Quizzically Rosalyn searched the keys and panels on the table around her and eventually found what looked like a microphone attached to the table surface with a button below it, like an intercom. She held the button down.
“SNTNL?” she said softly.
They waited a moment. Then a new message appeared, clearing away the old ones:
i can hear you. we need to stop the aliens from overriding the core overheat function. do you have any ideas.
“You want my ideas?” she said with a raise of her eyebrow.
yes.
Rosalyn lifted her finger off the intercom button and looked back at the others, unsure what to say.
“What’s with the text?” wondered Sam. “If there is a speaker system in this room, why is SNTNL not using it like it’s been doing? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Maybe it’s running out of memory or something,” said Terri.
This was bizarre, but Rosalyn shook her head and went with it. She pressed the button again and spoke to SNTNL.
“Did the creators of this place make a self-destruct function?”
yes but its not working. i think aliens in the core are siphoning energy. i havent found a solution yet. did you find the others
“We’re here, SNTNL,” assured Sam.
yes. thats amazing. rosalyn . . . youre incredible. you can help me come up with a plan. we can do this
Rosalyn lifted her finger off the intercom button again. “Something’s very odd about SNTNL, that’s for sure.”
Terri swallowed. “Do we trust it?”
She bit her lip, but gave a slight nod. “Something’s odd, but…somehow I think it’s alright,” she said softly. She pressed the button once more and asked, “Can I find out what the aliens are doing to the core and fix it from here?”
no. ive tried that. someone would need to go and climb down into the core itself and examine it. very dangerous. lots of aliens in there and doing who knows what.
but even if you get in there and fix it there will be even more aliens flowing into the bottom of this room and climbing up into the core. unless we find some way to stop them theres no point in fixing the core.
Rosalyn’s brow furrowed in frustration at their dearth of good options. “Give us a minute to think,” she said.
ok.
With disbelieving eyes, Terri and Sam looked at Rosalyn and then out at the reactor through the glass. It was pulsating with energy. Going inside that thing? It sounded insane. Not to mention attempting to find a way to kill all the aliens flowing into it.
Thinking furiously, Rosalyn tapped on the screen again. She brought up the image of the Seclurm pipes that led all throughout the city. There were some that led into the reactor room, she realized. They were closed off. She looked out the long window into the great, expansive room and saw a long ring of large pipe covers all around the length of the wall of the huge room in several rows around the middle, each one in or right next to a structure.
“SNTNL, is Seclurm flowing into the reactor room? I see schematics of Seclurm pipes that seem to indicate that.”
there are pipes with covers all around the room but the covers are closed. no liquid is passing into the room.
She licked her lips. “…Can I open them from this control room?”
There was no response for a long moment. Then:
yes. but why would you want to open them
She turned around to speak to her crewmates and SNTNL altogether as she said, “Our object is to destroy all the Seclurm, right? We can flood this entire room with Seclurm to kill or at least stop all the aliens trying to get into the reactor. Then when the reactor overheats it explodes, destroying the city and all the Seclurm in it.”
Sam and Terri were awed by the idea, desperately trying to catch up to Rosalyn’s rapid-fire thought process.
yes. thats brilliant. yes. that could work. but one problem. unless you time it right youll end up drowning yourselves.
“Well, then I have one last question for you, SNTNL. Is there a terminal in the core, or any way to communicate with you or with this room from inside the reactor?”
yes there is one terminal at the top of the inner core and one within.
Rosalyn grinned brightly as she saw the pieces coming together so satisfyingly in her mind’s eye. She kept the intercom on but turned again to speak to Terri and Sam. “Here’s the plan. I’ll go into the core and find out what’s wrong. One or both of you will stay here and open up the Seclurm pipe flaps once I’ve got it figured out, and then we can get out of here.”
The others were speechless for a few moments. Sam’s gun hung limply at his waist, and he smirked with wide eyes and said, “This is just crazy. But I think it will work. We might even survive.”
“Climbing down into the core, huh?” said Terri, leaning against the panel for support. “How in the world do you believe you can survive that?”
She shrugged. “You know the drill, Terri. If I don’t contact you after about forty-five minutes, or if there’s some kind of emergency, just go ahead and open the pipes; I don’t know if a flood of Seclurm in itself will destroy the reactor or not, but even if it doesn’t and I haven’t figured out a solution in time, it should at least buy you some time to get to the hangar with help from SNTNL.”
Terri rubbed her forehead and grimaced. “Okay. It’s your skin.” She took a deep breath. Then another. And another. “Well, I guess we’re doing this. I’ll stay here, then.”
Sam touched Rosalyn’s arm and gave her a look. “I’m coming with you. You know the drill.”
She beamed. “Thanks, Sam. And…thank you, SNTNL.”
no need to thank me. i should be thanking you.
ill see you on the other side. good luck
Rosalyn picked up her gun and went for the exit with Sam by her side. “Best of luck, Terri. Keep that gun on you.”
She slung it onto her shoulder and stood up straight with neutral expression before replying, “I will.”
Her eyes were wet as she watched them go. Sam shook off his fear and pain and trusted in Rosalyn’s judgment. Doing that, he felt oddly peaceful. It was a beautiful feeling.
