by Gary Gibson
‘But why? There’s still too much to—’
‘Nathan,’ another voice cut in; this time it was Nancy Schiller, the Mjollnir’s chief of security. ‘I’ll explain everything when you get up here. Don’t bring anything with you. Leave it all for the spiders. Just get here as fast as you can.’
She cut the connection, so that Ty hadn’t even had a chance to tell her what he had found.
He pulled himself back along the passageway until he reached Shaft A, a borehole nearly thirty metres wide that cut straight through the heart of the asteroid, at which central point it intersected with a second shaft – Shaft B – running at a right angle to it. The asteroid itself was a little over thirty-five kilometres across; thousands of passageways, all identical in width but varying in depth, radiated outwards from each of the shafts.
He tapped at a panel on the arm of his spacesuit and, in response, one of a dozen spider-mechs that had been floating motionless near the centre of the shaft now moved towards him, propelled by tiny puffs of gas. The approaching device consisted primarily of a series of grappling arms that extended from a central hub a metre in diameter.
Once it had reached Ty, the spider rotated, presenting two handholds to him. Ty grabbed on to them, taking care not to look down the length of the shaft towards the asteroid’s core as the machine carried him back towards the surface. Despite the minimal gravity, one such glance was sometimes all it took to send his suit’s bio-monitors into high alert.
Instead he looked up towards a slowly widening circle of stars no more than a few hundred metres away – the white dwarf around which the clade-world had been orbiting for the last few billion years standing out clearly amongst the rest.
A second dome had been deflated by the time Ty got back to the surface camp, which had been set up in a shallow crater a short distance from the mouth of the shaft itself. He let go of the spider-mech and allowed himself to drift slowly downwards, his boots kicking up a tiny puff of ice and dust. Then he made his way over to where Nancy and Cesar were working hard at packing the first dome back into its crate, under the harsh glare of an arc light. The Mjollnir was visible far overhead in the starry blackness, like a black and grey stick thrown high into the air, and which had never come down.
The frigate had taken a beating on the trip out, and it had not taken long for Ty to realize there was a very good reason why almost all the Shoal’s superluminal craft comprised hollowed-out moons and adapted asteroids, since contact with the superluminal void put enormous stresses on the hull of any craft equipped with a faster-than-light drive.
The Magi starships were self-healing, but the Mjollnir wasn’t built from the same pseudo-organic material. Along with the relatively few other human-built craft that had so far been converted to superluminal travel, the frigate was instead forced to undergo lengthy and difficult repair stops at the end of each and every jump it undertook. Outer hulls became corroded and damaged. Drive-spines required such constant repair and maintenance that onboard fabrication engines had to work around the clock to keep up with demand. While Ty and Nancy had been exploring the clade-world’s passageways and caverns, Martinez and his crew had been striving to get the Mjollnir in full working order for the trip home.
One of the two helmeted figures now glanced up, and Ty’s suit automatically projected an icon floating beside that figure, identifying it as Nancy.
‘Merrick’s swarm is on its way here,’ she told him without preamble. ‘Mjollnir’s on full alert, and Martinez wants us out of here within the hour.’ Ty was close enough now to see the worried expression through her visor. ‘I’m sorry, Nathan. We did our best.’
‘How do you know it’s on its way?’ he asked.
‘The reconnaissance probes we sent out,’ explained Cesar. ‘One of them picked up a lot of drive-signatures no more than thirty light-years from here.’
‘Drive-signatures?’
‘Sure,’ said Nancy. ‘Remember the briefing?’
Ty made an exasperated noise. ‘There were endless briefings. Care to remind me?’
‘Superluminal ships produce gravitational anomalies every time they enter or depart normal space,’ Cesar continued. ‘The probe’s got tach-net monitors that can pick up short-range fluctuations propagating through superluminal space. So we know something just turned up.’
No more than thirty light-years from here, Ty reflected. How easily the words tripped off Cesar’s tongue. They’d travelled a thousand light-years without any help from the Shoal, putting them on a par with the greatest explorers the human race had ever known.
