Alexander arrived outside the doors to the manufacturing hub along with Travers and his team. Jallen had to return to his duty.
He liked Jallen, the man was good with children and seemed to know just what to say to calm Yulia. He wasn’t quite sure about Travers yet. The man had been quiet the entire way and their interaction in the atrium had been brief. He also didn’t know how he was with children as Yulia had promptly fallen asleep after asking Alexander to pick her up and carry her.
He couldn’t blame the girl, they had quite an exciting morning so far.
“This is it,” Travers declared as he walked over to a busted entry pad off to the side of the large set of dual doors. “Another team was on this side of the facility, so I don’t know if this lock was broken before or after they got here. Considering how corroded it looks behind the box, I’m gonna say it was broken a long time ago.”
“You don’t have to worry about who broke what,” Alexander assured the man. “I knew going in that there was going to be a large amount of repairs ahead of me.”
The man grunted in acknowledgment. “Still, it looks bad on the Hawks if they are running around smashing things just to get in.” After some fiddling with the wires, the door controller beeped and the doors squealed open a few inches.
“Those lazy shits from B. There’s no way they entered this room to clear it properly. I’ll go to the nearest atrium and get a hydraulic jack to force the doors open.”
“That won’t be necessary, I can handle it. If you don’t mind.” He held a sleeping Yulia out to Travers, who looked a bit surprised before he put his weapon away and took the girl. “This won’t take long, please step aside.” The group of mercenaries moved out of the way as Alexander stepped up to the opening. He slipped both arms into the space and pulled.
The door groaned and for a moment, didn't appear it was going to open. Then with a loud metallic screech, the door slid open a few more inches. Alexander adjusted his hands and pulled again. The door moved much easier now, but still only opened enough to allow him to pass through.
“After you,” he waved.
Travers nodded and handed the sleeping girl back before he pulled out his rifle. “Go in assuming the room is hostile. On me.” With that he moved into the room, sweeping his flashlight one way while the next guy swept his beam the other. Alexander waited while the rest of the team filtered into the room and cleared it. He was more than a little impressed by their professionalism.
Considering he hadn’t been able to watch them in action during the initial operation to clear this facility, this gave him a good glimpse of how the Hawks worked. He could now see why they were the premier mercenary company on Ganos, and why Violet from Fidelity Properties had recommended them.
“Clear,” came a series of calls.
“It’s safe to enter, Mr. Kane.”
“Thank you,” Alexander replied as he slipped through the barely wide enough gap. “And please just call me Alexander.”
Travers nodded.
Alexander walked over to where he recalled the light switch to be from the blueprints. With no surprise, he found it was missing. And so were the wires that led to it. “Any way we can light the room up?” he asked.
One of the men plucked a ball from a pouch on his belt. He shook it vigorously and the ball started to glow softly. Then the man hurled it into the dark room. After a few seconds, the softly glowing ball exploded into bright white light as it slowly hovered in the air on counter-rotating blades that had popped out from the center.
“Flare drone,” Travers answered the unasked question.
“Neat!”
The group chuckled quietly at Alexander’s comment.
“Yeah, they come in handy,” Travers smiled.
Alexander surveyed the room and frowned. “Where are all the robotic assembly machines?”
He had gotten an inventory of what items to expect when he arrived. And a list of items that might be here. The vehicles had been listed under the ‘might be’ column so that’s why he wasn’t surprised to see them missing. But the robots had been listed as ‘present’ with a notation that they were in storage mode. All Alexander could see through the flickering shadows cast by the drone was a large empty room, where things had once been.
It was clear where the robots had once been by the platforms left behind and the too-clean spots in the concrete floor.
Travers had been speaking into his radio while Alexander scanned the room. He spoke up. “Nobody located any robotics moved to other areas of the facility. Someone likely stripped this room and sold them off. Probably quite some time ago going by how rusted and unused the door was. Do you want us to question the people to see if anyone knows what happened to them?”
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Alexander shook his avatar's head. He would have likely had to recycle the robots or rebuild them completely anyway. There was also no point accusing the people here of the theft without proof. If he wanted to fix this place up in any reasonable sort of timeframe, he was going to need their help.
That being said, he would have to make it very clear going forward that cannibalizing the facility would get the person responsible and their family immediately expelled. He wasn’t going to spend all his time fixing this place up just to have people stealing stuff constantly. “No. I will have a talk with Damien. I was hoping they weren’t in too bad of a shape so I could just fix them. Having them missing completely is going to set my plans back by quite a bit though.”
He sighed internally. “I think I’m going to start by fixing this door. Can you gentlemen notify the engineers to bring my cargo to this space? I can sort through it after that.”
Travers nodded before talking into his radio again.
