by Rick Partlow
He didn’t say anything, for once, and he didn’t have to. His hearing was better than ours and if he was heading for cover, it meant someone was coming. I lunged ahead of him and pulled at the door handle, finding it unlocked. Inside was darkness and the musty stench of dust and old chemicals, but I pushed Beckett ahead of me and shut the door, knowing nothing we’d inside was worse than being found outside. Beckett moved behind me and I heard her bump into something metal and send it scraping across the floor.
Dog shushed her urgently but I just put a hand on her arm, squeezing gently in what I hoped was reassurance. Yelling at someone close to panic isn’t the best way to calm them down in my experience, but Dog wasn’t as much of a people person as I was. If he was a person at all. We’d had long debates about that, but if the Union courts still couldn’t decide, I doubt the two of us were going to be able to hash it out.
It was pitch-black in the closet, just the barest slice of dim light creeping under the bottom of the door, and only Dog’s teeth and eyes showed in the dark…and a flickering shadow from the hallway outside. Boot soles scraped on concrete floor and the tones of casual conversation filtered through the door, muted and incomprehensible. I figured Dog could probably hear them and I caught his attention with a motion.
“Do you think they know we’re here?” I asked, too softly for even Beckett to pick up from a few centimeters away, much less anyone out in the corridor. But I knew Dog would hear.
He shook his head, the movement just barely visible. He couldn’t tell me anything else, but that was enough. I made myself relax just a bit, despite chafing at the wasted time. There was still the whole part where we had to get back before they figured out we were gone. I waited until the footsteps had faded and the shadows were past, and reached for the door handle, but I felt Dog’s teeth bite down ever-so-gently into my calf, just a slight jab through the tough cloth of my pants, and I paused.
He let go and moved up against the door, his body blocking out the light. I gave it another few seconds, letting him use his enhanced hearing to make sure the passers-by had really passed by, and finally he stepped back.
“Go,” he said. “Hurry, before some other malingering meatsack wanders through here.”
He didn’t wait for us once the door opened, just trotted away and left it to Beckett and me to keep up. I wanted to sprint after him, but I didn’t know if Beckett was a runner, and I figured she’d spent the last year or so driving a truck and visiting the bar every night, which didn’t exactly encourage physical fitness. I kept my pace to a brisk jog and she managed to hang with me, though her heavy, whooshing breaths nearly drowned out the smack of her soles on the floor, every step an echoing impact that made me wince in sympathy.
I wondered how long she could keep it up, and I was about ready to ask Dog to slow down when he turned right into a connecting hallway and came to an abrupt halt in front of a hatchway indistinguishable from any of the others except for a small label affixed to the thick, metal door with a stylized nautilus shell. Beckett stumbled from a quick jog to a walk, then skidded to a stop next to me and I checked behind her reflexively, making sure no one was following.
No one was there, but I still felt an itch between my shoulder blades. Dog had taken care of the security cameras in the waiting area, but there were still more along the corridors. The only advantage we had was that no one would be looking for us on them since they thought they knew where we were. Any of the guards monitoring the cameras could see anywhere in the base, most likely, but they didn’t have enough people to see everywhere at once.
The door into the Nautilus dome was sealed with an ID plate and I pulled my ‘link again, ready to use it to open the lock, but Dog shook his head.
“Won’t work,” he told me. “This place isn’t run by the mining corporation. It’s on its own separate security system. Give me a second.”
He put his forepaws up against the wall, trying to reach the pad…and came up several centimeters short. He actually hesitated a moment before glancing back at me with what looked suspiciously like a wounded expression, the sort a real dog might give you when it’s peed on the floor and knows it screwed up.
“I’m gonna need a hand here, Masterson.”
I very carefully did not smile or laugh, knowing the inevitable argument that would ensue and also knowing we didn’t have the time for it. I just came up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, lifting him up using my legs and not my back—he was a lot heavier than he looked.
“I know you’re just loving this,” he said.
“Just get it done,” I urged him, already starting to feel a bit of strain.
His head was right in my face and I spit fur out of my mouth, wishing I could see what he was doing. Not that I would have understood it even if I could have seen it, but anything would have been better than a thirty-second deadlift of a seventy-kilogram robot. A far-away click signaled that something had happened, but Dog remained silent, eyes still fixed on the ID plate, fur still trying to work its way into my mouth.
“Any time now,” I grunted, a muscle fluttering in my core.
“If you want them to seal us in here, or bust in and arrest us, then you can put me down now. Otherwise, I’m going to need another few seconds to penetrate the Nautilus security protocols.”
Beckett was beside me and I felt her arms wrapping around dog beneath mine, taking some of the weight off me. I sighed just a bit in relief and nodded my thanks.
“That’s done it,” Dog announced almost immediately, making me suspicious he’d just been forcing me to hold him up for the sheer fun of it. “You can use the manual hatch release.”
I dropped him none too gently, his claws scratching against the hard floor as he fought to retain his balance, and grabbed the release lever with both hands, yanking downward. The smell of must and disuse wafted out from the other side, and a darkness broken only by the frosted glow of emergency strip lighting. Past the entrance hallway was a huge storage room, the ceiling climbing higher, almost to the exterior shielding of the dome, a dusty, vacant cathedral completely empty.
