Thorn tried to message Lief via his System, but it didn’t work. He tried again, but received the same error message.
It was the first time he’d tried to comm Lief while in the dead zone, but he decided it was something to investigate further at a later time. For now, he continued on through the doors to explore the rest of the bunker.
Lief’s drone swept its light over the darkness behind the entryway. There was a small landing, and then steel-plated stairs leading upwards. The walls here were finished, unlike in the previous living area, smooth and painted a dull, matte silver color.
The air was stale and vaguely foul.
“What is that smell?” Thorn whispered. He walked up the stairs, trying not to make too much noise. The light would give him away, if there were other people here, but it still felt safer to be as quiet as possible.
The drone flew in front of him and zig-zagged side to side, as if to say “wait here.” Thorn paused on the stairs, as the drone killed its light and flew soundlessly upwards. After less than a minute, it came back down, light on, and retook its position over Thorn’s shoulder.
Assuming Lief had scouted the way ahead and it was all clear, Thorn proceeded up the stairs.
He came up into a short hallway. There was a door on either side, both closed, and one at the end of the hallway that was open. He tested the handles of the closed doors, but they were both locked.
Thorn continued on to the open door at the end of the hall. There was something on the floor holding the door open. The sickly-sweet odor grew stronger as he drew nearer.
He nudged the dark bundle on the floor with his foot, and it sagged inwards. The horrible smell grew worse. Thorn noticed two longer sections of the mound leading to shoes inside of the next room. The dark mound was a body. A dead body, one that had decomposed significantly.
Thorn gagged and stumbled back. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand and took a few deep breaths; after his nausea died down, he scooted around the dead body and into the room beyond.
It was a large room, tall, with the same matte silver finish on the walls and ceilings..
At the center of the room was a large table, its surface the clear, dark sheen of an unused tablet or control screen. Six chairs surrounded the table, and three of those chairs held more dead bodies. His gaze lingered on each of the corpses.
A door on the left turned out to be a small bathroom with a toilet, sink, and mirror.
The only other feature in the room was a series of three large, mechanical levers on the wall opposite the bathroom. Two of the levers were pulled into the down position. Plaques below them read, “South,” “West,” and “Cavern.”
“What the hell happened here?” Thorn murmured.
Again, his System had responded to a question that had not been specifically directed at it. He’d lived with this System for years, and it had never done that. It had changed after he’d leveled up, and that worried him. He had yet to see a single emoji or advertisement for the CES after the change, which was a good thing. Great even. But it was as if the village drunk had stopped drinking and taken up crochet.
It was unnatural.
Despite that, he thought its analysis was sound (not that he was going to perform any autopsies to verify it). A little bit too good, in fact; it had noticed details that Thorn had missed. He’d seen the details with his eyes but had not processed the information.
His System had though.
Moving on from the dead bodies, it was clear to Thorn that this was the main control center of the operation. Secure entry, shielded walls, and some kind of centralized work station. Thorn had seen similar control schemes, although not this exact set up, in his village growing up. He expected the table in the center of the room, when in use, to have shown security feeds, growth projections, upcoming project milestones, deliveries and pickups; all of the elements that an operation of this size would need to manage.
None of the tech was operational at the moment, because there was no one with a System plugged into the tech to operate it. Thorn didn’t think his System would be able to plug in, but it was more possible that Lief, who had more machine integration capabilities, might be able to. It was also possible that the whole thing was entirely specialized and encrypted to the specific System of whoever had run the place.
It was difficult to know when there was nothing powering it. Depending on the tech and energy requirements, solar energy and quintessence were the two primary sources of power. Nearly all tech could run on quints, and if the keypad and door were any indication, this control room should do the same.
Testing that would have to come later, though. He was low on quints, and he’d seen enough for the moment.
He walked back down the hallway, pausing to examine the two doors in the hallway outside the control room once more. Both had keypads, but none of the input buttons were as worn as the ones on the keypad to the door outside. It would take a bit more effort to break into these. The doors themselves were made of steel, but a rap of his knuckles didn’t produce the same heavy, dull sound that the blast doors had. These were much thinner, then.
He was too low on quints at the moment to try his trick on these.
He closed the blast doors behind him, sealing the dead bodies back into their tomb, and retreated back to the room with Lief and the crow to debrief.
“That was the control room for this operation, for sure,” Lief said.
