Authors: Gavin Smith
‘Friend of yours?’ Cat demanded as he reached us. The rest of the
whanau
were not far behind him.
‘Never seen him before in my life,’ Tailgunner said, moving through us to get a better look at the guy.
The infiltrator was just moving his head from side to side as he took us all in. Although he was obviously human, there was something very alien about him. He was observing us as though he’d never seen the like before.
‘So who the fuck is he and what’s he doing here?’ Cat demanded.
‘And how’d he just walk through our guards?’ I asked.
‘I think he’s a Morlock,’ Tailgunner said, staring at him with an expression bordering on wonder.
‘Bullshit, they’re a myth,’ Soloso scoffed as he joined us.
‘What’s a Morlock?’ Morag asked. Mudge opened his mouth to reply. ‘Not you; someone who knows what they’re talking about.’ Mudge shut his mouth again.
I noticed that the strange man had looked at Tailgunner when he’d said the word Morlock.
‘Soloso’s right – they’re an urban myth,’ Big Henry began. I saw that a lot of the Kiwis were nodding but some of the others were holding on to the little wooden or greenstone charms I think they called
tikis
. There was an air of superstitious fear in the cave. I didn’t blame them. This was a weird guy and it was scary how he’d got in so easily. ‘Supposed to date back to early colonial times, before the war, during the great Lalande 2 mineral rush. When the corps moved in there were rumours that some of the prospectors and freelance surveyors went deep, as deep as they could, to get way from the corps and live free.’
‘How long ago?’ I asked.
‘Ninety, maybe a hundred years ago,’ Big Henry said, forgetting that he wanted to kill me for a moment.
‘What do they live on?’ Morag asked.
‘Story goes they took some of the terraforming gear, maybe some livestock.’
‘Tell the rest of the story,’ Soloso said, grinning.
Big Henry sighed.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘They’re supposed to take people, for eating,’ Soloso said, and then his booming laughter echoed off the cave walls.
‘Maybe that’s what he’s here for,’ Merle said scornfully.
I couldn’t help looking around the cave for others silently surrounding us in preparation for a violent barbecue.
‘So we’ve got a group of humans who’ve lived separately for a hundred years, completely isolated, their own society, their own technology by the looks of it, adapting to a deep environment?’ Pagan asked.
‘I guess so,’ Big Henry said.
‘So are you going to talk to us, mate?’ Mudge called.
‘We could make him talk,’ Merle suggested. Morag gave him a look of contempt.
The strange man pointed at Cat, patted his chest and pointed to one of the cave exits.
‘I think he wants you to go with him,’ Morag said.
‘Maybe it’s a date,’ Mudge suggested.
‘Nobody say anything unless it’s useful,’ Cat said distractedly. That would pretty much render Mudge mute. She addressed the strange man: ‘Okay, we’ll come with you, but we need time to get ready. If this is a trap or you in any way fuck with us, you die first. Understand me?’
The man said nothing.
‘Well, it’s good we got that sorted out,’ Mudge said.
‘Mudge, what’d I say?’ But Cat wasn’t really paying attention to Mudge; she was studying the strange man.
‘What are you doing?’ Merle demanded.
‘Stay here if you want.’
‘I’m coming,’ Morag said.
‘Ladies love pale willowy types,’ Mudge said, nodding sagely. The man turned to stare at him.
‘Amazing. You can irritate people who you probably don’t even share a language with.’ Morag seemed impressed.
‘It’s a gift.’
Painkillers, cybernetic medical support, alien nanites – none of them were helping with my hangover. We’d gone deep, very deep, so deep that the caves were starting to get warmer. Occasionally we would see the distant glow of lava.
