Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 14 / Chapter 16 –>

The MUT growled across the windblown terrain, its thunderous tires and thigh width axles jouncing over stones and small outcroppings of rock. The two days since the last foray to the geothermal fissure had rewritten the grooved surfaces of the path to the outer engines, and Vernon seemed to struggle mightily–but without success–to keep from rattling their teeth from their jaws. Brett re-discovered the extendable cleats in the floor and managed to keep himself on the narrow bench with a constant exertion of pressure from his legs and a white knuckled grip on the bench’s underside rail. Djen rode beside him once again, their hips touching, or rather slamming together with each jarring lift and drop. Ilam had tucked himself into a corner where he kept his hands woven in a blanket of cargo netting to keep his balance.

Every time Vernon goosed the accelerator he would howl like a good southern boy. Yee-haw! Yee-haw! Brett knew for a fact that he’d never been further south than Atlantic City, wouldn’t recognize the Georgia state flag if he was draped in it and probably couldn’t tell an old country-western tune from Brazilian reggae, and he thought that someone should breach the cockpit and slap him until he remembered.

But Vernon sensed and vicariously shared everyone else’s surge of greedy momentum. No one complained about the jostling. No one removed their helmets after the atmosphere and pressure had stabilized in the crew compartment. If it had been safe, Brett might have ridden with his hand on the exit latch. Because they weren’t so much hurried after the morning as they were plain desperate.

For Brett, it was a dawn that had come too early after a short night. Sandwiched in between had been more of Djen and a sputtering, gasping attempt to finish what he had begun the previous night. And he had, just barely had, before her strong features softened and melted and transformed until it was Emily beneath him and the scent of peaches in his nostrils and the chill of crisp October midnight against his naked back. When he had ejaculated into her, the vision shattered. It was just Djen’s dark and sparkling eyes and white teeth that he saw. Her firm musculature beneath him. Somehow she had known, and while she stroked her sharp-nailed fingers up and down his back, she had congratulated him. He wasn’t certain what for exactly, except maybe persistence. Then they had slept because he was exhausted, and Brett had been glad for it.

Liston had roused them, pounding on the door until Brett straggled blearily out of the tangle of limbs and bedsheets. Ritter? Brett had asked him. It was a logical conclusion. Past bloodshot eyes that had no right to be discovering the morning and lips swollen from grimacing, the doctor had said, Rand. Same symptoms, but worse. Plus Ekers. He started to go during his overnight shift, but stuck it out until the end because it was just aches and a light fever. . .and he’d had the shot this morning. He stopped on the way to let that girl of his from chem prog know. She was comatose when he found her. I can’t tell if he’s deranged with grief or infection, but he’s out of his skull. I had to sedate him.

At his back, Brett had known Djen was rising, listening, pulling on her clothes. Even as Liston spoke, all he heard were her soft moans of pleasure from the previous night. He could see her long and supple limbs pressing into the starched white undershirt, then her shipsuit. He had to blink at Liston to recover his attention.

Who’s your second? Djen had called over Brett’s shoulder. It was Micah, of course. Micah the biologist who would have his hands more than full enough after the morning mission. Brett had recovered enough to say Get him to help you. I’ll take Ilam to the vent instead. Micah’s yours until we get back, then we’ll make other arrangements.

Three more victims. It was just as well that they’d dropped overnight. The station wouldn’t know it yet, not as a general fact. It would take longer for people to correlate that the new ones had received the same antibiotics as everyone else, and an additional few minutes to verify it. Then the panic would begin in earnest. Then something would have to be done or at least a plan for the doing presented in a calm and rational fashion.

Assuming, of course, that no one else went down in the meantime, especially in a visible and violent fashion. Ritter fashion. Ashburn had received pale and uneasy control of the station and the impending crisis, telling Brett that this time he’d welded the weapons’ cabinet shut but that was no excuse not to hurry the hell back.

So they hurried.

#

The fissure’s slope sharpened as they passed the depth where Ritter had taken his samples. They proceeded single file with Brett leading, Djen and Ilam crowding close behind and Vernon bringing up the rear. With each step, Ilam muttered into his radio things they could not hear, but Brett observed that it was better in some ways than the silence that surrounded them now and had smothered their attempts at conversation on the long ride, so he didn’t tell him to stop. It was disturbing, the near absence of sound. They carried their high-intensity lamps. The satchels slung from their shoulders were lined with sensors, drills, hydrometers. The weight and rattle of the equipment against his hip was tangible through his suit, but enclosed in his helmet and impermeable suit, to his senses the bag made no noise. The deeper they plunged, the more aware he became of the darkness and the weight of rock piled above them. It made him want to gasp for air as though his tanks were low or incorrectly calibrated.

