been weird, but it was weird. I had Miki and the team backburnered, so I knew exactly where they were, and their voices filled the silence in the feed. But there was something about this place that made my human skin prickle under my clothes. I hated that.
I couldn’t pin down what was bothering me. Scan was negative, and this far away from the team there was no ambient sound except the whisper through the air system. Maybe it was the lack of security camera access, but I’d been in worse places with no cameras. Maybe it was something subliminal. Actually, it felt pretty liminal. Pro-liminal. Up-liminal? Whatever, there was no knowledge base here to look it up.
The team was proceeding down an outer corridor. On their left side, big bubble ports looked into a purple-gray cloud swirl in the storm, on the right were open passage locks leading down into the various engineering stacks. On a private channel to Miki, Abene said, This place makes my skin shiver, Miki.
I think so, too, Miki said. Even though it’s empty, it’s like someone might step out in front of us at any moment.
Well, Miki wasn’t wrong. Something glittered in the air ahead, but when I reached the lift junction it was just an emergency marker display, floating below the ceiling and listing emergency exit procedures in thirty different languages. HubSystems offer continuous translation, and I’m guessing non-corporate political entities had something similar for their feeds, but in an emergency you’d want to make sure the instructions were clear even if the feed was down. There it was, cheerily doing its job in this empty hulk.
I tapped my private connection to Miki. I’m about to use a lift, Miki. If your scan picks up the power fluctuation, please don’t tell anyone.
Okay, Rin. Where are you going?
I have to look at the geo pod. It’s part of my orders. The lift responded to a ping and arrived 1.5 seconds later, by which time I remembered that I’d told Miki my job was to provide extra security for the assessment team. Oops.
Fortunately, Miki understood about orders and it didn’t occur to it to question me. Be careful, Rin, Miki said. This place makes our skin shiver.
I stepped into the lift and told it to go to the central geo pod. The door slid shut and it whooshed away. I tracked it on the schematic, as it curved past the giant bulbs used for atmosphere dispersal. I considered telling Miki that I was here to collect data on possible alien remnant violations by GrayCris. Nothing I was doing would hurt Abene or the team or GoodNightLander Independent, and I was already lying about so much. But Miki would tell Abene immediately, I knew it would. Not that her team wouldn’t figure out on their own soon that something was sketchy about the terraforming facility. (Like the decontam room near the passenger lock; you don’t need a clean facility for terraforming but you might if you were scavenging alien bio remnants.) But if Miki told Abene, she would ask how it knew, and I knew Miki would tell her about me. It wouldn’t lie to a direct question.
Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas.
(Yes, that was sarcasm.)
The lift stopped and the doors opened into another empty, quiet corridor. I followed it around and found the big hatchway into the main geological hub. It was a large semicircular space, with a section of ceiling that had been left clear. I’d seen the storm through Miki and the humans’ cameras in the corridor on the way to the bio pod, but seeing it with my own eyes, no interface to interpret it, was different. The clouds were like a constantly moving structure, colors not so much swirling as in slow, ponderous motion. It was immense, and wrong, and terrible and beautiful all at the same time. I stood there for what I later clocked as twenty-two seconds, just staring.
Something must have bled over into the feed, because Miki said, What are you looking at, Rin?
That jolted me out of the spell. Just the storm. The geo pod has a clear dome.
Can I see?
I didn’t know why not, so I made a copy of the visual, scrubbed any code that might identify me as a SecUnit from it, and passed it to Miki over the feed. Pretty! Miki said.
Miki ran the video a few times as it followed Abene down a ramp. They