Considering all the work someone had put into this space, he was going to assume that they knew the doors were there and were either blocking them off to prevent outsiders like him from accessing them, or to prevent some employee or minion or guest from accidentally stumbling into them.
Or maybe the path between the piles led to the only door whoever had set this area up felt important.
He was breathing a little too shallowly, and despite his best intentions, he had lost track of time.
He glanced at the small numbers scrolling at the bottom of his hood. Eight minutes, twenty-seven seconds.
If he wanted to see what was near those lights, he would have to pick up his pace.
He didn’t dare go too fast, though, because he didn’t want to knock something over, or kick something, or step into a trap.
He moved slowly, still taking in the equipment. Some of it was deeply recognizable, bits of DV-Class vessels, parts of beds or chairs or control panels like the ones he had used in the past.
Other equipment wasn’t as recognizable, but still seemed to be in the same family. Consoles with rounded edges instead of sharp ones. Hard flat surfaces that seemed to be made up of nanobits. Open (and empty) anacapa containers, all in different sizes and shapes.
Then he reached a pile of those containers that made him stop. They too were empty, but they were brown, made of the same material as that wall.
He frowned at them. They were very much out of place with anything he had seen before. Anacapa containers were—by very stringent regulation—made of nanobits, and nanobits only.
He almost picked one of those containers up, then decided against it—again.
Eleven minutes had gone by. He wasn’t going to make it to the back, even though he wanted to.
This room was longer than he expected. And all he was finding was more questions than answers.
He gave the back a longing look, thought of running there, and immediately decided against it. Then he frowned at it.
Were the lights brighter? Were there more of them? And did he see an open door back there or was that simply an optical illusion caused by a nanobit wall?
He couldn’t tell.
He crouched and used his knuckle lights to peer between some of the pieces of equipment, hoping against hope he would see a console that was attached to the floor or something that made sense of this mess.
But he found nothing.
He stood, looking toward the back again.
Those lights definitely were brighter. And there was an open door.
Now, the question was, should he violate his own rules for this mission and take the extra time to go back there?
This might be the only shot.
But he was alone. And if something happened, he would be trapped here, maybe for good.
He let out a small exasperated breath.
He hated being responsible. He hated following the rules in a situation like this—particularly when he made them.
So he tried one last-ditch thing.
“Yash,” he said on that private channel. “Yash, can you hear me?”
He could tell, even before the words were out of his mouth, that she couldn’t hear him. The signal was either dampened by the room or couldn’t get out of the room.
He tried one last time on the overall channel, hoping that maybe Perkins or Chen could hear him because that door was open.
But they didn’t answer him either.
He had to turn back, with more questions than answers, hoping that he would get at least one more chance to explore this space and doubting that would ever happen.
Thirty-Three
The pale light in the large room had once been stronger. Yash could tell time and use had diminished the light the moment she stepped through the double doors. The light came from the ceiling above. Nanobits had created a series of lights that ran along certain panels in the ceiling. She had worked on buildings with that design early in her career.
The lights were supposed to be very bright. If the nanobits stopped replicating, the lights would fade. At that point, the building’s engineers would know that they either needed to add a new layer of nanobits or replace that part of the ceiling altogether.
The fading light meant that the nanobit bonding was slowly starting to fail.
And bonding like that didn’t fail in the first five to eight hundred years unless something had gone wrong.
There were no signs of anything going wrong.
Except for the large brown wall to her right. It blocked her off from Coop. They both had known, without saying, that the different doors led in different directions.
She had, however, expected a nanobit wall between them, not a wall made of that same brown material that they had seen outside.
The presence of foreign material bothered her more than the weirdly retired sector base. She didn’t like that someone was using this area for their own purposes—had redesigned this area for their own purposes.
Although the design wasn’t familiar to her. The interior looked like the reception area for a big business. Rows of desks, with chairs behind them and signs that glowed ever so faintly above them.
She could barely make out the words on the signs closest to her—Security, Employment Matters, Information—all written in the same Standard as the control panels.
She took a step forward, feeling a bit stunned. The light from her boots flared, and it took a half second for her to realize that the floor was white, not black.
She glanced at that brown wall. The floor beneath it was white as well. That looked like it had once been the floor of the sector base.
She walked up to the desks, half expecting someone to stand up and ask what she wanted.
But that didn’t happen. The signs didn’t get brighter, either. The room seemed to end just behind them, but she knew that was some kind of optical illusion. There had to be more to this base, both aboveground and underground. She just didn’t know how to access it.
She looked to her right, saw more desks and a few furniture groupings. Nothing looked untoward until she realized all the furniture should have been gone.
Sector Base E-2 was supposed to have been closed, and closed bases were emptied. No desks, no equipment, no chairs, no furniture groupings.
