from a cow that's been eating grain and hormones. Same here. This guy had never eaten sunlight. He'd never been to the surface. Never eaten an animal that had gone up top. It was probably his first time away from the tribe.'
'And you killed him,' she said. He looked at her.
'You have no idea how brutal this looks,' she said. 'Dear God. What did they do to you?'
He shrugged. In the span of one heartbeat, he had fallen a thousand miles away from her. 'I'll find him,' he said.
'Who?'
He pointed at the raised scars on his arm. 'Him,' he said.
'You said that was your name.'
'It was. His name was my name. I had no name except for his.'
'Whose?'
'The one who owned me.'
Four days farther on, they found Shoat's river.
Ike had been sent ahead. He was waiting for the expedition at a chamber filled with thunder. They had been hearing it for days. In the center of the floor lay a great vertical shaft, shaped at top like a funnel. A city block wide, the hole roared up at them.
The walls sweated. Small streams sluiced into the maw. They girdled the rim, trying to see the bottom. Their lights illuminated a deep, polished throat. The stone was calcareous serpentine with green mottling. Ike lowered a headlamp on a rope. Two hundred meters down, the tiny light skipped and skidded sideways on an invisible current.
'I'll be damned,' Shoat said. 'The river.'
'You didn't expect it to be here?' someone said.
Shoat grinned. 'Nobody knew. Our cartography department gave it a one-in-three chance. On the other hand, it was the most logical way to explain the continuum in their data.'
'We came all this way on a wild guess?'
Shoat gave a happy-go-lucky shrug. 'Kick off your shoes,' he said, 'no more backpacks. No more hoofing it. From here, we float.'
'I think we should first study the situation,' one of the hydrologists said. 'We have no idea what's down there. What's the river's profile? How fast does it run? Where does it go?'
'Study it from the boats,' Shoat said.
The porters did not arrive for another three hours. Since leaving Cache I, they had been freighted with double loads for double pay, some carrying in excess of a hundred and fifty pounds. They deposited their cargo in a dry area and went over to a separate chamber, where Walker had arranged a hot meal for them.
Ali came across to Ike, where he was rigging lines into the hole. At their parting on the dance floor, she'd been drunk and brimming with curiosity and, ultimately, repulsion. Now she was as sober as a pebble, and the repulsion had abated. 'What happens with them?' she asked, referring to the porters. 'Everyone's wondering.'
'End of the road,' he said. 'Shoat's retiring them.'
'They're going home? The colonel's been hunting the runaways down, and now they're all being turned loose?'
'It's Shoat's show,' Ike said.
'Will they be okay?'
This was no place to cut men, two months out from the nearest civilization. But Ike saw no reward in arousing her indignation all over again. 'Sure,' he said. 'Why not?'
'I thought they'd been guaranteed employment for a year.'
He hooked a coil of rope with one hand and busied himself with knots. 'We've got worries of our own,' he advised. 'They're about to become a powder keg. Once they figure out we're ditching them, it's a matter of time before they go for us.'
'For us?' she started. 'For revenge?'
'It's more basic than that,' Ike said. 'They'll want our weapons. Our food. Everything. From a strictly military point of view – Walker's view – the expeditious thing would be to frag them and be done with it.'
'He would never dare,' Ali said.
'You don't see it?' he asked. 'The porters are segregated from the rest of us now. That side cave is a cage with no door. They can only come out one at a time, and that makes them easy targets if they get tired of being cooped up.'
Ali couldn't believe this other, meaner layer to the expedition. 'He's not going to shoot them, is he?'
'No need. By the time they finally decide to poke their heads out, we'll probably be long gone down the river.'
All over again, the quartermaster opened the loads and laid out the supplies from Cache I. One of his first tasks was to distribute specially made survival suits to the soldiers and scientists. Made by Jagged Edge Gear for NASA, the suits were constructed of a ripstop fabric that was waterproof but land-friendly. He issued the suits in sizes from small to extra large. A wiry mercenary ran them through the basics.
'You can walk in it, climb in it, sleep in it. If you fall overboard, pull this emergency ring and the suit will self-inflate. It preserves your body heat. It keeps you dry. And it's shark-proof.'
Someone made a joke about a magic suit of armor.
The suits were a composite of rubbery shorts, sleeveless vests, and skintight oversuits. The fabric was night-striped with charcoal gray and cobalt blue. As the scientists tried on their elastic clothing, the unsettling effect was of tigers on two feet. There were a few wolf whistles, male and female.
They tried lowering a video camera to examine the lowest reaches of the shaft. When that didn't work, Walker sent down his crash dummy: Ike.
Not so many years before, a trail must have led from the chamber down to the river. Ike had already spent part of a day looking for it. But along the most likely tunnel, there was a boulder-choke triggered by recent tremors. Hadal evidence was everywhere – carved pillars, washed-out wall paintings, spouts to lift streamlets, rocks piled to divert them – but no suggestion that the hole had ever been used the way they were about to use it, to access the river from straight above.
Ike rappelled into the stone throat, feet braced against the veined rock. At the bottom of the first rope, a hundred meters down, he peeked upward through the falling water. They were watching him, waiting to see what would happen.
The shaft gave way to a void. Ike had no warning. His feet were suddenly pumping
against the blackness. He halted, dangling in a vast, quiet bubble of night.
Casting around with his light beam, he found the river fifty feet below. He had descended into a long, winding geological cupola. Its vaulted ceiling hung above the flat river surface. Strangely, the thunderous noise stopped the moment he left the shaft. It was practically silent here. He could hear the water slithering past, little more.
If not for his rope leading up through it, the shaft hole might have disappeared among all the other gnarled features above and around him. The walls and ceiling were scaled with igneous puzzles. It was a complicated space with one logic – the river.
He let himself down the line and locked off within reach of the water. It ran smooth as black silk. Tentatively, Ike reached his fingertips against it. Nothing leaped up to bite him. The current was firm. The water felt cool and heavy. It had no smell. If it had come from the Pacific Ocean, it was no longer sea water; the journey inward had filtered any salt from it. It was delicious.
He made his report on a short-range radio that Walker had given him. 'It looks fine to me,' he said.
They lowered like spiders on silk threads. Some required coaxing for the rappel, including several of the soldiers. Clients, thought Ike.
