Deepsix

by Jack McDevitt

  Nightingale took the lead. His manner suggested it would be best if he were in position to confront any potential danger. In this environment, where vision was so limited, she doubted it would matter much who was standing where. She also thought it unlikely there’d be any large predators up here, for the simple reason there was probably no prey. And she guessed Nightingale had come to the same conclusion.

  They passed through the entry into a wide corridor. The walls were plain, undecorated, unmarked in any way. The ceiling was comfortably high. They switched on their lamps in an effort to dispell the general gloom. But the fog reflected the light back into their eyes, so they shut them down again.

  Small animals scattered before them. It was hard to get a good look at any of them, but Hutch heard wings and saw something that looked like a white chimp. A segmented creature with a lot of legs scuttled into a side corridor.

  There were rooms off either side, partially illuminated by windows. The chambers were quite large. Most could have comfortably accommodated groups of fifteen or more. They were empty of any kind of furniture. Long paneled strips overhead might have been artificial lighting devices.

  “It feels as if it’s been here a long time,” she told Marcel, showing him a picture.

  The cross passages were equally devoid of special features.

  Unlike the tower, which had seemed timeless, as if its builders had meant it for the ages, this structure, despite the granite, gave the impression of being a government make-do. A temporary construction.

  They explored side corridors, passed more doorways and bare cubicles of varying sizes, filled only with whatever leaves and dirt had blown in. Most of the doors were missing. A few hung open; others were shut tight. No knobs or latches were visible. “Electronics,” said Nightingale, examining one. “Looks like a sensor.”

  They crossed a room, passed through a door on the opposite side, and came out into a new passageway. One wall had been lined with windows, but whatever transparent material had sealed off the interior was gone, and the wind blew steadily into the building.

  They went up a ramp.

  Reluctantly, she began using her laser to mark the walls so they could find their way back.

  They kept a channel open to Kellie and Marcel, recording their impressions, their sense of a structure that was part office building, part mall, part terminal. Commodious spaces in some areas. “Intended for large numbers of occupants.”

  “Large numbers?” asked Marcel.

  “Wide corridors.”

  “How many people ride on a skyhook?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There were shelves and niches. All the surfaces were covered with thick dust, with centuries of accumulation, but whenever Hutch took time to wipe something clean, it looked as if it had been recently installed. Whatever it was, she decided, the construction material had resisted aging remarkably well.

  They were in a passageway with a series of windows, all open to the outside.

  “Hey.” Nightingale dropped to one knee. “Look at this.”

  A sign. Hung in a wall mount. But the mount was low, down around her hips. It contained several rows of symbols. The symbols were faded, turned to gray, but not illegible. She made sure it became part of the visual record. Then she delightedly discovered she could lift the sign off the mount. It was a plaque, and it came out whole.

  “Why is it down there?” she asked. “Why not put it at eye level?”

  “It probably is at eye level,” said Nightingale. “For the crickets.”

  She studied the symbols. “That’s strange.”

  “What is?”

  There were six lines. The style and formation of the characters varied extensively from one to another. But within each individual row they were quite similar. Some symbols were even repeated, but only in their own line.

  “I’d guess we have six alphabets,” she said.

  “Is that significant?”

  “What’ll you bet it’s the same message in six different languages?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t see why that’s important.”

  “It’s a Rosetta stone.”

  “Well, maybe. But I think that’s overstating the case a bit. The message is too short to qualify as a Rosetta stone. It probably says ONLY PASSENGERS PAST THIS POINT. Nobody’s going to solve a language from that.”

  “It’s a beginning, Randy. And the fact that we can put it in context might make it easier to translate. This place was a hub, for a while. A lot of the natives came through here.”

  “Going where?”

  “You haven’t figured it out?”

  He looked at her. “You know what was going on here? What all this was about?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Hutch detected movement on the circuit and wasn’t surprised to hear Marcel’s voice: “It was a rescue mission, Randy.”

  Nightingale looked at her, and his brow creased.

  Kellie broke in: “When they date this place, they’ll discover it’s three thousand years old.”

  “The ice age,” said Nightingale. “The Quiveras Cloud.”

  “Sure.” Mac speaking now. “Somebody tried to evacuate the locals.”

  “A whole planetary population?”

  “No,” said Hutch, “of course not. Couldn’t have. Not with one skyhook. No matter how much time they had. I mean, the natives would have reproduced faster than they could be moved.”

  Nightingale nodded.

  “We met some of the folks that got left,” she added.

  Outside, branches creaked in a sudden burst of wind.

  “The hawks were the larger species.”

  “I’d think so.”

  “The rescuers.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s incredible. Did everybody know this except me?”

  No one spoke.

  She wrapped the plaque, but it was too large to put into her pack, so she hefted it under one arm.

  Wall markings, most badly faded, began appearing with some regularity. She recorded what she could, started to put together a map to indicate where everything had been found, relied on her visual link to make a record of the place, and belatedly realized she hadn’t been using her laser consistently and was lost. But that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. They could follow the radio signals back in the correct general direction.

