Analog SFF, July-August 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “You don't have to apologize."

  “I can't pay you now. I will, though."

  She was leading and he couldn't see her expression, but he sensed the discouragement in her voice. The Belt was always a rough place, but this had to be especially hard on someone so young.

  “As I recall,” he said, “my payment was five percent. Five percent of nothing is nothing. You're paid in full."

  His grin faded when she didn't answer.

  They entered into the grove of rock needles. She paused and gazed at the jointed stalks. Then she faced the legend scribbled in chalk on the wall.

  “'Aladdin's Palace,'” she read. “Right out of the book. Which tells you all you need to know about dad's problem and mine. We expect life to match fantasy. But there's no buried treasure here."

  “Was there one in Tom Sawyer's cave?"

  "Tom Sawyer!" she said, as if spitting.

  Roger felt as if the vacuum were echoing the silence. Finally, he said, “You know, you traveled millions of kilometers. You can't just turn back."

  “Of course not. I don't have money for a return trip."

  “Grady can help you get a job with CM."

  “Work as a miner? That won't make enough to help my father."

  “We'll come back here and search some more, all right? You won't give up without a fight, will you?"

  She swung around and met his eyes. In her gaze, it seemed, a fire had been kindled with that one remark.

  "No," she said. “That's what Becky Thatcher would do. Weep and moan and say something insipid like, ‘I do declare that we are doomed without any hope of respite whatsoever!’”

  He chuckled at her squeaky caricature.

  “You said she was Tom Sawyer's girlfriend. He was attracted to that?"

  “In the nineteenth century, men liked their women as delicate flowers."

  “Well, in this century, we like our women strong. Not disagreeable, mind you, but a little backbone is appreciated!"

  She struggled, but a grin at last curled her lips. “All right.” She allowed Roger to come alongside, and they walked together. He was still working up the courage to ask her to dinner when she said, “To answer your question. Yes. There was a treasure in Tom Sawyer's cave. It was hidden by the villain, Injun Joe, and Tom and Huck discovered it."

  "Injun Joe?"

  “Twain was commenting on the racial attitudes of the times. Injun Joe was simply a product of societal rejection and.... “She saw the glaze on his face. “Sorry. I guess there's a little of the literature teacher in me, too."

  “The treasure. How'd they find it?"

  “It was buried under what Twain called ‘the mystic symbol’ of a cross, that Injun Joe had drawn on the wall. And don't bother looking. The moment we came down here and I saw the first chalk marks, I've looked for a cross."

  “Well, I can't recall any—"

  With a chill, Roger felt the rocks behind him crying out. He whirled and stared at the writing in chalk.

  AREA 1. AREA 2. Crystalarium/FAC.

  "'Crystalarium,’” he said.

  “What about it?"

  “It's the only word not in capital letters."

  “So?"

  “The ‘t.’”

  “Oh God! Dad's sense of humor!"

  They pounced upon the rubble beneath the fifth letter. There was no sign of treasure at first, but Roger was ready to dig to the core of the small world, if necessary.

  He was too engrossed to notice the brief tremor.

  * * * *

  Black sky and parched landscape had never looked so cheerful as Roger descended from the cave mouth and plopped the chest onto the crater plain.

  “Too heavy for regolith, that's for sure."

  Rebecca twisted the padlock. “I don't have a key."

  “I'll get my cutters."

  Roger rounded the cliffs. His heart gushed, and it was hard to keep from jumping like a jackrabbit.

  He expected to find his flivver parked in the clearing. In the vehicle's place, however, was a crater he didn't remember. Nearby rested a charred tangle of metal. It took a moment for the causal relationship to sink in.

  He sprinted back to the cave entrance. Rebecca and the treasure chest were still there. A few meters away stood a figure garbed in a bulky space suit. The gloves of the suit clenched a rifle.

  “Stand next to her!” a voice growled in Roger's earphones.

  The rifle was a late-model Kleister, popular with the local constabulary. Eying the bulging clip of explosive-tipped, rocket-propelled shells, Roger sidestepped over to Rebecca.

  A hand lifted a helmet visor. Mel Barrow smirked at Roger.

  “You're betraying my father!” Rebecca said. “He offered you a partnership!"

