The field station was a twin of Yambuku, set deep in the Lesser Boreal Continent’s temperate forest. Like Yambuku, it was situated in a cleared perimeter, its rigorously sterile core contained inside layers of increasing biohazard. Its biologically hot outer walls were scrubbed daily by maintenance tractibles, or should have been—lately the tractibles had begun to malfunction; the bays were full of machinery demanding maintenance, and bacterial films had compromised three of the station’s exit locks. When the shuttle dock seals began to show similar wear, the station manager, a Shoe Clan virologist named Weber, called for general evac.
The call was not well-received by the IOS. Apparently Marburg’s shuttle would be routed to a secondary bay that was being set up for prolonged quarantine. Weber ascribed this to Terrestrial paranoia, though he feared it might signal something worse.
But there was no postponing the evac. Weber loved Isis and had worked hard to make Marburg a going concern. But he was also a realist. Postpone the evacuation much longer and people would begin to die.
The Oceanic Station had already collapsed. The Isis Polar Station, anchored in the glacial wasteland of the planet’s northern ice cap, reported no significant problems and continued to operate on a day-to-day basis.
Yambuku, however, was on the brink of total breakdown.
Avrion Theophilus burst through the shuttle-bay doors from decon, brushed aside his courtesy detail, and marched directly to Yambuku’s remote-ops room.
His full-dress Devices and Personnel uniform drew a few stares from the otherwise distracted downstation crew. He was accustomed to that, at least from the Kuiper-born. In civilization it would have been considered ridiculously gauche, the peasant’s impulse to stare. But Yambuku wasn’t civilization.
He found the station manager, Tam Hayes, coming off a long remensor session. Hayes looked groggy, unshaven. Theophilus took him aside. “We need a place to talk.”
“I gather she’s injured,” Theophilus said.
“It looks that way.”
“Out of contact.”
“Verbal contact, certainly. We’re still getting some telemetry, but it’s intermittent. The fault may be with our antenna array. Remensors are down, too, and the excursion tractibles are dead. All of them.”
“But Zoe is not.”
“No. To the best of our knowledge, Zoe is not.”
“We have good telemetry up to the point at which she was attacked?”
“Yes.”
“Forwarded to Earth?”
“Forwarded to the IOS, at least. Degrandpre bottlenecks traffic to Earth.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that.”
Hayes blinked. “Believe me, that’s not what I’m worried about.”
“Have the satellites located her?”
“To within a meter of the digger colony, but the atmosphere’s too cloudy for any kind of visual confirmation.”
“Not good enough,” Theophilus said.
They had come to the small shuttle-control chamber above the core. It was occupied only during launches—a good place for a private conversation. Hayes was in a hurry to get back to the remote-ops room; Zoe was alive, and he meant to bring her back to Yambuku. Right now Avrion Theophilus was only an obstacle, and the man’s peremptory manner made Hayes clench his fists.
He said, “Are you worried about Zoe or about her excursion technology?”
“The technology has already proven itself, don’t you think? The fact that she might yet be alive despite a wild-animal attack is evidence of that.”
“Because if it’s Zoe you’re worried about, it might be best if you let me get back to the business of bringing her home.”
“Not all the novel technology is in her excursion suit, Dr. Hayes.”
“Excuse me?”
“She’s a package. It isn’t just the interface. She’s augmented internally, do you understand? She has an entirely artificial immune system riding on top of her natural immunity. Microscopic nanofactories stapled to her abdominal aorta. If the suit is breached, we need to know that. There’s much more we can learn from her even if she dies in the field.”
“You’re saying she might survive even if the suit is breached?”
“For a time, at least. It might be difficult to retrieve her body, given the situation here. But if we can—”
“Fuck you,” Hayes said.
He didn’t want to retrieve Zoe’s body. He had a better plan.
Dieter Franklin came into the staging bay as Hayes was suiting up.
Hayes’ standard bioarmor was clumsy and immense compared to the gear Zoe had worn. A sterile core wrapped in steel and flexiglass and nanofilters. Hayes had just sealed the massive leggings when the inner door slid open.