Thorn nodded. “Your theory of the place being overrun by beasts and the whole thing going south is busted. My System thinks the four people were murdered by a fifth operator, and its analysis seems sound.”
“Your System, huh? Have you unlocked a new detective skill or something?” Lief snorted.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
“That wouldn’t be bad…” Thorn mused, distracted by the possibility for a moment. “Do you think you would be able to operate the control center?”
“Probably not,” Lief said. “Worth a try, possibly, but my Skills are very much focused on drones, and highly specialized. The Yeoman and the Pioneer Systems at the AG were the ones that had the generalized tech operating capabilities, not the Wardens.”
Thorn shrugged. “Might be worth a shot anyway. Want to check it out?”
“Okay.”
“Actually, let me recharge a bit with Meditate first. I need a few quints to open the blast door again. I probably shouldn’t have closed it back up, but it felt weird leaving it open with those bodies in there.”
After about an hour, Thorn came out of his meditation and Lief was ready to go. He hoisted Lief onto his back, and without missing a beat, the crow hopped up on Thorn’s shoulder.
“So what’re you going to name it?” Lief asked. “It’s basically your pet now.”
“I dunno, I might be its pet,” Thorn said, walking out into the living area and towards the control room. “But if we’re thinking of names, ‘dumb bird’ is one option.”
The crow pecked him on the side of the head.
“Ow.”
Thorn glared back at the crow, and at Lief, who was chuckling.
Thorn was much less quiet and cautious this time around, opening the door with a quick application of Concentrate and dextrous work on the keypad.
He’d needed to set Lief down on the floor, to use both hands, and the crow had annoyingly tried to hop up in front of his hands as he’d activated Concentrate. The bird was obviously a glutton for quintessence.
“I’d thought you’d have just melted the hinges off, but definitely more efficient this way,” Lief said approvingly. “Ahh. The smell of the rotting dead. How nostalgic.”
The foul odor greeted them as the doors swung open and they climbed up the stairs.
Thorn deposited Lief at the table, in one of the empty chairs, and then after a brief hesitation, decided he needed to do something about the dead bodies. He wheeled the chairs with corpses off to the side for now.
“Sprinkle some of your fairy dust over here, and let’s see what we’re dealing with,” Lief said.
“Fairy dust? Really?” Thorn said, pulling the last chair up to sit next to Lief.
“Better than ‘deposit a load’ or ‘fire a shot’ or ‘spread your essence,’ don’t you think? I could keep going.”
“No, thank you,” Thorn said in disgust, quickly activating his skill and releasing quintessence into the environment around him. He was careful not to put his hands too close to the table.
The screen that served as the table’s surface flickered and came on but appeared blank.
“Anything?” Thorn asked.
Lief shook his head. “It was a bit of a long shot, but no. I can use the table, project visuals on it, but that’s it. My System can’t do anything else with it.”
Thorn sighed and dropped his hand. “Too bad we can’t operate the security system,” he said.
“Nothing for it. It probably took a lot of quints and would need to be powered at its nodes, all over the base, not just here. Your fairy dust might get some things to work locally, which, believe me, is a very interesting skill, should you ever want to get into some… let’s just say, higher-paying discovery work than you’re used to. But even if stuff turns on here, that doesn’t mean the whole thing will work.”
“Makes sense,” Thorn replied. “What about those switches on the wall?”
“We can check, but I believe they are for the grow lamps; emergency breakers for three main locations.”
“Right.”
“Did you check the bodies?” Lief asked, a grin on his face.
“…No.” Thorn leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He didn’t like where this was going. Lief had been watching him, so he knew the answer to his question already.
“It’s hard to tell, but I believe there is a passive air exchange system through those vents on the ceiling. So this is the most secure place in this facility, and if I’m going to set up shop to wait things out, I’d do it here. After you evict the previous occupants, of course.”
“No,” Thorn replied a bit more firmly. It wasn’t that he was squeamish, or scared of dead bodies. They just smelled really bad.
Lief stared at him and grinned. It was like the crow understood too; it hopped around the table, eyeing the bodies on chairs and then looking back at Thorn.
“Hrrrrk,” it said, pecking the table for emphasis.
“If the edge of the quintessence void is slowly creeping inwards, the control room here is likely to be centrally located, making it a viable base of operations. I’ll confirm that with the drone… but someone’s gonna need to move those corpses, and it ain’t gonna be me.”
