Going Bold

Andrea and Lin were both disappointed, but a loss of signal was not too shocking. Apertures in space were well known for having deleterious effects on signal strength and the distinct possibility that the pool was in a subterranean location added another reason to expect rapid loss of signal. Since there was no longer anything to see from the probe Andrea finished her climb of the tree, her stomach gurgling as the part synthesis progressed rapidly inside her. “Here we go, this height should be sufficient to ensure consistent signal between the cave entrance and our camp.” Andrea noted, as she stopped climbing and looked around. While the height may have been enough for the signal booster, it did not provide much of a sweeping view. Andrea was nestled comfortably inside the canopy and found herself able to see less than she could from the ground. “I think you’re right I’m able to ping both the camp network and the mini-drones near the anomaly.” Lin affirmed Andrea’s choice of location before noting “Good timing too, the extra parts are about finished. Once we eject them we can hook them up to the mini-drone and leave it here.” As she said this Andrea felt the telltale sensations of synthesized parts and material transferring from her organs to her implants for finishing. It never hurt but it sure felt bizarre, and the first few times she’d felt it she’d had a minor panic attack at the utterly alien sensations. Fortunately familiarity had robbed the process of it’s ability to horrify her on a visceral level, but it never felt normal to Andrea either. Probably why this sort of tech had never caught on as a mainstream addition, and was a voluntary part of the Surveyor Corps kit. It was invaluable in survival situations, but extremely unsettling to actually use.

As Andrea waited she checked to see if Jorge and his crew had attempted contact, noting no signal from them yet. As far as Andrea was concerned this was fine, she didn’t want to miss the first com window as they entered orbit and came over the horizon for the camp’s antenna. So far she’d always been there to welcome the follow up teams right from the start, and didn’t want to break her perfect streak now.

After about 5 minutes a port on Andrea’s flank opened up and ejected the assembled parts into her waiting hand. With a few simple steps Andrea broke down the mini-drone and connected it with the new parts, turning it from a mobile scouting and research tool into a stationary signal repeater. After securing the device to the tree Andrea quickly climbed back down and continued her hike to camp.

Remembering that they needed to replace the mini-drones, and to study the anomaly, Lin used their connection to the signal booster to remain in contact with the camp’s fabrication equipment and queue up replacement mini-drones as well as an aquatic drone to form a pair with the one they already had stored at camp. After those were added, Lin drew on the documentation for studying spatial anomalies to queue the fabrication of the necessary equipment to run safety and stability analysis.

By the time they returned to camp, Andrea and Lin were greeted by 10 newly minted mini-drones flying to meet them and land themselves in Andrea’s shoulder ports. The camp consisted of half a dozen hemispherical inflatable dome structures. The largest two rising about 10 meters tall, one housing power generation and storage with the other holding the fabrication tools Lin had already put to work churning out new equipment. The remaining structures, at 4 meters tall, functioned as storage, sample testing labs, and housing for Lin and Andrea. Lin had numerous drones of varying sizes and configurations that she kept stowed among the various domes that she could use to explore and work independent from Andrea’s body or when Andrea was sleeping and Lin wanted to remain awake and active. Though she mostly eschewed humanoid forms, Lin did have one humanoid drone for her to puppet around, largely because she felt she could connect better with Andrea if they could interact in a manner closer to standard human friends on occasion, and frankly, for a change of pace, acting at being a traditional human was something that Lin enjoyed, but in moderation.

Lin wrangled some of her drones to start packing the gear for transport to the anomaly as it rolled out of the assembler. With nothing immediate for her to do, Andrea took the opportunity to hit the shower in their living quarters and wash off the accumulated mess of a busy morning. Once she’d gotten clean and dry Andrea hopped into a fresh field uniform, she always kept a full spare set of basic gear and field uniform clothes ready to go for exactly these sorts of situations. She could get clean and comfortable while still being ready to go back into action at a moments notice. Not that Ristula 4 had proved to be a particularly dangerous assignment, in fact the morning chase from the Farrous probably counted in the top 5 most dangerous encounters she’d had on the whole expedition.

