by Max Carver
“I still say we should bash our way inside, see what took our little robot pal.” Bartley shook his head, looking frustrated. “Doesn't seem right, leaving him behind.”
“We'll be back tomorrow,” Eric told him. He was ready to leave, too. They were all exhausted from an eleven-hour work shift. And if something hostile was lurking in that chamber, he wasn't ready to risk his life fighting it.
On the other hand, he was curious to see what was in there. The ancients who'd built the wormhole gates had been gone for thousands of years. Most scientists believed that intelligent life was extremely rare in the universe, based on how few relics of it had been found.
No, the mysterious underground chamber had to be something left by the first generation of miners, the one whose city had been obliterated by Allied attackers in the war...and maybe it would bring them closer to the gold they sought.
Everyone headed up the slope. Eric and Bartley rolled on the treads of their exoskeletons, Hagen drove his shotcrete mixer, Naomi her single-person scout. The loader bot rode folded up on the front of the dump truck. Malvolio rolled on his unicycle again, whistling a cheerful tune and once more juggling his single ball as if there were three, hands tossing and catching two other balls that didn't exist, his programming as worn out as his overcoat.
They merged into a central tunnel, then reached the mouth of the mine. They parked all the vehicles inside the mine for the night, except for the cement mixer, which Hagen parked just outside the steel gate. He would take the mixer into Canyon City for cleaning and refilling overnight.
Reluctantly, Eric disconnected the mining exoskeleton from his spine. He felt himself grow suddenly much smaller, losing the strength and power of the giant industrial arms along with the easy mobility of the exoskeleton's tank-like treads. When he was plugged into a machine like that, his nervous system seemed to expand, giving him the illusion of being some kind of huge, strong animal. He'd enjoyed that feeling ever since his teens, when he'd started jacking into the family tractor and driving it around their sprawling ranch, hands-free.
As much as he enjoyed the feeling of strength and power, he hated unplugging from any big machine, whether it was a tractor or a mining rig, and plugging his leg braces back in. He could feel himself shrinking, once again slow and weak.
Sighing, Eric climbed down from his seat in the exoskeleton and stood on his own legs.
“This should go without saying, but we need to keep this absolutely quiet,” Hagen said. “Everything we saw tonight.”
“We can't talk about the climbers?” Bartley asked, shutting down his own exoskeleton and hopping out.
Naomi shook her head, hanging her helmet on her scouting vehicle. “The hidden room, genius.”
“Right. Yeah, that was my second guess.” Bartley used a compressed-air hose to blast the creature guts off his exoskeleton, and then Eric took a turn took blasting his own clean.
They stepped outside. Malvolio remained within the mine, balancing on his unicycle, as the steel mesh gate clattered down into place. The loader bot remained near Malvolio, folded into a boxy rectangular shape at the front of the dump truck, where he would wait until morning.
“Watch for anything unusual tonight,” Hagen told Malvolio.
“Yes, sir!” Malvolio saluted, rocking slightly on the unicycle. “I shall protect the mine with my life, sir. And should this prove my time of fate...should duty lead me into those great and terrible jaws of death...know that it was an honor serve you. To serve with all you.” His voice broke, and he took a nonexistent handkerchief from the torn, ratty breast of his jacket and mimed dabbing at his eyes. “Take care of Ma for me,” he whispered. “You know how she likes her grits.”
“I think that robot's flipped his can,” Bartley said to Eric. He used his hand to shield his mouth from Malvolio, but did nothing to lower his voice.
“Just contact me if anything happens.” Hagen shook his head and double-checked the mesh gate. It looked like the mine was a store in a shopping mall, closed down for the night behind steel bars, with Malvolio like a forlorn clerk locked inside.
Naomi rode into town in the small cement truck with Hagen. Eric caught a ride with Bartley, as he'd done for the last six months. Bartley drove a patchwork pick-up truck with no doors and only one panel of windshield, right in front of the driver, so Eric had to squint or close his eyes the whole way.
“Up for a beer?” Bartley asked, steering them around steep dirt roads at high speed. There was no guard rail, even at the tight curves, just a straight drop into deep, rocky canyon below.
