Nellie and the Nanites - Bk3 - Ch.10

Chapter Ten

Disquiet.

The dirt beneath her boots felt wrong. Nellie tried her best to convince herself it was all in her head and that knowing how drained and dead this place was made her imagine things. But she knew that wasn’t it. Her senses were beyond such tricks now.

Soil should crunch, smoosh, or softly whisper against her boots as she walked. This stuff just flattened with a puff of dust. It reminded her of ash. A field of ash. Her feet even sank into it, almost to the heel, like walking in snow. It was awful. Even the dust kicked up as they passed was wrong. It hung in the air, too weightless to fall quickly back down as good, honest dust should. It lingered, swirling in the air behind them as they walked. 

Combined with the dulled colors and peeling paint, it gave the entrance to the facility, whatever it was, an ominous air. Nellie kept a hand on her pistol anxiously as she touched the sunbleached panel next to the large metal door. The enamel covering the entrance door was an unpleasant off-white that her mind described as ‘eggshell,’ which somehow made everything worse. 

Her apartment had been painted eggshell, as had every other property she had ever rented. It was almost the universal color. Only the ones who owned things got color; the rest had to make do with eggshell. 

The panel didn’t react to her touch, not even a squawk of refusal.

“Lucy, can you?” Nellie gestured.

“On it,” Lucy placed her hand against the panel and frowned. “No power, but I think I can connect it for long enough to open the lock.” 

“Just be careful,” Nellie warned. “We don’t know what kind of protections they have to keep people out.”

Lucy nodded, and the panel flickered for a moment before the door clicked.

“Anything?” Nellie asked.

“No, I sealed the unlock circuit and just powered that,” Lucy said with a smile. 

The entranceway had a creepy, ‘corporate informal’ look that set Nellie’s teeth on edge. A couple of faded and dusty posters in a language she didn’t understand hung behind a half-circle reception desk that featured a chair and very little else.

You would have seen the same exact thing if you entered the office of everything from a law firm, trading office, or any of a hundred offices with the idea of looking professionally welcoming while still keeping the riff-raff out. 

Nellie had spent some time behind desks like that in her old life, giving a polite smile and a cheery expression while earning minimum wage from the assholes spending more on lunch than she earned in a week. 

Lucy whistled softly and pointed to the exit from the lobby. There was only one, and it was significantly thicker than the front door.

“Hello, someone’s hiding something nasty back there,” Nellie replied quietly, sealing her suit speakers to avoid any noise.

“I can override it,” Lucy offered. 

“I’d rather you keep from directly interacting with the facility electronics, whatever they are,” Nellie countered. “Normally, you are the queen of this stuff, but…”

“But the I.E.S. is more advanced,” Lucy frowned. “So what are we going to do instead?”

“Something a little more traditional,” Nellie said as she turned and kicked the door as hard as she could. 

“An oldie, but a goldie,” Lucy grinned and launched a flying kick at the door that caved it in.

“Show off!” Nellie grumbled. 

“I aim to please,” Lucy winked and sashayed over the wrecked door with what Nellie was sure was too much self-satisfaction. 

The corridor beyond was simple enough, with doors leading off it and what looked like elevator doors at the far end. 

The first door led to a series of cluttered cubicles. The language was still unfamiliar, but the dust-covered pads were clear enough. The little cubbies with the sad, dead plants in them just completed the picture of corporate drudgery. 

It was still weird to Nellie how much of this stuff she saw in a universe that included spaceships and stations, AI, and laser weaponry. There were only so many things that could change; she supposed that no matter how advanced technology got, somebody still had to do the paperwork. 

They moved on, heading through the next door; it was a doublewide and seemed to lead to some kind of storage area. There was a surprising amount left here, which seemed incredibly strange to her. They had taken everything from the station, so why not do the same with the facility? 

“Most of this seems to be resources,” Lucy added as they searched the boxes and shelves. “I found several pallets of what appears to be a metal alloy.”

“Maybe they brought it with them?” Nellie asked. 

“No, this alloy is strange. I think they alloyed as many elements as possible to create something for transport.” Lucy picked up one strange ingot of the stuff. It was the same kind of ingot that Nellie saw in the Fed depots, a bar but one that looked like a stretched hexagon instead of the rectangular ones from Earth. 

Dialing up her senses, Nellie could see what Lucy meant. The alloy contained almost a dozen different metals and minerals, most of which did not provide anything useful. 

The most useful thing in the whole storage room was a box of two dozen or so blank datapads. They were a lot thinner than the standard datapads, so Nellie put them in the hallway before they moved on, where they could grab them on the way out. The pads were full of rare metals, but the design was also something that Lucy could study, which could lead to improvements in their own technology. 

