by Max Carver
The smell of burnt ozone filled Eric's nostrils as Naomi zapped and fried one toad-like creature after another. Eric kept thrusting his drill. But it was no weapon. A climber could easily dodge it.
Trapped in his exoskeleton, Bartley had drawn his own bulbous orange shock pistol, screaming like a berserker as he zapped climbers who'd wriggled inside with him. One of them unrolled a long, sticky, whiplike tongue across Bartley's eyes, and the man howled, momentarily blinded.
Dozens of the creatures swarmed out. A clump of them charged along the wall at Naomi. Another group leaped toward Eric, landed all over his exoskeleton. He drew his shocker pistol and started firing, but the battery wasn't going to last. It looked like Naomi's shocker was drained, judging by how she'd stopped shooting it and was now using it to club the ugly climbers instead.
Frank Hagen arrived first. The middle-aged man was their supervisor, and also the team's ground support specialist, in charge of securing walls and ceilings in newly dug tunnels. He drove a compact-sized cement mixer with a small rotating drum. The moment he arrived, he drew the hose from the side of the mixer and began blasting spurts of quick-drying cement at the horde of little monsters. He hit them with splats of cement, knocking them to the dirt. Those he hit would squirm slowly, kicking and choking in the quick-hardening gray mush.
Eric dropped a couple more of the climbers with short-range electrical bolts, but the shocker's charge quickly depleted. He continued using the industrial arms of his exoskeleton, stabbing at the scurrying climbers with the drill, occasionally scraping or puncturing one. With the exoskeleton's other arm, he grabbed one of the pale creatures and crushed it, fighting revulsion as black blood and pale guts splattered everywhere.
It was a losing fight, with their shockers already depleted and dozens of the biting little creatures still left. Eric and Hagen did their best to pick the monsters off with their tools. Eric crunched another one under the treads of his exoskeleton.
Several climbers had invaded Bartley's exoskeleton, and he was fending them off with his bare hands, his eyes squeezed shut. Naomi pelted them with handfuls of volcanic rock and kicked at them with her boots. One tried to bite through her helmet, and she grabbed its leg and slammed the creature against the wall.
“This isn't working!” Eric shouted. A climber lashed its long sticky tongue at his face, leaving a thick stripe of lumpy residue on his cheek. He caught the thing and broke its neck, but more were climbing up the exoskeleton toward him, their jaws snapping. “We have to free Bartley and retreat—”
Then music filled the tunnel—it sounded like “Camptown Races,” played maniacally fast on a calliope, growing louder as it charged toward them.
The security bot was there to save them all from the swarm of ugly monsters, but Eric still couldn't help rolling his eyes a little as it arrived.
It rolled into the room on a unicycle, dressed in a garish crimson-and-yellow top hat and a matching coat, the coattails flaring out behind it. A fake blue flower was mounted in its lapel. The robot was juggling a single bright red ball, but its hands made a bunch of unnecessary extra movements, as though the robot believed it was juggling three balls instead of just one.
Its name was Malvolio, and it was a drama-bot, built for entertainment in the earlier age, the “Big Times” of initial expansion and unimaginable wealth, as humans quickly colonized one star system after another, before the war impoverished them all. He'd been designed to look like a tall, handsome man with an extravagant mustache that curled up at both ends. Now his colorful plumage-like garments were filthy and tattered. Chunks of his face were missing, revealing rubber and steel beneath, and one of his eyes never quite closed.
Malvolio was the security bot, but he definitely hadn't been built for that purpose. He'd been found at a salvage yard for a low, low price. His main job was to be a roving pair of eyes and ears, watching the mine for fires and intruders, especially when the miners were gone for the night. If something happened, he would call in the real security and emergency personnel from downtown. He was far from an intimidating fighting machine, but he was better than nothing. Slightly.
