by Max Carver
“I want the quiet one,” Alanna said quickly.
“Eric, you're with us,” Reamer said, waving Bartley back.
Eric nodded, but had a sinking feeling inside. There were all kinds of ways to get into trouble with the bosses here. He was as curious as anyone to look into the strange complex of colored quartz rooms and corridors, but he recognized that exploring a newly discovered underground labyrinth on a volcanically active, tectonically loose alien world was dangerous enough. Now he'd have to be distracted by the egos of his inexperienced bosses along the way.
Still, he was at the bottom of the totem pole here, in no place to refuse. There was more than wonder and danger waiting inside the crystal complex, there was also immense opportunity. Eric's contract entitled him to a certain small percentage of any finds. It was the only way for the mining companies to attract reasonably sane human beings to prospect for gold on a remote, barely civilized planet best known for earthquakes, eye-burning volcanic smog, unpleasant levels of heat, and almost nothing else. Drilling exploratory tunnels was dangerous work, especially when the bosses wanted to invest as little as possible until actual valuable minerals were found.
Fortunes had been made here on Caldera. Eric had seen it himself more than once: the haggard-looking guy struggling to pay for fried bread at the bar one day, then buying a round for the house the next. Some of the lucky strikers blew it all locally, on the range of lowbrow entertainments and risky pleasures on offer in Canyon City. Others kept digging for more, and still others would pack it up and head home.
Eric wanted that more than anything else—to get rich quick and get back home to Suzette. Even an eyeless cave climber could see that she was changing, pulling away from him, and heading down a strange path.
If this discovery paid off, he could go home, straighten things out with her, resume his duties on the farm, and return to normal life, but it would be better than ever. He'd use some of his fortune to build the most beautiful house Suzette had ever seen.
He knew just the spot where he would build it, a flower-filled meadow about a kilometer from his parents' house. The meadow sloped down to a spring-fed creek brimming with fish, turtles, and frogs. Eric and Suzette had camped there together with friends countless times. He could still smell the campfire when he thought of it, hear Korey Perzwalski playing his stupid sitar while everyone laughed, and taste the homemade blueberry wine and corn liquor, which had probably added to the laughter.
In his mind, the house would be huge, made of local stone and brick. A henhouse for fresh eggs, a stable and corral for horses, orchards, a vegetable garden, and their own herd of devilhorn out on the range, tracked by GPS tags. And children. Plenty of them. Why not? Gideon was full of wide open spaces.
All this played and replayed in Eric's mind as they prepared to enter the crystal tunnels.
Each four-person team had a spool of fiber-optic cable, connected in a Y junction in the main tunnel so they could communicate with each other as well as Malvolio, who'd be waiting by the yellow com box in the main tunnel in case either team called for help.
At the same time, Hagen hurriedly added a couple of bolts and some concrete to the newly widened passageway, so the loader bot wouldn't have to stand around bracing it against cave-in any longer.
“Loaded,” the big bot said, then reversed out to the main tunnel and parked next to its dump truck, waiting for more orders.
They assembled in their teams and performed a last equipment check, which made Alanna tap her foot impatiently.
Reamer had, not surprisingly, appointed himself leader of the team with Prentice and Alanna. He called this group “Team A.” Reamer carried the fiber cable spool on his belt and the portable screen to which it attached. He'd be in charge of all communications. Everybody carried an orange stunner in case of nasty critters. Prentice curled his lip a little as he strapped the dusty holster belt over his designer suit.
Their team advanced first, through the passageway and into the crystal-forest room they'd already studied. Alanna glanced into each of the six different paths out of the room, not including the steep tunnel entrances on the ceiling.
“This one,” she said, pointing to a corridor lined with deep blue quartz. Her voice was low, as if impressed with what she saw ahead. “Definitely.”
Then they were off, while Team B—Bartley, Naomi, Hagen, and Iris—set off down another corridor, lined with orange citrine rock.
“Let's find some aliens!” Bartley said as the teams separated.
