Analog SFF, June 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Sometimes a big chamber would have lots of exits spidering off in every direction. Elsewhere, dead ends sparkled in Floyd's and Rudolph's suit lights. There were also chambers with only one or two narrow exits—black, shadowed holes leading toward places whose secrets seemed better unexplored. The CAT-scan map didn't have the resolution to spot things like that; all it could tell us was the direction to the next large cavity.

  Unless you're a gerbil or kangaroo rat, talus caves on Earth are rarely navigable. You need big talus, with no small chunks. Otherwise, the small pieces block the passages, like the dust-bunny stuff we'd found in the clumps.

  The surprising thing here was that we actually made consistent progress, albeit in a two-steps-back-for-every-three-forward fashion. Plus a lot of sideways. But even when we had to backtrack, we would eventually find a way through.

  Most standard sims of planet formation, including moonlets like this, assume that a growing world scoops up a lot of little debris along with the big: snowballs as well as icebergs. More than enough to clog the pores. But this place was mostly comprised of big stuff. There was a bit of dust and small fragments, but most of it seemed to have been produced when moonquakes had caused boulders to grind against each other—one of those things I really didn't want to think about too much, though I'd run a thousand sims by then and concluded that quakes were common only on a geological timescale.

  Still, any quake dust was disconcerting. But so was the lack of small rocks. It was just one more sign this place was weird. I kept trying to write sims that gave me a moonlet comprised only of icebergs. To make them work, they not only required the thing in the center to be dense, but to have arrived in Saturn System late in the game, when there were already plenty of big chunks for its gravity to attract.

  It isn't a spaceship, I told myself. But there was something odd down there, and Rudolph seemed hell-bent on meeting it face-to-whatever.

  Floyd was in his own world. When I tried to talk, he accused me of chattering. “There are no aliens,” he said. “And all moons are weird. Name one that isn't. No, don't. I really don't want to argue about it.” His vision shifted, swiveling his suit lights across the chamber we were crossing. “And these passages show no signs of gas ablation. There's no geyser down here that's going to zap us. This isn't Enceladus.”

  He didn't say anything, though, about getting squished. It's a lot easier to dismiss someone else's phobias than your own.

  * * * *

  With all of that going on, I wasn't unhappy when, about three-quarters of the way down, we found ourselves in a chamber from which the biggest exit looked like a showstopper.

  We spent an hour looking for other options, but good downward-leading passages were becoming less common as the weight of the overlying boulders mounted. The deeper we went, eons of moonquakes had crushed more and more passages flat or into narrow exits like the one we were now facing. Still, the CAT-scan map showed a nice, large chamber on the other side of this one, not all that far away, if we could get there.

  Floyd was staring at the hole, thinking thoughts he didn't choose to share. He's a small, wiry type, and he was probably trying to gauge his chances of getting through. Rudolph was bouncing around the near-zero-gee chamber, still looking for alternatives, though it was pretty obvious it was this one or give up. Me, I was all for giving up. Let someone else meet the aliens. Or the moonquake.

  I'm not sure what Floyd would have done on his own, but Rudolph was digging into his pack, and before his body shifted and blocked the view, I caught a glimpse of an odd-looking packet. I had no idea if he knew I was watching, but he'd given me enough of a glimpse. I froze a frame and did what I could to enhance it. I still couldn't quite read the text, but the package bore a couple of familiar-looking icons.

  Again, I later realized that this should have been a sign that whatever Rudolph was after, he was willing to take huge risks to get it. But he'd already given me plenty of reasons to peg him as a cowboy, so at the time, I merely panicked.

  “Whoa!” I yelled to Floyd. “That's explosive paste. What does he think he's going to do?”

  I accessed what I knew of mining, which wasn't much. Still, the physics said that unless Rudolph was an expert—and he was a speculator, not an engineer—he was a lot more likely to seal us in or block the passageway entirely than to enlarge it.

  Floyd snapped his head around, pinning Rudolph in his suit lights. “That's not a great idea,” he said.

