The trapdoor was metal, around four feet square, and set into a kind of lip. A touchpad was set into the base of the door, its keys glowing redly.
"Looks like whomever put this here remembered to lock up," Lyon noted.
"Well, you did say that you were good with alarms and physical security."
"I did say that, didn't I? Well, let me take a shot at it."
Producing a small toolkit, she pried the face off the keyplate and got to work. It wasn't easy, as the lock was the kind of class-A security usually reserved for the military, powerful corporations, and government facilities, but after 8.34 beats she had it done. There was a soft beep, and the lights glowed green. She replaced the keyplate, put away her gear, and drew her railgun.
"Ready?"
"Go for it."
She tapped the "open" key, and the trapdoor slid neatly into the lip, revealing an angled passage.
"I see," Ryland said. "They pull the crates over the opening from beneath, then close the trapdoor. Since they're not heavy, they're easily pushed away if people want to leave. And since the crates are empty, passerby wouldn't be likely to mess around with them."
They descended through the open door. The octagonal passage was reminiscent of ones Lyon had seen in No Man's Mines under the surface and was clearly of Coralian construction. Lights strobed along the walls, perhaps in response to the flow of Photon energy through the tunnel's systems. The vibrations were even stronger here; they were clearly on the right track.
Cautiously, Lyon in the lead just as they'd done while exploring the forest, they descended the tunnel, which continued for about thirty feet before it opened into a square room. It might have been intended as a kind of sentry room, but appeared to be unmanned. Its only feature of note appeared to be a small computer terminal in one corner, but as Lyon looked at it her vision seemed to ripple, as if the light was being distorted by a heat haze. Since there was certainly no heat source, she initiated a diagnostic on her vision, a spark of worry beginning to mount within her.
"Lyon, look out!"
A bolt of lightning, obviously conjured by Ryland's Zonde technique, struck into the middle of the hazy area and arced across its surface. The haze flickered, just slightly, but enough for Lyon to recognize that it was not a field of shifting air, but that it had a definite humanoid outline, though taller and broader than even the burliest RAcast. Internally Lyon cancelled the diagnostic and adjusted her perspective to track the nearly invisible shape, while externally she fired three shots from her railgun into it. Ryland shifted tactics and flung a stinging spray of cold into the enemy, but his Gibarta failed to freeze it. The enemy leapt at Lyon, who shot it again as it jumped, and knocked her against the far wall. She kept her grip on her gun, though, and even as it turned to Ryland she pumped three more shots into it. The haze faded, revealing a bulky white robot with green trim. Sparking from several places where her railgun blasts had pierced its armor, it keeled over to one side. A dull whump signaled the detonation of its internal circuitry, a typical measure in combat robots to keep defeated units from being analyzed by the enemy.
"What was that?" Lyon exclaimed.
"Photon camouflage. I've heard about it, but never seen it before in the field. Pioneer 1's Lab apparently developed it."
"This is from Pioneer 1? What's it doing in the Residential Area? So far the only time we've encountered robot armies is down in the mines."
"No, I think it's one of ours. The details were sent back to us on Pioneer 2, and adapted to some of our Sinow-type security robots. The military hasn't deployed them on Ragol yet, though, because they're afraid of the D-factor infection that's sent the Pioneer 1 robots haywire."
"Until now."
"Until now," Ryland agreed. "This all but confirms it, though. There almost has to be military involvement if a Sinow Berril is being used."
"So why didn't it signal an alarm? Why aren't doors sealing shut and sirens blazing?"
"I don't know."
He stepped to the computer and began to access it. Apparently there weren't any security protocols in place, since he was able to find the data he sought.
"Here we go. Outpost maintenance data. Well, this explains the vibrations, at least."
"Oh?"
"The tunnel isn't stable--well, more accurately, the ground above it isn't stable. Basically, they're constantly using power to hold the area above it from turning into a giant sinkhole which might damage the structure and would definitely be noticeable to any hunters operating near the west side of the Central Dome."
"Which is a fair number, since that's where the emergency access teleporter is."
"Uh-huh."
"If there's maintenance data there, can you get a map?"
He tapped a couple more spots on the terminal and a window opened amidst the scroll of green text.
"Hunh. That's odd."
Odd, Lyon decided, barely scratched the surface. The entire facility consisted of the tunnel they'd entered through, the room they were in, and a second tunnel that slanted back up out the far side.
"I don't get it. What's going on here? There's no experiment chambers, no production factories, nothing to keep hidden."