After the first hundred meters, the shape and characteristic of the vent began to change. The rippled surface became harsher, all sharp edges and clutching, bladed stones. The rock had a look of obsidian, cold and hard and gleaming darkly in the light. If any of them fell, the risk to their suits was substantial. But the walls had also begun to separate, widening out into what was not precisely a cavern, but less claustrophobic surroundings nonetheless.

Further along, there were niches which looked like impressions worn into the rock by the roped bodies of serpents. Some were vertical gashes tapered at the ends and wide in the middle that stabbed up toward the roof, but most were shallow horizontal cuts near the floor. Brett passed these for a time, panning his light around and ahead, then stopped. He noted that the air temperature had climbed to 281 Kelvin, well above the freezing mark. He put his hand against the wall and pulled it away. The stone was still dry. If there was any dampness to it, he wouldn’t have been able to feel it through his gloves.

“Food, water, warmth,” he said, only half to himself.

“Except they obviously don’t require warmth if they did what we suspect they did to Nine,” Ilam said in return.

Djen shone her light at them. “The ability to survive and the conditions for optimal breeding are two separate things. You could survive naked in Death Valley, but you wouldn’t feel much like slinging the seed pod after the first day.”

Vernon chuckled. “Depends totally on what she looks like. Understand the mind of a man before making generalizations.”

Brett ignored them. He carefully lowered himself to his knees and peered below the jutting horizontal shelf of stone at his feet. There were small depressions in the floor beside and beneath the outcropping, puddles where lava had once pooled in its slow trek to the surface. He reached into the cavity as far as his hand would go, felt along the floor, then brought the glove back for a look. Nothing.

“That isn’t very scientific,” Djen said, kneeling beside him.

He shrugged. “It’s the most sensitive instrument I’ve got handy.”

“Put you face closer to the ground and shine the light in. If there’s any surface dampness, the edges of the rocks should glint.”

“Oh, that’s much more scientific than my method.”

Brett flattened himself with the light held in front of him. The niche was deeper than he’d suspected, nearly a full meter. There weren’t any definite edges to examine, only a sort of rounded alcove molded into the far wall like the banks of a tidal pool or the rut left behind by an automobile tire that has been stuck in mud. Still, there was something he could not quite settle about the view. The rock appeared glazed, almost glassy and it initially occurred to him that it might have been carbonized by the incredible heat of an ancient magma flow. But the luster was sharp, as though the surface had been freshly polished. He reached toward it, but couldn’t get far enough. He tried to shimmy beneath the shelf to get closer, but nearly succeeded only in wedging himself.

“I’m too big to get my hands back there,” he said finally. “Djen, you’re going to have to try.”

“I have a hydrometer,” Ilam said, but Brett waved him off.

“I want clear evidence, not just numbers on a readout telling me there’s water here. If I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”

“Is it water?” Vernon asked.

“I don’t know. It’s something, though. Maybe just more of the silicate ring structures.”

Brett stood and Djen handed him her lamp as she dropped onto her chest in front of the fissure. “Not so fast,” he growled. “Be careful.”

She wriggled about for a moment, started to roll onto her back before remembering the rectangular bulge of her heat exchange and air unit strapped to her shoulders. She settled for pressing the outside of her helmet and the side panels of the exchange unit up against the shelf and wriggling for extension. Brett could hear her exertions, faint grunts and gasps of air as she struggled forward.

“Markus,” she said.

“Do you want your light?”

She didn’t answer at first, but she drew in a gasp of breath. “Markus, did you see this?”

“It’s like glazing, I know. It’s too warm to be frozen, but is it damp? Is it water?”

“It isn’t water.”

A stab of disappointment. “Are you certain? You don’t have your light.”

“That’s why I’m sure. You’ve got to see this.” He began to lower himself over her, hoping to peer in the slice of darkness above her head. She stopped him. “Turn out the light, Markus. Turn out all the lights.”

“I don’t think that’s wise,” Vernon mused. “Those lights have spent the last couple of hours rolling in and out of wide pressure differentials and temperature ranges. You shut them off and they might blow when you want them on again.”

“Then muffle them, for God’s sake! You’ve got to see, Markus!”

He was beside her then, thumbing the button on both of their lamps because Vernon and Ilam would certainly leave theirs on. Shadows closed about them, and his helmet brushed hers as he knelt, then lay flat and stared into the crevice. For a moment, he was alone in the watery black of the tunnel. Afterglow images of the lamps blinded him. He felt cold despite the vibration of his heat exchange against his back.

