I doubt she wanted to go on, no. If she had a sane bone in her body by that point, she’d have felt the way the rest of us did. Terrified. Scared out of her fucking skull. Every nerve screaming turn around, go back, this is wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
But she carried on. Brave Teterev, thinking of her son. Wanting to get back to him. Thinking of him more than her own survival, I think.
You say we were just the same? Just as brave?
Don’t piss on her memory, Captain. The only thing driving us on was greed.
Fucking greed. The only thing in the universe stronger than fear.
But even greed wasn’t strong enough in the end.
THE SILVER VEINS looped and crossed each other, defining the outlines of looming forms. The forms were humanoid, with arms and legs and heads and bodies. They were skeletally thin and their torsos and limbs were twisted, almost as if the very substrate of the rock had shifted and oozed since these silvery impressions were made. Their heads were faceless, save for a kind of hemispheric delineation, a bilateral cleft suggesting a skull housing nothing but two huge eyes.
The strangeness of the figures—the combination of basic human form and alien particularity—disturbed me more than I could easily articulate. Monsters would have been unsettling, but they would not have plumbed the deep well of dread that these figures seemed to reach. The silver patterns appeared to shimmer and fluctuate in brightness, conveying an impression of subliminal movement. The figures, bent and faceless as they were, seemed to writhe in torment.
None of us could speak for long minutes. Even the monkey had fallen into dim simian reverence. I was just grateful for the opportunity to regather my strength, after the recent exertions.
“If that’s not a warning to go,” Lenka said. “I don’t know what is.”
“I want to know what happened to her,” I said. “But not at any cost. We don’t have to go on.”
“Of course we go on!” Rasht said. “These are just markings.”
But there was an edge in his voice, a kind of questioning rise, as if he sought reassurance and confirmation.
“They could almost be prehuman,” I said, wondering how we might go about dating the age of these impressions, if such a thing were even possible.
“Pre-Shrouder, maybe,” Lenka said. “Pre-Juggler. Who knows? What we really need is measuring equipment, sampling gear. Get a reading off these rocks, find out what that silver stuff really is.”
By which she meant, return to the ship in the meantime. It was a sentiment I shared.
“Teterev went on,” Rasht said.
Her prints were a muddle, as if she had dwelled here for quite some time, pacing back and forth and debating her choices. But after that process of consideration she had carried on deeper into the tunnel, where it continued beyond the chamber.
By now the monkey almost needed to be dragged or carried. It really did not want to go on.
Even my own dread was becoming harder to push aside. There was a component to it beyond the instinctive dislike of confined spaces and the understandable reaction to the figures. A kind of unarguable, primal urge to leave—as if some deep part of my brain had already made its mind up.
“Do you feel it?” I risked asking.
“Feel what?” Rasht asked.
“The dread.”
The Captain did not answer immediately, and I feared that I had done my standing even more harm than when I questioned his judgement. But Lenka swallowed hard and said: “Yes. I didn’t want to say anything, but…yes. I’ve been wondering about that. It’s beyond any rational fear we ought to be experiencing.” She paused and added: “I think something is making us feel that dread.”
“Making?” Rasht echoed.
“The magnetic fields, perhaps. It’s strong here—much stronger than outside. What we saw before was just leakage. Our suits aren’t perfect Faraday cages, not with all the damage and repair they’ve had over the years. They can’t exclude a sufficiently strong field, not completely. And if the field acts on the right part of our brains, we might feel it. Fear, dread. A sense of the unnatural.”
“Then it’s a defense mechanism,” Rasht said. “A deterrent device, to keep out intruders.”
“Then we might think of heeding it,” I said.
“It could also mean there is something worth guarding.”
“The Amerikanos never had psychological technology like this,” Lenka said.
“But others did. Do I need to spell it out? What did we come to this system for? It wasn’t because we thought we’d find Amerikano relics. We were after a bigger reward than that.”
My dread sharpened. I could see where this was going. “We have no evidence that Conjoiners were here either.”
“They say the spiders liked to place their toys in caches,” Rasht went on, as if my words counted for nothing. “C-drives. Hell-class weapons.”
Despite myself I laughed. “I thought we based our activities on intelligence, not fairy tales.”
“I heard someone already found those weapons,” Lenka said, as if that was all the convincing Rasht would need.
But his voice turned low, conspiratorial—as if there was a chance of the walls listening in. “I heard fear was one of their counter-intrusion measures. The weapons get into your skull, turn you insane, if you’re not already spidered.”
I knew then that nothing, not even dread, would deter Rasht from his quest for profit. He would replace one phantom prize with another, over and over, until reality finally trumped him.
“We have come this far,” Rasht said. “We may as well go a little deeper.”
“A little,” I said, against every rational instinct. “No further than we’ve already come.”
We pushed out of the chamber, Lenka setting the pace, following Teterev’s course down another rock-walled tunnel. To begin with, the going was no harder than before. But as the tunnel progressed, so the walls began to pinch together. Now we had to move in single file, whether we liked it or not. Then Lenka announced that the walls squeezed together even more sharply just ahead, as if there had been a rockfall or a major shift in the hill’s interior structure.
“That’s a shame,” I said.
“We could blast it,” Lenka said. “Set a couple of hot-dust charges at maximum delay, get back to the ship.” She was already preparing to unclip one of the demolition charges from her belt.
“And bring down half the mountain in the process,” I said. “Lose the tunnel, the chamber, Teterev’s prints, probably blast to atoms whatever we’re hoping to find.”
“Her prints don’t double back,” Rasht said. “That means there must be a way through.”
“Or this obstruction wasn’t here,” I answered.
But there was a way through. It was difficult to see at first, efficiently camouflaged by the play of light and shadow on the rock, almost as if it meant to hide itself. “It’s tight,” Lenka said. “But one at a time, we should manage. With luck, it’ll open up again on the other side.”
“And luck’s been so kind to us until now,” I said.
Lenka was the first through. It was tight for her, and would be even tighter for Rasht, whose suit was bulkier. She grunted with effort and concentration. Her suit scraped rock.
“Careful!” Rasht called.
Now most of Lenka was out of our sight, swallowed into the cleft. “It’s easier,” she said. “Widens out again. Just a bottleneck. I can see Teterev’s footprints.”