web, and went back in. The hot blue tongue of the cutter sliced the drum's cover off and fused its pulsing innards.
Back in the cockpit, I saw we were now travelling down a wide cavern that was barbed with oily dripstones and varnished with incandescent blooms of moon-milk and angel's hair.
'They look lost already/ Medea remarked, nodding at the scanner box. She was right. The yellow cursors were moving with nothing like the same confidence. They were milling, trying to reacquire our signal./
We travelled for two more hours, through small flask-chambers gleaming with cavepearls, across vast low seas of chert and lapilli, between massive stalactites that bit tunnels in two like the incisors of prediluvial monsters. Domepits and sumps sheened with brackish alkaline water and the smoke snaking from nests of fumaroles betrayed the fact that there was now a rudimentary atmosphere: methane, sulphur, radon and pockets of carbon monoxide. Venting cases from Cinchare's active heart and the gas-products of chemical and gravito-chemical reactions built and collected here, far below ground, leaking only slowly up to the airless surface. Hull temperature was increasing. We were now about fifteen kilometres down, and beginning to feel the effects of the asthenosphere.
'Hey!' said Medea suddenly.
She slowed the pod, and swung it around, traversing the lights. We were in a gypnate chamber where the chert-covered floor was scalloped by several gours formed by water eons before. Several side spurs led away into tight pinches or were revealed on the chart to pinch out no further than twenty metres in.
What did you see?' I asked.
There!'
The spot-lamps framed a black shape that I thought for a moment was just a jagged pile of boulders and stalagmite bosses. But Medea roved us in.
It was a prospecting pod, similar to ours, but bearing the crest of Ortog Promethium. It had been crushed and split like an old can, the stanchions of its cabin protruding from the metal hull like ribs.
'Hell…' Medea murmured.
'Mining's a dangerous job/ I said.
That's recent/ Aemos said, appearing at our shoulders. 'Look at the tephra/
The what?' asked Medea.
'It's a generic term for clastic materials. The dust and shale bed the wreck's lying on. Move the lamp round. There. The tephra's yellowish-white gypnate all around, but it's scorched and fused under the wreck. Mineral smoke from the fumaroles we passed just now vent back down here and cover everything with oxidised dust. I'd wager if it's been there more than a month, the powder would have overlaid the scorching… and coated the wreck.
'Pop the hatch/1 said.
The subterranean atmosphere seemed scalding hot and I began to sweat freely the moment I jumped down from the sill. I could hear nothing except my breath rasping inside my rebreather mask. I trudged round to the front of the hovering pod into the cones of its lights, and saw Aemos and Medea in the lit cockpit, both hidden behind rebreather masks of their own.
I waved once and crunched off over the dusty sill, my bootcaps catching the occasional geode which scattered and flashed in the light.
There was no mistaking the blast holes in the wreck's hull. Sustained fire from a multi-laser had split the pod wide open. I shone my hand torch in through the rents and saw a blackened cabin space, burned out.
The three crew members were still in there, at their posts, reduced to grimacing mummies by the acidic air, and by the hundreds of glistening white worms that writhed and burrowed as my light hit them. It figured that with its hot, wet, gaseous interior, Cinchare was a far from dead world.
More troglobyte things scurried and squirmed around my feet. Long-legged metallic beetles and inflated, jelly-like molluscs, all drawn to this unexpected source of rich nutrients.
Something moved beside me and slammed into my left hip. I fell hard against the broken hull, cursing that I hadn't been wearing my motion tracker. It came in again, and this time I felt a sharp pain in my left thigh. I kicked out with a mask-muffled curse.
It was about the size of a large dog, but longer and lower, moving on lean hind limbs. Its skin was nearly silver, and its eye-less head was just a vast set of jaws filled with hundreds of transparent fangs. All around the maw, long sensory bristles and tendrils twitched and rippled.
It lunged again, its thin, stiff tail raised high as a counterbalance. This thing, I guessed, was top of the food chain in Cinchare's lightless cavities. Too big to force its way inside the wreck to get at the corpses, it had been lurking outside, feeding on the carrion worms and molluscs that had congregated on the crash.
With a twist of its head, it had a good grip on my left ankle. I could feel the tips of its teeth biting through the heavy leather of my boot.
I managed to tug my shotgun from the scabbard on my back and shoot it through the torso at point black range. Viscous tissues and filmy flesh scattered in all directions and the thing flopped over. By the time I had prized its jaws off my boot with my knife, the carrion-eaters had begun to swarm over it and feed.
We moved off again, down a gour-lined spur and into a cavern breathtak-ingly encrusted with glass-silk and billions of cavepearls.
'There's been fighting down here/ I told Aemos and Medea, raising my voice to be heard over the re-cycling cabin air as we pumped the last of the coarse Cinchare gas-soup out.
'Who's fighting who?'
I shrugged, and sat back to tug one of the predator's broken fangs out of my boot leather.
'Well/ said Aemos, 'You'll be interested to know that the cavern with the wreck in it matched one of the spectroscope traces from the Mechanicus transmissions exactly'
'How long ago?'
'About two weeks.'
'So… Bure could have been the one who did the shooting/
'Bure… or whoever's sending transmissions back to the annex/
'But why would he take out a prospector pod?' I wondered aloud.
'Rather depends on what the prospector pod was trying to do to him/ said Medea.
Aemos raised his tufty eyebrows. 'Most perturbatory/
Another three hours, another two kilometres down. It was damn hot, and the air outside was thick with venting steams and gases. Fumaroles, some large, some in scabby clusters, belched black smoke into the caves, riddling some areas like honeycomb. Several caverns and domepits were home to luminous acidic lakes, where the geothermals steadily simmered
the water. Gorges and the occasional pitch showed flares of red light from lava rivers and asthenospheric cauldrons of molten rock.
We no longer had to rely on the lamps. The cave systems were lit by streams of glowing magma, flaming lakes of pitch and promethium and thick, sticky curtains and rafts of bio-luminescent fungi that thrived in the heated ducts. The pod's air-scrubbers were no longer able to remove the scent of sulphur from the cabin air, and the cooling system was inadequate. We were all sweating, and so were the interior walls of the cabin. Condensation dribbled down the bare metal of the hull's inner skin.
'Dead stop, please/ Aemos said.
Medea cut the thrusters and let us coast slowly over a seething lake of lava that radiated a glare of almost neon brilliance from beneath its blackened crust.
Aemos checked the chart against the spectroscope readings that the min-
