Cyber Dreams 4.43 - Deja Vu

Enjoy the chapter!

-Plum

A combination of Angel’s seriousness and the pressure on her leg finally helped Juliet to calm her hysterics and focus on her situation’s gravity. When she twisted in her seat to look under the console, she saw that the cockpit floor had deformed, bending upward and forcing the metal compartment that housed her left leg to compress and come apart at the plasteel joint. The bottom half was pinching her leg against the housing, the edge deeply embedded in her calf. “How the heck am I supposed to get my leg out of there?”

“I don’t see any bolts to remove that housing, and if I did, you can’t move to the tool compartment.”

“I guess it's me and my vibroblade, then.” Juliet pulled her knife out of its sheath, happy that she was obsessive about keeping it charged, and began slowly, methodically, shaving away sections of the plasteel housing that was pinching her leg in place. “At least it doesn’t hurt. Thank you, nanites.”

After a while, when she’d shaved away enough of the plasteel to expose the part embedded in her calf, Angel said, “Your blade is cutting noticeably more slowly. I believe the kinetic amplifier in your knife is wearing out. It might be the blade itself, but I doubt it; that alloy is much harder than plasteel.”

“Yeah. I just need to cut this last piece away. Then, I should be able to pull my leg out. Do we still have hull integrity?” Juliet asked because she was worried about the breach in her armor’s underlayer.

“The cockpit is still air-tight. If you’re worried about the suit, it should seal when you remove the intruding plasteel fragment. It has a self-sealing gel layer that will merge and harden when exposed.” As Angel responded, Juliet carefully maneuvered her vibroblade toward the bottom of the eight-inch shard of plasteel stuck in her leg. Praying that the mechanism that made it work wouldn’t fail, she carefully pulled the knife upward, carving through the plasteel about ten centimeters from her leg. The knife rattled and shook her hand more than usual, but it worked, and when she was done, she thankfully thumbed it off and put it back in the sheath.

Grunting with the effort, she stood up on her good leg and slowly extracted her other foot from the crushed console. When it was clear, she looked down at the long, plate-sized shard sticking out of her upper calf. “Can I pull it out?”

“Yes. Your suit will seal rapidly, and you shouldn’t lose much blood; your nanites have been working to seal off severed vessels.”

Juliet reached down, found a good, solid grip on the shard, and then closed her eyes, not wanting to watch the bloody metal emerge from her leg. She slowly tugged it out and away from her leg. It came easily at first, but when the bottom half was out, it stuck, and she realized the top end was in her bone. A wave of dizziness and nausea threatened to send her fainting to the deck, but she gritted her teeth and yanked, finishing the job and sending the shard clattering against the cockpit paneling. She grabbed hold of the pilot’s seat, leaning all her weight on her right leg, and squeezed her eyes shut until the encroaching blackness faded.

When she opened her eyes, Juliet was surprised to see the splashes of blood still rolling around in partially spherical blobs on the cockpit’s floor panels, almost like they were falling in slow motion. She supposed they were, by Earth’s standards. She looked away, focusing on her damaged suit. Just as Angel had predicted, the gash in the underlayer was closed, sealed with a dark, glue-like substance. “At least the gravity’s light. I should be okay to hobble around, huh?”

“Yes! Your nanites are working to repair the damage as quickly as possible, but in the meantime, they’re blocking your pain receptors.”

Juliet looked at her oxygen readout and saw she had more than ninety percent and that Angel was providing an approximate countdown until it would be gone—she had more than two hours of air. “I should be able to reach those coordinates in plenty of time. You said four kilometers, yeah?”

“Yes. Hopefully, there’s something there. Do you think you should broadcast a mayday in case there isn’t?”

“Not yet, Angel. Let’s not throw in the towel until we’ve had a look at that hatch.” Juliet patted her vest, making sure all of her things were still with her and hadn’t come flying loose in the crash. She was most concerned about her data deck, but it was there, snugly ensconced in its pocket. Her extra ammunition was where it should be, along with her other belongings. Nodding, she took one last look around the cockpit. “Doesn’t look like I’m forgetting anything.” When Angel didn’t contradict her, she opened the bulkhead door and, feeling almost weightless in the light gravity, entered the shuttle's cargo compartment.

The space was cluttered with broken compartment panels, modular components that had been shaken from their housings, and big clumps of compression foam that the poor little vessel had released in an attempt to shore up its failing hull. Juliet hopped and crawled her way to the rear hatch, and when it wouldn’t open, she had to follow Angel’s instructions to crank it open manually. Once she’d made a gap wide enough to squeeze through, she did, pulling herself out of the dead vessel, a black-clad, armored fetus born to an alien world.

She stood in a bluish-gray, icy canyon with steep walls that blocked out any view aside from directly ahead or above. Glancing up, the stark blackness of space made the dominant, rust and ochre form of Jupiter even more pronounced, its massive presence illuminating the Ganymede landscape in a strange, almost haunting glow. The weirdest part of the whole experience was that Juliet had seen it before; the canyon was exactly like the one she’d been traversing in her true-dream. She took several steps away from the shuttle and then turned to look at what she’d survived.

