"Check in, is anyone hurt?" Kyle said.
"I'm leaking!" Donny cried. "There's a crack in my helmet!"
Almost too casually, Kyle slapped something on the faceplate of Donny's helmet. When his hand moved away, I saw it was a strip of duct tape. "How's your pressure now?"
"It's gone back to normal," Donny said, sounding out of breath.
"I don't know how well that will hold, but it should do for now," Kyle said. "Any others?"
"Being prone atop the platform appears to have lessened the impact on us," Ixa said.
"Miss Pain, you need to get our friend down here. I don't care what he says, make the two of you a construct and float down."
"Understood," Jennifer said. We stood up and checked our gear. A golden platform drifted down from the terrace to where we were climbing off the wreckage.
"There's no way back from down here," Jace said. I couldn't read Scyan expressions, but I got the impression he was unhappy.
"Yes there is," Kyle said. "Through the tower. You just have to make the computer like us."
"Now, would you kindly tell me what that noise was?" Omegaburn said.
"The robots knocked down part of their ramp with us on it," I said. "Their plan backfired."
"Well, the seekers here are quite unhappy. They may be moving in your direction."
"Copy," Kyle said. "We're moving to fight them anyway. Eyes up, guns up, advance to that tower." We fell back into our hexagon formation with our lasers held near eye level.
"I can't see shit," Donny said.
"Has visibility worsened?" Omegaburn asked.
"The sealant patch is in his line of sight," Kyle said. I cast a glance over my shoulder. The sealant patch still looked like a strip of duct tape. But, it probably wouldn't be all that comforting to say 'we duct taped your helmet together', even if it was holding the small crack closed. I turned my attention forward as Wolfjack stiffened visibly. A skittering mass of gunmetal emerged from the blowing dust, moving low and fast.
"Incoming," I said, aiming for the firing chamber of one of the lead bots. As I hoped, the resultant blast knocked a hole in their mass, scattering several others. The rest of the team joined in. Donny's shots came slowest as he tried to line them up around the tape obstructing his vision. Ixa missed the most. Kyle, being the guy who taught me to shoot, was even more accurate than I was.
Before they got too close, a wedge of golden light plowed through the seekers, battering them aside even as chunks were blasted from the construct by particle beams. The construct disintegrated under the hammering it received, but the seekers had lost cohesion, and their aura of menace along with it. We picked them off until those still able to move skittered away into the dust.
"Okay, how do you guys make it look so easy?" Ixa asked.
"A lot of practice," Kyle said.
I was going to offer to take her to the range, but the subtle downturn of the corner of her mouth told me that it would be poor timing.
"Pick up the pace again, lets see if we can't make the tower before they regroup," Kyle said. We broke into a jog again.
A caterpillar track as wide as a house and just as tall loomed out of the dust, followed by another, and another. Each of their massive track segments was big enough to flatten a semi and trailer under. These tracks were gargantuan, and there were eight of them in a neat row under the tower. It slowly pierced my shock-addled brain that this meant the whole edifice was mobile. It was currently stationary, but the building-sized piece of machinery was made to move. Slotted between tracks four and five was an access ramp leading to the top of the framework connecting the tower to the treads. As we made our way up, I glanced at a cogwheel whose face was as large as the footprint of the residential dome inside Gruefield. I knew this thing was big, just from the view out the habitat, but the abstract understanding was being hammered home with each new colossal detail.
"I'm starting to see why the aliens left this thing here," Wolfjack said. "Can you imagine trying to shift it?"
"Didn't they bring it here in the first place?" Jennifer asked.
"It would have been constructed on-site from local materials," Jace said.
"Then it makes sense they left it behind."
Jace approached a door in the base of the tower not unlike the exterior airlock of the habitat. "I'll see if I can gain admittance to the structure," Jace said.
"Cover him while he works," Kyle said. We formed a rough semicircle around the door. Every so often, I looked up, just in case there were seekers climbing down the side of the tower. Other than girdered ironmongery and blown dust, I didn't see anything. I felt the clunk as the door locks disengaged and the doors parted. The chamber beyond was lit in a pale amber. We piled inside and the door closed behind us.
"Where's the other door?" I asked.
"This is a lift-lock. It is an airlock and..." Jace paused while the floor jolted into motion, "An elevator."
"Please tell me the computer isn't going to lock us down in here," Donny said.
"I am doing what I can to prevent that," Jace said. "Please do not distract me." We fell silent as Jace continued to fiddle with the device on his wrist. One of the values amid the mass of readings coming from my life support gear was rising rather quickly. I focused in on it. The tense knot threatening to form in my shoulders faded as I realized it was 'external pressure'. I sent it back to the sea of values that were not of immediate interest. When it stopped rising, the door opened again. The passage beyond was ill-lit, a few green bubbles hung on the wall near the ceiling. We had enough lights to overcome the difference.