They climbed back onto the gondola and set it moving towards the thundering reactor core with guns in hand.
Sam smiled at her with a look that said we’ve succeeded so far—we’ll succeed now. Rosalyn returned the smile, but it was a little forced.
Inwardly she ruminated on what she had learned from the live computer schematics of the reactor core, which she hadn’t shared with them: somewhere between two and three hundred red dots swarming up and into and all around the core interior.
19
The violent rattling of the gondola increased by the second as it approached the reactor core. The temperature became so hot that Rosalyn considered tossing off her jacket. Perhaps if Sam hadn’t been next to her, and if she didn’t know that she could survive and have to brave the cold again while heading back up to the hangar, she might have done it. Instead, she settled for rolling up her sleeves.
Though the very bottom of the colossal room was too dark to see clearly, they could distinctly hear movement down there. It was an easy guess as to what that movement was.
There were countless Seclurm-evolved aliens flowing into this place. The noise—awful screeches and roars—started to pierce through the pervasive hum of the reactor, sending fear into the hearts of Rosalyn and Sam in spite of their weaponry.
Sam examined the neutron-scatterer in his hands, flicking switches and running his wounded fingers over the dull metal surface in wonder. He looked to Rosalyn and said, “Wish I’d had one of these an hour ago. Or while we were on the ship. Would have solved us a lot of problems.”
“Well, you’ve seen how little each shot does. These guns aren’t really meant for lethal combat,” she explained. “SNTNL’s impression was that it was like a mining drill. It told me that the neutron-scatterer’s effect on living organisms isn’t entirely predictable. It took a
whole lot of shots to kill that…thing in the silo. And I don’t know how much energy the neutron-scatterers have to them, so we can’t be firing recklessly.”
“Gotcha. Guess our best chance is to stay quiet, then.”
Coming closer to the reactor structure itself they could see a number of scaffoldings and platforms accessible along the outside of its columns and continuing up along its huge upper section, suspended there like a hanging titan.
The gondola touched down on the oval-shaped platform built into the side of the reactor between two columns and they stepped out and walked cautiously closer to the edge of the inner core, surveying what lay before them.
Through the metal columns connecting the upper and lower reactor they could see a dark-colored section of the upper core hanging high above their heads. Emitting from it was a huge beam of yellow-white light that blanketed them in heat and seemed to fry the very air they breathed. The beam shot straight down into the hollow lower reactor core, through the middle of a ring-shaped, flat-topped, metal structure with no handrails that was not connected to the adjacent lower reactor walls. Another wall sloped up to where the two crewmates stood between the columns on the edge, and a small elevator right in front of Rosalyn and Sam looked like it would move down along the sloping wall to the ring-shaped structure below, where a lone computer terminal stood on the edge of the inner hole near the beam of light.
The energized hum of the reactor, especially the beam itself, was so loud they could hardly hear each other when they spoke, so they didn’t do much talking.
They stepped onto the elevator, just large enough for both to stand together comfortably, and tapped a button to descend. It was starting to get extremely hot, as if they were in the warmest desert on Earth in the dead of noon. Or perhaps in a volcano. Rosalyn started to doubt whether it had been wise to come without some kind of protective wear. SNTNL hadn’t mentioned any need for it. But as they had discussed, did they truly know if they could trust SNTNL?
On the other hand, she thought, if it wanted to kill us, this is the least efficient way to do that.
She hadn’t spent much time really pondering what could have happened to make SNTNL possibly untrustworthy. Could it have been co-opted by some malevolent alien entity or A.I.? Could it simply have blown some circuits? Had FAER designed this emergency mode somehow in an attempt to eliminate or hinder them? She had to admit that as far-fetched as all those theories seemed, they remained possible.
And yet she didn’t believe one of them for a moment. Her heart told her SNTNL was trying to help them.
Strangely, though, even that didn’t make sense. Why was an A.I. designed and built by FAER to support the company’s efforts working against them and in favor of the now-somewhat-rogue crewmates?
As if to jolt her back into focus, screeches and roars echoed up to her ears from down within the lower core. Even if her heart was wrong, she certainly had bigger things to worry about than SNTNL’s trustworthiness.
The elevator came to a stop, and they stepped onto the sturdy, ring-shaped structure.
Approaching the computer terminal, they peered over the edge of the hole through which the pulsating beam of white-yellow light was passing. The inner reactor went down seemingly forever. Lit up like midday by the beam were dozens of evolved creatures all along the walls, working like bees at tearing into the sides of the reactor’s innards. Were they trying to destroy it by shutting it off? What was their game?
The intense heat was starting to make Rosalyn feel hazy, her very skin hot to the touch. Sam contemplated on the situation—how something the aliens were doing was overriding SNTNL’s attempts to overheat the reactor and cause a meltdown. How were they managing to do that?
He had a feeling that when they discovered, they might find their plan was less fool-proof than it seemed. All that really kept him going was being with Rosalyn and knowing that soon all of this would be over with and he would be free at last.
