The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  Pushing 800 years of age now himself, Ask had not yet surrendered to terminal boredom. Admittedly he found most people execrably vapid. About the time they’d gained enough life experience to have something interesting to say, they tended to die of old age. People came and people went, but there was always some fascinating hole in the ground with his name on it.

  He’d discovered the sulfur fountains deep beneath the brittle crust of Melisande-3?. He’d been the first to walk the narrow, quivering ice bridges in the deep canyons of Qiu Ju, that rang like bells at every footfall. He’d found the lava tube worms on Førfør the hard way, barely escaping with his life and famously losing over two million Polity-IFA schillings worth of equipment in the process.

  First. That romance had never died for him.

  Here beneath Redghost, Ask was exploring a network of crevices and tunnels lined with a peculiar combination of rare earths and alloys with semiconductive properties. Considerable debate raged within his employer’s Planetary Assay Division as to whether these formations could possibly be natural, or, to the contrary, could possibly be artificial. After over a millennium of interstellar expansion to a catalog of better than sixteen thousand explored planets, more than two thousand of them permanently inhabited, the human race had yet to settle the question of whether other sophont life now populated, or ever had populated, this end of the galaxy.

  Ask recognized the inherent importance of the question. He didn’t expect to run into aliens beneath the planetary crust, though. Beneath any planetary crust, in truth. So far he had not been disappointed.

  And these tunnels… Many were smooth like lava tubes. Most of those interconnected. Some were not, jagged openings that tended to dead-end. All were lined with a threaded metallic mesh that glinted in his handlight with the effervescence of a distant fairyland glimpsed only in dreams. Seen through his thermal vision, they glowed just slightly warmer than the ambient stone, a network like a neural map.

  That resemblance was not lost on Ask. Nor was the patently obvious fact that whatever natural or artificial process had deposited this coating inside these tunnels was more recent than the formation of the tunnels themselves. His current working theory was that the smooth passages were the result of some long-vanished petrophage, while the rough passages were formed by the more usual geological processes. The coating, now, there was a mystery.

  Ask sat in an intersection of three of the smooth passages, enjoying his quick-heated fish stew. Redghost boasted a generous hydrosphere that the colonists here had husbanded magnificently with Terran stock. And the smell of it was magnificent, too—the rich meat of the salmon, spicy notes from tarragon and false-sage, the slight edginess of the kale.

  If he closed his eyes, held very still, and concentrated, Ask could hear the faint echoes of air moving in the tunnels. Atmospheric pressure variations and subtle pressures in the lithosphere made a great, slow, rumbling organ of this place.

  A series of jarring thumps more felt than heard woke him from his reverie. Dust fell from the arch of the ceiling—the first time he’d observed that kind of decay while down here.

  He consulted his telemetery. One advantage of being a Howard was all the hardware you could carry in your head. Literally as well as figuratively. Data flowed into his optic processing centers in configurable cognitive displays that he could chunk to whatever degree he liked. Like fireworks in the mind, though fractal in nature. Elephants all the way down, one of his early tutors had said, before being forced to explain the joke. Elephants, made of tinier elephants, made of tinier elephants, almost ad infinitum.

  In this case, Ask’s fractal elephants informed him that the subsurface sensors were jittering with tiny temblors, confirming in finely-grained technical detail what he’d already felt. The surface sensors were offline.

  That was odd.

  He also noted a series of neutrino bursts. Solar flares from Redghost’s host star? That hadn’t been in any of the forecasts.

  The still-operating sensor cluster closest to the cave mouth started to register a slow increase in ambient radiation as well. Everything above that was dead, as was his surface equipment. It would be a long walk home if the rockhopper and his base camp equipment just outside were knocked out of commission just like the upper sensors.

  Had someone let off a nuke? Ask found that almost inconceivable. Politically it was…bizarre. Disputes within the Polity weren’t resolved by force of arms. Not often, at any rate. And even then, almost always via small-scale engagements.

  Tactically it was even stranger. Redghost didn’t have much that anyone wanted except living space and arable land. Who would bother?

  Uneasy, he rested out the remainder of his body-clocked night. The radiation levels near the surface quickly peaked, though they did not subside all the way back to their earlier baseline norms. Hotter than he might like, but at least he wouldn’t be strolling into a fallout hell.

  April 28th, 2977 [RTS-ra]

  When he reached the first inoperative sensor cluster, Ask peeled the nubbly gray strip off the wall and studied it. Ten centimeters of adhesive polymer with several hundred microdots of instrumentation. The only reason for it to be even this large was the convenience of human hands. With no camera in his standard subsurface packages, focal length was never an issue.

  The failure mode band at the end was starkly purple from radiation exposure. The neutrino bursts must have been part of some very fast cloud of high-energy particles that fried the equipment, he realized. Instrumentation deeper down had been protected by a sufficient layer of planetary crust. Not to mention the curiously semiconducting tunnel walls.

  A cold thought stole through Ask’s mind. What would that burst have done to the enhancements crowding for skullspace inside his head?

  Well, that spike had passed, at any rate.

