At the bottom of the shaft, thirty meters down, the light caught the gleam of bright red, orange, and yellow. Those were all warning colors, associated with hazards and safety. It might be an exit, so I swung over to another cable and started down. That was when I figured out something was really wrong with my left knee joint.

Five meters away I could make out pieces of a broken hatch or large seal striped with warning colors, that it was scattered on a pile of rubble above a cracked, partially caved-in surface. The stripes were an old kind of emergency/hazard marker paint, from before they made it able to send large data bundles to the feed and started using it for advertising. I scanned channels again, looking for a signal that might be very faint.

There it was. It was repeating, Warning: contamination in different languages. They were the Target languages, the Pre-CR ones that Thiago had assembled the translation module for.

My organic parts went cold. Oh, right. I’d found the original site of the alien remnant contamination.

Had the Targets who stuck me down here been hoping I’d be affected? Was I affected? I didn’t feel affected. I felt scared, and pissed off.

I also needed to get out of here. I started climbing back up, toward the light source.

I scanned for more warning stripes or marker paint that might indicate exits but I wasn’t picking up anything. Still no sign of any human prisoners, that was good. I made it all the way to the top, to where a temporary scaffold/platform had been installed to one side of the shaft, near the assembler’s interface housing. The light source was there, a self-contained safety globe attached to what was left of the hand rail. Parts of the platform had fallen off, but I was able to crawl along one of the assembler’s crane arms and then climb down to it.

I limped across the platform. This close, I could pick up the weak signal of the safety light’s warning, also repeating “caution” in multiple languages. I adjusted it to point up and saw the giant hatch overhead. There was fungal growth around the edges, that looked old and dried out. This area had probably originally been dug as a storage shaft for the Pre–Corporation Rim colony.

Had those colonists known what they were looking at when they found the remnant, or did they just know there was something freaky about it and that it was probably dangerous? The Adamantine colonists had stored their heavy equipment down here, after the supplies stopped coming and they hadn’t needed the assembler anymore, but had wanted to keep it safe just in case the abandonment was temporary. This shaft hadn’t been on the schematic of the surface dock, so this was probably under the other structure, the complex with the weird ribs that the alien remnant-contaminated Pre-CR colonists might have compulsively constructed before they all killed each other or melted or whatever.