Tor started to connect the heatshield’s sensor array to the gig’s neural network, turning his back to the two Marys, his fingers making quick shapes.
Don’t you worry, boss. I take good care of everything.
It was the best Bea could hope for, but it was only a slender hope, and there was no turning back. Less than an hour after she’d been tasered, she climbed into the gig with John-Jane Smith and one of the Marys and nudged it away from the ship before firing the long burn that would take it down to the surface of Hades.
Hades was one of the few rocky planets in the so-called First Empire, fifteen red dwarf stars connected by a wormhole system the Jackaroo had sold to humanity in the early days of first contact. Apart from Earth and First Foot, most people lived in asteroid reefs or on the moons of warm Jupiters, and no one at all lived on Hades, a small, dry, dusty, pockmarked world tidally locked to its feeble M-class star, one hemisphere in perpetual day, the other in perpetual night. At the twilight zone between the light and dark hemispheres, katabatic storms howled off the flanks of shield volcanoes, and every so often two or three storms merged into a hypercane that lofted billions of tons of dust into the atmosphere, shrouding the entire planet for hundreds of days and generating continent-sized thunderstorms that hung above fields of iron-rich lava that oozed from the vents and calderas of the planet’s many volcanoes, which were fed by a core kept molten by tidal heating.
Elder Cultures had attempted and failed to planoform the bleak, hostile little world. It was littered with impact craters from successive bombardments with comets that had enriched its thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and nitrogen with water and other volatiles, and several times it had been seeded with cunningly engineered mixtures of microbes. But the water had either become chemically locked in Hades’ rocks or had frozen out on the night side’s equatorial ice cap, and most of the microbe populations had either died out or retreated deep into the planet’s crust. Only a tough microbial symbiosis containing organisms from at least three different evolutionary trees flourished on the surface, littering the playas and inter-mountain basins of the day side with stromatolite mounds, spattering dust-smoothed rocks and lava fields with slow-growing crusts wherever there was a little moisture and sunlight.
The symbiosis and a few refuge species of microbe in the deep crust were the only life now known to exist on Hades, but in the deep past at least three different Elder Cultures had attempted to settle the planet. The most successful had been the Tunnel Builders, a species that had excavated city-sized mazes deep beneath the surface. The largest surviving tunnel city was in the twilight zone of the southern hemisphere, more than a thousand kilometers of tunnels in a hundred separate systems that wound around each other, each with its separate entrance, some simple burrows less than a kilometer long, others elaborate mazes. No one knew if each tunnel system had been inhabited by a family or an individual, or if each system had had a different civic use. The Tunnel Builders had ascended some ten thousand years ago, leaving behind no records or artifacts except the tunnels themselves. Well, maybe the Jackaroo or the !Cha or the Reedemers knew, but the one trait shared by the un-ascended alien species was that they became maddeningly vague and elusive when questioned about how other species had lived before they ascended to wherever it was that the ascended went.
Isham Palmer had chased the rumor of surviving alien technology he’d bought from an itinerant Jackaroo trader to the tunnel city on Hades. That was where Linval Palmer had gone to find out what had happened to his younger brother. That was where Bea Edvard was headed in her ship’s tiny gig, with John-Jane Smith and one of the Marys. All three were sealed inside pressure suits and strapped side by side in acceleration couches. Because her link had been burned out, Bea was flying by manual control, something she hadn’t done since her apprentice days. It mattered little that the storm had passed its peak. On the horizon dead ahead, the crown of a shield volcano rose above dull brown haze and reflected a red spark of sunlight; here and there the flashes of lightning storms or the glow of an eruption showed feebly under the deep murk, but otherwise the day side of the planet was entirely shrouded by dust storms. Pushing a dense wedge of superheated gases ahead of it, scratching a flaming trail across the sky, the gig plowed through the upper edge of the dust and began to buck and sway as the atmosphere thickened and hypervelocity winds plucked at it, sending it miles off course. Bea blew the explosive bolts and took control as the scorched heatshield dropped away, the stick juddering hard as the gig slammed and skidded through howling dust-laden winds. Coming in on radar alone, she overshot the level stretch of playa she’d selected as a landing site and had to haul hard about, pushing the envelope of the gig’s aerodynamics, the Mary shrieking with crazy glee in her ears.
