“It’s a door, all right,” he said, moving the groundcar forward again and steering us over to run right along the edge of the forest. Any advanced surveillance would see us, but more casual scrutiny might not. “And there are tracks in front. Can’t tell how recent they are.”
Jahelia put the zoomlens up to her eye again. “Not long ago. The wind would have scoured them away with all this loose sand and dust.”
I looked a question at Sedmamin and he raised his eyebrows. “Really, I don’t know,” he said. “If there are recent tracks, I guess we’re in the right place. There was nothing in the files to indicate that whatever was here had been moved.”
Pita confirmed, “No, there was nothing like that. I mean, we had to figure out that the references in the files even were about a secret base, so it’s not like they were going out of their way to record everything. But if they noted these coordinates, then it makes sense that if they’d moved, they would have recorded those coordinates, too.”
“Unless this base was discovered, and they didn’t want to take any chance with the next one,” Lanar mused.
“Well, we’re not going to find out anything sitting here. Just stay alert, the closer we get,” I said. My ankle still throbbed, making me cranky, and I didn’t feel like getting blown up twice in one day. I glanced at the sky. Still no word from the Tane Ikai. I didn’t want to think about their silence, or why they weren’t already here. When I’d been knocked unconscious by PrimeCorp operatives on the planet Rhea, the little monitor that Baden had surreptitiously installed in my ID implant had alerted the ship right away and the crew had come to rescue me. I’d certainly been knocked out in the drone explosion. Had the ship not received the same message this time?
I pushed these worrisome thoughts away and concentrated on the mountain looming ahead of us as we sped along in the shadow of the forest.
Nothing seemed to notice us. Not while we kept to the treeline, not when we stopped to study the mountain from a mere hundred metres away. Not when, throwing caution to the winds, we drove the groundcar under the canopy of trees for cover, and left it to creep cautiously on foot to that big camouflaged door. I was still limping, but the painkiller function had finally kicked in. I could put almost my full weight on the ankle now, so maybe it hadn’t been broken.
The lack of security around the presumed base was puzzling. The two drones that had attacked us had been high-tech defence, although I’d assumed that they were being controlled by an actual person who had us on a screen somewhere. It was possible, I thought now, they’d been completely automated, programmed to attack intruders who crossed some invisible line and to follow certain assault paths until either the intruders or the drones were destroyed. If the base was still operative, it didn’t feel like enough security.
We stood just out of sight of the doors, clinging close to the rocky side of the mountain. Sedmamin’s annoyance had turned to agitation. “This doesn’t feel right,” he’d said as we got closer to the mountain with no sign of further interference. “They wouldn’t do this—leave it unguarded. It must be a trap.”
Jahelia shook her head and murmured, “You’re looking at it the wrong way around. If this is a PrimeCorp installation, and they’re working with the Chron, who do they need to protect it from?”
Lanar nodded. “Because no-one else from Nearspace was ever able to get here before this—”
“And presumably there’s no need to protect it from their business partners, the Chron. If there are no other known races that even come to this system, then what’s the point in having resources dedicated to security?”
“But what about the drones?” Sedmamin asked. “They were pretty determined to stop us.”
Jahelia shrugged. “Insurance. If someone did stumble in here by accident—someone they didn’t want snooping around—the drones are a good deterrent. And a good early warning system. They were probably programmed to deploy if anyone approached the mountain from any direction and got close enough.”
I peered around an outcrop of rock to look up at the big double doors. They were as tall as those on the Tane Ikai’s cargo pod bays and almost as wide. Something big could move in and out of here. The sandy ground in front looked windswept, but crisscrossed by discernible wheel tracks. Some of the loose rock and sand almost looked as though it had been kicked around in a scuffle, but that might be just my imagination. The overhang of rough stone felt very heavy, looming twenty feet above our heads. It protruded far out over the doors at its thickest point, casting the area below into heavy shadow even in the bright sunshine of the day.
