Timothy Zahn - Spinneret

"You all right?" Meredith asked.

"I think so." Perez fished out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. There was a grunt from the other side of the car, and he looked up to see Barner slide awkwardly in through the window, where he'd apparently been sitting in rearguard position.

"As far as I could tell it never fired a shot," he said, twisting to look out the back window.

"I'm not sure it wasn't for lack of trying," Meredith replied grimly. "At least two of those snakes were tracking me from the second it came through the door."

Barner grunted. "You get it?"

"Wasn't trying to. I was firing at its feet, trying to knock it over long enough for us to get out."

"Maybe all the dust helped, too." Barner turned back to face forward. "The local police force, you suppose?"

"Or else a burglar alarm," Hafner offered.

"Burglar alarms are usually set up in the individual house," Perez said, coughing ceramic dust.

"Ours are," Hafner said. "But the whole setup of this town seems pretty cozy by human—well, at least by Western culture standards. It's quite possible that a gregarious people like the Spinners would go with a centralized burglar-proofing system."

"A police force by any other name," Barner said, dismissing the distinction. "And the real question then is how many more of them are still functional."

The car hit a tight curve and fishtailed a bit getting around it. "I think you can slow down now, Nichols," Meredith said.

The unfamiliar architecture and geography of the Spinner cavern made distances deceptive, and it turned out that the wall was both farther and higher than it had looked from the tunnel entrance. Rising a good six meters above them, its surface an intricate pattern of subtle colors, it was as if a hundred rainbows had been caught and smashed together into the leading edge of a glacier. Meredith grimaced; the image was an oddly unsettling one.

"Well, Colonel?" Perez prodded from behind him. "Was it for defense or not?"

Meredith let his eyes rove the wall's length. No crenels or loopholes for gunners to shoot through, no towers or turrets, nor any indication the wall had ever had them.

"If it was, it was an extremely passive system," he said. "Regardless, we've got to get through it. Anyone see anything that looked like a break or gateway on our way in?"

"I thought I saw a gap over to the left," Barner offered, frowning off in that direction. "But I can't find it now."

"Maybe the color pattern's hiding it," Meredith suggested. "Let's go take a look."

They piled into the car; and barely fifty meters away they found the tall, thin opening Barner had seen.

"Wouldn't have believed a simple hole could be that hard to see," Barner grunted, leaning through the gap for a quick look at the other side. "Well … it's a cinch we're not going to get the car through here, Colonel, but the tower looks to be only a ten-minute hike away."

Meredith motioned him aside and stepped through the opening himself. Unlike the other side, this part of the cavern was nearly devoid of structures. Those he could see looked less like houses than industrial or business buildings: long and low, with little of the decoration they'd seen on the domed homes behind them. Or they could be the town cafeteria and rec centers, he reminded himself. All the vacant ground could have been gardens or a forest. In which case the tower would have been … what?

The tower. It rose up from the ground perhaps half a kilometer away, looking rather like a cross between a church spire and an airport control tower. About fifty meters tall, he estimated, with what looked like wide windows halfway up and also near the top. A half-dozen flat-roofed buildings were clustered at its base.

Service sheds or housing for the night shift, perhaps? Or were they the local dispatch points for little nasties like the one they'd already run into?

"We'll go on foot," he announced, stepping back to the group. "Major, get the rifles and four grenades out of the trunk. Dr. Hafner, go with him and bring back the Geiger counter that's under the front passenger seat."

Harrier's eyes widened a bit at mention of the extra weaponry, but he obeyed without argument. Meredith consulted his watch: they'd already used up over an hour of the four he'd allotted for his reconnaissance. The return trip should be faster, but that was still a lot of tower to explore in two hours. They'd have to make some guesses as to where the most interesting sections were likely to be.

Barner and Hafner returned with their loads. "Okay," Meredith said, slinging his Stoner 5.56 mm over his shoulder and hooking two of the rifle grenades onto his belt. "Stay in a loose formation and keep your eyes open."

The cluster of huts surrounding the tower base were not, as Meredith had assumed, physically connected to the structure, but were placed two or three meters away from its dull-metal wall.

"Interesting," Hafner said as they circled the tower in search of a door. "First structure we've come across in here that doesn't have that white ceramic coating."

"Would that make it a more recent building?" Perez suggested. "Put up near the end, when they didn't have time for cosmetic appearances?"

"Or else it's subject to vibrations," Meredith said, recalling the fragile ceramic in the village building. "I think I see a door around that side. Let's take a look."

Like the doors they'd seen elsewhere, this one was tall, slender, and elaborately carved. It was also unlocked, leading into a bare lobby like area shaped like a small piece of pie with a bite taken out of the tip. The missing point contained a floor-to-ceiling cylinder. "The elevator, I'd guess," Barner said as he took one final look outside and closed the door behind them. "Shall we see if it's running?"

"We can," Meredith said reluctantly, "but we'd better not actually ride it. Let's see if the Spinners understood the concept of stairs."

It took several minutes, but eventually they discovered that pressing a wall design caused the whole cylinder to rotate, bringing an off-center and doorless opening into view. Stepping into the opening and turning to the right led into the elevator car proper, while a left-hand turn ended in the stairway Meredith had hoped to find. With the colonel in the lead, they started up.

Progress was slow, hampered as they were by both the relatively cramped quarters and by Meredith's insistence on slowly easing his weight onto each new step.

Hafner muttered at least once that such exaggerated care was a waste of time with cable material structures, but Meredith ignored him. There was little conversation; faint hums and clicks were becoming audible from the areas around and above them, and no one seemed willing to drown them out with idle chatter.

Meredith took them to the very top of the stairway, hoping the most important equipment would be at that level. The inside release for the rotating cylinder, once located, worked perfectly. Holding his pistol ready, the colonel stepped through the short runnel and into a garish sea of color.

For a moment he just stood there, his eyes and mind struggling furiously to adjust to the sight. Give a small child a box of crayons and a detailed photo of a shuttle flight deck, he thought, and you might wind up with something like this. The meterwide semicircular ring that wrapped around the room beneath the windows was a familiar control board design; the panels set into it were decidedly not. Painted some of the brightest colors Meredith had ever seen, the panels had curved or even squiggled edges; some vaguely rectangular, but most not. For several seconds Meredith's brain tried anyway to classify them in terms of familiar polygons—squarish, trapezoidal, triangular—before finally giving up the exercise as pointless. The controls themselves—mostly black, but with occasional colored ones mixed in—were similarly arranged without regard for the concept of straight lines. None of the panels had exactly the same shape or layout, and some of the color juxtapositions were almost painful. Make that a color-blind child, he added.