Now the sides of the shaft, or tunnel, or however he preferred to think of it, had become harder and more glossy—less like elephant hide and more like insect chitin. He shone his torch light ahead into the gloom, the beam sliding off the shining black surface. Then—just when it looked like it would end abruptly—the shaft jogged violently to the right. Fully suited, with the additional bulk of the thruster harness, it was an effort to squeeze round the bend—but at least the smooth-sided shaft would not snag his suit or rip away any vital component. He looked back and saw Norquinco following him, the other man’s slightly larger bulk making the exercise even less easy.
But now the shaft widened out, and after it intersected with another the going became even easier. Periodically Sky stopped and asked Norquinco to ensure that the line was spooling out properly and that the line was still taut, but the inertial compasses were still functioning properly, recording their movements relative to the entry point.
He tried the radio. “Gomez? Can you read me?”
“Loud and clear. What have you found?”
“Nothing. Yet. But I think we can say with some confidence that this isn’t the Caleuche. Norquinco and I must be twenty metres into the hull, and we’re still moving through what feels like solid material.”
Gomez waited for a few moments before answering. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No, not if we keep on assuming this is a ship like our own. I don’t think it is. I think it’s something else—something we definitely weren’t expecting.”
“Do you think it came from home—that it’s something they sent out after we left?”
“No. They’ve only had a century, Gomez. I don’t think that’s enough time to come up with something like this.” They slithered deeper. “It doesn’t feel like anything human. It doesn’t even feel like we’re inside a machine.”
“But whatever it is, it just happens to look exactly like one of our own ships from the outside.”
“Yes—until you get close. My guess is it altered its shape to mimic us; some kind of protective camouflage. Which worked, didn’t it? Titus . . . my father . . . he always thought there was another Flotilla ship trailing us. That was disturbing, but it could be explained by some event which had happened in the past. If he’d known there was an alien ship following us, it would have changed everything.”
“What could he have done about it?”
“I don’t know. Alert the other ships, perhaps. He would have assumed it meant us harm.”
“Maybe he was right.”
“I don’t know. It’s been out here an awfully long time. It hasn’t done much in all those years.”
Something happened then—a noise that they felt, rather than heard, like the sonorous clang of a very large bell. They were floating through vacuum so the reverberation must have been transmitted through the hull.
“Gomez—what the hell was that?”
His voice came through weakly. “I don’t know—nothing happened here. But you’re suddenly a lot fainter.”
After we had been descending for nearly two hours, I saw something below, far down the vertical pipeline.
It was a faint golden glow, but it was coming closer.
I thought about the episode I had just had. I could still taste Sky’s fear as he entered the Caleuche; hard and metallic like the taste of a bullet. It seemed very much like the fear I was feeling myself. We were both descending into darkness; both of us seeking answers—or rewards—but also knowing that we were placing ourselves in great danger, with very little idea of what lay ahead. The way the episode resonated with my present experience was chilling. Sky had gone beyond simply infecting my mind with images. Now he seemed to be steering me, shaping my actions to commemorate his own ancient deeds; like a puppeteer whose strings stretched across three centuries of history. I clenched my fist, expecting that the episode would have caused blood to gush from my hand.
But my palm was perfectly dry.
The inspection robot continued its clunking descent. Nothing that Quirrenbach had done lately had made the machine move any faster. It was unbearably hot now and I reckoned none of us would have survived more than three or four hours before dying of heat exhaustion.
But it was getting lighter.
I soon saw why. Below us, but coming closer now, was a section of pipeline walled in filthy glass. Quirrenbach made the machine rotate so that none of us were easily visible by the time the robot began to descend through the transparent section. I still had a good view of the dark chamber we were moving through, a cavernous room infested with looming curved machinery: huge stovelike pressure vessels connected by networks of shiny intestinal tubing and festooned with slender catwalks. Rows of mighty turbines stretched away across the floor like sleeping dinosaurs.
We had reached the cracking station.
I looked around, wondering at the silent vastness.
“There doesn’t seem to be anyone on duty,” Zebra said.
“Is this normal?” I asked.
“Yes,” Quirrenbach said. “This part of the operation more or less runs itself. But I’d hated to have picked the one day when there was someone on duty who noticed the three of us coming down.”
Many dozens of pipes, much like the one I was descending, reached to the ceiling, a wide circular sheet of glass spoked by dark metal supports, and then rammed through it. Beyond it was only a stained soot-grey fog, for the cracking station lay deep in the chasm and was usually covered by the mist. Only when the fog parted momentarily, cleaved open by the chaotic thermals which spiralled up the chasm’s side, could I see the immense sheer walls of planetary rock rising above. Far, far above was the antenna-like extension of the stalk, where Sybilline had taken me to watch the mist jumpers. That had been only a couple of days ago, but it felt like an eternity.
We were far beneath the city now.
