Vigiant (25 page)

We didn't land straightaway... not till we'd flown four passes over the area, scanning through four different ranges of the EM spectrum. The survey showed nothing but trees and tundra-dogs, teeny rodent-niche animals that chewed out nests under the carpet moss.
Were they dangerous?
Ramos asked me.
Could they bite? Did they carry disease?
I told her they were no worse than Terran squirrels. Yes, they had teeth and on occasion they could carry a nasty microbe or two; but come on, Festina-girl, they were just squirrels.

Ramos gave me a grim look and flew around for another pass.

At last we landed: two hundred meters from the mine, on the shore of a small lake. Our charts called the place Lake Vascho, Oolom for eclipse. Probably the lake got mapped the same day one of our flyspeck moons pranced across in front of our sun. Not that we ever got true eclipses, not with our moons so small; occasionally the sun just acquired a darkish beauty mark on her face.

Thanks to spring, Lake Vascho had cleared its center of ice; but the shores were still frozen, with a thin crust that would take another few days to thaw completely. Everything—land, lake, air—bristled with pure northern silence.

Hold-your-breath beautiful.

Ramos holstered on a stun-pistol before leaving the skimmer. ("Not that hypersonics will affect robots," she said, "but if those tundra-dogs get uppity, zap!") Paulette and Daunt wore full body armor (gray/black urban camo) and they each carried an over-the-shoulder rocket launcher whose magazine packed four smart robot-poppers: tiny missiles designed to coldcock machines with a massive electrical jolt. Supposedly the missiles could distinguish androids from humans, and were programmed never to juice a living target. I wished I could take a minute to talk with them... make sure the popper missiles knew me as a chummy good-time gal. But the cops might get the wrong idea if I asked for a chat with their ammunition.

Ramos took the lead through the forest. No useless fuss about the cold this time. She'd put on gloves, but probably not to keep her hands warm... more likely, to avoid bites when wrestling rabid tundra-dogs. In one hand, she carried the paint-can device she'd used at the dipshits' house—the thing she called the Bumbler. Its screen showed a fish-eye view of the woods around us, but Ramos scarcely gave it a glance; she was too busy scanning trees and ground and sky, trusting her own eyes more than the machine's.

A stone's throw from the hole, Ramos stopped. "Do you want us to go ahead?" Daunt asked.

"I
never
let someone take risks for me." Ramos glanced my way. "But if you and Tic want to stay out here, feel free."

Tic shook his head. I did the same a moment later. "Okay," Ramos said, "forward. Immortality awaits."

The hole was artificial—that became precious obvious as soon as we got close enough for a peek inside. Not a random crack in the shield-stone, but a tunnel with a well-engineered slant floor. A ramp down into the bedrock, like the ancient mines back at Sallysweet River, except more overgrown.

"Do we go in?" Paulette asked.

"Absolutely," Tic said, bold as blood. He'd found a chemical torch-wand in one of the skimmer's equipment chests. Now he tapped the activation stub and the torch lit up like a two-hundred-watt baton of silver-shine.

"Let's go."

Ramos and Daunt moved to the lip of the tunnel; Paulette slid behind Tic and me, taking rear guard. "You aren't going to panic, are you?" she murmured to Tic with ham handed cop sympathy. "I know Ooloms don't like cramped, confined—"

"I'll be splendid," he interrupted. "A monument of imperturbability. Proceed."

But his ear-lids showed just a hint of the shivers.

The tunnel's center was bare wet stone, washed clean with meltwater. Out toward the edges, things got messier: spongy compost made of animal droppings, plus mud slopped down from outside. For centuries, tundra-dogs, thatch beetles and gummylarks had wandered in here, built nests, brought up babies. A great bleeding lot of them had died here too, leaving behind dirt-crusty litters of bone and carapace.

Plants had rooted in the thin soil, and some had even grown—tundra species don't need much light or root space. But the farther we got from the entrance hole, the fewer signs of flora and fauna. Even carpet moss won't grow in absolute darkness, and after a while, tundra-dogs must get the willies, wandering into black silence.

I could sympathize: thank heavens for Tic's torch-wand. When I glanced that way, though, I noticed Tic's knuckles had turned gray-blue as they squeezed the torch in a death grip. Dads had amused himself making up names for that gray-blue color. Anxious indigo. Whacko woad. Unbalanced ultramarine. When an Oolom hits a crapulating level of stress, the color-adaptive glands get thrown off-kilter by other hormones, and random patches of skin start turning that telltale shade. Yet Tic forced himself onward, till the tunnel entrance faded from sight, and there was nothing around us but cold walls of stone.

