However, the base had never been legally decommissioned, so technically it remained Commonwealth territory. It was a reserve station in case the Commonwealth was ever threatened again; its array of emergency communication systems maintained by a smartcore and an ageing regiment of bots. There were no humans there any more.
The sensors showed Paula a cluster of long crumbling concrete blockhouses at the centre of strangely straight lines that stretched out into the desert. After a thousand years exposure to Kerensk's ferocious sun by day and freezing air each night even the strongest construction materials crumbled away. The desert was slowly constricting around it. Only the blockhouses remained intact, switching on a small force field once every couple of years or so when the desert finally summoned up enough energy to spin up another sandstorm.
Kingsville reminded Paula of Centurion Station.
The Alexis Denken touched down on a dedicated landing zone that was simply a flattish area of sand and loose rock. She floated down out of the main airlock, with a trolley-sledge hovering behind her. The air was as hot as she'd expected. She put on a pair of silver sunshades against the violet-tinged sun.
A dull metal door on the nearest blockhouse slid open with a grating sound of small stone particles being crunched somewhere in the actuators. She gave it a glance as she went inside, wondering why they didn't use malmetal. It closed behind her and the trolley-sledge. Inside, there was less evidence of decay, though it had obviously been decades since the air conditioning had been on. Fans were now making odd groaning sounds behind their grilles as power was fed into their motors. Light panels came on in the ceiling, revealing an empty rectangular room with a single lift door ahead of her.
Paula's u-shadow gave the Kingsville smartcore her authority code, and the lift doors flowed open. The base itself was buried three hundred metres below the desert. Thankfully, the lift ride down was a smooth one.
The transdimensional communication systems were housed in eight caverns that radiated out from a central engineering hub. Paula walked past the big silver-cased machines in cavern5, followed by the trolley-sledge. The chamber was completely silent. She couldn't even hear a mild power hum despite the huge energy flows her field scan revealed to her behind the silver casings.
Tucked away at the end of an ancillary chamber was another lift. It took her down another hundred metres to the oldest section of the base, comprising a single fortified compartment. This deep shelter had been designed to survive a nuclear strike by the Primes; it had force fields and molecular binding generators reinforcing the superstrength carbon walls. None of them had been switched on for over five hundred years; the smartcore didn't have the resources to maintain them at combat readiness. It didn't really matter, all they protected was an ancient secure storage vault dating back to the Starflyer War.
The Navy command at the time had estimated loss rates among the insurgency forces would be at least eighty per cent. Because of that the last thing every soldier did before being shipped out to their combat zone was to make a copy of their memories so they could be re-lifed if they didn't return. Kingsville's vault still retained the memories of those thirty thousand soldiers.
Paula's integral force field was on when the lift doors opened. She stood perfectly still scanning round with her biononic field functions. The air down here was foul; life support had broken down seven hundred years ago, and hadn't been repaired. There was no need, only bots moved through the ancient compartment. Two light panels out of thirty came on in the ceiling; it was as if the patches of floor they illuminated were suspended in deep space.
Paula's field scan function couldn't detect any evidence that the environment had been disturbed by a human for centuries, but having the scan pick up any proof was remote at best. Eight sensor bots deployed from the trolley-sledge, little globes that glowed with a weak violet light as they drifted forward through the air, sprouting long gossamer strands woven with sensitive molecular chains. The strands floated about like hair in water, probing the air.
Her u-shadow inserted itself into the chamber's ancient network and began to interrogate the management routines. Even with time-resistant fail-soft components and multiple redundancy there was little left functioning. Just enough to maintain viability. At the present rate of decline even that would be lost in another hundred years, and the Navy would have a decision to make.
A batch of forensic remotes darted out of the trolley-sledge. They zipped about through the darkness like cybernetic moths, settling on the physical sections of the network designated by Paula's u-shadow. They extruded active-molecule tendrils that wormed through the fragile casing to meld with the inert components below and began a very detailed analysis.
The network database gave Paula the location of the secure store she was here to investigate. Twelve hundred years ago, the Cat had sweated away her training sessions in the hot desert sun above before being deployed to Elan. Like everyone else, before she left she'd downloaded her memories in case she didn't come back.
Paula walked through the darkness, trepidation stirring her heart. The compartment was filled with row upon row of sealed shelving, containing thirty-thousand small armoured boxes. She stopped in front of the one holding the Cat's memorycell. Two forensic remotes were attached to it, their tendrils examining the twenty-centimetre door and its lock. The tendrils withdrew, and the remotes glided away to hover beside Paula.
'Open it, she told her u-shadow.
It took such a long time she wasn't sure the mechanism still worked — in fact she was quite impressed the network was still connected to the majority of the stores. Eventually the box buzzed as if there was a wasp trapped inside; then the little door hinged open and pink-tinged light shone out. The memorycell was sitting on a crystal pedestal, a neat grey ovoid three centimetres long.
Paula sent one of the forensic remotes in. It sat on the rim of the box, and extended its tendrils around the memorycell. Then the fragile strands were infiltrating the casing to probe the crystal lattice beneath. For something so old, the memorycell had endured surprisingly well. The company which had manufactured it twelve hundred years ago could finally justify their eternity survival marketing boast, Paula thought as her u-shadow displayed the results in her exovision.
DNA encrypted data confirmed the memories contained in the memorycell belonged to Catherine 'the Cat' Stewart, assigned to squad ERT03. Paula waited for twenty minutes while her forensic bots completed their analysis of the vault before calling ANA: Governance.
'I was right, she said. 'Somebody made a copy.
'Oh dear, ANA: Governance said.
'Quite. They were very good. There's almost no trace. I had to analyse dead network components for clues. A file search was conducted a hundred years ago in the network. And a quantum atomic review of the memorycell confirms a complete read with a corresponding timeframe.
'So it is her.
'The Accelerators must be very desperate indeed.
'We already know that.
'This isn't the Cat that went on to found the Knights Guardian; that was an older smarter personality. This is an early one.
'Do you believe the difference is relevant?
'I'm not sure. I expect this one to be… raw. Sholapur was confirmation of that.
'Are you sure? Remember why you finally arrested the Cat.
'Good point.