The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  “If that’s not a warning to go,” Lenka said. “I don’t know what is.”

  “I want to know what happened to her,” I said. “But not at any cost.

  We don’t have to go on.”

  “Of course we go on!” Rasht said. “These are just markings.” But there was an edge in his voice, a kind of questioning rise, as if he sought reassurance and confirmation.

  “They could almost be prehuman,” I said, wondering how we might go about dating the age of these impressions, if such a thing were even possible. “Pre-Shrouder, maybe,” Lenka said. “Pre-Juggler. Who knows? What we really need is measuring equipment, sampling gear. Get a reading off these rocks, find out what that silver stuff really is.”

  By which she meant, return to the ship in the meantime. It was a sentiment I shared.

  “Teterev went on,” Rasht said.

  Her prints were a muddle, as if she had dwelled here for quite some time, pacing back and forth and debating her choices. But after that process of consideration she had carried on deeper into the tunnel, where it continued beyond the chamber.

  By now the monkey almost needed to be dragged or carried. It really did not want to go on.

  Even my own dread was becoming harder to push aside. There was a component to it beyond the instinctive dislike of confined spaces and the understandable reaction to the figures. A kind of unarguable, primal urge to leave—as if some deep part of my brain had already made its mind up.

  “Do you feel it?” I risked asking.

  “Feel what?” Rasht asked.

  “The dread.”

  The Captain did not answer immediately, and I feared that I had done my standing even more harm than when I questioned his judgement. But Lenka swallowed hard and said: “Yes. I didn’t want to say anything, but… yes. I’ve been wondering about that. It’s beyond any rational fear we ought to be experiencing.” She paused and added: “I think something is making us feel that dread.”

  “Making?” Rasht echoed.

  “The magnetic fields, perhaps. It’s strong here—much stronger than outside. What we saw before was just leakage. Our suits aren’t perfect Faraday cages, not with all the damage and repair they’ve had over the years. They can’t exclude a sufficiently strong field, not completely. And if the field acts on the right part of our brains, we might feel it. Fear, dread.

  A sense of the unnatural.”

  “Then it’s a defense mechanism,” Rasht said. “A deterrent device, to keep out intruders.”

  “Then we might think of heeding it,” I said.

  “It could also mean there is something worth guarding.”

  “The Amerikanos never had psychological technology like this,”

  Lenka said.

  “But others did. Do I need to spell it out? What did we come to this system for? It wasn’t because we thought we’d find Amerikano relics. We were after a bigger reward than that.”

  My dread sharpened. I could see where this was going. “We have no evidence that Conjoiners were here either.”

  “They say the spiders liked to place their toys in caches,” Rasht went on, as if my words counted for nothing. “C-drives. Hell-class weapons.” Despite myself I laughed. “I thought we based our activities on intelligence, not fairy tales.”

  “I heard someone already found those weapons,” Lenka said, as if that was all the convincing Rasht would need.

  But his voice turned low, conspiratorial—as if there was a chance of the walls listening in. “I heard fear was one of their counter-intrusion measures. The weapons get into your skull, turn you insane, if you’re not already spidered.”

  I knew then that nothing, not even dread, would deter Rasht from his quest for profit. He would replace one phantom prize with another, over and over, until reality finally trumped him.

  “We have come this far,” Rasht said. “We may as well go a little deeper.”

  “A little,” I said, against every rational instinct. “No further than we’ve already come.”

  We pushed out of the chamber, Lenka setting the pace, following Teterev’s course down another rock-walled tunnel. To begin with, the going was no harder than before. But as the tunnel progressed, so the walls began to pinch together. Now we had to move in single file, whether we liked it or not. Then Lenka announced that the walls squeezed together even more sharply just ahead, as if there had been a rockfall or a major shift in the hill’s interior structure.

  “That’s a shame,” I said.

  “We could blast it,” Lenka said. “Set a couple of hot-dust charges at maximum delay, get back to the ship.” She was already preparing to unclip one of the demolition charges from her belt.