Then he could hear Djen’s soft breath, full of an unspoken wonder. She seemed to surround him, to share the space inside his helmet, his e-suit. And then he could see.

From the darkness emerged a faint opalescence, what he had initially mistaken as further afterglow in his peripheral vision. But it didn’t remain at the edges of his sight, it filled the darkness in the fissure with a patina of shimmering color. Not white, but red and green, blue and a dozen other shades he couldn’t name, all pulsating and shifting from one to the next like the sparkle off a pure diamond. It was starlight glimpsed from a billion light years, so ghostly and pale as to be almost invisible except on the clearest and deepest of winter nights.

“What is it?” he whispered to her, though he couldn’t say why.

“Internal luminescence. Possibly some form of stored oxidized luciferin–like lightning bugs back home. Can you see it, Markus, they’re moving? Like veins of silver.”

He couldn’t see her, but he could hear the excitement rising in her voice. “But is it what we came for?”

“It’s warm enough. The conditions down here are hostile, but the temperature could be called comfortable enough if they can make the transition from 280 K to human body temp . Nutrientwise, there could be gaseous detritus from the last volcanic event that supports a basic ecosystem.”

She grunted and extended her arm until her fingers just brushed the surface of the rock. She held them up and Brett could see a shimmering smear on their tips.

“Don’t do that,” he muttered.

“My suit’s secure.” She did not say the rest, what they were all thinking.

As if it isn’t already too late.

“All the same,” he said as he took her hand in his and brushed her fingers clean, “let’s not take any unnecessary chances.”

“What are you talking about?” Vernon asked.

Illuminated by the light of his lamp, Ilam grinned. “Critters. Critters in the ground.”

Vernon wheeled on him. “What the fuck?”

No one had explained it to him.

“Microscopic biological organisms,” Djen said. “They’re the cause of the failure by Engine Nine. Among other things, that is.”

“No way.” Vernon eased nearer to her, holding his lamp in front and creeping slowly forward. “Let me see.”

Djen shifted to the side and levered herself to her feet. She took Vernon’s lamp and shone it down the vent the way they had come so he wouldn’t be blinded by the glare. He lay prone for a time, saying nothing, then struggled to his feet. His face was grim when he accepted the lamp back from her.

“How is this possible? Assgasp scrubbed this rock to a two kilometer radar depth for sterility. The project would have never flown if there was any life form evidence, no matter how primitive the ecosystem.”

Ilam said, “Obviously they missed something.”

But Brett frowned. “Vernon’s right. We’re not deep enough yet. It could be a hyper reflective glazing that’s bending the light waves from the operating lamps. It could be a new type of mineral with photodistributive properties. Maybe it’s a flourescent chemical reaction or a luminous gas coating. It could be anything.”

“Or they could have just missed them,” Ilam repeated. “The Global Survey Project readings may not have been sensitive enough to spot an organism of this size.”

“You’re both right,” Djen said. She opened her satchel and brought out her wide bored coring drill. “We’ll get a sample here, then keep going. We can’t afford to make any assumptions. There may not be time to come back if we’ve gathered insufficient evidence.”

Brett agreed and they set to work. Djen settled back onto the floor and wedged herself beneath the rock shelf. Brett extended the stabilizing legs and tested the power cell before handing the drill down to her. The drill was compact and heavy. Rather than a standard bit, it used a wide dual cylinder bore jagged at the cutting edge with twin rows of teeth.

The drill whined to life and Djen leaned her shoulder into it for several moments.

“The first cylinder is at depth,” she reported. “I’ve primed the tracers. Do you want me to take a second depth?”

The reservoir of argon tracer lubricant seeped fluid both between the external cylinder and the rock and on all exposed surfaces of the internal and external cylinders. The interior bit could extend beyond the first bore almost double the original drilling depth. The sheathing of lubricant both cooled the metal and protected the integrity of the sample by coating the core with a sealant that would be pared off in the laboratory. The argon was readily identifiable under magnification and samples containing the argon tracers after paring could be eliminated as having been compromised by surface contaminants.

“Just to be thorough,” he said, nodding. “Though I don’t expect contamination to be an issue.”

It took only a few minutes longer, then Djen rose, careful to carry the drill with the bore elevated. Ilam produced a sterile bag, unsealed it and held it open as she pressed the button on the drill’s handle which ejected the core. The striated pearl and gray segment dropped in, its surfaces steaming from the heated lubricant coating and Ilam sealed the bag around it. The bag also contained an interior coating of unreactive argon gas to shield against contaminants.

