Fifteen, sixteen … Suzi realised she was mouthing the numbers silently as the tekmercs emerged, and jammed her teeth together.
She switched inputs to the village cave sensors. The tekmerc’s reconnaissance disk darted nervously out of the passage, hovering above the first stair. A couple of the squad followed it, spinning out of the entrance in a fast, well-practised motion, crouching down, rip guns swinging in wide arcs.
The flatscreens in the middle of the village suddenly flared white, casting a wintry glow over the huts circling the podium. A star was erupting into a phosphorescent nebula with a dense arc-bright core.
Looked like the Co-Defence League’s kinetic missiles had snuffed the Dolgoprudnensky spaceplane. Clean and sweet.
Eight tekmercs were in the village cave. Four of them descending the staircase. Talbot Lombard stood on the top of the stairs, looking round in trepidation.
The first charges in the lake cave detonated. Suzi heard the explosion through her suit pick-up mike. The ground trembled.
A tekmerc was punched out of the passage by the blast-wave, somersaulting through the air. The pair holding on to Talbot Lombard lost their footing and went tumbling. Lombard landed heavily, mouth wide, screeching unheard torment.
‘Go,’ Melvyn said.
Suzi cancelled the optical sensor inputs, and headed forwards. The second set of charges in the lake cave went off. She wished they’d brought enough charges to bring the whole fucking roof down on the bastards. Would have made life a bloody sight easier.
She reached the mouth of the crack as the first glare flares ignited. Small nova-bright spheres soaring out of shoulder launchers on the tekmercs’ suits, swarming like a miniature galaxy above the village. Black overload spots ruptured right across her photon-amp image.
Tekmercs were coming out of the lake cave passage so fast that for one moment she thought they were equipped with jetpacks again. They were diving for cover, behind troughs, into crannies. The crash team opened fire, rip gun bolts slamming out from the walls, furious dazzle streaks that boosted the light intensity to a near-universal glare sheet. Her photon-amp image dimmed alarmingly, greying out to protect her retinas. She saw the bone-dry huts catch fire as a sleet of glare flare embers rained down. A tekmerc was speared by two rip gun bolts, disintegrating into a jarred purple corona of ionized molecules. Her pick up mike had cut out, she could feel the suit vibrating from the sonic battering. The energy pouring into the cave had turned the air into a cloying orange haze, fast gusts were roaring past her down the crack as the pressure build up escaped into cooler areas. Temperature displays were flashing amber caution warnings. The suit’s heat exchanger was already operating near its safety margins, and she was partially sheltered. It wouldn’t take long before heat alone snuffed the tekmercs.
Activate Weapons Suite.
Target graphics materialized over the burning huts, graded scarlet circles. She brought the rip gun round. Dark, humanoid figure running with inhuman speed, spitting starpoints of intolerable light. Framed by red circles. Her rip gun discharged short beams of solid sunlight, the muscle armour thrumming as it compensated for the jackhammer recoil. She wiped the segmented line across the fleeing figure, watching the suit outline crumble.
Then her reflexes were automatically flattening her back against the rock. ‘Shoot and shift,’ Greg had told her, down in Peterborough and a long time ago. ‘Stasis is death.’
A fusillade of tekmerc rip gun bolts chewed the mouth of the crack. Molten rock sprayed out.
‘Dennis, where’s Reiger?’
He was crouched down, firing up at the staircase. ‘I can’t …’ His voice dissolved into a roar of static as the tekmercs cranked up their ECM. He jumped back fast as lava pebbles splattered his suit.
‘Shit!’ she screamed.
There was a lull in the firing. The air in the cave was choked with glare flares. All they had to do was wait until the tekmercs ran out of chaff.
One of the crash team up above the Solaris spots opened fire with his plasma carbine, pulses jabbing down and splashing open against the floor, violet ripples expanding on the edge of visibility. Two pulses hit an armour suit, flinging it into the air, spinning madly; its legs were missing. Tekmercs answered with a deluge of rip gun bolts from around the cave.
It was a knock-on effect. Every bolt revealed someone’s location. The crash team fired on exposed tekmercs who shot back.
