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It had been a routine thing for Gau to seed a surveillance packet onto the belly of the wounded Skycatcher as he’d followed in its wake. Like a parasitic needle worm, the packet was programmed to burrow into any inorganic material it encountered before hatching its contents. Gau surveilled the interior and exterior of the main hangar through the “eyes” of dozens of tiny spying machines.
He was distantly aware of his true body reclining on a couch, a VR band around his head and his hands sheathed in haptic gloves. Multifaceted audiovisual feeds cascaded across his senses. He used the gloves to swipe between them, dismissing some and enlarging others. All were focused on the ship filling the largest repair berth.
Against the background of space, the Skycatcher had seemed a modestly large ship; in the confines of the hangar, it was a towering rhombus the size of a midsize building, cocooned in scaffolding and attended by the parasitic forms of spindly repair drones. The drones were directing a construction foam enriched with fabricator nanites through the rents in the Skycatcher’s hull. Within hours even for a ship this size, the nanites would complete the delicate repairs to the Skycatcher’s internal machinery, and it would be impossible to tell the supply ship had ever been damaged.
Gau watched the repairs for a moment before turning his attention to the stand-by repair drones racked to either side, each armed with another canister of construction foam. Carnivore was a tenth the size of the Skycatcher, the damage to its hull a pinprick; one of those drones should be sufficient to repair the damage to the hull and structures inside.
As for the mysterious cloud of debris that had dealt both their ships crippling blows, his machines had picked up some interesting transmissions in and around the port. Apparently, the Urd had improperly disposed of one of their ships in Hensk’s upper orbit. Instead of scuttling the craft and letting it burn up in the gas giant’s atmosphere, a catabolic nanite package had been employed. It was the same method by which Terran ships were disposed of—but the fools hadn’t correctly calibrated the breakdown settings. Instead of dissolving the craft into a fine dust that would disperse in vacuum, the nanite package had broken it into chunks. The result had been an instant artificial asteroid belt.
Gau turned his mind back to the task at hand. Now that he had eyes on the repair bay’s setup, it was time to expand his reconnaissance and start mapping the port complex itself. Gau sent half of his spying machines scuttling toward the hangar’s open main hatch and side entrances. He directed them to the edges of the hangar’s roof; from there, they would have a clear vantage of most of the port complex.
Kressheel Port was nestled in a rolling river valley. Benchmarks of wooded hills rose to either side of it, the tenacious jungle foliage kept back by a roughly oval-shaped ring road around the port that was itself surrounded by a high ceramic berm topped with shards of glass. Metal gates in the berm gave access to the ring road and smaller roads that cut across the port. A square kilometer of landing pads separated the administration building from the dry dock repair hangars.
Gau sighed in quiet approval. Most likely the Skycatcher’s Terran crew would be in the administration building, filling out paperwork for their stopover on Rreluush-Tren; with luck, he and Arkk could be in and out of the hangar before anyone was the wiser.
Just to be thorough, Gau checked the back side of the hangar as well, noting a couple of squat buildings that were probably equipment sheds or storerooms. Behind them, a windowless domed building squatted in the mud at the very back of the port. Its curving sides had been bolted together from slabs of rust-red metal. A ridge of spikes running up the dome divided it into quadrants, each sporting a single porthole-like window or hatch open to the air.
Most of Kressheel Port’s architecture was relentlessly utilitarian; this was something else. Gau had the sense of looking at an object whose purpose was as much ritual as functional. A chain-link fence, obviously a later addition, walled off the building from the rest of the port complex, but on zooming in he could see signs of an old road running to the building under the fence.
Could it be? I wonder. With a pinch of his fingers he shrank his direct control to a single spy machine and aimed it toward the building. The machine popped off the hangar roof with a gentle puff of jets and rode a breeze to land on the curving side of the dome. He followed the curve upward until it reached one of the hatches.
The bot’s legs settled onto a mesh grille covering the end of the cylindrical shaft. Not entirely open to the air, then. Beyond the mesh he could just make out an access shaft running to the left and right, illuminated from the right end. That was odd—the light was different than that filtering down from the hatch itself, and this section of tunnel wasn’t close enough to any of the other portholes for them to be the source.
Gau drew his gloved fingers together, telling the bot to contract its legs and squeeze itself through the rough mesh. It settled with nary a vibration onto the floor of the vent. From there, the bot’s semi-autonomous guidance systems followed the light and a gradient of fresh air down the shaft and came up against another mesh grille. The camera focused and Gau looked down into a single huge space.
The chamber housed what looked like some kind of lethal obstacle course: at one end hung several sets of shackles suspended from tracks in the ceiling. The tracks in the ceiling led past a gauntlet of heavy-duty drills, saws, and large vats that he suspected must once have contained boiling water.
Kressheel’s old meat factory. Like all of them, it was supposed to be decommissioned—but the lights burning in the curved ceiling put the lie to that, even though the deadly machinery was still. With that thought in mind, Gau retraced the bot’s steps and took it along the other path until he found a power relay. The bot probed it for a millisecond or two and transmitted the result: power was indeed running to the circuits, all the circuits.
The peace treaty might have decommissioned the meat factories, but Kressheel’s factory was operating.