“What the heck is this?” asked Kwon, stumping up to me with an oddly-shaped lump of resin in his hands. The thing looked like a melted tree-branch, or a bone made of candlewax.
I took the object and examined it closely. I had no concept of its significance. It did not look like a natural formation, however. Someone had created this on purpose. My men were wandering the chamber, using their suit-lights to examine the walls. They pointed and poked at the artifacts they found. There were ovals on the walls, with dark reliefs formed inside the ovals. These reliefs were delicate, and when my men reached out and poked at them, they broke and crumbled.
“I bet they make these,” said Kwon, “with spit or something.”
I looked at him sharply, then looked back at the walls and the ceiling. I ran my suit lights over a dozen ovals and sculpted shapes that stood apart here and there, rising up from the floor like stalagmites.
“Hands off, everyone!” I ordered. Men moved quickly. They backed away from the walls and pulled out their weapons. Beamers glowed, their targeting dots shining red on a hundred spots.
“No,” I said, “they aren’t dangerous. These are—pieces of art. This is some kind of gallery, or museum. Don’t damage anything further. No souvenirs.”
A few men dropped twisting sculptures of brown resin. Kwon came up to me and leaned close.
“This don’t look like art to me, sir,” he said, using his usual, overly-loud whisper. He reached out to touch a flaky sculpture with his thick fingers. Pieces of it crumbled as he poked at it.
“I know. But a lot of what I find in museums doesn’t look like art to me, either. To a Worm mind, maybe this is priceless. Maybe that big Worm was the librarian, and the others were on a field trip from school.”
Kwon gave a halting, honking laugh. I didn’t bother to argue my point further with him. Few of my men seemed to be troubled by the fact we were invading the city of another biotic species and wrecking the place. The Worms were just too different, I supposed. For most people, they engendered no sympathy.
“Enough dawdling. Let’s move out. Wounded get to ride in the drill-tanks. No faking. Kwon, get my team moving. Put anyone who breaks more stuff in here on point.”
My last order got a response from the men. No one wanted to be on point. Kwon, shouting and slamming his great hands together to make booming noises, got everyone moving again. We found a tunnel out of this place and set a drill-tank to digging right through the wall of it. I aimed it as straight as I could. No more fooling around, we were going to bore our way to the central chamber—whatever it was—and get this mission finished. A few of the frescoes and reliefs broke as the drill-tank fired up. I gritted my teeth and felt slightly sick about it. What would a pack of humans at the Smithsonian look like to an army of Worms? Would they be capable of respect and mercy? I couldn’t be sure, but I figured any beings that valued art must have some kind of higher aspirations.
-52-
Once we broke through the relatively thin walls of the art chamber and plowed deeply into the dirt beyond, the drill-tanks began to speed up. I was surprised to see they were soon moving at a slow walking-pace. At this speed, we could reach our goal in few hours.
I had a new sensor officer assigned by now—a non-com corporal named Jensen. “Jensen, get over here,” I shouted.
“Sir!” he yelled and trotted up, dragging the unfortunate Lieutenant Chen’s array behind him. It was gouged and heavily-stained, but was still operable. Jensen bounced the unit over every hard rib of dirt on the tunnel floor.
“Take it easy with that thing. Treat it like a rifle.”
“Sorry, sir,” he said, standing nervously beside me.
I watched him fidget for a second or two. I wondered if he thought I’d somehow given Chen an assignment which had led to her gruesome death. He could be right. Maybe these Worms, especially the big ones, didn’t like our actively pinging sensor arrays. Maybe it made big Worms grumpy to get hit with sonar echoes. Well, that was just too bad.
“Don’t piss yourself, marine,” I said. “You’ve got a sweet gig here. All you have to do is switch that thing on and feed me the density readings while we follow this tank to Hell. You are my sensor-operator until you’re dead, or I find someone better.”
“Thank you, uh, sir…” Jensen said. With diffident fingers, he worked the sensor array’s interface. He set it for a thirty yard range—unreasonably short for most purposes, but enough to answer my question.
I snorted as I watched him dial down the range even further. I knew why he did it. He suspected that the active pinging of the sensor unit was what had drawn that big Worm and caused it to eat Chen. Maybe he didn’t relish the idea of ending up inside the next big one’s belly.
“Well?” I asked.
“This is very soft stuff, sir,” he said. “It’s softer than normal dirt back home. It’s not even dirt, really. It’s more like—sawdust. Full of cellulose and resins. It is structurally sound, however. It doesn’t seem to crush down easily, or we would sink in it. Another point is the heat we are using to make our own tunnels, we are melting the material and making it stiffer.”
“All right,” I said, considering his information. “You’re going to walk right behind the lead drill-tank from now on. Keep that thing dialed up another notch or two for range. I want to know if there are any cavities around us, any openings. They should be easy to spot now, with thin walls and even thinner stuff on the other side. Make sure you don’t let the roof collapse on us, or let us sink through the floor into some water reservoir.”
“Right. Yes, sir,” Jensen said. “Ah, how far out do I have to scan, sir?”
“Thirty yards. Every direction. And don’t let me catch you dialing it down any closer, either.”
“No sir,” said the Corporal. He made a spinning motion with his finger on a blue screen. The device pinged with greater enthusiasm. Jensen himself looked slightly green to me. I bet he was thinking about Chen again. Who knew? Maybe that sensor unit sounded like a mating call to a Worm. Jensen began trailing the drill-tank with the sensor bumping behind him. He reminded me of a golfer with a wheeled golf bag, lost in the rough. I smiled inside my hood, behind my goggles. This had to be worst rough any golfer had ever experienced.
Our system worked for quite awhile, making relatively rapid progress. We avoided neighboring tunnels whenever we detected them by changing course. We went up, down, left, right—any direction to keep away from existing tunnels. But always, we drove closer to our goal, the heart of the great mountain.
As we passed through the soft interior I picked up handfuls of the crumbling stuff. We didn’t have a full lab with us, so I couldn’t do a chemical analysis. After looking at it and experimenting, I had to agree with Jensen. The material was not the normal contents one expected when venturing into a mountainside. If I squeezed the earth in my hand, it compressed somewhat. It looked like dirt, but fluffed up dirt, the kind you get when you freshly plow a field and don’t wet it down afterward.
“Kwon, come up here,” I said waving to my Sergeant. He never seemed to be far from my side. I wasn’t sure if that was because he wanted to protect me, or if he thought I frequently needed help. I didn’t bother to ask which it was.
“Sir?”
“What do you make of this? You grew up on some kind of farm, didn’t you?”
“We cut down trees and bred koi, sir.”