Melvyn ordered a round of airbuster grenades into the cave. They exploded five metres above the ground in a blaze of ragged plasma, lightning tendrils lashing down, grounding out through tekmerc armour suits.
Suzi squeezed off a couple more bolts. One of them catching a tekmerc head on. Total detonation. This time there was no return fire.
The ECM jamming blanket ended abruptly.
‘Suzi? You OK, girl?’ Dennis asked.
‘Yeah. No problem. Snuffed two. Can you spot Reiger for me?’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Did any of them get out?’ Melvyn demanded.
‘Isaac here, chief. Thought I saw two of them make it to Dean’s cave.’
‘Dean? Dean, respond please.’
‘One was heading for Neil’s cave, chief.’
‘Snuffed him,’ Neil called.
‘Dean, respond.’
The glare flares were definitely thinning out. She saw explosions away on the other side of the cave, orange fireballs splattering against the rock.
‘Robbie, Lilian, get a reconnaissance disk down Dean’s cave fast,’ Melvyn ordered.
Another bout of rip gun bolts ricocheted round the cave. More explosions smothered the rock opposite her. This time she caught the black darts flicking through the air before the blasts.
‘Hey, the pricks are using missiles,’ she cried.
The pump casing was torn open, glowing metal fragments whirling away. A narrow jet of water fountained horizontally out of the rock wall above the pool; chunks of rock flaked away from the gash that had opened, skittering along the blackened smouldering moss. New cracks multiplied across the wall with frightening speed.
‘Take out those fucking missile launchers,’ Melvyn shouted.
Tekmerc rip gun bolts mauled the wall, splintering the rock, concussion clawing the cracks apart. Two more spouts of water gushed out. A third formation of missiles impacted.
Suzi knew the rock wall was going to collapse under that kind of onslaught. ‘Dennis, where is that fucker?’ She had to fight against crushing the rip gun butt she was wired so hot.
‘Left of the stairs, behind a trough.’
She swivelled like something mechanical. Five possible troughs. Infrared was no use, the whole cave still crawled with energy. The rip gun smashed the first trough apart. There was nobody behind it.
Then the rock wall shattered.
38
The first cave was a small one, with a single red-tinged biolum globe jammed up between the saw-teeth rock snags of the roof. Rosy light made it seem warmer than it was. Someone had hacked a circular depression in the floor, four metres across; it was full of some transparent gel with a tough flexible plastic sheet stretched across the top.
Greg tested it with his hand, and watched a sluggish ripple ride across to the other side. Eleanor would like to hear about this, she adored waterbeds. He smiled furtively, wondering what she was doing right now. New London was on Greenwich Mean Time, which meant they would have finished the day’s picking by now. She would probably be sitting outside by the camp’s range grill, supervising the evening meal.
The clump of Teresa’s boots as she climbed down out of the crack broke his train of thought.
‘Tol,’ Sinclair called. ‘Tol, me boy. You’re all right, ’tis only me.’ He looked at the other two openings in the cave walls, and grimaced ruefully. ‘Ah, well. I was hoping the lad would be down here. Your tin men, they won’t be going shooting at civilians, now will they?’
‘No,’ Greg said. ‘If he does wander back into the village cave, he
’ll be quite all right.’
‘That’s fine, then. He’s a good lad.’
Julia and Rick were already down in the cave, Jim Sharman was bringing up the rear. Julia ignored the gel bed.
‘Where now?’ she asked.
Sinclair pointed to one of the openings. ‘This one. It goes into one of our storage caves.’
‘Carlos,’ Greg said. ‘Lead out.’ He could hear faint whines and thuds coming along the crack to the village cave. Melvyn getting ready. He wished Suzi had come with them.
The passage sloped downwards. Greg watched the rock grow darker, from burnt ochre at the entrance to a deep slate-grey; it was harder, too, more brittle. Almost like flint, he thought.
