Spinneret

by Timothy Zahn

  And then, with nearly two thirds of the wall covered, Nichols hit pay dirt.

  “If you rest your hand right here for a second or two you get a faint scraping noise from behind the wall,” the geologist told Meredith, indicating a section of wall pocked with tiny fissures. “We never noticed anything significant about these cracks before, but I wonder now if it could be an air intake of some kind.”

  “With a Gorgon’s Head on the other side?” Gingerly, Meredith placed his palm over the spot. Sure enough, the scratching was just barely audible. Gorgon’s Head snakes against the wall?

  “Wouldn’t an air vent show a more regular pattern?” one of the others objected.

  “You haven’t seen the Spinners’ love of squiggles,” Meredith told him, testing various sections of wall immediately around the vent. “Seems pretty solid. Let’s check around, see if the door is offset or something.”

  A search of the five meters to either side proved fruitless. “If there’s a door here it looks like we’re going to have to persuade it to open,” Nichols said at last. “I’ve got some hydrofluoric acid; we could try it in the air vent.”

  “Go ahead, but I doubt it’ll do any good,” Meredith said, eyeing the wall thoughtfully. “So far we’ve never come upon a Gorgon’s Head that couldn’t get out of its cubbyhole when it wanted to. I suspect the door’s not jammed but locked, and we’re expected to know how to open it.”

  “I don’t see anything that looks like the buttons of a digital lock,” Nichols said slowly. “An ID card in one of the slots?”

  “More likely a verbal command—you wouldn’t want some worker to get trapped in the cone with no way out.” An extremely foolish idea was beginning to take shape in the back of his mind. “On the other hand, you may also not want the average Spinner who has no business up here just wandering in and out like they can with the Dead Sea entrance.”

  “Well, then, what are we going to do? We’re a long way from deciphering the written language, let alone the spoken one.”

  “Let’s try the acid and then maybe firing a few explosive shells around—just in case it is stuck. After that … well, we’ll talk about it then.”

  Neither the acid nor explosions seemed to make any difference to either the door or the hidden Gorgon’s Head … and eventually Meredith was forced to climb out of the crater, make contact with Carmen in the command center, and lay out his plan.

  She didn’t like it. Neither, when consulted, did Nichols, Perez, Barner, and Andrews.

  “Ridiculous,” was Carmen’s immediate response. “Ridiculous and suicidal and you’re not going to do it.”

  “Out of the question,” Barner seconded. “It’s too long a shot to gamble your life over.”

  “I’ll be in no danger,” Meredith assured them.

  “What do you mean, ‘no danger’?” Barner retorted. “You know half the safety interlocks in this mechanized anthill are gone—look at what happened to the men in the solenoid tunnel.”

  “There weren’t any Gorgon’s Heads present then, and the men weren’t supervisors,” Meredith pointed out. “Besides, even if it doesn’t work I ought to be safe enough against the wall. Safer than the first troops through the main entrance would be, anyway.”

  “If it’s so safe,” Perez said suddenly, “then let me do it instead of you.”

  “No. It’s my idea, and I’m going to do it. Period. Carmen, you’ll make the proper arrangements immediately.”

  “Yes, sir.” Carmen’s voice was sullen; but she clearly recognized an order when she heard one.

  Or maybe she, too, recognized that they had no other choice.

  They’d been inside for nearly a day when Hafner was abruptly shaken out of a deep sleep. “What’s going on?” Major Dunlop’s voice demanded.

  Squinting in the light streaming through the open tent flap, Hafner tried to chase the cobwebs out of his brain. “Going—what do you mean—?”

  “That rumbling—can’t you hear it? What’s Meredith up to?”

  Frowning, Hafner listened for a moment. The sound, though, wasn’t hard to place. “He’s not up to anything. That’s just the Spinneret starting into its production cycle.”

  His eyes had adjusted enough now to see Dunlop’s face … and the expression on that face was one of tense suspicion. “What do you mean, production cycle? He’s making a cable? Now?”

