Paphos, p.7
Paphos, page 7
“Come on, father,” Carolina said, holding his hand. Father?
“I wonder what’s powering these lights?” Orlean asked.
“Solar power?” Helena suggested.
“We didn’t find solar panels, but there’s definitely a power source,” Athen said.
The lights were recessed in inverted domes in the ceiling, providing a soft, pleasant glow. Austin looked closer at the signs over the doors, trying to make sense of them, as if he could. He stood near a desk with stacks of sheets or files, perhaps marked with symbols similar to those over the doorways.
Austin blinked twice when he found Carolina doodling on the table with her markerpen.
Watching Carolina’s scribbling triggered a visual of sorts. She looked like a patient in a waiting room, passing the time until the doctor called her back. He studied the room, looking from corner to corner, as puzzle pieces wanted to fit together. “Guys,” Austin said loudly. He waited until everyone looked at him. “I think it’s a hospital.”
CHAPTER 9
Carolina doodled on her notepad, eyes innocent as she drew. “They came here for safety.”
She realized everyone was staring at her and set her marker pen down. She went from casually doodling to head down and shoulders slouched.
“What do you mean?” Dmitry asked.
Carolina looked at her drawing and crumpled up the paper, tossing it and glaring at the empty desk. Dublin and Dmitry shared a look.
Austin put a hand on her shoulder. This was a mistake. But being at the quadrohuts was a worse mistake; he had to believe that he was making the best of the bad choices.
“Do you know where the parasite went?” Orlean asked her. She pursed her lips and hid behind her hair. Austin was ready to interrupt, but surprisingly, Dmitry did it for him.
“Orlean, how far do your sensors reach? I see three pathways in this room.”
Inside this room was a hallway to the left, to the right, and a path across. Dmitry and Dublin judged each one without much to go on. The hallway in the middle was glowing with red lights; the hallways to the left and right were dark.
“My readings aren’t clear.”
“Follow the light?” Dublin suggested.
“I’m thinking so.”
They went ahead as a group, entering the domed hallway, which was filled with a soft, red light that saturated their suits. Austin followed Carolina in front of him. He wouldn’t let her be further than arm’s reach away, hating every moment of going this way. There was excitement buried somewhere, but he was otherwise just worried about Carolina. A few meters in, he noticed square-shaped patterns on the wall, which were decorative. There were also ventilation slits about every ten meters.
The red glowing light stuttered and flicked off, bathing them in darkness as the ever-persistent hum of electricity died.
“Power’s out.”
“Thanks, Captain Obvious.”
“Quiet. Stay calm, we all have personal flashlights,” Dmitry said. Before Austin got his activation, the hum returned, and the red lights came back on. Faces in the passageway proved they all still existed, grateful to see each other again.
“The power is unstable,” Orlean sighed. “That’s exactly what we need.”
After a moment, they continued. The hallway wound down and around, sending their silhouettes in different directions. The floor lowered a half step, abruptly and seemingly for no reason. Then Austin noticed water damage along the floorboard, rising about three centimeters. At some point, this hallway had flooded. He supposed that wasn’t totally unexpected, being underground and all. The floors were still polished and smooth, except that they now encountered debris piles, decades old, with no indication of what had caused them.
Dmitry slowed as they came upon a smooth, round crate in the hallway. Empty, but they stopped and studied it anyway. Then, traveling further down the hallway, which was approximately fifty meters long, and passing over an odd step in the floor, they discovered two more crates. They took less time examining them and continued deeper inside.
It reminded him of a mining tunnel as they reached the end and found a gaping chute.
They stood in front of it. There was a frame over two meters tall and wide enough for all seven of them, with a drop on the other side that went further than they could see. Dmitry traded a glance with Dublin. Being the Engineer Element, it was Dublin or Athen who had the official opinion on safety, even if they were on another world. “I bet there’s a lift.”
“I bet it only goes down. Thinkin’ we should backtrack, try the other hallways,” Dublin said.
