Neptune Crossing

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  *

  Be careful? Bandicut thought, driving the laser forward into the shaft, guided by images on a small monitor. What could be simpler? He thought he heard a faint, mewling protest somewhere deep in the mines of his own thoughts; but perhaps that was the quarx, working out its own problems. But he couldn’t count on the quarx; the Charlie he knew was gone, and he was on his own.

  The tunnel was not yet very deep, reaching only a few meters. The guide beams glinted red, sparkling through the thin haze that filled the tenuous air, marking the track of the invisible infrared and ultraviolet beams that bored and probed and sent back reflections to the sensors. The rock and ice layers scintillated, sparkling of emerald and ruby and sapphire; it was a pretty show for Bandicut, but also information for the recorder. If there were veins of metal, even trace residues, the spectra would be detected in the return beams.

  For a time, he was boring through rock, his laser slowly deepening and widening the hole before advancing. Then he struck ice and a vapor cloud billowed out of the shaft, obscuring his view. As the exhaust vent drew the cloud away, he glimpsed a dancing display of fluorescence and refraction in the monitor, deep in the hole. He was dazzled by the sight; it reminded him of the image Charlie had shown him in their first meeting—what a quarx might look like, if it existed in material form.

  Was he imagining it, or did he feel Charlie-Two trembling? He blinked as the laser licked at ice and rock, melting and vaporizing, hollowing out the tunnel. He glanced up from the monitor to peer directly into the borehole. He saw faces peering back from the inner walls of the shaft. There was Charlie-One as he might have appeared as a human: a trifle pudgy and world weary, with thinning flyaway hair, but a gleam in the eye and a quip on his tongue. And there was Charlie-Two, narrow and stern, with dark, strictly kempt hair, and eyes that bored into Bandicut’s, trying to understand—

  Both faces flickered and melted in the laser heat, and turned to a hazy, gauzy light, with jets of fire spurting out to the sides.

  “Bandicut! What the hell are you doing?”

  He started and realized that his hands were working the controls of their own accord. Jones strode out of a cloud of steam like a creature from an old movie. What was he doing? “Are you falling asleep at that goddamn thing?” he heard, and he blinked and saw that he had taken the laser off auto-guide and let it wander, hollowing out the walls, creating a pool of melted ice that was now hardening to a slick surface. He snapped the laser off and backed it out. He peered into the tunnel in dismay. It was now almost big enough for a man to walk into, if he got up there and crouched low. Too big.

  Jones stared into the tunnel, shaking his head. “Jesus, Bandicut, I thought I could trust you to do this simple little—”

  “Did I ever say I was a miner?” Bandicut protested weakly.

  “Even a goddamn pilot ought to be able to see—!” Jones gave up with an audible sigh. “All right, never mind. Now that you’ve got it so big, we need to get a robot in there to check it out.” His voice sharpened. “Commlink Echo, Robot Delta Mike Four, report to my location. Copernicus—you got that?”

  Bandicut heard a drumtap in reply, and a few moments later, a small, upright robot with four cone-shaped wheels lumbered out of a cloud of vapor at the next work station and stopped in front of Jones. “With you, boss,” it twanged.

  Jones pointed. “I want you to go into this borehole and do a short profile type-B spectrascan. Got that?”

  Copernicus drumtapped acknowledgment. Using its upper appendages, it lifted itself into the shaft, then reconfigured itself into a horizontal attitude, one pair of cone wheels stretching forward. A cluster of lights on its nose blinked on, and it rolled forward into the borehole.

  Bandicut watched, befuddled, as the robot’s scanning lights glinted and reflected back out of the tunnel. Another memory was being touched here; he felt Charlie twisting in pain.

  /You okay there?/ he whispered nervously.

  An image flickered in his mind: the quarx, in its Rohengen host, sprinting down a passageway, lights flashing and ground trembling. They were under attack, underground, running for cover; but this was the wrong direction. There was a synthetic creature ahead of them; they were trying to save it. For some reason it was special . . . it was a coworker, a friend. They ran, hoping to catch it, to bring it back to safety. There was a blinding light, and the ground shook—

  And everything changed forever for the quarx. It was all gone in that flash: not just the robot-friend and the corridor it had been running through, but all hope for the Rohengen, for the future of quarx and host alike. The image blurred, as though obscured by tears, quarx and host fleeing back the other way. But the host was injured and dying. It barely made it through quaking underground corridors to the deep shaft where the quarx’s translator was hidden. Then the host died, releasing the quarx to the translator, and quarx and translator were falling, falling . . . plunging toward the center of the moon, away from the battle and the terror . . . but it was all gone, everything that it had lived and hoped for, its only friends . . .

  A squawk on the comm made Bandicut blink. It was the robot, chirping. Through the haze of confusion, he heard it calling . . . loss of traction, adhesion to ice . . . caught . . . trapped . . .

  Trapped, and it needed help. Before Jones could respond with any sort of instruction, Bandicut pushed the laser-probe aside, clawed for purchase on the lip of the borehole as he climbed up, crouching as he made his way into the tunnel to help the robot . . .

  “—what the flying fuzzookie are you doing?” Jones yelled.

  No need to answer, got to get to the robot before it was injured, damaged, destroyed . . . lights flashing here, rock trembling . . . there it was, glinting just beyond the narrow constriction where the tunnel was carved out of rock, before the ice pocket. Bandicut crouched and stretched forward, and yes, it was awfully icy here, he’d really burnished it to a slick surface, but he could almost reach the robot . . . give it a good yank before the big flash came to end everything. He had his hand on it and felt a sudden flush, and a tingle going down his arm . . . the quarx was stirring, with some kind of reflex, trying to reach out to communicate with the thing.

