Chapter 300: To the Pylow Labs - I

Kordula’s Falcon set down behind the forward position a little after noon.

The rotors threw up a cloud of powdered snow that took a long time to settle. When it finally did, she saw the BACV parked beside a line of vehicles near the valley road, and the mountains rising behind them on three sides.

She was told to pack for the cold, and she did, but it still wasn’t enough.

A soldier met her at the ramp and walked her to the BACV. Inside, it was warm and cramped, full of screens and people who didn’t look up from them. The woman standing at the center table turned around when the hatch closed.

A small tag appeared beside her. Commander Marianne Krile, Northern Command.

"Overseer Weissenberg. You made good time."

"The pilot didn’t give me much of a choice." Kordula pulled her gloves off and flexed her fingers. "Is it always this cold here?"

"Today’s one of the better days."

Marianne brought the underground picture forward on the table.

Kordula had only seen the door before. The model showed the connected spaces behind it.

Chambers sat inside the rock at different depths, joined by tunnels that bent and branched and came back together somewhere else. Shafts climbed toward the upper slopes, and a few passages ran north until they ended at structures buried under the snow.

The entrance the Scouts found sat at the edge of all of it.

"How far down does this go?"

"Farther than the picture shows. Anything sealed off from the rest won’t appear." Marianne turned toward the hatch, where the DASF squad and three Engineers were waiting. "The team’s ready. Crystal Three and Crystal Four are already on the slope for overwatch."

She addressed the DASF squad leader next.

"Find out what’s inside and whether any of it is still running. Don’t force anything that will compromise the soldiers or the Engineers."

"We’ll be under your care, Overseer," the squad leader replied.

"Don’t call me that. I’m already your subordinate."

"Heh." Marianne chuckled. "You seem like an easy person to talk to."

...

The vehicles took them as far as the service track, and the rest of the way was on foot.

The warm seam was easy to follow. Snow thinned along both sides of it until there was only wet rock and meltwater running downhill in thin lines. The pole with the bent crossarm still stood beside the track, its cable disappearing into the ground.

Kordula heard the drone before she saw it. Crystal Four’s operator kept it high above the slope while the two Scout teams held their positions farther up, where they could see the door and the whole valley below it.

The door looked the same as it did on her screen at the power plant. Gray and flush with the rock, and without any markings. The status light above it was still dim.

The DASF squad spread out on either side while one of the Engineers ran a scanner along the frame.

"No external weapons. No sensors I can find, either."

Kordula crouched beside a small cover plate set into the rock at waist height and pried it open with her glove. Behind it was a panel with a narrow slot, a row of indicators and a service port.

She knew the type; the NPP had dozens like it.

"It’s a maintenance lock," she said. "Standard DAEDALUS service access. It isn’t tied into site security. It’s meant for work crews who need to get in without waking the whole facility."

"Can we open it?"

"If it has power, yes."

The Engineer connected a diagnostic lead to the port. The indicators lit one after another, and the lock released before he finished working through the panel.

He looked at his scanner, then at the door.

"That was quick."

The door slid aside into the rock. Beyond it was a short vestibule with a second door at the far end, and that one opened on its own as they approached.

Warm air came through first.

"Northern Command, we’re inside," the squad leader said.

"We have you on the picture," Marianne answered. "Carry on."

...

The first thing Kordula noticed was the hum.

It came from somewhere below them, low and steady, too faint to point at but constant enough that she stopped hearing it after a few minutes. The corridor lights were on at a reduced level, and the air moved against her face.

One of the Engineers checked his reading. "Ventilation’s running. Fourteen degrees."

"Somebody’s paying the electric bill," another said.

The corridor opened into a service area wider than the vestibule, and then into a hall full of equipment.

Heat pumps stood in racks along one wall, each unit connected to insulated lines that ran into the ceiling. Farther in were storage tanks, squat and heavily insulated, with frost gathered around their valves and fittings despite the warm air in the room.

Kordula walked along the row and checked one of the gauges.

"Cryogenic storage. Surprisingly, the tanks are still holding." She tapped the gauge.

"What are they here for?" one of the Engineers asked.

"Anything down here that has to run colder than the surrounding rock draws from these. We’re talking about test chambers, cold-start rigs, or superconducting lines if they had them. If these ever warmed up, half the experiments in this place would’ve failed overnight."

The next room was a test cell.