By the time they reached the store cave his breath had become a white mist. There was a sprinkling of hoarfrost on the walls. It was a small cave, barely more than a wider section of the passage, with an uneven floor. A rough lash up of metal shelving stood along one side. Composite cargo pods were stacked opposite them, the names of various shops and New London civil administration departments stencilled next to long bar codes. There was a weak vinegar smell coming from the apples and plums on the shelves. The globes of fruit were large, gene-tailored, their skins crinkling.
Carlos walked past the end of the shelves, helmet lights picking up the thicker rime covering the rock.
‘This is it?’ Greg asked Sinclair. ‘The drone was here?’
‘That’s right, Captain Greg.’
‘Dead end,’ Carlos said.
‘You knew that,’ Julia said. ‘And you still brought us down here.’ Her mind boiled with weary frustration.
‘ ’Tis what you wanted,’ Sinclair said sullenly.
‘It’s all right,’ Greg said. They were in the right place, he would have known otherwise. There were levels of intuition, and this seemed to be the most intangible, yet perversely the most resolute. He reckoned that if he shut his eyes and started walking he would wind up standing beside Royan and the alien. Close, it was close now.
‘Wait there,’ Greg told Carlos. He ordered up a secretion, the neurohormones acting like a flush of icy spring water in his brain. His thoughts seemed to lift out of time as he walked down the cave towards Carlos, mind flicking methodically through the impressions of his sensorium, searching for evidence of Royan, that unique spectral imprint his soul discharged in its wake.
The rock walls beyond the shelves were lined with small holes and slender zigzag clefts. Tiny splinters had flaked away where water had penetrated hairline cracks and expanded as it froze; the result was as if someone had taken a chisel and meticulously chipped a million pock scars into the walls.
There was a horizontal gash, about four metres long, varying between half a metre and a metre wide, level with Greg’s head. He stood squinting into it, listening to the silence it exuded. The alien’s siren song. ‘Bring some of those pods over here,’ he said.
‘You can’t be expecting me to go in there,’ Sinclair said as Greg stood on the pods and shone his torch into the gash. It was flat for about five metres, then angled upwards. ‘ ’Fraid so. It must get wider past that slope. Carlos, can a suit get in there?’
Carlos sent a fan of green laser light into the gash from his shoulder sensor module. ‘Tight fit, but we can get through.’
‘Any electronic activity in there?’
‘No.’
Nerves fluttered back to hound him as Greg levered himself into the gash. It had an uncomfortable resemblance to a pair of lips, plates of the mouth waiting to bite down.
Stop it!
He lay on his back, and shifted his buttocks sideways, shuffling towards the slope at the rear. His breath was melting the hoarfrost on the rock above him, tiny beads of oily water flowing into droplets that fell onto his face.
When the floor began to lift he stopped and shone his torch up. It seemed to be some kind of kink in the gash, rising up a couple of metres, then levelling out. Growing narrower, though, maybe two metres long at the top. Sighing, he began to work his way up.
He could tell there was a cave just beyond the top of the kink. The air had the right deadness for an empty space, sucking up sounds. Exertion was leaving a layer of sweat all over his skin which would quickly turn clammy cold as the suit’s shunt fibres kicked in and drained the heat out. The temperature palpitation was bloody irritating.
There was a shelf at the top of the slope. He rested on it, and shone his torch into the cave. The ledge was about two metres long, ending abruptly. All he could see were the nondescript curves and angles of more dark grey rock. It was too much effort to wrestle his hood into place and use the photon amp, so he inched over to the lip and shone his torch straight down. The floor was a metre below. He swung his legs out.
This cave was much smaller than any the Celestials used. He prowled round it as the others squirmed their way out of the gash. There was very little frost on the walls.
‘Where now?’ Rick asked. There was no scepticism in the big man’s tone. He had accepted Greg’s talent as genuine. Even Jim and Carlos had no qualms, but then, three of their team mates were sac psychics.
Greg led them on, down a passage whose walls slanted over at thirty degrees. Selection was automatic. Seductive whispers in his mind.
They walked for about two hundred metres. In one place the walls and floor contracted, forcing them to crawl on all fours for five metres. Then Carlos said his sensors were picking up magnetic patterns ahead.
‘Can you identify them?’ Greg asked.
