ShipCore

USD: 72 Days after arrival at Fort Glisson

Location: Nu Crateris, Outer System, Hades, Checkpoint Alpha, SRS Heaven’s Fire

Yapper’s head popped up as Amy slipped out of her quarters. The Rexxor fell in behind her quietly as she headed to join Heeler in the ship’s shuttle bay.

Repairs to the Heaven’sFire had been completed early, but Heeler had declared that he needed more time before he began tinkering with the construct’s power and control node. Amy had agreed with no reservations, taking the time to get a long sleep and take care of her hygiene and make something nice to eat.

Wyles and his teams had declined returning to the ship, preferring to continue to secure different buildings and zones up to the fiftieth floor. She had no idea what they were looking for or collecting, but all the reports had been negative and she was certain that they would find nothing living, anyway.

Beyond just clearing the interiors of the buildings, the away teams had worked with Heeler’s drones to build a base camp in one section while securing the area around the power and control node. Amy wasn’t sure why they needed so much security when everything on the moon was dead, but she wasn’t going to argue with Heeler’s defensive mentality or Wyle’s security concerns.

Maybe zombies would wake up and start shooting at them or something.

As the door to the shuttle bay opened, Yapper bumped her as he pushed his way past to run and play with the other nestlings that were wrestling over a length of broken machinery. Heeler was waiting beside a large flatbed air car, and she quickly made her way to him.

“First you need a day to prepare, then you message me to stop whatever I was doing and rush down here.” Amy quipped as soon as she was in vocal range.

Heeler’s shell vibrated. “It has been 18 standard hours. It is close enough to a day and I have finished my preparations. The time to attempt the interfacing has come.”

“Are you sure we can’t just do it from here?” Amy said, a frown forming on her face.

“The interfacing requires my personal presence. Do not worry, while the atmosphere contains no oxygen, it is an inert form of nitrogen with the proper temperature gradients. Your skinsuit should serve sufficient to prevent your expiration.”

“That’s… not exactly what had me worried. Still, isn’t the atmosphere in the tunnel weird?”

“It is an excellent choice for preservation, although I suspect the oxygen was simply consumed by some process and never replaced because of the shutdown of systems.”

“Right. Well, I’m ready. Uhh… we are taking this?” Amy asked, looking at the aircar. The flatbed on the back was a modification she had not seen before. Heeler answered her by lifting himself up off the ground with his tentacles and setting himself onto the car’s flat surface. The entire vehicle sagged in the air momentarily.

She opened the front side door and sat down, clicking on her restraint. She looked back at Heeler. “Oh. Uhh, do you want me to get some cargo straps or something?”

His growl was deeper than usual as his tentacles lowered and wrapped around the back of the vehicle. Amy assumed that he’d be strong enough to hold on.

Yapper suddenly landed in the seat beside her, letting out several vocal yaps before spinning in a few circles. Finding a comfy spot, he plopped down and let out an excited yap at her.

There were no controls present, which was a good thing because she had no idea how to fly an aircar. The vehicle’s info panel lit up and then a low-pitched whine sounded as the aircar lifted them up off the ground. There was a moment’s hesitation before they shot forward out of the hangar’s d-field.

“This can’t be safe flying!” Amy shouted over the wind, and the car suddenly relaxed to a more sedate pace.

“We will arrive in only a few minutes.” Heeler announced.

Amy tried to relax in her seat, but then Yapper stood up and stuck his head out from behind the windshield, causing her to have a minor panic attack.

She grabbed him and pulled him back, eliciting a surprised yap, but the nestling didn’t resist and started yapping happily as she started petting it.

Heeler’s growl was mostly lost in the wind. “It disturbs me how quickly this generation has taken to taking mannerisms of a domesticated animal. You should have allowed it to learn the dangers itself. It is unlikely that it would perish at this speed and altitude.”

“Did anyone even check its suit oxygen?” Amy said before checking the nestling’s outfit. The readout showed a crimson red. “No! He was going to suffocate!” She quickly grabbed a line from the car’s dashboard that fed oxygen and pressed it into a port on the Rexxor’s suit.

“This generation of nestling has internal oxygen stores, but an extra source from the suit would not be a negative.”

Amy looked back and frowned. “Like you? You’re not wearing any suit either. Do you carry your oxygen inside?”