The inspection robot continued its descent. I had expected that we would stop somewhere near the floor of the cracking chamber, but Quirrenbach carried us slowly below the turbine floor, into darkness again. Perhaps there was another chamber to the cracking station, below the one we had passed through. I managed to cling to this idea for a while . . . until I knew that we had descended much too far for that to be the case.
The pipe we were in reached completely through the cracking station.
We were going deeper still. The pipe made a few jogging changes of direction, almost threading sideways at one point, and then we were descending again. It was so hot now that it was an effort to stay awake. My mouth was so dry that just thinking of drinking a glass of cold water was too much like mental torture. Somehow I stayed conscious, however—knowing I would need clarity of mind when I arrived wherever the robot was taking me.
Another thirty or forty minutes, then I saw another light below me.
It looked like journey’s end.
“You too. Norquinco—check the . . .” But even as he said it, Sky directed his torch back up the shaft they had come down, and he could see how the previously taut line was now beginning to drift, as if it had length to spare. It must have been severed somewhere further up the shaft.
“Let’s get out now,” Norquinco said. “We haven’t come very far—we can still find our, um, way back.”
“Through solid hull? That line didn’t cut itself.”
“Gomez has cutting equipment on the shuttle. He can get us out if he knows where we are.”
Sky thought about it. Everything that Norquinco said was correct, and any right-thinking person would now be doing their utmost to get back to the surface. Part of him wanted to do that as well. But another, stronger part was even more determined to understand what this ship—if it was a ship—actually meant. It was alien; he felt utterly sure of that now—and that meant it was the first evidence of alien intelligence any human being had ever witnessed. And—staggering though the odds were—it had latched itself onto his Flotilla, finding the slow, frail arks in the immensity of space. Yet it had chosen
not to contact them, instead shadowing them for decades.
What would he find inside it? The supplies he had hoped to find aboard the Caleuche—even the unused antimatter—might be insignificant prizes compared to what really lay here, waiting to be exploited. Somehow or other this ship had matched velocities with the Flotilla, achieving eight per cent of lightspeed—and something made him certain that the alien ship had not found that in any way difficult; that achieving this speed had probably been trivially simple. Somewhere inside this worm-ridden solid black hull there had to be recognisable mechanisms which had pushed her up to her current speed, and which he might be able to exploit—not necessarily understand, he admitted that—but certainly exploit.
And perhaps, much more than that.
He had to go deeper. Anything less than that would be failure. “We’re carrying on,” he told Norquinco. “For another hour. We’ll see what we find in that time, and we’ll be careful not to get lost. We still have the inertial compasses, don’t we?”
“I don’t like it, Sky.”
“Then think about what you might learn. Think of how this ship might work—its data networks; its protocols; the very paradigms underpinning her design. They might be exquisitely alien; as far beyond our modes of thinking as—I don’t know—a strand of DNA is beyond a single-chain polymer. It would take a special kind of mind to even begin to grasp some of the principles which might be at play. A mind of unusual calibre. Don’t tell me you aren’t the slightest bit curious, Norquinco.”
“I hope you burn in hell, Sky Haussmann.”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
The inspection robot shunted itself into another branch of the pipe, just like the one where Quirrenbach had found it back on the surface. The hammering of the suction pads slowed, quietened and stopped, the maching ticking quietly to itself. We were in complete darkness and silence except for distant, thunder-like sounds of superheated steam roaring through remote parts of the pipe network. I touched the hot metal of the pipe with the tip of my finger and felt the faintest of tremors. I hoped that it didn’t mean there was a wall of scalding, thousand-atmosphere steam slamming towards us.
“It’s still not too late to turn back,” Quirrenbach said.
“Where’s your sense of curiosity?” I said, feeling like Sky Haussmann goading Norquinco forwards.
“About eight kilometres above us, I think.”
That was when someone slid back a panel on the side of the pipe and looked at all three of us as if we were a consignment of excrement someone had sent down from Chasm City.
“I know you,” the man said, nodding at Quirrenbach. Then he nodded once at me and once at Zebra. “I don’t know you. And I certainly don’t know you.”
“And I don’t know you from shit,” I said, getting my own word in before the man who had opened the pipe could get the edge over me. I was already heaving myself out of the robot, relishing the chance to stretch my legs for the first time in hours. “Now show me where I can get a drink.”
“Who are you?”
“The man asking you for a fucking drink. What’s wrong? Did someone seal up your ears with pig shit?”
He seemed to get the message. I’d gambled that the man wouldn’t be a major player in whatever operation was going on down here and that a large part of his job description would consist of taking abuse from visiting thugs a little higher up the food chain.
“Hey, no offence, man.”
“Ratko, this is Tanner Mirabel,” Quirrenbach said. “And this is . . . Zebra. I phoned through to say we were on our way down to see Gideon.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And if you didn’t get the message, that’s your fucking problem, not mine.”
