The carrier finally reached its destination, and trundled through a large door not unlike the one that had given them entrance to the complex. Tomas signaled a halt, and slid a sensor unit through the door before it closed. The rest of the team crowded around as he brought up a live feed from inside the room on one of his devices. The walls seemed to have no effect on the signal.
A series of holes either side of the carrier's keel opened, and the metal sands tumbled into a pit in the floor. Then the carrier was blown clean by nozzles along the wall. It reversed itself out of the room, and began retracing its steps along the corridor.
Inside the roughly coffin-shaped room a type of spinning process was underway. Some of the metal sands, differently coloured to others in a line of central hoppers, were getting airborne. As they watched, multiple beams of light stabbed and pushed at the highest point of the arc. Each band of spinning metal was slowly being shaped, whirling around as dozens of gradually extending hoops.
The objects being shaped started to glow, and then more of the sands began to lift into the mix.
"Alloys," said Brun quietly, "using rare earths that melt at different temperatures. We're a hundred years away from this."
Then he jumped, as if something had struck him.
"Zero-gee manufacturing! They're doing it right here, under gravity. We always thought we'd have to wait until we built factories in space."
He turned to the rest of the group. "Don't you see? At the top of the arc the hoops are effectively weightless, the way astronauts used to train in jetliners by arcing through the atmosphere."
"Are they shaping the material with light?" said Cathy, finding that part hard to understand. Light exerted a pressure, but it was very small.
"No," said Brun, "alpha particles and the like, I would think. Bits of atoms moving at light speed."
They watched the performance for a few more minutes, and then Tomas closed the feed. He wouldn't try to retrieve the sensor from inside the room.
"We've got one more thing to do, people," said Tomas, "and that's see what the citadel does if there's a little accident. I hope you're ready for a day at the circus."
41
Imazighen village
Atlas Mountains, North-west Africa
Clouds had come in at dusk – a rare occurence on the edge of the Sahara – but the early morning sky cleared as the diggers brought Don out of the rockfall. He was covered in a layer of fine grit that looked ghostly in the light from a half moon.
Glittering mountain stars roofed the valley, a breathtaking sight in other circumstances. The diggers eased Don into a pile of blankets, and Jo and Mosha dropped to their knees as they went to work.
"No blood loss, no breaks," said Mosha, moving his hands expertly over Don's legs and pelvis, burrowing under the blankets to be thorough. Like all SAS soldiers he was trained in battlefield trauma.
Jo nodded. She moved an oil lamp from a nearby rock until it was close to Don's head. The lamp flickered in the night-time breeze that had arrived at dusk, and kept on increasing. A few of the older women had brought the two medics food, and then remained as company. Bull had gone down to the village with the stretcher carrying Graham.
A handful of young men sat around a fire nearby, waiting to carry Don – alive or dead – down to the village as well. The rest of the villagers were sleeping the sleep of the exhausted in their homes.
"No spinals, no head damage," added Jo, tracking her fingers along Don's skin and trusting her years of experience to tell her what was happening inside him. She checked his eyes.
"No concussion," she said, becoming more puzzled as the obvious diagnoses slid away. Mosha had his fingers up against the tall man's neck, trying to read the faint pulse more accurately.
"I don't think there are internal injuries," he said hesitantly. That was the hard one. Hard to diagnose and almost impossible to treat without the facilities of a modern hospital. Don's pulse was steady. Faint, but steady. It wasn't bounding, in the way hearts did when a body was bleeding out internally.
Jo checked the pulse herself, taking a long time, and eventually nodded.
"He's only just hanging on, though," she said, pushing her feelings to the back of her mind as she realised what that meant. Getting wound up about the situation would only lessen her ability to help him.
"And it's up to us to find out what he needs," she added.
Mosha nodded in turn. Her medical experience was greater than his, and this strange anomoly, whatever it turned out to be, was as far from a battlefield injury as it was possible to get. Don was a mass of bruises, and he wouldn't be able to move for a week – if he recovered – but neither of them could make sense of a pulse that was so weak.
Jo placed a hand on the inside of Don's thigh, sliding in under his trousers as she found the femoral artery. She did a quick mental calculation as her hand chilled. She placed her hand under his shirt at the top of his stomach, and repeated the calculation.
"Hypothermia," she said, and Mosha looked up sharply. The temperature had dropped to zero as the high mountain night had worn on, but an active man like Don, in full battle clothing, should have shrugged that off. He raised his eyebrows.
"It's the only explanation that fits," she said. Mosha grabbed the shirt under Don's battle jacket, and squeezed a trace of water out of it. He cursed abruptly. Jo looked at him.
"Bloody high-tech breathable clothing!" he swore. "Takes water and sweat away from the body. His jacket will be the same. There must have been seepage coming out of the cliff, and Don's been lying in it. This fucked-up material has been dispersing it round his body, and out to the surface of his clothing. Then this wind has been chilling the life out of him!"
