by Neal Asher
Soper stared at the head for one interminable moment, then turned and fled, her men following fast. Salind understood now why Argus was totally offline. The AI had remotely shut it down: no recordings, no transmission. He watched the allosaur take off after the three and disbelievingly watched what happened in the shadowy interior of the building. No one would believe this: Polity AIs were just so measured and moral.
Breathing ash out of his burnt mouth, Garp stepped up beside Salind. ‘Even AIs can get pissed off when a friend gets killed.’
‘I guess so,’ Salind replied, remembering the acrobat.
Soper’s scream, the last one, seemed more protracted than that of her two fellows, probably because Geronamid took his time about eating her.
4
THE SEA OF DEATH
So lay they garmented in torpid light,
Under the pall of a transparent night,
Like solemn apparitions lull’d sublime,
To everlasting rest, – and with them Time
Slept, as he sleeps upon the silent face
Of a dark dial in a sunless place.
—Hood
To say it is cold is to seriously understate the matter. The inside of the shuttle is at minus fifty centigrade because of what Jap calls ‘material tolerances’.
‘These coldsuits we’re wearing – take ’em above zero and they’ll fuck up next time you use ‘em outside,’ he told me.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Two centuries ago I’d have believed you, but things have moved on since then.’
‘Economics ain’t,’ was his reply.
I am careful not to respond to his sarcasm.
The landing is without mishap, but I am surprised when the side of the shuttle opens straight down onto the surface of the planet Orbus.
‘No point maintaining an entrance tunnel,’ says Jap over the com.
I don’t mind. It is for moments like this that I travel, and it is moments like this that fund my travel. I walk out with CO2 snow crunching underfoot and the clarity of starlit sky above that you normally only get in interstellar space. I gaze across land like arctic tundra with its frozen lakes and hoared boulders. In the frozen lakes trapped faerie lights flicker rainbow colours.
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
‘Water ice. Below one-fifty it turns to complex ice and when it heats up and changes back it fluoresces. Talk to Duren if you want the chemistry of it.’
I don’t need to. I remember reading that this is what comets do. It had taken a little while for people to figure that the light of comets was not all reflected sunlight – that comets emit light before they should.
‘What’s heating it up?’ I ask, turning to gaze at the distant green orb of the dying sun.
‘The shuttle, our landing. There’s nothing else here to do it,’ he replies.
We walk the hundred or so metres to the base and go in through a coldlock. In the lock we remove our cold-suits and hang them up. Jap points to the white imprint of a hand on the grey surface of the inner door.
‘Keep your undersuit and gloves on until we’re inside,’ he tells me. I stare at the imprint in puzzlement. Is it some kind of safety sign? Jap obviously notes my confusion. He explains.
‘Fella took his gloves off before going through the door,’ he says.
The imprint is the skin of that fella’s hand, and some of the flesh too. Later I speak to Linser, the base commander, and ask why they take such risks here. We stand in his room gazing out of a panoramic window across the frozen wastes.
‘Thermostable and thermo-inert materials are expensive, Mr Gregory. A thermoceramic cutting head for a rock-bore costs the best part of fifty thousand New Carth shillings and has to be shipped in. Doped water-ice cutting heads can be made here. Coldsuits that can function from plus thirty to minus two hundred cost fifty times as much as the ones we use. That’s a big saving for a small inconvenience,’ he says.
‘I never thought this operation short of funds,’ I say.
‘Energy is money and there’s none of the former here. It costs fifteen hundred shillings a minute to keep one human alive and comfortable. We have over two thousand personnel.’
I walk up beside him and focus on what has now caught his attention. Machines for moving rock and ice are busily gnawing at the frozen crust out there. Floodlights bathe something that appears a little like a building site.
‘Found an entrance right under our noses,’ he tells me.
‘Lucky,’ say I.
He turns to me with an expression tired and perhaps a little irrational.