“You can’t be serious,” Franklin said. “Lee Reisman said you were raving about an emergency excursion. I told her you were smarter than that. Tell me I wasn’t lying.”
“I’m bringing her back.”
“Slow down a fucking minute and think about this! You’re planning to cross the Copper River in a suit of armor that can sustain you for, what, two days maximum?—when it’s working properly. And at a time when every piece of machinery we’ve sent into the field is either dead or failing and we can’t even keep our own seals intact.”
“She’s alive, maybe injured.”
“If she’s alive, she needs a functioning ground station to come home to. You’re more useful to her here. Not out in the mud with a hot servomotor, or worse, dividing everybody’s attention and costing us resources we can’t afford.”
“I owe her—”
“Nothing you owe her is worth suicide. And that’s what this is, you know it. Odds are, you’ll end up as a few kilograms of compost inside a broken steel shell. And Zoe will end up right where she is.”
Hayes wound a layer of insulation around his waist, forcing himself to slow down, do it right. “She was a fucking test platform, Dieter. D-and-P doesn’t give a shit about the diggers. Zoe thought she was here to do social studies, but she was a test platform.”
Dieter Franklin nodded slowly. “For the excursion suit. Elam suspected as much.”
“Elam suspected. But I knew.”
Franklin said nothing. Hayes tried to focus his attention on his armor, working the procedures, sealing bands of pneumostatic plastic over his rib cage. He wished Elam were here to read him his checklist.
“You knew?”
“I saw all the D-and-P memos. Little communiques to the Yambuku manager. No details, but enough that I should have realized it was her gear that mattered. She was a fucking test platform, Dieter, and I let her walk out there in all her glorious ignorance.”
“You need to think about this. She has good gear, but it’s not breach-proof. We can’t be sure she’s still alive.”
Next, the soft inner helmet. “She has more than the suit. She’s been internally modified. She has a heavily augmented immune system. Even if her suit’s damaged, she might survive long enough for us to get her back here. Maybe long enough to save her life.”
Dieter Franklin was silent for a time.
He said at last, “Even so, Tam. It’s a bad bet.”
“I know it’s a bad bet.”
“Because Yambuku won’t be here much longer. That’s the obvious conclusion no one wants to draw. Look at the Oceanic Station. Look at Marburg. It’s the bios, Tam, working out strategies, learning how to corrupt our seals and our locks. Synthesizing solvents and spreading the knowledge, sharing it somehow. Five years ago, that biohazard armor was good enough to protect you. Today . . . it’s the next best thing to fucking useless.”
Hayes toggled the atmosphere lock. Overhead, a series of fans began to create positive pressure. An alarm sounded. Dieter Franklin fled the room.
Hayes pulled on his helmet.
PAIN. DOUBLE VISION. Zoe felt herself being dragged, the heels of her boots bumping against impediments. She was suffering from concussion, she thought vaguely, or worse, from some cranial injury
from which she wouldn’t recover. She smelled impossible things: burning rubber, ammonia, rotting food; and when she closed her eyes she saw pinwheels and flares.
She was terribly nauseated but dared not vomit. The excursion suit would process the mess, but probably not before she choked to death.
She was awake, or perhaps not: consciousness ebbed; time passed in gusts, like the wind.
She struggled—briefly—when she realized the diggers were dragging her into one of their mounds, away from starlight and firelight and into the rocky, claustrophobic dark.
The mound entrance was narrow. The diggers spindled their sickeningly mobile bodies and entered one at a time; Zoe was dragged by her extended arms, helpless, over the rocky lip and into a tunnel encrusted with digger excretions. The air was thick with an unfamiliar stench, spicy and foul at once, like cardamom and rotted food. She wondered if she would asphyxiate here. In the dark.
And for the first time in her life, Zoe felt panic.
