“Are we certain it’s the only one?” Strambli asked.
“There ain’t another,” Prozor replied.
“What if it gets faster, once we’re in the tunnel?”
“It won’t, Stram. I might not’ve seen one of these before, but there’s rules that they play by. They don’t get faster.”
Prozor was trying to settle Strambli’s nerves. There had been rather a lot of that lately. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Strambli was cowardly—she signed onto her earlier crew as an Opener, after all—but she was the least steady of us whenever events departed even slightly from the anticipated plan. That in turn made the rest of us jittery, and jittery people make mistakes.
No one needed to remind Prozor of that.
“Stram,” she went on, forcing her point. “This is a queer place to come for fuel, I’ll grant you. But it’s just a bauble. It was dug out by different coves than us, for reasons we can’t speculate. There’s things about it we won’t ever fathom. But that don’t mean it’s takin’ a personal interest in you, me or any of us. Anything that’s clever in a bauble, anythin’ that might react to us, adapt to our presence, try and trick us, that’ll have broken down or gone wrong long ago. What’s left is dumb stuff like a rumbling ball, and I’d bet you a bag of quoins it don’t know we’re here, and even if it did it wouldn’t be capable of changin’ its behaviour to suit. I’ll bet you a second bag that if we came back in a million years it’d still be takin’ thirty-eight minutes to go around.”
“I ain’t got the shivers,” Strambli said, a little resentfully.
“Wouldn’t blame you if you did,” Prozor said. “Shivers is helpful. But you’ve got to know when you can trust a bauble.”
Strambli would not be persuaded to waste another light-imp, so we made do with our helmet lamps, beams bobbing up and down as we shuffled. It took us fifteen minutes to get to the other door, better than Prozor’s estimate, and all the while the signal on the localiser was getting firmer and more insistent. The second doorway was set on the same side of the tunnel as the first, but instead of leading to a corridor sloping up, this one faced another descending shaft. It was not so steep as to hinder us, though, and before long our lights were picking up signs of another large space ahead. The shaft levelled off and we stepped through another doorway.
The fuel was there. We had taken only a few paces into the chamber before our lamps picked up the ribbed casing of a propellant bottle, and then another, and another after that, each painted metal drum about as tall as a person, with valves and gauges on the outside. They were stacked on top of each other, upright in piles of between three and five bottles. It was done haphazardly, none of the bottles lined up too neatly, so that the higher stacks looked fit to wobble over without much persuasion. We walked around them, and then eased through the gaps between the piles, not saying much.
We were all arriving at the same thought, which was that things had taken a tricky swerve.
“Is this how would’ve Rack left ’em?” Fura asked.
“No,” Prozor said. “Wasn’t no need.”
Most of the room was empty, with the piles of fuel gathered in the middle like a kind of sculpture or shrine. Other than that, there were alcoves with broken statues in, most of them just rubble with the occasional foot or part of a leg, and a couple of dark doors leading into deeper parts of the Rumbler.
“We’ll need to come back with heavy gear,” Strambli said resignedly. “Ropes and tackle. Power winches. Hydraulics. If not this window, then the next.”
“This is what we came for,” Fura replied. “This is what we’re taking. It’ll take more’n a jolt or two to set that fuel off, won’t it, especially if there’s no atmosphere?”
Prozor scratched a glove against the side of her helmet, leaning back as she looked all the way up one of the piles. “Depends on your idea of a jolt, girlie.”
“We’ll take our chances,” Fura said, as if it were a settled thing. “Ain’t got the muscle to take down one of those stacks piece by piece, so we’re just going to have to topple one and keep our fingers crossed.”
“I wouldn’t stop at fingers,” Prozor said.
Fura brushed her metal hand against the side of one of the three-high piles, reaching high enough to press the second bottle, hard enough to make the bottle rock slightly, and the one above rocked a bit more. “These bottles are dented enough as it is. I reckon they’ll take a few more knocks.” She stepped back, hands on hips, eyeing the stack until it stopped wobbling. “This one’ll do. That top bottle’s just waiting to topple off, and a quoin says it’ll roll away from the others when it hits the floor.”
