I could focus on my mission again for, in front of me, the grotto was shrinking drastically. The diameter was soon almost too tight for the Kitty to pass through. I sometimes felt the rock scraping against the armor. I was beginning to fear that it would tear away equipment. I could have widened the path with a machine gun, but I wasn’t thrilled about the risk of the ceiling collapsing.
“You talked about a military facility?” I asked, retracting one of the searchlights before it hit a floating block of ore.
My partner’s answer came with a slight delay: “It looks a bit like the Marine’s lair on Hyperion. I didn’t understand the entry protocol… the speakers… croaked then died. But there’s definitely oxygen so I’m taking my helmet off.”
A lost military base then. So far, there had been no defense system, but that may not have been the case inside. “What do you see?” I asked.
“Red walls. Yellow painted signs, but totally illegible,” Ali commented. “There’s a lot of rubbish floating around. I can follow the footprints of leaded soles.”
“Footprints?” Outside, the egress of the tunnel finally began and I could distinguish new human constructions. Placed against the dusty ground lay half-boned monopods. Their wrecks made it difficult to maneuver in this dark cloister. “Be very careful,” I went on. “I arrived at an emergency exit. I’ll try to moor the Kitty there.”
Ali didn’t answer. The radio link had been momentarily cut before a few curses crackled through my headphone and startled me, making me hit a ferrous stalactite. A few seconds later, my human was back on the line: “I found Connie.” The sobriety of the message was foreboding.
“How is she?” I inquired, pausing my risky maneuver.
“I’ll ask her when I pick up her face.”
“How do you know it’s her?”
“The transmitter’s at her feet. Plugged into a bulky terminal with a shattered screen.”
I grunted. It wasn’t the best of scenarios. Her assailant had probably gotten rid of her in the end. But when I asked my partner if there were any traces of him, she demanded silence. The radio link was cut again. Voluntarily.
I resumed my maneuver, sliding the Kitty against the ceiling which crumbled in places. The dust and the blocks of rock thus rose came to drum against the windows of the cockpit, obstructing all vision. I had to wait a few minutes for the cloud to condense before I could reach the pontoon. There, I managed to spin and get close enough to the metallic wall and clumsily linked the ship’s lateral airlock to the ejection pad that once hosted a sidereal lifeboat. “Let’s see what sapiens were scheming so far from Ceres and Pallas,” I muttered to myself as I wired the control computer to the miraculously functional network thanks to the Kitty’s telescopic arm.
My human came back online at the same moment: “Lee?” Her voice was weaker, as if she were whispering. “I… got… guy in sight. I think I’m… He… away!”
“I can’t hear you well, partner,” I replied. “Were you able to get Connie’s FID? We don’t have any HRP to bring her body.”
“No! That guy… that bastard ripped it out of her!” she shouted as I imagined her run across a metal floor. “Stay on the ship… a map of the area… can help us. I think…! Do you—” The communication was concluded by a gunshot and a grunt of pain.
“Ali?”
No answer.
Sacrebleu! A map? Yes, there had to be. I had to access the system if the core hadn’t been stolen or destroyed. I could even turn on lights or reactivate cameras. But it turned out I had been highly naive. The station appeared older than I had thought as evidenced by the welcome message in both Cyrillic and Mandarin. “A Communist base?” I cried. “That’s incredible!” It was amazing, because the place was an immaculate museum.
The antiquated ALGOL operating system, even when translated, appeared to be difficult to browse because of the dozens of access codes required for each operation. The onboard computer, coupled with my intellect, easily cracked them but this proved to be time-consuming. Those damn Soviets definitely wanted to keep their dirty little secrets. “The mess menu—yuck! The maintenance log—we don’t care…” I listed before finding an old, half-corrupted, incomplete file issued by the fire safety. “Here’s our 2D map!”
On the drawing appeared many rooms that didn’t look like barracks. The only docks on the map were the ones we had flown over. It was still too small to accommodate larger ships. The most likely hypothesis? We had entered an old exploration complex. The commies had well-known ambitions for the Outer Worlds.
Alas, this wasn’t a time for History lessons, but for bounty hunting. Synchronizing the map to the control computer, I could establish Ali’s approximate position before contacting her again: “Ground Control to Major Tom?”
Ali replied: “Yes—hold on!” In the interactive image, she appeared to have run several miles through the maze of corridors. It was impossible to gain accuracy because of the radio interference. “Mission accomplished! I just flatlined the bugger discreetly in a corner,” she whispered. “But it will take me a while to get back. There are other guys here.”
“Other guys?”
“Sleeping in one of the sculleries I went through. They looked like pirates.”
Pirates? Haven’t they been recently almost repulsed to the Rings by the Marine? Could they have come in through a different entrance?
Still, the base was occupied. It was time to get out of here with FID in hand. But my partner wanted to know more: “This place is strange. Imma try to reach the complex’s heart where I can hear some music. Do you hear it too?”
“No,” I said. “Proceed slowly. But listen… you’re not exactly an infiltration expert and your physical condition isn’t…”
The control computer sent me a visual alert on the central monitor. It had hit a new security layer, this time entirely in old Mandarin; I could finally access to the terminal on Ali’s wrist by a primitive IR link and run through her FID scan to confirm the capture and claim the bounty.
And what a surprise! Picking up the distress call was a miracle, because Connie Senghor, like her target, Franky D. Thomas, had likely disappeared more than thirty years before.
“Ali?” I asked. “What did your convict look like?
“Franky? I dunno. A guy with a big black beard, beer bod and tattoos all over his arms. I’d guess… around twenty-five, not more…”
“What? No way! He would have to be at least twice that age.”
This base was very strange. But I had to wait for the computer to complete its calculations before exploring the system further.
“Lee?” continued Ali, terrified. “I just recognized someone I never thought I’d see again!”
“Who was it?”
“The Arch-Countess Athena! She’s here, Lee! She just landed from her burning ship!”
“Burning ship? Athena of the Omega—the Lunar God? She died a long time ago! That’s ridiculous.” Medicine made anything possible, but to bring the dead back to life? “Don’t move, Ali! I should have access to the cameras soon—Damn it!” Error messages kept invading the screen. The whole data-core was riddled with bugs. “Your darn Uyghur gulags were better organized than this database, Mao!” I ranted, drumming my paws on the control panel’s mechanical keys. I craved a cigarette.
“Get… the FID! I’m going to… Athena. She won’t harvest what’s mine! I… her in front of her entire Caste!”
“Entire Caste?” Hiding on this lost station? Impossible!” I shouted into the microphone. “Give me five minutes! Don’t do anything boldiotic!” But it fell on deaf ears.
“Lee? I… nothing! There’s… music over it… Chuck Berry…What are you hearing on the channel?” The communication got even worse but there had never been a melody. “There’s also a group of people whispering! A man with a cigar. They’re talking about tanks, Niku-dolls and gruesome things!”
“On my ninth life, there’s no people mumbling on any frequencies!” I raged as I nervously flipped between the different inputs on the radio.
“What’s going on?” my partner’s voice echoed before fading out.
Anxiety made me spit my nicotine gum. I finally managed to crack a new security level allowing me access to the cameras. It was difficult, however, to find one functional or dust free. “Ali should be around here…” I was starting to panic at this strange situation as I browsed the feeds in the area where my copilot had described kitchens. There, she had seen pirates sleeping. “What the—it's impossible! Ali? Ali!”