“You're soaked in climber guts,” Eric pointed out.
“It'll air out.”
“I doubt it.”
Bartley clapped a hand, still damp with climber blood, onto Eric's shoulder and laughed. “You got me there, brother. We'll just run by my place so I can change my shirt. Cool?”
“You probably need to change more than that,” Eric said, but Bartley was accelerating, and the wind whipping through the windshield frame drowned out his voice.
They drove northward toward the multi-colored lights of Canyon City. Mining on planet Caldera was a miserable life but paid well, and sometimes people struck it rich. Canyon City offered every sort of means of separating miners from their money: drinking, gambling, drugs, prostitution, games and fights of every kind. It was a near-lawless town where vice and crime flourished.
Bartley was exactly the sort of man for whom Canyon City existed. Eric, on the other hand, hoarded and saved every credit he could, intending to build his savings and eventually return home with his pockets brimming full of money—not exotic venereal diseases.
They drove much too fast over bumpy, rock-strewn roads and around hairpin turns, dodging rock heaps and drop-offs along the way. The old truck's seatbelts were missing for some reason, and Eric did his best to hold tight against the danger of being flung out of the truck.
Had they gone south, toward the rocky planet's ocean, they would have passed open pit mines where people and robots worked into the night, and smoking refineries and foundries. Cyanide and other chemical waste ran straight into the river.
Even farther south, the river flowed through the twisted ruins of Money City, built by the first wave of settlers. Many of the essential metals and minerals used by the Colonial League, the rebels in the war, had come from this planet, and eventually entire ships were built at Money City.
The Alliance, made of Earth and Earth-loyal colonies, had bombed Money City to rubble, essentially salted the ground with depleted uranium shelling and a tactical nuke or two. The Alliance military really knew how to send a message.
Eric had never been to the old ruins, but he'd seen images of the city, both before and after. Before, it had a brick downtown lined with trees and gardens of imported flowers, not the leathery, thorny plants that grew wild here on Caldera. The first settlers had even put up some glass skyscrapers, now reduced to towers of bare twisted steel that stood like skeletons against the sky. Nobody went there, between the superstitious rumors of ghosts haunting the old city streets and the real concern about radiation left from the war.
The narrow dirt track widened and became paved, though cheaply and unevenly so. Canyon City lay ahead, mostly slapdash buildings of quick-pour concrete and metal salvage, illuminated by lurid holograms advertising everything from fried chicken to opioids to a hundred varieties of morally questionable entertainment.
“Wait here,” Bartley said, slamming his truck to a halt in front of his own apartment building, which was much pricier than Eric's—Bartley wasn't scrimping and saving, but enjoying his wages. It was a three-story apartment building with an adobe finish, lots of archways, all the exterior doors and windows caged to keep out the numerous dangers of the street. A row of lanterns glowed softly on the exterior now that night had fallen.
“I think I'll just walk home,” Eric said, starting to step down from the passenger seat.
“Come on, man. It's time for a night out!” B
artley ran up concrete stairs that zigged and zagged up the canyon side.
“Don't you go out every night?” Eric asked, but Bartley gave no sign of hearing. He just leaped over a junkie passed out on the steps and unlocked the gated archway beyond. The apartment building didn't offer real luxury—that didn't exist on Caldera—but did provide security against crime and sturdiness against the storms of hot ash and embers that sometimes rained from the sky, blown in from active volcanoes kilometers away.
Dark forms watched Eric from a nearby alcove. He reached a hand into his pocket, closing tight on a lump of hard lava with a sharp edge. He'd shattered his legs when he was twelve, a stupid attempt to cliff-dive into a river back on Gideon. Since then, he'd worn the braces, moved slowly and stiffly, and been a target for bullies, especially when his older brothers were away winning sports tournaments in other towns, and later battles in the war against Earth. Of course, Eric's brothers had done their share of targeting and ridiculing him, too.
He had learned to expect attack, and he'd learned to carry a weapon. Living here in the mining colony on planet Caldera had only sharpened his suspicions and heightened his awareness of danger.
