The room at the end of the corridor was roughly the same size as the one the hunters had arrived in, but included two computer terminals. One was the small, waist-height workstation common to Gal De Val Island, while the other was a bulkier, block-like one more like the ones in No Man's Mines. Gowan stepped over to the latter unit while Lyon took the smaller, less complex one.
"Data: negative."
"Do you mean there's nothing there at all? Or that it wasn't the kind of activity that we're looking for?"
Gowan looked at Ryland for a moment, then reached for the navigation unit on his left wrist and began typing. A moment later, Ryland's own unit beeped.
"Simple-mail? Oh, I see. 'This machine has been accessed within the past week, but has not been used for the transmission or copying of data. The local data appears to be concerned with facility management rather than research.' Does that mean you can find a map of this place?"
Gowan returned his attention to the computer. A moment later, the largest screen on the machine shifted images to display a sketchwork map of the area.
"Download: commencing," he announced, sending the data to his nav unit.
"That was handy," Naomi said. "Usually we have to go in blind or by memory. Did you find anything over there, Lyon?"
"Just the door control." She touched it, switching a panel light from red to green. "Let's go."
They went back to the intersection and took the branch path away from the dam face. As expected, the door slid open at their approach, leading to a large lobby-like area, with plants under glass and five other exits. There were few signs of violence, and the hunters moved through the complex with the unusual experience of not meeting any hostile encounters.
"I can see why there wouldn't be any animals or D-cellular sub lifeforms," Lyon said, confused, after verifying that the fifth room was indeed empty, even of camouflaged Sinow robots, "but there should be security robots, shouldn't there?"
"Not without some way for them to get in. This isn't like the Seabed facility or the outdoors of the island; the automated factories would keep generating robots until shut down, but there's no way from there to here," Ryland deduced. "Dr. Lucerne's team probably cleared whatever they found left over from Pioneer 1, and there's been no way to replace those guards."
"Okay, I'll buy that."
They explored what looked like test chambers, where observers could watch experiments from behind barriers of reinforced barrier plastiglass, often smoked or with altering polarization to deal with bright flashes, material that resembled that of the dome surrounding Pioneer 2's city although on a much smaller scale. In one place, a large room led to a kind of gantry with metal grill catwalks over the huge generators and Photon converters of the hydroelectric plant several levels down; the scale of it was amazing, especially when one considered that the entire facility on Gal De Val Island had been kept secret from the bulk of Pioneer 1's civilian population. No matter how many times she saw the evidence, Lyon never seemed to stop being overcome by the lengths Dr. Osto and his staff had gone in pursuit of the secrets of Photon energy and the D-Factor...and the lack of any restraint imposed by ethics or sanity on those lengths.
As they progressed, the paused to check out every working computer terminal they located. More than once Gowan discovered that data had been examined or downloaded from it, consistent with the pattern of an exploration trip, but no sign of any transmission to a remote location of the kind that they were seeking.
Then they entered another long, featureless corridor, only to be greeted by the sight of a body sprawled face-down across the way. The hunters didn't need Naomi's caution to keep an eye out; if anything their watchfulness increased as they approached the fallen figure. The corpse appeared to be a male Newman, his platform shoes, stiff brocade coat, and jester-like tasseled cap suggesting that he'd been a Force. That the body was a corpse wasn't in doubt; he'd been dead for several days and decomposition had set in. The cause of death seemed self-evident; he'd been stabbed in the back, the scorching suggesting it had been a Photon blade rather than a physical one—a weapon, not a creature's claws.
Lyon and Gowan turned the body over; he'd been a registered hunter as shown by his Section ID badge. She accessed it.
"His name was Robin Vance," she said. "That was one of the hunters on Dr. Lucerne's expedition team."
"This bears out the tale of an ambush," Ryland said. "A surprise attack to take out the Force before the battle begins would certainly be a sensible tactic. Though I would have expected a long-range attack, a gunshot or technique, not a stab wound. How does an enemy get that close to a trained hunter in a narrow corridor like this?"
"Good question. It makes me worry that somebody's finally made Photon camouflage units that work for people."
"Thankfully that's still an urban legend, Naomi, but I wouldn't be surprised if several research teams were working on it even as we speak."
"Ryland," Lyon cut in, "there's something wrong here."
"Oh?"
It took him a couple of seconds, since he didn't have the benefit of an STM buffer containing the precise data for replay. Still, he got it with her reminder, his eyes widening behind his spectacles.
"He wasn't shot."
"Observation: repetitious."
"That's not what he means, Gowan," Lyon corrected the assumption. "The survivor's report on the ambush specifically said that the FOnewm had been taken out first, first paralyzed and then killed by shots."
"Sounds to me like your survivor's report consists of bald-faced lies."