Dmitry poked his head down the chute, satisfied with what he saw. “We came all this way, let’s find out.” He pressed a hand-sized panel and stood back as a guttural whirr brought something to them. A large, doorless elevator climbed up the chute and stopped at their level. It was not pulled by any cables they could see. It was empty, too, Austin remarked gratefully.
When the elevator arrived, a light came on in the domed cabin, and a key panel was glowing blue.
Dmitry looked expectantly at Dublin.
“It climbed up here smoothly, no stuttering or whining of parts. This elevator is functional,” Dmitry said. He stepped on and turned to the crew. “We’re here for a reason, guys.”
Austin prayed this was the moment they all came to their senses, but instead, he watched each of them muster their courage and step onto the elevator.
“It’s okay, father,” Carolina said, leading him by the hand.
“When did I stop being dad?”
She only smiled. She’d never called him father before today. That was twice now.
Dublin examined the foreign symbols that illuminated after the elevator arrived. “G’wan then, why not?” With a hopeful smile, he pressed a button. A neargasp among them as the elevator smoothly descended, the floor rising up to seal them in.
Austin’s stomach twisted. His knuckles were squeezed white, but it wasn’t Carolina squeezing; it was him. He looked down at her, realizing he was far more anxious than she. In fact, she wasn’t the slightest bit nervous. He gave her a smile and a wink, a timid effort to reassure her, and suddenly the elevator came to a halt and opened its doors. They hadn’t traveled much at all. Thank goodness.
It was warmer here, at least ten degrees. There was also steam drifting up through the floor vents. Dmitry stepped off, studying their surroundings. The elevator had stopped at a cave-like room, all carved from stone. A hallway stemmed away from them, walled and floored, full of lighting and ventilation. Green lights turned on, sensing their presence. Most of the facility was fully constructed, but spots like the elevator chute and this landing pad were strangely just carved out of rock.
A sharp snap of electricity shot out from the ceiling, sending a dazzle of sparks. Damage or decay had loosened electrical wires in the ceiling of the hallway. He found something comforting about the use of electricity and cables, though he wasn’t sure why. They shared the same laws of physics; it felt familiar in this strange environment.
“Jus’ look how much dust is down here, plus it’s hotter than hell,” Dublin hacked.
“How is the electricity still running? The motion sensors, lights, elevators, what’s maintaining it?” Athen asked. No one voiced speculation yet.
Austin detected mechanical struggles in the ceiling, like metal fans chipping at water. A similar sound would come from a clogged coolant system. “Whatever it is, it hasn’t been maintained. Orlean, you’re watching for death traps, right?”
“Way ahead of you. I’m calibrated to their energy signature now; it won’t happen again.”
Orlean approached a terminal sticking out of the wall. It had several slots in it, he guessed, for connecting other devices, but they were shaped in unfamiliar ways. “I wonder if they rely on binary computing like we did, or if they’ve gone full quantum. I suppose it could be something totally different, too.”
“You don’t usually share your thoughts out loud this much,” Athen kicked his boot with hers.
“Yeah,” he chuckled. “Well, I’m not usually staring at something like this.”
Helena studied her sidepiece, reading the charts from the prosthetic mini-lab. “There is a lot of energy being used on this floor, a thousand times more than needed for lights and ventilation. There’s something big we haven’t found yet.”
“Radioactive?” Dmitry asked.
“No, not radioactive,” Orlean said, looking at the screen on his forearm. He studied for a few moments, making small “tsk” sounds with the end of his tongue. “It’s not an energy leak, not like a faulty reactor. This is stable and deliberate. My best guess is some kind of active system that needs a lot of power. Like, a lot.”
“Like vaporizing beams of electricity?” Austin said, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. He was trying not to be the voice of reason, dammit.
“Could be a security system like on the top floor,” a pause as they collectively remembered Athen’s glove becoming white-hot ash. “Or it’s interference, because my sensors just stopped working.”