  “And bring down half the mountain in the process,” I said. “Lose the tunnel, the chamber, Teterev’s prints, probably blast to atoms whatever we’re hoping to find.”

  “Her prints don’t double back,” Rasht said. “That means there must be a way through.”

  “Or this obstruction wasn’t here,” I answered.

  But there was a way through. It was difficult to see at first, efficiently camouflaged by the play of light and shadow on the rock, almost as if it meant to hide itself. “It’s tight,” Lenka said. “But one at a time, we should manage. With luck, it’ll open up again on the other side.”

  “And luck’s been so kind to us until now,” I said.

  Lenka was the first through. It was tight for her, and would be even tighter for Rasht, whose suit was bulkier. She grunted with effort and concentration. Her suit scraped rock.

  “Careful!” Rasht called.

  Now most of Lenka was out of our sight, swallowed into the cleft. “It’s easier,” she said. “Widens out again. Just a bottleneck. I can see Teterev’s footprints.”

  Rasht and the monkey next. I could see that the monkey was going to take some persuasion. To begin with it would not go first, ahead of its master. Rasht swore at Kanto and went on himself, his suit grinding and clanging against the pincering rock. I wondered if it was even possible for Rasht to make it through. He could have discarded the suit, of course—put up with the cold, for the sake of his treasure. I had known the Captain endure worse, when there was a sniff of payoff.

  Yet he called: “I’m through.”

  Kanto was still on the leash, which was now tight against the edge of the rock. The monkey really did not want to rejoin the Captain. I felt a glimmer of cross-species empathy. Perhaps the magnetic emanations were affecting it more strongly than the rest of us, reaching deeper into the poor animal’s fear centre.

  Still, the monkey did not have much say in its fate. Rasht pulled on the leash, and I pushed it through from the other side. I needed the maximum amplification of my struggling suit. The monkey would have bitten my face off given half the chance, but its teeth were on the wrong side of its visor. Reunited, our little party continued into the tunnel system. But we had only gone a hundred metres or more when the path branched. There were three possible directions ahead of us, and a mess of footprints at the junction.

  “Looks as if she went down all three shafts,” Lenka said. Only one set of prints had led to this point, so Teterev must not have returned from one of those tunnels. But it was hard to say which. The prints were confused now. She must have gone up and down the shafts several times, changing her mind, returning. Given the state of the prints, there was no way of saying which had been her ultimate choice. We selected the leftmost shaft and carried on down it. It sloped a little more, and eventually the ice under our feet gave way to solid rock, meaning that we no longer had Teterev’s prints as a guide. All around us the silver patterning continued, streaks and fissures of it, jetstreams and knotted synaptic tangles. It was hard not to think of a living silver nervous system, threading its way through the stone matrix of this ancient mountain. “Your suit, Lenka,” Rasht said.

  She slowed. “What about it?”

  “You’ve picked up some of that patterning. The silver. It must have rubbed off when you squeezed th
rough the narrowing.”

  “It’s also on you,” I told the Captain.

  It only took a glance to confirm that it was on me and the monkey as well. A smear of silver had attached itself to my right elbow, where I must have brushed against the wall. Doubtless there was more, out of sight. I moved to touch the silver, to dust it from myself. But when my fingers touched it, its contamination seemed to jerk onto them. The movement was startling and quick, like the strike of an ambush predator. I stared at my hand, cross-webbed by streaks of gently pulsing silver. I clenched and opened my fist. My suit was as stiff as it had been since my accident outside, but for the moment it did not seem to be affected by the silver. “It’s nanotech,” I said. “Nothing the suit recognises. But I don’t like it.”

  “If it was hostile, you’d know it by now,” Rasht said. “We push on. Just a little further.”

  But turning around there and then is exactly what we should have done. It might have made all the difference.

  The next chamber was a palace of horrors.

