relevant data before we consider how to achieve extraction.”
“Okay,” Joshua said reluctantly. “Your call. But we’re here if you need us.” He returned to the tactical situation.
“Right, let’s keep these bastards busy,” Joshua said. He instructed the flight computer to fire another combat wasp at the planet.
Halfway down the giant spiral ramp, the easiest way to descend was to sit and slide. Black frost had coated the floor, sending broad tendrils scurrying up the wall like frigid creepers. Along with the others Monica was bumping along on her bum as if she was on an aprиs ski glissade, gradually picking up speed, and ignoring the total lack of dignity. Clouds of filthy ice motes were spraying up from where the suit was making its grinding contact with the ramp. Every now and then she’d hit an uneven patch and glide through the air for a metre.
“Getting near the bottom,” Samuel datavised.
He was two people down the line from Monica, nearly obscured by the black particle haze. Suit beams were jouncing about chaotically, throwing discordant shadows across the walls.
Monica put her gauntlets down to try and brake her speed. They just skipped and skidded about. “Just how do we slow down?” she asked.
“Manoeuvring pack.” Samuel triggered the jets at full throttle, feeling the gentle thrust slow him. The serjeant directly behind bumped into his back. “Everybody at once, please.”
The ramp shaft was suddenly full of whirling pearly-white fog as ice granules and nitrogen blended together, boosting the air pressure. Suit lights fluoresced it to a uniform opacity.
Monica shifted to micro-radar as her speed slowed drastically. This time when she put her hands down she pressed hard enough to activate the augmentation. It allowed her to dig her fingertips into the sheet of ice, producing a loud wince-inducing screech as they gouged out ten straight furrows. She halted on a relatively flat section. Radar showed her the end of the ramp fifteen metres ahead and the other armour suits skating elegantly to a halt around her. The white fog vanished as quickly as it’d emerged, sucked away back up the ramp, and out through the archway ahead.
They picked themselves up and scanned round. The ramp had come out at an intersection of eight corridors. Beacons had been stuck on each archway. The ice along the floor of every corridor was slightly rumpled, like stone paving slabs worn by centuries of feet. Nothing else showed the archaeology expedition had once passed this way.
“This is where we should split up,” one of the serjeants datavised. “Two of us will lay heat trails, while you head for ring five.”
Monica accessed the archaeology expedition’s map file, and integrated it with her inertial guidance block. Orange graphics overlaid her sensor vision, indicating the corridor they should take. She took another sensor disk from the tube and stuck it on the wall. “Okay. You two take care, they’ll be here in another twenty minutes. Oski, Renato, let’s go.” The four humans and two remaining serjeants started off down the corridor, bouncing along in low glides in the one-third gravity field.
Ione’s quad mind started to melt away into four more individual, independent identities as the serjeants separated from each other. One of her chose a corridor which the map file showed would lead towards a chemical plant of some kind. She drew a laser pistol and datavised it to a very low power setting, with an intermittent discharge varying over three seconds. As she walked forwards in long loping steps she began sweeping it in a short arc, keeping the muzzle pointed at the ground. Speckle points of warmth blossomed around her feet—never enough to thaw the ice, just to make an imprint. To an infrared sensor it would appear as if several people had walked along beside her.
The darkness which contracted around the bubble of light from her suit lights was absolute, isolating her to an unnerving degree, a fact only slightly alleviated by affinity contact with her other three selves and Samuel.
My third experience of life outside Tranquillity, and it’s just rock tunnels not much different from Ayacucho. But a lot more oppressive, and that’s without the possessed after me.
The others in the team were feeling the same low harmonic of unease. Monica was leading now, a locomotion auto-balance program keeping her movements smooth and steady in the low gravity. Despite the depressing surroundings, their easy progress was confidence enhancing. She’d had a lot of misgivings about the whole mission, and this part most of all. In her mind during the flight here, Tanjuntic-RI had taken on the appearance of a large chunk of debris, just like the fragments that made up the Ruin Ring. Reality was considerably better. Nothing was broken inside the arkship, merely neglected and cold. She could even imagine revitalizing the old wanderer. If the fusion generators could be started up again, and power fed through the distribution net, it would be a simple matter for light and heat to return.
“How come they abandoned this?” she asked. “Why not rendezvous with an asteroid and use it as a ready-made base for their microgee industry?”
“Because of the upkeep,” Oski datavised back. “The whole thing is interdependent, you can’t just keep a life support ring going and dump the rest. And it’s big. Keeping it functioning would take too much effort for the level of return. They were much better off building smaller-scale asteroid habitation caverns from scratch.”
“Shame. At the very least the Tyrathca could have made a fortune selling it as a human tourist destination.”
“That’ll be that famous phlegmatism of theirs. They just don’t care about it.”
After five minutes they came to the first second-level cavern. A hemisphere two hundred metres high, the walls ribbed by bands of tubes. There was a single huge machine in the centre, supported by ten three-metre- thick pipes that rose out of the ground to act as its legs. Another ten pipes emerged from the top of the machine to vanish into the chamber’s apex. The team stood just inside the entrance, playing their suit beams over the metal beast. Its sides were fluted with long glass columns, tarnished on the inside with heat-blackened chrome. Valves, coils, relays, motors, intake grids, high-voltage transformers, and pumps protruded from the rest of the edifice like metallic warts.
“What in Christ’s name is that?” Renato asked.
“Access your file,” Oski told him. “It’s some kind of biological reactor. They bred a lot of organic compounds inside it.”
Renato walked over to one of the big pipes and took a look directly underneath the reactor’s formidable bulk. The casing had cracked as the arkship lost its heat, allowing ragged strings of some blue green compound to ooze out all over the base. They’d clotted in hanging webs before freezing solid. Smears and stains of other liquids were splattered across the floor.
“There’s something wrong with all of this,” Renato datavised.
“What do you mean?” Samuel asked.
“Just look at this thing.” The young astronomer slapped his hand against the pipe. Even in the rarefied atmosphere, the suit audio sensors could pick up a faint clang. “It’s, like . . . immortal. I can’t imagine anything else occupying this chamber since the day they left their star. I know they’ll have rebuilt it a hundred times during the voyage. And I know they go for the brute strength engineering solutions. But I don’t understand how nothing can have changed in fifteen thousand years. Nothing, for Christ’s sake. How can you draw a line across your technology and say we will never develop anything that goes beyond this?”
“You’ll be able to ask them soon,” Monica datavised. “Their ship will reach us in another ten minutes. Look, Renato, I know this is all fascinating, but we really don’t have the time. Okay?”
“Sure, I’m sorry. I just hate unsolved puzzles.”
“That’s what makes you a good scientist. And I’m glad you’re here to help us. Now, this is the corridor we want.” Monica left another sensor disk on one of the stolid pipes and started walking again. Renato took a last glance at the ancient reactor and followed her. The two serjeants brought up the rear.
“The Tyrathca ship is definitely docking,” Beaulieu said. “They’ve matched velocities with Tanjuntic- RI.”
“Bugger,” Joshua grunted. They were enjoying a slight lull in the three-dimensional chess game that was the high-orbit diversion.
