Lithium City Blues: TerraCorp Visit

    I pulled my beat-up sedan into the Visitor's Parking spot pointed out by the guard at the front gate.  I unclasped my shoulder holster and pulled it off my chest, gun and all, shoving the whole thing into the glove compartment before opening the door.  They would have let me carry it in, I had the permits for it, but it added a level of complexity to a situation that didn't need anymore.  The gun made people nervous.  That's why i carry it.  But it was only useful in getting information if I show I'm willing to use it, and roughing up a bunch of scientists wasn't going to get me anywhere helpful.
    I climbed out and lowered the car door again, reaching up to fix my collar before turning towards the sidewalk. He was waiting for me.  He was a tall man, cleanshaven and with close cropped hair, wearing glasses like it was some kind of mark of his profession.  The labcoat gave it away, along with the laminated TerraCorp ID that hung from the breast pocket.  Dr. Mullholand Dermott.
    "Mr. Mercereaux, I'm glad you could make it."
    "I'm glad you invited me.  It'll help my investigation to know what kind of work Mrs. Gaines was doing."
    Mullholand's answer was slow, downcast.  "Yes, she was an excellent colleague"  His tone told me it had been more then that, but I didn't press the issue.  The thought conjured up old memories and images of her.  They were faint, disjointed, hard to sort out.  It had been such a long time...
    "I hope It's not a bad time.  I won't be long, I just wanted to get a look at her workstation, maybe any documents she was working on."
    The young doctor nodded.  "Certainly, come right this way."  He gestured towards the smoked glass edifice of the TerraCorp Research and Quality Assurance Labs.  Like everything TerraCorp built, it was an order of magnitude nicer and more expensive then any similiar building nearby.  Hell, probably on the planet.  From what I could get from the breif Zak threw together for me, this is where the data from digger probes and surface sensors went to be looked at by other scientists like Dermott, analyzed, then reported on and archived for future reference.  It had been the workplace of Katlyn Gaines for almost a year and a half, but you wouldn't know it to look at the place.  TerraCorp had simply reassigned her projects to another lab tech, then locked the door to her office until someone could go through it and clear it out.  That was TerraCorp for you.  Damned efficient, and damned impersonal.  But I guess you can't fault them for it.  Without the mine, the city dies, so they don't exactly have time to sit around and wait for next of kin.
    The lobby was bigger then my apartment, but it was hard to tell the exact size thanks to the nuetral colors on the wall and strange, curvy architecture that made it impossible to measure any two points with accuracy.  Behind the receptionist desk sat a young woman with a pinstripe suit and golden brown hair caught up in a ponytail.  He pink-glossed lips moved a mile a minute as the phone in front of her rang non-stop.  She looked up at me as I entered, then down at her desk, her eyes scanning something while her mouth continued to move at breakneck speeds.  She looked up at me again and nodded a greeting, lifting a temporary ID card from her desk and laying it out for me on the perfectly clear glass desk.  I took it and attached the clip to a pocket, glancing down to make sure it fit right.
    The paperwork took only a minute.  A signed contract told me what I already knew. Anything I find in here is sensitive information, and if I tell anyone about it, I can look forward to hearing from their lawyers, which meant I'd be better off getting aced by a security team.  Same outcome, less waiting.  Any and all documents or files i found and intended to use as evidence had to be picked over by the execs first, etc etc yadda yadda yadda.  I'd done this kind of work before.  Tracked down a rogue corporate manager to a little tropical island once.  Though it wasn't foul play as the client suspected.  The guy was on vacation with his new girlfriend.  His wife was understandably upset.
    I wasn't about to argue.  I'd almost spit out my morning coffee when Zak told me there was a message from the TerraCorp office inviting me to see the place Katlyn had worked.  The invite came from the V.P. of Operations, but I doubted seriously I would be meeting him in the flesh, just like I doubted seriously he would have let me in of his own accord.  Someone high up must have pulled a string, someone higher then Mullholand.  Mechanically speaking it didn't matter who it was, but I found myself wondering who it was and what their motives were.  Mostly becuase I figured it was a good bet that the man or woman who had opened a door for my investigation was on the low end of my suspects list, which at this point was sparse and almost entirely hypothetical.
    The receptionist took the clipboard from me and looked it over with a precise, professional expression.  She nodded, apparently satisfied, and set the clipboard down.  Pivoting in her chair, she turned to her computer terminal, extending her arms and typing something on the ergonomic keyboard with the speed of a machinegun spitting lead.  On my badge, a small chip in the lower left corner turned green.  This meant I could use it to move about the complex and open doors I had been cleared for, and would allow me to interface with the buildings A.A.P to find my way.  I figured Doctor Mullholland would be my constant companion anyhow, but again, I wasn't going to raise a fuss.  Besides, another pair of eyes would be welcome, even untrained, and I'd get a lot of background information and analysis that I wasn't going to get otherwise.