  “I'm not turning back,” Rudolph said.

  Meanwhile, I was frantically searching everything I knew about caves: vids, books, etc. The vids were best, because even if they were totally hokey, I could watch how the actors maneuvered in tight passages.

  I didn't like what I found, but Floyd wasn't going to win his argument with Rudolph, and Rudolph was the one with the explosives.

  “Tell him we can probably get through without them,” I said.

  “Probably?”

  “Yes.” Or we'd get stuck and die. Not a great choice, but better than letting Rudolph play with the paste. “More likely than not.”

  I made Floyd take a really good look at the hole, while I did my best to calculate its diameter. “Yeah,” I said. “I think you can make it. It'll be a little tougher for Rudolph.”

  The first job was to shuffle oxygen around between the storage compartments of Floyd's skinsuit. Calves and thighs were good: shoulders and back, bad. Luckily we had plenty of spare air in canisters that Floyd could push through ahead of us. The full backpack was just plain too big. Stupid thing to bring into a cave. Worse, there wasn't any rope—who needs it in near-zero-gee? That meant we had to push everything ahead of us, rather than drag it through behind.

  “Okay,” I said. “The trick is that your shoulders are the widest point. Reach one arm out in front and let the other trail behind, at your side. That way, you can angle your shoulders to fit through a pretty narrow hole.”

  I didn't have to tell him that this meant one arm was going to be trapped until the passage widened, and that if it never did, this was how he'd die. “If you still stick, we'll bleed off some air.” I thought again about Floyd's parents. “Of course, there's no reason you have to do this. You can always let Rudolph be the guinea pig.”

  Floyd's vision swung around the cave. “No. I'm the guide. I go first.”

  A moment later we were on the move. Right arm ahead, pushing the supplies. Left arm trailing, soon pinned. Ice boulders pressing in on all sides.

  And then, suddenly, I understood. “You know,” I said, “you're not going to bring them back. And"—I wondered whether I should continue, but it was too late to back out—"they'd be proud of what you've become.”

  Floyd's inching progress halted.

  “Brittney,” he said, “this is a really bad time for psychoanalysis.” Then, to the extent possible in that tight passage, he laughed, and I felt the tension that had been building between us for weeks ebb. “Even when you might have a point.”

  It's odd. In that moment, I no longer cared that we were virtually trapped, kilometers deep inside a too weird moon. Then Rudolph wrecked it. “Having fun in there?” he asked.

  * * * *

  We had to bleed out a bit of air, but we made it. Rudolph had a tougher time, though, and getting him through put a bigger dent in our air supply. In vacuum caving, I now know rule number one: when possible, keep air in bottles, not your suit. Unfortunately, that's one of those things that's a lot more obvious in retrospect.

  Still, we had enough left, so long as we didn't have to squander too much more.

  Luckily, we didn't. Close to the center, we found dust, but not enough to block passages. It was black, in stark contrast to the boulders we were climbing over, around, and beneath.

  Floyd scooped up a handful and held it close. This time, he remembered to shut off his suit mike. “Look familiar?”

  “I can't be sure, but it certainly looks like Iapetus.”

  “So how'd it get here? Assuming it's the
same stuff.”

  I didn't need to run any fancy sims for that. “We're tunneling backward in time. So, whatever dusted Iapetus must have happened at about the time the core of this place was forming.”

  The thought of Iapetus brought up memories of music, longing, and camping atop Rudolph's mons, but whatever I yearned for was better symbolized by going up and out, not in and deep. Here, there was merely darkness. Joseph Conrad territory: a story to savor in the reading, not the doing.

  * * * *

  A couple of passageways later, we were as close to the center as we were going to get. Below us (to the extent “below” had meaning) was a black floor of ... something. Something that looked a lot more solid than the labyrinth through which we'd been proceeding.

  This close to the middle of most worlds there would be no gravity, but whatever it was that formed Daphnis’ core was dense enough to exert some pull. Still, it took a bit of a shove-off to get us moving toward it. Even with the shove-off, slowly was the operative word.

