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Blue was in front, but Hayes was close behind him. The rest of the crew stayed well back, nearly a quarter of a kilometer down the long, straight hallway running toward the central hub of whatever this place was. Her years in Special Activities drilled a different way of looking at jobs like this into her head. She was twenty meters behind their most important asset, armed only with a knife and fully aware that any violent action she took would likely be her last.
Yet her nerves were as calm as they ever were. Part of this was the gene mod all SA operatives were required to take. It wasn’t the sort of pervasive engineering kids like Dex went through. She only had one of that type; the standard age-retarding mod most humans were given as fetuses. Her SA mods were less encompassing, serving to keep certain chemical signals in the brain in check as well as speeding up her reflexes. Neither of these worked by deliberate trigger. When the stress reaction began, certain altered glands woke up and did their thing.
One unexpected consequence of this reaction was a near inability to truly get bored. Her focus could remain sharp and directed for hours at a time. It was this aspect of her Navy-gifted genes she was most thankful for as she stood sentinel behind Blue. The ability to watch for danger without her mind wandering increased their odds of survival significantly.
Blue stood frozen for a solid five minutes before shaking himself and gesturing her forward. Hayes moved up, knife in a loose reverse grip in her gauntleted hand.
“What’s up?” she asked over the external speaker, the volume turned whisper-quiet.
Blue raised one hand and let the bright signal light on his wrist get the attention of the crew, telling them to begin moving forward. Then he turned to her. “We can move up another eighth of a kilometer, but there we will have trouble. I was able to infiltrate the system here fairly deeply. I have layouts and locations. The hub leads to a lift system that will take us down to the flight bay. I believe we can take a ship and escape once we are aboard.”
Hayes smiled grimly behind her faceplate. “But getting there is the trick, huh? What’s waiting for us?”
“Most of the facilities on this planet appear to be in standby mode, including this one,” Blue said. “However, the access point from this level to the lift has an automated guard protecting it.”
“Just the one,” Hayes said, simply making a statement. There were two likely possibilities represented by one guard, automated or not. The first was that in standby mode, the system kept one as a failsafe. Something as a just in case measure.
The other was that one was all they needed pretty much regardless of threat level. Which changed the game quite a bit. Without weapons more complex than a blade, Hayes needed data.
“What can you tell me about it?”
Blue shook his head. “Other than that it exists, nothing. The system here is segregated in a way that seems unusually harsh. Only generalities about the lower levels and other systems are available. Each is managed by its own network, none of which are connected to each other.”
The hallway began to curve slightly, just enough to keep whatever lay at the end out of sight. Considering it didn’t actually need to bend, she figured this for a deliberate choice. Why not? If you’re putting a death machine at a critical choke point, why give away its presence if you don’t have to?
She put a hand on Blue’s armor, stopping him in place. “Why don’t you wait here? I’ll scoot forward and try to get a look at this thing. See what we’re up against.”
Blue cocked his head. “Would it not make more sense for me to attempt to interface with it? Perhaps stop it before it can do any harm?”
Hayes sighed. “I don’t think it’s likely. If you were going to install an automaton as a defense measure, what would be the first thing you would do? Cut off its ability to network, right?”
“Ah,” Blue said. “Of course. What should we do if it attacks you?”
Hayes shrugged. “Pray.”
––––––––
Edging slowly around the bend turned out to be wholly unnecessary. The thing guarding the lifts wasn’t able to move. That much was clear on first glance.
The wide hallway spread into a vastly wider exchange. Tubes jutted from the floor like the largest pipe organ in the universe, each dotted with identical holes. Nestled dead center in the hallway between Hayes and those doorways to potential freedom was what looked like a mechanical tree sculpted by a crazy person.
Its roots broke through the clean, mathematically even tiles without a second thought—the thing was clearly brought here and installed as an afterthought. Its trunk split off in hundreds of branching divisions, each containing a small cluster of what looked like dim lights. She increased magnification and the hundred meters or so between it and her dropped away. That was the moment she began to understand.
The other facilities she’d seen were clean, virtually sterile. Everything on this planet appeared meticulously cared for even when abandoned, probably because of the intense automation to be found in every corner. Surely there were machines to pick up and scrub, keeping the facilities looking new.
Just not here. The hallway around the tree was littered with small things. What looked vaguely like a shoe sat forlornly on its side. Black scrapes and burns marred the tile and walls. And there, about ten meters before the tree—a corpse. Charred beyond recognition, but definitely humanoid. Its bones splayed out as if it had fallen forward on a mad dash toward freedom.
Those lights, however, brought her attention back to the tree. From a distance and with the strange field permeating every cubic centimeter of space, it was impossible to see. Only with a close-up did the nature of the tree become clear.
Each of those little lights generated a smaller version of the field. The angle of the broken rainbow of colors emanating from them was slightly off from the planet-wide version. The guardian was not an offensive weapon, or so she hoped.
Like a surgical patient still shaking of anesthesia, Hayes could not truly feel the fear welling up in her brain. At best it was a distant and dull thud, a patient in a mental institution beating on a wall five rooms over. She sensed it vaguely, understood its importance, but the mods kept her mood focused and smooth.
She took a step forward. Then another. Then, in a moment of clarity that probably saved her life, she stopped. It took only a handful of seconds to detach a drone and send it forward slowly, well below the speed limit imposed by the field. With every meter she expected the thing to halt and break apart, or for the tree to unfurl a weapon of some kind and blast it to nonexistence before targeting her.
To her surprise, the drone trundled right along, coming within a meter of the tree’s trunk and moving past without so much as a twitch from the mechanical bole.
Taking a deep breath, Hayes followed suit. There was only one way to know for sure, and it wasn’t as if she hadn’t risked her life hundreds of times before. Later—if such a thing existed for her—Hayes would slow down enough to consider the wide space between dying in a battle and being twisted apart by invisible hands for having the gall to move slightly too fast.
She discovered the limits of her mods during that walk. Her heart hammered against her sternum as she stepped even with the annihilated corpse. Sweat beaded on her skin despite the controlled climate of her suit as she moved toward the trunk of the tree, stepping over the twisted roots. She noted in a detached way that they looked like thick power runs, which fit with the design ethic she’d seen elsewhere on this goddamn rock.
It became clear that so long as she maintained a low enough speed, no attack was coming. Her brain, all too human and with human biases, tried to understand the sort of species that wouldn’t use offensive weapons to defend such an important nexus point. Surely the vast energy it took to power the field could be used more efficiently in the form of directed energy weapons or even good, old-fashioned firearms with automated targeting.
Deciding to take a risk, Hayes stopped and scooped up a piece of debris from the floor. It looked like a piece of a larger item that had been blown off and partially melted. Without context, the palm-sized chunk of worked metal and ceramic could have been from anything. A personal computer, a piece of equipment, a weapon. No way to know.
They hadn’t taken much with them. Maybe this would come in handy.
To be sure, Hayes walked all the way to the nearest lift before turning back. She wouldn’t risk a transmission in this place—too much potential for some overly sensitive warning system to perceive radio waves as a threat—so the only choice was to walk back to her crew and let them know the score.
Dormant, the planet seemed almost harmless. She just hoped it stayed that way. Even as the thought crossed her mind, Hayes decided thinking such a thing was brushing close against daring the universe to make things worse.
In that, she was not wrong.