to Mudge and Pagan’s weapons.
We seemed to be heading towards black light, an ultraviolet light source. We stopped and waited while Pagan scouted ahead. After what seemed like a very long time he came back and gestured us forward. Even through the anonymity of an environment suit I could see that he was ready to drop from fatigue. We needed to rest soon but the surface hadn’t been the place to do it.
I was working on automatic now as I picked up that fucking container again and we headed down.
I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but despite the briefings and vizzes I still wasn’t prepared for the sheer scale of the cavern. We were huddled in a tunnel mouth in the ceiling of a chamber looking down at a two-mile drop. The cavern floor was a dense carpet of genetically modified fern and what looked like giant spider plants. There were also ghostwood trees – wide but low and stunted, radiating out like ancient wagon wheels – genetically modified versions of the kauri tree indigenous to New Zealand. In the high-G environment they produced dense wood that was incredibly strong but difficult to cut and work. They were grown from seeds imported from Earth and had been designed to help with the terraforming process. The huge UV strip lights that ran across the cavern ceiling provided the plants with energy and bathed the whole chamber in the visible violet light from that part of the spectrum.
Acidic salt-ice glaciers had crawled through the belly of this planet like worms aeons ago. As they receded back into Nightside, subject to the vagaries of the planet’s unpredictable geothermal activity, they had left in their wake smooth caverns like this that went on as far as the eye could see.
The walls of the cavern were smooth and again reminded me of weather-eroded bone, but down here the clearly defined different rock strata were multihued and showed in stripes. However, the walls and much of the visible floor of the cavern showed extensive damage. The rock had been scored, burned and heavily cratered. Large areas of the genetically modified plant life had been trampled and ripped up – I assumed by fighting and the movement of large bodies of human and presumably Their troops. Parts of the rock were deformed where plasma strikes had made it run like lava before it had cooled and solidified.
Despite the war damage and the artificial violet light giving it an unreal feeling, like a London art club, the cavern was strangely beautiful. Or at least that was what I thought until I took my helmet off. The environment suit’s sensors had advised me that it was okay to try the air. They fucking lied. I could breathe, if you could call it that, but the atmosphere was greasy, acrid. It smelled of rotten eggs and every breath tasted like licking a battery.
I was covered in sweat from head to foot and steamed in the frigid but manageably cold air. The others were removing their helmets as well. All of us were gasping for breath, which, filter or no filter, was making our lungs burn.
We all looked different now. Just before the drop we’d injected our faces with a morphing compound that allowed us to change the look of our features to a degree. We were heading into what we expected to be a near- total-surveillance environment and needed to avoid being identified by the sophisticated facial feature recognition software that Demiurge was bound to be using.
The others all looked like themselves only slightly skewed. We’d also made other cosmetic changes. Changed hair colours, changed hairstyles where possible. Mudge didn’t look right with brown hair and he was going to have to wear glasses all the time to cover his camera lens eyes. I’d thought Pagan was going to cry when he’d cut off his ginger dreadlocks.
‘I’m sorry,’ Pagan said to everyone, shaking his head. I could hear the misery in the aging hacker’s voice at letting us down. He looked awful.
‘Don’t worry about it, that was a miserable fucking tab,’ I heard a bone-tired me say to him.
Merle ran his hand through the stubble on his skull. He’d shaved it to get rid of the mess of hair he’d grown in captivity. He looked more like his sister than ever now.
‘We need food, rest and a brew-up.’ I’d said it to everyone but I wanted Merle’s opinion.
‘We need to be careful. We’re near one of the processors. They’re heavily guarded. A lot of the fighting went on around them during the war. They have remote and manned aerial patrols so we can’t stay here too long, and I don’t know what a brew-up is.’
‘A cup of tea. You’re American – you wouldn’t understand,’ a panting, sweat-soaked Mudge said.
‘What’s not to understand about a cup of tea?’ Merle asked.
‘For your lot, how to bloody make one,’ Mudge answered.
Everyone from Britain who’d ever had an American-made cup of tea was smiling. Even Pagan managed a weak grin. I think Merle had understood his job as straight man. That was promising.
It wasn’t a proper brew-up in a mess tin over a camp stove. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk that in this atmosphere. It’d taste bloody awful. Instead we had cans of self-warming sweet tea – it wasn’t the same – and some energy bars.
Merle was rigging the climbing gear, though each of us would check it before we used it. I wasn’t sure where he was getting the energy. Particularly as up until less than two weeks ago he’d been living in a hole in the ground with a French name.
‘I love the atmosphere,’ Mudge said, hawking and spitting. ‘Nope, no better. I don’t even want a cigarette. This is a deeply depressing world.’
‘It’s what it does to my hair that bothers me the most,’ Cat surprised me by saying.
‘I could see how that would get to you,’ Mudge said.
Merle smiled as he drove another piton into a seam in the rock. The crack echoed out into the huge cavern. We paused and scanned the cavern for movement. We waited and waited. Nothing.
‘What, you think I was born bald?’ Cat said as if the conversation had never been interrupted.
Morag looked horrified. ‘It’s just grown back,’ she said, fingering her lank and sweaty hair.
‘It’s all right, honey. I shaved it because it kept on going frizzy; it didn’t fall out.’
Morag looked relieved. Pagan and Mudge were smiling and shaking their heads.
‘See, this was why I didn’t join the army,’ Merle said dryly.
‘Too worried about their hair?’ I asked.
Despite the banter we were constantly scanning our surroundings and taking it in turns to eat and drink; the rest of the time we had weapons in our hands. We needed the banter after that walk.
‘The air force have better stylists,’ Cat said.
I smiled at this. Now time to spoil everyone’s fun.
‘Okay, everyone pack up the E-suits and shove your camo on.’
By camo I meant reactive camouflage. They were like gillie suits made of a rugged liquid-crystal thinscreen that adapted to and blended with the surroundings. One of the benefits of a near-bottomless expense account. Well that and the amount that each of us had embezzled. We took it in turns to get out of the E-suits, breaking them down and packing them away. More weight to carry but we didn’t know when we’d need them again. Then we shrugged on the reactive camouflage over whatever armour we were wearing.
Each of us was carrying five hundred metres of photoreceptive smart rope. Merle was taking the end of each of the pieces of rope and chemically bonding them together. He was then checking them, then Cat was rechecking them and then I did the same.
‘Is this enough?’ I asked.
Merle shrugged in a not very comforting manner. He took the winch frame and mechanism from the drop container and started fitting it together. I headed around to the other side of the hole in the cavern floor to aid him. The rest were watching our backs. We wrapped the container in a reactive camouflage suit and swung it out over the hole. The engine whined quietly as the winch mechanism slowly started feeding in the rope we’d coiled on the floor. Merle guided it through to make sure it didn’t snarl up. Now Cat and myself were covering the hole in case anything happened. In theory it was moving so slowly that the camouflage sheet and the properties of the rope should render it almost invisible.
It took a long time. We’d fed over a thousand metres of rope through when we heard it. An engine. The so- familiar sound of a gunship had once been a comforting sound to me. Not now.
Merle slowed the winch, bringing it to as gentle a stop as he could manage. I could still see the rope swinging from the winch. Cat and I backed a little further away from the edge of the hole. Merle took something from his webbing and unfolded it. Super-spy had brought a hand-held periscope. He lay down on the rock floor and peered through it into the cavern.
