The Best of Subterranean

  “But first the wreck. Make sure it isn’t going to shoot us down the instant we turn our backs. Match our orbit, Nidra—but keep us at a safe distance.”

  “Fifty kilometres?” I asked.

  Rasht considered that for a moment. “Make it a hundred.”

  * * *

  Was that more than just natural caution? I’ve never been sure about you, if truth be told—how much stock you put in traveller’s tales.

  Mostly we aren’t superstitious. But rumours and ghost stories, those are something else. I’m sure you’ve heard your share of them, over the years. When ships meet for trade, stories are exchanged—and you’ve done a lot of trading. Or did, until your luck started souring.

  Did you hear the one about the space plague?

  Of course you did.

  The strange contagion, the malady infecting ships and their crew. Is it real, Captain? What do you think? No one seems to know much about it, or even if it really exists.

  What about the other thing? The black swallowing horror between the stars, a presence that eats ships. No one knows much about that, either.

  What’s clear, though, is that a drifting, preyed-upon hulk puts no one in an agreeable frame of mind. We should have turned back there and then. But if Lenka and I had tried to argue with you on that one, how far do you think we’d have got? You’d have paid more attention to the monkey.

  Yes, Kanto’s fine. We’ll take very good care of him. What do you think we are—monsters?

  We’re not like that at all.

  No, I’m not leaving you—not just yet. I just have to fetch some things from Teterev’s wreck. Be back in a jiffy! You’ll recognise the things when you see them. You remember the wreck, don’t you?

  Not the ship in orbit. That was a wash-out. The fucking thing was as derelict and run-down as Lachrimosa. No engines, no weps. No crew, not even frozen. No cargo, no tradable commodities. Picked clean as a bone.

  No, I’m talking about the thing we found on the surface, the crash site.

  Good, it’s coming back to you.

  That’ll help.

  * * *

  “It’s a shuttle,” Lenka said.

  “Was,” I corrected.

  True: the shuttle was a wreck. But in fact it was in much better condition than it had any right to be. The main section of the shuttle was still in one piece, upright on the surface. It was surrounded by debris, but the wonder was that any part of it had survived. It must have suffered a malfunction very near the surface, or else there would have been nothing to recognise.

  Around the crash site, geysers pushed columns of steam up from a dirty snowscape. Holda’s sun, 82 Eridani, was rising. As it climbed into the sky it stirred the geysers to life. Rocks and rusty chemical discolouration marred the whiteness. A little to the west, the terrain bulged up sharply, forming a kind of rounded upwelling. I stared at it for a moment, wondering why it had my attention. Something about the bulge’s shape struck me as odd and unsettling, as if it simply did not belong in this landscape.

  Unlike the other ship, no misfortune befell us as we completed our landing approach. Rasht selected an area of ground that looked stable. Our lander threw out its landing skids. Rasht cut power when we were still hovering, so as not to blast the snow with our descent jets.

  I wondered what chance we stood of finding anything in the other craft’s remains. If the ship above had proven largely valueless, there did not seem much hope of finding glories in the wreck. But it would not hurt us to investigate.

  But my attention kept wandering to the volcanic cone. Most of it was snow or ice-covered, except for the top. But there were ridges or arms radiating away from it, semicircular in profile, meandering and diminishing. I supposed that they were lava tunnels, or something similar. But the way they snaked away from the main mass, thick at the start and thinner as they progressed, gradually vanishing into the surrounding terrain, made me think of a cephalopod, with the volcano as its main body and the ridges its tentacles. Rather than a natural product of geology, the outcome of blind processes drawn out over millions of years, it seemed to squat on the surface with deliberation and patience, awaiting some purpose.

  I did not like it at all.

  Once we had completed basic checks, we got into our spacesuits and prepared for the surface. When Rasht, Lenka and I were ready, I helped the monkey into its own little spacesuit, completing the life-support connections that were too fiddly for Captain Rasht.