Whatever misgivings I had, and there were several, I had to admit that we were scarcely spoilt for choices. So I joined my sister, and we started pushing hard on the second bottle, waiting for it to wobble back before giving another shove, the way you might assist a child on a swing. Each push we gave added a bit to the wobble, and then that wobble started spreading like a rumour to the bottle above, until that was tilting back and forth in the opposite direction.
None of this made any discernible sound, but I could imagine the creaking and groaning as our efforts made the pile increasingly unstable. The top bottle was wobbling more than the one under it now, because it had nothing above it to weigh it down, and with each lurch I wondered if it was going to come down on our heads.
Fura’s timing was impeccable, and she stepped back from the rocking pile a second before it gave way. The bottle toppled as it went, and clouted the floor on its rim, denting itself but not bursting. It bounced once—up half the height it had already fallen—before landing again and rolling away from the other fuel bottles, and us.
“Now the next one,” Fura said, before the first bottle had come to a halt, and she was already setting the second bottle rocking back and forth again.
Before long we had three bottles for the taking, which—under the circumstances—struck me as a fair haul. Given the time left to us there was no hope of working any more than these three back up to the top chamber.
“Here,” Prozor said, and she was holding the localiser up to the side of one of the bottles still in a pile. “This is the one. Rack opened it up, welded in a little compartment, fixed the transmitter inside. Clever gubbins. Runs off a little thermal engine—just takes a sip of fuel when it needs to, not enough that you’d ever miss it.”
“Sly old Rack,” I said, feeling proud and sad at the same time, and thinking Fura must be having similar thoughts.
We took stock. We still had three and a half hours before we needed to be off the bauble, but there was the additional question of that big rolling ball to consider. It was due back again in four minutes, so there was no hope of making it back to the far doorway before it arrived.
“We can still get a headstart,” Fura said. “We’ll roll the bottles up to the top of the slope, one at a time, without concerning ourselves with the ball.”
Even the dented bottle still rolled nicely enough, but it took three of us to begin shoving it back up the slope, and even then we could have benefited from another helper. But three was the most that could squeeze alongside each other and not get tangled up, so while Fura, Prozor and I did the hard grunting, we sent Strambli up to the top of the slope to keep a watch on the big tunnel. We worked carefully, knowing it would only take one slip to have the bottle rolling back the way it had come.
That shaft was shorter than the first and after four minutes we were nearly at the top. Strambli was waiting for us, hand on the doorframe, ducking her head in and out of the open space like a nervous chicken.
“Here it comes,” she said.
The rumble grew. We shoved the bottle onto an area of level floor at the top of the shaft and I only let go once I knew it was safe. The ball came past, the rumble juddering through to our bones. Quick as I could I jerked my own head out into the tunnel, looking toward the huge object as it rolled away from us. I regretted it, as the beam from my helmet lamp picked ou
t the ball’s scabby patterning, plastered over it like the territories on a globe. It was just a flash, even then, but I saw more than the first time.
Those patterns were imprints. They were what was left of things that the ball had rolled over and squashed, the way it finished off Strambli’s light-imp. Not merely squashed, but absorbed into itself, with a layer of them stuck onto it as it rolled away. And those patterns were not as random as I’d initially fancied. They were bodies, stamped onto the ball, arms and legs and heads all spread-out and distorted but unavoidable once your eyes had figured them for what they were. Monkey shapes, sometimes, but not always.
Other, stranger coves than us had ended up stuck on that ball.
“What you were saying earlier, Proz,” I said. “About how balls like that usually end up jammed, stuck in the tunnels. I think I see it now.”
“Does you, girlie?”
“It’s because they get bigger and bigger, isn’t it? Whenever they roll over someone who doesn’t make it between those doors in time.”