Jo understood. The cold of the night had disguised the dampness in Don's clothing, so they hadn't picked it up earlier. The air movement through the rocks had brought on a dangerous chill factor. She didn't hesitate, dropping her desert robes to one side before lifting her Imazighen tunic over her head.
"What are you doing?" said Mosha, as she wriggled out of the thermal longs that were her one nod to Western technology.
"What did they teach you about hypothermia?" she said, lifting up the blankets on one side and sliding in beside Don.
"That it should be someone of the same gender," said Mosha, smiling broadly.
"Yeah, well, let's give him a little added incentive to come back to us," she said, beginning to colour as she opened his jacket and then his shirt. She felt how cold he was, dangerously cold, and took a deep breath before sliding over on top of him. She wrapped herself around his body, and hung on as the cold began to chill her bones.
"Goddamn. Little miss righteous from Carolina is growing some balls," said Mosha, laughing.
"It's Virginia, you ass!" she said, and lifted one of the blankets over her head to shut the world out.
Mosha called the young men by the fire to lift the blanketed bundle onto a stretcher nearby. They were having trouble processing what they had just seen, but his words brought them back to life. A few minutes later the stretcher was swinging along toward the guest quarters in the village, Mosha leading them down the gentlest slopes he could find.
It was two days before Don was completely out of danger. Jo hadn't been able to find any broken ribs, but he coughed blood for a while. Skin on his toes went white, and then started to heal, but nothing had to be amputated. In later days, memories of the moment when he regained consciousness would steal up on her, giving her a secret moment of joy.
"Are you awake?" she said, as his eyelids fluttered. It was not one of her best lines. Don had been unconscious until the afternoon of the next day. She had finally left his body to its own devices when his rectal temperature had been normal for two hours. Now she was kneeling on a rug beside a low bed normally used by the most prestigious guests to the village.
It was hard to keep her hands off him, after undressing him and cleaning his unconscious form, checking his vital signs regularly, and turning him e
very few hours in the beginning. When he had been in a coma-like state she had followed up by wrapping herself around him from behind.
She settled for reaching across and taking one of his hands in hers.
"I had the strangest dream," he said languidly, as if he was floating down a river on a Summer's afternoon, "and it was all about you." Then his eyes focused, and he looked at her more sharply.
"It wasn't a dream, was it?" he said, making her feel uncomfortable. He fell back a moment later, realising how weak he was. She was overcome with shyness, and shook her head. It wasn't a dream.
"Would you like a permanent job?" he said weakly, a mischievous grin ghosting across his face. "Night-times and free afternoons?"
"Don't joke about things like that," she said firmly. "Besides, you've probably got that 'fall in love with your nurse' thing, whatever it's called."
Don looked at her incredulously and laughed. "I'm hardened SAS, given to self-discipline and the realities of the situation. If I wasn't I would have died long ago. Hell, I bet I don't have any emotions at all, beyond a certain childlike glee when things go 'bang'."
"I don't believe that," she said, putting his hand back on the covers. He promptly reached out and grasped her hand again, then winced as the deep bruising in his shoulder cut through the painkillers.
"Besides, there's this 'end of the world' thing going on," she said, "and a very uncertain future for any of us."
"And I'm your boss," he finished. She said nothing.
"You've been thinking this through," he said, after a while, "and ended up tying yourself in knots. Female thing. More trouble than it's worth, believe me. Since we'll all probably be dead tomorrow, none of that 'working out the right thing to do' stuff is worth a pinch of the proverbial."
She said nothing.
"All right!" he growled at last, exasperated. "Why are women always so bloody difficult? If we survive this current piece of world-wide bullshit, which is highly unlikely, we'll take 'us' seriously, okay? Build a house, go out to movies, make pancakes together on Sunday mornings, type of seriously. In the meantime, we'll have to take any time together as we find it, and that won't be often I'm picking.
"Is that all right with you?"
She thought about it for a minute, then nodded.
42
Lake Adelaide
Southern Alps, New Zealand
It wasn't long before they learned what Tomas meant by his cryptic remark. What they set up in the next half hour was, indeed, something of a circus act.
Eileen and Brun were sent to look for a 'back door' to the complex, if there was such a thing. Drainage pipes, ventilation, unsupervised openings, anything a human form could squeeze through.
Cathy followed Tomas as he tried to find some sort of control panel along the corridors. It took him a while, and he found what he wanted in the ceiling, two floors above the ground level they had started on.
"Central section of the red belt," said Tomas, waiting while Cathy passed the contents over. Tomas was carrying weapons and detection devices of various sorts, and Cathy was loaded up with food rations and the overflow from Tomas. She was quite happy with the arrangement. The few times she had been timetabled on at the firing range at Waiouru, it had not gone well.
"That should do it," said Tomas, sliding an overhead panel back into place. It had been difficult to stand on his toes and do fiddly work, but his remote-controlled device was all set now. Setting fire to a few small pieces of explosive in the confined space should trigger some sort of alarm, but not look like a deliberate act. The Hexanyl burned like a firelighter, but cleaner, and all evidence of the set up would disappear in the process.
