THE FALL OF ROSENROT STATION

PROCEDURE

The smell of a carnivore was in the air. That heavy hot smell of offal and rotten meat. It hung like smoke in the narrow corridor.

Starting a meter or two inside, the bulkhead was scored by parallel cuts five or six millimeters deep. The deck was also cut and a tile ripped out in one place exposing cables and circuitry. Even traced the white glint of exposed corten steel with his light to the threshold where the exterior door was missing and the recess buckled and torn.

He found the door outside, bent about its internal reinforcements and abandoned a few meters down the hallway.

Even paused here and scanned his light left and then right across the deck. Near to the doorway was a smear of blood and a small pool of the same now dried and cracking. There was nothing else.

The dead morph. You left it here. Even said in a low voice.

Yes. As you directed.

He went left from the doorway down to an intersection. There was darkness in every direction that seemed to consume their light after just a few paces.

Right.

They came to a large set of doors that lay open, doors nestled into recesses. Beyond this point there were pipes all along the wall, along one side, of various diameter. They passed by a part where the pipes disappeared back into the bulkhead only to erupt back from that place a few meters beyond.

They came to this circular chamber with a domed roof and vented metal floor that echoed with their footsteps. Halfway about its circumferance was a section missing from this floor the steel eyelets bent up on one side. Even shone his light down into the opening. Shortly there was a glimmer returned from a flat body of fluid beneath.

They went around, hugging the wall as they walked the narrow band of remaining floor. The steel groaned and creaked under them.

Several narrow conduits led away and they followed one. The conduit ran straight about twenty meters then directly right the pipes bending with it wrapped about the inside corner.

Steam came from somewhere, flowing along the passage about their waists so that they were wading through mist. It hit the cold walls and ran as droplets down the steel. There was the smell of carnivore again and here and there was evidence of its passage. A busted pipe that hissed steam. A scratch or scrape cutting the steel bulkhead. A splash of blood.

They found a carcass of a man or woman; it was impossible to distinguish which lay here for the carcass was picked clean. The white bones lay stripped of their meat save a small amount of fleshy red stuff between their interstices. The pelvis and femur bones crushed. The skull lay cracked open, suckled clean.

The narrow corridor joined into a wider one that ran in both directions. Again the synthetic consulted her palm coder then pointed.

The corridor passed through another set of doors that lay open to them. The corridor then opened abruptly into a broad space lit by the glow from some further source that came in heart-pulses of heat and light. There were coil stations rows of them and banks of capacitors each as tall as a man. Cables and wires looped down from overhead all combining and joining towards a central source in a complex root system of steel and wire and plastics. There was an oppressive feel to the place and they felt it reacting at every wet dripping or blast of steam or surge that hummed through the deck.

The floor dropped away abruptly. At the edge Even peered down upon the turbine itself. There were three heads, cylinders laid sideways, arranged by size each larger than the previous. They were held two meters or so over the floor, held up by the thick pipes that brought high pressure steam piped in from the exterior reactor and returned as fluid, a lithium oxygen and hydrogen peritectic mixture, stripped of its energy, back to the reactor for reheating. The turbine blades were, when operational, turned by the steam and then turned a crank shaft. This supplied torque to a nearby generator whereby a magnetic field, rotated about banks of copper wire, resulted in electrical energy. In seven hundred years no better means had been found to thereby eliminate the generation of electricity from steam. Only the means of creating steam had advanced.

There was a gangway here. It led over to a cabin. The cabin hung from steel girders in the roof, hung directly over the turbine.

The gangway shifted from side to side as they moved over it to the cabin. It had a steel door with a glass window. Even opened the door which hinged out of its casement then slid back alongside the outer wall. Inside was a plastic seat on a bench with a console and screens and controls arrayed before it. Glass windows on the opposite side and in front.

Like we planned. Even said.

Sarah looked at him and nodded and went inside. She situated herself on the seat and waited.

Even followed the gangway around the side of the cabin to the rear where there was an electrical panel.

He pulled a hand-sized breaker switch and the cabin powered up drawing power from a series of connected batteries. Light flashed on inside the cabin and a row of small dirty-yellow lights just below the rim of the cabin.

Even had started back when he halted and holding the railing he looked down into the turbine floor.

Something was moving down there; a shadow behind one of the steam pipes lengthened then broke apart then reformed into shadows across the side. But in the moment between breaking and reforming he saw it, some demon red thing that ambled on a huge musculature a humanoid but with some oddity about its back where the rib bones seemed to burst out from the skin.

It was gone now. Even hurried inside the cabin. The synthetic looked up.

What's wrong.

Nothing yet. Have you booted the system.

She nodded.

In front of her the screens flickered and displayed a logo. A slot opened in the console and a keyboard input slid out and locked into place. She studied it a moment then looked up at the screen and began to tap in commands. A request for a hexcode was made and she tapped in certain glyphs and numerals. The operating system opened up to her. Turbine. Turbine controls. Power levels. She used the arrow keys to move the power levels from ten percent to eighty.

A warning light flashed overhead and an automated voice echoed loud through the turbine room.

Start up sequence initiated.

A deep thrum passed through the deck.