“Rioting isn't all that's going on,” Dimity said. “There's something happening in space.”
“Our satellite's gone.”
“There's been something happening long before that. I've been watching. A lot more ships have taken off over the last few weeks than have landed again. And some of the ships that have landed have been damaged. When did we last hear anything from the Serpent Swarm?”
“I've not heard much at all lately.”
“I have. You may have been on the Defense Council but I'm a better hacker than you—or a more unscrupulous one. The messages are in code, but I could work out that we and the Swarm have been losing ships. Lots of ships.”
I remembered the fragments of military science and history I had sweated over so uselessly in the preceding months.
“It doesn't make sense. If you mean losing ships to aliens, why put the messages in code? Aliens aren't going to read our language, surely.”
“I don't think it's to stop aliens reading them. It's to stop us reading them. Nils, why do you think you were put on the Defense Council?”
“Why not?”
“What was the point? It was all set up in a hurry, sure, and people were given seats on various committees partly to keep everyone who mattered quiet, but you're a biologist! What were your qualifications? Not anything to do with biological warfare; you can't even start that until you know what the enemy is like, and for all we know these aliens, if they exist, use nerve gas for underarm deodorant.
“You were there because you're Mr. Nice Guy. How many news features have there been, over the last ten years, on your expeditions?”
“Lots.”
“Exactly. You are a celebrity. More than that, a celebrity who is also a scientist. And you've been given statements to make to the media over the past few weeks.”
“Because I'd been on TV often enough before, yes.”
“Because you are reassuring. Those statements were handed to you, weren't they?”
“Yes. I know what you're going to say next, Dimity.”
“You haven't the least idea of the real situation. You were a handsome talking head, who was not identified with any political faction.”
“That's why I've no qualms of conscience about quitting without much notice now. I realized I wasn't doing anything real. Look around you. That's why I'm here. Why you're here.”
“Our culture hasn't much experience of this sort of thing, has it?”
“But we've got plenty of experience of politics, it seems. I thought of us as a young, innocent world.”
Suddenly, I found myself crying. Dimity took me in her arms and I clung to her until the fit of sobbing and shaking had passed. I did not tell her I was crying a little for my own uselessness and a great deal more for fear for her.
Suddenly there were tiny chimes of music in the air. Dimity had brought a little music box from her collection. Heaven knows how she had thought of it, but those single notes, falling one by one, calmed me.
“You need some sleep,” she said. “And you know we're safe. Nothing can reach us here.”
I hadn't cried since I was a child. It seemed (or so I hoped) to release stress of whose intensity I had had no idea. I needed her arms round me to get to the bunk. I must have been asleep before she finished undressing me. “Nothing can reach us here” were her last words in my ear.
Chapter 9
Amid a multitude of projects no plan is devised.
Mechanical sounds. The hummings and clickings of an electronic habitat. I woke with the instant rush I have learned to hate. When I am at peace I wake slowly.
I remembered how much I had broken down the night before, remembered Dimity feeding me some sort of pills and liquid during the dark hours. I had not realized how vulnerable to strain I was. There was, of course, an autodoc in the module, and my first temptation was to make for it. But we might need to learn to exist without docs. I unwound Dimity's arm, got up and went to the desk. I dialed myself something to eat and drink. My beard was suddenly angering me and I cut most of it away.
I didn't want to look at the news just yet. I brought in the security camera instead.
I should have stayed with the news. The drift of guano showed big footprints. Not mine, not Dimity's, not human. But I had seen prints like them before.
I already had too much adrenaline in my system. I brought my pulse and breathing under control. Panic would do no good. We knew there were large animals in the deep caves, not only morlocks—I wished now that we had given them another name—which seemed to have rather more intelligence than dogs, but the modules, built of spacecraft hull-metal, were more than strong enough to keep them or any known Wunderland animal out.
Any known Wunderland animal, I thought, remembering the wrecked defenses of the marshmen's camps.
Would the aliens seek out a place like this? I didn't know how they thought. The behavior of terrestrial felines and Wunderland tigripards gave us two samples of felinoid behavior, investigating holes and caves, stalking before leaping, but these were allegedly felinoids with weapons… weapons that could burn through the hulls of spaceships or these walls around us.
I felt Dimity's hand on my shoulder. She too was looking at the footprints on the screen. One of the troubles with Dimity was that she could so often tell what I was thinking before I said it.
“Do we take the chance it's just a morlock?” I knew it wasn't.
“I don't think we can. And if it's not a morlock…”
“It could be back any time. We can't just wait for it.”
Now that we were looking for them, it was possible to make out more of the footprints on the cave floor. They could be tracked into the deeper passages, but the drier blowing dust near the entrance showed nothing. We followed them to the limit of the camera's range. Then we tooled up with lights and weapons, and took a couple of fight-or-flight pills. Not generally legal, but I had permission to keep them for hazardous expeditions.
We didn't like locator implants as a rule—too much like the sorts of thing Flatlanders went in for—but I had insisted on them for all cave-exploring students and so of course had had to accept one myself. It was in my left arm and about half the size of a grain of rice—no trouble. There wasn't much point in it when there was no potential rescue party anyway, but I made sure the desk was keyed into it in case Dimity and I somehow separated and she got back without me. It showed where I was anywhere on Wunderland.
We left a beacon blinking and beeping on the module, and with electronic locators the danger of getting lost was at least minimal. I was not planning for us to be in the caves long, but I also took some concentrated ration packs, largely from force of habit.
Lower gravity than Earth's meant huge ballroom chambers could form with fewer roof collapses. There were taller, sharper stalagmites, broader stalactites, and shawls, heligtites and fields of flow-stone more luxuriant than any terrestrial cave could show, vast majestic frozen waterfalls frosted with crystal, glittering, mineral-colored wings and curtains and flowers of stone. Limestone-dissolving streams flowed more slowly than on Earth and in less straight lines, with more complex intertwining labyrinths resulting. Bigger caves also meant more and bigger cave animals.
Crystalline surfaces flashed in the light. Insectoids and other small creatures were swift shadows. We turned a bend, and the pulse of the beacon and the faint glow of the twilight zone disappeared. Oddly, I felt far less frightened than I had in the module the night before, and I was still scientist enough to notice the fact. Something to do with an ancient hunting reflex, I suppose.