“I thought this was supposed to be barren,” she said. Whatever the animals were, they slowed to a bouncy trot about a hundred meters away, then to a walk, and headed off in single file.
“Just rock and ice, they said in school,” Betange said. “Terraforming failure, nothing grows there.”
“I wish we had a gun,” Sergeant Cosper said. “Real meat, and lots of it—”
“We’ll find a way,” Ky said. At the thought of meat, fresh meat, her stomach cramped. She looked away from the animals, now disappearing into a dip. There, ahead to the right, something looked odd. Straight lines, not natural. “There!” she said, pointing. “That’s got to be a structure.”
“How far away is it?”
“Do you think anyone’s there?”
“What is it?”
Ky didn’t wait to answer the questions. The road—she was sure it was one now—aimed that way, and she kept going. “We’ll find out when we get to it,” she said.
“But—”
“Let’s go.”
Another upward slope dragged at their feet, but the structure—clearly now a structure—loomed higher with every step, and they were clearly on some kind of intentional roadway, a surface smooth as pavement beneath the uneven covering of snow. When they reached the brow of the low hill, they saw a broad, shallow bowl with a tower rising from it.
“Bet it’s a mine shaft,” Betange said. “And buildings.”
“And that looks like a landing strip,” Ky said, looking beyond the tower and the buildings near its base to a long, straight, nearly flat stretch of snow at least three times wider than the road they’d been walking on. “And a hangar. Long enough for a shuttle landing, do you think?”
“Might be,” Yamini said.
The way down was steeper and slippery with ice under the snow; as they neared the bottom of the bowl, the snow to either side lay deeper. They hurried as much as they could; Ky knew they craved the potential shelter of real walls and a roof.
“Slow down,” she kept saying. “No broken ankles—we’ll get there—”
The sun was long gone and green auroras danced overhead before they arrived in that cold unwelcoming light. Finally they reached the first building, a simple rectangle with a steeply pitched roof. Corrugated metal walls, metal shutters over what Ky hoped were windows. A metal door, locked, had a weathered stenciled label, A-2, and a keycard reader that looked newer than the buildings. They banged on the door and yanked, but the lock held. “Who’s got a Spaceforce ID card?”
Yamini fished his out. “Try it,” Ky said. She didn’t think it would work, but she also couldn’t think of anyone using this place but the military, and just possibly it would open to any current ID card.
“It wants a code number, too,” Yamini said. “ID maybe?”
“Try yours,” Ky said. Yamini keyed in a string of numbers, but the lock didn’t release. The tiny illuminated screen read ERROR. ONE OF THREE ALLOWED ATTEMPTS.
“We’re done,” Yamini said, shoulders slumping. He leaned against the wall and slid down until he was sitting on the ground.
“I’ll try,” Ennisay said, reaching for the keypad.
Ky put out her hand. “No. If it won’t take Yamini’s, it won’t take yours. We need to think it through. We can’t afford guesswork. It must be working from either a list of those locally authorized, or some chain of command.” The others looked at her blankly, exhausted, clearly beyond hope. She felt like falling on the ground herself, but that wouldn’t accomplish any more than would her own command code from the Space Defense Force.
What might? An officer’s code number? They had none… unless her original number from Spaceforce, back when she was a cadet, would work. Had they disabled that number? Were officers’ numbers any more useful than enlisteds’? No way to know. But she had nothing else to offer, and they had—if she interpreted the screen aright—three tries. She knew her own number; she’d had to recite it many times as a cadet. She entered it.
The screen flashed twice. ERROR. TWO OF THREE ALLOWED ATTEMPTS.
“It’s no use,” Corporal Lakhani said. “Coming up here was just wasted energy and now we don’t even have a canopy to break the wind.”
As if to emphasize the importance of that, the wind strengthened, whistling under the eaves of the building.
“We’ll break in some way,” Ky said, though she had no idea how, without tools. Her mind felt stiff, unwilling to think. She needed numbers, the right numbers, numbers from Spaceforce, from some command position in Spaceforce… like Aunt Grace. But she was Rector of Defense, not in Spaceforce. She had no number… or did she? Even as she felt the wind sucking warmth from her suit, even as she struggled not to shiver visibly, a vague memory of Aunt Grace and numbers came to her.
That message granting Ky command of Slotter Key’s privateers had strings of numbers—routing numbers, she’d assumed. She hadn’t understood any of them, or needed to; the message had been clear enough. But one string, immediately under the Rector’s seal—could that be a code identifying the Rector? Was it the same as on the other messages she’d received?
She couldn’t remember—but her implant should have recorded every detail. Yes. Under the Rector’s seal on every message from Grace had been a single numeric string. She retrieved messages from the other Slotter Key ships, from the admiral who had come to Nexus: different strings. If only she hadn’t wasted that second try on her cadet number—stupid idea. Because now she had a choice of the Rector’s number or an admiral’s. The admiral was active duty; he was high on the chain of command. But this installation—on a continent declared uninhabited, a terraforming failure—this installation, combined with the sabotage of shuttle and officers, suggested a secret group within Spaceforce. The door code might be limited to such a secret group. Was that admiral in it?
She was certain Aunt Grace was not. But if she hadn’t changed her authorization number from the previous Rector’s—and the previous Rector, she’d been told, had been involved in the treason that killed her family and brought down the government…
Her hand was shaking, partly with cold and partly with anxiety, but she entered the numerals carefully, one after another. 4 1 1 9—“Are you sure, Admiral?” asked Kurin. “I mean, it’s the last chance—”
“Not entirely,” Ky said. Her voice was steadier than her hand as she entered the last digits: 7 6 0 1. Nothing happened for a moment, then the display blanked and the locking mechanism clunked. Ky tugged; the door resisted, then scraped a path through the snow as it opened. She glanced at the others. Most were still standing, hunched against the cold; Yamini still sat beside the door. “Let’s get inside,” she said. “Sergeant, use your pin-light. Staff, help Corporal Yamini up.”
She turned on her own pin-light. She could just see a solid smooth floor as the others shuffled and staggered past her, disappearing into darkness that looked solid after the flickering auroral light outside. As the last one passed her, she turned to go in, pulling the door almost closed and tugging off a glove to put in the gap to keep the lock from connecting.
In the darting shafts of Kurin’s pin-light and her own, Ky saw two metal-framed double bunks, a table with four chairs, two desks each with its own chair, and a door to the right. On the desks were dimples that might have been made by equipment feet, and each one had an electrical outlet mounted flush to one end.