A broad cargo airlock at least five meters across took up one wall, and I would have been willing to bet the dome was connected to its own landing platform to unload freight without any prying eyes watching. A utility locker was built into the wall next to the airlock, all the doors hanging open, the space within empty, except for one at the very end. I pulled at the handle and it stuck, but a more determined yank on it wrenched it free. Instead of the treasure trove of proof I’d been looking for, I was gifted with three ratty, faded space suits.
“Shit,” Beckett hissed from behind me. I glanced back and saw her staring at the emptiness with an expression of almost devastation, as if she’d expected there to be incontrovertible proof sitting there on the floor for us to find.
“Pull the hatch shut,” I told her.
Dog was pacing around the storage area, sniffing in a very dog-like way, running the dust and detritus through chemical sensors, spectrometers and a half a dozen other tests I wasn’t smart enough to understand even if he’d taken the time to explain them. I let him go about his business, walking past the cargo bay and through the open doorway into what looked like it had once been a break room. The furniture was gone, but I could see marks on the counter where an auto-kitchen had sat, and maybe a refrigerator. There were cabinets built into the walls above the counter, as empty as the cargo bay now, but once they’d held king-sized containers of soy paste and spirulina powder. No steak and potatoes on an airless moon unless you were rich enough to afford a lab to grow it yourself.
A single, broad corridor led past the break room to employee housing, a few dozen tiny, single-bed apartments barely larger than my cabin aboard the Charietto. The beds remained, stripped to bare metal, but the walls were bare. I suppressed a policeman’s urge to search the drawers of the nightstands and dressers, knowing there wasn’t time, and moved on through to what had to be some sort of lab. It had o
nce been sealed off, but the airtight pressure lock hung open now, as abandoned and unused as the rest of the place.
Stencils on the Spartan, grey walls provided dire warnings about contamination from untreated air and how anyone coming in through the lock must wear cleanroom suits and surgical masks or face immediate termination. I assumed they meant they’d fire the offending party, but given what I knew of their practices, murder might not have been out of the question. The interior was darker than the rest of the place, lacking even the emergency lighting. I didn’t want to search around for a switch, so I pulled a flashlight off my belt and shined it around the room.
It was big, forty meters square I estimated, the walls and floors all the same stark, sterile white. All that was left of the lab was a double row of what looked like hospital beds with attachment points built into the side rails for some sort of monitoring equipment.
“What were they doing with those?” Beckett asked, pointing at the beds.
“Human experimentation,” I guessed. “Just the sort of thing you’d come to an isolated mining colony to pull off without Union oversight.”
“Whatever they were doing,” Dog added, padding into the chamber behind us, “they had a shitload of Bartoli crystals here. I can still pick up the residual radiation signature.”
“There’s nothing left, though,” Beckett declared, a hopeless moan below the words. “They stripped it all clean.”
“Maybe not everything,” Dog said.
Without elaborating, he moved down the length of the room, head swinging back and forth, ears pricked up, nose in the air. None of that was strictly necessary for his various scanners to work, and I had to think whoever had done his initial programming had quite the sense of humor.
Finally, almost to the opposite wall, he stopped and turned right, making a beeline to a spot just behind the last of the hospital beds. There was a metal platform there, wheeled at the base, with outlets built into the top, like something that might have been use to recharge portable equipment. Dog pulled open a small compartment at the base of the platform, hooking his claws into it and prying downward. Curious, I stepped up and shined my flashlight into the panel he’d opened, catching just a glimpse past his head of various physical data inputs.
“What is it?” Beckett asked. I was glad she’d asked instead of me, because he probably would have let me stew on it.
“Humans forget things,” Dog declared. “I don’t have that problem, but it comes in handy sometimes. Like charging stands. They charge instruments but they also have automatic data backup. It only lasts until the next user plugs in, but if no one has used this stand since Nautilus did whatever they were doing here…”
“Thank God for redundancy,” I said, shaking my head. It was about time inefficiency and bureaucratic screw-ups worked in my favor.
God didn’t respond and neither did Dog. His face was buried in the compartment and I caught a glint of light off metal where something jagged and unnatural was extending from his left eye to plug into the physical connection. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up at the unwelcome reminder of exactly what Dog was. Sure, I repeated “he’s a robot” so many times I could practically hang a sign around my neck, but it was easy to forget, not that he wasn’t a dog but that he wasn’t a biological entity at all. I was beginning to understand why sentient AI were so strictly regulated. It wasn’t the harm they’d do to us, it was how the general public might start to feel about them.
“Okay, there’s a shitload of data here,” he announced after a few seconds. “I’m just skimming the interesting parts while I download it, but there were definitely human subjects present. No names, just randomly-generated number designators, but there’s a personal history giving their medical backgrounds…” He trailed off, which meant he’d found something he needed to concentrate on. “That’s funny. Same thing in common for every single one of the subjects.”
“They all got paid?” I couldn’t keep the cynicism out of my tone, I’m afraid.