Reamer led them into the deep blue tunnel, trying not to look nervous, but his bald dome gleamed with sweat, and he was twitching. Alanna and Prentice followed behind him, with Eric taking up the rear.
The quartz was midnight blue where they walked, even darker beneath their feet, but gradually moved to a lighter hue the farther Eric looked up the wall.
“The ceiling's too high to see,” Alanna said. “It looks like it goes up and up...but it can't be that high, can it?”
“Could be an optical illusion,” Prentice suggested.
“Look at this,” Alanna breathed. The corridor widened, and suddenly it was decorated as intricately as the first room had been. Murals of undersea life in every hue of quartz adorned both walls. Eric saw golden fish with fins that resembled large deciduous leaves, long predator fish with saw-like teeth, and strangle alien creatures with mats of tentacles and grape-like clusters of dark eyes.
Columns decorated to look like kelp and green-and-purple anemones supported the ceiling. More fish, crabs, and turtle-like creatures with six legs hid among the branches of the aquatic life. As in the previous room, the walls, columns, and floor were raw quartz, still embedded in native volcanic rock, but with murals of quartz fragments cemented over them.
The room widened even more, and the kelp column-sculptures grew so numerous and dense that they couldn't even see the walls anymore. It was a cramped maze, with tight corners and narrow spaces, walled with green quartz kelp and pink quartz coral. The undersea creature sculptures grew larger and more threatening as they advanced, with larger claws, teeth, and tentacles, sharp and spiky shells, and fewer adornments. The larger creatures were crudely sculpted from big lumps of raw rock with thick quartz veins.
“Stay close,” Reamer said. The short manager repeatedly dabbed at himself with a handkerchief, because he was sweating hard. The tan mine-worker coveralls he'd donned for the day had enormous dark stains around the armpits. The man was scared, either of being deep underground or of the strange artifacts all around them.
Eric was nervous, too, mostly about the possibility of a cave-in, or more climbers or rock scorpions. He kept one hand near the fat orange shock pistol on his belt. He was glad to be in the rear, since his legs moved stiffly and slowly anyway. He wished he had the speed and strength of his exoskeleton.
The rock-kelp seemed to close in around them as they advanced, until they found themselves ducking low, almost crawling through a narrow tunnel with stone branches pointing out at them.
“This is a mistake,” Alanna said. “We should go back—”
“There's something up here.” Reamer, despite his small size, had to drop to his hands and knees to continue onward.
“Let us know what it is.” Alanna came to a full stop, which meant Prentice and Eric had to stop, too. There was certainly no chance of squeezing around her, even if they'd been inclined to try.
Reamer crawled on ahead while they waited. Eric could see nothing; the passage ahead was blocked by Prentice and Alanna, hunching below the tunnel's low peaked ceiling of kelp-shaped rock.
“Um...” Reamer finally called back. “Wow. Everyone? Wow.”
“You're not being very specific,” Prentice called ahead.
“Come on up here,” Reamer said. “You'll want to see this.”
The three of them followed, Prentice grumbling about the filthy floor ruining his suit.
When they reached the end and stood up, though, all grumbling ceased.
“Is that real?” Alanna asked, nearly breathless.
“It's uh...” Reamer cleared his throat and looked at Eric. “Rowan, I'd like a second opinion.”
“You never gave a first opinion,” Prentice pointed out.
Eric stepped forward for a look.
“It's real,” Eric finally said, his heart racing. “It's all real gold.”
In his mind, he was already packing his bags to fly home.
Chapter Seven
The narrow tunnel widened into an open area encircled by the stone kelp on every side.
Sea scorpion sculptures the size of bulldogs faced out toward the kelp like a ring of guardians. Like the other large and threatening sea creatures the group had passed, they were crudely carved from the local quartz-laden rock. They looked just like the rock scorpions that inhabited the caves of Caldera, except their eyes were large and dark, not blind and ingrown.
The scorpions' backs had been hollowed out and filled with gleaming starfish and seahorses made of solid gold, with the deadly stingers curled forward as though to protect the treasure.
