He glanced at it. “Ah. Simple’s better. When people are panicked, they ain’t gonna remember a code. Red button closes the door. Green opens it. Flashing means that’s what it’s stuck on—closed. We don’t like to leave the green button pressed for longer than it takes to open the small door to the cooling chamber. Bots’ll come as soon as it’s open. They keep a watch on things and make sure a certain temp’s maintained in here, but it doesn’t matter much. Those lucole crystals can handle anything. Well, most anything. But it’ll take a week for the room to cool if the big door opens for longer than a few seconds, which makes it unpleasant for me.” He shrugged. “Beyond the smaller door is a cooling chamber. We’ll go through it when we exit.”

I turned around, staring back at the expanse of the room. The bots were back there, some watching us, but most keeping an eye on the room in general. I tilted my head to see a bit farther down the line of containers but could only see a few rows. Still, I just walked through the bay from one end to the other. This place was massive. I couldn’t believe…

“I’m sorry, but you said lucole?” There had to be hundreds of thousands of the round three-foot tall bins. “You can’t mean all of these are filled with lucole.”

“They sure are.”

That couldn’t be true. Even with all of SpaceTech’s greed for more, they didn’t need that much fuel. “But some of them are food or supplies or replacement parts for bots, right?”

“No, ma’am.” His eyebrows drew down. “Only lucole. That’s what we do here.” He considered me for a moment. “This is the main hold for the mining facility. Bay Four has some medical supplies, a good amount of food, various other necessary things, plus a bit of lucole. We usually ship out fuel to the colonies little bits at a time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But about three weeks ago, they shut down processing and started clearing out the bays. Lotta ships coming and going these days. Bay Five was finally emptied last week, and half of Bay Six has gone, too, but Bays Two, Three, and Seven are the same as this.”

I knew that it was a mining facility, but knowing it and seeing how much they were actually stockpiling were two different things. “But why do they need so much?” And why did they stop processing it? Why were they shipping so much out? I wanted to ask but didn’t want to start piling on too many questions at once.