Quirrenbach appeared impressed enough to want to join in. “That’s fucking right. And get the fucking man the . . . get the man the fucking drink he asked for.” He wiped a sleeve across his parched lips. “And get me one too, Ratko, you, er, fucking little cocksucker.”
“Cocksucker? That’s good, Quirrenbach. Really good.” The man patted him on the back. “Keep on taking the assertive-ness lessons—they’re really paying off.” Then he looked at me with what was almost an expression of sympathy, a professional-to-professional thing. “All right. Follow me.”
We followed Ratko out of the pipe room. His expression was difficult to read, since his eyes were hidden behind grey goggles sprouting various delicate sensory devices. He wore a coat patterned like Vadim’s, but of shorter cut, its patches a little less rough and more lustrous.
“So, friends,” Ratko said. “What brings you down here?”
“Call it a quality inspection,” I said.
“No one’s complaining about quality, that I hear of.”
“Then maybe you haven’t been listening too well,” Zebra said. “The shit’s getting harder and harder to track down.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really,” I said. “It’s not just the Fuel shortage. There’s a problem with purity. Zebra and I supply Fuel to a portfolio of clients all the way up to the Rust Belt. And we’re getting complaints.” I tried to sound menacingly reasonable. “Now—that could mean a problem somewhere in the chain of supply between here and the Belt—there are a lot of weak links in that chain, and believe me, I’m investigating them all. But it could also mean the basic product is getting degraded. Cut, watered, whatever you want to call it. That’s why we’re making this a personal visit, with Mister Quirrenbach’s assistance. We need to see that there’s still such a thing as high-quality Dream Fuel being manufactured in the first place. If there isn’t, someone’s been lying to someone else and there’s going to be more shit hitting the fan than in a Force Ten shitstorm. Either way, it’s bad news for someone.”
“Hey, listen,” Ratko said, holding up his hands. “Everyone knows there are problems at source level. But only Gideon can help you with the why.”
I threw out a line. “I hear he enjoys his privacy.”
“He doesn’t have much choice, does he?”
I laughed, trying to make it sound as convincing as possible, without understanding what I was laughing at. But the way the man with the goggles had said it, he obviously thought he had made a joke of some kind.
“No, I guess not.” I changed the tone of my voice, now that he and I had established some shaky grounds for mutual respect. “Well, let’s put our relationship on a more friendly footing, shall we? You can put my doubts about the immediate quality of the product to rest by providing me with—how shall we say—a small commercial sample?”
“What’s wrong?” Ratko said, reaching into his coat and handing me a small, dark-red vial. “Got high on your own supply once too often?”
I took the vial, Zebra passing me her wedding-gun. I knew I had to do it; that only Fuel would enable me to unlock the final secrets of my past.
“You know how it is,” I said.
Sky and Norquinco pushed onwards, always keeping a wary eye on the inertial compasses. The shaft branched and twisted, but the head-up displays on their helmets always showed their positions relative to the shuttle, together with the route they had so far followed, so there was no real possibility of getting lost, even if they might encounter obstructions on the way out. The route they had taken led more or less to the middle of the ship, and now they were heading roughly forward, towards where the command sphere should be. They had been carrying on for perhaps five minutes when there was another bell-like reverberation, as if the entire hull had been struck like a gong. It seemed fractionally stronger this time.
“That’s it,” Norquinco said. “Now we’re going back.”
“No, we’re not. We lost the line already, and we already have to cut ourselves out. Now it just means we have some more to cut through.”
Reluctantly now, Norquinco followed him. But something was changing. Their suit sensors were beginning to pick up traces of nitrogen and oxygen instead of hard vacuum. It was as if air were slowly building up inside the shaft; as if the two cl
angs they had heard had been part of some immense alien airlock.
“There’s light ahead,” Sky said when the air pressure had reached one atmosphere and begun climbing beyond it.
“Light?”
“Sickly yellow light. I’m not imagining it. It’s like it’s coming from the walls themselves.”
He turned off his torch light, ordering Norquinco to do likewise. For a moment they were in near darkness. Sky shivered, feeling again the old, never-entirely-vanquished terror of darkness which the nursery had instilled in him. But then his eyes began to adjust to the ambient illumination and it was almost as if they still had the torches on. Better, in fact, for the pale yellow light reached far ahead of them, revealing the tract of the tunnel for tens of metres.
“Sky? There’s something else.”
“What?”
“I suddenly feel like I’m crawling downhill.”
He wanted to laugh; wanted to put Norquinco down, but he felt it too. Something was definitely pressing his body against one side of the shaft. It was soft now, but as he crawled further (and now it really was a kind of crawling), it increased in strength, until he felt almost as if he was back aboard the Santiago , with her spin-generated artificial gravity. But the alien ship had been neither spinning nor accelerating.
“Gomez?”
The answer, when it came, was incredibly faint. “Yes. Where are you?”
“Deep. We’re somewhere near the command sphere.”
“I don’t think so, Sky.”