He sat beside the pack and blaster on a knee of flowstone protruding from the passageway wall at an appropriate height and uncapped his water bottle. At least they had access to abundant freshwater down here. Even if it tasted a mite strange, and both Mildred and Doc fretted about possible ill effects of its unknown mineral content on their health.
He took a long swallow anyway. The stuff hadn’t given anybody the pukes or the runs, nor any pains yet. So any bad effects were in the long run, which they didn’t seem likely to live to see.
The passageway descended at a gentle angle deeper into the earth. By the light of the glowing moss the coamers set out everywhere to illuminate their living spaces,
he could see several of the cannies carrying what looked like human infants with oddly pearlescent skins and no limbs visible at this distance. From having seen the things up close, he knew that was because their limbs were more like an unknown number of paired black hooks along their bellies. They were in fact infants, though. Just not human ones.
Nor mammalian ones. He’d been wrong to think “grub farms” was a figure of speech.
“You and I have very different definitions of sophisticated, Doc,” Mildred said.
“It is a relative term,” the old man stated loftily. “Consider the workers down there. They conform in general to a rather different somatotype from the ghouls we first encountered on the surface, do they not? While they are superficially similar, with the same symptoms of albinism—with apologies to Jak…”
Hunkered nearby, a little farther down from the rest as if to stand guard in the direction, Jak just nodded.
“They possess sturdier builds, shorter limbs and blunter physiognomies.”
“Physio-whats?” asked J.B., who was clearly interested despite himself.
“Faces,” Mildred said. “Theirs are more like ours.”
“I propose that the differences are more than incidental,” Doc said. “It seems to me that the two types have been born into distinct castes, each bred for a different line of work.”
“They’re like ants!” Ricky exclaimed.
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“Working the same way bugs do doesn’t strike me as sophisticated,” Ryan said. To him, here and now, discussing even the finer points of cannie society did not
constitute indulging in abstract knowledge. They were grasping at straws, and their lives were at stake.
By J.B.’s wrist chron, they’d been working their way through a slowly and irregularly descending network of caves and tunnels for three days now. They had so far seen nothing that looked like a sign of this giant menacing
thing
they’d been sent to hunt and chill, which was lucky in a way. If the creature was that scary, none of the companions were in a hurry to come face-to-face with it. But there was no way of knowing when that crazy old coldheart McComb the Mother would decide time was up and send a swarm of her wicked brood to put an end to them all.
As was often the case, if Krysty’s thoughts weren’t the same as his, they resonated. “This caste system of yours,” she asked Doc, “how does that fit with their queen? She doesn’t look like any of the others, except for her pale skin and hair. And the hair is probably whitened by age.”
Doc shook his head ruefully. “I cannot account for her. She is an anomaly.”
“That seems like kind of an understatement,” J.B. said. “Then again, this whole setup seems pretty anomalous. Even compared to what we’re used to.”
“Hey,” Ricky called. “Check this out, guys.”
He had a hand buried to the elbow in a crevice in the wall. It was so narrow not even Ryan’s eye, lone but keen, had picked it out of the smoothly irregular surface.
“Don’t stick your hand in there!” he and J.B. said simultaneously.
“It’s all right,” the youth replied. “I scoped it with my butane lighter first.”
He pulled his hand back and waved what was in it triumphantly over his head.
“It’s a book,” Mildred said.
“Some kind of diary, by the looks of it,” Krysty observed.
“Hand it here,” Ryan ordered.
Though he was obviously beyond reluctant to let go of his newfound treasure, Ricky instantly complied. Ryan turned it over in his hand, squinting at it. It seemed to have been bound in leather—expensive even for its time—which was either black to begin with or blackened by age and possibly accreted human grease. The pages were warped by ages of moisture. He experimentally opened it and thumbed through a few pages.
Ricky lit one of their lanterns and held it up helpfully near Ryan’s face. Their stock of turpentine oil was dwindling despite efforts to conserve it, making use of the ubiquitous luminous moss. But he didn’t complain.
“Handwritten,” he said, squinting at the fussily precise blue lines of cursive. “But some of it’s blotted out by water. Some of the pages are stuck together, too.”