A heaping pyramid of treasures rose within the ring of scorpions, supported by anemones decorated with a rainbow of precious stones. Crudely made silver sharks were mounted on the anemone branches, not particularly large, but impressive. Within their sharp open jaws lay mounds of golden fish with sapphire eyes. None of the little gold fish-coins were particularly large, but there was an enormous number of them.
Well above the silver sharks were smaller aquatic creatures with bulbous heads, a kind of marine mammal like the whale or dolphin. These were made of gleaming white platinum.
Above and behind all of these floated an enormous black statue of a bug the size of an elephant, with four long, long legs that reminded Eric of the water-walker bugs in creeks and ponds back home. This one was carved of black obsidian. The heap of gold and gems seemed to have been set at the bug's feet like an offering.
“Bug worshipers,” Reamer muttered, shaking his head. “This has gotta be worth...what?”
Enough, Eric thought. I hope.
“I can't believe it.” Prentice wandered forward as if hypnotized by all the precious metals. He passed the scorpions, and his hand trembled as he reached into an open shark mouth heaped with treasure.
“Be careful,” Eric said, reluctantly speaking up because nobody else was. “There could be some kind of trap. In case of thieves.”
“This isn't a movie, kiddo.” Prentice began grabbing handfuls of golden starfish and seahorses and jamming them into his pockets. Given his penchant for expensive jewelry, maybe he was planning to wear them. “Look at all this,” he whispered, shaking his head.
“Do I need to remind you that all of this falls under my claim?” Alanna asked, raising an eyebrow at him.
“Well, no, of course not,” Prentice said, but he blushed and stopped greedily scooping up handfuls of gold and gems. “It was just...we need samples...for testing.”
“Let me see one.” Eric accepted a golden seahorse and looked at it carefully. As Iris had said about the murals, the artifacts were impressive from a distance, but more uneven and crude-looking up close.
He drew a quick gold-testing kit from a pocket in his coveralls. He scratched the surface of the seahorse with a copper blade, then poked it with the tip to see how it crumpled. He sniffed it—nothing. Then tasted it.
“Still seems real to me,” Eric said. “Don't forget my percentage. It's in my contract—”
“We take contracts very seriously,” Alanna told him.
“This is great,” Prentice said, admiring golden fish in both his hands. “Worth crawling through that filthy tunnel.”
“Did you guys hear something?” Reamer stepped out past the ring of scorpions, looking into more of the stone kelp beyond.
“Like what?” Eric asked.
“Maybe a scraping, or a slithering—” Reamer leaned forward and peered through the stone forest.
Eric heard it then, too. A rapid scraping sound, like something was scratching its way across the stone floor, unseen in the shadows of the dense sculptures.
Reamer screamed and backed up as fast as he could. He tripped over the extended claw of a sea scorpion statue and landed on his ass on the rock floor.
Everyone else shouted when it emerged from the kelp forest, slithering rapidly toward Reamer, a couple of meters long, snakelike.
“Gas masks!” Eric shouted. Hagen had drilled Eric and the other miners repeatedly in quick responses to underground creatures, but Reamer and the other two had only had quick demonstrations. They all wore air masks around their necks for this mission, just large enough to cover their noses and mouths, ready to draw them up at a moment's notice, since cave climbers were a known threat down here.
This was no climber, though, but something serpentine. Eric pulled his mask up into place with one hand. With the other, he drew the nozzle of the industrial-strength bug spray that had wiped out the climbers. He advanced on the snakelike invader, hitting it with quick, controlled blasts of the concentrated green gas. He hoped everyone else had their masks on.
The creature slithered right through, undeterred, its front end rising from the floor as it approached Reamer, who sat on the floor, eyes wide behind his own mask.
It curled up into something as tall as a man, in the shape of a slender metallic question mark, and now Eric could see that it wasn't a creature at all. It was some kind of long, serpentine robot. The tip of it was a large black lens, which gazed down at Reamer. Four long, thin metallic triangles jutted out around the black lens like pointy eyelashes.
“What?” Reamer asked, holding up a hand to defend himself. “What is that?”
