Edge of the Wire, page 9
“Bringing more men here,” Rowe considered aloud. “Putting them into danger again.”
“It is the only way to accomplish the task,” Noyes insisted. “Plus, they would only be working on the exterior of the ship, where no violence has occurred.”
“Okay,” said Rowe. “I don’t have anything better. Let’s just get out of this place.”
Waverly nodded to say he agreed with that plan.
They returned up the dark corridors and staircases of the Marie Curie, making their way back toward the opening into the loading bay. Both men were lost in thought. During the entire return journey, Rowe only spoke once.
“‘Don’t Waste Your Time’ . . . Noyes, I’m just now thinking; Is there any chance you can analyze the handwriting from that message?”
“Already have, boy-o. I think someone wrote it with a hand that was not dominant. It doesn’t register a clear match with anybody from the Marie Curie. It was probably done by a female person, but I’m not 100 percent. Men can have feminine left hands.”
“Hmm,” Rowe said. “Okay.”
As they reached the opening to the loading bay, Rowe’s enviro-suit again made sputtering audio noises as though someone was trying to reach him.
“What the fuck is it this time?” Rowe said to himself.
Then he put his hand to his ear and said: “Go ahead.”
In a few moments, the transmission became clear.
“Yes, Rowe? This is Chief Engineer Glazer. We’re a few clicks north of the lander starting a cable plow. I don’t know if it might be connected to what you’re looking for out on the Marie Curie, but it could be.”
“What?” asked Rowe. “What might be connected?”
For a moment the chief engineer’s voice faltered. Rowe tapped the side of his suit with his finger, trying to bring the signal back.
Then it came.
“You should just come and take a look. We’ve found something. It’s underneath the surface.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
BACK AT THE LANDER, ROWE AND WAVERLY SAT ON AN UNPACKED PALLET of digging equipment and waited. All along the horizon they could see places where Silkworms had begun to erect pylons and stanchions holding aloft great masses of wire that would soon crisscross the planet and broadcast the Goo. Other Silkworms prepared to deploy wiring in a subterranean manner, readying great diggers and drills.
“With all this wire, you’d think we could run a physical communications line up to the Apollinax or something,” Waverly said idly. “Have the ship match the planet’s rotation. Stay in touch that way.”
An engineer carrying a spool of wiring equipment passed close as Waverly said these words, and chimed in.
“Nah,” said the man. “That atmosphere would eat anything we rigged up! Steel. Kevlar. Shred it in a matter of minutes. Chew it up like electric teeth! I’m surprised that emergency rocket ever got up to us with the picture. Have you even looked at what the lightning did to the outside of our lander during the descent?”
Rowe and Waverly had not. Now they did, and saw that the lander’s hull was crudely gnawed and chewed all along the sides, as if by giant metal canines. Many parts of the ship’s exterior had been seared entirely black.
“The worst part’s on the bottom, where you can’t even see,” the engineer added.
Rowe and Waverly could only nod in agreement.
A moment later, a squad of five men—with one very tall person at the fore—sauntered up and introduced themselves. The tall man had prematurely white hair and pale blue eyes that conjured a Siberian Husky for Rowe.
“I’m Chief Engineer Glazer,” he said. “Thank you for coming back so quickly.”
Rowe and Waverly introduced themselves.
Glazer stared at Noyes, whom Rowe had kept floating by his shoulder. The chief engineer’s expression said he was uneasy with this apparent breach of protocol.
“It’s okay; he can have an AI because he’s dying,” Waverly said. “Like real soon. Of natural causes, though.”
“Oh,” Glazer said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Glazer didn’t sound very sorry. (It was one of those phrases Rowe had, by now, become accustomed to. The lack of sincerity was expected, and almost always there if you knew to look for it.)
“Are you ready to see what we found by the plow ports?” Glazer asked.
“Yeah, all right,” Waverly replied.