‘Lucky? … Oh yes, you’ve been in transit. You haven’t seen the latest survey results. You see, we were having a bit of a Schrödinger problem with the deep scanners. The energy of the scan was enough to cause fluorescence of the water ices down there, full-spectrum fluorescence. It was like shining a torch into a cave and having the beam of that torch turn on a floodlight. We saw only a fraction of it until we started using those low-energy scanners.’
‘A fraction?’ I say. ‘Last I heard you’d mapped twenty thousand kilometres of tunnels.’
‘That’s nothing. Nothing at all. They’re everywhere you see. Yesterday Duren told me that they even go under the frozen seas. We’re looking at millions of kilometres of tunnels, more than a hundred million burial chambers with one or more sarcophagi in each.’
I absorb this information in silence, slot it in with a hundred other details I’ve been picking up right from Farstation Base to here.
‘Obviously I want to see one of the sarcophagi,’ I eventually tell him.
He glances at me.
‘See and touch it I would have thought. Unfortunately you don’t get to smell anything. Too cold for decay here,’ he says.
‘Seeing and hearing are the most important,’ I reply. ‘Most people don’t go for full immersion for a documentary. There are much more enjoyable FI entertainments.’
‘Okay, get yourself settled in and we’ll run you down in an hour or so. Will you be needing any of your equipment off the shuttle?’
‘No, I have my eyes and ears,’ I reply.
He studies me, his inspection straying to the aug nestled behind my right ear. He seems too tired to display the usual discomfort of those confronted by a human recorder like myself.
The tunnels resemble very closely the Victorian sewers of Old London on Earth. The bricks are made of water ice and are, on the whole, over three quarters of a million years old. A strange juxtaposition of age and impermanence. Just raise the temperature and all the tunnels will be gone. Of course, the temperature will not rise here for many thousands of years. Duren, who walks with me to the first chamber, is distracted and gloomy. I have to really push to get anything out of him. Finally he comes out with a terse and snappy summation.
He tells me, ‘It will keep on getting colder and colder, but not constantly so. Every eight hundred years we get the Corlis conjunction and the resultant volcanic activity. In about a hundred thousand years Corlis will fall in orbit round here and all hell will break loose for a time. The volcanic activity will destroy all these tunnels, melt all the ice. That’ll last for a few hundred years then things will settle down and freeze again.’
‘So future archaeologists will have to dig the sarcophagi out of the ice?’ I ask.
He waves his hand towards a side chamber and we duck into there. The lights inside are of a lower luminescence than those outside. They don’t want the light damaging things, apparently.
‘Doubt that. Hundred thousand years and we’ll know all we need to know about this place. We’ll let them sleep in peace then.’
I study him and try to figure the tone of his voice. It is too difficult to read his expression through his coldsuit mask, though.
The sarcophagi are metallic chrysalids averaging three metres in length. I say metallic because they appear to be made of brass. I am told that they were made of something very complex that does have as its basis some copper compounds. I ask if it is org
anic. I am told no, it is manufactured – it isn’t complex enough to be organic.
There are two sarcophagi in the chamber. One off alone, untouched and easily viewed, the other so shrouded in scanning equipment, I don’t know it is there until Duren tells me I can look inside.
No one has yet opened a sarcophagus, simply because there is not a lot more to be learned that has not already been learned by scanning. Inside each sarcophagus, suspended in water ice that is thick with organic chemicals, is an alien. These aliens are frightening. What is most frightening about them is how closely they resemble us. They have arms and legs much in proportion to our own. Their bodies are longer and wasp-waisted, their feet strange hooked two-toed things, and their hands equally strange, with six fingers protruding from all sorts of odd points, and no palms. Their heads … how best to describe their heads? Take an almond and rest it on its side, expand it only where the neck joins it, hang two sharp barbs at the nose end and back from that punch a hole straight through for eyes … It is theorized that they had used some kind of sonar sense. This is one of the theories.
