"But effective."
That was all the excitement we had until we came to a point just west of Old Bones Village Ruin. Twenty meters north of the National Park Information Center was a junction. To our left a tunnel led due north. That was likely the other end of the tube that led to Champion's stall. Straight ahead, however, was the real question mark. Without discussion, Shad and I had both flown in that direction. Another few meters and the tube took a ninety-degree turn south.
"Oops!” said Shad.
"What is it?"
"Nothing."
"You said ‘Oops,’ Shad. Oops is never good."
"We—I almost ran the cruiser into that little information center in the ruins. I put it in hover park.” He aimed his sensors at me. “That's where the tunnel leads, Jaggs: the basement of that building."
"Find out who is employed there."
While Shad accessed the park authority records, we moved ahead until suddenly there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Several lights, actually. I zoomed in on them and they looked like instrument lights on some sort of control panel.
"Hold up, pard,” said Shad, causing both of us to come to a halt.
"Who did you find?"
"No one—I mean, there's no record of anyone ever being employed there. According to the Park Authority, there is no information center there. There's no record of anyone even thinking about it. It's a front."
"Shad, give me the cruiser controls.” In a moment, I was looking through the cruiser's forward camera. It was still dark. The infrared illumination revealed the back side of the little building. A late-model Honda electric was parked there on the uncut grass. I maneuvered the cruiser around until I could see the front of the building. As evidenced by the weeds and grass growing in it, the crushed gravel path to the front door had seen little traffic. There was a sign on the door saying that the center was closed for repairs and thank you for all your patience. I left the cruiser hovering there and turned to Shad. “Let's go."
We moved toward the end of the tunnel, and long before we reached the end we could tell the space beneath the small building was much larger than the structure above, the curiously scalloped walls apparently carved from the granite bedrock courtesy of a Magic Mole. There was the sound of a small internal combustion engine running. The panel lights we had seen from inside the tunnel were mounted in the face of a large orange-colored console. Mounted above the lights was an identification plate, which cleverly named the machine upon which it was mounted a genuine Whack-A-Hole Magic Mole Control. To the right of the console on the wet granite floor were what looked like pipes of different diameters. Shad moved over to them to see what they were. Beyond the pipes and extending as far as I could see in the carved-out space were what looked to be piles of purple glass hockey pucks—millions of them.
"These pipe thingies are different-sized Magic Mole bits in their containers,” said Shad.
"See if you can tell what those piles of purple things are."
"Puckets,” he answered immediately.
"Sorry?"
Shad aimed his lens at me. “I ran across it when I put in the search for boring equipment and came across Whack-A-Hole. Transcompression equipment manufacturers call them puckets. When the Mole goes through certain dense materials, like granite for instance, there's stuff left over after the matter transcompression forms the tube lining. The Mole compresses the excess material to about a sixth of its volume and excretes it in this form: puckets.” Shad aimed his lens to his right. “Hello?"
I turned in the direction my partner was facing. Behind the Mole control unit was a refrigerator, a table with a hotplate, and a shelf with a few tins and boxes on it: biscuits, crisps, jam and such. To the right of this rudimentary kitchen, standing next to a stairway, was a forty-year-old vertical EMU capsule, its casing scratched and dented, its bottom sitting in at least five centimeters of water. “Where's all this water coming from?"
I slipped a bit to my left and saw the companion capsule standing next to the first in a send-receive configuration and a massive old engram management unit console beyond it. I hadn't seen equipment that old since I copied into my first bio. The EMU console was located next to an equally vintage stasis bed. In repose upon the bed was a middle-aged woman dressed in Wranglers and a Harris tweed jacket over an olive turtleneck. Her hair was graying, unusually short, and she wore heavy black-framed eyeglasses. Her skin color was bright red. “Shad, run the air quality."
After thirty seconds, Shad said, “I'm glad we're in the mechs, Jaggs. The carbon monoxide level in here is lethal. If she's not dead, she's not an oxy breather."
"Get a DNA and liver temp."
While Shad was sticking a needle into the corpse, I flew past the stasis maintenance console following the sound of what I suspected was a generator. Indeed it was, and a petrol burner at that, the fuel bladder tucked into the northeast corner of the chamber. Air was piped into its carburetor from outside and the exhaust fed into a stack that went up through the floor above. The seal between the purple glass exhaust pipe and stack was leaking badly, the glass apparently cracked. Just behind the generator, the scalloped chamber wall was wet and dripping. It was rainwater seeping through the dirt between the edge of the building and the bedrock.
I reversed course and as I passed the stasis bed, Shad was running the DNA ID on the body. Past the EMU capsules I turned left and left again to go up the long staircase. The door to the upstairs was open slightly and I moved in, the overcast sky visible through one of the windows just beginning to grow light. There was enough furniture and decoration in the room to convince someone looking through a window that this was indeed an official information center. There was, however, only the one room, a closet with nothing in it, and the stairwell leading to the mysterious cavern below.
I did a quick analysis of the upstairs air and the carbon monoxide level above ground was even more concentrated than below. The exhaust stack from the generator came up through the floor at the back of the building, apparently with the assistance of a Magic Mole, which had made the glass stack pipe, as well. The piping ran across the open ceiling and up into the casing of the pseudo brick chimney. Prefab the building might have been, but it was fairly tight, without a crack or hole large enough for me to get to the outside. I was about to call an end to my meat suit's stasis and have myself land the cruiser and open the door with a pry bar, but I hate doing that. When the mech and the meat suit both are running at the same time and independently altering our engram content, there are always sync problems with useful items frequently deleted in the resolution. It was unnecessary, though. I opened the mail slot in the door and exited through it. Once outside I moved up to the roof and over to the chimney. One glance down the chimney showed what was blocking the generator exhaust port: dead birds.
As I came back through the mail slot and down the stairs, Shad was returning from the direction of the pucket dump. We both altered direction and stopped at the stasis bed. “Did you ID the body?” I asked Shad.
"DI Jaggers, I'd like you to meet the late Dr. Shirley Wurple. She's been dead a little over three hours. Find out where the water's coming in?"
"In the back. There's no foundation. The rain caused the building to settle slightly, which cracked the exhaust seal and probably toppled a couple of dead birds in the chimney over the exhaust port, blocking it."
"Something doesn't mesh, Jaggs. She's a wheel at Fantronics, right? She has to have access to better equipment than these old junkers."
"Probably left over from her research days with Dr. Widdows, Shad. She wanted her plans under the radar. Junkers are junked, you see, not registered."