Dawn of Procyon (20 page)

Chapter 39

PSD 29-213: 1907 hours

It was late when Cait and Pasternak finished up. After they left the UEM hangar, they trudged along the conduit that led back to the workshop, but by the time they reached it, everyone had left. The place was quiet, almost peaceful, the sound of tools and the Optechs’ banter stilled for another day.

“Everyone’s cleared out,” Pasternak remarked, his voice betraying no surprise.

“It’s not like these guys are fond of overtime,” Cait said. “When the whistle blows, that’s it.”

Pasternak finished clearing off the work tasks on his omni-device, then handed it across to her. “So, see you at Dive in ten?” he grinned.

“You bet,” she said. “I just want to go home and change first—”

She caught sight of Landry’s desk—
her
desk—in the corner, and the stack of omni-devices that the Optechs had tossed upon it when they left. Dodge’s words from a few hours before came back to her, loud and clear.

I want a full review of every new work request that came in today, and a report forwarded to me before you go home.

“Maybe not,” she said under her breath.

“What is it?”

She weighed things. On the one hand, she could simply ignore Dodge’s orders and head to the Cross. She could have some fun and feel better about herself, forget about work for the night. That was what she
really
wanted to do.

But then, this was her first full day in her new job. Her first day as a supervisor. Did she really want to screw things up this badly already? Dodge was vindictive, and he’d already demonstrated that he had no issues with dismissing a supervisor who’d done the wrong thing, even one like Landry, who’d been making a solid fist of the job for years.

If she was demoted back to being a low-level Optech, that would be it. She’d be stuck there forever. No promotions would be sent her way again. She would have a black mark put through her name in permanent ink.

She pictured her father’s smug face, saw him smiling and shaking his head in disdain.

I knew you couldn’t do it, Cait.

“I can’t go,” she said finally.

“What? You’re not backing out on me now, are you?”

“I have to clean some stuff up for Dodge. Go through the work list. It won’t take long.”

“Phew. You really are taking this job seriously, huh? Working late, even.”

She smiled wanly. “Better put me in a straightjacket next, right?” She gave him a slap on the shoulder. “Get going. I’ll see you there.”

He smiled and gave her a sly glare from the corner of his eye. “You just want me to get there earlier so you can win our little contest.”

“Woe is me. You figured out my master plan.” She gestured to the door. “Get going.”

Over at the desk, she slumped into the chair and began going through the omni-devices. The guys had left them in a mess, as usual, and she wanted to go through each of them first to make sure that nothing had been missed. She found requests that had been completed but not signed off, others that had been signed off with incorrect closure codes. More still with no hours logged against the job.

It was all over the place, an administrative nightmare. Cait began to wonder how many hours Landry spent back here going through this stuff, sitting alone in the quiet and gloom of the workshop, poring over grubby omni-devices and filling in the blanks. Dotting the i’s.

He could afford to do that because he was a loner. He had no life, no other ways to invest those hours that were devoted purely to work. No one to spend those hours
with
.

But that might not strictly be true, Cait,
she told herself.

It took her more than an hour to sort out the omni-devices, and then she started on the review of the newest requests, the ones that had arrived earlier in the day.

The work never stopped around the workshop. The requests were endless. With Landry allocating tasks every day, she’d never really gotten a full picture on exactly how much work was coming in. It was
a lot
, she realized. She wondered how they ever got through it all.

She began at the top. The first request was for an inspection of an air-conditioning unit in the eastern wing of Outpost Control. Apparently it wasn’t running cold enough. Definitely low priority. The next wasn’t much more interesting—the call button on Elevator Three wasn’t lighting up on one of the accommodation levels.

Who cares?
Cait thought irritably.

There were several more of the same ilk, trivial issues that were little more than nuisance value, and Cait gave them each a cursory glance before moving on.

Then she moved onto the next one.

It wasn’t a new request, as such. It was actually a job from several weeks ago that had been updated and revised earlier in the day, placing it near the top of the queue.

The request for Tower 117 had initially been logged two weeks ago as a simple comms failure. The tower had stopped transmitting data. It happened from time to time. The towers were close to twenty years old, and, like any hardware system, components broke down. It was inevitable. Although the towers were vital to Earth’s security, the array grid had been built to tolerate failures of single nodes. There was overlap between the towers’ scanning field, and unless two adjacent towers went down, there was generally no cause for alarm.