"I don't think this is a facility the way we think of it. I think it's a passage."
"A passage to where?"
"Here." He shifted the map slightly.
"The Central Dome? But that's crazy. Not only is there nothing in there, but sooner or later one of those magma vents will open and trash the tunnel."
"Not quite the Central Dome," Ryland corrected. "This display is precise. Look more closely."
Lyon wondered if it would have been too much trouble to just tell her, but she looked again and saw what he meant.
"A tower," she said. "One of the auxiliary towers that surround the dome."
"Right. They've been inaccessible since they were accessed through the main Dome and both the physical doors and any warp platform to reach them were decimated. In people's minds they were written off as irrelevant, presumed destroyed as a part of the whole. I've never even seen a Guild Quest listing concerning one."
"Neither have I."
"But that doesn't mean that they actually are destroyed, or that there isn't something valuable inside one."
"Okay, but why all this?" She waved a hand to encompass the room and the facility beyond. "Surely it would have been easier and cheaper to just break in above the surface on ground level if they wanted to get in?"
"If this is military, then the odds are they don't have authorization to be running their own exploration op at all. Procedure would be to send hunters first into any hazardous environment and Lab or military follow-up teams later. If they know what they're looking for, maybe they don't want the Administration to know for fear they'll steal it."
"Or maybe they're just so hardwired to do everything covertly that they can't tie their shoes without a major coverup and three levels of plausible deniability," Lyon snapped.
"I sometimes wonder if that might not be the truth," said Ryland. "In any case, shall we move on and see what it is that they're protecting?"
Lyon took the hint and led the way up the second passage. It was much longer than the first and felt almost claustrophobic, as if she could sense the weight of the earth pressing in on all sides. It ended by sloping up to another trapdoor, but this one was already greenlit. She opened it, and the two hunters stepped up into the auxiliary tower.
"This place is a mess," Lyon remarked succinctly. The basic structure was intact, excepting a jagged crack down one wall, but the interior was a ruin. What had been a kind of open-air workroom two stories high was full of destroyed computer parts, wrecked terminals, and bits and pieces of industrial robots, probably the ones the military had used to construct the passage. With them it would have taken a couple of days to finish the job instead of weeks. A broad, sloping ramp led up the side of the windowless wall to the upper floor.
Then Lyon caught sight of the first uniformed corpse. She snapped her gun up, scanning the room for the sight of any threat.
Nothing. Not even a camouflage shimmer.
"It looks like he was burned to death," Ryland said, examining the body. "We'd need a medical opinion to say if it was from a fire technique or something natural, though."
The next body wasn't human, but a Type: W military android. Lyon had met several and liked none of them; they were tasked killing machines as much as they were people, a perfect example of what could go wrong in android design. But this one was inert, dead in every way that counted, and she couldn't help but feel a twinge of sympathy. He'd been burnt, too, the damage so intense that it had melted good chunks of his carapace and no doubt the AI core beneath.
They found a second human body, this one with a lieutenant's bar on his collar. He didn't show any signs of violence at all.
"Megid," Ryland deduced. The dark Photon technique simply cancelled out the life-sustaining Photon in the target; the body just...stopped.
"What happened here? Was it an enemy Force that ambushed these soldiers?"
"A rival faction? Maybe."
"There's another one over there." Lyon nodded towards the ramp. Another soldier's corpse was sprawled there, half-hidden by the guardrail.
"Frost damage," Ryland decided when they reached it. "It looks like your guess of an enemy Force, or more than one, was right. I can't think of anything else that could do this many different types of damage. What I don't understand is how someone could have found out about this mission. Unless it was from Dr. Carstairs's data and it's the murderers of these military personnel running the coverup? But that doesn't make sense, because the military surely knows that they came here, and no amount of coverup would conceal their internal knowledge."
Lyon had to agree that it didn't add up the way things seemed to be happening. Somewhere they had either misinterpreted something or just didn't have enough data.
The pencil-thin red line that stabbed down from above gave only a split second's warning. Threat-response algorithms, prioritized because of their location in the field and what they'd discovered, gave Lyon an amazing reaction time, and she grabbed a fistful of Ryland's robes and pulled him away.
"Move it!" she shouted, half-running, half-diving aside with the Force in tow. She hit the ground, heard the explosion and felt the heat wash over her, but she'd been outside the damage range of the Rafoie blast. "Ryland! You okay?"
"Yes; what was that?"
She rolled onto her back for a better look.
"Coming again! Move!"