  They walked into a bay and encountered their first furniture. Small benches, on a scale for the crickets. “But none for the larger species,” said Nightingale.

  They were a type of plastic, and they, too, seemed to have endured well.

  Ramps led to both lower and higher levels. They went down, where they found more inscriptions, some in passageways, some on the walls of individual cubicles. These were at Hutch’s eye level. Possibly a bit higher.

  The offices and corridors seemed designed for the use of the hawks. The placement of inscriptions, and the size of the doors, supported that thesis.

  Hutch wished the fog would go away so she could get a good look at her surroundings. “They brought everybody cross-country, some maybe by air, certainly some by hovercraft.”

  “How’d the hovercraft get up here?” The one they’d seen could never have climbed the mountain.

  “That’s a detail, Randy. They probably took them to an airport somewhere, and flew them up.”

  “Must have been one hell of an operation. I think I’d like to meet the hawks.”

  XXX

  Life is a walk in the fog. Most people don’t know that. They’re fooled by the sunlight into thinking they can see what’s ahead. But it’s the reason they are forever getting lost or falling into ditches or committing matrimony.

  —GREGORY MACALLISTER, The Marriage Manual

  Hours to breakup (est): 33

  The asteroid was almost spherical. It was somewhat more than a kilometer in diameter, contained within a metal web that was itself attached to the assembly by means of a plate.

  Janet watched an O
utsider team descend onto the plate and begin to cut it loose from the assembly. When they were finished, only one shaft, the Alpha, would remain attached. And only 320 kilometers of that.

  John Drummond oversaw the action on a bank of screens. He was charged with monitoring all the Outsider operations: the asteroid units, the four teams that would shortly go outside on each of the ships, the five that were now being dropped along the assembly to sever the Alpha from the bands that held the structure together, and the net unit that was en route with Miles Chastain.

  She didn’t particularly like Drummond, who behaved as if anyone not involved in advanced mathematics was wasting her life. There was a lot of pressure on him at the moment, and she understood that, but Janet had concluded that if circumstances were normal, he’d still be a jerk.

  Their pilot’s name was Frank. Frank didn’t care much for Drummond either, and probably for the same reasons. She could hear it in his voice, but if Drummond noticed, he paid no attention. While Janet watched their teams spread out, Frank turned in his seat and informed them that one of the Star shuttles would be alongside in a few minutes. That would be Miles and Phil Zossimov, who wanted to get a look at the net.

  “Okay, Frank.” Drummond glanced down at his instruments. “We’ll start in three minutes.” He brought the asteroid up on his screen, rotated it, leaned forward, plumped his chin on his fist, and directed the AI to show him the proposed line where they would cut the net. The area where the plate connected to the assembly had been designated the north pole. A cursor appeared just off to one side of the plate and circled the asteroid, passing quite close to the south pole.

  Janet looked out at the net, which was visible only when the shuttle’s lights hit it the right way. Its links were narrow, no more than a finger’s width, and they were closely connected, the interstices small enough that a human being could not have squeezed through.

  Drummond admitted freely that, once they began cutting it, there was no way to be sure at precisely which point the asteroid would come loose. That lent a degree of uncertainty to the operation, but he seemed confident there was no possibility the rock would cause damage or threaten the team now on the far side of the plate.

  She couldn’t help noticing how close the shuttle was and wondered whether Drummond had considered the possibility it might come their way.

  “Why will it go anywhere at all?” she asked him. “What makes you think it won’t stay right where it is?”

  “The center of gravity will change,” he said, not entirely hiding a note of disdain. “It’ll change for both the asteroid and the assembly. So they’ll both change their dynamics somewhat.”

  “Can we predict what’ll happen?” she asked.

  “Not as precisely as I’d like. Under normal circumstances it’d be simple enough. But with the gas giant in the neighborhood, the calculations get a bit sticky.” He looked at her, apparently trying to decide whether she was frightened. “There’s really nothing to worry about, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He checked their position on the screens. “Okay,” he said into a mike. “Ready to go.”

  The AI took over. It accelerated, descended closer to the surface, and aimed the lasers that Miles’s team had installed. Drummond warned the people among the shafts to get behind the plate and stay there. “Keep your heads down,” he told them. “We’re starting.”

  Janet knew that he’d have preferred to have no one out on the assembly while they were releasing the rock. Especially this close. But they had to cut fifteen shafts away from the plate, and there simply wouldn’t be time to get the job done unless they’d started on it as soon as they arrived.

  The shuttle moved in close. Janet could have put a foot out the airlock and touched the asteroid. In its flat masculine voice, the AI informed them portentously it was about to activate the lasers.

  It performed a brief countdown, and twin lances of white light sliced into the dust.

  The shuttle moved slowly north to south down the face of the asteroid. It passed just wide of the south pole and started back up.

  “We’re getting a good cut,” said Frank. “We should have separation in a minute or so.” Then he added, “Uh-oh.”

