BK> See this?

  JN> Yeah. Life support on the blink.

  BK> Not a good sign.

  JN> An incredibly bad sign.

  Griffin activated the airlift on the first attempt. One of the cars was on level Sub-5 and it opened immediately. He stepped inside and the Estral strode past him to stand against the rear wall. There was plenty of room for Nation and Keller to enter without having to come into physical contact with the aliens. As she walked past Griffin, Keller gave him a wide grin. His expression was hidden behind the suit visor, but his hands fidgeted with his diagnostic tablet.

  JN> Stop teasing him.

  BK> Whatever do you mean?

  JN> He’s nervous enough as it is.

  Griffin reached for the lift panel and took three attempts to get it going. The Estral made no effort to intervene.

  “You’re doing well,” said Keller through the RRT Alpha comms channel. The aliens wouldn’t be able to hear any conversation conducted through the suit comms.

  “Thanks.” Griffin’s voice was more or less steady.

  Nation didn’t have a visor and didn’t need one to access the suit comms. He chose his words and sent them into the channel, where they were converted to speech. “Hold it together,” he said. “How far to the comms station?”

  “Two or three hundred metres.”

  “Once we’re there, you don’t need to stick around.”

  “Okay.”

  The lift stopped and something screeched far below. Nation pressed his hand to the wall and detected vibration, though he had no idea where it was coming from. The door opened halfway, stopped, and then slid fully aside.

  “Your whole damn place is falling to pieces,” said Griffin aloud.

  The Estral didn’t respond or even acknowledge he’d spoken. Nation studied the parts of their faces he could see through their suit helmets and the aliens were giving nothing away. There was clearly something wrong and Nation doubted it was confined to the airlifts.

  There were no surprises outside the lift. The doors opened to reveal a large room, with bare metal floors, smooth walls and a ceiling supported by thick beams. Nation idly noted fractures in the stone around one of the beams, as well as signs of the metal bowing under the immense strain. The Estral were renowned experts when it came to tunnelling through rock, so it was odd to see signs of failure. There again, the Isob-2 facility likely had many untold tales.

  This room was empty of personnel. In terms of equipment, a row of four status screens was fixed to the left-hand wall. Two of the screens were blank, a third flickered wildly and the fourth showed a series of temperature alerts for level Sub-3. Five passages led deeper into the complex, only one of which had a sign above it.

  Communication Centre – Secondary Routing Hub

  RL Griffin made directly for this passage and his escort followed. There was a compact gravity car at an angle across the way, with no driver and a large metal crate on its flat bed. The corridor was wide, allowing plenty of room to walk past the vehicle. There was no obvious reason it had been abandoned here.

  “Explosives,” said Nation, spotting the Estral symbols on top of the crate.

  “That wasn’t here last time I came this way,” said Griffin.

  “They’re trying hard to keep something hidden from us,” said Keller. “And they want to get it done so quickly it’s making them careless.”

  Griffin’s curiosity overcame his nervousness. “How are you doing that, ma’am? I mean, I can see you and the Estral can’t. Stealth augmentations are something I can understand, but this?”

  “I just tell their minds that I’m not here, Lieutenant. The more of them there are, the harder it becomes to fool them. It works on any sentient being. Now please, no more questions.” She didn’t speak the last words unkindly, it just wasn’t a good time to be talking about her psi capabilities.

  They entered a second large room, with several exits. There were four console stations in the middle of the floor and Nation saw Keller studying them carefully. They were ten-screen models, probably used by comms technicians to keep an eye on the main array. The seats were empty and most of the screens were switched off or tied in to a failed system.

  BK> I can hard connect to this closest one.

  JN> It’s quite open here. You might have to break off if someone comes by.

  BK> No sign of anyone.

  JN> Let’s keep it in mind if the comms station doesn’t work out.

  BK> Agreed. I’m beginning to doubt if there’s any hardware in Isob-2 that’s working well enough for me to tap into it with confidence.

  JN> It’s that bad?

  BK> We’ll see.

  At that moment, Nation sensed something coming along one of the side passages. Visibility was exceptionally poor in that direction – the cold blue lighting was low and it appeared to be completely out further into the distance. He was forced to use his sensor augmentation to get a clear image.

  “Soldiers,” he said. “Lots of them and coming straight this way. RL Griffin, pick up the pace.”

  “Coming for us?” he gulped.

  “I doubt it. Move.”

  Griffin increased the length of his stride without trying to be subtle about it. He led them into one of the other passages and kept going. They reached a T-junction and Griffin turned left.

  “Hold,” said Keller.

  “What?” said Griffin, startled.

  “Take a reading or something.”

  While Griffin fumbled with his portable sniffer, Keller and Nation watched the Estral soldiers file past in the room behind. The aliens carried a full loadout of gauss cannons and repeaters, and a few lugged shoulder launchers. In addition, they wore thick plates of alloy armour which were fixed to the front of their spacesuits. They crossed the room, heading for the airlifts. On and on they came, hundreds and hundreds, marching three abreast. In the centre of their line was an evil-looking selection of Gallenium-powered artillery guns. Nation counted two brutal plasma repeaters and a heavy-duty guided plasma rocket launcher which was so large it was a wonder they’d got it down here.

