I heard her but didn’t respond. I was too busy staring out the door.

Before we entered the hallway, we’d been in a room that I might have described as a biosphere (except technically speaking it wasn’t spherical). This was bigger and though I hadn’t measured it, if I had to guess, it was bigger than the building appeared outside.

While that might mean some kind of Tardis-style “bigger on the inside” weirdness, it might also mean that the hall dropped below the surface in a nonobvious way as we walked.

Put simply, this room had its own lake.

It wasn’t a lake as in Lake Michigan—the kind of lake you can’t see across, has a coastline covering hundreds of miles, a major effect on local weather patterns, and a whole history of shipwrecks that people write books about.

This struck me more as an inland lake, the kind where someone would buy the land around it and build a campground, giving it a cringey, fake Native American name. I’d seen a few.

What it had in common with places like that was that the lake was big enough for waterskiing—though you’d go around it every twenty minutes at most.

It was free of campers, tents, and people except for us. Birds flew above the lake and as I watched, a fish splashed in the water.

“More terraforming fantasies,” Rachel said, walking toward the door. “There shouldn’t be any real dangers except maybe from an animal or two. The trap here will be in reverse engineering. If I’m right, there will be a village and a control center. Young species are supposed to go to the control center and copy the information. The fun begins when they start to use it.”

Marcus followed her in, “So like you said before with the terraforming equipment manufacturing viruses and stuff?”

Rachel stepped onto the grass and stopped, becoming a touch lighter in color, showing that she’d gone a touch out of phase, “Viruses, but also guiding their evolution, or even setting up circumstances that promote internal conflict like making some resources common in some places and rare in others. You know how that will go. Eventually, someone will decide to seize the resource.”

Shaking his head, Marcus said, “The Artificers were messed up.”

Rachel looked back at him as she took a step forward, “You haven’t seen the weapons caches.  They also fake war-ravaged outposts and place weapons in them that young species won’t be ready for. You know what’s funny? The Artificers push nuclear weapons, but we invented them without help.”

Holding her gun at the ready, Cassie stepped out the door to Rachel’s left, “Did any of you see movement in the trees across the lake? The gun tagged something for a second, but then it flickered out. Does Rocket tech get anything?”

Jaclyn stepped out and I followed her, shutting the door behind me. I could still feel the presence of its controls. If we had to get out, it would only take an instant for the door to open. I tested it by opening it halfway and shutting it.

Glancing back at me, Jaclyn said, “That was you, right?”

“Yes. Testing we could get out,” I said, but I was also reviewing the last few seconds of footage from my cameras to see if I’d missed something in the trees.

“Good,” Jaclyn said, “because I didn’t see anything.”

“Me neither,” I said.

Neither had anyone else.

“That doesn’t make me feel more secure,” Cassie looked over the trees again, pointing the gun from one side of it to another.

One of these days, I’d have to see if Cassie would be willing to let me figure out more about the gun’s systems.

“I agree,” Jaclyn appeared to be using her suit’s sensors on the edges of the forest and the lake, covering wherever Cassie’s mystery creature might have gone.

I decided that this might be a good time to test using “Artificer vision” on the off-chance that what Cassie had seen was something I could control, hoping this wasn’t one of the times where using it would endanger all of us.

Breathing deeply, I imagined pulling power into myself, regulating it by imagining a slow but steady draw.

While it might be nice to imagine that seeing the world through the eyes of creatures older than our universe would include at the very least new colors or the ability to see into the fourth dimension and thus time itself, I had no such luck. If my abilities had that potential, I couldn’t tell, possibly because they were being processed by the same old brain every Earth primate had its own variant of.

So there was no secret color, secret chord or anything special.

I did get a spot of blurry movement in the trees. Maybe a real Artificer would have seen it clearly, but I could see a shape. It was shaped like a bird, but didn’t move like one, reminding me of Rook’s bird-shaped drones, the ones I’d nicknamed “crowbots.”

I let go of Artificer vision to check my suit’s scanner and couldn’t find the crowbot. So, it was invisible and maybe using Artificer/Abominator-derived technology? That didn’t feel good.