The shadowy figures stood in the glow of iridescent graffiti. The largest painting was a simple eye, with pronounced eyelashes and a pentagram instead of a pupil, that seemed to watch over the street. He'd seen that one a few times—the sign of some weird space cult. KOZMA WILL AWAKEN, claimed the words sprayed below it.
“On we go!” Bartley announced when he returned. “Who's ready to dive balls-deep into some cheap tail? Uh, me!” He raised one meaty, freckled hand, as if he was a kid who'd been called on in class.
Eric shook his head, wishing he'd gotten out and walked home when he'd had the chance. But he knew from experience that if he went somewhere with Bartley tonight, the guy would stop pestering him about going out for a couple weeks. This night seemed as good as any. Besides, Eric had the feeling that the mysterious face sculpted out of crystal, the evidence of civilization that really shouldn't have been there, would linger in his mind long after his eyes closed for the night. Maybe a drink would settle his nerves.
“What do you think we're going to find when we break open that room in the mine?” Eric asked as Bartley stomped the accelerator. They bounced along the uneven blacktop.
“A million tons of gold,” Bartley said. “Enough so we can each buy our own planet. Or a nice little moon, at least.”
“Do you think we'll find real evidence of alien life, though?”
“Hell, yeah. Rich-ass aliens with a vault full of shiny noble metals.” Bartley charged down the road, then swerved abruptly to avoid a man leading a donkey across. Dirty hand tools were heaped in a basket on the animal's back. Hoofed animals were common on Caldera, where humans kept to the long networks of canyons, below the foul layer of sulfurous, chlorinated volcanic smog that covered much of the planet's surface.
“Move your ass!” Bartley shouted at the donkey driver, then swerved to avoid a motorcycle driven by a tough-looking old woman with the grimy look of a long-time miner. She responded with an obscene gesture.
Canyon City had little to no planning, as reflected in the narrow, crowded roads hugging the canyon walls and the questionable safety of the architecture. After the armistice, it had quickly sprouted from a small mining camp to a crowded gold-rush town. Nobody really wanted to live on Caldera, with its clusters of active volcanoes all over the globe belching hot, noxious gases. The surface was rocky, the plant life leathery and sharp, the local wildlife ugly and venomous. But the planet was rich in rare precious metals like gold and platinum, which were in constant demand by a range of industries. Extraction was lucrative, and things were revving up now that it seemed the Alliance wouldn't be returning to bomb Caldera's industry back to the Stone Age again, at least not within the near future.
“Let's go to The Tipping Point,” Eric suggested, since that was the bar closest to his own apartment. It would be a quick walk home if Bartley got drunk and vanished without explanation, as he tended to do.
“That place is miserable. Full of old war vets smoking and farting and staring into space.”
“Yeah, it's nice and quiet,” Eric said.
Bartley shook his head and drove on—straight into the back district, where the shabby concrete establishments advertised themselves with glowing neon holograms of scantily clad women dancing and scantily clad men fighting, with happy mugs of dancing beer and drowsy, smiling needles.
“Come on,” Eric said as Bartley parked. “Not the Pony Hole.”
A glowing pink unicorn hovered in front of a cinderblock building with barred, tinted windows. It winked at them and waggled its horsey hips as they approached. A few actual horses and burros were tied at the hitching post.
“I'll introduce you to everyone.” Bartley clapped his hand on Eric's shoulder as they climbed the rickety, steep stairs to the bar. Canyon City was full of steep stairs.
“You really don't have to,” Eric replied as Bartley nodded at the bouncer, an enormous man perched on a slanted stool by the cage door. He was covered in fire-red glowing tattoos of goats and snakes. Sharp metal implants studded his knuckles, which would enable him to stab and tear flesh in the event of a fight. Probably made going to the bathroom uncomfortable, though.
