“Stop,” Rasht said, as I turned over a page. “Go back. What was that figure?”
I turned back the sheets with a sort of dread. My eye had caught enough to know what to expect.
It was a drawing of the volcanic cone, exactly as it appeared from the position of the wreck.
Perhaps it was no more than an accident of Teterev’s hand, but the way she had put her marks down on the paper only seemed to add to the suggestion of brooding, patient malevolancy I had already detected in the feature. Teterev seemed to have made the cephalopod’s head more bulbous, more cerebral, the lava tubes more muscular and tentacle-like. Even the way she had stippled the tubes to suggest snow or ice could not help but suggest to my eye rows and rows of suckers.
Worse, she had drawn a gaping, beak-mouth between two of those tentacles.
There was a silence before Lenka said: “Turn to the end. We can read the other entries later.”
I flicked through the pages until the writing ran out. The last few entries were barely entries at all, just scratchy annotations, done in haste or distraction.
Phrases jumped out at us.
Can’t wake the others. Tried everything I can. My dear Lev, lost to me.
Such a good boy. A good son.
Doesn’t deserve me, the mistakes I’ve made.
Stuck down here. But won’t give in. Need materials, power. Something in that hill. Magnetic anomaly. Hill looks wrong. I think there might be something in it.
Amerikanos were here once, that’s the only answer. Came by their old, slow methods. Frozen cells and robot wombs. No records, but so what. Must have dug into that hill, buried something in it. Ship or an installation. See an entrance. Cave mouth. That’s where they went in.
I don’t want to go in. But I want what they left behind. It might save my life.
Might get me back to the ship.
Back to Lev.
“They were never here,” Rasht said. “Teterev would have known that. Their colonies never got this far out.”
“She was desperate enough to try anything,” Lenka said. “I feel sorry for her, stuck all alone here. I bet she knew it was a thousand to one chance.”
“Nonetheless,” I said, “there is something odd about that hill. Maybe it’s nothing to do with the Amerikanos, but if you’re out of options, you might as well see what’s inside.” I turned back to the drawing. The mouth, I now realised, was Teterev’s way of drawing the cave entrance.
But it still looked like the beak of an octopus.
“One thing’s for certain,” Lenka said. “If Teterev went into that hill, she didn’t come back.”
“I didn’t notice any footprints,” I said.
“They wouldn’t last, not with all the geothermal activity around here. The top of the ice must be melting and re-freezing all the time.”
“We should look into the cave, anyway,” Rasht said.
I shook my head, struck by an intense conviction that this was exactly the wrong thing to.
“It’s not our job to find Teterev’s corpse.”
“Someone should find it,” Lenka said sharply. “Give her some dignity in death. At least record what happened to her. She was one of us, Nidra—an Ultra. She deserves better than to be forgotten. Can I look at her journal?”
“Be my guest,” I said, passing it over to her.
“Nidra is right—her body isn’t our concern,” Rasht said, while Lenka paged through the sheets. “She took a risk, and it didn’t work out for her. But the Amerikanos are of interest to us.”
“Records say they weren’t here,” I said.
“And that’s what I’ve always believed. But records can be wrong. What if Teterev was right with her theory? Amerikano relics are worth quite a bit these days, especially on Yellowstone.”
“Then we return to orbit, send down a drone,” I said.
“We’re here already,” Rasht answered. “There are three of us—four if you include Kanto. Did you see how old Teterev’s helmet was? We have better equipment, and we’re not down to our last hope of survival. We can turn back whenever we like. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
It took something to make our ramshackle equipment look better than someone else’s, I thought to myself. Besides, we were inferring a great deal from just one helmet. Perhaps it had been an old keepsake, a memento of earlier spacefaring adventures.
Still, Rasht was settled in his decision. The orbiting ship had been picked clean; the shuttle held nothing of obvious value; that left only the cave. If we were to salvage anything from this expedition, that was the last option open to us.
Even I could see the sense in that, whether I liked it or not.
DON’T MIND ME, for the moment. Got work to be getting on with. Busy, busy, busy.
What am I doing with these things?
Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it? I’m arranging them around you. Jamming them into the ice, like mirrored sculptures. I know you can’t move your head very easily. There’s no need, though. There’s not much to see, other than the cave mouth behind you and the wreck ahead of you.
What are you saying?
No, it’s not for your benefit! Silly Captain. But you are very much the focus of attention. You’ve always liked being at the centre of things, haven’t you?
What?
You’re having difficulty breathing?
Just a moment, then. I don’t want you to die before we’ve even begun! It was lucky, what happened with the winch. I mean, I’d have found one eventually, and the line. Of course it didn’t seem lucky at the time. I thought I was going to die in there. Did you think of abandoning me?
I think you did.
Here. I’m making a micro adjustment to the tension. Is that better? Can you breathe a little more easily?
Wonderful.
WE WENT OUTSIDE again. The monkey was having some difficulty with its paw, as if the contamination had worked its way into the servo-workings. It kept knocking the paw against the ground, trying to loosen it up.
