She let the door go and it slammed shut with a thump, leaving the med-tech with a soul shattering look of disappointment on his face. “It’s spring loaded,” she said. “That’s why it closed behind them. There’s probably a safety lock they had to break to get it open the first time.”
“Can you force it to stay open? I don’t want to risk getting trapped on the other side,” Walker said.
Marti reached out and drove the manipulator end of one of its heavy arms through the wall, sending them all jumping away in surprise. Tearing out a steel framing member, it handed it to Angel. “This will work,” it said.
Shaking her head and laughing, she wedged the beam into the open door and stomped it down against the door sill to drive it into place. Flipping on her handbeam, she leaned into the opening and pointed the light down the shaft. “I don’t see the platform, but it only looks to go down a few floors. Maybe twenty meters tops.”
“Too far to jump,” Billy said. He stood behind the automech, still looking back like he expected someone to come out of one of the doors they’d passed.
“If we’ve got a tether, we could tie off there,” she said. She was shining her light up at the bottom of the lift deck one floor above them.
“We’re sure they went this way?” Preston asked, walking around to the small storage box built into the back of Marti’s body to look for a rope.
“There is no cable in my kit,” it said before he managed to look.
“I don’t think we were expecting to be rappelling when we tooled up for this mission,” the captain said. “Unless they had a better plan than we do, I don’t think they were carrying that kind of gear either.”
“Maybe there are handholds,” Angel said, grabbing Marti’s arm and swinging into the shaft with her upper body to look back at the wall inside the door. “Yah, there’s a ladder, and it’s got foot prints on it.”
“I may not be able to traverse a ladder,” Marti said, almost sounding disappointed.
Ethan nodded. “Maybe there’s another way down—”
“Ethan Walker, are you down on the surface?” Leigh barked over his private command-comm channel. He flinched in surprise.
Frak! “No. You are having a bad dream,” he said. “Go back to bed. It will all be better when you wake up.”
Muting his mic he growled and thumped a knuckle against Marti’s automech. “Why didn’t you tell me she was on to me?”
“I didn’t think you needed the distraction at this moment,” it said. “In typical unpredictable human fashion she accessed the commlink without warning.”
“Fine. Just figure out how to get us down there,” he said, pointing down the shaft and cutting himself back into the com.
“Are you ignoring me?” she said, her voice sounding like she was fast approaching hysterical. “I can’t believe you’d actually be insane enough to do this.”
“Leigh, calm down. I had no choice,” he said.
“You had no reason. None,” she screeched. “It doesn’t matter how you try to justify this, there’s no way this isn’t going to end your career.”
“I know you’re probably right,” he said, stepping back as Marti scuttled forward and tilted its sensor head toward the shaft. “When I get back up there, I’ll explain.”
“You will explain it to me now,” she ordered. “While you are getting back to the shuttle and back to the ship.”
“I’m sure Nuko or Rene has told you what happened. I’m down here trying to find our passengers and bring them—”
A bright arcing flash lit the walls with twisted shadows, and then everything plunged into sudden darkness as a thundering crash cut her off in mid sentence.
“Holy frakking hell!” Angel roared.
Blinking several times to clear the spots from his vision, he could see a glow where the body of the automech had flown back and crashed into the wall beside him. The top of its neck was glowing molten red with rivulets of metal slag running down across the floor in hissing rivers of flame. The entire sensor head was gone, like it had been vaporized.
“Everybody report,” Walker ordered, ignoring the voice of Leigh screaming in his ear for the moment. He stomped on the flaming carpet trying to put out the tiny fires before they spread.
“We’re good,” Billy said. A beam of light snapped on behind Marti’s body and a second later, another one appeared.
“Speak for yourself,” Preston groaned. “You damn near … oh. Never mind.” Until he turned around, he’d apparently not seen the dead automech lying in a crumpled heap where he’d just been standing.
“Angel, you still with us?”
“Yah, I’m fine. I’m seeing spots and hanging by my fingers, but unhurt,” she said. “I lost my light down the shaft somewhere.”
“What the hell happened?” Nuko cut in on the comm overriding the link from Salazar. “Marti says its teleop link has blown out and it can’t reestablish a connection to the automech.”
“Affirm,” Walker said. “Let me get everybody back on their feet and we’ll figure that out. Stand by.”
Flipping his own handbeam on, he edged toward the open doorway. The air hung heavy with the smell of burned metal and ozone. Leaning into the shaft he spotted Angel dangling from a cable a meter past the doorway. She could have swung over on her own, but with Marti’s head exploding in her face, she probably couldn’t see it. Reaching in, he grabbed Angel by the front of her jumpsuit and pulled her back into the corridor. She leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor.
Squatting down in front of her he studied her face as he tried not to shine his light directly into her eyes. She had what looked like moderate flash burns and her eyes were pouring water. “Can you see?”
“For the most part,” she said. “Fortunately, I wasn’t looking right at Marti when it happened.”
“Was it a weapon of some kind?” Billy asked as he and Preston climbed over the back of the automech and joined them.