“Goodness!” Angel said, providing a much more polite exclamation than Juliet had been preparing to utter. The shuttle was ripped and crumpled, the front end more flat than pointy, the sides torn, exposing shiny innards, and the wings shaved down to stubs.

“Whoever built that thing deserves a five-star review. Remind me if we ever make it back to civilization.”

“I will! I’ll also write a good review!”

Juliet laughed and turned, walking in the direction indicated by the map on her AUI. She favored her injured leg, though it didn’t really hurt to walk on. She could feel that something was off with it—her ankle was stiff and didn’t flex right, and her knee was similarly difficult to bend. With those reminders, she took careful steps, performing a kind of hopping walk in which her right leg did most of the work. She watched as the distance slowly ticked down, watched as the oxygen meter did likewise, and when she was down to just a kilometer left to travel, she paused and said, “Have the nanites stop blocking my pain. I want to know how bad it is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I keep wondering what’s waiting for me at those coordinates, and I’d like to know if I’m going to be able to function if things go sideways.”

“I’ve issued the command.” A few seconds after Angel’s pronouncement, Juliet’s left foot began to tingle, reminding her of how it feels when a limb that’s “fallen asleep” wakes up as circulation is restored. It started in her toes and progressed up her leg. Along with the tingles came twinges of sharp pain and a persistent, dull, throbbing ache from the general vicinity of her knee. It wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t terrible. She supposed her tight body armor and all the work the nanites were doing helped in that regard.

“Okay. I can deal with this. Keep the nerve blocks off.” She began moving again, a little more haltingly at first, but then back to her old pace as she grew accustomed to the pain. She preferred being able to feel her injury so long as it wasn’t debilitating; her body was telling her how hurt she was, and she found that information useful. The canyon she’d been traversing had grown increasingly narrow as she made her way toward the coordinates, bringing her more frequent bouts of déjà vu as things kept looking “familiar” to her.

She’d been through a similar experience with the true-dream of the shuttle she’d boarded from Phoenix to Luna, but this was something altogether different. It boggled her mind to think she’d had a vision of this place before ever being within a million kilometers of Jupiter. Perhaps too tired or simply too lazy to look at the readout on her AUI, she asked, “How far to the coordinates?” As she spoke, she stepped over the hard-packed, bluish-gray, silty ice, and, despite the light gravity, she stumbled, her injured knee and ankle giving way as she slipped on a slick, ice-covered stone.

Angel answered as Juliet fell to a knee, catching herself on the tough, rubbery grip of her suit’s glove. “Eighty meters further up this cleft.” A flashing yellow circle appeared near the base of the ravine wall, where it narrowed ahead. Juliet let her gaze track upward toward the sky, saw the massive, monstrous, swirling sphere of gas that hung in the sky, and paused as she struggled back to her feet, absorbing the sight, something humans had never been meant to behold.

The planet shed too much light for her to make out other celestial bodies nearby. It painted the moon’s surface with its radiance, adding a tint of rust to everything it touched. She let her gaze fall again into the canyon-like ripple in the moon’s surface and began trudging toward the flashing yellow circle Angel had painted on her AUI. Her leg ached in half a dozen places, but she wasn’t complaining; if it weren’t for the nanites, she’d probably have bled out, and she certainly wouldn’t be walking.

Slowly but surely, she made progress to the circle. When she was twenty meters from the target of her toiling travels, she saw a cluster of small boulders dug from the ice sometime in recent history. “This doesn’t look like it’s been used much.” Juliet frowned inside her helmet, wondering if she’d made a colossal error in choosing this as her “controlled crash” site.

“Yes, but you knew that. You saw the photo from Bradbury’s secret drive and also had a true-dream . . .”

“Yeah. I know.” Juliet wended her way between the big frosty rocks, and when she emerged in the middle of the jumble, there it was—the matte-gray plasteel hatch. “Is there a . . .” She’d started to ask if there was an access panel, but she breathed a sigh of relief as she spotted an icy, hinged cover to the left of the hatch’s hinges.

“You’ll need to get that panel open.”

“Yeah.” She hopped closer and tried to kneel next to the hatch to get a better look at it, but her left knee protested painfully at the notion. Instead, she took advantage of the light gravity and plopped down on her butt beside it, keeping her leg straight. She tugged at the panel with her cybernetic hand, but she couldn’t get enough leverage to pull hard enough to break the frosty seal. “Come on, buddy, one more job for you.” She pulled out her vibroblade and thumbed it on. It rattled and vibrated jerkily in her grip, but she held tight and drew it around the seams of the panel, chipping away the frost. In seconds, she was able to pry it open.

Ten minutes later, after plugging into the panel, Angel announced, “I’ve bypassed the ICE. This panel hasn’t seen a security update in decades. If we had access to a planetary net, I probably could have found an exploit in seconds.”

As the bolts holding the panel clicked, sliding into their housings, Juliet pulled her data cable out of the panel and stood up, waiting to see what might await her beneath the surface of the icy moon. The hatch haltingly swung wide on ancient-seeming mechanisms, revealing a ladder in a plasteel shaft leading straight down. Amber LED lights on every third step illuminated the shaft, allowing Juliet to peer into depths she hadn’t expected. Her optics enhanced the light and zoomed when she stared, and Angel provided an estimate of the distance to the bottom—two hundred meters.

