Event Horizon (Hellgate) (103 page)

And Lai’a: “Step into the jump bay and standby for flooding.”

To Marin it was uncomfortably familiar. The armordoors locked and he stood with Travers as salt water washed up around their legs, but in memory he was back in the airlock capsule belonging to the dive boat
Cailenne Drifter
, suited up, waiting to dive the wreck of the
Beluga
, off the coast not far south of Westminster. He was seventeen years old – his conscription notice had been posted and he had already downloaded his travel orders. He was expected at the Fleet office, with a hundred other draftees, in three days’ time – from there, it was a shuttle to the transit terminal in orbit, and then a courier to some training ship. It might be five years before he saw Jagreth again, if he lived that long –

The jump bay hatch opened without a sound, and in Marin’s helmet display the navigational data had already begun to run. His heart gave a lurch as four gundrones took point, forty weapons between them panning over every centimeter ahead. They could have torn the platform apart, but nothing was moving and sensors reported not so much as a flicker of energy or heat to betray a gun, a sniper, a mine. Humans and Resalq moved out into the 40 meter, semi-rigid tunnel of the boarding tube, and at once the drones scudded ahead. In seconds they were aboard the platform itself, and setting a perimeter.

To human eyes, the Zunshu structure’s ambient light was cold, blue-gray with a tint of green. Irregularly spaced panels on every surface, including the floor, were alive with brilliant bioluminescence, but the compartment into which the party moved out was so vast, the overall light level remained low. In the rounded corners of the six-sided enclosure, tall, wide plants the color of red wine clung to the walls, waving slender vines through the water. Each branch was frilled with meter-long tendrils which could only be filtering the water, cleaning it, freshening it for life forms which had fled.

It seemed a blue twilight had settled over an area the size of a gunship hangar. Marin turned a three-sixty, trying to pick out detail as they made their way cautiously with the gundrones ranged around them. He saw apertures that might have been hatchways or doors, but rather than being at floor level they were at any height above the deck, set apparently at random and without purpose.

“Damnit, look at this,” Jazinsky said quietly. “It’s like … Hangar 4 aboard the
Wastrel
, but with everything stripped out, three out of four lights turned off, and a lot of something like bull kelp growing everywhere. There’s doorways … counting nine of them – two are in the ceiling. Do you call it a door, if it’s in the ceiling?”

“Take the left-side ‘door’ in the ceiling,” Rusch said levelly.

“We’re looking at the same nav plot,” Shapiro told her. “Nothing big is moving, just a few tiny shapes darting about, maybe 20 meters away, off to the right, but they’re – well, they
look
alive, not like any drone I’d recognize. Or weapons.”

“They look,” Marin added, “like fish, or maybe tiny cuttlefish. Lai’a, could they be intelligent?”

“Or could they just be lunch?” Vidal asked sourly. “What do we do, Mark – extend the hand of friendship and say, “Salutations from the peoples of the Deep Sky, we come in peace,” to something that’s going to be laid out on a green salad come dinnertime?”

“That,” Mark said soberly, “is a very good question indeed.” He panned his helmet sensors in the direction of a school of the tiny creatures which swooped and dove in elaborate formation. “See the way they move … Lai’a, is it possible they’re trying to communicate with movement?”

“This is feasible,” Lai’a allowed. “I have tasked the gundrones to collect video of the creatures. If information is encoded in their observable performance, I will identify discrete, repeating patterns in a few moments. However, translation will depend on a cipher. A key. Some point of reference is necessary.”

Marin took a long deep breath. “I wonder if they realize that?”

“If they cracked transspace physics,” Dario said harshly, “they’re
smart
. They know by now, they can’t understand a syllable we’re saying. If we’re all so damn’ smart, we can hash out a common language. Lai’a!”

Almost to Marin’s relief the AI said, “The creatures are schooling in the pattern of convection currents generated by pulsing bladders in the kelp-like filter trees in the near corners. Their movement is consistent with the ‘chorus line’ effect observed in flocking birds. No information is coded into it.”

“Thank gods,” Vidal muttered. “I’d have felt a prize idiot, making first contact with a shrimp cocktail.” He tilted back his helmet to view the ceiling. “The
door
is this way.”

And up 200 meters, Marin knew, to a gallery the size of an aeroball stadium, opening off the spiral of a passageway which looped back on itself, coiled, twisted without reason. Or, without any reason a human would perceive. He and Travers were right behind the lead gundrone; Vidal and Kulich brought up the rear with the Sherratts and Shapiro between them.

The compartment measured at least 100 meters across; the ceiling aperture was just off-center, and 50 meters from the boarding tube Marin felt so naked, the hackles prickled erect on the back of his neck. Still, the drones and Lai’a reported nothing save the jetting performance of schools of tiny creatures riding currents, the stately, waving tendrils of filtering ‘trees,’ the minute pulsations of the millions of krill-sized, bioluminescent molluscs which clung like limpets to their panels, filter-feeding and giving off their cold, brilliant light.

The ‘door’ was four meters wide and angled off toward the heart of the platform. Three drones went up first; humans and Resalq hung back until sensors reported nothing moving through a hundred meters. Suit repulsion whined, vibrating through the bones as it sent them up like the drones, and Marin found his hands going instinctively to his weapons.

The same blue-green twilight lit the passage. Human eyesight quickly became accustomed to it. He could see comfortably without need of the floodlights, and as they rose into the stadium-sized enclosure he caught his breath. Everywhere, he saw shapes like shells, aeroshells, cornucopia and spirals, some half a meter high, some ten meters high, in pale blue and green and pink, shot through with striations of red, green, brown.

