Now they were on instruments, using the “You Are Here” signs only as confirmation, as they followed the dark halls and walkways towards the central energy core.
There were, at least, some pictures along the wide hallways and in many of the large offices and stores that were built, multilevel, around the control center. Both Queson and Nagel had expected to see exotic faces in some kind of ancient-looking cultural garb, but the fact was, the folks looked pretty ordinary. Beaming faces, mostly dark complected but with Oriental cheeks and eye structure rather than Indo-European, making it likely that the original guess was right. Something like Laotian, Thai, Vietnamese, or perhaps Malayan was at the root of these people’s ancestry. They certainly had a sameness about their racial features that made it clear that they were either picked to a standard or had remained cohesive when having children long before these people had come here.
“Vegetarian, most likely, and not enamored of synthetic foods,” Nagel guessed from the three-dimensional photos that seemed so real. “That would explain the huge greenhouses. Funny, most of these racial-purity-type colonial projects were also selectively technophobic; I don’t see any signs of that here.”
Queson nodded. “A couple of the pictures show they had babies the old-fashioned way, and I don’t see much attention to livestock. You’re probably right. Some form of Buddhist sect, I would suspect. Affluent, well educated, setting up a colony so they could practice their specific faith, whatever offshoot it was, and keep away from the culture polluters while enjoying the benefits of modern life where it didn’t conflict. Makes sense.”
“Except they chose this hole. As you say, they clearly had money, so what the hell were they doing picking a cold, rotten desert like this?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Queson replied. “They were here for the long haul, and for religious and cultural reasons. They probably took it because nobody else wanted it, and it had enough underground water and a heavy enough atmosphere to sustain them. Their ancestors way back not only lived in dense jungles but in valleys carved by glaciers from mountains eight or more kilometers high. If they indeed had any Laotian blood in them, then their distant ancestors picked up and walked ten thousand or so kilometers from ancient southeast Asia on Old Earth up to the frozen Arctic, across frozen ice bridges eighty kilometers across, and down another two continents back when they were hunting prehistoric mammals with spears. These people were technological enough to grow fat and lazy without a challenge. This was it.”
“Yeah, I’ll take fat and happy to dead and consumed,” Nagel commented. “Look at where their faith and high dreams took ’em. What a waste.”
“Maybe. I’m reading fifty-two percent power, though. If we can’t find the light switch and get going, we’re going to wind up a kilometer short and with no protection.”
Nagel nodded and stepped up his pace. It was getting easier and easier to just ignore the density of empty clothes and just make sure you didn’t slip on them.
They’d had this discussion before, and would again. Nagel believed in nothing but the moment, and attaining by any means available the wealth to indulge every pleasure; he thought it was stupid to do anything else. The universe, after all, was going to end someday, going to go out and die, and then everything, everybody, and the sum total of all human achievement would be absolutely meaningless. To him, and many of the others, such a philosophy was the easy way to justify just about anything they felt like doing.
Scavenging dead worlds was a way to accumulate great wealth without having to dig mines or commit more daring robbery against the living. It could be dangerous, as now, but never once in his experience in the salvage business had a dead man ever shot him.
Randi Queson stopped and shined her light at a doorway that was, like almost all of them, wide open. It had been standard procedure when the power went down for all the locks to spring open and all the doors to slide open unless tagged specifically for security. That way, you could always get out. It was a much larger entrance than most of the others, and had all sorts of signs and pictographic symbols as well.
“Jerry, I think we’ve found the control center.”
He came over and looked. As with many of the important stores and offices in this part of the complex, there were lots of empty suits stacked up around the doors. Clearly there had been great panic at the last moments here, but it was also clear that they knew what was coming for them. It seemed clear, from the direction of most of the clothes, though, that whatever they were running from had begun right around here.
“Everybody’s running away,” she noted, feeling a tightness in her chest and breathing very heavily.
She could hear his breathing, too, and took some comfort that it was as labored as her own.
They walked cautiously into the control center office. It was a large place, clearly the center of administration as well as the central power plant. The inner wall, however, was transparent, a shielded window down to the power plant and reactors far below. She checked her suit monitor. Radiation was well within tolerance, although higher than it should have been.
The window area, and the whole inner office complex, was also notable for its near lack of empty clothing. Whatever had come for them, they were running from it, running from right here.
The control board and manual override stations were still active, as they’d suspected. The screens were dark, but unless they’d shorted out or been damaged somehow they should come on when an operator assumed control. That would not only give them a view of the power plant area at various levels but also access to the bank of screens on the inside corridor wall that probably would allow them to examine any greenhouse or, perhaps, any public area in the whole complex.
“I wonder how long this stuff’s been sitting here, running on standby?” Nagel mused. “Maybe a century or more. Control, can you still get us?”
“We’re all eyes and ears, Jerry,” An Li’s voice responded. “Give us a scan of the panels and the control system. We’ll see if we can access an operator’s manual. They almost certainly used a standardized system, and if we can translate the stuff for you then we can show you how to operate it. Both of you, do as much scanning of hardware as you can, will you? And if you see any manufacturer name, symbol, serial or model number, or whatever, focus in.”
