‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Nice old software protocols. Nothing too difficult.’
‘Careful,’ Clavain said. ‘I wouldn’t put it past them to have installed some kind of trap here—’
‘There’s no trap,’ she said. ‘But there is — ah, yes — a verbal entry code. Well, here goes.’ She spoke louder, so that her voice would travel through the air to the door even above the howl of the wind. ‘Open sesame.’
Lights flicked from red to green; dislodging a frosting of ice, the door slid ponderously aside to reveal a dimly lit interior chamber. The base must have been running on a trickle of emergency power for decades.
Felka and Clavain lingered while Galiana crossed the threshold.
‘Well?’ she challenged, turning around. ‘Are you two sissies coming or not?’
Felka offered a hand. He took hers and the two of them — the old soldier and the girl who could barely grasp the difference between two human faces — took a series of tentative steps inside.
‘What you just did, that business with your hand and the password…’ Clavain paused. ‘That was a joke, wasn’t it?’
Galiana looked at him, blank-faced. ‘How could it have been? Everyone knows Conjoiners haven’t got anything remotely resembling a sense of humour.’
Clavain nodded gravely. ‘That was my understanding, but I just wanted to be sure.’
There was no trace of the wind inside, but it would still have been too cold to remove their suits, even had they not been concerned about contamination. They worked their way along a series of winding corridors, some of which were dark, others bathed in feeble, pea-green lighting. Now and then they passed the entrance to a room full of equipment, but nothing that looked like a laboratory or living quarters. Then they descended a series of stairs and found themselves crossing one of the sealed walkways between the toadstools. Clavain had seen a few other American settlements built like this one; they were designed to remain useful even as they sank slowly into the ice.
The bridge led to what was obviously the main habitation section. Now there were lounges, bedrooms, laboratories and kitchens — enough for a crew of perhaps fifty or sixty. But there were no signs of any bodies, and the place did not look as if it had been abandoned in a hurry. The equipment was neatly packed away and there were no half-eaten meals on the tables. There was frost everywhere, but that was just the moisture that had frozen out of the air when the base cooled down.
‘They were expecting to come back,’ Galiana said.
Clavain nodded. ‘They couldn’t have had much of an idea of what lay ahead of them.’
They moved on, crossing another bridge, until they arrived in a toadstool almost entirely dedicated to bio-analysis laboratories. Galiana had to use her neural trick again to get them inside, the machines in her head sweet-talking the duller machines entombed in the doors. The low-ceilinged labs were bathed in green light, but Galiana found a wall panel that brought the lighting up a notch and even caused some bench equipment to wake up, pulsing with stand-by lights.
Clavain looked around, recognising centrifuges, gene-sequencers, gas chromatographs and scanning-tunnelling microscopes. There were at least a dozen other hunks of gleaming machinery whose function eluded him. A wall-sized cabinet held dozens of pull-out drawers, each of which contained hundreds of culture dishes, test tubes and gel slides. Clavain glanced at the samples, reading the tiny labels. There were bacteria and single-cell cultures with unpronounceable codenames, most of which were marked with Diadem map coordinates and a date. But there were also drawers full of samples with Latin names, comparison samples which must have come from Earth. The robots could easily have carried the tiny parent organisms from which these larger samples had been grown or cloned. Perhaps the Americans had been experimenting with the hardiness of Earth-born organisms, with a view to terraforming Diadem at some point in the future.
He closed the drawer silently and moved to a set of larger sample tubes racked on a desk. He picked one from the rack and raised it to the light, examining the smoky things inside. It was a sample of worms, indistinguishable from those he had collected on the glacier a few hours earlier. A breeding tangle, probably: harvested from the intersection point of two worm tunnels. Some of the worms in the tangle would be exchanging genes; others would be fighting; others would be allowing themselves to be digested by adults or newly hatched young; all behaving according to rigidly deterministic laws of caste and sex. The tangle looked dead, but that meant nothing with the worms. Their metabolism was fantastically slow, each individual easily capable of living for thousands of years. It would take them months just to crawl along some of the longer cracks in the ice, let alone move between some of the larger tangles.
But the worms were not really all that alien. They had a close terrestrial analogue: the sun-avoiding ice-worms that had first been discovered in the Malaspina Glacier in Alaska towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Alaskan ice-worms were a lot smaller than their Diadem counterparts, but they also nourished themselves on the slim pickings that drifted onto the ice, or had been frozen into it years earlier. Like the Diadem worms, their most notable anatomical feature was a pore at the head end, just above the mouth. In the case of the terrestrial worms, the pore served a single function: secreting a salty solution that helped the worms melt their way into ice when there was no tunnel already present — an escape strategy that helped them get beneath the ice before the sun dried them up. The Diadem worms had a similar structure, but according to Setterholm’s notes they had evolved a second use for it: secreting a chemically rich ‘scent trail’ which helped other worms navigate through the tunnel system. The chemistry of that scent trail turned out to be very complex, with each worm capable of secreting not merely a unique signature but a variety of flavours. Conceivably, more complex message schemes were embedded in some of the other flavours: not just ‘follow me’ but ‘follow me only if you are female’ — the Diadem worms had at least three sexes — ‘and this is breeding season’. There were many other possibilities, which Setterholm seemed to have been attempting to decode and catalogue when the end had come.
It was interesting… up to a point. But even if the worms followed a complex set of rules dependent on the scent trails they were picking up, and perhaps other environmental cues, it would still only be rigidly mechanistic behaviour.
‘Nevil, come here.’
It was Galiana’s voice, but it had a tone he had barely heard before. It was one that made him run to where Felka and Galiana were waiting on the other side of the lab.
They were facing an array of lockers occupying an entire wall. A small status panel was set into each locker, but only one locker — placed at chest height — showed any activity. Clavain looked back towards the door through which they had entered, but from there it was hidden by intervening lab equipment. They would not have seen this locker even if it had been illuminated before Galiana brought the room’s power back on.
‘It might have been on all along,’ he said.
‘I know,’ Galiana agreed.
She reached a hand up to the panel, tapping the control keys with unnerving fluency. Machines to Galiana were like musical instruments to a prodigy. She could pick one up cold and play it like an old friend.
The array of status lights changed configuration abruptly, then there was a bustle of activity somewhere behind the locker’s metal face — latches and servomotors clicking after decades of stasis.
‘Stand back,’ Galiana said.
A rime of frost shattered into a billion sugary pieces. The locker began to slide out of the wall, the unhurried motion giving them adequate time to digest what lay inside. Clavain felt Felka grip his hand, and then noticed that her other hand was curled tightly around Galiana’s wrist. For the first time, he began to wonder if it had really been such a good idea to allow the girl to join them.