Above them, in a ring surrounding the beam, were several spade-shaped flaps that Sam and Rosalyn guessed were there to stabilize the beam and ensure it didn’t overload. They were branching out in an open shape like flower petals. The beam had plenty of space to widen—and it probably was now wider and hotter than it was supposed to get—but something the creatures were doing down in the core was stopping that from happening in its destructive fullness.
Sam went to the terminal and tapped it on. A two-dimensional screen lit up, and a message was pre-written there in those crude letters.
rosalyn and sam let me know when you reach this terminal please.
He tapped on what looked like an intercom button identical to the one in the control room and wondered if SNTNL could make sense of his words amid the dreadfully loud hum of the beam.
“SNTNL, are we safe to be standing here? It’s like a volcano.”
i believe so. it may not be comfortable but you can manage. just stay careful.
Rosalyn leaned over. “How do we enter the core?”
tap the button that looks sort of like an arrow. its an alien logogram that means open.
On the screen Sam found a button labeled with a character that looked like a line and a “greater than” sign with some extra marks around it. Upon tapping it, they heard a mechanical clank and creak behind them as a fissure-like port suddenly opened in the middle of the floor.
They peered down into it. It was not large, and it looked like a geometric shamble of squarish shapes, but it was traversable. The rough and irregular sides led down for six feet to a landing, which continued to another drop off, and so on like a bizarrely-designed staircase. Rosalyn took a deep breath.
“So, I guess this is it,” she said, staring down the hole as if it led to the deepest levels of Hell itself. “Let’s see if SNTNL has any more advice for us before I go.”
They returned to the computer and found another message.
it would be wise if one of you would stay at the computer. youll be able to communicate with terri and myself as well as monitor the state of the meltdown.
Sam and Rosalyn looked to each other.
“You’re not gonna let me be the one to go down there, are you?” Sam asked with a shake of his head.
“Not with your fingers burned like that. Had a run-in with the acid aliens, right?”
“How’d you guess?”
“It just came to me. Can you even manage to pull a trigger?” She gestured to his neutron-scatterer.
“It will hurt, but I think I can do it. Still, you’ve got a point, as much as I hate to admit it.” He gave a deep sigh and then added, “Stay safe in there, Rosalyn. I doubt I’ll be able to communicate with you anytime soon.”
She nodded to him as she started walking towards the hole. “But you’ll know if I’ve fixed the problem.”
Sitting down on the edge of the hole, she slipped her gun off her shoulder and carefully tossed it down to the landing before leaping down herself. Sam watched her go with great unease. There was a part of him, as much as it irritated him to acknowledge it, that was beyond relieved he didn’t have to go down there.
Before very long Rosalyn could only hear the hum of the core’s machinery, and her body sent forth sweat like a fountain. Every wall and floor was hot to the touch. The air here was stuffy and chemical-smelling. She was growing dehydrated, and that would only grow worse the longer this took. So she quickened her movement.
Before long the strange tunnel opened up into a slightly larger (yet still claustrophobic) chamber, every room vertically-framed and squished within the cylindrical shape of the lower core. Rosalyn saw loads of holes and buttons and mechanical pieces of every conceivable sort scattered in and around every wall and ceiling, and only dim red lights along the walls to grant vision of it all.
It was a demented maze. Even if Rosalyn found her way through all of this and located whatever the issue was, how would she find her way back?
Maybe I won’t, she conceded. You already prepared for this, you know. You s
ent that video to FAER to show to your family in case you didn’t return.
It felt comforting in that moment to know that if she did die, her relationships wouldn’t end on a completely poor note.
Yet a greater, nobler desire filled her, and she let that push her forward:
To save everyone’s lives, including her own, and to make that “goodbye” video obsolete.
She ducked underneath a length of wall and made her way down a crumbling staircase, spiraling deeper into the confined bowels of the core.
♦♦♦
Terri sat in the corner of the control room with the gun in her hands at all times. Her gaze kept returning to that stinking alien corpse in the corner. She didn’t trust the silence of this place. Not the room, nor the building housing it.
Nor did she really trust Sam and Rosalyn to complete their objective, if she was honest with herself. The horrifying transformation and then death of Randy had shattered her last refuge of normalcy. Besides, she had little affinity for the other two survivors remaining.
Sam never took anything seriously and tended to take what he wanted with little consideration for others, and Rosalyn was—Rosalyn.
Their earlier shouting match hadn’t made Terri feel any better. She knew that even though Rosalyn was right about what they needed to do, she would still hate her for contributing to their current situation. If Rosalyn had made better choices, all of this might have been avoided. Her being brand new to the captain’s position didn’t matter; she had always acted like a captain anyway.
Terri wiped sweat from off her face and scratched at her filthy hair. I should just ask SNTNL to guide me back now, she thought, though not seriously. She couldn’t do that and spend the rest of her life knowing Rosalyn was right. Infuriatingly right.
“Terri, can you hear me?” came the voice of Sam, emitting from the intercom along with a very loud background hum.
She slung the gun around onto her back and tapped the intercom button. “Y-yeah, I can hear you. Are you inside the core?”
Seclurm: Devolution Page 30
