Chapter 22: SERVICE CALL / WARRANTY WORK

  Automated remediation performed by legacy maintenance systems shall be treated as a compensated service, not a gratuity, regardless of operator sentiment or survival outcome. Where direct payment instruments are unavailable, the system may satisfy continuity obligations by drawing against proximate inventories, including third-party custodial assets, provided recoverability is documented in the compensation ledger. Disputes regarding “ownership” of recovered items should be filed after return-to-port and are not grounds to delay remediation.

  — MIC Access & Salvage Circular, Rev. 11.2, §6.3 “Compensated Remediation in Unclaimed Installations”

  ? ? ?

  By the time we made the decision to go “just a little deeper” again, we had already started lying to ourselves.

  Not big lies. Not heroic lies. The small, practical lies you tell to keep your hands steady while you do stupid things: We have a camp. We have a map. We have a return path.

  We had a bubble of printed ribs and seals we’d declared “Camp 0.1,” like adding a decimal made it safer.

  The city—terrain, not skyline—didn’t care about our decimals.

  We broke camp without calling it breaking camp. Nobody said pack list out loud. Nobody said abort criteria. We just moved, fast and practiced, like motion could outrun dread.

  Chloe tightened straps on the sampling canisters until her knuckles went white.

  Trevor checked the suit filters twice, then checked mine, then pretended he hadn’t.

  Frankie hovered near my shoulder, thumb-sized and squinting like a cranky guardian angel. “I want it on record,” he said, “that I voted for staying in the bubble and writing a strongly worded letter to the universe.”

  “You don’t write,” I said.

  “I can draft an emotion,” Frankie shot back. “A heartfelt one.”

  Mercy’s voice came through the comms, smooth and too present. “If you depart now and maintain your current pace, you will reach the projected vector band in approximately three hours.”

  Trevor paused mid-clip. “Three hours there,” he said. “Three hours back.”

  “Assuming the route remains consistent,” Mercy replied.

  There it was. The little hook under the ribs.

  Chloe shouldered her pack and forced a grin. “So… six hours of cardio in an alien megacity. That’s normal.”

  Frankie pulsed brighter in my peripheral like a tiny warning light. “We also have three spools of tape,” he added. “I would like to know why we have three spools of tape.”

  “Because the universe hates you specifically,” I said, and cinched down the last buckle.

  Trevor stared at the tape like it had betrayed him. “We have tape because it is versatile. It is prudent.”

  “It is cowardice,” Frankie said. “It’s the tool version of saying, ‘This will probably break.’”

  I grabbed the breadcrumb kit—beacon, reflective marker strip, and one micro-drone with a short-life battery that would blink until it died—and walked twenty meters from the bubble to a shallow notch in the terrace wall.

  I drove the beacon spike down. The printed ceramic resisted like it didn’t believe in holes, then gave with a faint squeal.

  “Marker placed,” Mercy confirmed.

  “Great,” I said. “If we die, at least our ghosts can find the way back.”

  Chloe laughed too loudly. Trevor didn’t laugh at all.

  We stepped away from Camp 0.1, and the bubble immediately looked like what it was: a soap bubble someone had left on the edge of a continent.

  The city stretched. Terraces stacked and stepped into haze. Transit ribs ran straight until distance swallowed them. Towers rose like mountains with no foothills, just sudden vertical violence.

  And somewhere out there, the triplet rhythm had coughed once, then slammed a door.

  We walked anyway.

  ? ? ?

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  The first district boundary didn’t have a sign that said WELCOME TO A NEW DISTRICT. It didn’t have anything that polite.

  It announced itself the way geology did: texture.

  Under our boots, the terrace surface changed from smooth, stubborn ceramic to something patterned—fine ribs in repeating threes, shallow grooves like someone had dragged a comb across the world and stopped caring halfway through. The overgrowth changed too, as if the plants had their own map: braided mats gave way to thin, pale fans that flaked when our drones brushed them.

  Chloe slowed, visor sweeping. “Okay,” she whispered. “Okay, this is—look at the seam.”

  I looked.

  The seam was not a crack. It was a join. A line where one kind of construction stopped and another began, not blended, not patched—stacked. A history written in layers.

  Trevor tried to sound bored. “Different material batch. Different era.”

  Chloe snapped her head toward him. “That’s not ‘batch,’ Trevor. That’s language. It’s build language.”

  Frankie drifted between them like a tiny mediator with terrible credentials. “Mom and Dad,” he said, “please save the divorce for when we are not being observed by alien architecture.”

  “We are not being observed,” Trevor said automatically, like he could make it true by declaring it.

  “No one said observed,” Frankie replied. “I said—” He paused, then tried again, softer. “I said noticed.”

  We crossed into a stretch where the walls—low terraces, broken structures, half-collapsed arches—carried markings that made my stomach drop in a way I didn’t like.

  Not because I understood them.

  Because they looked like someone had cared about standardization.

  A busted plaque lay half-buried in a mat of growth. Its face was scuffed, but the spacing of the marks—clean, measured—felt like something that had passed through a committee.

  Chloe crouched, hands hovering like she was afraid to touch it and also afraid not to. “This one,” she breathed. “This is… Martian, right?”

  Trevor’s shoulders went rigid. “We do not know that.”

  Chloe looked up at him. “We know how humans build when we’re pretending we’re not scared. We build grids. We build standards. We label things like it makes the world obey.”

  Frankie’s projection dimmed a fraction. “That’s a human love language,” he muttered.

  Ahead, the geometry changed again.