A mechanical arm sat clamped inside a sealed chamber, its joints wrapped in sensors. Frost covered the chamber walls. As she watched, the arm flexed slowly, held, then relaxed again.

Kordula leaned closer to the display beside the window. A counter sat near the top of the screen, and the number was very large.

She scrolled through the log. The last operator sign-in was almost a year ago, and the test continued without anyone after that. The chamber kept freezing and warming the arm on schedule, cycle after cycle, recording every result for no one.

She recognized the seals around the arm’s joints. Contraction-tolerant ones, the same pattern as a batch of parts that once arrived at the NPP from somewhere she was never told.

"So these things actually came from here?"

"Are they familiar, Overseer?"

"Contraction-tolerant seals." Kordula pointed at the arm’s shoulder joint through the glass. "Metal shrinks in the cold, and different metals don’t shrink by the same amount. Put two of them together in a joint, freeze it, and the gap opens. An ordinary seal either cracks or slips, and whatever’s inside the joint starts leaking out."

She stepped back from the window.

"We had that problem with the heavy platforms on the NPP perimeter, and basically anywhere else the cold could reach. Every winter, the joints started weeping hydraulic fluid, and after a cold night, half the actuators wouldn’t move until someone warmed them up. Then a batch of these arrived with a certification sheet and no return address. The problem went away, and nobody upstairs would tell me where they were made."

The Engineer looked at the counter on the display.

"And this test measures what, exactly?"

"Someone wanted to know how many times a joint can freeze and thaw before the seal gives out." Kordula looked at the number again. "Look at this iteration, though. That many cycles, and the material hasn’t been affected at all. The ones we got at the plant were already good. These are better."

"Mark this one as intact."

The Engineers were already marking each section against the Radar model as they went and sending the updates back to the BACV.

Kordula named what she recognized and told them plainly when she didn’t.

The room after the test cell held a long steel frame with a row of plates clamped inside it, each one about the size of a door panel and numbered in black paint along the top.

Only the first plate was broken. It hung in the clamps in three pieces, split from a single impact point all the way to its edges, and the stencil above it read CONTROL.

Every plate after it carried the same kind of impact. Each had a shallow dent and nothing else. There were no cracks running from them, and there was no chipping along the edges.

A card was fixed above each plate with a test temperature written on it by hand. The numbers kept dropping down the row until the last few were colder than anything the mountain could produce on its own.

A cold chamber stood at the end of the frame, its door open, with a mounting rig inside sized for the same plates.

"Cold makes metal brittle," Kordula said. "Hit a steel plate at room temperature and it bends. Freeze it hard enough first, and the same hit breaks it like glass. One crack starts and runs straight through the whole thing."

She ran her glove along the line at the edge of one of the later plates.

"So you build it in layers, with something softer between them. A crack gets through the first layer, reaches the soft one and stops. You lose the outside of the plate instead of the whole plate."

She looked down the row, past the control plate to the last card.

"These don’t even crack through the first layer anymore. They weren’t testing whether it works. They were testing how cold it has to get before it stops working, and it looks like they ran out of cold first."

The next room was different. A low-pressure chamber occupied most of it, surrounded by instruments that had little to do with the machinery tests behind them.

Inside the chamber was a padded seat with straps across the arms and chest. Leads for heart and breathing monitors hung from a panel beside it, next to an oxygen mask on a hook.

"I have no idea what that’s for," Kordula said. "Machines don’t need heart monitors. Human testing, probably HELIX."

She turned away from the window. "Mark it anyway."

A small maintenance unit sat docked in an alcove near the next doorway. It was a tracked machine about knee-high, with its arm folded against its body and a green light on its casing.

The Engineer beside her looked at it, then at the floor.

"Floors are clean. Something’s been maintaining this place."

Kordula had noticed that as well.

There was dust, but only in the corners. The doors were closed and undamaged. Nothing had been forced open or barricaded, no furniture was piled against a doorway, and nothing looked like people had tried to hold out anywhere.

There were also no infected.

At the NPP, ASS-116 sealed its survivors inside and kept them there. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she expected to find the same thing here. People, or what was left of them.

So far, there was no one.

The squad leader stopped at the end of the corridor, where it turned and sloped downward.

"Northern Command. Upper section is clear. No contacts, no damage. Equipment’s still running. We’re moving down."

"Copy."