Athen stared at the data-ports with Orlean. “Give it a moment. It’s alien technology, maybe they are using something completely unknown to us,” she said. “This and everything we’ve seen so far needs to be documented and studied.”
“Let’s continue on.”
Dmitry led them down the hallway, which turned a few meters later. Then the hallway opened up, displaying a barracks-style room. Double doors lined both sides of the vast chamber, dozens of them in sets. They were oval in shape and clear for viewing. Orlean approached one, scanning with his prosthetic arm.
“It’s a type of clear plastic, basically,” he said as if having read Austin’s mind. They squinted at what appeared to be specimen cages on the other side. Whatever this floor was used for, it did not match the décor from the hospital lobby above.
Austin didn’t like it and wanted to go back, but he needed someone else to suggest it. He needed someone else to become the voice of reason so they could forget about hating him. He saw something in one of the rooms, something organic. He looked through the window, shining his light inside. On a table in this room were murky beakers and vials full of liquid, and inside them were specimens—dead specimens, of unknown origins.
“Guys…”
Dublin peered over his shoulder, making Austin step out of the way with a little more aggression than called for. “I’ve got fish in this room,” he said.
“Alive?” Dmitry asked. He was looking through the other doorway across from them.
“Dead. What have you got?”
“I’ve got fish too, and mine are alive,” Dmitry confirmed.
They huddled around Dmitry, peering past him at a table lined end to end with specimen jars. One of the jars, round and squat, contained an aquatic organism with triangular gills and long antennae emanating from its head and belly. It looked like something from the deep ocean. It floated lethargically through the grey, murky water until Dmitry shone his light on it, then it reacted in tight bursts.
“Okay, wow, this is amazing,” Athen almost cried. As scientists, it was an easy feeling to get caught up in. “How long has it been down here? This place has been abandoned for decades, at least, right?” Athen asked.
“At minimum… ten years based on the age of the debris. Possibly as much as fifty.”
“Dublin?” he motioned to the oval door. The Irishman took one of his tools and pried it open so they could all enter.
“They did experiments here, obviously, look at all the equipment and the way the specimens are laid out on the table,” Dmitry said. “Quite a smell, though.” He looked around and found Carolina still in the main hall. She was apparently uninterested in alien fish.
A fact dawned on Dmitry. “Orlean, document everything you can in sixty seconds. We need to move ahead if we are going to catch that parasite, but we’ll definitely come back to this.”
“Let’s go, Orlean,” Athen said, sixty seconds later, pulling him and Helena away. It was like dragging a bear from its nest, but they reluctantly came.
And it was just as well that they moved on; the experiments in each room continued to astound. Orlean took copious pictures and scans. Some lived, while most did not, and thankfully, the ventilation was partially working, as the smell of the dead fish was putrid. So far, all were aquatic organisms. Austin watched Dmitry’s impatience grow specimen by specimen. He was worried about letting the parasite get away.
They stopped at a giant hole in the wall.
“I could park my bulldozer in there,” Dublin whistled. Orlean snapped a photo and scanned the hole. It did not appear to be a deliberate part of the building, not in the slightest.
“What could have done this? These walls are very thick,” Athen asked.
Carolina tugged at Austin’s hand. “Daddy, it’s time to go back.”
He looked at her. “Why? What is it, what happened?”
Her eyes went to the floor.
He waited, but didn’t get more from her. If he thought for a moment that he wouldn’t be the outcast again, he would have marched her the hell out of there. But he tasted their greed once already. She was still safest with him, and he was still safest in the group.
Dublin straddled rubble that had spilled on the floor near the giant hole.
“Something exploded here,” Orlean finally said. “I’ve got warps and scorches, not to mention this giant hole. But I swear… these are claw marks on the ceiling.”
They all looked up. Helena audibly gulped.
“Maybe a gas-pipe burst, or something of a similar nature?” Dmitry wondered. “Come on, we need to keep moving. We reached the end, let’s go back to the elevator. Orlean?”
