In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (18 page)

They’d put the portapotty in another room. Even now it took a certain amount of willpower for Jeremy to use it. The damned thing was
alive
. . .

“Here’s the latest on the tunnels,” Sally said. “Teyud’s been sending reports by runner as they find stuff.”

A spider web sprang into existence on the screen, with sections color-coded in blue, red, and gray.

“These are clear; those are filled; these are collapsed; and these are partially choked but clearable.”

“Why on Earth . . . well, you know what I mean . . . do Martians burrow like ants? Every place they’ve been around for a while, you find these warrens underneath.”

“Storage and insulation. And they just seem to like it. At least
they build tunnels big enough to get around in without knocking your head, mostly; and it’s convenient during weather like this.”

“Plus, you’re safe from flocks of giant flesh-eating birds.”

“That, too.” Her voice lost its bantering tone. “You have any luck getting through to base, or Zar-tu-Kan?”

“None. But this crappy weather is bad enough that that might be natural, now.”

“Yeah,” she said flatly. “It could be. But it isn’t.”

He shrugged uneasily and took a swig from his canteen; Sally reached out a hand, took a drink herself, poured a little into a mask, and clipped it across her face.

Being pursued by Boris and Natasha who want to steal the treasure of the lost city really isn’t what an archaeologist is trained for
, Jeremy thought.

Granted, he was an Olympic-level fencer and a rock-climber of note; you didn’t get to go off planet unless you had physical
and
academic qualifications. Intrigue and possible violence, though . . . not his style. He would have thought it had gone out of fashion even for the Eastblockers, now that they were ravenously successful capitalists. At least the eastern part of the Eastbloc were, and they ran the show nowadays.

Pardon me, now that they’re employing “socialism with special characteristics.” Which mostly means exporting areaphones and videoplayers and thinscreens and replacing beautiful old pagodas with the butt-ugliest skyscrapers outside Chicago—only twice as big—and building mansions outfitted with gold-plated bathtubs and squads of big-titted blond Russian housemaids in skimpy uniforms. But I guess when the stakes are high enough, atavistic instincts come to the fore
.

Luckily, if there
were
Eastbloc agents out there shadowing them, they’d have to use locals for transport, probably those ones Teyud had spotted. And this weather would ground local aircraft and send landships into buttoned-down mode, bare poles and noses anchored into the wind and everyone waiting it out belowdecks. Martians didn’t try to fight a sandstorm. There weren’t that many in a season—this planet had fewer active weather systems than Earth—but a bad one could strip the flesh off your bones and then grind your bones to meal. They were the cutting edge of the Deep Beyond, claiming a little more of the Real World each year.

“I’d better go have a look in person,” he said.

He was smiling as he left. Teyud seemed to have caught some of his passion for ancient relics; or at least she was very enthusiastic about
this
set of them.

He could see the glow-sticks that illuminated the Thoughtful Grace’s improvised command post long before he got there. The oval walls of the ancient tunnel were slick enough to reflect light, still held by the chemical saliva-mortar of the beast that had drilled them. Mica glittered in the glassy rock; at closer range, he could see the light shining in the Martians’ great eyes, as luminous as those of cats.

Teyud looked up at him with a slight, enigmatic smile, made a gesture of greeting-acknowledgment, and then went on to her second in command as she made a mark with her ink-stick on the wall of the junction. “Anything of significance?”

They were in a Y-fork of what had been the waste recirculation system that was linked to all the larger buildings and lined with reconfigured rock. A foot-deep layer of surface dust had accumulated here; the problem was that in some places it had filled the tunnels completely, and in a few, the fall of the towers above them had ruptured the passageways. Approaching their goal in the former centrum of power would not simply be a matter of following the airship’s map. They would have to draw a map of their own, testing which ways were open.

“We have cleared a passage to the large chamber
here
,” Baid said. “There are promising exits which may lead to that which we seek, as of yet still blocked by accumulated sand. There are also many cockroaches and a large variety of small, burrowing insects in these areas, particularly the large chamber.”