“Hi Andrea, looks like you’re ready to go again. I’ve started ferrying the testing equipment to the cave mouth with a couple of my larger flying drones, and I deployed a few of the purpose built signal boosters on the route so our jury rig can serve as a backup connection.” Lin had been busy during Andrea’s break to shower and change, one of the advantages of not being so deeply integrated into a physical body was less physical need for breaks, though overworking could easily become a problem without careful attention.

“Awesome, I’m going to grab a meal bar and then we can head back to the anomaly, since we’ve got a reliable network connection between here and the anomaly site we don’t need to hang around waiting for Jorge and the Study team to get in touch. In fact after we’ve got the preliminary experimental equipment brought over, lets fab another habitation dome and set it up near the anomaly so I don’t have to lose exploration time on hiking back and forth.” Andrea’s energy had been flagging a bit after her long morning but getting cleaned up and the prospect of a nice coffee and chocolate flavored meal bar had her enthusiasm buoyed back up. Not that it needed much help, the prospect of learning about the strange beings on the other side of a spacial anomaly was enough to keep Andrea going for days on nothing but sheer curiosity.

Andrea made a quick stop by one of the storage domes to grab that food bar and another quick stop by the fabrication dome to grab a backpack load of new equipment to haul, already prepped and tested for balance by Lin with her humanoid drone. Now refreshed and ready to start properly surveying a new frontier Andrea set back out towards the mesa top cave with Lin busy orchestrating a dozen drones of various sizes to move more materials towards what was shaping up to be a proper outpost.

Once Andrea reached the cave she quickly made her way back to the anomaly in the middle of the fungal forest. By this point the mini-drones they’d left behind had finished mapping out the region within about a kilometer of the anomaly, low on charge they’d grounded themselves and were waiting for free drone ports to become available for charging.

“Nothing the drones found seems too different from what we noted in the area we walked through the first time. Once we set up a regular patrol of mini-drones from a hab dome and drop a few sensor packages around it should be safe to sleep here.” Andrea noted as she glanced through the data that her mini-drones had gathered over the past several hours.

“I’ll take care of all that, the drones bringing down the testing equipment can drop some sensor packages in the area and set up the hab dome. Let’s focus on the interesting stuff, like the anomaly and whatever it is we’ve seen on the other side. The anomaly is big enough for us to pass through, so if these tests show it’s safe I vote we go through and try to make friends with the locals on the other side.” Lin was often more cautious than Andrea, but clearly she’d become at least as caught up as Andrea in the excitement of discovering something so strange and significant.

The first step in testing the anomaly was to assemble a scaffold around the basin, getting close to the edge of the spatial warping but not contacting it. This took several hours of work from both Andrea and some of Lin’s drones. During this process the assembler had finished building the second aquatic drone and the pair of them had been transferred to the burgeoning research station. Both aquatic drones were given the payload of a high strength signal booster (sensitive receiver antenna and powerful broadcast antenna) and promptly pushed into the sphere of water. They began mapping out a relatively shallow and broad pool that wound up being an oval about 200 by 150 meters and 1.5 meters deep the sphere of water on Andrea and Lin’s side was mirrored in the pool as a spherical anomaly that, as best the drones could measure, was identical in size, and when one drone was directed through it, passed directly back through and flopped into the basin under the sphere.

“Well it certainly allows free passage both ways and nothing seems immediately hazardous on the other side. Even the atmosphere outside the pool tests as breathable, at least with your lung implants, it would be a bit too oxygen rich for safety and comfort if you weren’t modded.” Lin summed up her findings so far, Andrea had been focused on finishing up the construction of the scaffolding and needed the update. “Seems promising for a crewed expedition so far, have those signal boosters gotten us back in touch with the first probe?” Andrea asked as she wiped some sweat of her face and flopped down on the ground to rest for a few minutes, even with her augments, generally excellent fitness and drone assistants, moving half a dozen tons of scaffolding into place and assembling it was hard work.