“I don’t know,” she said, wiping away the tears with the back of her hand. “I was getting ready to swing around and head down the ladder, when Marti leaned into the shaft. All I know is it went spastic and then disappeared. After that I was dangling in space and seeing spots.”
“Looks like whatever it was, flatlined Marti’s body,” Billy said, shining his light at the metal carcass.
“Maybe not,” the AA said over the commlink from the ship. “If one of you can reset the unit, I might be able to assess the damage and restore some control function.”
A diagram of the automech body appeared on his visor screen and Ethan pulled it back over his eyes to study it. The same display must have appeared on Billy’s visor, because he flipped it down and climbed up on the carcass to feel around between its legs for the reset switch. “Got it,” he said, after several seconds. “They couldn’t have put that in a less embarrassing place to get to, could they?”
The automech shuddered violently, and the handler jumped back as it fumbled around trying to find itself. “It appears that all fine-level motor controls are down, however gross system function appears to be restoring. Ambulation should be possible.”
“Can you tell what happened?” the captain asked. Preston tapped him on the shoulder and he stood back up and to give him the space in front of Angel.
“Primary power is down to three percent,” Marti reported. “I would surmise that I got my head caught in another one of those power drain fields. Internal diagnostics are telling me that the entire sensor array is offline.”
“It slagged your face right the hell off, is more like it,” Billy said. “The entire upper surface of your body is covered in molten burn spots and the top half meter of your neck assembly might have vaporized.”
“Understood,” it said. “At this point I am effectively blind and deaf. I am also critically low on power and will need to return to a shuttle to recharge.”
“You can still walk?”
One leg twitched in response. “I have accurate positiona
l awareness and can retrace my course to our landing site. It will take me several hours to recharge fully, but once I have done that, we can resume our mission.”
“We can’t afford to wait for you to recharge, and even if we did, you’d still be blind without major repairs.”
“This is valid,” it said. “Without seeing the extent of the damage I do not know if repairs can be made on location.”
“I’d say it’s a safe wager the answer is no,” Walker said. “Do you have enough power to make it back to the shuttle?”
“Yeeezzz,” it said, using the local audio. Its voice sounded like it was coming through the blades of a ventilator turbine. With a groan like twisting metal, it pushed itself up off the floor. One leg hung lifeless and drug with a scraping noise as it moved.
“Marti, you’re foobed hard,” Billy said. “You need to sit this one out. We can go it alone from here.”
“Agreed,” the captain said, looking down at Angel. “Should she go back too?”
Preston nodded, but Angel glared at him. “I’m good to go,” she said. I’ve got to go get my flashlight.
“Is it safe to go back into the shaft?” Ethan asked.
“It didn’t affect me,” Angel said.
“Or her handbeam,” Billy pointed out. He was looking down the shaft. “It’s still working down there. And our passengers apparently went down the ladder with no ill effects either.”
“It is possible that the drain only affects high power level systems,” Marti said. “In both cases when I was affected, it only activated when one of my core power lines broke a known physical boundary.”
“Then you go back and recharge and we’ll press on,” the captain said.
“You will not,” Leigh said. “You need to get your ass back to the ship now.”
He shook his head. “Nuko, lock her in her quarters until I get back to the ship.”
“Ethan Walker you wouldn’t dare,” Salazar snarled.
After several seconds Rene came on the comm. “At this point it probably doesn’t matter, but I didn’t know Nuko could move like that. I think Leigh’s arm will grow back. Eventually.”
“Nojo?” the captain asked.
“Mostly nojo. Do what you need to do. The Magellan will be dropping out of cruise in about two-and-a-half hours. It would be good for you to be back before I have to make excuses to Captain MacKenna.”
“Working on it.”
Chapter Fifteen:
They were following footprints in the dust on the rungs of the ladder. It looked like they’d gone all the way down to the bottom. They didn’t want to assume that to be a fact so the four of them moved slowly in the near total darkness. Every three or four rungs they stopped to make sure they could see evidence that Kaycee and Pruitt had continued.
Relatively speaking it was cooler the further underground they went. And ventilation shafts pulled the air from the lift-shaft outward in directed rivers of almost tolerable cool.
“Wait, I hear something,” Preston whispered, as he lingered by one of the vent entrances sucking up the breeze. He cocked his head to the side and held it close to the grating.
“Is it them?” Walker asked from above him on the ladder. He leaned back and looked down between his feet at the med-tech.
“I don’t know. It didn’t sound like either of them,” he said. “But it was definitely a voice.” He shook his head.
Angel pointed the light that Billy had loaned her down the ladder. “They went past this level,” she said. “At least another floor below me.”
Preston’s head was just below floor level between sub level three and four, almost three meters above where she hung. He pointed at the vent with his free hand. “There’s someone on this level.”
The captain squeezed down beside him. Wrapping an arm around the vertical bar to stabilize, he leaned out and pointed his light down the duct. Side vents broke off every dozen meters or so and slanted up toward the deck above them.
