Cleve secures his rope around his cryopod, and then I’m the first one to slide down it into the Progenitor chamber. The doors along this hallway are huge, like ten feet high. And rather wide, too. But that’s not the weirdest thing. The metal makes an unusual clang when I land. Then, when I take my first step, I feel a slight tug on my right boot. That shoe has a built-in brace. In a manner of speaking, so do my right ankle and shin; I’ve still got a few metal pins reinforcing them. I tap the steel-shod tip of my cane against the floor, and I can feel the tug before contact is even made. “Whoa! This floor is really magnetic!” I call up to my companions. I let go of my cane, and it stands there for a moment, then falls to the ground without a bounce. I crouch down to lift it, and there’s definite resistance there. It’s not so strong that I can’t pick up the cane, but it does take effort. Fortunately there’s less metal in me.
“C’mon down,” I encourage the others. “But maybe don’t set your computer down on anything, Takuto.”
“There are no sparks, right?” Cleve asks. Given the jolt he got before, I can’t blame him for being nervous. I assure him that nothing seems active, and he slides down the rope. “Do you think they were really big?” he asks, taking in the scope of the doors. “Or just had a long horn on top of their head?”
I laugh in delight at the mental images that conjures up. “Who knows!” I say excitedly. “Maybe we can get Takuto to power up that terminal.”
“That would really be something!” the teenager says from above, eager to try. I spot him on his way down the rope. Once on solid ground, he cradles his laptop protectively to his chest as he looks around in wonder.
“It’s probably a piece of a spaceship,” Cleve opines, rapping on a wall and listening to the metallic clang.
The doors are all marked with symbols that vary a little bit from door to door. I pull out my sketchbook and copy them down. Some are constant across the doors, but what they could mean, I have no idea. I don’t recognize any pictographic features. “I think we should check out the terminal before we start opening doors. Think you have enough power in your battery?” I ask Takuto.
He checks Datapad++. “Well, we can try. I don’t know how much this is going to take. I’ve never plugged into a Progenitor thing,” he says a little nervously.
“Well, Roze vouched for you,” Cleve says. It might be meant as encouragement, but it sounds like a challenge to my ears.
“You got this,” I tell Takuto, giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder. I accompany him to the terminal.
Takuto takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly, looking over the device. “This holds data that no one in Data Haven has ever seen before,” he says almost reverentially.
“No one on this planet has seen it,” I observe. “Well, no humans anyway.”
Takuto’s full attention is on the terminal pedestal now, and soon he’s yanking out cables and splicing into a datalink. “This should work,” he says. “We’re going to be taking in raw data. I have no idea what the right amount of power is, so we’re going to slowly ramp it up until something happens.” He definitely sounds like a more careful hacker than Hypercor. I watch over his shoulder. “If you see smoke or smell smoke—or anything weird happens, let me know,” he tells me.
“And I’ll make sure no one wakes up in this place,” Cleve says from further down the hall. “We might not be the only ones who came out of cryopods.” He makes himself useful, standing guard.
Takuto gets in almost immediately. The terminal powers up, its screen bearing symbols we don’t know how to read. Some are similar to the ones on the doors. Takuto begins copying the data over to his own device. On his screen, the same information displays, and he’s actually translating some of it already! It’s kind of crazy how fast he’s working. It turns out Takuto is pretty sharp when he’s able to breathe.
“Spent some time with Roze, have you?” I ask with a grin.
“Huh? What? Yeah.” His mind is clearly in the data, not in this room. “Aww, can’t wait to tell Arx about this! They’re going to be so stoked!” I hope he’s right. I hope we find Arx in a good enough state that they can appreciate this new find and that Takuto came to rescue them.
Takuto taps away for a bit and then announces, “Oh, these were, like, prison rooms. All these doors are super locked.”
“Whoa, what?” That is not what I was expecting to hear about this place. “Prison rooms?”
“Or like, a jail? I don’t know.”
“Who knows what’s illegal on an alien planet,” Cleve says philosophically.
“Should I open one?” Takuto asks. He’s no Corazon, though. He waits to hear an answer before continuing.
“Um, hold that for a moment,” I suggest. I turn away from his work at the terminal, taking in all the doors again. If one goes to another hallway, that would be far preferable to opening up cells. “I’d rather we not release any alien mass murderers.”
“Whoa, these could be alien political prisoners, you don’t know!” Takuto says.
“Yes, exactly, I don’t know. I have certainly committed criminal actions myself, but that doesn’t mean I think all crimes are okay. Surely one of these doors leads somewhere else.”
Takuto tries to get the door here at this end of the hall, near the terminal, to open, but something in it shorts out. “I think it’s broken. This room might be the only intact part of their ship or whatever this is. But I think some of these cells, I guess, must have been empty. Do you want to open that kind first?”
I nod. “It’s a good place to start. At least that way we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Uh, Mr. Cleve! A, B, or C?”