  “Why not? Probably demonstrating to the aliens out there that Astra’s still in business … that you aren’t really in control of anything except a few square kilometers of underground real estate.”

  The last dig may have been a mistake. Dunlop’s brow darkened and the fingers clenching his holstered pistol butt tightened noticeably. “Perhaps we should prove otherwise,” he ground out. “What do you say we go out to the tower and start pushing buttons until it shuts off?”

  Hafner felt his mouth go dry. “I say that if you mess up the settings or erase some program in the process, Colonel Meredith will make a fortune selling tickets to your disemboweling,” he said as casually as he could. “You’d probably have everyone from the Rooshrike to the M’zarch offering suggestions on technique, too.”

  Dunlop glowered at him for a moment, then turned on his heel and stalked away, letting the tent flap close behind him.

  With a relieved sigh, Hafner checked his watch and settled back to try and catch another hour of sleep. I wonder, he thought as the darkness closed in, just what the colonel is up to.

  Chapter 28

  THE LAST GLINT OF sunlight had vanished from the inner lip of the volcano cone when the gravimeter fastened to the edge of Meredith’s helmet began to change. “It’s started,” he announced quietly into his microphone. “Two percent down and picking up steam.”

  “Your restraints set?” Barner asked, his voice barely discernible over the static that was beginning to fill the radio bands.

  “Yes,” Meredith told him, trying to sound more confident than he felt. The lines and bracing bars fastening him to the inner cone wall near the air vent weren’t nearly as secure as he’d hoped to make them—unlike the Spinneret cable itself, which stuck to other things with a vengeance, the flat panels with which the volcano cone and cavern structures had been built were made of a very inert substance. Depending on the gradient of the zero-gee field, it was conceivable Meredith would wind up being shot into space along with the latest batch of cable.

  With a conscious effort, he put the thought out of his mind and reached out to press his bare hand against the air vent again. The gentle breeze that was starting to spring up kept him from hearing any scratching, but he was sure the Gorgon’s Head behind the wall had detected and identified him. What it would do with that knowledge, though, was still an unknown.

  The gravity was dropping rapidly now, and the local atmospheric pressure was beginning to follow. Cool air hissed behind Meredith’s head, filling the pressure suit that covered all of the colonel except his hands. The general medical consensus was that such a limited exposure to vacuum would be safe enough for a reasonable length of time, but no one on Astra really knew what the limits actually were. Keeping one eye on the air vent and the other on his gravimeter, Meredith gritted his teeth and waited.

  Brought up on a diet of American cliff-hanger drama, he was rather expecting the Gorgon’s Head to wait until the last second before taking action … and it was therefore almost anti-climactic when, with the gravity only down to point four gee, a section of wall suddenly slid back and down, exposing the short-tunnel-and-elevator-shaft arrangement that had also been used in the cavern control tower. Meredith hit his harness release with one hand, reaching out with the other to try and get a grip on the edge of the opening. He needn’t have bothered; from an alcove just off the tunnel a tentacle snaked out to wrap itself around his neck, and before he could do more than get his hands up to grip the metal hose he’d been pulled inside the tunnel and released. Massaging his throat, he watched the door slide shut again and, giving silent thanks to the Gorgon’s
Heads’ programmer, set to work locating the inside controls.

  Half an hour later the static cleared and he was able to reassure the anxious listeners that the gamble had worked. Twenty minutes after that, Andrews and the ten-man commando team had joined him. Together they crowded into the elevator and started down.

  It was a long trip. Meredith hadn’t until that moment had a real feeling for how far below Astra’s surface the Spinner cavern was—the gentle slope of the entrance tunnel had effectively masked that fact—and he was beginning to get fidgety by the time the elevator finally stopped. Moving quietly, the men fanned out, weapons ready.

  They were, as Meredith had anticipated, in an unexplored area of the cavern complex. The room they’d entered was as large as the storerooms leading off the main entrance tunnel, but without the curlicue floor designs and with a much higher ceiling. At either end of the room were huge doors; and linking them—

  “Railroad tracks,” Andrews muttered, poking carefully at one with the muzzle of his Stoner 5.56. “Heavy-duty, from the look of them.”

