Gridlinked

Gant went on. 'You detailed climbing equipment. We brought 2k reels of chain-cotton and motorized abseils. Is it a straight drop? Could be difficult if we run into trouble.'

'No, the shaft runs down at about thirty-five degrees. There'll be ice, though.'

Gant tapped the box he was sitting on. 'Grip shoes. I didn't like the footing last time we went down. How about lighting? I'd like to send drone lights ahead, if that's possible.'

'We'll try it. Anything else?'

Cam spoke up then. His voice was soft but incisive. 'You realize that if this object is impenetrable to scan, it may be impenetrable at close range to portable equipment?'

'There is that possibility, I agree…'

'I merely wish to ascertain that you are aware of the difficulties. It may be that the artefact will have to be… moved to the ship.'

From under two kilometres of rock?

Cam observed him, and his mouth twitched with repressed amusement.

Cormac suddenly twigged. He nodded.

'That can wait. There may be other evidence down there we don't want to destroy… like whatever got the probe. Is that all?' They all nodded agreement. 'Let's go then.'

The shuttle dropped into atmosphere with all the aerodynamics of a paving slab. Heat indicators stuttered up their scales, groping for the red areas, and screens showed a lambent glow along the front of the wing's surfaces. The deep droning of AG and the shuttle's turbines made speech almost impossible. Cormac was glad of his straps and hoped Cento remembered that his human cargo was not so durable as himself. Rather than the acid hiss of ice crystals on the screen and body of the shuttle, there was a drawn-out roar as it punched through yellow cloud and left a wide vapour trail behind. Cento did not treat the machine with the same gentleness as did Jane. He tested its limits, flew it hard, perhaps for a good reason, perhaps just for the hell of it. Cormac had seen a devilish grin of anticipation on his face as he had taken the pilot's seat. He wondered what the AI that programmed him had been thinking of. The rear-view screen, he saw, was whited out. The forward view showed cloud getting steadily darker above a landscape of fractured slabs.

'Getting near to night here!' Cento shouted.

Cormac remembered that Samarkand did experience night and day, but, with its ponderous turning, each was nearly a solstan week in length. When they finally came into land below cloud now slowly turning to the colour of brass, only Cam made comment on the flight.

'Lucky no mycelium was missed,' he said as he unstrapped himself.

As he picked up his facemask Cormac nodded agreement. There was a lot of ceramal in the construction of this shuttle. He watched Cento and Aiden as they rose from the front seats and came back. Cento appeared smug. Aiden was all Teutonic efficiency; even in the enclosed space of the shuttle he seemed to be marching. Only then did Cormac notice that the suits they were wearing were not coldsuits. These Golem considered appearance to be secondary to the mission, then. A good sign, he hoped.

Before they all disembarked, Gant demonstrated the chain-cotton abseil devices. He held up a harness with a cylindrical box attached, and with a wide ring he pulled from the box a line so thin it was difficult to see.

'Cento and me'U be wearing these on our backs. The lines will be fixed to the rock outside. The rest of you will wear them side-harnessed and attached to our lines. They're easy enough to use.' He pointed to a touch-control on the front of the harness. 'Here you can control the speed of your descent and ascent. We probably won't be using that, though. We'll be walking down with grip shoes, so we'll use the friction setting. Should there be an emergency of some kind, don't use the full-speed setting. These babies can wind you in at thirty kph.'

He nodded to Cormac when he had finished, but Cam spoke out before Cormac could say anything.

'What about the chain-cotton? Slightest mistake and you could lose an arm.'

'No, I can't demonstrate it here - wrong temperature - but out there the cotton will be coated with a speed-set foam as it comes out. The foam is stripped off when the line is wound in.'

Cam nodded, satisfied.

With little more to add, Cormac signalled that they go.

Outside the shuttle the air was pellucid even in the encroaching darkness. It seemed almost like a frosty morning and Cormac half expected to see vapour billowing from Aiden's mouth. The temperature was 150 Kelvin, though, and if he had taken his mask off, his first breath would have frozen his lungs to a delicate glass sculpture that would have shattered on his next breath.

On the horizon the Andellan sun was a small copper coin on an off-white sheet. The place where they had landed, with the dark cloud sliding overhead, seemed almost to lie beneath some sort of overhang, so heavy was that cloud. Cento had put them down on a frozen lake of complex water ices, which now fluoresced as the heat from the shuttle raised them to the temperature where they made the transition to normal water-ice. It was a weird scene: the shuttle blackly silhouetted over those lights. Cormac turned away and saw that Cam was looking at the dim sun.

'Morning here,' Cormac told him. 'At the installation it's midday. One week solstan and it'll be night there. Lot colder then.'

Cam nodded. 'I'm aware of that. So's Chaline. She's getting impatient.'

Lugging equipment, they moved from the shuttle to the nearby shore of the lake. Here the slabs had fallen like stacks of coins, and in places had the appearance of curving staircases. Sitting on one of these slabs they pulled on grip shoes and the abseil equipment. The entrance to the shaft was only a short climb above them, over the crusted purplish rock. They reached it in ten minutes.

The mouth of the shaft was a perfect oval created by its angle into the flat ground. Either this area where it had been started was clear to begin with, or it had been specially cleared. Its walls were coated with a fine white powder of carbon-dioxide crystals streaked with the green of sulphate impurities. At the lip of the shaft Gant squatted and opened a box. Within were silver spheres stored like eggs in a tray.

'I've pre-programmed them,' he said, and took one from its packing. As soon as it was in his hand it glowed like a light bulb. He tossed it into the shaft. As soon as it was out of his hand it streaked away. 'There are sixty in this box. The way I programmed them we'll have one every thirty-five metres with a couple left over for the chamber itself.'

Cormac said, 'Should be enough. I would suggest a

Gridlirtked twenty-metre spacing between us as we go down. You can call the lights down.'

Gant nodded. 'You're the boss.'

Cormac smiled, then remembered that Gant could not see his mouth through the mask. He was about to say something more, when a loud crack behind had him spinning with his finger poised at the quick release on his shuriken holster.

Cento was holding a long tube with two handles. While Cormac watched he loaded a cartridge into the top of it and pressed on the cap. A couple of metres across from the first, he fired another fixing bolt into the ground. Cormac let out a tense breath. Until that moment he had not realized how on edge he was. He straightened up and watched as Cento pulled the ring from the box on his belt. As he pulled it, there was a faint fizzing sound. With its cladding on, the chain-cotton looked like a yellow rope, impossibly thick to have come from such a small box.

Gant joined him and attached his line, and soon the two of them were walking down into the shaft. As they had been instructed, Cormac and Cam attached their abseil motors and followed after. Learning to use the friction setting was difficult at first, but Cormac soon found that the way to do it was to lean forwards a little way and walk normally.