  “That was a lie, Little Becky,” Mel said. “Your father kept this mine a secret. I found out where it was on my own."

  "How?"

  “Saw a robot in Alphaville one day, wearing a straw hat, loading wine bottles into a storage unit. Had ‘Tom’ on its nameplate. Not too hard to connect to Alberto. So I followed it here."

  Rebecca's expression hardened. “And you were the one who got my father arrested, weren't you?"

  “Becky, really. Why would I do that?"

  “To keep the government from investigating you. You stole the equipment from the government nanotech facility, and then you accused my father of the crime!"

  “Becky, I was too late. Someone stripped the place clean before I got there. Think I'd live in that hole if I had any money? All I found was Engine Joe."

  "Engine Joe?” Roger asked.

  Mel chuckled. “Alberto would appreciate my humor more than you will."

  He pointed a remote control toward the cliffs. Something stirred in the shadows. Roger felt cold and breathless.

  A dirty ovoid, towering three meters tall, emerged upon spiderlike legs, tentacles whipping.

  “Class One Autonomous Excavator,” Roger said slowly, finding it hard to enunciate through numb lips and a suddenly dry mouth.

  “Reprogrammed as my watchdog,” Mel replied. “Not too bright, though. Tore apart poor Tom and Huck before I could download their memories. Now, move from the chest, or he might get excited again."

  Roger and Rebecca retreated from the chest. Mel aimed the remote, and the excavator bowed toward the padlock. Out of its head grew spikes that looked capable of slicing and dicing a Kodiak bear. The spikes twirled into a blur. The padlock fell with a cascade of sparks.

  “Mel,” Roger said. “Let Rebecca keep a share. Her father needs—"

  “Ever hear the story of the djinn imprisoned in a bottle for two thousand years?” Mel's eyes held pinhead pupils above an ear-to-ear grin. “First thousand years. Swears he'll grant every wish of the person who frees him. Second thousand, swears he'll kill the person for taking so long. Get the picture? I've spent too many years buried alive in a frozen pit, searching for that treasure!"

  “You can't blame Rebecca for your own—"

  "Open it!"

  Roger lifted the lid. He backed away at a gesture from Mel's rifle.

  Mel stared into the chest. A deep scowl creased his face, from contorted mouth to pulsing temples.

  "What kind of joke is this?"

  He yanked out one of the bottles and threw it hard. Blobs of inky black exploded and flowed in rivulets against the cliffside. The sight transfixed Roger, until he noticed Mel's glare upon him.

  "Think this is funny?"

  Mel thumbed the remote. Engine Joe's lenses trained on Roger.

  “Please!” Rebecca cried. “We don't know where the platinum is!"

  Mel, Roger realized, wasn't looking in the right direction—or the mixer would have known. Roger saw no reason to enlighten him. The rage in Mel's face said that even with the treasure, he wouldn't allow them to live.

  The excavator backed Roger into a cleft. Roger attempted a dodge. Tentacles slapped him center. Spinning spikes approached his helmet plate.

  “Stop
it!” Rebecca shouted.

  Her hand dove into the handbag. She withdrew a pistol, a nine-millimeter automatic. Extending a shaking arm, she targeted Mel.

  Mel guffawed. “Little girl, this suit is special. Armored against micrometeoroids. I don't know who sold you that Earth toy, but out here it's—"

  Rebecca's gun flashed. The recoil slammed her backward. The slug struck Mel's shoulder. It glanced off his armor, but the momentum knocked him from his feet.

  Roger jumped, somersaulting over the excavator's head. Rebecca emptied her ammo clip. Mel stopped flinching. He had dropped the remote but still held his rifle.

  Grabbing Rebecca's arm, Roger sprinted into the cave mouth just as a new crater pocked the cliff wall.

  Roger ran so fast, his body forgot gravity. His boots recoiled off the walls, bouncing from the sides, his legs never giving Ceres opportunity to pull him floorward. Rebecca, despite her newness to minigravity, kept pace.

  They reached the bottleneck. Unmindful of pain, Roger wormed through as fast as he could, pushing Rebecca ahead. She didn't protest.

