She had to admit, the results of the first three days of Mycoborer penetration were impressive. After that initial visit, Amiri and Jet had found their way to the garage on their own, by different routes each time, for once-a-day checks and repositionings of new myco-sticks as the old ones successively pooped out. But Tej was afraid Grandmama was going to have to report to her Earth friend that his straight route and uniform diameter goals were still a hope for the future. The black walls of the shaft wavered-and not just from her wobbling light-widened and constricted irregularly, and bent away. Tej arrived at a kind of foyer Amiri had made at the bottom of the shaft to store the bulk of their supplies, straightened, and caught her breath.
Amiri held a finger to his mask. “As little talking as possible, from here on,” he whispered. Jet and Tej nodded dutifully. They’d left their wristcoms in the locked utility room, and traded shoes for soft, muffling slippers. Tej’s had bunny faces on the toes, and Grandmama’s had kittens, which was what they got for letting Em do the shopping, she supposed. The floor felt odd, through them-rubbery, not solid.
The tunnel leading away toward the park was just wide enough to stand upright in, though Grandmama had to bend her head, except where it occasionally constricted, and they all had to duck through. Worse, it turned, randomly. Twice, they had to sit and slide around complete bends. It seemed less like traveling a tunnel than like crawling through a giant intestine.
Continuing the comparison, the tube also seemed to be growing appendixes. Most were no larger in diameter than Tej’s arm; she felt no impulse to stick her hand in, glove or no, but Jet, having taken a possessive attitude toward it all, demonstrated that one could. Tej made a face at him. Jet stopped at another irregular wide spot, his eyes bright over his mask.
Amiri was leading Grandmama on toward an inspection of the working face; he cast a look of irritation over his shoulder, but could not, of course, yell at them. Their lights bobbed away.
“Here!” Jet whispered, pointing with his light to his prize, or surprise, as he’d resolutely refused to tell his sister what the wildly wonderful thing that he’d found was.
A pale, skeletal foot was sticking through the wall, at about waist height.
Tej jumped back, and glared at her odd-brother. Even-brothers, odd-brothers, all brothers were the same. He apparently found it hilarious that she wasn’t allowed to scream, choking instead. She drew a calming breath, deciding that an unruffled front would be the best revenge. “Well, that’s one Barrayaran who won’t be bothering us.”
Jet snickered, and drew a long, folding steel knife from his jacket pocket. He opened it and held the point to the rubbery wall beside the foot, leaning in. After a moment of resistance, it poked through.
“What are you doing?” Tej demanded in a tight whisper, as he began to saw.
“The walls harden up after a couple of days, as they cure,” he whispered back. “Won’t be able to do this tomorrow without making noise. It’s now or never.”
Tej could see the logic of that, though she didn’t see the problem with never. Or at least, somebody else, much later. Jet, finding that he couldn’t pull the foot out of the wall even after he’d cut a small circle around it, started on a much larger circle. When he peeled that away, entirely too much dirt came through, and Tej wondered if she should run, and which way, but the stream trailed off. Jet dug a bit more, then stood up with his hand stuck through out of sight and a surprised expression on his face. “There’s space past here!”
“Another tunnel, maybe?” asked Tej. “That poor fellow has to have got all the way down here somehow.”
Jet knelt again, digging with canine enthusiasm. And style. After too much more dirt, he bent and wriggled through his opening. His voice came back after a moment: “Wow, you should see this!”
Tej wasn’t sure that was true, but…she couldn’t let her little brother go off exploring in a dangerous place on his own, now, could she? She nearly had a responsibility to follow him.
She stuffed her hair down her jacket collar, donned her knit hat, and wriggled after Jet.
He was crouching in a small, smelly space seemingly held upright by some bowed-looking timber supports. Not very much farther along, some other supports were crushed very flat. Had a cave-in trapped their corpse?
A long time ago, or the space would smell much worse. About half of the body was uncovered, face-down, skeletal arms out as if clawing. A tiny wisp of hair still clung to the skull, but otherwise most of the organics seemed to have decomposed, including some of his clothing. The synthetics still held up, shabbily; some woven straps, most of a backpack of some sort, flung out before him as if by his bony hands. Some metal bits were blobs of corrosion or rust, others still shiny, including those eye-pins she’d seen on the ImpSec men and a strange necklace around the skeleton’s neck. Tej worked it loose, to find a metal tag at the end with incised letters: an unfamiliar prole name, Abelard, V., the rank of sergeant-assuming that was what the abbreviation Ssgt. translated to-and a long alphanumeric string. “It looks like he was a Barrayaran soldier,” murmured Tej. “So what was he doing down here?”
She looked up to find Jet opening the backpack.
“Don’t touch that!” she said in a fierce whisper.
“Why not?” asked Jet, folding back the cover.
“I think it’s a bomb.”
Even Jet paused at this. He brought his cold light closer to reveal a wad of corroded and uncorroded but in any case dead electronics, and an even more mysterious gray mass. “Er,” he said, and backed up a little.
Tej pocketed the necklace and crawled over to look more closely. The gray mass, several kilos’ worth, was slumping, and old wires led into it. “Plastic explosive of some kind?” Tej hazarded.
Jet’s brow wrinkled. “Some really old kind. Maybe it’s deteriorated by now.”
“Maybe it’s not.”
“Um.”
A frightened whisper, Amiri’s voice, came from their hole. “Tej? Jet?”
Jet rolled over, stuck his head down, and whispered back, “Amiri, you have to come see this!”
“I told you to leave that damned foot alone.”
“Yes, but it’s attached to a whole guy! You’re the doctor-you might be able to tell how old he is!”
Some muffled swearing was followed, a few minutes later, by Amiri wriggling through their makeshift passage. Anger at his more adventurous siblings warred with curiosity, in his expression; with a visible mental IOU, curiosity won, temporarily. Amiri’s gloved fingers danced over the visible portions of the corpse, probing, pulling, checking.
“Can’t be sure without knowing more about Barrayaran soil ecology,” he whispered. “But it’s not very dry down here. Not less than twenty years. Not more than forty. A local forensics expert could likely date it more precisely.” His eye at last fell on the backpack, stretched out beyond the skeletal fingers. “Oh, crap. Don’t even touch that!”
Jet tried for an innocent grin, defeated by his medical mask.
“Told you,” whispered Tej.
“It might be too old to go off, though,” Jet suggested. “Maybe we should, like…try to take a little sample to analyze.”
This approach plainly appealed to the researcher in Amiri, but he did stick his head down their hole to whisper, “Grandmama! You’re more of a chemist than I am. Do plastic explosives deteriorate over time?”
“Some do,” her voice came back.
“Ah.” Amiri unceremoniously plucked the knife from Jet’s hand, knelt, and gently tried to carve out a few grams of gray blob. It had apparently hardened with the decades.
“…some become unstable,” Grandmama’s voice continued.
Amiri abruptly desisted.
“I vote we leave it alone,” said Tej. “Or at least come back later when everything else is done. If there’s time.”
“Yes,” said Amiri, reluctantly folding the knife up. He didn’t give it back to Jet.
Jet didn’t protest.