She indicated them with a finger. “Once or twice there is a brief glimpse of very fast mammalian vermin, possibly rodents of unusual size.”

“Interesting,” Teyud replied, and the engineer nodded. “Very interesting.”

“Why is that interesting?” Jeremy asked as he came up. “It is what I would anticipate in such an environment.”

Baid looked at him and took a pose of comically exaggerated
surprise, which meant widening her eyes slightly and touching the fingers of one hand to her chin.

“Incredulous disbelief,” she said.

Teyud realized the problem. “Life requires water,” she explained. “We are in the Deep Beyond, and this city has been abandoned for a considerable period.”

“Oh,” he said.

Yeah, the Deep Beyond isn’t a place, really, it’s a condition. The deadest spots on a dying planet, where even evolution can’t keep up with the freeze-drying process anymore. This makes the Sahara look like the Everglades
.

“The towers?” he said.

“They would provide a little moisture, but not enough, I think, for the observed activity, particularly of late. Even the Mountain does not reap as much water from the atmosphere as it once did. The flying predators would be a source of organics, but in the towers where they nest, not here.
Something
dwells here below. This may complicate our search and produce delay. Baid, relieve the watch on the
Traveler
. Jeremy, come; we should investigate.”

She turned on her heel and led the way, which was perfectly polite in Martian terms, if a little imperious.

She’s worried
, he thought.
Which means I should be worried. But I’m not. We’re so close!

They went through the tunnels the crew of the
Traveler
had explored. The way was faintly lit by glow-globes—the original ones, cleaned out and given fresh cultures of algae and feeding sludge.
But not very many. Granted, Martians see in the dark better than we do, but not
that
much better
.

“Why so little light?” Jeremy said.

“Hibernation,” Teyud said.

“Explicative-Interrogative?” Jeremy replied—actually an expressive sound that meant “expand on your last statement.” In Martian, even the equivalent of “huh?” was precise. You could communicate the same with an inclination of the shoulder and an earflick, but they weren’t face to face.

“Carnivorous and parasitic organisms in hibernation will be stimulated to full activity by heat, light, the increased moisture brought by our exhalations, and the scent of our flesh,” she said succinctly
without turning around. “It is unwise to give them more stimulation than strictly necessary.”

Which was exactly what you wanted to hear when you were struggling through sand soft as talc, in a dimly lit warren of tunnels in a lost city in the Deep Beyond, with a blasting sandstorm raging above and possible pirates, assassins, and spies waiting for you. Most Martian land animals did hibernate, too—even the hominids could do it if they had to, by a sheer act of will, something that still had the biologists a bit puzzled. Hibernation was logical on a planet with winters longer and colder than anything Earth had ever seen.

“Screw logic,” he muttered to himself in English, with his hand on his automatic.

They climbed up a sand drift that half filled the tunnel, then down a spiral staircase that had been shoveled open and from there upward into a great chamber, circular and about a hundred yards across, with a floor covered in waist-high dunes; the walls were of the native ironstone bedrock for fifteen feet, and the smooth synthetic—or
digested
—stone above that. The roof was intact, a low, seamless dome of the poured-stone material reinforced with organic glass fiber. That had been the staple of Martian buildings since early in the Imperial era. It was deep in shadow; pools of light were scattered here and there where the crew had set up globes on portable stands.

There was a faint odor, too. Nothing you could really call a smell; it was more of an absence of the utter
lack
of smells that most of the tunnels had.

“This was a manufacturing facility,” Teyud said. “I think the repair shops for the warships were located here; possibly a hospital or budding-plant for engines.”

Jeremy nodded, then gestured agreement. There were glassine pipes along the wall for distributing the noxious waste-sludge that engines ate. Places on the floor where the slow accumulation of sand had mixed with rust and odd eroded shapes marked the location of machinery.

The leathery faced hybrid with the nose slits came up to them; he had an arrow on the string of his bow, and he was glaring around.

“Too much,” he said, in gutturally accented Demotic. “Bugs in the sand. All dark here.”

