'Ready?' she asked, one finger hovering above an arm-mounted control.
Ty nodded.
'Okay Three, two, one, boom.'
There was no sound, of course, but Ty's imagination filled it in all the same. Seismic taps on the surface immediately fed details of the resulting tremor back to him through his suit's readout. Barely a moment later, a thick column of grey smoke and grit came billowing out of the mouth of the passageway, spreading into the main shaft.
Nancy was now barely visible through the dust and swirling grit. 'Can't see anything on the visuals,' he heard her say.
'Too much debris for that,' he replied. 'Let's go see if it worked.'
They sent a couple of spiders in first, in case there were any really big chunks of debris still bouncing around inside the passageway, then both followed it in, moving carefully.
The explosives had worked better than Ty might have hoped, and yet the passageway immediately beyond what remained of the false wall differed little from the section that preceded it. The threat of disappointment lurked like a leaden weight in the pit of his stomach. But they finally got a good look at what they'd previously glimpsed only as an indistinct grey shadow.
It was indeed the body of a single Atn – but nothing else.
'Are you getting this?' Nancy asked. Ty looked round to see her turning her head slowly from side to side as she moved through the opened-up section of the passageway. He assumed she was transmitting live video to the Mjollnir's bridge.
Ty kneeled by the Atn's bulky corpse and brought his suit's light up close to it, studying the intricate, stylized whorls and sigils engraved into its carapace. As far as he could see, there was nothing whatsoever unusual about it.
'Well, I guess that's it,' he heard Nancy announce over the general comms link. 'This is all there is.'
'Just hold on a minute,' Ty snapped irritably. 'We've barely had a chance to look around yet.'
'Come on, Nathan, there's nothing here. Let's face it, we tried and we failed.'
Ty struggled to control the quiver in his voice. 'Nothing here except for an Atn that the rest of its clade went to such enormous time and trouble to hide. Does that make sense to you?'
'I don't know. Maybe it's simply a burial chamber, and this was one of their leaders. That would explain the story of the Mos Hadroch, wouldn't it? Maybe that thing's what the Atn regarded as a king or hive-queen?'
'You're talking nonsense,' Ty snapped, running one gloved hand along the creature's carapace. And also you're over-anthropomorphizing them. Besides, the Atn are entirely non-hierarchical. And if this place is nothing more than a burial chamber, then explain to me why a swarm of alien machines just turned up searching for this asteroid.'
'I'm just telling you what I see here,' Nancy insisted, and he could tell he'd sounded too harsh. 'A dead Atn, that's it.'
Ty stood up and looked around. All he could see were smooth, unblemished rock walls, entirely devoid of glyphs, amid swirling dust. 'All the evidence points right here,' Ty reaffirmed, thinking out loud.
'All right, and maybe it's a deliberate red herring set up to misdirect anyone coming looking for the Mos Hadroch, and we fell for it.'
The same thought had already occurred to Ty, but he didn't care to admit to it.
Commander Martinez's icon blinked back into life at the bottom of Ty's visor. 'We just picked up a mass of gravity-traces located no more than three or four AUs from here,' he informed them. 'Whatever you think you have, grab it and get out, or you risk being left behind.'
Ty could feel the blood pounding in his head, and he felt suddenly sick with anxiety. He leaned forward, again shining sharp-edged light on the dead alien's carapace markings, while he studied it for long seconds.
Think, he told himself. All they had so far was a name… they had no idea what the Mos Hadroch might look like, how big it was, or how small…
A sudden sense of excitement gripped him and he pinged Nancy with a request for a secure one-on-one link, at the same moment he severed his comms link with the Mjollnir 's bridge.
Nancy accepted the link, and her voice came through a moment later. 'What the hell, Ty?' she asked. 'Why did you just cut off the ship? Martinez'll throw a fit.'
'We can't go back yet.'
Her shoulders slumped, her expression more puzzled than angry.
'Look around you,' he demanded. 'What do you see?'
'An empty passageway – and a dead alien.'
The Atn were a cyborg species, and only part organic, of course; that much was well known. Not that anyone had ever managed to prove it, but the general consensus was that their long-term memories and any other data stored in their brains could be passed from one individual to the next. That way you got creatures whose individual identities constantly shifted and changed, as they each accumulated the experiences of their brethren. What if he wondered, the Mos Hadroch was nothing more than some form of information, carefully hidden inside some dormant circuitry located somewhere inside what passed for this creature's brain?
Ty shook his head, thinking hard and fast. No, that couldn't be it. If that had been the case, they'd have done as well to hide the actual stack-discs here, too, rather than destroy them in their storage chamber.
He let out a snarl of exasperation and squatted on his haunches. 'X marks the spot,' he muttered.
'What?'
'Everything points to here,' he said, unable to contain his exasperation. 'The records I found way back when, the spiral texts we discovered here, and even this Atn.'
Nancy said nothing, simply stood there waiting, while he stared at the Atn's metal carapace. They were hardly elegant creatures: slow and ponderous, the size of a small car. There was, he suddenly thought, a lot of room in there.
He bent down again to read more closely at the creature. There was something, he was sure, wrong with its head. He put both hands under it and tried to lift it. It moved with surprising ease, as if it were nothing more than an empty casing.
He stood up again. 'It's in there,' he declared, flushed with sudden and overwhelming certainty.
'Excuse me?'
'The smashed discs, the walled-off passageway… none of it makes sense unless there's something inside the body.'
He stared at Nancy, his eyes bright, while she gazed back at him in mystified, thin-lipped silence. 'How can you be sure?'
'Frankly, I can't. There's just nowhere else it could be. Nobody's been in here since that false wall was put up, so it has to be inside that thing.'
'We don't have time to break it open,' Nancy replied decisively. 'We'd need cutting tools for that, which means we're going to have to get it back to the Mjollnir.'
Ty nodded. 'Tell Martinez we're coming out.' The Atn lay with its head pointing in the direction of the main shaft, the bulk of its massive body pushed up against the wall on one side. Deciding to move it was one thing, but managing it was another. Ty got in touch with Cesar and told him what he was planning, while Nancy reopened the link with the Mjollnir and fielded Martinez's angry demands.
Ty glanced down at the image of the swarm's movements projected on the interior of his visor, and saw that some of its members were converging on the Mjollnir's location a lot sooner than he had expected.
Nancy signed off and just stood there, looking tense and angry. 'How long did Martinez give us?' he asked her.
'Thirty minutes, that's it. And then they jump without us.'
'I just talked to Cesar,' Ty explained, 'and he's got an idea he wants to try.'
'Fine. In the meantime, let's get this thing hooked up to the spiders, then haul it the hell out of here.'
Some of the spiders were equipped with additional bits of equipment, among them a powerful oxyacetylene torch and several winches that spooled out super-strong cable. While he talked with Cesar over the comms, Ty unwound the cable from one of the spiders and fixed the carabiner lock attached to it around the dead alien's neck like a noose. Nancy did the same with another, and after a few minutes' work they'd secured the body to three separate cables.