  You may say: why did we all go out? Why did we all go down to the surface? The truth was, that was Rasht’s way. If one or more of us stayed in orbit while he was down here, there was a chance of the ship leaving without him. If he sent one or more of us down here, while he stayed in orbit, he could not rely on our trustworthiness. We might find something and lie about it, keeping its secret to ourselves.

  Rasht’s way. And what Rasht wanted, Rasht got.

  So our happy little party stepped out the lander, testing the ground under our feet. It felt solid, as well it ought given that it was supporting the weight of our ship. The gravity on Holda was nearly Earth-normal, so we could move around just as easily as if we were on the ship. The planet was about Earth-sized as well, enabling it to hold on to a thick atmosphere. Although the core was dead, Holda was not itself a dead world. Rather than orbiting 82 Eridani directly, Holda spun around a fat banded gas giant which in turn orbited the star. As it turned around the giant, Holda was subjected to tidal forces which squeezed and stretched at its interior. These stresses manifested as heat, which in turn helped to drive the geysers and surface volcanism. From orbit we had seen that most of Holda was still covered in ice, but there were belts of exposed crust around the equator and tropics. Here and there were even pockets of liquid water. Life had spilled from these pools out onto the surface, infiltrating barren matrices of rock and ice. According to Lachrimosa’s records there was nothing in the native ecosystem larger than a krill, but the biomass load was enough to push the atmosphere away from equilibrium, meaning that it carried enough oxygen to support our own greedy respiratory systems.

  In that sense, we did not really need the suits at all. But the cold was a factor, and in any case the suits offered protection and power-assist. We kept our helmets on, anyway. We were not fools.

  It was a short walk over to the crash site. We plotted a path between bubbling pools, crossing bridges and isthmuses of strong ice. Now and then a geyser erupted, fountaining tens of metres above our heads. Each time it was enough to startle the monkey, but Rasht kept his spacesuited pet on a short leash.

  The other ship must have been quite sleek and beautiful before it crashed, at least in comparison to our own squat and barnacled vehicle. Much of the wreckage consisted of pieces of mirrored hull plating, curved to reflect our approaching forms back at us in grotesque distortion. Lenka and I seemed like twins, our twisted, elongated shapes wobbling in heat-haze from the pools. It was true that we were similar. We looked alike, had roughly the same augmentations, and our dreadlocks confirmed that we had completed the same modest number of crossings. During port stopovers, we were sometimes assumed to be sisters, or even twins. But in fact Lenka had been on the crew before me, and although we functioned well enough together, we did not have that much in common. It was a question of ambition, of acceptance. I was on the Lachrimosa until something better came along. Lenka seemed to have decided that this was the best life had to offer. At times I pitied her, at others I felt contemptuous of the way she allowed herself to be subjugated by Rasht. Our ship was half way to being a wreck itself. I wanted more: a better ship, a better captain, better prospects. I never sensed any similar desires in Lenka. She was content to be a component in a small, barely functioning machine.

  But then, perhaps Lenka thought exactly the same of me. And we had all been hoping that this was going to be the big score.

  Our reflections shifted. Lenka and I shrunk to tiny proportions, beneath the looming, ogrelike form of our Captain. Then the monkey swelle
d to be the largest of all, its armoured arms and hands swinging low with each stride, its bow legs like scuttling undercarriage.

  What a crew we made, the four of us.

  We reached the relatively secure ground under the other wreck. We circled it, stepping between the jagged mirrors of its hull. The force of the impact had driven them into the ground like the shaped stones of some ancient burial site, surrounding the main part of the wreck in patterns that to the eye suggested a worrying concentricity, the lingering imprint of an abandoned plan.

  I picked up one of the smaller shards, tugging it from its icy holdfast. I held it to my face, saw my visored form staring back.

  “Maybe a geyser caught them,” I speculated. “Blasted up just as they were coming in. Hit the intakes or stabilisers, that might have been enough.”

  “Kanto!”