  “BANDICUT!” Jones bellowed.

  And he finally, dimly realized what he was doing. It was sheer idiocy; he could get stuck here himself. He was caught in the quarx’s memory of a desperate need to save a robot . . . but Copernicus was in no real danger. And even if it was, so what? /Charlie,/ he whispered, /did you want me to do this—?/

  The answer rattled up faintly, from somewhere deep in his mind:

  /// No, but . . . what are you . . . ? ///

  The scanning lasers on the robot suddenly rotated and flashed back off the ice, dazzling him. The quarx writhed . . . the destruction of everything . . .

  Bandicut shuddered and squirmed back. He twisted, glimpsing where Jones was standing at the entrance to the borehole, yelling at him.

  “Are you delirious? Get out of there!”

  Bandicut shuffled, crouching, toward the foreman. He heard himself croaking, “No, no, not delirious—” he gasped. “It’s this damn alien in my—”

  /// NO! ///

  shrieked the quarx, and did something inside Bandicut’s head.

  His vision flickered off and on once, then went black as he fainted. It was only for an instant, but long enough for him to lose his balance, for his feet to shoot out from under him on the ice. He skidded feet first toward the end of the tunnel and Jones’s head—and the mining laser just beyond Jones. He clawed futilely—so light in this gravity—

  He flew out of the shaft, airborne, and Jones hit him with a body blow to deflect him, and he careened into the cavern wall and bounced back toward the blazing light. He screamed and stuck out a foot—and caught it on the laser’s pedestal, then slammed into the pedestal before dropping in a crumpled heap to the floor. Pain blazed up his leg, and he cried out, once— />
  —before the quarx, panicked, shut off the pain impulses; and then his consciousness, too.

   Chapter 14 

  Strange Fevers

  HE BECAME AWARE of voices before he knew where he was. They seemed to be discussing whether or not to get him unsuited before taking him to the infirmary. “It’ll just get in their way,” someone was saying.

  “This monitor says he’s got a broken ankle,” someone else answered. “Whaddyou think we’ll do to that if we try to take this suit off? They got nano-shit that can do that, in the infirmary.”

  A heavy voice cut in, “I don’t want this suit ruined down there. They ain’t gonna give a flyin’ horse-moke about the equipment.”

  “Have a little heart, Herb! The guy’s hurt!” That sounded like Krackey.

  “Yeah, well, he may be hurt, but that don’t make him any less of a dumb fucker,” the heavy-sounding voice retorted. “Imagine goin’ on shift with a fever of a hundred ’n’ four and not tellin’ anyone! Serves him right he almost got hisself killed.”

  Massengale. That last idiot was Massengale.

  “Hey, come on, will you? He was probably too feverish to know he was sick.”

  Bandicut’s eyes blinked open. His visor had been pushed up, and he was staring up at the ready-room ceiling. How’d he get here? he wondered vaguely. He groaned aloud and fended off the hands that were trying to remove his helmet. With a Herculean effort, he shoved it off himself. He felt a region of numbness around his left ankle. He tried to recall what had happened, and found his memory a feverish muddle. He remembered the silence-fugue. And he remembered the quarx shutting him down like an overloaded circuit.

  /// You were in severe pain.

  It seemed the best course of action.

  Are you okay now? ///

  “Awww, too bad! He woke up,” Massengale remarked.

  Bandicut tried to raise his head to glare, but the supervisor was already on his way out of the room. “Stupid stoker,” he grunted. He shifted his gaze to see who else was here with him. Krackey was the only one he knew. “Ah, man!” he sighed.

  “Take it easy, there, Bandie,” Krackey said worriedly. “You got a fever an’ a broken ankle. It must hurt like a bastard, but we don’t want to do nothin’ until the meds get a look at you.”

  Great, he thought. The meds. The same meds who’d tried to fix his neuros. He wondered if the quarx could do anything to help.

  /// I can keep the pain turned off,

  as I’m doing now.

  That’s about all, I think. ///

  He sighed and forced a grin in Krackey’s direction. “It’s . . . not too bad,” he said, realizing suddenly that it was true. He felt disoriented, but there was very little physical pain, except for a hollow sort of emptiness below his left knee. He wondered if that was what a phantom limb felt like to someone who’d lost a leg.

  “Ho, man, Bandie! If you’re not in some serious pain, it must be because of that fever.” Krackey looked at the first-aid monitor and shook his head. “You got yourself one whale of a fracture there. What happened? And what the hell were you doing, working, if you were sick like that?”

  Sick? he thought. Fever? Had he actually been delirious with fever, instead of silence-fugue? That, somehow, would be easier to take.

  /// Uh, no—sorry.

  I gave you the fever

  as an excuse for your behavior.

  What were you thinking of,

  trying to pull a robot out by its hind legs? ///

  /Thinking? Didn’t you notice, I was out of my mind with fugue?/ He remembered the quarx’s flashback-induced silence. /Anyway, where were you? You’re supposed to help me out when these things happen./

  /// I am?

  I don’t have much recollection of that.

  I suppose . . . I was a trifle indisposed

  for a while there. ///

  Bandicut felt movement, and realized suddenly that he was on a gurney, being rolled toward the door. Krackey was walking alongside him. The door opened and two medtechs came in and took the gurney. “You guys can’t go walking out of here like that,” one of them said. “Your boss said to tell you to go back to work,” said the other. That was when Bandicut noticed that the miners were all still suited, except for their helmets.

  “I’ll check in on you as soon as I can,” Krackey promised, with a wave. “Don’t worry—these guys will have you riveted back together in no time. Just take it easy and get over that flu!”

  Bandicut blanched as the techs sped him through the door and down the corridor.