"So, what else can fit through a fox hole?"
"Fox terriers,” offered Shad. “Various mechs, squirrels, rats, all kinds of birds, weasels, badgers, monkeys—"
"You said your package included thermal imaging,” I interrupted. “How sensitive is your system?"
"I can track another bird through the air by the long heat trail it leaves and can determine which shotgun a duck hunter used five hours after it was fired by the heat differential between it and the hunter's unfired weapons, and that with a load of birdshot in my butt."
"Shad, we have to get back up to the cruiser. When we get there, move into your feathers and do a scan around the lodge and stables for the underground route that was used to get in here. Whatever was used, it had to generate some heat to get through this foundation. My instruments, crude as they are, can detect a temperature differential between the inside of the arc we've been scanning and the surrounding material."
"What are you going to do?"
"Perhaps I'll find a shovel to wield."
Shad's micro hovered for a moment, then he said, “You're going to make me copy into the big mech and do the digging, aren't you?"
"Unless your scan can find us another way in."
While I downloaded my data into the cruiser's computer, Shad did one quick flap around the lodge and stables. Long before I managed to copy back into my meat suit, he was back with a report. “I found the underground tunnel coming out from beneath the northwest corner of the lodge. That was the end cut last. From there it runs around three meters deep northwest, then arcs until it heads southwest, arcs again until it's headed southeast, and then the thermal signature is so faint my equipment can't pick it up. The largest part of what I could follow was cut through mostly solid granite."
My sync was complete and I sat up and pointed at the cruiser's data screen. “Show me."
It was as he said. In addition, the trace was very regular, not a perceptible difference in diameter between any two parts of the machine-cut tube. Every detectable portion of the tunnel was three to four meters deep, most of it running through granite. If we were going to break into it, we'd need equipment, explosives, daylight, a crew, and to throw away any kind of edge surprise might lend us. I glanced over to the driver's seat, and Shad's tail was twitching. “What are you doing?"
"Searching for small-diameter tunneling equipment. I've found three designed for putting in water and sewer lines, as well as running conduit through masonry, that can do the tunnel job we detected. The Euclid 750 Pipe Snake is what was used to put in all of the long-run tunnels Houndtor Down Hunts uses to run camera feeds along the different fox runs. I see it's pretty obsolete, too, as far as knowledgeable plumbing and sewerage dons are concerned."
The image came up. The Euclid model resembled a horrible huge snake, the mouth on its fearsome head tipped with ghastly-looking circular grinding teeth. Just behind the teeth were high-pressure water jets and intake holes to float the stone dust and remove the slurry. Just behind the takeaway scoops was a gasket, and behind that were holes designed to inject and coat the interior of the tunnel behind the head with a smooth layer of chemical and weather-resistant plastic. The rattle on the tail of this snake was a huge piece of nuke-powered equipment that would be incredibly obvious wherever it was used. Shad pointed out that the Pipe Snake could have easily made the hole into Champion's stall, but all it could do after that is coat the inside of the opening with plastic. It couldn't have refilled the hole.
"The other two models are the Pipe Dream, manufactured in Macao by Red Star Industrial, and the Magic Mole, manufactured in Burbank by an outfit called Whack-A-Hole. Both pieces of equipment use the same technology, matter transcompression—"
"They eat dirt and rocks and squirt out pipe."
"Yes. Self-contained, nuke powered. A feature of the Magic Mole, however, is its ability to fill the pipe it's made with anything the contractor wishes, whether it's an inline computer-controlled valve, a line switch—"
"Or what it removed,” I completed. “Does Whack-A-Hole have a twenty-four-hour office in London?"
"Yes."
"See if Marcus Licinius Crassus can get the manufacturer to give up a customer list. Meanwhile, take the cruiser over to where Bowman's body was found. If our killer used a Magic Mole to get a portable image implanter into Champion's stall, I'm pretty certain the same was done where Bowman was killed. Perhaps we can get in at that end. The forest floor there, at least, isn't made of plastic or granite."
It was well past three in the morning by the time we located the tunnel entrance. It was beneath the remaining branches of the dead tree next to the pine that had Champion's hair on it. No attempt had been made to fill the hole. It looked, in fact, as though a fox or some large burrowing animal had dug it. Shad had Whack-A-Hole's British customer list, and it was daunting. Every municipality, hamlet, and large institution in the country had one or more of the tools, as well as plumbers, drain layers, and building contractors of all types. For the mundane tasks of laying pipe or running conduit, it seemed, there was nothing like a Magic Mole. To take all the variously formatted employee databases of all of the institutions and companies and run each person's antecedents against our total name database was beyond our capacity. Shad logged into the Heavitree ABCD Center and gave the task to the mainframe. Meanwhile, we got small, copied into our micros, and entered Whack-A-Hole's underworld.
Once the excitement of being confronted by a belligerent salamander and several alarming spiders was past, monotonous would be too generous a description of how it felt to be in a flying lipstick traveling down an apparently endless but definitely featureless length of dark pipe. After a few minutes of travel there was a very gentle arc toward the northeast, and we traveled along that, gradually descending all the while. After more than an hour of this, another gentle arc had us heading due east, but still descending. “Here's something interesting,” said my partner at last.
"Let me have it, Shad. I'm stimulation-starved to the point where I could eagerly listen to knock-knock jokes."
"You know how fast a twenty-five centimeter diameter Magic Mole can travel through an unobstructed pipe of its own manufacture?"
"Can't say that I do."
"It can top sixty kilometers per hour under its own power. With compressed air behind it, the mole can top a hundred and seventy."
"Fascinating."
"I only bring it up, Jaggs, because I note we are both flying along at our top speed of four kilometers per hour. Sort of made me wonder what the plan is, should we find a Magic Mole coming at us from the other direction."
I thought on it. “In such case, we get annihilated. Now that you bring it up, it would probably behoove us to maintain a continuous data sync with the cruiser. That way, should we get swatted, we'll remember it. What's our signal like to the cruiser pickup?"
Shad ran a quick signal strength and fidelity test. “Weak. I'm bringing the cruiser over our present position.” After a minute or two, Shad ran the test again. “Perfect. As long as the cruiser follows along above us, it should be fine."
"Very well. Keep an eye on the autodrive monitor, though. Wrapping the cruiser around a tree or dashing it to pieces on a building or rock cliff would be all Supt. Matheson needs to sack both of us."
"Something from Exeter coming in,” he announced. “Fantronics's maintenance division currently keeps three Magic Mole systems in its inventory. Two of the systems were replaced three months ago. Apparently the replaced systems were destroyed along with a lot of other equipment when the division's warehouse in Reading was consumed in a chemical fire. Kind of a drastic way to cover up an equipment theft,” he observed.