  He doubled back and dropped his camping gear, instruments, tools and handlights down the tunnels with the last working sensor. It seemed sensible enough, given that he had no way of knowing whether the events of last night would re-occur.

  Once that was done, he approached the entrance with caution. Though the official reports he occasionally saw were far more complex and nuanced, the chief causes of death among his fellow Howards could be boiled down to either murder or stupidity. Or too often, both.

  Whatever was happening on the surface seemed ripe for either option.

  His outside equipment remained obstinately dead. Ask drifted to the point where reflected light from the surface began to make deep gray shadows of the otherwise permanent darkness. He should have been able to pick up comm chatter now, at least as garbled scatter.

  Nothing.

  There had been no more quakes. No more neutrino bursts. Whatever had taken place last night was a single event, or contained series of events, not an ongoing situation. Which rather argued against solar flares—those lasted for days at a time.

  Stupidity? Or murder? Could those happen on a planetary scale?

  Why, he wondered, had that thought occurred to him? Everything he’d experienced since last night could just as easily be local effects from a misplaced bomb or a particularly improbable power plant accident. Not that there were any power plants up in Redghost’s mountains, but a starship having a very bad day in low orbit would have served that scenario.

  It was the silence on the comm spectra that had put the wind up him, Ask realized. Even the long-wave stuff used for planetary science was down.

  Quiet as nature had ever intended this planet to be.

  He walked into the light, wondering what he would find.

  * * *

  The base camp equipment looked normal enough. No one had shot it up. Fried electronically, Ask realized. The rockhopper on the other hand, was…strange.

  When you’d lived the better part of a thousand years, much of it exploring, your definitions of strange became fairly elastic. Even in that context, this decidedly qualified.

  Really, the rockhopper was just an air car, not radic
ally different from the twenty-fourth century’s first efforts at gravimetric technology. A mass-rated lifting spine with a boron-lattice power pack around which a multitude of bodies or hulls could be constructed. Useless away from a decent mass with a magnetosphere, but otherwise damned handy things, air cars. The rockhopper was a variant suited to landings in unimproved terrain, combining all-weather survivability with a complex arrangement of storage compartments, utility feeds and a cab intended for long-term inhabitation. Eight meters long, roughly three meters wide and slightly less tall, it looked like any other piece of high-endurance industrial equipment, right down to the white and orange “see me” paint job.

  Someone had definitely shot it up. Ask was fairly certain that if he’d managed to arrive somewhat earlier, he would have seen wisps of smoke curling up. As it was, sprung access panels and a starred windshield testified to significant brute force—that front screen was space-rated plaz, and should have remained intact even if the cab around it had delaminated.

  Something had hit the vehicle very, very hard.

  After a bit of careful climbing about, Ask identified seven entry points, all from a fairly high angle. He couldn’t help glancing repeatedly up at the sky. Redghost’s faintly mauve heavens, wispy with altocirrus, appeared as benign as ever.

  Orbital kinetics. No other explanation presented itself. That was even weirder than a nuke. And why anyone would bother to target an unoccupied rockhopper off in the wilderness was a question he could not even begin to answer.

  A particularly baroque assassination attempt, perhaps? He’d always avoided politics, both the official kind intertwined with the Polity’s governance, and the unofficial kind among the Howards themselves. That particular stupidity was the shortest path to murder, in Ask’s opinion.

  As a result of the strike on the aircar, the power pack was fractured unto death and being mildly toxic about its fate. Nothing his reinforced metabolism couldn’t handle for a while, but he probably shouldn’t hang around too long. As a result of the neutrino bursts, or more to the point, whatever had created them, every independent battery or power source in his equipment was fried, too.

  Someone had been annoyingly thorough.

  He finally found three slim Class II batteries in a shielded sample container. They lit up the passive test probe Ask had pulled out of one of the tool boxes, but wouldn’t be good for much more than powering a small handlight or some short-range comm.

  The way things were going, carrying any power source around seemed like a bad idea. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do much about the electronics in his skull, except to hope they were sufficiently low power to avoid drawing undue attention.

  As for the batteries, he settled for stashing them with the surviving campsite equipment he’d left back in the caves with the last working sensor suite. He retrieved what little of his gear was not actively wired—mostly protective clothing and his sleeping bag—and went back out to survey his route down out of these mountains. His emergency evac route had been almost due west, to a place he’d never visited called the Shindaiwa Valley. A two-hour rockhopper flight over rough terrain could be weeks of walking.

  Not to mention which, a man had to eat along the way. Even, or perhaps especially, if that man was a Howard.

  May 13th, 2977 [RTS-ra]

  Ask toiled across an apron of scree leading to a round-shoulder ridge. He was switchbacking his way upward. Dust and grit caked his nose and mouth, the sharp smell of rock and the acrid odor of tiny plants crushed beneath his boots.

  Had the formation been interrupted, it would have been a butte, but this wall ran for kilometers in both directions. The broken range of hills rising behind him had dumped him into the long, narrow valley that ran entirely athwart his intended line of progress.

