But if Paulette and Daunt had ever played the jeering rebels, they were far past it now. By-the-book police types down to the crotch tattoos. If I had suddenly found myself stuck in a cozy resort with one of my spouses, I know what I would have done; but Paulette and Daunt told us they'd spent the night conducting a more thorough search of Maya's room, collecting hairs and dirt specks the housecleaning servo had missed, then dismantling the servo itself for more samples. When that was finished, they took shifts, one sleeping while the other prowled the grounds in search of acid-blasting androids.
A jolly old evening. You can always hope they were lying.
After breakfast, we went for a walk around town... by which I mean Tic and Festina ragged on me for a tour of my childhood tree-forts/skating rinks/skipping areas/make-out spots, till they wore me down. Not that I could show them much of the town I'd known. Twenty-one years had stampeded past since I said good riddance to Sallysweet River—years with heavy feet, trampling down defenseless places where kids played. Tree-forts had got cut flat to make room for ski chalets. Skating rinks were moved far downriver, where shouting and laughing wouldn't annoy the tourists. The skipping areas were gone too: my junior school had expanded with two new domes plunk on top of the old playground. As for make-out spots... I sure as sin wasn't going to check on those with two ScrambleTacs looking over my shoulder. Or Tic. Or Festina.
Instead, we wandered aimless-blameless, with me trying hard not to sound like some old fart, bemoaning the things that had changed. A dozen new stores. New housing, especially near the mine, which had acquired a slew of unmarked outbuildings. All the tourist facilities, with paintings and holos and sculptures of my father, lined up in every window... most of them using that creepy artist's trick where the eyes follow you.
Dads watching me everywhere. Enough to bring on hot flashes and me only forty-two. My knee-jerk reflex was to feel guilty, like he'd caught me in something. But what did I have to squirm about? A respectable member of the Vigil now, sashaying out with a master proctor and an admiral, for God's sake. I could hold my head up no matter who was looking at me... including people I'd gone to school with, all looking saggy middle-aged and none showing the slightest click of recognition as we passed in the street.
Faye Smallwood, vertical and sober, not cursing, not dirty, not dressing slut. Why should they recognize me? And why should I want them to?
Christ, I was happy when our strained little tour got cut short by the probes reporting success.
One success, two alerts.
Alert #1 = a whispery chirp from a remote-link in Festina's pocket.
Alert #2 = an image ghosting up in front of my eyes.
Image = snowy forest: the transitional kind, halfway between sparse bluebarrel tundra and boreal woods filled with chillslaps and paper-peels. You only saw such forest near water, a lake or river big enough to moderate the temperature a titch... a nudge up from tundra-only cold but not quite warm enough for no-holds-barred timber-land.
In my mind, I couldn't see the water, wherever it was; but I could see a hole in the ground. Not long ago, the hole must have been stuffed bushy with weeds and bramble. Now, the overgrowth was cleared away—hacked down, dragged out, heaped up. Nearby sat the grotty remains of a campfire: half-burnt branches black and slick with melted snow. Many weeks old, by the look of it... covered white by blizzards and just now reappearing in the thaw.
"Are we seeing things, Smallwood?" Tic whispered to me.
"Yes."
He smiled... maybe pleased for me that I'd got a vision from Xé, maybe pleased for himself that he wasn't just hallucinating.
"We've got a positive hit fifty klicks south of here," Ramos reported, checking the readout on her remote. "The probe gives 73 percent confidence this is a 'meaningful find.' " She gave a small snort of doubt. "I'd take that with a grain of salt, but it's worth checking."
Tic and I didn't speak. We could see the find was more than just "meaningful."
Ramos locked in the probe's reported position, then ordered the missile back to its programmed search pattern, looking for other "meaningful" sites that might be lurking in the wilderness. The second she punched in the probe's new orders, my vision of the hole in the ground winked out.
Meanwhile, Paulette and Daunt rang up Cheticamp for instructions. Should we take a run out to see what the probe had found? Or sit stony till a larger squad could fly in? After much hemming and hawing, Cheticamp gave the go-ahead to "proceed with caution"... which meant he'd totaled up his belief that Maya was already dead, plus Festina's doubt that the probe had found something, minus the waste-time inconvenience of sending cops on another fools' errand to Sallysweet River. Our two ScrambleTacs promised to call for backup at the first hint of trouble or genuine evidence; but we all knew help would take a long time coming.
