by R. A. Nargi
“What just happened?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“We’re docked and Jannigan destroyed the hangar tunnel and bought us some time,” the Sean bot said. “Let’s not waste it.”
“Agreed,” Narcissa said.
I climbed down from the turret to find the Sean bot extending a mooring arm and securing the ship. I didn’t even know that the Vostok had a mooring arm.
“Nice shooting there, Jannigan,” Narcissa said.
“Thanks.”
We all made our way to the weapons locker to gear up.
“Sidearms only,” the Sean bot said. “We’ll likely need our hands free.”
Down in the hold we suited up, checking each other’s seals as well as our own. There was no time to outfit a sled, so we just stuffed side bags with whatever we could carry.
“Jannigan, you get to hold on to this.” The Sean bot handed me the Levirion.
“Oh goody.”
“Don’t lose it, son.”
“Yeah, no pressure.”
“Everyone check your Aura,” Chiraine said. “See the schematics?”
“Yeah,” Narcissa said. “But I’d feel a bit better if there was some atmosphere in there. And gravity.”
“There is an atmosphere,” the Sean bot said. “Rhya atmosphere. Nitrogen, argon, and carbon dioxide. In that order.”
“In other words, keep your hat on, sister,” Ana-Zhi said.
“And your magtouch activated,” I chimed in. “We probably don’t want to be floating away in there.”
“Move out,” the Sean bot said.
After disembarking from the Vostok, we found ourselves in a vast enclosed landing bay and dry dock filled with gantries, staging pads, and maintenance bays. A fair number of Rhya craft were moored on the deck. Their odd organic shapes made them look more like giant sea creatures than starships.
Ana-Zhi noticed Narcissa eyeing one of the ships. “Don’t get any ideas, stretch. You wouldn’t even be able to find the on button for the simplest of Rhya ships.”
“I can look, can’t I?”
We ducked under a cluster of conduits and cables, weaved around refueling stations and towers of scaffolding, and finally reached a thick blast door set in a circular wall at the center of the station. I was surprised to see that the door was sized for humanoids, and Chiraine explained that the Rhya didn’t build the Fountain. They just operated it.
Without a word, the Sean bot fiddled with the access control pad. He worked on it for a good half minute with no luck. Then from his side bag he removed a compact metallic cylinder the length of my hand. With a smooth motion, he pressed one end against the control pad.
“Is that a donokkal?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes.” The blast door slid open with a whoosh.
“Where’d you get it?”
“I found it on the Baeder. Come on.”
Motion-activated illumination panels winked on as we stepped into a narrow corridor.
“We should probably get the guns out,” Ana-Zhi said. “This whole place could be swarming with security bots.”
“Doubtful,” Chiraine said.
“Oh yeah? Why’s that, princess?”
“They don’t need security. Who would be crazy enough to raid a Rhya station?”
She had a point. What I wanted to know was how come there was still power if the reactor was down.
“The station is running off auxiliary power,” the Sean bot said. “It’s not enough to actually open a jump gate, but it’s enough to keep the lights on.”
The corridor led us into a room which came alive once we entered it. Without warning, nozzles emerged from the walls and ceiling and sprayed us with a thick foam.
Chiraine shrieked in alarm, but Ana-Zhi grabbed her and calmed her down. “Relax. It’s just disinfectant. Standard procedure in a place like this.”
Jets of gas blew the foam from our suits as we proceeded through the room. Then a series of bright flashes of light followed us as we moved towards the far end of the room, where another blast door indicated the way out.
After a few moments, the door opened with an automated whoosh.
“At least we’re clean now,” Narcissa said.
We trudged into a corridor and made our way past various machine shops and storage rooms. In one of them, I saw lines of unmoving repair magnatae, standing like statues in the dim light of the store room’s utility panels.
“Look, Sean, your kinfolk are having a picnic in there,” Ana-Zhi jeered.
“Too soon, Ana-Zhi,” I said. “Way too soon.”
Chiraine grinned at me and gave me a comforting hug.
After five minutes of winding our way through a maze of corridors, we reached the inner spire which, according to the schematics, was the central core of the station.
“That might be a lift,” I said, pointing to a set of doors recessed in the central spire.
“It is,” the Sean bot said. “A maglev lift, judging from its energy signature.”
Narcissa managed to use the controls to summon a pod. “You think it’s safe?”
“No reason why it wouldn’t be,” the Sean bot said.
Soon we were descending into the bowels of the Fountain’s control station.
I hoped we could ride this lift all the way to the bottom of the station where the primary reactor and power core was, but no such luck.
The pod slowed and then stopped. Last stop, I guess.
According to the schematics on my Aura, we still had 300 meters to go in order to reach the primary reactor, but now we had to head back out away from the inner core and find another route down.
As we turned a corner, I caught sight of something lying on the ground a half dozen meters away.
It was a body. A Rhya body to be exact, dried and shriveled, like a fish that had accidentally jumped from its tank and landed on the floor while no one was at home.
“Poor thing,” Chiraine said.