  It was Rasht, screaming at the monkey. The monkey had bent down to dip its paw into a bubbling pool. Rasht jerked on the leash, tumbling the monkey back onto its suit-sheathed tail. Over our suit-to-suit comm I heard Kanto’s irritated hiss. In the time it had dipped its paw into the pool, a host of microorganisms had begun to form a rust-coloured secondary glove around the original, making the monkey’s paw look swollen and diseased.

  The monkey, stupid to the last, tried to lick at the coating through the visor of its helmet.

  I hated the monkey.

  “There’s a way in,” Lenka said.

  * * *

  I’m back now, Captain. I said I wouldn’t be gone long. Never one to break my promises, me.

  No, don’t struggle. It’ll only make it worse. That thing around your neck isn’t going to get any less tight.

  Do you recognise these? I could only carry a few at a time. I’ll go back for some more in a while.

  That’s right. Pieces of the crashed shuttle. Nice and shiny. Here. Let me hold one up to your face. Can you see your reflection in it? It’s a bit distorted, but you’ll have to put up with that. You look frightened, don’t you? That’s fine. It’s healthy. Fear is the last and best thing we have, that’s what she told me.

  The last and best thing.

  Our last line of defense.

  She? You know who I mean. We found her helmet, her journal, in the wreck.

  That’s right.

  Teterev.

  * * *

  Lenka fingered open a hatch and used the manual controls to open the airlock door. We were soon through, into the interior.

  It was dark inside. We turned on our helmet lights and ramped our eyes to maximum sensitivity. There were several compartments to the shuttle, all of which seemed to have withstood the crash. Gradually it became clear that someone had indeed survived. They had moved things around, arranged provisions, bedding and furniture, that could not possibly have remained undisturbed by the crash.

  We found an equipment locker containing an old-fashioned helmet marked with the word TETEREV in stencilled Russish letters. There was no corresponding spacesuit, though. The helmet might have been a spare, or the owner had chosen to go outside in just the lower part of the suit.

  “If they had an accident,” Lenka said, “why didn’t the big ship send down a rescue party?”

  “Maybe Teterev was the rescue party,” I said.

  “They may have only had one atmosphere-capable vehicle,” Rasht said. “No way of getting back down here, and no way of Teterev getting back up. The only question then is to wonder why they waited at all, before leaving orbit.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t like the idea of leaving Teterev down here,” Lenka said.

  “I bet they liked the idea of dying in orbit even less,” Rasht replied.

  We continued our sweep of the wreck. We were less interested in Teterev’s whereabouts than what Teterev might have left us to plunder. But the two things were not unrelated. Any spacer, any Ultra, is bound to care a little about the fate of another. Ordinary human concern is only part of it. There may be lessons to be learned, and a lesson is only another sort of tradable.

  “I’ve found a journal,” I said.

  I had found it on a shelf in the cockpit. It was a handwritten log, rather than a series of data entries.

  The journal had heavy black covers, but the paper inside was very thin. I thumbed my way to the start. It looked like a woman’s handwriting to me. Russish was not my strongest tongue, but the script was clear enough.

  “Teterev starts this after the crash,” I said, while the others gathered around. “Says that she expects the power to run out eventually, so there’s no point trying to record anything in the ship itself. But they have food and water and they can use the remaining power to stay warm.”

  “Go on,” Rasht said, while the monkey studied its contaminated paw.

  “I’m trying to get some sense of what happened. I think she came down here alone.” I skimmed forward through the entries, squinting with the concentration. “There’s no talk of being rescued, or even hoping of it. It’s as if she knew no one would be coming down.” I had to work hard not to rip the paper with my power-augmented fingers. It felt tissue-thin between my fingers, like a fly’s wings.

  “A punishment, then,” Rasht said. “Marooned down here for a crime.”

  “That’s an expensive way of marooning someone.” I read on. “No—it wasn’t punishment. Not according to this, anyway. An accident, something to do with one of the geysers—she says that she’s afraid that it will erupt again, as it did ‘on the day.’ Anyway, Teterev knew she was stuck down here. And she knows she’s in trouble. Keeps talking about her ‘mistake’ in not waking the others. Says she wonders if there’s a way to signal the other ship, the orbiting lighthugger. Bring some or all of the crew out of reefersleep.” I paused, my finger hovering over a word. “Lev.”

