Stephen Baxter - Coalescent

Dower came to stand beside him. She grunted. “Well done, Corporal. Okay, let’s take a minute. Check your kit again.” The troopers, working in pairs, complied.

Dower pointed at the mountain. “You were right — uh, Denh. The mountain’s tectonic, not impact- created. We’re standing over a midocean ridge: a place where the crust is cracking open, and stuff from within wells up to form new ocean floor. And where that happens, you get mountains heaping up, like this. On this planet it’s still happening. The loss of the sun destroyed the surface and the air, but it made no difference to what’s going on down deep. All along this ridge you will have vents, like valves, where the heat and the minerals from within the planet come bubbling up. And that heat will keep little pockets of water liquid, even now. And where there’s liquid water—”

“There’s life.” That mumble came from a number of voices. It was a slogan from biology classes taught to five-year-olds, all across the Expansion.

“And that is the ecosystem that will have survived this planet’s ejection from its solar system: something like bacteria colonies, or tube worms perhaps — probably anaerobic, living off the minerals and the heat that seeps out of the cracks in the ground. Radioactivity will keep the planet’s core warm long after that lost sun itself has gone cold. Strange irony — life on this world will probably actually last longer than if it had stayed in orbit around its sun …”

Abil piped up: “Tell us about the warren, sir.”

She began to sketch with one finger in the loose ice. “The warren is a rough toroid dug into the ice, encircling that central peak. In places it’s nearly a mile deep. It’s not a simple structure; it’s a mess of interconnected chambers and corridors. We suspect the birthing chambers are the deepest, the closest to the mountain rock itself; that’s the usual arrangement.

“Now here—” She slashed at her diagram, drawing diagonal lines that reached up from the torus and down to the face of the mountain. “Runs. Access chutes. Some of them vertical, probably the oldest,

fitted with lifting equipment; the more recent ones will have stairs and ladders. You can see these runs provide access to the surface, for the disposal of the dead, foraging missions for oxygen, perhaps other resources. These lower tunnels reach down to the face of the mountain, to the pockets of liquid water and the life-forms down there. With suitable processing the colonists will be able to live off the native organic compounds.” She looked up. “You need to know that it’s common for colonies of this type to reprocess as much of their raw material as possible.” She let that hang in the silence.

Denh said queasily, “You mean, people ? But we saw the corpses in that great ring.”

Dower shrugged. “In these wild warrens patterns vary … Just remember two things. First, across the Galaxy we are at war. Our alien enemy is pitiless, and cares nothing for your moral qualms, or even your nausea, Denh. We need warm bodies to be thrown into the war, and that’s why we’re here. We’re a press gang, nothing more. And second — remember that whatever you see down there, however strange it seems to you, these are human beings . Not like you — a different sort — but human nevertheless. So there’s nothing to fear.”

“Yes, sir ,” came the ritual chorus.

“All right. Abil—”

Denh pushed herself forward. “Let me, Captain.” She jumped into the pit and rubbed her hands, pretending to spit on the palms, to the soft laughter of her mates. “Clockwise, you think?” She turned the wheel.

The ground shuddered under Abil’s feet. The great lid of metal and rock slid back, disappearing under the ice. Denh yelped, and jumped out of her hole.

The run was a broad, slanting tunnel cut into the ice. Crude steps had been etched into its lower surface, four, five, six parallel staircases. There was no light but the stars, and the spots of their skinsuits.

Eight of the ten teams would enter the run, leaving two on watch on the surface. Dower waved two units forward to take the lead. Abil’s red team was one of them.

Abil led the way into the hole. He clambered easily down the stairs, wary, descending into deeper darkness. His hands were empty; though the weapons of his team bristled behind him, he felt naked.

Abil had descended maybe two hundred yards into the hole when suddenly the ice under his feet shook again. The lid was closing over the hole, like a great eyelid, shutting out the stars. He heard hurried, gasping breaths, the sounds of panic rising in his troopers. He tried to control his own breathing. “Red team, take it easy,” he said. “Remember your briefing. We expected this.”

“The corporal’s right,” growled Dower, somewhere above him. “This is just an air lock. Just wait, now.”

For a few heartbeats they were suspended in darkness, their puddles of suit light overwhelmed by the greater dark.

There was a hiss of inrushing air. Then a coarse gray light flickered into life from fat fluorescent tubes buried in the walls. Abil looked up at the lines of troopers, weapons ready, standing on the floor of the cylindrical hall.

Dower held up her gloved hand. “You hear that?”

They listened in silence. Sound carried through the new air: muffled footsteps from beyond the walls, pattering away into the void beyond. And then more footsteps — many more, like an approaching crowd.

“They have runners,” Dower whispered. “Throughout the warren. Patrolling everywhere. If one of them spots trouble, she runs off to find somebody else, and they both run back to the trouble spot, and then they split up, and run off again … It’s a pretty efficient alarm system.”

There was a noise from behind Abil, carried through the new, thick air. Only a few steps beneath him, there was another lid door, like the one they had come through from the surface. It, too, had a wheel set on an upright axle.

The wheel was turning with a scrape.

“They’re coming,” Dower said, hefting her weapon. “Let’s have some fun.”

The door slid back.

I like to escape from the crowds. Even in the winter, the center of Amalfi and its harbor area swarm with locals and tourists, mainly elderly British and Americans here for the winter sun.

So I climb the hills. The natural vegetation on this rich volcanic soil is woodland, but higher up the land has been terraced to make room for olive groves, vineyards, and orchards — especially lemons, the specialty of the area, though I swear I will never get used to limoncello ; I can never get it off my teeth.

I like to think Peter would have seen the aptness of my retiring here, to Amalfi. For as it happens it was here, over a century ago, that Bedford, the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon , fled after his remarkable adventures in the moon, and wrote his own memoir. I keep a copy of the book, a battered old paperback, in my hotel room.

Yes, it would have pleased Peter. For what Bedford and Cavor found in the heart of the moon was, of course, the hive society of the Selenites.

I kept hold of Lucia, with her baby, all the way out of that hole in the ground.

When we could get away from the area, I found a cab and took her to my hotel. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. We attracted some odd stares from the staff, but it did give us a chance to calm down, clean up. Then I called Daniel, whose number, on a dog-eared business card, Lucia had always kept with her.

Peter was the only fatality that day. He really had planted his bomb carefully. It wasn’t hard for the forensic teams to establish his guilt, through traces of Semtex on his clothes and under his fingernails, and to figure out the purpose of his little remote-control radar gun. His true identity was quickly established, and he was linked with the mysterious group that had bombed the geometric optics lab in San Jose.