It took a moment for his remark to register with Jeremy; how could you have a food chain without light? The answer was straightforward; you had to have a rain of nutrients from someplace that
did
have light, the way life of the abyssal depths of Earth’s oceans survived. Something had to be bringing organic matter to this lifeless place, even if that only meant crapping on the floor.

The thought seemed to strike Teyud, the noseless one, and Jeremy at the same time. Their heads snapped upward, and Teyud shouted:

“Elevate the lights!”

You did that by using a reflective collar. One of the crew rose and used the thin flexible length of mirror to throw a beam upward. At first Jeremy thought the ceiling was merely blotched. Then it began to move, rippling. Eyes blinked open, huge and crimson.

“Feral engines!”
the hybrid shouted, and the string of his bow went
snap
on his bracer as he shot upward and snatched for another arrow.

A moment later the shout turned into a gargling scream. A tentacle lashed downward, growing thinner and thinner until it was like a wire loop, hooked around the man’s body and reeled up like a bungee cord recoiling. Only this one didn’t stop until it hit a mouth. The thing had no vocal cords, but the crunching noise the man made as he was smashed in past the circle of horn plates that surrounded the orifice was loud enough. So was the moment of silence that followed the scream’s sudden end.

And underneath that, you could hear the endless waxy
puckapuckapuckapucka
as the beasts’ tentacles slapped their suckers on the polished stone and tore them loose while they moved; and the harsh panting as their lungs swelled like veined sacks on either side of their bodies.

Jeremy threw himself backward onto the sand with his pistol up. “Christ, how many—there must be hundreds of them!” he shouted.

“Forty-two,” Teyud answered calmly, and opened fire with the dart gun in her left hand, the sword ready in her right. “Doubtless they lair here and climb to the towers above to prey on the birds and their leavings.” In a ringing shout like a brass trumpet: “We must kill them all
expeditiously!
”

Everyone started shooting, the sharp echoing
brak-brak-brak
of
Jeremy’s automatic overriding the slower
phffft
of the dart pistols and rifles, the sharp upward stab of orange-white flame as he emptied the magazine, the smell of the cordite choking-strong in the cold dry air. A huge limp shape fell to the sand next to him with a thud he could feel along his whole body, ripped open and leaking blood that smelled like copper. Its tentacles raised a fog of dust as they thrashed the ground like whips of boiled leather.

One struck him across the upper thighs with paralyzing force; Jeremy screamed, but forced himself to keep shooting with an effort of will that left his face gray and running with sweat. His eyes stung in the darkness, half blinded by the muzzle flashes, and he wasn’t sure if he hit anything. Then the slide locked back as the last cartridge flicked out, and he fumbled at his waist-belt for the spare magazine, ejected the spent one, fumbled a little again as he strove to click home the next. It finally snicked into place and he started shooting again.

Another robed figure rose sprattling toward the ceiling, with a shriek that ended in that grisly crunch. Chewing and sucking sounds followed, and bits and pieces rained down. More of the beasts fell dead as the neurotoxin in the Martian dart guns struck; unfortunately one of them fell directly on top of a glow-globe, cutting the light in half. Now there was only one island of visibility in the middle of the great room, and all around it shadows where monsters walked.

“They are coming down the walls!”
a voice shouted.

“Twenty remain,” Teyud said; somehow her voice cut cleanly through the brabble of shouts and screams. “To the light, but do not look closely at it. Back to back, stand!”

The pain in his groin had subsided a bit; the tentacle hadn’t struck squarely—he’d be dead or puking and screaming if it had—and the adrenaline washed a bit of the agony out. Harder was standing up when one of those organic whips might crack down out of the darkness above and carry him toward the waiting maw.

Christ, what a place for an archaeologist to end up!
he thought, sweat sending raw pain through his chapped lips.
And I asked for it! Goddamn Mars and Goddamn me, too!

For an instant he felt a paralyzing longing for the sight of green grass and trees and the smell of barbecue cooking.