After some moments of silent inspection, Strong-Flukes wriggled back along the Ice surface to Cilia-of-Gold.
She hesitated. “We’ve got problems, I think,” she said at last.
The Seeker seemed to pulse inside Cilia-of-Gold, tightening around her gut. “What problems?”
“This Chimney’s inhabited already. By Heads.”
Kevan Scholes stopped the rover a hundred yards short of the wall-mountain’s crest.
Irina Larionova, wrapped in a borrowed environment suit, could tell from the tilt of the cabin that the surface here was inclined upwards at around forty degrees — shallower than a flight of stairs. This “mountain,” heavily eroded, was really little more than a dust-clad hill, she thought.
“The wall of Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said briskly, his radio-distorted voice tinny. “Come on. We’ll walk to the summit from here.”
“Walk?” She studied him, irritated. “Scholes, I’ve had one hour’s sleep in the last thirty-six; I’ve traveled across ninety million miles to get here, via flitters and wormhole transit links — and you’re telling me I have to walk up this damn hill?”
Scholes grinned through his face plate. He was AS-preserved at around physical-twenty-five, Larionova guessed, and he had a boyishness that grated on her. Damn it, she reminded herself, this “boy” is probably older than me.
“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll love the view. And we have to change transports anyway.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
He twisted gracefully to his feet. He reached out a gloved hand to help Larionova pull herself, awkwardly, out of her seat. When she stood on the cabin’s tilted deck, her heavy boots hurt her ankles.
Scholes threw open the rover’s lock. Residual air puffed out of the cabin, crystallizing. The glow from the cabin interior was dazzling; beyond the lock, Larionova saw only darkness.
Scholes climbed out of the lock and down to the planet’s invisible surface. Larionova followed him awkwardly; it seemed a long way to the lock’s single step.
Her boots settled to the surface, crunching softly. The lock was situated between the rover’s rear wheels: the wheels were constructs of metal strips and webbing, wide and light, each wheel taller than she was.
Scholes pushed the lock closed, and Larionova was plunged into sudden darkness.
Scholes loomed before her. He was a shape cut out of blackness. “Are you okay? Your pulse is rapid.”
She could hear the rattle of her own breath, loud and immediate. “Just a little disoriented.”
“We’ve got all of a third of a gee down here, you know. You’ll get used to it. Let your eyes dark-adapt. We don’t have to hurry this.”
She looked up.
In her peripheral vision, the stars were already coming out. She looked for a bright double star, blue and white. There it was: Earth, with Luna.
And now, with a slow grandeur, the landscape revealed itself to her adjusting eyes. The plain from which the rover had climbed spread out from the foot of the crater wall-mountain. It was a complex patchwork of crowding craters, ridges and scarps — some of which must have been miles high — all revealed as a glimmering tracery in the starlight. The face of the planet seemed wrinkled, she thought, as if shrunk with age.
“These wall-mountains are over a mile high,” Scholes said. “Up here, the surface is firm enough to walk on; the regolith dust layer is only a couple of inches thick. But down on the plain the dust can be ten or fifteen yards deep. Hence the big wheels on the rover. I guess that’s what five billion years of thousand-degree temperature range does for a landscape…”
Just twenty-four hours ago, she reflected, Larionova had been stuck in a boardroom in New York, buried in one of Superet’s endless funding battles. And now this… wormhole travel was bewildering. “Lethe’s waters,” she said. “It’s so — desolate.”
Scholes gave an ironic bow. “Welcome to Mercury,” he said.
Cilia-of-Gold and Strong-Flukes peered down into the Chimney cavern.
Cilia-of-Gold had chosen the cavern well. The Chimney here was a fine young vent, a glowing crater much wider than their old, dying home. The water above the Chimney was turbulent, and richly cloudy; the cavern itself was wide and smooth-walled. Cilia-plants grew in mats around the Chimney’s base. Cutters browsed in turn on the cilia-plants, great chains of them, their tough little arms slicing steadily through the plants. Sliding through the plant mats Cilia-of-Gold could make out the supple form of a Crawler, its mindless, tubelike body wider than Cilia-of-Gold’s and more than three times as long…
And, stalking around their little forest, here came the Heads themselves, the rulers of the cavern. Cilia-of-Gold counted four, five, six of the Heads, and no doubt there were many more in the dark recesses of the cavern.
One Head — close to the tunnel mouth — swiveled its huge, swollen helmet-skull towards her.
She ducked back into the tunnel, aware that all her cilia were quivering.
Strong-Flukes drifted to the tunnel floor, landing in a little cloud of food particles. “Heads,” she said, her voice soft with despair. “We can’t fight Heads.”
The Heads’ huge helmet-skulls were sensitive to heat — fantastically so, enabling the Heads to track and kill with almost perfect accuracy. Heads were deadly opponents, Cilia-of-Gold reflected. But the people had nowhere else to go.
“We’ve come a long way, to reach this place, Strong-Flukes. If we had to undergo another journey—” through more cold, stagnant tunnels “ — many of us couldn’t survive. And those who did would be too weakened to fight.
“No. We have to stay here — to fight here.”
Strong-Flukes groaned, wrapping her carapace close around her. “Then we’ll all be killed.”
Cilia-of-Gold tried to ignore the heavy presence of the Seeker within her — and its prompting, growing more insistent now, that she get away from all this, from the crowding presence of people — and she forced herself to think.
Larionova followed Kevan Scholes up the slope of the wall-mountain. Silicate surface dust compressed under her boots, like fine sand. The climbing was easy — it was no more than a steep walk, really — but she stumbled frequently, clumsy in this reduced gee.
They reached the crest of the mountain. It wasn’t a sharp summit: more a wide, smooth platform, fractured to dust by Mercury’s wild temperature range.
“Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said. “A hundred miles wide, stretching right across Mercury’s South Pole.”
The crater was so large that even from this height its full breadth was hidden by the tight curve of the planet. The wall-mountain was one of a series that swept across the landscape from left to right, like a row of eroded teeth, separated by broad, rubble-strewn valleys. On the far side of the summit, the flanks of the wall-mountain swept down to the plain of the crater, a full mile below.
Mercury’s angry Sun was hidden beyond the curve of the world, but its corona extended delicate, structured tendrils above the far horizon.
The plain itself was immersed in darkness. But by the milky, diffuse light of the corona, Larionova could see a peak at the center of the plain, shouldering its way above the horizon. There was a spark of light at the base of the central peak, incongruously bright in the crater’s shadows: that must be the Thoth team’s camp.