The Deftly Paradox

by Matthew D. White

  “Lucky us,” Maddie replied. “If that was the only other way in, we never would have made it. Did the orders have anything about the nature of their target?”

  “Negative, it just said to secure the facility,” Shafer said. “Whether the subordinate orders gave more details of the facility, I don’t know without them here. Regardless, I don’t think it went as intended.”

  “You don’t say.” Maddie traced her hands along the wall, sweeping a finger along a trail of bullet impacts, digging into the last of the burst. “They wanted no one to find this place ever again.” She watched as a trickle of pulverized rock tumbled down from the last hole, disturbed by her hand.

  “I’ve got a ramp!” Erikson announced and stole the attention from the crumbled stones and sand. He made his way to the far side of the room where the walls fell away and the darkness continued deeper into the alien bedrock. Flipping on the light to his rifle, he scanned the passage, spying a single body crumpled up at the corner of an intersection. “One deceased…” he said, looking over the corpse. “Just a civilian worker, killed by gunshot. Looks to be unarmed.” The others followed Erikson’s lead and he continued forward, venturing down the stone ramp with nothing but the single cone of light to guide his way.

  A second beam of light swept across from Shafer as he caught up and scanned his side of the passage. “Does the Dominion have standard layouts for bunkers? Or do you think all this was installed as needed or at random?”

  “Probably a bit of both. The tooling is likely the same across most places like this, so they would be limited firstly by the terrain and the material they need to bore through,” Erikson replied. “After that, they might have considerations for ease of access and defense, but anything else would be form following function.”

  “Agreed. Any ideas what this place was used for?”

  “No idea,” Maddie offered, spying more cables snaking their way along the ceiling. “Whatever they were doing, they had some significant data feeds coming down from the surface.”

  “Door on the left,” Erikson announced and flashed his weapon across the opening. “Not much to see. Couple racks, three dead workers. Hold up.” He stepped through for a closer look before emerging back in the hall. “Two of them were soldiers. Armed, but I don’t know if they had enough warning to fight back.”

  Shafer took the front as Erikson gave the room a final glance. Ahead he caught his light reflecting in a regular pattern. “Looks like an elevator ahead,” he offered. “I suppose there’s no chance it’s still powered.”

  “Agreed. Be careful and let’s find a way down,” Maddie said. Her head still throbbed from the impact and the picture in her head of the corpse behind them. The training provided her for the MOC was seriously lacking at the moment in how to deal with such issues along with her internalized, visceral responses.

  “Stairs to the right. Heading there,” Shafer said and gave a quick glance down the shaft. “We’ve got a ways to go. This thing is deep.”

  “Then don’t waste time. Let’s keep going,” Erikson relayed.

  Circling the elevator shaft was a winding set of metal steps, little more than a scaffold, but solidly anchored to the ancient rock wall and resistant to swaying in any direction. Looking down through the metal grating which separated them from the open shaft, Maddie could barely make out the dim reflection of the elevator car far below. Without much in the way of measurement, she guessed it to be close to twenty floors deep. Her head spun at the sight and she stumbled, barely catching herself on the railing. Shafer caught her by the arm. “You’re sure you’re okay? We can go down they rest of the way if you just want to wait for us up here.”

  “No, I’m fine,” she insisted. “I didn’t come here to cheese out and hang out by the ship while you go off adventuring.” She got her feet back under her and they kept moving, keeping a watchful eye open for anything out of place. Dust had collected in the corners of the treads, and although they looked new enough, it was impossible to tell if the wear had occurred before or after the destruction in the upper supply area.

  The journey down the shaft consumed nearly an hour as each turn brought the three operators pause, attempting to balance speed with some semblance of safety. Even though the bunker appeared ready to be forgotten by the world, there was no reasonable way to know whether OSIRIS would decide to revisit it.

  Shafer stepped onto the lowest landing first and felt a crunch beneath his feet. He flashed his rifle low and spied a scattered mess of old, spent brass along with an empty pistol magazine. He picked it up and studied it under the light. The metal box was dented from a misplaced step, and specks of rust had begun to form along the corners where the paint had flaked away. “Someone put up a fight,” he said and scanned the passage that opened up before them. Twenty yards down, a lightly armored soldier’s corpse was planted on the floor by the wall.

  Maddie held her hand before her face, half attempting to block its existence from her mind. She swallowed bile at the dried pool of blood spread across the floor. “I guess that’s…better than dying in your sleep?”

  “Hell yes, it is. I don’t know about you, but I’m not planning on being offed in my sleep like a damned farm animal,” Erikson muttered. “Not for me. I ain’t checking out without a fight.” He paused and flagged his rifle down the hall ahead, spying the reflection from a polished silver object. “I think we’ve got an airlock ahead of us. Or a vault.”

  “Buried treasure!” Shafer said with a quick laugh before continuing on down the passage. As Erikson had noted, a large armored airlock had been fitted to the rock face, but through the last operation had been nearly blown off its sizeable milled hinges. It was now twisted and wrenched open, leaving enough room for its visitors to slip past. Shafer shined his rifle through first, found the next room clear, and squeezed his way over the threshold.

