hint at the depth and extent of the tunnel system. The corvette now lay with its dorsal lock positioned over the surface entry point, separated by only a couple of metres of clear space.
“I can do this alone,” Dreyfus said, ready to push himself through the suitwall.
“We don’t both need to go inside.”
“And I’m not babysitting the corvette while you have all the fun,” Sparver replied.
“All right,” Dreyfus said.
“But understand this: if something happens to one of us down there—whether it’s you or me—the other one gets out of there as fast as he can and concentrates on warning Panoply. Whatever we’re dealing with here, it’s bigger than the life of a single prefect.”
“Message received,” Sparver said.
“See you on the other side.”
Dreyfus pushed himself through the grey surface of the suitwall. As always, he felt ticklish resistance as the suit formed around him, conjured into being from the very fabric of the suitwall. He turned around in time to observe Sparver’s emergence: seeing the edges of the suit blend into the exterior surface of the suitwall and then pucker free. For a moment, the details of Sparver’s suit were blurred and ill-defined, then snapped into sharpness.
The two prefects completed their checks, verifying that their suits were able to talk to each other, and then turned to face the waiting airlock that would allow entry into the rock. Nothing about it surprised Dreyfus, save the fact that it existed in the first place. It was a standard lock, built according to a rugged, inert-matter design. The lock had been hidden before the engagement, tucked away near the base of one of the slug cannons. A concealed shaft must have led down from the surface before the cannons deployed.
There was no need to invoke the manual operating procedure since the lock was still powered and functional. The outer door opened without hesitation, admitting Dreyfus and Sparver to the lock’s air-exchange chamber.
“There’s pressure on the other side,” Sparver said, indicating the standard-format read-out set into the opposite door.
“There’s probably no one inside this thing, but there might be, so we can’t just blow it wide open.”
It was a complication Dreyfus could have done without, but he concurred with his deputy. They would need to seal the door behind them before they advanced further.
“Close the outer door,” Dreyfus said.
The lock finished pressurising. Dreyfus’ suit tasted the air and reported that it was cold but breathable, should the need arise.
He hoped it wouldn’t.
“Stay sharp,” he told Sparver.
“We’re going deeper.”
Dreyfus waited for the inner door to seal itself before moving off. Common lock protocol dictated both inner and outer doors be closed against vacuum unless someone was transitioning through.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” he said, knowing that Sparver’s vision was at least as poor as his own.
“I’m switching on my helmet lamp. We’ll see if that’s a good idea in about two seconds.”
“I’m holding my breath.”
The helmet revealed that they had arrived in a storage area, a repository for tools and replacement machine parts. Dreyfus made out tunnelling gear, some spare airlock components, a couple of racked spacesuits of PreCalvinist design.
“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 face-patch 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
