Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

Liis watched all this with astonishment. What were they going to do? Start a fight in the impossibly crowded dropship?

“Hey!” Sav said suddenly. “Look at the screen!”

Josua stopped struggling with the harness, turned back to the co-pilot’s panel.

“I’m reading a signal over by the south-west corner. I don’t believe it, but it looks like the thing is still powered!”

On the screen a colour gradient now overlaid the dark landscape. In one corner of the solar array was an irregular pool of amber light. A thin, snaking tributary in brighter gold ran away from it up into the hills. “That’s got to be the regulator. And that thin thing is probably the main power cable. If we follow it, it should lead us to the facility.”

“Then let’s do that,” Josua said, his anger gone as abruptly as it had risen.

Sav swung the dropship towards the thread of gold; Hebuiza slumped back into his sitting position. Josua hunched over the screen, calling out readings, while Sav did his best to make the craft follow the serpentine track of the line.

It didn’t take them long. It was less than a kilometer from the array.

The entrance to the stasis facility was a nondescript, concrete portico that thrust up from the hillside. Next to it was a small landing pad; it had been built atop a levelled rise of crushed stone. Clutches of weeds had pushed through the tarmac, and along one edge was a two meter wide gap where the surface had crumbled into a small pit filled with water. To Liis it looked like someone had taken a bite out of the pad. A dilapidated link fence surrounded both the entrance and the landing pad. If there had been a service road, it had long since disappeared.

Sav set down dead centre on the crumbling pad. The whine of the engines diminished, then died.

“Well,” he said in the sudden silence, “We’re home.”

Black metal doors barred the entrance to the facility. There were no handles or data sockets visible, and only a small plaque identified the site. A sensor, apparently long dead, was embedded in the wall above the entrance. “We can cut through it,” Sav said. “There’s a couple of lasers on the dropship. I threw them into a locker when we were gathering supplies. Thought they might come in handy.”

“Then let’s get them,” Josua said impatiently.

In moments they’d pulled the lasers out and strapped the battery pack onto Sav, the only one who’d used a laser before. Without asking, Josua picked up the other. Liis helped him on with the battery pack. The lasers themselves looked like stubby rifles, squat silver tubes grafted onto burnished metal stocks. They had ridiculously large trigger guards that let the thick finger of their gloves fit through. Josua flicked the power switch and Liis saw a display on the stock come up, the LCD showing the intensity setting and a bar graph of the battery strength.

“Okay,” Sav said to Josua. “You plug the cable on the laser into a wrist jack on the hand you’re firing with, like so, and clip the laser onto the inside of your forearm so its barrel extends past your fingertips.” Sav demonstrated; Josua nodded and did the same. “We’ll cut a meter and a half square, up from the ground, to give us enough room to crawl through,” he said. “It doesn’t look like the door is recessed on the bottom, but if it is, we might have to go back and cut some wiggle room on the top to rock out the pieces.”

“Got it,” Josua said.

Sav pointed. “You start here on the left and I’ll take the right.”

Josua went down on one knee, aimed, and pressed the trigger on his laser. A beam of coherent light bit into the door, turning the metal red almost immediately. It started crawling upward as Josua slowly lifted his arm centimeter by centimeter. After watching him work for a moment, Sav began cutting on the other side.

It took fifteen minutes before Josua stepped back to let Sav finish his cut. The plate fell inward on its own as the last bit of metal boiled away.

They waited for the edge to cool.

Then Sav turned on his helmet lamp, went down on his knees and peered through the opening.

“Well?” Josua asked.

Sav pulled himself out and stood. “Looks okay. Just be careful not to catch your suit on the edge when you’re crawling through.”

Josua started to unclip his laser. Sav put a hand on his shoulder. “I know the batteries are heavy, but we’d best bring these with us-in case we have to deal with another door.”

Josua nodded. He switched on his lamp, went down on all fours and crawled through the opening. Sav followed, Liis right behind, the Facilitator, who’d been standing several meters away during the whole process, coming last.

Inside, they stood at the end of an unadorned corridor that ran away from them, tunnelling deeper into the hillside. Containers of all sorts had been stacked haphazardly near the wall, constricting the passage. At regular intervals were doors, most of which stood ajar. Everything was layered with a thick dust.

“Keep your eyes peeled for data port, or anything that might look like an interface,” Sav said, then he started off down the corridor, Josua on his heels, their boots kicking up clouds of dust that swirled around their knees. Hebuiza and Liis trailed after.

Sav moved straight down the corridor, pausing briefly to play his light over each door; but none of them bore any kind of inscription and he didn’t seem interested in exploring them. When he came to an intersection of corridors, he ignored the branch and continued straight on. Liis hung back and pushed on a partially open door; it swung wide to reveal a storage cupboard with empty shelves.

