Gridlinked

Jane turned the shuttle on its tail and they streaked into the sky.

As the shuttle drifted through the shimmer-shield into the Hubris, Cormac noticed that a large area of the shuttle bay's deck had been replaced. A couple of crew-members were working on something behind the far wall, near the drop-shaft, but otherwise it looked as if most of the damage had been repaired. The shuttle itself had been attended to before they went out, and at least ten technicians and numerous robots had been waiting for them to move the vehicle, so they could get to the deck underneath it.

'Well, that's the holiday over,' he said to Jane.

'You considered that restful?' she asked him.

'Yes. I have a feeling I'll be looking back on our little trip with something approaching nostalgia in the days to come.'

He undipped his belt and stood up. He grinned to himself as he left the Golem; it was nice that she could think of no patronizing reply. Now, as he had told her, the holiday was over. Perhaps something more had been discovered here. Bowing slightly to Jane's observations, he headed for the recreation room, rather than the mis- anthropic solitude of his cabin. From there, he would talk with Hubris. As he entered the corridor leading to that room he saw Chaline, her overall wrinkled and sweat-stained yet again, walking in the opposite direction with another technician. At the end of the corridor they kissed before moving on. Cormac felt a moment of chagrin, then grinned to himself again. Perhaps her shower didn't work properly. He entered the canteen.

The only people in the room were diree technicians. They were eating a meal while checking computations on their notescreens and arguing about five-dimensional singularity mechanics. Cormac heard one of them mention N-space and another say something about Skaidon cusp time vectors. He nodded to them and headed for the food dispenser. It was not as if it was a conversation to which he might be able to contribute. The round screen of the dispenser clicked to life when he tapped a miniconsole that someone had left extended from the wall on its narrow stem.

'Do you have Cheyne white cakes,' he asked.

The words 'In Stock' appeared on the screen and a 'Waiting' sign began flashing in its lower right-hand corner.

'OK,' he said. 'I'll have Cheyne white cakes, new bread and butter, and a suitable white wine.'

The words changed to 'Acquiring', and it took only a few minutes for his meal to drop into the slot below on a sealed tray. He had been on worse ships. He sat at a table as far from the technicians as he could get - their discussion had reached the waving-plastic-knives-across-the-table stage - and flipped up the table's screen.

'Hubris, anything new?' he asked as he unsealed his tray. He examined the glass bottle of wine he freed from the tray. Made from null-G grapes; he pursed his lips in approval, and tfien pulled a glass free too.

There was a delay before he received an answer from Hubris. The screen flicked on to reveal the view seen from something moving slowly down a smooth-sided shaft.

Hubris said, 'Deep scan has revealed a black spot underneath Samarkand's surface. This shaft leads to it. It is two kilometres under the ground. I initiated a probe.'

Black spot?

Then he remembered: a black spot was something the various radiations of scan bounced back from without the usual spectroscopic information; or something from which they did not return, like a black hole.

'Did you get a bounce?' he asked.

'Total reflection. There is a lenticular object of an as yet unidentified material. It is five metres wide by two metres thick.'

'What materials give that kind of reflection?'

'There are one hundred and fifty-six recorded—'

'OK, don't list them.' He continued to watch the screen. Then something more occurred to him. 'Hang on, will that probe be all right down there? What about the mycelium?'

'All the ceramal in this probe's construction has been replaced by chainglass.'

Remembering what Jane had said, Cormac snorted and returned his attention to his food. The picture was uninteresting and he gave it only cursory attention. He finished his meal and poured out the last of his wine. As he sipped, Hubris spoke again.

'Further information indicates that the shaft is too narrow for the object to have passed down it in its present form.'

'How do we know it did?' asked Cormac.

'We do not, but it does seem likely.'

'Then there would be a crater. Signs from when it struck.'

'Not necessarily. Samarkand has had recent volcanic activity.'

'What exactly do you mean by recent?'

'Two hundred thousand years ago,' Hubris replied.

Cormac let that sink in. He also equated it with a claim Dragon had made about his age and wondered just what the hell he was dealing with here. He got back to the central issue.

'It might be that the shaft was cut by people on Samarkand. Perhaps they were digging this thing up,' he said.

The picture from the probe changed as it slowed and turned. What he was seeing now was frosted black glass. He doubted the crystals were from water-ice, though.

'The walls of the shaft are made of compression glass,' Hubris told him. 'This indicates the rock was melted and compressed. The usual method of tunnel digging is to either cut or vaporize the rock. Here, on a cold world with an energy surplus from the runcible, it would have been the latter method. There are no records of either being used. No records of any such excavation.'

'They would have been destroyed with the runcible, wouldn't they?'

'The discovery and subsequent excavation of such an object would have been of interest to all Polity AIs and many human experts. The Samarkand AI would not have kept the news to itself.'

Cormac sat still and let that percolate through his mind. It seemed as if something other than people had been at work here. The dracomen again?

'Have you scanned for any equipment near the mouth of the tunnel?'

'I have. Before moving to deep scan I completed a full scan of the surface of the planet.'

'Oh,' said Cormac. Then he looked up at the screen as it blanked out. 'Hubris, where's the picture?'

'There is no more picture. Something destroyed the probe.'

Cormac stepped out of the drop-shaft into the shuttle bay, took a deep breath to bring some calm to himself. It was not what they might find on the planet that worried him; it was the briefing he was about to give. All four of the Sparkind awaited him, along with an assistant of Chaline's. She was too busy with preparations to install the runcible to come herself, so she said. As he walked to the shuttle Cormac studied these people, for they were all people under Polity law.

The two Golem Thirties made Gant and Thorn appear small. Both of them were over two metres tall and archetypes of human physical perfection. Only Cybercorp produced androids like this. All other androids were poor by comparison, if you believed their advertising. It was true that there were some pretty dreadful copies: the metal-skins, or others that were more like a collection of prosthetics than anything coherent.

Aiden had cropped blond hair and blue eyes, and looked like what Hitler might have been after with his eugenics programme. He was distinctly Teutonic. Cento had curly black hair, brown eyes and tanned skin, and might just as well have been modelled on Apollo. All four of the Sparkind were loaded with equipment. The weapons they carried did not weigh much, but then did not have to. If they were not sufficient, then the next step would have to be a direct strike from the ship. Chaline's assistant, Cam, was a small monkeylike man, thin and wiry. He affected a beard like Thorn's, but his hair was long and tied in a ponytail. Behind his right ear was the crystalline slug of a cerebral augmentation, and his eyes were mismatched. His right eye, its yellow pupil matching the colour of his crystal aug, was certainly artificial; the other eye was a mild brown. His left hand was silvered, and a wide range of instruments was strapped up his arms and on the belt of his coldsuit. Cormac reckoned that he had more instrumentation inside than outside, and felt a moment of affinity with him. He stepped forwards to speak to them all.