Thorn stared back at Lief and shook his head.
“Hop to!” Lief smiled.
“Hrrrk, crrkk!” the crow added.
“Fine!” Thorn replied, throwing his hands up into the air. “I’ll clean up!”
It took Thorn a few hours, glaring at Lief and the useless crow the whole time. Lief had closed his eyes, focusing on his visual feeds, after Thorn had opened the door to let his drone out. He was carefully mapping the size of their little egg yolk by looking closely for signs of life, or rather, their lack.
Little bugs, worms, rodents; all of those negligible signs of life that were easily ignored were clues as to the boundary. Lief couldn’t see the quintessence field, or where the rip had occurred, but he could see its effects. If all those signs of life were missing… that was the edge.
Meanwhile, Thorn did the manual labor. Moving the decomposing bodies was relatively easy, except for the one on the floor. He just rolled the chairs out, down the stairs, and out into the cavern.
At first, he didn’t want to dump the bodies outside; he worried that might attract more beasts to the area. The only other option was to take the corpses down the right fork in the tunnel. This path curved downwards for about a hundred meters, then ended at a flooded stairwell. The still water stank, and Thorn decided he didn’t want to dump the bodies there.
Removing the bodies didn’t take much time, but the work afterwards did, especially the scrubbing of the floor. He checked the small bathroom to see if it worked, and the good news was the toilet flushed, and there was a trickle of running water. Even if there was just a bit left in the pipes, it was still something they could use for drinking water.
But the bad news was, for cleaning, he needed to bring water from the lake. Once he found a few buckets, he took the crow out into the cavern. When it pecked him on the ear, which he hoped to hell meant “all clear” and not “I see the fincroc heading this way,” he ran out to the lake, filled up his buckets, and hurried back.
He hauled a few beds to their new secure area, as well as anything else that could be useful.
He also got the other two doors in the hallway open. He’d been stumped, thinking that he would have to brute force the keypad entry combination again, but Lief had suggested not bothering with that. Instead, he’d pointed out that the lock mechanism was likely opened by a small motor; if he could activate that motor with his skill, it might turn the lock.
After a bit of trial and error, he got them open.
The door on the right had opened to a small closet armory. Three repeating rifles, high-capacity magazines, with small caliber rounds using chemical accelerants. Less powerful and more costly than the linear motor rifle he’d lost in the river, but Thorn wasn’t going to complain about weapons. There were also two handguns, and the space for a third that was missing.
The other door held something far more dangerous, however.
“The basilisk’s sagging tits, boy,” Lief had said, staring at the stacks and stacks of bottles, the pills inside glimmering through the clear plastic bottles.
Lief hadn’t believed him when he’d told him, and he’d wanted to see it with his own eyes and not his drone’s cameras. Thorn had had to carry him down and show him. The side room wasn’t large, only a few meters long and barely larger than the width of the door. But the whole room was stacked, floor to ceiling, with bottles and bottles of the most popular illegal drug on the planet: glitter.
About ten million quints worth, give or take, Thorn had roughly calculated. That was far more than a little city like Aba could handle; this operation had been far bigger than they’d imagined.
On the bottom shelf, tucked in and hidden behind a line of bottles, had been something slightly different. Thorn hadn’t noticed it until the stupid crow hopped into the small room and started pecking at the wooden box, taking splinters out of the side. He’d been puzzled at first, until he’d opened the box and the crow went nuts trying to crawl its way up his leg, unable to fly with its broken wing.
There were three large pills nestled on silk fabric. They held a deep, gold color with white flecks, smelling of cinnamon and something earthy. They didn’t look like drugs; they looked more like something you’d see in a bakery, or a confectionary.
“You know anything about these?” Thorn asked.
“No,” Lief said. “Not a clue. They look expensive though. Keep that bird away from them too.”
He didn’t understand what his System had said, but he agreed with Lief. Thorn put the box back in the closet, and began to close the door before he suddenly had an idea. He grabbed one of the bottles of glitter pills and turned to Lief sitting on the floor of the hallway.
“Um, you sure you’re okay after your rat blood bath?” Lief asked. “You were pretty out of it, and now’s not the time for a glitter addiction.”
Thorn shook his head emphatically.
“No, no. I’ve got an idea.”