“We go over in force,” he continued. “Niska, O’Malley, Romanov and at least three of our people. Everyone in exosuits. Treat it like we’re assaulting a fortified enemy position.”
He shook his head and studied the abandoned but still-spinning ring.
“I don’t trust that place to be as dead as it looks.”
Eight people in exosuits would have crowded the shuttle they’d taken from Starlight to the breaking point. Fortunately for Damien’s calm, they no longer needed to pretend to be a Republican spacecraft, which meant they were back to his old standby RMMC assault shuttle.
His hands itched to take the controls over from Kelzin, but it wasn’t like he currently could. Regardless of his desires, he was still a year away from being able to reliably use his hands.
So, he and LaMonte waited in the main passenger compartment. Unlike their hulking companions, they wore simple vac-suits. Neither was trained in the heavier gear, and Damien, at least, didn’t need it.
“You stay behind the Marines,” he ordered LaMonte. “I can shield myself against most threats, but that vac-suit’s armor is all you have.”
“I’ve played combat hacker before, Damien,” she told him with a chuckle. “This isn’t my first rodeo any more than it’s yours.”
He nodded his understanding and swallowed. It was easy, sometimes, to forget that LaMonte had spent the years since they’d both left Blue Jay behind just as actively and interestingly as he had.
Damien had become the First Hand of Mars, but LaMonte had earned command of a covert ops insertion ship and had then commanded that covert ops ship through the shadow war against Legatus—and the early days of the open war against the Republic.
“Contact in sixty seconds,” Kelzin reported. “I don’t suppose these people could have left the centerpoint access behind?”
“The Legatan design doesn’t have one,” Damien told him. “They’ve got some very good computers to manage the latch-on.”
“Yeah, well, those are currently turned off, so I’m doing this on my own,” the pilot replied. “So, everyone hold on, because this is going to be one hell of a bump.”
Damien brought up the shuttle’s display on his suit HUD, then concealed a chuckle.
Kelzin was preparing everyone for a problem, but from what Damien could see, he was coming in for a perfect landing. There was barely even a noticeable impact as the shuttlecraft latched on to one of the docking ports, Kelzin having exactly matched the rotational velocity.
“Well, welcome to the latest in the Republic’s line of mysterious, creepy, abandoned space stations,” the pilot told them all. “Thanks for flying aboard an MISS spacecraft and make sure you take your guns with you.
“That place looks real creepy.”
Damien snorted and unbelted himself. He rose, adjusting for the angular acceleration that acted as gravity on a spinning station. Less than half a gravity, he confirmed. Enough to stick them to floors as designed, at least.
“Let’s go, people.”
Damien had lost count of the number of space stations he’d been on in his life, but he’d never been on one with no power. The complete lack of lights, moving air, or any kind of feeling of life was strange at best.
“Air is present,” Romanov noted. “It’s safe, even, though it reads like it would stink. I guess the life-support plant was running up to the end.”
“If they left the place with breathable air and no one is breathing it, well.” Damien could hear the shrug in Niska’s voice, though the Augment’s body language was invisible inside the hulking exosuit.
“Also tells us there are no leaks,” LaMonte noted. “They abandoned a perfectly functional station. That’s…weird.”
Their lights weren’t picking out much of anything. The access corridor they’d ended up in was larger than most, but it was still a short connector between a docking port and the actual entrance.
“Get that door open,” Damien ordered, gesturing toward the door at the end of the corridor.
O’Malley stepped up to it and prodded the metal a couple of times.
“How much damage do we want to do?” she asked. “We can cut it out of the way or power it up.”
“Power it up,” Damien said after a moment. “We want this place’s secrets. Let’s not get in the habit of just punching our way through everything.”
“Your call, Montgomery.”
The Augment removed the access panel next to the door and poked around in its guts. After a few seconds, she pulled a cord from the arm of her suit and hooked it into a port inside the door’s systems.
The door promptly and smoothly slid open.
“Systems are working just fine,” she reported. “There’s no power, but nothing is damaged and it responded immediately.”
That added up. The Republic hadn’t abandoned this station because it was damaged or useless. They’d abandoned it because they believed destroying it quietly was the easiest way to keep it secret.
“What the…”
Romanov’s shocked words brought Damien forward into the main loading bay. The access tube they’d connected to had been intended for larger ships, but the bay they’d now entered was where shuttles would have landed and where passengers from those larger ships would have been met.
The lights picked up bits of bright, cheerful banners. None of their flashlights were really wide enough to read a full sign, but they quickly picked out that there were a lot of them.
“Let me make some light,” Damien ordered. He had air to work with, after all, and air was the key component to a lot of a Mage’s spells.
He conjured a tiny ball of light and let it float up into the air to illuminate the entire space. The bright banners were mostly declaring Welcome in large blocky letters. A mural of semi-anthropomorphized animals covered one wall, culminating in a single fox twice the height of man holding another Welcome sign.
“What the fuck,” Niska finished Romanov’s prior sentence. “What is this place?”
