13.
The left knee gave out in mid-bounce and she pinwheeled sideways, bashing against the rock. In an instant Vonnie hit the opposite side of the gap. But the ghost was quick to compensate. Her right heel and then one hand touched lightly and the ghost had already corrected their spin, regaining speed, clawing forward through the maze.
"Lam?" she said, heart pounding.
—
You're all right. There's no breach
.
Christ. She hadn't even thought of decompressing and tensed at the idea, hurting her neck when the ghost bent to fit a hole. For twenty minutes they’d been fighting through a series of cave-ins and grinds, and now the suit spidered forward with the bad leg trailing awkwardly, protecting it.
"How long for repairs?" she asked.
—
That may not be possible. Every anterior cable in the knee snapped and one medial
.
They were falling apart. The suit had never been designed to take this kind of abuse and Vonnie wasn't doing much better, punch drunk on stress and stimulants and more than thirty hours on the run, nearly fifty since she'd really slept. She didn't want to make the wrong decision.
"How long, Lam?"
—
Without the toolkit our best option might be to scavenge material from the ankle, weld it solid and restore some function to the knee. I estimate that would take an hour
.
"No."
If they stopped she was afraid she'd close her eyes. It would only be smart to rest but it would be too much like being blind again. “No, keep going,” she said.
If his sims were correct, they were still at least two kilometers down — and at some point they'd have to transition from rock to ice. This mountain rose up like a fin, always narrowing, disappearing completely a kilometer and a half from the surface. There would be islands suspended in the ice, broken-off hunks as large as New York and gravel fields like sheets and clouds. The trick would be to find a gas vent that went all the way up. The trick would be to climb through without touching off a rock swell.
Vonnie clenched her teeth, trying to avoid the thought. She knew that too much planning would overwhelm her.
They ducked another gap and suddenly the rift opened into a huge volcanic bubble, open on one side. It was half full of ice, but just to look across three hundred meters of open room was disorienting. Vonnie felt the same uncertainty in Lam. The ghost hesitated, scanning up and back.
“What do you think?” she said. "There's definitely some new melt over there. If we dig we might get into a vent, get out of this rock, close the hole behind us."
He lit her visor with radar frames.
—
Look
.
"Oh." Vonnie surprised herself. Her fear twisted in her like a saw but even now, after everything, she also felt a strong, clear surge of excitement.
There were more hieroglyphs across the cavern, a long wall of symbols cut into the rock itself. It was easily twenty times larger than the site they’d found at the surface, and she only wrestled with herself for an instant.
"How fast can you get a recording?" she said.
14.
The pellets in the ice were more than Bauman and Lam had hoped for, and swept away any last hint of doubt. This was a sentient race, or had been long ago — because each little ball looked to be feces mixed with other biologics like saliva or blood and swamped in hormones. Vonnie could only admire the elegance of it. In this resource-limited environment, the carvers had found at least two ways to encode information, both by shaping the ice and in their own chemistry.
When she started down the tunnel, it was with the thrill of history. She would always be first to walk inside this moon and a slavecast kept a swirl of tiny mecha around her feet, sounding the ice, recording everything. Unfortunately she wasn't so graceful. The passage dropped steeply but she tended to crash into the ceiling, misjudging the gravity. Worse, the opening shrank until it wasn't much bigger than her suit, and twice became too narrow for Vonnie to continue on without roughly shouldering through the brittle walls.
Their telemetry betrayed them, as expected. The men on the radio questioned her movement and ordered her back. She kept going. Sonar showed an end to the tunnel after four hundred meters, yet infrared revealed that it was a shade warmer than its surroundings, with a hot pinprick of gas leaking through.
Vonnie preempted any debate. "There's something behind here," she said. "My sonar's going crazy."
"Something alive?" That was Lam.
"I don't know. But this is an airlock. Look at it. So smooth." It was definitely not a formation caused by slow melt or tidal pressures. Amazing. Vonnie would have cringed at the idea of placing such responsibility in anything as flimsy as ice, but there were no metals here. What else could the carvers use? It spoke again of their inventiveness and determination, and she couldn’t wait to see more.
It was a test of sorts, a chance to prove herself the way that Lam and Bauman had already done. Every step deeper, every challenge met, showed her worth to the team.
To get through without losing the air, she would need to trap herself between this block and a new seal of her own making — and every surface in the ice showed old scars and stubs. Irregular holes marred the walls where building material must have been dug out.
"I say 'go,'" Lam said to the men on the radio. "We're picking up some kind of reading. Noise. Heat. There's no telling what we'll miss if we just sit here."
“I can get us in,” Vonnie agreed.