“Yeah, I hope it didn’t suffer.” I felt my jaws clench as anger flushed through me. This was a brutal attack by the Mayir. And completely unprovoked. We needed to bring them to justice. No matter what.
We found a dozen more bodies on this level. Some were in the corridor, others were crowded next to an emergency exit that led to a much smaller lift that ran along the outer edge of the station. We ended up using that lift to descend a hundred meters through what the Sean bot thought was a systems control core.
“We’re getting closer,” he said. “Below us should be energy storage. We’re going to have to find a shielded route; otherwise you’ll need to carry me out.”
That was true. Intense energy radiation from the station’s power accumulator cells might fry us all.
“Here we go.” Narcissa had located another access shaft, and from the look of the shielding on the door, it should provide us safe passage through the energy storage levels.
We climbed down into it, descending a metal ladder.
“You okay?” I asked Ana-Zhi. It looked like she was still favoring her left side.
“For now,” she said.
“I can carry you, Z,” the Sean bot said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know what would be worse—the shame of being carried by the likes of you—or falling into a reactor.”
Thankfully, we all made it down in one piece.
At the bottom of the access shaft was a utility room filled with maintenance bots. The Sean bot inspected one of them and then informed us that they were automated core sweepers.
“Not dangerous,” he said.
“I told you,” Chiraine said.
A locked blast door was the only way out of the utility room. The Sean bot used his donokkal to unlock the door and immediately my suit registered a blast of cold air.
Chiraine had noticed it as well. “We just had a twenty-five-degree temperature drop.”
“Cooling units for the primary reactor,” the Sean bot said. “We’re very close now.”
Ana-Zhi stopped in her
tracks. “I have to say, I’m having some second thoughts about this. Maybe you should take it down there and we’ll wait for you here.”
The Sean bot shook his head. “We have no idea what the area of effect is. It might just be a few meters. In that case, I’d be free but the rest of you would be stuck here with a bunch of angry Mayir.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” I said. “C’mon, Ana-Zhi. As you like to tell me: grow a pair.”
“Very funny.”
As we headed back in the direction of the central shaft, the temperature continued to drop. We were still within the operating range of our exosuits, so I wasn’t worried. Yet.
“So what do we do once we get to the reactor?” I asked the Sean bot.
“What do you mean?”
“We need to turn it on, don’t we?”
“That’s the idea, son.”
“You know how to do that?”
“Conceptually, yes.”
I rolled my eyes. My dad could be so pompous. “And how are we planning to get juice inside your little pyramid? I didn’t see any sockets, did you?”
“I’m not really sure.”
“Induction, maybe?” Narcissa asked.
“Could be,” the Sean bot said. “You know what they say about advanced technology.”
“Magic,” Chiraine said.
“Exactly.”
That didn’t make me feel any better.
It turned out that we hadn’t made as much progress as we thought. We must have missed an access panel somewhere along the way, because we reached a dead end and then spent a half hour wandering around, squeezing our way between massive heat exchangers, big coolant canisters, and thermal regulator units. Eventually, Narcissa spotted another maintenance tunnel which snaked its way across to the far edge of this level, then dropped down into another shaft.
But before we made it down to the next floor, a loud boom rocked the shaft.
“What the hell was that?” Ana-Zhi yelled.
“Whatever it is, it was close,” Narcissa said.
“Sounded to me very much like a breaching charge,” the Sean bot said. “Looks like the Mayir are finally getting off their asses. We need to step up the pace.”
“How did they even know where we were?” Chiraine asked.
“Thermal scans, maybe,” Narcissa said. “Who knows?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just move.”
The shaft ended in a dark space. There were no emergency lights or directional illumination like in all the corridors we had encountered so far.
“You think the power’s out down here?” I asked while turning on my helmet lights.
“I don’t think so,” Narcissa said. “We don’t have time to check, but it wouldn’t make sense that only part of the station would have a power loss.”
The beams on my helmet illuminated a horizontal tunnel that ran back towards the central shaft. I kept my eyes peeled for any indication that this area had power, but didn’t see any status lights, moving ventilation blowers, surveillance scanners, or anything else.
“Hold up,” the Sean bot said. “Everyone freeze for a second.”
He squatted down and placed the flat of his hand on the floor.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Vibrations.”
“From the Mayir?”
He shook his head. “I think the reactor is right below us. And it’s running.”
That would be surprising.
“What are we waiting for?” Chiraine asked.
“Exactly,” the Sean bot said.
I still wasn’t sure what I expected to find once we located the primary reactor. Would the reactor be able to activate the jump gate? Or would it activate the Levirion? And how did it manage to turn itself on?
“This way!” Narcissa had discovered a hatch in the floor. As she pulled it open, a blast of air blew through. I caught a glimpse of a wide open space below us, illuminated by an expanse of dim pinpoint lights that looked like a star field. At least the power was on down there.
“In, but be careful,” the Sean bot said.
I activated the EVS overlay on my helmet display and then climbed down onto a metal catwalk suspended a dozen meters above a battery of power core modules, all set into the ground and connected by hundreds of meters of coupling lines. Looking around, it appeared that we were inside of an immense sphere.