The gig swooped higher as it swerved around, dropped into a steep glide against a headwind. Perfect. But then it hit a pocket of still air, dropped five hundred meters in a couple of seconds, and was suddenly coming in too fast and too low. Bea fought the stick, managed to level out, and fired the retrorockets, but the gig came down fast and hard in a slide that collapsed two landing struts and left it canted nose-down at a twenty-degree angle.
After asking John-Jane Smith’s permission as politely as she knew how, Bea sent a brief message to the ship to report that although they had landed safely, the gig was out of commission, then powered down the little craft’s systems.
Whips of dust flickered in dim smoggy light beyond the narrow wedges of the windows; there was dust in the air of the cabin, too, blowing in fine sprays through splits in the seal of the hatch, and the hatch was jammed—it took the combined effort of all three of them to pop it open. In howling wind and blowing dust, trailed by John-Jane Smith and the Mary, Bea walked around the gig and knew it wouldn’t fly again. It might be possible to make it airtight and jack it up to the right angle for takeoff, but the nozzle of the main motor was crumpled beyond repair.
John-Jane Smith remarked dryly that this must count as a good landing because they could walk away from it.
Bea checked her headup display and pointed with an outflung arm. She was still buzzing from the massive amounts of adrenalin that had squirted into her bloodstream when she’d wrestled the gig down to its crash landing. “Your boss’s lander is sitting five and a half kilometers away, just a shade off due east. We better get going.”
It took them three hours, trudging across the flat, featureless plain in the dust storm, to reach the lander. Every ten minutes, John-Jane Smith broadcast a message to Linval Palmer across every radio channel, but there was no reply, nothing but the meaningless throb of the shortwave radio signal, steady as a sleeping giant’s heartbeat.
Wind shrieked and wailed and hooted, sometimes pushing them forward, sometimes pushing so hard against them that they had to lean into it and battle their way step by step. Dust scudded and skirled, and in every direction the world faded into a formless brown haze. The sun’s smeared blur hung low ahead of them, a fixed eye glowering through flying murk. Dust kept coating the faceplate of Bea’s helmet, and dust worked into the joints of her pressure suit. The suit’s left knee grew stiffer and stiffer, and an hour into the trek, Bea was walking with a pronounced limp.
“You keep up,” the Mary told her, “or we deal with you here and now.”
“Then you’ll have to fly yourself back into orbit.”
“It can’t be too hard,” the bodyguard said. “All it is, is straight up.”
John-Jane Smith told them to stop bickering and save their energy. “Our real work doesn’t begin until we reach the lander.”
Bea had a fix on the lander by radar and by its radio beacon, but because her mind was dulled by the sheer plodding labor of walking, the featureless haze, and the unchanging position of the sun, she was surprised when she saw a fat cone loom out of blowing dust. At first sight, the lander looked intact, squatting four-square on angled legs above the scorched pit its retrorocket had burned into the ground. But the hatchway to the lifesystem hung
open, and after John-Jane Smith went up the ladder and clambered inside, it gave a shrill cry, half surprise, half despair. Bea dodged past the Mary and swarmed up the ladder, swung through the little cupboard of the airlock (the inner hatch was open too), and found the neuter stooped over flight controls that had been smashed and broken in some mad frenzy. A mantling of dust covered every surface, and handfuls of cabling had been ripped loose from opened access panels. There was still a trickle of power from the batteries—barely enough to power the beacon—but there was no way the lander could be repaired, and a quick inspection revealed that its oxygen and fuel had been vented.
After Bea told John-Jane Smith and the Mary this, the bodyguard drew her reaction pistol, and Bea closed her eyes, hoping for a quick death. But with a scream of frustration the bodyguard fired past her into the howling storm, then turned around and stalked away.
“We will find Mr. Palmer,” John-Jane Smith said, once again calm and decisive. “Mr. Palmer will know what to do.”