  Meredith looked back and forth between the two doors. One led directly under the volcano cone, he estimated. The other was flanked by two very familiar-looking bulges. “Let’s backtrack it,” he said, starting toward that door.

  The Gorgon’s Heads emerged from their alcoves before the group was within fifteen meters, walking on their spider legs to stand in front of the door release. “It’s all right,” Meredith told them soothingly, speaking—he realized belatedly—as if they were a pair of pet Dobermans. Stepping forward, he ran a hand over the top of each, then reached between them to poke the release. The doors slid open … and Meredith found himself facing what could only be a spaceship.

  A big ship, too; nothing like the Aurora or Pathfinder, of course, but certainly comparable to the UN’s Ctencri-built courier ships. It rested on a transport cradle which, in turn, squatted across the tracks in the floor; and despite their age, Meredith had the feeling that, like the Spinneret itself, both would prove perfectly functional.

  “At least,” Andrews murmured from beside him, “we know now why they needed to make the volcano crater so big. Should we take a look inside, Colonel?”

  Meredith swept the room quickly with his eyes, noting the quantities of support gear stacked around the walls. “Not right now,” he told the other. “I doubt there’s anything here that would help us with Dunlop, and even if there were it’d take us too long to find it. We’ll mark the door and bring the experts in later.” Stepping back, he looked around for another way out of the first room. “Back to the elevator,” he decided. “We must have come down one level too many.”

  The guess turned out to be right, and a minute later they were moving silently down a corridor in what Meredith hoped was the direction of the cavern. Assuming they didn’t get lost, they should be in range of Dunlop’s rebels in a couple of hours.

  There had been a long and—or so it had seemed to Hafner—heated debate going on over by the barrier for nearly half an hour now. Digging his spoon into the self-heating can of field ration stew, Hafner strained to pick out as much of it as he could. The topic itself wasn’t hard to guess: Perez’s latest message, delivered via bullhorn from down the tunnel, had succeeded beautifully in its obvious goal of undermining morale. If he’d been telling the truth—if Astra really was rallying unanimously behind Meredith—then Dunlop’s cabal was indeed facing ultimate defeat and possible death besides. Apparently, the argument centered around whether the rebels should continue to maintain what was being increasingly seen as an indefensible position or whether they should withdraw to the cavern control tower. Hafner couldn’t tell which side Dunlop himself was on … but when the major strode up to him a few minutes later, his lips were tightly compressed with anger.

  “On your feet, Doctor—if you don’t mind,” he added in a token effort at courtesy. “We’re moving deeper in.”

  “Oh?” Deliberately, Hafner scraped one last spoonful out of the can and ate it before leisurely getting up. “I’d have thought the other direction would be smarter.”

  Dunlop apparently had too much on his mind already for Hafner’s pinpricks to have any effect. “We’re moving you to the tower,” he growled. “From the top we’ll have a clear line of fire at anyone who tries to approach—and as you’ve already pointed out, Meredith won’t dare shoot back at us there. Get in that car—we’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”

  Hafner did as he was told, his mind spinning with unanswerable questions. Had Meredith pushed Dunlop into this move in the hope that he, Hafner, would find a way to escape in all the activity? Should he try and make such an opportunity? Or was the colonel expecting him to still be in custody when he made his counterstroke? A pity we never planned for this kind of thing, he thought, watching the soldiers breaking camp around him. We could have set up contingencies, code words—something. I don’t know how to play this by ear.

  But whatever move Meredith had planned, it didn’t come before the cars began to move through the Spinner village. Looking out the window, Hafner noted with a growing tightness in his stomach that fourteen men—a quarter of Dunlop’s force—had been left as rear guard at the tunnel barricade. He’s split up his people, Hafner thought. Somewhere on this trip the attack will come.