Another explosion from somewhere above us rocked the superstructure, swaying the catwalk dangerously. We all grabbed on for dear life.
“That was definitely closer,” Ana-Zhi said.
“I’m concerned that we could be trapped here,” Narcissa said. “Wherever here is.”
“This is the reactor,” the Sean bot said. “We made it. JJ, if you will?”
He reached out his hand.
“What? The Levirion?”
“Yes, the Levirion.”
“Right.” I rifled through my bag until I found the artifact. “Here you go.”
The Sean bot tucked the Levirion into his own bag and said, “Wish me luck.” Then he ran full tilt and vaulted over the edge of the catwalk.
I expected to hear the crash of a combat bot accidentally dismembering itself from the impact of falling three stories or so, but the Sean bot managed to use its magtouch to slide down the wall of the sphere like some robotic parkour athlete. Impressive.
He scampered around the floor of the reactor, probably getting his bearings and figuring out what was what. But I was getting a bad feeling about the Mayir closing in on us.
“Keep an eye on him,” I told the rest of the team.
“Where are you going?” Narcissa asked.
“Like you said, I need to make sure that there’s not a squad of commandos bearing down on us right now.”
I jumped up and caught the edge of the hatch, then pulled myself up through it and into the dark corridor. Scrambling to my feet, I snapped my RB out of its holster and thumbed it on.
I listened carefully, but didn’t hear much beyond some distant mechanical sounds somewhere above me. Then I crept through the dark corridor until I reached the vertical shaft.
Should I go back or keep investigating? I didn’t want to get too separated from the others, but I also didn’t want to be a victim of a surprise attack.
I decided to continue up, climbing the shaft, towards the illuminated section of the maintenance tunnel. I moved slowly, careful not to let anything knock against the metal hand rails of the ladder.
From above, I heard a distinct clang. Yeah, that wasn’t far away at all.
I emerged into the chamber with all the cooling units and hid behind a stack of coolant canisters as tall as I was. Movement caught my eye and I peeked out to see a Mayir legionnaire wearing a jetpack affix a metal cylinder the size of a beer can to one of the central shaft’s bracing beams. What the hell was he doing?
“Ana-Zhi?” I hissed over the comm. “Come in.”
“Yeah, what’s going on? You didn’t get lost, did you?”
“I have eyes on a Mayir legionnaire.”
“Where?”
“One level up.”
“Have they seen you?”
“Negative.”
“Get back down here.”
“I just want to see what he’s up to.”
“Jannigan, get back down here!”
I muted the comm and took a deep breath. I really needed to see what that thing he had was. As I moved closer to get a better look, another legionnaire rounded the corner and spotted me. He cried out in alarm, just as I dropped to one knee and took a shot at him.
Unfortunately he ducked behind a heat exchanger tower and my blast ricocheted off into the darkness. The first legionnaire had probably heard the warning over his comm, because he was nowhere to be seen.
This was bad.
I wished I had a drone or something, because visibility was horrible in this maze of cooling units. I didn’t know if I was being surrounded or what.
I couldn’t take the chanc
e. I had to keep on moving.
My stomach rolled into a knot. Which way?
I decided to see if I could get back down into the maintenance tunnel. At least there I wouldn’t be so exposed.
Pressing myself up against one of the thermal regulators, I eased my way back towards the maintenance tunnel. But before I could even get halfway there, the two legionnaires flew over my head, propelled by their jet packs. They didn’t appear to be armed, but even if they were, they didn’t try shooting at me. It was strange, because they must have seen me.
I activated my magtouch unit, leapt up on the closest cooling unit, and scrambled up the side of it. From my new vantage point I could see the two legionnaires flying towards a gaping hole in the side of the station’s outer hull.
I didn’t get it. Why were they retreating?
When I re-established the comm link, Ana-Zhi began to curse me out.
“Hold up a second!” I said. “This is important. I saw another. Two hostiles. With jetpacks.”
“Jetpacks?”
“Yeah, and a big freaking hole in the side of the station where they breached the hull.”
“What?!”
“Stay tuned, I’m going to investigate.”
“Be careful, Jannigan!” Chiraine said.
“Always.”
I climbed back down and did a quick circuit of the area, checking for more Mayir. I didn’t find any, but I did find what they had left.
A bomb.
16
The cylinder appeared to be a fusion bomb with a magnetic positioning bolt and a small control panel set into one end. Of course the triggering mechanism had been locked.
This was bad. Really bad.
I didn’t waste any time trying to free the bomb.
“Guys, we have a situation here.”
I quickly explained what I was looking at.
The Sean bot’s voice cut in the comm. “Jannigan, do you see a timer on the control panel?”
“Negative.”
“It’s probably broadcasting its data on an encrypted channel, then. Either that or there’s no timer. They’ll just detonate when ready.”
“I’m afraid to mess with the control panel.”
“You should be. Just move away from it.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.” I backed away.
