“We’re old friends,” Tak explains. “Vinnie, introductions?”
I hesitantly make the rounds, naming names and ranks, introducing Kumar as former Wait Staff. “Met him at Madigan,” I say.
Joe looks abashed. “Sorry about that,” he says. “Alice told me you didn’t make it across the border.”
“I got you the fucking coin,” I say behind the faceplate.
“And now we’re here.” He wipes his face with a green-speckled towel.
Mushran suggests that the tour continue, there is not much time. “Joe, would you carry on?” They seem on good terms. Kumar notes this with precise calm.
“Yeah, well, this big dig looks like we’ve been here forever, but it’s only been a few months,” Joe says. “We drilled from the galleries around the upper levels, down to where we hit crystal—then blasted fractured basalt and sandstone a few kilometers east of here, diverting an ancient aquifer until it found its way to Fiddler’s Green.”
“Deliberate,” Borden says.
“Absolutely,” Joe says. “When the water began to intersect the rocky layers containing nodules of crystal, it triggered the assembly of kobolds, which began to carve outward through the matrix. Reproducing what happened in the Drifter, but this time… quicker and, as you say, deliberate.”
“Water was enough?”
“The comets might have helped speed things up,” Joe says. “Lots more nitrogen in the atmosphere.”
“The Antags seeded nitrogen… on purpose?” Borden asks. “How does that fit in?”
“There is some thinking that the Antags are also divided and in turmoil over these artifacts,” Mushran says. “But any theory of such planned action is not yet widely accepted.”
“Weren’t you afraid it would make you different—less than human?” Jacobi asks.
“Some of us are affected,” Joe says. “Kazak was. Others, like me, like Tak, don’t seem to feel it. For us, it’s just dust. Nobody actually gets sick because of it.”
“Why doesn’t all this shoot out spikes and turn you to glass?” Ishida asks.
“We’re not trying to hurt it,” Joe says, his eyes crinkling with amusement, or anticipating Jacobi’s next question.
“So if it’s not going to kill us, why would the Gurus want it destroyed?”
“It’s older than the Gurus by a few billion years,” Joe says. “Older tech. Maybe they feel outclassed.”
“But it’s not technology,” Ishida says. “It’s more like rocks.”
“That’s how the ancient civilization kept records,” Tak says. “The one that lived in the old moon before it fell. We still don’t understand the process.”
I want to throw up, I’m so torn inside. Seeing DJ, Joe, Tak, waiting to see Teal—and everyone here is talking like this is a ride at Disneyland. “What happened to Kazak?” I ask.
“Killed when they attacked Fiddler’s Green,” Joe says.
“Who attacked?” I ask.
“Antags,” Tak says. “We got most of them.”
Kazak didn’t make it. That fucking hurts. I was sure he’d survive everything and see us all home. My heart sinks. Everything’s falling away beneath my feet. I absolutely need to see Teal. I feel dizzy.
“Those crystals aren’t, like, a diamond as big as the Ritz, or quartz—or anything like that,” Jacobi says. “They’re some sort of server—data storage made of rock?” She’s working this over. The literary reference is nice—I did not anticipate that. Maybe I tend to think grunts are ignorant, too. “So the dust, the tea, is…” She looks intense and lets it trail off.
“Why not just let it sit here?” Ishida asks. “Why did the settlers dig it up?”
“Tell us, Vinnie,” Joe says, with that provocative grin I know so well. The grin that got me into the Skyrines. The grin that ultimately brought me to Mars. “Why do the Voors think it’s important—why are we here?”
“The green powder hooks us into something I don’t understand,” I murmur. “Something really old. Maybe more important than anything the Gurus have offered.”
“Speak up, please,” Mushran says.
“Origins,” I say, louder, to get through the faceplate. “Access to the deep past.”
“The wisdom of an ancient civilization,” Mushran adds, with an upward look, as if about to pray.
“Is that what you feel, Vinnie?” Joe asks.
“Yeah. I guess.”
Jacobi is taking this in with that same fixed intensity, and now she’s watching me the way I watch Ishida. They’re all watching me.
Three more men, two young, one old, all wearing capes and hoods, all tall and skinny, walk past with barely a glance at us and enter the hatch, which turns out to be the door to an elevator. I walk to the rim to watch the men emerge below. They go on about their business, surrounded by a flow of kobolds getting on with their own billion-year jobs.
“Where’s Teal?” I ask.
“We’re heading to the annex now,” Joe says. “That’s where you’ll have to decide whether to strip and join us, or break it off and go home.”
Which is why this charade is so ridiculous.
FAMILY UNIT
He leads us around the rim of the dig, through a low, flat cavern shored up with natural columns of rock and metal and braces of load-bearing concrete. The ceiling is a meter over my head. As I’ve said, I don’t like deep mines and the suggestion of overburden. I can almost see the openness of the Red, the surface, and wonder what the weather’s like. Probably weird. Safer down here. But I don’t feel that way.
We walk through a shadowy, unlit zone toward three bright spotlights. As we close on the lights, I make out a steel hatch, like the lock hatches but thicker. There’s a box with attached pad on the right side, at chest level. Tak takes out a platinum coin and places it in the panel. “We don’t get many visitors,” he says. “We’re just being extra cautious.”
“You don’t want shit getting out,” Jacobi says. Her eyes shift and her plate fogs. She’s not handling this part of the tour well. Maybe she shares my dislike for low, flat places covered with billions of tons of rock. Or maybe she’s been more thoroughly briefed than me. Maybe there are real dangers, and all these good folks are crazy, and we don’t want to join them.
The hatch opens. I’ve been through so many goddamn hatches, if I never see another I’ll be a happy man. But this is the sticking point, whatever the fuck that means. This is why we’re here.
Coyle’s gone back into hiding; maybe she doesn’t like caverns, either—with better reason than most, right? Bug is silent as well. It’s just me in my cranium, and to be alone is to be in bad company. Some Frenchman said that. Maybe Jacobi can tell me. Alice would know. Where the fuck is Alice? Right. She can’t go transvac anymore. Bad solar storm, no more Cosmoline. I remember. I remember the apartment in Seattle, Joe’s and Tak’s apartment where I was invited to stay when we were all on Earth, nice place, with a view of the Cascades and Puget Sound and all the ferries coming and going. Why we fight. What the Gurus told us, gave to us—all that tech.
But the Gurus lied. Everything’s a lie. And now, we’re about to be led into… what, the truth? Or another kind of lie, even older, even more devious and dangerous? Maybe the Gurus know more than we do about what the tea does. Maybe they really are looking out for our best interests, and we’re acting like upstart children. Moses after all goes up the mountain to see the burning bush and receive the Utterances, and down in the lowlands, his people get restless and start worshipping idols. Dathan, right? Edward G. Robinson orders the casting of the golden calf. Maybe we’ve just looked on the golden calf and now Moses is about to conjure the lightning to righteously teach a great big lesson. My chin cup fills with sweat. I want to open the faceplate. It’s too late for me, why not just open the plate and take in more dust, finish the job?