“Now here—” She slashed at her diagram, drawing diagonal lines that reached up from the torus and down to the face of the mountain. “Runs. Access chutes. Some of them vertical, probably the oldest,
fitted with lifting equipment; the more recent ones will have stairs and ladders. You can see these runs provide access to the surface, for the disposal of the dead, foraging missions for oxygen, perhaps other resources. These lower tunnels reach down to the face of the mountain, to the pockets of liquid water and the life-forms down there. With suitable processing the colonists will be able to live off the native organic compounds.” She looked up. “You need to know that it’s common for colonies of this type to reprocess as much of their raw material as possible.” She let that hang in the silence.
Denh said queasily, “You mean, people ? But we saw the corpses in that great ring.”
Dower shrugged. “In these wild warrens patterns vary … Just remember two things. First, across the Galaxy we are at war. Our alien enemy is pitiless, and cares nothing for your moral qualms, or even your nausea, Denh. We need warm bodies to be thrown into the war, and that’s why we’re here. We’re a press gang, nothing more. And second — remember that whatever you see down there, however strange it seems to you, these are human beings. Not like you — a different sort — but human nevertheless. So there’s nothing to fear.”
“Yes, sir,” came the ritual chorus.
“All right. Abil—”
Denh pushed herself forward. “Let me, Captain.” She jumped into the pit and rubbed her hands, pretending to spit on the palms, to the soft laughter of her mates. “Clockwise, you think?” She turned the wheel.
The ground shuddered under Abil’s feet. The great lid of metal and rock slid back, disappearing under the ice. Denh yelped, and jumped out of her hole.
The run was a broad, slanting tunnel cut into the ice. Crude steps had been etched into its lower surface, four, five, six parallel staircases. There was no light but the stars, and the spots of their skinsuits.
Eight of the ten teams would enter the run, leaving two on watch on the surface. Dower waved two units forward to take the lead. Abil’s red team was one of them.
Abil led the way into the hole. He clambered easily down the stairs, wary, descending into deeper darkness. His hands were empty; though the weapons of his team bristled behind him, he felt naked.
Abil had descended maybe two hundred yards into the hole when suddenly the ice under his feet shook again. The lid was closing over the hole, like a great eyelid, shutting out the stars. He heard hurried, gasping breaths, the sounds of panic rising in his troopers. He tried to control his own breathing. “Red team, take it easy,” he said. “Remember your briefing. We expected this.”
“The corporal’s right,” growled Dower, somewhere above him. “This is just an air lock. Just wait, now.”
For a few heartbeats they were suspended in darkness, their puddles of suit light overwhelmed by the greater dark.
There was a hiss of inrushing air. Then a coarse gray light flickered into life from fat fluorescent tubes buried in the walls. Abil looked up at the lines of troopers, weapons ready, standing on the floor of the cylindrical hall.
Dower held up her gloved hand. “You hear that?”
They listened in silence. Sound carried through the new air: muffled footsteps from beyond the walls, pattering away into the void beyond. And then more footsteps — many more, like an approaching crowd.
“They have runners,” Dower whispered. “Throughout the warren. Patrolling everywhere. If one of them spots trouble, she runs off to find somebody else, and they both run back to the trouble spot, and then they split up, and run off again … It’s a pretty efficient alarm system.”
There was a noise from behind Abil, carried through the new, thick air. Only a few steps beneath him, there was another lid door, like the one they had come through from the surface. It, too, had a wheel set on an upright axle.
The wheel was turning with a scrape.
“They’re coming,” Dower said, hefting her weapon. “Let’s have some fun.”
The door slid back.
Chapter 50
I like to escape from the crowds. Even in the winter, the center of Amalfi and its harbor area swarm with locals and tourists, mainly elderly British and Americans here for the winter sun.
So I climb the hills. The natural vegetation on this rich volcanic soil is woodland, but higher up the land has been terraced to make room for olive groves, vineyards, and orchards — especially lemons, the specialty of the area, though I swear I will never get used to limoncello ; I can never get it off my teeth.
I like to think Peter would have seen the aptness of my retiring here, to Amalfi. For as it happens it was here, over a century ago, that Bedford, the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, fled after his remarkable adventures in the moon, and wrote his own memoir. I keep a copy of the book, a battered old paperback, in my hotel room.
Yes, it would have pleased Peter. For what Bedford and Cavor found in the heart of the moon was, of course, the hive society of the Selenites.
I kept hold of Lucia, with her baby, all the way out of that hole in the ground.
When we could get away from the area, I found a cab and took her to my hotel. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. We attracted some odd stares from the staff, but it did give us a chance to calm down, clean up. Then I called Daniel, whose number, on a dog-eared business card, Lucia had always kept with her.
Peter was the only fatality that day. He really had planted his bomb carefully. It wasn’t hard for the forensic teams to establish his guilt, through traces of Semtex on his clothes and under his fingernails, and to figure out the purpose of his little remote-control radar gun. His true identity was quickly established, and he was linked with the mysterious group that had bombed the geometric optics lab in San Jose.
But that was where the trail ran cold, happily for me. Peter had signed into our hotel under an assumed name, and — as far as I know — never brought any of his bomb-making equipment there. The hotel staff hadn’t seen much of him, and didn’t seem to recognize the blurred face on the news programs.
Still, I checked out — paying with cash, making sure I left no contact address at the hotel — and fled Rome, for Amalfi.
I did bring with me all that was left of Peter’s possessions. It would surely have been a mistake for me to leave them behind. And anyhow it didn’t seem right. I burned his clothes, his shaving gear, other junk. I kept his data, though. I copied it from his machines to a new laptop I had bought in Rome. Then I destroyed the machines as best I could, wiping them clean, breaking them open and smashing the chips, dumping the carcasses in the ocean.
The incident soon faded from attention: bomb attacks in crowded cities are sadly commonplace nowadays. The authorities are still digging, of course. A common theory is that maybe there is some kind of trail back to the usual suspects in the Middle East. But a consensus seems to be emerging that it must have been Peter who was primarily responsible for both attacks, in San Jose and Rome, and that he was some kind of lone nut with an unknowable grudge, for no other link has been found between the geometric optics lab and the big hole in the ground in Rome.
As for that great underground city under the Appian Way, before the authorities were able to penetrate it fully — and I’ve no idea how they did it — the swarming drones cleared it out. There was little left to see but the infrastructure, the rooms, the partitions, the great vents for circulating the air. The purpose of some rooms was obvious — the kitchens with their gas supply, the dormitories where the frames of the bunk beds have been left intact, the hospitals. Some other chambers I could have identified, had anybody asked me, like the nurseries and the deep, musty, mysterious rooms where the mamme-nonne had lived. They even dismantled their suite of mainframe computers.