Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles) (20 page)

Beware your state of mind.
The warning thought—from Charlie?—flickered past and vanished as he rose and joined the robot, giggling silently.

A remaining sane corner of his mind recoiled in horror, then spun away in the wind. He reached out past the robot and picked up a rock. "I got one, too," he murmured. "Pretty, isn't it?"

The robot seemed to shake its head in disgust. It took the rock from him and turned it over in its mechanical hand. "Scanning," it muttered. "No metal." It turned and tossed the rock onto the refuse pile. "Next?"

"Next? Next
what
?"

The robot stared at him expectantly.

"You want me to stand here and hand you rocks? So I can look like a furgin' hunchback, too? Whaddya think we invented robots for, anyway?"

Quasimodo peered at him a moment longer, then gave a little jerk which might have been a shrug and turned back to its work, paying him no further notice.

Bandicut heard laughter. He saw Jones a little way up the corridor, walking back toward him. "Okay, Bandicut—I wasn't really gonna leave you there all day. Come on, I got something better for you to do." Jones waved him onward.

Following Jones, with a dark glance back at Quasimodo, Bandicut swiveled his head back and forth, glaring at the faces peering down at him from the walls, the ghosts maybe of all the aliens who once lived here, billions of years ago. He imagined them falling in behind him. No, no, he wanted to tell them. This is taking me
farther
from the answers! Go back! But he decided to say nothing. They would be gone soon, he knew. And so would the fugue. Soon.

Chapter 13

Silence-fugue

"Down here," Jones said, pointing to a shaft.

Bandicut stepped carefully forward and peered down into the shaft. It was ten or twenty meters deep. A cable descended from a hoist overhead, down through the center of the shaft. He could see movement below, the shadows of men working nearby, and occasionally an elbow or backpack jutting into view. His nerves jangled; he imagined fish with large teeth swarming down there. He stepped back. "Uh-huh."

"It's a little makeshift because the main hoist is broken, so we've got this rig here for the time being."

"And you want me to...run it?"

"Naw—hell no!" Jones laughed. "You think we can afford to have someone here running a stupid
hoist?
We got real work for you to do, down in the laser shaft."

Bandicut swallowed, and said nothing.

"Let me just show you how this thing works, so you can get yourself in and out." Jones pointed to a grimy panel of knobs and levers.

Bandicut peered and saw the knobs turn to little faces. He thought one of the levers waved.
Hi,
he thought. He had just enough presence of mind not to wave back.

Jones was activating the hoist. After glancing down the shaft to see that the way was clear, he pushed a lever and the cable began rising. "Here you go. Up. Down. Keep the tension even here. Simple enough?" He turned his shiny visor toward Bandicut.

"Simple," Bandicut whispered.

"Then let's go." Jones grabbed the cable and swung out over the shaft. He sank quickly. Bandicut stepped after him and clung as they descended deeper into the mine.

The shaft surrounded him like a tomb, then opened out into a cavern full of lights and suited men. There was very little headroom once clear of the hoist, which gave a closed-in feeling to the place, even though the room opened out horizontally for tens of meters. Mining holes were being bored outward in a radial fashion from the outer circumference of the cavern. Vapors from probing lasers periodically boiled out in great clouds, obscuring the view. Bandicut shivered with a sudden feeling that this was where the real heart of the Triton operation was located. It was in these deep mines that the most promising concentrations of Tritonmetal had been detected, the melted and twisted veins of living communities...of buildings, technologies, and people...of the Rohengen, before they had been consumed by their war. And no one else—no one human, anyway—had the slightest inkling of the history that he saw in this place.

He shuddered with a sudden intensity, and realized that the quarx, deep in his mind, was reacting violently to those last thoughts. He had a sense of tightly contained memories and feelings on the verge of erupting.

"Bandicut, for Chrissake, come on!" Jones was gesturing impatiently from halfway down a work line, where a dozen men were operating panels for the remote mining equipment.

"Right—"

"Hey Bandie—how you makin' out, man?" He heard a familiar voice, and swung around, looking for its source. Finally he spotted Gordon Kracking waving from behind a large computer console.