  Over two weeks of walking since he’d left the rockhopper behind. That was a long way on foot. Time didn’t bother Ask. Neither did distance. But the ridiculousness of combining the two on foot seemed sharply ironic. He’d not walked so much since his childhood in Tasmania. Redghost was not the Earth of eight hundred years ago.

  At least he’d been out in the temperate latitudes in this hemisphere’s springtime—the weather for this journey would have been fatally unpleasant at other times and places on this planet.

  He had no direct way to measure the radiation levels, but presumed from the lack of any symptoms on his part that they had held level or dropped over the time since what he now thought of as Day Zero. His Howard-enhanced immune system would handle the longer-term issues of radiation exposure as it had for the past centuries—that was not a significant concern.

  Likewise he had no way to sample the comm spectra, as he’d left all his powered devices behind. But since he had not seen a single contrail or overflight in the past two weeks, he wasn’t optimistic there, either. The night sky, by contrast, had been something of a light show. Either Redghost was experiencing an extended and unforecasted meteor shower or lot of space junk was de-orbiting.

  The admittedly minimal evidence did not point to any favorable outcome.

  Those worries aside, the worst part of his walk had been the food and water. He’d crammed his daypack with energy bars before leaving the rockhopper, but that was a decidedly finite nutritional reserve. Not even his Howard-enhanced strength and endurance could carry sufficient water for more than a few days while traveling afoot. Those same enhancements roughly doubled his daily calorie requirements over baseline human norms.

  Which meant he’d eaten a lot of runner cactus, spent several hours a day catching skinks and the little sandlion insect-analogs they preyed on, and dug for water over and over, until his hands developed calluses.

  Two hundred kilometers of walking to cross perhaps a hundred and twenty kilometers of straight line vector. On flat ground with a sag wagon following, Ask figured he could have covered this distance in less than four full days.

  The scree shifted beneath him. Ask almost danced over the rolling rocks, wary of a sprained or broken ankle. When injured he healed magnificently well, but he could not afford to be trapped in one place for long. Especially not in one place with so few prospects for food or water as this slope.

  The cliffs towered above him. The rock was rotten, an old basalt dike with interposed ash layers that quickly—in a geological sense—surrendered to the elements so that the material sheered away in massive flakes the size of landing shuttles. That left a wonderfully irregular face for him to climb when he topped the scree slope. It also left an amazingly dangerous selection of finger- and toe-holds.

  On the other side of this ridge was the wide riparian valley of the Shindaiwa River, settled thickly by rural Redghost standards with farmland, sheep ranches and some purely nonfunctional estates. Drainage from rain and snowpack higher up the watershed to the north kept the valley lush even in this drier region in the rain shadow of the Monomoku Mountains further to the west.

  All he had to do was climb this ridge, cross over it, and scramble down the other side. And he’d find… People? Ruins?

  Ask didn’t want to think too hard about that. He couldn’t think about anything else. So he kept climbing.

  * * *

  The river was still there. He tried to convince himself that this was at least a plus.

  The ridgeline gave an excellent view of the Shindaiwa Valley. Though nothing curdled with the smoke of destruction, he also had an excellent view of a number of fire scars where structures had burned. There seemed to be a fair amount of dead livestock as well. A lot more animals still wandered in fenced pastures.

  Nothing human moved. No boats on the river. No vehicles on the thin skein of roads. The railroad tracks leading south toward Port Schumann and the shores of the Eniewetok Sea were empty. No smoke from fireplaces or brush burning. No winking lights for navigation, warning or welcome.

  Even from his height and distance, Ask could see what had become of the hand of man in this place.

  He had to look. At a minimum, he had to find food. Most
of the structures were standing. The idea of looting the houses of the dead for food distressed him. The idea of starving distressed him more.

  * * *

  He didn’t reach the first farmhouse until evening’s dusk. Ask would have strongly preferred to do his breaking and entering in broad daylight, but another night of hunger out in the open seemed foolish with the building right in front of him. A tall fieldstone foundation was topped by two stories of brightly painted wooden house that would not have looked out of place on one of the wealthier neighboring farms of his youth.

  Ask wasn’t sure if this was a deliberate revival of an ancient fashion of building, or a sort of architectural version of parallel evolution.

  Chickens clucked and fussed in the yard with the beady-eyed paranoia of birds. Some had already climbed into the spreading bush that seemed to be their roost, others were hunting for some last bit of whatever the hell it was chickens ate.

  Beyond the house, a forlorn flock of sheep pressed against the fenced boundary of a pasture, bleating at him. He had no idea what they wanted, but they looked pretty scraggly. A number of them were dead, grubby bodies scattered in the grass.

  Water, he realized, seeing the churned up earth around a metal trough. They were dying of thirst.

  Ask walked around the house to see if the trough could be refilled. He found the line poking up out of the soil, and the tap that controlled it. Turning that on did nothing, however.

  Of course it wouldn’t, he realized. No power for the well pump.

  He sighed and unlatched the gate. “River’s over there, guys,” Ask said, his voice a croak. He realized he hadn’t spoken aloud in the two weeks he’d been walking.