She held up a short-barreled, stockless gun with a hand grip and a fat magazine. Hummingbird grunted in appreciation and held out his hand.
"I don't think so," Gretchen said tartly, tucking the assault rifle under her arm. "You're going in first and I'll cover you."
"What does it shoot?" Hummingbird's appreciative smile vanished. He was eyeing the rifle warily now. "It looks like something the Marines would use."
Gretchen shook her head with a smirk. "No – it's Swedish. A Bofors Sif-52 shockgun. Throws explosive flechettes in a room-sized cloud." She locked the magazine back into place. A green light gleamed at the back of the weapon. "So I'll probably wait until you're out of the way."
"Of course." The nauallis did not seem convinced, but he turned away and glided across the hard-packed dust towards the door. Gretchen scuttled along behind him, keeping to his right, the gun leveled on the opening. When he'd reached the edge of the door, she stopped, steadying herself. The barrel of the weapon was a distraction – flickering with curlicues of orange flame – and she concentrated, remembering only smooth, dark solid metal.
Hey, she thought as Hummingbird stepped around the corner into the opening, it works!
The rifle was solid again, barrel heavy and entirely lacking in radiant light.
Gretchen scampered up to the door and peered inside. Hummingbird had tuned the lightwand down low, but the flare of ultraviolet made the chamber entirely visible once Anderssen's goggles kicked in. She saw a large, rocky space with a rumpled, irregular floor. The far wall was not that of a cave, however, but worked stone – much like the frame of the opening she was crouched against – holding a second trapezoidal door.
There was nothing in the chamber save Hummingbird, who was crouched only a meter or two away, the lightwand held out at a stiff angle. Gretchen scanned the rest of the room over the sights of her shockgun, then fixed her attention on the dark space within the second door. There's something odd about all this…she started to think and then her mind sort of froze up like a water pipe caught in the first chill snap of winter in the high timber. Oh, blessed mother! O divine sister of Tepeyac!
Unaware of the fear choking the words in Gretchen's throat, Hummingbird advanced into the chamber, keeping to the left-hand wall. He led with the wand, now burning purplish-blue in high UV setting, and crouched against the flat, smooth wall on the opposite side. Something had caught his eye and the nauallis leaned close to examine some kind of a spot on the wall.
"Hu–Hu–" Gretchen couldn't make her voice work, the word coming out a choked squeak. Though gripped by a terrible desire to flee, Anderssen crept inside, shoulder to the right-hand wall as she scuttled towards him. "Hummingbird!"
"Look at this," the nauallis said calmly, pointing with the wand at a smudge on the smooth stone. "Remains of a glowbean, I think. Russovsky must have…What is it?"
Gretchen was clutching his arm, the rasp of her breathing loud in her ears. "Look at the floor, at the doorways," she hissed, pointing with the barrel of the Sif. "They're level."
Hummingbird nodded, though he tensed as well. "And so?"
"This is a First Sun building," Gretchen said in a tight, controlled voice. "This postdates the release of the eaters, the destruction of the surface, the rise of the Escarpment, everything. Your valkar made this place."
There was a hiss-hiss on the comm circuit. "I don't think so," Hummingbird said after a pause. "Look at this wall. This is not worked stone, not planed or cut or burned with a tunneller. The doorways are the same."
Gretchen peered at the wall, finding concentration and focus elusive amid the rampage of adrenaline coursing through her. "I…I suppose…" Then something odd about the surface caught her attention and she dialed up the magnification on her goggles. "Hmm. That's very strange – this surface is solid."
"Yes." Hummingbird moved along the wall to the inner doorway. Cautiously, he looked around the corner, then drew back. "Almost perfect, I would hazard."
Keeping the muzzle of the Sif pointed away from the Mйxica, Gretchen sidled up to join him. "Real stone isn't so smooth," she muttered under her breath, suspiciously checking the exit to the canyon. "It's usually porous, even a fine marble or granite. Filled with minute hollows, concavities…"
"True." Hummingbird looked around the corner again, leading with his lightwand. "But this is not stone as you think of stone. This is a wall assembled an atom at a time over a million years. Almost perfectly solid and more than a meter deep." He slipped into a corridor with walls slanting inward to a flat ceiling over a dusty floor.
Gretchen darted across the opening and swung the Sif to cover the passage. The tunnel reached back to end in an angled wall. Hummingbird moved carefully, one gloved hand pressed against the slanting wall.
"Watch out for this floor," he said, voice a low buzz in her earbug. "Like the walls, it is dangerously slick. There is very little traction."
Gretchen looked down at the dusty surface. A mirror image of her cloak, mask and rebreather stared back through a gray film. "Okay," she said, testing the surface with her boot. Sliding her foot from side to side elicited a queasy feeling like slipping on new ice. Pressing directly down seemed to gain some purchase. Ahead of her, Hummingbird was moving very slowly, taking his time and placing each foot with careful precision. Gretchen followed with equal care, keeping to the opposite wall.
The sloped passage turned to enter a second chamber at an angle. Hummingbird paused just outside the junction, risking a quick look inside before beckoning for Anderssen to join him. Gretchen moved gingerly to his side – her boots kept wanting to slip out from under her – hands grimly tight on the handle and stock of the Sif.
This room seemed to have no ceiling – or none she could see – and three smooth walls. The fourth, opposite them, was rough and unfinished. Gretchen's mouth tightened, making out irregular markings on the wall – inset spirals, whorls of raised, grooved rock – and she hissed in warning. At the base of the wall were scattered a number of cylinders.
"There." She pointed, indicating a section of bare stone which had been broken open. Hand-sized rocks lay in an untidy pile at the foot of the wall. Boot prints scuffed an ancient layer of dust. "Russovsky took the embedded cylinder away."
Without waiting for Hummingbird to respond, overcome by her own curiosity, Gretchen walked stiffly across the floor to the nearest cylinder. The artifact seemed much the same as the one Clarkson had cut open on the ship – a third of a meter long, four or five centimeters across – and the exterior was encrusted with the same kind of lime-scaling. Very gently, Anderssen nudged the device with the muzzle of the Sif, making the thing skitter across the impeccably smooth floor. The cylinder did not burst open.
She could feel Hummingbird's tension from the doorway, but Gretchen ignored him for the moment, moving to the cavity broken in the stone. Up close, she saw the wall was raw irregular rock, rising up through the floor at an angle and vanishing into impenetrable darkness overhead. The entire surface was crowded with fossils – more of the anemonelike structures, the fluted curl of something like a snail, serrated ridges indicating a swimmer with multiple spines. A flattened, bifurcated cone. Scorch-marks surrounded the ragged opening where small blasting charges had been used to split open the limestone.
"What made this place?" Gretchen whispered into her throat mike as she leaned close to examine the surface of the ancient sediment. She could see hundreds of specimens within arm's reach – a glorious view into a lost, dead world. "Did something survive after the valkar fled into hiding?"