In fact, there should have been piles of rock-like rubble or dirt or something to make whoever entered here think this was part of a weird natural cave.
No one had done that here.
She let out a small, nervous breath.
“Anyone hear me?” she asked into her comm, just to make sure.
No one responded. Four minutes in, and she finally realized just how alone she was.
She had eleven minutes before she had to think about leaving. Eleven minutes to get what information she could from this part of the base. Either she could see what was in the back or she could try to pull information from here.
She opted to pull information.
Which meant the desks. If they were standard-issue from her time, there would be a lot of information stored in them.
Fortunately, she had brought more than one data strip. She peeled one off her belt, walked to the nearest desk, and set the device on it.
The desk flared to life, sending little bits of blue light across its surface as if it were answering a summons.
The desk next to it also flared to life.
She stepped back and watched all of the desks heading down the row turn themselves on.
Her breath caught. She hoped she wasn’t activating something she shouldn’t have.
She was a lot more nervous than she wanted to be.
Then she thought of diving that runabout with Boss—how Boss had gone in, even though the damn thing had nearly killed her, and how she had braved the runabout again, just for bits of information.
Yash could handle pulling information off these desks—as many as possible—before she had to leave.
Then she smiled at herself. Boss would find it
deeply ironic that more than once today, Yash had taken inspiration from her.
Yash let out another shaky breath, then took another data strip off her belt. She set that device on the next desk.
She had one more data strip, and she placed it on the third desk.
No lights flashed at her, nothing in her suit showed a change in energy readings. No anacapa energy surged around her.
Nothing was any different except that the lights on the desks had activated.
Eleven minutes had gone by, faster than she had expected, and she had barely gotten inside the door. There was so much to see and absolutely no real time at all.
If she could communicate with Coop, she would have done so, asking for more time. Much more time.
But she couldn’t.
More lights flicked on. Above her, what appeared to be skylights opened, sending sunlight down on her.
Only it had been storming outside. Even if it hadn’t been, there shouldn’t have been sunlight. It was night.
She looked at the ceiling. Those lights were designed for employees, people who were trapped in this entrance, day in and day out, without any natural light.
The system was malfunctioning ever so slightly. It did not seem to know that outside this area, night had fallen.
The environmental systems were off, and so, apparently, were the systems that monitored date and time.
Movement caught her eye. She looked backward at the door into which she had entered.
Perkins or Chen stood there, waving her arms. She was completely encased in her environmental suit, making identification from this distance impossible.
Since the comm system was Fleet-based, it was blocked inside here. Yash couldn’t hear that person if she talked to Yash through the system.
When that person realized Yash saw her, she beckoned—hastily, it seemed—telling Yash that she had to leave.
She shook her head: she had more than half her time left.
But that person was insistent. They had to go now.
Yash bit back a surge of irritation, followed by a flash of worry. Had something happened to Coop? Had those alarms that she feared brought someone here? What, exactly, had gone wrong?
She glanced at the person near the door, wondering if that was even Chen or Perkins. They were wearing the right suit, the suit lights were on just like they had been outside this room, so that part, at least, was just fine.
Yash had to trust whoever it was, because otherwise, she might end up creating more problems than they needed.
Still, she wasn’t going to lose the data. She hurried back to the first desk, grabbed the data strip off it, then backtracked to the second, grabbing the strip, and the third, grabbing that strip.
The person at the door got even more agitated, signaling harder now. Yash nodded, shoved the data strips into their places on her belt, and hurried out of the room.
When she stepped out of the door and into that area behind the wall, sounds rushed at her.
“…hurry, Yash, because they’re on their way. And Lankstadt says he’s heard from the Ivoire. We have to get off this planet now.”
The voice belonged to Perkins, and she sounded almost panicked, which was weird because Perkins never sounded panicked.
Yash would parse all of that information in a moment. But first she had a few questions of her own.
“What about Coop?”
“Chen’s getting him,” Perkins said. “We have to go, now.”
“Wait,” Yash said. She handed one of the devices to Perkins. “In case something happens to me, one of these gets out of here.”
“Got it,” Perkins said.
Yash glanced at the other door. That was when she realized there was another person here, peering inside.
“Who the hell’s that?” she asked.
“Bridge,” Perkins said, with a bit of irritation, as if she’d already told Yash that. Of course, Perkins had no idea what Yash had heard and what she hadn’t. “He volunteered to come get us. We’re losing precious time, Yash. We have to go.”
“Take him and go,” Yash said. “I’ll get Coop.”
“No.” Perkins grabbed her arm. “I’m under instruction to get at least one of you out of here.”
“Lankstadt doesn’t have the right to give that order,” Yash said.
“That’s correct,” Perkins said. “Rooney does. And I agree. Now move.”
