Neptune Crossing

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  *

  As he stepped off the lift, he was some hundred meters beneath the surface, far deeper than he had been in Charlie’s cavern. With vapor lamps arrayed everywhere, it was considerably brighter here than Charlie’s cavern had been; but he couldn’t help shivering at a certain feeling of déjà vu. As he peered down the horizontal mine shaft, he saw that the walls here contained less ice and more rock than Charlie’s cavern. The ceiling had been laser-fused for structural strength, but it still made him nervous. /Does this remind you of anything?/ he asked Charlie, wondering if the quarx had memories of their first meeting.

  /// Yes . . . ///

  the quarx said weakly.

  /What’s the matter?/ Bandicut was puzzled by Charlie’s abruptly subdued demeanor. /You do remember meeting me—with your translator—don’t you?/

  The quarx seemed to have trouble answering. He clearly found this place disturbing, for some reason.

  /Say, you aren’t claustrophobic or anything, are you?/

  /// No, I— ///

  Bandicut frowned, beginning to wonder if something really was wrong with the quarx. /You lived in a cavern smaller than this, for millions of years. Don’t you remember?/

  /// Yes . . . I remember . . .

  But this . . . reminds me of . . .

  something else . . . ///

  The quarx’s voice trailed off.

  Bandicut realized that the other men from the van had gone off somewhere and disappeared. They probably had assumed that he knew where he was going. /Reminds you of what?/ he asked absently, wondering where in the hell he was supposed to go now.

  /// . . . of . . . ///

  The alien couldn’t seem to finish its thought. Someone who looked as though he might be the mining foreman was walking in Bandicut’s direction along the corridor shaft. Down at the far end of the tunnel, Bandicut glimpsed a flickering of light and shadow, men working. /What’s it remind you of?/ he muttered.

  /// Of the war, ///

  Charlie whispered.

  Bandicut felt a sudden chill. /What?/ he asked softly. Something had been touched deep in the quarx’s memory, something very sharp and painful, something that fitted with this underground image of tunnels in the rock and ice. Before he could ask, he felt a sudden sense of memories falling into place like the tumblers of a lock, and the quarx murmured,

  /// It reminds me of . . .

  our burrowing deep, very deep

  to avoid the destruction

  at the end. ///

  Bandicut fought off a wave of dizziness. The quarx’s voice carried great waves of sorrow and fear. Images flickered in Bandicut’s mind, too quickly to follow; but he recognized glimpses of what the first Charlie had shown him—memories of Triton millions of years ago, in another star system, at war. The end of the Rohengen civilization. This time the memory seemed to carry a keener sorrow—as if the sight of this mining tunnel touched a nerve that ran darker and deeper than any he’d touched before. /Charlie? Are you okay?/

  /// What do you mean? ///

  the quarx whispered hoarsely.

  /You don’t sound so good. Are you having some kind of flashback or something?/ He felt the quarx flinch, and an image flickered in his mind of someone running, desperately running, fleeing from approaching explosions. The image vanished, squelched at its source, and he sensed that it was not gone, but hidden from him. /Charlie?/ There was no answer. He had a fleeting impression of the quarx burrowing, curling into a ball, pulling away from him. Great, he thought.

  He heard a voice on the comm, “That you, Jimmy?” It was the suited man, approaching. “Who is that?”

  “Bandicut!” he called back. “Herb sent me down.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “How the hell would I know? He said you were short-handed. I’m supposed to help out.”

  “Aw, you mean I’m supposed to train a new guy, on top of everything else? Man, I need this like I need hemorrhoids—”

  “Listen!” Bandicut flared. “I didn’t ask to be sent down here! Who is that—Jones?”

  “Yeah, it’s Jones.” The foreman waved for Bandicut to join him. “Hey, nothin’ personal, Bandicut. I’m sure as a miner you’re a helluva good pilot. It’s just that we’re a little busy here. We’re on a bum streak and the man up in the office is tellin’ us to move our butts and get the output up, and what does he know about mining? Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. I know.” Bandicut could now read the man’s name stenciled on his suit: JQ Jones. At that moment, he felt a shiver run up his spine. It had nothing to do with Jones. It had everything to do with where he was, and why, and the fact that he was separated by a pane of cryosafe plastic from everyone around him. No connection . . . linkage . . . neurowarmth . . . neurostim . . .

  Oh no. /Charlie!/

  He couldn’t feel the quarx; Charlie had withdrawn into his own memories; but he felt something else, something disturbingly familiar. There seemed to be a distance growing, not quite physical or tangible, but a distance nonetheless, between himself and the foreman, himself and the cavern, himself and anything else that might touch him. The silence-fugue was just in its beginning phase, but he already felt a certain comfort in the familiarity of the sensation.

