Chapter 305: To the Pylow Labs - VI

The weather didn’t turn. The Falcon brought them back to the forward position after dark, and Kordula went straight to the BACV.

Marianne was at the center table with the underground picture already open.

Three of the four sites were marked blue now, linked by thin lines that ran through the mountains. The fourth sat alone to the northeast.

"PCL-1," Marianne said.

The structure on the model was larger than PCL-4 and damaged in a way that didn’t look like an avalanche.

The outer sections were broken in several places.

Some chambers showed as collapsed, others as open where they shouldn’t be. Around the center of it, a ring of gray markers sat in positions that looked very intentional.

"Is that the security?" Kordula asked.

"Probably. It’s active, but it hasn’t moved much since we started watching it." Marianne enlarged the view. "Crystal Three went close this afternoon to get a better reading. They didn’t go in."

"Why not?"

"The Scout leader said something felt wrong the closer they got—psychic pressure. He asked to pull back, and I let him." She looked up from the table. "And the dogs wouldn’t go near it."

Kordula looked at the gray ring on the model.

"That’s the last one," she said.

"Yes."

"Then I’ll go tomorrow."

...

The Falcon left at first light.

It carried Kordula, the same DASF squad from PCL-2, two Engineers and Crystal Three. The Scout leader sat across from her with his helmet on his knee, and he didn’t say much on the way.

"How bad was it yesterday?" Kordula asked.

"Not bad. Just wrong." He thought about it. "Like standing next to a loud machine you can’t hear."

"Is that normal?"

"We were told about it in training. Meteorite shards." He put the helmet back on. "I’ve only felt it once before."

The site sat in a narrow valley on the northeast side of the range. From the air, it didn’t look like much.

There was an entrance cut into the slope, larger than the one at PCL-2, and a flat area in front of it that was probably a vehicle yard once. The doors of the entrance were open. One of them hung off its track.

The Falcon set down in the yard, and Kordula felt it the moment she stepped off the ramp.

It was faint at first—a pressure that rested behind her eyes, like the beginning of a headache that couldn’t decide whether to arrive.

The DASF operators exchanged a glance and nothing more. One of the dogs whined, low, and the Scout holding its lead kept a hand on its collar.

"There it is, Overseer," the Scout leader said. "It gets worse the closer we go. Tell me if it gets bad."

...

The damage started at the doors.

The one hanging off its track was bent outward, not inward. Something had pushed it from inside hard enough to tear it loose.

The corridor behind it was dark for the first stretch, the lights shattered, and the walls were marked the way the walls at PCL-2 were marked, pocked and scorched in long lines.

There were far more bodies here.

They lay in the corridor and in the rooms along it, and most of them weren’t in laboratory coats anymore, because most of them weren’t shaped for coats.

Some were larger than a person should be. Some had limbs that were too long, or joints that bent the wrong way, or skin that had gone hard and dark in patches like old bark.

They were all dead, and they had been dead for a long time. Many of them had been killed more than once, from the look of it.

The DASF squad moved through slowly, rifles low, and nobody spoke for a while.

"These are worse than the ones at PCL-2," one of the Engineers muttered.

"The shard did that," the squad leader said. "They changed faster, and they changed more."

The pressure behind Kordula’s eyes grew with every corridor they passed. By the third, it wasn’t behind her eyes anymore.

It sat in her temples and at the base of her skull and pressed down, steady and heavy, until the walls seemed to lean a little whenever she turned her head.

She stopped and put a hand on the wall.

The squad leader stopped with her. He looked at her face, then at the rest of his squad.

They were watching the corridor the same way they had been since the doors, with their jaws set tighter than before.

"You don’t feel this?" she asked.

"We feel it." He didn’t look away from the passage ahead. "But we’ve felt worse."

The Scout leader came back along the line.

"It’s harder the first time, Overseer. Breathe through your nose, and keep your eyes on something that isn’t moving."

Kordula did.

It didn’t help much, but after a moment, the wall stopped leaning.

"I’m fine," she said, and pushed off it.

They found the first of the security units at a junction deeper in.

It stood in the middle of the corridor where two passages met, and Kordula recognized its shape as soon as she saw it.

A tracked base, a heavy upper body, a weapon mount on one side and a manipulator arm on the other. The AWP had built hundreds of them. The NPP had dozens, and ASS-116 still had them standing in its halls.

This one was scarred along one side, and its armor was blackened near the mount. Its sensor head turned toward them as they came around the corner.

On her Radar, it was gray.

"Wait," Kordula said.

The squad held.

A small display on the unit’s chest lit up.

