path like it would have in the pavement cracks.
Coop was going to comment on that when ice chunks started falling out of the sky.
Yash cursed.
“What is that?” Perkins sounded panicked for the first time in Coop’s memory.
“Hail,” Yash said.
The ice chunks were the size of small peas. They hurt when they hit.
Either the team had to go forward—quicker than they were—and hope there was shelter under that overhang, or they had to head back.
Bridge swore, and someone cried out in pain.
“Stay in this too long,” Yash said, “and our suits’ll be compromised. They’re not made to stand up to this kind of barrage.”
Coop made his decision. He loped toward the overhang, hoping that it would protect them.
The team followed. They arrived in seconds and managed to get underneath that overhang just as the hail pellets got smaller and more numerous. Coop’s microphone caught the sound of the pellets hitting the ground. The repeated rat-a-tat-tats were violent, almost as violent as the blows from the pellets themselves.
He shook some of the water off his suit, then looked out into the area the team had just come from. The hail was white in his lights. A long patch of bumpy whiteness that appeared both slick and treacherous.
“This is normal?” Perkins asked. Coop couldn’t tell if she was asking it of everyone, or just as a rhetorical question. He certainly didn’t know the answer.
“I don’t know about here,” Yash said, “but it’s normal in a lot of places. I lived in areas that got hail at least once a year.”
“No wonder we had warning about the storm,” Bridge said quietly. As if to punctuate his sentence, light split the sky, followed a few seconds later by a loud bang.
“Thunder,” Yash said, as if they didn’t know what that was. And maybe a few of them didn’t. Coop had experienced thunderstorms before, although he’d only seen lightning once before this.
Hail, though, that was something else entirely.
It continued, so he turned his back on it. Since they couldn’t leave right away, they might as well explore where they were.
“Let’s examine this overhang,” he said to the team, “and whatever this is in front of me.”
Because he truly didn’t know. The light from his headlamp kept vanishing into what appeared to be a curtain, at least to the visor on his hood. But information in that visor was processed through Fleet technology, so he didn’t entirely trust it.
“There is a curtain,” Perkins said, “and faint readings of doors beyond. I’m having trouble getting a fix on anything, though. These warnings are extreme.”
“I’m not getting any warnings.” Stone moved to Coop’s side, holding her tablet so that he could see what she saw. “And while I see a curtain, I don’t see doors. I see a sturdy barrier beyond, and I don’t like some of the readings coming off it.”
Yash leaned closer, then took the tablet from Stone’s hand. Yash scrolled through, moved the tablet to different areas, then handed it back.
“Make it a holomap, would you?” Yash asked. “One we can all see. And superimpose it over this opening.”
Stone gave her a sideways glance. Coop couldn’t see Stone’s expression from where he stood, but he had a hunch he knew what she was feeling.
Stone didn’t like taking orders. She never had.
Still, she had learned to overcome that on the handful of trips she had taken with Fleet personnel.
She tapped the tablet, and a holomap appeared in front of the curtain. The map was part science, part guess since they didn’t have any information except what their sensors were providing.
The map showed a solid block of something, like a heavy wall or door, beyond the curtain. There weren’t even ghostly doors or outlines of doors, just a solid surface, which the holomap projected as brown, just like the ground.
“Perkins,” Yash said, “add a holomap of what you’re seeing—without the warnings, if possible. Don’t let the map show color. Just white.”
Perkins stepped next to Coop, holding up her tablet. He could see the image to his side, lots of blaring red like he had seen earlier.
She tapped the tablet, and the red vanished. Then her holomap merged with Stone’s.
The white layer showed the same curtain as Stone’s. Nothing had changed because of that. But the doors Perkins showed were several yards behind the barrier that had shown up on Stone’s holomap.
“Are the Fleet maps using the sector base’s actual layout?” Coop asked.
“Possible,” Yash said. “But I don’t think this is a real map of what the sensors are picking up. I think it’s a spoofed map.”