  If it was an alien spaceship, it was an old one. Its surface was pitted, as though it had been bashed, hard, by many things before accreting its iceberg mantle. Even without the pits, it didn't look like it had ever been smooth. For the first time, I truly didn't believe we had anything to worry about from aliens.

  And then, finally, we were there.

  It's not really possible to stand in anything lower than .001gee. The usual approach is with a tethered expansion bolt. And since bolt guns work best at zero range, Floyd came in headfirst, ready to fire the moment the muzzle made contact. Pretty much standard procedure, except that when Floyd fired the gun, it and the bolt bounced.

  He had it off to one side, or we'd have taken the full force of the rebound. As it was, he was able to let go of the gun, which drifted off somewhere behind us. He killed his tumble with an outflung arm and we wound up within a couple of meters of the surface.

  With the hand thrusters parked all the way back at the entrance, we had no choice but to wait for gravity. Rudolph had come down behind us and shoved off—too hard, of course—to chase the bolt gun, and was still cursing somewhere above us when gravity finally began to do its thing.

  As we drew near, I could see that the rock wasn't completely unscathed. Where the bolt had hit, there was a little dimple with cracks radiating outward. However hard this stuff was, it was brittle.

  “Can you get a really good close look?” I asked. Floyd's middle-aged vision isn't what he'd like to think it is, and while my suitcam had a zoom, closer is always better.

  I knew from the scans that the rock was as dense as granite, though not as dense as your typical nickel-iron asteroid. Now, magnified, I saw a glassy-looking surface with numerous tiny pores.

  I'd once seen a picture of such a thing. “Holy smokes,” I said. “I think it's—”

  And then the picture turned to a blur.

  It took me a moment to figure out what happened. One instant I was looking both through Floyd's eyes and the cam. Then the feed from his eyes flipped off and the suitcam jolted—first rushing toward the rock, then receding, with a starburst pattern in the lens, as Floyd's faceplate collided with the rock, then rebounded, mimicking the bolt gun. There were also noises: a thump, then a slow, deadly hiss that I could continue to hear, first through Floyd's ears and then, when I thought to tap into it, the suit mike.

  My first thought was geyser. My second was that something had fallen on us. Except that down here, at near-zero gravity, it had happened way too quickly.

  I didn't need the suit telemetry to tell me that Floyd was unconscious. The fact that I could hear through his ears merely meant the nerves and eardrum were still functioning. Unfortunately, I was the only one paying attention.

  * * * *

  For a long time it might as well have been Enceladus repeated—long enough that I had plenty of opportunity to ponder the irony that Floyd's insistence on facing his own phobia had put me in too-intimate connection with the type of event that, whatever miracle it had produced the first time, was the thing I most feared. At least this time I wasn't blind. The suit lights still worked, though for 2.619 seconds, there wasn't anything to see except rock. Whatever had hit us had come from behind, and while Floyd's bounce off the surface had set us spinning again, it took that long for behind to rotate into view.

  It's amazing how much time there is in two seconds. Normally, I adjust my thinking speed to match my environment. It's not that I actually alter my rate of data processing—that's hardwired into the chips. It's more like savoring a book or watching a real-time vid. It keeps me from overthinking and helps me carry on the type of conversation humans expect.

  Now, I kicked into high gear.

  You know how it is in vids when time seems to stop? That's how it is for me when I focus my attention. It's like having a week to think about what you're going to do or say next. Only in this case, there wasn't anything to do but wait for Floyd's body to rotate. The most useful thing was to write an algorithm to correct for the starburst pattern in the suitcam, once there was anything worth seeing.

  What I finally saw was Rudolph, holding the bolt gun. The tether was a tangle, the bolt still snapping at the end of it.

  Waiting, I'd had plenty of time to calculate the strength of the blow that had hit us. The bolt gun certainly fit, though if Rudolph had used it correctly, rather than from long distance, Floyd would now have the bolt in his brain and whatever game Rudolph was playing would be over. Though it looked pretty much over, anyway. I could see a spray of mist in the suit lights—ice crystals from the air leak, I thought at first. Then I amped up the zoom and saw red speckles on Rudolph's suit.