She had not panicked even in the cold dormitories of the orphan crib; her thymostat had suppressed any violent emotion and left only a hollow, pervasive sadness, the aching knowledge of her captivity and abandonment. What she felt now was worse. There was no advantage to struggle but she felt she must struggle. The need to fight obliterated thought, became a madness rising out of the meat of her. She tried to suppress the scream that rose from her chest but the effort was futile; the scream erupted and continued without reason or volition. She kicked and pulled at the coral-sharp claws that held her wrists and ankles. But these animals were complacently strong. All light vanished. There was only darkness now, and compulsive motion, and the enclosing walls of the tunnel. And the sound of her sobbing.
She woke again—alone, exhausted beyond fear.
Was she blind? No. It was only the darkness of the diggers’ mound. Aboveground it might be noon or midnight. Here, it was always dark.
But at least she was alone, at least for now. She moved, stretched tentatively . . . found a rocky ceiling just above her head, too close to allow her to stand, curving to arm’s-length walls and a floor somehow softer (but damper) than the entrance tunnel had been. The silence beat at her ears. The only audible sounds were the rattle of her breath inside the suit’s filter and the rasp of her movements. If she had a light—
But she did! She did have a light. Several, in fact: the firefly lamps strapped to her tool belt, the tool belt she had been using to mend the tractibles.
Stupid, stupid, languishing in the blackness when she could have been seeing! She fumbled at her belt almost fearfully, and indeed some of the small lamps had torn away during her struggle, but some of them remained, as small as bullets and with an activator built into each base. She extracted one and thumbed its switch.
The light it emitted was faint but welcome. Order was restored; she was in a place with contours and dimensions—a rounded pressed-earth hollow glistening with damp. The floor was carpeted with a pale, almost translucent growth through which small mandibled insects crawled, and on the wall there was the gauzy nest of some spider-like creature, a mass of cotton-floss thread to which the mummified bodies of insects adhered.
The firefly lamp was good for an hour or two. There were seven more remaining on her belt; she counted them with her fingers. She would have to be careful.
But of course she couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. No food. No water. She had some water reserves in her suit, which would recycle her urine, too, but that was an open loop and good for maybe a day or two at most without exterior replenishment. Basically, she needed to get to her base camp, find food and water and maybe a working tractible, then head back to Yambuku.
Resources, Zoe thought. She was perhaps not thinking very clearly; her head ached horribly where the digger had clubbed her, and when she touched her temple she felt a plump bruise under the excursion suit’s membrane. Resources: what did she have that she could use to her advantage? Telemetry, communication . . . the thought of talking to Tam Hayes was so enticing she almost wept. But when she called up her coms protocol there was no carrier—nothing from Yambuku, wide- or narrow-band, which meant that her gear was damaged, or theirs was, or perhaps the digger mound was blocking radio transmissions.
She wondered then how far below the surface she had been carried. She didn’t know—no one knew—how deep these tunnels ran. There had been a few seismic-imaging experiments conducted by remotely operated tractibles near the digger mounds, enough to suggest that the warrens were extensive and complexly interconnected. The digging might have gone on for centuries, might have reached down kilometers below the topsoil. . . . But no, that was a bad thought. Impermissible. She felt panic rising like a lump in her throat. Daylight might be a kilometer away, but it also might be just an inch above this sealed chamber. She had no way of knowing and she instructed herself not to think about it.
She held her breath for a moment and listened carefully. Was she alone? A tunnel roughly as wide as her shoulders was the only entrance to this cul-de-sac. The firefly lamp would not illuminate that space beyond a meter or so; she saw only that the tunnel was circular and that it rose at a gentle angle, perhaps twenty degrees of slope. Listen. She held herself still and tried to calm the pulsing of blood in her ears. Listen. But the silence was absolute. Surely a digger traversing these tunnels would betray itself by the sound of its passage, claws on soil packed as hard as rock. There was no such sound. Good.
Maybe it was daytime, Zoe thought, and the diggers were outside gathering food. She tried to scroll a clock, but her corneal display seemed to be broken. Another effect of the blow to her head perhaps.
