By the time they arrived, we’d unlatched the ScrambleTacs from their armor. Daunt had got off lucky — a single round of shots. Paulette had taken two volleys: one that Swiss-cheesed her body shell and a second that splashed through the holes. She had dozens of vicious-bad burns, arms, legs, stomach, even one on her cheek.
Ramos gritted her teeth at the sight of that one.
We sponged down Paulette’s wounds with snowmelt, trying to ignore the hiss of steam whenever we touched water to acid. All of us had trained in first aid, but Tic took charge of the treatment — the world-soul had linked him to a burn specialist down south, and now he was talking us through what we had to do. Soon after the Sallysweet River contingent landed, Paulette was stable enough to transport. We packed her and Daunt into the police skimmer, then dispatched the baby-boy cop to drive like a demon to the nearest hospital.
The retirement-age cop stayed behind to "protect" us. Mostly that meant she glared suspiciously at the motionless robots and occasionally muttered, "We should yank those guns out of their hands."
She never actually tried it; we would have stopped her if she had. Let sleeping androids lie.
JUNIOR ATTACHE
When Cheticamp arrived, he brought a whole platoon of ScrambleTacs… and they all wanted to blast the two frozen androids with robot-poppers. "Must you?" Tic asked. "They’re no threat now. And a violent electric jolt will frazzle their memory. Possibly useful evidence."
Cheticamp grouched about safety first, protection of his officers, blah-blah… but he agreed to hold off till cybernetics experts could arrive to try a "sanitary" shutdown. The experts were already on the way — Tic had beeped them while we waited for the cops to show. (Naturally, Tic knew all the top boffins in the Civilian Protection Office; or at least he knew the top boffins as of seventy years ago, which was when he’d last had dealings with that particular branch of the government. Amazingly, a few of them were still alive… and tickled three shades of pink to be called into the field again.)
The boffins were headquartered (or perhaps nursing-homed) in Comfort Bight, halfway around the world… but sleeve travel got them to Bonaventure up-down-done, and from there it was only forty-five minutes to our position. Under the watchful eyes of the ScrambleTacs — dour as Judgment, robot-poppers trained and ready — the tottery old experts deactivated the androids with nary a whiff of excitement.
"No self-destructs on these," Cheticamp observed.
"No," I agreed. "And the androids down the mine didn’t blow up either. Odds are, the killer never expected these ones to be found."
"Lucky for us," Cheticamp said. "Though we had to catch a break sooner or later. And maybe there’s more to find down the tunnel."
"We’ll see," I answered.
His eyes went squinty. "I hope you weren’t planning to go with us underground. There’s no place for civilians—"
"But there is for accredited members of the Vigil," Tic interrupted. "Proceeding with a duly authorized scrutiny of police methods. You know we’re legally allowed to watch everything firsthand."
Cheticamp looked like he’d bitten a toad.
Tough titty.
Into the hole again. And just when Tic had lost his gray-blue hives from the last time.
This trip, we set our sights on a survey of that side shaft: the one where the androids had been waiting. No one wanted to jinx things by predicting what the side tunnel might hold, but we all expected to find something momentous. Even the ScrambleTacs, young bucks who desperately wanted to come off as grim servants of justice, occasionally let the corners of their mouths twitch up into we’ve-got-the-bastards smiles.
A short distance in, we passed a patch of moss that was crushed down and crumbled — the spot we’d all landed after tumbling out of the peacock tube. It occurred to me none of us had talked about that tube: not in the quiet before the police arrived or in the bustle after. Sure, Cheticamp had asked me what happened, and I’d given him the full rundown… but he’d just recorded that part of my statement without comment. None of the clarifying questions he’d asked about other parts of the story.
Tic hadn’t talked about the tube.
Festina hadn’t talked about it.
I hadn’t talked about it.
I hadn’t asked, "What in blazes is this peacock thing, and why does it keep following me around? When it showed up in the mine, why did it materialize in front of me? In Pump Station 3, why did it save me from the acid but not Chappalar? And if it did want to save my life for some reason, why did it disappear both times before the threat was actually over?"
No answers. No explanations popped magically into my brain.
So I continued to trudge downward, over the hard stone floor.
A dozen ScrambleTacs went into the side tunnel ahead of us, advancing with show-off military precision: at any given time, only two were moving forward while the rest held ready to fill the tunnel with covering fire. Oooo, those boys and girls loved to deploy. If there’d been any androids still on the hoof, those old bit-buckets would be wearing a bouquet of robot-poppers in the blink of an eye.
But we found no more androids — none but the conked-out bodies of the ones Daunt and Paulette had shot. They looked completely human: a teenage Asian boy, a grand-fatherly African man, a fortyish Frau not so different from me… down like corpses now, creepily motionless. We lifted our feet high-warily over them and moved on.
Some distance from the main shaft, the side tunnel ended in a chamber twenty meters square and two stories high. Clumps of rusty metal dotted the floor, junk an archaeologist might understand but I didn’t. This could be the remains of a machine shop, a locker room, a bunch of air pumps, or any of the other equipment needed by ancient miners. Three thousand years had reduced everything to least common denominators: lumps and stains on the rock.
At the far side of the room, two ScrambleTacs had stationed themselves by an elevator shaft, just like the one in the main tunnel — no elevator, merely an open hole. The club-thumpers trained their poppers down into the darkness; if robots clambered up from the depths, our fierce protectors would be ready. Other ScrambleTacs had spaced themselves out around the room, but most had congregated in a knot off to my right.
They were circled around a corpse. Not human. Not Oolom.
Freep.
The ScrambleTacs surrounded the body, but stood well back from it. I suppose they didn’t want to disturb the death site. Or should I call it a murder site? Hard to say. The Freep lay flat on his back, eyes closed, hands folded cross his chest: a natural position for a corpse tucked into a coffin, but hard to imagine anyone dying half so tidy. Most likely, someone else had arranged the body after death — maybe the robots.
And the cause of death? Nothing obvious. The Freep was healthy-looking and only thirtyish. He wore a good winter parka, clean of acid splashes, knife wounds, and bloodstains. Maybe the poor sod had frozen, even with that parka — Freeps were designed for hard ultraviolet and blazing heat, not Great St. Caspian cold. But no sense speculating, when an autopsy would provide a definitive answer.