  Luckily, the smart fabric in Floyd's skullcap was already plastering to his skin, sealing off the leak. That and vacuum cauterization would also stop the bleeding so well it would take surgery to detach the suit from his scalp. Assuming frostbite didn't get him first. Lots of spacers have survived big gashes on their arms or legs. A frozen brain is a different matter.

  Not that we were likely to live long enough to die that way. Rudolph had found the tether release, and while the gun held only two charges, there were more in Floyd's pack. Even without them, the gun would make a dandy club. Right now, Rudolph was drifting, but as soon as he could, he'd launch back at us. I figured we had about thirty seconds until he got his chance—thirty eternities to think about it; not a lot of time to do anything. Maybe being able to watch death come at you wasn't so much better than not knowing, after all.

  The first thing I did was to try to wake Floyd up. But people don't just snap out of major head injuries. It was up to me.

  I gave myself two seconds to think through the conceivable options, plus several that weren't very conceivable: plenty of time to think, but not enough data to do much good. Rudolph had found what he was looking for and now he wanted us dead so he could keep his secret. He'd muffed it, which meant he wasn't a pro at killing. But still, he'd preferred killing to trying to buy our silence, which meant he was either determined not to share or not sure we'd keep our end of a bargain. I had to give him no choice but to bargain.

  I wasted ten more seconds trying to link into his suit processor. There were only about a thousand channels on which the thing could be operating, but channel flipping is something you can only do in real time, and I flipped through about four hundred before I scored.

  When I finally got in, I found a stripped-down version of the guardian I'd encountered on his capsule system. I should have expected it. Rudolph was a security freak. Even his backpack had a radio-controlled voicelock. Its frequency had been number 226 on my trial list.

  Rather than dodging the mini-guardian, I let it catch me—well enough to sound an alarm, but not enough for it to bar the door. Then, just when telltales should have been flashing on Rudolph's goggles, I accessed Floyd's radio. “If you want to live, drop the gun, now!”

  My suitcam was rotating out of view again, but I could see Rudolph jump: Shackleton revisited. He writhed
like a cat, trying to see what was behind him. Earther reflex, I realized. A voice comes out of nowhere, you look behind. In all the scenarios I'd played through, that wasn't a reaction I'd anticipated. Spacers avoid sudden moves.

  “Who are you?”

  Another thing I'd not anticipated. Who the hell did he think I was? ET? He'd known all along the thing at Daphnis’ core wasn't a spaceship.

  He figured it out quickly enough, though. “You're that Brittney thing, aren't you?”

  There are times not to argue about word choice. If I got out of this alive, perhaps it was time to give myself an extra year's maturity. “Yes.”

  “Maybe I should just cut you out of him and take you with me.”

  That meant the bolt gun wasn't the only weapon he had. For once, something didn't surprise me. He had to have had some plan in mind until the gun came into his hands, and even the toughest skinsuit fabric wouldn't stop a good knife. I wasn't sure whether the fact he'd given that away so easily was another sign he didn't really respect me, or simply that he wasn't good at murder: ruthless in business, not with his hands—probably why he'd tried to use the gun from long range. Unlike the books and vids I'd chosen to mostly forget, the ones I'd savored had convinced me that most humans find it easier to kill at a distance. Cornered, though, Rudolph would be a lot less squeamish.

  By now, I was far enough off my game plan that all of my scenario planning was useless. I split my perceptions so I could talk colloquially, in Rudolph-time, while continuing to think in the background. “You wouldn't survive that,” I said.

  Another thing I've learned from vids is that threats are useless if you can't convince people you can carry them out. I'd shut down Floyd's medical telemetry so Rudolph couldn't see what bad shape he was in, but as far as I could tell, Rudolph didn't need to hit him again. He could just leave us here. Even if Floyd did wake up before the frostbite got too deep, he'd never make it back to the surface. Somehow, I had to persuade Rudolph to help us.