The Morlock had a vehicle stashed disturbingly close to the
pa
. It was open-topped and multi-sectioned, and made of the same brassy material. It ran on thick rubbery tracks but made surprisingly little noise. He’d plugged into the vehicle like we would, but the jack had appeared on a mobile snake-like apparatus from within his clothing. The vehicle reminded me of a centipede in some ways but it was fast through the caves and tunnels. It also had a lot of locked cabinets and sealed crates. Presumably these contained examples of their tech that he did not wish to share. The floor of the strange vehicle was covered in some kind of dark soil. I saw Pagan looking at the soil with interest. I remembered how important soil had been to the inhabitants of the Avenues back in Hull.
The Morlock said nothing to us; he just drove deeper and deeper. Tailgunner, Pagan, Mudge, Morag and I had joined Cat. Merle had been too disgusted to go. Big Henry, I think, was too scared. Soloso had seemed scornful about the whole thing. Under the scorn I thought I detected a degree of fear as well. I think the Morlocks on Lalande 2 were thought of in much the same way that the Twists were back on Earth. Every culture needs a bogeyman, something to point at and be afraid of.
My cheek still ached every time I saw Soloso. He seemed cheerfully unrepentant about fish-hooking me with a sickle. Mother had stayed back because she was in command of the
pa
.
I don’t know why we were taking so much on trust with this guy, but despite his weirdness I just didn’t get a sense of malevolence. I’d been wrong about a lot of people before, however. Like Pagan. I found myself glaring at him almost subconsciously. He knew it and was avoiding catching my eye. We were all carrying our full combat gear just in case. I was a little worried having all our hackers with us but it wasn’t my problem any more.
‘Pack it in,’ Morag hissed at me.
I looked away from Pagan as we trundled into a huge vertical crack in the rock that disappeared into the darkness far higher than I could see, even when fully magnifying my vision. Deep below us I could make out the orange glow of lava. Even this far above it I could feel the heat. It was a welcome change from the normal damp chill of the caves.
‘I should have taken a really strong psychotropic,’ Mudge said, removing his sunglasses. We’d tried to explain the pointlessness of wearing sunglasses underground but he’d insisted it was a hangover tradition.
There were a lot of cave mouths, natural pathways in the rock, surrounding the enormous fissure. Some of the ledges were big enough to be small plateaux in their own right. On the opposite side of the fissure, waterfalls cascaded down to be turned to steam far below us. The ledge we were on and much of the surrounding area was covered in dark soil with large flat mushrooms growing out of it. The mushrooms gave off a faint ghostly bioluminescence. However, the most singular thing about the whole area was the beanstalk.
‘Fe fi fo fum,’ Mudge said, grinning as he popped something in his mouth. He’d spent the previous couple of minutes searching all his pouches, presumably for just the right drug for the occasion.
‘I smell the blood of an Englishman,’ Pagan finished and then for some reason glanced at me. Perhaps it was because I was staring at him.
It looked more organic and less like the solid liquid that made up Them but was unmistakably Themtech. Though it was only about the thickness of one of the skyscrapers that I’d seen in New York, its sheer scale reminded me of the Spokes. It ran as high as I could make out and down into the lava below. Smaller tendrils or roots branched from its entire length, burrowing deep into the rock or into tunnels.
‘What are those for?’ Cat asked.
‘At a guess, it’s harvesting resources it needs from the surrounding area, taking minerals, water from the ice for fuel, using the lava below to generate geothermal energy,’ Pagan said.
The Morlock was impassive but I couldn’t shake the feeling he hated this thing. It was like a giant parasitic maggot eating away at the guts of his planet.
‘It probably processes and gets rid of waste as well, but whatever it’s doing it looks like it’s collecting a hell of a lot of raw material and energy,’ Pagan continued.
‘That’s Nightside over there,’ Tailgunner said, nodding towards the opposite side of the fissure. He looked horrified.
‘You had no idea?’ I asked.
He just shook his head.
‘That would explain why it’s been expanding, growing,’ Morag said. Pagan nodded in agreement.
‘What’s been growing? What is this?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you know where we are?’ Pagan asked.
‘Pagan, I will throw you in the lava,’ I told him.
I received a warning look from Cat.