“You couldn’t just tell us?” Rowe asked. “Send a photo?”
“Better to see firsthand,” Glazer declared. “There are . . . aspects that might be confusing in a picture.”
They followed Glazer and the rest of his squad. The men marched north of the lander toward one of the massive electric plows. It sat motionless and imposing, like a large resting land mammal just visible on the horizon. It had churned a single rut into the slate gray surface—long and wide—where wire would soon be lain to carry the Goo.
The men arrived at the edge of the rut and looked down into it.
“It’s like . . . tubes,” Glazer said.
The rut was perhaps three feet deep. The plowing machine had displaced the ground, breaking the glassy green veins that ran through it into crystalline chips. This revealed dead rock that would take centuries of TerraChem to convert into soil. Yet there was something else as well. And Rowe would be damned if Glazer wasn’t right. It looked like—yes—little tubes. Ancient and nearly fossilized, but something made of a material wholly unlike anything else on Tendus-13. Rowe could think of very few scenarios in which they could have come into existence organically.
Rowe pulled up his mission briefing and began to page through the backgrounder covering the history of the planet.
“Mineral matter, rocks, glassy sand, dust,” Rowe read. “There was probably surface liquid at one time, but I don’t see anything about underground tubes that carried water . . . which is what these have to be.”
Rowe looked up from his notes.
“Tendus-13 has water in the atmosphere though, right?” he added.
“Only above a certain height,” Glazer replied. “The water stays up inside stratus clouds that never produce rain.”
“What about in previous times?” Waverly chimed in. “The history of this planet through the aeons, and such.”
Noyes cleared his throat.
“The origins of a J-Class can be hard to know,” the hologram said. “It could have had water tubes at one point.”
Waverly tilted his head to indicate that this answer was not very satisfying.
“These look like they were put here,” Rowe said, voicing what everyone was silently thinking. “They don’t look like something that happened in the course of geological time.”
“Now then, boy-o,” Noyes cautioned. “Many planets have anomalies that look intentional, and we know how few of them actually are. There’s the perfect face on Gunther-X. The natural elevators on the Mandarin Ring planets. Or think of the Giant’s Causeway back on Earth; all those perfectly interlocking hexagons that everyone thought had to be made by man. Except they were only the planet doing what planets do.”
Rowe looked over to Glazer.
“Let’s excavate a length of the tubes,” Rowe said.
“We can do that,” Glazer said, and motioned for his team to get back on the enormous plow.
“What made you think this was connected to the Marie Curie?” Rowe asked as the plow team worked.
“Can’t be too careful,” Glazer said, scanning the horizon. “It seems to me that it could all be connected. All of it or none of it. Could these tubes have made people go crazy and kill each other? Hell if I know.”
Rowe did not know either.
As Rowe and Waverly watched, Glazer’s squad used the front part of the plow—which looked more than a little bit like a cow-catcher at the fore of a steam locomotive—to carefully dig into the ground around the tubes. With extreme precision, the great machine unearthed a tenfoot length and deposited it on the ground beside the rut.
Rowe bent and picked up some of the tubing.
“It’s light and pliable, like rubber,” he announced. “The interior of the tube is hollow. But look at this . . .”
There were tiny strings inside that fell apart when Rowe touched them.
“Are these veins for circulating something?” Rowe asked. “Sap or blood?”
Rowe looked around. The other Silkworms merely shrugged.
“Our mission backgrounder makes clear that there has never been traditional organic life on this planet,” Glazer said.
Suddenly, Waverly spoke up.
“What if it’s us?”
“Excuse me?” said Glazer.
“What if that’s something we did—the ESA,” Waverly clarified. “What if this is a tube that we put in the ground?”
Glazer looked straight ahead and blinked his piercing blue eyes for several moments.
“You mean the Marie Curie crew did this, before they were rendered homicidal?” Glazer asked.
“Yeah,” Waverly said. “They were sent here to wire the planet, after all. Maybe they got around to doing some of that before things went haywire.”