“It’s what Fleet personnel would expect if they showed up,” Perkins added.
“I don’t like this,” Stone said. “The warnings strike me as real, kind of like, keep away or get hurt.”
“But the hurt being promised is a decay and dangerous hurt, not something from this wall,” Perkins said.
Coop looked at it all—the curtain, the image of the wall behind it, the doors beyond.
“Can you show me what’s past those doors?” he asked Perkins.
“It’s a projection,” Yash said.
“Based on the schematics, you said.” He continued to wait for Perkins, who wasn’t moving yet.
“I said that was possible,” Yash said. “I didn’t say it was accurate.”
“Let’s see the possibilities, then,” he said. “Kjersti?”
He spoke gently, and didn’t use Perkins designation, trying to get her to work with him. Not that she usually had troubles. He was just being cautious.
Or maybe he was shedding Captain Cooper as bits of a plan formed in the back of his mind.
Perkins tapped her screen, then more white appeared, showing a large cavern, even more doors, and the faint outlines of corridors that led deep into the mountain.
There were also small rectangles and signs and tiny squares. It took Coop a moment to process that. Those were symbols for desks and chairs and the locations of various departments.
He had been right: these were schematics.
“Son of a bitch,” Chen said. “They’re projecting the map of this place, using the plans. Why would they do that?”
Coop jumped at the sound of her voice. He hadn’t expected a member of the security team to speak up. Normally, they wouldn’t speak at all. But he was the one who was changing the rules; no reason why they couldn’t, too.
The hail continued to pelt, creating a rustling noise that constantly had him check the pavement behind them. The sound made him uneasy; he wasn’t used to constant noise caused by something unpredictable. Usually noises like that had a mechanical source—at least in his world—not one that came from the elements.
“I don’t think they expected anyone from the Fleet to examine this stuff closely,” Yash said. “I think they were showing what we’d expect to see, and then the warnings, hoping we’d stay away.”
“Make sure yo
u get as much of those readings as possible,” Coop said to Perkins. “That’s probably as close to the specs as we’ll find, at least right now.”
She nodded and continued to tap her tablet. No more extra places showed up on the white version of the holomap. It faded as it went deeper and deeper into the mountainside.
But Yash’s speculation didn’t answer Chen’s question. Why would anyone do that? A basic misunderstanding of the Fleet? Or something else?
Because anyone from the Fleet who needed to be here would try to see what was causing the warnings, and maybe try to repair that.
“You said there were things you didn’t like in the readings about that barrier.” Coop turned toward Stone. She was leaning slightly, peering at Perkins’ tablet.
Stone glanced back at her own, then shoved it toward him. He took it, even though he didn’t want it. He didn’t look down at it either. He wanted her to tell him.
“That wall is alive,” she said. “Not in an organic way. But tiny energy spikes rise off it. I think it might be the source of the transmission going to the Fleet technology.”
“That’s logical,” Yash said.
“But I don’t like the spikes,” Stone said. “I don’t know how to read them.”
Yash took the tablet from Coop, and dug into it just a little. “Stupid outdated tech,” Yash muttered, which he found amusing because that tech she disliked was younger than she was by centuries.
But he knew what she meant. She meant that the tech wasn’t as sophisticated as the Fleet tech, which was actually what this team needed right now.
“Yeah,” Yash said. “That barrier is active.”
“Is it gathering information and transmitting it?” Coop asked.
“No,” Yash said. “Not that I can tell. That doesn’t mean it isn’t. But it seems to be more concerned with preventing entry than it does with communicating that someone is nearby.”
Coop frowned. “That barrier is made of the same material as the ground we’re standing on.”
“In theory,” Yash said. “I’d need an actual sample to compare.”
“And we didn’t register any energy spikes off this ground cover,” Coop said.
“But it’s wet, not shielded,” Bridge said.
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