by Scott Azmus
Something in his words, the arrogant tone or maybe the hint of condescension, makes you want to lash out at him. You wave at Odette’s figures. “Good luck. Looks like you’re going to disappoint a lot of investors.”
Verbeck rakes the stones into his cupped palm and rams them into his pocket. His eyes flash hatred. “Damn you, woman. Why don’t you get off your skinny little ass and do something about it?” His fist crushes the note slab’s glowing display. “Find out who did this!”
You stare back, but restrain your gut reaction. He’d be even more difficult with his face ripped off. You stalk him to the exit, grab his fancy heater suit by the jeweled cuff, and pull him around. “I’ll need to get my ‘skinny little ass’ into the pit—”
He carefully extracts his sleeve from your grasp. “Relax. I didn’t mean anything derogatory by that. I’ll take you there myself. Tomorrow. Now, if you will excuse me, I have a few things to check out aboard my star yacht. Drop by for late supper if you care to.”
His leer strays down to your breasts before he releases you and turns toward the landing pad. Odette slams the door. “Bastard. You should have seen him after the attack…screaming and tearing at his hair. Only he wasn’t upset about the missing miners. He was sweating the loss of his precious starphires. I hope he loads his yacht past lift capacity.”
You nod slowly without showing your disagreement. If all else fails, you’ll need that yacht. It might, just might, quiet your investors.
You hold a fingertip to the spinning scaife and lift a partially polished slice. It looks as if you’ve cut your finger. “What does all of this have to do with the attack?”
Odette draws in a deep, exhausted breath and slumps into a chair. “I don’t know.”
You return the starphire slice. It has turned slightly more yellow than red. “That’s strange,” you say. “Another new optic property?”
Odette doesn’t even look up. She only stares at the specimen pans. The meager remains are all anyone can find of Manipura’s support and mining personnel. You begin to sort through the mixed debris…all you have to go on. Human molars, seal zips, part of a digital frictometer, a mangled fork and a…. “What’s this?”
Odette checks the holotag. Her hands tremble. “Canirex mandible and teeth. All that’s left of the mine’s guard dogs.”
You drag a thumb across the blunted serrations. Hard to think of anything getting by a canirex. The vid transmitted to your inbound transport-cum-relief ship showed little more than streaking multi-hued lights and a hypnotic buzzing that still forces your nape hair to attention. When the lights and sounds faded, only the stars and the hovering auroral luminescence remained.
“What killed them?” you ask.
“Can’t say. Even the hardest driving snow can’t tear flesh and bone like this.” She lifts a smaller, deeply abraded bone fragment. “This was someone’s upper femur. Diamond blasting would do a less effective job.”
Your guts twist. You brace yourself against the wall. Who could have done this? The Tescada does not sanction murder. A license for this kind of carnage would have cost more than any possible haul. This has to be a rogue operation. If you don’t find out whose, your investors will eat you alive.
You stare out the window. The only movement is the silent progression of robot loading carts to and from Verbeck’s yacht. You’ve seen the inside of plenty of star yachts; you know there’s no way Verbeck could have the stolen starphires too.
You lift your boot to the table top and hug your knee. Think, think, think. What if the stones are still on planet? Where would they be? Another storage area? The pit? One thing for certain, you are not waiting until tomorrow. You don’t trust Verbeck. The last thing you want is to be alone with him.
A wall map’s curling edge brushes your arm as you rock against your knee. You study the thinly penned lines and the precisely blocked script. It details the projected expansion of the mine pit. You compare it with the diagrams and security overlays you’d previously memorized. Interesting.
“When was the last time Verbeck changed the pit’s working level?”
Odette shrugs and tabs into the geologist’s note slab. “Not since late autumn.”
So much for finding the stones hidden under the ice until the thaw.
She calls up another display. “The robominers have been extending the drifts ever since—”
“The drifts!”
Donning your parka and grabbing your pack, you leave Odette with only the vaguest of explanations. If you recover the starphires, you may still pull yourself out of this mess.
The hair in your nostrils crinkles like tiny icicles as you stare into the pit. The only designed access is an inclined haulage angling into the ice like a lonely boat ramp. Even with the active search protocols neutralized and the high ice level, you wouldn’t dare try it. A separate system of inlaid motion trackers interrogates and attacks any unauthorized movement on the ramp. And any activity there could override your lockouts. The microlaser towers would then track and destroy any motion within the pit. And, of course, any vehicle would vaporize itself on remote command.
You nod silent gratitude at the near horizontal steam plume, slap your hands together for warmth and smile behind face shield and goggles. In reallocating laser coverage, Verbeck has left much of the pit’s edge unprotected.
When your hands have warmed enough to allow the tying of knots, you drop your pack and break out your climbing gear. Outside, just seconds later, you secure your anchor line, tie into the carabiner with an overhand figure-eight knot and back over the edge.
Cold air oozes down the rock face like an icy waterfall and the wind batters you as you limit your rappel to a leisurely, but efficient, twenty meters per minute. You would prefer a faster drop, but you’d once seen a guy slip from the end of his standing line. And what was left of him.
