Earthcore, page 39
Their lights faded out.
Veronica knelt, started forming loose rock and sand into an arrow pointing to the right. That would tell Lybrand and O’Doyle which way to go.
A glimmer caught her eye.
She snapped her head up, fear gripping her — she was alone. No weapon if the silverbugs poured down the tunnel to the left, swarmed over her, long legs crawling, hooks tearing …
Nothing there. Veronica let her headlamp beam play around the tunnel walls. No movement. No reflections.
She bent her head toward the arrow — again, that glimmer. She looked up. Nothing there.
Suddenly it hit her: she reached up, snapped off her headlamp.
It took a second for her eyes to adjust — total blackness, then there it was far down the tunnel. Faint but unmistakable.
A tiny line of light. Yellowish. Still. Like being in a dark house and seeing daylight through a crack in the wall.
Veronica screamed down the tunnel to her right. “Connell! Get back here now!”
Another gunshot made her lurch, made her foot scatter the half-formed arrow.
A bouncing light from her right: Connell, running to her.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Where’s Sanji and Mack?”
He jerked his thumb behind him. “I left them up there. Why is your light off?”
In answer, she gently reached up and turned his lamp off, then pushed the side of his face to make him look down the tunnel.
“Holy shit,” he said. “What’s up there?”
She switched her headlamp on again, pulled out the map.
“It looks like a huge, kidney-shaped cavern. It’s huge, even bigger than the Picture Cavern. Looks like the bottom is far below our current elevation. The tunnel might lead to a cliff on cavern’s side.”
“Is there a way down to the cavern floor?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s hard to tell.”
“Well, we’re going to find out,” he said. “Go get Mack and Sanji, bring them to this spot and wait. I’ll run back for Lybrand and O’Doyle. If there’s a light, that means someone is there. We may have found our silverbug owners.”
10:51 p.m.
“Platinum,” Randy said. “The whole thing?”
Angus nodded. “Yeah, dude. I think so. Except for the innards.”
A pair of tiny portable halogen lamps flooded the tunnel with light. The AL lay on a flat rock, its spindly legs sticking motionless into the air. Angus had found small catches built into the body, catches that had let him remove the bottom of the sphere. What had been a fast-moving robot a few hours ago would now make one helluva bowl for chips and salsa.
Randy lifted one mangled leg, tapped at the heavily dented spherical body.
“Wish we hadn’t smashed it up so bad,” he said. He let the leg drop. “We damaged the internal structure.”
Which Angus regretted, but it wasn’t like they’d had a choice. With no suitable equipment on hand, they’d used that most primitive of research techniques — smash the thing with a big rock until it stopped moving.
Angus was a smart man. One of the smartest in the world, he wasn’t too shy to admit — yet the technology in this machine blew him away.
The legs were thin, hollow straws made of the same material as the shell. Angus didn’t exactly have a mass spectrometer in his pants, so he couldn’t be sure, but he suspected the material was the same platinum/iridium compound that made up the Dense Mass.
Long strands of a fibrous black material stretched through those leg tubes, anchoring at various points inside. Artificial muscle, he figured. Contracted to apply force, just like the real thing. The stuff had to be very powerful to make the ALs move so fast.
The first two sections of every limb were identical, each about a quarter inch in diameter and eight inches long. The last section was actually two thinner tubes, about an eighth of an inch in diameter and, again, eight inches long. Those last two tubes — Randy had dubbed them “split feet” — ended with a cluster of tiny retractable hooks or claws, perfect for gripping any type of rough surface.
The shell itself was a hollow ball about seven inches in diameter, packed full of fascinating items. The black muscle material coated the interior, obviously providing locomotion for various external gadgets whose purpose remained a mystery. Angus figured a large blue chunk of glassine material in the center served as some kind of battery. Randy thought he identified an irregular, faceted crystalline lump as the CPU, the AL’s computer brain, but that was only a guess — the structure differed from anything the two men had ever seen.
