Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

The first armoured figure waddled gracelessly up to the lip of the hole, massive in the restricted width of the tunnel. Infrared picked out ruby shimmers around its joints, fluctuating at each movement. Greg wondered if any of them would be able to fit down the steps.

Carlos held out an arm and dropped a thick ten-centimetre reconnaissance disk down into the hole. Greg watched the miniature UFO swoop into the cave, its motor glowing, tracing a crimson line that curved through the air like a bent laser beam.

“No hazards visible,” Carlos reported. He started down the steps. His arms scraped the rock on either side, sending up a burst of vivid orange sparks.

Greg winced.

Lesley followed with more grinding noises.

“I see you don’t intend on creeping up on my folk,” Sinclair said.

“Is it all this narrow?” Greg asked.

“No. And you’ll be going to thank the Lord for that this next Sunday.”

“I might just do that.”

It was unlike any cave Greg had ever seen on Earth. The rock had been split along natural fracture lines, crystalline weaknesses, stress lines, veins of metal in the ore. Greg imagined a tracery of hairline cracks spreading down from the electron-compression blast crater, cancerous shadows eating through the rock. Pressure differences clashing at each shock wave. Some of the internal structure around the fractures must have compacted, while others had wrenched apart in a parody of tectonic faults, creating vast empty fissures.

For every sheer surface there was a corresponding plane above, razor-sharp ridges had left torn gouges, the angular root-pattern of shining metal veins was perfectly twinned. It was the most intricate three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle ever made. And for the first time in his life, Greg felt claustrophobic. Floor and ceiling so obviously fitted together-they belonged together. Jaws of a vice, waiting.

Sinclair waited until all the crash team came down the steps from the service tunnel, then took a torch out of his pocket. “Now then, would you be so good as to close the grid above you there?”

The light of Sinclair’s weak beam was picked up by Greg’s photon amp, illuminating the cave like a solaris spot. He saw a couple of power cables trailing out of the crack next to the steps, snaking away into the gloom. The Celestials must have spliced them into the lines up in the service tunnel.

“We’ll reel out an optical cable as we go,” Melvyn said as the last team member pulled the grid back into place. “Keep our communications with the security centre open.”

“Yeah, OK,” said Greg. He gestured at the red power cables. “Is this your power source?” he asked Sinclair.

“One of them, Captain Greg. Space is awash with energy. The light, the radiation, the wind from the sun. Bountiful it is. I’m sure Miss Julia here doesn’t begrudge us this mere trickle.”

“Sure she doesn’t. So where were you given the flower?”

“This way.” He started following the red cables, stepping lightly over the crumpled rock.

The cave turned out to be about fifty metres across, its floor a gentle upward slope. Sinclair was heading for a bottleneck crevice opposite the stairs. There was no dust, Greg noticed, none of the little drifts of soil and bat droppings that contaminated natural caves.

His initial feeling of claustrophobia was fading. Bubbling up in its wake came a twinge of expectation. Foolishly he felt bright to the point of being cheerful. It wasn’t quite his usual intuition, more like instinct. On the right path and getting Closer. The same blind compulsion a salmon feels as the unique surge of fresh water from the mouth of its birth river finally flows around it.

The alien.

Was this the bewitchment Sinclair experienced? God knows, it was cogent enough to be mistaken for divine guidance.

A grin tugged at his lips. You’re enjoying this, you idiot.

A glimmer of light was shining out of the crevice ahead of him. He pulled his dissipater-suit hood off, initially confused by the monochrome gloaming he found himself immersed in. A swirl of air cooled his sweaty face. The light coming from the crevice was blocked out as Sinclair moved into it. Greg hurried after him.

There was a horizontal oval passage leading away beyond the entrance, its sides crimping together. Biolum globes dangled on slim chains from the roof. Their radiance was decaying into greenish blue, giving the wrinkled passage a biotic appearance, as if it had been grown, the inside of a giant root. Sound would carry here, Greg knew, the rough clanking of the crash team’s boots against the rock rolling on ahead of them.

“Is it worth it?” he asked Sinclair. “Living like this, hiding in caves?”

“Well now, Captain Greg, we walk the park in the day, sun ourselves, dance in the rain, take our children to the beach. Nobody starves; to be sure, I even weigh in a little over the odds meself. And here we are, with Miss Julia Evans herself coming to see what it is that attracts us here. ‘Tis only due to people like you that we can’t live in the southern endcap. Men and women have a right to live in space. We shouldn’t be persecuted for exercising that right.”

Greg grunted and gave up.

There was another cave at the end of the passage, a big lenticular bubble of air. They came out halfway up one side, looking down on a forest of sharp conical outcrops. Someone had left a cluster of biolum globes sitting on the top of the spires near the centre. Sinclair led them down to the bottom on a path which had been hacked into the rock, then straight into another passage.

“Christ, Julia, this is one badly fucked asteroid,” Suzi said. “This many catacombs, it’s gotta be leaking air all over the shop. Did you know it had so many busted rocks?”

“Seismic analysis showed there were eight major fault zones,” Julia answered. “All of them occur where different strata intersect. There were five deep in the interior, two of those got excavated to make room for Hyde Cavern. This is the third, the fourth will be excavated for the second cavern, and the last is down at the northern end of the second cavern. We had to vitrify a square kilometre of Hyde Cavern’s floor after it was excavated, because it bordered on an external fault zone. And we’ll have to do the same thing to the second cavern when it’s finished. But New London’s integrity is sound.”

And Royan would know about all the seismic analysis and the fault zones, Greg thought, probably more than the Celestials did.

He heard the water when he was still twenty metres from the end of the passage, a suckling sound that grew with each step. The passage opened out into a cave about fifty or sixty metres across. Greg thought it must have had a deeply concave floor, the surface of the dark lake which filled it possessed the kind of stillness which he associated with depth. On the other side, a streamer of water oozed out of a fissure near the roof, slithering down the wall, making the sounds he’d heard. Ripples spread out from its base, dying away before they reached the middle of the lake.

“We’re below the Cavern level,” Melvyn said. “There must be a leak in the freshwater streams.”

“Integrity, huh?” Suzi murmured.

Greg trailed after Sinclair along a crescent-shaped shelf of rock that served as a shore, running three-quarters of the way round the side of the cave. A row of bright biolum panels on the wall above him fired harsh pink-white beams out across the lake. Serpents of reflected light twisted over the damp black walls.

A flick of movement caught his eye, and he turned in time to see a ring of ripples out on the lake accompanied by a quick chop as the water came together.

“Hey, it’s got fish in it,” Greg said.

“Indeed there is, Captain Greg, some of the finest rainbow trout this side o’ heaven. I thank the Lord for his providence every night.” Sinclair stood right by the edge of the water, and crossed himself. The darkness of his thought currents were a clue to just how seriously he meant what he said. “I found this lake, Captain Greg. It was shown to me, like Moses and his burning bush. I heard the call, and brought me friends down here to sanctity and solitude where we wait for the new dawn.”