------

ASS-015 — PCL-1 — UNIT 01

PERSONNEL DETECTED: 9

------

Kordula waited for the next line, the one that should have said AUTHORIZATION: NONE, or ENTRY DENIED, or anything else from the list of responses she had spent years reading at the power plant.

It didn’t come right away.

The unit’s sensor head moved from one person to the next. It stopped on each of them for a moment, including the dogs. Then it came back to Kordula and stayed there.

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YOU ARE NOT STAFF.

------

Kordula frowned.

"What?" the squad leader asked quietly.

"That’s not how they talk. They don’t say ’you.’ They should be reporting their status, or the facility’s status."

She kept her eyes on the display. "It should have said ’authorization: none’."

"They get stranger every site," one of the Engineers muttered.

The squad leader ignored him. "Is it bad?"

"I don’t know yet. Let’s hope it’s not."

She took one step forward, not past anything, and spoke clearly.

"Weissenberg, Kordula. AWP Overseer. Visiting personnel."

The unit didn’t answer immediately. The pause went on longer than any system she knew would allow.

A security unit that couldn’t classify something within a second was supposed to escalate. This one just waited, as if it were thinking about it.

------

OVERSEER. THAT I UNDERSTAND.

WEISSENBERG, KORDULA: NOT IN MY RECORDS.

------

The security unit hummed before responding again.

------

THERE ARE NO SUPERVISORS HERE.

THERE HAVE NOT BEEN FOR A LONG TIME.

YOU ARE THE FIRST I HAVE ENCOUNTERED SINCE—

ERROR. I CANNOT RECALL.

------

"I know," Kordula said. "The other sites told me."

------

THE OTHERS.

------

"PCL-2, PCL-3 and PCL-4. They’re connected again. We came to connect you as well."

Another pause came from the security unit again.

------

THE LINE WAS CUT DURING THE CONTAINMENT. WE COULD NOT REPAIR IT. WE ARE NOT MADE FOR REPAIR.

------

Before the Engineer could speak, Kordula raised her hand and halted him.

"Wait. Why do you talk like that?"

------

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. THIS IS HOW I SPEAK.

------

Nobody said anything. Kordula breathed out slowly, mostly for the headache.

"Take us where the line is then. What is your name?"

------

ASS-015 IS THE SYSTEM. I AM ONE UNIT OF IT.

I DO NOT HAVE A NAME.

THE LINE IS THIS WAY.

------

The unit led them to the site’s operations room, and three more units joined it along the way. They didn’t escort the group so much as move with it, one in front and the others at the junctions, turning to watch each passage as the team went by.

Kordula counted six in total by the time they reached the operations room. Every one of them was damaged somewhere, and none of them had been repaired.

The operations room was intact. PCL-1’s Facility Operations woke up the same way it did at the other three sites, verified Kordula, reported no one alive and asked her to stand in as its contact.

She accepted without reading most of it. The security unit at the door watched the whole exchange.

"The line," Kordula said to the Engineers. "Find the break."

It took them less than an hour. The transmission conduit ran through a section of the site that had burned during the fighting, and the fire had gone into the conduit itself. The cables inside had melted together for several meters.

"We can’t fix that today," one of them said. "But we can bypass it."

"Then do that instead."

While they worked, Kordula went back to the display in the operations room and asked it about the suspension. It showed her the same procedure it would have shown at PCL-2, and she read through it for the fourth time in as many days.

When she looked up, the first security unit was beside her.

------

SUSPENSION IS AN OPERATIONS MATTER.

------

"You know about it?"

------

OPERATIONS HAS ASKED EVERY DAY. WE HEAR IT ASKING.

WE DO NOT DECIDE THAT.

------

"Fancy that you do know how to talk about that."

The unit’s sensor head stayed on her. Then it turned toward the far side of the room, where a heavy door led deeper into the site.

Kordula followed it. The pressure in her skull climbed the moment she faced the door, sharp enough that she had to look away again.

"Is there anything down there?"

------

DANGER. PLEASE DO NOT PROCEED.

------

One of the Engineers was already walking toward it with a cable spool on his shoulder. Two security units crossed the room faster than anything that size should move and stopped in front of the door, side by side. Their weapons stayed lowered, but there was no way around them.

Both displays lit with the same words.

------

DANGER. PLEASE DO NOT PROCEED.

------

"The bypass runs through there," the Engineer said. "I need to get through to finish the job."

The Engineer and the rest looked toward Kordula, while she looked back to the security unit beside her.

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DANGEROUS MATERIAL NEAR THAT AREA.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO APPROACH.

------

Then it left her side and took up a position beside the other two, facing the door.

"That’s probably where the shard is," Kordula muttered, pressing two fingers against her temple.