Polaris Rising (Consortium Rebellion, #1)(75)

I snapped on my helmet and my suit powered up. “Testing coms,” I said.

Rhys already had his helmet on. “I hear you,” he said.

“With the ship in stealth, you won’t be able to communicate with me, but you should receive my signals. You don’t need to respond unless I specifically ask for transmission confirmation. I’ll leave my com open for as long as I can so you can monitor my progress.”

Eventually Rockhurst troops on the ground would realize the outgoing transmission wasn’t one of theirs and start listening in. When that happened, I’d have to shut it down or risk broadcasting my location and plans. I couldn’t risk an active tracker or video feed for the same reason.

I waved to Rhys then sealed myself inside the docking bay airlock built into the side of Polaris’s cargo bay. This ship wasn’t big enough to bother with an atmospheric containment field over the cargo bay door, so I couldn’t open the cargo bay directly without admitting the foreign atmosphere.

The airlock hissed then the outer door opened. A short, steep ramp led down to the ground and I realized Rhys must’ve extended it. As soon as I was clear, the ship lifted into the sky and disappeared.

Loneliness tweaked my heart, but I shook it off and headed for the low bunker at the edge of the spaceport.

I had a job to do.





Chapter 20




The bunker was larger than it appeared from a distance. The opening was nearly eight meters tall by ten meters wide. It was curtained from the outside air with the faint shimmer of an atmospheric field. Hopefully that meant the air inside the building was breathable and I wouldn’t have to make my way through an airlock.

If anyone occupied this base, they likely knew I was here by now, since landing a ship was hard to miss, but the inside of the bunker was empty. Railings surrounded a wide, circular platform set into the floor with a control panel on the far side. If they had an industrial lift, they definitely transported large quantities of something.

A square room occupied the far back corner of the bunker. Solid concrete and concealed by a heavy, sealed door with a control pad on the wall, it probably contained the stairwell and elevator.

Time to see if Rhys’s codebreaker was any good.

I attached the com-sized device to the door’s control panel and hit the override button. While not as rare as the prototype shield on my belt, codebreakers still were not easy to come by. Thirty seconds later, the door popped open with a click. I put away the codebreaker and unholstered a blaster.

“I’m heading inside,” I murmured into the helmet’s microphone. I didn’t know if Rhys and Loch were still in range or if they’d already taken the ship and disappeared, but I wasn’t going to ask them to drop stealth just to reassure me.

A quick peek revealed an empty room. A specialty airlock elevator took up the left half of the room and another heavy door lead to a stairwell on the right. The elevator had too many potential failure points. If the security forces overrode the commands from the codebreaker, I’d be trapped in a metal box.

I put a door stop on the room door. A piece of metal that clamped around the edge of the door, it prevented the door from closing and locking behind me. The part that touched the door was coated in an insta-weld compound that permanently secured it to the door.

The door stop would have to be cut off to be removed. Using them was kind of a dick move on an unterraformed planet, because if the atmospheric field fell, the intermediate doors wouldn’t seal properly and would allow unbreathable air to seep inside.

I hoped the people inside practiced their contingency plans.

The codebreaker cracked the stairwell door’s unlock code in ten seconds, which told me that either it was less secure than the previous door or their codes relied on a pattern that the breaker had picked up on.

I eased the door open. The landing was clear. Where was everyone? I put a door stop on the door then peeked over the side of the banister. The stairwell was square. The stairs hugged the wall, leaving a hole in the middle. It had to be at least ten stories down to the distant floor.

“Too bad I didn’t bring rappelling gear. Would’ve made this faster,” I muttered. I resigned myself to spiraling down the steps as quickly as possible. And I was not looking forward to hauling ass back up these steps.

There were no other exits on the way down. At the bottom, a closed door greeted me. It was on the same side of the stairwell as the door at the top, leading out under the rest of the bunker. The industrial lift should be just out and off to my left. The codebreaker made quick work of the lock.

I crouched down and barely cracked the door open to reveal a large, brightly lit warehouse. Farther in the distance, separated from the warehouse by a wall full of windows and a wide door, large tanks were connected to a production line with thick plastech pipes.

Nothing glowed pink.

And, more worryingly, the vast room waited in silence.

“I’ve found the warehouse entrance, but I haven’t confirmed they’re mining. Setup looks right, but no material is visible. And the whole place is dead. Watch your backs,” I said softly.

I put a door stop on the door. No one moved in the warehouse and nothing disturbed the silence. The amount of radio traffic from this location was too high for it to be abandoned. So were they working in another section of the building or had they fled when they spotted me?