by R. A. Nargi
The thing I could do something about was saving my father.
A plan formed in my mind. I had to get the sled and get my dad. Bandala had to have some sort of medical facility for all the Yueldians who worked here. And from everything the archeobiologists knew, the Yueldians were not dramatically different from humans and they were actually fairly close to the Faiurae, biologically speaking.
But then a realization of despair hit me.
Even if I could revive my father, then what? Ana-Zhi was right. We were stuck here. For maybe fifteen years. We’d starve well before then. Or end up having to put ourselves in hibernation. Like my dad did.
That would be ironic.
The sound of Ana-Zhi Agrada’s voice snapped me out of my reverie.
“Here’s what we’re going to do.” She started to pace. “We’ll find that other landing deck. See if there is any sign that Yates went up there. Jannigan, you’re pretty good at tracking bootprints. We should be able to confirm whether or not he’s left Bandala.”
“And if he hasn’t?” Chiraine asked.
“I kick the shit out of him until he talks.”
I checked my Aura. “There’s not much time until the Fountain closes. I doubt Yates and the Mayir are hanging around. Especially since they got what they came for.”
“Agreed,” Ana-Zhi said. “But I want to make sure.”
“Then what?”
“Then we look for a comm station,” Ana-Zhi said. “A place like this would need to have a long-range communications array in order to stay in contact with Yueld. Especially during an armed conflict. We find the array and the princess here gets it running. Then we broadcast a distress call.”
“To whom?” I asked. “You said that the Rhya had disappeared.”
“I said I’m not sure what happened to them.”
“So what makes you think they’ll answer a distress call now?”
“I don’t know what was going on earlier, junior. Maybe the wardens finished up their work early and headed back home. But what I do know is that when three ships go into the Fountain and only one comes out, there’s going to be an investigation. The Rhya are going to hold open the gate for as long as they can and they will send a shitload of wardships in to make sure no one is trying to remain in here illegally and mess with the Obaswoon. We need to be ready for that. You understand?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “And I’m on board with everything. But first I am going to get my dad.”
“Of course, but we’re going to need to be careful. We know that zone’s defenses are active. We got lucky with the prowlers, but I have a feeling there’s something much worse just waiting for us.”
“If we can get to the LVX controller, I’ll shut the zone down,” Chiraine said.
“You know how to do that?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It’s an LVX. How hard can it be?”
We backtracked towards the depot and recovered the sled from where we had hidden it. As Chiraine set to work familiarizing herself with the LVX, Ana-Zhi and I assessed the other gear on the sled. It was just the basic stuff. No food or water. Some cutting tools, a magwinch, ammo boxes, thermal flares, and a few spare scanners. It didn’t look like Yates had removed anything.
“Got it,” Chiraine said. “I’m in.”
“You’re a lot quicker than Yates,” Ana-Zhi said.
“It’s a pretty primitive system. We just need to be careful to stay on it. I can see how it might be easy to accidentally wander into an active zone.”
We showed her where on the topo we needed to go and then she accessed the defensive grid for that zone. In a few minutes she was able to shut it down.
“Now we just have to figure out how to get up one level with the sled.” I quickly explained to Chiraine how we had found some narrow access shafts, but they were too small for the sled.
With Ana-Zhi looking on, Chiraine used the scanner function on the LVX to try to fill in some of the blanks on our topographics.
“This is weird,” Chiraine said.
“What?”
“You said we’re going to find your father here?” She showed me an area on the LVX’s display.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”
“Weird.” She moved to working on her Aura. “Hold on, I need to double check something.”
While Chiraine worked, Ana-Zhi turned to me and said, “We need a gravlift or a cargo shaft in order to take the sled up.”
“Shouldn’t there be something near an airlock?” I asked. “I mean, if the Yueldians had cargo they needed to store on a floor that didn’t have a landing deck, they would need some way to move it up or down.”
Ana-Zhi nodded. “Good thinking. Once the princess here is done with whatever she’s doing that’s so important, we’ll head back to the landing deck. Check around for some kind of vertical cargo shaft—at least big enough for a—”
“I knew I was right!” Chiraine said. She leaned over and showed us the info on her Aura.
“What are we looking at?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“This is where the Tabarroh Crystal was found.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
As far as I knew, the info was never shared outside of the company.
“Six months after the last mission I found a reference to the Tabarroh Crystal in node A548.”
“You found it?” I asked. “On your own?”
“Yes.”
Ana-Zhi nodded. “She’s right about the location. I remember that from our debrief.”
“So what are you saying?” I asked.
Chiraine tapped another section of the topo. “This is where your father is. Look how far away it is!”
She was right. The location of the Tabarroh Crystal was easily a kilometer away from where I had found my dad’s body.
“That doesn’t make sense.” According to Yates’s account, the security bots had overwhelmed them right after they found the Tabarroh Crystal. But that was impossible. My dad’s body was not even between the Tabarroh Crystal’s vault and the landing deck. It was in the opposite direction.
Ana-Zhi put her hand on my shoulder. “This is interesting and all, but we need to get going, Jannigan.”
