Quantum Dark: The Classic Sci-fi Adventure (The Star Rim Empire Adventures Book 1)

by R. A. Nargi

  In another, a black citadel stood on the edge of a cliff. It looked strange and haunted with dagger-like spires, spindly towers, and weird-looking turrets.

  “We’re not here to admire the artwork, junior,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “If you can call that artwork,” Galish sneered.

  “Get a move on.”

  We passed through a tall archway into some sort of cargo depot. At least that was what it looked like to me. Lined up against one wall stood a row of ancient-looking hover-carts. A confusing array of illuminated beacons ran down at least a dozen separate corridors.

  “This is starting to look familiar,” Yates said.

  “Oh yeah?” Galish said.

  “I think so. If I was smarter, I would have brought the old mission logs. But I never thought—in a million years—I’d be back here.”

  Maybe it was my imagination, but Yates seemed pretty stressed. Like something was gnawing at him.

  The depot had more gantry cranes as well as a bunch of tall automated cargo bots standing lifeless in the shadows.

  “Let me check the coordinates,” Ana-Zhi said.

  After studying her AuraView, she pointed to one of the corridors. “I think that will take us in the right direction.”

  The corridor was a big metal tube that splintered off from the depot. We followed it for ten or twelve minutes before Ana-Zhi called for us to halt.

  “I fucked up. This doesn’t connect. We need to go that way.” She pointed off to the right.

  So we backtracked to the depot and then she chose another tunnel that looked exactly like the first one, but veered off in a slightly different direction.

  Galish double-checked Ana-Zhi’s interpretation of the topo. “These tubes all go to different storage galleries. The Yueldians would load up carts full of their stolen treasures and transport them through these tunnels. None of them seem to connect.”

  “Why can’t you just find the right tunnel on the map?” I asked.

  “The topos are incomplete,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “Thanks, Chiraine,” Galish said sarcastically.

  “It’s not her fault,” Ana-Zhi said. “If the data isn’t there, it isn’t there.”

  We continued forward through this tunnel, which seemed to bring us closer to where we wanted to be. So far, Bandala seemed rather innocuous—just a vast warehouse-type structure that had lain empty for 700 years. The biggest challenge we faced was not getting lost.

  “Hold up,” Yates said. “We’re going to need to stop and deactivate the next zone.”

  “Already?” Galish asked.

  “Better safe than sorry. Believe me.”

  It only took him ten minutes or so to access the next zone on the defensive grid and shut it down. Then we continued down the tunnel.

  “Are you sure we haven’t overshot the location?” I asked.

  “No,” Ana-Zhi said. “I don’t think so, but we are going to need to go up soon.”

  Finally the tunnel opened up to what Galish called a gallery. It was a vast circular chamber with a big center column that rose up ten stories or more. Both the inner and outer walls of this chamber had rows and rows of large square doors inset into them. Maybe a thousand in all. Everything was bathed in the soft glow of illuminated beacons.

  “What are those?” I pointed up to dark shapes perched on the walls at regular distances. They kind of looked like gargoyles on a cathedral.

  “Those are the guardian bots,” Yates said. “Deactivated, thank Dynark.”

  “What are they guarding?” I asked.

  “This gallery,” Galish replied.

  “So we’re essentially in a big storage facility?” I asked.

  Galish nodded. “Behind each one of the doors should be a vault.”

  “Yeah, that’s how it works,” Yates said. “We found the Tabarroh Crystal in a location just like this. I remember thinking that it felt like we were inside a tower.”

  “According to the topographs—partial topographs—there are over five hundred of these galleries per level,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “And how many levels?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  Galish whistled in appreciation. “No wonder nobody has ever found the Kryrk.”

  “We actually don’t know if that’s the case,” Yates said. “The vault could be empty.”

  “Way to bring the mission down, old man,” Galish said.

  Secretly, I checked my Aura for the coordinates of the lifeform in hibernation—my dad. It said he was close, distance-wise, but if these tunnels and galleries really didn’t connect, it would be tough to get to his location from here.