Half an hour later, Festina's skimmer hovered over the site. Everything matched my ghostly vision: the mixed forest, the hole in the ground, the punky campfire leftovers. Enough to call in Cheticamp? Paulette and Daunt shook their heads; the fire could belong to hunters or naturalists snowshoeing through the area anytime over the winter. The same people might have cleared brush away from the hole, out of pure curiosity or because they saw a storm brewing and decided they'd have more protection underground.
Ramos said she agreed with the ScrambleTacs—this might be nothing. But her bright eyes had tamped down their glint to a controlled focus: sharp-fierce-alert. The "game face" of an Explorer making ready for a mission.
We didn't land straightaway... not till we'd flown four passes over the area, scanning through four different ranges of the EM spectrum. The survey showed nothing but trees and tundra-dogs, teeny rodent-niche animals that chewed out nests under the carpet moss. Were they dangerous? Ramos asked me. Could they bite? Did they carry disease? I told her they were no worse than Terran squirrels. Yes, they had teeth and on occasion they could carry a nasty microbe or two; but come on, Festina-girl, they were just squirrels.
Ramos gave me a grim look and flew around for another pass.
At last we landed: two hundred meters from the mine, on the shore of a small lake. Our charts called the place Lake Vascho, Oolom for eclipse. Probably the lake got mapped the same day one of our flyspeck moons pranced across in front of our sun. Not that we ever got true eclipses, not with our moons so small; occasionally the sun just acquired a darkish beauty mark on her face.
Thanks to spring, Lake Vascho had cleared its center of ice; but the shores were still frozen, with a thin crust that would take another few days to thaw completely. Everything—land, lake, air—bristled with pure northern silence.
Hold-your-breath beautiful.
Ramos holstered on a stun-pistol before leaving the skimmer. ("Not that hypersonics will affect robots," she said, "but if those tundra-dogs get uppity, zap!") Paulette and Daunt wore full body armor (gray/black urban camo) and they each carried an over-the-shoulder rocket launcher whose magazine packed four smart robot-poppers: tiny missiles designed to coldcock machines with a massive electrical jolt. Supposedly the missiles could distinguish androids from humans, and were programmed never to juice a living target. I wished I could take a minute to talk with them... make sure the popper missiles knew me as a chummy good-time gal. But the cops might get the wrong idea if I asked for a chat with their ammunition.
Ramos took the lead through the forest. No useless fuss about the cold this time. She'd put on gloves, but probably not to keep her hands warm... more likely, to avoid bites when wrestling rabid tundra-dogs. In one hand, she carried the paint-can device she'd used at the dipshits' house—the thing she called the Bumbler. Its screen showed a fish-eye view of the woods around us, but Ramos scarcely gave it a glance; she was too busy scanning trees and ground and sky, trusting her own eyes more than the machine's.
A stone's throw from the hole, Ramos stopped. "Do you want us to go ahead?" Daunt asked.
"I never let someone take risks for me." Ramos glanced my way. "But if you and Tic
want to stay out here, feel free."
Tic shook his head. I did the same a moment later. "Okay," Ramos said, "forward. Immortality awaits."
The hole was artificial—that became precious obvious as soon as we got close enough for a peek inside. Not a random crack in the shield-stone, but a tunnel with a well-engineered slant floor. A ramp down into the bedrock, like the ancient mines back at Sallysweet River, except more overgrown.
"Do we go in?" Paulette asked.
"Absolutely," Tic said, bold as blood. He'd found a chemical torch-wand in one of the skimmer's equipment chests. Now he tapped the activation stub and the torch lit up like a two-hundred-watt baton of silver-shine.
"Let's go."
Ramos and Daunt moved to the lip of the tunnel; Paulette slid behind Tic and me, taking rear guard. "You aren't going to panic, are you?" she murmured to Tic with ham handed cop sympathy. "I know Ooloms don't like cramped, confined—"
"I'll be splendid," he interrupted. "A monument of imperturbability. Proceed."