  It didn’t come as they drove down the winding streets; nor did a squad roar up from behind as they piled out of the cars by the Great Wall. Unreasonably, Hafner tensed as the first four men slipped through the narrow opening—unreasonably, since no one could have slipped past the tunnel guards to set up any such trap by the wall. Sure enough, a moment later they called an all-clear, and when Hafner and his knot of guards squeezed through, he saw the terrain was indeed as empty as ever. Nothing moved but the usual number of Gorgon’s Heads—

  Moving Gorgon’s Heads? Hafner felt his teeth clamp together as the anomaly hit him like a slap across the face. Ever since his first visit here he’d invariably found the Gorgon’s Heads grouped with patient vigilance around the tower’s base. Now, though, nearly half of them were clumping toward the tower from the rear section of the cavern … as if they’d gone to one of the exit tunnels back there to investigate intruders. …

  Hafner’s heart thudded in his ears as the rest of the details fell into place. Meredith had found a second entrance to the complex; he or Barner had led a team in through it; they had run ahead of the slower Gorgon’s Heads and were waiting with stunners ready just inside the tower door. In five minutes it would all be over. …

  And a hundred meters from the tower, Dunlop abruptly signaled a halt. “Smith, Corcoran; go check out the tower entrance,” he ordered two of the soldiers.

  “They can’t get in without me,” Hafner spoke up, a shade too quickly. “The Gorgon’s Heads will stop them.”

  Dunlop eyed him for a long moment. “All right, then,” the major said, “stand back from the machines and lob a couple of grenades through the opening. That shouldn’t hurt anything, should it?”

  Wordlessly, Hafner shook his head, his eyes on the soldiers moving toward the tower. They were barely five paces from the opening when, without warning, three khaki-clad men appeared in the doorway, the stunners in their hands sweeping the group of rebels. Even as he dived toward the ground Hafner felt a tingle ripple across his skin … and he’d barely hit the alien soil when the thunder of automatic weapons fire exploded into the air around him.

  His ears were still ringing from the burst when a hand grabbed his collar and roughly yanked him to his knees. Peripherally, he saw Dunlop’s men stretched out on their bellies, rifles pointed toward the tower … but his main attention was focused on the pistol Dunlop held against his temple. A pistol gripped by a white-knuckled hand.

  “Meredith!” the major yelled toward the tower and directly in Hafner’s ear. “I’ve got Hafner here—you hear me? Surrender or I’ll kill him. I mean it!”

  He paused for breath or an answer … and in the silence Hafner heard, dimly, the sound of d
istant gunfire. Dunlop’s hand twitched; but before he could do or say anything, Meredith’s voice drifted faintly from the tower. “Give it up, Dunlop. You haven’t got a chance.”

  “I’ve got Hafner!” the major shouted again. “You want to see him die?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Meredith called. “You can’t get into the tower, your rear guard at the tunnel’s been taken—you’ve got no supplies and nowhere to run. What the hell is a hostage going to buy you? You or your men?”

  “Just shut up!” Dunlop yelled.

  “Major,” a sergeant spoke up tentatively, “maybe we ought to surrender—”

  “Talk of surrender will be treated as desertion,” Dunlop cut him off harshly. “Meredith! I’ll make you a deal. You call the UN ship and have them send down a shuttle for us. Then have your people pull back and let us leave here.”

  “What about Dr. Hafner?”

  “I’ll ask Msuya to send him back down once we’re aboard. “

  “Forget it,” Meredith called. “However, I’ll make you a counterproposal. If you turn Hafner loose right now, I’ll guarantee you all safe passage to the UN ship.”

  “You think I’m stupid enough to trust you? We’re leaving, Meredith—you’d better call your people off.” Cautiously, Dunlop stood up, hauling Hafner to his feet. “All right; everybody get up and fall back to the cars.”

  Slowly, even reluctantly, the soldiers complied—and because he was watching them, Hafner saw the shocked expressions as they began turning to leave. “Oh, bloody hell,” someone muttered.