  BK> Sixty seconds earlier and I’d have had a job on my hands trying to keep hidden.

  JN> What the hell are they doing? That launcher could flatten a town. There’s no way they can think it’s a good idea to fire it down here.

  BK> And why aren’t they using the cargo lift?

  “What’s wrong?” asked Griffin nervously. Further along the passage, he waved the sniffer around and scrutinised his diagnostic tablet as if he’d discovered the most lethal cocktail of toxins in the entire universe. The Estral watched him closely, as if they suspected foul play.

  “Troops,” said Keller. “They’re not even trying to hide.”

  “I’ve seen enough,” said Nation. He checked his Istoliar power cells. The stealth modules were draining them, but nothing to be concerned about. “Let’s go.”

  Griffin didn’t need to be asked twice. He pocketed the sniffer and set off again. Doors punctuated the walls at regular intervals and the alien script etched into their metal surfaces indicated the rooms beyond were for storage or other mundane uses. Their access panels were locked down and disabled in the way they had been on Sub-5. The Estral didn’t want anyone getting inside.

  Keller remembered something. “When Koltar-Reon first took us to the room on Sub-5, he told us that most of RRT Alpha was down there.”

  “That’s right. We’ve got R2 Rich Bonner and R2 Kelly Sasso trying to find anything that might be useful on Sub-4.”

  “Is there something there?”

  “No, ma’am. All the answers are on Sub-6 or lower. We’ve got to do something, though, so we try to make a nuisance of ourselves. We figure the Estral might make a mistake at some point and we could learn something.”

  “Doesn’t seem as if it’s working out too well for you.”

  “Between you and me, this is the worst assignment I can remember. In spite of what my colleagues would have you believe, I served a couple of years moving between Estral facilities like this one at the end of the Eighth War. Things were a lot easier back then – the Estral were just as rude and stubborn as they are now, but our teams had backup. Out here? It feels like we’ve been abandoned.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I think the Space Corps’ hands are tied by the Confederation Council’s fears of upsetting the Estral without having absolute certainty of a treaty breach,” said Keller. “Once they have proof of whatever there is to prove, they’ll send that backup.”

  Once she’d spoken the words, Keller realised she didn’t believe them herself. Admiral Cody had been well aware of the ramifications, but didn’t once commit to sending more spaceships.

  Griffin was equally sceptical. “You sound sure, ma’am. I don’t share your confidence. The Estral are getting harder to handle – each time I come to a new facility to do an inspection with one of our teams, we face more and more obstacles. We write up our reports and nothing ever happens. It’s like the Estral know we don’t want to start another war, so they’ve decided to do what they damn well please.”

  “We have far more Istoliar than they do,” said Nation. “The SC Gundar alone could knock out a dozen of their spaceships.”

  “Maybe the advantage isn’t as great as you think,” said Griffin with a bitter laugh. “They’ve been refining Obsidiar-Teronium under our noses for years and shipping it out. Do you really think they’re installing it in their hospitals and power stations?”

  “Our Estral friends are manoeuvring for war again.”

  “Same as it always was, Lieutenant Nation. Same as it always was.”

  They crossed another open space, this one with a high, domed ceiling supported by a thick central pillar of metal. A console surrounded the pillar, with none of its screens working properly. Occasionally, sparks of white jumped from screen to screen, or from operator pad to control joystick. There was an unpleasant hum in the room and the acrid stench of burning ozone.

  “Was it like this when you got here?” asked Keller.

  “No, ma’am. This whole place is going to fail if they don’t get a handle on whatever’s happening below Sub-5.”

  “They must have abandoned most of the maintenance areas like this one. That means it’s either not safe to work or there’s something stopping them getting it operational again.”

  “I’ve not seen any evidence the Estral care about a few accidents,” said Griffin.

  They exited the room, into another passage similar to the others. There was so much dampness on the walls here, it dripped to the floor and formed pools. The temperature was hardly above freezing point and falling slowly. The light remained poor and the ceiling orbs created blue halos in the air. It was oppressive and reminded Nation of an old mineworks, rather than an advanced research and processing facility.

  “Your door is coming up on the right,” said Griffin. “You’re sure you can get inside?”

  “One way or another,” Nation replied grimly. “The door will need brute force; the terminal inside will require finesse.”

  The entrance to the secondary comms room was hard to miss. Midway along a corridor, a sign saying Communications Room hung from the ceiling and the adjacent door was much wider than the others, suggesting a lot of personnel came through. Keller and Nation hung back and watched Griffin heading away with his escort in tow.

  “I’m going back. Good luck,” Griffin said. “Remember, the suit comms won’t easily reach between the levels of the facility. If you need to speak to anyone, you’ll have to drop down to Sub-5. Even then, the thickness of the walls means it’s hit and miss.”

  “We’ll work with it. Thanks for the guided tour.”