  “Everyone on the sled,” Ana-Zhi said. “We’re going up.”

  We all piled on, and Galish took us up slowly, so we could check for connecting passages.

  “Hold it up!” Ana-Zhi said. “Go down one level and get us to the other side of that pillar. I think I saw an exit.”

  She was wrong. Five stories up was another circular depression set into the outer wall. Unfortunately it went in only a half meter.

  “Maybe there’s a door?” I asked.

  “Or maybe not.” Galish checked his scanner. “The EMR doesn’t show anything beyond it.”

  Ana-Zhi said, “Let’s keep looking.”

  We got another two stories and then all hell broke loose.

  All of a sudden, a half dozen guardian security bots came alive and launched themselves from their perches directly at us.

  Immediately Ana-Zhi realized what had happened. We had wandered into the edge of a new zone—one that hadn’t been deactivated.

  “Yates, shut it down now! Everyone else, protect Yates!”

  Within seconds, the air was filled with a barrage of blaster bolts. I managed to take one of the bots out, but we were in an impossible situation. There were bots skittering along the walls above us and below us and we had zero cover.

  While Yates frantically worked the LVX, Galish keyed the sled’s thrusters, shooting us up at an even faster rate. If we could clear the bots on top of us and get to the ceiling, we’d at least have some cover. In the meantime, Ana-Zhi and I kept shooting.

  A stray bolt sizzled along the shoulder of Yates’s armored suit, knocking him back and off balance. He toppled over the edge of the sled and would have fallen, if I hadn’t managed to grab ahold of his equipment belt and haul him back on board.

  “Thanks, Jannigan.”

  “You can thank me by staying down!”

  I shot over his head and caught one of the bots right in the chest. It shuddered once and then lost power, which caused it to teeter off its perch and tumble to the ground eight stories below—where it landed in a heap of parts.

  The sled nearly hit the ceiling before Galish stabilized us. Ana-Zhi blew away the final bot that was above us, so now we had to deal with the three racing their way up the side of the pillar, shooting as they moved.

  We tried to pick them off, but these particular bots were as fast and nimble as spider monkeys on boost juice. They effortless leapt from wall to wall, evading our fire.

  “Yates, where are we at?” Ana-Zhi yelled.

  “Almost got it.”

  “We don’t got time for almost!”

  A bolt nearly took off her helmet before exploding over our heads in a cascade of sparks.

  I didn’t know what I was thinking, but I knew I had to do something.

  “That was just too close for comfort,” I said, then quickly powered up the magtouch unit on my suit and grabbed a cable. “I’ll draw them out!”

  Once I saw the green ready indicator on my visor display, I vaulted over the edge of the sled, shooting as I fell.

  The bots, attracted by the sudden movement, maneuvered to intercept me.

  This was going to be close!

  I swung from the cable around the central pillar until my boots connected with the wall. For a few seconds I was secure enough to fire with both my RB and my railgun. I got a lucky hit on one of the attackers which caused
it to smash against the far wall in an eruption of bot fragments.

  This was insane. Completely insane. But there were only two left.

  I felt my boots scrape against the pillar as I slid down. Then the crackle of a bolt cut through the air and a shower of sparks burst off the wall above my head.

  Crap! I was a sitting duck.

  Out of nowhere Ana-Zhi came through with a volley of shots that took out the remaining security bots.

  I holstered my guns and grabbed on to the pillar with my magtouch enhanced gloves. Thankfully it was enough to arrest my movement.

  Galish took the sled down and I jumped aboard.

  “Well, that was fun,” Ana-Zhi said. “Nice shooting, junior. You must practice a lot.”

  “A little bit,” I said, out of breath.

  She turned to Yates, eyes blazing in anger. “You! That cannot fucking happen again.”

  “These zones are not laid out in nice even blocks,” Yates said sheepishly. “It’s almost impossible to know when we strayed out of it.”