  It was as large as the earlier place, the shape similar, and a tunnel led out from it as well. But there all similarities ended. Here the tormented human forms were not confined to figures marked on the walls. These were solid shapes, three dimensional evocations of distorted and contorted human anatomies, thrusting out of the wall like the broken and bent figureheads of shipwrecks. They seemed to be formed not of rock, or the silver contamination, but some amalgam of the two, a kind of shimmering, glinting substrate. There were ribcages and torsos, grasping hands, heads snapped back in agonies of perfect torment. They were not quite faceless, but by the same token none of the faces were right. They were all eyes, or all mouths, hinged open to obscene angles, or they were anvil-shaped nightmares that seemed to have cleaved their way through the rock itself. I was struck by a dreadful conviction that these were souls that had been entirely in the rock, imprisoned or contained, until an instant when they had nearly broken through. And I did not know whether to be glad that these souls were not quite free, or sick with terror that the rock might yet contain multitudes, still seeking escape.

  “I hate this place,” Lenka said quietly.

  I nodded my agreement. “So do I.”

  And all of a sudden, Lenka’s earlier idea of setting a demolition charge did not seem so bad to me at all. The mere existence of this chamber struck me as profoundly, upsettingly wrong, as if it were my moral duty to remove it from the universe.

  The charges at maximum delay. Time to get back to the ship, if we rushed, and none of us got stuck in the squeeze point.

  Maybe. Maybe not.

  That was when the monkey broke free.

  * * *

  So, anyway. About what we’ve done to your suit.

  Its basic motor systems were already compromised when I found you near the cave mouth. You’d got that far, which can’t have been easy.

  Yes, well done you.

  Brave Captain.

  The nanotech contamination, the traces you picked up from the cave wall, was clearly the main cause of the systemic failure. Obviously, if you’d stayed any longer, your suit would have begun to turn against you, the way it happened with Teterev. Allowing itself to be controlled, absorbed. But you still had some control over it, and enough strength to overcome the resistance of the jammed locomotive systems.

  It was never as bad for me. I think when I fell in that pool, some of the native organisms must have formed a barrier layer, a kind of insulation against the nanotech. Perhaps they’ve had time to begin to evolve their own defense measures, to contain the spread of it. Who knows? My good fortune, in any case.

  It didn’t feel like good fortune at the time, but that’s the universe for you.

  Anyway, back to your suit.

  You’re already paralyzed, effectively, but just to make sure that the systems don’t begin to recover, I’ve opened your main control box and disabled all locomotive power. Locked it tight, in fact. You might as well be standing in a welded suit of armour, for all the success you’ll have in moving.

  Why are your arms the way they are?

  We’ll come to that.

  You are standing, yes. Your feet are on the ground. Obviously, with the noose around your neck, the one thing you don’t want to do now is topple over. I won’t be there to catch you. But your suit is heavy and provided you don’t wriggle around inside it too much, you should stay upright.

  Of course, if you don’t want to stay upright, that’s one way out of this for you.

  You’re cold?

  I’m not surprised! It’s a cold planet, and you’re not wearing a space helmet. Be a bit difficult, slipping a noose around your neck, if you were still wearing your helmet!

  Fine, you want some more heat? That’s easy. Your life-support systems are still good, and you can adjust the suit temperature. The reason your arms are positioned in front of you the way they are, is that I want you to be able to operate your cuff control. That’s right. You can do that. You can move your fingers, tap those buttons.

  Here’s the thing, though. There’s only one thing you can do with those buttons. Only one system you can control.

  You can turn up your suit temperature, or you can turn it down. That’s all.

  Why?

  The why is easy. You remember those pieces of the wreck I went to so much trouble to position around you?

  There was a point to all that.

  There’s a point to you.

  * * *

  I suppose the terror was too much for Kanto, and that the passage through the narrowing had weakened his leash. Whatever the case, the monkey was out of the chamber, gibbering and shrieking, as it headed back the way we had come.