“I have no idea—” Eric began, and then Prentice threw a handful of golden fish studded with precious gems at the snake. Most of them missed and hit Eric, Reamer, or the floor instead, but a couple connected with robot snake's body with audible clinks.
Uh-oh, Eric thought.
The snake whipped around and looked at Prentice, who was rearing back with another handful of precious stones and metal figurines to throw.
The long triangles around the snake's tip came together in front of the eye, forming a pyramid shape with a sharp tip. It began to spin at high speed, whining like a drill.
Then the snake whipped right past Eric, on its way to defend itself against the onslaught of rocks. Prentice threw his second handful—again hitting Eric and Reamer more than he hit the snake—then he cringed, waiting for the thing to arrive and start drilling its way into his flesh.
Eric grabbed the metallic snake's body as it raced past him, trying to save the guy's life. An instant later he realized his mistake: he was about to die for some rich lawyer he barely knew, while his own family was back home, waiting for him to return.
It was too late. The snake's head whipped around, the drill charging right toward Eric's face, toward his eye, like it planned to drill through his optic nerve and into his brain.
Eric dropped the useless bug-spray nozzle and reached for the big zapper holstered on his belt, but there wasn't time for him to draw before the spinning tip of the snake's drill reached him.
It bored into Eric's cheek, and the pain was intense, between the sharp cutting point and the friction of its high-speed rotation against his skin. The robotic snake also spat some kind of fluid all over his face as it bored into him, a foul-smelling lubricant.
Electricity arced across the room, hitting the metal snake and crackling along its segmented shell. Some of the juice conducted right through into Eric's arm, jolting him. He got a simultaneous dose in the face, too. He managed to let go of the crackling snake before another bolt struck it, then another.
Alanna approached, firing shot after shot with the orange stunner they'd given her, cranking up the blasts to max power now that the metal wasn't touching Eric anymore. The metallic snake writhed on the floor, its electrical systems overwhelmed.
Eric unlatched the poison-gas tank from his
belt and hurried over. He slammed the heavy base of the steel tank down on the writhing snake's head. There was a satisfying crunch and the crack of glass breaking, and the robotic creature finally fell still.
Prentice pelted it with a handful of golden starfish and jeweled crabs, which mostly hit Eric.
“Would you stop doing that?” Eric snapped at the lawyer. “You're not helping.”
“Well, sorry! I don't know how to use this thing.” Prentice drew the orange stun gun and waved it at Eric, his finger right on the trigger, his hand shaking.
“Then give it to her!” Eric shouted, and fortunately Prentice did, passing the stunner over to Alanna, who'd fired her own until the battery depleted. “Nice shooting, Miss Li-Whitward.”
“Thanks. You're gushing blood from your face.” Alanna said it without much concern, as if noting the shape of passing cloud.
“Oh, here!” Prentice rushed forward, drawing a thick silk handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “We have to stop the bleeding.” He attempted to press it against the hole in Eric's face, but Eric caught him by the wrist.
“There's no snot on there, right?” Eric asked. Coppery blood ran into his mouth as he spoke.
“It's clean! I promise! You need to get to a hospital.”
Eric took the handkerchief and pressed it against his wound. “There's first aid kits back in the main tunnel. I'll just staple it back together.”
“You'll be scarred for life,” Prentice said. “But I can recommend a fantastic plastic surgeon—”
“Reamer, you okay?” Eric looked over at the general manager, who was gaping at the robotic snake on the floor like he expected it to jump back up any moment.
“We gotta get out of here.” Reamer stood, looking pale, his eyes darting around in a panic. “I don't belong down here, people. I've got three kids and two ex-wives to support back on Huayuan. Before my transfer here, I was in charge of catering and entertainment purchasing for Li Airlines. I had an office with glass walls and a nice apartment. This place...is like a punishment...”
“It is a punishment,” Alanna said. “You had a poor performance review and at least four sexual harassment complaints from your underlings. I didn't want you here, either, but my father wanted you away from everyone else.”