Soon mey reached the area where the lights had been destroyed. Thorn shot two potassium flares past Cormac and the chamber below ttiem was lit up with garish purple light.
'It has no eyes,' stated Thorn. 'It uses sonar. You felt it?'
Cormac nodded agreement. He had felt it all right. 'It destroyed the lights while they were moving. It was probably put here to destroy anything that moves.' He glanced back to see Aiden coming up behind them fast.
In the glare from the flares they could see a gleaming arc of something. It seemed too large to be the creature's torso. There was movement; a play of shadows. One of the flares went out. Thorn shot two more flares in as the three of mem detached from their lines and dropped ttirough the entrance. They landed on a curved metallic surface. It was frictionless and mey slid to the floor. The creature charged, slipping on what remained of Gant. Thorn and Aiden began firing immediately, ttieir weapons on full power. Cormac tfirew his shuriken, its chainglass blades out to their fullest extent. The creature slammed to a halt in a wall of fire, then the shuriken struck. There was a whining scream and a flare of sparks. A piece of the creature's body fell away, the shuriken bounced off, hovered, struck again. A clump of legs shattered, and the creature fell to one side. The shuriken struck again, then again. CO2 vapour filled the chamber. Thorn and Aiden were firing blind. Cormac could hear the creature scrabbling to get away and the repetitive scream of each of the shuriken's strikes. The scrabbling soon ceased. Thorn and Aiden put up their weapons.
'Dead?' wondered Thorn.
'If it was ever alive,' said Cormac.
His shuriken continued to strike until he hit the recall. It came out of the fog, retracting its blades and shrugging away pieces of something green and frozen, like shards of emerald. Cormac held up his arm as if to a falcon, and it snicked itself away in its holster. About them the fog refroze and snowed from the air.
The creature lay in pieces in a frozen green pool. Ignoring it, Thorn walked forwards amongst Gant. The soldier had been ripped to pieces. Cormac shook his head and stared down at a hand frozen to the floor before him.
'A Tenkian,' said Aiden at Cormac's side.
'Yeah,' said Cormac, watching Thorn. Thorn had found Gam's head and pulled it from the floor with a disc of frozen blood attached to it.
'I don't hold out much hope for his recovery,' Thorn said.
The joke was macabre in the extreme. Thorn wandered off to the side of the chamber, still holding his comrade's head.
'He will be all right,' said Aiden on the comunit's personal mode. 'Thorn knows the risks and is most philosophical about death. He will toast Gant on Hubris, then drink himself into a stupor. Then he will carry on. Gant would have done the same.'
Cormac inspected the Golem Thirty and wondered if it had any actual feeling of sympathy, or was just good at emulating it. It was a question that had bothered humankind for a couple of centuries now.
'Cam, you can come down now,' he said, and then walked past the dismembered guardian towards the artefact they had come to see.
It rested on the floor of the chamber like a gigantic droplet of mercury. In the light of the flares it glinted as if covered with frost. A closer inspection showed there was no frost on its surface. Cormac pushed his hand against it, and his hand slid to one side. It was friction-less, yet on inspection its surface revealed a fine crystalline structure and seemed it should have some roughness.
Cam cautiously lowered himself into the chamber and slid to the floor down by the surface of the artefact, before detaching his line. He stared at the creature for a long while, shifted his gaze to Gant's remains, and then quickly turned his attention to the unknown object. He removed a device like a copper limpet from his belt and placed it against the thing's surface.
'This is a metallurgical tester - or M-tester if you don't like long words. We use them for spot analysis of hull metals and the like. Measures stresses, density changes, alloy configurations…' He paused, glanced at Thorn who still held his friend's head, then looked at a small display on the M-tester. He continued hurriedly. 'Incredibly dense…' He crouched down and examined where the curve of the object met the floor. 'It must be hollow.'
'What makes you say that?' asked Cormac.
'If it was solid it would weigh a few thousand tonnes. It would have sunk into this floor a lot deeper than it has, and -' he inspected an instrument strapped to his arm '-1 detect no AG emanations.'
He placed the M-tester against the surface again, then took his shaking hand away. He caught the tester before it hit the floor.
'Frictionless, but with only microgravity readings. Definitely hollow.'
He removed a miniconsole from his belt and placed the M-tester into a hollow incorporated in it. He punched out a program, then removed the M-tester.
'Aiden…' Aiden stepped smartly forwards. 'Hold this against the surface for thirty seconds. Do not let it move any more than one millimetre. It can't correct for any more than that.'
Aiden obliged, pushing the M-tester against the surface, then freezing into a stillness no man could match. Cam turned to Cormac. Cormac noted he was shivering, but not from the cold.
'Hopefully we'll be able to get a surface reading. This stuff's too dense for us to scrape away a sample.' He walked round the object, stopping every now and then to push his hand against it. Cormac glanced round and saw that Thorn had stood up. The soldier dropped his companion's head to the ground and walked over. He had lapsed for a while, but to a Sparkind a dead man was just so much meat. They only buried the dead if there was a risk of infection.
'I'm sorry, Thorn,' said Cormac.
Thorn put his hands on his hips and looked to one side for a moment before replying. 'He had a hundred and sixty-three years. He knew the risks… I only ask that you let us stay with this to the end. I want to meet whoever or whatever left that creature here.'
Cormac thought about that. Had it been left here? Or had it been here for its own purposes? Was there really a connection between this place and the runcible incident? There were still too few facts to go on.
Aiden turned then, removing the M-tester from the object's surface.
'There's a hole here,' said Carn from the other side. They moved round to join him.
In the gleaming surface was a hole about twenty centimetres across. It looked as if something had melted right through from the inside. Cormac noted that the material was eggshell-thin. Carn shone a light inside.
'Nothing there,' he said, and then he took the M-tester from Aiden. 'Ah, we have a reading…' He fell silent and stared at the device for a long while.
'What's the problem?' asked Cormac.
'This can't be right,' said Carn.
'What can't?' said Thorn with a touch of irritation.
'The reading we… It's adamantium…'
'And?' Cormac prompted.
Carn looked up. 'We can crystallize adamantium. It's sometimes used for machine tools when field and beam technology can't be used… As far as I know, it is theoretically impossible to shape it…'
More questions… Who made this thing? What had been inside it? Where had its guardian come from? All
Cormac knew was that this was alien. Dragon? Perhaps he would know soon.
'OK, is there much more you can find out now?'
'Need more equipment, really.'
Cormac turned to Thorn. 'Collect some pieces of that creature. We'll take them back for Mika to analyse.' He turned back to Cam as Thorn stepped away, unhooking a bag from his belt. 'I'll want you to put a team together and come straight back here.'