We sit for a moment in silence, out of uniform, worn to nubs. The air in the hollow is cool, strangely sweet… Active environmental. All of it just adds to our enormous puzzle.
Gamecock looks down at the general’s face, then up at the rest of us. “Get ready to listen,” he says. Closer to the general’s ear, he says, enunciating each word, “Sir, we’re secure. You need to tell us what you know.”
The general swings his head right and left, scanning us, the side of the bus—then looks straight up at the stone roof. “This is retreat, reservoir,” he murmurs. “Place to hide.” A wave of pain racks him.
“Maybe it is,” Gamecock says.
“Much more,” the general says, eyes searching for relief. Gamecock gestures for Tak to give the general more morphine—a half dose. Tak complies.
“What’s the plan, sir?”
“Old plan, year old,” the general says, eyes moist. “Land and reinforce, lay forts and tunnels, claim low flats, establish networks of resources, fountains, depots. Big drops, rocket descent pods. Big effort from Earth, funded by Russia, China. Lots of my soldiers. Informed not much enemy orbital. All wrong. We arrive, Russians first. All wrong. Lots of enemy orbital, recently inserted, take us down, Antags have big ground presence, dominance. We fight. Lose big. We know so little!” He looks away, ashamed. Nothing to be ashamed of.
“We were in transit when all that went down,” Gamecock says to the rest of us. “We were meant to be a backup or modest supplemental to the big push.”
“They could at least have told us,” Kazak complains.
“Antag G2O mopped us from the sky. All but one of our satellites were down.” He pauses, then adds, “That’s what must have happened.”
“No resources, no weapons, can’t do much down here,” the general says. That seems to be it, then. We’re all we’ve got, and we’re relying on the hospitality of a ranch wife and her peculiar cave just to stay alive.
Michelin and Tak and I go back to the others. Gamecock stays with the general, in case he has more to say.
“Muskies!” DJ says. “Bless ’em. Sure talk strange.”
“Not that strange, after so many decades,” I say, thinking on Teal, idly considering what it might be like to go AWOL and join the Muskies—not that we have another choice, right now. Hardly any command. Hardly any AWOL involved.
“What the hell is this place?” Kazak asks.
“Surprised there’s still air and water and power.” Tak shakes his head. “Don’t know how long it’s been empty.”
“If it is empty,” Vee-Def says, eyes searching. “Like the Mines of Moria. Orcs everywhere, man.” He spreads his hands, makes crawly motions.
“Fuck that,” DJ says.
Tak stretches his neck, then does a few yoga moves. I follow his lead. “She’s not telling us much,” he says, assuming downward dog.
“Why should she?” DJ asks. “What I’d like to know is, why is she out here all alone?” He puts on a squint-eyed frown that could be either suspicion or skepticism.
Gamecock and Michelin join us. “The general is out. We peeled back his skintight. Gangrene. He needs surgery.”
“Good luck with that,” Kazak says.
“He said something odd before he passed out. Mumbling in Korean and English, back and forth, about broken moons, uneven settling…” He shrugs. “I’m not sure this place is any kind of surprise to command.”
“They’ve been looking for it?” I ask, again feeling that spooky prickle.
“We don’t know what orders the first wave might have had. The general’s not exactly making sense.”
“Teal didn’t look happy when he was talking,” I say.
Gamecock glances between me and Tak, settles on me. “You’ve been studying her.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“Not at all. She’s receptive.”
“BS, sir,” I say. “She glammed Tak.”
“I’m a good judge,” Gamecock says. “Go after her. Find out what this place has to offer, how long we can stay, how long we should stay. Whether we’re alone. If this is a big ore concentration, then it’s dead cert the Antags will have scoped it out.”
“And we haven’t?” Tak asks.
“No need asking our angels,” Gamecock says. “They won’t carry strategic data we don’t absolutely need, and that includes planet-wide gravimetry. Still, that kind of info has got to be pretty old… Why wouldn’t the Antags know?” He shoves all this aside with a push of his palm. “Go,” he tells me.
The others smile as I stand. I shove my hands into the overall pockets, feel something cold, then, surprised, pull out a metal disk about the size of a quarter. I hold it out, catch the light, see that it’s featureless on one side like a slug, but made of what could be silver. Very white silver. And on the other side, there’s a long, coiling string of tiny numbers and letters.
“Holy crap!” Neemie says, and grasps at the air. I pass him the slug. Neemie’s father runs a rare coin shop in Detroit. He looks at it up close, turns it over, rubs it in his fingers, sniffs it. “It’s platinum,” he says. He passes it around and when everyone is done marveling, as much as any of us have the energy to marvel, Kazak hands it back to me.
“A sample of the local ore?” Gamecock asks.
No idea. I replace the purloined platinum in the pocket where I found it and move off after Teal.
THE DARKNESS BEYOND the antechamber to the buggy barn is broken only by occasional star lights, low-power jobs about the size of a grain of wheat. They look as if they might have been glowing for years.
I can see Teal’s footprints in the damp green dust that lightly coats the tunnel floor and almost everything else. A few minutes and I arrive at a juncture connecting other tunnels, right, left, straight ahead, up… and down.
Way down. I pull back and lean against a wall, heart pounding against my ribs.
Almost fell into a shaft.
Maybe she wants us all dead. That would make sense, given the situation. Maybe she thinks, or was told, that there are troops out here looking into the family secrets. She could pick us up off the Red, fake concern, take us to the very place someone’s looking for, but it’s a mine where she can just dump us down a deep, deep hole…
I nearly died in a mine at Hawthorne. Joe pulled me back at the very last instant. Rocks rolled from under my boots into a pit, splashing into stagnant water dozens of meters down.
This hole is about four meters wide. With considerable care, I walk around it and try to pick up Teal’s footprints on the other side, but the floor beyond is suddenly bare—no dust, no prints. However, I hear distant padding sounds… echoes of someone breathing. I hope it’s Teal.
The walls are marked again by regular grooves, scoring the stony surface in a fashion that makes me think machines might have done the excavation, leaving grooves so that other machines could use them for stability or guidance. Maybe the machines are still down here. I imagine a mobile printer/depositor, serviced by a truck carrying buckets of slurry for different builds… going from place to place and building stuff for the miners.
Another thirty meters and I hear a voice off to one side, coming from a cubby. Teal emerges, rises to her full height, and looks down on me in the dim light.
“Are t’ey coming?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
“Just you?”
“Just me.” I take out the coin and hold it up in the palm of my hand. “Found this in a pocket. Any idea what it’s for?”