“I carry a complete closed loop oxygen recycling system within my shell.”

“Of course you do…” Amy said, her voice trailing off as she sat back in her seat, petting Yapper’s head idly. Despite their slower speed, they were still flashing by the landing pad’s nearly flat surface at a rapid clip.

It was nearly five kilometers to the nearest building from the ship, and it quickly became apparent at how massive the landing platform the Heaven’s Fire had landed on was. She couldn’t shake the feeling that even with how large it was, it felt dwarfed by the enormity of the tunnel cavern.

She wasn’t sure how serious Heeler had been about Yapper surviving a fall. They were moving quickly enough that she doubted any human would survive, at least without a miracle or special augmentations.

Amy took in the sight of the towering buildings that seemed to stretch endlessly into the darkness above. The sheer size of the space made her feel small and insignificant. As they made progress away from the Heaven’s Fire, the darkness became more pervasive.

She spotted a few lights on the ground from the MilTech teams, but they only provided a dim, eerie glow that barely illuminated the lower floors of the surrounding buildings. The lights indicated which buildings they were searching and had been through, but those stopped at the second row, hinting at the futility of their mission to secure everything.

The only real source of light was cast from the battlecruiser’s massive floodlight arrays. Even those disappeared into the dark as their light diffused between the towers.

As they came closer to the buildings, she couldn’t shake the words that Heeler had said earlier, comparing the construct to a tomb. The air tasted dry and metallic, even with her suit in oxygen additive mode and with its humidifier on.

The power/control building was in the second row, directly behind the closest building to the ship, and the aircar slowed as it came in for a landing at the front entrance that had an array of extra flood lights. Several sentries stood behind makeshift embrasures made from scrapped metal furniture. Amy found herself waving back at one of them as the aircar sat down.

Despite the attempts of the security personnel to fortify, a feeling of abandonment and desolation permeated the area, and she couldn’t help but feel awed by the sheer scale of the place. She leaned her head back and activated her suit’s headlamp, but the beam died with no hint at an end to the tower’s height.

The only sound was the whirring of the aircar’s engines, and it felt like they were intruding on something that maybe they shouldn’t be. When they shut off, there was nothing but the quiet humming of her suit, at least until Yapper jumped down and let out a bark.

The aircar made a bang against the metal artificial flooring as Heeler lifted himself off the flatbed on the back of it.

Wyles and one of his aides approached.

Amy nodded to the power and control building. “Did you get it cleared?”

“That wasn’t needed.”

She raised an eyebrow. “But you’re working so hard on the others.”

“You’ll see when you get inside.” Wyles looked up at Heeler. “We’ve cut out the entryway so you can fit.”

“Thank you, Wyles Hammok. It would be an annoyance if I had to crush the structure to make my path.”

Amy saw what they meant when they reached the entrance. The normal door was large enough for a human. If you were willing to duck.

She realized that the species they had found was on the short side, and it would only make sense if the doorways and furniture were all sized for them, not humans.

Or Heelers.

A closer look at the metal showed no rust or decay, but a thin sheen of brown dust covered every inch of everything that hadn’t been disturbed by the MilTech crews.

She looked up at Heeler as everyone moved to enter the building. “How many of these nodes are there? Isn’t it strange that this is the only one emitting power signals?”

“I suspect it is due to being the nearest node to our entry. Whatever active process attempted to sanitize the Heaven’s Fire was likely carried out from here. As for the number of nodes, I have no exact count, however, it is likely that they number in the thousands or tens of thousands. This is a guess based on the proximity of other nodes detected in a low-power state nearby.”

Amy nodded and frowned. The scale of the ‘battlemoon’ was just so mindbogglingly large.

As she stepped inside, she suddenly understood why Wyles said securing the floors wasn’t necessary. The interior of the building was a single large chamber, a micro-sized version of the massive tunnels playing throughout Hades. Random pieces of equipment and architecture jutted out from the walls, but the space was dominated by a string of clear spheres of some type of glass or crystal that stopped a dozen meters from the center of the room.

Each bubble contained a faint flicker of white light that created a disorienting feeling as they continued endlessly into the darkness above.

Heeler’s shell resonated with his voice. “There are more power-cores in the chamber than I anticipated.”

“They are more advanced than our fusion cores?” Amy asked.

