Chapter 304: To the Pylow Labs - V

The Engineers finished the diagnostics a little before evening.

Most of it was what they expected. Pumps, switching banks, a few sensors that stopped reporting and needed replacing. The last screen was different, and the Engineer who opened it turned the console so Kordula could see.

It was a distribution chart. The reactor’s output ran in from the left, and on the right, it split into branches.

A thin branch went to PCL-2 itself. Ventilation, lighting, the laboratories upstairs, the lift, the cryogenic storage. Everything they walked past that afternoon fit inside that one line.

The rest of it went out along the transmission lines. Three thick branches, marked PCL-1, PCL-3 and PCL-4, each labeled SCHEDULED EXTERNAL OPERATIONS.

Two of those branches ended in red.

"It’s still sending power down lines that don’t reach anything," the Engineer said. "Whatever it can’t deliver, it sheds. It’s been doing that for months."

Kordula looked at the chart for a while.

"Northern Command," she said. "The storms your Scouts watched on the slopes. They’re coming from here."

"From the reactor?"

"From what it powers. This site runs the schedule, and the other three sites carry it out. Half the network can’t hear it anymore, so the storms come out weak and end early."

She tapped the red lines. "That’s why it wants to stop."

The channel was quiet for a second.

"Understood. I’ll pass that on."

...

Kordula went back to the suspension request and asked Facility Operations what it would take, step by step, rather than whether she could approve it.

The answer came back longer than she expected.

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FACILITY OPERATIONS — SUSPENSION PROCEDURE

1. PRE-SUSPENSION RECORDS PRESERVATION — CUSTODIAN REQUIRED NETWORK

2. CONFIRMATION — PCL-1, PCL-3, PCL-4

3. SUPERVISOR APPROVAL

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The first line had a note underneath it.

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CUSTODIAN: TEMPORARY OPERATIONAL CONTACT ELIGIBLE

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"Records preservation?" the squad leader asked.

"If a site is about to be suspended, it may never come back online. So before anything stops, everything it holds has to be copied and handed to someone who can keep it."

Kordula scrolled down the note. "Normally that would be the supervisor in charged here. There isn’t one, so it’s asking me."

"Does it include everything?"

"Everything that this thing can reach. Security is a different matter, however."

She read on. "And whatever crosses the containment boundary has to pass screening first. Security still gets a say in that."

"And the other computers upstairs? The laboratories?"

"Those too. Most of it will be locked per project, and operations can’t read those either. It can only hand them over." She closed the note. "That’s fine. The Commander can deal with locked drives."

She accepted the custody the same way she accepted everything else, by saying her name.

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FACILITY OPERATIONS

RECORDS CUSTODIAN: WEISSENBERG, KORDULA

PRESERVATION: INITIATED

SECURITY AUTHORITY OBJECTION: LOGGED

BOUNDARY SCREENING: REQUIRED FOR ALL MEDIA

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"Northern Command," the squad leader said. "We’re going to need more Engineers, a lot of storage, and transport. The facility’s handing over its records."

"How much?"

Kordula looked down the corridor toward the rows of dark laboratory doors.

"All of it. If you can spare more, that would be for the better."

...

The additional Engineers came up the valley road that night with the parts for the pumps and more storage than Kordula had seen in one place since the NPP. By morning, the copying ran in three shifts.

The work settled into a routine quickly. Engineers went from room to room upstairs and downstairs, connecting to every workstation and server operations could open, while others carried drives and sealed cases back toward the boundary.

At the bulkhead, every case stopped under the same pale light that scanned the squad the day before, and the security display gave the same answer each time.

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MEDIA SCREENING: CLEAR

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The mount above the door watched every one of them pass. The marker on Kordula’s Radar stayed gray.

Downstairs, the first of the two failing pumps came out of the heat-rejection loop before noon. The reactor’s output figure stopped falling an hour later. It didn’t rise much, but it stopped falling.

The link to PCL-3 took longer.

The fault wasn’t at either site. It was at a junction box halfway up the slope, where the transmission line came out of the rock and ran along the surface for a stretch before going back in.

Crystal Three found it from the Radar model and led two Engineers up to it on foot through knee-deep snow.

The box was intact. The cable running into it wasn’t. Something, probably ice, had worked into the housing over the winter and split one of the conductors.

