Aneka Jansen 3: Steel Heart (27 page)

~~~

The room was stark, undecorated, and largely empty. It was one of the larger ones reserved for senior staff at the station, and it had a double bed as well as the more basic facilities of a desk and a couple of chairs. According to the staff roster, this was the room which had been assigned to Andrea Johnson.

Aneka pulled open the drawers of the desk and then slammed them shut again. ‘Nothing. Not a single piece of paper. No pictures. Nothing.’

Ella emerged from the small bathroom holding a glass. ‘Not nothing, exactly. She had a boyfriend.’

Aneka frowned at her and then noticed the old-style, double-edged safety razor sitting in the glass along with a very dry-looking toothbrush. ‘It might have been hers…’

‘You don’t have to shave your legs; I really doubt she would have needed to.’

Aneka nodded a little reluctantly. ‘I guess. Besides which I used to use a plastic disposable one, not one of those metal things. That’s
really
old-fashioned. Has more of a male feel to it.’ She looked around, still seeing nothing useful. ‘So we know she had a man, and he had a preference for old-style shaving implements, and that’s about it.’

Ella took the razor out of the glass, turning it over and examining it. ‘And something happened to him before they left the station.’

‘Where do you get that from?’

‘Well, let’s say they had weight restrictions on the ships they used to leave and they could only take a few personal artefacts. The other rooms we’ve gone through have a lot of stuff in them which I’d have thought they would take, but nothing
really
personal. I’m not seeing pictures of couples. Only a few family pictures or pictures of kids. So they took everything they could.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Well, a man who shaves with something like this… This is about as personal an object as it gets and I bet he wouldn’t be able to replace it. He’d have taken it. Maybe the computer can tell us more. We can check through the personnel files…’

Nodding, Aneka headed for the door. ‘What was she doing out here pretending to be a security officer anyway? According to Eve she was supposed to be this big influence on the space programme. You can’t do that if you’re on a gas station in the arse end of the system.’

‘We’re not sure, but we think the war was going for as much as fifty years before the Xinti came here. Maybe she decided she wanted to be out of the way. Didn’t want to kill Xinti, couldn’t help Humanity in the war.’

‘Maybe. You know… this means she could be alive.’

‘It still seems pretty unlikely,’ Ella replied. ‘Even if she is, she could be almost anywhere.’

‘Yeah… Yeah, I know.’

~~~

The activity up in Central Control was rather more animated than it had been. Gillian was actioning the ‘kid in a candy store’ plan for handling the sudden acquisition of a lot of useful data; she was flicking through file directories, reading the names of files, and randomly opening some to see what was in them. She would settle down after a while and start being systematic.

Monkey looked up from the console he was sitting at when Aneka landed softly on the deck beside him. ‘Well, we got some useful information already,’ he said. ‘The earliest data file in the system was created in twenty-thirty-seven, so we figure that’s when the base was established. The last entry in the commander’s log is in twenty-one-thirty-seven. So it was running for almost exactly a century.’

‘The personnel records suggest a staff of around four hundred and fifty,’ Gillian went on. ‘Three hundred working the refinery in shifts, the rest handling administration and scientific work.’

‘So they were doing some sort of science here,’ Ella stated.

‘It seems to have been a largely commercial operation with government oversight,’ Bashford said. He was tapping at another console which he suddenly seemed to have some success with. ‘Yes! This thing has a file system like a trail of glickle droppings.’ They all looked up as the large screen which took up much of the southern wall changed to displaying a schematic of the station. The majority of it was on or close to the surface, as they had suspected, but there was what looked like a drilled tunnel leading down from the main structure beneath the link tunnel between Control and the refinery. The schematic just cut it off after a couple of hundred metres. It did similar things to the pipelines into the refinery.

‘I am detecting wireless network activity,’ Al said. ‘Attempting to negotiate connection.’

‘I got the primary networks up,’ Delta said triumphantly from up on the walkway. ‘We should have data access to the refinery, security cameras… We could get the external sensors up if you’d like.’

‘What about that pipe sticking out the bottom of the station,’ Aneka asked. ‘Anything on that?’

