“What?”
“They can do dating based on radioactive decay. Relative amounts of various forms of this or that atom—I don’t know the precise details. And there might be some contamination muddling it all up, or something. But the chaps tell me some of the dinos died maybe fifteen million years after some of the others.”
“You’re trying to tell me there were dinosaurs living in this tunnel for fifteen million years?”
“No, love, not a bit of it. Just that some of them died fifteen million years after the others.”
“I don’t understand,” Marcia said. What was Selby talking about?
“I know you don’t,” Selby said. “That’s for the best, just for now. But when you do understand, I think maybe it will make more sense to you after that.”
“Fine. Whatever,” Marcia replied.
“We’ll be there in a minute,” Selby said.
In less time than that, Marcia spotted a new light far down the tunnel. It grew as they drew toward it, and Selby slowed the cart. It was another side cavern, a small one, off to the right. Worklights inside threw a warm glow into the greenish air of the tunnel.
“One of our survey workers found her about three days ago,” Selby said. “Look, Marcia,” she said in a softer voice, “punch over to comm circuit twelve, will you? The team doesn’t use that one, and we’ll be able to talk more private-like.”
Marcia got the distinct impression that Selby was more concerned with her not hearing what the survey workers had to say. More than a bit mystified, Marcia did as she was told, but there was one question she needed to ask. “We’re still very close to the Rabbit Hole. They’ve explored much further than this. Why did they just find the—the whatever it is—now?”
They got down off the runcart, and Selby led her to the cavern entrance. “You’ve got to understand there are hundreds, maybe thousands or tens of thousands of these side chambers,” she said in apologetic tones. “We’re still not a tenth of the way around in our initial survey of the tunnel. We’re frightfully understaffed. No people at all, except for our workers. We’re just starting in to map them all in, and there’s nothing in a lot of them—the caverns I mean, not the workers. Sometimes it’s all we can do to just poke our head in for a quick peek and then move on. Our records show this cavern was first mapped four years ago—but we didn’t check it all the way. Three days ago, Peng Li was doing a follow-up and noticed the inner chambers. Come on inside.”
Marcia followed her into the side chamber. The entrance was a circle cut out of the main tunnel, about a meter and a half across, about half a meter off the floor of the cavern. She climbed up into it and found herself in an oblong room about ten meters long, three high, and two wide. The chamber was empty.
“We’re going to have to widen this out before very much longer,” Selby said, half to herself. “Lots of gear we’ll need to get in here. Anyway, there’s the entrance Li found.”
Marcia looked over and saw a hole in the floor of the room, at the far end, about the size and shape of a small maintenance accessway. A ladder was sticking up out of it. Light was glowing up from it, and the exterior mikes on Marcia’s suit were picking up the sounds of movement from inside. In the dark, on a quick check, it would be easy to miss.
“Right, now, in we go.” Selby crossed the chamber and started down the ladder. She hesitated with her head just at ground level and looked back up at Marcia. “Now be careful here,” she said. “No one has disturbed anything in this chamber yet. We want to make sure we have it photographed and scanned every way we possibly can before we move—ah, it.” Her voice turned as stony as the cavern, and her face was expressionless, cold and firm through her suit helmet. “It is not as bad as I’ve made it out to be. But it’s also much worse. Come.”
She continued down the ladder. It took Marcia a moment or two before she could force herself to follow. She stepped onto the ladder and made her way down, moving very carefully, staring straight ahead. She stepped back from the ladder and found herself standing near the edge of a hemispherical chamber, a dome in the rock about ten meters high at the center. The room was dead empty except for a rack of too-bright lights shining almost exactly in her eyes—and one other thing, splayed out in the center of the floor. Good God, what was that? A human body?
“Lucian Dreyfuss,” Selby said. “Or at least his pressure suit.”
Marcia’s eyes adjusted, and she could see more clearly. Fresh relief and fresh horror sprang to her heart at one and the same time.
It was indeed a pressure suit, lying flat on its back, arms and legs spread-eagled, sliced neatly open, straight down the centerline of the body, one continuous cut clean through the fabric of the suit, through the helmet, down the chest and abdomen packs, and finishing up at the crotch. The cut was surgically precise, slicing perfectly, flawlessly, through all the different materials, the two sides of the cut neatly peeled back. There were other, equally perfect cuts down the arms and legs of the suit, likewise peeled back.
Flecks and bits of Wheel epidermis had sifted down on the suit, and some sort of reaction with the Wheel’s interior atmosphere had turned it from white to brown. It was an old shriveled thing that had been lying here in the darkness for five years, like the desiccated remains of some corpse mummified by chance. Marcia stared at the suit, her heart beating wildly, her breath suddenly short. Lucian Dreyfuss. He had vanished down that tunnel, and then had been laid out here in his suit, sliced out of it, picked like a pea from a pod and then taken—
“Where?” Marcia asked. Her voice was not steady, and she could not trust herself to say more.
Selby didn’t need any other words to know what Marcia meant. “This way,” she said. She led her around the edge of the chamber, careful not to come too close to the violated pressure suit.
She stepped behind the rack of worklights. Just behind it to one side was the entrance to yet another chamber. It had been hidden by the glare of the lights. It was a tall, broad passage, about fifteen meters long and three wide, leading downward at about a five-degree grade, the walls high, the ceiling vaulted.
Marcia followed Selby down the passage, moving slowly. Her mind pursued meaningless side questions. Why were the chambers built in this odd configuration? Why this large passage when the way to the exterior was so much smaller? None of that mattered in the slightest just now, but at least for a few seconds, it kept her mind off what she had just seen—and whatever she was about to see.
Light and movement filled the inner chamber, figures going back and forth, moving with the slightly awkward stiffness of people not completely used to working in pressure suits.
As they stepped into the chamber, all movement stopped. People stopped in their tracks and looked toward Marcia. The tableaux held for a moment, and then, moving with one accord, everyone filed past Marcia, out of the chamber. Selby must have jumped to another comm channel and given the order to leave.
The third chamber was of precisely the same dimensions as the second one. But where the second room was empty but for the suit, this one was filled with all manner of artifacts, both human and Charonian. Marcia could not even identify most of the human gear. It was all on portable racks, and most of it looked vaguely medical, somehow. Lights gleamed, displays glowed, leads trailed off.
Three or four small dead Charonians of various sorts lay slumped over against the far wall of the chamber. Were they the ones who had cut Lucian from his suit and then—and then what?