    Doc Mullholland gestured towards a pair of double doors and I fell into step behind him.  As we approached, there was a soft beeping as our badges were scanned and the door swung open to let us pass into about what I expected to see.  Sterile glass, concrete, and linoleum formed a short hallway that connected to the main ring of the lab.  We walked slowly, my shoes squeaking on the floor.
    "Looks smaller from outside..."  I observed as we turned right and stepped up to a row of maglev carts.  Mullholland nodded as he swiped his ID.  One cart came to life and began to hover, awaiting passengers.
    "From outside, it is smaller.  About halfway across, the facility slopes down into the ground, and most of the facility is underground."
    I chuckled.  "Appropriate" I mused, earning a smile from Mullholland.  I hopped up on the cart after Mulholland, taking my place in the passenger seat.  With a keystroke by Mulholland, the cart lurched forward soundlessly. 
    Mullholand elobarated.  "Most of the tests and experiments we run here requrie conditions similar to what you'd encounted in the mines.  Rather then try to adapt the surface buildings to the right pressure and such, we just built the facility underground."
    "But Doc, whereever did you get the digging equipment?"  I asked with a wry grin and a voice filled with mock suprise.  Other people in labcoats walked along the pedestrian hallway, and if it weren't for the labcoats I might have mistaken the place for a subway station with all the activity.  Some carried breifcases or portfolio cases, others were engrossed in electronic pads in their hands.  One young woman was paying so much attention to what she was reading, that she bumped into a man walking in front of her.  She blushed furiously and aplogized before darting into the crowd, out of my sight.  The labs were concrete and glass mostly, like the outside of the building, and as nears as I could tell from reading the placards on the doors, the top section was devoted to studying surface factors, a different section for soil, water, and plants.  I caught sight of a small hydroponic garden in one of the labs before the walkway inclined downward.  The cart stayed horizontal, but the sudden change in direction caught me a bit off guard.
    Mullholand spoke as we leveled out.  "This is our Shallow Core level.  We keep tabs on what's happening in the top-most tunnels and make sure the supports are holding up."  We passed a glass window that looked into a room that could have been a lecture hall, where rows and rows of researchers and computer terminals faced big screens that displayed various statistics about the status of the mine. "We monitor pressure, oxygen, temperature, seismic activity... if a groundhog got into the mine, we'd know how much it weighs."
        I gave an appreciative whistle and nodded.  The foot traffic down here was a bit lighter, but there were still plenty of people moving back and forth through the massive corridor flanked by offices and labs.  We continued along the ring of the facility, passing other labs, one marked simply "SOIL" and lined with long metal tables which held potted plants under a sunlamp suspended from the ceiling.  One scientist was bent over one of the plants with what looked like a turkey baster.
    We continued on past more concrete and glass until finally the floor angled down again, but this time I was ready for it, and managed to keep my seat without the sudden jolt I'd suffered the first time.  As we descended down another level, i started to feel the change in temperature and humidity.  Small beads of sweat formed on my eyebrows and forehead as the moist air clung to me as our cart continued to move, smooth and soundless.  The air got a little stale, and I had to adjust my breathing just a bit to get used to it.
    "And finally, Deep Core"  Mulholland announced like a tour guide.  "This is where we bring the core samples collected by the digger probes, and use them to figure out where the big pockets of ore are, and where to dig next."
    The lighting in this section was paler then the upper levels, chemical lighting if I had to guess.  Glass bulbs probably didn't do so well with the slightly increased pressure this far down.  We passed a lab with long racks of metal tubes about as big around as a manhole covers, the samples I guessed.  A big robotic arm slid around the lab suspended from the ceiling, scanning the labels on the canister, then grabbing it in steel fingers and hauling it over to feed it into a big hexagonal machine, all under the supervision of a dour-looking tech.  I sympathized.  I'd only been down here a few minutes and I was already uncomfortable.  This guy probably put in 8 to 10 hours a day.
        "And how many writeups do you have to have on your file to get sent down here?"  I asked as we floated along past another large lab, this one had one whole wall dedicated to massive display screen that showed the shafts and clearings of the mine, like a giant antfarm.  It was marked with red X's in some places and blue squares in others, while other whole sections where shaded in rounded, oblong, blobby shapes.