I stripped off and took my jogging kit out of my bagez. Like every good fitness fanatic I used several layers, from inner skintights to more baggy outers, finishing with a waterproof for any inclement weather. I was only interested in the skintights, which gripped as tight as any wet suit. The top even had a hood, which combined with my sunglasses, covered every square centimeter of skin. Sandjay interfaced with it, and the fabric surface turned a perfect black. As well as being visually nonreflective, it absorbed a vast section of the electromagnetic spectrum should you try probing it with radar or laser sweeps. And that was just its outer surface. Long ribbons of thermal battery were woven into the arms, legs, spine, neck, and skull, which used a web of heat-duct fibers to soak up all my body heat, making me thermally neutral. The ribbons could accumulate ten hours of heat before they needed to pump it out. A gill mask neutered my breath, siphoning out the heat and scrubbing telltale biochemical leaks. Wearing that stealth suit, I was like an empty human-shaped hole in the universe.
Sandjay linced to the fly swarm and sent them streaming down through the hatchway. I sucked in my gut and slipped through after them.
There was a cramped utility compartment running under all the yurts. It was filled with human-built sanitation equipment, which sterilized all the water and effluent from the baths, showers, and toilets above. Chemical and solid waste was separated out and stored in tanks that would ultimately be vented into space, while the clean water was released back into the
The compartment’s floor was made from thick carbon slabs, as hard as granite. Agents we’d sent in before had cut the slab that the outlet pipe went through, slicing it into manageable rectangles with angled sides to hold them in place. Pulling them up was a bitch. They were as heavy as stone, and I was crouched over, which is a bad position to be lifting. Eventually I got them clear, and dropped down through the hole into a tunnel carved into the naked rock.
Pipes and cables ran along it, not all rigid and fastened into place like humans would lay them, but twining around like ivy clinging to the tunnel walls. They even looked like they were alive, or at least had been. I thought maybe a plant with hollow trunks, like terrestrial bamboo, that grew along the tunnel, then died and hardened, producing a natural tube. It made a kind of sense, given the way the Olyix liked to integrate their biological systems with mechanical ones.
Sandjay splashed an enhanced image across my tarsus lenses. The suit’s thermal sensors showed me that several of the meandering tubes were warm, containing a heated fluid of some type, while the magnetic scan gave power cables a gold-sparkle glow. My inertial navigation took a location fix, and I set off down the tunnel.
Twenty percent of the fly swarm was behind me as I scrambled over the meandering tubes, covering my ass in case an Olyix came along on an inspection or maintenance job. The rest buzzed on ahead, scouting the way. Just as in the tunnel we’d driven through earlier, there were intersections and splits. Some went straight up; others branched down into the unknown depths. There were times when the tunnel sloped so much I had to get down on my hands and knees and crawl along to stop myself from slipping.
Inevitably, it wasn’t a straight route toward the rear of the arkship. I had to check the inertial navigation every time the swarm found another junction, working out which was the way forward. Five times I miscalculated and had to turn back and try again as the tunnel I chose started to curve away. But then some tunnels were almost devoid of cables and tubes, allowing me to jog along for long stretches. Without those, I would never have made it back before morning.
After the inertial navigation confirmed I’d passed the end of the third biochamber, I started looking for a route into the fourth. There were plenty of junctions that had branched off into the bigger transport tunnels, with vehicles trundling along them. I began splitting the swarm at intersections, sending them out exploring farther ahead. Eventually, when I was four hundred meters short of where we’d worked out the fourth biochamber to be, I found a transport tunnel that seemed to be heading in the right direction.
The swarm flew on ahead, but there were no vehicles about. My problem now was the light. The transport tunnel was illuminated by long bright strips halfway up the walls. If the swarm saw anything coming, I’d have to sprint for a junction. There weren’t many of them.
Four hundred meters. Most Olympic athletes could cover that distance in forty-five seconds. I was fit, and had some gene-up treatments, but not to that level. Besides, I was in a two-thirds gravity field—also not conducive to speed. Best estimate was over a minute.