He shivered, physically repelled at the thought, but unable to shake it.
“Got it,” Baxter said. Hoop waited for the man’s outburst of disbelief, a shout of terror, but none came. “Hoop?”
He moved beside Baxter and looked down at the screen. Across the top were several thumbnails, and the main screen was taken with a view of the dome’s interior, as seen from high up on one side. The lights were still on. Everything was motionless.
“Thumbnails?” Hoop asked.
“Yeah. Other cameras.” Baxter touched the screen and images began to scroll. They were from differing angles and elevations, all showing the dome’s interior. Hoop was familiar with the ten or so buildings, the vehicles scattered around, the planet’s geography altered and flattened inside the dome’s relatively small span. Nothing looked particularly out of place. It all seemed quite normal.
“Can’t see any damage,” Lachance said.
“Don’t like this at all,” Kasyanov said. Fear made her voice higher than normal. It sounded like impending panic. “Where are they? What about the other miners, the ones left behind?”
“Dead down in the mines,” Sneddon said. “Taken deep to wherever those things were found, maybe. Like wasps or termites, gathering food.”
“Oh, thanks for that,” Kasyanov said.
“It’s all just maybes,” Ripley said.
Hoop nodded. “That’s all we’ve got. Baxter, keep in the middle of the group, and keep your eyes on that screen. Scroll the images, watch out for any movement that isn’t us. Shout if you see anything.” He moved to the door controls and checked the control panel. “All good here. Ready?”
Baxter held back, and the others stood in a rough semicircle around the big doors, weapons held at the ready. Not weapons, Hoop thought. They’re tools. Mining tools. What do we even think we’re doing down here? But they were all looking to him, and he projected calm and determination. With a single nod he touched the switch.
A hiss, a grinding sound, and the doors parted. A breeze whistled out as pressures equalized, and for a moment a cloud of dust filled the tunnel, obscuring their vision. Someone shouted in panic. Someone else moved quickly forward and through the doors, and then Hoop heard Ripley’s voice.
“It’s fine in here,” she said. “Clear. Come on through.”
He was next through the doors, spray gun at the ready. The others followed, and Kasyanov closed the doors behind them. They were much too loud.
“Sneddon?” Hoop asked.
“Air’s fine,” she said. She was checking a device slung onto her belt, its screen showing a series of graphs and figures. She slipped off her helmet and left it hanging, and the others did the same.
“Baxter?” Hoop asked.
“I’ll tell you if I see anything!” he snapped.
“Right, good. Just keeping you on your toes.” He nodded at a bank of steel containers lined up along the dome wall beside the door. “Okay, let’s get these suits off, secure them in one of these equipment lock-ups. We’ll pick them up on the way back.” They stripped the suits quickly, and Hoop piled them inside one of the units.
“Mine entrance?” Ripley asked, and Hoop pointed. There were actually two entrances, both housed inside bland rectangular buildings. But they were going for the nearest.
Hoop led the way. He carried the spray gun awkwardly, feeling faintly ridiculous hefting it like a weapon, even though he knew their enemies. He had never fired a gun in his life. As a kid, living in a more remote area of Pennsylvania, his Uncle Richard had often taken him out shooting. He’d tried to force a gun into Hoop’s hands—a vintage Kalashnikov, a replica Colt .45, even a pulse rifle illegally borrowed from a neighbor on leave from the Colonial Marines’ 69th Regiment, the Homer’s Heroes.
But Hoop had always resisted. The black, bulky objects had always scared him, and his kid’s knowledge of what they were for had made the fear worse. I don’t want to kill anyone, he’d always thought, and he’d watched his uncle’s face as the older man blasted away at trees, rocks, or homemade targets hung through the woods. There had been something in his expression that had meant Hoop never truly trusted him. Something like bloodlust.
His uncle had been killed years later, just before Hoop’s first trip into space, shot in the back on a hunting trip into the woods. No one ever really knew what had happened. Lots of people died that way.
But now, for the first time ever, Hoop wished he’d taken one of those guns and rested it in his hands. Weighed the potential uses he might have put it to, against the repulsion he felt for the dull black metal.
An acid spray gun. Who the fuck am I kidding?
This had always been a strange place, beneath the dome. Hoop had been here several times now, and he always found it unnerving—it was the planet’s natural landscape, but the dome made it somewhere inside, the climate artificial and entirely under their control. So they kicked through sand and dust that the wind no longer touched. They breathed false air that LV178’s sun did not heat. The structure’s underside formed an unreal sky, lit in gray swathes by the many spotlights hung from its supporting beams and columns.
It was as if they had trapped a part of the planet and tried to make it their own.
Just look where that had got them.
As they neared the building that enclosed the first mine head, Hoop signalled that they should spread out and approach in a line. The door seemed to be propped or jammed open. If one of those things emerged, best it was faced with an array of potential targets. All of them armed.
They paused, none of them wanting to be the first to go through.
“Hoop,” Ripley whispered. “I’ve got an idea.” She slung the charge thumper over her shoulder by its strap and darted quickly toward the building. Beside the half-open door she unbuckled her belt and pulled it loose of the loops.
Hoop saw what she was about to do. His heart quickened, his senses sharpened. He crouched low, ensuring that the gun’s nozzle was pointing slightly to the left of the door. If something happened, he didn’t want to catch Ripley in the acid spray.
Ripley fashioned a loop at the end of the belt and edged forward, feeding it over the top of the door’s chunky handle. She looked back at the others, acknowledging their slight nods. Then she held up her other hand with three fingers pointing, then two, one…
And she pulled.
The door screeched across accumulated grit. The belt slipped from the handle, and nothing emerged.
Before Hoop could speak, Ripley had swung the charge thumper from her shoulder and edged inside.
“Baxter!” Hoop said as he ran forward.
“No cameras in there!” Baxter responded.
It wasn’t as dark inside as Hoop had expected. There was a low level illumination coming through the opaque ceiling—artificial light borrowed from outside—and the lift’s internal lights were still powered up. The lighting was good.
What it showed was not.
There was a dead miner in the lift. Hoop couldn’t distinguish the sex. In the seventy days since they had died, bacteria brought to the mine by the humans had set to work, consuming the corpse. Environmental control had done the rest; the damp, warm atmosphere providing the ideal conditions in which the microorganisms could multiply. The result caused the corpse’s flesh to bloat and sag.
The smell had diminished until it was only a tang of sweet decay, but it was enough to make Hoop wish they’d kept their suits and helmets. The unfortunate victim’s mouth hung open in a laugh, or a scream.