Ilam popped the container into his satchel and snapped the locks.

“Forward ho,” he said.

“Forward ho,” Brett agreed.

Vernon only shook his head and peered at the darkness beneath the overhanging rock. “Alien bacteria. That is just not right. Not right at all.”

#

The vent leveled out beneath them, a sharp and sudden break from the steady descent. Brett plunged ahead, more than willing to take full advantage. They’d paused at occasional niche or outcrop to search for more indications of the organism. They had four new samples to show for it, and he had been monitoring his remaining air closely. They would have to return to the MUT before long.

Brett wasn’t displeased; it was tedious work, taking samples. Lots of walking and straining and searching for something that would be definitive. And all the time, Persia weighed heavily on him. What did Liston know? What had he learned in the intervening time? Were there more sick now?

Or more dead.

He pushed himself on, promising just a little farther, just beyond that next pool of darkness. Except that finally there was no next pool, just one continuous void of empty black. The walls of the vent curled back, the floor rolled out beyond the insignificant illumination of his lamp. He raised his eyes and saw only more darkness, more suffocating night. Brett stopped and shone his light in a wide arc. He could see nothing.

Vernon whistled, but there was a catch of fear in the sound of it.

“What is this place?” Djen asked, her voice hushed.

“Give me a GPS,” Brett said.

It took Vernon a few seconds to access his palm terminal. “Do you want the numbers or just confirmation for what you’re thinking?”

“What are you thinking?” Ilam said.

“Halprin Mons,” Vernon answered. “This would have been the magma chamber for Halprin Mons, when it was active, I mean. Some six or seven thousand odd years ago.”

Brett nodded. “What’s our depth?”

“Just under two k.”

Djen added the beam of her light to his. “Do you think this is the end of the line? There are likely to be other vents exiting this chamber.”

“Let’s not burn the air,” Ilam suggested. “I’m going to have to switch to my reserve midway up as it stands now.”

Brett thought about it and agreed. “We don’t know where the other vents might come out. We could wind up kilometers from the MUT if we can get to the surface at all. Vernon, what’s my ambient temp?”

“A very comfortable three-oh-four Kelvin. Bikini weather.” Vernon winked at Djen.

“Approaching human body temp,” she said. “You want a core from this room?”

“It would stand to reason.” Brett moved back to the tunnel, then turned and followed the irregular curve of the chamber wall. Where he shone his light ahead of him, the walls glistened with crystalline silicates as they had near the surface. He stopped. “I’m wondering.”

“Wondering about what?”

“Ilam, what exactly is a silicate?”

“A silicate is a mineral type containing silicon, oxygen and one or more metallic trace elements. Structurally, they appear as ionic tetrahedrons–pyramids with one silicon atom surrounded by four oxygen atoms. They’re formed in large quantities within most occurrences of cooling lava.”

“You’re not a geologist,” Vernon said.

Brett ignored the comment. “This entire vent structure is silicate rich.”

“As would be expected. Much of most terran class planets are silicate rich.”

“What’s the difference between, say, a naturally occurring silicate and semiconductor grade silicon. Specifically, the silicon coating we use on the micromesh cables for the Engine screens.”

Ilam hesitated for several moments, but stood blinking at Brett. “Industrial grade silicon like what we use for the screens goes through a series of refinements. The meshes have a multi-dopant electrical semiconductor grade silicon coating over a silicate glass fiber tube. The electrical energy and information packets transmitted along the fiber is dispersed at regular node points and retransmitted along the silicon coating to microreceptors on the mech units. The actual dopant atom in use depends on the segment of the screen and the sector of the mesh in question.”

Brett shook his head. He felt as though he was attempting to climb a wall he could not see. “But silicates and silicon. . .what’s the difference?”

“Industrial or electronics grade silicon is almost an obscenely pure substance. Silicates are its bastard relatives who have made a series of questionable marriages.” Ilam grinned. “How’s that?”

“Silicon is extracted from silicates.”

“By heating or dilution in hydrofluoric acid. It’s much more complicated than that, though.”

Djen said. “Markus, I don’t know that we have a biological precedent for a bacteria that metabolizes electronics grade doped silicon compounds.”

Ilam shook his head. “Don’t look at me. I’ll defer to Micah on that question when we get back to Persia.”

“I think we’re already way beyond precedents as it is,” Brett said. “But let’s assume Djen’s right, what other uses would could the organism find for a silicon rich environment?”

“What would a silicon metabolizing bacteria find as nutrient in the spinal fluid and brain of Tappen?” she countered.