  “Lev?” Lenka repeated.

  “She mentions Lev. Says Lev would help her, if she could get a message through. She’d have to accept her punishment, but at least get off Holda.”

  “Maybe Teterev was never meant to be down here,” Lenka said. “Jump ahead, Nidra. Let’s find out what happened.”

  I paged through dozens and dozens of entries. Some were dated and consecutive. Elsewhere I noticed blank pages and sometimes gaps of many days between the accounts. The entries became sparser, too. Teterev’s hand, barely clear to begin with, became progressively wilder and less legible. Her letters and words began to loop and scrawl across the page, like the traces of a seismograph registering the onset of some major dislocation.

  “Stop,” Rasht said, as I turned over a page. “Go back. What was that figure?”

  I turned back the sheets with a sort of dread. My eye had caught enough to know what to expect.

  It was a drawing of the volcanic cone, exactly as it appeared from the position of the wreck.

  Perhaps it was no more than an accident of Teterev’s hand, but the way she had put her marks down on the paper only seemed to add to the suggestion of brooding, patient malevolency I had already detected in the feature. Teterev seemed to have made the cephalopod’s head more bulbous, more cerebral, the lava tubes more muscular and tentacle-like. Even the way she had stippled the tubes to suggest snow or ice could not help but suggest to my eye rows and rows of suckers.

  Worse, she had drawn a gaping, beak-mouth between two of those tentacles.

  There was a silence before Lenka said: “Turn to the end. We can read the other entries later.”

  I flicked through the pages until the writing ran out. The last few entries were barely entries at all, just scratchy annotations, done in haste or distraction.

  Phrases jumped out at us.

  Can’t wake the others. Tried everything I can. My dear Lev, lost to me.

  Such a good boy. A good son.

  Doesn’t deserve me, the mistakes I’ve made.

  Stuck down here. But won’t give in. Need materials, power. Something in that hill. Magnetic anomaly. Hill looks wrong. I think there might be something in it.

  Amerikanos were here once, th
at’s the only answer. Came by their old, slow methods. Frozen cells and robot wombs. No records, but so what. Must have dug into that hill, buried something in it. Ship or an installation. See an entrance. Cave mouth. That’s where they went in.

  I don’t want to go in. But I want what they left behind. It might save my life.

  Might get me back to the ship.

  Back to Lev.

  “They were never here,” Rasht said. “Teterev would have known that. Their colonies never got this far out.”

  “She was desperate enough to try anything,” Lenka said. “I feel sorry for her, stuck all alone here. I bet she knew it was a thousand to one chance.”

  “Nonetheless,” I said, “there is something odd about that hill. Maybe it’s nothing to do with the Amerikanos, but if you’re out of options, you might as well see what’s inside.” I turned back to the drawing. The mouth, I now realised, was Teterev’s way of drawing the cave entrance.

  But it still looked like the beak of an octopus.

  “One thing’s for certain,” Lenka said. “If Teterev went into that hill, she didn’t come back.”

  “I didn’t notice any footprints,” I said.

  “They wouldn’t last, not with all the geothermal activity around here. The top of the ice must be melting and re-freezing all the time.”

  “We should look into the cave, anyway,” Rasht said.

  I shook my head, struck by an intense conviction that this was exactly the wrong thing to do.

  “It’s not our job to find Teterev’s corpse.”

  “Someone should find it,” Lenka said sharply. “Give her some dignity in death. At least record what happened to her. She was one of us, Nidra—an Ultra. She deserves better than to be forgotten. Can I look at her journal?”

  “Be my guest,” I said, passing it over to her.

  “Nidra is right—her body isn’t our concern,” Rasht said, while Lenka paged through the sheets. “She took a risk, and it didn’t work out for her. But the Amerikanos are of interest to us.”

  “Records say they weren’t here,” I said.