Half an hour later, Festina’s skimmer hovered over the site. Everything matched my ghostly vision: the mixed forest, the hole in the ground, the punky campfire leftovers. Enough to call in Cheticamp? Paulette and Daunt shook their heads; the fire could belong to hunters or naturalists snowshoeing through the area anytime over the winter. The same people might have cleared brush away from the hole, out of pure curiosity or because they saw a storm brewing and decided they’d have more protection underground.
Ramos said she agreed with the ScrambleTacs — this might be nothing. But her bright eyes had tamped down their glint to a controlled focus: sharp-fierce-alert. The "game face" of an Explorer making ready for a mission.
We didn’t land straightaway… not till we’d flown four passes over the area, scanning through four different ranges of the EM spectrum. The survey showed nothing but trees and tundra-dogs, teeny rodent-niche animals that chewed out nests under the carpet moss. Were they dangerous? Ramos asked me. Could they bite? Did they carry disease? I told her they were no worse than Terran squirrels. Yes, they had teeth and on occasion they could carry a nasty microbe or two; but come on, Festina-girl, they were just squirrels.
Ramos gave me a grim look and flew around for another pass.
At last we landed: two hundred meters from the mine, on the shore of a small lake. Our charts called the place Lake Vascho, Oolom for eclipse. Probably the lake got mapped the same day one of our flyspeck moons pranced across in front of our sun. Not that we ever got true eclipses, not with our moons so small; occasionally the sun just acquired a darkish beauty mark on her face.
Thanks to spring, Lake Vascho had cleared its center of ice; but the shores were still frozen, with a thin crust that would take another few days to thaw completely. Everything — land, lake, air — bristled with pure northern silence.
Hold-your-breath beautiful.
Ramos holstered on a stun-pistol before leaving the skimmer. ("Not that hypersonics will affect robots," she said, "but if those tundra-dogs get uppity, zap!") Paulette and Daunt wore full body armor (gray/black urban camo) and they each carried an over-the-shoulder rocket launcher whose magazine packed four smart robot-poppers: tiny missiles designed to coldcock machines with a massive electrical jolt. Supposedly the missiles could distinguish androids from humans, and were programmed never to juice a living target. I wished I could take a minute to talk with them… make sure the popper missiles knew me as a chummy good-time gal. But the cops might get the wrong idea if I asked for a chat with their ammunition.
Ramos took the lead through the forest. No useless fuss about the cold this time. She’d put on gloves, but probably not to keep her hands warm… more likely, to avoid bites when wrestling rabid tundra-dogs. In one hand, she carried the paint-can device she’d used at the dipshits’ house — the thing she called the Bumbler. Its screen showed a fish-eye view of the woods around us, but Ramos scarcely gave it a glance; she was too busy scanning trees and ground and sky, trusting her own eyes more than the machine’s.
A stone’s throw from the hole, Ramos stopped. "Do you want us to go ahead?" Daunt asked.
"I never let someone take risks for me." Ramos glanced my way. "But if you and Tic want to stay out here, feel free."
Tic shook his head. I did the same a moment later. "Okay," Ramos said, "forward. Immortality awaits."
The hole was artificial — that became precious obvious as soon as we got close enough for a peek inside. Not a random crack in the shield-stone, but a tunnel with a well-engineered slant floor. A ramp down into the bedrock, like the ancient mines back at Sallysweet River, except more overgrown.
"Do we go in?" Paulette asked.
"Absolutely," Tic said, bold as blood. He’d found a chemical torch-wand in one of the skimmer’s equipment chests. Now he tapped the activation stub and the torch lit up like a two-hundred-watt baton of silver-shine.
"Let’s go."
Ramos and Daunt moved to the lip of the tunnel; Paulette slid behind Tic and me, taking rear guard. "You aren’t going to panic, are you?" she murmured to Tic with ham handed cop sympathy. "I know Ooloms don’t like cramped, confined—"
"I’ll be splendid," he interrupted. "A monument of imperturbability. Proceed."
But his ear-lids showed just a hint of the shivers.
The tunnel’s center was bare wet stone, washed clean with meltwater. Out toward the edges, things got messier: spongy compost made of animal droppings, plus mud slopped down from outside. For centuries, tundra-dogs, thatch beetles and gummylarks had wandered in here, built nests, brought up babies. A great bleeding lot of them had died here too, leaving behind dirt-crusty litters of bone and carapace.
Plants had rooted in the thin soil, and some had even grown — tundra species don’t need much light or root space. But the farther we got from the entrance hole, the fewer signs of flora and fauna. Even carpet moss won’t grow in absolute darkness, and after a while, tundra-dogs must get the willies, wandering into black silence.
I could sympathize: thank heavens for Tic’s torch-wand. When I glanced that way, though, I noticed Tic’s knuckles had turned gray-blue as they squeezed the torch in a death grip. Dads had amused himself making up names for that gray-blue color. Anxious indigo. Whacko woad. Unbalanced ultramarine. When an Oolom hits a crapulating level of stress, the color-adaptive glands get thrown off-kilter by other hormones, and random patches of skin start turning that telltale shade. Yet Tic forced himself onward, till the tunnel entrance faded from sight, and there was nothing around us but cold walls of stone.
Some distance down, we came to a fork: a side tunnel ran to our right while the main shaft continued straight. Ramos pointed the Bumbler down the side tunnel and squinted at the machine’s display screen. "Nothing obvious down there," she said in a low voice. "Not that the Bumbler can see much farther than we do in pitch-black." She turned and pointed the Bumbler forward along the main shaft. "Hello," she murmured. "Looks like an animal carcass. Does Demoth have bears?"
Daunt leaned in to peek at the screen himself. "I think it’s a shanshan." Great St. Caspian’s closest analog to a bear: covered in black peach fuzz instead of hair, and sporting orange dorsal sacs for sexual display, but shanshans were still four-legged omnivores with claws and a temper. "Are you sure it’s dead?" Daunt whispered. "Shanshans hibernate. If one decided to hunker down here for the winter…"
"No body heat," Ramos answered. She thumbed a dial on the Bumbler, "And almost no bioelectric activity — just a little glow from decay microbes working their way through the flesh. Maybe it came down here to hibernate, but it didn’t survive the cold. Old age or disease, I suppose." She drew her stun-pistol. "We’d better check it out."
Ramos and Daunt moved forward, right keen cautious. Tic and I followed at a safe distance while Paulette hung back, standing guard at the junction where the main shaft met the side tunnel. Tic had both ear-sheaths open; he might have been listening for the shanshan’s heartbeat, though he probably couldn’t hear bugger-all over my own heart’s pounding.
Sweat trickled down my armpits. Something in the tunnel felt alive and active… maybe not the shanshan, but something.
The shanshan didn’t shift a whisker as we approached. Warily, Ramos nudged the body with her foot.