They did as instructed, and finally An Li called, “That’s enough. They’re Kalnikoff Systems units, almost certainly fifteen oh fives. That makes the power station almost certainly a colonial model five five six three Kaminichi Power Systems unit. Yes. No problems. And in that condition we might be able to do a ton of salvage. That’s fairly recent stuff for colonial kits, no more than a hundred and five years. You just can’t get those any more. Expensive to chip it out and move it, but it might well be sold in place. Then it would be the buyer’s problem.”
“Quit adding up the hypothetical profits and let’s see if we can get some of it back on line!” Queson snapped. “The sooner we do, the sooner we can access and upload the records and find out what the hell happened here. And the sooner Jerry and I can get out of here and back to warm food, showers, and a bed!”
“Only one? Hmmm… Never would have thought it of the two of you.”
“Can the comedy,” Nagel grumbled. “Something killed a shitload of people here, and I’d really like some confirmation that it isn’t going to suddenly show up and dissolve me too.”
“All right, all right. Are you sure you want to bring it back on line, though? Somebody deliberately shut this thing down before they panicked, or maybe while everybody was panicking. Sorry, but if something’s shown up and started eating or dissolving folks right and left, do you take the time to lock the door and turn out the lights before you run like hell?”
That brought them both up short. Nagel looked at Queson in the eerie near-darkness, illuminated only by their lights, by a few other lights showing shutdown status on the command consoles, and by the soft glow from the power plant even in its most dormant stage
beyond that protective picture window, and she looked back at him.
“Maybe we ought to take a closer look at the rest of this room,” she suggested, and he didn’t argue.
An examination through various light filters didn’t help. The only one that registered much was infrared, and that only because of the residual energy coming from the close proximity to the well-shielded reactor chamber. The lights, though, showed that at a point where the undershielding extended underneath the fifteen-centimeter-thick floor, there was some buckling.
“Jeez!” Jerry breathed. “That’s impossible! We go to space with shielding pretty much the same as this, and the interior of Stanley is made of this same calrithium compound. What kind of pressure short of a black hole would distort it so much?”
Randi Queson walked over close to the window, and, for the first time, looked down deep into the central power core and shaft.
“Jerry? I don’t think we can salvage this power plant.”
“Huh? What do you mean? I—” He suddenly saw her just staring down and went over to the window and saw what she was looking at.
“Holy Mother of God,” the most faithless of men breathed as he looked down.
II: RESEARCH AND RESCUE
Behind the window was a vast area that must have been impressive under any conditions. Always lit by its own glow, the shielding material was actually designed not only to trap radiation but to convert it into harmless light that did good rather than harm.
It was likely that the entire complex had been built into a natural cavern, although there were signs of some enlargement by laser construction trimmers. Still, the opening went down so far that it was only barely possible to see the reflected surface of a relatively warm body of water below, perhaps a vast underground sea. The water almost certainly wasn’t that warm, but it was liquid and that was good enough for anybody looking to develop a planet.
Rising up from the ocean to beyond their own viewing level was a huge core complex, roughly cylindrical but with walkways, robotic service tracks, and monitors all about. Catwalks and thin bridges containing magnetic tracks for the robots went in at various levels, allowing for service without obscuring the view of the entire complex. Bumps, hatches, burl-like bulges off and on through the structure, all provided access to various parts of its internal circuitry and systems, and around the outer walls of the cavern were oval dishes that captured output as required and transformed the energy into useful forms and sent them on to storage elsewhere in the complex.
It was a magnificent site, and all they expected to see, but what was about halfway down the center shaft between them and the dark waters below was not. It required magnification to bring into proper view, and, even with that, it wasn’t clear what they were looking at.
Both knew, however, that they were observing the most dangerous thing they’d ever seen.
It looked for all the world like some kind of cartoonish mouth, swallowing the shaft at that point like some kind of carnival sword swallower. You had to stare at it for a few seconds to realize that it was actually a mass, much the color of the surrounding limestone, and without much in the way of features, but a mass nonetheless of gigantic size wrapped completely around the shaft at, or perhaps from, that point. It hadn’t been immediately clear that it was a living thing rather than some kind of poured support, but the more they looked at it, the more they could determine slight undulations along the outer skin or whatever, and the clammier it appeared.
“Well, you guessed that the last one would eat up all the others,” Nagel whispered, although he didn’t really know why. They were talking over a radio inside sealed helmets, after all.
“Yes, but why is it still alive, let alone so huge?”
“Maybe it isn’t through digesting things yet. After all, it ate all the food for an entire city, plus the plants that grew it and even the people who would have consumed it. You ever seen anything like it?”