Her friends had less than two hours to live when they joined her near the airlock, grinning like kids. Bauman was last in line, so Vonnie took control of Bauman’s suit, dropping frozen blocks into place and soldering the stack together with her laser finger on a minimum setting. "Slow work," she said, apologizing, not wanting to blunt their energy.
Lam only shrugged, running sims on his visor as he waited. "Think what they used," he said. "Body heat? Urine, maybe. There are organic contaminants all through here."
"Some good DNA," Bauman agreed, restless and happy.
Finally they were sealed in, and Vonnie eased through the original lock. Immediately she saw another ice plug further on. That was good engineering, but she was disappointed to realize how many lifetimes it must have been since the carvers had come here or even considered this tunnel important.
Long, long ago, the top of the second lock had slumped open and her suit analyzed the low-pressure atmosphere bleeding over her as nearly one hundred percent nitrogen — a gas so inert, no creature could have evolved to burn it as an energy source. This seemed to be a dead place. Why bother to block it off?
"Nobody home," she said.
"No." Lam was cheerful, even buoyant, bumping her shoulder as he tried to look past.
But maybe the air here was bad
because
this place was unused, she thought. Maybe they controlled oxygen content with flood-gates. It could be their most precious resource.
Lam and Bauman were beyond listening, though, lost in the invisible chatter of data. Some of their tiny mecha had run ahead while others lingered to taste the ice, and Lam especially was in his element, pulling files, fitting each little perspective into a working whole.
Vonnie was eager, too, yet meticulously rebuilt the locks behind them. Then she moved in front again, her exhilaration like a shout.
Another eighty meters on, though, the slanting tunnel dropped away completely. A sink. It was encrusted with old melt and across the way was a hollow of uncertain depth, thick with stalactites. There had been a catastrophe here, a belch of heat, probably, but she couldn't feel sad. She walked to the edge. Her sonar raced down the gaping channel like a fantastic halo but did not reach bottom.
Somewhere down there was the dark heart of this world.
"Perfect," Lam said, uploading a sim to her to complete the thought. This shaft was a cross-section through the ice, maybe rich, maybe not. A mecha descending—
"Sure. Give me fifteen minutes.” It would be easy to sink a few bolts, play out a molecular wire and send a bot down like a spider. Vonnie rifled through her kit.
"Huh," he said then, and one of the mecha near Vonnie's feet reared back and shot a marker into the ice.
It was dirty ice, like most of the patches that Lam had already targeted, some dark with lava dust, others discolored like milk or glass.
There was a shell. A small spiral shell. It wouldn't have looked unusual on any beach on Earth, but here it was a treasure. Even so, Lam was careful. He merely stuck a radio pin into the wall of the tunnel.
The wall exploded, white ice, black rock. Vonnie was nearly in front of it and that saved her. The blast knocked her out and up, snarled in her wire.
Bauman yelled once, "Lam, get back!"
There was probably no more than a quarter ton of debris stopped up behind the dust pack — a mass of gravel and larger stones that had gradually absorbed just enough warmth to slump forward into a loose, dangerous bulge — and it weighed only a tenth as much as it would have on Earth. But in this gravity, it splashed, and it still had all of its inertia and mass.
It tore the vent. It hit other nodes of rock.
There were three upward shockwaves: the first ricochets, a vicious swell and then a smaller, settling riffle. Vonnie escaped the worst of it, half-conscious and confused, her body slammed into the safe pockets at the top of the vent as her friends disappeared, their sharecasts bursting with alarms and then one massive injury report before cutting off.
But she was still tied to the wire, and it would not break. One end caught in the heaving ice and the swell took her too.
15.
Vonnie lurched sideways across the cavern and pushed against another slab of rock. The torn fragments of the wall had shifted as water and ice intruded, retreated, came again, and some wild feeling in her was able to guess which pieces were only debris and which held hieroglyphs on one side or another.
It made the hair stand up on her arms and neck, uneven and mute. It felt exactly like... "Wait."
—
Sonar
.
Somehow she’d sensed it first, even before his machine ears, but there was no time to wonder at the weird creeping changes in herself. "How close are they? We're almost done."
—
At least a thousand meters. It's only echoes. My estimate could be off but I'd say they're still deep in the tunnels. Possibly they don't even know we're here
.
"No. They know."
—
Their voices aren't directed this way
.
"Let's move. Can you pull up that block over there? I think it came out of that corner. If we can scan whatever's left on it we'll have most of this end of the wall."
The suit limped forward.
Vonnie wondered how it would hold up in a fight and knew she didn't want to be out in the open like this. Better to find a hole, place the explosives... "It's not amphibians, is it?"
—
No. The others
.
She shoved at the rock, moving feverishly now, but it felt good and right to stay — to have purpose again. She would kill as many as she had to, but she was not just a rat in a trap, running mindlessly. She had worn down to the bedrock of herself and found what she needed, a last reservoir of strength.
