‘What’s happening, Jerry?’ Jap asks over the com. He’d told me to keep my mouth shut and my ears open for the present.
The woman who replies sounds tired and irritated.
‘Duren flipped. He cut open the sarc in B27 and started to thaw out the chicken. Security got on to him and he took his crawler into the system.’
Jap says, ‘Always thought he was a bit too close to ‘em. He was on it from the start wasn’t he?’
‘You know he was,’ says the woman, her irritation increasing. I wince: Jap isn’t very good at subterfuge.
‘What’s happening now?’ he quickly asks.
‘They still haven’t found him and the computer quite competently tells us that for every hour that passes our chances of finding him halve. Ain’t technology wonderful?’
‘What about the sarcophagus and the corpse?’
‘Linser says waste not want not or some such ancient bullshit. He’s having them moved inside for intensive study. . Here they come now.’
I stare down the slope and see one of the crawlers towing something up the slope. I glance round at Jap and make the hand signal he had only recently taught me. We both switch our com units to private mode.
‘The Corlis intersection is in two solstan days. Would this Duren survive that?’ I ask.
Jap replies, ‘Depends where he is, but yeah, most likely, though not much beyond it. His suit would have to go onto CO conversion after a day and that drains the power pack.’
2
‘So he’d freeze and join the rest of them here.’
‘That about sums it up, yeah.’
Corlis is hammering towards us at fifty thousand kilometres per hour; pretty slow in cosmological terms. It is the size of Earth’s moon and not much different in appearance. Its major differences are its huge elliptical orbit and the smattering of ices on its surface. It will pass close enough to Orbus to perturb both their orbits. Orbus’s orbit by only a fraction, Corlis’s orbit will wind in a completely different spirograph shape round the sun. This has been happening for about three quarters of a million years and is set to change in a hundred thousand years, when Corlis will finally be captured by Orbus. It’s funny, but I find most of the scientific staff rather reluctant to discuss the coincidence of dates: the aliens have been frozen for the same length of time that Corlis has been on its erratic orbit. Only Linser has anything useful to offer.
‘These tunnels, chambers and sarcophagi are all that survived the disaster that sent Corlis on its way, or maybe they are all that survived Corlis’s arrival in this system. The tunnels survived because they are so deep. There was probably a surface civilization but it’s all gone now.’
It doesn’t ring true.
‘When Corlis passes here tomorrow, will we be safe?’ I ask.
‘Oh yes. The nearest disturbance will be five hundred kilometres away at a fault line,’
Linser replies. I get him to show me exactly where on a map, then thank him for his help before going off to see if I can steal a crawler. It is a surprisingly easy task to accomplish.
Just kilometre after kilometre of brick-lined tunnels. To begin with I stop at a few side chambers but find them all depressingly the same. A map screen inside the crawler shows my current position and just how far I have to go. A quick inspection of the mapping index gives me files filled with thousands of such pages, and directories filled with thousands of such files. Linser told me they had mapped but a fraction of the system. I have to wonder if there is any point in continuing — it obviously covers the entire planet and is much the same everywhere. While I am studying this screen a message flicks up in the corner and is also repeated over my coldsuit com.
‘Alright everybody, we’re not going to find him before conjunction. I want you all back at base by twelve hundred, Linser out.’
I look at the message in the corner of the map screen and realize that the only reason I have not been caught is that a lot of crawlers are out being used in the search for Duren. It only occurs to me now that all the crawlers must have some sort of beacon on them, some way they can be traced, and that Duren must have disabled it on his own. I immediately try to use the crawler’s computer to find out more about the beacon. On the menu I get beacon diagnostics and a hundred and one things I can do with said beacon. I cannot find where the damned thing is though.
‘Number 107, didn’t you get my message?’
Linser sounds a bit peeved. I ignore him while I continue to try to locate the beacon.
‘Ah, I see,’ says Linser. ‘That crawler is not your property, Mr Gregory.’
I decide it is time for me to respond. ‘I’ll return it to you in one piece,’ I say.
‘How very civil of you. You do realize you’re heading directly for the nearest fault line; an area that is going to become very dangerous in only a few hours from now?’
‘Yes, I do know,’ I reply. ‘I’m sure that’s where Duren is.’
There is a pause, then when Linser speaks again it is with a deal of irritation.
‘So you think we have not already searched Duren’s most obvious destination?’ he asks.
I feel a sinking in the pit of my stomach, but stubbornness prevents me from turning the crawler round.
‘You may have missed him,’ I say.
‘Well,’ Linser replies. ‘If you are intent on getting yourself killed then that is your problem. We will bill Netpress for any damage to the crawler and for the recovery of your body.
Good day to you Mr Gregory.’