About the only things they could identify were a pair of tiny pneumatic pistons mounted behind the wedge-shaped head, and a cluster of orange lumps that Angus had identified as a simple radio transmitter and receiver, not so different from the RFID chips of his Marco/Polo System.
Randy tapped his finger against the orange lumps.
“You really think these machines operate independently? No one is controlling them?”
“Radio waves aren’t going to travel that far down here,” Angus said. “Certainly not from the surface, so I doubt they’re remote-controlled. I bet the ALs use the transmitters to talk to each other more than with their owners.”
“Ah, like a distributed intelligence,” Randy said. “A colony of ants working together as opposed to individual bugs wandering around.”
Angus nodded. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? If these things are made for exploration and mapping, you don’t waste energy by having them covering the same ground. A simple algorithm makes sure they each take an area, stay a certain distance apart. I bet we could jam their communication. Fix our walkie-talkies to transmit static at that frequency. Might mess them up pretty bad.”
It would at that. The ALs didn’t seem to pose any danger, but jamming was a good card to hold back in case it was needed.
Angus squatted on his heels, looked closely at the leg they’d opened up. Something about it didn’t seem right.
“No wires,” he said. “Look how the artificial muscle groups don’t connect with each other. No connection between them, no continuous signal with the brain. How do they get the signal to contract?”
Randy rapped his knuckles on the dented, scratched shell.
“The platinum itself does the work, I think. I bet the main processor sends signals through the entire shell, but specific muscles only react to specific commands.”
Angus should have thought of that. Made perfect sense. Platinum’s high conductivity would help. The metal didn’t corrode, either, and wouldn’t be affected by the high temperatures down here. No wires to break, no fuses to short out. The ALs looked durable as all get-out.
“Dude, Kirkland is going to shit egg rolls when he sees one of these.”
“Yeah,” Randy said. “That guy hates competition.”
“That, and the platinum itself. There’s over half a million bucks worth of metal in this one alone. That’s before all the crazy tech. And we’ve seen dozens of these little boogers scurrying about.”
Randy glanced around, as if the talk of money might bring some unseen enemy.
“Who could afford to make such a thing? And who could keep tech like this secret? No one has stuff this good, Angus. Not even the military.”
“Well, someone has stuff this good,” Angus said. “And money to burn, too. Or we wouldn’t be looking at it.”
“But it’s so much platinum. Just in the ones we’ve seen, we’re talking maybe three hundred pounds of the stuff. No one can afford that kind of investment for a simple exploration.”
“Not with the known supply, no,” Angus pointed down. “But if you have enough raw material, cost isn’t an issue.”
Randy’s jaw dropped.
“You think someone is already mining the Dense Mass?”
“Must be,” Angus said. “No one is going to make machines like this out of platinum unless they’ve got tons of it. The people who made these ALs must have found the Dense Mass and already mined it. A portion of it, anyway.”
“Doesn’t make any sense.” Randy played with the AL’s leg, moving it up and down like it was part of his favorite toy. “If someone got to it first, how come Kirkland didn’t know? And how come the platinum market isn’t flooded?”
Ah, Randy … so naive.
“King-Shit Kirkland doesn’t know everything,” Angus said. “Looks like someone is smarter than he is. And the market isn’t flooded because scarcity determines price. Just because people possess a resource doesn’t mean they want to sell it all at once. How do you think the Saudis got so rich? If they put all their oil on the market, the stuff would be cheaper than Kool-Aid. Or the De Beers with diamonds — they hoard that shit so that stupid women make stupider men pay crazy prices for a shiny rock. Sell something all at once, it’s worthless. Sell it over decades, it’s priceless.”
Randy frowned. He nodded, frowned deeper, then shook his head.
“But if this mystery company already reached the Dense Mass — which we think they had to do to build the ALs — then why would they build the ALs at all?”
Randy had a point.
