After a confusing series of twists and turns, they emerged into another chamber, ten times the size of anything she’d seen before in the tunnels. It was like stepping into a cathedral. A fluting sound like wind over the top of empty bottles muttered through the space with no clear origin. Strange, almost organic-looking mechanisms grew up from the floor and towered over her, ten or fifteen stories high. For a moment, she felt something like awe.
In among them were half a dozen pits filled with viscous brown fluid, like sewer water mixed with petroleum oil. The dog walked over and dropped its broken bit of crystal into one of the pools, then waited motionless. The suit warned her that there were eleven other mobiles in the cavern. Each of them another one of the weird dog things. None seemed hostile. As she watched, they brought things into the room and dropped them in the pools. One time, a dog took something resembling a half meter of water pipe out of the pool and then left with it.
“This your machine shop, puppy?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”
Tanaka raised her arm and fired half a dozen shots into one of the motionless dogs, blowing it apart. She waited. After a few moments, three of the other dogs came over and began gently picking up the pieces of their dead comrade and dumping them into the pools.
“Ah-ha,” Tanaka said to them. “Fixing your friend up, aren’t you? All right. I’ll wait.”
They just looked back at her with their big eyes as though they were embarrassed at her outburst.
One said ki-ka-ko but didn’t move.
There were a lot of strange chemicals in the air in the chamber, and the suit took a while sorting through them all, but after a few moments it popped up an alert. Duarte’s scent. It was a significant trace. She had a hard time believing that it was just contact with a repair drone. If he’d passed through that room, had he been hurt or killed and the dogs brought him there? Had he figured out the same thing she just did, and used the sewage pools to fix something? Her hands itched a little bit, and she grinned. She felt the impatience of the chase, like she was a dog straining at its leash at the smell of rabbits. The joy of the hunt.
Slowly, methodically, she moved around the perimeter looking for the strongest match. Tracing Duarte’s movement inside the room was probably pointless, but knowing where he’d come from and what direction he’d left would be enough. The best hit was a tunnel leading off the large cavern and gently sloping up.
She followed it, the chemical scent growing stronger as she moved. Half an hour later she emerged into a large room with an open window to the outside.
The chamber was shaped like a half circle, with a flat wall nearly sixty meters across. The middle twenty meters of the wall were missing, creating a large opening to the outside. Sunlight streamed in. Sky glowed oxygen-blue between the draping strands of vine and branch.
He’d been here. More than that, he’d spent time here. Duarte’s scent marker was everywhere.
“High consul?” she said, the suit amplifying her. “This is Colonel Tanaka. If you’re here, I just want to talk with you, sir.”
No one answered.
On either side of the outside opening were spindly cradles growing up from the floor, with fifteen-meter-long egg-shaped objects held in them. The eggs had the same mother-of-pearl gleam she’d seen in the interior of a Gravitar-class battleship. Like something made at the alien construction platform. And the high consul’s most recent scent track moved up to the empty cradle in the center. She walked slowly around the cradle, but no track led away.
“All right, little buddy,” she said to the egg that had been there and was gone, “what the fuck are you?”
“A ship,” Dr. Ochida said.
Tanaka leaned back in her chair. She’d taken over an office in the State Building as her base of operations with a staff of ten and high-priority access to everyone of any importance to the empire. The décor was generic politician, but she’d put a print of Ammon Fitzwallace’s Artemis the Hunter on the wall where she could see it, all vibrant green with shocks of bright and bloody red.
“You’re sure?”
“Well, no,” Ochida said. “We have a team going to the site now, as you requested. We’ll know more once that’s complete, but we have seen similar structures elsewhere. Persephone system. Bara Gaon. Swarga Loka. Seven Kings. It’s not the most common, but it’s certainly not unprecedented. A fair proportion of the artifact tree seems focused on material transport, and especially in the Seven Kings data, we see—”