The final door in the corridor before they hit the elevators was the crew quarters: four rooms, each with three beds in each. Guess everybody was friendly enough to share. Each bed had a small locker next to it and a matching storage box at the end of the bed. It kind of reminded her of the setups she had seen in barracks in military movies back home. 

“Look at this!” Lucy called Nellie into the last room, where she was crouched over one of the storage boxes.

“What have you got?” Nellie asked, leaning down to see.

“This!” Lucy proudly displayed… a pair of extremely skimpy knickers.

“Uh, Lucy, love, this isn’t exactly the time to be…” Nellie said, trying to figure out how to explain that going through a dead woman’s knickers was creepy to her AI girlfriend.

“The fabric, Nell.” Lucy gave her a hard look. “It’s amazing.”

Nellie tentatively took the thong and looked at it closer. The fabric was pretty strange. There was a slight sheen and a strange octagonal weave. She held it closer, dialing her senses up, and it seemed to be made of some kind of metallic weave—metal as a fabric. It was a strange alloy as well.

“What the hell is this stuff?” Nellie asked.

“Not telling you now,” Lucy sniffed. 

“Oh, come on,” Nellie protested. “Lucy, what the–”

Lucy broke down laughing, so Nellie threw the knickers at her. 

Searching through the rest of the storage chests and lockers revealed a lot of old clothing, most of it half worn through by overuse, some scattered electronic devices that were nothing to write home about but still gave them more I.E.S. tech to study, and a whole lot of dust. When the air filters in this place shut down, they stopped filtering the natural build-up of dust… and it showed.

Just as they were heading out, a flash of metal under one of the bunks caught Nellie’s eye, so she bent down and grabbed it. 

Her implant went haywire as it tried to analyze it. 

Augmented Implant (Mk unknown)

(Unknown)

(Unknown)

“Uh, Lucy?” Nellie shook the item in front of Lucy. “I think I just made this whole trip worthwhile.”

Lucy poured over the implant for almost ten minutes before she stood up and sighed. 

“What?” Nellie asked.

“This is not compatible with your body,” Lucy shook her head, “Or anyone with Nanites.”

“Merde,” Nellie swore.

“We can still probably adapt it to be useful somehow,” Lucy commiserated. “But this thing was designed to be a sealed unit from start to finish. If anything, it’s supposed to give AI abilities to someone who isn’t one.”

“So all we have so far is the equivalent of consumer I.E.S. gadgets, an implant we can’t use, and fancy knickers?” Nellie grumbled. “This place better have something better than that.”

Her mood did not improve when she pulled open the elevator doors and saw the top of the car sitting just below the current level. Nellie was very tempted to just shoot the cables, sending the cart crashing below, but that would cause just as many problems later as she faced now. Instead, she held her hand behind her back as her backpack dispensed a pair of nanite cubes and threw them on top of the cart before sending commands via her implant. 

The cubes dissolved into a mercury-like liquid that spread across the roof, eating into the surface as the puddle grew. In a few seconds, holes opened in the roof, and most of the liquid dripped inside. 

“This place is really pissing you off, isn’t it?” Lucy asked as she watched. 

“Just a little,” Nellie said through gritted teeth. “These fuckers almost killed me, and I finally get hold of some of their technology, and it’s all useless.” She took a deep breath. “I just….”

“Want to kill them all, take their stuff, and leave the survivors weeping on a shitty world somewhere?” Lucy offered.

“That’ll do for a start,” Nellie chuckled. “Thanks, Lucy.”

“No problem,” Lucy shrugged. “Just try and remember that even if we don’t find anything here, the resource ingots in the storeroom are useful.” 

===<<<>>>===

Nellie and Lucy rode down to the first basement level on a shimmering silvery disk of nanites that used to be the elevator car. Immediately, it was obvious this level was a lot larger than the one above. 

“Lights,” Nellie warned as she dialed up her suit lights. 

“Senses up,” Lucy advised. 

Nellie dialed her enhanced senses up to about thirty percent, taking a second to adjust to the input. Once the auras and color waves had merged into a single picture, she could move around. She drew her pistol and moved to one side of the corridor, keeping a wary eye on the two turrets on the ceiling at the corridor’s far end. 

“Two doors,” Lucy noted. “One half way, other beneath those turrets.”

“They look particularly fancy?” Nellie nodded to the turrets.

“Not really?” Lucy offered. 

“Just checking,” Nellie holstered her pistol and pulled her Mk2 Nanorifle instead. She flicked it to maximum power and shit both turrets with a concentrated beam until they were melted scrap. “Just in case.”

“Never tell Paren you did that,” Lucy advised.

Nellie smiled and kept her rifle in her hands as they moved carefully down the corridor. Her senses told her there was something like metal cages beyond the door on the left, while the one at the far end was shielded. Even without power through it, she could not see anything beyond. 

