I was wrong.
There was a glow coming out of the ground. It was so faint that I had stood no chance of seeing it until this moment, and even now it was much harder to make out by looking directly at it, than by catching it in my peripheral vision. Nor was it continuous. The source of the glow was a loose tracery of yellow-green threads, branching and rejoining in a kind of ragged net. It was either growing on the surface, or shining through from a layer just a little below it.
I was careful not to assume too much from this one glimpse. It might be a living organism, and that would have been worth an annotation or two in any report I ever managed to file back to my superiors. But it could also have been the result of some mineralogical process, owing nothing to metabolic chemistry. Interesting either way, but only a footnote, albeit a curious one.
I committed to my jump and sailed off into the void.
4.
In darkness I watched the maggot crawl into my trap. We were a mountain apart, but within each other’s line of sight. I was labouring up a slope, hardly needing to fake the slow failure of my suit’s locomotive systems. Thermal overload warnings sounded in my ears, forcing me to halt for long minutes, allowing the systems to cool down to some acceptable threshold. It gave me all the time I needed to track the maggot. I had removed all my faceplate notifications apart from a marker showing the mine’s location, and a dim pulsing bracket signifying the alien’s moving position. Everything else–the larger mass of the mountain, the shape of its summit and plunging flanks–I trusted to memory.
Now the maggot had surmounted the summit and was working down to the same area where I had implanted the mine. Moving quickly, too– even for an Eight-Warrior. I wondered what it made of my painful, halting deliberations. Confusion or some faint flicker of alien contempt? Both our suits must be struggling now, though, even though the maggot had a temporary advantage. I was at one thousand and sixteen atmospheres, already over the thousand-atmosphere design limit for this type of suit.
“Come on …” I breathed, urging it forward.
I had been still for some while. Even with the symbols in my faceplate, I became aware that there was a tracery of yellow-green threads around my position. They seemed brighter and thicker than before, more apparent to my eyes, and as I leaned back from the slope I could trace their extent much more readily. The threads wormed away in all directions, forming a kind of contour mesh which gave shape and form to the mountain.
It was not a mountain, of course. Mountains have foot slopes and bedrock. They are anchored to continents. This was a floating mass, suspended in the air. In our hurried race for shelter, there had been little time for theorising. But since I was obliged to pause, I allowed my mind to skim over the possibilities.
Nothing like this could ever have formed as a single entity, intact and whole. Nor could the mountain have fallen from space and somehow bobbed down to an equilibrium position in the atmosphere. It would have burned into ash at the first kiss of air, and if a few boulder-sized fragments made their way into the depths, they would have been moving far too fast to ever settle at these levels.
More likely, I thought, that the mountain had grown into this form by a slow process of accretion. Tiny particles, dust or pollen sized, might be borne in the atmosphere by normal circulation patterns. If those grains stuck together, they might begin to form larger floating structures. Provided the density of the accretion was less than the volume of atmosphere they displaced, they would not sink. But floating at a fixed altitude demanded some delicate regulatory process. If living material infested the whole of the mountain, not just its visible crust, then perhaps what I stood on was better thought of as a creature or colony of creatures that had incorporated inanimate matter into its matrix. Biological processes—the ingestion and expulsion of gases, organic molecules, other airborne organisms, could easily provide the means to regulate the mountain’s altitude.
So: perhaps more than a footnote. But it would be of only distant interest to my superiors. Simple organisms often did complex things, but that did not make them militarily useful. If a discovery could not be weaponised, or in some way turned to our advantage, it would be filed away under a low priority tag. A useful tactical data point, no more than that.
My suit had cooled down enough. I turned sharply back to the rock, and in that instant of turning a pulse of animation flowed through the glowing threads, racing away in all directions.
I had not imagined it.
The network had responded to my presence. I froze again, watching as the tracery returned to its former quiescence, and then moved again. Ripples of brightness raced through the threads, surging and rebounding. And even as I watched, new veins and branches seemed to press out from the ground. Perhaps they had been there all along, but were only now being activated, but it was impossible to avoid the sense that I had stimulated a spurt of growth, a spurt of interest.
It was aware of me.
My heart raced. Much more than a footnote, now. A reactive organism, capable of some low-level of information processing. And completely unknown, too. Had the maggot fleet not decimated ours, not forced our flight to this system, had their pursuit phalanx not chased us into this atmosphere, not whittled our fleet down to a few crippled survivors, and then just the one ailing ship …
Slowly my gaze returned to the mountain beyond this one. I should have seen nothing of it, across the void of darkness. But there was a faint glowing presence, something
