Gomez waited for a few moments before answering. ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘No, not if we keep on assuming this is a ship like our own. I don’t think it is. I think it’s something else — something we definitely weren’t expecting.’
‘Do you think it came from home — that it’s something they sent out after we left?’
‘No. They’ve only had a century, Gomez. I don’t think that’s enough time to come up with something like this.’ They slithered deeper. ‘It doesn’t feel like anything human. It doesn’t even feel like we’re inside a machine.’
‘But whatever it is, it just happens to look exactly like one of our own ships from the outside.’
‘Yes — until you get close. My guess is it altered its shape to mimic us; some kind of protective camouflage. Which worked, didn’t it? Titus… my father… he always thought there was another Flotilla ship trailing us. That was disturbing, but it could be explained by some event which had happened in the past. If he’d known there was an alien ship following us, it would have changed everything.’
‘What could he have done about it?’
‘I don’t know. Alert the other ships, perhaps. He would have assumed it meant us harm.’
‘Maybe he was right.’
‘I don’t know. It’s been out here an awfully long time. It hasn’t done much in all those years.’
Something happened then — a noise that they felt, rather than heard, like the sonorous clang of a very large bell. They were floating through vacuum so the reverberation must have been transmitted through the hull.
‘Gomez — what the hell was that?’
His voice came through weakly. ‘I don’t know — nothing happened here. But you’re suddenly a lot fainter.’
After we had been descending for nearly two hours, I saw something below, far down the vertical pipeline.
It was a faint golden glow, but it was coming closer.
I thought about the episode I had just had. I could still taste Sky’s fear as he entered the Caleuche; hard and metallic like the taste of a bullet. It seemed very much like the fear I was feeling myself. We were both descending into darkness; both of us seeking answers — or rewards — but also knowing that we were placing ourselves in great danger, with very little idea of what lay ahead. The way the episode resonated with my present experience was chilling. Sky had gone beyond simply infecting my mind with images. Now he seemed to be steering me, shaping my actions to commemorate his own ancient deeds; like a puppeteer whose strings stretched across three centuries of history. I clenched my fist, expecting that the episode would have caused blood to gush from my hand.
But my palm was perfectly dry.
The inspection robot continued its clunking descent. Nothing that Quirrenbach had done lately had made the machine move any faster. It was unbearably hot now and I reckoned none of us would have survived more than three or four hours before dying of heat exhaustion.
But it was getting lighter.
I soon saw why. Below us, but coming closer now, was a section of pipeline walled in filthy glass. Quirrenbach made the machine rotate so that none of us were easily visible by the time the robot began to descend through the transparent section. I still had a good view of the dark chamber we were moving through, a cavernous room infested with looming curved machinery: huge stovelike pressure vessels connected by networks of shiny intestinal tubing and festooned with slender catwalks. Rows of mighty turbines stretched away across the floor like sleeping dinosaurs.
We had reached the cracking station.
I looked around, wondering at the silent vastness.
‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone on duty,’ Zebra said.
‘Is this normal?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Quirrenbach said. ‘This part of the operation more or less runs itself. But I’d hated to have picked the one day when there was someone on duty who noticed the three of us coming down.’
Many dozens of pipes, much like the one I was descending, reached to the ceiling, a wide circular sheet of glass spoked by dark metal supports, and then rammed through it. Beyond it was only a stained soot-grey fog, for the cracking station lay deep in the chasm and was usually covered by the mist. Only when the fog parted momentarily, cleaved open by the chaotic thermals which spiralled up the chasm’s side, could I see the immense sheer walls of planetary rock rising above. Far, far above was the antenna-like extension of the stalk, where Sybilline had taken me to watch the mist jumpers. That had been only a couple of days ago, but it felt like an eternity.
We were far beneath the city now.
The inspection robot continued its descent. I had expected that we would stop somewhere near the floor of the cracking chamber, but Quirrenbach carried us slowly below the turbine floor, into darkness again. Perhaps there was another chamber to the cracking station, below the one we had passed through. I managed to cling to this idea for a while… until I knew that we had descended much too far for that to be the case.
The pipe we were in reached completely through the cracking station.
We were going deeper still. The pipe made a few jogging changes of direction, almost threading sideways at one point, and then we were descending again. It was so hot now that it was an effort to stay awake. My mouth was so dry that just thinking of drinking a glass of cold water was too much like mental torture. Somehow I stayed conscious, however — knowing I would need clarity of mind when I arrived wherever the robot was taking me.
Another thirty or forty minutes, then I saw another light below me.
It looked like journey’s end.
‘You too. Norquinco — check the…’ But even as he said it, Sky directed his torch back up the shaft they had come down, and he could see how the previously taut line was now beginning to drift, as if it had length to spare. It must have been severed somewhere further up the shaft.
‘Let’s get out now,’ Norquinco said. ‘We haven’t come very far — we can still find our, um, way back.’
‘Through solid hull? That line didn’t cut itself.’
‘Gomez has cutting equipment on the shuttle. He can get us out if he knows where we are.’
Sky thought about it. Everything that Norquinco said was correct, and any right-thinking person would now be doing their utmost to get back to the surface. Part of him wanted to do that as well. But another, stronger part was even more determined to understand what this ship — if it was a ship — actually meant. It was alien; he felt utterly sure of that now — and that meant it was the first evidence of alien intelligence any human being had ever witnessed. And — staggering though the odds were — it had latched itself onto his Flotilla, finding the slow, frail arks in the immensity of space. Yet it had chosen not to contact them, instead shadowing them for decades.
What would he find inside it? The supplies he had hoped to find aboard the Caleuche — even the unused antimatter — might be insignificant prizes compared to what really lay here, waiting to be exploited. Somehow or other this ship had matched velocities with the Flotilla, achieving eight per cent of lightspeed — and something made him certain that the alien ship had not found that in any way difficult; that achieving this speed had probably been trivially simple. Somewhere inside this worm-ridden solid black hull there had to be recognisable mechanisms which had pushed her up to her current speed, and which he might be able to exploit — not necessarily understand, he admitted that — but certainly exploit.
And perhaps, much more than that.
He had to go deeper. Anything less than that would be failure. ‘We’re carrying on,’ he told Norquinco. ‘For another hour. We’ll see what we find in that time, and we’ll be careful not to get lost. We still have the inertial compasses, don’t we?’
‘I don’t like it, Sky.’
‘Then think about what you might learn. Think of how this ship might work — its data networks; its protocols; the very paradigms underpinning her design. They might be exquisitely alien; as far beyond our modes of thinking as — I don’t know — a strand of DNA is beyond a single-chain polymer. It would take a special kind of mind to even begin to grasp some of the principles which might be at play. A mind of unusual calibre. Don’t tell me you aren’t the slightest bit curious, Norquinco.’
