The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(49)

“You get used to it eventually, sir,” he said.

“I hope so,” Marce said, exasperated.

The walk to the network operations room was slow, as Gamis promised. The magnetic feet in the suits kept the team on the deck, but they were all tethered to each other regardless, just in case one of them lost their footing and started to float off. Marce found the deliberate gait of magnetized walking enervating, compounded by the walking being done in a blackness punctuated only by their helmet lamps. By the time they got to the door of the operations room, he felt like he had run a marathon.

“See, I did need this after all,” Gamis said, retrieving the door-spreading hardware from the case of equipment they had brought with them. The lack of gravity made it easy for Gamis and Lyton to carry the case between them, but hard for them to maneuver it. Its inertia wanted to take it places they didn’t want it to go.

Gamis and Lyton set the door-spreader. It did its magic, cranking open the sealed hatch. Marce was surprised he could hear the protesting of the door as it opened, then realized he was hearing it through his feet. The sound had carried through the floor and into his suit.

As he walked into the ops room Marce noticed marks on the door, and pointed them out to PFC Gamis, who nodded. “We’re not the first ones to do this,” he said.

“Can you tell how old those other marks are?” Marce asked.

“Not really,” Gamis said. “Could have been made five hundred years ago, could have been made last week. But I’m guessing probably not last week.”

Inside the operations center everyone untethered. Lyton tossed something toward the ceiling of the room, and suddenly the entire operations center was bathed in light, shadows radiating out from the single source.

“Let there be light,” she said, and looked over to Hanton. “You’ve got about six hours of that.”

“More than enough,” Hanton said. He walked over to the equipment case and retrieved a small computer module and a portable keyboard, and a tiny cube power source. He carried all of them over to a workstation.

“You got a power cord for that?” Gamis joked.

“Don’t need one,” Hanton said, turning on the power cube. A monitor light flashed on it, three times in red, then in steady blue. “I checked the archives. These workstations had induction plates. All you have to do is feed power to them and they’ll turn on.”

“If it’s just a terminal then that won’t do you any good,” Lyton said.

Hanton shook his head. “It’s mostly used as a terminal, but there’s a cache of onboard local memory. It’s pretty substantial because habitats believe in redundancy. If the primary computer system here ever went down, the primary operational systems could still have basic functionality with the information in these terminals. At least long enough to get the primary back up and running.”

“Assuming you can get in,” Gamis said.

Hanton patted the computer module he’d brought with him. “If it turns on at all, I brought some fun toys with me, folks. Eight-hundred-year-old security is about to meet modern cracking tools. It should be an instructive event.”

“And if it doesn’t work?” Marce asked.

“Then there are a dozen other workstations in here.”

Marce nodded at this and regarded the room. It was large and circular and in the lighting, which threw razor-sharp shadows, was a little creepy. Along one arc was a window and a doorway into another room, which held silent rows of black metal boxes. The actual processing heart of the habitat, or one of them—workstations aside, a habitat this large could have several rooms like this sprinkled around. Redundant systems save lives.

For a while, at least. The computers in those black boxes were probably long past their expiration date, as would be any others elsewhere on the habitat. Turning them on would require more than the power cube Hanton had brought with him.

Marce wondered what it would have been like on Dalasysla when the power systems stopped working. The habitat had been powered by a combination of reactors and solar. Those generators and arrays were prone to the same mechanical failures as any system, as was the power transport grid. So many ways for things to go wrong. Marce imagined it was the systems that failed before the knowledge base for maintaining them died off, but it was hard to be sure. When the world is breaking down, scientists might be the scapegoats.

“Oh, hello there,” Hanton said. “Someone’s awake.” Marce turned and saw that the workstation had sprung to life, booting into a diagnostic screen.

“That’s kind of amazing,” Gamis said.

“This system is mostly solid-state,” Hanton said as he went through menus. “Made out of mostly stable materials. Industrial grade, not consumer grade. When you’re building a habitat, you build to last, not for flash.”

“Okay,” Gamis said. “But eight hundred years.”

“Oh, we’re lucky as hell,” Hanton agreed. “But some of that luck is built on design. Okay, here.” He activated a tab, and a storage structure came up. “All the local data files. I’m transferring them over to my own computer now and can open them in a virtual environment.”

“What’s there?” Sergeant Sherrill asked.

“Lots of things,” Hanton said. “What do you want?”