She was right. The clock was ticking.
We found the gravlift fairly quickly, but it was a bit farther east than the central corridors which bisected this level and a bit north of the landing deck. Access to the shaft was through a pair of heavy doors ten meters wide. I used the donokkal to open them.
The shaft itself was about eight meters square and completely open. One misstep and I’d find myself tumbling down a couple of hundred meters into the bowels of Bandala.
“Where’s the platform?” I asked.
“Probably at the bottom,” Chiraine said. “Let me see if I can call it up here.”
“Don’t bother,” Ana-Zhi said. “We’ll take the sled. Just make sure that there’s no active security in this thing.”
Chiraine spent a few minutes using the LVX to scan the area. Finally she gave the all-clear and we began to ascend the shaft. We went up 70 meters and then I opened the doors to that level.
Ana-Zhi guided the sled out into a long cargo corridor that was a twin of the one we had just left. Soon we found ourselves at the big four-way intersection where Ana-Zhi had saved me from the prowlers. Their lifeless shells were still scattered around.
Chiraine kneeled down to examine one. “Definitely seventeenth century technology. Look at this locomotion system. And the sensors. Analog antennas. What were they thinking?”
As we passed under the big archway into the eastern depot, Chiraine saw the dead arthrodes. “Ugh. These things belong in a museum.”
“They worked just fine when they were trying to slice me to ribbons,” I said.
We left the sled and made our way to the maze of storage tanks, power relays, transformers, and thermal cores. Chiraine seemed to think that this was the power substation for this quadrant.
Once we got to t
he coupler closet with my dad, she gasped in surprise. “Oh my god, it’s really him. Sean Beck. And he is alive!”
I explained about his attempt to hook his suit up to the coupler and how I had discovered that the cable hadn’t even been connected.
“He’s very lucky,” Ana-Zhi said. “I don’t know how his suit is still running after seven years.”
“I’m almost afraid to move him,” I said.
“We don’t have a choice.”
It took a while, but we carefully extracted my dad from the closet and the complex of machinery and got him onto the sled.
Ana-Zhi checked his bio monitor display. “Everything’s still good, but I’d feel better if we could wake him up.”
“Me too.”
With the sled, we headed back to the cargo shaft. It was an easy run, but the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up the whole way. I kept expecting another squad of prowlers to round the corner and start blasting at us, but luckily we made it to the shaft and prepared to ascend again. This time, we’d be going up five more levels to where the next landing deck was—the landing deck where Yates had likely escaped from.
“You’re still checking the zones?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“Yes, mom!” Chiraine said in a perfect imitation of a teen girl. She explained that it was a bit problematic to travel vertically in a safe way because the security grids were organized by level. She had to check each one individually, and there were fifteen levels above us.
After what seemed like forever, Chiraine finally told us that the way was clear and we got ready to depart from this level.
Between the gear and my dad, there was no space for passengers, so Ana-Zhi draped the cargo netting over the sides of the sled and we all hung on for dear life.
We rose slowly and didn’t get more than twenty meters when two small drones flew into the shaft through the open doors and followed us up.
Reflexively, Ana-Zhi drew her RB, but I told her to hold up. I recognized the drones. Well, at least one of them, anyway.
The smaller of the two was my own micro drone—the one I had launched to lead the prowlers away from me. It must have escaped.
The other drone was a bit larger and it was a model that I didn’t recognize. Maybe it was Yates’s drone.
The two drones flew up and landed on the sled, perching beside one another.
“What the hell?” Ana-Zhi eased the sled to a halt.
“One of those is mine,” I said. “Is the other yours?”
“It looks like it found a friend,” Chiraine. “Weird.”
“That’s not weird at all,” Ana-Zhi said. “They’re programmed to flock together if they go out of the bounds of their command zone. The weird thing is that other drone.”
Now I was getting worried. “Could it be Yates’s? Is it a bomb?”
Ana-Zhi looked at it closer. “No, it’s not a bomb. That’s an MJ-13 D-Wing.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to us?” Chiraine asked.
“They don’t make them anymore. They haven’t for six or seven years.” She pointed to my drone. “That’s an MJ-55. The current model. Beck Salvage is pretty good at keeping our gear current.”
“I don’t get it, then,” Chiraine said. “What’s an old drone doing in Bandala?”
I thought I knew the answer to that. “It’s my dad’s.”
“No,” Chiraine said. “It couldn’t be…”
“No, Jannigan’s right,” Ana-Zhi said. “Seven years ago, we would have been using the 13s. But how the hell did it stay alive for so long?”
“No idea,” I said. “But it’s sure a loyal little contraption.”
We continued up the shaft until we reached level 12 of Bandala. Using the donokkal I opened the door to this level, and Ana-Zhi piloted the sled out into a cargo corridor. Before we jumped off the sled, I directed my hand-lamp towards the ground, looking for bootprints.
Nothing.
I didn’t think Yates had come this way, but I wanted to be sure.
“Chiraine, lock down this zone,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Already on it.”
