Spinneret (22 page)

“Dr. Hafner's team's uncovered a door in one of the hills near the Dead Sea. It may be the entrance to the Spinneret machinery.” He moved his phone closer to his mouth. “Colonel Meredith. I want a flyer ready for me in fifteen minutes … no, thanks, I'll fly it myself. Thank you.”

He dropped his arm to his side and made to go around Perez. “Let me go with you,” Perez said, blocking his way again.

Meredith glared at him … then abruptly nodded. “All right. But stay out of our way.” Sidestepping the other, he disappeared through the door.

Perez followed, lengthening his own stride to catch up.
Maybe now,
he thought,
we'll finally find out what this whole Spinneret thing was for.

I
T SEEMED LIKE FOREVER
before the flyer swooped in out of the west to settle down among the tow hills, but Hafner knew it had actually been less than half an hour since his call. His four-man team had made good use of the time, though, uncovering enough of the double doors to get an idea as to how big they really were. In the silence that followed the flyer's landing, Hafner could hear the sound of approaching cars, and he wondered uneasily just how big a crowd Meredith was bringing. He debated heading out to the flyer to ask, decided not to waste the effort. Meredith and that pain Perez had emerged from the flyer; any questions could wait until they reached the doors.

As it turned out, everyone arrived at the same time: the two from the flyer plus six cars bursting at the seams with soldiers. “What's all this for?” Hafner demanded as the troops piled out and began taking up positions around the hill. Organizing things, Hafner saw, was Major Barner from Crosse.

“Security,” Meredith said briefly, striding past the geologist and stopping in front of the doors.

Hafner joined him, trying to ignore the racket behind them. Moments like this should be celebrated with champagne, not machine gun emplacements. “We've been trying to enlarge the hole so that the doors will have room to open,” he told the colonel. “You can see from that hinge over there that they swing outward.”

“Um.” Meredith ran his fingertips a few centimeters along the door. “Feels awfully smooth for something that's been buried this long.”

“The Spinners seem to have built things to last,” Perez commented, coming up behind them.

“Yeah.” The colonel turned away and looked around. “Well, let's get them clear. Sergeant! Digging team, on the double!”

The caravan had come well equipped with shovels, and within two minutes a double handful of soldiers were making the dirt fly. It was relatively fast work, the crumbly ground offering little resistance; but had the doors been as tall as their five-meter combined width would have suggested, it would still have taken a good part of the day to uncover them. As it was, the doors proved to be just under four meters high, and the process took only an hour.

“Now what?” Perez asked when Meredith had taken as many pictures of the exposed doors as he seemed to feel was necessary.

The colonel deferred to Hafner. “Doctor? Can you suggest a way to get them open?”

“Well …” Hafner stepped to the hairline crack separating the twin panels and carefully prodded a raised design that spanned the doors at eye level. “This is the obvious candidate for lock or doorknob. The problem is … it doesn't seem to want to move in any direction.”

Meredith joined him and tried it himself. “Mm. You think we've been deliberately locked out?”

“Hard to tell.” Hafner stepped a few paces back and peered at the edges of the hill. “This particular mound looks like a simple case of particle accumulation—dust and sand collecting first on the lee side of an obstacle and slowly growing to cover the entire thing.”

“You're saying the entrance wasn't deliberately concealed?” Perez asked.

“I don't think it was, no.”

“Then chances are it's not deliberately locked, either,” Perez concluded. “What do we try first: sledgehammer or dynamite?”

“Perhaps you'd prefer a small nuclear device,” Hafner snapped. “It's faster and gives a much more satisfying boom.”

“I wasn't suggesting we break down the doors,” Perez replied mildly. “Obviously, anything that's lasted this many years isn't going to be bothered by a couple of blasting caps. I was thinking more of seeing if we could dislodge any sand that may have gotten into the latch mechanism.”

“Oh.” Hafner felt like an idiot.

“May be worth a try,” Meredith grunted, squinting at the raised design. “Looks like a small crack between this thing and the doors that dust could've gone through.”

“Let's try something a bit less drastic than dynamite first, though,” Hafner said as the colonel started to signal one of the soldiers.