‘How could they get here so soon?’ he demanded. ‘I thought the best estimates gave us at least another month before they arrived here.’
‘Nathan . . . Cesar . . . for Christ’s sake, shut up and get packing, will you?’
Ty turned his attention to Nancy. ‘Look, we can’t possibly leave here with nothing to show, not after coming all this way. Tell me exactly how much time you think we have left, to the precise minute if it’s at all possible.’
He could just make out her terse expression through the visor. ‘Nathan—’
‘Just humour me, okay?’
Nancy hesitated, and Cesar jumped in. ‘I’d say anything from ten to twenty-four hours before they’re right on our doorstep, Nathan. But I don’t rate our chances of survival very high if we aren’t ready to jump out of here before then.’
Ty thought hard for a moment. ‘Okay, but once the swarm does reach this system, exactly how long do you think we have before they pinpoint our exact location?’
‘Nathan,’ Nancy spoke as if she were talking to a slightly dim child, ‘if there was ever anything here, it’s long gone now. Give it up.’
‘Is that Martinez’s opinion too?’ he countered.
‘Of course it is, otherwise we wouldn’t be packing up, would we? Unless you’ve got any last-minute bright ideas.’
‘Maybe I do. Look, we spent a week just trying to find this rock after we arrived in this system, right?’
‘What’s your point?’ asked Cesar.
‘The swarm needs to find us first, or more specifically this one asteroid out of the huge volume of them surrounding the white dwarf. Now, clade-worlds are always found within specific distances from their stars, which is one reason we managed to find this one as quickly as we did. The swarm’s going to know that, but it still means we’re going to have at least some time to finish our work before they trace us.’
‘We really don’t have time to debate this,’ Nancy snapped, her voice getting louder. ‘You’ve worked harder than anyone else, Nathan, and there’s no reason we couldn’t come back here some other time and try looking again, after the swarm is gone.’
‘Think about what’s at stake,’ Ty insisted. ‘What’s going to happen if we return empty-handed?’
‘Jesus and Buddha, Nathan!’ Nancy finally exploded. ‘Don’t you understand? All that happens if we stay on now is we get killed, and it’s all over either way! Not unless you finally think you found the damn . . .’ She stuttered to a halt, and he realized she could see the grin almost splitting his face in half.
Cesar looked back and forth between them. ‘What – you found something?’
‘There’s an anomaly,’ Ty explained. ‘It was right there in front of me the whole time.’
‘So why the hell didn’t you mention it before?’ Nancy demanded, angry again.
Ty shrugged, then remembered the gesture probably wouldn’t be visible to the others, regardless of how light and flexible their suits were. ‘You didn’t really give me a chance. I came up here when you called, and—’
‘Okay,’ Nancy said, cutting him off. ‘Okay, what anomaly?’
‘I’ll need to show you,’ he replied.
Nancy conferred quickly with Martinez and got permission for them to go back inside the asteroid. Cesar remained on the surface to supervise the spiders as they busily manoeuvred the packed tents and supplies on board an unmanned cargo transpo
rt that had just arrived from the frigate.
‘I hope you know I’m risking my life for you,’ Nancy muttered over a private channel, her voice tense.
‘I promise I won’t read too much into it,’ Ty replied. The shaft walls slid past as they dropped down into darkness, each of them carried by a spider-mech. ‘God forbid you might ever admit to actually liking me.’
‘It’s not that I don’t like you; it’s just that . . . I don’t know.’
‘“I’m just not your usual type.” That’s what you always say, isn’t it?’ he asked.
Sudden, intense sexual relationships were to be expected, while so far from home for months at a time; and such had been part and parcel of Ty’s experiences while exploring other clade-worlds in years long gone by. But he never let himself forget that Nancy Schiller was a Freeholder. She was not unlike Karen, in that she was used to a life of discipline, and her body was a landscape of smooth, well-trained muscles; whenever they shared a bed, Ty would find himself wondering whether life under an assumed identity had left him with a perverse attraction to the threat of discovery.