Somehow, Yulia was still fast asleep in his arms, despite the bright light hovering only fifty feet away and the screeching of the rusted door. He was beginning to suspect she had stayed up all night in her excitement.
Working while carrying her wasn’t ideal, but there was no soft surface to set his daughter down on. So he did his best. Considering he was a robot, his best was pretty damn good.
It didn’t take him long to remove the panels along the bottom of the door. A pool of stagnant yellow water greeted him when he moved the heavy pieces off to the side. And if he could breathe, he was sure the smell of rotten eggs would be permeating the room right about now.
That explained the rust. This part of the facility was pretty far away from the collapsed section, so water and rust infiltration shouldn’t have reached this far.
He reached his free hand into the brackish water and felt around for the drain hole. It took a bit to find it and pull the rag out that had been stuffed inside. It reminded Alexander of the feeling you got when trying to remove food stuck in the sink drain. He shivered mentally at that thought. Why couldn’t he have forgotten something like that instead of all the other important stuff? Bleh!
As soon as the rag was removed, the couple of inches of disgusting water drained away, revealing the mess hidden for who knows how long.
The once chrome-coated track was a pitted rusty mess. And one of the rollers had fallen into a section that had completely rusted away. It was no wonder the door wouldn’t open any further. It would need to be completely replaced. To do that though, he needed one of his printers set up, and they would never fit through the doors.
“Excuse me, Mr. Travers?”
“Yes, Mr.– Alexander?”
“Can you show me to my residence? I need to put her down before I can work properly.”
Travers picked two men to watch the open door before leading him to the small room down the hall that would be his apartment. It had been lived in by someone, but that someone was now waiting aboard the Talon for a trip back to STO space to face their punishment. It’s one of the reasons he picked the room.
“This is the closest living space to the workshop. It’s also far away from any others. That is probably why the individual we arrested was living here. You may want to scrub this place with industrial cleaners as soon as possible,” the man wrinkled his nose. "Smells like body odor and illicit substances.”
“Do you think Yulia will be fine for the night?” If the room was that bad, he might just find the cleanest bedding he could and move it back into the manufacturing center.
“If she keeps her mask on, it should be fine. I will leave a few people here to keep an eye on her and alert you if she wakes up.”
“I know this isn’t part of your duty, so thank you.”
“Use us as needed, that’s why we’re here.”
***
It took Alexander four hours to remove one of the heavy steel doors from the tracks. And that was only thanks in part to Travers and his men assisting with the hydraulic ram after he finally relented and let them grab it.
From there he was able to move the printer into the space piece by piece. Printing out a new door guide was not ideal. It was rougher than the original and had to be printed in parts because the only printer he could fit through the opening wasn’t large enough to do it as a single piece.
He really needed a lathe or precision grinder, but a door that could open was better than a door that couldn’t.
They reattached the door and pushed it into the pocket of the wall. It shook as they moved it, but it wasn’t as bad as he had feared. The second door followed, and he reinstalled that as well. Now that he had full access to the room, the engineers began bringing in his cargo using portable jacks.
The manual devices looked almost exactly like Alexander remembered from four hundred years ago. He supposed there wasn’t much to improve on the simple cargo-moving devices. He did see the wheels had been replaced with omni rollers though.
While he worked on unpacking and printing things, the Hawk’s engineers started examining the wiring in the room. They didn’t have anything else to do, so they just kinda stuck around.
He was glad for the help. They fished out the old corroded wiring and Alexander handed them a brand new roll from his inventory. He didn’t have enough of the electrical wire to rewire the entire station but he had enough to redo this room and a few others. He had expected to have a wire machine here to make more, but that was gone along with everything else. Replacing it was not high on his priority list at the moment.
After a few hours of work, the lights in the cavernous room flickered fitfully to life. The few that still worked at least. He added ‘printing new LED lights’ to his growing list of to-do items. At least the main power to the room was still functional. That did mean people had to steer clear of the hacked-off copper cables that hung limply from where the robot stations used to reside though.
With the lighting working, the engineers moved to the task of assembling the printers. If it wasn’t for them assisting, he would still be mucking about in the dark or with the stupid door. It was proof that not even he could do everything. He would have to thank them for their assistance.
Alexander made a note to speak with Damien to see if they had any engineers who wanted to help. Once the manufacturing lab was up and running, he would quickly find himself too swamped with tasks to actually finish them all. And it was better to find out now, while the Hawks were still here, rather than find out in six months that there were no qualified individuals among the locals.
He doubted that was the case though. The drifters had managed to keep this place operational for who knows how many years. Even if they weren’t conventionally trained, there had to be people who lived here who knew how certain things worked. If they didn’t, he had the learning modules to train anyone who wanted to learn. It wouldn’t come free though.