Bea thought it was unlikely that the surviving member of the expedition—Linval Palmer or one of his companions—would be any help at all. It was obvious that one of them had wrecked the lander, and it had been done recently too—when she’d checked out the lander via the uplink before beginning the descent to the planet, all its systems had been working just fine. It had probably been wrecked after her gig had landed, by someone who not only didn’t want to be rescued but wanted to strand their would-be rescuers as well. Someone who had left the beacon working, to draw them here. . . .
The snap of a shot cut through the noise of the wind. The Mary had fired her pistol again. And this time she had killed something.
The bodyguard held it up for inspection. Half a meter of pink muscular rope armored in ridged translucent scales like fingernails, ending in a red rag of smashed flesh. The rest of it was spattered on the ground, already half buried by blowing dust. Its blunt head lacked a mouth and had bunches of coarse black bristles where its eyes should be.
‘It wrapped itself around my ankle,” the Mary said. “Gave me a nasty electrical shock too. Would have paralyzed someone without my training. Stay frosty. There may be more of them.”
Green lights of a headup display ran up inside the faceplate of John-Jane Smith’s helmet; the neuter pointed aslant the bleary eye of the sun. “The entrance to the tunnel system Linval was investigating when he disappeared is in that direction. That is where we have the best chance of finding him.”
As she trudged after the neuter and the bodyguard, Bea’s thoughts ran quick and cool, like beads of water down a windowpane. There really was nothing like the prospect of imminent death to concentrate the mind. She knew that there should be no life anywhere on Hades bigger than a microbe, and although her knowledge of biology was pretty basic, she was certain that an animal as large as the snake-thing had no business being here unless there was an entire ecosystem where snake-things could live. Most of the rumors about Elder Culture technology sold by Jackaroo traders were bogus; the Jackaroo were expert swindlers with a tradition more than a million years old. Before first contact, they’d infiltrated Earth’s information systems and started a global war, then convinced the survivors to exchange rights to most of the Solar System for the specifications for a basic torch fusion drive and access to the impoverished wormhole system of the First Empire. It was little consolation that they had pulled this kind of trick many times before. At least a dozen Elder Cultures had left their traces on the asteroid reefs of the First Empire before ascending to wherever it was ascendent species went. Still, around one in a hundred of the rumors about functional Elder Culture tech sold by Jackaroo traders to the credulous, desperate, or plain crazy were authentic, just enough to keep humans coming back for more. Linval or his brother must have found something in the tunnel city after all, and it had driven them mad. . . .
Bea kept her speculations to herself, limping up a long slope littered everywhere with wind-smoothed pebbles, a dry beach waiting for its sea. She noticed that the Mary was limping too, and asked if she was all right.
“Snaky fucker gave me a bad shock. I’ll live.”
The Mary’s voice was tight with pain and laced with self-loathing. It gave Bea a little hope, although she hated herself for it.
The entrance to the tunnel city was a shallow cirque that narrowed and gradually closed around them as they walked down it. The sound of the wind died back, and the haze of dust lessened. At last they could see that they were descending a long tube with smooth black walls that curved up to meet ten meters overhead. Their shadows were cast ahead of them by the sun, which glowered straight into the entrance. Dust had fallen out of the still air in high, silken heaps and ridges heaped one after the other across the wide floor, and the Mary discovered footprints leading away between the shoulders of two sinuous ridges.
John-Jane Smith couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of its voice, saying that it had been right all along, saying that they would find Mr. Palmer and everything would be fine.
Bea thought that the footprints could be anyone’s. She also thought that, like the beacon, they could be the bait for a trap. Stripped of her intimate contact with her ship, her merely human senses felt blunted, and she had the eerie feeling that something was watching them in the darkness beyond the reach of their helmet lamps. It didn’t help her nerves that John-Jane Smith kept calling to Linval Palmer over the radio.
After about ten minutes of steady walking, the dust heaps smaller now, not much more than waist high, the trail of footprints ended, and the tunnel split into two. While John-Jane Smith and the Mary were casting about, Bea said that if anyone wanted to be rescued they would have answered by now.
“We aren’t going to stumble over them by accident. There are over a thousand kilometers of tunnels down here. It would take weeks to explore the entire city, and we only have a few hours.”
