not close enough for the
dross to lunge at it. It would hover at least a hundred meters in the air.”
“Then how did it crash? Mechanical failure?”
“That’s very rare, but possible,” she spoke slowly, uncertain.
Burke kept pulling at the drone’s innards, peeling more protective
layers away with the assisted strength of his armor. When he broke into the
core of the drone, where processing and storage units were, he lowered his
hands and leaned his head closer into the hole he had made.
“Can you see everything?” he asked. “What parts do we need?”
“Just one part. One moment.”
She highlighted different sections of the drone’s components as she
cycled through them and eliminated the unimportant ones from the visor’s
display. She did this more for his benefit than hers, narrowing the search down
so he knew which pieces to avoid when he went in to extract something.
“There,” she said finally, highlighting one piece inside the mess of
wires and electronics. “Grab that part but don’t pull it just yet. I need to
check something.”
He leaned his head back and reached inside the drone with his right
hand. He recognized the part as a computer core, but it was the largest one he
had ever seen. The part had a handle, as it was a common component that was
switched out between systems, or used temporarily as an independent processing
piece. He closed his hand around it and waited until Cass let him know to pull.
The drone whirled to life a few seconds after his hand made contact.
She funnelled power from through the aegis and into the drone. Sparks sprayed
harmlessly around Burke’s arm but it still made him uncomfortable. The noise
was the worst of it and he shifted inside the armor as he heard it.
“Try to be quick,” he murmured.
“I’m just making sure all the data is moved from the permanent
drives,” she explained as she worked. “I wish Havard had told us exactly what
he wanted. That would have made this easier. Huh, that’s odd.”
“What?”
“There’s nothing but standard data on here. Nothing about the dross.
There’s atmospheric data. Temperature readings. There’s no mention of the
aliens in anything it recorded.”
“Then why the fuck did he send us to get it then?”
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I’m finished.”
He pulled on the handle and felt it resist. Even with the augmented
strength of the aegis, the drone’s core remained lodged inside of itself. He
turned his head and looked at the back of the machine, embedded in the tunnel,
and wondered if part of it had been crushed around the core. He kept his hand
around the handle and shifted his body onto the floor, bracing his right leg
into the drone’s side to anchor himself as he pulled harder. Still, the core
didn’t budge.
He pressed harder with his foot against the drone and yanked on the
handle at the same time. He strained both his arm and leg as he pushed and
pulled in opposite directions, pushing the drone away from him as he pulled the
core towards him. He felt something snap from around the core and it suddenly
came out whole as the drone’s body was pushed away.
He held the core in his hand, intact, as he watched the rest of the
machine collapse into the tunnel. It was like a blockage had been punched
apart, and the stuck drone now fell in pieces through the hole. The sound was
horrendous, like thousands of pieces of metal grinding and tearing each other
apart. The vibrations of it falling shuddered through the ground and his armor
as he sat there, dumbfounded, holding the processing core above his head and
staring at the now vacant tunnel. When the grinding stopped, a cacophony of
alien wailing and hissing erupted from the ground beneath him.
“We need to run,” Cass said frantically.
He didn’t move.
“Burke! Run!”
* * *
Burke scrambled out of the chamber and shot up to the surface. Cass
smoothly removed the low light filter from the suit’s visor but
Basilica: The Splendor, the Scandal: Building St. Peter's