by Allen Wold
When they got to the height of the treetops Rikard put on his recording helmet, scanned the horizon, took a close-up of the surface of the cone, and spoke into the mike. "This is marble, metamorphosed limestone. In nature it would be from sedimentary shell deposits, in this case, who knows."
"Perhaps," Grayshard said, "the structure was organically grown, then fused."
Rikard stared at him. "Grown? By what?"
"Domesticated coral perhaps."
"I've never heard of anything like that," Rikard said. "Besides, coral needs an ocean and this was grown on dry land."
"It's been done before," Droagn projected, and Rikard automatically vocalized for the sake of the recording. "There used to be a people we called Kapanosians, sort of like hairy birds with long legs. They had domesticated a kind of a mollusk that produced excessive amounts of shell when properly fed and stimulated. They'd put these snails into molds, grow a structural piece of calcium carbonate, then use other snails to weld the pieces together. Weirdest damn architecture you ever saw."
"I'll just bet," Rikard said.
They continued climbing, and using a variety of optical enhancers, they scanned the corrugated and eroded surface for any sign of an entry, but found none. Rikard added his commentary to the recording as appropriate.
The higher they went, the more the surface was worn away, and if the outer walls were thin enough, they might eventually find a place where the weather had broken through for them. From the pictures in the Ahmear text, it had seemed that there might be an entrance of some kind associated with a projecting shelf and vertical ridge, but if there had been such a structural feature on this cone, a million and more years of erosion had erased any traces of it. Nor could Droagn, using his Prime, detect any hollows within.
But at last they could climb no farther. They were halfway to the top, and the surface offered no more purchase. They clung as best they could to the side of the cone while Rikard took a stonecutter from one of the boxes on the floater. After the expedition into the Ahmear ruins he'd decided that such a specialized tool was worth bringing along, and so it proved. With it he was easily able to chip holds and corrugations in the smooth stone. And this revealed that the nature of the material of the cone changed subtly a few centimeters below the surface.
They worked their way, more slowly now, upward to where the going became easier again, where the surface became split and fractured. Now it was Droagn's turn to pause. "It is hollow," he said, "but it's a long way in."
"Does it get closer to the surface anywhere?" Rikard asked.
"It's hard to tell. The cracks here complicate the image. They moved farther upward, until once again Droagn, using his Prime to probe into the cone, suggested they pause.
"I think we can cut through here," he said. "The space inside can't be more than four or five meters in."
Rikard got out another stonecutter for Droagn and they set to work while Gray shard kept watch. They first cut themselves secure footholds and belly-holds, then started to make a large opening in the side of the cone.
"We've got company," Grayshard said when they'd penetrated a little over a meter.
Rikard and Droagn turned to look behind them. There were six floaters coming toward them, still some distance away, over the tops of the trees. Grayshard focused his image enhancers. "They're Una Tlim," he said.
"Let's keep working," Rikard suggested, and he and Droagn attacked the rock face with renewed vigor, now striving for a less capacious but deeper opening.
But even as they did so Grayshard shouted, "They're shooting," and they could hear the sounds of projectile weapons going off. The Una Tlim were too far away yet to be effective, but their intentions were clear.
"Which group are they?" Rikard asked as he stowed his cutter back in its box. Droagn kept on working. Though Rikard didn't want to fight these people, it didn't look like he was going to be given the choice.
"I don't know," Grayshard said. "I can't tell them apart."
"Let's see if we can just drive them off," Rikard suggested, so Grayshard drew his micropulse. It was a close-in weapon, not intended for long range. He waited until the floaters reached the cone and started to climb, then fired. At that distance, the multiple laser pulses were greatly attenuated, and hurt rather than damaged Grayshard's targets, which he had no difficulty hitting. It made them duck, but didn't otherwise slow them down.
Rikard drew his gun. Time slowed. The concentric rings centered on his target, but the red spot, which should indicate where a bullet would hit, was diffuse. The range was too long, and by the time the bullet got there, the target could easily have moved out of the way. He put his megatron back in its holster and took one of the heavy laser rifles from the floater instead.
Una Tlim bullets began to dig up chips and dust just below their position. There wasn't much space in the hole for them to find cover, especially with Droagn still trying to dig through to the hollow within, but they did the best they could. Rikard took careful aim at one of the floaters and fired. The violet beam hit the engine compartment, and the floater settled to the surface of the cone and slid down toward the trees. The other five floaters kept coming.
Grayshard used his micropulse to harass the approaching Una Tlim, and their shots were for the most part way off target, but a few heavy slugs struck close enough to make Rikard fear for his life. He aimed at a second floater, and brought this one down as well. The first one had disappeared into the foliage below. The other four floaters slowed their ascent.
Then there was a brighter flash from one of the floaters, and a heavier report, which came from what looked like a cannon. The shot missed, low and to the right, and Grayshard concentrated his fire on the gunners. Rikard took new aim, but could see in the rifle's scope that the heavy gun was armored. It fired again, still low and a bit to the left, and the rock cracked under Rikard's feet, and small stuff rained down from above.
