Quantum Dark: The Classic Sci-fi Adventure (The Star Rim Empire Adventures Book 1)

by R. A. Nargi

  17

  After Chiraine made sure the zone was clear, we retraced our steps through the large ruined hallway, and then back west towards the central corridor. Then we headed north towards the core.

  If the corridor hadn’t been so dimly lit, I’m sure we could have seen the core, since it was only a few hundred meters away.

  “Easy,” Ana-Zhi warned. “I don’t like the looks of this.”

  “I’ve shut down the grid in this zone,” Chiraine said. “We’re clear to proceed.”

  As we drew closer, we could hear the hum of the life support and ventilation systems. I noticed that there was a lot less dust and debris in the corridor as we got closer to the core. I wondered if there were maintenance bots that worked in this area.

  Finally we got close enough to get a good look at what was in the center of Bandala. It was a cylindrical tower ringed by a suspended walkway with various pressure doors and hatches running around its perimeter.

  “One of these doors has to lead to some sort of lift,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “Probably the one right in front of us,” Chiraine said.

  “Stay here,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Just a quick walk around the perimeter.”

  She was back in a few minutes. “We’re at the intersection of four wide corridors. I’m fairly sure this is the absolute center of Bandala.”

  “I guess that’s why they call it ‘the core,’ right?” Chiraine said.

  I used the donokkal on the pressure door in front of us. It opened into a ten-meter-wide hallway leading into the heart of the core. And as we stepped in, an array of bright lights along the top of the walls winked on, illuminating the hallway.

  “That’s better,” Ana-Zhi said. “It’s almost like they are welcoming us.”

  “I’ll take welcoming lights over welcoming security bots any day,” I said.

  The hallway was plated with large panels and ran north into a central circular room, fifty meters in diameter. There was a large gravlift in the center and numerous doors set in the walls of both the hallway and the chamber. Lots of options here.

  We spent the next fifteen minutes or so opening doors and peeking in rooms at random, but didn’t see anything that appeared to be a comm station. There were plenty of machine shops, fabrication bays, parts storage, and bot maintenance stations.

  “Would they have grouped different functions on different levels?” I asked. “You know, like medical on one floor, the command center on another?” I knew that was contrary to how most space stations were designed, but I also knew that Bandala had been built 700 years ago by a race who maybe didn’t share the same design principles as humans.

  “It’s possible,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “More than possible,” Chiraine said, “Think about it. Would you bury a communications array under a kilometer of metal?”

  “No,” I said. “I’d put it as close as possible to the hull.”

  “You know what else they would put close to the hull?” Chiraine asked.

  Ana-Zhi snorted. “More guessing games? Really?”

  “Wouldn’t it make sense to have some kind of emergency shuttlecraft or lifeboat or something at the bottom of the core?”

  “Sure,” Ana-Zhi said. “There might be something like that. But even if we find some old shuttle, chances are it won’t be space-worthy.”

  She was right. Bots and enviro systems could last a millennium but even a fairly simple drive needed to be maintained regularly. Still, it was worth checking out if we ran into a lifepod or something.

  “We’ll keep our eyes open for something like that,” I said.

  “In the meantime…” Ana-Zhi looked at the gravlift. “Which way is it going to be? All the way up or all the way down?”

  “I vote for down,” I said. “Psychologically it seems closer to the planet.”

  “Down it is.”

  We had our procedure for traveling through vertical shafts down pat: force the door open with the donokkal, disable the security grid, hang on to the cargo net, and ride the sled to our destination. Which, in this case, was the very bottom of the gravlift shaft.

  Fortunately the lift’s platform was somewhere above us, and we were able to travel the eleven levels without dealing with any obstructions. We still had to take it slow, because roughly every four levels, we had to stop and allow Chiraine to clear the next zone.

  Finally we arrived in a circular chamber like the one we had just left.

  “Would it have killed the Yueldians to put up a sign or two?” Ana-Zhi grumbled. “This Way to Communications Station.”

  “Where’s the challenge in that?” I said.

  We set to work exploring the area and checking doors, being careful to stay together and within sight of the sled. There were dozens of doors along the four main corridors, and as Ana-Zhi had noted, they were all unmarked. Some of them led to other hallways; some led to rooms. This would take forever.

  “Hey!” Chiraine shouted. “The drone! It’s just took off!”

  I looked where she was pointing and saw the old MJ-13 speeding off down one of the side corridors.

  That was strange.

  “Don’t just stare at the blasted thing!” Ana-Zhi said. “Follow it!”

  I activated the magtouch repulsors on my boots—just a bit—to give me some extra speed, and raced after the little drone. It weaved in and out, around corners, through passageways, and finally stopped and hovered in front of a door. The door was ajar, but its controls had been torn open. By a laser cutter from the looks of it. The tool had been tossed nearby.

  “Someone was pretty eager to get into this room,” Ana-Zhi huffed, trying to catch her breath as she jogged up behind me.

  “Where’s Chiraine?”

  “With the sled.”

  Ana-Zhi picked the cutter up and inspected it. “Definitely one of ours. Human, I mean. Not Yueldian. But old.”