  Behind them, the excavator halted at the choke point. Then the spikes spun and rapidly chewed into the soft, congealed rubble that composed most of Ceres this close to the surface. In seconds, the machine widened the gap sufficiently to allow the skirt of its midsection to pass.

  In the widening passage, they outdistanced their pursuer—for regardless of how Mel had programmed its brain, on the outside it was still an excavator. Its designers hadn't built for speed, for rocks didn't run away. But Roger knew the living could only run so far, and then they would be cornered.

  They burst into Aladdin's Palace. Roger swung from branch to branch, paralyzed with indecision. Then he bolted straight ahead.

  “The dust!” Rebecca cried.

  “I know!"

  He saw the dust pool and doubled his speed and leaped. Momentum sailed him a score of meters. He smacked onto solid ground. Rebecca landed alongside.

  Scrambling behind a boulder, they scrunched and extinguished helmet lamps. Roger felt rivulets of sweat trickling down his face as he stared into the darkness.

  Soon a pale glow lit the walls. A glimpse portrayed the lamps of the excavator as ghoulish eyes. The machine was an arachnid in silhouette, gliding on legs too slender to have supported its weight in Earth gravity. But they were not on Earth.

  Sensing the human presence, the machine approached the edge of the pool. Tentacles probed the surface. The excavator trundled forward. The pool swallowed it like a gulped morsel.

  Absolute darkness reigned. Roger flipped on his lamp. On the surface of the pool, a ripple faded. Rebecca's eyes reflected his hope.

  Then the surface roiled and a tentacle snapped like an anteater's tongue and grabbed a stalagmite. The excavator broke the surface and flopped onto solid rock.

  Roger slapped Rebecca's shoulder. They fled into the descending passage.

  The floor abruptly came to the vertical drop-off. Roger's lamp surveyed the seemingly bottomless pit. He turned. All too near, the ghoul's eyes jogged.

  Rebecca reloaded an ammo clip. Roger grabbed the gun. While she slithered down the line, he pumped bullets. The slugs ricocheted off steel limbs and plexiglass sensor covers and gouged into the soft cave walls. Roger retreated to the pit, judged the drop, and leaped.

  In Ceres gravity, a fall of fifty meters is like a meter and a quarter on Earth. But gravity also conspired against him. Crucial seconds passed while he drifted. The excavator arrived at the upper ledge. Eyestalks tracked his descent. The computer brain made a split-second calculation. Legs and tentacles pushing for added velocity, the ovoid lunged.

  Roger smacked inside the mouth of the lower passage and rolled. Rebecca dragged him from the tentacles as the excavator anchored itself and clambered over the ledge.

  Exhausted, they raced into the Crystalarium. They doused their helmet lamps. Rebecca's silhouette arm motioned to a gypsum outcropping. They hid. The faint sparking of the crystal was overwhelmed by the glare of the excavator's lamps.

  Roger watched the machine's fractured reflection in a sheet of quartz. The excavator swayed its camera stalks back and forth, in imitation of human indecisiveness. Perhaps the electrical discharges, Roger thought, were degrading its sensors.

  The machine made a methodical search, poking tentacles behind outcroppings and into crevices. Conforming to the contours of the concealing rocks, the humans slunk from the cavern, into the passage that led to the nanotech facility and the end of their escape route.

  * * * *

  Dodging the liquid nitrogen tank, Roger flew to the shelves of the facility cavern and picked up a nanojuice applicator—hose and wand and fluid drum—and carried it to the Stage One tank. He pulled off end caps and connected fittings. He twisted a valve. The balloon tank jiggled as the fluid silently enacted the motions of gurgling.

  “You said the nanojuice won't work anymore,” Rebecca said.

  “It's too senile now to fetch platinum,” he replied. “But as it ages, it actually gets nastier—more acidic."

  She watched the level indicator. “Like wine, fermenting into vinegar?"

  “Yeah. Hydrochloric acid is the first component to detach from the molecular machinery."

  The fluid was syrupy. In one-fortieth earthgrav, it flowed into the applicator drum far more slowly than he remembered from a college lab demonstration a decade earlier—which was his most recent experience with nanotechnology.

  Rebecca staggered from the passage. “It's coming!"

  Only a few liters sloshed in the applicator drum, but Roger broke the fittings. Slinging the applicator strap over his shoulder and working the hand pump, he strode past Rebecca.