“There aren’t any footprints,” Lenka said, tugging binoculars down from the crown of her helmet. She was speaking in general terms, addressing Rasht and I without favour. “But I can see the cave mouth. It’s just where Teterev said it was. Must be about five, six kilometers from here.”
“Can you plot us a path between these obstacles?” Rasht asked.
“Easily.”
It was still day, not even local noon. The sky was a pale blue, crisscrossed by high-altitude clouds. Beyond the blue, the face of the gas giant backdropped our view of the hill—one swollen, ugly thing rising above another. We set off in single file, Lenka leading, Rasht next, then the monkey, then I. We were all still on suit air, even though our helmet readouts were patiently informing us that the outside atmosphere was fully breathable, and (at the limit of our sensors) absent of any significant toxins. I watched the monkey’s tail pendulum out from side to side as it walked. Bubbling pools pressed in from either side, our path narrowing down. Every now and then a geyser went off or a pool burped a huge bubble of gas into the air. Toxins or otherwise, it probably smelled quite badly out there. But then again, we were from the Lachrimosa, which was hardly a perfumed garden.
I had no warning when the ice gave way under me. It must have been just firm enough to take the others, but their passage—the weight of their heavy, power-assisted suits—had weakened it to the point where it could no longer support the last of us.
I plunged down to my neck in bubbling hot water, instinctively flinging out my arms as if swimming were a possibility. Then my feet touched bottom. Instantly my suit detected the transition to a new environment and began informing me of this sudden change of affairs—indices of temperature, acidity, alkalinity and salinity scrolling down my faceplate, along with mass spectrograms and molecular diagrams of chemical products. A tide of rust-coloured water lapped against the lower part of my visor.
I was startled, but not frightened. I was not totally under water, and the sui
t could cope with a lot worse than immersion in liquid.
But getting out was another thing.
“Don’t try and pull me,” I said, as Lenka made to lean in. “The shelf’ll just give way under you, and then we’ll both be in the water.”
“Nidra’s right,” Rasht agreed, while the monkey looked on with a sort of agitated delight.
It was all very well warning Lenka away, but it only took a few minutes of frustration to establish that I could not get myself out unassisted. It was not a question of strength, but of having no firm point of leverage. The fringe of the pool was a crust of ice which gave away as soon as I tried to put any weight on it. All I was doing was expanding the margin of the pool.
Finally I stopped trying. “This won’t work,” I said. By then I was conscious that my arms were picking up the same sort of furry red contamination that had affected the monkey’s paw.
“We’ll need to haul her out,” Rasht said. “It’s the only way. With us on firm ground, it shouldn’t be a problem. Lenka: you’ll need to go back to the lander, get the power winch.”
“There’s a quicker way,” Lenka said. “I saw a winch in the stores locker, on the wreck. It looked serviceable. If it’s no good, it’ll only cost me a little longer to fetch ours.”
So Lenka went back to the crash site, detouring around the pool in which I was still trapped, then rejoining our original path. From my low vantage point, she was soon out of my line of sight. Rasht and the monkey kept an eye on me, the Captain silent for long minutes.
“You think this is a mistake,” he said eventually.
“I don’t like that hill, and I like the fact that Teterev didn’t come out of it even less.”
“We really don’t know what happened to Teterev. For all we know she came back to the wreck and was eventually rescued.”
“Then why didn’t she say so, or take her journal with her?”
“We’re going into the cave to find answers, Nidra. This is what we do—adapt and explore. Mazamel’s intelligence proved faulty, so we make the best of what we find.”
“You get the intelligence you pay for,” I said. “There’s a reason other ships never dealt with Mazamel.”
“A little late for recrimination, don’t you think? Of course, if you’re unhappy with your choice of employment, you can always find another crew.” I thought he might leave it at that, but Rasht added: “I know how you feel about Lachrimosa, Nidra. Contempt for me, contempt for Lenka, contempt for your ship. It’s different now though, isn’t it? Without that winch, you’ll be going nowhere.”
“And without a navigator, you won’t be going much further.”
“You’re wrong about that, though. I can use a navigator, just as I can use a sensor specialist like Lenka. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t operate Lachrimosa on my own, if it came to that. You’re useful, but you’re not indispensable. Neither of you.”
“Be sure to tell Lenka that, when she returns.”
“No need. I’ve never had the slightest doubt about Lenka’s loyalty. She’s emotionally weak—all this stupid concern over Teterev. But she’ll never turn on me.”
The monkey gibbered. Lenka was coming back.
The power winch was a tool about the size of a heavy vacuum rifle. Lenka carried it in two hands. We had similar equipment, so there was no question of working out how to use it.
The winch had a grapple attachment which could be fired with compressed gas. Lenka detached the grapple from the end of the line, and then looped the line back on itself to form a kind of handle or noose. The line was thin and flexible. Lenka spooled out a length from the power winch and then cast the the noose in my direction. I waded over to the noose and took hold of it. Lenka made sure she was standing on firm ground, turned up her suit amplification, and began to drag me out with the winch. The line tightened, then began to take my weight. It was still an awkward business, but at last I was able to beach myself on the surrounding ice without floundering through. I crawled from the edge, belly down, until I felt confident enough to risk standing.