  “How old?” I asked.

  “Hard to say. It’s got an old-fashioned boost inductor. Could be thirty or forty years ago.”

  “So from one of the first three missions?”

  “Probably,” she said. “But it’s weird. I never heard of an expedition going this deep into Bandala.”

  I glanced over at the little drone, which was still bobbing in place in front of the door. “I think what’s weird is that this drone seems to be guiding us here.”

  “Agreed, that is weird. But we need to check it out.” Ana-Zhi contacted Chiraine and filled her in on what we had discovered.

  “The sled won’t fit through that door,” Ana-Zhi told Chiraine. “You’re going to need to stay with it.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re running the LVX. I need you to keep scanning the area.”

  She reluctantly agreed.

  Ana-Zhi and I squeezed through the door, weapons drawn. As we moved, the drone followed us into the room. I wondered why it wasn’t leading the way like it had a few moments ago. Maybe it was my imagination, but the little drone looked scared.

  We found ourselves in what appeared to be a galley, with Yueldian-sized tables and chairs. Various cabinets and storage units lined the walls, and on one of the tables were what appeared to be eating implements and several piles of a dusty powder.

  “Mmmm, looks delicious,” Ana-Zhi said. “We probably could reconstitute that if you’re hungry.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  Two doors led out of the galley. We could either go north or continue east. When I went to examine the east door, I saw that it had been welded shut. I called Ana-Zhi over. “What do you think of this?”

  “Something valuable’s in there,” she said.

  “Or something dangerous.”

  “We could get that laser cutter and find out.”

  “I don’t think we have time.” According to the chron module on my AuraView, the Fountain would be opening in five hours and closing nine hours after that. We were right down to t
he wire, and I had a sinking feeling that we wouldn’t make it. I pushed the thought from my mind and checked the north door.

  This was some sort of storage room, stacked with crates. Probably foodstuffs, long since turned to dust—like whatever was left on the table.

  With the drone following along, we continued through a door leading north which opened into a long room filled with rows of what appeared to be beds—although these beds were a meter longer than any bed that I had ever slept in.

  “Yeah, even Sky Reavers need to sleep and eat,” Ana-Zhi said.

  There were two exits out of this habitation module—east and west. To the west, through a pressure door, was some kind of life-support bay filled with a row of cryocapsules, again sized for Yueldians. I walked along the row, peering inside of each capsule. Even though they were all empty, I was getting pretty creeped out.

  “That’s strange,” I said. “Why would they need cryocapsules on a fortress?”

  “No idea,” Ana-Zhi said. “A lot of this stuff just doesn’t make any sense.”

  There was another life-support bay to the east of the room with the beds. It also had a row of cryocapsules, but one of them was missing.

  “What the hell?” Ana-Zhi poked at the floor with her boot.

  On the ground there was a clear outline of where the capsule had been. Severed power, data, and coolant cables poked through a broken hole in the floor. It was like someone had just plucked the capsule off the ground and whisked it away somewhere. But these things were huge. They probably weighed five hundred kilos and would be a tight fit getting through the doorways.

  Ana-Zhi thought maybe the unit had been out for repairs when Bandala was abandoned, but that seemed like a stretch to me.

  “No, there’s something really strange about this,” I said.

  “We’re not here to solve mysteries. We’re here to find a goddamn comm station. Let’s keep going.”

  The next room had racks of electronics equipment—all smashed to bits. Broken display screens and control panels. Toppled data boxes and workstations. I felt my gut twist. Was this the comm room?

  “Do you think…?” I trailed off.

  Ana-Zhi picked through some of the debris, then looked around the room. “No, this isn’t what we’re looking for. It’s too small. This is some sort of data analysis bay. The princess would be right at home here—if it wasn’t all broken to shit.”

  “I heard that!” Chiraine said, over our comm channel.

  “Yeah, well, nothing to get your hopes up about, sweetie,” Ana-Zhi aid. “We’re just ankle deep in junk here.”

  We continued west into another storage room. This was filled with dozens of identical statues, each about a half meter tall. The statues were of some small humanoid creature with a frog-like head and webbed hands and feet.

  “That’s random,” I said. “Do recognize the species?”

  “No idea.”

  I was about to pick one up and examine it closer, but Ana-Zhi grabbed my arm. “Leave it. They could be bombs for all we know.”

  The only exit was a door to the north, leading to a short hallway which ended in a T. We could go either east or west. I felt we had been heading west in general so we continued in that direction. But Ana-Zhi wasn’t moving. She just stood there with her arms folded.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This is a waste of time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’re just wandering around, hoping that we stumble upon a communications station.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  She leaned against one wall. “Not really.”

  “C’mon, the next door we come to could be it.”

  “Or it could be a storage closet filled with Yueldian toilet paper.”

  “What?”

  “I say we go back. Let the princess spend some quality time with the LVX scrubbing through the Ambit.”

  “For what?”

  “To pinpoint the location of communication station.”

  “That might take a while,” Chiraine said over the comm channel.

  “Yeah, well it beats randomly wandering around the bottom of the core. I hate to say this, junior, but I think we are well and truly fucked.”