‘Uh… There’s a panel over on the south side says something about an observation lab hoist.’

‘Network link established,’ Al said into Aneka’s head. ‘I have managed to replicate your double’s login details so we have extensive access.’

‘Download all the personnel records for the station and start going through them for details on Andrea Johnson,’ Aneka instructed. Aloud she said, ‘Think we should take a look at that hole?’

‘I think that’s not on the plans,’ Bashford replied. ‘That I can find anyway. Only way we’re finding out what it is is to go look.’

~~~

The chamber under the base had all the signs of something put together on short notice, but it did have a feature which was interesting.

‘The sensors suggest that this is later construction,’ Gillian said. ‘There’s something much more like modern Plascrete behind the metalwork.’

‘They built this far later,’ Bashford said. ‘Makes sense. It would explain why the full structure isn’t on the plans.’

The room had various monitoring stations which suggested that this was the primary control suite for the geothermal system, and one very heavy looking metal door. Aneka looked over some of the displays and then wandered over to the curved pressure door.

‘It said “hoist,” right? So they must have drilled down to make the geothermal system and… this is a way to get down to the machinery at the bottom?’

‘It also said that it was the hoist for an observation lab,’ Ella replied. ‘The geological sensors suggested a decoupled crust. I suspect this leads down to a lab that sits under that, in whatever is underneath.’

Aneka looked around at Bashford who was standing at a console in the middle of the room. He pressed something and the huge door levered outward and then to the side. Behind it, set into a metal-lined tube, was a lift car which looked like it could withstand the pressure at the bottom of an ocean. Another button opened the car’s heavy door. There was room inside for three people if they stood very close together.

Bashford grunted. ‘I suppose we want to send someone down there?’

‘I’d like it checked for anything interesting,’ Gillian said, ‘but only if it’s safe.’

‘Everything up here seems to suggest the systems are intact,’ Monkey said.

The lead facilitator stroked his bald head, looking thoughtful and worried. ‘Aneka, Ella, are you up for this?’

‘Of course,’ Ella replied.

Aneka shook her head, grinning. ‘If she’s going, then so am I. Put your helmet on, love, we don’t know what the air will be like down there.’

With helmets set firmly in place and Ella interfacing three different sensor units to her implant computer, they climbed into the pressure vessel that was the lift. Aneka looked out at Bashford and gave him a nod.

‘The two of you keep in radio contact,’ Bashford said, then he punched a couple of buttons.

The two doors slid into place, sounding very solid as they locked. That was reassuring. There was a shudder, Aneka caught Ella as she stumbled, and then they were moving down. Ella looked up at Aneka; she was not smiling.

‘Al, link me through to Ella’s implant. Just voice.’

‘We’re going to be good, right?’ Ella’s voice sounded in her head immediately.

‘We’re going to be fine. They wouldn’t have built this thing without taking into account every contingency.’

‘That was a thousand years ago.’

Aneka’s navigation system was telling her that they were dropping at around thirty metres per second now. ‘I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Even if I have to climb the cables with you on my back.’

Ella grinned at her. ‘I don’t think it’s got cables.’

‘So I’ll crawl up the sheer wall. It won’t come to that anyway.’

Bashford’s voice intruded through their helmet speakers. ‘How’s it going down there?’

‘So far so good,’ Aneka replied. ‘This thing’s moving pretty fast.’

‘Yeah. We’re monitoring that here. By our calculations, you’ll drop out of range for the suit radios in about ten seconds.’

Aneka looked around, spotting a speaker box on the wall with a button under it. She pressed the button. ‘Are you hearing this?’

There was a pause and then Gillian’s voice came from the speaker. ‘We are. Are the sensors picking anything up, Ella?’

‘Nothing much. The walls on this car are too thick. I am getting some readings of electromagnetic activity. I think this thing’s running on some sort of maglev system.’

‘That seems likely. I’m not sure there’s much we can do except wait. Let us know if anything changes, and…’

‘Check in every five minutes,’ Bashford cut in.

‘Will do, Boss,’ Aneka replied, and let go of the switch.

‘I wonder how long we’ll be going down,’ Ella said, her voice sounding in Aneka’s head.

‘No idea. How thick is the crust?’

‘Not sure.’

Aneka gave her a grin. ‘Then we’ll be at the bottom sometime.’