“Such as?”

“Hydrofluoric acid. We can squirt it into the crack or dribble it in from above. It should take care of any dust, and shouldn't affect the actual mechanism.”

He regarded it as a small personal triumph when Meredith agreed.

It took only a few minutes for Hafner to retrieve the bottle of acid from his supplies and squirt a healthy dose of it behind the raised door design. He gave it time to get into any hidden crannies, then tried the lock again. This time it moved a millimeter or so upward. More acid, and a few careful taps with a prospector's pick, and the lock abruptly came free. Hafner swiveled it a hundred and eighty degrees around its left-hand door pivot point before it stuck again. …

And with a crunch like a steamroller on gravel, the doors slowly swung open.

“Get down!” Meredith snapped. Hafner, backing rapidly out of range of the huge panels, was yanked down into a crouch by a nearby soldier. Behind the doors was a dark tunnel that seemed to angle downward. Nothing moved back there, at least not that Hafner could see from his angle, and for a moment he considered standing up and telling Meredith there was no danger. But the soldier still had a solid grip on his arm, and with a mental sigh he resigned himself to waiting.

He didn't notice the faint sound of a motor until it cut off into silence, leaving the doors standing parallel to each other like extensions of the tunnel's walls. From somewhere behind him a car-mounted searchlight probed the gloom, reflecting briefly off dull metal as it danced around.

“All right, everyone; at ease,” Meredith called. The hand on his arm loosened, and Hafner stood up, turning to face the colonel. Only then did he see the double semicircle of soldiers behind him, their weapons only now shifting away from the tunnel mouth as they rose from prone and kneeling firing positions.
My Lord!
he thought, his hands starting to tremble.
What if the Spinners had left something behind to greet visitors? They would've cut it in half!

“So. Even their doors still work,” Meredith commented as he came to Hafner's side. “Smells sort of strange.”

Skin crawling with the thought of the guns at his back, Hafner took a step nearer the tunnel and sniffed. “Probably just
very
stale air,” he said. “I've opened caves on Earth that were a lot worse. We can do an analysis, though, if you'd like.”

“Please.” Meredith stepped to one of the doors and began studying the inside surface. Easing his way past the soldiers, Hafner went to get his air-test kit.

The smell was already dissipating by the time he was set up to begin, and a fast check showed that the air composition was indeed basically Astran normal. “Some trace things that look like metal oxides and a slightly higher concentration of radon gas are the only anomalies I get,” he told Meredith. “There
could
be alien bacteria, I suppose; we don't have the equipment to test for organic contaminants.”

“Given the rest of Astra, I don't think that's a real danger,” Meredith countered dryly. “All right. Let's go see what all the Spinners left us.” He gestured toward Major Barner and started back toward the cars.

“Just a moment, Colonel,” Hafner stopped him. No telling how Meredith would take this, but Hafner's conscience demanded he bring it up. “How many of these soldiers were you planning to take in?”

Meredith cocked an eyebrow. “Three squads—that's thirty men. Don't worry; I'm sure they can handle anything we run up against.”

“Exactly my point. They'll handle things, whether those things actually need handling or not.”

The colonel frowned. “What?”

“I doubt very seriously if there's anything dangerous in there, provided we keep our hands off any equipment,” Hafner said. “I'm more worried about someone shooting up something irreplaceable because it reflected a flashlight beam back at him.”

“Come on, Doctor—my men aren't that trigger happy—”

“Furthermore, I think this is the right moment to set a precedent here.” Hafner waved at the tunnel. “If we want the other races around us to treat the Spinneret as a peaceful manufacturing device, we've got to make it a
civilian
matter right from the start. You put soldiers inside here and everyone's going to jump to the wrong conclusion.”

“You're oversimplifying,” Meredith said, with obviously strained patience, “not to mention anthropomorphizing. At least two of the species out there don't seem to even
make
a distinction between military and civilians.”

“Then let's do it for ourselves,” Hafner insisted.
“We
make that distinction, and so do all the people back on Earth. In the UN, for instance.”