“So, if the drones are an early warning system—how come no-one has been warned?”
Jahelia shouldered her plasma rifle. “That’s the next question,” she said. “And the answer is behind these doors.”
“All right, let’s have a look,” Lanar said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out something small, which he clipped to the lapel of his jacket. “Just so you all know, I’m recording what happens from here on in.” Then he stepped around to survey the front of the doors. “Control panel on the right-hand side,” he reported. “Looks like standard PrimeCorp technology. Sedmamin, Sord, this might be why we brought you along,” he said, throwing a grin back at us.
“There are lots of reasons you brought me along,” Jahelia said, “and most of them are more important and interesting than opening doors. But I’ll give it a try if you say please.”
“Let Sedmamin give it a try first,” Lanar said. “And we’ll save your talents for later.”
Jahelia grinned at Lanar and I felt a little off-balance. Were they flirting with each other?
“This is not going to work,” Sedmamin said, but he followed Lanar over to the control panel. A red light burned weakly above a biometric pad and an implant reader. He stood looking at the implant reader for a long moment, and I could guess what he was thinking. Using that reader might alert PrimeCorp immediately where he was, whether the panel allowed him to open the door or not. Using it could be a big risk.
“You can let Jahelia try first,” I told him.
He sighed. “No use. I don’t think the clearances I set up for her would work here—since I didn’t even know that this existed. I’m doubtful even mine will, but I suppose it’s worth a try. They might have been lazy and just copied permissions wholesale.” He met my gaze. “Just remember that you’re supposed to protect me, all right?”
“I’ll do everything I can.”
“All right then.” He held his forearm against the implant reader and the red light began a slow blink. Then he put his index finger into the biometric reader, all the way to the second knuckle. The red light shifted to yellow and blinked faster. I don’t know about anyone else, but I held my breath.
The light flashed green and an audible clunk sounded somewhere inside. With a whoosh of air like a quick intake of breath, the doors parted and began to slide sideways into the mountainside.
I DON’T THINK any of us really expected it to work. Sedmamin started visibly when the doors parted, and Jahelia hefted her plasma rifle to an easier firing position. Lanar pulled the pistol from the back of his waistband.
No alarms sounded; no-one appeared in the doorway.
“This is weird,” Jahelia said. “I don’t trust it.”
“Me neither,” I said. “Stay put for a minute.” Even though the ship still hadn’t responded to my earlier messages, I sent another one, letting them know we were heading inside the mountain. Just in case they were receiving.
“That’s all we can do,” I said. “Let’s see what’s inside.”
The space beyond the doors looked like an abandoned loading dock. Dimly lit, the room was a couple of stories tall and perhaps twenty metres square. On the back wall, another implant reader guarded a second set of doors as tall as the outer ones. A few large pieces of machinery sat idle next to the walls, and the concrete floor bore multiple greasy-looking stains. Despite the meagre tracks or markings in the sand outside,
there were plenty in here. Groundcars and other vehicles had moved about, been parked, and come and gone, leaving their marks on the floor. Likewise, many booted feet.
“They go to a lot of trouble to erase most of the evidence of activity outside,” Lanar said.
“Or it’s easily swept away by the wind,” I said. “It’s the same question as the security—why go to any trouble at all when there’s little likelihood of anyone finding the place?”
Jahelia had the rifle up, sighting around the room, but the place was quite empty. “Will we see what’s behind the next door? Not much happening here.”
Sedmamin stared around the space with a look of mild distaste. I imagined that as Chairman, he’d rarely had occasion to visit dirty rooms where physical work happened.
Then I started to notice things I hadn’t before. “Lanar, Jahelia,” I said in a quiet voice, “take a close look around this room and tell me what you see?”
Jahelia frowned at me but swung her head around, looking the room over. “Huh,” she said.
One of the vehicles had a shattered windscreen, cracks spiderwebbing out from a central hole. Another had a similarly damaged side window. One rested on a flat tire. Looking up from some shards of glass on the sand-strewn floor, I saw why the lighting was low—several of the HPS lights had been damaged.