"If they don't kill us," Droagn aid, "they might break through for us."
Rikard fired, the violet beam melted a crater in the heavy gun's shielding. Grayshard's shots were still the most effective. Droagn threw down the stonecutter and grabbed the floater. The big gun fired again, the shell hit just above them, Rikard felt himself being dragged backward by Droagn's strong arm, then the rock above them gave way and slid down over the opening he and Droagn had cut, even as they fell backward into the darkness.
2
If it hadn't been for Droagn, Rikard would have been badly hurt, and Grayshard would have been completely crushed. As it was they got away with only a few bruises. Broken stone kept on falling, in the utter darkness, as they scrambled away from the slide, but it was soon over. The opening above them wasn't large enough to admit much rock.
"Is everybody all right?" Rikard asked.
"I'm here," Grayshard said.
"I'm just fine," Droagn projected. "Who's got a light?
"Did you get our stuff in all right?" Rikard asked.
"Just a minute," Grayshard said. There was the sound of boxes falling over, a lid opening, a muffled fumbling, then a clear white light filled the hollow. Grayshard stood by the floater with half its load tumbled off. Droagn coiled beside it, his tail half buried under the white, fallen rubble. Rikard was sitting a bit farther back, his recording helmet askew. "Doesn't look like we're going to get out of here very soon," Droagn said. He pulled his tail out from under the heap of broken marble.
"Maybe they'll think we're dead," Rikard said. He got to his feet, brushed himself off, made sure his camera was working, and went over to the grounded floater to inspect its cargo. Though a few of the crates and boxes were dented, the contents seemed to be undamaged.
"Is that thing going to work," Droagn asked, or am I going to have to carry everything?
Rikard tried the floater's controls. The free end lifted up a few centimeters. He and Droagn moved the rocks aside, and the floater came up to thirty centimeters. They reloaded the equipment, got out lights for Rikard and Droagn
, and set up four more on the corners of the floater. At last they were able to pay some attention to where they were.
From the outside the cone-shaped mountain had seemed to be composed of a fine-grained marble, partially decomposed, with little or no variation in texture. Inside it was different, seeming at once to be both marblelike and like natural shell. The inner surface was, however, just as hard as the exterior. It was white, and their lamps, though not intrinsically very bright, reflected off it so that the whole interior was as well lit as a living room.
They were in a chamber, some six meters square, with openings on either side near the inner wall. The fall of rubble filled the outer half of the chamber, blocking the opening that Droagn had cut, which was high in the wall and partially through the ceiling.
"You still think this place was grown?" Rikard asked Gray shard.
"It could be," Grayshard said. His fingers were just touching a wall. Concealed by his gloved hand, hundreds of red-tipped white fibers were "tasting" the surface. "It's a natural material, as near as I can tell, though not like any shell I've ever encountered before."
"It doesn't look like it was made in pieces and cemented together," Droagn commented,
"I don't think it was. It feels like it was made all of a piece."
"It would take one hell of an animal to lay down a shell like this," Rikard said, "and with a very peculiar physiology"
"More likely billions of animals, like coral. I could be wrong."
The floors were flat, and showed no signs of wear. The walls met them at a 90-degree angle, only slightly rounded. The ceiling was parallel to the floor, and showed no signs of fixtures of any kind.
"How did they see in here?" Rikard asked.
"Maybe they didn't," Grayshard said.
"Or breathe?" Droagn added. "No air-conditioning. Is there any plumbing?
"That's your specialty," Rikard said. "Can you feel anything in the walls?"
"They're solid, as far as I can tell."
They had no clue as to which way to go, so they chose the corridor on the left. Halfway down it there was a door in the outer wall, tight-fitting and nearly undetectable, so that only the sharp angle of the lamps casting a tiny shadow revealed it. It opened out from the corridor, into a room as empty as the one by which they had entered. At the end of the corridor was another room exactly like the first, with another corridor opposite the entrance. They went on.
The layout varied little. The rooms between corridors were empty. There was usually just one room off the outer side of the corridor, but sometimes two, and occasionally three. They were all empty. Most of the doors were closed. The walls, floors, and ceilings were white or creamy white, but here and there were traces of orange, rust, brown, and occasionally gray or even blue.
The corridors were not perfectly straight. There was an imperceptible arcing, which Rikard could detect only by using a laser gauge that shone a beam down the corridor in both directions. These rooms and corridors completely surrounded the cone, forming a band just beneath the surface. If there were other similar bands inside and concentric to this one, they did not find them.
They proceeded clockwise until they came to a passage parallel to the corridor, but which slanted down to a lower level. There were no stairs, but unlike the Ahmear ramps, the floor surface was perfectly smooth.
