We work our way around the chamber, searching the deep shadows for exits, side tunnels—and find a dark hole hiding behind a basalt outcrop. No star lights, but wide enough to allow a buggy. The big tunnel cuts through metal and black rock. No grooves. Why?
“T’is was made near te end, I t’ink,” Teal says. “Afore t’ey left.”
If the Voors are indeed hard-core bigots, renegades, killers—patriots intent on making their own nation because they fit nowhere else… Are they also the most rational of pioneers? Would they attract and keep the best engineers, enough to plan and carry out a long-term drainage operation? Or did they just keep blasting pits and tunnels way down below until they tapped into the hobo? Ruining or drastically delaying their schemes of conquest, forcing them to abandon the Drifter…
Waiting, fuming—angrier and angrier.
“Your father was their chief mining engineer?”
“Geologist,” Teal says.
“Did he go to Green Camp to offer them his expertise? After the Voors…”
“He told enow a keep t’em interested, so t’ey’d allow him a stay. But he never told all. He kept saying te hobo would be down soon, because wit’na the Drifter and its promise, we have na value. Ally Pecqua and Idol Gargarel finally got tired, arrested him. T’en t’ey stole my widow’s due, and he knew ’twas over for bot’ us. When he wouldna tell more, t’ey sent him out te dust. I wor next. Sa I left.”
“Was it always that bad?” I ask.
“Rationals love a correct and trouble. Cut off from Eart’, t’ey only got harder and meaner.”
Makes my neck hairs bristle. Still, though we owe Teal our lives, I have no way to verify her story, no way to know how a meeting with the Voors might turn out. Maybe they’re just tough. Maybe they’re fighters. Maybe we are better off with bigoted fighters than corrupt Muskies. I’ve certainly known enough bigoted good ol’ boy Skyrines. Nasty boys in town, terrific in a fight.
SNKRAZ.
At the end of this wide tunnel lies a wider, square chamber, and within the chamber, a great big knobby shadow surrounded by even darker boxes and drums. The walls are equipped with shelves—some cut out of the rock. Right and left are smaller antechambers. Teal pokes in and out of them in sequence, silent.
Then she emerges from the last.
“Is that a printer?” I ask.
She nods. “Never seen one t’at old. ’Tis big.”
“And the drums… slurry?”
“Plastic, metal, alumiclay, a t’ere—” She points. “Sinter chamber. Make almost any machine part. May gin up te buggy, te other buggies. If I can switch and ramp power.”
“Where would we do that?” I’m acutely aware our time is running out. The Voor buggies were less than ten klicks away when last we looked.
“Track a star lights,” she says. “T’ey’ll get brighter. Te generator and t’ermal source should be near te emergency reserves.”
“Your father said that?”
Another nod.
We walk together back up the slot, find a dark offshoot we missed, venture along for a dozen meters.
“T’ere’s a big battle out t’ere,” Teal says. “You, te Far Ot’ers.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I walk a couple of steps behind her. She’s liable to fling her arms back as she feels around in the dark, and she’s strong. Don’t need to lose teeth.
“You have any idea what Eart’ did, cutting us off, cutting us loose? How many you have killed a loneliness and Eart’-grief?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“We’re morna half crazed. Cost me my first husband. He had Eart’ family too.”
“Oh?”
Her accent gets deeper. She’s going home in memory. “He worna used a narrow places. Came star-eyed, filled a freedom-talk. Romanced my family and won me young, t’en spent most a his time far-minding it, away in his t’oughts—back a Eart’. Cut off, he lapsed, sorrowed, didna see us, didna see me. Vasted up here.” She pronounces this “vaysted,” a portmanteau word, a cruel bundle of her first husband’s life. “Gone stir,” she adds softly. “After t’at, never saw me clear. Saw only his Eart’ wife. Tore t’ings, violent, til te camp passed judgment and sent him out te dust. He just wanted a go home.”
Not just the Voors are hard, apparently.
I’m not about to point out what we were told, about Muskies not paying their cable bills. Not paying taxes. Or any of the rest of it. Our lives may depend on this young woman’s tolerance, if not her favor.
Quiet minutes as we push along, until we see a single star light hanging on its almost invisible wire—but brighter than the others. Another fifty meters, in darkness and complete silence except for our breath and padding boots, and here the star lights are brightest of all—five bunched together, as if marking a location. Should have brought Tak, I think, with his new eyes. But mine have caught a black hatchway she missed.
“Here,” I say to Teal, who has gone on, perhaps distracted by her memories.
Doubling back, standing beside me, she pulls out her platinum, feels around the hatch—finds a small panel, slides it open, revealing a display and keypad. She lays the coin against the panel and punches in the string of numbers. The hatch clicks and together we pull it wide. Beyond brightly glow a lot more star lights, hundreds suspended from the ceiling, outlining the walls of another larger chamber, also square and about twenty meters on a side. The illumination is bright enough to dazzle for a few seconds, but we can clearly make out a medium-sized electrical panel, and beside this, the steel cap to a thermal source. Hot water from below ground? Nuclear? Likely not spent matter. That’s never been shared off Earth. Just as well…
Teal seems to be following memorized instructions. In a few minutes, moving from station to station, she’s got the station humming, buzzing, snapping inside its ranks of transformers, storage cells, fuel cells. The star lights brighten and the room lightens to clarity surrounded by stony gloom, except where a vein of that crystal-patterned nickel-iron reflects cloudy brilliance.
“Hydro still strong inna deep works,” she says.
“Can we lock the southern gate?” I ask.
“Maybe,” Teal says.
“Do you know how?” I ask.
“Control room,” she says.
“This isn’t it?”
“SubstaTon for te nort’ern upper works. T’ere should be a substaTon for sout’ and east, also big deeps and central digs—a main board for te whole installaTon.”
In the new brightness, I see that Teal’s face is still slick with tears. This was her father’s domain. He worked here… For the Voors. Told her what he knew.
But all that he knew?
“You know where that is?”
Her large gray-green eyes flick, searching, looking beyond me. “Maybe,” she says, and returns to the wide tunnel. At the junction, she points left. “T’is way.”
She moves ahead. My squad’s survival likely depends on what we find. I’m already remiss in not telling them what I know about the Voors. I judge we have about ten minutes to prepare for the new buggies’ arrival. If this chancy operation succeeds, and nobody gets in our way, we might be able to rejoin the battle—the war. To live is to fight.
But I’m thinking on this woman, no doubt about it. Some points down the trail I’m going to find out all I can about the Muskies, about Teal’s people at Green Camp, if she still thinks they’re her people—whatever they call themselves. Little Green Men and Women. Maybe they’re all just Martians now. Very romantic, that. More history. More culture and language.
More about what made her what she is.
The brighter lights reveal all we missed before: a sunken door, a fallen sign, a set of steps carved into the rock, leading up about fifteen meters through a smooth-cut corridor to another chamber. This one is lined and sealed by black, shrink-down plastic sheeting. Teal sets to removing the plastic, not an easy task, and I help. In a few minutes, we unveil a much wider shuttered viewport facing southeast—and beneath that, a dusty and decades-old control panel, sporting a holographic display panel—tiny projectors mounted on a strip above the panel—