Damien’s vacations tended to include such “low-pressure” tasks as speaking to schools and other collections of teenagers. Motivational speaking wasn’t really his forte, but the First Hand of Mars carried some weight, even with kids.
He had enough experience to recognize the space he was standing in.
“It’s a school,” he said softly. “Or, at the very least, it’s pretending to be one.”
36
Digging around the loading bay some more, Damien at least knew the name of the place they were standing in. Supposedly, this was the University of Tau Ceti Special Satellite Campus.
He would have been very surprised if the University of Tau Ceti knew it had apparently branched out into specialty Mage schools in the UnArcana Worlds.
“Whoever came up with this has never actually been to UTC,” one of Romanov’s Marines observed over the radio. “Logo is wrong; they changed it from that one twelve years ago. Text is wrong; the University has a brand standard and it isn’t that.
“Plus, well, UTC’s high school outreach is on a much lower scale,” the trooper concluded. “I went to UTC, sirs.”
“That’s about what I figured, but the confirmation is good,” Damien replied. “Stick in pairs, people, but let’s move out and explore this place. If it isn’t a school, what is it?”
There was no question who was coming with Damien. Romanov hadn’t left his side since they’d come in, and he switched to a private channel.
“Make sure the Marine with LaMonte is one of your best,” he ordered quietly. “We need her to rip open this place’s brains once we find them.”
“I’ll see to it,” Romanov confirmed.
A few moments later, everyone had shaken out into their pairs and the Marines were opening up several cases they’d brought with them.
“Let’s hold here while we get the drones up,” Romanov told Damien. “I’ll be linking them to everyone, and they should give us a better idea of what we’re heading into.”
&nb
sp; “All right.”
Damien left the Marines to their work and studied the room. There wasn’t much to see, really. Half of the space had been designated for shuttles, but there hadn’t been that much shuttle traffic. As far out in the system as the station had been, larger ships had delivered the cargos and passengers for this place.
There was a map, he realized, and he waved LaMonte over.
“Can you grab a picture of this and upload it to the tacnet?” he asked her. “My wrist-comp only works so well with my hands and a vac-suit’s gloves.”
She chuckled humorlessly and obeyed. “That’s funny,” she said aloud.
“What?”
“This map isn’t complete by a long shot. It only covers forty percent or so of the station.” LaMonte leaned in to study it more closely. “Kind of looks like that’s all they wanted the students to know existed.”
“Pass that on to everyone,” Damien ordered. “If the ‘school’ is less than half the station, then the odds are that what we’re looking for is in the other half.”
“Gives us a starting point,” Romanov rumbled, the Marine interjecting himself into the private channel with the ease of long practice. As Damien’s bodyguard, Damien had to specifically exclude the Special Agent Mage-Captain from a channel for him not to hear what the Hand was saying.
“And a starting point gives us somewhere to send the drones,” Damien agreed. “Get to it, Romanov. This place makes my teeth itch.”
The drones the Marines had brought were designed for this environment. In true gravity, the head-sized ion-thruster-equipped orbs would never have stayed in the air. In the pseudogravity of a rotating space station, they simply needed to make sure they never touched the “ground.”
Twenty-two of them were launched and sent off into the station, their networked artificial sequential intelligence—an ASI or “artificial stupid”—making sure they moved sufficiently far apart to build up their own map of the space station.
Thanks to LaMonte, that map was now overlaid on the HUD of Damien’s helmet on top of the map of the school.
“So far, everything’s lining up with the map and the drones haven’t encountered any difficulties,” Romanov reported after a moment. “Doors are mostly open so far, too. We’re flagging closed ones for follow-up.”
“That’s a good starting point,” Damien agreed. “Move our teams out; check on the closed doors. Most are going to be nothing, but who knows what this place is going to hide.”
Romanov set to organizing the teams, then he and Damien set off.
“I’ve flagged this door for us,” he told the Hand. “It’s next to what the map says is the boys’ dormitories. None of the doors to the dorms are open.”
“Do we have any other areas closed off like that?” Damien asked.
“No. Not yet. The drones are still drawing their own map.” Romanov sighed. “Even with the map we have only covering forty percent of the station, that’s a lot of real estate. The station is a kilometer across, after all.”
Damien’s nod was visible through his lighter vac-suit as he considered the math. A ring a kilometer across, so three and a seventh kilometers or so of circumference. The ring was fifty meters “high” and four stories “thick”—plus a triple-height inner level that was entirely rotation and power systems, per the original design.
That forty percent they’d found the map of was most of a square kilometer—and the unmapped segments were a full square kilometer.
Searching that was going to take time, though the drones were going to take on most of that work.
They reached the door they were after, and Romanov immediately set to opening it up. The exosuit had a collection of tools for that purpose, though in this case he simply powered the door up rather than cutting it open.
Stepping through was surreal. There were still no lights in there except for Damien’s floating ball of sunshine, but that was enough to pick out the calmly organized nature of the rooms. They’d entered a common area with a dozen tables, clearly used for gathering and snacks.
