Aron had spent four hours after lunch opening up the cat E.V.A. suit, working out its systems and taking measurements. He found it mildly surprising that the cat helmet also featured a display projected on the inside of its visor, but was considerably more surprised when he discovered that the legs were around forty-centimetres shorter on the inside than they were on the outside.
Further investigation revealed an exoskeleton system from the waistline down to powerful actuators below where the cat creature's feet would rest. The mechanism was very slim and brilliantly integrated into the structure of the suit. Weirdly, he could not find any matching assistance in the upper half. It appeared that the cat E.V.A. suit would assist mobility but nothing more.
It had only taken a few minutes to work out how to switch the suit on, causing the exterior lights and visor display to activate, but he still had not got the leg mechanism to work. Just moving the feet positions from the inside did nothing. His assumption that pressure sensors would drive the mechanism was wrong.
He had successfully detached the life-support pack from the back of the suit and placed it on the end of the trestle table when the communication system in the laboratory bonged for his attention.
"Can you meet me by the remaining buggy?" came Ekono's deep voice.
"Sure. Why?"
"Megan wants me to take you to the crystal hologram room."
"That seems...unlikely," he chuckled.
"Isa's team have not returned," said Ekono, almost worryingly calmly.
"When were they due back?"
"One and a half hours ago."
"That's not good. Why me? Megan said I'm not going on any expeditions for a while!"
"It could just be that something is wrong with their buggy or they are having difficulty opening one of the doors in this place. In either case, your expertise may be invaluable."
* * *
"This is the one," Aron announced as they pulled up at the door to the crystal hologram room.
"The door is already open!" replied Ekono, dropping neatly off the buggy the moment it stopped. Holding his sidearm ready, he jogged to the edge of the door and peered inside.
Aron switched off the two-seater buggy and joined him as quickly as he could. For this expedition, he had been issued with one of the L.E.O. handguns, complete with armour-piercing ammunition. The more serious weapon made him feel a strange combination of more secure yet more at risk.
"I can see the lights from our other buggy in there, but no activity," Ekono reported.
"I've got a data connection on the radio to L.E.O. Cohen but his bio-sensor data is blank. There's no connection to Isa or Margaux at all!"
"Okay, moving into the room," Ekono announced. "Stay behind me. Be ready to leave immediately if I say so."
"Will do," Aron replied, trying his best to sound business-like, hoping that would hide his nerves.
Ekono advanced quickly into the mostly dark chamber, sweeping his suit lights around quickly to establish what was present. Aron followed directly behind him at first but then veered off towards the four-seater buggy parked at forty-five degrees to the wall to the right of the doorway. He realised immediately that it was oddly positioned; too close to the wall to be able to reach the doorway without reversing first.
As he got closer, he discovered that the passenger-side headlamp, the one nearest the wall was damaged and only emitting a fraction of the light it should. That was when the crushing realisation hit him that the buggy was not parked. It had crashed into the wall, apparently caving in the left wing before coming to a halt.
His suit lights revealed an E.V.A-suited figure in the driver's seat, slumped over the compact steering wheel. While Ekono efficiently checked that the rest of the room was clear, Aron edged closer to the buggy, holding his handgun ready.
"Is the buggy driveable?" came Ekono's voice over the radio.
"Too early to tell," Aron replied. "Someone's still in it."
"I noticed that. This room's clear."
"It's L.E.O. Cohen!" announced Aron as soon as his suit lights illuminated the visor on the stationary figure.
Ekono attached his handgun to his suit's belt as he jogged closer to the damaged buggy. Aron's visor display still showed that no medical information was being received from L.E.O. Cohen's suit. Now standing directly beside the driver's seat, he looked up at the L.E.O.'s visor and did not like what he saw.
L.E.O. Cohen was leaning forwards onto the steering wheel, staring blankly ahead. His face was sunken and pale under the dim illumination inside his helmet. A blackened area near the centre of his chest turned out, on closer inspection, to be a charred hole right through his E.V.A. suit.
"He's gone and there's no trace of anyone else in the room," reported Ekono as he arrived at the damaged buggy.
"Where are Margaux and Isa?" Aron asked, looking briefly around the large room even though Ekono had just told him there was no-one there.
"There are a couple of crystals on the floor, but no damage to the room that I can see."
"Nothing seems to damage whatever this place is made from," replied Aron.
"I know you outrank me, Aron, but I strongly advise that we find out if this buggy is driveable and get out of here. There is clearly a hostile party in this area and we know nothing about their location or strength."
"They could come back," Aron replied.
"Exactly."
Aron walked quickly around the buggy to get a better impression of the damage. The front was in reasonable shape, needing little more than a new wing and a headlamp assembly, but the rear was a different matter. Both rear tyres had large holes scorched right through them, badly damaging the wheel hub in one case. The driver's side rear seat had two similar scorched holes through it, at least one of which had travelled on through the front seat and right through L.E.O. Cohen, E.V.A suit and all before punching a hole through the buggy's windscreen.
Ekono heaved the L.E.O.s lifeless form carefully onto the floor beside the buggy while Aron checked out the electrical systems on the buggy. Aron soon found that the motor in the damaged wheel hub was seized up and another seemed to have no power. The front wheel on the passenger side had sheared its steering linkage. He leant into the buggy from the passenger side and unclipped the tablet computer from the dashboard.
When they got back to the Arcadian, he should be able to pull enough data from the buggy's tablet computer to establish what had happened. For now, he decided it would be best to press the large, red button on the dashboard that would power-down the buggy, preserving its battery.