  “No problem.”

  Keller and Nation checked out what they faced. Each of the sliding doors had a warning etched into the surface of the metal, advising it was a restricted area. To the side, an access panel waited for the right input. The panel was active, but the orange colour of the text indicated it was inaccessible to anyone without the highest level of clearance.

  BK> What do you reckon?

  JN> Hmmm.

  BK> What does hmmm mean?

  JN> It means I’m thinking.

  BK> RL Griffin and his pals just disappeared around that corner. Stop thinking and start doing.

  There was no way to hard link into an Estral door panel. They were sealed units designed to open doors or deny access to people without clearance, and they had no ports. One of Nation’s many augmentations was a development of the old Internal Security Override Packs, generally called an ISOP or a number cruncher. He stood close to the door panel and activated his ISOP.

  The ISOP connected remotely. Immediately, the door panel changed rapidly between its access denied and no entry notifications as the number cruncher bombarded its security software with octillions of permutations per second. Nation checked the utilisation on his processing cluster. It peaked at its fifty percent permitted maximum and remained there.

  The use of the number cruncher on top of the stealth modules increased the power usage across his internal systems and his power cells drained at an increased rate. They recharged naturally over time, but it wasn’t a good idea to let them fall too low.

  “They must have improved their encryption algorithms since last time,” he grunted. Chill from his Istoliar processing cores radiated through his skull and he gritted his teeth.

  Keller stepped away from the wall and looked both ways. She turned her head, to give the visor sensor a better chance of picking up noise. “I’ve got no idea if there’s anything coming. Sound doesn’t carry too well down here. How long till the ISOP finishes?”

  “It doesn’t give me a progress report.”

  “It’s going to bring every Estral running this way once they realise there’s someone pissing about with their door.”

  “I don’t need reminding.”

  Nation was on the brink of overriding the fifty percent core cap to see if he could speed things up, when the door panel abruptly changed from orange to blue.

  “Bingo.”

  The doors slid open and Nation took a moment to reassure himself that the secondary comms hub wasn’t filled with Estral soldiers. Anyone inside would have been ignorant of the break-in attempt, but they would probably be suspicious when the doors opened without reason.

  “Looks empty,” said Keller.

  Nation gave a nod. “In.”

  Having to force the door open meant their time was already limited and there was plenty to do in the comms hub. Without any more delay, the two of them hurried inside.

  Chapter Seven

  The secondary comms hub was a square space, twenty-five metres to each side. The walls, floor and domed ceiling were undressed stone. There was nothing so crude as a support beam and the low thrum of a gravity field generator betrayed the method the Estral used to guard against collapse. A central post joined floor to ceiling. This post had a diameter of three metres and was pure black in colour. Cold spilled away from it and a thick layer of ice covered much of the floor.

  The doors closed behind them and the script on the inner access panels stayed blue. At least they weren’t going to be locked inside. The comms console which circled the secondary antenna was free of ice, but it was completely dead. Keller dashed over to it, swearing under her breath.

  “You dare be broken.”

  Her boots crunched across the ice as she made her way around to the far side of the antenna.

  “I’m going around here so the Estral won’t see me straight away if any come through that door,” she said.

  Nation stood to one side of the lone entrance with his stealth augmentation activated. There was a waist-high metal bench nearby, with a couple of metal trays covered in some of the pastes the Estral replicators disgorged. The food looked frozen and completely unappetising.

  “I’ll keep watch from here.” Nation had nonlethal methods of disabling an opponent, but it would be for the best if they simply got this over with before the Estral showed up.

  “Remember, I can’t hide myself while I’m interfaced.”

  “I know. Any life in the console?”

  “Checking.”

  The comms console looked similarly advanced to something in a Space Corps hub, with touch indentations, screens, keypads and switches. Keller was fully trained in the use of alien tech, but the Space Corps didn’t exactly receive a regular supply of the newest gear off the Estral production line. She tentatively tried to activate it.

  “Dead,” she muttered.

  “Do we need to move on?” asked Nation.

  “That’ll waste too much time. I’m going to plug in – it’s possible only the front-end has failed and it’s still linked to the base mainframe.”

  She sat on one of the hard, cold seats and pressed the spacesuit-covered tip of her index finger against one of the several open ports just below the bank of status screens. She called it hard linking when in reality there weren’t any physical wires involved. All Keller required was touching distance to a wide-bore data port in order for her Faor augmentation to establish a connection.

  As soon as she made contact, she felt every single nuance within the hardware. There were multiple hardware failures in this console – burnouts probably resulting from a huge unregulated power spike. She reached out further, the incredible processing power of the Faor able to slip amongst the Estral security walls with barely a hesitation.

  “It is linked to the mainframe,” she said, her voice taut with the effort of concentration.

  Keller was hidden from the door, but when Nation leaned out, he could see from her pose the effort it took to harness the augmentation.

  “This secondary antenna is linked to every sub-floor,” she continued. “There’s no traffic coming through it.”

  “Can you find their lower level monitoring sensors?”