Chapter 155 - 153 — The Reports They Came Back With II

I closed the withdrawal section.

I was not going to build a plan out of promises nobody had made.

When I returned to the operations desk, the man who had helped me earlier was still working.

He had taken the pen from behind his ear and was using it to mark something on a printed sheet. The other documents had been rearranged, and the equipment case that had been passing through the corridor earlier was now standing beside his chair.

He looked up when I approached.

"Finished already?"

"I’ve finished the preparation packet."

"That’s different."

"I noticed."

He set the pen down.

"Was there something else you needed?"

"The original survivor statements. The packet refers to them, but it doesn’t include all of them."

"Which expedition?"

"Both."

He looked toward the reading room.

"Have you found something in the reports?"

"Not yet. That’s the problem."

He waited, so I explained.

"The Halloran and Ashford accounts disagree about the floor’s objective. I want to know what each survivor actually reported before their statements were condensed into the expedition summaries."

He turned back to his screen.

"Those are separate records. Some of the material we received was supplied specifically for expedition preparation, and the complete debriefings weren’t all transferred with it."

"Can Myrmidon request them?"

"We can request additional information. Whether the originating organization releases everything is another matter."

"Then I’d like to make the request."

He opened a form.

"Is there a particular question you want answered?"

I considered telling him I wanted to know how to clear Floor Three.

That would have been accurate, but it was also the sort of answer that would produce another folder full of conclusions I did not know whether to trust.

"Yes," I said. "I want the survivors’ descriptions of when their expeditions decided to withdraw, what they understood about the available route out, and what prevented the other members from returning."

He began entering the request.

"Anything else?"

"Their original observations about the floor’s objective, before the expedition summaries were prepared. I want to know which parts they witnessed themselves and which parts they learned from their teammates."

He stopped typing.

"That’s a fairly specific request."

"I’ve read the general version."

"And you believe the general version is wrong?"

"I believe two groups of people can come back from the same floor with different explanations of what they were supposed to do. I don’t know which explanation is right, and I’d rather not find out by standing inside it."

His expression changed slightly.

Not surprise, exactly.

More the look of a man who had finally been given a question he could put into a form without wondering what the person asking it actually wanted.

"That I can write down," he said.

He went back to the keyboard.

I waited while he completed the request.

There were other things I wanted to ask, including whether anyone had returned from Floor Three recently enough to remember details that had not made it into the written reports, but I did not expect the operations staff to summon a surviving expedition member simply because I had decided an interview would be useful.

I asked whether a follow-up request could be made if the existing statements proved insufficient.

"It can," he said. "But an interview is something we would have to arrange with the survivor or the organization responsible for their debriefing."

"I understand."

He looked at me over the screen.

"Do you?"

"I understand that you can ask. I wasn’t expecting you to bring one of them here before dinner."

He glanced at the clock.

"It would be supper, at this point."

"That’s even worse. I wouldn’t want to interrupt somebody’s supper."

He gave me a look that suggested he was not entirely certain whether I was joking, then submitted the request.

A confirmation appeared on his screen.

"I’ve sent it through. You’ll be informed when we have a response."

"Thank you."

He returned to the printed sheet on his desk, but before I could leave, he spoke again.

"Sir."

I turned back.

"Your father had the same preparation packet."

"I know."

"He also had access to the people here who assembled it. If there’s something in the material you don’t understand, you can ask."

"I intend to."

He nodded and went back to work.

I walked away with the reading terminal under my arm, thinking about the fact that Christopher had already done all of this.

He had looked at the same figures, read the same conflicting accounts, and decided how many people he could take into Floor Three.

He had not waited for somebody else to clear it.

He had gone in because the Tower was not going to move forward if everyone kept waiting for somebody else to make the first attempt.

I understood that.

I also understood that eleven members of the Halloran expedition had died, and that five members of Ashford’s team had not returned.

My father had said he was using their dead.

At the time, I had thought it was a hard way to describe the value of the reports.

After Floor Two, I was beginning to understand what he meant.

Those people had entered a place without a complete guide, and whatever they managed to learn had become part of the preparations for the next expedition.

Their deaths were not a strategy.

They were the cost of obtaining information nobody had possessed before them.

And now Christopher was inside Floor Three, adding to that information himself.

I wanted to follow him.

I wanted to be strong enough to reach him before he needed somebody else to bring him home.

But I could not stand at the entrance to an uncleared floor with five people who had trusted me once and tell them that we would work out how to leave if something went wrong.

Not after what we had just survived.

I returned to the reading room to collect the notes I had made.

They were not particularly impressive.

Two casualty figures, a list of missing information, and several questions about withdrawal that I had no way to answer yet.

I had started the evening expecting to learn more about how to clear Floor Three.

Instead, I had learned how much I did not know about surviving an attempt that failed.

I looked at the six names I had written near the bottom of the page.

Jace. Krüger. Mara. Hana. Theo. Anton.

Mara would probably object to being included in a possible expedition before her leg had recovered. Hana would object to the fact that I had written the names down at all without asking anyone. Krüger would want a plan, and Anton would want to know what equipment the plan required.

Theo would probably ask whether I had compared the reports with whatever the Player Blog had collected.

I smiled at that, then crossed out the names.

Not because I no longer wanted them beside me.

Because I had not asked.

I left the questions about withdrawal where they were and closed the terminal.

There was enough in the reports for me to begin preparing, but not enough to decide who should enter the Tower with me, or even whether I should be entering it yet.

The request for the original survivor accounts was already moving through Myrmidon’s operations staff.

Until those accounts arrived, I had other things I could do. I needed to recover, inspect my equipment, and understand what Floor Two had cost me before I began treating Floor Three as the next item on a schedule.

I got up and headed for the door.

Halfway there, I stopped and looked back at the reports lying closed on the table.

Twenty-two entered. Eleven returned.

Nineteen entered. Fourteen returned.

Christopher had gone in with twelve.

I had spent most of the evening asking how someone was supposed to clear Floor Three, and the more I read, the less useful that question became.

Before I asked anyone to follow me into it, I needed to know something else.

If we failed, how many of us could I bring home?