Weapons up, we moved down the hallway. The floor lurched under my feet as the hallway swung to the right. With a grinding noise that I felt in my bones, the string of green bubbles extended into the distance, lengthening the corridor. "You are headed the wrong way," Jace said.
"Where is that hallway going?" I asked.
"In all probability, it is attaching directly to the fabrication facility to permit the robots ready access to us," Jace said.
"Then lead us in the right direction," Kyle said. "Everyone keep your eyes peeled. Expect incoming."
Jace opened a door to the side of the elevator and we backed towards it. If not for the transparent panels wrapped around it, I would have called this hallway a catwalk. It followed the rim of the tower and took a sharp right at the corner. I paused there as movement caught my eye. A wave of skittering gunmetal undulated along the gantry arm. Striding atop the edifice amidst the sea of their smaller brethren, the mining bots moved like a siege train at the heart of the army. A carpet of the tiny maintenance bots scurried amidst the ever moving legs of the larger units.
"I don't think we can hold them," I said.
"Miss Pain," Omegaburn said, "Do you think you can sever the gantry?"
Jennifer hesitated, looking over the arm upon which the horde crawled. "Not before they get here, that's a lot of steel."
"Delay them for as long as possible," Jace said. "We have reached the computer core." I glanced over in time to see the Scya vanish into a doorway halfway along this span of hall. I hurried over to join the others in a defensive cordon there. The alcove in which Jace was operating was smaller than even the lift had been. We couldn't all fit in there and still fight, so we stayed in the hall.
The first skittering form rounded the corner, inside the hallway. The realization that I hadn't seen anywhere near all of the oncoming horde shook me a little bit more. Kyle took the shot, burning a hole in its chassis, but the seeker was overtaken by those behind it before it had even slumped to the floor. We poured shot after shot into the ever-growing tide of gunmetal. The first firing chamber to explode blew out the windows. A bulkhead slammed shut behind us, but not on the far side of the seekers. An onrushing howl of wind whipped past them and into the thin Martia
n atmosphere. The computer was letting the air drain to leave the way open for the bots to attack.
Jennifer sent a rain of construct shards down upon the oncoming seekers, slicing open metal bodies and impaling their hulls on spars of golden light. The next rank simply blasted through the shells of their fellows, reducing the budding barricade to molten slag before it could impede their progress. Motion above distracted my gaze. A mining bot sailed off the tower amidst a jumble of parts from its smaller fellows. That had to have been Kevan's handiwork, he was the only one up there who could throw one of them. I tore my gaze off the falling bot and resumed firing on the seekers trying to reach me.
"Tell me you've got something," Omegaburn said over the radio. The strain in her tone was obvious.
"Working," Jace said. The translator drone's intonation left the statement ambiguous.
A mining bot landed on the roof of our hallway. Cracks propagated from where its feet hit the windows, and a second later, it fell into the hall proper. Two unfortunate seekers were crushed between it and the floor, but the glowing barrels of its particle cannons were fixed on us.
Jennifer's half-formed construct was smashed aside by the twin beams. Wolfjack and I threw ourselves to the floor, but Kyle stepped into the blinding streams, hand outstretched. For a moment, I feared his grimace would be the last I saw of my uncle. Of course, that was forgetting why he'd taken the codename Infernoclast. As I blinked away the afterimage of the particle beams, he stood there quite defiant, with only slight singes on his gear. Of course, he couldn't hold that much energy for long, and he sent it cascading back at the mining robot in an unfocused ray of green. Despite its weakened and diffuse state, the beam still sliced through the robot and blew out the window at the far end of the hall. With so many panels missing, rust-red grit was swirling into the hallway on the Martian wind.
"Oof," Kyle said. "That one had a bit more kick than I was expecting."
Stray laser beams lit up the blowing dust as grit caught in their path incandesced. Both lasers on the roof were firing. "Do we have an update?" I could almost hear the clenched teeth through which Omegaburn spoke.
"Working," Jace said.
Kevan dropped down through the hole the mining bot had made, scrambling to join our position. Omegaburn fired one more shot behind her before gliding in herself. "Our position was becoming untenable, so I decided to join you," she said.
"This location may not be much better," Kyle said. Punctuating his remark, seekers began crawling down from the roof towards the same hole in the ceiling. We immediately started picking them off. My attention was drawn to the power indicator, it had dropped ominously low. With each additional shot, it lowered even further. Disabled seekers tumbled through the hole as the rest of the tide pressed down through the gap. Jennifer smashed them back with another construct, but the tide pressed in.