  “Waah, waah, waah!” Galish said. “You always have an excuse, don’t you?”

  “Can it, Galish!”

  “So, are we at a dead end?” I asked.

  “I was hoping there would be some sort of vertical access shaft, but I don’t think any of these galleries connect.” Ana-Zhi showed me her datapad, and pointed to an area that was fifty meters away. “We need to get there.”

  “There is a hatch,” Galish said. “According to the scanner. Look.”

  They conferred for a few moments, then Ana-Zhi told him to take the sled up to the top of the gallery and then slowly around the pillar.

  We found the hatch. It was a pressure door set into the ceiling on the far side of the pillar. Unfortunately it was only a meter square. The sled wouldn’t fit.

  14

  “We have to backtrack,” Ana-Zhi said. “This sucks.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “According to the topo, the bottom of the next gallery is up twenty meters or so and then over a hundred and fifty. I bet this hatch leads to an access tunnel that connects them. It’s just not made for cargo transport. They used the wide corridors for that.”

  “You may be right,” she said.

  “Of course I’m right. You saw the size of those hover-carts. There’s no way they could fit through that hatch.”

  “I don’t see how that helps us,” Yates said. “You want to leave the sled?”

  “The Kryrk is only supposed to be a meter long,” I said. “Maybe less. That’s what Sainecourt told me. Not so big that we can’t carry it.”

  Yates shook his head. “We can’t leave the LVX here. That would be suicide.”

  “He’s right,” Ana-Zhi said. “I don’t want a repeat of what just happened. We were lucky. There were only six security bots. Imagine a roomful of scrubbers instead.”

  “No thank you,” Galish said.

  “What if I go by myself?” I asked. “I could take the donokkal. Do a little recon. Yates, you can deactivate the next zone, can’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t like it,” Ana-Zhi muttered. “Never a good idea to split up.”

  We went back and forth for several minutes. “It’s literally less than two hundred meters away,” I said. “I’ll just check it out. See if there’s an actual connection. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  “Make it ten,” she said.

  “You got it!”

  “And we’ll be monitoring your video and audio at every step.”

  “No problem.”

  We ended up not even needing to use the donokkal on the hatch. Yates was able to open it remotely using the LVX. As I had guessed, the hatch led to a two-meter by two-meter access shaft stretching up. There was both a ladder and a step lift running up a rail along the wall. I chose the ladder.

  I made it up through the vertical shaft and found myself in the corner of another large depot.

  “You guys seeing this?” I asked into my comm unit.

  “Affirmative.”

  It was a twin of the depot we had walked through near the entrance, with a dozen or so cargo corridors fanning off back towards where the team waited—but twenty meters over their heads. Clearly I couldn’t take any of those corridors. They were all heading in the wrong direction.

  A wide archway connected the depot to another immense corridor that was even wider than the cargo corridors and was broken up by more archways stretching for as far as I could see in the gloom.

  I checked the topo on my Aura. I knew that there were no cardinal directions on an orbital fortress in space, but in my mind I assigned the location of the airlock as being in the southeast quadrant. The corridor I was standing in was northeast of the airlock, and up about seventy meters. The Kryrk looked like it was to the northwest, but there was another marker on my display.

  Roughly six hundred meters due west was where Chiraine had noted the location of my father—if the life form in hibernation was my father.

  I had to go. I had to see for myself whether or not it was him.

  “You’re going the wrong way, asswipe!” Galish said over the comm unit.

  “Yeah, I need to check something out.”

  “Negative, junior,” Ana-Zhi said. “This ain’t no sandbox game. You go where you’re told.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant by ‘sandbox game,’ but I ignored her command and kept walking.

  The big east/west corridor intersected a wide north/south corridor, with a line of hover-carts against one wall. Everything was lit by directional beacons and faint utility lights and there was a lot of dust on the ground here.

  In fact—

  Holy shit!