“I’m reading a floor beneath this one,” Orlean said, scanning his fingers over the floor tiles.
“Great then. We’ll go there next.”
“Daddy?”
Austin looked down; she was terrified. He nodded. “Alright, kid, let’s get the hell out of here,” he said. The chips were going to fall where they may; he was getting her topside. “Guys, I’m calling it, gonna’ take her back to the huts.”
“Nay. You’ll reside where’n I see you,” Dublin said.
“Relax,” Dmitry said calmly, which made him seem more threatening. “Don’t be paranoid. Everybody is safe right now.”
Austin wasn’t going to wait for their permission; he’d seen enough. He grabbed her by the hand and took a step down the hallway anyway.
Dmitry walked with him. “This was a dead-end; we’re headed back anyway. So just keep your cool,” he added. Austin led the way with his daughter as the team trailed behind through the specimen hall. Dublin made certain to linger within arm’s reach of him at any time. When they made it to the elevator, Austin realized it’d been silent the entire way. No one had made any small talk. He was doing it again, and they were sidestepping away from him again. They stepped onto the elevator. He needed to get Carolina to safety and smooth things out with the crew.
“Just take us up first, we’ll wait in the lobby room, and we won’t leave until you guys are there too. We won’t go to the huts without you,” Austin said.
Dmitry hit a button to take them lower. “Soon, but not yet,” he said.
The elevator slid a few inches down when a sharp popping erupted beneath them, flashing light and arcing.
“Get off the bloody elevator!”
The elevator tilted to one side. A wave of shrieks flew. Orlean tried to get off just as the elevator fell, trapping his prosthetic arm. The ground disappeared, taking his limb with it.
A weightless terror filled them as the elevator fell, scraping and rocking down the chute. Shrieks evaporated as the air rushed, and for a moment, Austin thought this was it. He held Carolina to his chest and whispered, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay…”.
Another pop of electricity and a powerful gushing of servos slowed the elevator to an uneven halt. Cries of relief and a flood of thoughts to decipher what saved them. Emergency brakes of alien design, taking their blessed time to engage.
“Damn it!” Orlean cursed, holding the stump of his left arm. “It’s up there! I’ve got to get it back… There has to be another elevator!” Orlean looked up as if he could see through the ceiling.
“Jus’ give me a minute to accept I’m still alive, would you!” Dublin roared, holding his chest to keep his heart from falling on the floor.
“Oww…” Helena groaned. Dmitry examined her scalp and found it was bleeding.
“You hit your head pretty hard,” Dmitry said. “Is anyone else hurt?”
“Guys,” Athen said quietly. “I might have a problem.”
She sat on the floor of the elevator with her legs out. A narrow steel rod was poking out of her thigh, with blood pooling from top and bottom.
“Just stay put, Athen,” Dmitry said calmly. She looked down and stared at her leg in frustration.
“I’m so sorry. It’s not real bad, is it?”
“Not bad at all,” Dmitry said, removing his belt. He wrapped it around her upper left thigh and applied a tourniquet. He motioned at Dublin, who scrambled through the medical bag until he displayed a small syringe.
“I’m giving you a little something for the pain,” Dmitry said.
“I don’t feel any pain, weird right?”
“This will ensure you don’t feel anything later.” He sank the injection into her arm. She looked away from him and tried not to cry. It wasn’t the pain causing her tears.
“Oh no, Athen,” Helena gaped.
“Easy now, lass, we’ll get you patched up. This is just a minor issue,” Dublin tried to calm her. They were close as coworkers, being part of the Engineering Element. They had been teammates long enough to know each other’s habits and read each other’s thoughts. A gesture with a tool or a shrug was often all the dialogue they needed.
Dmitry whispered in Dublin’s ear. “It’s a little close to the artery. We have to cut her free without removing it, or she could bleed out. We’ll remove it later at the quadrohuts.”
“You failed whispering class, boss,” Athen said, her words happy from the effects of the painkillers.
