We walked for bloody hours.
We knew we were going to. There was one of the lit areas some way ahead that the remotes had found, our base-camp-to-be. We’d all been exercising and on a cocktail of steroids, but none of it prepared us for a long hike under gravity. We had to stop sooner than anyone liked, and then after another march we had to stop again. And then, when we set off, the trolley wouldn’t work.
That was unwelcome.
Thankfully, doing complex maintenance while suited up is something we had trained for, and at least the tools wouldn’t keep drifting off. Karen and Katarin took the trolley apart and tested every single circuit and ball bearing of it, while the rest of us kicked our heels and Louis flew the remote ahead, trying to get a glimpse of the promised lights. There was nothing wrong with the trolley, except it wouldn’t work. Nothing we did could make the damn thing go. The blame for this somehow fell on me because I’d been driving it, though nobody could say what I was supposed to have done wrong.
So that was all our gear – our supplies, our tents, all that useful stuff that nobody wanted to haul through a G of gravity. In the end we cannibalised the wheelbase of the trolley, and Ajay and I pushed it. Actually pushed it, like an actual supermarket trolley with a squeaky wheel, loaded with as much as we could manually shift.
And we set off again, a testament to the indefatigability of human dumbassery. But, trolley aside, all was still not well. Louis couldn’t find the lights, and everyone agreed that, given the distance we’d travelled, we should be seeing them by now. The remote was sent further and further, finding only more lightless passageways, draining a battery we couldn’t recharge now we’d had to leave the guts of the trolley behind. We watched the camera feed on our HUDs, seeing only an extra slice of second-hand darkness overlaid on the personal dark outside our helmets.
Joe had a confab with the Mission Team about what we should do. They said they’d send more remotes after us, but probably we hadn’t gone as far as we thought, and we should just continue.
I wonder about that trolley, you know. Because I’ve met plenty of aliens walking the Crypts, and walking was what they were doing. I never met an alien in a golf cart or a motorised carriage. Even the Egg Men, who were kind of in little robot suits, had little robot feets to move them around. I firmly believe the Makers killed our trolley, or something they left behind did, perhaps even some intrinsic and unimaginable law of the Crypts. You travel their ways with a proper reverence, perhaps. You make your pilgrimage to the stars, if not on your knees, then at least by putting one foot after another, just as I still am, all this time later. Nobody gets a free ride.
But there we were, going deeper and deeper into terra incognita because we’d rather play chicken with the universe than look yellow.
When we stopped again, Joe’s confab with Doctor Naish was rather more heated. Our remote’s battery warning was on, despite the fact it should have had way more life in it, and we hadn’t seen so much as a space glow-worm lighting up the place. Worse, the chaser remotes, which should have overtaken us an hour before, were conspicuous in their absence. Naish said they were still on their way to us, following our trail of comms relays. Joe Martino said that was frankly impossible unless she’d sent them by snail. We all had a good laugh; not.
Then Louis said he’d found something.
It was not our proposed base camp, but it was something, and we’d been in those four-metre-wide tunnels for a long time. Any variety seemed like a good deal. In this case it was a big chamber, twenty metres across at least, by the remote’s instruments. There were several passageways issuing off it. None of this had been found by the initial drone, and we had obviously missed a connection somehow, turned when we should have gone straight or vice versa. How could we have been so bloody stupid? I could feel everyone on edge, on the point of blaming each other. Doctor Naish’s voice, somewhat staticky, said we should camp in the chamber, set the proximity alarms and keep a watch, generally get some shut-eye. Ajay and I, still on trolley duty, heartily agreed.
“How can the remotes be following our beacons without finding us?” Karen demanded. “I vote we go back.”
I don’t know what might have happened if we’d listened to her. We didn’t, obviously we didn’t, and I have reason to believe it wouldn’t have been wine and roses even if we had. But it would have been different. I’d still be in a mess, doubtless, just not this mess.
And there was something – the last words I had from her, crackly and broken over the comms. I wonder, I really do. I wonder just how far we walked, and what we put between us and home other than mere distance.
Toto, this is where it happens. The moment we’ve all been waiting for.
We reached the big chamber. Twenty metres across, like I said, but far higher, like we were at the bottom of a big old silo. I remember shining my torch upwards, turned as strong as it would go, and seeing a weird silvery layer of dust motes glittering up above our heads, as though it marked the border between two layers of pressure. That was possible, of course – we knew from the remotes’ misadventures that there were parts of the Crypts invisibly sectioned off into regions of hostile atmosphere, greater or lesser pressure, all that. We had originally picked out a path that avoided such shifts, and somehow we had followed a different path that still managed to remain curiously Earthling-friendly. And I don’t know. I have suspicions about why we never found the lights, but that way madness lies. And I passed madness some while ago and don’t want to have to retrace my steps.
Ajay and I just parked the trolley and sat down on it, exhausted. My suit was already showing some warning signs of wear and tear, never really intended to be worn for extended periods in-atmosphere. Katarin was setting up the one tent we’d been able to carry, which was self-powered and would provide us with somewhere to de-suit, if we were Olympic-grade contortionists. We’d had two tents, but one was back with the trolley’s innards. The whole expedition was a disaster; everyone knew it, nobody was talking about it.
Karen had the drone controller and was taking the little flier up to look at that dust ceiling, with what was left of its battery. Joe was hailing home again, saying that we’d have to come back after we’d slept, a long and defeated slog nobody much wanted to envisage. Naish’s voice on the comms was crackly and faint despite the relays. The replacement drones hadn’t turned up, though Naish seemed to be saying she’d found the room we were describing but where were we? Another room, obviously, only a crazy person would think otherwise. And perhaps that wasn’t even what Naish was saying; her voice seemed to be echoing to us distantly, from far far away.
Louis snapped, then. He had thus far kept up a profoundly dignified professional front, but something about this latest indignity broke him and he threw a magnificent strop. “That’s the line!” he yelled, whether to Naish or to us. “This goddamn mission!” He took his helmet off, fumbling angrily with the catches. His pink-tinted face glowered at us, weirdly undersized within the neck-ring of his suit. “Don’t look at me like that,” he snapped. “I already got a body-full of whatever the hell this place has to offer, don’t I? And it’s fine. The air’s fine. Look.” He made a great show of breathing in and out, an effort mostly hidden by the bulk of his suit.
“You’re going to have to go into quarantine when we get back,” Joe warned him.
“I’ll live with it. This is goddamn ridiculous,” Louis shot back. “I have never been part of such a goddamn fool mission in all my days. I swear we should never have got into bed with the goddamn Hispanics.” By which I assume he meant Madrid.