When the first sarcophagus was found people started to bandy about phrases like ‘parallel evolution’ while others claimed credence for their own pet theories. Those of a religious bent called the discovery proof of the existence of God, though the selfsame people had heretofore claimed that the discovery of no humanlike races had also been proof of the existence of God. Some claimed the discovery evidenced ancient alien visitations of Earth, whilst still others talked of interstellar seeding. How so very personal, human and petty is each theory. Coming to make my documentary about the catacombs of Orbus and the passing destruction of the moonlet Corlis I have not thought which of them to give credence.
‘Do you think it’s parallel evolution?’ I ask Duren as I peer through the scanner.
‘Does a scorpion look like a human? It evolved under the same conditions and even on the same planet,’ he says, and totally destroys the parallel evolution argument.
‘What about interstellar seeding?’
‘Same arguments apply,’ he replies, and of course they do.
‘God?’ I ask.
He laughs in my face then says, ‘I try to understand it. I don’t try to cram it in to fit my understanding.’
He definitely has the essence of it there.
I hesitate to call this my first night here as there is little to mark the change from day to night. You could go outside and spot the sun in the sky, but as Orbus revolves about it once every three solstan centuries that wouldn’t be much help. The personnel at the base work a shift system. My waking period concurs with that of Duren, Jap, and about five hundred others who I have yet to meet. After a night of mares in which I am chased down Victorian sewers by subzero rats I wake to a day of subterfuge and obfuscation. Something has happened and people either don’t know or don’t want to tell the nosy bastard from the Netpress. I use the most powerful weapon in my armoury to get to the bottom of it. Jap takes my bribe.
We don coldsuits in the ball-shrinking coldlock and step on out. Jap leads me to one of the tracked surface cars they call a crawler and we motor over to the nearby excavation. I still find it difficult to take in that the treads of the vehicle we ride in are made of doped water ice. The whole idea of using such a substance makes me see our civilization as so delicate, so temporary. I guess my objection is that this is the truth.
The excavation is a tunnel that cuts at thirty degrees through rock and ice into the side of one of the Victorian sewers. This is the way I had come yesterday with Duren to view the body, so to speak. We climb out of the crawler and Jap approaches a suited figure who is walking up from the slope.
‘What’s happening, Jerry?’ Jap asks over the com. He’d told me to keep my mouth shut and my ears open for the present.
The woman who replies sounds tired and irritated.
‘Duren flipped. He cut open the sarc in B27 and started to thaw out the chicken. Security got on to him and he took his crawler into the system.’
Jap says, ‘Always thought he was a bit too close to ’em. He was on it from the start wasn’t he?’
‘You know he was,’ says the woman, her irritation increasing. I wince: Jap isn’t very good at subterfuge.
‘What’s happening now?’ he quickly asks.
‘They still haven’t found him and the computer quite competently tells us that for every hour that passes our chances of finding him halve. Ain’t technology wonderful?’
‘What about the sarcophagus and the corpse?’
‘Linser says waste not want not or some such ancient bullshit. He’s having them moved inside for intensive study … Here they come now.’
I stare down the slope and see one of the crawlers towing something up the slope. I glance round at Jap and make the hand signal he had only recently taught me. We both switch our com units to private mode.
‘The Corlis intersection is in two solstan days. Would this Duren survive that?’ I ask.
Jap replies, ‘Depends where he is, but yeah, most likely, though not much beyond it. His suit would have to go onto CO2 conversion after a day and that drains the power pack.’
‘So he’d freeze and join the rest of them here.’
‘That about sums it up, yeah.’