Some distance down, we came to a fork: a side tunnel ran to our right while the main shaft continued straight. Ramos pointed the Bumbler down the side tunnel and squinted at the machine's display screen. "Nothing obvious down there," she said in a low voice. "Not that the Bumbler can see much farther than we do in pitch-black." She turned and pointed the Bumbler forward along the main shaft. "Hello," she murmured. "Looks like an animal carcass. Does Demoth have bears?"

Daunt leaned in to peek at the screen himself. "I think it's a shanshan." Great St. Caspian's closest analog to a bear: covered in black peach fuzz instead of hair, and sporting orange dorsal sacs for sexual display, but shanshans were still four-legged omnivores with claws and a temper. "Are you sure it's dead?" Daunt whispered. "Shanshans hibernate. If one decided to hunker down here for the winter..."

"No body heat," Ramos answered. She thumbed a dial on the Bumbler, "And almost no bioelectric activity—just a little glow from decay microbes working their way through the flesh. Maybe it came down here to hibernate, but it didn't survive the cold. Old age or disease, I suppose." She drew her stun-pistol. "We'd better check it out."

Ramos and Daunt moved forward, right keen cautious. Tic and I followed at a safe distance while Paulette hung back, standing guard at the junction where the main shaft met the side tunnel. Tic had both ear-sheaths open; he might have been listening for the shanshan's heartbeat, though he probably couldn't hear bugger-all over my own heart's pounding.

Sweat trickled down my armpits.
Something
in the tunnel felt alive and active... maybe not the shanshan, but something.

The shanshan didn't shift a whisker as we approached. Warily, Ramos nudged the body with her foot.

No reaction.

From this angle, we could only see the animal's back. I didn't notice any decomposition in the parts I could see... but if the shanshan died during winter, the cold would have slowed decay, as good as a powered freezer.

Ramos poked the animal a few more times. Still no reaction. Keeping her stunner trained on the shanshan's head, she walked around the body, levered her foot underneath, and gave a heave.

The carcass rolled limply, deadweight. Its legs splayed outward as Ramos flopped it over on its back. "Definitely deceased," Daunt murmured, looking down at the shanshan's chest. From muzzle to belly, the animal's flesh had been eaten away by...

By...

Not insects or bacteria. I was close enough to smell a tangy bite in the air, wafting up from the shanshan's wounds. The odor was ugly familiar: cruel, vinegary acid, harking back to Pump Station 3.

The shanshan had wandered in here... and got shot gooey dead.

"Run!" I yelled.

But of course it was too late.

They came out of the side tunnel: one android after another, old, young, male, female, too many to count. Jelly guns galore. Tic had carried the torch-wand with him to the shanshan, so Paulette didn't have enough light to see them coming. At the last second, she must have picked up their footsteps, tiptoe-soft, sneaking in for ambush. She bellowed something, a warning, a battle cry, the same instant I was screaming, "Run!" Then she fired her whole magazine of poppers into the onrushing pack.

Thunder. Rocket blasts lit the whole tunnel, flame venting out the exhaust ports of Paulette's shoulder launcher.

Four missiles. More than four androids.

Boom, the sound of impact. Crackle, the zap of lightning shorting out robot circuits. Then cough-cough-cough-cough-cough, a flurry of jelly guns unloading on the nearest target.

Paulette staggered back from the impact—acid wads slapping against her body armor, splotching over her chest, arms, helmet. Her armor bloomed with smoke, every acid drop keen to burn its way through the plastic shell and blister the woman inside.

"Get out!" Daunt yelled at her... but in the split second Paulette had before the robots were on top of her, she charged toward us rather than heading back to the mine entrance.

So. All five of us were blocked in, with an army of gun-toting androids between us and the exit.

Jolly.

Daunt fired his four robot-poppers up the tunnel. The bang of their ignition damn near deafened me... that plus the echoes crashing off the rock walls, pummeling like fists on my eardrums.
Fé leejedd,
I thought witlessly; I hear the thunder. Then the poppers struck and four more androids went down, legs and arms jerking in short-circuit spasms.

Not good enough. I counted four robots still on their feet, black silhouettes outside the shine of Tic's torch.