“No. Sleeping off a big feed, maybe, but I don’t think it ate the place recently. No, it’s getting the warmth from the shaft, but it’s not feeding on the energy. If it could do that, why attack the colony? There’s no sign they even had any big weapons, so it wasn’t self-defense. That leaves hibernation. It came up from the sea attracted to the warmth, and after a while it found things it could eat here. When it finished, it went to the warmest point and went to sleep.”
“How about letting it stay asleep and getting the hell out of here and back to the ship before it decides it wants a midnight snack?” Nagel said nervously.
“I doubt if we’d be worth much to it. Still, it would be totally instinctual. I agree. I think we ought to get out and leave the power down as it is. In fact, I think we ought to lift off when we get back and wave goodbye as we blast off.”
“We’ll see about the rest, but I agree about the first. Let’s go.”
They backed out of the place, and walked briskly down the hallway back towards the corridors to the greenhouses.
“We can’t get close enough in to pick you up from there right off,” An Li reminded them, “but we think we ought to extract as soon as feasible. At least until we can figure out what to do next. Let me run some figures and we’ll see what’s possible. In the meantime, get back into the greenhouse area quick so we can get individual tracking. It’s a little too hot in the cliffs for what you put out.”
They needed little argument, and stepped up the pace.
“Jerry? Are you sure this is the corridor we came in on?” Queson asked him.
“Probably not, but it’s to the greenhouses,” he responded. “I—”
He stopped abruptly, looking ahead into the darkness. His helmet light streamed ahead and caught what appeared to be several figures standing at one end of the corridor, near the first tube into the greenhouses. He was keyed up enough that it took him a moment before he realized that they were environmental suits quite similar to their own.
“Jerry! They’re not empty!” Randi exclaimed, approaching the nearest one.
Sure enough, as her filters popped into place, she could see inside the helmet of the yellow suit in front of her. It was the ghastly face of a partially decomposed human head.
“There’s another one like that in this blue one,” Nagel told her. “Huh! Looks like all but one of them. Wonder why they weren’t consumed?”
“This thing appears to be able to penetrate only organic material,” she told him. “Remember how perfect everything else was, even the clothes and boots? These are sealed suits. I bet you’ll find a tear or some other failure in the empty suit.”
“Yeah, but if that’s the case, how come they died?”
“Where do they go? What do they eat when the emergency rations in the suit run out? What about water? Recharge and it’s got you. It might even have engulfed them, just waiting for the air to run out or the power pack to run down. God! I don’t know how horrible it is to be dissolved, but I’ll bet you the ones it got had a cleaner and easier death than these poor people!”
“That’s us if that thing wakes up,” Nagel reminded her. “Let’s save the funeral for another day.”
As they went on, Queson commented, “Actually, death by oxygen deprivation’s supposed to be kind of peaceful, like drowning without the panic. You hallucinate, you feel you’re floating, and you slowly go out like a candle in a gentle breeze.”
“At least that solves the mystery of who shut everything down. They knew they had enough protection to be able to handle it. Must’ve been hell, though. I can’t imagine anything close to that size being all that fast. Makes you wonder why they didn’t lower the emergency doors, too. There’s a set at each entrance and exit and each new corridor or section. You could even seal off a greenhouse and get enough air, water, and, if you’re in one with the right stuff growing, even food. Why shut down the control center but not take the time to get people where they had at least a slight chance, maybe keeping the power levels up a bit? It still doesn’t make sense.”
�
��It’s always a mystery until you know the facts,” Queson replied, breathing hard now. At this pace, she was rapidly approaching her own personal limit.
“You okay?”
“No,” she admitted. “But I will be once we get out of here.”
They went through three greenhouses without any more incidents or discoveries, but then they got a call from On High.
“Hey, you two! Heads up!” An Li called. “We’ve got you on our tracker now and we’re trying to work on as quick an exit as we can. But I have to tell you we’re monitoring some movement behind you. It’s still inside the cliffs, but we’re getting really odd fragmentary radiation readings from there now, distinct from the core.”
“That— thing?” Queson asked her, feeling her stomach knot up.
“Nothing that big. Smaller, faster, and somewhat indecisive. Like whatever it is is trying to figure out where you went. Randi, I’ve got your readings right here and I know what condition you’re in, but you’ve got to keep going and step it up! If you can make another three or four greenhouses and stay roughly in the middle of the complex, we may be able to chance it, come in, and get you off the roof from outside! But you can’t stop and you shouldn’t stumble! My blips have merged and are now coming down the same exit you used. They finally picked up your scent or whatever they use.”
Jerry Nagel unsnapped his pistol and with his thumb set it to maximum power without even stopping. She took hers out but was in no shape to set it. Its average power level would just have to be enough.
“You really think these little pistols can do much?” she asked him.
“Save your breath for moving! I have no idea. I think not, since that window in that far greenhouse was shot out, so they had a few things here and couldn’t dent it, but who knows? Better than rocks. Stay along the far wall there. If anything comes close to us we want to be able to get outside and quick. Whatever that thing is, it’s carbon based, a child of water, and loves the heat. That’s three things that aren’t outside.”
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