  It wasn’t louder. It wasn’t brighter. It was cleaner in a way my eyes didn’t like. Edges that were too precise. Curves that made my inner ear itch. Surfaces that seemed to ignore dust and mineral bloom the way water ignored insults.

  Chloe went quiet.

  Trevor, for once, didn’t say anything.

  Frankie drifted closer to my shoulder. “Okay,” he said softly, “that’s the fancy stuff.”

  “The Veloran stuff,” I murmured before I could stop myself.

  Mercy’s voice sharpened. “Be careful with assumptions.”

  “Be careful with everything,” Frankie replied. “Including the floor, which has already tried to flirt with me.”

  Chloe stood and forced movement back into her legs. “If there’s still power anywhere,” she said, voice small with hope, “it’ll be in the clean stuff.”

  “Or in the stuff that wants to kill us fastest,” Trevor said.

  “Stop,” I said. “No meetings. We keep moving, we keep eyes up, we keep dropping breadcrumbs.”

  My HUD ticked as the micro-drone ahead pinged its position back to the chain we’d laid.

  A thin thread across stacked infrastructure.

  Mercy’s map overlaid it for a heartbeat: a line so small against the city that it might as well have been drawn on the edge of the world with a fingernail.

  “Return path integrity currently acceptable,” Mercy said.

  “‘Currently’ is doing a lot of work,” Trevor muttered.

  Frankie gave a tiny, humorless laugh. “Everything here does a lot of work.”

  ? ? ?

  We found the big interior by accident, which is how the city seemed to do everything: you walked long enough and the world got tired of pretending it was empty.

  The structure rose out of the terrace like a stadium that had decided to become a mountain. Not one building, really—several fused together, ribs and arches overlapping, walls thick enough to be cliffs. One side had collapsed inward, leaving an opening wide enough to fly the rover through, if the rover hadn’t been a fragile little insult to this place.

  We stood at the threshold, helmet lights pointed into a darkness that swallowed them like it was hungry.

  Chloe’s voice came soft. “That is… huge.”

  Trevor’s voice came tight. “That is… optional.”

  Frankie floated forward, thumb-sized, bright against the black. “That is… where horror movies go to breed,” he announced.

  I stepped in first, because that’s what I did when my team needed someone to be stupid on purpose.

  The air inside was cooler. The sound sharpened, then stretched. My footsteps didn’t echo the way a normal hall echoed—too slow, too delayed, like the space had its own sense of timing and it was rude.

  Our helmet lights painted the nearest ribs: suspended infrastructure arcs hung overhead like the bones of some extinct creature. Between them, gardens—dead, or sleeping, or something worse—hung in nets and trays, thick with pale growth that didn’t look like it belonged outside.

  Chloe whispered, “Suspended agriculture.”

  Trevor whispered, “Suspended liability.”

  Frankie drifted higher, scanning. “Okay,” he said, trying for comedy. “So we’re inside the world’s most haunted greenhouse.”

  I kept moving, counting exits. The opening behind us. A side gap to the left where collapsed wall met terrace. A dark corridor ahead that could be a hallway or a throat.

  Drones buzzed out, their feeds painting false-color overlays that made the space look like a fever dream.

  “Depth sensors are experiencing intermittent variance,” Mercy said. “Not consistent with simple occlusion.”

  “Translation,” Frankie said, “the building is doing weird math.”

  “Do not anthropomorphize the building,” Mercy replied, and I could hear the strain in her voice, like she was trying to hold onto rules the way you held onto rails in a storm.

  Chloe stopped under one of the hanging trays. The growth there had braided itself into thick ropes, and the ropes had braided into threes.

  Triplets everywhere, if you wanted to see them.

  I did not want to see them.

  Chloe lifted her hand, then stopped herself. “It’s… intact,” she whispered. “Not preserved. Not entombed. Just—intact.”

  Trevor’s voice came sharp. “We do not touch unknown biomatter.”

  Chloe jerked her hand back like she’d been burned. “I wasn’t going to.”

  “You were thinking about it,” Trevor snapped.

  Frankie, for once, didn’t make a joke. He floated closer to Chloe, projection dimmer, edges slightly fuzzy. “I was also thinking about it,” he admitted. “It looks like it would feel… satisfying.”

  “That is the stupidest sentence you’ve said on Venus,” I said.

  Frankie blinked. “That’s a high bar.”

  We moved deeper.

  The structure opened into a central bowl—stadium-sized, easy. The floor sloped gently down, and in the center was an empty space that felt like it used to hold something big.

  Not a stage.

  A machine.

  The ribs overhead converged toward it, like all the architecture had been built to pay attention to that one spot.

  I stopped breathing for a second, then realized I was doing it and forced myself to inhale.

  “Rally point,” I said. “If we get separated, we meet here. Nobody plays hero.”

  Trevor’s laugh was a short bark. “We are already playing hero.”

  Chloe’s eyes were wide behind her visor. “We’re playing first,” she whispered.

  Frankie hovered near my shoulder. “I would like to be second,” he said quietly. “Second is safer.”

  We marked the point with a beacon and a bright strip of reflective tape that looked obscene in this clean darkness.

  Then, somewhere in the bowl, a light blinked.

  Not our light.

  A thin line, pale and sharp, tracing across a panel we hadn’t noticed. It blinked once, then again, then held.

  Chloe’s breath caught. “Did you see that—”

  “I saw it,” Mercy said, voice suddenly fast. “Hold position.”

  Trevor whispered, “No.”

  Frankie whispered, “Yes.”

  And I felt the hairs on my arms rise under my suit liner, not from fear, but from that cold, impossible thing: something here still worked.