When your toes graze the pit floor, you drop and slip to a cold, ice hugging sprawl. Damn. Real professional, Roanne. It hadn’t occurred to you while packing that anyone would fill a mining pit with ice. You anchor your line in a rise of icy talus and, from your knees, push into a wide legged almost-shuffle. Without crampons your forward progress is not attractive. You crunch across a series of frozen, jagged edged ruts and lurch around a sparkling, ice-encrusted ore hauler before nearly passing the mouth of the first drift.
You wade into the darkness, remove your goggles and thumb an icy crust from the lenses. Your breath fogs the air and you are relieved when the ice tapers away after only a few paces. Minutes later the floor angles more sharply upward until you walk hunched over with your fingertips pinched to the floor. After one minor collision, you twist your light wand’s iris open just enough to warn yourself from the idle equipment lining the upper passage.
The spike tracked ore extractors are still poised in mid-gnaw. They must have stopped during the first moments of the attack when their operators—
No, don’t think about that.
The beam sweeps across their raised cutting booms and helps you avoid the many small pocked openings in the floor. They look like miniature fumaroles or earthworm holes. What do they remind you of? You search your memory, can’t track it down, and move on.
When the floor finally levels, the passage gives way to a blank, cloying darkness. You chance a light over the edge. Nothing. Not a single reflection. You consider trying another drift, but figure that whoever took the starphires would have looked for a hiding place just like this. You might have.
You drop a hex nut into a crack several meters back down the drift and set a pair of leaf pitons as secondary anchors. Using a manual ascender for self-belay, you drop eighty meters before trying another light. You grope the wand’s tether and swear. The air is stale and thick with an unnamable stench. You swear again. There must be better ventilation in a grave.
You twist the wand’s iris to deepest penetration. All you see is blackness and the rope in front of your face. You drop another twenty before hearing the first sounds.
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br /> They begin as a rasping, whispery metallic grating to your right. You secure the descender and probe the darkness. Except for a faint glint from one side, nothing.
You pull a flare from your slash pocket. So much for stealth. You throw it out and away as far as you can. Shit. Should have dropped it straight down. Now you’re arcing close to the upturned boom of another ore extractor. It must have broken through the cavern wall and fallen. Strange, intensely chromatic insects cling to the blade’s bright surface.
After pulling yourself high enough to clear the snag, you look down. The cavern is a riot of color. Stocky mineral prisms, curls of white aragonite and colorful flow stone share floor space with an uncountable, shifting mass of large, long appendaged insects. As you watch, more pop themselves from the ground and migrate to the flare with something more than mothlike attraction.
A beautiful scarlet-red insect fans its drying wings at the flare and turns toward its neighbor just in time to meet its closing, heavily serrated mandibles. You look away from the glistening jaws, but can’t escape the chitinous munching. When you look back, the cannibal’s color has changed from orange to a sickly yellow.
The strangeness of the color change catches at your curiosity. Another insect eats its partner and shifts down the spectrum from green to blue. You shudder and clutch the rope as some unreasoning dread shakes you. You want to run, but dare not move. It is a long way down.
You take deep, even breaths until the rope steadies. What the hell’s wrong? You flex your fingers and wish you could do the same for your aching thighs. You’ve been gripping the rope pretty hard. You look down again. You’ve made several oscillations and are once more approaching the extractor’s business end. It has grown. It reaches for you. It probes the air.
You look closer. You see no eyes in the shifting mass, but they plainly know where you are. You gauge your position on the rope. Even if you clear them, your rope might be—you can’t think of a better word—seized. You draw your knife and cut the rope at knee level. It coils as it falls, but before the trailing end touches down the insects converge on it. They lose interest almost immediately, but you’ve seen something remarkable. In the fraction of a second it took one end to join the other on the cavern floor, a hundred insects had begun to climb after you.
And there are more all the time. The floor and walls boil forth a steady stream. You ignore the sourness at the back of your throat and wonder if they sense your fear.
These are what had happened to Manipura.
You pull an ascender from your slash pocket as a flash of iridescence warns that they’ll be flying soon. Cellophane wings flash in the flare light and the air fills with a dry, remorseless buzz. You cringe. An insect’s evening song is pleasant. An en masse orchestration is hypnotic.
You shake with surging revulsion and the ascender slips from your fingers. You grab for it and clutch the rope. No good. Damn. Tears well. You bite your tongue.
As the ascender vanishes within the churning insect hoard, they swarm into a tiny mound around and over it. They want you. The buzzing rises to a deeply penetrating roar.
“Leave me alone!”
You swallow hard and force your fingers to weave pack tether into the prusik knots that had always seemed second nature. Come on, Roanne. Don’t be a cry baby. Tie the damn knots!
You step into the looped stirrups, but nearly break the friction locks with the eagerness of your pulling strokes. You warn yourself to keep calm and force your legs and arms into a smooth, rhythmic progression that quickly dampens the exhausting rope bounce.
After climbing about ten meters, you hear the buzzing stop and an aggressive fanning of wings begin. They’ll be flying soon. You see another flash of color and the image of an arctic white bone haunts you. So does the color of the starphires you came to steal.
