must have. Dada…was perhaps persuading himself to believe.
As Tej, Amiri, and Grandmama exited the groundcar, Pearl detached herself from the shadow of a pillar and waved them over. Amiri removed a hefty valise from the trunk and followed.
“It’s looking good,” said Pearl. “Seems to be a storeroom for garage maintenance, in use, but no one has been in or out since I’ve been monitoring. I’ve adjusted the lock for us.”
She glanced around and led the way into a small, utilitarian chamber lit only, at the moment, by a cold light set on a metal shelf. The chamber and shelves seemed to contain stacks of various traffic barricades, buckets of paint, a ladder, and encouragingly dusty miscellanea. Pearl cracked a second cold light, doubling the eerie illumination.
“We need to leave it looking like no one has been in or out, too,” said Amiri. “At least for now. Where should we start?”
“Let’s shift these two shelves,” said Pearl. “We can shift them back, after. Here, Tej, take one end.”
Tej dutifully lifted her half of the grubby thing. When they were done, a large patch of concrete flooring lay exposed in the chamber’s corner.
From the valise, Amiri handed out breath masks, all marked with logos from the jumpship line the Arquas had traveled in on. Tej was under the impression that such safety devices were supposed to be handed back at the end of the voyage, but oh well. Waste not. He then donned biotainer gloves and removed a bottle from the valise; everyone else stood well back as he squatted and trailed a line of liquid in a smooth circle about a meter in diameter over the concrete, which began to bubble.
While the cutting fluid worked, he laid out other objects, including a long, mysterious padded case. Then they all stood back and stared for a while.
“All right,” he said at last, and he, Tej, and Pearl combined to lever the concrete slab out of its matrix and shove it aside. Revealed was a layer of pressed stones.
Pearl trundled up a waste bin, and she and Amiri and Tel then knelt and began prying up rocks-by hand. “You might have brought a shovel,” Tej grumbled.
“There should only be about a half a meter of this before we hit subsoil,” Amiri said. “Maybe less, if the contractor stinted.”
“Many hands make light the work,” Grandmama intoned, watching. At Tej’s irritated glance over her shoulder, she added, “It’s an old Earth saying I picked up.”
“No wonder everybody left the planet,” muttered Tej. Hired grubbers with power tools seemed a better deal for lightening a load to her.
“I would feel more secure if we could have found a place to rent or buy,” said Amiri. “Really proof against interruptions.”
“But this leaves no data trail,” said Pearl, perhaps defending her find.
This squabble continued intermittently until Tej found herself at the bottom of a half-meter-deep hole levering rocks out of identifiable dirt. Grandmama leaned over, shone the light down, and said, “That’s probably enough.” At least Amiri gave Tej a hand out. She pulled down her mask and sucked on a bleeding fingertip where her nail had broken.
Amiri brought the long box to the lip of the hole, took a deep breath, and knelt to open it.
“You don’t have to handle it like a live bomb,” Grandmama chided. “It’s quite inert until it’s activated.”
“If the stuff eats dirt, won’t it eat us?” said Amiri.
“Only if you are foolish enough to get it on yourself while it’s working,” said Grandmama. “Which I trust no grandchild of mine would be, especially after how many years of expensive Escobaran biomedical education?”
Amiri sighed and redonned his gloves. Tej ventured nearer to look more closely into the box.
It bore a label reading Mycoborer, experimental, GSA Patent Applied For. Do not remove from GalacTech Company premises without authorization, under penalty of immediate termination and criminal prosecution. Inside the box were layers of trays holding an array of thin, dark sticks, each about fifty centimeters long.
“How deep should we go for the first vertical shaft?” asked Amiri.
“Since Pearl’s location has given us the first two stories down for free, I think eight meters should be enough to start,” said Grandmama judiciously. “We may have to dogleg down more later, depending on what we find between, but that should put us approximately level with the top floor of my old laboratory bunker.”
“What diameter? A meter may not be very roomy, if we have to bring much stuff back up and out.”
“Mm, we may be able to drive a parallel or diagonal shaft later. For the moment, the chief urgency is to get someone inside to inventory what’s still there as swiftly as possible.”
If anything, Tej couldn’t help thinking.
“Right,” said Amiri, and gingerly took up a pair of cutters, measured eight centimeters along one of the sticks, and snipped it through. He then took a half-meter-long drilling rod, descended to the hole, and began twisting it down through the hard-packed soil. Everything still all by gloved hand.
“If we’re doing this,” said Tej, “then why do I have to spend all day tomorrow driving Star around to engineering and plumbing supply places?”
“To give your nice ImpSec people something to look at, dear,” said Grandmama. “They will be happier that way, I’m sure.”
“By the time they think we’re ready to start, we should be done,” said Pearl. “How did you find out about this”-she bent to peer at the label-“Mycoborer product, anyway?”
“I did some consulting a few years back for GalacTech Bioengineering, and struck up an acquaintance with one of the developers.”
“Did you steal it out of their labs?” asked Pearl, with an air of incipient admiration.
“By no means,” said Grandmama, with a bit of a sniff, possibly at so crude a concept. “But when I and your mother and Shiv thought of this possible resource, I remembered Carlo, and went to see him. He was happy to give me a large supply. I thought it might be needed.” Her tone was a touch smug.
Amiri slipped the stick down his new hole, eyed it for straightness, climbed out, and drew from his valise a liter bottle of perfectly ordinary household ammonia, apparently purchased from some local grocery. He descended again and gingerly poured about half of it in around the stick. It disappeared into the dark with a bare gurgle, only its pungent aroma rising, along with Amiri, from their little excavation. Tej hastily readjusted her mask.
Four people stood around the pit, staring.
“Nothing’s happening,” said Tej after a minute.
“I thought you said this would work fast,” said Pearl.
“It’s not instantaneous,” chided Grandmama. “Macro-biological processes seldom are.” She added after a while, as anything visible continued to not happen, “The Mycoborer was developed as a method of laying pipe without having to dig trenches; the genetic developer hopes it can be trained to build its own custom pipe as it goes, but that seems to lie in the future. For the moment, they’re happy to have it proceed in a straight route with uniform diameter.”
“Pipes,” said Tej, trying to picture this. “Will they be big enough for people to get through?”
“Some pipes are quite large,” said Grandmama. “For civic water tunnels and underground monorails, for example.”
“Oh,” said Tej. “Um…if it’s really alive, what stops it from just growing forever?”
“The tubular walls, which are composed of its own waste products, eventually choke it off,” said Grandmama. “Failing that, there is a suicide gene built-in after it loses enough telomeres, and failing that, there is ordinary senescence. And failing that, it can be sterilized by heat. Really, I was entirely in sympathy with poor Carlo over his frustration with the delays about the scaled-up outdoor testing. Those Earth regulatory agencies are so obstructive.”
Amiri blinked. “Wait. This stuff has never been tested?”
“Outdoors, no. It has been tested most extensively in Carlo’s laboratory.” She added pensively, “It is supposed to penetrate fairly swiftly through soil, subsoil, and clay. So-so through sand. Poor in limestone, stopped by granite and other igneous rocks and by most synthetic materials. It is possible we may be compelled to reroute a few times, if the Mycoborer comes up against unexpected subsoil inclusions.”
Amiri was staring downward, looking disconcerted. “Never been tested…and we’re betting the House on it?”
“It’s being tested now,” said Grandmama, in a voice of utmost reason. “And in a very tidy legal isolation from
