A couple of hundred metres up the slope there was a fork in the passage. He steered the creature into the smaller passage. It branched again, then came out into a junction with five tunnels, one going vertical, which was almost completely jammed with tubes in a faintly obscene twining contortion. Onward, again down the narrowest tunnel. There was a gap in the web of arboreal tubes just big enough for a human to wriggle through. It was lightless inside.
Callum paused the creature and focused his consciousness on the chaotic tumble of the onemind’s thoughts. Filtering and interpretation were far more art than science. But eventually he believed he was perceiving the narrow tunnel where the creature was waiting. Whatever lay in the gap seemed to be a natural cessation in the onemind’s perception.
‘What do you think?’ he asked Jessika. ‘Trap or genuine perception break?’
‘Let me review,’ she replied.
It was nearly an hour before she spoke again. ‘There is some kind of activity in there. The tubes go in, and I can sense pressure in the fluids. But there’s very little flow. The impulses are all part of the autonomic process. I’m guessing some kind of fluid reserve.’
‘A tank?’
‘Tank, bladder, reservoir – whatever. A place to store reserves.’
‘No armoured quint inside waiting for us?’
‘Ninety-eight per cent: no. I think it’s clear.’
Callum took a breath and refocused on the spy creature. He eased it into the gap. At first guess, it was an original fissure in the asteroid before the Olyix started converting it into an arkship. The walls were irregular, creating a cleft that extended over fifty metres, varying in width from twenty metres down to paper thin at the extremities. A cluster of silky spheres five metres in diameter were affixed to the walls close to the entrance with tough strings of fibre encasing them like nets. The tubes plaited around them, slowly pushing fluids in and out. Callum thought they looked like eggs laid by some beast twice the size of a T. rex, and ten times scarier.
Beyond the egg tanks, the cavern was empty.
‘This place goes against everything we know of asteroid composition,’ Kandara said. ‘I’ve been on enough of them to know they’re either S-type – the solids – or a congealed pile of rubble. They don’t have caves and caverns. That’s strictly part of planetary geology: cavities in rock form from water eroding limestone. And the one thing you don’t get in space rock is limestone, because it’s sedimentary. The other thing you don’t get on an asteroid is water, let alone free-flowing water.’
‘The obelisks Feriton reported seeing in the fourth chamber were made from sedimentary rock,’ Alik said.
‘A fourth chamber which didn’t exist,’ Yuri countered. ‘It was a simulation.’
‘And yet, here we have a bona fide cave. Somehow I don’t think the Olyix produced it for aesthetic satisfaction. It could be significant.’
‘I really don’t care about asteroid formation processes,’ Callum said. ‘We have a cavern that has minimal perception inside. End of story.’
‘But why is it there?’
‘I dunno. Bring it up at the next philosophy-of-geology lecture. We have our refuge.’
‘We have the first possible site for our refuge,’ Yuri said. ‘Although I agree it is favourable. Let’s keep reviewing the locale.’
After another three days, they agreed Callum’s cave was the one they were going to use. There were other cavities within a kilometre of the hangar, but they were either smaller or packed full of the arkship’s biological structures.
‘So how do we get to it?’ Alik asked.
‘The visual glitches in the hangar perception routines should cover us in here,’ Jessika said. ‘It’ll take time, but I should be able to extend them up the passageway to the cave.’
‘And physically?’ Yuri asked. ‘How do we get our supplies there?’
‘Trojan horse. We’ll use an initiator to assemble a creeperdrone in the shape of one of the medium-size creatures, and use its internal cavity as a cargo hold. That way we can move stuff there slowly.’
‘I’d like to establish our own sensors in the passageway first,’ Kandara said. ‘The same type we’ve installed around the hangar; they can keep watch for any of the Salvation’s own creatures or a quint moving about. The last thing we want is your cargo creature unexpectedly bumbling into anything too analytical. We only make a delivery run when the passage is completely clear, agreed?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Callum said.
‘Okay then,’ Yuri said. ‘We go ahead with this. Let’s start with a wish list. And, Kandara – personal defence weapons only.’
‘Mary, but you really know how to kill a party.’
Neutron Star
Morgan
’s
Arrival
The fleet was still two AUs out from the neutron star when Ainsley appeared, velocity matching perfectly so that the elegant white ship held position a thousand kilometres from the Morgan. The duty crew on the bridge had no warning; there wasn’t a single sensor on any ship in the fleet that had detected the giveaway gravitational waves that theoretically should have been coming from Ainsley’s drive as the ship approached.
‘A stealthed gravitonic drive,’ Yirella muttered as she clambered out of bed. ‘Who knew?’ The alerts zipping into her databud had woken her after only a couple of hours’ sleep. She’d gone to bed expecting to be well awake and refreshed when they finished their deceleration manoeuvre an estimated million kilometres outside the neutron star’s unnatural ring. So far contact had been limited: a few messages from the fleet when they were a lightmonth out, announcing they were coming – in peace. A brief: We know,you are welcome, in reply. And details – what orbit to go into, contact protocols; the neutron star inhabitants were organizing a reception congress to discuss ‘unified intent’. All reasonably predictable, if a little stark. There were no images of them