John-Jane Smith said, “These are the tunnels Mr. Palmer set out to explore just before we lost contact with him. He is in here somewhere. I know it.”
Bea said, “That’s hardly a rational attitude.”
For a moment she was tempted to tell John-Jane Smith about her plan to survive this. But then the Mary told her to be quiet, adding, “I should kill you. You waste air we need.”
“We are not murderers,” John-Jane Smith said.
The bodyguard ignored the neuter and raised her pistol and aimed it at Bea. Her hand was trembling lightly, and her voice was trembling too; she must have been more badly hurt than she had admitted. “We’ll all be dead soon, so what does it matter if she dies now?’
Bea fought the urge to run—the bodyguard would cut her down at once.
The moment stretched. Then John-Jane Smith said, its voice low and urgent, “I see something.”
Bea turned to look to where the neuter was pointing, saw a fugitive flicker of red light a little way down the right-hand tunnel, and felt a chill wave climb her back, tighten around her neck, her scalp.
John-Jane Smith called out to Linval Palmer again and began to trudge toward the flickering light.
“Make no more trouble,” the Mary said, and forced Bea to follow at pistol-point.
Bea’s first thought—really it was more of a hope than a thought—was that the fugitive light was some kind of static discharge. But it was too regular and too bright, and it quickly resolved into hair-thin lines that blinked from one part of the tunnel to another in a nervous web. Like message lasers, Bea thought, gripped by another chill. She flicked on her pressure suit’s night-sight capability, enabled the movement tracker. Almost immediately the tracker caught something and replayed it in a pop-up screen. Something hand-sized scuttling into the base of a heap of dust, emitting a brief thread of red light as it buried itself. Bea played it over again and was about to call out a warning when John-Jane Smith, who had almost reached the beginning of this display, suddenly turned aside, trotting toward the curving wall, kicking through a knee-high dust ridge.
Five bodies la
y half buried in the dust, laid out neatly side by side, wrapped in shrouds of some kind of polymer with the grain of human skin, thickened here and there in callus-like ridges. Bea enabled infrared and saw that they were a few degrees warmer than ordinary human body temperature, much hotter than the ambient temperature of the tunnel, glowing an even white from head to foot.
John-Jane Smith touched the nearest body with the tip of its boot and hastily stepped backward when it jerked and shuddered. The other bodies jerked too, like puppets pulled by the same string.
The Mary’s reaction pistol fired, a flare of light filling the tunnel, a thunderclap rolling away into darkness. It wasn’t a snake-thing she’d killed this time, but something like a hand-sized crab. Most of it had been smashed to a bloody ooze, but enough of it remained to see that it had a bony shell, two pairs of knuckled limbs tipped with what were very definitely fingernails, and a thick sensory stalk at the front bearing a single blue, human eye.
Bea realized what it was and felt her gorge rise. Red threads were flicking all around them. The Mary was pointing her pistol this way and that; she gave a shout of triumph and fired again. Ridges of dust erupted, and hand-crabs shot toward her from every side, swarming up her legs, her torso. She swung completely around as she swatted at them, and Bea threw herself to the floor just before the reaction pistol fired again, three quick shots that screamed overhead and knocked chunks from the tunnel wall. John-Jane Smith shrieked, and the Mary was down, her legs kicking, crabs covering her torso and her helmet. White vapor jetted when an air line gave way.
John-Jane Smith had fallen to its knees and was clutching its midsection. Blood leaked through its gloved fingers. Hand-crabs were stalking toward Bea over a ridge of dust, blue eyes jerking to and fro on thick upraised stalks, fixing on her. Bea took a step toward the neuter, and the hand-crabs stepped sideways too, uptilted rear ends firing threads of red light from an offset bump that would be the wrist bone if they were real hands, every hand-crab linked in a flickering web, more and more of them emerging from the mounds and ridges of dust. John-Jane Smith knelt in a tightening circle of hand-crabs . . . And beyond the neuter, beyond the five bodies in their cocoons of warm skin, stood a human figure.
Forbidden Planets Page 7
