Cilia-of-Gold and Strong-Flukes peered down into the Chimney cavern.
Cilia-of-Gold had chosen the cavern well. The Chimney here was a fine young vent, a glowing crater much wider than their old, dying home. The water above the Chimney was turbulent, and richly cloudy; the cavern itself was wide and smooth-walled. Cilia-plants grew in mats around the Chimney’s base. Cutters browsed in turn on the cilia-plants, great chains of them, their tough little arms slicing steadily through the plants. Sliding through the plant mats Cilia-of-Gold could make out the supple form of a Crawler, its mindless, tubelike body wider than Cilia-of-Gold’s and more than three times as long…
And, stalking around their little forest, here came the Heads themselves, the rulers of the cavern. Cilia-of-Gold counted four, five, six of the Heads, and no doubt there were many more in the dark recesses of the cavern.
One Head — close to the tunnel mouth — swiveled its huge, swollen helmet-skull towards her.
She ducked back into the tunnel, aware that all her cilia were quivering.
Strong-Flukes drifted to the tunnel floor, landing in a little cloud of food particles. “
The Heads’ huge helmet-skulls were sensitive to heat — fantastically so, enabling the Heads to track and kill with almost perfect accuracy. Heads
“We’ve come a long way, to reach this place, Strong-Flukes. If we had to undergo another journey—”
“No. We have to stay here — to
Strong-Flukes groaned, wrapping her carapace close around her. “Then we’ll all be killed.”
Cilia-of-Gold tried to ignore the heavy presence of the Seeker within her — and its prompting, growing more insistent now, that she
Larionova followed Kevan Scholes up the slope of the wall-mountain. Silicate surface dust compressed under her boots, like fine sand. The climbing was easy — it was no more than a steep walk, really — but she stumbled frequently, clumsy in this reduced gee.
They reached the crest of the mountain. It wasn’t a sharp summit: more a wide, smooth platform, fractured to dust by Mercury’s wild temperature range.
“Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said. “A hundred miles wide, stretching right across Mercury’s South Pole.”
The crater was so large that even from this height its full breadth was hidden by the tight curve of the planet. The wall-mountain was one of a series that swept across the landscape from left to right, like a row of eroded teeth, separated by broad, rubble-strewn valleys. On the far side of the summit, the flanks of the wall-mountain swept down to the plain of the crater, a full mile below.
Mercury’s angry Sun was hidden beyond the curve of the world, but its corona extended delicate, structured tendrils above the far horizon.
The plain itself was immersed in darkness. But by the milky, diffuse light of the corona, Larionova could see a peak at the center of the plain, shouldering its way above the horizon. There was a spark of light at the base of the central peak, incongruously bright in the crater’s shadows: that must be the Thoth team’s camp.
“This reminds me of the Moon,” she said.
Scholes considered this. “Forgive me, Dr. Larionova. Have you been down to Mercury before?”
“No,” she said, his easy, informed arrogance grating on her. “I’m here to oversee the construction of Thoth, not to sightsee.”
“Well, there’s obviously a superficial similarity. After the formation of the main System objects five billion years ago, all the inner planets suffered bombardment by residual planetesimals. That’s when Mercury took its biggest strike: the one which created the Caloris feature. But after that, Mercury was massive enough to retain a molten core — unlike the Moon. Later planetesimal strikes punched holes in the crust, so there were lava outflows that drowned some of the older cratering.
“Thus, on Mercury, you have a mixture of terrains. There’s the most ancient landscape, heavily cratered, and the
“Later, as the core cooled, the surface actually shrunk inwards. The planet lost a mile or so of radius.”
Like a dried-out tomato. “So the surface is wrinkled.”
“Yes. There are
She looked up, following his pointing arm. There, just above the far horizon, was a small blue star.
She had her face plate magnify the image. The star exploded into a compact sculpture of electric blue threads, surrounded by firefly lights: the Thoth construction site.
Thoth was a habitat to be placed in orbit close to Sol. Irina Larionova was the consulting engineer contracted by Superet to oversee the construction of the habitat.
At Thoth, a Solar-interior probe would be constructed. The probe would be one Interface of a wormhole, loaded with sensors. The Interface would be dropped into the Sun. The other Interface would remain in orbit, at the center of the habitat.
Thoth’s purpose was to find out what was wrong with the Sun.
Irina Larionova wasn’t much interested in the purpose of Thoth, or any of Superet’s semi-mystical philosophizing. It was the work that was important, for her: and the engineering problems posed by Thoth were fascinating.
The electric-blue bars she could see now were struts of exotic matter, which would eventually frame the wormhole termini. The sparks of light moving around the struts were GUTships and short-haul flitters. She stared at the image, wishing she could get back to some real work.
Irina Larionova had had no intention of visiting Mercury herself. Mercury was a detail, for Thoth. Why would
The flitters from Thoth actually comprised the largest expedition ever to land on Mercury.
But, within days of landing, both investigative teams had reported anomalies.
Larionova tapped at her suit’s sleeve-controls. After a couple of minutes an image of Dolores Wu appeared in one corner of Larionova’s face plate.
Dolores Wu was the leader of the Thoth exploratory team in Caloris. Wu was Mars-born, with small features and hair grayed despite AntiSenescence treatments. She looked weary.
“How’s Caloris?” Larionova asked.
“And?”
“A black hole?”
“Then what?”
Wu looked exasperated.
Wu closed off the link.
Standing on the corona-lit wall of Chao Meng-Fu Crater, Larionova asked Kevan Scholes about Caloris.
“Caloris is
“The what?”
A huge planetesimal — or
“Away from Caloris itself, shock waves spread around the planet’s young crust,” Scholes said. “The waves focused at Caloris’ antipode — the point on the equator diametrically opposite Caloris itself. And the land there was shattered, into a jumble of bizarre hill and valley formations.
She could
He walked across the summit towards her. “Look up,” he said.
“Damn it, Scholes—”
There was a pattering against her face plate.
She tilted up her head. Needle-shaped particles swirled over the wall-mountain from the planet’s dark side and bounced off her face plate, sparkling in corona light.
“What in Lethe is that?”
“Snow,” he said.
In the cool darkness of the tunnel, the people clambered over each other; they bumped against the Ice walls, and their muttering filled the water with criss-crossing voice-ripples. Cilia-of-Gold swam through and around the crowd, coaxing the people to follow her will.
She felt immensely weary. Her concentration and resolve threatened continually to shatter under the Seeker’s assault. And the end of the tunnel, with the deadly Heads beyond, was a looming, threatening mouth, utterly intimidating.
At last the group was ready. She surveyed them. All of the people — except the very oldest and the very youngest — were arranged in an array which filled the tunnel from wall to wall; she could hear flukes and carapaces scraping softly against Ice.
The people looked weak, foolish, eager, she thought with dismay; now that she was actually implementing it her scheme seemed simple-minded. Was she about to lead them all to their deaths?
But it was too late for the luxury of doubt, she told herself. Now, there was no other option to follow.