"No way to get whatever mechanism opened them in the first place to work?"
A.J. shook his head. "I don't think anything in this base is going to be workable any more. If the colonel's scenario is correct, something went wrong to keep these doors from opening in the first place. So even if the power was on, they'd be jammed shut anyway."
"Then what are the odds of them being openable now? Wouldn't the survivors have tried?"
"First, we don't know there were any survivors. Second, on the ones I'm interested in, I don't see any signs of heavy prying or other forcible entry attempts. And third, after all this time the seals and other things may have become fragile, turned to dust, or otherwise changed in their basic nature enough that force which couldn't move them before can do so now."
"What about vacuum welding?"
He shrugged. "There's a lot of different materials involved here. I don't think that will be a factor. Speaking of welding, I'm still playing around to see if there's some way I can get some kind of welding or cutting electron beam out of one of my babies, but I'm not hopeful. There are limits to the configurations I can get."
"When do you think you're going to try to get one of these closed doors to open?"
"Not for a while yet. We want to explore as much of the base as possible with all Faeries running before we risk damage to any of them. Oh, yeah," A.J. brightened again and waved his hand to activate some commands, "here's the real important jackpot aside from the discovery of the century."
The screen in front of them flickered, then showed another Faerie-eye point of view, drifting down a different corridor. Before it a large doorway loomed, mostly shut but with about two and a half feet of space on the one side where the apparently rotating valvelike door had stopped. The Faerie slowly drifted down to that level and spent a few moments making sure it could fit through the opening. Satisfied, it began to move forward again.
This room was huge. The "floor" slanted slightly in what would be the "downward" direction, but soon the smoothness vanished, replaced by a chaotic mass of dark brown and black, with occasional white streaks. The floor was rippled and scalloped and extended back into dimness, with deep hollows and narrow columns connecting it to the ceiling. The scalloping was almost scalelike, in some places. Much of it was dull and absorbed light almost like a sponge, making the range of vision even shorter than normal.
In a few spots there was a bright glint, a shine from something smooth. That seemed more common toward the rear, which was confirmed as the Faerie cautiously continued farther into the huge room.
"What is that?" Jackie asked finally, as she watched the images wend their way through an increasingly narrow and hallucinogenic set of passages of the dark material.
"Mud," A.J. answered with satisfaction. "Looks like it's more water towards the back, more dirt towards the front, which makes sense. It's been subliming away for a long time through that door and these passages. But even after all that time, there's still a hell of a lot of water there. Our unknown visitors were possibly aquatic, or amphibious, because this seems awfully excessive for a reservoir but very sensible for something like a staff mudbath/swimming pool/whatever combined with a main water supply. From the surveys I've done, I think there's enough water left in this room to fill a cube a hundred meters on a side."
"A hundred . . . That's a million metric tons of water!"
"And all in one easily accessible chunk. Run it through a filter and I think you'd be able to drink it. Unless our extinct friends left some very long-lived bacteria behind. But I doubt if any diseases they had are something we could catch, anyway."
"So Phobos Base is definitely a go."
Colonel Hathaway smiled. "You could say that, Jackie." His wristphone buzzed. "I have a meeting to go to. There may be one both of you want to attend later, in a few days."
"No offense, Ken," A.J. said. "But I doubt I want to go to any meetings."
Hathaway's smile widened. "You'll want to go to this one, I think. See you people later, I have some business to attend to." As he turned to go, he paused. "Oh, and Jackie—this is under complete nondisclosure. You can't even tell anyone back at the labs, at least not yet."
She shook her head. "Ken, that's asinine. There's no way you can keep a lid on this very long. A few more days, maybe. But not much longer. Don't they realize that?"
"I think they do, Jackie. They're trying to decide how they want to approach it, and the time pressure is not helping. I'm trying not to add any pressure on our side. People, we can afford to wait. As you say, they can't keep this secret very long. When they do make that decision, I want them to think of us as the people who didn't give them a hard time over it. Capice?"