“But . . .” objected Glazer. “But we found this underneath flat, undisturbed silt and unbroken glass that has been here for thousands of years. Plus, this doesn’t look like any ESA wire I’ve ever seen.”
“No, it doesn’t,” said Waverly. “So maybe it’s a wire that’s been corrupted. Maybe the planet heals itself in a way we don’t fully understand. Maybe it heals very quickly, and that’s what wire looks like after a week here.”
Rowe did not think his friend’s hypothesis carried much weight, if only because the wiring equipment had yet to be unloaded from the Marie Curie. Still, he appreciated Waverly’s willingness to toss out new ideas, even when they were far-fetched.
Enviro-suits were not designed for analyzing much more than immediate environmental dangers. Nonetheless, Rowe activated every scanner he had in his suit and focused them on the tube in his hand.
“Nothing,” he said after a moment. “This just tells me it’s not poisonous. Or not very poisonous. And not alive.”
“The lander has more powerful tools for looking at these sorts of things,” Waverly reminded him. “Failing that, we could try to launch some of it up to the Apollinax. It might get through.”
“That’s one idea,” Rowe said.
For the moment, he hung the wrapped tubing around his neck like a lanyard. It was not heavy.
“Any reason we shouldn’t keep digging?” Glazer asked.
“Not that I see,” Rowe told him. “But let us know if you find anything else.”
“Do you think this . . .” Glazer began, then started over. “I’ve wired a lot of planets, and this is my first time seeing this sort of thing.”
“Me too,” said Rowe as he headed off in the direction of the lander. “And it’ll be my last time, probably.”
Glazer did not have to ask what that meant.
Inside the lander, Rowe and Waverly fired up the Apex scanner and placed the tube within. The scanner was like a large glowing glass bowl, ringed with light. Not quite big enough for a man to stand inside, Rowe had to coil the tube like a snake to make it fit.
While the scanner beeped and booped and thought, Waverly sat upside down in a chair with his legs over the backrest.
“Is there anything it’s going to tell us that’ll change anything?” he wondered.
His face glowed in the light cast by the scanner.
“What do you mean?” Rowe asked, slouching against the lander wall.
“Is there any reason we wouldn’t still go and drill the black box?” Waverly clarified. “Depending on what we find, I mean?”
Rowe said: “No, I think that’s what we’ll do next regardless. Unless this tube wakes up and starts talking, that is.”
“Right,” Waverly said, rotating further in his chair, “I’ll go see about a team for the drill.”
Waverly rose and ambled away.
Rowe edged over to a canteen station in the side of the lander and made himself a hot chocolate, eyeing the scanner the entire time. He stood sipping his drink. About twenty minutes later, the scanner flashed bright green to show it was finished. Rowe pulled up the results on his enviro-suit display. All of the fundamental materials constituting the tube were things already known. Carbon, nitrogen, neon, and trace amounts of about twenty other non-exotic components. What made Rowe raise an eyebrow was that the Goo seemed not to find any previous instances of these materials occurring together in such a pattern.
“Does it seem made by some intelligence?” Rowe asked aloud.
Noyes hovered into being.
“It is not ESA,” Noyes said. “Not our intelligence, in other words. As to the possibility some other entity created it or left it here . . .”
The hologram shrugged.
Waverly suddenly reappeared in the lander doorway.
“Anything?”
“Unclear,” said Rowe.
“Ah,” Waverly said. “Shall we go and drill, then?”
Rowe didn’t have a better idea.
In the forty-eight hours that followed, their team erected a massive set of scaffolding that stretched up the side of the Marie Curie. Then they carefully hoisted a very large drill to the top. It had a single rotating blade. When the cutting began in earnest, the sound was quieter than anyone expected; the Marie Curie’s outer skin was composed of a synthetic fiber that deadened most noise. It would be slow going. Even with men working around the clock, they would make only a few inches of progress each day.
