‘Want to take a guess at how long this junk’s been here?’ Sparver said, activating his own lamp.
‘Could be ten years, could be two hundred,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Hard to call.’
‘You don’t pressurise a place if you’re planning to mothball it. Waste of air and power.’
‘I agree. See anything here that looks like a transmitter, or that might send a signal?’
‘No joy.’ Sparver nodded his helmet lamp towards the far wall. ‘But if I’m not mistaken, that’s a doorway. Think we should take a look-see?’
‘We’re not exactly overwhelmed with choices, are we?’
Dreyfus kicked off from the wall and aimed himself at the far doorway, Sparver following just behind. Doubtless the rock’s gravity would eventually have tugged him there, but Dreyfus didn’t have time to wait for that. He reached the doorway and sailed on through into a narrow shaft furnished only with rails and flexible hand-grabs. When the air began to impede his forward drift, he grabbed the nearest handhold and started yanking himself forward. The shaft stretched on far ahead of him, pushing deeper into the heart of the rock. Maybe the shaft had been there for ever, he thought: sunk deep into the rock by prospecting Skyjacks, and someone had just come along and used it serendipitously. But the tunnelling equipment he’d already seen didn’t have the ramshackle, improvised look of Skyjack tools.
He was just pondering that when he caught sight of the end of the shaft.
‘I’m slowing down. Watch out behind me.’
Dreyfus reached the bottom and spun through one hundred and eighty degrees to bring his soles into contact with the surface at the base of the shaft. Up and down still had little meaning in the rock’s minimal gravity, but his instincts forced him to orient himself as if his feet were being tugged toward the middle.
He assessed his surroundings as Sparver arrived next to him. They’d come to an intersection with a second shaft that appeared to run horizontally in either direction, curving gently away until it was hidden beyond the limit of the illumination provided by their helmet lamps. The rust-brown tunnel wall was clad with segmented panels, thick braids of pipework and plumbing stapled to the sides. Every now and then the cladding was interrupted by a piece of machinery as rust-brown and ancient-looking as the rest of the tunnel.
‘We didn’t see deep enough to map this,’ Dreyfus said. ‘What do you make of it?’
‘Not much, to be frank.’
‘Judging by the curvature, we could be looking at a ring that goes right around the middle of the rock. We need to find out why it’s here.’
‘And if we get lost?’
Dreyfus used his suit to daub a luminous cross onto the wall next to their exit point. ‘We won’t. If the shaft’s circular, we’ll know when we come back to this point, even if something messes around with our inertial compasses.’
‘That’s me fully reassured, then.’
‘Good. Keep an eye out for anything we can use to squeeze a signal back to Panoply.’
Dreyfus started moving, the brown walls of the shaft drifting past him. His own shadow stalked courageously ahead of him, projected by the light from Sparver’s lamp. He glanced down at the suit’s inertial map, displayed just below his main facepatch overlay.
‘So do you have a theory as to what the Nerval-Lermontov family needs with this place?’ Sparver asked. ‘Because this is beginning to look like a lot more than a simple case of inter-habitat rivalry, at least from where I’m standing.’
‘It’s bigger, definitely. And now I’m wondering if the Sylveste family might have a part in this after all.’
‘We could always pay them a visit when we’re done here.’
‘We wouldn’t get very far. The family’s being run by beta-level caretakers. Calvin Sylveste’s dead, and his son’s out of the system. The last I heard, he’s not due back for at least another ten or fifteen years.’
‘But you still think there’s a Sylveste angle.’
‘I’m all for coincidence, Sparv, and I agree that the family has a lot of tentacles. But as soon as the Eighty popped up in our investigation, I got the feeling there was more to it than chance.’
After a pause, Sparver said, ‘Do you think the Nerval-Lermontovs are still around?’
‘Someone’s been here recently. A place feels different when it’s deserted, when no one’s visited it for a very long time. I’m not getting that feeling here.’
‘I was hoping it was just me,’ Sparver said.
Dreyfus set his jaw determinedly. ‘All the more reason to investigate, then.’
But in truth he felt no compulsion to continue further along the corridor. He also felt Sparver’s unease. There was nothing he would rather have done than return to the corvette and await back-up, however long it took to arrive.
They hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred metres along the gently curving shaft when Sparver brought them to a halt next to a piece of equipment jutting from the wall. To Dreyfus it looked almost indistinguishable from the countless rust-coloured items of machinery they had already passed, but Sparver was paying it particular attention.
‘Something we can use?’ Dreyfus asked.
Sparver flipped aside a panel, revealing a matrix of tactile input controls and sockets. ‘It’s a tap-in point,’ he said. ‘No promises, but if this is hooked up to any kind of local network, I should be able to find my way to the transmitter and maybe open a two-way channel to Panoply.’
‘How long will it take?’
Sparver’s suit had been conjured with a standard toolkit. He dug into it and retrieved a strand of luminous cabling with a writhing, slug-shaped quickmatter universal adaptor at the end. ‘I should know within a few minutes,’ he said. ‘If it doesn’t work, we’ll move on.’
‘See what you can get out of it. I’ll be back here in five or ten minutes.’
Sparver’s eyes were wide behind his facepatch. ‘We should stay together.’
‘I’m just taking a look a little further along this shaft. We’ll remain in contact the whole time.’
Dreyfus left his deputy attending to the equipment, fiddling with adaptors and spools of differently coloured froptic and electrical cabling. He had no doubt that if there was a way to get a message to Panoply, Sparver would find it. But he could not afford to wait around for that to happen. Elsewhere in the rock, someone might be erasing evidence or preparing to make their escape via a hidden ship or lifepod.
Eventually Dreyfus looked back and saw that Sparver had vanished around the curve of the shaft.
‘How are you doing?’ he asked via the suit-to-suit comms channel.
‘Making slow progress, but I think it’s doable. The protocols are pretty archaic, but nothing I haven’t seen before.’
‘Good. Keep in touch. I’m pressing on.’
Dreyfus passed through a constriction in the cladding of the tunnel, tucking his elbows in to avoid banging them against the narrow flange where the walls pinched tighter. Looking back now, he could not even see the faint glow caused by the light spilling from Sparver’s helmet lamp. Psychologically, it felt as if they were kilometres apart rather than the hundreds of metres that was really the case.
Suddenly there came a bell-like clang, hard and metallic. Dreyfus’s gut tightened. He knew exactly what had happened, even before his conscious mind had processed the information. Where the constriction had been was now a solid wall of metal. A bulkhead door — part of an interior airlock system — had just slammed down between him and Sparver.
He returned to the door and checked the rim for manual controls, but found nothing. An automatic system had sealed the door, and the same automatic system would have to open it again.
‘Sparver?’
His deputy’s voice came through chopped and metallic. ‘Still reading you, but faintly. What just happened?’
‘I tripped a door,’ Dreyfus said, feeling sheepish. ‘It doesn’t want to open again.’
‘Stay where you are. I’ll see if I can work it from my side.’
‘Leave it for now. We made a plan and we’ll stick to it, even if I have to stay here until help arrives. If necessary I should be able to cut through with my whiphound, provided the door doesn’t incorporate any active quickmatter. In the meantime I’ll try circumnavigating and see if I can meet you from the other side.’
‘Try not to trip any more doors on the way.’