There were gaming consoles along one wall, disabled from the lack of power. Even books. The place had been neatly cleared away and shut down, then abandoned.
Wordlessly, Damien crossed the room and pushed open the unpowered door to the actual dorm rooms with a burst of magic.
Fifteen beds, all neatly made up. Stepping back into the corridor, he counted eight doors.
“Hundred and twenty kids here,” he noted. “How many dorm sections are on the map?”
“Four.” Romanov replied.
“We know they brought more than four hundred and eighty kids here.” Damien shook his head. “It’s supposed to look like this was their long-term home, but it clearly wasn’t…so who were they trying to fool? And where did the kids go?”
“So far, the drones are finding that we’re running up against walls where the map says the station ends,” Romanov reported over the channel an hour later. “Is anyone finding anything behind the closed doors?”
Damien already knew the answer. Their people had been flagging areas on the shared map as they’d been exploring them, and the answer was much the same.
All they’d found so far was a “school” that happened to be in space that exactly matched the map they’d pulled from the landing bay. It was definitely a school for Mages, with several classrooms set up for the rather destructive process of teaching young Mages self-control, but it was otherwise relatively, well, normal.
“Kelzin,” he addressed the pilot once everyone else was aboard. “Were there other access points?”
“A couple, but they weren’t primary connectors,” the shuttle pilot confirmed. “I targeted the one that looked like where they’d be bringing in ships.” He paused. “I didn’t expect half of the station to be cut off like you’re saying it is.”
“I doubt they took shuttles from the school area to the rest of the station,” Damien replied. He and Romanov were now in the girls’ dormitory, which was basically identical to the boys’ dormitory, barring the additional storage cabinets in the bathroom for sanitary supplies.
He studied the map.
“The dormitories are all up against the edge of the map on this side, and the main administration area and teachers’ apartments are up against the edge on the far side,” he noted. “LaMonte, I suggest you get some of the computers booted up and see if there’s a control program for opening a secret door.”
Rhapsody’s captain had ended up on the far end of the “school” from Damien and Romanov.
“We could just go through the walls,” Niska suggested.
Damien studied the outer wall of the dormitory. Half of the actual dorm rooms with their neatly arranged beds backed against that wall. He had a grim suspicion that it could be opened, but…
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “We’re recording everything, right?”
“Everything is being recorded in the tactical network and relayed to the shuttle,” Romanov confirmed. “And that is being backed up on Rhapsody. Even if this station blew up right now, everything we’ve seen would make it back.”
And most importantly, no one there could edit or censor the footage, Damien realized. Whatever they saw, the Protectorate would eventually see.
“I don’t know what kind of time limit we’re facing, beyond that it’s only two weeks before this thing hits Santa Maria,” he noted. “The faster we know what we’re going to find out, the better.”
He grimaced.
“Cut ’em open, people. Let’s gut this place and see what falls out.”
Suiting actions to words, Damien took a second to inhale and study the innocent-looking wall barring his way. Force flashed from his hands and the metal came apart in tatters, the rotation of the station flinging the debris away from him into the space on the other side of the wall.
The piping and tanks in that space sent a chill down his spine.
He charged forward, studying the wreckage of the wall with a terrified eye.<
br />
“Romanov? You seeing this?” he asked.
“Concealed vents hooked up to a piping system and a set of tanks holding compressed gas,” the Marine confirmed, his voice very flat. “More piping on the roof and to the other rooms. All eight rooms were hooked up to this setup.”
Damien checked the tanks and swallowed hard. The source tanks were a standard size provided by the manufacturer, still labeled with their contents.
“Nix-Seven,” he said softly. Neutralization Solution Seven, a low-lethality knockout gas. “They gassed the kids.”
“Dosage controls over here,” Romanov told him. “They’re set by…room.” He coughed, his voice breaking from the deadly calm flatness. “All of them are off now, but the last setting shows. They were keeping them at low dosages, to keep the ones sleeping asleep.”
A row of stripped beds, identical to the ones in the room behind him, were lined up against the wall on the other side of the room. Without the bedding, it was more obvious that they all had wheels.
“Wait till the kids are asleep, pump in Nix-Seven to keep them asleep, unlock the wheels and roll them out,” Damien said slowly. “Room by room. Clean out an entire dorm in a night. Want to bet the classes were segregated by dorms?”
“So no one would notice when an entire dorm of kids was suddenly missing?” Romanov asked. “Yeah. Where the hell did they take them?”
“We’ll find out,” Damien promised grimly. “What are the rest of you seeing?” he demanded.
“Dorms have…a fucked-up setup with gas and rolling beds,” O’Malley replied instantly.
“This one, too,” he confirmed.
“Then they all do, I’m guessing,” Niska told them, the Augment’s voice deathly cold. “What about the other side?”
“We’re just seeing more administration capacity here,” LaMonte said quietly. “I recognize the layout, though, so I’m going to try and find this shithole’s real computer center.”
Sword of Mars Page 22