Once the area was clear, we took the sled north along the corridor towards the central core of Bandala. It was slow going. Every ten minutes or so Chiraine had to check to make sure that we had not entered a new security zone, and if we had, she needed to shut it down.
We passed numerous side hallways and passages—most leading to depots which connected to storage galleries. The layout seemed very similar to the level we had come in.
I checked every intersection for bootprints, but didn’t find any until we were halfway to the central core.
“There!” I pointed to where the dust was disturbed. A single set of prints crossed the main corridor and headed west. “That’s Yates. I recognize his small feet.”
Carefully, we followed the bootprints. They wound down several corridors, doubled back a few times—as if Yates didn’t know where he was going—and finally emerged into a cavernous space leading to a landing deck. As far as I could tell we were in the northeast quadrant of Bandala.
This area looked much different than the entrance area of the landing deck we had come through.
“What the hell happened here?” Ana-Zhi.
The place was a wreck, with heaps of mechanical refuse, partially collapsed walls, stacks of blackened and broken equipment, and dead mechloaders that towered like ancient statues. I swept the room with the sled’s lighting array to get a better sense of where Yates had gone.
Chiraine said, “Looks like there was some sort of attack here.”
She was right. Huge metal panels and braces had been set up on the outer walls. They were partially covered by a strange organic-looking ooze. It almost looked like a lava flow.
“What do you supposed this is?” I asked.
Ana-Zhi picked at a section with her knife. “Hardened crusts of suppression foam, it looks like. They had some sort of breach here.”
I tracked Yates’s prints to an airlock door near one of the few observation windows that hadn’t been covered over.
“He went through here.”
The three of us pressed up against the window and looked out. I’m not sure what we expected to see. The landing deck was littered with lifters and gantries, power hookups, and thermal exhaust ports. But there was no Mayir ship. And no sign of Yates.
“That’s pretty,” Chiraine said.
I turned to look where she was pointing. It was a nice view of the planet Yueld—a swirly green marble floating in space.
“It kind of looks like your biklode,” I told her.
“What, you mean this one?” She pulled out a little sphere from her belt pouch.
“Are you serious? Where did that come from?”
“My life’s work is on here,” she said. “I keep it with me at all times.”
“And yet you trusted it to me.” I remembered how she passed the tiny orb to me in a kiss right before the Faiurae took her.
“Yeah, well. You have a trustworthy face,” she said with a shy smile.
“You two want to get a room, or what?” Ana-Zhi said.
Under other circumstances, I would say that might be a splendid idea. But we were running out of time.
“We should look for that comm station.”
“We can’t just wander around willy-nilly and hope that we run into it,” Chiraine said.
“You have a better idea?” Ana-Zhi said. “Or better yet a directory to this facility?”
“Let’s try to think this through logically,” I said. “What do we know about Bandala?”
“We don’t have time for this, junior.”
“I think he’s right,” Chiraine said. “Let’s break it down. We have some knowledge of Bandala from the topographics and the data we extracted from the Ambit. We know that it has twenty-one levels.”
“It’s a cube,” I offered. “Approximately one point five kilometers in every direction.”
“I’m not going to play th
is game,” Ana-Zhi said.
Chiraine continued. “We know that Bandala’s primary purpose was to secure valuable artifacts, safely away from Yueld.”
“And it’s got thousands of galleries,” I said, turning to Ana-Zhi. “Right?”
“Yes,” she sighed impatiently. “Five hundred and seventy-six galleries per level. Twenty-one levels. You do the math.”
“Twelve thousand ninety-six galleries,” Chiraine said. “But we know there has to be more than just storage space here.”
“Of course,” I said. “We saw lots of cargo facilities, corridors, loaders, hover-carts, cranes.”
“And security, power, defenses,” Chiraine said.
“And maintenance,” Ana-Zhi said. “All that cargo equipment won’t maintain itself.”
Something had just occurred to me. “Wait a second. Let’s go back to the galleries. You said that there were five hundred seventy-six galleries per level.”
“Yes,” Ana-Zhi said.
“On all twenty-one levels, right?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“What do you mean?”
Chiraine jumped in. “That’s a piece of data that was recovered years ago. It’s pretty much common knowledge.”
“Do you see what that means?”
Ana-Zhi scowled at me. “Just tell us.”
“It means that the floors are fairly uniform.”
“That’s true,” Chiraine said. “I mean, you can just look at the topos and you’ll see that. Same layout on every level. Four quadrants, a grid of access corridors. All around the core.”
“The core,” I said excitedly. “That’s the key!”
“We don’t really know what’s in the core,” Chiraine said.
“But we do!” I said. “Besides a few landing decks, most of Bandala is taken up by galleries. And that’s what’s been recorded in the Ambit.”
“You’re right!” Chiraine said. “All the boring stuff—life support, power, defense, command center, crew quarters, medical—and communications!”
“Exactly!” I said.
Ana-Zhi shook her head in disgust. “Why didn’t you just say we need to go to the core? I didn’t really need a lesson in facilities planning.”