Even trying just gave her a mild headache, so she motioned to Lucy, and they took position on either side of the door to what seemed like cages. 

Nellie counted down, and then they both kicked the door, sending it flying into the darkness beyond before they swept into the room. 

Abandoned didn’t mean there was no danger. For all they knew, some machinery was still running somewhere.

The metal cages turned out to be some kind of restraints, but they were tubes of glass reinforced with metal. Inside the tubes were a number of extremely dead prisoners. Several of them she recognized as Human, Brackta, or Greys.

At the far end were two empty tubes. 

“They probably have liquid in them when occupied,” Lucy was running her fingers through the dust on the floor. “I think this is what remains of long-dried nutrient fluid.”

“So they just left them here?” Nellie asked. “Ostie, I think I might have gotten lucky with being dumped in that asteroid field.”

The beings in the tubes seemed to be desiccated by time, but that didn’t mean they had died easily. There were claw marks and streaks of blood on the inside of the tubes. The occupants tried to get out, only to find themselves stuck in a glass tube.

“They disconnected the liquid on the way out,” Lucy said coldly. “There.”

Nellie crouched down and looked. Below the tanks, there was a large connector with a pipe lying in the dust underneath. The connector could be pushed on and turned to hold in place, so it was no accident that they came unlocked. 

“Who could even do this to people?” Nellie asked. “What kind of people are these?”

“We should take the empty tanks,” Lucy said gently. “We can learn from them.”

Nellie suppressed a shiver down her spine but nodded. Technology was technology; how it was used was the problem here. 

Despite the creeping revolution in her spine, Nellie and Lucy made a careful sweep of the entire detention block. There was not a lot more to it than they had seen already. An interrogation room, complete with restraints and something that looked uncomfortably like a cattle prod that Nell refused to take. Something designed to cause pain was not the technology she needed. Or would use, even if she did. 

The last partition turned out to be some kind of medical bay, which had seemingly been stripped of anything useful. 

In short, the entire detention block was almost a complete bust. Not only did it not provide much tech for them to examine, but they still had no idea what the facility was designed to do.  

Standing before the final door, Nellie was sure this place had something more to offer. It was sealed, for a start, with a much heavier door that they ended up having to cut through with nanoblades. 

A solid sheet of heavy metal was behind that, which took even longer to open. Even the impossibly sharp nanoblades had a tough time with the hyper-dense metal.  

“I’ve been thinking,” Nellie said as they worked. “We should come up with a mounting for a retractable nanoblade on the rifles.”

“Why?” Lucy asked. 

“In close combat, the rifle becomes a hell of a weapon,” Nellie said with a smile. Plus, they would part power armor in a single hit.”

“I’ll look–” 

The slab of metal fell inward with a loud clang while the light from their suits was reflected back at them a hundred times over, blinding them both for a fraction of a second before their nanite-enhanced eyes compensated. 

Stepping carefully into the room beyond, they found a hallway lined with trays of complex crystal growths. 

“Okay, what the hell is this?” Nellie frowned and blinked a few times. “Are you seeing the same thing I am?”

“The crystals seem to affect everything,” Lucy said slowly. “These ones are giving off magnetic fields!”

“Don’t touch anything,” Nellie said, reaching out to grab Lucy’s hand before she picked one of them up. “Look.”

Just up the hallway from them were a pair of strange-looking corpses. One looked like a former brackta, but a strange crystal growing from the exposed bones seemed to emit an odd halo of energy around the corpse. The dead brackta had their hands wrapped around the neck of the other body, who was clearly something like a human, but their whole body was slightly elongated, thin, and almost frail looking. A metal exoskeleton was fastened around the body.

There was no way to get near the bodies. The energy field the crystals were giving off was nasty-looking, and neither of them was sure the suits would be able to block it. Nellie decided to try and toss a pair of nanite cubes at it, letting them break down everything in the field before it could reach them, which was kind of a hit-and-miss success.

“I don’t like it,” Lucy shook her head as another cube of nanites failed and joined the pile of dust. 

Each time they tossed a cube into the energy field, the nanites dismantled more of the crystal, but in the process, the tiny machines were destroyed by the field itself. They had already gone through six of the eight cubes she had left before the seventh seemed to finally shift the balance, and the brackta’s body was dissolved, taking the last of the crystal with it. 

“What the hell was that?” Nellie asked. 

“I don’t know,” Lucy said quietly. “I need to analyze that energy to try and make the nanites immune. Who knows what would happen if we were hit with something like that?”

“Shall we pull out?” Nellie asked. 

“No,” Lucy said as she seemed to focus inwards. “Just give me a few minutes before we go any further.”

“Take your time,” Nellie said and kept her eyes fixed on the hallway. “I’ll watch out for any more nasty surprises.”