“What now?” one of the other four jumpsuits asked.
“Find water,” Nikitin replied. He looked up and down the ravine they were hiding in. “This used to be a creek, I think. Should lead us toward water, give us a little break from the wind as we go.”
Jack could hear two or three more flying cuttlefish in the distance. Either that or his head was worse than he thought. “Yeah, it’ll keep us out of sight, too. Anyone know where we are?”
Nikitin shook his head. “Fat chance. Everything looks like landfill, and this shit’s so thick I can’t find the sun. Could you make out any landmarks from the cockpit?”
Jack’s memories were still scattered, coming back in flashes that faded just as quickly as they arose like embers spitting out of a campfire. He closed his eyes and tried to play through it, and all he saw was a dust cloud stretching off to the horizon. “Nope,” he said.
Nikitin looked down at his watch. “Well, we’ll have a better idea at sundown. I should be able to figure something out, what time zone we’re in at least. Until then, let’s make tracks.”
Weary and bruised, the corpsmen climbed back to their feet and dusted themselves off. The jumpsuits that were once bright orange were already growing dingy, turning the same shade of brown as everything else in sight.
Jack knew that Nikitin was doing the right thing; they had to keep moving. The weight of their situation might sink in if they stood still too long, but there was always hope as long as they were moving forward. Better to keep going, keep pressing on toward something, toward anything at all. Settlements clung to running water, and with a little luck, they might find some scrap of civilization that had survived the massacre.
For the first time, Jack realized he wouldn’t even mind running into Blade Aerospace or Carbon Corp troops.
Nikitin looked up and down the ravine again. To Jack, both directions looked equally inhospitable, but using some method that he couldn’t guess at, Nikitin picked a direction and said, “That-a-way.”
The rest of the corpsmen started to march. Nikitin waited to pull up the rear with Jack. “You alright to walk, pal?”
“Yeah. Just needed a couple minutes to recharge.”
“Good.” Nikitin gave him a hardy slap on the back that hurt more than it should have. “You know me, Jack. I’m not real big on this leadership crap. The sooner you can climb back into the hot seat, the better.”
Leadership meant responsibility, and that had never been Nikitin’s strong suit. He was a real hero-type to be sure, the kind that went to the zoo ready to jump into a lion cage at the first shout of “My baby!” He would never let Jack down, but he preferred to have the option. Leaders don’t have that luxury.
Jack was just the opposite. He ate up responsibility like a shark after chum. “Gimme a few klicks to get my head on straight.”
“Sure. One other thing, though,” Nikitin said, and he craned down to Jack’s level. “Thanks for saving our bacon in the ‘viathan. That was some true blue hero crap, and we’d be a pudding splat without you.”
The memory of a spinning cabin flashed through Jack’s head, accompanied by the feeling of tumbling out of the sky. He’d never heard Nikitin thank anyone for anything, and at first, he didn’t know what to say. The only answer that came to mind was the trite catch-phrase from the old ERC recruiting commercials. As he started to recite the words, Nikitin chimed in and they said them together. “No need to thank me. The Corps saves lives. It’s what we do.”
Chapter 11:
Anatomy
The thing that really struck Marcus Donovan about Zebra-One’s interior was the emptiness. As his team trundled down the long corridor, there were no access panels, controls or anything for a person to interact with. There hadn’t been any junctions, nor were there any markings indicating where they’d been or where they were going. He wasn’t foolish enough to expect a wall-map with a big red arrow labeled “You Are Here”, but anything at all would have been nice, and something resembling writing would have been even better.
Instead, he was left to wonder whether the original occupants—the “natives”—used written language at all. It was possible that their writing was in a wavelength he couldn’t see, but the team’s few peeks into infrared and ultraviolet revealed nothing worthy of note.
Still, he felt like the natives must have had some way to keep track of their location, and as his exploration continued on, the possibilities occupied his thoughts.
Small round ventilation organs ringed the corridor every twelve meters, and it was possible they released pheromones, or some other chemical marker that neither his team nor their equipment could detect. Communication by stink, as it were. That led to an image of man-sized ants and Zebra-One as their hive, but neither idea excited him very much.
The team had detected several fluctuating EM signals in upper radio frequencies, and Marcus toyed with the idea of electromagnetic communication. That was momentarily interesting until he imagined the natives as bipedal platypi, electro-sensitive duck-bills and all, and he cast the idea aside. Besides which, the signal could just as easily have been some kind of electrical equipment, and his team hadn’t discovered any meaningful pattern in them.
For just a moment, he wondered if the natives were telepathic, and Zebra-One had been trying to communicate with him since he arrived. Maybe, he said to himself, he’d stumbled into the land of acid-trip kaleidoscopes and crystal balls, with a totally blind third eye. Perhaps he’d brought the wrong kind of gypsies along. The thought made him burst into a fit of hysterical laughter, which attracted unwanted attention, and prompted one of Juliette St. Martin’s check-ups.
While she inspected him, Faulkland and the others took a closer look at the glowing walls. The light followed them as they traveled along, so that they were continually in a lit section of corridor about ten meters long that faded to reddened darkness at either end.
“Is it just me, or does it feel like we’re walking in place?” Faulkland asked as he moved his hand along the wall. An electrical pattern traced the motion of his fingers, exactly as had happened outside, but the effect was less striking here.
The miners were unconcerned with the lack of progress, but that wasn’t surprising; they’d spent most of their professional years walking through nondescript tunnels. Ignoring the alien architecture, this was all just a day’s work for them, Marcus figured. Not that he knew much about any of them. They kept to themselves, and every attempt to find common ground had been rebuffed.
“I won’t lie. I’m feeling kinda frustrated,” Marcus said. “Walking a straight hallway with no turns isn’t exactly my idea of high adventure.”
“Maybe this is a service duct. We could turn back and try another iris,” Juliette said.
Marcus never liked turning back. “Not yet,” he said. “I’ve got a feeling we’re missing something here.”
He started to chew on his lower lip. The problem felt familiar, or at least the frustration did. It felt like trying to solve a riddle.
He hated riddles. They weren’t real problems, as far as he was concerned. Real world problems had multiple solutions, each with its own strengths and drawbacks. They could always be solved through some combination of persistence and creativity, or failing that, they could be circumnavigated. Riddles, on the other hand, were contrivances. They were tricks with only one answer that was intentionally hidden behind misleading words and false imagery.
To solve a riddle, it was necessary to throw away one’s preconceived notions. Either that, or hit the person with the answer. Marcus weighed the two options and considered the cutting torch on his belt, but he wasn’t ready to cut the Gordian knot just yet. That only left re-examining his preconceptions.
“Someone tell me what a tunnel is.” Marcus was thinking out loud, and realized he sounded like a perfect idiot.
One of the miners answered, “A passageway through solid material, connecting two or more places, sir.”
“It takes you some place you want to go, right?”
“I guess,” another miner replied. “Not much point in building a tunnel to somewhere you don’t want to go, is