“Liis, over here!”

Thirty meters down the hall Sav and Josua were shoulder to shoulder staring at something to their right; Hebuiza stood a pace behind them, looking over Sav’s head. Liis hurried to join them, struggling in her bulky suit. When she got there, she realised they stood before the doors of an elevator. Josua and Sav moved back a step to let her look. The doors were ajar and inside was a suit, not unlike the ones they wore, lying on the floor. When she shone her light on its visor, she could see a shrivelled, desiccated face, thin lips curled back over yellowed teeth, empty sockets where there had once been eyes.

“The elevator is dead,” Hebuiza said.

Liis nodded, unable to take her eyes from the mummified remains.

“There’s a service shaft,” Sav added.

Liis turned. A few meters to the left of the elevator was an low arch. A small gate that had once barred this entrance lay crookedly open, its top hinge torn from the wall. Inside was a circular dropshaft. At the back of the shaft, half a dozen thick pipes slid from view into the depths; the head of a ladder poked just above floor level.

“And here’s a map,” Sav said, pointing to a multicolored diagram fixed to the wall between the elevator and shaft. Beneath it was a directory listing departments, divided according to level. Seventeen levels in all. This level, numbered zero, and sublevel one housed administrative offices; the stasis cells didn’t begin until the third sublevel where the tunnels quadrupled in length.

“This is a waste of time,” Hebuiza said scornfully. “It will takes us weeks to search a place this size.”

“Then we’ll split up,” Josua said. “Take different levels.”

Sav looked at the Facilitator. “We don’t need to search every room,” he said. “All we need is an active data port. We know the place has power. So there’s a decent chance the network’s still up. We’ll start by looking in the most likely places on the upper levels, then work our way down.”

“I think we’ve already seen all there is to see.” The Facilitator crossed the dark arms of his suit over his chest. “Unless, of course, you are interested in corpses. I suspect that’s all we’ll find here.”

Liis emerged from the dropshaft onto the fourth sublevel just in time to see the first door on the left swing shut behind Josua. He’d clambered down the ladder dangerously fast and she’d done her best to keep up, but slowed when she nearly lost her grip. Far below, Sav and Hebuiza were exploring the lower levels of the complex; she and Josua had taken the upper ones, and had just finished with the floor above-to no avail. None of the computer systems were active. It would no doubt be the same here.

Liis cursed and hustled over as quickly as her EVA suit would allow and pulled the door open. It was a room identical to the dozen they’d already been in. She stared down the length of the chamber, her helmet lamp cutting the gloom. In the uncertain shadows she could not see the end of the room; its low, curving ceiling receded to a vanishing point hundreds of meters away. Long, parallel rows of I-beam track-each with its own winch-were bolted to the ceiling. Spaced regularly below each track were hundreds of transparent domes rising above the floor: the tops of stasis cells cradled in recessed vertical bays, bundled cables stretching from their crowns to junction boxes on the ceiling, thicker umbilicals buried in the floor. Most of the cells were dark, their occupants long dead. A few dozen, scattered randomly throughout the room, radiated a pale green light, silhouetting the heads of those interred.

Liis spotted Josua halfway down the room, his helmet lamp cutting from left to right, then back again; he was moving between the rows of cells, shining his light in each one, just as he had in all the other rooms. In the first chamber they’d explored, Liis had asked him what he was doing, but Josua had snarled something incomprehensible and ignored her. Liis thought briefly about contacting Sav. But what would telling him accomplish? Nothing. If anything, it would only confirm Sav’s fears about Josua’s stability. It wouldn’t help her-or Josua. So she let it go, waiting patiently while he completed his odd routine eleven more times in the chambers above.

Liis turned her back on him and played her light over the far wall, spotted a panel, presumably the interface to the AI regulating the cells in this chamber. Like all the other panels she’d seen so far, it was dark, and had no external jacks or sockets. She turned back to the array of stasis cells and walked to the nearest one that was lit. Power was being fed to it, the readouts on the cell confirming its lucky occupant was still alive. It made no sense.

Before they’d done anything else, they’d used the maps on the walls to locate the systems room on the second sublevel. It had been gutted. All the computers had been smashed with a deliberate violence and the network cables purposely severed, isolating the room. So there was no central control. And all the local panels in these chambers were dead. Still, something was feeding the few lit cells juice, monitoring them, keeping them alive.

But what?

Josua had reached the end of the row and was doubling back, his light cutting back forth. The next closest active cell was halfway between Josua and Liis. It winked out.

Josua shouted; he half-staggered, half-ran forward, dropping to his knees in front of the cell.

“What is it?” Liis shouted, but Josua ignored her. Instead he rubbed frantically at the cell’s surface and peered into it, his visor almost touching the transparent dome. Abruptly, he pushed himself back