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Spencer was the last one in before the airlock, triggered by Blue, snapped shut behind them. The interior hallway was enormous, and the reason was immediately obvious: a giant machine sat in front of them.
“Well, there had to be some reason for the big front door,” Spencer noted dryly.
Batta snorted. “That your expert opinion as an intelligence agent, is it?”
Spencer stopped for a moment to take in the truly massive piece of equipment in front of her. Her eyes danced over it as she mentally stripped away the odd bits and extraneous differences from human technology. “Is it just me, or does that thing look like a giant truck? One of those old-school ground kind with wheels they use on new colonies to haul stuff around.”
It was easily twenty meters tall and slightly more wide. The rear did indeed appear to be an enormous carrier bucket of some kind, while the front end had a complicated piece of machinery that looked as if it could scoop up huge mouthfuls of raw material.
“That it is,” Blue said. “It is why I chose this entrance in the first place. It has been largely unused and contains several storage areas I was able to take full control of. I believe it will serve as a useful base of operations. We will have to store our suits here at some point in order to recharge them.”
The area might have been guarded from the outside, but Blue turned out to be right: it was abandoned within. The cavernous space led to smaller halls with doors on either side at regular and predictable intervals, as she expected from an installation designed by machines.
When they reached the room Blue indicated should serve as their base, Spencer felt a surge of relief to be in relative safety. She was accustomed to danger, but that didn’t mean the stress and fear from being out in the open didn’t touch her.
As if from an unspoken command, everyone exited their suits at virtually the same time. The room was large, about twenty meters on a side, and about a quarter full of what looked like crates of broken machinery. A large fabricator took up a third of one wall, silent and powerless.
“What is this place?” Grant asked as he stepped out of his armor. “Repair shop of some kind?”
Blue explained that each of the transport hubs within the Vault had a space like this where materials could be reclaimed. Spencer listened with half an ear as she walked along one wall. There were power cells stacked in neat rows, each using the strange interface unique to Children technology. Their suits were designed to use it.
“What are these for?” she asked out loud, mostly to herself. The room had power points built into the walls, yet there were charging cradles for the cells as well. Strange.
“They are supposed to be used on the transport,” Blue said, smoothly interrupting himself mid-explanation. “From the schematics I read, it takes twenty of them to run it for a full four-hour shift. There are one hundred and sixty here, all charged. We will use them as our power supply since tapping into the Vault’s power network would give away our location. I was able to blind the system to doors and panels opening and closing, but the power system was out of my reach.”
Well. That was a fairly damning indictment of their situation. Now that the threat of immediate death was gone, the combat team was off the board. They weren’t ideal for this next part.
“Blue, how many of these transport hubs are there?” Spencer asked.
The answer was immediate. “Sixty-four.”
Everyone in the room except Spencer and Blue had some kind of reaction, and she didn’t gasp because years of self-control took over. “Okay. That’s...a lot. How big is this place?”
“Quite large,” Blue said. “I believe the structure itself measures several kilometers across, though I was unable to find exact exterior measurements. I do know that the central chamber is 680 meters wide, a perfect circle. It is heavily protected. I believe the main systems for the local mind are housed there.”
Spencer blew out a breath and turned to Grant. “Okay, you know what I’m about to say, right?”
“Yeah, kind of expected you to jump right in,” he replied with a strained grin. “You could take a break, you know. Get your bearings.”
Spencer shrugged. “That’s exactly what I plan to do. Blue, I need you to lay out everything you know about this place in as much detail as you can give me.”
––––––––
Two hours, an excruciatingly informative brief, and one change of clothing later, Spencer was off.
The interior lighting was low pretty much everywhere inside the Vault. Not too dim to see by, but certainly on the low end of human usefulness. Machines didn’t need much light to see by, and the human drones could get by well enough.
Spencer wore a particularly useful bit of tech, one she hadn’t had the chance to dust off in a while. It was a suit of skintight fabric that covered every inch of her body, including her face. She could breathe through it if needed, though for this trip she wore a mask beneath the hood that allowed her to inhale normally through the thin material but distributed the heat of her breath across her torso. The sensors here probably weren’t calibrated to detect heat differentials so small, but she had been in more than one facility beyond that level of paranoid.
The suit operated on low power, altering its color to match her surroundings. It wasn’t invisibility, but its natural capabilities combined with the muzzy shadows nestled in every corner of the place made it the next best thing.
Her comm was of course manually switched off. Grant didn’t like that. He wanted to be able to swoop in and save her if something went wrong regardless of how dead that would make him and anyone he dragged with him. It was an endearing quality in its own way; he’d come so far in the last few years. She liked the confidence. It suited him as a leader.
But this was the plight of the front-line agent. Risk everything for the mission knowing you could be killed and disavowed without a second thought. The nickname for independent agents like Spencer within the larger intel community was the Forgotten. Nearly everyone who’d been in the job as long as her was either retired or one of those sad little corpses recycled for its constituent elements. She’d done the retirement thing herself, until the war broke out.
Damn, it felt good to stretch her legs again. The months of training helped her deal with Krieger being gone. This, however, made her feel alive again for the first time in years.
Inside the main ring—what Blue called the outer hallway running the Vault’s circumference and connecting the hubs to the inner section—were dozens and hundreds and fucking thousands of crates. Every one of them was sealed. No machines removed any that she could see, only the occasional automated carrier rolled up to add one here or there. Spencer let the odd pieces of this puzzle lay on an empty field in her mind, making no judgments until she had more information.
There were supposed to be human drones all over the place. Blue had said so. The installation extended well below the surface just as it did above, but the ground floor should have been a hive of activity. Yet after an hour and having moved a quarter the way around the main ring, she’d seen no other living creatures whatsoever. Those guarding the exterior were the last.
Hmm.
The general layout was as Blue said it would be. There were occasional quarters for the slave population and entrances to the upper and lower levels, but no traffic of any kind through them. Now, that was odd. There were manufacturing facilities of some kind below, and the relatively small operations needed to keep the slave population alive were on the upper levels. There should have been something going on here.
Ah. Of course. This was a trap. The mind knew they were here somewhere. Instead of sending out small armies of its most versatile resource—the humans who could spot Spencer and her people—it was creating the most inviting scenario it could. Give them enough rope and curiosity would do the rest. Spencer had almost been ready to leave her hiding place along the back wall of the main ring, within the shadows of several tall crates. The only reason she hadn’t was that bump of suspicion in the back of her mind that rebelled on instinct when anything looked too good to be true.
Because in her experience, that was nearly universally the case.
If she had to bet, she’d have put money on the more critical areas of the facility being choked with human guards just waiting for the right moment to strike. Draw in the unsuspecting with a clear path, then cut them down. It’s what she might have done in the mind’s place. The problem with this as a long-term strategy was that it wasn’t one; even a merciless machine intelligence had to recognize that eventually the guards would have to eat and sleep and relieve themselves. Activity would have to resume or the mind risked losing its resources.
Which made this a waiting game. Spencer was good at those. She settled into a nook where two hallways intersected, climbing high into the shadowed support trusses where they met, and prepared herself for a very long day.