Corlis is hammering towards us at fifty thousand kilometres per hour; pretty slow in cosmological terms. It is the size of Earth’s moon and not much different in appearance. Its major differences are its huge elliptical orbit and the smattering of ices on its surface. It will pass close enough to Orbus to perturb both their orbits. Orbus’s orbit by only a fraction, Corlis’s orbit will wind in a completely different spirograph shape round the sun. This has been happening for about three quarters of a million years and is set to change in a hundred thousand years, when Corlis will finally be captured by Orbus. It’s funny, but I find most of the scientific staff rather reluctant to discuss the coincidence of dates: the aliens have been frozen for the same length of time that Corlis has been on its erratic orbit. Only Linser has anything useful to offer.
‘These tunnels, chambers and sarcophagi are all that survived the disaster that sent Corlis on its way, or maybe they are all that survived Corlis’s arrival in this system. The tunnels survived because they are so deep. There was probably a surface civilization but it’s all gone now.’
It doesn’t ring true.
‘When Corlis passes here tomorrow, will we be safe?’ I ask.
‘Oh yes. The nearest disturbance will be five hundred kilometres away at a fault line,’ Linser replies. I get him to show me exactly where on a map, then thank him for his help before going off to see if I can steal a crawler. It is a surprisingly easy task to accomplish.
Just kilometre after kilometre of brick-lined tunnels. To begin with I stop at a few side chambers but find them all depressingly the same. A map screen inside the crawler shows my current position and just how far I have to go. A quick inspection of the mapping index gives me files filled with thousands of such pages, and directories filled with thousands of such files. Linser told me they had mapped but a fraction of the system. I have to wonder if there is any point in continuing – it obviously covers the entire planet and is much the same everywhere. While I am studying this screen a message flicks up in the corner and is also repeated over my coldsuit com.
‘Alright everybody, we’re not going to find him before conjunction. I want you all back at base by twelve hundred, Linser out.’
I look at the message in the corner of the map screen and realize that the only reason I have not been caught is that a lot of crawlers are out being used in the search for Duren. It only occurs to me now that all the crawlers must have some sort of beacon on them, some way they can be traced, and that Duren must have disabled it on his own. I immediately try to use the crawler’s computer to find out more about the beacon. On the menu I get beacon diagnostics and a hundred and one things I can do with said beacon. I cannot find where the damned thing is though.<
br />
‘Number 107, didn’t you get my message?’
Linser sounds a bit peeved. I ignore him while I continue to try to locate the beacon.
‘Ah, I see,’ says Linser. ‘That crawler is not your property, Mr Gregory.’
I decide it is time for me to respond. ‘I’ll return it to you in one piece,’ I say.
‘How very civil of you. You do realize you’re heading directly for the nearest fault line; an area that is going to become very dangerous in only a few hours from now?’
‘Yes, I do know,’ I reply. ‘I’m sure that’s where Duren is.’
There is a pause, then when Linser speaks again it is with a deal of irritation.
‘So you think we have not already searched Duren’s most obvious destination?’ he asks.
I feel a sinking in the pit of my stomach, but stubbornness prevents me from turning the crawler round.
‘You may have missed him,’ I say.
‘Well,’ Linser replies. ‘If you are intent on getting yourself killed then that is your problem. We will bill Net-press for any damage to the crawler and for the recovery of your body. Good day to you Mr Gregory.’
He manages to make me feel like a complete idiot and I nearly turn back, but the stubbornness remains. It has been pointed out to me that stubbornness is not strength. It is in fact a weakness. I keep driving. Two hours pass and the first tremor hits. As the tunnel vibrates and little flecks of ice fall onto the crawler’s screen, I replay the conversation I’d had with Duren as we walked back to his crawler after viewing the dead alien.
‘Most people would wonder if they are in cryostasis,’ I had said.
‘They’re not,’ Duren replied. ‘They are decayed, even though they were pickled in brine before that brine froze.’
‘Were they all preserved at the same time?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes.’
‘How do you account for that then: a hundred million of them going into their sarcophagi at the same time?’
Duren was silent for a while. I didn’t push him.
‘I did say that they are not in cryostasis,’ he said. ‘I did not say that some attempt may not have been made to put them in such.’
