“Your suit’s a mess,” Rasht observed.
“I’ll live. At least I didn’t dip myself in it deliberately.”
But my suit had indeed suffered some ill effects, as became apparent while we resumed our trek to the cave mouth. The life support core was intact—I was in no danger of dying—but my locomotive augmentation was not working as well as it was meant to. As had happened with the monkey’s paw, the organisms in the pond seemed to have infiltrated the suit’s servo-assist systems. I could still walk, but the suit’s responses were sluggish, meaning that it was resisting me more than aiding me.
I began to sweat with the effort. It was hard to keep up with the others. Even the monkey had no problem with the rest of its suit.
“Thank you for getting the winch,” I told Lenka, between breaths. “It was good that you remembered the one in the wreck. Any longer in that pond, and I might have had real problems.”
“I’m glad we got you out.”
Perhaps it was just the flush of gratitude at being rescued, but I vowed to think better of Lenka. She was senior to me on the crew, and yet Rasht seemed to value her capabilities no more than he did mine. Whatever I thought of her lack of ambition, her willing acceptance of her place on the ship, it struck me that she deserved better than that. Perhaps, when this was over, I could break it to her that she was considered no more than useful, like a component that would serve its purpose for the time being. That might change her view of things. I even imagined the two of us jumping ship at the next port, leaving Rasht with his monkey. Perhaps we could pass as sisters or twins, if we wanted new employment.
The terrain became firmer as we neared the hill, and we did not need to pick our course so carefully. The ground rose up slowly. There was still ice under our feet, and we were flanked on either side by the steadily widening lava tubes, which were already ten or fifteen times taller than any of us.
Ahead lay the cave mouth. Its profile was a semicircle, with the apex perhaps ten metres above the surface of the ice which extended into the darkness of the mouth. The hill rose up and up from the mouth, almost sheer in places, but there was an overhang above the entrance, covered in a sheath of smooth clean ice—the “beak” of Teterev’s drawing.
The tongue of ice continued inside, curving down into what we could see of the cave’s throat.
“Still no footsteps,” Lenka said, as we neared the entrance.
That the ice occasionally melted and refroze was clear from the fringe of icicles daggering down from the overhang, some of them nearly long enough to reach the floor. Rasht shouldered through them, shattering the icicles against the armour of his suit. As their shards broke off, they made a tinkling, atonal sort of music.
Now Lenka said: “There are steps! This is the way she went!”
It was true. They did not begin until a few metres into the cave, where sunlight must have only reached occasionally, or not at all. There was only a single pair of footprints, and they only went one way.
“That’s encouraging,” I said.
“If you want to remain here,” Rasht said, “we can exclude you from your cut of the profits.”
So he had gone from denial of the Amerikano settlement, to a skeptical allowance of the possibility, to imagining how the dividend might be shared.
We turned on our helmet lights again—Rasht leaning down to activate the light on the monkey, which was too stupid to do it on its own. The monkey seemed more agitated than before, though. It was dragging its heels, coiling its tail, lingering after Rasht.
“It doesn’t like it,” Lenka said.
“Maybe it’s smarter than it looks,” I put in under my breath, which was about as much as I could manage with the effort of my ailing suit.
But I shared the monkey’s dwindling enthusiasm. Who would really want to trudge into a cave, on an alien planet, if they had a choice in the matter? Teterev had gambled her salvation on finding relic technology, something that could buy her extra time in the wreck. We had no such compulsion, other than an indignant sense that we were owed our due after our earlier disappointment.
The angle of the slope pitched down steeply. The ice covered the floor, but the surrounding walls were exposed rock. We moved to the left side and used the grooved wall for support as we descended, placing our feet sideways. The monkey, still leashed to Rasht, had no choice but to continue. But its unwillingness was becoming steadily more apparent. Its gibbering turned shriller, more anxious.
“Now now, my dear,” Rasht said.
The tunnel narrowed as it deepened. All traces of daylight were soon behind us. We maintained our faltering progress, following the trail that Teterev had left for us. Once or twice, the prints became confused, as if there were suddenly three sets, rather than one. This puzzled me to begin with, until I realised that they marked instances of indecision, where Teterev had halted, reversed her progress, only to summon the courage to continue on her original heading.
I felt for Teterev.
“Something ahead,” Rasht announced. “A glow, I think. Turn off your lights.”
“The monkey first,” I said.
“Naturally, Nidra.”
When Rasht had quenched Kanto’s light, the rest of us followed suit. Our Captain had been correct. Far from darkness ahead, there was a silvery emanation. It did not seem to come from a single point source, but rather from veins of some mineral running through the rock. If they had been present nearer the surface, we would probably not have seen them against the brighter illumination of daylight. But I did not think they had been present until now.
“I’m not a geologist,” Lenka said, voicing the same thought that must have occurred to the rest of us. We had no idea what to make of the glowing veins, whether they were natural or suspicious.
Soon we did not need our helmet lights at all. Even with our eyes ramped down to normal sensitivity, there was more than enough brightness to be had from the veins. They shone out of the walls in bands and deltas and tributaries, a flowing form frozen in an instant of maximum hydrodynamic complexity. It did not look natural to me, but what did I know of such matters? I had seen the insides of more ships than worlds. Planets were full of odd, boring physics.
Eventually the slope became shallower, and then levelled out until our progress was horizontal. We were hundreds of metres from the entrance by now, and perhaps beneath the level of the surrounding terrain. It would have been wiser to send a drone, I thought. But patience had never been the Captain’s strong point. Still, Teterev would not have had the luxury of a drone either. Thinking back to her journal, with its increasingly desperate, fragmentary entries, I could not shake the irrational sense that we would be letting her down if we did not follow her traces all the way in. I wondered if she had felt brave as she came down here, or instead afraid of the worse fate of dying alone in the wreck. I did not feel brave at all.
But we continued.
In time the tunnel widened out into a larger space. We paused in this rock-walled chamber, leaning back to study the patterning of the veins as they flowed and crawled and wiggled their way to the curving dome of the ceiling.
And saw things we should not have seen.
WE SHOULD HAVE turned back there and then, shouldn’t we? If those figures weren’t an invitation to leave, to never come back, I don’t know what could have been clearer.
What do you mean, Teterev went on?
Of course she went on. She was out of options. No way off this planet unless she found something deeper in the cave, something she could use to wake up the orbiting ship. To go back to the wreck was to die, and so she knew she might as well continue.