“Didn’t think you’d care for all the details.”
“That’s a lot of time, a lot of dead coves,” Strambli said, with a dawning horror in her voice.
The rumbling had passed. The ball was off on its next lap, as single-minded on that course as the drooling, mad-eyed greyhounds they used to race at Jauncery Field. “Right,” I said, pushing aside thoughts of the poor folk who’d been rolled over already, and nodding in a matter of fact way back to the fuel bottle. “Let’s get this to the other doorway, shall we? If we can get it rolling, it shouldn’t take us much longer than when we came.”
“No, we’ll fetch the other two bottles first,” Fura said. “Get them here, all together, then we’ll worry about rolling ’em the rest of the way.”
We gave Strambli the choice between guarding the one fuel bottle or coming back down with us, and after a bit of deliberation she decided she would sooner remain with us. So with Prozor keeping an eye on the time, we went back down to the lower chamber and began to roll the next bottle up the sloping corridor. It was harder this time, the sweat dripping salt into my eyes. According to the gauges there was just as much fuel in this one as the previous bottle, no more and no less, but we were more tired and our suits offered no sort of mechanical assistance.
I stumbled when we were halfway up, and as my fingers came off the bottle Fura and Prozor only just had time to stop it rolling back.
“You tired?” Fura asked, breathing heavily.
“We’re all tired,” Prozor said. “Be a miracle if we weren’t. Won’t hurt to take a minute to get our breath back.”
Strambli was a few paces ahead of us and looking back over our shoulders and down the length of the corridor, back to the room where we had found the fuel. No part of it was visible now, just a blackness beyond the limit of our lamps.
But Strambli made a sort of clicking noise, the way some people do in their sleep when they have not quite reached the point of snoring. “F—” she started to say, and I knew she was trying to call Fura’s name.
Prozor twisted around as far as she could without letting go of the bottle.
She looked back down the corridor, the way we’d come.
“Hello, cove,” she said.
Something was shuffling out of the darkness, coming up the corridor behind us. It was a shadowy thing emerging from shadows, puzzling at first, but a second or third glimpse was all it took to recognise the essentials. A boot, a knee, a chest-pack, hoses and pipes, a gloved arm reaching out to us. Slowly more of our light fell on it, picking out the details of a spacesuit, older in its parts than any of ours, but just as jumbled and motley. The helmet—what we could see of it given the figure’s stooping, down-looking gait—was all rusted and scabbed, like something that had been underwater for centuries.
The figure kept shuffling up the corridor. It moved as if it were stiffer on one side than the other, meaning it had to shuffle sideways, and something else was compelling it to bend down, as if doubled-over with laughter or gut-cramps.
I suppose I had the beginnings of a shivery intimation even then, but it started small and built slowly, because at first I was relieved to see that our thief—because who else could it be—was a regular bauble-cracker just like us. There were still some questions that needed settling, such as how long this person had been in the bauble, and how they had got past Rack’s tell-tale without breaking those threads. But I supposed all that would come clear in the fullness.
What we were not facing was a robot or an alien or a Ghostie or any of the other things rumoured to wander around inside baubles.
“You want to take a breather there, cove,” Prozor said, as the figure came closer. “We can parlay just fine without gettin’ in each other’s faces.”
“Pass me my bow,” Fura said.
Strambli reached over and extracted Fura’s crossbow from the rig on the back of her suit. The bow was already cocked, the way Fura preferred it. She took one hand from the bottle and took the bow in the other, levelling it down the corridor. The figure straightened up a bit, just enough that we could start to see its face coming into view through the curve of its visor.
That was when my shivers turned to cold terror.
3
There were two realisations, striking almost simultaneously. The first was that there was no glass across that visor, so the figure couldn’t be breathing. The second was that, in all frankness, not breathing was rather the least of their problems. Not having any skin was the more pressing issue. No skin, no muscle, no nothing. There was just a bony skull, with black caves where there ought to have been eyes.