He looked up at Ricky, who was shifting his weight from one foot to another and trying not to look stricken at the idea of someone else being the one to make use of his uncovered treasure.
“Here, kid,” Ryan said. He tossed Ricky the old book. “You look through it. Read us anything that sounds good.”
He pushed up off his seat on the smooth rock.
“All right, everybody,” he said, shouldering his pack again. “Time to move.”
He led them on down the passage. The workers and their unappetizing cargo had vanished.
“The diary seems to belong to a man named Alton J. Foxton,” Ricky said. He was trying to hold the lamp
closed with one hand while carrying the diary in the other, turning the pages with his thumb. “Whitecoat. He seems to have been in charge of some kind of lab. Listen to this. ‘Our cover as a mining-exploration company in search of uranium deposits deep in the caves seems to be satisfying the curiosity of the locals as to what we are doing underground. They also seem to be convinced our small prefabricated office complex on the surface constitutes the majority of our operation. Little do they know that it isn’t even the tip of the iceberg, compared to our subterr—’ Sorta blurs out there.”
“Huh,” Mildred said. “Sounds like he’s talking about our secret scavvy mine.”
She and Krysty walked side by side behind Ryan. Jak ranged out ahead of them like a scout dog.
“If it was really the headquarters for some kind of secret project, it would certainly explain why there was so much worthwhile gear and supplies to recover,” Krysty said.
“Especially the ammo and explosives,” J.B. added.
“So why didn’t the coamers find this stash before?” Ryan wondered. “I judge they’ve long since found and picked through every hidey-hole down here. Especially so close to their main digs.”
“Observe the workers closely,” Doc said. “While their appearance differs markedly from those of what I think we might term the ‘soldiers,’ they are no taller. And the tallest is still shorter than young Ricky.”
“Shorter than me,” Jak said, emphasizing his point not just by jabbing his own skinny chest with a forefinger, but by speaking in a more or less complete phrase, with an actual conjunction, and even a pronoun. Ryan was impressed.
“So they didn’t ever notice it in that cleft there,” Ryan said. “They always walked right by because it’s over their heads.”
Doc shrugged. “Or they lack interest in written matter, inasmuch as they almost certainly lack letters.”
“I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts that creepy-ass queen of theirs reads,” Mildred said. “And I would be surprised if she hasn’t ordered her kiddies to bring her any books or journals or similar stuff they find.”
“Why would that be?” Krysty asked.
“She seems like a type who wants to suck up all the information she can. She had her people watching us take dumps in the frigging woods, for cripes’ sake. Plus, it doesn’t strike me that these coamers have much conversation. All we’ve seen of the rank and file makes Jak look like Doc here.”
Jak looked narrowly at her, unsure whether that was a compliment or not.
“So think how nuking bored she must be. If they brought her an old cereal box, she’d probably read it all the way through every day, fine print and all.”
Krysty pulled a face and nodded. “I think you’re right.”
They entered the cavern where the grub-carriers had passed through earlier. It was lit in places by the luminescent moss. Even in the poor and patchy light Ryan could see that it had a low, fanged ceiling. On closer appraisal he reckoned there was ample headroom for him and even Doc to walk upright, at least mostly.
Three exits gaped out of the chamber. A group of workers was clustered by the one away to the left. A muted but oddly musical
thump-thump-thumping
sound came from that direction.
Mildred squinted. “Why are they beating the walls with rocks?”
“Widening the passage, probably,” J.B. replied.
“By hitting it with rocks?”
“It’s not like they got better tools. Much less dynamite.” He allowed his thin lips a twitch of a smile. “Not like us.”
“Doesn’t that take forever?” Krysty asked.
“They’re not pressed for time down here,” Ryan said.
“That reminds me,” Doc stated with an air of a man awakening. Ryan suspected he’d been starting to zone out again. “Did it strike anyone else that the final tunnel they carried us along before we reached Mother McComb in her royal cavern seemed unusually uniform? It seemed almost perfectly circular in section, and the walls did not show the marked corrugation characteristic of most of them, carved as they are by the limestone being dissolved away, with other limestone from higher above carried down and deposited along them.”