“I don’t know,” Angus said. “Maybe—”
A soft beeping from the tablet: the motion-tracker app. Randy picked it up.
“Uh, Angus? I think you better figure out how to jam those radio signals. And fast.”
He turned the tablet so Angus could see the screen: on it, some twenty red blinking dots were coming closer.
10:56 p.m.
Patrick O’Doyle cursed under his breath. He didn’t know how many shattered silverbug bodies he’d left in his wake, but the damn things kept popping up all over the place. He was down to his Glock’s last magazine, and only five shots remained. The silverbugs had quickly learned his effective range and stayed beyond it, far enough that he missed most of the time, but still close enough for the light of his headlamp to reflect off their twitching legs and burnished bodies. They scurried across the tunnel floor and up the walls, moving away from the light as it flashed back and forth. The collective noise of their whirs and their feet clicking on rock filled the tunnel with an eerie, constant chatter. It sounded like a million windup toys packed into a small steel box.
The silverbugs increased their distance even more when Lybrand started shooting — her aim proved to be far more accurate than his. He felt a surge of pride each time she pulled the trigger and another machine erupted with a shower of sparks and that sickening smell of burnt chocolate.
Patrick switched aim, targeting one creeping out just past the tunnel’s far bend. He fired, saw rock chip away — a miss. The silverbug scurried out of sight.
He swept left, looking for a new target, but nothing moved.
“Cease fire,” he said. He brought the Glock to his chest, angled down in the SUL position.
He kept moving backward, Bertha’s hand still firmly between his shoulder blades. She tapped his left shoulder. He turned, able to take the bend without looking away.
“They gave up,” she said. “I’m down to two rounds. There were dozens of those things, maybe hundreds. Why didn’t they just swarm us?”
He didn’t have an answer. Maybe they didn’t attack at all, maybe that wasn’t their purpose.
She tapped his right shoulder. He turned, grazed the wall, corrected, kept moving backward, kept looking for targets. His beam played off the ceiling and floor, a thin spotlight fighting a losing battle against the endless darkness.
A new voice hissed out.
“Don’t shoot! It’s me!”
Kirkland, screaming at the top of his damn lungs.
Patrick turned, sprinted down the tunnel. Just as he’d asked, Lybrand was already three steps ahead. They reached Connell in seconds. He had the EBR in his hands. If he’d been gripping it any tighter, he might have broken it in half. Patrick would have to get the man to relax a little. At least he had proper trigger discipline.
“We saw a light,” he said. “Something fixed, like a crack in a wall. Not sure what it is. I came to get you so we could all check it out together.”
“Good call,” Patrick said.
A light. The assholes who’d killed his men?
Connell looked down the tunnel, back where Patrick and Bertha had come.
“We heard shooting,” Connell said. “More silverbugs?”
“A fuck-ton,” Bertha said. “We shot a bunch, they kept coming. Then they stopped chasing.”
“Let’s move before they come back,” Patrick said. “Connell, lead the way.”
He did. He moved quickly, but was clearly favoring his right leg. It was slowing him down somewhat.
Patrick saw a light up ahead, bodies silhouetted. Unmoving. Rigid. Reeves and Sanji, Mack leaning heavily against the tunnel wall.
Then he realized the light wasn’t coming from them.
And, it wasn’t white.
Reds, blues, greens, yellows, flashing and pulsing.
Connell sprinted, his pain apparently forgotten. Patrick was only a step behind.
What was that smell?
He and Connell reached the others, stopped.
Far down the tunnel, Patrick saw the light Connell had described, a glowing crack in the wall.
Between him and that light, the source of the flashing colors.
A tentacle god.
10:59 p.m.
What Connell saw hammered him, jarred him, sheared his thoughts as hard as if another rock had cracked into his skull.