The Engineers had it replaced in under an hour. On the display in the sector control room, the line marked PCL-3 flickered, dropped, then came back and stayed.

A new header appeared underneath it.

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PCL-3 — FACILITY OPERATIONS — CONNECTED

PCL-3 — PERSONNEL ACCOUNTABILITY — ASSIGNED PERSONNEL — LIVING: 0

PCL-3 — CONTAINMENT BOUNDARY — HELD

PCL-3 — TEMPORARY OPERATIONAL CONTACT (VIA PCL-2): WEISSENBERG, KORDULA — ACCEPTED

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It was the same story as here, only smaller, told in four lines.

"One down," the squad leader said.

"Two to go."

...

PCL-4 was a flight away.

The Falcon took Kordula, two Engineers and Crystal Four north the next morning, over a ridge that looked the same as every other ridge until the pilot started descending toward it. There was no door on the slope below, and no warm seam leading to it either.

There was only snow, and a long scar of broken rock and ice where half the mountainside had slid down at some point and stopped.

"Radar has the structure under that," the pilot said. "Entrance is buried. There’s a breach on the east side, near the top of the slide."

The breach was a gap where the slide had torn part of an outer wall away. Rock and ice filled most of it, but the Scouts found a way through near the top, wide enough for one person at a time.

The dogs went in first. The Scouts followed, then the Engineers, and Kordula went last.

It was cold inside. Not as cold as outside, but close.

The avalanche had broken through more than the wall. Snow had drifted down the first corridor and packed itself against the doors, and ice covered the walls in thin sheets where meltwater had run in and frozen again.

The first remains they found were under the debris near the breach. They seemed to be staff from the clothing alone. Whoever they were, the slide reached them before anything else did.

The second group was farther in, and those weren’t under anything.

They stood in the corridor.

There were four of them, spread out as if they had been walking toward the breach when the cold came in. Their skin was gray and frosted over. One of them had its arm raised against the wall, fingers curled into the ice.

None of them moved.

The dogs growled low and didn’t go closer.

On Kordula’s Radar, the four markers were red. They were very faint, and they didn’t move either.

"Still alive?" she asked.

"Barely," the Scout leader said. "They froze before they could go anywhere."

"Can they come back if it warms up?"

"Probably."

Kordula looked at the raised arm and the curled fingers for a moment longer.

"We should kill them. They’re red, so enemies, right?"

The Scouts did it quickly and quietly. After that, the four markers were gone, and the dogs stopped growling.

The core of PCL-4 was intact. The avalanche had crushed the outer sections and buried the main entrance, but the rooms at the center of the site were set deeper into the rock, and whatever the slide did to the rest, it didn’t reach them.

The lights there were dim, the heaters were running at the lowest setting that kept the equipment alive, and a single display in the control room woke up as Kordula came through the door.

It scanned the room the same way PCL-2 had.

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PCL-4 — FACILITY OPERATIONS

IDENTITY VERIFICATION IN PROGRESS

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The lines filled one by one. There were no records for the Scouts, the dogs or the Engineers. Then her name came up on the list.

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WEISSENBERG, KORDULA — VERIFIED

CLASSIFICATION: VISITING PERSONNEL

ASSIGNED PERSONNEL — LIVING: 0

POWER: LOCAL RESERVE — LOW

TRANSMISSION — PCL-2 — CONTACT LOST

REQUEST: VISITING PERSONNEL TO ASSUME TEMPORARY OPERATIONAL CONTACT

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"It’s the same request," one of the Engineers said.

"Yeah, cold as hell," Kordula said. "How come nobody inside really survived? Is the security that lax?"

None of the soldiers nor Engineers commented on her remark.

She accepted it, and the Engineers went to work on the line. The transmission route out of PCL-4 ran under the slide, and the slide had sheared it somewhere in the middle.

There was no digging it out in a day. Instead, they ran a temporary line across the surface, over the top of the debris, and spliced it into the route on the far side of the break.

It was nearly dark by the time the connection came up. The display in the control room updated with one line.

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TRANSMISSION — PCL-2 — CONNECTED (TEMPORARY)

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"Northern Command," Kordula said. "PCL-4 is connected. No one’s alive, like the others. Four infected in the upper corridor, frozen. They’ve been dealt with."

"Copy. Good work, all of you." There was a pause. "Come back before the weather turns. I want to show you something."