Only a few shards left now. Possibly the beginning of an answer. Lam said he'd seen enough of the amphibians’ language to try to communicate, but this stretch of carvings was too valuable to abandon. A sample this large would be priceless in translation efforts, and even if she survived they might never find their way back to this cave. And if she died... well, if she died, their probes might still find her. Her suit would transmit her files even if she was buried and lost.
Vonnie realized she was crying and wasn't angry. She wasn't ashamed. She had done her best all the way through and maybe that was enough. That was good and right.
She dropped the rock and pushed over a smaller boulder with only a chipped half-moon of a carving on the underside. "Got it?" she asked, feeling close to him again, the real him and the ghost. He was a powerful friend.
—
Three hundred meters, Von. We should go
.
"You got it?" she repeated.
—
Yes. Von, listen. There are more of them this time, at least ten, moving fast now
.
"Help me with this last big one."
The truth was that nobody even really knew which questions to ask. She didn't wonder why there were amphibian hieroglyphs in what was obviously no longer their territory. The catacombs probably changed hands regularly or were deserted and reclaimed. But why she hadn't seen more carvings? These hieroglyphs were ancient. Were the amphibians only coming back now after a long absence? Even then, why hadn't she seen more signs of activity?
Maybe some part of the secret was here, and she was willing to fight for it.
Something else, she realized. The answer might be in their enemies, and Vonnie swung to face the approaching voices with an excavation charge in either hand.
16.
The first little world in the ice would always be her favorite. It was peaceful. The two species of bugs — closely related to each other but wholly unlike the fat-bodied ants brought up by the ESA rover — seemed to feed solely on the gray, sticky algae that grew alongside the wells of the hot springs, where the melt was thick and ever-changing.
At one time this chamber must have been part of a larger area, but ice-falls had long since walled it off. Vonnie only stumbled into this open space when she refused to be deterred and started digging. Her mind had felt very, very small in those hours, too small for any thought except to get away from the lethal, creaking weight of the collapsed vent above her.
She wasn't hurt, other than a sprained elbow. She was alone. Communication with the outside had already been staticky, despite the relays she'd left along the tunnel. Maybe those machines were all gone. Maybe she'd fallen further than she thought. Obviously she had to find a way back to the surface. The other ships were still two days out and it might take them another day to gear up and scout for her, even longer to forge their way through the crumbling mass above.
She regretted not having monitors to leave in this place. Bauman especially would have been excited, but nearly all of Vonnie’s mecha had been lost in the rock swell. The two she had left she sent exploring and then sat still, grieving, resting —
and recording. Her camera lights were dazzling in the wet ice.
The atmosphere here was oxygen-rich, though still nothing that would support a human being, laced with hydrogen chloride. More interesting, the pressure was three times what she'd seen near the surface, due in part to a lower altitude but mostly because this hollow was self-contained.
Neither species had eyes, of course. They used fan antennae and scent instead. They were basically helpless. Droplets fell steadily or in periodic rains, and the chamber floor was pebbled with thousands of specimens who had been caught by the slush and frozen. Vonnie collected several. But the mortality rate, while high, didn’t seem enough to keep the bugs from outgrowing their food source. This pocket ecology was more than incomplete; it was unworkable; it was temporary.
She was frustrated when she built the ghostling to help her, angry at him, afraid of dying in this impossible place. Bauman would have been a better companion. Vonnie wouldn't have tried so hard to control her and the mess she made of Lam was erratic, missing too much. She'd held back more than half of his mem files, but included the last. She wanted him to know why he died. She wanted him to be cautious, even timid.
She didn't trust the result.
Vonnie dug her way out of the bugs' small world when her mecha reported a faint current of atmosphere, half a kilometer away. She knew there were more vents nearby.
The tremor was probably another aftershock. The bulk of the fallen vent was pressing out against the surrounding area, and as other networks collapsed they also pushed down or sideways. She felt a long, low creaking sound and suddenly the ice lurched, slamming at her. Then some larger section gave way and Vonnie fell tumbling into the white.
A queer thought struck her as she labored to free herself, sinking ever deeper through the loose hunks and powder, certain after the third hour that she was in her grave.
This was no ocean into which she was descending — it was this moon's sky. Caught here, native species had no concept of anything further up. They would always look for the mountains or the liquid seas below.
She began to dig down instead of sideways, not fighting the avalanche but using it to her advantage, sifting, swimming. Finally she fell into a world of rock, a honeycomb of soft lava worn open at one time by running water. Whether it was an island suspended in the ice or a true mountain she couldn't say yet, but she had at last come down out of the frozen sky.