“Ladies and gentleman! The great Malvolio has arrived!” the drama-bot announced. He doffed his top hat and bowed, all without leaving the unicycle. Canned applause and cheers played from somewhere on his body. He caught the single red ball and made it vanish. Then he fanned out playing cards with the same hand. Several of the cards were missing, leaving noticeable gaps. “How may I entertain you today? Breathtaking magic? A heart-rending aria, performed a capella? Perhaps a stirring monologue from Death of a Salesman—”
“Bug bomb!” Naomi shouted, swinging at the ugly climbers with sharp rocks in both fists.
“As you wish,” Malvolio said, replacing his top hat. “For the audience is king, and humble players merely servants of the court—”
“Now!” Eric interrupted.
“Masks on!” Hagen added, pulling a bulky oxygen mask from his compact mixer truck.
Eric and Bartley strapped on the oxygen masks built into their suits. Naomi backed away to her small scouting vehicle to grab one.
“Gas in the hole!” Malvolio announced, then fired a thin, dense green streak of toxins at the climbers. The gas expanded into a thick fog of green.
The toad-like creatures groaned and tumbled from the tunnel ceiling and walls. Their squirming, poisoned bodies littered the floor. The cocktail of poisons, concentrated in a tank under Malvolio's long circus-ringmaster coat, was meant to kill any of the underground pests that miners might encounter on this world.
It worked, maybe too well. Their large, needle-lined mouths opened, and the toads began to literally puke up their guts—first just steaming green fluids, with small chunks of half-digested bones and meat from unidentifiable alien creatures. Then up came entire stomachs and the ropy tubes of their intestines. Black, yellow, and green liquids ran out of the gaping mouths and other orifices in the bodies of dozens of quivering, toad-like corpses.
The green cloud dissipated slowly. Eric kept breathing his canned air.
“Everyone still alive?” Naomi asked, her voice mechanical through the air mask.
“My eyes hurt like a jellyfish pissed in them,” Bartley announced. His eyelids were still squinted shut, and he rubbed them with the back of one big, freckled hand. He was covered in steaming climber guts.
Hagen squatted and opened the small first aid kit bolted inside Bartley's exoskeleton. He quickly found the eye wash and began to squirt it into Bartley's eyes. “Hold still,” he grunted as Bartley hissed and tried to nudge him away. “There isn't much of this stuff. Don't make me spill it.”
The main tunnel rumbled, and the mining truck returned with its payload empty, the loader bot squatted on the front again.
“Loading,” the loader bot announced. It began lifting the remaining rocks from Bartley's exoskeleton.
“Yeah, thanks a lot,” Bartley said, wiping at his eyes and blinking. “Loader, next time I get attacked, try lending a hand. You want me to die or what?”
“Unloading,” the boxy robot replied, dumping rocks into the back of the truck.
“Do not feel rejected by his taciturnity. Loaders are rarely talkative,” Malvolio told him. “They are single-taskers. Not like me!” His unicycle collapsed into the shape of a pie slice, then slid away inside his shredded yellow pants leg. “Perhaps you would like to be serenaded with a classic by the great Dan Fogleberg. I have a complete setlist—”
“Just help me up,” Bartley said. “Both of you robots.”
“And as we do, I could sing 'Lovin' You'—”
“No!”
Malvolio and the loader bot worked together to set Bartley's exoskeleton on its feet. Bartley grimaced, looking pale as he tossed ruptured climbers aside. Entrails dripped from all over his rig.
“I've never seen them swarm like that,” Frank Hagen said, putting away his shotcrete hose. More than a dozen of the creatures were frozen in blobs of the quick-drying f
luid, already turning to solid concrete. “You must have hit a nest.”
“That's what we thought,” Naomi said. She glared at Bartley, but didn't repeat her threats of formal action against him, not with Hagen there.
“Where did they all come from?” Eric rolled forward, wincing at the sound of one climber after another crunching under his treads, coating them in alien gore. With his clamp-tipped arm, he began excavating the heap at the collapsed end of the tunnel. The loader bot worked with him, moving it all to the truck for eventual hauling.
“You should really clear out of here until I can harden the tunnel,” Hagen said, frowning up at the ceiling.
“We're just looking for...that.” Eric shoveled aside broken rocks to reveal the opening from which the climbers had emerged. It was a deep fissure in the back wall.