Starphires! You recall Odette’s demonstration. A thought hits you like a punch to the belly. The Starphires are the dormant form of these incredibly voracious creatures.
But what triggered their first attack? The availability of food? A natural cycle? Some critical population mass? Even if Verbeck is a rich jerk, you’ll have to warn him. His yacht might be too damn full.
The flare dims and fades completely. Something brushes your arm and you imagine winged things leaping at you from the darkness.
You panic. No other explanation. Your knuckles scrape rock. You pull over the edge and roll onto your back. You scramble to cut the rope and hurl yourself down the passage. When your skull crashes down on the ice, you know you’ve left the drift. The snow has stopped. You pull the night’s dark chill into your lungs with every wheezing breath. The stars spin wildly as the cold searches for and finds openings in your heater suit.
But it doesn’t feel cold.
Your whole body convulses with the instinct to brush away insects. You find none. Still, something bites and tears at your side.
A flash and a nearby steam geyser warns that someone—Verbeck—has re-armed the microlasers. Another beam scores and, if not for the ice-shrouded hulk of a pit crawler, almost stops you.
You force your chattering teeth together. You have three conflicting options. Stay calm and hide from the probing beams. Stay calm and become breakfast if the insects get out. Or don’t stay calm.
Number three wins. You grab your knife and dive across the ice. When the deadly beams get too close, you stab down and angle off in a new direction. The microlasers track your original path. But not for long. The tracking system can’t miss your searing body heat.
And you still have to do something about the impending plague of flesh hungry locusts. It doesn’t take much effort to imagine them, a wave of vibrant color, shooting from the drifts. You’ve seen the vid of the last attack.
Coherent light slashes the ice just centimeters from your face. You slam into another crawler’s greased undercarriage. You feel no elation. You never thought to counterfeit an override key. If the crawler moves while the lasers are actively targeting, the security system will simply detonate their security charges.
Either way, you’ll fry.
The instant you peer from between the studded, oversized tires a new beam slashes the ice. The shaky tracking warns that someone is actively targeting you. Personally. From somewhere high above you catch a hint of snorted laughter. Another beam cuts a jagged fissure beside you. The scorching steam gives you an idea.
You look around and breathe an abbreviated “thank God.” Somehow, in your terrified evasion, you’ve ended up less than a dozen paces from your entry rope and the water inlet conduit. You slide out, open the crawler’s cockpit hatch and punch the ignition. After the machine has completed most of a slow pirouette and is pointing directly at the water conduit’s waste heat plume, you release the throbbing controller and drop.
It doesn’t make it. The security system triggers its explosive charge. And then the microlasers rake its sliding carcass until it crashes several meters from where you’d wanted it. Useless.
Plan B. You have ten, maybe twenty seconds before the tracking system’s imagers recover from the blinding explosion. You pray the blast has also blinded whoever’s manually targeting you. You drag yourself to another crawler and snap open its engine hood. Beneath the warning, “Penalty For Unauthorized Removal,” you quickly locate the security tracker and its dedicated explosive pack. Despite the clinging ice, you pry the tracker free. You set it gingerly—oh, so gingerly—aside and attach your last length of pack tether.
The explosive pack is heavy, but you sling it over your shoulder just ahead of another rain of searing cutter beams. You back away while carefully playing out the tether. You reach the pipe ahead of the converging rays.
Second thoughts are a real pain in the ass. You wonder if this is the right thing to do. The explosives might be more effective in the drift entrance. No, there’s more than one drift. You can’t buy time enough to blow them all.
You take tension on the tether, heave the explosive pack onto the inner valve, drop,
and cover your ears. You hope the security system is alert and give the tether one sharp pull.
The concussion is larger than expected. But not as shocking as the sudden roar and rush of cascading sea water. You race to your entry rope and scramble up the icy tailings just ahead of the advancing flood. The spreading ice will—hopefully—seal the drifts well into the spring thaw.
You return to the camp in time to watch Verbeck’s yacht lift against the freshening wind. Odette paces the edge of the landing field. “There goes Verbeck! And about a galaxy’s worth of starphires. If they’re worth anything at all.” She kicks at a heap of shattered comm gear. “He smashed it. We can’t recall him until it’s repaired.”
You fight your smile as the yacht’s air wake sends a swirling of snow from the rooftops. Whatever triggered the starphires; food, confinement, or biologic clock, Verbeck is in trouble. You shiver at the thought that you’d come to steal the starphires.
Odette lifts her chin toward Verbeck’s office. “I finished the preliminary analysis. Probably about as far as the geologist got before the attack.”
You wait patiently, already knowing what she’ll say.
“The clouding we saw in the microscope…the starphires could be organic.”
You turn to her. “Organic? Sounds like something we’d better check out. After all,” you wink, “business first.”
Preface: Department 17
I wrote this next very short piece for E.J. Gold at Galaxy Science-Fiction. It is still online in their “Science Fiction Museum,” if you want to search for it.
Because the story is so short, I’m virtually certain it is my most widely read story!
Department 17
Acquisitions’ Editor Gerald Trezise spun from the half-octagon console and its fading fractal interface. The intercom buzzed again.