"Truth rests more comfortably in the hands of sole survivors," Lyon's cynicism followed up on Naomi's. "And Dorn was a Hunter, so he'd be used to making close-range attacks."
That certainly fit with their initial cynicism and suspicion, but it did not satisfy. The Dorn that Wayland Parr and Coris had described wasn't a man who'd ambush his team and assassinate his sponsor—or if by some twist of events he did, it would be for some powerful, personal reason, not something that would have him slipping back to Pioneer 2 only to get offed by his old friends in a business deal gone bad.
Something was missing. She shared a look with Ryland.
"Let's keep going," he agreed.
They tagged the body for corpse retrieval so that it could be returned to the ship by the Guild and a proper funeral held. Maybe Vance had had someone to care for him and maybe not, but as hunters, all four of them knew they'd want the same done for them. Then, they went on down the corridor and into the next room.
This was it.
The oblong room was a laboratory, probably the control and monitoring room for experiments, judging by the way a "bubble" protruded out of one side like a bow window overlooking what was probably a test chamber that they'd actually been in earlier in their explorations. Computers were on, with data scrolling across the screens, charts and graphs. That was unusual; the computers in No Man's Mines were like that because the area AI, Vol Opt, was still active although corrupted, but the Gal De Val AI, Olga, had been destroyed with Heathcliff Flowen. These computers had been recently activated.
What clinched the point, however, was not any of the machines from the original facility, but one that had been added. It looked like a floating gold ring, with panels of blue light above and below so that the whole thing seemed vaguely like a crown, if Lyon was forced to compare it to anything. It was a CALS terminal, an extension of the Lab mainframe on Pioneer 2 used as a data interface and communication system by hunters on Lab missions so they could communicate with their operator on the ship. Its existence was clear proof that Lab-backed activity had taken place here—and after all, why would Dr. Lucerne use a local computer if he had access to technology created for his precise purpose?
And then there were the bodies.
"Deceased: expected?"
"Possibly," Ryland said. "A female android and a Newman in a white lab coat. That matches with two of the people we believed we'd find."
"Let's check and be sure," Lyon said.
The Newman looked to be in his fifties, with long silver hair. His identification confirmed that he was indeed Dr. Kylan Lucerne of the Lab. His death appeared to have come quickly.
"One shot, probably a handgun-type weapon," Lyon observed.
"Are you sure? It couldn't have been a rifle?"
"Androids don't have confirmation bias, Ryland," Lyon said. "And I said it was possibly a handgun, not that it was absolutely so."
"I apologize. It just seemed to be coming too easily."
"Query: confirmation?"
"The use of a handgun to kill Dr. Lucerne suggests a Hunter, rather than a Ranger or Force, and Barton Dorn was a Hunter," Ryland explained. "When you consider that Dorn was the sole survivor of the expedition team, and that what we've found doesn't match up at all with what he told our client...well, it's easy to have certain suspicions."
Naomi snorted.
"Yeah, I bet. Well, if this guy got it clean and neat, that android definitely didn't."
Sif-04A was a Type-S/F Ranger model, a series that was Weinstine Co.'s predecessor to the more advanced L/Ys like Lyon. She'd fought valiantly against whatever or whomever had attacked her, as indicated by the several injuries from Photon blades that marked her carapace and the saber that lay near her. Both the main control in her body and the core unit in her head had been destroyed, and her left arm severed.
"What do you think?" Lyon asked. "After getting rid of Vance in the hall, Dorn came in here, put Lucerne down, and Sif attacked him, in self-defense and to try and get Dr. Lucerne a Moon Atomizer to keep him from dying?"
"It could be," Ryland said. "We'll probably never know the exact sequence of events but that sounds as reasonable as any."
"Then why kill Dorn?" Lyon wondered.
"Maybe because he didn't get what he came for?"
"Dr. Lucerne sent a message?"
"He's lying almost underneath the CALS terminal. That wound would have been fatal, but not immediately."
"So while Sif was fighting Dorn, keeping Dorn from doing anything else but fend her off, the dying Dr. Lucerne sent his data somewhere using this CALS terminal?"
Ryland nodded.
"We'll probably never know every detail, but I think it was probably something along those lines. Gowan?"
"Transmission: verifiable."
He stepped over to the CALS terminal and accessed it, using the details of the cover mission they were working for Dr. Severin to verify that he was in fact entitled to connect to the terminal. In a few moments, he'd pulled up the record, and once again sent a simple-mail.
"All right, then. According to Gowan, five days ago at 816.1, a compressed-burst transmission uploaded a large data file from here directly to CALS. This was a pre-set operation requiring only a single command to execute," Ryland summarized.
"Probably an emergency backup plan," Lyon decided. "In the event of a crisis, his data could be instantly sent on. The data was one day before Dorn's murder, as well, suggesting that trouble finally caught up with him."
