Rasht and the monkey next. I could see that the monkey was going to take some persuasion. To begin with it would not go first, ahead of its master. Rasht swore at Kanto and went on himself, his suit grinding and clanging against the pincering rock. I wondered if it was even possible for Rasht to make it through. He could have discarded the suit, of course—put up with the cold, for the sake of his treasure. I had known the Captain endure worse, when there was a sniff of payoff.
Yet he called: “I’m through.”
Kanto was still on the leash, which was now tight against the edge of the rock. The monkey really did not want to rejoin the Captain. I felt a glimmer of cross-species empathy. Perhaps the magnetic emanations were affecting it more strongly than the rest of us, reaching deeper into the poor animal’s fear centre.
Still, the monkey did not have much say in its fate. Rasht pulled on the leash, and I pushed it through from the other side. I needed the maximum amplification of my struggling suit. The monkey would have bitten my face off given half the chance, but its teeth were on the wrong side of its visor.
Reunited, our little party continued into the tunnel system.
But we had only gone a hundred metres or more when the path branched. There were three possible directions ahead of us, and a mess of footprints at the junction.
“Looks as if she went down all three shafts,” Lenka said.
Only one set of prints had led to this point, so Teterev must not have returned from one of those tunnels. But it was hard to say which. The prints were confused now. She must have gone up and down the shafts several times, changing her mind, returning. Given the state of the prints, there was no way of saying which had been her ultimate choice.
We selected the leftmost shaft and carried on down it. It sloped a little more, and eventually the ice under our feet gave way to solid rock, meaning that we no longer had Teterev’s prints as a guide. All around us the silver patterning continued, streaks and fissures of it, jetstreams and knotted synaptic tangles. It was hard not to think of a living silver nervous system, threading its way through the stone matrix of this ancient mountain.
“Your suit, Lenka,” Rasht said.
She slowed. “What about it?”
“You’ve picked up some of that patterning. The silver. It must have rubbed off when you squeezed through the narrowing.”
“It’s also on you,” I told the Captain.
It only took a glance to confirm that it was on me and the monkey as well. A smear of silver had attached itself to my right elbow, where I must have brushed against the wall. Doubtless there was more, out of sight.
I moved to touch the silver, to dust it from myself. But when my fingers touched it, its contamination seemed to jerk onto them. The movement was startling and quick, like the strike of an ambush predator. I stared at my hand, cross-webbed by streaks of gently pulsing silver. I clenched and opened my fist. My suit was as stiff as it had been since my accident outside, but for the moment it did not seem to be affected by the silver.
“It’s nanotech,” I said. “Nothing the suit recognises. But I don’t like it.”
“If it was hostile, you’d know it by now,” Rasht said. “We push on. Just a little further.”
But turning around there and then is exactly what we should have done. It might have made all the difference.
The next chamber was a palace of horrors.
It was as large as the earlier place, the shape similar, and a tunnel led out from it as well. But there all similarities ended. Here the tormented human forms were not confined to figures marked on the walls. These were solid shapes, three-dimensional evocations of distorted and contorted human anatomies, thrusting out of the wall like the broken and bent figureheads of shipwrecks. They seemed to be formed not of rock, or the silver contamination, but some amalgam of the two, a kind of shimmering, glinting substrate. There were ribcages and torsos, grasping hands, heads snapped back in agonies of perfect torment. They were not quite faceless, but by the same token none of the faces were right. They were all eyes, or all mouths, hinged open to obscene angles, or they were anvil-shaped nightmares that seemed to have cleaved their way through the rock itself. I was struck by a dreadful conviction that these were souls that had been entirely in the rock, imprisoned or contained, until an instant when they had nearly broken through. And I did not know whether to be glad that these souls were not quite free, or sick with terror that the rock might yet contain multitudes, still seeking escape.
“I hate this place,” Lenka said quietly.
I nodded my agreement. “So do I.”
And all of a sudden, Lenka’s earlier idea of setting a demolition charge did not seem so bad to me at all. The mere existence of this chamber struck me as profoundly, upsettingly wrong, as if it were my moral duty to remove it from the universe.
The charges at maximum delay. Time to get back to the ship, if we rushed, and none of us got stuck in the squeeze point.
Maybe. Maybe not.
That was when the monkey broke free.
SO, ANYWAY. ABOUT what we’ve done to your suit.
Its basic motor systems were already compromised when I found you near the cave mouth. You’d got that far, which can’t have been easy.
Yes, well done you.
Brave Captain.
The nanotech contamination, the traces you picked up from the cave wall, was clearly the main cause of the systemic failure. Obviously, if you’d stayed any longer, your suit would have begun to turn against you, the way it happened with Teterev. Allowing itself to be controlled, absorbed. But you still had some control over it, and enough strength to overcome the resistance of the jammed locomotive systems.
It was never as bad for me. I think when I fell in that pool, some of the native organisms must have formed a barrier layer, a kind of insulation against the nanotech. Perhaps they’ve had time to begin to evolve their own defense measures, to contain the spread of it. Who knows? My good fortune, in any case.
It didn’t feel like good fortune at the time, but that’s the universe for you.
Anyway, back to your suit.
You’re already paralyzed, effectively, but just to make sure that the systems don’t begin to recover, I’ve opened your main control box and disabled all locomotive power. Locked it tight, in fact. You might as well be standing in a welded suit of armour, for all the success you’ll have in moving.
Why are your arms the way they are?
We’ll come to that.
You are standing, yes. Your feet are on the ground. Obviously, with the noose around your neck, the one thing you don’t want to do now is topple over. I won’t be there to catch you. But your suit is heavy and provided you don’t wriggle around inside it too much, you should stay upright.
Of course, if you don’t want to stay upright, that’s one way out of this for you.
You’re cold?
I’m not surprised! It’s a cold planet, and you’re not wearing a space helmet. Be a bit difficult, slipping a noose around your neck, if you were still wearing your helmet!
Fine, you want some more heat? That’s easy. Your life-support systems are still good, and you can adjust the suit temperature. The reason your arms are positioned in front of you the way they are, is that I want you to be able to operate your cuff control. That’s right. You can do that. You can move your fingers, tap those buttons.
Here’s the thing, though. There’s only one thing you can do with those buttons. Only one system you can control.