“Not my department,” Ryan said, “but now that you mention it… J.B.? You’re our engineer. Or can pass for one in bad light, which this is.”
J.B. pushed his fedora back and scratched his forehead.
“Not that kind of engineer,” he said, “in any kind of light. But for what it’s worth, I agree. I don’t know if it struck me as unnatural or not. But it was different.”
“So which way do we go from here, kemo sabe?” Mildred asked.
Ryan shrugged. “Straight ahead. It looks to go down. We know this Big Ugly we’re on the trail of likes down. Until and unless we raise some actual traces of it, that’s all we got to go on.”
He set out walking toward the cave mouth roughly opposite the one they had come in by. Jak, who was prowling a circuit among the stalagmites and columns surrounding the rest of them, silently glided to scout the way ahead. The others followed.
“Hey, guys!” Ricky exclaimed. He had doused the lantern, thankfully, and hung it back from his overstuffed pack. Instead his round face was spookily underlit by the blue-green-white glow of clump of the illuminating moss, sticking out the top of his shirt like the chest hair he so conspicuously didn’t have.
Ryan thought the kid was being more brave than smart. The stuff was radioactive. Ryan’s and J.B.’s lapel rad counters told them as much.
“Listen to this. ‘Sadly, owing to the fact that our research entails similar genetic manipulation—although theirs does not involve integrating cybernetic controls systems into the organisms they create—the Totality Concept forces us—’”
Doc, whose expression had settled back to that dreamy blankness that indicated he was mentally wandering off in the fog again, stiffened and almost stumbled. His blue eyes snapped open. The soulless, dispassionate whitecoats of the late nineties had destroyed his life.
“If those damned whitecoats were involved,” Mildred said, “we know whatever was going on here was evil.”
“Wait,” Ricky said. “‘—forces us to share our underground primary facility with a human-modification project, whose codename COMB appears to have been chosen to flatter the ego of its unreasonable and subcompetent head, the so-called Dr. Angela McComb.’”
“Ho-lee shit,” Mildred said. “That explains a lot.”
“Does it?” Krysty asked.
“It sure gives us a clue as to where the coamers came from. We already knew how they got their name.”
“Does it mean that the Mother McComb actually created the coamers?” Krysty asked.
It was Mildred’s turn to frown. “Do you think she’s actually more than a century old? I mean, she’s no spring chicken, sure, but still, that seems a little bit extreme.”
“The diary does say Project COMB was involved in human modification,” said Ricky, who was leafing further along in the book, evidently in search of either nonblurred writing, or something else worth sharing. “Maybe along with a whole race of cannies, she came up with a way to make herself immortal?”
“There’s a comforting thought,” Mildred said.
“Perhaps she inherited the name,” Doc suggested. “And with it both the mantle of authority over the wretches, and a superior education by the standards of today.”
“I don’t see how that loads any blasters for us,” Ryan growled. “Immortal bitch-queen or just Angela the Fifth or whatever number, she’s still got us staring down both barrels of a scattergun with her finger on both triggers.”
Something snagged the edge of his attention. His eye automatically tracked to that which had initially tweaked its peripheral vision: Jak, who crouched by the tunnel entrance they were coming up on, frowning and looking as if he was sniffing the air.
“What’s up, Jak?” Mildred called. “You look like somebody farted.”
To Ryan’s surprise Jak nodded vigorously.
“Did,” he said. “Big-time!”
“Rad waste!”
As soon as the words left his mouth, Alfie Kayde turned away. Wymie heard him heaving his guts out on the bare-trampled soil, but she refused to turn her own eyes away from the terrible sight.
The nude figures nailed on the crudely hewn quartet of ten-foot-tall crosses had all been partially torn apart and devoured. Some of the legs had been eaten down to expose the bones of shin and thigh, with shreds of their skin hanging over their feet and down to the ground. Others had had their bellies torn open, organs ripped out by the handful, intestines unspooled the way poor Buffort’s had been.
She could do nothing other than pity Alfie in her heart, rather than reproach him. Mebbe he had a queasy stomach for the man who had succeeded her murdered cousin Mance as her chief bodyguard.