“Well . . .” Juliet didn’t know what to say. Her only option, other than seeing where the shaft led, was to have Angel initiate an SOS from the shuttle and pray someone came along before her air ran out. She didn’t like that option, so she stepped onto the ladder and, using her right leg and arms, began to descend. Once her head was inside the opening, she touched the panel inside the shaft, activating the old display and selecting the “close hatch” function.

It was easy going down the ladder. She hardly had to use her feet at all, just using her hands to slow her gentle fall. In just a few minutes, she touched down on the plasteel flooring and saw that she was in a small oval room with a bulkhead door blocking further progress. When she approached the door, a heavy, dense, plasteel alloy similar to what you might find in a spaceship airlock, she was dismayed to see a glass-covered sensor array but absolutely no control panel, handle, or any sort of data port. “Is there a wireless port?”

“Nothing I can detect.” As Angel responded, a red LED flashed inside the glass dome of the sensor array, and Angel amended, “I just received a query for your identification.”

“Is there any option? What should we answer? I don’t know who owns this place, so do I give them a criminal pirate’s ID? My SOA card? Something else?”

“I wish I had a good answer. Let me see if they’ll respond to a query of our own.” Juliet waited, mind racing, trying to decide how to answer if Angel couldn’t get another clue. Something about announcing she was Lacy Blake to total strangers bothered her. She had other options; she could pull up one of her older IDs, but what would be best? If there were criminals inside this secret hideout or base or whatever it was, would they respond well to . . .”

“The query just repeats ad nauseam no matter what I ask. It won’t let me make any sort of connection.”

“Just send my SOA credentials.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Call it a hunch.” The truth was Juliet didn’t have much of a hunch. She just felt the SOA card was her least controversial ID. SOA operatives were seen as neutral by most factions in the Sol System—sometimes, they collected bounties, but sometimes, they stole from the corps that issued them. She could attest to that.

After a tense minute, the bulkhead door clunked as the locking pins retracted, and it lifted upward, emitting a thick cloud of steam. A scratchy, robotic voice emanated from within, “Step into the airlock.”

Without many other options and with her air nearly half-depleted, Juliet stepped forward into the ten-by-ten chamber. She wanted to grip her shotgun, but she knew she was being observed, so she left it hanging by her side in an attempt to appear unthreatening. The big airlock door thunked shut behind her, and air began to hiss through vents. After a couple of minutes, Angel announced, “The air is breathable, and pressure is equalized.”

“Remove your face covering,” the robotic voice demanded.

“I’d rather not,” Juliet said, trusting Angel to allow her voice to emanate from her helmet’s speaker.

“Remove your face covering.”

“The command is identical to the first one in intonation and timing—either a recording or a non-human entity.”

“Okay, thanks, Angel.” Juliet sighed and touched the release for her helmet’s visor, allowing it to slide up over her eyes. The airlock had a sensor array identical to the one outside, and LEDs flashed within it. After a moment, the inner door opened just as noisily as the outer. When it rolled out of sight, a long, empty, concrete corridor stretched away, illuminated by the same amber LEDs as the shaft that led down from the surface.

“Proceed,” the scratchy voice commanded. Juliet stepped into the corridor and began to limp her way forward, more favoring her leg out of habit and caution than necessity. After ten steps or so, she slid her visor back into place. The air had seemed fine, if a bit stale, but she wanted to be careful, and she preferred having the Diamatex shielding her face as she walked into the strange place.

“Did we pass some kind of screening, or did we fail? Are we being allowed in as guests, or are we marching to our doom?”

“I’m assuming those are rhetorical questions. The port where I sent your ID has closed, and no further queries were forthcoming. Neither sensor array had any sort of open connection, and I’m still not detecting any wireless networks. I’m quite unnerved.”

“You are? Well, how do you think I feel? I’m half a klick under the surface of an icy moon orbiting a planet that would kill me in a thousand spectacular ways if I got too close. I’m walking around in a damaged suit with a limited air supply, and not a single soul knows where I am!”

“I do.”

“Yeah.” Juliet sighed and continued marching forward, focusing on the metallic door that had come into focus something like a hundred meters distant. “You’re right, Angel. I am very, very lucky to have you here with me. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Have you noticed the change in building material?”

“The concrete? Yeah. Does it mean something?”

“I’m not sure, but I wonder if this area was built before or after the plasteel access shaft and airlock.” Juliet didn’t have an answer for her, so she continued in silence, wondering what she’d gotten herself into. When she approached the door, it slid open on rails that must have been old and infrequently used—its progress was halting and grated noisily. When she stepped through, another wave of déjà vu hit her. She’d walked into a giant concrete space with portions of its walls made up of natural stone. She’d seen it before, and something about it made her heart hammer and her breaths come quick and shallow.

“I’ve seen this, Angel! Why do I feel scared . . .” It hit her as she spoke, and she cut off her words as she looked around, eyes wide with panic. She’d been in this space before, and something had woken up, something with a shiny metallic body and gleaming red eyes . . .