Inside, the place was dimly lit, crowded, thick with smoke. Somebody played an out-of-tune piano in one corner, most of it mercifully drowned out by a group of shouting men nearby. They were crowded around a cage where two creatures stalked each other. One was an armored cave scorpion native to Caldera, about the size of a cat, its tail dripping with lethal venom. Another was an elongated reptile with bony plates and horns jutting out around its face, sort of like a small alligator with a triceratops face. That one wasn't native, but had been imported just for fights. Men shouted their last-minute bets as the creatures faced off.
Eric ordered a beer while Bartley downed a whiskey. Soon Bartley was caught up in talking with other miners he knew, his voice raucous over the crowd.
Eric shook his head. He hadn't exactly made a lot of friends since arriving here. It was certainly nothing like his town back home. Wellspring wasn't much more than a hamlet, with a few shops, one public building housing the court and post office, a little church school for the surrounding farm kids. Eric had grown up in wide-open spaces, a gravity-heavy and oxygen-rich planet filled with huge hoofed beasts and the massive predators who hunted them.
Canyon City was a small town, too, compared to images and movies he'd seen of the huge megatropolis sprawls of Earth—or even Lightpoint, the capital city of Gideon, home to more than a million souls—but to Eric, this remote mining town was enormous, overwhelming, dangerous and full of strangers. He was used to peril from wild animals and bullies at school, but even bullies were people whose names and families he'd known, and underneath there had been a sense of community, of everyone knowing each other, that had kept things from going too far.
Here, everyone was anonymous. Everyone had traveled from worlds all over settled space, more than two dozen star systems. Many were desperate. Many were criminals on the run.
His twentieth birthday had just passed. There had been nobody here who knew about it, and he certainly hadn't mentioned it to anyone. He hardly expected the other miners to bake him a cake and sing him a song. Nobody would care except maybe Bartley, who would just see it as another excuse to encourage Eric to get debauched with him.
What am I doing here? Eric asked himself. He looked among the thick crowd of rough miners, drinking, brawling, shouting. He sipped his bitter beer. Surely his brothers had been in rougher places in the war, surrounded by more dangerous people, Samuel especially, serving for years in the infantry, fighting Earth and its allies on world after world. Fighting for freedom. Just like Abel, the oldest brother, the golden boy who'd been accepted into the fleet. Fighting to break free of Earth's senseless tyranny.
And I'm just here for the money. Fighting a war against roc
ks.
“Hey there, handsome. You sure look like you could use some company.” She emerged from the smoke and the crowd, slender and tan, dressed in a revealing red dress that looked like it belonged in a lingerie drawer. It took him a moment to realize what she was. Her fingers brushed his arm. “Those big muscles of yours need a girl to hold. I bet you've got another big muscle for me somewhere, don't you? Hee hee.”
He wasn't sure what to say. Her permanently smiling mouth was visibly slotted, like a ventriloquist's dummy. Her hair was long, yellow, and yarn-like. Her plastic eyes slid from side to side automatically as her mouth moved up and down. “Hot in here tonight, isn't it? I know I can't wait to get out of these clothes. Hee hee.” Her warm, rubbery fingers slid up and down along his arm. Her plastic face moved closer to his, her fake eyes trying to simulate contact. They might not have been completely fake—there were probably tiny lenses embedded in them, watching him. “What do you say, cowboy? Want to saddle up and go for a ride? Hee hee?”
“No, thanks. I'm just here for a beer. Then heading home.”
“That's too bad. I looked all over this room and you were the guy I wanted.” She moved even closer, sliding an arm around his waist, rubbing a silicone breast against his arm. “Don't you want me like I want you?”
Eric felt weirdly embarrassed, and also kind of sorry for the cheaply built robo-hooker trying to seduce him. The big screws at her shoulders and elbows were plainly visible, reminding him of the Army Andy action figures he'd played with as a child.
“Sorry, I'm not interested.” Then he had a bit of insight. “Also, I'm flat broke. I don't have any credits in my account, and I spent my last cash on this beer.” It was far from true, but hopefully it would make her disengage.
“Maybe I'll see you another time, honey.” She released him and moved on, her head panning back and forth as she scanned the crowd for another mark.
He wondered what had made her approach him. Maybe she had some kind of algorithm for detecting loneliness and need in human faces. Maybe he looked desperate.