He heard her sigh, over the channel. ‘Forget I said anything,’ she muttered. ‘How long before we get to this chamber?’
‘Not long. Does it matter?’
‘No,’ she grumbled. ‘It’s just . . .’
‘What?’
She made an irritated sound. ‘I just can’t stand to think of those . . . machines hunting us through all this darkness.’
‘It’s not far,’ he replied, knowing she was referring to the images of swarm-components they’d occasionally watched since departing Ocean’s Deep.
The mouth of the shaft had shrunk to almost nothing, and now the only light came from the spider-mechs’ lamps, which cast sharp-edged pools of illumination against the walls of the shaft as they rushed by. Their conversation lapsed into silence, and Ty guessed Nancy was just as intimidated by the scale of the clade-world as most people were the first time they found themselves inside one.
Before long they reached the crossroads at the asteroid’s heart. Someone had directed a spider to nail up a handwritten sign indicating basic directions. Ty braked, and waited for Nancy to do the same.
‘We’re going into Chamber Two,’ he explained, nodding in the direction of Shaft B West. ‘It’s pressurized, okay? That means we can—’
‘Nathan, I know you’re dedicated to your work, but get your head out of your ass. Remember I’m the one who writes the daily progress reports. What makes you think I don’t already know it’s pressurized?’
‘Sorry I was just thinking out loud. Another hundred metres, then down the hatch.’
The Atn usually left a basic assortment of data and tools behind whenever they abandoned a clade-world, but in this case there seemed to be a surfeit of artefacts both physical and virtual. The data was recorded on storage devices built around a core of self-repairing molecular circuitry, the resulting stacks resembling rows of bronzed shields embedded in the walls of dedicated chambers. Most, but not all of the data stored there still remained incomprehensible to human researchers.
The stack chamber was accessed through a pressure seal installed by spider-mechs shortly after their arrival. They passed through the airlock quickly, Ty pulling off his helmet once they were inside the chamber. He watched as Nancy did the same, shaking sweat from frizzy blond hair cut into a bob.
The chamber was rectangular, its walls crowded with the ubiquitous spiral-form glyphs. A heap of what might appear to the casual observer as nothing more than blackened junk lay jumbled in one corner. The remains of eight Atn stack-discs were embedded in the wall directly opposite the pressure seal. Each had been carefully and deliberately vandalized; fragments and chunks of the discs lay scattered all around.
Nancy knelt by the pile of junk and poked at it with one gloved finger. ‘I don’t know, Nathan, we’ve already been over every inch of this place, and I’ll be seriously surprised if we’ve missed anything.’
Ty pulled off a glove and ran one hand over the ruined edge of a stack-disc. ‘We missed one thing.’ He nodded towards the pile of junk in the corner. ‘That’s the remains of an Atn, for a start.’
‘Oh.’ She stood up and took a step back. ‘Are you sure?’
He glanced past her at the twisted remains, which were hardly recognizable as having ever been anything living. ‘I ran a tomographic analysis on some trace organic remnants. It’s definitely the remains of an Atn, and it’s been subjected to extremely intense levels of heat, like something turned the interior of this chamber into a furnace. You remember what Cesar found out about those craters?’
A lot of them were formed relatively recently, and in the same short period of time, right?’
‘Exactly It’s like something turned up here, killed everything living it found, then disappeared again.’
‘All right,’ she said, eyeing him with wary respect. ‘But if that does turn out to be the case, doesn’t it lend itself rather strongly to the notion that if the Mos Hadroch was ever here, it’s gone now? And you told me yourself the Atn clades used to go to war with each other. Maybe the ones in this asteroid just happened to lose a fight.’
Ty shook his head violently. ‘No, the assumption used to be that the Atn must have fought amongst themselves, but the data we got from Merrick makes a strong case for the swarm being responsible for all the damage to clade-worlds we’ve found in the past.’ He stared thoughtfully at the stack-discs for several seconds.