Two nose-slits, a grin of a mouth, a jaw lolling open on a few gristly shreds of tissue.
Fura shot the crossbow. It went straight into the chest-pack, and perhaps that was the sensible place to aim when you were dealing with a living cove. I was less sure that it made any difference now. Had it been me, I would have directed the bolt through that open visor and shattered that skull like pottery.
Still, it had an effect. The chest-pack gave off a silent crackle of sparks, then some black emanation came belching out of it, and the figure toppled forward with its arms stretched before it, much as if it were offering itself up in supplication.
It remained still, prostrate on the sloping floor. The black smoke was still coming out of it, curling out from under the body, and there were still sparks lighting it up from underneath, but there was no trace of movement.
“Seen some wrong things in my time,” Strambli said, speaking low and slow. “None of ’em were a tenth as wrong as that, though.”
“You ain’t been around much,” Prozor said.
Fura walked slowly to the prostrate form, taking the time to drop another bolt into her crossbow. The figure didn’t move as she neared, and when she gave the helmet a kick the body twitched once but gave no other reaction.
Fura looked at Prozor. “You got a theory for this as well, I s’pose?”
Prozor made her own way to the fallen form. She knelt down, squatting as well as one could in one of our suits, and scooped a hand under the empty rim of the helmet, tugging it higher to bring the skull back into view.
Prozor craned down so she could peer deep into the empty sockets.
“Mm-mm,” she said, like a doctor about to deliver the bad news about an illness.
“What?” I asked.
“Cove’s a twinkle-head. Or used to be.”
I had rattled around with Prozor for long enough to pick up a good measure of her spacefaring cant, but that was a new one on me. Since I did know what the “twinkly” was, though, I ventured an educated guess.
“Something to do with the gubbins inside skulls?”
Prozor nodded behind the bars of her faceplate. “Some crews get greedy, or lazy, or can’t find a Bone Reader that’s a match to their skull. So they scoop out the twinkly from inside the alien skull, and plop it into their own noggins, cutting out the middle-girl, so to speak.”
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“How—why—would they do that?” I asked.
“How’s the easy part,” Prozor said. “You girlies had your Neural Alley. Places like that all over the Congregation, and there isn’t a service someone won’t offer, for the right price. They drill little holes in you, like mineshafts, and they drop the twinkly into your grey at various depths and leave it there. The holes seal over and the twinkly takes root.”
“All right—and the why?”
“Once in a while, it gives a cove the ability to speak to bones—and more—without any sort of extra apparatus.” She allowed the helmet to fall back to its resting position, standing up as she did. “But generally there’s a cost. Occasionally the twinkly gets a will of its own. Starts whispering to things it oughtn’t to. Like spacesuits, ’specially the clever sort, with gubbins of their own. It comes to a sort of arrangement with the suit, mutually beneficial.”
“And the cove?” I asked.
“Superfluous. The twinkly don’t need it, and neither does the suit. Usually only one way that ends.” Prozor gave the helmet a kick, firmer than the one Fura had delivered.
“Is it worth us bringing back the suit and the corpse?” Fura asked, replacing her crossbow in its rig, now that it had served its purpose.
“Best left to rot,” Prozor said. “Ain’t anything we can’t find somewhere else.”
“What did the twinkle-head want with our fuel, do you think?” I asked.
“That suit can run off fuel, just the same as Rack’s transmitter,” Prozor said. “More’n likely—and knowin’ what I do about twinkle-heads—it had plans to lure us in then keep us down here, in the bauble.”
“What use are we to that bag of bones?” Strambli asked.
“None at all, girlie. But our suits, our gear, that’s another story. Things break down, wear out, especially down here. The twinkle-heads can always use new parts to keep ’emselves goin’.”
“It was going to cannibalise us, that’s what you’re saying,” Fura said.
“Good job there was the just the one of them,” Strambli said.
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