They did, scrambling to their feet and dashing in separate directions through the rubble. The red line--a targeting sight, Lyon realized--tracked towards Ryland, but the Force was faster than he looked, even in his ornate robes. He hurdled the wreckage of a computer workstation, then veered sharply right and the second Rafoie went off behind him.
With the hazard's attention on Ryland, Lyon got a chance to see what it was they were facing. Descending the ramp from the upper level was a large black machine, easily big enough to be a vehicle but probably some kind of robot. Lyon fired at it, but her shots impacted harmlessly against the massive oval armor plate on its facing side, one of four that made the thing all but impregnable.
What is that, some kind of tank? It'd take field-grade artillery to scratch that armor! Lyon thought helplessly.
The machine slid inexorably down the ramp and into the lower room. Equipped as it was with hover-flight capabilities, the damage and obstacles did not hinder it. Lyon continued to fire helplessly while Ryland tried his Zonde technique with equal fruitlessness. It did not counter with further devastating Rafoies, though, but tried a new technique. It suddenly stopped and its shield-plates detached from the main body, extending outwards and whirling around it in a rapid arc. Pulsing blue auras swelled around the guards, and Lyon wasn't fast enough to elude one as the sudden move had taken her by surprise. Cold washed over her, blasting her structure, but worse yet she was sheathed in a thin ice prison that held her helpless. The effect was temporary, she knew, but how much more damage would she take before she broke out?
Suddenly the ice crumbled in a shimmer of light and she flung herself back just in time to avoid the next orbiting guard.
"Thanks!" she called to Ryland, who'd freed her with an Anti technique. Useful, teaming with a Force!
"Any time." He hurled another Zonde, which sought out the nearest guard with no effect at all.
"Ryland! Not the shields--hit the body!" Lyon was suddenly inspired, and suited her actions to her words. Timing the orbiting guards, she fired between them and was satisfied to see her shots blast gouges in the exposed gray metal where the guard-plates had been mounted.
"Right!"
Ryland switched from Zonde, which would automatically be attracted to the nearest shield, to Gizonde, sending a chained bolt of lightning leaping from target to target and striking the war machine's main body on the way.
"That's it! Keep it up!"
They hammered at the killing machine with everything they had for more than a minute, when it suddenly pulled its shields in. Once more the tracking beam swept out and the hunters scrambled away, barely dodging the attack. A second, then a third blast nearly finished things, until it stopped again. This time Lyon anticipated the shields and it was a good thing she did, because the aura they projected wasn't blue but a deep violet, the color of dark-attributed Photon. That explains the soldier killed by Megid, she thought. Pick your element; this thing has it.
The fact that the machine had to stop moving during its shield attack, though, was a fatal design flaw, as was the touch-only effect of the guards' auras. It was a brutally effective way to clear out a close-range attack but ineffective against ranged attackers who used a bit of care. Perhaps with a human, android, or AI operator controlling it the machine could have used its immense power more efficiently, but on its own it seemed to just cycle through attacks.
It didn't survive the cycle. Lyon and Ryland reduced its vulnerable core section to scrap.
"What was that?" Ryland asked, panting for breath.
"Search me; some kind of cutting-edge combat mech, I'd say."
"Obviously operating in seek-and-destroy mode. That's almost certainly what killed the military team. And it's too big to have fit through the tunnel, so they didn't bring it with them."
"So you think the military was after this, whatever it was?"
Ryland nodded.
"Presumably a breakthrough made by Pioneer 1. We can assume in their various research operations the military got wind of its existence, then came here to attempt to retrieve both the unit itself and more importantly the design data. They always complain about being undergunned and this certainly would have changed that. Only when they broke through, either they triggered some security protocol that made it attack or else it was subject to D-Factor infection. I doubt they knew what hit them."
"So the operation failed, but they covered it up anyway?"
"They had to. First off, they'd certainly want to launch some kind of follow-up eventually. Maybe they did and are even now trying to come up with a plan to secure the machine. Secondly, they'd certainly want to cover up the fact that they'd been involved in an illegal operation." He rubbed his chin. "Yes, I suspect they're trying to come up with a Plan B. If they'd just given up they'd have dismantled the tunnel to keep their activities secret."
"Only we've pretty much trashed their plans."
Ryland nodded.
"We'll have to report this to the Administration."
"The sooner the better," Lyon agreed. "I don't fancy being next on the list of things to be covered up."
"You'll get no argument from me. But there's one other little detail that we need to clean up first."