"I agree, but I'd like to verify that. Is there any way to corroborate that the transmission was sent by Dr. Lucerne?"
Lyon glanced at Gowan.
"Can you verify Sif-04A's shutdown time?"
"Operation: possible."
The two organics looked at her curiously.
"What are you thinking, Lyon?"
"Most android parts, as you know, are interchangeable. An android's 'self' is in their core, of course, and the main control in the body is what allows it to operate, but limbs and the like retain their own sub-processors. So while Sif is dead and her memories of the incident destroyed, since her body is mostly intact, Gowan can check on when the limbs stopped receiving commands from the main control—the precise time of death."
"I see. That's excellent thinking."
Lyon shrugged.
"Just self-knowledge."
The hulking RAcast, meanwhile, had knelt down next to the fallen android. With surprisingly deft movements, he connected a thin cable to the base of his neck and then ran it to a panel on Sif's still-connected wrist. Lyon couldn't help but wince whenever she saw that; it was why she'd asked Gowan to do something she could handle perfectly well herself. Despite the damage he'd suffered, he had no phobia about linking directly to other computer systems, while Lyon had no desire to open herself to potential hacking or viruses if she could avoid it.
"Shutdown: 816.2," Gowan reported. He moved on to the legs and repeated the same result from each, establishing that this was the time the main control had been destroyed.
"That sounds like your scenario was right, Lyon," Naomi said. "Dr. Lucerne was shot first, and then sent the transmission while Sif fought the killer. But hey, why didn't the killer just steal whatever data it was off the CALS terminal after the fight?"
"Data: erased."
"The program to send the transmission also wiped local data?" Ryland questioned the RAcast's meaning.
"Supposition: accurate."
"Which makes sense, since the point is to keep the data away from the people attacking them."
"So is that it, then? We're done here?" Naomi asked.
"No, let's do this right. We finish properly, making sure no other computers around here did anything, and also looking for the fourth missing member of the expedition."
"Cyndra Vallere," Lyon provided. "You're right, Ryland. We're probably only going to get one chance down here, and we don't want to risk leaving any clues to this mess behind us."
As it turned out, though, the only thing they gained by finishing the job was certainty, because there was nothing useful to be learned and no sign of the remaining hunter's body. Unless she'd gone over the catwalk and was hidden by the generating plant, Lyon thought, she wasn't there to be found. Nor had any of the computers turned up anything interesting; maybe there was something, but it was for scientific experts to sift through and tell the wheat from the chaff, not hunters. The point that mattered to them was that none of them had been used as a computer by Dr. Lucerne, only being sources of stored data to access. As for surprising developments, there were none of those as well, not even a Sinow Berill dropping from the ceiling in the last room.
They teleported back to the Guild using Ryuker, rather than walking all the way back to the facility entrance and using the Central Control Area teleporter. They reported in at the Guild, collecting their fee and reporting the tagged bodies of Vance, Sif, and Dr. Lucerne so the recovery teleporters could bring them back.
"Let us know how it turns out, if you can," Naomi told Ryland as they parted ways.
"If we show up to pay you the back-end money, you'll know," Lyon told her, making the brawny Newman roll her eyes.
"That's just what I meant and you know it. You two always get the interesting jobs."
"You put her up to saying that, didn't you?" Lyon joked to her partner, but Ryland seemed passive.
"Sometimes, they turn out a little too interesting," he said softly.
~X X X~
"So that's it?" Kendric said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. "You go down to Ragol and all you find is that a Lab scientist reported Lab business back to the Lab while he and a couple of hunters were being murdered? How does that help us?"
Ryland poured coffee into a mug. Since Kendric was staying over while this was going on, Lyon had laid in food and her partner was quickly taking advantage of it.
"There's quite a lot more to it than that," Ryland said. "For example, the first statement is perfectly untrue."
"What?"
"About Dr. Lucerne reporting to the Lab." He walked back over to the living area and sat down. "I'm quite sure that he didn't."
"Why not?"
Ryland turned to his partner.
"Can you tell him, Lyon?"
She stared at him, but he didn't so much as glance away from her blank, blue-light eyes.
"Are we really playing detective games over this?"
He shook his head.
"No games. I really want to know if you see the same things that I do. If not, then I get worried I'm letting my imagination get ahead of itself." He glanced at Kendric, wishing it was only Lyon in the room, then sucked it up and admitted, "You know that I like mysteries and conspiracy stories, but the problem with that is, I very quickly see mysteries and conspiracies, sometimes even where there aren't any."
"I don't think you've got that problem just now, Donny," Kendric said dryly. "I think it's pretty clear we've got something going on here."