  None of us had spoken until that moment. The chamber had struck us into a thunderous, paralyzing silence. Even when Kanto left, we said nothing. Any utterance would have felt like an invitation, permission for something worse than these stone ghouls to emerge from the walls.

  Lenka and I looked at each other through our visors. Our eyes met, and we nodded. Then we looked at Rasht, both of us in turn, and Rasht looked as frightened as we felt.

  Lenka went first, then Rasht, then I. We moved as quickly as our suits allowed. But even though none of us felt like lingering, I was no longer having to work as hard to keep up with the other two. My suit still felt sluggish, but it had not worsened since I came into contact with the silver contamination. Lenka and Rasht, though, were not moving as efficiently as before.

  I still could not bring myself to speak, not until we were well away from that place. If the monkey had any sense, it was already through the narrowing, on its way back to daylight.

  But when we reached the junction, the intersection of four tunnels, Rasht made us halt.

  “Kanto’s taken the wrong one,” he said.

  In the chaos of footprints, there was no chance at all of picking out the individual trace of the monkey. I was about to say as much when Rasht spoke again.

  “I have a trace on his suit. In case he…escaped.” The word seemed distasteful to him, as if it clarified an aspect of their relationship best kept hidden. “He should be ahead of us now, but he isn’t. He’s behind again. Down this shaft, I think.” Rasht was indicating the rightmost entrance of the three we had faced on our way in. “It’s hard to know.”

  Lenka said in a low voice: “Then we have to leave. Kanto will find his own way out, once he knows he’s gone the wrong way.”

  “She’s right,” I said.

  “We can’t leave him,” Rasht said. “We won’t. I won’t allow it.”

  “If the monkey doesn’t want to be found,” I said, “nothing we do is going to make any difference.”

  “The fix isn’t moving. I have a distance estimate. It isn’t more than twenty or thirty metres down that tunnel.”

  “Or that one,” I said, nodding to the middle shaft. “Or your fix is wrong, and he’s ahead of us anyway. For all we know, the magnetic field is screwing up your tracker.”<
br />
  “He isn’t behind us,” Rasht said, doggedly ignoring me. “There are really only two possibilities. We can check them quickly, three of us. Eliminate the wrong shaft.”

  Lenka’s own breathing was now as heavy as my own. I caught another glimpse of her face, eyes wide with apprehension. “I know he means a lot to you, Captain…”

  “Is there something wrong with your suits?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Lenka said. “Mine, anyway. Losing locomotive assist. Same as happened to you.”

  “I’m not sure it’s the same thing. I fell in the pool, you didn’t. Can you still move?”

  Lenka lifted up an arm, clenched and unclenched her hand. “For the time being. If it gets too bad, I can always go full manual.” Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and reopened them. “All right, Captain.” This with a particular sarcastic emphasis. “I’ll check out the middle tunnel, if it’ll help. I’ll go thirty metres, no more, and turn around. You can check out the one on your right, if you think Kanto’s gone that way. Nidra can wait here, just in case Kanto’s gone ahead of us and turns back.”

  I did not like the idea of spending ten more seconds in this place, let alone the time it would take to inspect the tunnels. But Lenka’s suggestion made the best of a bad situation. It would appease the Captain and not delay us more than a few minutes.

  “All right,” I agreed. “I’ll wait here. But don’t count on me catching Kanto if he comes back.”

  “Stay where you are, my dear,” Rasht said, addressing the monkey wherever it might be. “We are coming.”

  Lenka and Rasht disappeared into their respective tunnels, their suits moving with visible sluggishness. Lenka, whose suit was more lightly armoured, would find it easier to cope than Rasht. I speculated to myself that the silver contamination was indeed having some effect, but that my exposure to the pond’s micro-organisms had provided a barriering layer, a kind of inoculation. It was not much of a theory, but I had nothing better to offer.

  I counted a minute, then two.