[capnq]

Almost half a month passed before Milsu Sutre returned to the mysterious airlock. It had taken that long to get the Masters' skycity floating level again, and would have taken even longer if one of the salvage engineers hadn't thought of opening some of the buoyancy cells on the higher side, rather than repairing them all on the low side. The city had sunk another third of a kilometer, but the salvage workers could move around much more easily.

The Masters' city had not turned out to be the treasure trove that had been expected. There were surprisingly few artifacts left to claim; apparently the Masters had taken almost everything with them when they abandoned the city. Heavy equipment and other things that were too large to move had mostly corroded away as Jalwu's atmosphere leaked into the dome. The buildings had held up better than anything else, apparently built from materials that the atmosphere didn't affect much. Many of the investors in the salvage rights had resold them to cut their losses, and the remaining speculators were expecting smaller profits from selling settlement rights after the dome was repaired. Sutre had kept the rights to the shipyard section for himself, and hoped to eventually restore it to working order. The partially completed ship would probably have to be removed first, and he wasn't going to do that until he'd seen the inside.

He'd come better prepared this time, carrying an extra hydrogen tank so he could explore longer, and a cutting torch in case the airlock door had corroded shut. The manual release handle that he'd found Last time had already become discolored now that it was exposed. He grasped the handle with both hands and put all his weight into turning it. It moved more easily than he'd expected, and he could hear the clank of the latches disengaging even through his environment suit.

Sutre pushed against the inner door, and it swung open. He stepped through the opening and found himself in a corridor with an oddly low ceiling, less than three times his height. Perhaps it had been some kind of maintenance tunnel, but then why would it have an exterior airlock, rather than access doors from the interior? There was a door that nearly reached the ceiling opposite the airlock, and he could see similar doors on the inner wall in both directions. The door in front of him had a manual latch just above eye-level, like any normal door. It opened easily when he tried it.

Behind the door, Sutre found a rather small room with two notable features. Set into the wall was something that looked like an antique flat display screen, with an archaic data entry panel below it. In front of the screen was something that looked a little bit like a table, but with a long bent section sticking up almost vertically from one edge. The strange table was fixed to the floor, but he found that the horizontal surface pivoted. He could read most of the characters on the data entry keys, but some were marked with other symbols that meant nothing to him. There were obvious access panels on the wall to either side of the display, so Sutre opened both of them, but what was inside was barely recognizable as electronics components. He wondered whether it was possible that millenia-old circuits could still work, if he found a way to connect them to a power supply.