Paulette raced toward us, wrapped in peels of acid smoke; and as she ran, she slapped a button on the wrist of her armor. Inside my head, I felt like someone had just shouted, "Mayday, Mayday!" though I hadn't heard the actual words. An emergency alert to Protection Central. I decided to add my own:
Xé, if you have any tricks up your sleeve, now would be a precious good time to trot them out.

Nothing. Then Ramos was pulling my arm, shouting words my buggy-whipped ears couldn't hear. I got the message anyway: retreat down the tunnel.

Where else? Except that if this mine was like the ones near Sallysweet River, we'd soon run out of retreating room: the top level always dead-ended at a pithead. Once upon a time, such pitheads may have held elevators to transport miners down to lower levels, and ore back up. But after three thousand years, the elevator sure as deviltry wouldn't be working... which meant we'd just have the elevator shaft. A sheer drop into the depths.

Still... better a nice clean fall than chug-a-lugging acid.

Run, run, run: us, then the robots in pursuit. We all sprinted full speed, except Tic, who launched himself into a downward glide that matched our pace. To keep his hands free, he'd jammed the torch-wand under the straps of his tote pack. The light reflecting off his scaly chest had a glowery gray-blue cast to it... but Tic was far from collapsing with the jitters. As he flew, he shouted back over his shoulder at the androids. "Stop, you're burning us! Stop, you're freezing us! Stop, you're drowning us!"

"What the hell are you raving about?" Daunt snapped.

Ramos and I didn't try to explain. "Stop, you're smothering us!" Tic hollered at the robots. "Stop, you're strangling us! Stop, you're squeezing too hard!"

"Stop," Paulette said, "we've hit a dead end." The pithead. Tic's torch showed a blank wall in front of us, broken by a black hole opening downward. Above the hole hung a few rusty twists of metal, all that was left of the elevator mechanism.

"The sides are sheer rock," Daunt said, looking into the shaft. "Straight down."

"The robots are going to fire again," Paulette shouted from behind us. I glanced over my shoulder in time to see her spin to face the shots and spread her arms wide. Trying to protect us from the acid barrage by blocking it with her body.

Daunt shouted, "No!" Then four blobs of goo splashed simultaneously against Paulette's ravaged armor, scattering sticky beads all over her body. Dozens of droplets found their way through holes in the armor, holes burned by the previous round of shots. Paulette sucked in her breath, then screamed, "Shit! Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!"

"Don't say that!" Ramos bellowed. Shoving past Tic, she yelled furiously at the robots, "Stop, you're stabbing us. Stop, you're making us bleed!" Festina: doing the only thing left. "Grab my waist," Tic barked at me. "I can parachute you down to the next level."

"And run out on everyone else?"

"Save yourself, damn it!" Ramos called over her shoulder.

"Yes, go! Now!" That came from Daunt; he'd thrown himself forward the moment Paulette was hit, and now stood between her and the androids. The androids had stopped their advance, all four of them standing across the tunnel like a wall, giving their jelly guns another few seconds to pressurize. They seemed in no hurry; they had us all in range.

"Faye!" Tic said. "Grab me! There's no time left."

But there was.

Flickering into existence from nowhere, a tube of light appeared in the tunnel. Purple. Blue. Green. One end of the tube opened wide, straight in front of me. The rest of it stretched back up the shaft, floating weightless in the air, over the heads of the androids and on into the distance. In some spots, the tube narrowed to the breadth of my arm; in others, it widened to fill the whole tunnel, its diameter fluctuating from moment to moment, shimmering peacock tinsel.

Tic gasped in surprise. "Xé?"

"No, it's a Sperm-tail," Ramos told him. "Escape route."

Before I could react, she slammed me hard across the shoulders and knocked me into the tube.

I'd shot through transport tubes before, but never in the unprotected flesh. To ride Bonaventure's up-sleeve, you always got put into stasis: sit down in a transport capsule, wait for the stasis field to on, and next thing you know, an attendant says, "Welcome to North Orbital Terminus." No jolt, no bump, no sensation of passage.

But this time, I wasn't in stasis.

Forward—I flew helpless-forward through the tube. When it compressed, I compressed. When it expanded, I did too. Bones didn't crunch, even as I squeezed through tight spots a centimeter across or ballooned out fat several meters wide... but I felt it all, felt my body pulled like plasticine, twisted-kneaded-sculpted to match the peacock tube's shape. The forces working me were blandly impersonal, crushing me, then rolling me out pastry-style; yet beyond all that wrenching and wringing I got the feel of a tangible sentience. Something that
knew
me. Something that felt queer-familiar.