Three of the mining robots positioned themselves on the lip of the roof, angling themselves to draw a bead on us. The glow built within the emitters of their particle cannons. I took aim at them and pulled the trigger. My power indicator blinked zero. My mental plot of the spread of the impending shots left nowhere to go. I froze up, uncertain of what I could do. My jaw tensed as I fought the impulse to cry out as I waited for them to fire.
The shots never came.
"Work complete," Jace said. "Security alerts rescinded."
Part 9
With the gantry hall decompressed, Jace was able to let us off near the habitat. Someone had dragged a few human-sized folding chairs into the habitat. They were nothing special, but even that small comfort was welcome. Not all of the smell had cleared, but I didn't care. The visitor's interface was a slab about the size of a tablet, covered in glyphs I couldn't read. The 'door open' sign was the only one I knew, simply because Jace had made a point of telling us which one it was. All of the other controls were a complete mystery, so I left them alone.
"Are we done?" Kevan asked.
"No," Wolfjack said. "We came here to find out what made the computer call for help."
"So why are we sitting around?"
"Because the mission specialist is extracting information," Wolfjack said.
I don't know if it was accurate, but Jace was engrossed in work on the computer. He was the only one who could read the Uta|la||tek|li script, so we had no way to know what he was doing.
"Are we going to have time to do un-serious stuff while we're here?" Donny asked.
"Like what?" I asked.
"I don't know."
"Maybe you should think about it before bringing up the question."
"What's the point of being un-serious if you have to think about it?"
I waved him off. "You want another fractured faceplate?" I asked.
"That probably sounded funnier in your head," Donny said. I decided against mentioning I wasn't trying to make a joke. Our moment of peace was interrupted by Jace.
"I know why the computer called for manual intervention," he said. He sparked up the hologram emitter in the table and we clustered around.
"All right," Omegaburn said. "What's the big hullabaloo about?"
"I'm afraid part of that didn't translate," Jace said, staring blankly in her direction.
"What did you find?"
"The computer stopped mining activities and called for manual intervention because it unearthed something artificial." Jace brought up a few static images that hung in the amber framework above the holograph table. These were grayscale images that showed a void or cavern in the rock. Arrayed along the floor of the space were what looked to be buildings. Their walls resembled adobe, or a similar material. Their rooves were tiled, but a few had collapsed. Openings for doors and windows were fairly obvious, though the only source of light appeared to be the bot that took the pictures.
"Upon finding a void, procedure is to survey it for structural integrity," Jace said. "When the survey robot found structures of an artificial nature, the computer had no automatic protocol and attempted to alert its operators for instructions. Or it could have been a failsafe to prevent property damage. Either way, this is why the computer activated its gate."
"Why are there underground buildings on Mars?" Kyle asked.
"That's what we have to find out," Omegaburn said.
"Do you think there are natives?" Kevan asked.
"Those structures look... human," Ixa said.
"Architectural similarity of seventy-three percent," Jace said. "Features are primitive. If we remove advanced human civilizations from the comparison, similarity exceeds ninety percent."
"We're back to why there would be buildings in a cave on Mars," Kyle said.
"The original team plus Ixahau and Baron Mortis are going to go down to check it out," Omegaburn said. "Miss Pain and Infernoclast will hold the habitat."
"Oh?" Kyle asked, but no answer was forthcoming. I don't know if she was reasserting authority, or if there was some actual logic behind her decision. Either way, she didn't explain further.
"Can I get a helmet without a crack in it?" Donny asked.
Having the computer's cooperation made crossing to the far side of the pit relatively easy. It was still a mile-long walk, but none of the robots we passed hassled us. I wasn't sure why we still had our laser rifles with us, but freshly charged packs meant they weren't just useless bricks. Better safe than sorry, I guess. The long, telescoping hallways in the gantry, bridge, and main arm were still only lit by small green bubbles. It was probably safety lighting, since full illumination of the spans was pointless most of the time.
A ramp had unfolded from near the joint connecting the main arm to the bucket wheel. This ramp had safety rails, which were appreciated, as the wind whipped us about viciously. It was bad enough that Jace held his translator drone under his arm rather than risk having it whisked away on the sand-p
iled gale. We passed through the lee of a scoop bucket large enough to pick up an apartment building and scrambled through boulder-sized rubble. In the raging dust cloud, our destination was a darker patch amid the ruddy landscape.
We tumbled through the hole in an almost undignified manner, pushed along by the edges of the storm. A mining robot stood, half buried in dust, just beyond the threshold. The sudden silence of being out of the wind struck me almost as much as the darkness. We played our lights over the nearby structures. What I'd taken to be adobe looked more and more like mud brick. The roofing tiles were slabs of terracotta. The doors and windows were holes in the walls. A few held tattered remnants of curtains. Had this been anywhere else, I'd have regarded it as an archeological curiosity, a well-preserved site of great antiquity by the looks of it. Here, it was alien and just plain wrong.
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