  The excavator was glowing eyes, a looming shadow, then tentacles swiping at his throat. The machine bowed, spun its crown of spikes, parted its jaws, and charged.

  Roger leaped aside. He aimed the wand and squeezed the trigger. A spray of foam caught the excavator in the face. The machine crashed into a boulder, spikes hurling a cloud of rock. It reared. Foam lathered its entire front. Roger thought of a rabid bull.

  He had no time to think more. The machine advanced, brandishing tentacles, forcing him to the Crystalarium.

  The tentacles extended their full length and probed the walls—right, left, up and down, flicking too fast to allow evasion. Slowly, Roger retreated toward the pit.

  At the ledge, Roger abandoned the applicator and climbed the line. The machine halted at the drop-off and elevated its stalks, tracking his progress.

  But the lenses, Roger noticed, were caked with foam and dust, and etched with acid. How could the machine see?

  That instant, he realized: it couldn't. But it had memorized the cavern layout, and could reason where he was—

  Roger yanked and released the line just as a tentacle slashed at exactly where he would have been had he kept climbing. His impulse flung him against the pit wall. He shoved with a leg and flew to the other side. He pushed again. The perpendicular sides of the pit offered no handholds, but so long as he kept bounding from one side to another, he could keep from falling. But fatigue was winning...

  Roger jumped at the machine's head and grabbed a swiping tentacle. Striking the wall, he shoved off with all his strength. At the other end of the tentacle, the machine teetered.

  It seemed to regain balance. Then Rebecca tackled from behind.

  The excavator stumbled over the ledge and into the pit. Prioritized with self-preservation, it released Roger and clawed its tentacle tips into the wall. But the wall material was too soft to support the weight and the tentacles only scraped furrows as the machine plummeted.

  Roger clung to Rebecca's hand. Two wall pushes later, they flopped onto the ledge. Hundreds of meters below, the excavator's lights shrank into faint stars.

  “Can it climb back?” Rebecca asked, gulping breath.

  “It needs to jump, like we did,” Roger replied. “Excavators aren't designed for jumping."

 
Kilometers below, a flash briefly lit a blanket of mist.

  Rebecca touched his shoulder. “My suit power's at twenty-eight minutes."

  Roger checked his own gage. “Twenty-five."

  Less than half an hour, and their suit recirculators would stop refreshing their breathing air, and their suit thermal coils would cease to warm their bodies above the ambient temperature of a hundred degrees below zero centigrade. Then they would gasp and freeze, and end by envying Alberto Sanchez in hypersleep.

  Roger decided not to look at his power gage anymore.

  * * * *

  They entered Aladdin's Palace. Roger hefted a rock and handed another to Rebecca, along with her gun. They switched off their lamps and headed into the passage to the surface.

  A light gleamed around the bend. Roger slipped to the corner and peered. He confronted the barrel of a rifle and reflexively dropped the rock in his hand.

  “Someone will have to get his dog,” he said softly.

  From the ground, Mel Barrow's eyes gazed at the spot on the roof where his helmet lamp beam blazed a circle. Flecks of blood dabbed his lips. Black crystals ringed the fist-sized hole in his abdomen.

  “Explosive bullet,” Roger said. “Probably shot in the back."

  He wasn't sure about that, but neither was he going to turn over the body to make sure. Rebecca stood at a distance and looked elsewhere. Roger pried away the rifle. Cradling the weapon, he advanced toward the cave mouth.

  “Whoever shot him, they're still—” Rebecca began. “Well, we don't have a choice, do we?"

  “I think it's just one person,” Roger said. “You take the rifle, I'll draw his fire. Then you shoot him. Can you do that?"

  "I'll draw his fire. I'm a smaller target and you're probably a better shot."

  “Now, look—"

  But no matter that he raised his voice, her expression remained unmoved. Not that he really wanted to do it his way—

  They passed through the excavator-widened bottleneck. Rebecca gasped at the unanticipated darkness. Roger flipped on his helmet lamp and stopped worrying about who would leave the cave first.

  He faced the mouth, but instead of the outer world, they saw rock—like the haunch of a hippopotamus pressed against the only known exit.

  “Stand back,” he said.