Jameson said, “You’re very comforting, Hernando.”
“What other choice do I have?” Ruiz said impatiently. “Let’s go.”
It took them another two days to reach the hub. They were able to climb an average of half a mile per hour in the rapidly diminishing gravity, but they had to stop to hide frequently, whenever the humanoids’ sensitive noses sniffed out the presence of Cygnans. They stopped to sleep twice; Ruiz slept fitfully, hopped up by the stimulants Janet had given him. Jameson scrupulously called a halt for ten minutes every hour to let them rest, and every four hours he made them eat some of their rations and drink some water. They were able to refill their jugs at any number of places where condensation caused by the chill outer walls of the shaft had run into hollows, making respectable pools. Once there was a rainstorm that lasted a half-hour; the interior spaces of the arm were vast enough to cause weather.
Jameson never saw the humanoids eat or drink. During the humans’ rest periods they frequently disappeared, coming back when it was time to play bloodhound again. Jameson never inquired into the reason for the humanoids’ little side expeditions. He prayed fervently that humanoid and Cygnan biochemistry were incompatible, and that the humanoids’ incredible sense of smell was leading them to stores of synthetics they could snack on. If there was anything edible within miles, Dmitri assured him, they would be able to home in on it.
The spaces they traversed were between the outer skin of the folding arm and the yawning central well that contained the corkscrew tubeways. From time to time, with the humanoids to warn him of danger, he cautiously checked their progress by poking a head out of an inner compartment and peering into the dim abyss beyond, where the flashing shapes of Cygnans whizzed through the transparent spirals. They were too far away and moving too quickly to notice him; what he was afraid of was being seen by a Cygnan on one of the nearby adjacent ledges that overhung the chasm. But the humanoids’ sense of smell was infallible.
The Cygnans used the spaces around the core of the arm—but mostly for storage. It could hardly be otherwise, when down became up and up became down every few years. They wouldn’t have wanted to go to the trouble of refurbishing every single cubby and cell. But every mile or two Jameson and his party came across clusters of gimballed containers that were as big as houses. What were they? Low-gravity luxury housing? Factories or biological laboratories? Slums? It was impossible to tell. But some of them had windows, and Jameson gave them a wide berth.
They avoided open spaces like the plague, climbing the pipeline beanstalk as it wound its way through the niches and flues and chambers that riddled the outer layers of the shaft, and leaving it for alternate routes whenever it emerged into some roomy expanse.
Twice more they came upon dead Cygnans. One had been turned into orange hamburger by Klein’s automatic weapon. The other had been burned—perhaps by Chia’s laser—and hacked apart needlessly by an ax. Klein had left a trail of minuscule spy instruments, but the humanoids were adept at finding these by the scent of the human oils that had been left on them. Jameson destroyed them as fast as they were found and tried not to worry about them.
“They’ll be terrified if they see us coming after them,” Ruiz grunted. “Kitchen knives and wrenches and a couple of cute pink mascots.”
“They might not have seen us,” Jameson said. “They won’t be monitoring their bugs continuously—just spot-checking them.”
They were bobbing around like balloons by this time, in gravity that was too weak to notice, launching themselves upward in giant swoops. For the vertical ascents, the humanoids changed their mode of travel, boosting themselves along the ducts and cables, their faces never far from a surface.
Eventually they found themselves in a small, crazily shaped room whose ceiling was a doughy substance that dimpled when Jameson experimentally poked a finger into it. The dimple began, slowly, to fill itself as he watched. Around them was the terrifying hiss of escaping air. The whole chamber was part of a huge gasket—a gasket with a faulty seal, as it happened—and Jameson knew that the leviathan bulk of the starship’s, main body hung above, with its three-sided forests and leaning turrets and the inconceivable energies of the interstellar drive sleeping within its spine.
There was a puckered area in the center of the ceiling. Without hesitation, one of the humanoids leaped straight upward. Its head and shoulders sank into the navel-like depression. It wriggled briefly, and its legs disappeared from view. The second humanoid gibbered encouragingly, exuding an odor of perspiring feet.
“I’ll go first,” Jameson announced. “Then you, Hernando—careful not to stab me with that spear. Maggie, you’re next. Dmitri, you bring up the rear.”
He sprang for the dimpled spot, and it swallowed him up. He fought his way upward through the doughy sphincter, all his senses muffled. After he’d forced his way through it for what seemed an inordinate distance, he had a moment of panic. What if he was simply burrowing into a thousand feet of insulation, to smother deep within its yielding mass? But common sense told him that the humanoids must have picked up traces of human scent. This was a definite passage, perhaps an emergency route. He could breathe in the spaces his head and shoulders opened up, though the air was stale. After what seemed hours, the spongy stuff disgorged him into an echoing void that smelled of metal and lubricants.
He was clinging to a metal slope that tilted to a dim gorge beneath. Across an intervening space a tentlike wall of metal leaned massively inward, its angle matched to the cliff he clung to.
To his right the view stopped at what he at first took to be mountain ridges, until he realized that he was looking at the edge of a great toothed wheel half a mile across. There was a gargantuan jumble of machinery—ratchets and pawls and pinions on a scale that made him feel like a flea in a tower clock. To his left the enormous metal cavern stretched on for miles, and he knew that he had finally reached the axis of the ship.
The ancient metal of the cliff was scarred and pitted, its face pocked with handholds and even places to stand. He eased off to one side and helped Ruiz through, then Maggie and Dmitri. The other humanoid wriggled through last.
The feathery beings motioned him to silence and pointed up toward the peak of the metal mountain. Their gestures told him to be cautious.
He climbed the rusty slope and reached the top, another fifty feet up. He peeked over the edge. Down at the bottom of that toboggan-slide incline was another gorge, rising to another inward-leaning cliff.
Figures were moving around down there.
Human figures, tiny with distance. They milled around a projecting housing that had to be an air lock. It had a round door, pulled out like a drawer front on three shafts. Some of the figures, bulkier than the others, were either wearing spacesuits or being helped into them.
There was no way he could slide down the metal toboggan slope without being seen a long way off. Was there a way around the end of the ridge, where those gigantic gears meshed?
He eased himself cautiously down a foot and sighted along the crest.
And froze.
A mob of dark shapes was pouring out of the shadowed spaces behind the titans’ gears and swarming purposefully along the ridge toward him. Jameson fumbled for his rope and hammer. He had just time enough to glance down the slope, and see that the humanoids had disappeared, when the dark shapes halted a couple of yards away. They started to deploy themselves down the two sides of the ridge to encircle him.
The one straddling the ridge, keeping his feet planted to keep from drifting off in the almost nonexistent gravity, was Gifford. He was hefting an ax. The others, wielding axes and crowbars, were members of the Chinese missile crew, six men and a chunky, muscular-looking girl.