“Look at this,” Lanar said, and knelt to touch a fresher-looking stain on the floor. His fingers came away stained sticky and dark.
“Blood?”
He nodded. “Looks like PrimeCorp should have spent more on security after all.”
Lanar’s discovery lent the quiet a suddenly discomfiting edge.
Wordlessly we followed Lanar and Jahelia to the doors at the back of the space. Jahelia stepped aside and motioned Sedmamin to the implant reader with a flourish. “Do the honours, Chairman.”
Sourly, Sedmamin repeated the ritual that had opened the outer doors. The lights went through their sequence again, but this time continued to flash yellow, never moving to green. A screen glowed to life, with six input blocks. Sedmamin stared at it.
Lanar looked at me and I shrugged. “Higher security for this door? Any PrimeCorp ID might get you in the front door, but you need top clearance to go further?”
“Sounds likely. Chairman, you have a guess?”
He frowned at the input screen. “Six-digit codes are not a norm. All PrimeCorp passcodes are either five or twelve.”
Jahelia said, “What about that gadget Baden gave you? Just because it didn’t work on the drones doesn’t mean it’s useless.”
Damne. I’d hoped no-one was going to ask about that. I shook my head. “Crushed in the accident. I left the remains back there.”
Jahelia frowned. “I might have been able to do something with it.”
“You didn’t see it. It was smashed beyond recognition. A section of the drone landed on it.”
“All right,” Lanar said. He turned to Jahelia. “Anything your AI friend can do here?”
She pursed her lips. “Pita? I doubt it.”
“Hey!” Pita piped up. “I resent that.”
“Oh, calm down. I just meant that if my clearance is no good—”
“But you didn’t download all those tip-top-top-secret files into your memory, did you?” the AI asked with a definite smugness. “I’ve actually compiled a database of codes, passwords, and data fragments that might be access codes, from those files. So, you might at least let me make the attempt.”
Jahelia rolled her eyes. “Okej, okej. You’re not contractually obliged to live up to your name.”
Lanar and Sedmamin looked blank, but I knew Pita’s name was an acronym for pain-in-the-ass. That wasn’t what made me smile, though. It was how irritating Jahelia Sord obviously found the AI, especially considering that it was based on her own personality.
“Try this,” Pita said, and rhymed off a six-digit alphanumeric string. Sedmamin keyed it in, in case there was a biometric aspect to the keypad and it was reading his fingerprint as well.
Nothing happened.
Pita offered a second code, but it bore no better results.
“How about this one, then?”
Sedmamin huffed but punched in the six digits.
This time a deep boom echoed from the other side of the doors, and like the first set, they parted in the centre. Still no alarms sounded and the place remained deserted of everyone but us.
“This is eerie,” Lanar said, and I had to agree.
But sheer awe replaced the mystery of the situation when we moved carefully to the opening in the doors and looked into the room beyond. It lay in darkness, but as we moved cautiously through the open doors, motion-activated lights sprang to life around the room, illuminating the looming dark shape within. I heard Lanar suck in a whistling breath between his teeth.
It was a Chron ship.
It stood on an open grid metal platform perhaps six feet above the floor of the cavern, some of the high-powered lights trained directly on it. A single-pilot fighter from the Chron War era—Cerevare Brindlepaw had shown us images of ships from the time, when she travelled with us. It was not completely intact—parts of the fuselage had been removed, exposing the inner workings of the craft, and the body of the ship itself had been separated into three segments; nose, midsection, and aft. Scattered around the room were diagnostic consoles, minutely dismantled electronics, and piles of other mechanical parts that could only have come from the inside of the ship.
“Merde,” Jahelia Sord said, a hint of admiration in her voice. “They had a Chron ship, and they took it apart.”
“Had it for a long time,” Lanar said. “This is a relic from the Chron War.”