He remembered the last vacation he’d taken with Cori before her death. A driving trip of California. San Diego. Highway One. Big Sur. Cannery Row. Amid a hundred touristy things, they’d visited the Salk Institute to see an exhibit by the artist Chihuly — crazy sculptures of colored glass, twisting tentacles that seemed like living things flash-frozen in a moment of mad motion. They’d seen it at night, the sculptures lit up from within, glowing against the night sky.
Then, and now.
Now, something that looked like a Chihuly sculpture come to life. The size of a basketball, maybe. Undulating tentacles touching the tunnel floor, sticking out to the side, sticking up, all swaying like cobras poised to strike. It wasn’t only the body that moved, it was the colors — spreading and shrinking, expanding and contracting, flowing, all the hues the world had ever known cascading and coursing. Loose patterns, flowing lines … hypnotizing in their complexity, stunning in their simplicity.
The curling tentacles, they weren’t fixed. Some shrank into the body, some extended out, a kaleidoscope sun birthing slow-motion solar flares, casting incandescent radiance against the surrounding walls.
Within the shimmering colors, he saw black spots of various sizes. Thousands of them, spread all over each there-then-not tentacle, throughout the shapeless body. Small, polished onyx jewels embedded in strange flesh.
All the art in the Picture Cavern — carvings and paintings alike, the flawless and the mad — it all made sense. Not gods or demons, not visions. Living creatures.
The assault on his eyes, his thoughts, and his nose as well: the pungent reek of dog shit mixed with the sickeningly sweet waft of rotting fruit. Strawberries, perhaps. Maybe apples.
The still moment stretched on, as permanent as the mountain itself. Endless and disturbing. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t speak.
O’Doyle slowly pushed his pistol toward it, two-handed grip firm and unforgiving.
Connell reached out, put his palm atop the gun.
“Don’t shoot,” he said, the voice that creaked out of his throat somewhere between a hiss of command and a cry of confusion. “We don’t know what it is.”
The thing didn’t come closer, didn’t move away. It stood there, tentacles waving softly.
“Kill it.”
Two words Connell would have expected from O’Doyle or Lybrand — but they came from Veronica Reeves.
“We know exactly what it is,” she said. “We all saw those carvings in the Picture Cavern. We know what these things do to people. The knives, Connell. Now we know what happened to Jansson.”
Those carvings. The stone-still images of horror flashed through Connell’s thoughts: cutting, slicing, severing.
Jansson’s thumb.
Slashed at him …
Wicked-sharp …
But that strange, amorphous creature in front of him seemed so small. Couldn’t have weighed more than ten pounds. How could something this size have killed a grown man? One kick would send it flying. The knives were almost as big as the creature itself.
A hand on his shoulder. Lybrand, leaning close, whispering.
“It’s seen us,” she said. “Whatever the hell it is, it’s seen us. What if it wasn’t another company that attacked us — what if it was these things?”
Her voice carried steel, the sharp edge of a sword. It made him shiver.
Was she right? No, the Kilroy signs … someone had done that to send a message. A message to him. Creature or no creature, other people were down here.
O’Doyle slowly adjusted his stance, dropping his hips a little lower.
“Say the word,” he said. “I’m ready.”
Connell had to decide? This wasn’t mining, this wasn’t business. How did he have the right to make a call like that?
Motion from a thin fissure in the wall to the creature’s right, up near the ceiling.
Connell felt himself take a step back, sensed the others doing the same.
Two yellowish-brown globs squeezed out of that crack, accompanied by a hissing sound of dead leaves blowing over concrete.
“Lybrand,” O’Doyle snapped.
“Got it,” she said. She aimed at this new threat, while O’Doyle remained locked on his.
A second small creature slid out of the fissure like pudding pushed through a strainer, its body swelling as it left the stone confines. No glow, no colors. Yellowish-brown skin flecked with those spots of onyx.
Limbs squished out. It positioned itself between the people and the first creature, which had yet to move.
“This one isn’t glowing,” Sanji said. “Ronni, why isn’t it glowing?”