“Funny, meatsack. No, they’re all pilots. Mostly ex-Navy, some commercial, but they all have over 10,000 hours in hyperspace. Noted in their files in each case.”
“Why is that important?” Beckett wondered. She’d crept closer until she was up even with me, and I could see the look of almost disgust on her face at the computer connection extending from Dog’s eye.
“Don’t ask me, honey, ask Nautilus,” Dog replied. “There.” The connector withdrew back into his head and the eye slipped back into place as if it had never left. He turned back to us, grinning, suddenly very dog-like again. “Got it all. We can review it at our leisure, so I suggest we haul ass back to the holding area before they figure out what we’ve been up to.”
“You don’t think there’s anything else here we could use?” Beckett wondered, looking around as if some magic piece of evidence was going to drop out of the ceiling. “Will that data be enough?”
“It had better be,” Dog snapped. “Because it’s all we’re getting out of this place.”
“We need to go,” I interjected, touching Beckett on the arm. “God knows how long we have before someone comes back to physically check on us in the…”
The alarm was a tiny, hollow whooping, the sound muted by the distance. I figured it didn’t come over the speakers in the Nautilus dome because it was marked as unoccupied, but it filtered in from the hallway even past the closed hatch. It could have been anything, of course: an air leak, a drill, some sort of industrial accident… But it wasn’t, and we all knew it.
“What now, fearless leader?” Dog asked me. He was being snarky, but the question felt honest. He might have been a supercomputer, but he didn’t know what to do, either.
“Let’s get out of here and try to make it back as close as we can to the public area,” I ventured, trying to smooth the ragged thoughts streaming through my head. “These guys might be pissed off at us, but they’re just security guards, basically. They aren’t going to shoot us if we’re wandering around bored in the local company store, for instance.”
“We’re just going to throw ourselves on the mercy of the court?” Dog asked. “That’s your plan?”
“If you come up with a better one between now and then, you let me know,” I shot back over my shoulder, heading for the door.
Beckett had closed it, as I’d instructed, but it wasn’t locked and it swung open toward me when I tugged on the handle. I poked my head out carefully, seeing nothing out to the end of the side corridor that had led down here from the main hallway, and I waved the others to follow. I jogged to the next junction, trying to get as much distance between us and the Nautilus lab as possible. The farther we got without running into anyone, the better I was feeling about the plan. Dog was tucked in behind me, trying to keep out of sight, while Beckett was huffing and puffing, just keeping up on my left side.
The klaxons were louder out here, their blaring hoots grating at my nerves, but I tried to make my pace deliberate and not panicked. There were people out here in the main corridor now, not security guards but regular workers here at the station, technicians and repair specialists in unremarkable, grey work clothes emblazoned with corporate logos. They weren’t looking at us, simply staring up at the speakers where the klaxons originated, trying to read the flashing marquis floating by on message strips on the upper corner of the main hall.
It was saying something about intruders, giving a description and pictures of us. I ducked my head down and walked past the workers, hoping they’d be so wrapped up in reading the scroll that they wouldn’t notice what we looked like. It almost worked.
“Hey!” The man’s voice was loud and obnoxious, pitched high enough to carry over even the alarm. “Is that a fucking dog?”
“No, it’s a robot,” I hissed under my breath. “Go!”
We ran. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing in the world, but I wasn’t feeling particularly smart at the moment. This whole enterprise had been seat-of-the-pants and I shouldn’t ha
ve been surprised when it fell to pieces. I had resigned myself to the idea that we were all going to be spending at least a few days in the local lock-up, so when I saw a squad of security guards coming around the corner, pushing through a small crowd of workers, I just slowed to a walk, motioning for Dog and Beckett to do the same.
Beckett looked grateful for the break, her face red, sweat matting her hair, while Dog seemed annoyed.
“I can take them out before they know what happened,” he offered, and I knew it wasn’t an idle boast.
“Yes, because then we can explain to the Marshals why exactly we committed a federal crime in the process of trespassing on corporate property.” I raised my hands by my side in a calming gesture as the guards saw us and began steering through the small crowd of workers toward our position. “Everyone just stay calm and keep your mouths shut.”
Especially you, Dog, I thought at him but refrained from saying. No use getting him more riled up.
As the guards approached within thirty meters, I saw they were led by Neanderthal himself, and he didn’t look happy. Nor, I noted with a bit of concern, did he exactly look angry, not the way he had before. Instead, his broad, heavy-boned face seemed set in fearsome determination…and his hands were filled with the ugly, utilitarian lines of a blaster carbine.
“Hey, man, I’m really sorry,” I said, pitching my voice to carry over the blare of the alarms. “We got kind of restless and the door just opened up for us, so…”
Fire exploded from the muzzle of Neanderthal’s blaster and I was falling…
Chapter Ten
It took my brain a few seconds to process exactly what had happened. Something had yanked hard on the tail of my jacket and I was flying backwards, the fall seeming to take forever, and before my back even hit the floor, something hot and blinding was passing through the space where I’d been a half-second before. Time snapped back like a broken rubber band on impact, the cold concrete and the contrasting heat of the blaster fire just over my head bringing me to reality.
