We stood in the dark tunnel while I re-examined my original request. It was faultless; the Chirikti could have refused, but there was no way they could have misunderstood.
“Perhaps the signal dispersed,” I said. “I’ll try again.”
We clambered through the rock until we came across a small group of Chirikti tending a fungal garden on the rock wall. I approached cautiously and delivered my query a second time. There was the same initial acceptance and wait while my request was actioned. The signal returned and we followed a succession of three Chirikti guides until the last one abandoned us in a tunnel a few hundred yards from where we had started.
I asked again, and again. Each time my query was accepted but then, apparently, countermanded. Our final guide took us only half a dozen steps.
“What’s the problem, Professor,” Jura asked.
I paused while I reviewed the data.
“He doesn’t know!” said Smith. His voice was noticeably shaking now. Even the others must see that.
“I never said this was going to be easy,” I said.
“He doesn’t fucking know!”
“You’re still getting a reply though, right?” Mina asked.
“Yes, but it appears to be over-ridden almost immediately.”
“And you said there’s something in the language that signifies distance?”
“Where are you going with this?”
“If we keep moving and keep asking the question, we can triangulate those distances... Get a bearing: find the diamond ourselves.”
Mina used the distance we had travelled so far to make a rough calibration, and we set off to make a good baseline before trying another reading.
All I could hear was panting over the open channel. The Chirikti tunnels branched in all directions and our pressure suits weren’t built for spelunking. I watched the others as they climbed. Mina, deliberate and focused: every movement a ballet of economy as if someone had told her the location of all the handholds in advance. Albright Smith was just the opposite: burning energy in a flurry of avian ticks and flinches and half-movements. Jura, powering up the slope, driving its mass of grafted muscle as if it was stolen.
After twenty minutes of scrambling through the rock, we came to a large cylindrical space like an old lava tube. It was crawling with Chirikti. Once again I asked my question and translated the returning signal. Mina blip-casted the output from her mapping software onto my faceplate. Three green lines converged on a spot in the middle of the asteroid.
“About a quarter of a mile, give or take,” Mina estimated. “We’ve got enough air--just about.”
“Going to be more like double that,” Jura said. “These tunnels aren’t exactly straight.”
“Then we eat into the reserve,” Mina said. “That’s what it’s there for.”
Smith started to pace up and down. “We should go back.”
“We’re not going back empty-handed,” said Mina.
“Maybe I should check the shuttle.”
“We’re not splitting up either,” Mina replied. “The shuttle’s fine.”
“How do you know? This could have been a stalling tactic; they wanted us out of the way.”
“Just calm down,” I said to no effect. Smith was still pacing up and down and gesticulating wildly. It was his wet-wired raptor neurons, I realized--claustrophobia. His falcon hind-brain wasn’t taking well to being trapped inside a trillion tons of bug-infested rock.
I noticed a few local Chirikti turning towards the commotion. “You really need to calm down,” I said again. Smith ignored me.
“They’ve done something to the shuttle, I’m sure of it. They know why we’re here.”
More Chirikti turned towards us, their disc-like bodies turning like the wheels of a giant clockwork engine, each cog meshing against its neighbor until twenty of the aliens had turned to face us.
“Get behind me!” I ordered with all the force Prester John’s voice could muster. “Everyone get around Smith.” I wanted him at the centre of the shibboleth where the pheromone concentration was highest. That might help to turn attention off him.
Jura had other ideas. It saw the ring of Chirikti surrounding us.
“He’s right. We’re blown.” The giant neuter reached into the pack he was carrying, the big hold-all that we had brought to carry our prize, and pulled out a short-barreled carbine. It snapped open the stock and dropped to one knee in a perfect rifleman’s crouch.
Oh fuck!
The slow ratcheting of clockwork wheels became a chain reaction as ripples of attention tore through the accumulated mass of Chirikti. A thousand compound eyes turned towards us. Colors pulsed in unison, strobes of high end purples shimmering into violet and then the ultra-violet beyond my sight and visible only to my suit's sensors.
The translation macros I was running threw invectives onto my heads-up display: aggression, fear, violation and something else--a kind of focused unity that I had never seen in any Chirikti communication. If my mangled contact suit was ever returned to the university these readings could earn someone a Nobel.
“Don’t shoot!” I shouted at Jura. “We can still negotiate.”
The telomeric language structure was back, this time as a prefix to the coded UV pulse. With each cycle it was breaking down in a pattern similar to a half-life decay, shortening.
A count down.
“I can get us out of this,” I said against all the observable evidence.
The muzzle of Jura’s carbine panned wildly as if the neuter was unsure of which of the massed ranks of Chirikti it would blow away before it was overrun.
“Morgan! Say something!” Mina’s calm broke into shards and she spat it out in a series of sharp-edged curses.
I was already talking as fast as I could. I had adopted a posture of abject contrition and was spewing out a cloud of pheromones, at the same time frantically shouting at Jura to lower its weapon.
The Chirikti’s first shots were aimed at Jura. The bugs spat sticky globs of epoxy with unnerving accuracy. The first clogged the receiver of the carbine and glued Jura’s hand to the now useless weapon. The next shots took out its legs and remaining arm. After that the epoxy was flying everywhere. I felt hits on my legs and then torso. They were strong enough to have knocked me off my feet were I not already glued down and buttressed by amber epoxy that was knee deep in seconds.
The impacts grew dull as successive layers added to the laminated shells of my prison.
We had only one chance now. Mina had paid for a way out as well as a way into the vespiary. I unhooked the light emitter from my chest plate and triggered the failsafe I had built into the back of it. LEDs started to blink in a countdown. I flung the emitter as far as I could into the air and it burst into a staccato strobe of multi-colored light flooding the whole spectrum.
The light was picked up by the Chirikti’s photo-reactive suits and flashed around the chamber like a bush fire of burning magnesium. The Chirikti were overloaded with information. Their communications were swamped. The meta-individual of the vespiary shattered into its component organisms.
The attack on us ceased as the Chirikti around us stood dazed, their suits still pulsing with a confusing babble of light.
“We should have a few minutes,” I said. “Is anyone free to move?”
A Chirikti walked up to me. It’s suit black and inert, its gaze purposeful. Its back was distended slightly in a star-shaped bulge. It spat at me.
More of the inert, unaffected Chirikti appeared and resumed our burial. As the shots landed I thought not only had I failed, I had failed twice.
Then the first shot to my head knocked my skull against the inside of my helmet and I passed out.