  I checked my Aura. “No, in thirteen hours, seventeen minutes we’ll be fucked. Look!” I motioned towards the drone, which was flying slowly west down the hallway.

  Ana-Zhi let out a loud sigh of disgust, but she walked with me as we followed the drone.

  The hallway angled to the northwest, then the corridor widened into a long room with doors to the north, south, and west. The west door was quite a bit larger and heavier than all the others. Kind of like a blast door.

  I went over to it and checked it out.

  “You think they’d put a comm station behind something like this?” Ana-Zhi asked sarcastically.

  “Only one way to find out.”

  I used the donokkal on the door’s control box and was rewarded by a clang as the door’s internal locking mechanism released. I pulled on the handles and heard a hiss of air. That meant the pressure was being equalized.

  Ana-Zhi heard it too and told me to be careful.

  I slowly opened the door and looked inside.

  Interior lights flickered on and I saw that the room was octagonal and maybe ten meters across. Two open doorways led in opposite directions: north and south out of the room.

  The space looked like some sort of control room. There were several workstations arranged around the room—all powered on. On every wall hung big display screens and the screens were alive with strange images. The displays showed all sorts of volcanic landscapes. On one screen, streams of lava cascaded down dark cliffs into bubbling pools. On another, a dark castle loomed over a vast plain of fissured stone. Large winged creatures soared over jagged hills enveloped in a shroud of toxic-looking mist. These scenes looked familiar, but I couldn’t place them. I tore my eyes away and surveyed the rest of the room.

  Towards the middle of the chamber I saw that someone had piled all the chairs in a hill of furniture. Bizarre.

  I took one step in, with Ana-Zhi right behind me.

  “Do those images look familiar to you?” I asked.

  “No. That’s not Yueld, but I’m not sure where it is.”

  “Could this be the comm station?”

  “No idea,” she said.

  We both wandered around the room, clicking at control surfaces, trying to see if we could turn anything on or off, but nothing we did changed the strange images on the displays.

  All the while, the little drone buzzed around the north doorway, zooming down the passage, and then zooming back when it noticed that we weren’t following it. At least, that’s what it seemed like to me.

  “Let’s get going.” I moved towards the north exit.

  “Other way,” Ana-Zhi said.

  “What?”

  “I’m sick of following that thing. Its guidance system is probably scrambled. Follow me!”

  “I don’t think—”

  But she was already moving quickly down the southern hallway.

  The little drone flew around in circles—almost like it was panicking.

  “Jannigan, come on!”

  I hurried after Ana-Zhi. This corridor was narrow and featureless, with plates of metal on the walls and just the barest illumination from light strips along the ceiling. After a couple of dozen meters, the corridor ended in a pressure door, which was unsealed.

  “Everything okay, guys?” Chiraine asked over the comm.

  “Yeah, if wandering around aimlessly is okay to you,” Ana-Zhi said.

  Ana-Zhi led the way through the door and directed her hand-lamp into the tunnel beyond. This passage was even narrower and rounded like a tube—with ribbed vaulting every four meters or so. Kind of creepy. It reminded me of the inside of a gullet or something, but Ana-Zhi seemed to think that we were finally on to something.

  “If this doesn’t lead us to the c
omm station, we’re heading back,” Ana-Zhi said to Chiraine.

  Chiraine tried to reply, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. Her transmission was all garbled. Probably because of the plating.

  As we walked down the tunnel, I noticed long scratch marks along the floor and lower parts of the wall. It almost looked like something large had been dragged through here.

  “Here we go.” Ana-Zhi squatted down on the floor.

  I moved closer and saw that she was peering down a manhole-sized hole that had been cut in the floor with a torch.

  “Now things are getting interesting,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Whoever came before us was very motivated to find a way down to the level below us.”

  “But I thought we were at the bottom level? Chiraine, can you confirm?”

  But there was no reply other than a burst of static.

  “Yeah, we are at the lowest functional level,” Ana-Zhi said. “But if this place is like most space stations, it probably has another hundred meters of superstructure behind the hull. That’s what’s below us.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “That’s what we are going to find out.” She crawled down and disappeared into the hole.

  I rushed over to the edge. “Hey, Ana-Zhi? You okay?”

  “Never better, junior. I think we’ve got something here.”

  Curious, I eased myself down after her. By the light of Ana-Zhi’s hand-lamp, I could see that we were in some sort of narrow access tunnel. All sorts of cables and conduits snaked along the ceiling and hung in a tangle from the walls.

  “A comm station needs a lot of connectivity,” she said, motioning to the cables. “Let’s see where they lead.”

  I followed her through the access tunnel, looking back to see if the little drone had followed. There was no sign of it. Maybe it had finally given up on us.

  Unlike all the other hallways and passages we had been through, this tunnel was clean of dust. Maybe the air filtration system was a little more robust down here.

  We continued walking, but didn’t get more than a dozen meters before a loud, sharp crack nearly overwhelmed our audio sensors. It sounded like a gunshot. Then, without warning, the entire tunnel lurched suddenly, tilting down, then dropped away—spilling both Ana-Zhi and me forward.