This particular request, however, had been modified earlier in the afternoon. The array had come back online, apparently, and then begun changing transmission frequencies in what the comms officer believed to be some sort of test pattern. The result was that the transmissions had begun to annoy him with continual alerts, so he had initiated a remote shut down on the tower. He’d then updated the request for the Optechs to investigate.

Cait reached for her omni-device, hands trembling. She went through the carrier logs, located the entries pertaining to Tower 117. Going over the timestamps, she could see the fluctuations in frequency from earlier in the afternoon, and then the final command to initiate the remote shutdown.

She took the data and fed it into a graphing function on her omni-device that she and the other Optechs used regularly when analyzing logs.

It was plain to see that the fluctuations weren’t random. There was a pattern. Three short delays, three long, then three short. Repeated over and over.

Her blood went cold.

Doesn’t this idiot in comms know an SOS signal when he sees one?

She slapped the omni-device down and pushed away from the desk, pinched the bridge of her nose as she closed her eyes.
An SOS signal
.

Or was she just reading too much into this, she wondered?

First, Landry disappears without a trace. Then there’s a distress signal from a tower out in the wasteland.

But, wait a minute. Does that mean they’re connected? So what if a weird signal came in from the array? What if it was some kind of glitch in the tower’s code? Somebody’s idea of a bad joke? There could be a thousand reasons why those signals came in, none of which have anything to do with the disappearance of Landry Stanton.

And even if it did, there wasn’t much Cait could do about it. The outpost was in lockdown. No one in, or out. Landry was now officially dead, so it wasn’t as if a search party would be sent out to look for him. She knew that they wouldn’t waste the resources.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she said to herself, out loud. Her voice didn’t sound convincing, even to her own ears, so she said it again, louder this time. “Not a thing.”

She put the request behind her and continued going through the remainder of the items that had come in during the afternoon.

She allowed Landry to slip out of her mind.

Two hours later, she finished her work, closed up the workshop and went back to her apartment to change.

Chapter 40

PSD 29-213: 1720 hours

“Landry?”

His eyes shot open. The inside of his visor was coated with condensation so thick that a Toad could have been standing right in front of him and he wouldn’t have known.

“HAIRI?” he said breathlessly. “Where have you been?”

“I apologize, Landry. I had to divert my resources to interrogating the OXEE. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“Frightened?
Me?
Who are you kidding?” He felt as though he were drowning, sucking in mouthfuls of air that still left him short of breath. “I wouldn’t be scared of–”

“I have discovered the reason why the OXEE shut down.”

Landry stopped, waiting. “And?”

“It was performing as per its design. When the OXEE detects that it has entered an already oxygen rich environment, it is essentially performing no function, and it returns to a standby operating mode.”

Landry was finding it difficult to think clearly, but he tried his best to process that information. “What do you mean, an oxygen rich environment? Are you telling me there’s O
2
in these tunnels?”

“The OXEE reports that the air here is remarkably similar in composition to Earth’s atmosphere. There are minor variations in the percentage of nitrogen, oxygen, and argon, but these are negligible.”

“So the air is breathable here?”

“It would seem so.”

Landry fought back the impulse to rip his helmet off and take a lungful of air. “Wait a minute. If I take my helmet off, what if there’s alien spores or something in the air? What if there are viruses that will eat my face off the minute I expose my skin to them?”

“I imagine that would be a painful experience.”

“You interrogated the OXEE, right? Can’t you tell it just to turn itself back on and filter out the nasties?”

“I cannot. I am not equipped with the correct handshaking protocols to override its default settings. The controller is still embedded within the scout itself.”

“Right. So the only choice I have is to suffocate inside the EVA suit, or take my chances by removing my helmet.”

“It doesn’t sound like a choice to me.”

“No. Guess not.” He raised his hands and gripped the helmet, still wondering whether he would go through with it. This was madness, wasn’t it? Taking off his gear in an alien environment? Before yesterday he would have considered it inconceivable.

And yet, much had changed since them.

He disengaged the catch and pulled his helmet free, lifting it to one side.

The first thing he noticed was the coolness of the air around him. The tunnel was still, silent, but he could feel the air on his cheeks, on his brow. He expected something to happen—for that somewhat pleasant sensation to suddenly turn sour, for his face to begin stinging, but it didn’t happen. Everything seemed fine, he thought. Everything was okay.