But his ear-lids showed just a hint of the shivers.
The tunnel's center was bare wet stone, washed clean with meltwater. Out toward the edges, things got messier: spongy compost made of animal droppings, plus mud slopped down from outside. For centuries, tundra-dogs, thatch beetles and gummylarks had wandered in here, built nests, brought up babies. A great bleeding lot of them had died here too, leaving behind dirt-crusty litters of bone and carapace.
Plants had rooted in the thin soil, and some had even grown—tundra species don't need much light or root space. But the farther we got from the entrance hole, the fewer signs of flora and fauna. Even carpet moss won't grow in absolute darkness, and after a while, tundra-dogs must get the willies, wandering into black silence.
I could sympathize: thank heavens for Tic's torch-wand. When I glanced that way, though, I noticed Tic's knuckles had turned gray-blue as they squeezed the torch in a death grip. Dads had amused himself making up names for that gray-blue color. Anxious indigo. Whacko woad. Unbalanced ultramarine. When an Oolom hits a crapulating level of stress, the color-adaptive glands get thrown off-kilter by other hormones, and random patches of skin start turning that telltale shade. Yet Tic forced himself onward, till the tunnel entrance faded from sight, and there was nothing around us but cold walls of stone.
Some distance down, we came to a fork: a side tunnel ran to our right while the main shaft continued straight. Ramos pointed the Bumbler down the side tunnel and squinted at the machine's display screen. "Nothing obvious down there," she said in a low voice. "Not that the Bumbler can see much farther than we do in pitch-black." She turned and pointed the Bumbler forward along the main shaft. "Hello," she murmured. "Looks like an animal carcass. Does Demoth have bears?"
Daunt leaned in to peek at the screen himself. "I think it's a shanshan." Great St. Caspian's closest analog to a bear: covered in black peach fuzz instead of hair, and sporting orange dorsal sacs for sexual display, but shanshans were still four-legged omnivores with claws and a temper. "Are you sure it's dead?" Daunt whispered. "Shanshans hibernate. If one decided to hunker down here for the winter..."
"No body heat," Ramos answered. She thumbed a dial on the Bumbler, "And almost no bioelectric activity—just a little glow from decay microbes working their way through the flesh. Maybe it came down here to hibernate, but it didn't survive the cold. Old age or disease, I suppose." She drew her stun-pistol. "We'd better check it out."
Ramos and Daunt moved forward, right keen cautious. Tic and I followed at a safe distance while Paulette hung back, standing guard at the junction where the main shaft met the side tunnel. Tic had both ear-sheaths open; he might have been listening for the shanshan's heartbeat, though he probably couldn't hear bugger-all over my own heart's pounding.
Sweat trickled down my armpits. Something in the tunnel felt alive and active... maybe not the shanshan, but something.
The shanshan didn't shift a whisker as we approached. Warily, Ramos nudged the body with her foot.
No reaction.
From this angle, we could only see the animal's back. I didn't notice any decomposition in the parts I could see... but if the shanshan died during winter, the cold would have slowed decay, as good as a powered freezer.
Ramos poked the animal a few more times. Still no reaction. Keeping her stunner trained on the shanshan's head, she walked around the body, levered her foot underneath, and gave a heave.
The carcass rolled limply, deadweight. Its legs splayed outward as Ramos flopped it over on its back. "Definitely deceased," Daunt murmured, looking down at the shanshan's chest. From muzzle to belly, the animal's flesh had been eaten away by...
By...
Not insects or bacteria. I was close enough to smell a tangy bite in the air, wafting up from the shanshan's wounds. The odor was ugly familiar: cruel, vinegary acid, harking back to Pump Station 3.
The shanshan had wandered in here... and got shot gooey dead.
"Run!" I yelled.
But of course it was too late.
They came out of the side tunnel: one android after another, old, young, male, female, too many to count. Jelly guns galore. Tic had carried the torch-wand with him to the shanshan, so Paulette didn't have enough light to see them coming. At the last second, she must have picked up their footsteps, tiptoe-soft, sneaking in for ambush. She bellowed something, a warning, a battle cry, the same instant I was screaming, "Run!" Then she fired her whole magazine of poppers into the onrushing pack.