  Janet’s heart picked up a beat.

  “Everybody, heads up.” It was the voice of Frank the pilot. “Rock swarm incoming. About thirty seconds. Get behind the plate on the assembly side.”

  Tom Scolari looked over the top of the plate to see if they were visible. The action brought a cold remonstrance from Janet, and he got back down. The other members of his team were complying.

  “Stay behind the plate,” warned Janet. “They’re coming in over the asteroid. Keep low, and you’ll be fine.”

  Something blurred past him, a quick silent shadow across the stars. And a second, little more than the whisper of his own heartbeat. It all happened so quickly he couldn’t be sure. People were breathing on the circuit. Somebody made a scared noise.

  He felt a vibration, and then a jolt. Out along the assembly, something flashed.

  “That one hit,” Janet said.

  Another tremor shook them. Scolari gazed into the eyes of the woman beside him. She looked frightened.

  He waited, listening to his pulse until Frank came back up: “That seems to be it, folks. Screen’s clear.”

  “Everybody okay?” asked Drummond.

  There were some acknowledgments, and Janet had them respond to their names. While they did, Scolari counted bodies. All present. All moving.

  They looked at one another. The woman—her name was Kit—went back to work. But from that moment, whatever nonchalance he might have possessed earlier, Scolari understood that he’d put his life at risk. He was glad not to be alone.

  His instructions were simple: slice into as many of the shafts as possible. But no deeper than about halfway until the asteroid was gone. When the shuttle announced that separation was imminent, see that everyone stayed behind the plate. When it was over, when the rock had been disposed of, go back and finish the job, cut everything loose so that the Alpha shaft, the plate, and the net remained one piece but had been separated from the rest of the assembly.

  Scolari was the oldest member of his team. He didn’t know much about the personal lives of the others, only what he’d picked up from a few dropped hints. This one was on the prowl, that one was a mother of two. But they were all excited about helping rescue the landing party. Two were visibly scared. Maybe they all were, and some just better at hiding it. God knew he was scared. But the adrenaline rush was high, and he felt good. Watching the dancing lights of the lasers flickering around the edges of the plate, he felt incredibly alive. Everyone, he thought, should have a chance to do something like this at least once in a lifetime.

  Back along the assembly, toward Deepsix, lights were approaching. He recognized the triangle of lamps on the prow: It was an Academy shuttle. Though whether it was from his own ship or from Wendy, he had no idea.

  Janet’s voice broke in: “All right, people. Everybody down. It should be any moment now.”

  The glow had moved around to the other end of the plate. That meant they’d cleared the south pole and were working their way up. Janet had assured them that when the rock began to move, there was no way it could come in their direction. And he believed her, but it was easier to accept in the illuminated ready room on the ship than out here sitting behind a narrow strip of metal that was all that shielded them from the monster.

  He was leaning against the plate when it shuddered.

  “Asteroid’s away,” said Janet.

  One of the women, a middle-aged classics instructor with the unlikely name of Cleo, had backed off a bit and was gazing up. She was in tan coveralls and was wearing a blue scarf. Light from the laser fell across her features and her eyes were rising, looking at something behind him, over his shoulder. “There it goes,” she said.

  Scolari saw a black rim rolling out past one side of the plate, moving slowly. “And good riddance,” Cleo added
, waving farewell.

  The confirmation that the rock had been cut loose was the signal for Lori to move Wildside up close again to the Alpha shaft. It guided the ship so that the shaft did not run directly parallel to the vessel’s axis, but was angled at eighteen and a fraction degrees. The Zwick was also being attached off center, and aimed in the opposite direction, allowing these two vessels to start the rotation that would eventually bring Alpha’s forward end to bear on Deepsix. When Wildside was lined up, Jase Power and his crew went back outside and welded ship and shaft together.

  They completed the job without incident, examined their work, decided it looked okay, and waited for Janet’s verdict. She insisted on close-ups, and minutes later a shuttle moved in for a sensor inspection. She directed them to go back and reinforce a couple of areas, then gave her blessing. “Very professional,” she said. “Come back inside. Report when you’re all in. And thanks.”

  Zwick was first to check in. “Attachment complete.” They were welded to the Alpha shaft.

  Wildside followed within seconds.

  “We’re all set,” Janet told Drummond.

  The asteroid, freed of its encumbrance, was seeking a new orbit. It would continue to circle Deepsix, at least for another day or so, until Jerry Morgan changed the deep-space geometry.

  Drummond watched it go with a sense of satisfaction. It was rare, in his line of work, that he got to see so practical an application of his skills. It was true that Marcel and Beekman were technically making the decisions, but they were using Drummond’s numbers. And, by God, it was a good feeling.

  At the top of the assembly, the now-empty net was slowly spreading out. They had cut about three-quarters of the way around it when the asteroid came loose. Now the net trailed behind the assembly like a veil caught atop an endless stick.

  Captain Nicholson announced to all vessels and shuttles that the first step had been successful, and that everything was proceeding according to schedule.