  “Here y’go, Bandicut. Want to help us out here?” Jones stopped beside a bank of equipment which, as far as Bandicut could tell, might have been used for drilling or for dishwashing. Was he going to be expected to operate this stuff? Then he saw that Jones was pointing not at the equipment, but just beyond it to what looked like a pile of rock rubble. A small, hunchbacked robot was picking its way across the pile. “Quasimodo here is sorting through these tailings for traces of metal that might have gotten through the big processor. You want to help it?”

  Bandicut’s head was buzzing. He wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “Say again? You’re joking, right?”

  “Naw, our big sorters sometimes miss bits that are worth as much as half a crawler load.”

  “And you just dump it here and let a robot claw through it?” Bandicut felt great bubbles of disbelief billowing open in his head. He’d thought he understood how things worked around here, but was it possible they were even more idiotic than he’d supposed?

  Jones shrugged without apparent humor. “Quasimodo here does a pretty good job—bit of a perfectionist, really. He’ll show you what to do.”

  Bandicut’s vision flickered with little tongues of flame. He was to be a servant and apprentice to a robot? “Now, wait a second—”

  “I tol’ you, I don’t have anyone here to train you.” Jones grinned. “If you get real good at this, maybe we’ll promote you tomorrow. Now, I gotta go. Lunch break is at eleven-thirty Zulu.”

  Bandicut stared at the foreman’s dwindling back and thought, time is fleeing, and this is what I’m doing? Charlie? He turned to stare at the little robot. It was dusty and nondescript, with a couple of flickering lights and three eye lenses. As it rose from a crouch, it looked like a tiny, ancient man, plucking at the rocks. It examined the chunks one by one, then flicked them aside into the shadows. Bandicut brushed off the top of a small boulder and sat down, blinking.

  He was casually aware that the robot was looking almost alive to him, and for that matter, the corridors were starting to remind him of a hive maze, and his safety-net Charlie was nowhere to be found; and he was dimly aware that he was teetering on the brink of a potentially major silence-fugue, perhaps as bad as the one that had sent him careening toward Charlie’s cavern in the first place. He had no power to take any action, but he watched what was happening in his mind with keen interest and an avid curiosity. Spectator mode: the kind of silence-fugue that he liked best, really . . .

  He felt a little shiver from Charlie, but nothing more.

  He was suddenly aware that the robot was utterly still. It was watching him. It extended one telescoping arm and poked at a chunk of rock. “Yeah?” Bandicut said dreamily. “What d
o you want?”

  The robot raised its arm and pointed at him. He chuckled, “Get outa here.”

  The robot hooted softly.

  Bandicut squinted at the metal creature, and imagined an army of them crawling around, scrabbling at loose rock in search of stray grains of metal which they would deposit in a small pile. He imagined a storm gathering up the meager collection in a whirlwind and blowing them away as fast as the robots could collect them, all of their efforts coming to nothing as they dug and probed and toiled, for nothing at all.

  Beware your state of mind. The warning thought—from Charlie?—flickered past and vanished as he rose and joined the robot, giggling silently.

  A remaining sane corner of his mind recoiled in horror, then spun away in the wind. He reached out past the robot and picked up a rock. “I got one, too,” he murmured. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

  The robot seemed to shake its head in disgust. It took the rock from him and turned it over in its mechanical hand. “Scanning,” it muttered. “No metal.” It turned and tossed the rock onto the refuse pile. “Next?”

  “Next? Next what?”

  The robot stared at him expectantly.

  “You want me to stand here and hand you rocks? So I can look like a furgin’ hunchback, too? Whaddya think we invented robots for, anyway?”

  Quasimodo peered at him a moment longer, then gave a little jerk which might have been a shrug and turned back to its work, paying him no further notice.

  Bandicut heard laughter. He saw Jones a little way up the corridor, walking back toward him. “Okay, Bandicut—I wasn’t really gonna leave you there all day. Come on, I got something better for you to do.” Jones waved him onward.

  Following Jones, with a dark glance back at Quasimodo, Bandicut swiveled his head back and forth, glaring at the faces peering down at him from the walls, the ghosts maybe of all the aliens who once lived here, billions of years ago. He imagined them falling in behind him. No, no, he wanted to tell them. This is taking me farther from the answers! Go back! But he decided to say nothing. They would be gone soon, he knew. And so would the fugue. Soon.

   Chapter 13 

  Silence-fugue

  “DOWN HERE,” JONES said, pointing to a shaft.

  Bandicut stepped carefully forward and peered down into the shaft. It was ten or twenty meters deep. A cable descended from a hoist overhead, down through the center of the shaft. He could see movement below, the shadows of men working nearby, and occasionally an elbow or backpack jutting into view. His nerves jangled; he imagined fish with large teeth swarming down there. He stepped back. “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s a little makeshift because the main hoist is broken, so we’ve got this rig here for the time being.”

  “And you want me to . . . run it?”

