“Dakota, I believe. Or perhaps it was Minnesota. Somewhere to the north, at least.”
“I’m from Galveston,” Floyd said. “That puts us a world apart.”
“None the less, you will take on the case?”
“We have an appointment, monsieur. We can discuss things then.”
“Very well, then. I shall expect you on the hour?”
Floyd shook the second letter from its envelope, which was postmarked from Nice. A single sheet of grey paper, folded in two, tipped out on to the desk. He flicked the paper open to reveal a handwritten message in watery ink that was only a shade darker than the paper on which it was written. He recognised the handwriting immediately. It was from Greta.
“Monsieur Floyd?”
Floyd dropped the letter as if it was stamped from hot metal. His fingers seemed to tingle. He hadn’t expected to hear from Greta again—not in this life. It took him a few moments to adjust to her sudden intrusion back into his world. What could she possibly have to say to him?
“Monsieur Floyd? Are you still there?”
He tapped the mouthpiece. “Just lost you for a moment there, monsieur. It’s the rats in the basement, always at the telephone lines.”
“Evidently. Upon the hour, then? Are we agreed?”
“I’ll be there,” Floyd said.
TWO
Verity Auger surveyed the underground scene from the safety of her environment suit, standing a dozen metres from the crippled wreckage of the crawler. The tarantula-like machine lay tilted to one side, two of its legs broken and another three jammed uselessly against the low ceiling of carved ice. The crawler was going nowhere—it couldn’t even be dragged back to the surface; but at least its life-support bubble was still intact. Cassandra, the girl student, was still sitting inside the cabin, arms folded, watching the proceedings with a kind of haughty detachment. Sebastian, the boy, was lying about five metres from the crawler, his suit damaged but still capable of keeping him alive until the rescue squad arrived.
“Hang in there,” Auger told him on the suit-to-suit. “They’re breaking through. We’ll be home and dry any moment now.”
The crackle and static accompanying the boy’s response made him seem a million light-years away. “I don’t feel too good, miss.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Headache.”
“Just stay still. Those suit seals will do their job if you don’t move.”
Auger stepped back as rescue crawlers from the Antiquities Board emerged from above, forcing ice aside with piston-driven claws and picks.
“That you, Auger?” came a voice in her helmet.
“Of course it’s me. What took you so long? Thought you guys were never coming.”
“We came as fast as we could.” She recognised the voice of Mancuso, one of the recovery people she had dealt with in the past. “Had trouble getting a fix on you this far down. The clouds seemed to be having some kind of argument tonight, lots of electromagnetic crap to see through. What exactly were you doing this deep?”
“My job,” she said tersely.
“The kid hurt?”
“His suit took a hit.” On her own faceplate monitor she could still see the diagnostic summary for Sebastian’s suit, hatched with pulsing red hazard indicators near the right elbow joint. “But it’s nothing serious. I told him to lie down and keep still until rescue arrived.”
The lead crawler was already disgorging two members of the rescue squad, clad in the faintly comical suits of the extreme-hazards section. They moved like sumo warriors, in squatting strides.
Auger moved to Sebastian, kneeling down next to him. “They’re here. All you have to do is keep still and you’ll be safe and sound.”
Sebastian made an unintelligible gurgle in reply. Auger raised a hand, signalling the nearer of the two suits to approach her. “This is the boy, Mancuso. I think you should deal with him first.”
“That’s already the plan,” another voice squawked in her helmet. “Stand back, Auger.”
“Careful with him,” she warned. “He’s got a bad rip near the right—”
Mancuso’s suit towered over the little boy. “Easy, son,” she heard. “Gonna have you fixed up in no time. You all right in there?”
“Hurt,” she heard Sebastian gasp.
“Think we need to move fast on this one,” Mancuso said, beckoning the second rescuer to him with a flick of one overmuscled arm. “Can’t risk moving him, not with the particle density as high as it is.”
“Recover in situ?” the second rescuer asked.
“Let’s do it.”
Mancuso pointed his left arm at the boy. A hatch slid open in the armour and a spray nozzle popped out. Silvery-white matter gushed from the nozzle, solidifying instantly on impact. In a matter of seconds, Sebastian became a human-shaped cocoon wrapped in hard spittlelike strands.
“Careful with him,” Auger repeated.
A second team then set to work, cutting into the block of ice immediately underneath Sebastian with lasers. Steam blasted into the air from the cutting point. They paused now and again, signalling each other with tiny hand gestures before resuming. The first team returned with a wheeled, stretcherlike harness, pushing it between them. Thin metal claws lowered from the cradle, slipping into the ice around Sebastian. The cradle slowly hoisted the entire cocooned mass—including its foundation of ice—away from the ground. Auger watched them wheel Sebastian away and load him into the first recovery machine.
“It was just a scratch,” Auger said, when Mancuso returned to check on her. “You don’t have to act as if it’s an emergency, scaring the kid to death.”
“It’ll be an experience for him.”
“He’s already had enough experience for one day.”
“Well, can’t be too careful. Down here all accidents are emergencies. Thought you’d have known that by now, Auger.”
“You should check on the girl,” she said, indicating the crawler.
“She hurt?”
“No.”
“Then she isn’t a priority. Let’s see what you risked these kids’ lives for, shall we?”
Mancuso meant the newspaper.
“It’s in the crawler’s storage shelf,” Auger said, leading him over to the crippled machine. At the front of the crawler, tucked beneath sets of manipulator arms and tools, were a netting pouch and a hatch containing a compartmented storage tray. Auger released the manual catch and slid out the tray. “Look,” she said, taking the newspaper out of its slot with great care.
“Whew!” Mancuso whistled, grudgingly impressed. “Where’d you find it?”
She pointed to a sunken area just ahead of the wrecked machine. “We found a car down there.”
“Anyone inside?”
“Empty. We smashed the sunroof and used the crawler’s manipulators to extract the paper from the rear seat. We had to brace the crawler against the ceiling to prevent it from toppling over. Unfortunately, the ceiling wasn’t structurally sound.”
“That’s because this cavern hasn’t been cleared for human operations yet,” Mancuso told her.
Auger chose her words carefully, mindful that anything she said now might be on the record. “No harm was done. We lost a crawler, but the recovery of a newspaper easily outweighs that.”
“What happened to the boy?”
“He was helping me stabilise the crawler when he ripped his suit. I told him to lie still and wait for the cavalry.”
She put the newspaper back into the tray. The newsprint was still as sharp and legible as when she had retrieved it from the car. The act of picking up the paper—flexing it slightly—had even caused one of the animated adverts to come to life: a girl on a beach throwing a ball towards the camera.
“Pretty good, Auger. Looks like you lucked out this time.”