  Beyond was a small control room with several terminals lined up beneath a large observation window, much like a similar but scaled version of the MOC.

  14

  “I feel like I’m back home,” Shafer remarked, scanning around the control facility and taking in the familiar surroundings. “A couple generations of equipment away from us, for sure, but this doesn’t look much worse than the command floor.”

  “True,” Erikson replied as he pressed his visor against the glass wall which overlooked a deep and open space below. “There’s more on the far side, but I can’t see much from here.”

  To the right and beneath a load of displaced shelving, Maddie spied another door. She pushed the mountain of spare equipment out of the way and forced the thin, minimally insulated obstruction aside. It was far from a secure vault and simply squealed as if it hadn’t been touched in years and had been left to rust in some forgotten house. She shined her light outward, illuminating the sprawling cavern, filled with a hundred silver monoliths arranged in a regular grid over the entire space. The center had been subject to a serious blast, and in a short radius there wasn’t much left of the objects. Farther out, several more were stained black from the explosion.

  Leading down to the ground floor was another set of circular stairs, this time barely two stories tall, and Maddie forged ahead, taking them down to the ground. Each step she took upon the metal treads echoed out across the space, simultaneously displaying the immensity of the room, as well as bounding it within the realm of the possible.

  Utilizing similar construction as the rest of the facility, sweeping metal ribs were wrapped along the walls, extending from the floor and across the domed roof above. Thick pads anchored each one to the ground utilizing hardware far more suited for bridge building than simple tunnel reinforcement, and although each brace was burnished and charred from the detonation, the polished fasteners stood out among the dull stone.

  “This certainly looks like a data center,” Maddie said as she got closer to the operational center of the room, passing by row upon row of darkened servers and supercomputing systems. Carefully maneuvering to the blas
t site, she found a tower nearly bent in half by the concussive wave but otherwise had survived. “Could this have been a prototype instance of OSIRIS?” she asked the others as they filed down the stairs. “The layout looks a little too similar.”

  “Could be, but I don’t know how you’d check without finding a generator and powering it up,” Shafer said. “Judging by the look of a few of these things, I doubt they need much more than a dependable source of three-phase-current.”

  “Agreed,” Maddie said, pulling up on the twisted steel door and forcing it aside. The components on the inside had been thoroughly demolished by the blast, and she couldn’t decide whether that particular tower had been chosen for destruction based on its function or simply its central location. She let the door fall closed with a sharp bang.

  “I think someone effed this up big time,” Shafer said, pointing to a nearby tower. Mounted upon it at chest height was positioned a black package, out of place among the rest of the equipment.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “There’s a tactical explosive over here with the burn marks from a spent fuse,” he replied. “For whatever reason, it looks like the main charge didn’t detonate. It must have been stale or poorly mixed.” He looked closer. “Low chances for that; I thought those things were supposed to have a pretty long and tolerant shelf life.”

  “Slim possibility, but I’d buy it at this point,” Erikson noted. “The team that rolled through here might have pulled the last of the whole damn bad batch.” He spied another burned but unexploded charge beside him. “The one over here in the center looks like only a fraction cooked off. I wonder how many others are spread around that never detonated.”

  “Let’s not find out.” Shafer shrank down inside his suit at the thought, as if the extra inch of rubberized protection around his throat would save him if a derelict charge decided to ignite. “So what’s the plan?”

  “Can you find a power source?” Maddie asked. “I want to know what all this did. Let’s see if we can at least get one of the terminals upstairs to respond, and maybe that’ll tell us why they wanted to take it out.”

  Erikson scanned the raised floor panels obscuring what amounted to no less than miles of cabling below the surface. “Sure thing. If not a generator, maybe they’ve got a battery with some power left in it.”

  ***

  Leo had remained in place, forced up against the corner of her cell, for more than an hour before willing her doubt and self-pity to subside. She let her fear of defeat turn into determination, in a renewed focus to undo her situation. Her transport was not likely to remain for much longer, and if she wanted a chance to warn New Loeria, there was no more time to waste.

  Her surroundings were nothing modern by any definition she would call reasonable, rather the cell appeared cobbled together from old scrap, broken equipment, and the occasional malformed weld. The door was locked down tight, built from a tightly-assembled array of metal fan blades which extended beyond both sides of the door, leaving the hinges and the lock out of her reach. Making things worse was their flared profile which kept her from being able to wedge an arm around the corner.

  Above the door, a small cluster of lights illuminated the nearby space and cast long, eerie shadows along the back wall. Her first thought was that it could be a source of power; for what, she did not know as a plausible escape had yet to come to her. With a high enough current, she considered using the cable to weaken the welds across the door enough to slip through, but a mistake would leave her literally in the dark.

  A low rumble was ever present in the room, impeding her ability to hear any activity beyond the cell walls. While she could make the assumption that such a small operation would be unable to have a full staff of guards, she knew there would only be one chance to find out. Scanning at a steep angle through the bars didn’t help much as the twisting halls of the blown-out rock were out of sight in a few yards.