Rowe and Waverly watched and supervised and noticed how the spinning metal edge of the drill seemed to catch the lightning just so.
Rowe made certain that no Silkworms went back inside the ship. He frequently thought about the shadowy figure that Davidson had seen, and made a point to visually monitor the ship’s darkened entryway at the top of the ramp. Yet nothing ever materialized. There was no sign of the humanoid form.
On the third day, Chief Engineer Glazer rejoined them.
“Did you find anything more under the ground?” Rowe asked as Glazer approached.
“Yes,” said Glazer. “There’s a ton of that tubing. It’s almost everywhere we dig.”
“Is it going to impede—you know—wiring the planet?” Rowe asked.
Glazer’s expression said that he had just been mildly insulted.
“I don’t know how many missions we’ve done together,” Glazer replied, “but I’ve wired planets that were almost pure acid. Or were made of steaming ice that could become unstable and explode at any moment. Or had packs of semi-sentient quicksand that would compete to be the first to chew through a piece of my wire. And I still got it done.”
“So?” said Waverly, stepping up to Glazer. He craned his neck to look up into the engineer’s eyes.
“So, weak tubes that fall apart when you gently touch them are not the biggest challenge I’ve overcome; that’s all,” Glazer said. “Anyhow, you want to analyze more of the tubes, or whatever they are? We have lots and lots of them now. That’s all I came to say.”
“Thank you,” Rowe replied. “I appreciate you letting us know. You can keep them for the time being.”
Glazer took a long look at the scaffolding and the giant drill. (It required no great deduction on Rowe’s part to know that this inspection was the reason Glazer had come personally.) He said nothing, but his expression made clear he would have managed the project just a bit differently.
“You’re welcome,” Glazer said, trying to end on an amicable note. “Let me know if you find anything good inside the ship. It’s clear your squad is . . . working hard.”
After Glazer left, Rowe and Waverly walked to the far edge of the crater lip to watch the drilling from a different perspective. They crossed their arms identically and looked hard at the drill atop the scaffold. Neither man knew precisely how much longer they had to go, or what the black box would hold when it was found.
As Glazer passed out of sight at the opposite side of the crater, Noyes misted alive on Rowe’s shoulder.
“Boy-o, please look behind you.”
For the first instant, of course, Rowe just glanced at Noyes.
“No, boy-o. Behind you directly.”
Rowe spun around. There was nothing there.
Waverly looked too.
“Train your eyes on the horizon,” Noyes said. “Second group of boulders to the left.”
“Yeah,” said Rowe. “Now I see it.”
What he saw appeared as a small flicker of movement. Like a single unsteady pixel on a computer screen. Something black against brown, and moving. Moving where there should not have been any movement . . . but movement nonetheless.
It was like a distant flag flapping in the wind, infinitely small.
Black-brown-black-brown-black-gone.
Abruptly, it stopped.
Rowe stared until he felt confident the anomaly was not going to recur.
“How on earth did you notice that?” Rowe asked Noyes.
“The camera in the back of your suit. I thought you’d want me to point it out.”
“Yes, I appreciate it,” Rowe said. “What was it? Not something alive?”
“Maybe an atmospheric thing,” Waverly cut in.
“Could be,” Noyes agreed. “I struggle, within my knowledge banks, to find something that will account for it with any precision. The wind was wrong for it to be blowing sand. And may I suggest you activate the overlay of that anomaly that looked like a path or trail?”
“He doesn’t need to,” Waverly said. “I can remember just fine. It led right to that spot.”
“You think we should go and have another look?” Rowe asked.
Waverly simply started walking.
They made their way briskly across the empty landscape, keeping their eyes on the place where the flicker had occurred. The lightning roiled in the sky above, and did, indeed, cast odd shadows on the rare occasions when it struck, but Rowe felt certain that what he had just seen had been no trick of light.