“Your suit’s a mess,” Rasht observed.
“I’ll live. At least I didn’t dip myself in it deliberately.”
But my suit had indeed suffered some ill effects, as became apparent while we resumed our trek to the cave mouth. The life support core was intact—I was in no danger of dying—but my locomotive augmentation was not working as well as it was meant to. As had happened with the monkey’s paw, the organisms in the pond seemed to have infiltrated the suit’s servo-assist systems. I could still walk, but the suit’s responses were sluggish, meaning that it was resisting me more than aiding me.
I began to sweat with the effort. It was hard to keep up with the others. Even the monkey had no problem with the rest of its suit.
“Thank you for getting the winch,” I told Lenka, between breaths. “It was good that you remembered the one in the wreck. Any longer in that pond, and I might have had real problems.”
“I’m glad we got you out.”
Perhaps it was just the flush of gratitude at being rescued, but I vowed to think better of Lenka. She was senior to me on the crew, and yet Rasht seemed to value her capabilities no more than he did mine. Whatever I thought of her lack of ambition, her willing acceptance of her place on the ship, it struck me that she deserved better than that. Perhaps, when this was over, I could break it to her that she was considered no more than useful, like a component that would serve its purpose for the time being. That might change her view of things. I even imagined the two of us jumping ship at the next port, leaving Rasht with his monkey. Perhaps we could pass as sisters or twins, if we wanted new employment.
The terrain became firmer as we neared the hill, and we did not need to pick our course so carefully. The ground rose up slowly. There was still ice under our feet, and we were flanked on either side by the steadily widening lava tubes, which were already ten or fifteen times taller than any of us.
Ahead lay the cave mouth. Its profile was a semicircle, with the apex perhaps ten metres above the surface of the ice which extended into the darkness of the mouth. The hill rose up and up from the mouth, almost sheer in places, but there was an overhang above the entrance, covered in a sheath of smooth clean ice—the “beak” of Teterev’s drawing.
The tongue of ice continued inside, curving down into what we could see of the cave’s throat.
“Still no footsteps,” Lenka said, as we neared the entrance.
That the ice occasionally melted and refroze was clear from the fringe of icicles daggering down from the overhang, some of them nearly long enough to reach the floor. Rasht shouldered through them, shattering the icicles against the armour of his suit. As their shards broke off, they made a tinkling, atonal sort of music.
Now Lenka said: “There are steps! This is the way she went!”
It was true. They did not begin until a few metres into the cave, where sunlight must have only reached occasionally, or not at all. There was only a single pair of footprints, and they only went one way.
“That’s encouraging,” I said.
“If you want to remain here,” Rasht said, “we can exclude you from your cut of the profits.”
So he had gone from denial of the Amerikano settlement, to a skeptical allowance of the possibility, to imagining how the dividend might be shared.
We turned on our helmet lights again—Rasht leaning down to activate the light on the monkey, which was too stupid to do it on its own. The monkey seemed more agitated than before, though. It was dragging its heels, coiling its tail, lingering after Rasht.
“It doesn’t like it,” Lenka said.
“Maybe it’s smarter than it looks,” I put in under my breath, which was about as much as I could manage with the effort of my ailing suit.
But I shared the monkey’s dwindling enthusiasm. Who would really want to trudge into a cave, on an alien planet, if they had a choice in the matter? Teterev had gambled her salvation on finding relic technol
ogy, something that could buy her extra time in the wreck. We had no such compulsion, other than an indignant sense that we were owed our due after our earlier disappointment.
The angle of the slope pitched down steeply. The ice covered the floor, but the surrounding walls were exposed rock. We moved to the left side and used the grooved wall for support as we descended, placing our feet sideways. The monkey, still leashed to Rasht, had no choice but to continue. But its unwillingness was becoming steadily more apparent. Its gibbering turned shriller, more anxious.
“Now now, my dear,” Rasht said.
The tunnel narrowed as it deepened. All traces of daylight were soon behind us. We maintained our faltering progress, following the trail that Teterev had left for us. Once or twice, the prints became confused, as if there were suddenly three sets, rather than one. This puzzled me to begin with, until I realised that they marked instances of indecision, where Teterev had halted, reversed her progress, only to summon the courage to continue on her original heading.
I felt for Teterev.
“Something ahead,” Rasht announced. “A glow, I think. Turn off your lights.”
“The monkey first,” I said.
“Naturally, Nidra.”
When Rasht had quenched Kanto’s light, the rest of us followed suit. Our Captain had been correct. Far from darkness ahead, there was a silvery emanation. It did not seem to come from a single point source, but rather from veins of some mineral running through the rock. If they had been present nearer the surface, we would probably not have seen them against the brighter illumination of daylight. But I did not think they had been present until now.
“I’m not a geologist,” Lenka said, voicing the same thought that must have occurred to the rest of us. We had no idea what to make of the glowing veins, whether they were natural or suspicious.
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 76