of garbage aside to reveal. .
Bishop.
Or, more accurately, what was left of him. The android components were scattered amid the rest of the junk and she had to dig and sort for another hour before she was certain she’d salvaged absolutely everything that might be of use.
She made a preliminary attempt to correctly position the parts. Not only was the result unencouraging, it was downright pitiful. Most of the face and lower jaw was missing, crushed beyond recognition in the EEV or lost somewhere within the mass of trash outside. Portions of the neck, left shoulder, and back had somehow survived intact. In addition there were sensitive related components which had spilled or been torn free from the exterior shell.
Grim-faced and alone, she began carefully packing them into the sack she’d brought with her.
That’s when the arm coiled around her neck and the hands grabbed hard at her shoulders. Another hand appeared, clutching feverishly between her legs, fondling roughly. A man materialized in front of her. He was grinning, but there was no humour in his expression.
With a cry she broke free of the arms restraining her. The startled prisoner just gaped as her fist landed in his face and her foot between his thighs. As he crumpled, prisoner Junior appeared and wrapped his thick arms around her, lifting her off the ground to the encouraging sniggers of his companions, throwing her spread-eagled across a corroded pipe. The other men closed in, their body odour obliterating the smell of salt, their eyes glittering.
‘Knock it off.’
Gregor turned, his gaze narrowing as he isolated a silhouette, close. Dillon.
Gregor forced a grin. ‘Jump in the saddle, man. You wanna go first?’
Dillon’s voice was low, ominous. ‘I said knock it off.’
With his weight resting on the gasping Ripley, Junior snarled back over his shoulder. ‘Hey, what’s it to you, man?’
‘It’s wrong.’
‘Fuck you.’
Dillon moved then, deceptively fast. The two men in back went down hard. Junior whirled and brought a huge fist around like a scythe, only to have his opponent weave, gut-punch him, and snatch up a metal bar. Junior staggered and tried to dodge, but the bar connected with the side of his skull. The second blow was harder, and he dropped like stone.
The other cowered and Dillon whacked them again, just to keep them thinking. Then he turned to Ripley, his expression solemn.
‘You okay?’
She straightened, still breathing hard. ‘Yeah. Nothing hurt but my feelings.’
‘Take off,’ he said to her. He indicated his fellow prisoners.
‘I’ve got to reeducate some of the brothers. We’re gonna discuss some matters of the spirit.’
She nodded, hefted her bag of Bishop, and started back. As she passed the men on the ground Gregor glanced up at her.
She punched him squarely in the mouth. Feeling better, she resumed her course.
VII
There is night, which is dark. There is the obdurate emptiness of dreams, whose lights are only imaginary. Beyond all is the void, illuminated however faintly by a million trillion nuclear furnaces.
True darkness, the utter absence of light, the place where a stray photon is as impotent as an atomic anomaly, lies only deep within the earth. ‘In caverns measureless to man’ as the old stanza rhythmically declaims. Or in those cracks and crevices man creates in order to extract the wealth of planets.
A tiny but in and of itself impressive portion of one corner of Fiorina was honeycombed with such excavations, intersecting and crisscrossing like the components of a vast unseen puzzle, their overall pattern discernible only in the records the miners had left behind.
Boggs held his wax-impregnated torch high, waved it around as Rains lit a candle. To such men the darkness was nothing to be feared. It was merely an absence of light. It was also warm within the tunnels, almost oppressively warm.
Rains placed the long-burning taper on the floor, next to the wall. Behind them a line of identical flames stretched off into the distance, delineating the trail they’d taken and the route back to the occupied portion of the complex.
Golic sat down, resting his back against a door set in the solid rock. There was a sign on the door, battered and worn by machinery and time.
TOXIC WASTE DISPOSAL
THIS SPACE HERMETICALLY SEALED
ACCESS TO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
PROHIBITED
That was just fine with the explorers. They had no wish to be suitably authorized.
Rains had unfolded the chart at his feet and crouched, studying the lines and shafts by the light of his torch. The map was no simple matter of vertical and horizontal lines. There were old shafts and comparatively recent ones, fill-ins and reopenings, angle cuts and reduced diametre accessways to accommodate specialized machinery only. Not to mention the thousands of intersecting air ducts. Different colours signified different things.
Numerous earlier expeditions had given the prisoners some idea of what to expect, but there was always the chance that each new team would run into something unexpected. A scrambled byte in the storage units could shift an abyssal shaft ten metres out of line, or into a different tunnel. The chart was a tentative guide at best. So they advanced carefully, putting their faith in their own senses and not in dated printouts.
Boggs leaned close. ‘How many?’ Though he spoke softly, his voice still echoed down the smooth-walled passage.
Rains checked the chart against his portable datapack. ‘This makes a hundred and eighty-six.’
His companion grunted. ‘I say we call it a vacation and start back.’
‘No can do.’ Rains gestured at the seemingly endless length of tunnel that lay before them. ‘We’ve at least got to check out the rest of this stretch or Dillon’ll pound us.’
‘What he don’t know won’t irritate him. I won’t tell. How about you, Golic?’ The third member of the trio was digging through his backpack. Hearing his name he looked up, frowned, and uttered a low, vaguely inquisitive sound. ‘That’s what I thought.’
Golic approached an ancient cigarette machine. Kicking the lock off, he yanked open the door and began loading packs of preserved narcosticks into his duffel. Naturally he chewed as he worked.
On the surface the noise would have been far less noticeable, but in the restricted surroundings and total silence of the tunnel the third man’s rumbling maceration resounded like a large, improperly lubricated piece of machinery. Boggs grumbled.
‘Can’t you chew with your mouth closed? Or better yet, swallow that crap you’re eating whole? I’m trying to figure how big this compartment is so we can decide if it’s legit toxic storage or some miner’s private stock, and I can’t think with all the goddamn noise you’re making.’
Rains rustled the chart disapprovingly. ‘Just because we’re away from the others doesn’t mean we, should ignore the precepts. You’re no supposed to swear.’
Boggs’s mouth tightened. ‘Sorry.’ He stared daggers at Golic, who quite naturally ignored them. Finally he gave up and rose to squint down the tunnel. ‘We’ve circled this entire section once. That’s all anyone could ask. How many candles, again?’
There was no reply from the floor. ‘Rains, how many candles?’
His companion wasn’t listening. Instead he was scratching himself furiously, an intense nervous reaction that had nothing whatsoever to do with the bugs, who didn’t live in the shafts anyway. It was so uncharacteristic, so