Meredith gazed at him for a long moment, and Hafner wished he had some clue as to what the other was thinking. Certainly the geologist's personal leverage and influence were very near zero, a fact Meredith obviously knew as well as he did. His only chance was that the colonel might somehow glimpse the various political-consequences involved here—consequences Hafner himself only dimly understood—and make his decision appropriately.

And apparently he did. “All right,” Meredith said at last, his eyes flicking back toward the troops. “The military presence will be limited to Major Barner and myself. I trust you won't mind if I have a defensive perimeter set up out here?”

The last was definitely sarcasm, but Hafner didn't care. “No, that'll be fine.”

“Thank
you.” Quickly, the colonel issued orders: he, Barner, Perez, Hafner, and Hafner's assistant, Nichols, would go inside for a fast look around. All would be equipped with emergency packs; Meredith and Barner would be armed as well with stunners and dual-clip pistols. There was some discussion as to whether or not to take a car inside, but the vehicle's ability to carry extra equipment eventually tipped the balance against the traditional military dislike for bunching up. In addition, Barner would wear a medium-range radio headset.

“We'll stay in continuous contact as long as possible,” Meredith told the captain being left in charge of the Crosse contingent. “Don't worry if we fade out, though, because these walls will probably cut off the signal long before we get to the end of the road. If we're not back in four hours contact Major Brown at Martello for instructions and assistance.” Climbing into the front passenger seat, the colonel glanced at the others: Barner, Perez, and Hafner squeezed together in back; Nichols at the wheel. “Everyone set? Okay, Nichols; slow and easy.”

The young geologist eased the car into the tunnel and started forward. Hafner discovered he'd been right; the floor
did
angle a couple of degrees downward. He was leaning forward, eyes searching at the limits of the car's headlights, when the tunnel abruptly blazed with light.

Nichols slammed on the brakes, and Hafner heard the double click of two pistol safeties. For a moment there was a tense tunnel was still empty.

“Automatic,” Barner muttered. “We hit the Spinner version of a welcome mat and they turned the lights on for us.”

“Yeah.” Meredith seemed to take a deep breath. “Well. Nothing seems to be threatening us at the moment. Let's keep going.”

Nichols got the car moving again, and Meredith craned his neck to look at Hafner. “Doctor, you quoted me a minimum time of a hundred thousand years once for how long the Spinneret has been operating. Does the length of time this entrance has been covered up correlate with that number?”

Hafner shrugged as best as he could, squeezed as he was between Perez and the right-hand door. “I really couldn't say for sure. We still know next to nothing about Astra's climatological patterns, let alone the erosion and compacting rates for many of the minerals here. I'd guess we're still talking in the tens to hundreds of thousands of years.”

“Does it matter?” Perez put in. “It doesn't seem all that different to me whether a piece of equipment lasts a thousand years or a million.”

“The difference—” Meredith broke off. “Never mind. Is that a door off to the left up there?”

It was indeed a door, one as tall as the outside entrance and nearly as wide. “Looks like it slides open instead of swinging,” Barner commented as they climbed out of the car.

Hafner nodded; he'd already noted the lack of visible hinges and the way the door was set back instead of being flush with the tunnel wall. “If you all want to stand back, I'll see if that plate in the center works the same as the one outside did.”

This time there was no sand gumming up the mechanism, and it took only a moment for Hafner to discover the eye-level design needed to be pushed in instead of rotated. As the door slid smoothly into the wall a set of interior lights came on, revealing a vast, empty-looking room as the others joined Hafner. “Floor markings and everything.”

“You'd never play basketball here, though,” Hafner muttered, eying the four-meter-high ceiling.

Nichols had taken a step into the room. “Boxes off in the corner, Dr. Hafner,” he announced, pointing.

“Where?” Meredith asked, moving alongside. He still held his pistol loosely in his hand, Hafner noted with some uneasiness.“… Ah. Interesting.” The colonel looked at the opposite side of the room, then back to the boxes. “Yes. See how they're not really arranged in rows? If the floor pattern's symmetric on both sides, it looks like they're set out along one of the French curves back there.”