"Is it driveable?" asked Ekono as he dragged the L.E.O.'s body closer to the room's open doorway.
"No. You can only steer one wheel and one of the back wheels isn't going to turn at all. I can repair it but it's going to need parts and time."
"We might not have time," Ekono replied calmly. "Let's salvage what we can and get Officer Cohen back to the ship. Check the boot."
"What about Margaux and Isa?"
"We'll have to assume that whoever killed Officer Cohen has taken them as captives."
"We can't just abandon them!" Aron protested as he struggled to open the buggy's boot lid.
"Sir, we have an unknown enemy with weapons we are highly vulnerable to. Our first priority should be to let the rest of the crew know what happened here. If we go after Isa and Margaux and disappear like them, the Commander will have lost half her crew and still have no idea what's going on."
"You are right, but I don't like it," he nodded. "And I still can't get this boot lid to open. I can't see any damage and it's not even lockable."
"What is in there?"
"Spare oxygen bottles and maybe some crystals that Isa might have chosen to take back to the ship."
"We should not waste any time," Ekono urged, continuing to drag the body towards the door.
"It's okay, I've got it now...what!?"
Ekono dropped the corpse and immediately drew his sidearm. "What is it, sir?"
"It's Isa!"
"In the boot?"
"Isa, turn on your radio!" Aron shouted.
"She's alive?"
"She was holding the boot lid closed from the inside!"
Isa's icon appeared on Aron's visor display and then her voice came over the radio, "I'm alive. I thought you were them."
"Them?" queried Aron. "And how did you fit in there?"
"I genuinely don't know. I guess terror makes all the difference," she replied, clearly overjoyed to see them.
"Who did this?" asked Ekono.
Aron helped her unfold herself out the four-seater buggy's small boot.
"I don't know," she whimpered. "Someone or something new."
"Describe them," Ekono ordered.
"We didn't get much time to see them," Isa replied as she got to her feet.
"Please try," Ekono pushed.
"There were two of them, like washing-machine-sized boxes with long, metal arms balancing on a single large wheel. They entered the room silently behind us. We were too engrossed in recording the crystals. L.E.O. Cohen was sitting in the buggy near the door and he warned us on the radio that they had arrived, but they ignored him and headed straight for Margaux and me."
"They ignored him?" asked Ekono.
"Completely, but he didn't ignore them. He reversed the buggy right at them. He was shouting to us to get on board. The robots accelerated towards Margaux and me. That was then he told us they had guns."
"What were the robots trying to do?" Aron asked as she jumped down onto the floor.
"I don't know, but they looked very aggressive. I saw that one of them had some sort of energy weapon attached to its back on a third mechanical arm. It fired two shots at me, narrowly missing as I dived out of the way, then L.E.O. Cohen started shooting with his pistol. The robots seemed totally impervious."
"Did the bullets leave any damage?" Aron asked.
"I didn't see any, but I didn't hang around to check! L.E.O. Cohen reversed the buggy right into them and that didn't seem to bother them too much either. He pushed them backwards a way, almost knocked one of them over but they still turned around and then both of them started firing. That's when I realised they both had guns mounted on their backs."
"What happened then?" asked Ekono.
"We should get out of here," said Aron.
"I agree," replied Ekono. "Help me get Officer Cohen on our buggy."
Between them the three of them heaved L.E.O. Cohen's corpse onto the load carrier of the two-seater buggy. Isa continued to explain what had happened.
"While the robots were distracted with the buggy pushing into them and bullets bouncing off their faces, Margaux and I tried to climb onto the buggy."
"They had faces?" Aron asked.
"Not really, I suppose. There was a glass-covered area on the front, at the very top of their bodies where I assumed their cameras were."
"Seems a reasonable assumption," Aron replied putting three spare oxygen bottles in the back of the buggy too.
Ekono climbed on the open back to sit beside the corpse, leaving the two front seats free for Isa and Aron. They wasted no time climbing into those seats then Aron activated the electrical system and pulled away.
"I climbed into the front seat beside L.E.O. Cohen and Margaux partially climbed into the seat behind him. L.E.O. Cohen fired a few more shots and then accelerated hard away from the robots. During that time, I wasn't watching Margaux as I was concentrating on keeping low and not falling off the buggy."
"Do you know what happened to Margaux then?" Aron asked.
"She screamed, so I looked round to see if she was okay, but she was gone. As the buggy got further away, I could see her lying on the floor behind us. The robots had hit the wheels a few times too and the buggy was making a screaming sound."
"They wrecked both back wheels," added Aron.
"Did Officer Cohen do anything to go back for Margaux?" asked Ekono sternly.
"He didn't," she replied. "But there wasn't time and she might have been dead already. She wasn't moving at all. There wasn't much he could do. His gun wasn't working on them. He probably decided it was better to get some of the team out alive."
"And I won't get to debrief him to find out what his thought processes were," Ekono sighed.
"So why did the buggy crash into the wall?" Aron asked.
"L.E.O. Cohen got hit, I think. He cried out and stopped steering. I tried to reach across to help steer when he was hit again and the shot exploded through the windscreen. Seconds after that, the buggy smashed into the wall and I was thrown out and into the wall of the room."
"The robots didn't see you?" Aron asked.
"The buggy was between me and them. I crawled around to the back and somehow managed to squeeze myself into the boot and close the lid before the robots got there. I thought it was wise to switch off my suit radio system in case they could detect that. For a while, I heard them poking about, but they never opened the boot. I didn't think I was going to make it."
"Sir, I think you should put y
our foot down. We have company."