A moment later he realized that, in his panic, he had been holding his breath. He exhaled slowly, then took a shallow breath of air. Once again, there was no strange sensation in his throat or lungs. It felt
good
. He took a longer breath, then began to breath normally.

“How do you feel, Landry?”

“I’m alive.”

“That is good.”

“Could be worse.” He got to his feet, placed the helmet down on the toboggan. As he did so, he noticed a ragged tear on the left hip of his EVA suit. He dug his fingers inside and saw that the suit’s integrity had been compromised.

He thought of the dull ache he’d felt after the fall, and realized that the fabric must have been torn as he’d scraped against the sharp section of wall. Cool air had been flowing in through the hole, inadvertently supplying oxygen to him while the OXEE had been inactive.

“That might be the first break I’ve caught today,” he muttered.

“Landry?” HAIRI said.

“Never mind. That’s one problem solved. But why is there oxygen here?”

“Unknown.”

“Is this all part of the Toad’s plan? To make me want to go deeper?”

“That would seem pointless. If the Argoni’s objective was to lure you here, then it has already succeeded.”

“True. So you’re saying I should keep going deeper.”

“That is up to you.”

Landry thought about it. “I still need that antenna, so I guess I will.” He began to walk again, towing the toboggan behind him. The HUD lights from his suit were projecting flashes of green over the ceiling in the absence of the helmet. The place still creeped the heck out of him, so he decided to whisper quietly to HAIRI to avoid attracting too much attention. “So. Let’s think about this. What possible reasons could the Toads have for creating an atmosphere so similar to Earth’s down here?”

“It is a perplexing question. Could it be that they are using it for study purposes?”

“How so?”

“It could be that they are experimenting with chemical weapons, or something similar, and observing how they interact with the environment.”

“So you’re saying that, any minute now, I’m going to start bleeding from every orifice?”

“It is a possibility.”

“Why do you
always
come up with the worst alternative?”

“I have several theories that are worse than this one. Would you like to hear them?”

“No. I’m good.” He negotiated his way over one of the black tubes that was threaded across the floor. “But why would they travel all the way out here to create a lab in a backwater like Proc-One? Why couldn’t they just do it on their home world?”

“That part does not make much sense.”

“Maybe this is just one big honeypot.”

“I am not familiar with this term in the context that you are using.”

“A honeypot,” Landry said. “A trap. Like I was saying before, the Argoni make a nice cozy cave down here to lure in unsuspecting humans. For all we know, the Toad might have left that arm over by the crash site on purpose. Maybe it wanted us down here.”

“I still believe this is unlikely. There are other means of capturing a specimen that are far simpler.”

“Right. It could have just taken me by force and shoved me under its arm. It’s surely strong enough to drag me down—”

He stopped suddenly. There was light coming from up ahead.

“Look at that. Do you see it?”

“I am not receiving visual input, Landry. The camera mounted to your helmet has been disconnected.”

“There’s light up ahead.”

“Is it sunlight?”

“I don’t think so. It looks greeny-yellow, like some kind of grotto.”

“If you put your helmet back on, I might be able to analyze it.”

“No. Just keep quiet.”

Landry edged forward, sliding the toboggan as quietly as he could. He paused to listen, but there was no sound in the tunnel, not even the slightest whisper.

It sounded deserted, but he knew that wasn’t true. The Argoni had to be down here somewhere, he thought, maybe more than one, judging by the size and complexity of this tunnel network.

So where are they?

He moved onward, and moments later he found the source of the glow.

It was a large chamber, far wider than the tunnels that Landry had seen thus far, with a relatively low ceiling that was once again covered in twisting black tubes that extended down across the walls and part of the floor. Within the walls themselves, however, emanated a phosphorescent glow, the origin of the light Landry had seen earlier. As he moved closer, he could see that these were lines, or perhaps cracks in the rock that created the illumination, almost as if the glow was coming from
behind
the walls and filtering through these tiny fissures. He reached out a gloved hand to touch one of them, but then retracted it again, thinking better of it.

There was something else on the walls now that he could see. It was scattered with reddish tinted plants of some kind—thin, tapering tubers with smaller branches or roots sprouting from the sides.

Landry turned in a slow circle, surveying the cavern. There must have been a hundred or more of the plants rooted in amongst the black tubes.

“It’s some kind of nursery,” he said, bewildered.