"That's it!" Lyon exclaimed. "We do have something going on, and that's why you don't think Dr. Lucerne reported in to the Lab."
Ryland sipped coffee. It wasn't as good as his favorite, but it was worlds ahead of the Blue Grotto's.
"Yes, exactly."
"Great, now I feel like the prize idiot," Kendric groused. "Mind telling me what I'm missing, or do we have to keep playing the party game until all of us figure it out?"
"The operation to seize Dr. Lucerne's data is still running. The Slashers attacked Justine, were spying on you and Eddy, murdered Barton Dorn, and so on in order to try and finish it off. If Dr. Lucerne had simply sent his research data to his Lab superiors, there'd be nothing for criminals or other factions to try to get—at least, not this way."
"Did the buyer know that, though?" Lyon asked. "Maybe Dorn was stringing him along, in the hope of getting a payout?"
"Was this Dorn guy that stupid?" Kendric asked. "You don't backstab someone unless you've got someone else to protect you or somewhere to run—and on Pioneer 2, there's nowhere to run to. You can't just leave the country like on Coral. It's one thing if he was a spy for the military or if the guy he was screwing over was a fellow hunter or something so he could go hide in Downtown, but doublecrossing someone on a criminal deal over Lab data just to pocket some cash?" He shook his head. "That'd just be nuts."
"I tend to agree," Ryland said. "A man who'd been a street gang member, then a successful hunter, would know that."
"Okay, I'll buy that," Lyon decided.
"So, we can assume that the data was not sent to Chief Milarose or some other Lab administrator. A verifying point is that we're not tripping over IntSec in all of this. Chief Milarose would definitely not let someone murdering a Lab scientist to steal data go unchallenged. If Dr. Lucerne had gotten the data back, she would have sent Internal Security agents or their hunters to find the responsible parties and teach them a very pointed lesson. But we haven't crossed paths with such a group even once."
Kendric spoke up to play devil's advocate.
"Haven't we? Remember what I said, the only way I think someone could be running electronic surveillance would be with a high-grade AI. That Lab chief has the only one we know exists, that CALS system."
"Possibly, but there still haven't been any living people involved. You're right that CALS could handle the surveillance, but there would still have to be follow-ups in the physical world."
"All right; just figured I'd mention it."
"I'm not upset; if my logic has holes, it's good to say so now before we depend on it." He lifted the cup to his lips and sipped. "Now, on to the next point Kendric's summary missed: we have an obvious loose end in Cyndra Vallere." He turned to the entertainment center and touched a remote, which called up a video image he'd managed to obtain of a Newman female in the typical skimpy outfit of a HUnewearl like Naomi, her bright blue hair moussed up in tall spikes and a visor-like eyepiece not unlike Wayland Parr had worn, her pale skin marked by gleaming light-gel tattoos on the upper arms and shoulders. "We found the bodies of the other two hunters, so why not her? Is she dead, too, but somewhere else—back on Pioneer 2 like Dorn? If so, why haven't we heard about her? Is she in hiding from the killers? Or was she in on the killings? She's a question mark, and figuring out how she fits in is very likely important."
"We'll have to check with Guild contacts like your friend Talissa about her," Lyon said.
"Anywhere else I screwed up and you learned something?" Kendric drawled. He sounded a bit better about it. It was, after all, his own situation more than either hunter's they were talking about, so Lyon figured he found it galling that he was being dismissive of efforts that had actually proven to be helpful. Maybe Ryland saw it too, as when he answered he did so hesitantly, at least at first.
"...Actually, there is one other thing. When Revelle Lucerne hired us, she showed us the report on the expedition's fate that Barton Dorn had sent her by simple-mail. While there were some similarities, the report was ultimately quite inaccurate for what we found."
"It was a lie?"
"Yes, but more than that it was a clumsy lie, one easy to catch him out at. Wouldn't Dorn expect a follow-up investigation to be made, if not by Lucerne, then at least by the Lab? I don't see what he had to gain by telling a story so obviously at odds with the facts."
"So do you know the answer to that one?"
"No. Well...maybe. I have an idea. You were able to hack into Lucerne's PDL before, weren't you, when you were looking for signs of surveillance?"
"Yes, I was."
"Then can you see if you can do it again? I'd like to know when she got those messages and if possible, who actually sent them."
"The first one I can do; the second probably not as it would involve hacking the BEE transmission network."
"Get me what you can. Meanwhile, Lyon and I will follow up the second point, Cyndra Vallere, with our friends and contacts in the Guild."
"Okay...wait, but what about the big point? Dr. Lucerne transmitted the data to the Lab's AI but you don't think that the Lab got it? Shouldn't at least one of us be looking into that?"
Ryland smiled at him over the lip of the coffee mug.
"Oh, there's no need to go researching that. I already know where Dr. Lucerne put the data."