“I think it’s a bomb.”
Even Jet paused at this. He brought his cold light closer to reveal a wad of corroded and uncorroded but in any case dead electronics, and an even more mysterious gray mass. “Er,” he said, and backed up a little.
Tej pocketed the necklace and crawled over to look more closely. The gray mass, several kilos’ worth, was slumping, and old wires led into it. “Plastic explosive of some kind?” Tej hazarded.
Jet’s brow wrinkled. “Some really old kind. Maybe it’s deteriorated by now.”
“Maybe it’s not.”
“Um.”
A frightened whisper, Amiri’s voice, came from their hole. “Tej? Jet?”
Jet rolled over, stuck his head down, and whispered back, “Amiri, you have to come see this!”
“I told you to leave that damned foot alone.”
“Yes, but it’s attached to a whole guy! You’re the doctor-you might be able to tell how old he is!”
Some muffled swearing was followed, a few minutes later, by Amiri wriggling through their makeshift passage. Anger at his more adventurous siblings warred with curiosity, in his expression; with a visible mental IOU, curiosity won, temporarily. Amiri’s gloved fingers danced over the visible portions of the corpse, probing, pulling, checking.
“Can’t be sure without knowing more about Barrayaran soil ecology,” he whispered. “But it’s not very dry down here. Not less than twenty years. Not more than forty. A local forensics expert could likely date it more precisely.” His eye at last fell on the backpack, stretched out beyond the skeletal fingers. “Oh, crap. Don’t even touch that!”
Jet tried for an innocent grin, defeated by his medical mask.
“Told you,” whispered Tej.
“It might be too old to go off, though,” Jet suggested. “Maybe we should, like…try to take a little sample to analyze.”
This approach plainly appealed to the researcher in Amiri, but he did stick his head down their hole to whisper, “Grandmama! You’re more of a chemist than I am. Do plastic explosives deteriorate over time?”
“Some do,” her voice came back.
“Ah.” Amiri unceremoniously plucked the knife from Jet’s hand, knelt, and gently tried to carve out a few grams of gray blob. It had apparently hardened with the decades.
“…some become unstable,” Grandmama’s voice continued.
Amiri abruptly desisted.
“I vote we leave it alone,” said Tej. “Or at least come back later when everything else is done. If there’s time.”
“Yes,” said Amiri, reluctantly folding the knife up. He didn’t give it back to Jet.
Jet didn’t protest.
From the same pocket, Amiri withdrew a child’s toy compass, a very simple analog tool indeed. He held up his cold light and squinted at the quivering needle. “I wonder where he was heading?”
“Depends on if he was coming or going?” said Tej.
Amiri sighed, and pocketed the compass again. “I need to get down here and hand-draw a meter-by-meter map, so we don’t waste time sending the Mycoborer in the wrong direction. Some more.”
They wiggled after him back through their unauthorized hole to find Grandmama waiting, scowling at the pile of dirt.
“Jet, you will have to clean this up,” she said, pointing. “Thoroughly, or everyone will be tracking it all over. And put something over this hole you made. The idea!”
“But Grandmama, it was a dead body!”
“Barrayaran graveyards are full of them, if you want more,” she said unsympathetically. “And very unsanitary they are, too. Cremation is much better.”
That was the Cetagandan custom, certainly.
Leaving the two boys to clean up, Grandmama gestured Tej back along the tunnel. Amiri didn’t deserve the chore, but it was plain someone had to watch Jet.
As they went along, Tej studied the ceiling more warily. Was it bending down, at any point?
They arrived back in the vestibule and doffed their masks and gloves. “What was wrong at the tunnel face?” Tej asked.
“The Mycoborer split around an inclusion. Went off in four perfectly useless directions. We started another.”
“What kind of inclusion?”
“Mm, storm sewer, I would hypothesize. It was a cylindrical pipe, anyway, and we could hear water running on the other side.”
“This deep?”
“We are actually close to level with the river, at this stratum. Though it wasn’t Barrayaran work-far too well made. I think it probably dated back to the Ninth Satrapy.”
“Grandmama-could our tunnel collapse? Like on the poor Barrayaran…” bomber? Tej tested that word-string in her mind, trying to decide if it made sense. Yeah, probably. Even if the fellow had been a suicide bomber, that had to have been a horrid death. She fingered the identity necklace in her pocket, and wondered if Ivan Xav owned a similar one. She’d not seen it among his things.
“Certainly, in due course.” Grandmama frowned back down their tunnel. “You have to understand, a perfectly circular pipe is in effect two arches supporting each other-an extremely strong shape. I saw such arches back on Earth, built only of simple stones, that have survived three millennia, and that despite it being such a tectonically active planet.”
“But our tunnel isn’t perfectly circular. It’s more sort of…intestinal.”
“Yes, pity. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to last the ages, only a week or two.”
But what if it collapses on somebody? Tej wanted to ask, but Grandmama was already climbing the rickety flex-ladder. She sighed and followed the carefully-moving kitty-slippers.
That night, by some miracle, Ivan found himself and Tej both awake and in the same place at the same time; and better yet, it was his bedroom. Tej was restless, though, wandering about the place. She opened the top drawer of Ivan’s dresser, into which he swept all his miscellaneous junk, and peered curiously, turning an item over now and then.
“What are you looking for?”
“I was just wondering…do you have any kind of military identification necklace? I’ve never seen you wear one.”
“Necklace? Oh, dog tags.”
“What do dogs have to do with it?”
“Nothing, that’s just what they’re called. I dunno why. They’ve always been called that. Plural, though they only issue you the one. I suppose that’s what they are, but necklace probably sounded too girly for the grunts.”
“Oh.”
“I think mine are hung with my black fatigues in my closet.”
“Do Barrayaran soldiers only wear them with the fatigues?”
“They’re not for every day, at least not at HQ. Just if you’re out in the field. Going into some dicey situation, say. There was an argument going around Ops for subcutaneous identity inserts, with electronic trackers, but the troops didn’t like it, and then somebody pointed out that if we could find our guys with a ping, so might an enemy, and the idea died in committee.” Not to mention the possibility that the bad guys could be their guys, in some civil fracas. It had happened before.
“So…” She hesitated, looking over her shoulder at him, where he waited in what he hoped was a good tactical position on what had become his side of the bed. “So if you were going into danger, that’s how I’d know?”
“I would hope you would know because I’d tell you.”
“No…” Her gaze on him grew thoughtful. “I’m not sure you would.”