She yanked Yash toward the still-open door at the far end.
Yash shot one last look at Bridge, hovering near the door Coop had gone through. Rooney, Lankstadt, and Perkins were right: they had to get either Yash or Coop out of here. Or both of them.
Both of them.
Yash pulled her arm away from Perkins.
“Neither of us,” Yash said. “Hell, none of us can get caught. We don’t want anyone to know about the Boneyard or Lost Souls or Boss. We have no idea what we’re facing, Perkins. Let’s get Coop, and let’s go.”
Perkins cursed, but through her hood, Yash could see a smile on Perkins’ face.
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Perkins said. She pulled her laser pistol off her belt. “So much for being sensible. So much for orders.”
So much for any pretext that they were operating like members of the Fleet, Yash thought but didn’t say.
Yash pulled out her laser pistol, too, and followed Perkins to the door that Coop had disappeared into a little over fourteen minutes before.
Thirty-Four
Coop had just forced himself to turn around, feeling disappointed that he hadn’t discovered anything he understood, when he saw someone slide in the door.
He grabbed his laser pistol, kept it low, and shut off his knuckle lights. He toyed with shutting off every light on his suit, but decided against it. For all he knew, the person near the door was one of his, not one of theirs—whoever they might be.
The person was wearing an environmental suit, and from this distance, it looked like one of the suits his team wore. Communications would be impossible from that suit to this one, though, because of the blockages.
He was about to mime that the person should remove their hood so the two of them could shout at each other when the person used some gestures he hadn’t seen since he’d been in officer training. Hand signals for when the communications equipment failed.
We need to evacuate. Now. We’re in danger.
He cursed and sped up, not quite allowing himself to run. He passed the brown anacapa containers and every single piece of equipment he had thought of snagging. He wanted to take something now, but that would only slow him down.
Whoever had come to get him—and considering the signals, it was probably Chen; Security personnel trained in hand signals for nearly a year—was extremely clear. Only a fool would ignore the word danger.
He scurried forward and then, as he rounded yet another batch of equipment, he decided he wasn’t moving fast enough.
Two more people appeared behind Chen, making his heart stop. Were they going to attack her? Help her? Kidnap her?
He gave up on being cautious. He wasn’t going to risk the whole team.
He ran to the door and realized at that moment that four people waited for him, not the three he expected. Still, they had followed his orders. No one had gone inside the base—if that’s what it was—except him and Yash.
He stepped out, and as he did, Chen said in his ear, “We have to hurry. Reports from the Ivoire say a lot of ships are heading toward this planet, and some are already in orbit around it.”
He had no idea how anything could orbit Nindowne, not with all the space junk around the planet, but he wasn’t going to question that.
“We’re okay here, then?” he asked. He wondered if they could just go deeper into the sector base and wait until the problem passed.
“No,” Chen said. “Small ships are landing nearby, and Lankstadt says he got chatter that a group of locals are gathering weapons to drive us out of here.”
Great. A full-b
lown army of some kind was advancing on them. Well, that answered the question of whether or not he had activated something in touching the brown stuff or opening the doors.
He was still having issues—why were there four people?—and then he recognized the suit. One of them was Bridge. His suit was scuffed and one arm was covered with white.
Bridge saw Coop looking at him.
“We really have to hurry,” Bridge said. “It took me longer than I wanted it to getting here. It’s icy out there.”
“We need to activate the gravity in our boots,” Yash said.
“It doesn’t work,” Bridge said. “Or, at least, mine didn’t. The boots need something to attach to, and the ice…”
He shook his head.
Coop toyed with closing that door behind him, then decided he wasn’t going to worry about it. If the group made it back to the skip—which was sounding like a big if—then maybe the open door would mislead whoever was coming for them. Maybe that person—that army—would think that Coop’s crew was still inside.
He peered out the door in the brown wall, noted that indeed, the pavement was covered in white. And it didn’t appear to be hail now. Now it looked like snow. Or maybe it was a combination.
Pellets were still falling from the sky, but they were clear. And, since his external microphones were still on, he could hear the pellets hit the nanobit wall. They sounded loud, louder than he would have expected.
But, he noted, when they hit the brown part of the ground, they didn’t seem to stick.
“Follow me,” he said and, with his head down, hurried out the last door.
The white was slick. His right foot slid away from him, but he took the weight off it and somehow managed to remain balanced on his left, which was on the brown stuff. He brought the right foot back, hands out, maintaining his balance, now walking on the brown stuff, heading back toward the skip.
He was tempted to order Lankstadt to move the skip closer to the entrance, but didn’t. This sector base was too odd. There were active controls and possible silent alarms.
He had no idea what would happen if an actual ship of any size drew close to the doors.
He didn’t want to risk it.
Searching for the Fleet Page 34