~~~

The car shuddered and Ella grabbed onto a rail which ran around one side. They were slowing down after fifty-five minutes of dropping through the crust of the little planet.

Aneka reached over and hit the intercom button. ‘We’re slowing. There are no horrible grinding noises, so I figure the slowing down is on purpose.’

‘It seems like a steady drop,’ Bashford’s voice replied. ‘Looks like you’re getting to the bottom.’

‘Vashma I hope so,’ Ella said. ‘I’m not looking forward to going back up.’

There was a loud clang and the car jolted to a stop. Then there was silence.

‘Are you reading anything?’ Aneka asked.

‘I’m not reading anything troubling. The electromagnetic effects have shut off.’

There was a dull noise from outside the car, and then the door swung out. Aneka turned on her helmet lights; wherever they had arrived at, it was pitch dark, the light from the lift only revealing the dim outline of a short corridor. The torch beams did not reveal much more. Out of habit more than anything, Aneka pulled one of her pistols, and then stepped forward into the corridor.

‘There’s a corridor ahead,’ Ella said for the benefit of those above. ‘We’re going to go in. Hopefully there’ll be an intercom in here somewhere.’

‘If not, check back here in five minutes,’ Bashford instructed.

The corridor was no more than five metres long, and it ended in a pressure door with a window in it. The room inside was dark, but there was no sign of water, or any other fluid, on the other side. Aneka located the controls and hit the open button, and the door levered away from them into the room.

It was circular, perhaps four metres across, and if it was a laboratory it was an odd one. A bed occupied one side, a metre from the curving wall. On the opposite side of the room a couch of some description sat facing outwards. There was a console in the middle, and they moved towards that. Aneka found a switch on some tubes mounted above it and fluorescent lights flickered into life. Almost immediately Ella spotted the intercom.

‘Uh… Hello from the dark room at the bottom.’

Gillian sounded relieved, even over the intercom. ‘You found something?’

‘Yeah. It’s kind of weird. It’s like someone had a bedroom down here. Bed, console, a sofa…’ She looked up at the blank, metal ceiling. ‘There are no overhead lights, just some lamps over the console.’

‘There’s a reading light beside the bed,’ Aneka said. She returned her attention to the console. ‘It said it was an observation lab…’ She hit a button. Behind them the door closed.

‘What was that?’ Gillian asked, alarmed.

‘The door on the room closed,’ Aneka replied. There was another sound, a faint but audible squeaking. In the dim light from the console lamps, they could just about see the walls moving. That was when they realised that the walls were actually some sort of glass with metal shielding over it. ‘There are windows. The shields over them are moving down, and… Oh wow…’

‘Aneka?’

Lights illuminated another world outside the structure. Visibility was not great, but they could see water, or maybe some other fluid, kilometres of it stretching out until the slight haze obscured everything. Metal rods blocked the view in a few places, extending down from the ice above them into the depths below, and there were pillars of ice too, reaching down from the underside of the crust like massive, glittering stalactites.

‘Aneka?!’

‘Sorry. We’re okay. The view is… quite something.’

Ella pulled herself together and moved over to the window in front of them. Taking one of her sensor units in hand, she directed it out through the glass. ‘Okay, this is a diamond-like crystal lattice structure, about twenty centimetres thick. The scanner is getting readings from outside… Water, ammonia, various hydrocarbons. That explains why the water is a liquid. Temperature is just over one-sixty kelvin… I’m getting organic signals.’

Aneka blinked. ‘There’s something alive out there?’

‘No. Well, unlikely. Amino acids though, some other precursors. Warm this place up and you might start getting life.’

‘Any safety concerns?’ Bashford asked.

‘Structural analysis is coming back sound on radar and ultrasound. I think we’re safe enough. Air is… breathable.’

‘All right. Scan whatever you need to, take pictures, and call us when you’re coming back up.’

‘I’d like to take an hour or so down here,’ Ella replied. ‘Aside from anything else, I want a break before I have to ride that car back up.’