Then he heard it. “That sounds like a kid’s voice,” he whispered.
The med-tech nodded.
“Billy, see if you can pry the doors on that landing open,” Walker said, hitting the inner latch mechanism with the light from his handbeam.
“Boss we’re here to find the passengers not mount a rescue mission,” Angel said. “The Magellan is coming to deal with that kind of operation.”
“She’s right,” Rene said. “You haven’t got time to be a hero.”
They were right, but it wasn’t in him to leave children behind. He looked down the shaft and then back at the door above, torn between what he should do and what he had to do. Billy hung beside the door waiting for a decision.
“Do it,” the captain said. He glanced down at Angel. “We’ll take five minutes and if we don’t find them, we’ll get back after Kaycee and Pruitt.”
“It’s your career,” she said, starting back up as Billy shoved the door open and jumped into the dark opening.
“Yah. It’s already over anyway, but at least ending on an up note is better than whimpering out at the end,” he said as he pulled himself up onto the deck.
“What kind of place is this?” Angel said as she stepped out of the shaft behind them.
Preston had walked forward and was looking at the dark control panels along the wall. Several heavy looking metal doors stood closed along the opposite wall. “It looks like a high energy diagnostic facility maybe,” the med-tech said. “There are fields of medicine that still use radiologic materials to diagnose and treat diseases.”
“Like uranium?” Billy asked as he stepped back from a door he was about to try prying open.
“No, usually things a lot safer than that, but they still require special handling and storage,” he explained. “They build shielded rooms to protect the technicians that are exposed all the time from building up a cumulative dose level.”
“So it’s safe?” Billy asked his skepticism evident in his tone.
“For the most part,” Preston said. “Anything you shouldn’t mess with should have clear labels.”
“So where are your voices?” Angel said, shining her handbeam down the long room. Other than a couple chairs along the wall and a wide alcove about halfway to the far end, it was just a wide corridor like most any other in a hospital. We’re on a timeline here.”
“Spread out and let’s see if we can hear them again,” the captain said.
“We don’t want to pry every door open if we don’t have to,” Preston said. “The walls will be thick so listen close.”
They started down the hall, rapping on doors and listening for a response. Angel made it first to the alcove at the mid-point in the corridor and stopped, shining her light on the wall. “This is odd,” she said.
“Whatcha got?” Billy asked. He was almost to the opposite end of the room, but had been walking along the wall on the left where most of the doors were. They appeared to be the actual diagnostic and treatment chambers.
“It looks like somebody tried to seal up a door here. It’s been plastered over with something,” she said.
Walker was staring at a heavy steel door on the opposite wall, wiping sweat out of his eyes, trying to decide if he should give up the search, and go back to chasing his passengers down. He bounced across the hallway and stopped as Angel stepped back abruptly after shining her light around a small workstation in the center of an alcove. A pile of canisters sat in a corner. All of them marked with radioactive materials warning labels.
“That looks like it was the secure supply locker,” Preston said as he joined them.
She spun the light back to the plastered over door.
“And that would be thermoplast,” the med-tech said, identifying the material plastered over the door.
“Why would they empty the storage room and then seal it up?” she asked. “Unless they were trying to protect something more important than that shit is dangerous.” She leaned forward and pressed her ear against the door. After several seconds,
she shook her head, pulled out her sidearm, and rapped hard against the center of the door with its handgrip.
This time when she pushed her head against the door she nodded and smiled. “Oh yeah, they’re in there. Sounds like a bunch of them.”
How do we get them out? We didn’t bring construction tools,”
“I have just begun to recharge my body, but I can attempt to return to your location,” Marti said.
“You’re blind,” the captain said.
“I can mount a body optic from one of the EVA suits to my frame and use that to provide rudimentary vision,” it said.
“How much power do you have?” he asked.
“I am back to seven percent,” Marti said. “I have one leg actuator that is damaged so mobility is limited, but I can do this.”
“How long will it take to bolt on an eyeball?” Ethan asked.
“It will depend on my ability to make the necessary modifications with only one fine-motor arm operating,” it said. “I would estimate it may take as much as an hour.”
“Get started and we’ll look for something to use down here,” he said.
Billy had dumped the contents off of a small utility cart and was ripping the handle off by brute force.
“The door is steel, and the wall looks to be polycon,” Angel said. “This will take some time.”
“And in this heat it will be even worse,” Walker nodded.
“Maybe we can just crack the plaster-stuff off and then force the door,” she said.
“It’s carbon fiber reinforced polymer,” Preston said. “The only way I know of to remove it is to get it to unlink molecularly. It’s not supposed to be breakable.”
“How do you do that?” Angel asked.
“Normally you use a photo-reactive chemical,” he said. “It’s specially designed so that when you bombard it with UV light it dissolves the thermoplast.”
“Unless you’re carrying one of those in your medkit, I don’t think that’s a possibility,” Walker said.
He shook his head.
“How thick do you think the wall is?” he asked as Billy returned with the metal bar and started at the door with the fury of a jackhammer.
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