Vernon goggled at them and began to sputter.

“Now isn’t the time to discuss it,” Brett said firmly. “Let’s take another coring and be done.”

He set them to work dragging out the drill and noncontaminant bags, then sent them around the curve of the room in opposite directions to investigate possible sites for drilling. Brett made his way toward the middle of the vast cavern. As the others spilled away, they chattered in his ear over the radio, but their voices seemed distant and tinny. Their powerful lamps seemed to dissipate, to lose their luminescence. When they turned away from him, it was as though he couldn’t see them at all.

This, he thought, is what it was like to be Tappen before he died, or Ritter or the others now comatose. Reality has receded. Human contact has become a whisper. It is unadulterated isolation. And it’s also what it must be like to be Cassandra, Emily, on a small scale. Locked away in a sub-level where no one visits, the lights dimmed or out completely. Only the sound of your own metallic respirations to keep you company.

He shivered, then reminded himself that it wasn’t really true. He had mobility. He had a light shining down at his feet and a voice that would bring companionship any time he chose to use it.

Almost without thinking, Brett clicked off his lamp. The darkness consumed him. He could feel it almost like waves rolling against him, buffeting him back, forward, side to side. There was no point upon which he could orient himself, and the awareness of his own body vanished. He floated on ebon seas beneath a moonless sky. He lifted his eyes and there were stars, faint but stunning, roiling across the dome of the heavens. Stars that twinkled from horizon to horizon.

The drilling began with a deafening, screeching howl. It echoed across the chamber, seemed to vibrate the air. Brett’s teeth set on edge, and as he watched, the stars began to fall. Not to plummet in fiery and fantastic arcs, not to race across the backdrop of space faster than his eyes could track them, but to drift down like argent snowflakes. They tumbled in slow and airy dances on the currents of unseen winds. A rain of stars.

Brett said, “Stop.”

No one heard him. The drilling went on in grinding, thunderous rhythm. He shouted at them, and the machine scream stumbled, then died.

“Ilam,” he said. There was too much breath in his voice. He sounded on the verge of panic.

“Yes, Commander.”

“Put your back to the lights and look at the roof. Tell me what you see.”

Djen’s voice intruded, sounding weary with strain. “Markus, are you all right?”

“Do it, Ilam.”

Silence. The universe seemed to fill with the death of the stars.

I’m not hallucinating. I’m not Tappen. I’m not going to die.

Ilam gasped. “My God, is that–”

“Billions of them,” Djen whispered, and her voice was rich with awe.

It wasn’t stars, it was them. The unnamed organism that had declared its war against Tappen and Persia and Sperling Engines in general. They strung themselves together in daisy chain structures of crystalline beauty. They tripped from high places, from cracks high in the chamber ceiling, from ledges along the walls. They coated the rock like sprinkles of pixie dust, and from the sonic thunder of the drill, they slipped and toppled and fell.

Brett breathed deeply and stared. Like Djen, his suit was secure, but he couldn’t tolerate the thought of their invisible, individual pinprick glows on his arms and shoulders, his thighs and his helmeted head. They couldn’t enter his e-suit, but they’d be there, clinging, waiting for the first breach, waiting to be drawn into the MUT, through the decon procedures maybe, then greedily on into Persia where they would join their brothers and sisters. The spore of Archae Stoddard, a sterile world.

He stabbed the button to turn on his lamp. The brilliance was blinding, but it warmed him also. It made the fall of stars vanish, replaced them with a peripheral glare against his faceplate.

Brett ducked his head and trotted back toward the tunnel from which they had come. He waved at the others as he passed, not trusting his voice to carry the proper message. They didn’t wait; they understood. The three of them clutched at their satchels, wrenched the drill from its partial bore and began to run after him.

#

They did not speak until they were safely inside the transport and heading home. Vernon drove even more recklessly, it seemed to Brett, as though what they had seen in the magma chamber had terrified him. No one asked about the status of the internal air. No one was going to remove their helmets or compromise their suits.

Finally, Djen said, “What was that back there?”

“We know what it was,” Brett said.

“But how? That’s what I mean. Those weren’t microscopic organisms, they were. . .clusters. There must have been hundreds of them in each flake, maybe thousands.”

“Interdependent ecocommunities coexisting on silicate wafers,” Ilam said slowly. “That would be my guess, though it’s unheard of at that level of development. But it also implies a level of altruism with which we haven’t credited bacterial species.”

Djen knuckled her brow. “If it’s altruistic, it’s sentient.”

Brett shook his head. “We don’t know that.”

<– Chapter 14 / Chapter 16 –>