  There were bootprints in the dust.

  “Jannigan, stop now,” Ana-Zhi said in a firm voice.

  “I found tracks. Bootprints.”

  “I don’t care if you found Jesus’s own coffee cup, you stop now, do a one-eighty, and return to us. Confirm, junior!”

  “I think they are from the last mission,” I said. Suddenly my stomach felt queasy.

  Then Yates came on the comm unit, speaking calmly. “You’re probably seeing our footprints, Jannigan. Yes, from the last mission. But you are outside of the zone I shut down, do you understand? Repeat, you are outside the safe zone and in serious danger.”

  I heard him, but I didn’t care. I kept going, following the two lines of bootprints as they turned south and led through an archway into another depot room. There I was confronted by a mess in the dust: blackened bits of metal and machine parts everywhere. Like some kind of robot slaughterhouse. There were partial bootprints, as well, but everything was disturbed. Violently disturbed.

  “Jannigan, get your ass back here now!” Ana-Zhi said. “We’ll all go around with the sled and investigate this together.”

  “I’m really close,” I said.

  This depot didn’t look like the others. On the west and south sides of the depot were a series of cargo tunnels extending away at various angles.

  But the east side of the depot was different. There were no corridors. It was just a fifty by twenty-meter chamber crowded with a labyrinth of heavy equipment: clusters of storage tanks, power relays, rows of energy couplers and big transformers, and a bunch of floor-to-ceiling thermal cores that were as thick around as the sled. Maybe this place was some sort of power station or something.

  But what had exploded in it?

  “Jannigan, come in—”

  I flicked off my comm unit and then the video feed, and inspected the dusty floor. When I aimed my hand-lamp at the ground at the right angle, I was able pick out the bootprints again amidst the debris. There were multiple sets, going in both directions along the farthest tunnel to the southeast.

  I was about to follow the footsteps when I decided to check my Aura. Good thing I did. It turned out that I was closer to my destination than I thought. And it wasn’t down the tunnel.

  My pulse was pounding so hard I could feel it
at my temples, but I kept moving. According to the topo, my dad’s body was less than a dozen meters away—somewhere in that maze of power units. I zoomed the display on my AuraView and oriented myself. Then I wound my way into the machinery, towards what looked to be a cluster of energy couplers. That was where the map said to go.

  The dust here was disturbed as well and I could make out one pair of bootprints—my dad’s bootprints.

  Blaster out, I stepped forward. There was something on the ground. A tool of some sort. As I moved closer I saw that it was an eight-inch judder knife. I had a newer model on my belt.

  I peered around a capacitor pylon as tall as I was and saw some sort of transformer well. It was a five-meter by five-meter square pit that went down a half dozen meters. Down in the center was a cubical structure with reinforced plates. It had a sealed hatch sized for a Yueldian. The structure reminded me of a maintenance closet of some sort.

  As far as I could tell, the prints led down there. I directed the beam of my hand-lamp down towards the bottom of the pit, but didn’t see anything. So I decided to climb down and try the hatch. It was locked, but the donokkal worked like a charm.

  I took a deep breath and grasped the handle. The metal groaned as I eased the hatch open.

  Then I saw it.

  There, on a makeshift cot beside an energy coupler, rested a man’s body, his hands arranged on his chest.

  He was wearing a Welkin armored exosuit. And the suit was wired to the coupler. The status display was faintly illuminated and it appeared to be working just fine.

  Beside him was an equipment bag marked with Beck Salvage’s logo. Set on top of the bag was an old Pacer radiant blaster.

  Carefully I kneeled down and played the lamp across the man’s visor and saw his face.

  It was my face.

  I had found my father.

  And, judging by the suit’s bio monitor display, he was alive.

  If there was one thing I remembered from my company-mandated SAR training over the years, it was that you couldn’t instantly revive someone from a state of deep metabolic hibernation. There was no way to flip a switch on my father’s suit and have him spring awake. It just didn’t work that way.