"Okay, uh... What are you doing here, Krackey?"

"Helpin' 'em straighten out this mess of a control system!" Krackey shouted, gesturing. Behind him a plasma laser flickered in a horizontal shaft. A conveyor belt was carrying a continuous load of rock and ice past a sensor bank for scanning and sorting. Bandicut blinked, imagining his friend as a great bird, flapping his wings and flying away in frustration from this place. He imagined Jones' gaze as a great invisible laser beam, cutting Krackey down and then turning on
him
, if he didn't move—

"
Comin', JQ!
" He hurried after the foreman, ignoring the curious glances of the other miners.

Jones was standing just beyond one of the main tunneling stations. He was fiddling with a portable control stand connected by cable to a small drilling laser. The laser, mounted on a self-propelled dolly, was parked just inside a small, fresh-looking horizontal opening. The shaft in the cavern wall was about a shoulder's width across. Its interior was dark. Jones turned his helmeted head toward Bandicut and hooked a gloved thumb toward the small shaft. "We'll be setting up a boring and extraction station here in a coupla' days, but here's the pilot hole so we can get some readings on any veins along the radial. This oughta be right up your alley, Bandicut. The instruments here're just like the ones on your survey rigs."

Bandicut stepped cautiously past the mining operation situated just to the left of the new shaft. The flashes and boiling vapors of the mining laser gave him a feeling of walking through the set of a holomovie, but he knew better. This was serious business down here; deep mining was the most dangerous operation on all of Triton. The lasers were mounted on stationary pedestals, their radiant output focused and guided by mirrors. The powerful beams glowed and shimmered within the shafts like exotic weapons beams, glittering dully off the sluglike vapor-exhaust ducts.

One of the men operating the laser was Mick Eddison, the miner who'd given him such a hard time in the dorm the other day. Bandicut shuddered, thinking, they let people like
him
control these life-threatening machines? He hoped Eddison hadn't noticed him.

Jones was flipping switches. Bandicut stepped close and peered at the instruments. Actually, they bore little resemblance to the readouts he was used to, but he assumed he could figure out how they worked. "Okay," he said.

"What you're gonna do is, walk this baby straight into the pilot shaft, and just drill straight out on a narrow beam. It's auto-guided. You record the findings here." Jones pointed to the instruments, then looked at him. "Think you can handle that?"

Whether it was John Bandicut responding or some inner creature released by the silence-fugue, he answered casually, "No problem." Before Jones could say another word, he flicked on the laser.

Jones backed hastily out of the way. "Be careful with that thing," he yelled, then vanished back into a swirling cloud of vapor.

*

Be careful? Bandicut thought, driving the laser forward into the shaft, guided by images on a small monitor. What could be simpler? He thought he heard a faint, mewling protest somewhere deep in the mines of his own thoughts; but perhaps that was the quarx, working out its own problems. But he couldn't count on the quarx; the Charlie he knew was gone, and he was on his own.

The tunnel was not yet very deep, reaching only a few meters. The guide beams glinted red, sparkling through the thin haze that filled the tenuous air, marking the track of the invisible infrared and ultraviolet beams that bored and probed and sent back reflections to the sensors. The rock and ice layers scintillated, sparkling of emerald and ruby and sapphire; it was a pretty show for Bandicut, but also information for the recorder. If there were veins of metal, even trace residues, the spectra would be detected in the return beams.

For a time, he was boring through rock, his laser slowly deepening and widening the hole before advancing. Then he struck ice and a vapor cloud billowed out of the shaft, obscuring his view. As the exhaust vent drew the cloud away, he glimpsed a dancing display of fluorescence and refraction in the monitor, deep in the hole. He was dazzled by the sight; it reminded him of the image Charlie had shown him in their first meeting—what a quarx might look like, if it existed in material form.

