She started to siphon the water into herself, opening up a plexus of capillaries to distribute it evenly.
Bodies in muscle-armour suits were lying above the sinking water, jammed into tight rifts, or caught on jutting rock fangs. Little clumps of jetsam bobbed along. In one passage she discovered a dog, its fur badly singed, barbecued flesh peeling away. She sent out a pseudopod, and digested it.
Suzi was floating face down in a crescent-shaped cave where the water had pooled, long scorch gouges down the back and legs of her armour. Rip gun bolts had gouged molten scars in the rock, glassy beads dribbling down the walls like wax from a candle.
Julia ingested the water, then pushed a large lump of herself into the cave, inflating it like a bubble until every square centimetre of the rock's surface was covered with a thin skin of cells. Four missiles had detonated, she could taste the bitter chemicals of the warheads imprinted on the walls. Minute particles of metalloceramic were detectable, along with composite and plastic fragments. Leol Reiger had been hit.
She retracted her far-flung body from the more distant sections of the fault zone, and concentrated on examining the area around Suzi's cave.
Footsteps betrayed him, she could hear the crash team blundering about in and around the village cave, but discrimination procedures quickly eliminated them. She heard it then, a monotonous clumping, one foot moving slowly, coming down hard.
She infiltrated the passage behind him, sprouting exploratory tentacles into the wall cracks. They discovered a labyrinth of narrow chinks behind the surface, dislodged ore veins, rock and metal torn apart. Her body oozed in, filling every cranny. The leading edges passed round him in silence, slithering on ahead. Ten metres in front of him, she seeped back out into the passage, forming a solid clot like cold brimstone.
The armour suit was limping, left leg grating loudly at each movement. One infrared helmet beam shone weakly ahead, swaying from side to side. Two of the thermal dump panels on his back were dead, the third glowed strongly in the infrared. Her magnetic-sensitive cells picked up shivers of energy from the muscle bands. Air filter intakes on the helmet growled asthmatically.
Leol Reiger stopped, his rip gun raised to point at the smooth protoplasm barrier. Julia sculpted a relief of her own face, a metre high, and extended it out of the integument. A green laser fan from the suit's shoulder sensor pod swept over her.
Julia opened her mouth, and used the cells inside as a diaphragm. "I warned you before, Mr. Reiger, I would not forget you."
Leol Reiger's suit speaker clicked on. "Julia Evans. Gotta hand it to you, this is some stunt. You wanna deal?"
"No. I want you to know it was me."
"Yeah? Then you'd better be good, rich bitch, you'd better be flicking supreme. Because I told you once already, the only way out now is you and me."
"Yes, that you did."
Leol Reiger fired, walking forwards. Rip gun bolts tore into her outsize face, clawing it to cinders. Steam and carbon particles spewed back at him as cells died in their hundreds of billions.
Julia started to expand her cells, filling the cavities around the passage. Osmosis impelled the water through her, bloating every capillary. She felt it as a peristaltic contraction, muscles straining at their limit. The rock screeched in agony as hydrostatic pressure began to close the passage. A violent shudder threw Leol Reiger to his knees. The rip gun clattered away. He rolled on to his back, and stuck his arms up, pushing against the roof as it descended. The metalloceramic armour buckled.
Julia kept on squeezing long after it was necessary, wringing every wisp of air out of the compacted rock.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Greg pressed himself against the rough surface of the passage wall as the alien behemoth squirmed past. He could almost believe neurohormone abuse had sprained his synapses into hallucinosis, abandoning him in a universe of the mind's whimsy. In a way he wished it were true, that would mean the alien wasn't real.
Two metres in diameter, a skin like coarse leather, coloured sable-black, gruesomely supple, and possessing more inertia than a rampant dinosaur. Shadowform thought currents purled along its length, distorted human idiosyncrasies, anything but reassuring in their metamorphosis. Human without humanity.
"A serpent of the night," Sinclair cried. "Satan incarnate."
Strong eddies of air whipped past Greg's face, bringing a scent of corruption, of ripe fruit mouldering on branches. He coughed, eyelids blinking against the acridity.
"Hail Mary, for all me sins I beg your forgiveness," Sinclair said. His eyes were right shut.
"It won't hurt you," Julia said, her voice raised above the rasp of alien skin slithering over rock. Her thought currents had a self-assured tranquillity Greg envied.
"Not this," Sinclair cried. "I didn't want this. You've let loose the beast. I wanted an end to madness, the start of justice."
"It's harmless," Rick said. "Believe me. That's what we've done, neutered it. You'll never see it again."
Sinclair opened one eye, and shivered.
Greg wondered just how big the alien was now. There must have been a lot of disseminator plant to give it this much bulk.
"Is it an angel or a demon?" Sinclair asked.
"Neither," said Julia. "It's hope. A very noble sort of hope."
"For who?"
"Maybe a lot of people. The whole Earth is going to be given proof we're not alone in the galaxy, and never have been. They'll see it written in the sky tonight. And God knows this world deserves to be touched with wonder."
"You're a religious woman, Miss Julia?"
"Yes, I suppose I am."
The tail of the alien rushed by. Swallowed by the darkness in seconds. Greg hadn't really appreciated how fast the bloody thing was moving. Muscles unknotted, his legs were shaking.
Circles of light from the helmet spots on the hardliners' suits shone on the opposite wall. He stepped out into the middle of the passage. The alien presence was dwindling, a dawn-washed star at the back of his mind. Julia was staring into the gloom after it.
"Regrets?" he asked.
"Not one. It was all I could do."
He put his arm round her shoulder, and gave her a little hug. Doubts were still cluttering the peripheries of her mind.
"I said you were the best when it comes to decisions," he told her.
She grinned up at him. "Thanks, Greg. And you, too, Rick. I'm deep in your debt; I would never have thought of that by myself."
"No," Rick said. "There's nothing to thank, this was the zenith of my professional life, I've justified fifteen years' work and dreaming, and you made it possible." He was solemnly intent, nearly entreating. Julia's grin became a little laboured.
"Come on, I think we'd better get going," Greg said.
"Yes," Julia said. "I must get in touch with Victor and Sean, there will be the most awful panic if I don't inform them what's about to happen."
Greg had half expected to meet the alien again in the caves. Two or three times he thought he could hear something rumbling, a sound like boulders being slowly ground together. But the only sign of its presence was an oval tunnel which had been bored into the storage cave, saving them from wriggling along the narrow crack. The rock had been sheered clean, giving it a polished-marble finish.
"Is it ahead of us?" Greg asked Julia.
"No. I want to get back to Hyde Cavern quickly."
"So it made this opening for you?"
"Yes."
Shelves and cargo pods had been smashed against the rear wall of the storage cave where the wave had flung them, walls and ceiling were dripping wet. There was no sign of any of the fruit.