‘We’re deep under the Citadel, Jakob,’ Morag said.
‘Sweet. Let’s climb up the beanstalk and slay the wicked giant,’ Mudge said. I wasn’t sure he was joking.
Pagan was shaking his head. ‘It has to come through at least two miles of solid rock before it gets to this fissure.’
‘Can we sabotage it?’ I asked.
‘What with? A nuke?’ Cat asked.
‘I’d go for that,’ Mudge said.
‘Cat?’ I nodded at the Morlock. He was staring at her. He seemed angry. Cat was so surprised at the change in expression and the intensity of his look that she stepped back involuntarily.
‘Chill, dude. We’re not going to nuke your mushrooms,’ Mudge said. ‘Do they have any hallucinogenic properties?’
‘Why don’t you eat some?’ I suggested. ‘Can we use this at all?’
I noticed that Morag was smiling.
‘This is our out,’ she said.
The sonic decoy was subtle. A lot of noise may have got the guard fauna to investigate and also would have alerted Demiurge. We lay on the bottom of the icy underground river as dark shapes swam through the water above us, the reactive skin of the dive sheaths hopefully blending us into the stone. The dark shapes in the water were leopard seals fed on growth hormones, altered with neurosurgery to make them even more aggressive and fitted with cybernetic systems including an enlarged and power-assisted jaw. Most divers I knew hated diving anywhere near natural leopard seals, let alone these augmented versions. I wondered if Rolleston had got around to using Themtech on them. The idea of leopard seals with tentacles caused me to shiver.
I felt incredibly bulky with the smart-fabric dive sheath over my full combat gear. The sheath worked as one massive gill, pulling air in from the surrounding water, and was jacked into one of my plugs using technology originally developed for exo-armour. It also masked my heat and electromagnetic signatures. The seals would have had biological material from sharks implanted into them to help them pick up EM signatures.
I’d had rudimentary dive training in the Regiment, as had Rannu, Cat and Pagan, but we were using skillsofts and what little time we’d had in virtual sims. Merle was an accomplished diver. He’d been trained by the US Marines for their Force Recon outfit. We’d had a day to prepare for this, and that had included a run to get some specialist gear from one of Merle’s other Cemetery Wind caches.
The dark, fast-moving shapes swam over us and headed back towards the time-delayed sonar decoy. It would switch itself off before they got there so they wouldn’t actually find anything. If they located the decoy their handlers would know that something was wrong.
We gently pushed ourselves off the cold stone of the underground river floor and finned forward. Cave diving was one of the more dangerous types of diving and I could see why. Lots of tight spaces, particularly if you were as heavily encumbered as we were. The buoyancy controls on our sheaths were working hard to keep us neutrally buoyant. The hostile overhead environment meant that we had to be aware of snagging and couldn’t just surface if things went wrong.
The dangers aside, I liked it down here. Despite the fact that I was cold as the heat was bled off me in an effort to mask my signature. Despite the fact that I was drenched in sweat, there was something peaceful and tranquil about it. Seen underwater, the rock formations that we had become used to took on a whole new life, driving home how alien the environment was, but in a good way. Once again, everything we saw was in the green of lowlight vision. For a while I even forgot about the threat of the leopard seals. Fighting them would be a ball ache. We’d win, but discovery by the seals meant compromise, which meant scrubbing the mission.
The hologrammaitic rendering of the Citadel looked out of place among the rough, sparse, Dark Ages splendour of the great hall of Pagan’s sanctuary
.
‘You’re going to have to trust me. I can hack it,’ Black Annis told us
.
Mother, Tailgunner and Cat were looking sceptical. Mudge was looking bored. I couldn’t read Merle’s face and Rannu was always difficult to judge, but I think there was eagerness in his expression. Either he wanted a chance to prove himself again, which was fine, or he wanted revenge, which was less fine. I wanted revenge. I badly wanted to fuck Rolleston up and, if I got a chance, kill him
.