  The lights flickered again above the door and she decided it would have to go. The welds of the blades did not appear to be extremely robust, and she set about finding any which were cracked or weak. Leo kicked the first one to no effect and heard a distant explosion rumble down through the corridor.

  15

  The seismic jolt which rumbled through the cavern was enough for Leo to cease her assault against the messily-welded prison door and reconsider her predicament. There was a chance for an industrial accident or perhaps a damaged ship in the bay; on one side, she prayed it wasn’t her ride and on the other she wondered if it might be something, or anything, to use to her advantage.

  As the rumble continued to churn through the stony tunnels, she had less a chance of alerting the guards with her movements. She waited for any noise in the distance for a chance to strike the metal bars again.

  Another blast ignited far off in the station with similar force, and Leo planted another solid kick against one of the smaller vertical supports crossing the blades of the door. She felt it give a few degrees and bend outward from the impact, so she lined up for another hit. Waiting for another explosion to mask her plan, she paused, giving little regard to the hypothetical disaster of half the base going up in smoke. It was her advantage to take and if the facility was in danger, she knew she’d have a better chance of survival outside the stone sarcophagus of a prison cell.

  No follow-up blast met her ears. She waited, balanced and ready against the door, until an irregular stream of pops echoed down the passage outside. They grew louder, some at different pitches, and Leo quickly realized it was gunfire. Two guards sprinted down the hallway a foot away from her position, paying little mind to their prisoner who had her arms wrapped through the iron bars. She paused, in case they turned, let them pass, and doubled her effort to twist the welded door aside. Anything she could use to pry the others apart or apply as a weapon was a goal worth pursuing at the moment.

  More gunfire erupted, louder and closer this time as Leo leaned hard against the door, bending the final weld of the weakest bar free until it loosened with a snap. It clattered to the floor with Leo on top of it and she froze, suddenly paralyzed at the noise. She felt nothing approach and gathered herself back up.

  The instrument was nothing more than a small, square bar of scrap, less than two feet long but still progress, and as a tool it was better than her bare hands. Sensing her heart rate quicken, she wedged it in the next support and put her weight upon the far end in an attempt to snap the next bar free. Two more and she’d have enough space to squeeze through.

  She leaned down on the square rod, the metal bending under the strain while shots and shouts between the guards continued to fill the air. Another sustained burst of shots, far louder than those previous, rang out and sent a flash of light reflecting off the glossy stone tunnel. Leo’s time was running short and she drove onto the bar again, feeling it give and bend again toward the ground.

  Looking around the small space, there were no other options; she had to get free and she had to run. The station was under attack by some unknown force, she was sure, as there would be no other way to spur the local Dominion forces to fight. Privateers or separatists were possible but neither were a common enough occurrence to convince her that such characters were the cause of their predicament.

  If they came, she was out of time to run and had limited means to hide. Leo looked back up to see the spotlight above her head. It was the one bit of proof of her occupancy. Changing tactics, she scaled the blades of the door and ripped the bulb free, instantly blanketing the cell in darkness. Dim reflected light still found its way in through the bars, but the rest of the cell was completely occluded. Half ignoring the roaring firefight as it built outside, she slunk back to the corner of the cell, the metal rod at the ready as if she were armed with a sharpened spear. It would be less than effective, but against an unsuspecting target, it could at least buy her time.

  One final, sharp burst of shots rang out and a sprinting security guard slammed hard and headfirst against the cell do
or before rolling off and collapsing to the ground out of sight. Leo’s heart continued to pound along and was nearly as loud as her breathing. She attempted to keep it under control as footsteps approached from farther down the hallway. They crunched over the random bits of littered rock, trash, and brass, getting steadily closer to the cell. The sound became overpowered by scraping as something unseen grabbed the body of the guard and slid it back into the shadows. Her time was running out.

  A heavy click emanated from the release of the door hasp and the metal fan blades swung out from the open doorway. Leo swallowed hard, leaning forward on her makeshift weapon, prepared to lose her life while fighting for it.

  Quicker than she could blink, two weapon lights flashed into the cell, blinding her with the sudden stimulus. She froze, squinted, and ducked, unable to react to the unanticipated action in time. From the shadows, hands grabbed the metal bar and wrenched it away. Leo held fast but lost her balance, falling hard onto the stone floor. The bar slipped away from her grasp, leaving her unarmed and at the mercy of her visitors.

  For a moment she lay there, unwilling and unable to move, waiting for one of the attackers to put a boot on her neck and execute her with a shot to the brain. No such shot came, and as Leo remained motionless, the random shuffling around her dissipated to nothing. She heard a voice cut through the space.

  “Captain, you are safe. You can get up.”

  Leo opened her eyes and glanced about. The attackers were dressed in suits she was not familiar with, which resembled heavy riot equipment and face-concealing shields. They had pulled back on their weapons, leaving the lights to reflect off the ceiling above. One of them knelt down beside her and offered a hand.

  “It’s okay. We’re here for you.” The scratchy voice echoed through the mask nearest her face.

  “Why? How?” she mumbled, unable to get a clear thought processed into audible speech.