“Admiral Vatta!” The guard’s face took on an expression of avid admiration. “Is there news?”
“All I know is that I am to return to Slotter Key as quickly and quietly as possible.” She looked around the room. “I have failed in the second requirement, that of discreet, quiet departure.”
“I’m sure the most important thing is that you find out about Admiral Vatta,” the guard said.
Stella repressed a sigh; it might be considered rude. But really—Ky was a hero, to be sure, but she herself had started businesses that brought in substantial benefits to Cascadia. And yet her value to them sometimes seemed to come primarily from being Ky’s cousin.
“I cannot hold out much hope she is still alive,” she said, pitching her voice low. “Crashing into an icy sea, and no word all this time. Everyone says there’s no way she could have survived on a life raft, even if she survived the crash. And yet—I cannot give up completely.”
“Of course not.” The guard shook her head. “Perhaps there is news they do not wish to spread abroad. Perhaps she is alive but impaired. No word has come from her flagship, either.”
“Will it be a problem if I finish packing?” Stella said.
“No, Sera. If you would like a little time to dress and pack, we can stand right outside the door.”
“Fifteen minutes,” Stella said. She wanted out of the sights and smells and mess of it all, and she wanted to call her office and her crew—they should be awake by now—and get an escort to the docks.
“A half hour would not be too long,” the guard said, bowed politely, and left.
Stella dressed, including her everyday body armor, picked up the always-packed duffel, and added lounge clothes for the trip itself, her makeup case, the gas mask, the gun, and IDs. She notified the office that her assistant would need to come, assess the damage, and arrange repairs. She learned that the crew was already aboard the courier, readying for the flight, and would contact her in the next few minutes. She checked what she had against the list in her implant, then stepped carefully back into the bathroom to pick up the box of quick-masks and the rest of the ammunition, including the half-spent magazine. As she walked toward the bedroom door, she checked herself in the mirror. Her face showed nothing of what had happened; nothing marred her appearance, her clothes, her small luggage. Aunt Grace would approve.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“When are you going to tell them this place wasn’t made by humans?” Staff Sergeant Kurin had piles of supplies stacked along the walls, supplies that—it was now obvious—could not be carried by the eighteen survivors. Eight days until they expected the enemy to arrive: eight days of water, eight days of food, plus weapons, ammunition for the weapons, and communications gear—they were fit, but not that fit.
“When we’re not trying to evade an invasion force,” Ky said. She felt like kicking the nonexistent tires of the vehicles they were working on. Trying to work on. “Besides, it was modified by humans, right here on the planet, or it wouldn’t have been full of clothes for us to wear, food we can eat, and beds to sleep in. And for all we know, the terraformers are human.”
“This is not a human-designed machine.”
“Unless the humans who designed it wanted to frustrate all who came after.”
“It’s got to be driverless,” Inyatta said, sticking her head out from under one of the vehicles. “Some planets use them. One of my cousins tried to modify his father’s field unit so he could nap while plowing.”
“How did that work?” Betange asked.
“Not very well. He didn’t think about having it slow down before turning at the end of a row. But the thing is, they exist. We’ve all seen them in vids from the older worlds.”
“There’s got to be some way of turning them on and programming them, then,” Ky said. “I don’t see any standard input slot.”
“If they were made by another culture,” Inyatta said. Before anyone else could speak she put out a hand. “Wait—hear me out. As the Admiral’s said, we’ve seen things we don’t recognize at all. Not the new stuff—the old stuff, like those marks on the controls under the labels we can read. So if this was made earlier—by some culture that came before the colonists we know about, and then moved on—”
“Why would they leave?”
“I don’t know,” Inyatta said. She pushed herself the rest of the way out from under the vehicle. “But that’s not the point. The point is, if this—all the parts of this we don’t understand—was made by another culture, we have to recognize it could be very, very different.”
Ky nodded. “That’s true… but if we’re not the same, can we use any of it, or is this a waste of time?”
“I’m thinking of what I know about driverless things. Inventory robots. Delivery units. Some use a sort of electronic map in the vehicle; others use a guideline.”
Ky remembered something she hadn’t seen in years, her first visit to Vatta’s semi-automated warehouse at Port Major. “So we need to know how to give these things a destination—but we have no idea what destinations are possible. There’s got to be a map and some kind of control surface somewhere.”
“I’d say tear one down and look, but if it’s a completely different culture their software might be so different it’d take years to figure out.”
“Humans figured out the controls for power and communications—”
“I think the communications we see were built into gap space by the people who occupied this place,” Betange said. “And they may not have done anything to the power supply, just retrofitted standard Slotter Key stuff so they could use it easily. Did you notice that the light fixtures are much newer than the openings for them?”
“No,” Ky said. It had never occurred to her to wonder if the age of the fixtures matched the age of the building. Tech thinking—and, in the circumstances, she was glad she had techs to notice what she ignored. “So… what in this space looks new? Is it possible that the humans using the facility never made it this far? And if so… maybe that could be useful to us?”
“We could hide out here? Bring food and water and some mattresses—”
“It’s ventilated—the air’s not stuffy—so I’d worry about gas.”
“We’ve been so focused on the vehicles,” Gossin said, “that we haven’t searched for more things these rods will open. Or where on vehicles such dimples might be.”
“One day,” Ky said. “Today, look for any hidden doors, controls, anything on the vehicles or in the rooms. Anything you find, or any other ideas you have, let someone else know, and pass it up to me. Betange, come with me and let’s see if the newcomers modified anything in the power control room other than putting stickers over the original labels.”
By suppertime, they had discovered that no sign of modern—“newcomer”—change existed beyond the door Inyatta had found. Access hatches had been cut to intercept power cables, and there were what looked like master switches—though not common usage ones—behind some of the hatches. Next to those were clearly newer control boxes using the types of switches and labels common on Slotter Key. Betange explained all this to Ky.
“It would’ve taken an experienced electrician—probably a team of them, and plenty of money—to convert the output to something our appliances could use. What do we call whoever did the original installation, oldtimers?”
“Good enough,” Ky said.
“I wish I had a crew and time to really study it.” Betange—completely focused and interested—was a different man from the anxious, depressed one she’d seen for so long. “I don’t quite get it—the complexity of it, the reasoning—but it would be great to know. Were they even human?”