Tropic of Creation (4 page)

What the enlisteds saw as sticks were actually plants of great complexity, ranging from short stubs to pillars over twelve feet high. Many of them were vertically striated with ridges, between which tracings of green appeared to carry on the plants’ photosynthesis. The grooves were deeply folded into the wood, as though hiding from, as well as benefiting from, the sunlight. The trees had a central shaft that at lower levels harbored modest reserves of water, tapped from the aquifer below. Burls of gnarled wood disturbed the symmetry of some of the trees. A few of these were great potbellied growths of enormous density. Beneath the gray spiny trees was no understory at all, only the dusty millennial mats of fallen companions.

Two suns fired the sky. Captain Marzano’s people called the smaller one, the one in elliptical orbit, a red dwarf from its smoldering, reddish glow, and no amount of science could dislodge a good name once the enlisteds dubbed something. But her father liked her to call it a brown dwarf, because technically it wasn’t a red dwarf, and not really a star at all, emitting its light from gravitational energy and reflected light from the primary.

Sascha spied the bright yellow cable that snaked through the Sticks between Charlie and Baker camps. With radio useless here, it was her only link to her friend, the elegant and profane Badri Nazim.

Private Nazim was Sascha’s friend—despite the fact that they’d never met in the flesh and had only known each other a few days. Nazim was just five years older than Sascha, but was old enough to have a regen skull, from which sprouted bone white hair in stark contrast to her nearly black skin. Sascha enjoyed Nazim’s exotic looks, worldly vocabulary, and their shared devotion to electronic chess. But she liked the vocabulary best—Nazim’s arsenal of expletives and ripe expressions. When Sascha posted a chess query on the electronic bulletin board, Nazim responded within the hour. “Delighted to play chess” was how Sascha related the message to her mother. What Nazim actually said was “Chess at 21:00. Just don’t mess your pastel panties if you lose.”

Stepping over the cable, she and her father hurried on, sparing no time for the Gray Spiny Forest and its modest wonders. The hexadron would soon be put to its task, an event that both intrigued and worried Sascha. “What will he find underground, Father?”

“Abandoned war bunkers, I should say.”

“He’s going alone?”

“So he says.”

“That’s brave.” She caught the flicker of a smile at the edge of his face. “Well, it is.”

“Yes, of course. I would never detract from the man’s virtues, Sascha.” Earnestly said. Teasing.

She took his hand. “But I love you best.”

“I’ll remind you of that when I’m in my dotage, and whining for my slippers.”

After a time she asked, “How will he get back up? How does it work against gravity?”

“Ahtra technology, I suppose. They’ve got ships forty-percent the speed of light, don’t forget.”

“But how will he know how to run it if we can’t even understand their technology?”

Her father smiled. “It’s just a digging machine, not a spaceship. The techs worked it out.”

They stood at the head of the draw where, below, Dammond and Marzano chatted, accompanied by a group of officers and enlisteds. Her father held firmly to her hand, keeping her beside him.

“He won’t care if we go down,” she protested.

The digging machine sat in the wadi like a dark egg, tucked away by some feral, metallic beast. This did not seem like a very good idea all of a sudden, this
going down
. She stood, letting the breeze fill her blouse and wick the sweat away. A rumble caused everyone to look in the direction of several towering clouds with scoured, gray bottoms.

“Why is he going alone? Shouldn’t he bring a few soldiers?”

“Well, if there’s to be trouble, one soldier or three won’t make much difference, I suspect.”

“Then it’s a very brave thing.…” She glanced at her father to see if he agreed, but as usual, he maintained a neutrality toward Eli Dammond, a habit of long practice, to remain aloof from military gossip.

At last Captain Dammond waved them down and Sascha, conscious of the group watching her, managed a graceful slide down the sandy hillock.

Captain Dammond wore plain fatigues, no insignia,
and his head was bare, showing a mass of sandy hair that he wore rather longer than the military style. The hair softened scoured features that made him seem uncaring or self-contained. The gray eyes, in particular, were flinty, and when angered she had seen them harden to black. But she had also seen him smile, and thought him handsome in any mood.

Looking to her father, the captain said, “Lieutenant Roche is in charge until I return.” Roche, standing next to Captain Dammond, was a veteran of war, a tall, burly fellow. Captain Marzano’s face was fenced in, no wisp of emotion escaping.

Her father nodded at the courtesy of the information. It was none of any Olander’s business who commanded, not strictly.

But Sascha was distracted from the conversation. There was something about this hexadron she didn’t like. For a machine to transport soldiers, it looked wrong. It was too small. It had no proper Congress Worlds design but that odd ahtra shape, those six sides, waiting to engulf Captain Dammond and keep him. No, this was not a good idea.

Eli was talking to her father. Then he smiled and said something to her, she hardly knew what, and he was climbing in. She wanted to cry out, put a stop to this event. What did it matter what lay below ground if they were leaving and never coming back? What harm to leave these bunkers and their war trophies behind? Even if ahtra lurked in the those tunnels, they were at peace now; no one need discover them or their purposes.

Just as they were closing the hatch, Sascha darted forward. The inside of the hexadron glowed from temporary lights the techs had rigged. She looked at Eli and said, “I’ve decided to name my spiny amphibian after you, Captain.”

“Thank you, Sascha. That would be an honor.” Looking at her closely, he finished, “See you in a little while, then.”
“Yes, but …”

He was watching her as he always did, patiently, as though he cared about what she might have to say.

“Sascha …” came her father’s warning voice behind her.

She swallowed, struggling with whether to speak, whether to say,
Don’t go, Captain. Don’t go down.…
But there was no reason why, no argument a soldier would listen to.