Was he imagining it, or did he feel Charlie-Two trembling? He blinked as the laser licked at ice and rock, melting and vaporizing, hollowing out the tunnel. He glanced up from the monitor to peer directly into the borehole. He saw faces peering back from the inner walls of the shaft. There was Charlie-One as he might have appeared as a human: a trifle pudgy and world weary, with thinning flyaway hair, but a gleam in the eye and a quip on his tongue. And there was Charlie-Two, narrow and stern, with dark, strictly kempt hair, and eyes that bored into Bandicut's, trying to understand—

Both faces flickered and melted in the laser heat, and turned to a hazy, gauzy light, with jets of fire spurting out to the sides.

"Bandicut! What the hell are you doing?"

He started and realized that his hands were working the controls of their own accord. Jones strode out of a cloud of steam like a creature from an old movie. What
was
he doing? "Are you falling asleep at that goddamn thing?" he heard, and he blinked and saw that he had taken the laser off auto-guide and let it wander, hollowing out the walls, creating a pool of melted ice that was now hardening to a slick surface. He snapped the laser off and backed it out. He peered into the tunnel in dismay. It was now almost big enough for a man to walk into, if he got up there and crouched low. Too big.

Jones stared into the tunnel, shaking his head. "Jesus, Bandicut, I thought I could trust you to do this simple little—"

"Did I ever say I was a miner?" Bandicut protested weakly.

"Even a goddamn
pilot
ought to be able to see—!" Jones gave up with an audible sigh. "All right, never mind. Now that you've got it so big, we need to get a robot in there to check it out." His voice sharpened. "Commlink Echo, Robot Delta Mike Four, report to my location.
Copernicus
—you got that?"

Bandicut heard a drumtap in reply, and a few moments later, a small, upright robot with four cone-shaped wheels lumbered out of a cloud of vapor at the next work station and stopped in front of Jones. "With you, boss," it twanged.

Jones pointed. "I want you to go into this borehole and do a short profile type-B spectrascan. Got that?"

Copernicus drumtapped acknowledgment. Using its upper appendages, it lifted itself into the shaft, then reconfigured itself into a horizontal attitude, one pair of cone wheels stretching forward. A cluster of lights on its nose blinked on, and it rolled forward into the borehole.

Bandicut watched, befuddled, as the robot's scanning lights glinted and reflected back out of the tunnel.  Another memory was being touched here; he felt Charlie twisting in pain.

/You okay there?/ he whispered nervously.

An image flickered in his mind: the quarx, in its Rohengen host, sprinting down a passageway, lights flashing and ground trembling. They were under attack, underground, running for cover; but this was the wrong direction. There was a synthetic creature ahead of them; they were trying to save it. For some reason it was special...it was a coworker, a
friend.
They ran, hoping to catch it, to bring it back to safety. There was a blinding light, and the ground shook—

And everything changed forever for the quarx. It was all gone in that flash: not just the robot-friend and the corridor it had been running through, but all hope for the Rohengen, for the future of quarx and host alike. The image blurred, as though obscured by tears, quarx and host fleeing back the other way. But the host was injured and dying. It barely made it through quaking underground corridors to the deep shaft where the quarx's translator was hidden. Then the host died, releasing the quarx to the translator, and quarx and translator were falling, falling...plunging toward the center of the moon, away from the battle and the terror...but it was all gone, everything that it had lived and hoped for, its only friends...

A squawk on the comm made Bandicut blink. It was the robot, chirping. Through the haze of confusion, he heard it calling...
loss of traction, adhesion to ice
...caught...trapped...

Trapped, and it needed help. Before Jones could respond with any sort of instruction, Bandicut pushed the laser-probe aside, clawed for purchase on the lip of the borehole as he climbed up, crouching as he made his way into the tunnel to help the robot...

"
—what the flying fuzzookie are you doing?
" Jones yelled.

No need to answer, got to get to the robot before it was injured, damaged, destroyed...lights flashing here, rock trembling...there it was, glinting just beyond the narrow constriction where the tunnel was carved out of rock, before the ice pocket. Bandicut crouched and stretched forward, and yes, it was
awfully
icy here, he'd really burnished it to a slick surface, but he could almost reach the robot...give it a good yank before the big flash came to end everything. He had his hand on it and felt a sudden flush, and a tingle going down his arm...the quarx was stirring, with some kind of reflex, trying to reach out to communicate with the thing.