Eileen and Brun returned to the ground floor after their scouting expedition to find Cathy waiting for them. She guided them to the new position. Brun nodded to Tomas, meaning an exit point had been acquired, and Tomas acknowledged the information with a quick lift of his eyebrows.
The last part of the plan was to set up a deadfall – whatever they could find or prise loose that would do damage when set off by a trip wire. A door around the corner opened to some gentle urging, and must have been a storage unit. It was easy enough to find something to use as a wire, and something heavy enough to smash one of the many small stations that ran along the walls near the floor. The stations seemed to guide the carriers through the complex.
Eileen and Brun were sent back to the exit point they'd found. If the other two weren't there in fifteen minutes they were to head for Sullivan's tunnel, and take what the team had learned back to Cal.
Tomas set up a sensor high on a wall, where it seemed least obvious, and retired down a narrow side alley into a less exposed part of the complex. When everything was ready, he ignited the explosive, and turned to the live feed from the sensor.
"There won't be any smoke from the Hexanyl," he said, "but the heat might set fire to some of the components inside the hub."
Cathy nodded. Two minutes later they were still waiting, but then a yellow smoke began to drift down from the ceiling. There was a momentary shower of sparks, and then a brief whump that loosened one side of the overhead panel.
The response from the citadel was immediate. A dense fog erupted from inside the hub and spread across the ceiling, which had to be some form of fire extinguisher. Nothing happened for a minute after that, and then a handyman brigade arrived. Cathy was impressed by the squad of small, metallic, many-legged things that whispered along one wall and disappeared inside the hub – but then she had always liked spiders.
It was another two minutes before security arrived. The spiders had finished their repairs and were locking the overhead panel back into place when something much bigger arrived at speed. Tomas felt the air pressure in the corridor shift, and lifted his finger to his lips to caution Cathy to stay perfectly still.
They both heard the whisper of soft treads a moment later, and then a formidable apparition appeared in the feed from the sensor. It set off the trip wire, and a chunky item from the storage room toppled onto the station at the base of the wall.
The spiders shimmered down the wall and began to pull the broken machinery apart. The security guard was a stippled black, and the number of nozzles and slots in its front suggested it had a number of options if it wished to enforce order.
The citadels had been observing humans for years, and would have worked out long ago the easiest ways to kill them, or any other predators on the planet. At least the guard was another machine, suggesting again that the citadel was completely automated.
The machine sat motionless, but Tomas started picking up faint, high-pitched pulses on one of his devices. He realised the guard was building up a detailed picture of the area from a type of sonar. Then one of the spiders scurried up the wall and plucked the sensor from its hiding place. A jerky picture showed the sensor being taken back to the broken station and added to the other debris. At least the guard hadn't spotted it.
The spiders left the station open and scurried into a side alley opposite Tomas and Cathy. She presumed they had gone to get parts. The air pressure in the corridor shifted again, and Tomas guessed the guard had gone. It made him realise how lucky they had been. The citadel had not anticipated anything from the outside getting into the cavern.
Eileen and Brun were waist deep in a canal when the other two arrived. The canal was carrying water away from a large, swirling pool near a cleft in the bedrock. It must have been simpler for the citadel builders to run the underground river out of the complex than to cap it or pipe it.
Tomas and Cathy joined the other two in the water. It was cold, straight out of the mountains. The packs were waterproof, but the team carried the more sensitive gear overhead as they struggled in the strong flow. Then they lowered themselves into the water, and let the current sweep them away.
"Bit of a slide up ahead," said Brun, who had followed the river for some distance during his initial reconnoitre. Then he dropped away right in front of them. Eileen followed, and Cathy
barely had time to prepare before she slid over the lip of a steep descent. It didn't drop for long, but it levelled out abruptly, and she went under the water before she manged to regain her balance.
She swore, surprising herself. Some of Tomas' precious instruments had just been dunked, and she hoped they were waterproof. Then they all had to duck under a control gate that had been lowered level with the surface of the water. A moment later they were through, and wallowing on a wide rocky slide that spread the river over a much greater area. Brun was the first to his feet, and then the others struggled to an upright position as well. Tomas led the way down the slope to the moat.
Cathy had forgotten how dark it was outside the sprawling complex, and she adjusted her goggles until she could see properly. On the other side of the moat, and half way up to their entry point, Tomas stopped them.
"Crap," he whispered. "We've got company."
Another sort of handyman machine was working on the hole the team had made into the cavern. There were two of them, each as big as a small human, and they'd built a scaffold up the cliff face to the entrance point. There didn't seem to be any of the guard machines about.
The machines had used tetrahedrons, four-pointed pyramids, for maximum structural strength. The first layer looked like a double range of miniature mountains a metre high, and the next layer had been slotted in upside down. There were a number of double layers, and the effect was much like large egg cartons stacked on top of each other.
Tomas studied the two machines for some time. The rope the team had used to climb down the drop off was gone. The SAS man was used to things changing – often rapidly and repeatedly – on a mission. 'No plan survives contact with the enemy' had become part of his nature.
Struggle for a Small Blue Planet Page 18