We moved toward it with halting steps, awed by the sheer improbability of its presence. Sedmamin stopped at a distance from the ship, glaring at it with his hands on his hips. I could guess what he was thinking—this should have been his secret. Jahelia crossed to a nearby computer console, intent, I guessed, on finding out what data it held. But Lanar and I both kept going, to stand beside the section of fuselage on the floor. Lanar put a hesitant hand on the sleek metal.
“This is a piece of Nearspace history,” he said, and I nodded.
“The Chron War always seemed so long ago,” I said, “but lately I feel like it’s been running to catch up with us.”
“I think it’s been closer than we thought for a long time. Now we have to make sure it doesn’t catch up.”
“This data goes back . . . decades,” Jahelia said. I glanced over and saw that she had her datapad—and therefore, Pita—sitting on the console. No doubt the AI had helped her gain access. Sometimes I thought Pita could be the most dangerous thing PrimeCorp had ever produced, and they didn’t even know it.
“Copy what you can,” Lanar said. “I’m going to get a closer look.” He pulled himself up onto the platform and peered into the cockpit of the ship.
I caught Sedmamin’s eye and he shook his head vehemently. “No. I did not know.”
I believed him.
But while Lanar and Jahelia were distracted by our findings, I noted that there were two more doors at the back of the room. I didn’t think we should ignore them.
“Give me your laser pistol,” I said to Jahelia.
“What makes you think I have one?”
I simply looked at her, and she grinned and pulled it from her boot, handing it over without further comment. With it in hand, I went to the leftmost door and listened at it. Only silence. Carefully, I put a hand on the handle and eased it open. A light clicked on and startled me, but it revealed only the stark utility of a washroom. The room was empty of inhabitants and I relaxed.
I closed the door as Lanar jumped down from the platform with a rueful grin. “Sorry, I got a little swept away by the past, there,” he said. “Good thing you’re still thinking.”
I was about to suggest we check the other door when it opened and a voice stopped us in our tracks.
“Admiral Mahane, how nice of you t
o drop by. And you brought the traitor with you.” Admiral Antar Mauronet stepped into the room and shut the other door behind him. More shocking than his sudden appearance and the wild, almost manic look on his face was the handgun he held, trained directly at Alin Sedmamin.
I WISHED I’D stayed behind the shadowed tail of the Chron ship a moment longer.
“Admiral Mauronet,” Lanar said easily, although I knew his mind must, like mine, be racing. Where had the admiral come from, and what was he doing here? Was he responsible for the damage—and the spilled blood—in the outer room?
“Good to see you in one piece,” Lanar continued. “You followed that Chron ship into this system?”
“Lower your weapon,” Mauronet said, ignoring Lanar. I realized he was looking directly at Jahelia.
“I don’t think so,” she said lazily. She still stood beside the computer console, but her plasma rifle was up and pointed directly at the admiral. “I don’t know you or what you’re doing here, so I think a nice safe standoff is how we’ll play this for now.”
“Was there anyone here when you arrived?” Lanar continued, as if the little by-play between Mauronet and Jahelia hadn’t happened.
“Just some technicians,” Mauronet snapped. “I’ve put them all in detention until I can figure out what’s going on here. PrimeCorp has a lot to answer for.” He spoke to Lanar, but he kept his eyes on Jahelia.
“Where’s your crew?” Lanar asked. He hadn’t moved, just stood casually where he’d stopped, but he still held his own laser pistol—he’d had it out since before we entered the outer room. He’d relaxed his arm so that hand hung just a little toward the back of his leg, making the gun less obvious from where Mauronet stood.
Mauronet motioned with his head to door he’d just come through. “I have officers guarding the detainees in the offices back there. I sent the ship on a scouting mission to look for a way back to Nearspace. Can’t get the wormhole to open with a standard skip drive. They’ll be back soon to get us,” he said, eyeing Lanar coldly. “What are you doing here, in a secret base filled with illegally held technology, and him?”
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