She hesitated for what might have been a moment or an hour, eyeing the crawl space suspiciously, reluctant to exchange this relatively spacious cell for the cramped enclosure of the tunnel. But then the firefly lamp began to sputter and dim, and anything, Zoe thought, anything would be better than more darkness.
She plucked another lamp from her belt and struck it, but it wouldn’t light. It was broken.
Her fingers shook as she worked the next lamp free. This one, when she pressed it, sprang brightly to life. She sighed her relief.
But that left only five more lamps . . . and none or all of them might have gone bad.
Now, Zoe, she thought. Go now.
She held the firefly lamp in her right hand and lay down on her stomach. The albino moss felt cool beneath her suit membrane. She would have to advance with her arms in front of her, squirming more than crawling, using her boots for traction. And what if she lost herself in this maze? What if all her firefly lamps burned out, one by one? Could she even take another one from her belt in such a narrow space?
No, she realized, not without dislocating her shoulder.
She backed off, removed her tool belt and slipped it over one shoulder. That way she could reach the remaining lamps, if need be.
Five lamps. Say, six or seven hours of light, if they all worked. And then—?
Another bad thought. She put it out of her mind and squirmed once more into the tunnel.
There was just enough space for her to lift herself on her elbows and inch forward, scrabbling with boots and knees in a sort of crabcrawl. She was grateful for the ubiquitous pale moss beneath her; it cushioned her knees and elbows where the vulnerable suit membrane might have torn or eroded.
The firefly lamp illuminated a narrow circular space perhaps a meter or two ahead of her. I need a plan, she thought. (Perhaps she said some of this aloud. She tried not to, but the gap between thought and word had narrowed and she caught the occasional echo of her own hoarse whisper coming back to her out of the distance. Giving herself away, she feared. But still, the animals hadn’t returned.)
A plan, she thought again. Here was a maze, and somewhere the minotaur. She decided that whenever she came to a fork in the tunnel she would always take the path that led upward, or if both paths were equivalent she would take the right-turning branch. That way she would eventuall
y reach the surface, or at least be able (but please don’t let it happen) to back out of a dead end and retrace her route.
She could do that, she decided, even if, God forbid, she used up all her lamps. Even in the dark, she could do that.
The dark returned when her current lamp flickered and dimmed. Too soon, surely. How far had she come? She couldn’t guess. A long way, it seemed, but not far enough. The tunnel had not branched, not even once. Or perhaps, horrible thought, the diggers made new tunnels and sealed old ones; maybe she would reach a final wall and—
No. Bad thought.
She fumbled another firefly lamp into her hand and pressed the base. To her immense relief, it flickered to life.
Another hour lost.
Bad thought, bad thought.
She had been imagining, vividly, what she would do when she got back to Yambuku—peel off her excursion membrane, stand under a hot shower, wash her hair, eat, drink sparkling water from tall crystal tumblers—when she came to a branching tunnel.
The first. Or was it the first? Here in this small arc of light it was hard to estimate time, to distinguish between events imagined and events actual. She had planned this, but had she already attempted it? She didn’t know. Nevertheless, Zoe thought, stick to plan. Did the left branch show an upward slope, or should she keep to the right?
Hard to say.
She paused, hoping to divine some clue. Was there a breath of wind either way? There was not. Only the same stale, stinking air, hardly enough to fill her lungs. No sound. She thought perhaps the right-hand tunnel rose ever so slightly, and she turned in that direction.
Running into Theo’s arms.
“One of my children survived.”
Running into Tam Hayes’ arms. . . .
She woke hurting. Arms stiff, legs stiff, her head throbbing. Pressure all around her. And blind—
No, it was the dark.
The dark.
She had fallen asleep.
She cursed her carelessness—time had been wasted!—and fumbled for the next firefly lamp. She kept her eyes tightly closed as she worked her fingers, because she couldn’t see anything even if her eyes were open, and because with her eyes closed the darkness felt like a choice, her own chosen darkness, not something imposed by the weight of clay and stone around her. The warm darkness, perhaps, of sleep. Though she must not sleep again.