“An advanced feed system appears to be in place to allow a cascading effect to multiply the amount of energy extracted from the inserted fuel. I would not use such a system myself as if the reactor was running at full power and damage occurred. It would shut down all existing cores.”

“You said there are possibly ten thousand of these throughout the moon, and they have a much higher energy extraction efficiency per core? I don’t even know how they could have gone about supplying so many, but doesn’t that seem redundant enough, and minimizing resource costs would be important?” Amy asked.

There was a low rumble from Heeler that Amy had never heard before.

“You are correct, human. I did not consider the implications of such scale.”

Around the central tower of fusion core bottles, multiple rows of consoles sat inert, little chairs arrayed around them. Amy counted them quickly and came up with forty in total. Assuming that a full crew was used to man the station, that meant the moon would have needed over 400,000 crew just for the power plants.

“I hope you can automate things.” She mumbled to herself.

Wyles spoke up as they approached the center of the room. “The consoles do react, but the ones here are the only ones that do so.”

As if on cue, holographic displays came to life, showing an array of alien characters and blank screens over each console. The panels on the consoles themselves lit up as well, although everything was covered in the thin sheen of dust. There were no buttons or knobs, so she assumed they were all at least of the modern touch screen type.

“I do not wish any interlopers to interrupt my analysis. Please keep all personnel from accessing the consoles while I work.” Heeler intoned, causing Yapper to whine and move, placing Amy between them.

The large NAI Avatar placed himself in front of the closest console to the core and placed his tentacles on them and then went silent.

Amy frowned as she wondered just why she had come along.

“I brought in some human sized furniture.” Wyles mumbled, and she nodded in thanks.

Amy focused on studying the architecture and photographs the away teams had collected for several hours. The few times she tried to bother Heeler, he had snapped at her grumpily to leave him alone as he translated the alien symbols and technology.

Yapper had curled up in a ball behind her chair and slept the entire time while Wyles had left them to organize the search teams and continue securing the area.

She was considering leaving and finding something else to do, or joining Yapper for a nap when the bottom reactor core flashed to life. Raising her hand to block the blinding light, Amy yelped.

The chamber shook slightly, enough for dust to scatter off every surface and fill the air in a sparse cloud. The holographic displays suddenly began to report different graphics and symbols. Looking up, Amy felt like someone punched her in the gut as she saw different forms and shapes of the aliens moving between the dust clouds.

Lights all along the walls lit up in a delayed sequence that traveled up into the ceiling, quickly pushing back the darkness. There was still no sight of a ceiling above them, however.

A second shaking followed the first and a black cylinder rose from the floor around the reactor, acting as a sunshade to block the escaping light from the activated reactor core.

“What the fuck, Heeler! Did you just kill us all with radiation exposure?” Amy shouted.

“The advanced construction of the reactor bottles prevents any dangerous energy escapes. There is no risk of any exposure unless containment is lost. The shade is simply to protect the visual acuity of units inside the control chamber.” Heeler said.

That did not mollify her. “What happened to taking things slow and no haphazardly booting up things? You didn’t even bother discussing what you figured out.”

Heeler grumbled. “The system has been running on intermittent transient power stored in the outer layer. This was hindering my database searches, and it took a considerable delay to decipher the startup sequence computer. I have only activated 0.000001% of Hade’s reactor power inside this single core.”

Amy looked back to the center of the room, white light escaping over the lip of the shade to light up everything above them in a powerful white shade of light. If Heeler’s math was accurate, then there were at least a million fusion cores throughout the construct.

“How did you even know the fuel was still safe?”

“The system reported fuel system nominal.”

“Did you stop to check that? What if the software said it was fine, but it was really a waiting time-bomb? After a few thousand years of no maintenance, that might be something important to check.”

“The construct is in remarkably good condition in this section.”

She gave him a piercing look. “And yet we know there are sections that have collapsed or aren’t in such good condition. Just because you might survive the reactor chamber going kaboom, it doesn’t mean the rest of us will.”

There was a silent acquiescence to her admonishment before Heeler responded with less surety. “I will apply stricter safety protocols in the future, Manager Amy Tanis.”

She looked up and saw a light rain of dust cascading down from the walls; the air filled with a falling, glittering radiance as the reactor light played over all the particles.

“Are there any reasons for shapes to have formed in the dust clouds?” Amy asked.

“Perhaps the psychological stress threshold for your species has been exceeded.”

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