He pointed his light into the crack. It ran deep. Bartley's reckless hammering had split open some kind of cavity or cavern. Quartz and pyrite glimmered within it, growing thicker and replacing more and more of the black volcanic rock toward the back of the fissure.
“Looks like we hit a hollow spot in the quartz reef,” Naomi commented. She took a picture with her pocket screen.
“There's a room back there,” Eric said. “It'll take some work to dig it out—”
“No more digging until this area is secure,” Hagen interrupted.
“Move back, let me have a turn to look,” Bartley said. The tunnel was too narrow to fit more than one mining exoskeleton at a time. Eric would have to back out before Bartley could move in.
“We need to send in a robot,” Eric said.
“I regret to note that I, being a standard human-sized android, could not fit through such a narrow pass,” Malvolio said. “Else I would heroically volunteer, surely. Perhaps I could cheer us all up with a Slavic folk dancing demonstration—”
“We'll send in a porcupine. There's one on my scout.” Naomi turned toward her scouting vehicle.
“Everybody back out of here, before anything else comes crashing down,” Hagen said, looking at Eric. Reluctantly, Eric put his treads in reverse until he reached the main tunnel with the others.
“What did you see?” Bartley asked. His exoskeleton was freshly battered and had several new dents from the cave-in, but it appeared to work fine. It was dripping with climber guts, though. “You should have let me have a turn.”
Naomi set a small robot on the ground, prickly with cameras and sensors, about the size of the small mammal for which it was nicknamed. Its main purpose was collecting mineral samples, but it could be used as a scouting drone, too. Its pointed face, with black camera-ball eyes mounted on either side of a soil-sipping straw, was also reminiscent of a curious little foraging mammal.
The porcupine ran over the volcanic rubble and ruptured climber bodies. Its spiny tail whisked back and forth, sampling the air and analyzing its quality.
Naomi took out her pocket screen and grabbed two opposing corners of the square device. The outer frame of the screen split apart as she stretched it to the size of a cookie sheet.
Multiple viewpoints appeared on the screen, showing the video feeds from every side of the little scouting bot. Everyone watched in silence as the porcupine crawled into the narrow fissure and the glittering open cavern that lay beyond.
“Man, there better be gold in there,” Bartley said, finally breaking the tense silence. “I mean giant piles of it. Enough to make it rain gold, you know what I'm saying? Enough that I can go home and build a house out of gold, and sit around in my gold underwear and gold slippers, smoking gold cigars and blowing it in my cousin Sean's face.”
On the screen, the viewpoints advanced through the narrow cavern, past more climbers poisoned by toxic fumes. Clusters of bubbles were tucked into rocky nooks. It took Eric a moment to recognize that these were probably climber eggs. Small, snakelike larvae were curled inside translucent bubbles, illuminated by lights on the side of the little porcupine as it crawled past them.
The robot nosed its way forward on four stumpy mechanical legs.
It emerged into a large chamber in which every visible surface seemed to be quartz, of one color or another.
Murals covered the walls—plants with glittering green quartz stalks, flowers of rose quartz and amethyst. They glittered in the light cast by the porcupine.
“This is impossible,” Naomi whispered. “Nobody's ever dug here before.”
“That's not just digging,” Hagen said. “That's decorating.”
At Naomi's direction, the little robot paused in its randomized roving and shined its light along one wall. The crystalline rock reflected a dazzling array of colors as the light passed over them. While the quartz murals on the walls depicted a grassy, flower-filled meadow, the columns looked like tree trunks, with brown and black smoky-quartz trunks and more green quartz for leaves.
“What's that?” Hagen touched one of the circle-shaped video feeds on the screen and swiped it. This sent a signal to the robot to turn its head in that direction. “Would you look at that? Are you seeing what I'm seeing?”
As it tilted upward, the camera's view was filled by a gray oval shape, wider at the top and narrow at the bottom, with two large black crystalline eyes that seemed to look right back at them.
Eric felt his blood turn cold, like he was being watched.
“A face,” Naomi whispered. “It's a face.”