  “Naw—hell no!” Jones laughed. “You think we can afford to have someone here running a stupid hoist? We got real work for you to do, down in the laser shaft.”

  Bandicut swallowed, and said nothing.

  “Let me just show you how this thing works, so you can get yourself in and out.” Jones pointed to a grimy panel of knobs and levers.

  Bandicut peered and saw the knobs turn to little faces. He thought one of the levers waved. Hi, he thought. He had just enough presence of mind not to wave back.

  Jones was activating the hoist. After glancing down the shaft to see that the way was clear, he pushed a lever and the cable began rising. “Here you go. Up. Down. Keep the tension even here. Simple enough?” He turned his shiny visor toward Bandicut.

  “Simple,” Bandicut whispered.

  “Then let’s go.” Jones grabbed the cable and swung out over the shaft. He sank quickly. Bandicut stepped after him and clung as they descended deeper into the mine.

  The shaft surrounded him like a tomb, then opened out into a cavern full of lights and suited men. There was very little headroom once clear of the hoist, which gave a closed-in feeling to the place, even though the room opened out horizontally for tens of meters. Mining holes were being bored outward in a radial fashion from the outer circumference of the cavern. Vapors from probing lasers periodically boiled out in great clouds, obscuring the view. Bandicut shivered with a sudden feeling that this was where the real heart of the Triton operation was located. It was in these deep mines that the most promising concentrations of Tritonmetal had been detected, the melted and twisted veins of living communities . . . of buildings, technologies, and people . . . of the Rohengen, before they had been consumed by their war. And no one else—no one human, anyway—had the slightest inkling of the history that he saw in this place.

  He shuddered with a sudden intensity, and realized that the quarx, deep in his mind, was reacting violently to those last thoughts. He had a sense of tightly contained memories and feelings on the verge of erupting.

  “Bandicut, for Chrissake, come on!” Jones was gesturing impatiently from halfway down a work line, where a dozen men were operating panels for the remote mining equipment.

  “Right—”

  “Hey Bandie—how you makin’ out, man?” He heard a familiar voice, and swung around, looking for its source. Finally he spotted Gordon Kracking waving from behind a large computer console.

  “Okay, uh . . . What are you doing here, Krackey?”

  “Helpin’ ’em straighten out this mess of a control system!” Krackey shouted, gesturing. Behind him a plasma laser flickered in a horizontal shaft. A conveyor belt was carrying a continuous load of rock and ice past a sensor bank for scanning and sorting. Bandicut blinked, imagining his friend as a great bird, flapping his wings and flying away in frustration from this place. He imagined Jones’ gaze as a great invisible laser beam, cutting Krackey down and then turning on him, if he didn’t move—

  “Comin’, JQ!” He hurried after the foreman, ignoring the curious glances of the other miners.

  Jones was standing just beyond one of the main tunneling stations. He was fiddling with a portable control stand connected by cable to a small drilling laser. The laser, mounted on a self-propelled dolly, was parked just inside a small, fresh-looking horizontal opening. The shaft in the cavern wall was about a shoulder’s width across. Its interior was dark. Jones turned his helmeted head toward Bandicut and hooked a gloved thumb toward the small shaft. “We’ll be setting up a boring and extraction station here in a coupla’ days, but here’s the pilot hole so we can get some readings on any veins along the radial. This oughta be right up your alley, Bandicut. The instruments here’re just like the ones on your survey rigs.”

  Bandicut stepped cautiously past the mining operation situated just to the left of the new shaft. The flashes and boiling vapors of the mining laser gave him a feeling of walking through the set of a holomovie, but he knew better. This was serious business down here; deep mining was the most dangerous operation on all of Triton. The lasers were mounted on stationary pedestals, their radiant output focused and guided by mirrors. The powerful beams glowed and shimmered within the shafts like exotic weapons beams, glittering dully off the sluglike vapor-exhaust ducts.

  One of the men operating the laser was Mick Eddison, the miner who’d given him such a hard time in the dorm the other day. Bandicut shuddered, thinking, they let people like him control these life-threatening machines? He hoped Eddison hadn’t noticed him.

  Jones was flipping switches. Bandicut stepped close and peered at the instruments. Actually, they bore little resemblance to the readouts he was used to, but he assumed he could figure out how they worked. “Okay,” he said.

  “What you’re gonna do is, walk this baby straight into the pilot shaft, and just drill straight out on a narrow beam. It’s auto-guided. You record the findings here.” Jones pointed to the instruments, then looked at him. “Think you can handle that?”

  Whether it was John Bandicut responding or some inner creature released by the silence-fugue, he answered casually, “No problem.” Before Jones could say another word, he flicked on the laser.

  J
ones backed hastily out of the way. “Be careful with that thing,” he yelled, then vanished back into a swirling cloud of vapor.