‘It’s a single structure containing several processors, power circuits, and some kind of giga-conductor cell.’
‘The drone,’ Greg said.
‘Could be.’
It was waiting for them in the next cave. A dull-orange oblong box, with a wedge-shaped front, a metre and a half long, seventy centimetres wide. There was a sensor cluster at each corner, two matt-black waldos folded back along the sides. He saw a small triangle and flying-V printed on one side near the rear.
‘Its sensors are active,’ Carlos said. ‘It’s seen us.’
‘Any datalink transmission?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hello, Snowy,’ the drone said. It was Royan’s voice all right, or at least a pretty good synthesis.
Julia let out a muffled gasp. There was a powerful burst of emotion from her mind – anger, but mostly worry.
‘Greg, thanks for coming,’ said Royan. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down. You never do. Good job, too. The alternative would have been dire all round.’
‘What alternative?’ he asked.
‘Clifford Jepson.’
‘You do know about atomic structuring, then,’ Julia said.
‘Yes. There’s no such thing.’
‘What?’
‘I have a lot to say, a lot to show you. And you’re not going to thank me, Snowy. Not for what I’ve done. Sorry.’
The drone’s six independently sprung tyres made easy going of the bumpy rock floor. Greg and Julia followed it, the others close behind. He was painfully aware of the conflicting thought currents in Julia’s mind: guilt, relief, and that consistent fiery thread of anger, compressed so tightly it was almost hatred. Flipside of love. He knew there was nothing he could say. They would have to sort that out for themselves.
And he liked both of them; he and Eleanor, Julia and Royan, they’d all been through hell and golden days together. Not exactly the happy reunion he’d been anticipating at the start.
They turned a corner, and saw a blue-green light at the end of the passage. The air was a lot warmer. Long tongues of glaucous fungal growth were probing along the passage walls. It wasn’t a true fungus, he decided when they drew level with the tips of the encrustations, it was too wet, too solid.
‘Is this your disseminator plant?’ Greg asked the drone.
‘One version. Its internal structuring was quite successful. It’s flexible and fast growing, but it couldn’t operate in a vacuum. I was thnking of using it to bore out l
iving accommodation similar to the southern endcap complex.’
The cave which the passage opened out into was a perfect hemisphere, completely covered in the plant; there were five equidistantly spaced semi-circular archways piercing the walls. A line of bulb-shaped knobs protruded from the wall at waist height, glowing with a soft light. When Greg touched a wall, he felt the growth give slightly below his finger; it had the texture of a hard rubber mat. Yet to look at it could have been a polyp, it had that same minute crystalline sparkle. Something poised in the gap between vegetable and mineral, then.
It gave off the most unusual psychic essence. Of waiting. Endless, eternal waiting. He felt an age here that made the centuries of human history fleetingly insignificant.
‘When did you grow this?’ he asked.
‘About a fortnight ago.’
He recognized it then: affinity with the origin microbe; drifting halfway across the galaxy in frozen stasis. A second eternity orbiting Jupiter, a life stretched beyond endurance.
Greg shivered inside the dissipater suit.
The drone trundled straight into one of the tunnels. The plant here was slightly different; a marble-like band ran along the apex, radiating a phosphorescent blue light; wide flat blisters mottled the walls. After twenty metres the tunnel began to curve, rising upward in a long gentle spiral.
‘Well, look at all this,’ Sinclair said. ‘Right beneath us the whole time, and we never even knew. You’ve been a busy lad, young Royan.’
Julia’s head was thrust forward, mouth bloodless. God help a granite stalagmite that got in her way, Greg thought.
‘The gaps already existed when I came here,’ said Royan. ‘The disseminator plant modified this section of the fault zone for me. But there’s nowhere to shove processed rock, so it just redistributed the space available. Reamed out the centre, and filled in the edges, so to speak.’
‘Did you manage to refine the metals and minerals out?’ Greg asked.
‘Some, yes.’
The blisters were becoming darker. Crisper, too, Greg reckoned; they could even have been dead. A faint tracery of black veins was visible under their delicate cinnamon skin.