This compartment was busy with the objects, some standing, some littered across the deck. Its light rippled with the random movement of floating colonies of the bioluminescent creatures, each two or three meters in diameter and drifting with the currents generated by ‘trees’ much more massive than those in the compartment below. Underfoot, as they followed the drones across the wide area beneath a fluted 30 meter ceiling, were objects that might have been tools or toys. Marin recognized none of them, though he knew what they must be.

“Possessions,” he said into the loop. “There were
people
here when we arrived. They took off too fast to take their stuff with them.”

“And look, here.” Vidal had bobbed up on repulsion to peer through an aperture in a shell-like structure ten meters high and twenty in diameter. The ‘door’ was high in the curved side of the shell, and the inside surface shimmered brightly with bioluminescence.

Travers bobbed up beside him to look; his vidfeed streamed in realtime, and it was Jazinsky who said, “Is that a – a house?”

Inside were segments, curved, inclined, each with a scatter of objects, tools, toys, abstract art – to human and Resalq the shapes meant nothing. A house? Marin wondered. “If it’s a house, then this –” he panned his helmet camera across the vast chamber “– is a town.”

“Shells,” Rusch observed. “Everything I’m seeing reminds me of those shells they sell in the hotel gift stores in Santorini and Moresby. Tropical seashells.”

She was right. Marin leaned closer to the wall before him, for a better view of the material. “Like mother-of-pearl,” he said softly as one gauntleted hand closed around an edge and applied pressure. The material snapped readily and he turned it to the light.

“Calcium carbonate,” Mark read off the chemical analysis, “with particulate copper and iron oxide … and it looks,” he added, “extruded.”

“Extruded?” Jazinsky was examining the same vidfeed. “It looks
spun
.”

“Everything I’m seeing appears similar.” Dario panned his helmet sensors at floor, walls, the ceiling far above. “A lot of this is very close to simple calcium carbonate, but infused with enough particulate metals that … damn it, Mark, you see this? Look at the floor, the deck, whatever you want to call it. Could you call this steel?”

“You mean, is it an alloy of iron and carbon?” Mark mused, hushed as he examined not the material but its structure. “It’s almost a philosophical question. I’ve never seen anything like this. Yes, it’s steel – but it isn’t. It’s iron and carbon, traces of nickel and chromium, but it’s been compounded from microscopic particles, as if…”

“As if,” Jazinsky went on, “they have a system of filtering the upwelling currents from the super-hot, deep ocean, taking the metals they want in particulate form, extruding whatever shapes they need. If they need steel – much stronger than the common building material of metal-dense limestone – they might use calcium carbonate like a mold, infuse iron, carbon, chromium, according a strict formula … drop the construct back into the furnace-heat of the deep atmosphere to ‘forge’ it, float it to the upper atmosphere to cool it, ship the finished object here for use. It’s far from impossible. It’s just that humans and Resalq never used the method.”

“Never had to,” Marin suggested, “or – never had the opportunity. We mine, smelt, forge … we live in an oxygen atmosphere where fire burns. Try that underwater!” He actually chuckled. “This is
beautiful
.”

“Alien,” Vidal added.

“Very.” Mark stirred with an effort. “And we still have a long way to go, and not too much safe time to do it in. Lai’a – report on activity in the outer system.”

“I am aware of no activity, Doctor,” Lai’a assured him. “The transspace drive remains on station keeping. Captain Vaurien appears to be responding to therapy. Cardiac function has stabilized; his left lung collapsed 35 minutes ago; it is being restored. Bone welding is complete; neural grafting is complete. Hepatic and renal function continue to be depressed. Doctor Grant has designed further nano therapy.” It paused. “Recommend you quicken your pace.”

“Why?” Shapiro barked the question. “What do you see?”

“I see nothing, General,” Lai’a said mildly, “which might, in itself, be cause for concern. I can detect no threat, but the longer your party lingers in Zunshu territory, the more likely you are to encounter it. The computer core is 750 meters from your current position.”

“It’s right.” Vidal growled. “We’re not on a sightseeing tour – and we’re inviting trouble –
hustle
!”

Without a word Marin turned in the wake of the gundrones on point. His hackles continued to prickle but he knew the discomfort stemmed from his awareness of the distance, the maze, stretching behind them, back to the boarding tunnel and Lai’a. Passages followed chambers, vessels and bubbles opened into pearlescent light with schools of tiny, jetting creatures of every color, and groves of ‘trees,’ every size, shape and hue, among which larger life forms clambered, grazed, swam in lazy, unconcerned arcs.

Here and there a creature turned toward them, paused long enough to afford clear images, and Travers swore softly. “What
is
that?”

“A shell-less cephalopod,” Mark told him. “Maybe 20 kilos, by the looks of it … and it’s a gill breather … vegetarian. I’d say it’s a grazing animal, lives on the ‘trees’ … colored golden-brown and deep red for camouflage. It has quite good eyes – six of them, there around the front end, call it the snout. It’s
looking
at us.”

“It’s probably an algae grazer,” Jazinsky mused. “I have a good, clear image of its mouth parts. I’m seeing a big, flat, sharp scraper of a tongue. It could take your arm right off with that.”

“Intelligent?” Vidal hazarded.

“I’d have to guess not.” Mark held out his hand to the creature, took a step toward it. “If it was intelligent, it would have taken off with the rest of the local folk, when we started to cut our way in. I’d guess they grabbed their children, pets and valuables and ran … which means this fellow is more than likely a domestic animal. And this,” he added with a nod at the grove of ‘trees,’ “appears to be a paddock.” He took one more step toward the cephalopod before the creature flushed brilliant scarlet, blew a cloud of blue-black ink and jetted into the cover of the grove with astonishing speed.