“Hurry back,” she said, at last, and conjured up her best smile, though it felt hollow as a spiny tree.

I
nside, the hexadron was spare and simple. A small control panel contained finger-sized depressions cradling touch pads for boring and hatch controls. Eli sat with his knees drawn up and his neck slightly bent, his 5’10” frame a tight fit in the capsule. His hand rested on the panel, but it was Sascha’s face he saw before him, a fleeting look of fear darting across her eyes.
Why are you doing this
, she seemed to say.
Don’t do this
.

He’d seen that look before, on his mother’s face, when she watched four of her five sons and her husband enter the mines day after day, year after year. Eli wondered why she always expected the worst of the mines when it was never mining that killed her boys, but only the war—the one she’d been proud to send them off to. Three came home again in body bags. And Eli, despite many battles, had never taken so much as a scratch. So despite the combat decorations, Eli lacked one badge—the indelible one—of regen.

He pressed the declivity to engage the digger. Gears churned, and the frame shuddered so hard his teeth
clattered. He clenched his jaw and braced his arms on the seat. After a few seconds the drilling took on a high-pitched whine paired with relentless grinding. Rock and dirt raced through the conveyor tubes of the hexadron’s hull, spewing the tailings behind as the craft sank into the ground. Soon there would be only a trembling mound of soil at the surface where the digger had been.

It took longer than Eli expected. He switched on his lamp. His hand on the small range gun at his hip was damp with perspiration as the hexadron warmed to its task. It was a descent of 120 feet. Next to him was a tank of air, in case of trouble on the way down or back up. He didn’t expect trouble, but that’s just when it would probably happen. His father and brothers would have been at ease in such a place, deep in the bowels of a planet; but Eli had vowed he would never be a miner, and his parents chose the only other option: they sent him for a soldier. The draft would have snared him eventually anyway, and it was an honorable calling; until Eli showed an aptitude for an officer. Then he saw his father harden toward him, as though Eli’s rise in rank set his brothers lower by default. If enlisted was good enough for them, it was good enough for Eli. But now that three of them were dead, how could he ever compete with that?

His ears were plugged with noise. Rocks ground beneath his feet as the hexadron lurched downward in small, shuddering jolts.

It felt like going into combat. Times like this were what a professional soldier trained for, maybe lived for. Times when the mental world peeled away, leaving you in the center of the moment, doubts left behind along with every other piece of cognition. He thought of the many times he’d slammed a shuttle down into atmosphere, ready to debark and fight … the old combat high … distant memory now after missions of transport, supply, administration, and routine. He still had his rank, despite the
carnage that was not—at least officially—his fault in that last battle. Not the last battle of the war, by any means, but
his
last battle …

With a final lurch, the craft stopped.

Dead quiet crept in, replacing the roar of teeth against stone. His bones rang with harmonics, skin tingling. Pings of small rocks skittered off the hull. He fingered the hatch control. A sickening delay, then the scrape of the panel. Beyond, only black—and the piquant rush of oxygenated air.

Eli powered up his lamp and crawled through. The beam flashed on walls to the side, and the floor, a short drop down from where he stood. The techs had nailed the calibration to within inches.

He stepped out, leaving the hexadron mostly buried in the wall, all but the egress side.

The beam of the lamp revealed a shelf cut into stone, stretching out beyond the cone of light, but far enough to convince him that this tunnel was a construct. Some ten feet high by eight feet wide, the place had the look and smell of decay.

Standing now in the middle of the tunnel, he listened. Profound silence surrounded him. After a time, he heard faint sounds, buried sounds: hissing of air, dripping water, creaks of sediments giving way to gravity. Once—though it was surely imaginary—a remote shout. On another level, he registered only silence. It was as though his ears carried background noise, the reverberation of things heard before, erratic snips of sound lost in the maze of the cochlea.

He set off in the direction of the most extensive tunnels as mapped by the survey team. There was no machinery, no litter of artifacts, no rails or tracks, yet the walls themselves, in their regularity, spoke of purpose and permanence. In places, water seepage traced rusty fingers from ceiling to floor.

Pulling out his comm unit, he made his call to Roche on the surface. It was no surprise to him when it went unanswered. If radio didn’t work on the surface, no reason why it would come to life 120 feet below ground. But he
would
follow procedures. It would all be done according to procedure.

Turning back, he secured his tether to the hexadron with a staple. When he glanced up from that task, he noted the walls again. Something odd about them, regular but pitted, gray with what might be a pinkish cast.

The place had to be ahtran—who else could have built this? If true, it was a momentous discovery. Command would want to know about this, and soon. Because ahtra were never known to use worlds other than their great metal spheres, the world-habitats. They were creatures of their metal worlds, only fighting on planetary surfaces for the rare ground offensive against Congress World targets.

If they mined here, what did they extract? No substitute for neymium, surely, the cause of decades of war. Neymium was the door to interstellar journeys, a fuel source so compatible with the fusion drives that ships were freed from the weight of massive fuel cargoes, freed to move fast enough, far enough. When Congress Worlds discovered the Belt, however, they found their trading partners had long since staked their claim, and weren’t happy to share. Congress Worlds looked at the Belt and thought of freedom, wealth, and converse among their worlds without dependence on ahtra traders. The ahtra looked at the Belt and thought,
Keep out
.

Damn likely the ahtra had a similar view of the place where he now stood.

But they were at peace, Eli reminded himself. Still, it was a fragile construct, a thing of words and promises between two alien combatants. Perhaps, to the ahtra, agreements meant nothing. Of course, having a system of tunnels on a backwater planet did not break the peace. If that
was all it was. But he felt certain there was more. And if there was, he’d find it, showing Command that he could pursue the ahtra when it was right to do so. Could pursue them as far as need be.