The lower level was much the same as the one above. The width of corridor and room together was never more than ten meters, sometimes less. Droagn probed the outer wall, but could not determine the thickness of the shell. The material was singularly impervious to his Prime, though he could read through metal, normal stone, and most plastics with ease.
They passed other ramps, sometimes going up, as often down, but never more than one level at a time. Sometimes two corridors connected the major chambers, or ran outside the intermediate rooms. Occasionally they encountered sections of the outer wall that had caved in, and then they had to backtrack and find another route, or turn back and go the other way, or take a ramp down. And always the rooms were empty. They chose the down-ramps preferentially. Each level was larger in circumference than the one above. At one point they found a crack that extended through the outer wall all the way to the surface. The wall was about twenty meters thick at that point. The crack was not wide enough for Rikard to reach his hand into it, and it was not straight, but weather had come in, and where it had the material of the cone was not at all shell-like, but only marblelike. How long it had taken that change to take place they could not guess. Geologists had called the cone mountains marble since they'd been discovered more than fifteen hundred years ago, Zapetti time, and yet they were not really marble after all.
As they went deeper Rikard noted that the increased interior circumference was not commensurate with the increased outer diameter, as he calculated it should have been from the exterior slope. They began to pay more attention to the outer walls, both in the corridors and in the rooms connecting and between, and sure enough, eventually Grayshard's sensitive tendrils found a doorway opening outward into a radial corridor, about twenty meters long, which led to another band of passages and chambers concentric with the one that they had been exploring.
Rikard's excitement began to wane. Aside from the structure itself, there was nothing here to get excited about. It was at least a million years old, and possibly older, and that in itself, and its mysterious origins, would be enough to keep certain scholars happy for decades, but it wasn't enough for him. He wanted more—artifacts, the nature of the builders, some clues as to their role in the galaxy at that time.
Ironically, it was just this dull kind of thing that would do the most to convince his grandparents that he was a serious scholar and not just an adventurer. Trouble was, he was an adventurer. Could he spend the next twenty years writing papers on this and doing what research he could among the Ahmear texts? The thought of it made him claustrophobic. Only the desire to please his grandfather made him think of it at all.
If he did major research on this, and proved that these marblelike mini-mountains, long thought to be natural, were in fact the product of some long-vanished civilization, he would have another academic credit of no small importance. But he couldn't accept that this was all there was to it. He couldn't believe that the whole core of this place was just solid. There had to be a way in.
He estimated that the top third of the cone was missing, and they had come in about halfway up that, and had by this time come down not quite halfway to the outside ground level. If access to the inner regions was at the top, they'd have seen it from the air, some kind of sinking or depression, but there had been none, just solid metamorphosed stone. That implied that one got to whatever inner chambers there were nearer the bottom, and so they continued down.
They found another connector to yet another outer band of chambers and passages, which was not what they wanted at all, but they stopped to examine the connection from the outside, shining their lights on the white surface on either side of the open door, and on the outer surface of the door itself.
Now that they were looking for it, it was obvious. There were thin smears of bluish gray that crossed the doorway and extended across the walls on either side.
"I've seen that pattern before," Grayshard said.
Rikard played back some of his recording. "You're right. We've passed marks like that several times."
"Do they write in color? Droagn suggested.
"I think it's just a sign," Rikard said, "not true writing."
"Let's go back to the last similar mark on the inside," Gray shard suggested.
They did, and Grayshard ran his tendrils along the smooth surface, white except for the faint smears of bluish gray. "There is a door here," he told them.
"I hate to use the cutter," Rikard said.
"Let me try," Droagn suggested. He held a long prybar with a very narrow working end. Grayshard guided the thin blade to what he said was the junction between door and jamb, and Droagn pushed hard.
"It's not so hard," he said, "if you get it in just the right place."
A passage extended inward about thirty meters or so, with a door at the other end. The surfaces here were not just white, but glowed in their lights with a subtle sheen.
Now that they had an idea of what they were looking for they hurried in search of more blue-gray smears. They went through corridors and chambers arranged much as before, but now the white shell-like stone of walls, floors, ceilings was glossy and clean. Here and there they found other color smears on the walls, long, short, single, multiple, almost always only one color at a time. There was nothing else visible, so either what the colors signified was well concealed, as the doors were, or the colors were just signs and labels, such as "level six" and so on.
One of the exceptions they found was a pale yellow smear above a pale cream smear. It was two colors at once, which they had seen a few times before, but the colors were shades they had not seen. But then, they were so subdued and near to white that even had such a mark been present in the outer bands it would have faded into the general creamy whiteness of the walls.
Grayshard felt around the mark with his delicate and sensitive tendrils and found, again, an all-but-invisible seam. It was not a doorway as such, since the seam outlined a rectangle with rounded corners with the bottom edge some forty centimeters above the floor.
Once again Droagn carefully wedged the prybar into the seam, under Grayshard's guidance, and pulled open the hatch. Inside was a kind of cupboard divided into three sections. In the top section was an object.