‘But? I can tell there’s a but.’
‘There are clade-worlds in even worse condition than this one, back home, but I’ve never come across stack-discs that looked like they’d been as carefully and deliberately smashed as these.’
She glanced at the melted remains of the Atn, and then back at Ty. ‘You think this one smashed them himself, before he got killed?’
‘I think it’s a fair conjecture. There was something in those discs he didn’t want found. Maybe even the exact location of the Mos Hadroch.’
She stared at him like he was an imbecile. ‘But if the stacks-discs have been destroyed, how the hell are you going to find out?’
‘By looking at things differently. For a start, we’ve mapped out every inch of this asteroid, but there’s one passageway off Shaft A that’s a hundred metres too short.’
She looked at him blankly, and he explained further. ‘Look, every single Atn clade in existence follows the exact same internal architecture. It’s like they have a blueprint they never deviate from. They only go for bodies of a certain size, between seventy and one hundred kilometres across. Then there are always two central shafts, and exactly the same number of branching passageways and chambers, all in the same place and according to a ratio relative to a particular asteroid’s dimensions.’
He grabbed her by the shoulders and grinned. ‘When Cesar called in, I’d already gone to check out that passageway – and I’d bet my life it’s capped with a false wall.’
‘You think there’s something hidden behind it?’
‘Why not? There’s gear back on the frigate that can tell us if I’m right.’
Nancy carefully extracted herself from his grasp. ‘Well, that’s great. We can have Martinez send over some explosives so we can blow it open.’
‘First we need to know how thick the false wall is. Too thick and we’ll need a lot of explosives, except that could collapse the passageway on top of us and maybe destroy whatever they hid beyond. No,’ he shook his head, ‘first we image the passageway to get some idea what’s back there. We can even drill a hole through if necessary. But we need to get started on this now, Nancy. Right now.’
She stared at him for another moment, then set her mouth in a firm line and opened a comms link to the Mjollnir ’s bridge.
Ty felt a weight lift off his shoulders; it seemed they were finally getting somewhere.
Less than an hour later, Curtis Randall and Anton Swedberg – technical specialists – were manoeuvring new
equipment down the shaft and into the suspect passageway, with the help of nearly a dozen spider-mechs. A large drill mechanism, mounted on a tripod and assembled from a kit, had been set up next to the false wall, its three legs firmly secured to the floor. The drill bit itself was hidden from view behind a flat plastic shield.
‘Got word from Perez,’ Ty heard Randall say over their shared comms. ‘Martinez is coming online in a couple of seconds. Something’s up.’
Ty glanced behind himself and saw two spider-mechs delicately directing a package down the passageway towards the false wall, casting deep shifting shadows as they passed under a string of lights positioned along the ceiling. ‘What is it?’
‘Anton says he spoke to Tibbs on the bridge, and Mjollnir ’s picking up a local increase in background tach-net noise as well as gravity flux waves in the tach-net continuum. Looks like the swarm just arrived.’
Ty felt a sudden panic flood him. They were running out of time.
Get a grip, he thought angrily. He glanced over at Nancy, unpacking gear beside him, and caught the look of alarm on her face, even through her visor.
‘If we’re lucky, it’s only a few advance scouts,’ Randall added, as the two spiders came to a halt. Ty turned to them and began unstrapping the packages they carried. ‘I’m sorry to be, you know, the bearer of bad news.’
Ty nodded, feeling numb. ‘Then we have to—’
‘Forgive me for eavesdropping, Mr Driscoll,’ said Martinez, ‘but I couldn’t help overhearing.’ Ty glanced down and noticed that the small, gold-coloured bar representing the Mjollnir’s commander had manifested in one corner of his visor. ‘The situation’s starting to look pretty desperate from where I’m standing.’
Ty could hear murmured conversations and background noises on the bridge. ‘How far away are they?’ Ty asked immediately. ‘A star system’s a big place, Commander, so we might have as much as a couple of days before they figure out exactly where the asteroid is.’