Then all the viewpoints of the little scouting bot turned black, and the words TRANSMISSION LOST blazed across the screen in glowing red letters.
Chapter Three
“Something ate our robot! Let's go get it!” Bartley looked from the screen to the narrow crevice. He raised his hammer arm as if he meant to go bashing his way in.
“Not until that tunnel's secure!” Hagen grabbed onto the exoskeleton arm. The older man was no physical match for the industrial mining rig, but something in his bearing stopped Bartley anyway. Bartley stared at the crevice, looking panicked.
“You saw,” Bartley said. “You all saw. It was one of the gray goblins. The aliens that kidnap people in their sleep.”
“Come on.” Naomi raised her eyebrows, looking at Bartley like he'd lost his mind. “You don't believe in that.”
“I saw that face,” he said. “My uncle told me about them, when I was a kid—”
“There are no known intelligent species on this planet,” Hagen said. “And most days, I would include humans in that statement. That chamber and those carvings must have been made by humans.”
“The first miners?” Naomi dabbed at her sweaty face with a rag. The volcanically active planet was always hot. “From Money City?”
“That doesn't really dutch for me,” Bartley said, frowning at her. “Why would they come two hundred kilometers north of Money City to build some wacky underground quartz...art museum, or whatever that was? The first miners were here for the same reason we are. To suck this ugly rock dry of heavy metals. Now you're telling me they were out here building a...a...whatever that was?”
“And you're telling me it's aliens?” Naomi crooked an eyebrow.
“It's well past clock-out,” Hagen said. “I don't know about the rest of you, but I didn't get any additional hours approved this week. I say we lock it up, head home, and I'll leave a message for Reamer. He can decide how to proceed, or whether we should leave it and go back to our assigned tasks.”
“Reamer?” Bartley snorted. “We're looking at evidence of real aliens, and you want to call that boring, snivelly little, uh...”
“Guy who approves our wage deposits?” Naomi offered.
“Well, yeah, that, but...man, we should be calling that Disturbing Mysteries show. You guys ever seen that? They showed it back on Gorrum.” That was the snowy, icy planet where Bartley and his apparently enormous extended family lived. “I still remember the abominable snowbeast one. They actually caught that creature, you know that? Big monster, like a giant shaggy white grizzly, but with horns and tusks like a boar. Lives up high in the moun
tains, hunting goats. And everyone said it was just a made-up story before that. Just like you're saying about these aliens.” He looked at Naomi and pointed at the crevice. “Think about it. The ancients, the ones who built all the wormholes. Maybe they built this, too! Maybe the ancients are the gray goblins—”
“I don't know what you're blabbering about, but it sounds like you're opposed to clocking out for the night. That can't be right,” Naomi said.
“Yeah, this cave is nothing,” Eric said, trying to convince himself it was true. “That weird stuff in there...probably someone from the early days. Maybe even a party retreat in the mountains or something, for an eccentric rich guy. The Big Times were full of eccentric rich guys.”
“Oh, indeed they were!” Malvolio spoke up. He lay his hand on his heart and cast a somber look at the ceiling. “Such festivals they had! Such parties! Such culture! But the war...it took so much. From us all.” He looked down at his tattered, dirty yellow-and-crimson tuxedo. “I haven't been back to Indus Rotronics for an upgrade in nigh upon forty years now, I am sad to convey.” He covered his face with both hands and crumpled low, as if crushed by sorrow. “Oh! The emotions I am experiencing.”
“Let's lock it up,” Hagen said again. “Reamer will probably kick this up to Alanna.” Alanna Li-Whitward was the president of the small mining concern that employed them—the aptly but blandly named Exoplanet Resource Development, XRD. It was owned primarily by the wealthy Li family of the planet Huayuan, one of the oldest colonies. Huayuan had been settled soon after the wormholes had been discovered, and had rebelled against the Earth alliance during the war. Under the armistice, it was nominally still part of the Earth system, but actually autonomous, like the other rebel worlds.
“I'm with Hagen,” Naomi said, scraping climber guts off the soles of her boots. “I'm ready to head home. Ideally, before anything else comes out trying to kill us.”