“Unfortunately no. From what the aquatic drones can make out, the pool on the other side appears to be subterranean as well and the boosters aren’t going to be sending or receiving much through any rock formations greater than a few centimeters thick.” Lin made a sighing sound before continuing “We’ll need to wait until we can send though a submersible landing platform that can float on top of the pool and let flying drones start exploring further and dropping signal boosters as they go. Running a physical power and communication cable through the anomaly to the floating landing platform will also let us gather more information about any fluctuations in the connection. Not as much as the dedicated equipment we’ll be setting up, but every bit of information is useful. I’ve added the necessary parts to the fabricator, we’ll need to restock on raw materials pretty soon at this rate. Let’s set up the rest of the testing gear while we wait.”

Several hours and a half dozen assembled testing rigs later, both the hab dome and hardwired floating drone pad were ready to be deployed. The hab dome was first, since its built in backup generator was going to be keeping the outpost running, and feed power across the anomaly to the drone pad. Once Lin and Andrea were satisfied with the location, about 20 meters away from the scaffolding around the anomaly in the direction of the surface access tunnel, they stepped back from the large package and ordered their assisting drones clear as they triggered it to deploy. The outer casing unlatched itself and the tough inflatable wall of the dome began to fill. The surface mapping done by the drones allowed the dome’s install routine to inflate ground barrier cells as needed to give the dome’s interior a level surface, despite being deployed on the side of a shallow hill.

After roughly an hour the inflation process was complete. The personnel entrance and the exterior generator access on the freshly deployed hab dome were now both, more or less, facing the anomaly. With the hab dome’s power online the mini-drones that had been laying on low battery were reassigned to the domes mini-drone ports and given automated patrol sweeps to run around the newly established outpost. Having spent the duration of the inflation process getting the drone pad positioned on the scaffolding with a feed system for the power and communication cable, Andrea was about ready to be done for the day. She and Lin connected the scaffold’s power network to the generator in the hab dome, before both decided to take a rest so they could be fresh for the next day’s testing of the anomaly and scouting of the other side. Andrea slung a hammock from a couple of the built in attachment points in the hab dome’s interior walls and quickly fell into a restful slumber, Lin decided she needed a break from work and joined her partner in sleep.

After a good rest Andrea and Lin deployed the mini-drone pad through the aperture. The duo, Lin utilizing a large drone, fed the sealed mini-drone pad, with 3 mini-drones docked, into the anomaly carefully before allowing the cable feed system to slowly reel out as the pad gradually floated to the surface of the pool directly over the anomaly.

Once the pad had floated to the surface and stabilized it opened like a lotus to reveal the docked mini-drones. Andrea connected to one of the mini-drones, launching it then directing it through the only visible entryway besides the anomaly. Beyond that entryway was what appeared to be a far more roughly worked passage. The winding twists and turns through dense rock required the deployment of a fair number of signal repeaters to keep up the signal strength for working with the drones. The passage to the surface was not quite a maze but there were some side chambers and little networks of side passages that didn’t seem to lead anywhere, anymore. Eventually the mini-drone exited out onto the surface.

Spread out before the mini-drone was a moonlit valley filled with what appeared to be fir trees with fog drifting in thick winding banks through the forest and around the hills and slopes. As they absorbed the breathtakingly beautiful yet eerie vista they swung their view in a full circle and finally took in the imposing edifice of a pyramid looming over the mini-drone. The tunnel passage linked to the chamber beneath appeared to have been roughly hewn into the neat lines of massive stone blocks. Blocks formed of rock so dark a gray that they verged on black.

“Wow...” both Lin and Andrea agreed. “This is definitely our next survey world, I wouldn’t miss this for anything.” Andrea murmured “I’m right there with you.” was Lin’s quick agreement. Before sending the probe out further, they planted another signal booster which enabled them to finally regain a connection with the first makeshift probe that had been so unceremoniously pulled through the aperture. It had no built in memory so they couldn’t retrieve what it saw when out of contact, but now they could see the interior of what appeared to be a tent containing a collection of strange artifacts with obviously sophisticated tools arranged for studying them.

Just as the duo were about to send their mini-drone out to start scouting around the base of the pyramid and triangulate the direction of the probe’s signal they were interrupted. Lin was pinged with a notification they’d been expecting since the afternoon before. “What timing! It looks like Jorge and the study team have arrived in orbit. Let’s say hi and give them the good news.”