Thunder. Rocket blasts lit the whole tunnel, flame venting out the exhaust ports of Paulette's shoulder launcher.
Four missiles. More than four androids.
Boom, the sound of impact. Crackle, the zap of lightning shorting out robot circuits. Then cough-cough-cough-cough-cough, a flurry of jelly guns unloading on the nearest target.
Paulette staggered back from the impact—acid wads slapping against her body armor, splotching over her chest, arms, helmet. Her armor bloomed with smoke, every acid drop keen to burn its way through the plastic shell and blister the woman inside.
"Get out!" Daunt yelled at her... but in the split second Paulette had before the robots were on top of her, she charged toward us rather than heading back to the mine entrance.
So. All five of us were blocked in, with an army of gun-toting androids between us and the exit.
Jolly.
Daunt fired his four robot-poppers up the tunnel. The bang of their ignition damn near deafened me... that plus the echoes crashing off the rock walls, pummeling like fists on my eardrums. Fé leejedd, I thought witlessly; I hear the thunder. Then the poppers struck and four more androids went down, legs and arms jerking in short-circuit spasms.
Not good enough. I counted four robots still on their feet, black silhouettes outside the shine of Tic's torch.
Paulette raced toward us, wrapped in peels of acid smoke; and as she ran, she slapped a button on the wrist of her armor. Inside my head, I felt like someone had just shouted, "Mayday, Mayday!" though I hadn't heard the actual words. An emergency alert to Protection Central. I decided to add my own: Xé, if you have any tricks up your sleeve, now would be a precious good time to trot them out.
Nothing. Then Ramos was pulling my arm, shouting words my buggy-whipped ears couldn't hear. I got the message anyway: retreat down the tunnel.
Where else? Except that if this mine was like the ones near Sallysweet River, we'd soon run out of retreating room: the top level always dead-ended at a pithead. Once upon a time, such pitheads may have held elevators to transport miners down to lower levels, and ore back up. But after three thousand years, the elevator sure as deviltry wouldn't be working... which meant we'd just have the elevator shaft. A sheer drop into the depths.
Still... better a nice clean fall than chug-a-lugging acid.
Run, run, run: us, then the robots in pursuit. We all sprinted full speed, except Tic, who launched himself into a downward glide that matched our pace. To keep his hands free, he'd jammed
the torch-wand under the straps of his tote pack. The light reflecting off his scaly chest had a glowery gray-blue cast to it... but Tic was far from collapsing with the jitters. As he flew, he shouted back over his shoulder at the androids. "Stop, you're burning us! Stop, you're freezing us! Stop, you're drowning us!"
"What the hell are you raving about?" Daunt snapped.
Ramos and I didn't try to explain. "Stop, you're smothering us!" Tic hollered at the robots. "Stop, you're strangling us! Stop, you're squeezing too hard!"
"Stop," Paulette said, "we've hit a dead end." The pithead. Tic's torch showed a blank wall in front of us, broken by a black hole opening downward. Above the hole hung a few rusty twists of metal, all that was left of the elevator mechanism.
"The sides are sheer rock," Daunt said, looking into the shaft. "Straight down."
"The robots are going to fire again," Paulette shouted from behind us. I glanced over my shoulder in time to see her spin to face the shots and spread her arms wide. Trying to protect us from the acid barrage by blocking it with her body.
Daunt shouted, "No!" Then four blobs of goo splashed simultaneously against Paulette's ravaged armor, scattering sticky beads all over her body. Dozens of droplets found their way through holes in the armor, holes burned by the previous round of shots. Paulette sucked in her breath, then screamed, "Shit! Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!"
"Don't say that!" Ramos bellowed. Shoving past Tic, she yelled furiously at the robots, "Stop, you're stabbing us. Stop, you're making us bleed!" Festina: doing the only thing left. "Grab my waist," Tic barked at me. "I can parachute you down to the next level."
"And run out on everyone else?"
Vigiant Page 19
