O'Doyle was dying. She had to get him out of here, get him to a hospital if he was to live. They'd run out of painkillers long ago, and antibiotics as well. She didn't dare touch his KoolSuit to check the wounds for fear she'd rip Angus's shoddy repair job. If that happened, O'Doyle's temperature would soar and he'd die. The heat and pain were taking their toll on her big man. Her impossibly tough, impossibly brave man.
"Hold on, Patrick,” she whispered. “Hold on just a little longer and we'll be out of here."
Watching O'Doyle, she failed to see two spidery metallic shapes silently emerge from the ship, moving toward her along the riverbank sand.
Randy followed Angus into yet another room of dust, pieces of glass, ceramics, and little else. “This thing's been here forever and a day. There's really nothing left but the platinum hull."
"That's the other reason they made their platinum-iridium compound,” Angus said, “it doesn't corrode. This hull will be here forever, until the damn tectonic plate this mountain rests on slides back into the mantle. This hull is a masterpiece of engineering."
Randy thought about the hull's complexity, the intricacy of the metals involved, and the alloy's strength. Nature had never come up with anything so strong, so resistant, so perfect for space travel. Guilt suddenly swept over him, overwhelming his mind with one blaring thought — how could they have missed it?
"Angus, we should have seen this in the lab."
Angus gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “Oh don't worry about it. We were getting ready for the spelunk. We would have found this easily if we'd looked for it."
"That's the point, Angus,” Randy said. “We were getting ready for the dig, we weren't doing our jobs."
"So what?"
"So we could have seen the platinum was artificial. It's blatantly obvious. Connell would have handled things completely different."
"Big deal. It's all water under the bridge now."
Randy felt anger explode in him like an atom bomb. He'd followed Angus every step of the way — Mack's death and any other deaths that might occur were as much due to his negligence as Angus's. He grabbed Angus by the shoulders and slammed him into the curved wall. Angus's eyes grew wide with surprise and, perhaps, fear.
"Don't you get it?” Randy said. “We're all in danger of losing our lives! Mack is dead! And it's all happening because we were too busy trying to get famous and not paying attention to our jobs. We should have seen this immediately!"
"Oh, so you want me to feel guilty for all this?” Angus said, pushing Randy away. “Fuck that, you bleeding heart. Fuck that, and fuck you. Everyone knew the risks. This isn't our fault."
Randy had never wanted to punch someone so bad in all his life. Angus simply didn't care about anyone or anything other than himself. “Yes, it is our fault. We're responsible because we didn't do our jobs."
"Hey, you be responsible if you want to. I've got a clear conscience. If they all weren't so stupid, they could've figured things out for themselves."
Randy started to rebut, but the words froze in his mouth when a flash of silver from the hallway caught his eye.
"Angus,” Randy said quietly. “Did you turn the scrambler off?"
"Of course not,” Angus said. “It's on, you can hear it, can't you?"
Randy realized the crackling hiss filled the room. He'd been listening to it for so long his brain had tuned it out. “Did you change the frequency?"
"Don't be a dumbass, Randy. What is it? What's wrong?"
"I think we're in a lot of trouble,” Randy said. “Turn to your left very slowly."
Angus turned. There, on the curved wall, perched an impossibly shiny silverbug. Their headlamps blazed off its polished shell and off its perfect, unmarred legs. It wasn't until that moment that Randy realized how pitted, scratched and dented all the other silverbugs were, as if they'd suffered a thousand years of tiny scrapes, nicks, and bumps.
This one was brand-new.
It wasn't milling about aimlessly. It sat on the wall, its wedge-shaped head looking right at them.
"The scrambler doesn't affect it,” Angus said, his voice a hissing whisper. “How could they change their frequency?"
"They didn't change it. They made a new one with a new frequency, to get around our scrambling.” Terror crept up Randy's legs and into his groin. They were deep in the alien vessel, and suddenly the equation had changed: they were no longer invisible to the silverbug's murderous stares.
"Who made a new one?” Angus asked. “The rocktopi are primitives! How the hell did they know to change the frequency? Who the hell is making these things?"
The silverbug shifted on the wall. A ringing, metallic scraping sound filled the hall as a nasty-looking, six-inch-long jagged blade slid out of the wedge-shaped head.
The sound of the blade faded slowly, until only the scrambler's useless crackle filled the room. Angus and Randy stood motionless and terrified, unsure of what to do, unsure of what to think.
"Now they've got soldiers to go along with the workers,” Randy said. “Nobody is making them, Angus. They're a collective. They're building themselves."
The silverbug made no motion. It waited and watched. As still as the wall itself.
As still as death.
Chapter Forty
Looks like they keep track of Earth time after all,” Veronica muttered, staring at the carvings inside the second alcove. “Whoopeedoo, aren't they clever?"
Connell wanted to get her out of there. Maybe back on the surface she'd snap out of this strange funk.
She vacantly stared at a series of three large carvings, so big they dominated ten square feet of the curved wall. The first showed the Sun and the familiar nine rings of the planets that orbited around it. The second showed an outline of the Wah Wah Mountains and a pattern of stars behind it. One chiseled star looked much larger than the rest, and seemed to nestle between two peaks. The last showed a map of the tunnels, highly detailed down to two tiny rocktopi climbing up a long, straight ascending shaft.
Connell recognized the shaft immediately. “The Linus Highway,” he said.
"Bingo,” Veronica said absently. “Give the man a prize."
"Is that the North Star?” Sanji asked, peering intently.
"Bingo-bingo,” Veronica said. “Two prizes for the price of one ticket. It appears to be the summer solstice. Our little uglies dug astronomy. Looks like they make the trip to the surface once a year."
"What for?” Sanji asked.
"Maybe keep a lookout for their enemy, maybe scout the stars for a rescue ship, maybe see if we'd put up a Burger King yet,” Veronica said. “Why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can."
Her lips started moving with no sound — Connell realized she was counting, staring at a series of dots chiseled under the large carvings. To the right of the dots were rows of the strange rocktopi writing.
A quick count showed the neat dots were 144 columns wide and 79 rows deep. Connell started counting up the last incomplete row.
"Ninety-five,” Sanji said, seeming to read Connell's mind and beat him to the punch. “For a total of 11,327 dots. One for each year they've made that trip to the surface?"
"Bingo-bingo-bingo,” Veronica said.
"Oh my goodness,” Sanji said quietly. “Look at how some of these characters to the right of the dots repeat. These are their numbers, Roni! See the pattern? I think they count in base-twelve instead of the base-ten system that we use."
As Veronica and Sanji set to work cracking the rocktopi numeric symbols, a distinctive mark on the detailed tunnel map caught Connell's eye. He recognized the dumbbell-shaped ship — from its bottom stretched a long vertical line. Hanging over the top of the tunnel, deep inside the ship, appeared to be a large spherical object. Unlike Angus's map, this rendition had no bottom-range limit. Connell eyeballed the carving, comparing the size of the ship with the shaft. He estimated the shaft's depth at over twenty miles. At the shaft's bottom, a series of caverns radiated outward in a circle. The caverns looked to be filled with thin pillars. While small in scale, the carving gave the impression that the pillars supported the massive weight of the mountain, the caves, the ship, even the very ground he stood on.